Just what we need, another ballot measure. And this one identifies a vague problem with no good solution or means of enforcement. Firstly, what grave harms are you doing to someone by collecting information on them? And secondly, if the computer which is doing the collecting is not physically in Oregon, how would such a law apply?
i live in oregon, and we have a ballot measure system that, in theory, is designed to pass laws that our legislature is too cowardly or disinterested to create. isn't it possible to write a measure that prohibits individually identifiable information from being collected on the internet? I realise that the US Congress has control over 'interstate trade' and so forth, but isn't there something that can be done on the local level? maybe passing the measure would get people to start paying attention to what's happening to their information behind the sceness. --
If you've played enough of any online game, you've already noticed the problem with any kind of rating system. It doesn't matter if the game is chess, Quake, or karma whoring on Slashdot. When you institute some sort of ongoing rating to measure the skill of the participants, the following things always happen.
First, people start attaching way too much significance to the ratings. Something in human nature, I guess, that gets gratified by watching one's statistics grow. (Anyone who's played Diablo or any of the better rogue-like games knows all about this.) Then, people start figuring out ways they can increase their rating that don't involve increasing ones skill at the game. On Slashdot, this analogizes to people ignoring the goal of posting informative and interesting stuff, and instead carefully choosing their posts to increase their karma.
Lastly, veteran players split into two types of people. The first type are the insecures who continue to play the game of gaining rating instead of playing the game that the ratings were instituted to rate. If enough people in a particular locale do this, then it significantly downgrades the level of sportsmanship and the quality of the games.
The second type of person realizes that she cares more about the game than about the rating, and goes back to playing as if there were no rating system, which in my humble opinion is the way things should be.
Unfortunately, only people who play the game for a while seem to be able to do this. Something about being a newbie makes one focus on the rating. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down to newbies here, I remember quite well how thrilling it's been to gain rating points in various games, karma-hoarding included.
So how does this relate to Slashdot? The moderation system perhaps does create a game out of aquiring karma, but in my opinion this has not degraded Slashdot much. If you take a more relaxed attitude towards it, it's actually a nice way of trimming down the comments so that you don't spend all day reading one page. All the people who like to complain extensively about Slashdot policy need to take a break and go play some other online game until they realize that playing the game for fun is much better than playing it for ratings.
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While I'm on the subject, an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie". I'm neither an xtian nor a fundie, but I find that sort of gratuitous nastiness distasteful. It only makes me think less of the person who uses it, not the person it's directed at.
"xtian," "xian," "xpn," and the like are all abbreviations for Christian that have been around for centuries in one form or another. They are shorter, not more derogatory. Similarly, 'fundie' is short for 'fundamentalist,' which is not really a blanket insult.
Of course, saying that someone is a fundamentalist is not inherently an insult, it depends on your view of fundamentalism. The word doesn't mean to ascribe any additional attributes other than a literal and somewhat fanatical belief in the bible. Since this is a fairly loony belief, however, I can see how you might get the impression that it is an insult.
Nastiness towards the christian religion can usually be left to a pointed description of the facts of that belief. However, if you really want to spew bile, 'xian' and 'fundie' are hardly sufficient. The preferred words for insulting christians are as follows:
funnymentalist
christfuck (use as a general exclamation)
god-ite
christ on a stick (another exclamation)
sheep
conformist fuckwad
brainwashee
Also good are references to their invisible god and magical christ figure.
Ever since they moved production to California, the show has pretty much sucked. I used to be a fan, but without everything being dark and wet and foggy, it lost its creepy-cool ambiance. It's funny that Duchovny is leaving the show, after he kicked and whined to make them move the production and basically killed it.
Yeah, I think the California thing is pretty key to why recent seasons have been really bad compared to the earlier ones. The X-Files' theme colors are black and green, something you can get a lot of in British Columbia, and almost none of in LA. Plus, and I've figured out that this is the thing that really bugs me, because they're in Los Angeles, they don't have access to *actors who look like normal people.* I swear, nothing kills an episode fast than not being able to have any empathy at all for the main character because they look like some Hollywood layabout rather than a normal person with some horrible alien parasite inside him.
There were a couple episodes last season that might have been all right. Take that one ep for example, the one where the high school kid finds a secret cave that gives him the power to move with impossible speed. That had some things in it that might have made it enjoyable to watch, although the three high school kids in it all looked like they were twenty-six years old, and they just looked completely wrong and unappealing.
