He didn't mention that anything psychic was happening at all. If you were in a restaurant of foreigners and a stabbing took place on the other side, then I'm 99% sure that you would be aware of it despite being unable to either see it or understand those around you. The screams and yelling that take place will be recognized in any language. It's not 'psychic', but it is using normally uninterpretable environmental noise to gain information about your surroundings.
Perhaps when people pick up a dowsing rod they switch which 'filters' they place on the information they're receiving. When looking at a field, I may not be able to immediately spot where I think water is, because it pretty much all looks the same to me. However, if I were to grab a piece of wood and start pointing it at things, my thought process would change from 'Is there a spot in this field that has water?' to 'Is THIS spot likely to have water?'. Perhaps asking yourself the latter question over and over again is a much better method of finding things than asking yourself the former. When looking at the whole field, you'll probably only be able to see maybe where the greenest plants are. When looking at individual spots, you'll still know reasonably well how green the plants are compared to the rest of the field, but you'll also get more detailed information from each spot. Perhaps the most water is in a shady, high traffic area, but you didn't notice the ground seemed damp until you pointed a rod at it and took notice because it was covered in dead grass.
"25$ character transfer, 25$ character name change, then 15$ per month to play, 50$ per expansion or game.....it adds up quick as being the most expensive game to play EVER."
First off your prices are wrong. $15 to change your name, and xpacs are only $50 on release day.
$20 for the game, $20 for the first xpac, and $40 for the second xpac equals $80 to buy the game outright, today. In order to match the price of a SINGLE set of golf clubs, you'd need to buy (after the game) a name change, a character transfer (comes with a name change), a race change (which comes with ANOTHER name change), a faction change (guess what else you get to change), and TWO months of game time.
At this point you've had 3 months of entertainment, and even though you've needlessly spent ridiculous amounts of money swapping your toons around (because none of these things are necessary to enjoy the game) you've still only spent about as much as someone who's owned a set of golf clubs long enough to walk them out of the store.
How is WoW even CLOSE to the most expensive game ever?
"both you and I know that our existence is true (whatever that implies)"
So you don't accept HIS pseudo-science, but such a generic, useless, non-insightful, and frankly meaningless phrase should be accepted universally? Neurons and DNA aren't 'true', but whatever bullshit you believe is because you know it is?
At least his ideas DO imply something, and are genuinely useful to those who want to know if there are any different, perhaps better, ways of looking at things. You talk about the 'reality of the human situation'; is that not neurons, chemicals, and electricity?
"I'm talking about people too edgy to acknowledge that like it or not, our existence isn't purely defined by genetics and chemicals."
So what IS it defined by? I really have nothing to argue against here, since you haven't provided your own viewpoint. You've only gone on and on about how we're wrong because -- well, we just ARE.
Must have been because we got beat up in middle school, I bet you hit the nail on the head with that one.
"So why does the mind feel guilt for bad things the body has done?"
It doesn't... necessarily. Who are you to say that guilt is not learned? After all, many arguably unjust actions have been performed without the actor feeling guilt for what he has done, and many people do indeed take a deterministic worldview as meaning that they should not feel guilt.
"Even from a purely evolutionary standpoint it doesn't make sense, because subjecting the mind to psychological suffering, can't correct the behavior of the body, since after all there is no free choice and the mind can't influence the behavior of the determined body."
Right, just like how the pain of something sharp couldn't possibly subject the brain to 'psychological suffering' in a deterministic manner so that it precipitates an electric response along the nerve pathways which control the afflicted limb, moving it out of the way. Are you somehow assuming that 'guilt' is not a physiological phenomenon? Your logic doesn't make much sense here.
"You can be friends with anybody as long as you're mutually willing to accept each other as equals."
The key word here is 'mutual'. He can want to be friends with someone more than anything in the world, but if the other person thinks he's just a gosh-darned smarty pants then there's really not much he can do, is there?
Why are you so pissed off that scientists don't know fucking EVERYTHING? Do you have a galaxy to pilot soon that might crash if you don't get the right equations?
I don't know why you've spent this entire thread bitching. Will you calm down if I get a few guys in lab coats to say they're wrong and admit you're smarter than them? Would it help if it was in writing?
