I have the same experience - in fact I haven't bough a single desktop PC (as a whole) in 15 years - and I second this.
Before you start researching ask yourself this: "Am I going to be playing 3D games on my PC?"
- If "Yes", then the price tag on your PC will make it worth the while to do a little research instead of just paying up for the best of the best. Go to the usual hardware review websites (such as tomshardware, anandtech) and start investigating CPU and Graphics Cards choices (typically most other decisions flow from these, for example: CPU dictates Motherboard which dictates Memory, while Graphics Card also dictates Motherboard plus Power Source). If you care about noise you'll have to check out speciality sites (such as silentpcreview).
-If "No", then it won't be worth the time and the trouble to do any kind of heavey research: just go for price. The only real decisions here are "How much memory?" (2GB is good, 4GB is better, beyond it's a waste atm), "How much HD space?" (how much were you using before? Was it enough? Were you feeling constrained. Remember you can always add a second HD later) and "How big a monitor?" (personal choice here, often dictated by the space you have for it) - the rest is simply price.
Younger voters have much more experience in average with new technologies including the Internet. Also, at the moment, they vote in lower numbers - possibly because of disapointment with traditional parties. Finally, many have a lot of experience in casually copying digitally stored data be it copyrighted or not.
While making up only 12% percent of the UK populations (18-20 and 20-25 age groups as per the 2001 census), they seem to be a natural constituency for the UK Pirate Party (beyond it's core of IP law-aware technology savy people) and do form a significant minority.
What is the UK Pirate Party doing to engage those potential voters?
The inner city kids have nothing to do because: - There is a lack of adequate nature spaces and sports fields in the inner cities. Probably because land is at a premium and city councils would rather waste money in monthly glossy magazines promoting themselfs than in creating a well-balanced environment to live in. - There are not enough community activities for young people in large part due to overboard Healt & Safety nuttyness blocking each an every inititiative that might involve any kind of risk (real or perceived).
Also: - There are lots of self contained areas of high unemployment and poverty (aka Housing Estates). - A media driven culture that values wealth and individualistic selfishness above all means that people around here are raised to not give a damn about other people, including their families.
So you end up with groups of hormone filled, immature youths with no money, no job and nothing to do, immersed in a culture that does not include the notion of respect for anybody else (not elders, not your parents, not teachers, nobody).
It's thus not suprising that England has the problems it has with youth violence...
I'm disapointed with the Lib Dems (which are the 3rd largest party in the UK) but not overly surprised: they have pretty much adopted the style, dialetics and posture of the two major parties.
This probably goes a long way to explain why, at a time when people are very disapointed with politicians in the UK (and one would expect that the two main parties, being more visible, would bear the brunt of it), the Lib Dems are not increasing their share of the vote.
The sleazy salesmen in designer suits have taken over the party and the result is that people, instead of going for them as an alternative, are just not voting at all or voting for more fringe parties, especially younger people.
Honestly, even though they are a bit of a "one issue" party, the UK Pirate Party are more in tune with what matters for the Internet generation than any of the "traditional" parties. If I could vote for the UK Parliament (i'm not a UK or Commonwealth national, so I can't vote in those elections) they would have my vote.
I was doing this "tethering" thing regularly 10 years ago with my old Nokia and a Palm Pilot. It was even easier to do with my desktop PC (I didn't own a notebook at the time).
Clearly there's a lot of consumers of mobile services out there conditioned to accept being shafted all the time by the telecoms...
I vaguelly remember an article in the newspaper that listed the BBC employee costs. A significant part of those was in paying "super-stars" (those entertainers that get payed millions of pounds per-year).
In a country like the UK with a long tradition of great humourists, paying a single comedian like Johnathan Ross 18 million pounds a year to host a couple of talk-shows is incredibly bad value for money.
Just for comparisson sake, the budget of BBC Radio 6 Music (which they're also planning on closing) is half as much. That's 24h/day, 7 days a weak, 52 weeks a year of music for half the price of maybe 10h/week of programming with Johnathan Ross. Measured in in hours-of-entertainment/pound terms that means that Johnathan Ross costs almost 34x more than BBC Radio 6 Music (and he's definetly not 34 times better).
Ditch that guy and couple more like him and replace them with new blood and you'll probably be able to cover the 110 million pounds that the BBC Internet operations cost. It will even have the nice side effect of enhancing even more the BBC's work in developing and promoting new talents in the UK.
In Chaos Theory, a small change to the inputs can cause large changes to the results.