Sigh. I guess I'll just have to watch episodes on tape when I want some good television.
And my situation is a good example of why David Brin's Transparent Society will never work. My personal life harms no one, and in my state of residence it's perfectly legal. But I guarantee you that if my personal life were revealed to everyone, I would have problems with my employer, not to mention my coworkers and possibly with over-zealous law enforcement who aren't familiar with the (lack of) sodomy laws in this state.
I disagree. While the "Transparent Society" would require a massive, massive change in the way our society views people and does its business, I don't think the reason you state is the one why it wouldn't work.
Let's say we had a very open society, and everyone knew of your "deviant" sexual practices. To be fair of course, you would know about everyone else's sexual practices as well. And so what?
Yes, in today's society, the revelation of your private practices did you great harm. But I don't think it would be the case that an open society would encourage conformity, quite the opposite. You see, of all the people who persecuted you for your actions, at least some of them had secrets about themselves, perhaps sexual, that they'd rather not share. It's the ability of these people to keep themselves hidden that allows them to attack you for your foibles.
If everyone's lives were out in the open, who would attack you for being a zoophile? Only people whose personal lives were deemed to be much "cleaner" than yours. If everyone were open to scrutiny, I think people would be *less* inclined to criticize, not more -- sort of like if *everyone* lived in a glass house there'd be a lot less stone-throwing.
Let's take to a concrete example -- drug use. In today's society a person usually, for good reason, covers up their drug use and doesn't let other people know. Suppose they had to let everyone know they were doing drugs. This would create three possibilities. A: the person would stop doing drugs, because they don't want to be seen doing them. (unlikely for most drugs.) B: The person would do drugs, and be comfortable doing drugs, and if anyone tried to ostracize them for it, they'd just shrug their shoulders and go on with their life. Or C: The person would do drugs, but desire not to do them, at which point people would know that that person had a problem, and perhaps the person would be able to get some help.
Now obviously, this is a rather idealized notion that involves people being nicer to each other than they are now. However, the vindictiveness of people stems not from an innate property, but from society, a society that encourages people to hide any deviant behavior away and pretend that everyone is perfectly normal. Having a less private society is the first step away from this kind of nonsense.
Carl Jung once obverved, and I forget the exact wording or circumstance, so don't quote me, that as society grows larger in population, the amount of "deviant" behavior increases. This is because the more people there are, the greater chance a deviant can find others her to support her. This would seem to indicate that eventually scenario B that I described above could come to pass -- if people don't like you for some reason, then fine, just find people who do like you.
I'm all in favor of giving law enforcement all the tools they say they need and they say they want under one condition: The more they get, the more light shines into them
I fail to see how the loss of somebody else's privacy compensates you for the loss of your own.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The right of privacy is tightly bound with the idea of egalitarianism. Privacy rights do not mean "Nobody gets to know anything about anyone." Privacy rights are when the same information about each person is either public or private, and people have an understanding as to which is which.
Suppose everyone's name, address and occupation and other information were all stored in public databases. And I mean *public* -- anyone can easily search the date for the information they want. So I know where you live, but you also know where I live. This would be a change in the way our society did business, but it would hardly be an erosion of privacy rights.
An erosion of privacy rights would be if certain individuals had more information in the database about them than others. Or if government organizations had access to even more information, but didn't share it, or even tell anyone they had it.
The fundamental loss-of-privacy situation is when aspects of your life are open to scrutiny, and the people examining you (and pointing fingers and laughing) have their own skeletons in their closets, but don't have to share.
Whatever... if people are going to do this, please make sure to only scramble works that you *know* are copyrighted and restricted. Remember, the object is not to foil data distribution, but to foil copyright infringement. Data sharing *is* the way to allow people to listen to more varied and better music, and well as just being a great idea in general.
Also keep in mind that if you "cuckoo" a work whose author is dead and gone, or a work that should have long since passed into the public domain, you are not doing anything noble, but rather shilling for the RIAA. Is it really your goal to make more money for the people who want to hide away information so that they can sell it?
It is really easy to say that something someone else created should be free.
But it's theft.