"Of course, there are low risk ventures: Harlequin romances, formula adventure stories, soap operas, bubble gum pop, and muzak. Mediocre product moves in reliable quantities. The world you would create would make anything beyond this impossible."
Really? REALLY?!?! The system is CURRENTLY set up in a manner that encourages this low risk, unoriginal method of creating art. Exactly what do you see being pumped out by our mega-billion dollar production companies RIGHT NOW? Almost EVERY SINGLE FILM that deviates from the ingrained Hollywood culture is independent, and, more often than not, low budget. These films don't rely on post-production extortion to make them possible (at least, not nearly as much).
"But as a consumer, you don't do much to influence anything. I've got real dollars behind my side of hte fight. You'll lose eventually. I've got the time to fight it out. And the purpose."
You want a fucking crown too, great lord and master of everything I take for granted?
I'm gonna go ahead and throw my weight behind this 'jackass' comment. The OP doesn't like sharing, end of story. He has no problem with this because he is entitled. He is your 'corporate owner', and he does not care about you, only what is 'his'.
And you know what? It will always be this way. He'll always have the support of those in power, because they are entitled as well. 'Senator', 'President', 'Judge'; these people are more important than us. They do not care about us, only what is 'theirs'.
If you have two identically skilled artists who each devote an equal amount of time towards creating a piece of art so that they have relatively equal values, and one releases their art into the public domain while the other lobbies the governments of the world to invent new crimes in order to force people to pay before experiencing his art, then who do you think has added value to society, and who do you think has shown themselves to be a leech upon society? It may seem extremely 'fair' for you to create an entire new class of criminals in order to support what you feel is a valid business model, but I think you fail to realize that your job shouldn't really be a job to begin with. What exactly is it that you do anyways that requires such draconian copyright laws?
If you create music, then you should stop relying on artificial scarcity to generate revenue. Even without copyright, a musical artist has many ways to make money. If you're big enough that mass copying is actually threatening you, then certainly you're big enough to make a killing off of official swag and large concerts (which is where most musicians money tends to come from anyways). If you're still a small, local artist, then fans copying your work is only going to help bring in the cash when you do start charging for concerts. Hell, even people with your albums downloaded for free onto the iPods in their pockets will pay for a signed or 'limited edition' CD.
If you create video, then what part of your business is threatened by people receiving copies for free? I could kind of understand if you owned a large Hollywood production company that blew millions upon millions of dollars getting an explosion to look just right, but even then you'd have a hard time convincing me that such an amazing waste of resources is necessary and that people should have to pay to see it on video just because it was expensive to make.
If it's not an artistic sort of video you make, then perhaps you generate stock footage on demand or something of the sort. I think it's already cheaper for producers to pay a token fee to access the vast libraries of stock footage already available than to pay for something new to be generated, so the people giving you money now already obviously want something from you that they couldn't get for cheaper (including free). If what you produce is actually valuable, then you should be able to charge for the production and be unaffected by any copying thereafter.
If you're one of the people maintaining those vast libraries of stock footage, then how can you feel accomplished when you just sit on other peoples work, denying the rest of society any benefit until they pay your fee? I just really can't see many ways in which copyright actually benefits us.
It saddens me to know that you think you have to 'protect' your intellectual property.
We live in a world where you can create nearly infinite joy with the stroke of a brush or the pluck of a string and distribute it worldwide in a matter of minutes, but for some reason people like you just can't handle that. Why must everything have a price?
"I actually don't expect this to happen. I think the military gives more thought to moral matters than people give them credit for. But it is frighteningly easy to imagine."
So I can just type whatever the hell I want to here, cause you don't read the last half of posts anyways. Wanker.
7) Someone smart enough to figure out that it's a troll may also be sinister enough to recognize an opportunity to counter-troll the poster by correcting his sig. Perhaps he takes pride in causing the undeserved self-satisfaction that the correction would give the original poster, or revels in the megalomania that comes with properly predicting and eliciting such self-satisfaction 8) This list would be really confusing if compiled together and displayed out of context 9) ??? 10) Profit!!!