However the changes are just as likelly to go in one direction as they are to go in the opposite direction: the butterfly effect is just as likelly to result in a typhoon instead of clear weather as it is to result in clear weather instead of a typhoon.
Also, small changes to inputs can cause small changes to the outputs or even no changes at all (that's why it's called Chaos Theory) - plenty of butterflies flutter-about with out creating typhoons;)
If indeed the system that underpins earthquakes is chaotic, underground nuclear tests are just as likelly to have brought forward quakes as they are to have delayed quakes as they are not not have had much effect at all - in fact, they're likelly to have done all of them.
C'mon, this is the UK police we're talking about: nowadays they're driven by targets that come from the politicians and directly influence their bonuses and career prospects.
Targets have been set by the highest level of government to collect and keep as many DNA samples as possible for the DNA Database, so Bonuses and Promotions are at stake here. They don't give a damn about the citizens they are supposed to serve except as means to reach their targets, so they would tell you whatever you wanted to hear to get another point on their DNA samples target.
Count yourself lucky though: people's lifes have been ruined when they got "Cautions" (an admission of guilt, which requires no court involvement and goes into the Criminal Record) for being drunken and rowdy or for (lightly) discipling their own kids.
I've lived in 3 European countries by now and this is the only one where I don't trust the police (which is kinda sad since I'm from Portugal, a country where people look up to the UK as a better place)
Not that I blame the lowly copper: at the core of the current rot are the power hungry politicians and money driven high-level officers.
I guess that people are getting what they deserve around here: the British electorate keeps voting on the same two sets of visibly lying, deceitfull, sleazy and two-faced politicians (or not voting at all) - these guys are so exceptionally untrustworthy (at least compared with Dutch and Portuguese politicians) that they are caught cheating and lying so often it's not fun anymore.
The stated speed of 100MB/s will only work as long you don't actually use it that often. If you use Bittorrent and/or Youtube/iPlayer too much Virgin will trottle down your connection (they do it alreay with their current 40MB/s fibre offer.
Oh, and by the way, your connection will be silently censored.
And let's not forget that Virgin is also a media company: if you, your kids, the neighbour (that managed to hack into your Wireless connection because you used no or easy encryption) or anybody else actually downloads music-tracks/videos/games/apps from some fishy place or other through your connection, expect a call from the appropriate industry's lawyers.
Last but not least, most Virgin companies have incredibly bad costumer service: even when their products are good, you can't trust them not to overcharge you, auto-renew your contracts against your wishes and/or other fishy practices. Usually they include incredible clausules in their contract designed to make it impossible for you to leave (good luck remembering to cancel your contract at a very specific couple of days in the year before they auto-renew).
Initial POV 1: God exists. Initial POV 2: God does not exist. [discussion] Conclusion: God exists on Mondays, Fridays and alternate Sundays.
What makes God?
Say, if an entity created mankind but could not perform any further actions that could be classified as miracles, would it be God?
How about Pantheons? Is not each and every Roman God a God?
Challenge the assumptions (i.e. the common usage of "God" to referer to the Christian God - which by the way, is the same as Allah) and there's plenty of room for discussion.
Every problem can be framed as a question having a yes/no answer: - No satisfatory answer will ever be found if you stay in the confines of such a question instead of arguing in the confines of the actual problem.
By the way, you just proved my point - plenty of people unknowingly mentally limit themselfs to two-sided approaches to questioning and thinking.
I suspect that most people in this world are very much unaware that they do belong to "tribes", how they have "authority figures" and how they influence one's behaviour.
In fact, i reckon that most Slashdoters have never looked at Slashdot as the tribe it is.
The problem with your argument is that it relies on the targets having the know-how and self awareness to understand it and recognize themselfs on it.
Countless sessions of friendly discussions with the local Jehovah's Witnesses that pop-up at my door (when I have the time and the passience) have taught me that those that believe the strongest and the truest are usually the most ignorant of their own compulsions, motivations and sorrounding social pressures.
In other words, your post was either like preaching to the converts or like pearls to pigs.
Yes, "try[ing] to view both sides of the argument as fairly as we can"
Actually as an interesting side note, looking at an argument as having two sides is a self-imposed mental restriction of cultural origin (I bet you're from the US:))
In fact, in most arguments neither side is fully right: if you notice, discussions where two people are discussing something with the intent of reaching a destination instead of winning points will often end with a conclusion which does not exact match the inital argument of any of them.
