You cannot have perfectly objective, hard and fast rules for everything.
In this instance, you can:
Nothing is outlawed because it is "obscene".
If you don't like something, don't look at it. If someone is forcing you to watch, that's different - but the availability of something shouldn't be denied because some people don't like it. (Note: that works for drugs too)
In Australia, we effectively have this.
You grade the candidates in your preference order. They then basically pick the least hated candidate.
They look at everyone's first preference and discard whichever candidate got the lowest. All the people who voted #1 for them then have their #2 preference allocated to each candidates total and repeat the process until there is only 1 left, and that's who is voted in.
I think it solves these problems very elegantly. You rank candidates in your actual preference order, and you don't have to worry about "wasting" a vote.
Same reason you could theoretically grow all your crops and never have to pay for them, but it's too much effort and people just end up going to the shops.
We may be half the size of California, but as a country we're one of only a very small handful European English-speaking countries (and I find Canada and the US hard to differentiate, and to be honest, NZ is extremely similar to us in all practical respects). This means that we are similar enough that our differences are cherished instead of feared as they are when they are TOO different in most other cases.
It's not surprising - you'd need to have a bulletproof case before you actually challenged a case in court and ran up the huge associated cost. For everything else you'd just settle.
Because Steam has a lot of benefits to me. It's very easy and simple, and takes care of things like patching and installing for me.
Cracking is harder work - not by much, but enough that I consider Steam to be a very acceptable trade.
I haven't met one person who actually said they want internet censorship in Australia.
I haven't had the same experience unfortunately. Most of my non-technical friends actually support it, due to "omg those pedophiles must be stopped!" mentality.
Why can't people think rationally as soon as children become involved?
I don't want to turn on Sponge Bob at 2pm and see Sandy with a strap on fucking Patrick up the Ass while Squidward cums on his face.
So don't watch channels that do that! How do so many people not understand that just because something exists doesn't imply that you'll be forced to see it!
Seriously, there are a LOT of adults with young kids in the world. There is a very large demand for kid-friendly material, and that demand will be met! Stop fucking worrying about the evil porn monster jumping out and randomly slapping your kids in the face - any channel that did that would never get another viewer or ad dollar ever again!
There *are* those kids who don't understand sarcasm, don't follow even the most basic logical arguments and may not understand that discussing terrorism does not imply becoming a terrorist. Slashdot posters who breezed through high school should understand that many people barely passed (hell, many people fail).
So because some people don't/can't understand it, the argument has merit? I'd hope we were going for a higher level of reasoning than lowest-common denominator consensus.
To be honest, most of the gamers in that mindset are moving to the consoles, and I really don't have a problem with that. I have been enjoying the recent round of indy-style games immensely, and hope the trend continue.
Some of my favourite, non-graphically intense recent games:
Alien Swarm
World of Goo
Braid
Osmosis
And Yet It Moves
Plants Vs. Zombies
For 3d games, Half-Life 2's Source engine is the sweet spot. From then on, graphics have been good enough, and what makes a game "good" is the gameplay.
I'm more pissed off at our government and society than pretty much anyone I know, yet where could I move? Every country seems to be fucked in their own special way
I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+"... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content
One effect of not having an R18+ rating means that there is immense pressure on the classification board to be very liberal with the 15+ rating, as companies spend millions of dollars making these games. This actually increases the chance of young kids seeing inappropriate content!
The trouble is, we've never really had any privacy - it's just been harder to find stuff out. Whereas you used to need a private investigator, you now just use the internet. Nothing really changed, just finding stuff out has (and will continue to get) easier to discover about people.
I don't really care about this too much - if the only obstacle to Bad Things happening is this some flimsy old-school notion of "privacy", we need to do some thinking.
The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government
Don't bet on it. I don't think Australia is intrinsically more inclined to being censored than other first-world, democratic countries - the majority of people are so scared of child porn trafficking that they will be OK with internet censorship as soon as their politicians find it politically convenient to bring it up.
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
Oh god... this...
95% of the time I couldn't even work out who was in what position in the action scenes.
Why get annoyed at human nature? That seems... self-defeating to me.
Piracy is a fact of life. If you don't want your game to be pirated, make it solely multiplayer through servers you control - but even then, bright people will crack your server protocol's and create their own implementations of them.
Really - if you don't want to get pirated, don't create copyright works!
So you go for the game with no LAN play that you have to connect to proprietary Blizzard Servers?
I don't get why people single out THIS as a flaw like it won't be broken within a week of the game being released, and after that it's effectively as if it had ALWAYS had it!
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot have perfectly objective, hard and fast rules for everything.
In this instance, you can: Nothing is outlawed because it is "obscene". If you don't like something, don't look at it. If someone is forcing you to watch, that's different - but the availability of something shouldn't be denied because some people don't like it. (Note: that works for drugs too)
How is it racist? Merely pointing out a statistical bias towards one race among a group does not imply a moral judgement!