"I just can't help thinking that sorting out such basic problems as hunger and poverty should be slightly higher on the list than whether they can play Facebook and post on Twitter."
Shouldn't it also be more important than you posting on/. then? How many orphans have YOU fed today?
OMG! I can't believe I was actually on the internet when the FIRST EVER expression of displeasure towards an overused meme was posted! So fresh, so original, so... intelligent! You truly are a hero of the internet!!!
Thanks for standing up for us, the little guys, who see memes posted day after day but are unable to do anything about it. You, sir, have surely stopped, once and for all, this abuse of popular culture.
"Why would I care whether the HP laser printer or the elevator can look up the new domain names?"
Judging by the latest trends in technology, I'm guessing that pushing your floor's button no longer sends an analog signal to the motor, but rather sends it a twitter.
His approach is better than the guy earlier in the thread who somehow let the internet force his 7 year old daughter to watch kittens die or something (yeah, yeah, I've given him enough shit for that already), but I do agree partially... at least let the kids have a mobile copy of Wikipedia or something.
"Thanks to the internet, I don't have to drive my kids to the red light district so they can play in the park across from prostitutes and sex shops while watching drug dealers sell drugs and having other kids show them how to sniff chemicals to get high or become bulimic because it's beautiful.. The internet brings that all to my living room. Oh and I can check email too."
Yes, thanks to the internet, all those things are now in YOUR HOME where YOU CONTROL them. Your anecdote didn't go, "...and then the internet reached out with its cabley tentacles, pinning me to the wall as it fixed my daughters head in place to ensure she saw the whole scene." Your story was "...and then I left my daughter alone with an obviously uncontrolled internet connection."
At 7 years old she should have a WHITELIST of sites to visit. Her nightmares are your fault.
Slashdot Mirror
So go beat the crap out of your city councilmen; what the hell are you telling us for?
Send me the, um, twelve dollars and I'll even do it for you!
No extra cost!
Puppy tossing?!! Now THAT'S over the line, mister.
Oh, so a hooker is a type of ventriloquist? Always wondered what they were...
Ventriloquists are fun, BRB going to ask my mom to get me a hooker for my birthday party.
He didn't mention that anything psychic was happening at all. If you were in a restaurant of foreigners and a stabbing took place on the other side, then I'm 99% sure that you would be aware of it despite being unable to either see it or understand those around you. The screams and yelling that take place will be recognized in any language. It's not 'psychic', but it is using normally uninterpretable environmental noise to gain information about your surroundings.
Perhaps when people pick up a dowsing rod they switch which 'filters' they place on the information they're receiving. When looking at a field, I may not be able to immediately spot where I think water is, because it pretty much all looks the same to me. However, if I were to grab a piece of wood and start pointing it at things, my thought process would change from 'Is there a spot in this field that has water?' to 'Is THIS spot likely to have water?'. Perhaps asking yourself the latter question over and over again is a much better method of finding things than asking yourself the former. When looking at the whole field, you'll probably only be able to see maybe where the greenest plants are. When looking at individual spots, you'll still know reasonably well how green the plants are compared to the rest of the field, but you'll also get more detailed information from each spot. Perhaps the most water is in a shady, high traffic area, but you didn't notice the ground seemed damp until you pointed a rod at it and took notice because it was covered in dead grass.
Was the original author out of breath or something? Why, all the, commas, man?
"25$ character transfer, 25$ character name change, then 15$ per month to play, 50$ per expansion or game.....it adds up quick as being the most expensive game to play EVER."
First off your prices are wrong. $15 to change your name, and xpacs are only $50 on release day.
$20 for the game, $20 for the first xpac, and $40 for the second xpac equals $80 to buy the game outright, today. In order to match the price of a SINGLE set of golf clubs, you'd need to buy (after the game) a name change, a character transfer (comes with a name change), a race change (which comes with ANOTHER name change), a faction change (guess what else you get to change), and TWO months of game time.
At this point you've had 3 months of entertainment, and even though you've needlessly spent ridiculous amounts of money swapping your toons around (because none of these things are necessary to enjoy the game) you've still only spent about as much as someone who's owned a set of golf clubs long enough to walk them out of the store.