Not a criticism, just pointing out that even the most enlightened people will unknowingly be biased by the environment they live in (and other factors, many other factors).
Everybody sees the world through the colored glasses of their own beliefs and prejudices: when it comes to human observation and judgement, perceptions taint everything we watch and conclude, it even taints our reactions.
Which is why care must be taken when setting up scientific tests and experiment: Why do you think clinical tests require control groups and are designed so that those in contact with the test subjects are not aware of certain factors in the experiment?
A sign of Wisdom and Enleightening is to be aware of one's own prejudices and how they affect the way one sees and interprets things.
Think about it: could it be that you quickly grabbed the conclusions of the article and interpret them as and endorsement of your own intense dislike of religions? [Here's another view: if religions are a manifestation of some emotional characteristics in human beings, not the other way around, then one could conclude that they are not the problem, just a symptom: maybe the real problem is most people's unawareness of their inner selfs. If that is so, then those that hate religions suffer just as much from it as those that are religious]
Personally I always wished that MMORPGS had age segregated servers available.
Not because of adult content (as somebody pointed out in another story, naked pixels are only really tillitanting when ur a teen), it's simply because an environment where teens can run around anonymously controlling powerfull avatars and there are no adults in supervisory positions tends only be fun - if at all - for the teens themselfs (things like griefing, being loud, obnoxious and showing off which look cool when ur 13 and have no life experience just look like signs of social/emotional desperation once you become mature enough to understand people).
I don't want all servers should be age segregated, I just whish there were such servers available - with, for example, a 25+ age limit - for those that want the option: I would even be willing to pay extra for it.
Bungie is supposedly going to do yet another Halo, only this time it's supposedly going to be much better than the previous ones and here's an article with what the producer's PR/Marketoids think should be said on what it's supposedly going to be like.
Reminds me of all the articles we used to have a couple of years ago about the latest and greatest new software that was coming out: it usually turned out to be neither that greatest, as ground/breaking or the seamingly flawless experience the software house's Marketing people had described it to be for the preview.
Now we have the same type of bull as game previews in Slashdot, kinda like the almost-paid-for, page filling pap which is the standard fare of the "Previews" section of the large (and mainstream gaming industry fanboy) game sites.
Until we actually have a post by someone with hands-on gaming experience on the game, maybe we should save the space for more interesting news, like say, new developments in the area of waste treatment - more substance and less perfumed s*it.
PvP realms are hardly empty- lots of people played on them, especially at launch. The problem is that arena and battlegrounds have killed world pvp, so there's little to no real pvp anymore. You can go 0 to 80 with only a handful of pvp deaths these days. In the old days you'd get a handful an hour, many of which were real fights you had a chance of winning. Since 99.9% of pvp happens in instances these days there's no reason to roll pvp anymore, that's why the pvp realms now have smaller pops.
As somebody who played WoW at launch on a PvP server I can tell you that the only reason I sticked around was because in the beginning one could not migrate the character to a different server (this was before Blizzard made the facility available).
The truth is that, while at the time non-consentual PvP did add some excitment when playing in the shared areas, this was often spoiled by griefers, which typically were higher-level characters that came to lower level areas.
During the first couple of months after WoW started, the typical difference in levels between characters wasn't that large (in fact, even though I'm a non-hardcore gamer, I kept up enough with the leveling threadmill that I was never faced with a griefer more than 15 levels above me) so one often had some chance against the griefers (often by enlisting the help of other players of the same faction in that region via regional chat).
In fact, one of the best PvP moments I had there was in Redridge Mountains (where most people are around lvl 20) when as a reaction to a pair of lvl 30 griefers (probably from Booty Bay) about 20 or more of us from Lakeshire village took them on (and won). This was before Battlegrounds and even before the PvP Ladder/Rankings (which preceeded Battlegrounds and pretty much ruined the game for me)
That said, I suspect that after those first couple of months griefers pretty much had free reign to do whatever they wanted (think gangs of lvl 60 griefer in a starter area). The 10-fold increase in gratuitous griefing that immediately follow the start of the PvP Ladder (literally from one day to the next huge, never-ending and very laggy battles started around certain key villages and questing became close to impossible due to the roaming gangs of players farmering other players) was a very good indicator of how easilly the game would turn unplayable in a PvP realm (and I was a Rogue, so i could sneak around: other classes didn't had it so easilly)
[I left a little after the PvP Ladder was implemented, because of this and because it's mechanics were such that casual players had no chance to compete (admited by the lead developer in a forum post which was later removed) - so I've been out of it for 4 or 5 years now]
The reasons why PvP realms were popular when WoW started were due to factors (ignorance of how it worked, impossibility of migrating you character, low spread of levels between players) which are not in effect anymore, so I wouldn't use that as an argument.