In Australia, we effectively have this. You grade the candidates in your preference order. They then basically pick the least hated candidate. They look at everyone's first preference and discard whichever candidate got the lowest. All the people who voted #1 for them then have their #2 preference allocated to each candidates total and repeat the process until there is only 1 left, and that's who is voted in. I think it solves these problems very elegantly. You rank candidates in your actual preference order, and you don't have to worry about "wasting" a vote.
maybe the true answer is that there aren't actually enough terrorists to be worth worrying about, hmmm??
More than that .. why would they need to attack again? They've already been amazingly effective with just the few attacks they've actually performed.
Same reason you could theoretically grow all your crops and never have to pay for them, but it's too much effort and people just end up going to the shops.
We may be half the size of California, but as a country we're one of only a very small handful European English-speaking countries (and I find Canada and the US hard to differentiate, and to be honest, NZ is extremely similar to us in all practical respects). This means that we are similar enough that our differences are cherished instead of feared as they are when they are TOO different in most other cases.
It's not surprising - you'd need to have a bulletproof case before you actually challenged a case in court and ran up the huge associated cost. For everything else you'd just settle.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
I find your sig quite ironic in this context.
Because Steam has a lot of benefits to me. It's very easy and simple, and takes care of things like patching and installing for me. Cracking is harder work - not by much, but enough that I consider Steam to be a very acceptable trade.
and NOTHING I would want yet.
FTFY, given that web apps can perform any task that native apps can perform
web apps just aren’t always going to do the job.
What's stopping them?
The only thing I can think of is cross-site scripting restrictions, but there are workarounds for that
I haven't met one person who actually said they want internet censorship in Australia.
I haven't had the same experience unfortunately. Most of my non-technical friends actually support it, due to "omg those pedophiles must be stopped!" mentality.
Why can't people think rationally as soon as children become involved?
I don't want to turn on Sponge Bob at 2pm and see Sandy with a strap on fucking Patrick up the Ass while Squidward cums on his face.
So don't watch channels that do that! How do so many people not understand that just because something exists doesn't imply that you'll be forced to see it!
Seriously, there are a LOT of adults with young kids in the world. There is a very large demand for kid-friendly material, and that demand will be met! Stop fucking worrying about the evil porn monster jumping out and randomly slapping your kids in the face - any channel that did that would never get another viewer or ad dollar ever again!
There *are* those kids who don't understand sarcasm, don't follow even the most basic logical arguments and may not understand that discussing terrorism does not imply becoming a terrorist. Slashdot posters who breezed through high school should understand that many people barely passed (hell, many people fail).
So because some people don't/can't understand it, the argument has merit? I'd hope we were going for a higher level of reasoning than lowest-common denominator consensus.
To be honest, most of the gamers in that mindset are moving to the consoles, and I really don't have a problem with that. I have been enjoying the recent round of indy-style games immensely, and hope the trend continue.
Some of my favourite, non-graphically intense recent games:
For 3d games, Half-Life 2's Source engine is the sweet spot. From then on, graphics have been good enough, and what makes a game "good" is the gameplay.
I understand, but isn't it just easier to just get rid of the damned refused classification all together?
Well ... that's exactly what I meant! If R18+ is a lower, not an upper, limit then by definition there can't be anything Refused Classification.
I'm more pissed off at our government and society than pretty much anyone I know, yet where could I move? Every country seems to be fucked in their own special way
I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+" ... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content
One effect of not having an R18+ rating means that there is immense pressure on the classification board to be very liberal with the 15+ rating, as companies spend millions of dollars making these games. This actually increases the chance of young kids seeing inappropriate content!
The trouble is, we've never really had any privacy - it's just been harder to find stuff out. Whereas you used to need a private investigator, you now just use the internet. Nothing really changed, just finding stuff out has (and will continue to get) easier to discover about people.
I don't really care about this too much - if the only obstacle to Bad Things happening is this some flimsy old-school notion of "privacy", we need to do some thinking.
The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government
Don't bet on it. I don't think Australia is intrinsically more inclined to being censored than other first-world, democratic countries - the majority of people are so scared of child porn trafficking that they will be OK with internet censorship as soon as their politicians find it politically convenient to bring it up.
Yes. The idiot "cinematographer" that destroyed the second two Bourne movies with his shaky-cam bullshit needs to be kept as far away from a video camera as is humanly (or inhumanly) possible. He (or she) absolutely ruined what would have otherwise been decent movies.
Oh god ... this...
95% of the time I couldn't even work out who was in what position in the action scenes.
But, as you say, war DOES have a unique property that it makes it easy to justify development.
Yes, it would be great if we DIDN'T need war to get that. Many things would be great if human nature weren't what it is.
Check out this great essay (under the "Money Is Not Wealth" section). About the best explanation I have seen.
Why get annoyed at human nature? That seems ... self-defeating to me.
Piracy is a fact of life. If you don't want your game to be pirated, make it solely multiplayer through servers you control - but even then, bright people will crack your server protocol's and create their own implementations of them.
Really - if you don't want to get pirated, don't create copyright works!
So you go for the game with no LAN play that you have to connect to proprietary Blizzard Servers?
I don't get why people single out THIS as a flaw like it won't be broken within a week of the game being released, and after that it's effectively as if it had ALWAYS had it!