No, theft is when you take a physical object from someone without permission. Piracy is when you capture valuable cargo on the high seas. Downloading someone's music without permission is, well, copying without permission. And, like theft, it's a crime, but it's a different crime.
Are there good reasons why this law against copying without permission is in place? Sure, some. Is it enforceable? Maybe. Does it benefit society as a whole? Maybe.
Why am I quibbling over sematics here? Because, sensible ethics and laws are not made through faulty analogies. They're made by considering the benefits and consequences of a particular course of action when weighed against another.
I suppose that I don't disagree with you. I am not someone who demands that work be given out for free. In fact, here is a list of my demands:
1. MTV goes off the air.
2. People listen to a wider variety of music, a portion of it for free.
3. Consumers are able to buy things, not just borrow them for a price and use them only how the lender orders them.
To counter that, if you ever catch a kiddie on your system (logged in), don't just boot him off. 'talk' him. Make sure he knows that there are people behind these machines, and that they're not just machines to be played with.
This may work with a few kiddiez, but overall it is a bad idea. You are not going to have a meaningful conversation with someone who just wants to screw with your box, and you could end up making yourself a target. The best defense is just to keep your machines as secure as possible. What's more inviting to some fourteen year-old wannabe, a mostly secure box where intrusions are efficiently detected and patched up, or one in which the admins drop in to say "hi?"
Stopping to chat just turns breaking&entering into more of a game than it already is. This is exciting for the kid, and a pain in the ass for you. For stopping everything from serious crackers all the way down to little kidz, the best policy is no retaliation, no dialogue of any kind.
Can anybody explain to me why liberals see the corporations as evil and big government as inherently good?
Both large corporations and large governments are human organizations that exercise control over many people's lives. Traditionally, the stated goal of a corporation is to make money, and the traditional goal of government is to improve the lives of its citizens. Therefore, a government is seen as a more benign entity than a corporation.
Of course, government is not *inherently* good or bad. If your government does bad things, then it is a bad government. If your government does good things, then it is a good government. Most fall somewhere in between.
I'm not an expert on this subject, but that's the simplest explanation I could think of. Hope this helps.
i am 16 and i can damn well understand the consequences of my actions better then a lot of the adults i know...
Try to remember what you were like when you were fourteen years old. Since then, haven't you become much more intelligent and mature? Aren't there many things that you understand a lot better now that you're a few years older? There's so many things that the fourteen year-old you didn't know, so many things he was naive about.
When you're eighteen, you'll look back at your sixteen year-old self and think the same things. And when you're twenty, you'll look back on you at eighteen and wonder what the hell you were thinking. And so on, at least as far as you experience intellectual and emotional growth.
Someday, you'll wake up a middle-aged man, and you'll think that all teenagers are idiots who dress funny, and you'll think it's well and good that the voting age is eighteen years.
No, what I'm looking forward to is a fully distributed system of communication where every client is also a sort of server.
ytalk, anyone? That's what I've always used when I wanted to chat with someone. Between the telephone, email, ytalk, irc and others, I've never really found a need for another communications program like ICQ. I dunno, I guess it feels unnecessary to have more communication devices than friends.
Sorry, but if you can't find one good computer game that came out in the nineties, then the simple fact is that you just don't like games. I suppose I could write you a list of games that have come out in the last decade that were wildly fun and innovative, but if you can't tell the difference between Populous and AoEII, then it probably wouldn't do much good. --
Add Pitch Black to the list, and we're definitely over three. Ok, so it's just a combination of old sci-fi ideas, (Asimov's Nightfall combined with Aliens) but it's wonderfully done and fun to watch. I'd recommend it to any fan of science fiction who needs a quick fix.
Silent computers? Are you kidding? That's a pretty horrible idea. Seriously, I like a little bit of noise from my computer, just enough so that I know it's on and working. Especially the hard drive. You type in a command and enter. The computer goes to a blank screen and sits there. Is it thinking? Blocking? Stalling? Dead?
Maybe I'm just nostalgic for my old Apple IIe. Man, when it wanted to read a disk, and it didn't like what was in its drive, it *told* you about it.
I think the most obvious and necessary new TLD is.xxx, for online vendors of pornography. It would be a distinction appreciated by both lovers and haters of porn. Is there any other subject matter for which such a strict distinction exists? Imagine...