There are a growing number of people who believe that aiming solely for fast large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is not an economically wise decision and it's better to mix less ambitious goals on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with engineering approaches to try and reduce global warming.
That said, reducing CO2 emissions does have some interesting side-effects such as reducing dependency on Oil and Gas.
Consider a world where there is no need to pay trillions of dollars to some far away countries whose only claim to greatness is lots of hydrocarbons and the subsidizing of madrassas in other countries to spread a particularly extremist and violent form of Islam, or spend trillions of dollars on wars to protect them. Not to mention that Oil and Gas keep some pretty nasty dictatorships in power.
In such a world, if China does not follow other countries into a low-carbon economy, they will be the sending trillions to those countries and paying for wars in faraway places...
It's very simple: you help poor people by making sure their kids have the same opportunities as the ones from more well-off families.
That means that laws are designed to help poor black/white/asian/latino/whatever kids but not rich black/white/asian/latino/whatever kids.
"Positive" Discrimination is flawed because it will, for example, help rich blacks just as much as poor blacks but not help poor whites (or any other racial group) at all - in fact there's nothing positive about those laws since they discriminate against everybody else.
The problem that needs addressing is that poor kids don't have fair chances, the color of their skin, their parents' religious beliefs or any other such things should not be relevant when deciding to help them or not.
"The Chronicles of Riddick" was a great action movie with a dark Sci-Fi/Fantasy background - in fact it might be quite a unique mix of genres: certainly the (Futuristic Black-Magic) background to the story is way off anything else Hollywood ever made.
That said, it's not surprising that those that first saw "Pitch Black" and then went to see "The Chronicles of Riddick" as a sequel were disapointed: to put it simply "Pitch Black" was a finelly tuned Horror-Action movie while The Chronicles was more of a Rambo style action movie (chewing gum for the brain) Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie with an anti-Hero as the main character (although Riddick as a character was much more developed in the second movie).
Personally I thoroughly enjoyed both movies in different ways, although this might be because I first saw "The Chronicles of Riddick" and then went looking for "Pitch Black" instead of the other way around so I didn't saw the second movie in the expectation it would be a continuation of the first.
This is not surprising: - Mobile phone makers are afraid that hardware is becoming commoditised (read: low cost, low margins) and software will become the way to make profits, just like it happened with PCs - Telecoms operators are afraid that they become providers of dumb-data-pipes (instead of the system that they have now of fragmenting data into services and charging more for some) just like it happened with ISPs.
So the phone makers want to get a share of any profits done on the software (just like Apple has) and the telecoms operators want to get a share of any profits done on new data services implemented on software (which do not relly on the headset's built-in functionality and thus cannot be controlled by the telecom operators via "subsidized headsets") especially since mobile phones capable of supporting innovative new functionality/services via downloadable software will outcompete the locked phones sold via the telecoms so the market will slowly moved away from the locked phones.
I don't know what world is being referred here, probably the marketing and fairy tale world. Last time I checked, Apple was a marginal player in the real world (i.e., not some particular geography or some fashionable pundits).
In the real world, Nokia might be the one to talk about, but even so, its share is far from "world domination"
You have to give a little leeway to US(ian) Slashdotters on this one - in the US market the iPhone was probably the first half-way decent mobile phone that was actually being willingly sold by the mobile telecoms.
In a market dominated by a small number of telecoms with a Government given monopoly, where most phone sets are locked and provided by the telecoms, Apple's "Mobile phone with features as have been provided outside the US for years but marketed as hippy and cool instead of geeky" probably looked like an earth shattering new invention.
Any law which is trully meant to protect people from unwanted/illegal content would pass the following check list:
Is the list of sites that are blocked openly available for examination?
Is it a voluntary (for the consumer) mechanism working on the basis of opt-in (for example users would be able to go to their control page on their ISP and enable/disable the filter)?
Is there a working mechanism for independent reviewing of complaints about sites which were incorrectly added to the list and, if the complaint was found valid, remove said sites from the list in a timelly manner?
Any law that fails one or more of this checks is just a censorship mechanism being created by those currently in power which is designed to silence dissent and critical political speech.
I'm just happy that the guys I helped elect to represent me in the EU are doing their job.
