The Airport Utility 6.0 actually has a whole lot less administration features than the 5.6 utility. In fact Apple has a download on their site for 5.6 if you want to use some of those features that are missing. As far as I can tell 6.0 is pretty much a Beta version. It's got an entirely different interface philosophy than 5.6 and most other router administration panels. I suspect that a lot of the missing functionality will be added soon, including ipv6.
I have no idea what "heel/toe" means but I think I know what you're talking about. When I downshift my manual, after depressing the clutch and engaging the lower gear I rev the engine up high enough that it meshes smoothly and thus you don't feel any change in speed. I taught myself how to drive stick by driving it home after a couple minutes of explanation from the previous owner. Sometimes (for instance when I'm taking an off ramp on a parkway) I downshift from 4th or even 5th to 2nd. With a decent amount of distance before the ramp I disengage and coast off the exit, then if necessary I brake a little to get it down into range for 2nd gear, rev and reengage it. I have no idea if that's what you're supposed to do but I've gotten good at it and the transmission doesn't make any unpleasant noises so I figure it's ok.
I can't say I've ever tried stomping on both pedals at the same time, but I would figure that the engine would stall out if it was engaged, revving at maximum with the car going nowhere... I can say from learning experience that a manual will definitely stall if you're dead stopped and the engine is engaged.
I drive a manual and I've done the EXACT same thing with the cruise control, though the road was long and empty. My sudden stop instinct in that car is to slam on both the brake and the clutch at the same time. After a second or so of being startled from the car suddenly lurching forward that's exactly what I did.
In my '96 Camry I can only go between Drive and Neutral without pressing the button on the selector. I figure that's to prevent accidentally slipping it into Reverse.
Ah, good idea. I've been renicing srcds to be more aggressive than minecraft. Wish I could find a better minecraft server manager though. Currently using McMyAdmin, which is a Windows program for which the Linux instructions consist of running "mono mcmyadmin.exe"...
Tell me about it! The Minecraft servers I run each use more CPU time and memory sitting idle with no players than one of the Team Fortress 2 servers does when it's half full. Every so often they like to suddenly grab a ton of CPU time and cause lag spikes in TF2.
Of course that's a great solution. Heck the publisher probably has such a program that generates the questions and answers that end up in the book and solution manual for a particular edition. As I recall, different editions have different questions and answers, so part of making the next edition is running the random number generator again. But of course that's exactly how the textbook publisher wants it. As it is, if the school needs new problems they have to purchase the new edition.
Excuse me? I most certainly recognize the industry's product cycle. I happen to believe that the consumer industry moves forward way too fast. I don't have any expectation that I should be able to drop an i7 into an LGA 775 socket and expect it to work. Rather I think it's irresponsible of the manufacturers to switch gears and discontinue technologies so quickly, particularly with the consumer market. Intel has moved through, what, four desktop CPU sockets in the past three years? Before the 2nd gen Core architecture the LGA 775 socket was current for at least four year, right?
If a collection of midrange Core 2 Quad hardware (hell the Q6600 was pretty low-end) is providing more than sufficient computing power for some pretty substantial enthusiast tasks then clearly hardware of that generation is not obsolete by lack of use cases. It's obsolete because there is a general tendency to toss technology simply because there is a newer version out now. I try to get as much use as I can out of a piece of equipment before I look into replacing it. Now I'm not against buying the latest and the greatest. I recently put an nVidia GTX 470 in this machine, but I was replacing an 8800 GT that wasn't able to handle the games I wanted to play.
The frustrating part is that capability-wise, the midrange CPUs of today have changed very little from the midrange CPUs of four years ago. Meanwhile going from the earliest CPUs (Pentium 4s) to the latest CPUs (Core 2 Quads) using LGA 775 there was a massive increase in computing power and efficiency. The consumer tech market of the last few years has been a mess of hype and upselling.
I remember my high school had to throw out a whole bunch of math textbooks and either buy the latest edition or buy a totally different series altogether because a student found a copy of the solution manual online and passed it around. Since practically every student in the classes that used that particular book suddenly started turning in the exact same "textbook" solutions to the homework, the teacher caught on immediately. Sadly, it made the book useless for assigning homework.
If a Q6600 is adequate for my current usage, why should I want to "upgrade" prematurely? All it means is that I'm spending money for hardware that I don't need yet that won't last as long. When I do get around to upgrading my system, I'll want to buy another mid to high-end combination to ensure that the new system lasts for as long as possible. Some of us are most definitely NOT made of money. I'll probably be forced to replace my T7700 laptop pretty soon as it has been experiencing numerous hardware problems lately.