How is WoW even CLOSE to the most expensive game ever?
"both you and I know that our existence is true (whatever that implies)"
So you don't accept HIS pseudo-science, but such a generic, useless, non-insightful, and frankly meaningless phrase should be accepted universally? Neurons and DNA aren't 'true', but whatever bullshit you believe is because you know it is?
At least his ideas DO imply something, and are genuinely useful to those who want to know if there are any different, perhaps better, ways of looking at things. You talk about the 'reality of the human situation'; is that not neurons, chemicals, and electricity?
"I'm talking about people too edgy to acknowledge that like it or not, our existence isn't purely defined by genetics and chemicals."
So what IS it defined by? I really have nothing to argue against here, since you haven't provided your own viewpoint. You've only gone on and on about how we're wrong because -- well, we just ARE.
Must have been because we got beat up in middle school, I bet you hit the nail on the head with that one.
"So why does the mind feel guilt for bad things the body has done?"
It doesn't... necessarily. Who are you to say that guilt is not learned? After all, many arguably unjust actions have been performed without the actor feeling guilt for what he has done, and many people do indeed take a deterministic worldview as meaning that they should not feel guilt.
"Even from a purely evolutionary standpoint it doesn't make sense, because subjecting the mind to psychological suffering, can't correct the behavior of the body, since after all there is no free choice and the mind can't influence the behavior of the determined body."
Right, just like how the pain of something sharp couldn't possibly subject the brain to 'psychological suffering' in a deterministic manner so that it precipitates an electric response along the nerve pathways which control the afflicted limb, moving it out of the way. Are you somehow assuming that 'guilt' is not a physiological phenomenon? Your logic doesn't make much sense here.
"You can be friends with anybody as long as you're mutually willing to accept each other as equals."
The key word here is 'mutual'. He can want to be friends with someone more than anything in the world, but if the other person thinks he's just a gosh-darned smarty pants then there's really not much he can do, is there?
Why are you so pissed off that scientists don't know fucking EVERYTHING? Do you have a galaxy to pilot soon that might crash if you don't get the right equations?
I don't know why you've spent this entire thread bitching. Will you calm down if I get a few guys in lab coats to say they're wrong and admit you're smarter than them? Would it help if it was in writing?
Exactly what are you going on about?
"Of course, there are low risk ventures: Harlequin romances, formula adventure stories, soap operas, bubble gum pop, and muzak. Mediocre product moves in reliable quantities. The world you would create would make anything beyond this impossible."
Really? REALLY?!?! The system is CURRENTLY set up in a manner that encourages this low risk, unoriginal method of creating art. Exactly what do you see being pumped out by our mega-billion dollar production companies RIGHT NOW? Almost EVERY SINGLE FILM that deviates from the ingrained Hollywood culture is independent, and, more often than not, low budget. These films don't rely on post-production extortion to make them possible (at least, not nearly as much).
"But as a consumer, you don't do much to influence anything. I've got real dollars behind my side of hte fight. You'll lose eventually. I've got the time to fight it out. And the purpose."
You want a fucking crown too, great lord and master of everything I take for granted?
None of your comment has anything to do with copyright, and the parent poster made no mention of patents. Don't change the subject.
I'm gonna go ahead and throw my weight behind this 'jackass' comment. The OP doesn't like sharing, end of story. He has no problem with this because he is entitled. He is your 'corporate owner', and he does not care about you, only what is 'his'.
And you know what? It will always be this way. He'll always have the support of those in power, because they are entitled as well. 'Senator', 'President', 'Judge'; these people are more important than us. They do not care about us, only what is 'theirs'.
If you have two identically skilled artists who each devote an equal amount of time towards creating a piece of art so that they have relatively equal values, and one releases their art into the public domain while the other lobbies the governments of the world to invent new crimes in order to force people to pay before experiencing his art, then who do you think has added value to society, and who do you think has shown themselves to be a leech upon society? It may seem extremely 'fair' for you to create an entire new class of criminals in order to support what you feel is a valid business model, but I think you fail to realize that your job shouldn't really be a job to begin with. What exactly is it that you do anyways that requires such draconian copyright laws?