The EU Parliament is the only directly elected EU institution (the members of the European Comission are nominated by countries' governments - and many are in the pockets of some lobbyist or other - and the Council of Europe is made up of representatives from each EU countries' governments) and it is the most consistent defender of things like consumer rights and the privacy of the EU citizens.
I would like to remind every EU Slashdotter that if you are an EU citizen, no mater where you live in the EU (even outside your home country) you can vote for the EU Parliament - most people in the EU are not exercising this right so your vote will be even weightier.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the same experience - in fact I haven't bough a single desktop PC (as a whole) in 15 years - and I second this.
Before you start researching ask yourself this:
"Am I going to be playing 3D games on my PC?"
- If "Yes", then the price tag on your PC will make it worth the while to do a little research instead of just paying up for the best of the best. Go to the usual hardware review websites (such as tomshardware, anandtech) and start investigating CPU and Graphics Cards choices (typically most other decisions flow from these, for example: CPU dictates Motherboard which dictates Memory, while Graphics Card also dictates Motherboard plus Power Source). If you care about noise you'll have to check out speciality sites (such as silentpcreview).
-If "No", then it won't be worth the time and the trouble to do any kind of heavey research: just go for price. The only real decisions here are "How much memory?" (2GB is good, 4GB is better, beyond it's a waste atm), "How much HD space?" (how much were you using before? Was it enough? Were you feeling constrained. Remember you can always add a second HD later) and "How big a monitor?" (personal choice here, often dictated by the space you have for it) - the rest is simply price.
Younger voters have much more experience in average with new technologies including the Internet. Also, at the moment, they vote in lower numbers - possibly because of disapointment with traditional parties. Finally, many have a lot of experience in casually copying digitally stored data be it copyrighted or not.
While making up only 12% percent of the UK populations (18-20 and 20-25 age groups as per the 2001 census), they seem to be a natural constituency for the UK Pirate Party (beyond it's core of IP law-aware technology savy people) and do form a significant minority.
What is the UK Pirate Party doing to engage those potential voters?
The inner city kids have nothing to do because:
- There is a lack of adequate nature spaces and sports fields in the inner cities. Probably because land is at a premium and city councils would rather waste money in monthly glossy magazines promoting themselfs than in creating a well-balanced environment to live in.
- There are not enough community activities for young people in large part due to overboard Healt & Safety nuttyness blocking each an every inititiative that might involve any kind of risk (real or perceived).
Also:
- There are lots of self contained areas of high unemployment and poverty (aka Housing Estates).
- A media driven culture that values wealth and individualistic selfishness above all means that people around here are raised to not give a damn about other people, including their families.
So you end up with groups of hormone filled, immature youths with no money, no job and nothing to do, immersed in a culture that does not include the notion of respect for anybody else (not elders, not your parents, not teachers, nobody).
It's thus not suprising that England has the problems it has with youth violence ...
I'm disapointed with the Lib Dems (which are the 3rd largest party in the UK) but not overly surprised: they have pretty much adopted the style, dialetics and posture of the two major parties.
This probably goes a long way to explain why, at a time when people are very disapointed with politicians in the UK (and one would expect that the two main parties, being more visible, would bear the brunt of it), the Lib Dems are not increasing their share of the vote.
The sleazy salesmen in designer suits have taken over the party and the result is that people, instead of going for them as an alternative, are just not voting at all or voting for more fringe parties, especially younger people.
Honestly, even though they are a bit of a "one issue" party, the UK Pirate Party are more in tune with what matters for the Internet generation than any of the "traditional" parties. If I could vote for the UK Parliament (i'm not a UK or Commonwealth national, so I can't vote in those elections) they would have my vote.
I was doing this "tethering" thing regularly 10 years ago with my old Nokia and a Palm Pilot. It was even easier to do with my desktop PC (I didn't own a notebook at the time).
Clearly there's a lot of consumers of mobile services out there conditioned to accept being shafted all the time by the telecoms ...
I vaguelly remember an article in the newspaper that listed the BBC employee costs. A significant part of those was in paying "super-stars" (those entertainers that get payed millions of pounds per-year).
In a country like the UK with a long tradition of great humourists, paying a single comedian like Johnathan Ross 18 million pounds a year to host a couple of talk-shows is incredibly bad value for money.