"Last night I loaded up one of those trashy.com sites. You know, just for the articles." *snicker*
"I think freedom of speech is fine, so long as my children don't get exposed to any of those.com sites."
Other useful ones might be.info (public information servers),.ent (entertainment, also easily corruptible), and.dotcom (cheesy internet scams)
Everyone should read the story on Ion Storm that ran in the Dallas Observer (here is a link to it) for a picture of too much ego + too much money.
I was sure you were going to make the pun "too much ego + not enough Id."
Oh well. From all accounts, Daikatana is a mediocre game that should have come out at least a year ago. If John Romero truly wants to be the design god he claims he is, then he should check out and learn from some of the more modern (than Doom) examples of great FPS design, like Half-life, System Shock 2, or Goldeneye.
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Re:There is no such thing as class war
on
Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 2
Social mobility makes the whole idea of class war fallacious
Actually, while I am no great proponent of the class-war paradigm, I find the above statement completely wrong. Who cares if people change sides? The rich still try to get richer at the expense of the poor, and the poor still try to elevate themselves into a higher income bracket. That's what's referred to as a class war.
What effect does this have on a society? It simply comes down to a Rawlsian ideal of justice. Would you rather come into this world in a society everyone was reasonably well off, or would you rather come into a society in which there are small number of super-rich, and a large number of people living in abject poverty?
Does it make a big difference if there is a little mobility? I think you overestimate the ability of the average person to "change sides," as it were.
The only solution to the problem is to bill the corporations for the wasted common resources, i.e. tax environment-unfriendly outfits. That way, impact on the environment becomes part of the cost-benefit calculations, and may sway those soul-less corps into the right direction.
Unfortunately, these taxes might be considered as a backdoor to socialism too:(
Anyone who thinks that, though, is an idiot. In a free capitalist society, who owns clean water and clean air? They are not just there for polluters to use as a convenient dumping ground, they are owned by the public. A lot of the environmental degradation we see is not the fault of capitalism at all, but that of our public representatives. If we, the public, allow producers to pollute for free, or for a cost much less than the cost of dirty air and water, then of course they are going to do so. Getting a fair price for our resources is not socialism, it's just good business.
Of course, it would help if the alleged guardians of public property (politicians) were actually concerned with the public trust as much as they are for bending over for corporate interests.
You don't see a difference between not knowing (and often not caring) and being certain of the negative case? I personally am agnostic, because I don't have any way of knowing, and science is far from complete. (Evolution in particular, does in fact have some pretty big holes)
I just don't see the word 'atheist' as meaning 'someone who is certain there is no god.' To me it's someone who doesn't worship any gods.
Are you also agnostic on the issue of Santa Claus? You have no way of knowing that Santa does not exist. I feel perfectly justified in saying that the Xian God does not exist, even though I am not 100.00% certain. Same goes for leprechauns, satrys, and invisible pink unicorns.
Why do you think that the question of whether or not animals evolve has anything to do with whether or not there is a god?
I never can figure out why people can't understand the religous nature of atheism. Atheists believe that there is no god or other supernatural entity of any kind, much as Christians believe that there is a god that has some degree of supernatural influence on reality. Agnosticism is the lack of religion, not Atheism people. You are wrong. A theist is someone believes in a theistic religion, loosely speaking, a moral philosophy or worldview that involves the worship of a god or gods. An atheist is someone who is not a theist.
Agnostic simply means "not knowing," ie someone who says that they can't be sure whether or not there is a God. I personally dislike this term, it sounds like an apologist, although I suppose I see how it could be substituted for atheist a lot of the time.
Sorry to break your bubble, but Ayn Rand was a militant atheist and therefore her insane ramblings have no bearing in reality, nor do they carry any weight with decent people.
ik, ik, ihbt. But anyway, I just have to vent for half a second. How the heck is it "insane" to not participate in any theistic religion? It is insanity that I don't have an invisible friend named Jesus? Should I be committed because I *don't* hear voices? Because I don't take orders from your magical deity?
Sigh, I guess I'm just not a "decent" person. Everyone knows all decent people follow that one religion. You know, the One True one.
Slashdot Mirror
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i live in oregon, and we have a ballot measure system that, in theory, is designed to pass laws that our legislature is too cowardly or disinterested to create. isn't it possible to write a measure that prohibits individually identifiable information from being collected on the internet? I realise that the US Congress has control over 'interstate trade' and so forth, but isn't there something that can be done on the local level? maybe passing the measure would get people to start paying attention to what's happening to their information behind the sceness.