If you create music, then you should stop relying on artificial scarcity to generate revenue. Even without copyright, a musical artist has many ways to make money. If you're big enough that mass copying is actually threatening you, then certainly you're big enough to make a killing off of official swag and large concerts (which is where most musicians money tends to come from anyways). If you're still a small, local artist, then fans copying your work is only going to help bring in the cash when you do start charging for concerts. Hell, even people with your albums downloaded for free onto the iPods in their pockets will pay for a signed or 'limited edition' CD.
If you create video, then what part of your business is threatened by people receiving copies for free? I could kind of understand if you owned a large Hollywood production company that blew millions upon millions of dollars getting an explosion to look just right, but even then you'd have a hard time convincing me that such an amazing waste of resources is necessary and that people should have to pay to see it on video just because it was expensive to make.
If it's not an artistic sort of video you make, then perhaps you generate stock footage on demand or something of the sort. I think it's already cheaper for producers to pay a token fee to access the vast libraries of stock footage already available than to pay for something new to be generated, so the people giving you money now already obviously want something from you that they couldn't get for cheaper (including free). If what you produce is actually valuable, then you should be able to charge for the production and be unaffected by any copying thereafter.
If you're one of the people maintaining those vast libraries of stock footage, then how can you feel accomplished when you just sit on other peoples work, denying the rest of society any benefit until they pay your fee? I just really can't see many ways in which copyright actually benefits us.
It saddens me to know that you think you have to 'protect' your intellectual property.
We live in a world where you can create nearly infinite joy with the stroke of a brush or the pluck of a string and distribute it worldwide in a matter of minutes, but for some reason people like you just can't handle that. Why must everything have a price?
"lol but thers nothinn on twiter or cnn about a evil trety what culd b so bad abt it?"
"I actually don't expect this to happen. I think the military gives more thought to moral matters than people give them credit for. But it is frighteningly easy to imagine."
So I can just type whatever the hell I want to here, cause you don't read the last half of posts anyways. Wanker.
7) Someone smart enough to figure out that it's a troll may also be sinister enough to recognize an opportunity to counter-troll the poster by correcting his sig. Perhaps he takes pride in causing the undeserved self-satisfaction that the correction would give the original poster, or revels in the megalomania that comes with properly predicting and eliciting such self-satisfaction
8) This list would be really confusing if compiled together and displayed out of context
9) ???
10) Profit!!!
"I just can't help thinking that sorting out such basic problems as hunger and poverty should be slightly higher on the list than whether they can play Facebook and post on Twitter."
Shouldn't it also be more important than you posting on /. then? How many orphans have YOU fed today?
OMG! I can't believe I was actually on the internet when the FIRST EVER expression of displeasure towards an overused meme was posted! So fresh, so original, so... intelligent! You truly are a hero of the internet!!!
Thanks for standing up for us, the little guys, who see memes posted day after day but are unable to do anything about it. You, sir, have surely stopped, once and for all, this abuse of popular culture.
The day youtube allows fonts in their comments is the day I quit the internet.
"Why would I care whether the HP laser printer or the elevator can look up the new domain names?"
Judging by the latest trends in technology, I'm guessing that pushing your floor's button no longer sends an analog signal to the motor, but rather sends it a twitter.
His approach is better than the guy earlier in the thread who somehow let the internet force his 7 year old daughter to watch kittens die or something (yeah, yeah, I've given him enough shit for that already), but I do agree partially... at least let the kids have a mobile copy of Wikipedia or something.
"Thanks to the internet, I don't have to drive my kids to the red light district so they can play in the park across from prostitutes and sex shops while watching drug dealers sell drugs and having other kids show them how to sniff chemicals to get high or become bulimic because it's beautiful.. The internet brings that all to my living room. Oh and I can check email too."
Yes, thanks to the internet, all those things are now in YOUR HOME where YOU CONTROL them. Your anecdote didn't go, "...and then the internet reached out with its cabley tentacles, pinning me to the wall as it fixed my daughters head in place to ensure she saw the whole scene." Your story was "...and then I left my daughter alone with an obviously uncontrolled internet connection."
At 7 years old she should have a WHITELIST of sites to visit. Her nightmares are your fault.