Just for comparisson sake, the budget of BBC Radio 6 Music (which they're also planning on closing) is half as much. That's 24h/day, 7 days a weak, 52 weeks a year of music for half the price of maybe 10h/week of programming with Johnathan Ross. Measured in in hours-of-entertainment/pound terms that means that Johnathan Ross costs almost 34x more than BBC Radio 6 Music (and he's definetly not 34 times better).
Ditch that guy and couple more like him and replace them with new blood and you'll probably be able to cover the 110 million pounds that the BBC Internet operations cost. It will even have the nice side effect of enhancing even more the BBC's work in developing and promoting new talents in the UK.
In Chaos Theory, a small change to the inputs can cause large changes to the results.
However the changes are just as likelly to go in one direction as they are to go in the opposite direction: the butterfly effect is just as likelly to result in a typhoon instead of clear weather as it is to result in clear weather instead of a typhoon.
Also, small changes to inputs can cause small changes to the outputs or even no changes at all (that's why it's called Chaos Theory) - plenty of butterflies flutter-about with out creating typhoons ;)
If indeed the system that underpins earthquakes is chaotic, underground nuclear tests are just as likelly to have brought forward quakes as they are to have delayed quakes as they are not not have had much effect at all - in fact, they're likelly to have done all of them.
C'mon, this is the UK police we're talking about: nowadays they're driven by targets that come from the politicians and directly influence their bonuses and career prospects.
Targets have been set by the highest level of government to collect and keep as many DNA samples as possible for the DNA Database, so Bonuses and Promotions are at stake here. They don't give a damn about the citizens they are supposed to serve except as means to reach their targets, so they would tell you whatever you wanted to hear to get another point on their DNA samples target.
Count yourself lucky though: people's lifes have been ruined when they got "Cautions" (an admission of guilt, which requires no court involvement and goes into the Criminal Record) for being drunken and rowdy or for (lightly) discipling their own kids.
I've lived in 3 European countries by now and this is the only one where I don't trust the police (which is kinda sad since I'm from Portugal, a country where people look up to the UK as a better place)
Not that I blame the lowly copper: at the core of the current rot are the power hungry politicians and money driven high-level officers.
I guess that people are getting what they deserve around here: the British electorate keeps voting on the same two sets of visibly lying, deceitfull, sleazy and two-faced politicians (or not voting at all) - these guys are so exceptionally untrustworthy (at least compared with Dutch and Portuguese politicians) that they are caught cheating and lying so often it's not fun anymore.
... to check on the status of things
The stated speed of 100MB/s will only work as long you don't actually use it that often. If you use Bittorrent and/or Youtube/iPlayer too much Virgin will trottle down your connection (they do it alreay with their current 40MB/s fibre offer.
Oh, and by the way, your connection will be silently censored.
And let's not forget that Virgin is also a media company: if you, your kids, the neighbour (that managed to hack into your Wireless connection because you used no or easy encryption) or anybody else actually downloads music-tracks/videos/games/apps from some fishy place or other through your connection, expect a call from the appropriate industry's lawyers.
Last but not least, most Virgin companies have incredibly bad costumer service: even when their products are good, you can't trust them not to overcharge you, auto-renew your contracts against your wishes and/or other fishy practices. Usually they include incredible clausules in their contract designed to make it impossible for you to leave (good luck remembering to cancel your contract at a very specific couple of days in the year before they auto-renew).
What makes God?
Say, if an entity created mankind but could not perform any further actions that could be classified as miracles, would it be God?
How about Pantheons? Is not each and every Roman God a God?
Challenge the assumptions (i.e. the common usage of "God" to referer to the Christian God - which by the way, is the same as Allah) and there's plenty of room for discussion.
Every problem can be framed as a question having a yes/no answer:
- No satisfatory answer will ever be found if you stay in the confines of such a question instead of arguing in the confines of the actual problem.
By the way, you just proved my point - plenty of people unknowingly mentally limit themselfs to two-sided approaches to questioning and thinking.
I suspect that most people in this world are very much unaware that they do belong to "tribes", how they have "authority figures" and how they influence one's behaviour.
In fact, i reckon that most Slashdoters have never looked at Slashdot as the tribe it is.
The problem with your argument is that it relies on the targets having the know-how and self awareness to understand it and recognize themselfs on it.
Countless sessions of friendly discussions with the local Jehovah's Witnesses that pop-up at my door (when I have the time and the passience) have taught me that those that believe the strongest and the truest are usually the most ignorant of their own compulsions, motivations and sorrounding social pressures.
In other words, your post was either like preaching to the converts or like pearls to pigs.