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First, people start attaching way too much significance to the ratings. Something in human nature, I guess, that gets gratified by watching one's statistics grow. (Anyone who's played Diablo or any of the better rogue-like games knows all about this.) Then, people start figuring out ways they can increase their rating that don't involve increasing ones skill at the game. On Slashdot, this analogizes to people ignoring the goal of posting informative and interesting stuff, and instead carefully choosing their posts to increase their karma.
Lastly, veteran players split into two types of people. The first type are the insecures who continue to play the game of gaining rating instead of playing the game that the ratings were instituted to rate. If enough people in a particular locale do this, then it significantly downgrades the level of sportsmanship and the quality of the games.
The second type of person realizes that she cares more about the game than about the rating, and goes back to playing as if there were no rating system, which in my humble opinion is the way things should be.
Unfortunately, only people who play the game for a while seem to be able to do this. Something about being a newbie makes one focus on the rating. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking down to newbies here, I remember quite well how thrilling it's been to gain rating points in various games, karma-hoarding included.
So how does this relate to Slashdot? The moderation system perhaps does create a game out of aquiring karma, but in my opinion this has not degraded Slashdot much. If you take a more relaxed attitude towards it, it's actually a nice way of trimming down the comments so that you don't spend all day reading one page. All the people who like to complain extensively about Slashdot policy need to take a break and go play some other online game until they realize that playing the game for fun is much better than playing it for ratings.
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"xtian," "xian," "xpn," and the like are all abbreviations for Christian that have been around for centuries in one form or another. They are shorter, not more derogatory. Similarly, 'fundie' is short for 'fundamentalist,' which is not really a blanket insult.
Of course, saying that someone is a fundamentalist is not inherently an insult, it depends on your view of fundamentalism. The word doesn't mean to ascribe any additional attributes other than a literal and somewhat fanatical belief in the bible. Since this is a fairly loony belief, however, I can see how you might get the impression that it is an insult.
Nastiness towards the christian religion can usually be left to a pointed description of the facts of that belief. However, if you really want to spew bile, 'xian' and 'fundie' are hardly sufficient. The preferred words for insulting christians are as follows:
funnymentalist
christfuck (use as a general exclamation)
god-ite
christ on a stick (another exclamation)
sheep
conformist fuckwad
brainwashee
Also good are references to their invisible god and magical christ figure.
HTH!
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yes.
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Yeah, I think the California thing is pretty key to why recent seasons have been really bad compared to the earlier ones. The X-Files' theme colors are black and green, something you can get a lot of in British Columbia, and almost none of in LA. Plus, and I've figured out that this is the thing that really bugs me, because they're in Los Angeles, they don't have access to *actors who look like normal people.* I swear, nothing kills an episode fast than not being able to have any empathy at all for the main character because they look like some Hollywood layabout rather than a normal person with some horrible alien parasite inside him.
There were a couple episodes last season that might have been all right. Take that one ep for example, the one where the high school kid finds a secret cave that gives him the power to move with impossible speed. That had some things in it that might have made it enjoyable to watch, although the three high school kids in it all looked like they were twenty-six years old, and they just looked completely wrong and unappealing.
Sigh. I guess I'll just have to watch episodes on tape when I want some good television.
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I disagree. While the "Transparent Society" would require a massive, massive change in the way our society views people and does its business, I don't think the reason you state is the one why it wouldn't work.
Let's say we had a very open society, and everyone knew of your "deviant" sexual practices. To be fair of course, you would know about everyone else's sexual practices as well. And so what?
Yes, in today's society, the revelation of your private practices did you great harm. But I don't think it would be the case that an open society would encourage conformity, quite the opposite. You see, of all the people who persecuted you for your actions, at least some of them had secrets about themselves, perhaps sexual, that they'd rather not share. It's the ability of these people to keep themselves hidden that allows them to attack you for your foibles.
If everyone's lives were out in the open, who would attack you for being a zoophile? Only people whose personal lives were deemed to be much "cleaner" than yours. If everyone were open to scrutiny, I think people would be *less* inclined to criticize, not more -- sort of like if *everyone* lived in a glass house there'd be a lot less stone-throwing.