Actually as an interesting side note, looking at an argument as having two sides is a self-imposed mental restriction of cultural origin (I bet you're from the US :))
In fact, in most arguments neither side is fully right: if you notice, discussions where two people are discussing something with the intent of reaching a destination instead of winning points will often end with a conclusion which does not exact match the inital argument of any of them.
Not a criticism, just pointing out that even the most enlightened people will unknowingly be biased by the environment they live in (and other factors, many other factors).
Everybody sees the world through the colored glasses of their own beliefs and prejudices: when it comes to human observation and judgement, perceptions taint everything we watch and conclude, it even taints our reactions.
Which is why care must be taken when setting up scientific tests and experiment: Why do you think clinical tests require control groups and are designed so that those in contact with the test subjects are not aware of certain factors in the experiment?
A sign of Wisdom and Enleightening is to be aware of one's own prejudices and how they affect the way one sees and interprets things.
Think about it: could it be that you quickly grabbed the conclusions of the article and interpret them as and endorsement of your own intense dislike of religions?
[Here's another view: if religions are a manifestation of some emotional characteristics in human beings, not the other way around, then one could conclude that they are not the problem, just a symptom: maybe the real problem is most people's unawareness of their inner selfs. If that is so, then those that hate religions suffer just as much from it as those that are religious]
Personally I always wished that MMORPGS had age segregated servers available.
Not because of adult content (as somebody pointed out in another story, naked pixels are only really tillitanting when ur a teen), it's simply because an environment where teens can run around anonymously controlling powerfull avatars and there are no adults in supervisory positions tends only be fun - if at all - for the teens themselfs (things like griefing, being loud, obnoxious and showing off which look cool when ur 13 and have no life experience just look like signs of social/emotional desperation once you become mature enough to understand people).
I don't want all servers should be age segregated, I just whish there were such servers available - with, for example, a 25+ age limit - for those that want the option: I would even be willing to pay extra for it.
<RANT type="no-more-pre-release-marketting" class="big">
Bungie is supposedly going to do yet another Halo, only this time it's supposedly going to be much better than the previous ones and here's an article with what the producer's PR/Marketoids think should be said on what it's supposedly going to be like.
Reminds me of all the articles we used to have a couple of years ago about the latest and greatest new software that was coming out: it usually turned out to be neither that greatest, as ground/breaking or the seamingly flawless experience the software house's Marketing people had described it to be for the preview.
Now we have the same type of bull as game previews in Slashdot, kinda like the almost-paid-for, page filling pap which is the standard fare of the "Previews" section of the large (and mainstream gaming industry fanboy) game sites.
Until we actually have a post by someone with hands-on gaming experience on the game, maybe we should save the space for more interesting news, like say, new developments in the area of waste treatment - more substance and less perfumed s*it.
</RANT>
As somebody who played WoW at launch on a PvP server I can tell you that the only reason I sticked around was because in the beginning one could not migrate the character to a different server (this was before Blizzard made the facility available).
The truth is that, while at the time non-consentual PvP did add some excitment when playing in the shared areas, this was often spoiled by griefers, which typically were higher-level characters that came to lower level areas.
During the first couple of months after WoW started, the typical difference in levels between characters wasn't that large (in fact, even though I'm a non-hardcore gamer, I kept up enough with the leveling threadmill that I was never faced with a griefer more than 15 levels above me) so one often had some chance against the griefers (often by enlisting the help of other players of the same faction in that region via regional chat).
In fact, one of the best PvP moments I had there was in Redridge Mountains (where most people are around lvl 20) when as a reaction to a pair of lvl 30 griefers (probably from Booty Bay) about 20 or more of us from Lakeshire village took them on (and won). This was before Battlegrounds and even before the PvP Ladder/Rankings (which preceeded Battlegrounds and pretty much ruined the game for me)
That said, I suspect that after those first couple of months griefers pretty much had free reign to do whatever they wanted (think gangs of lvl 60 griefer in a starter area). The 10-fold increase in gratuitous griefing that immediately follow the start of the PvP Ladder (literally from one day to the next huge, never-ending and very laggy battles started around certain key villages and questing became close to impossible due to the roaming gangs of players farmering other players) was a very good indicator of how easilly the game would turn unplayable in a PvP realm (and I was a Rogue, so i could sneak around: other classes didn't had it so easilly)
[I left a little after the PvP Ladder was implemented, because of this and because it's mechanics were such that casual players had no chance to compete (admited by the lead developer in a forum post which was later removed) - so I've been out of it for 4 or 5 years now]
The reasons why PvP realms were popular when WoW started were due to factors (ignorance of how it worked, impossibility of migrating you character, low spread of levels between players) which are not in effect anymore, so I wouldn't use that as an argument.