Let's take to a concrete example -- drug use. In today's society a person usually, for good reason, covers up their drug use and doesn't let other people know. Suppose they had to let everyone know they were doing drugs. This would create three possibilities. A: the person would stop doing drugs, because they don't want to be seen doing them. (unlikely for most drugs.) B: The person would do drugs, and be comfortable doing drugs, and if anyone tried to ostracize them for it, they'd just shrug their shoulders and go on with their life. Or C: The person would do drugs, but desire not to do them, at which point people would know that that person had a problem, and perhaps the person would be able to get some help.
Now obviously, this is a rather idealized notion that involves people being nicer to each other than they are now. However, the vindictiveness of people stems not from an innate property, but from society, a society that encourages people to hide any deviant behavior away and pretend that everyone is perfectly normal. Having a less private society is the first step away from this kind of nonsense.
Carl Jung once obverved, and I forget the exact wording or circumstance, so don't quote me, that as society grows larger in population, the amount of "deviant" behavior increases. This is because the more people there are, the greater chance a deviant can find others her to support her. This would seem to indicate that eventually scenario B that I described above could come to pass -- if people don't like you for some reason, then fine, just find people who do like you.
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I've said this before and I'll say it again. The right of privacy is tightly bound with the idea of egalitarianism. Privacy rights do not mean "Nobody gets to know anything about anyone." Privacy rights are when the same information about each person is either public or private, and people have an understanding as to which is which.
Suppose everyone's name, address and occupation and other information were all stored in public databases. And I mean *public* -- anyone can easily search the date for the information they want. So I know where you live, but you also know where I live. This would be a change in the way our society did business, but it would hardly be an erosion of privacy rights.
An erosion of privacy rights would be if certain individuals had more information in the database about them than others. Or if government organizations had access to even more information, but didn't share it, or even tell anyone they had it.
The fundamental loss-of-privacy situation is when aspects of your life are open to scrutiny, and the people examining you (and pointing fingers and laughing) have their own skeletons in their closets, but don't have to share.
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I think I hear the sound of an MTV exec somewhere laughing.
How much of a drop in music production would it be worth if we could raise artisic quality and stop the top40 money machine from controlling music?
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Also keep in mind that if you "cuckoo" a work whose author is dead and gone, or a work that should have long since passed into the public domain, you are not doing anything noble, but rather shilling for the RIAA. Is it really your goal to make more money for the people who want to hide away information so that they can sell it?
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But it's theft.
No, theft is when you take a physical object from someone without permission. Piracy is when you capture valuable cargo on the high seas. Downloading someone's music without permission is, well, copying without permission. And, like theft, it's a crime, but it's a different crime.
Are there good reasons why this law against copying without permission is in place? Sure, some. Is it enforceable? Maybe. Does it benefit society as a whole? Maybe.
Why am I quibbling over sematics here? Because, sensible ethics and laws are not made through faulty analogies. They're made by considering the benefits and consequences of a particular course of action when weighed against another.
I suppose that I don't disagree with you. I am not someone who demands that work be given out for free. In fact, here is a list of my demands:
1. MTV goes off the air.
2. People listen to a wider variety of music, a portion of it for free.
3. Consumers are able to buy things, not just borrow them for a price and use them only how the lender orders them.
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This may work with a few kiddiez, but overall it is a bad idea. You are not going to have a meaningful conversation with someone who just wants to screw with your box, and you could end up making yourself a target. The best defense is just to keep your machines as secure as possible. What's more inviting to some fourteen year-old wannabe, a mostly secure box where intrusions are efficiently detected and patched up, or one in which the admins drop in to say "hi?"
Stopping to chat just turns breaking&entering into more of a game than it already is. This is exciting for the kid, and a pain in the ass for you. For stopping everything from serious crackers all the way down to little kidz, the best policy is no retaliation, no dialogue of any kind.
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Both large corporations and large governments are human organizations that exercise control over many people's lives. Traditionally, the stated goal of a corporation is to make money, and the traditional goal of government is to improve the lives of its citizens. Therefore, a government is seen as a more benign entity than a corporation.
Of course, government is not *inherently* good or bad. If your government does bad things, then it is a bad government. If your government does good things, then it is a good government. Most fall somewhere in between.
I'm not an expert on this subject, but that's the simplest explanation I could think of. Hope this helps.
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i am 16 and i can damn well understand the consequences of my actions better then a lot of the adults i know...
Try to remember what you were like when you were fourteen years old. Since then, haven't you become much more intelligent and mature? Aren't there many things that you understand a lot better now that you're a few years older? There's so many things that the fourteen year-old you didn't know, so many things he was naive about.
When you're eighteen, you'll look back at your sixteen year-old self and think the same things. And when you're twenty, you'll look back on you at eighteen and wonder what the hell you were thinking. And so on, at least as far as you experience intellectual and emotional growth.
Someday, you'll wake up a middle-aged man, and you'll think that all teenagers are idiots who dress funny, and you'll think it's well and good that the voting age is eighteen years.
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ytalk, anyone? That's what I've always used when I wanted to chat with someone. Between the telephone, email, ytalk, irc and others, I've never really found a need for another communications program like ICQ. I dunno, I guess it feels unnecessary to have more communication devices than friends.
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Sorry, but if you can't find one good computer game that came out in the nineties, then the simple fact is that you just don't like games. I suppose I could write you a list of games that have come out in the last decade that were wildly fun and innovative, but if you can't tell the difference between Populous and AoEII, then it probably wouldn't do much good.
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Maybe I'm just nostalgic for my old Apple IIe. Man, when it wanted to read a disk, and it didn't like what was in its drive, it *told* you about it.
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"Last night I loaded up one of those trashy .com sites. You know, just for the articles." *snicker*
"I think freedom of speech is fine, so long as my children don't get exposed to any of those .com sites."
Other useful ones might be .info (public information servers), .ent (entertainment, also easily corruptible), and .dotcom (cheesy internet scams)
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I was sure you were going to make the pun "too much ego + not enough Id."
Oh well. From all accounts, Daikatana is a mediocre game that should have come out at least a year ago. If John Romero truly wants to be the design god he claims he is, then he should check out and learn from some of the more modern (than Doom) examples of great FPS design, like Half-life, System Shock 2, or Goldeneye.
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Actually, while I am no great proponent of the class-war paradigm, I find the above statement completely wrong. Who cares if people change sides? The rich still try to get richer at the expense of the poor, and the poor still try to elevate themselves into a higher income bracket. That's what's referred to as a class war.
What effect does this have on a society? It simply comes down to a Rawlsian ideal of justice. Would you rather come into this world in a society everyone was reasonably well off, or would you rather come into a society in which there are small number of super-rich, and a large number of people living in abject poverty?
Does it make a big difference if there is a little mobility? I think you overestimate the ability of the average person to "change sides," as it were.
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Unfortunately, these taxes might be considered as a backdoor to socialism too :(
Anyone who thinks that, though, is an idiot. In a free capitalist society, who owns clean water and clean air? They are not just there for polluters to use as a convenient dumping ground, they are owned by the public. A lot of the environmental degradation we see is not the fault of capitalism at all, but that of our public representatives. If we, the public, allow producers to pollute for free, or for a cost much less than the cost of dirty air and water, then of course they are going to do so. Getting a fair price for our resources is not socialism, it's just good business.
Of course, it would help if the alleged guardians of public property (politicians) were actually concerned with the public trust as much as they are for bending over for corporate interests.
obVoteNader
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I just don't see the word 'atheist' as meaning 'someone who is certain there is no god.' To me it's someone who doesn't worship any gods.
Are you also agnostic on the issue of Santa Claus? You have no way of knowing that Santa does not exist. I feel perfectly justified in saying that the Xian God does not exist, even though I am not 100.00% certain. Same goes for leprechauns, satrys, and invisible pink unicorns.
Why do you think that the question of whether or not animals evolve has anything to do with whether or not there is a god?
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Agnostic simply means "not knowing," ie someone who says that they can't be sure whether or not there is a God. I personally dislike this term, it sounds like an apologist, although I suppose I see how it could be substituted for atheist a lot of the time.
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ik, ik, ihbt. But anyway, I just have to vent for half a second. How the heck is it "insane" to not participate in any theistic religion? It is insanity that I don't have an invisible friend named Jesus? Should I be committed because I *don't* hear voices? Because I don't take orders from your magical deity?
Sigh, I guess I'm just not a "decent" person. Everyone knows all decent people follow that one religion. You know, the One True one.
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