There are a growing number of people who believe that aiming solely for fast large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions is not an economically wise decision and it's better to mix less ambitious goals on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with engineering approaches to try and reduce global warming.
That said, reducing CO2 emissions does have some interesting side-effects such as reducing dependency on Oil and Gas.
Consider a world where there is no need to pay trillions of dollars to some far away countries whose only claim to greatness is lots of hydrocarbons and the subsidizing of madrassas in other countries to spread a particularly extremist and violent form of Islam, or spend trillions of dollars on wars to protect them. Not to mention that Oil and Gas keep some pretty nasty dictatorships in power.
In such a world, if China does not follow other countries into a low-carbon economy, they will be the sending trillions to those countries and paying for wars in faraway places ...
It's very simple: you help poor people by making sure their kids have the same opportunities as the ones from more well-off families.
That means that laws are designed to help poor black/white/asian/latino/whatever kids but not rich black/white/asian/latino/whatever kids.
"Positive" Discrimination is flawed because it will, for example, help rich blacks just as much as poor blacks but not help poor whites (or any other racial group) at all - in fact there's nothing positive about those laws since they discriminate against everybody else.
The problem that needs addressing is that poor kids don't have fair chances, the color of their skin, their parents' religious beliefs or any other such things should not be relevant when deciding to help them or not.
"The Chronicles of Riddick" was a great action movie with a dark Sci-Fi/Fantasy background - in fact it might be quite a unique mix of genres: certainly the (Futuristic Black-Magic) background to the story is way off anything else Hollywood ever made.
That said, it's not surprising that those that first saw "Pitch Black" and then went to see "The Chronicles of Riddick" as a sequel were disapointed: to put it simply "Pitch Black" was a finelly tuned Horror-Action movie while The Chronicles was more of a Rambo style action movie (chewing gum for the brain) Sci-Fi/Fantasy movie with an anti-Hero as the main character (although Riddick as a character was much more developed in the second movie).
Personally I thoroughly enjoyed both movies in different ways, although this might be because I first saw "The Chronicles of Riddick" and then went looking for "Pitch Black" instead of the other way around so I didn't saw the second movie in the
expectation it would be a continuation of the first.
This is not surprising:
- Mobile phone makers are afraid that hardware is becoming commoditised (read: low cost, low margins) and software will become the way to make profits, just like it happened with PCs
- Telecoms operators are afraid that they become providers of dumb-data-pipes (instead of the system that they have now of fragmenting data into services and charging more for some) just like it happened with ISPs.
So the phone makers want to get a share of any profits done on the software (just like Apple has) and the telecoms operators want to get a share of any profits done on new data services implemented on software (which do not relly on the headset's built-in functionality and thus cannot be controlled by the telecom operators via "subsidized headsets") especially since mobile phones capable of supporting innovative new functionality/services via downloadable software will outcompete the locked phones sold via the telecoms so the market will slowly moved away from the locked phones.
Hi,
For improved understanding, could you please reprase your story as a car analogy.
Thanks in advance!
You have to give a little leeway to US(ian) Slashdotters on this one - in the US market the iPhone was probably the first half-way decent mobile phone that was actually being willingly sold by the mobile telecoms.
In a market dominated by a small number of telecoms with a Government given monopoly, where most phone sets are locked and provided by the telecoms, Apple's "Mobile phone with features as have been provided outside the US for years but marketed as hippy and cool instead of geeky" probably looked like an earth shattering new invention.
Any law which is trully meant to protect people from unwanted/illegal content would pass the following check list:
Any law that fails one or more of this checks is just a censorship mechanism being created by those currently in power which is designed to silence dissent and critical political speech.
I'm just happy that the guys I helped elect to represent me in the EU are doing their job.
The EU Parliament is the only directly elected EU institution (the members of the European Comission are nominated by countries' governments - and many are in the pockets of some lobbyist or other - and the Council of Europe is made up of representatives from each EU countries' governments) and it is the most consistent defender of things like consumer rights and the privacy of the EU citizens.
I would like to remind every EU Slashdotter that if you are an EU citizen, no mater where you live in the EU (even outside your home country) you can vote for the EU Parliament - most people in the EU are not exercising this right so your vote will be even weightier.