I've gotta second this. My Q6600 is still chugging right along quite happily running just about everything. I can play the latest games in Win7 and I do video rendering and transcoding from time to time in Mac OS X Lion (hackintosher:D). I've got 6GB of RAM (used to be 8, but one of the sticks failed) and a new stick of DRR2 2GB would cost about 2.5x the price of a new stick of DDR3 2GB. At this point I know I don't want to buy any new hardware until I upgrade the mobo/CPU/RAM as will probably become necessary within the next year or two. Until then, this 5 year old CPU setup does quite well for me. Actually I'd imagine that the real bottleneck on my system is the 667 MHz bus. When I do get around to replacing this hardware, I know I want to get a new hardware combination that would last for another four years at least.
Sure those could be hate crimes. Acts of violence become hate crimes when there is a malicious reason that they are targeting a subset of people. Burglars intentionally targeting elderly people because they are easier to burgle is not a hate crime. The same burglars targeting elderly people because they think that anyone over the age of 65 does not have a right to live is a hate crime.
There is of course a difference of degree between beating up black people and beating up fans of the Dallas Cowboys. There are probably more people who would go out and beat up black people if they could get away with it. Not to mention parts of this country have a history of violence against black people. Hence hate crimes against black people tend to get more air time than hate crimes against fans of the Dallas Cowboys.
The difference between a hate crime and a bar fight is that one is that neo-nazis who have beaten up a black man think that they have some duty to beat up black men. A bar fight is typically the result of intoxication and impulsive emotions. After the incident, the people who were fighting will probably have regrets and remorse, while the neo-nazis will proclaim that the police are being controlled by jews or some such and that they were/are trying to preserve the moral fabric of society by assaulting minorities. Even beyond the simple fact that the neo-nazis are more likely to go back out and organize more attacks, there's a line between what can be considered an accident or a poor decision and a conscious, willful attempt to hurt people.
The PS3 is NOT the top selling console in the world. Of the current generation consoles, it's the worst selling. Overall, the PS1 and PS2 are the top selling, but that was a very different time.
Are you kidding me? I'm voiding a couple mods I made but I just had to respond to this... utterly false statement. Have you ever done any iOS development at all? How about any Mac OS X development? Have you ever seen the Xcode developer tools? How about the Interface Builder component of Xcode? I've got a hunch that you haven't so I'm going to describe what it's like.
Interface builder is a WYSIWIG UI layout tool that generates XML files defining an application's interface to be loaded at runtime. Just about every app written for iOS has at least one of these interface files. The programmer uses Interface Building by dragging and dropping UI elements onto a sample device screen. You can resize and remask any element, as well as define new object templates with different appearance and behaviors. UIView objects, the base type of any interface element in the API, can be tweaked in an uncountable number of ways, as well as nested in other UIViews. The UI elements are linked to an Objective-C class that they are considered members of through a graphical relationship view.
Merely playing around with Interface Building for ten minutes will show you just how well iOS handles graphical scaling. Every piece of the UI kit is vector graphics and runtime rendering. Your uninformed conjecture has no basis in fact. Slashdot really needs a -1 wrong mod.
"I believe that Government is should, in fact, act as Mother and Father according to the will of the majority. We should not be allowed to act as we wish, only as we are allowed by Mother and Father. Regardless of whether or not our actions bring harm to others."
You just totally ignored what I actually said. I said specifically that our actions should be policed when they do bring harm to others. My point was that the definition of "harm" is arbitrary and totally dependent on what society you're a part of.
My statement about "violence" is more abstract that literally meaning to break down someone's door and haul them off to prison, or however you seem to have interpreted it. The concept of the "monopoly on violence" means that the US Government is the only body in this country that is legally allowed to coerce anyone to do anything. They do of course grant that right to groups that are not technically part of the government, but the point is that you or I have no true legal authority to force anyone to do anything. The best we can do and still be totally clear in the eyes of the law is inform others that the law is on my side and that they must cease breaking it or we will contact authorities and get the authorities to force them to stop. The defining feature of a governed society is that there is a group that has a monopoly on violence, be it direct physical violence, incarceration, fines, or other penalties. If you refuse to pay a bill the collection agency (hopefully) doesn't send men to break your kneecaps, they are supposed to use the law to hold you accountable.
There are no such thing as basic rights. Arguably, the only way there could be undeniable natural-born rights would be for some deity or extra-terrestrial authority responsible for creating the human race appeared and told us what we should be doing. As long as humans are a self-determined species, we have to agree on things like basic rights. If someone were to step up and dictate precisely what every other person's rights are, they are by definition a tyrant as they are dictating arbitrary rules.
Not at all am I saying that a government should "give us permission" for every little thing. Your believe that the "proper role of government is to defend our basic rights" is the exact same thing, we just disagree on how those rights should be determined. Whether those rights are described by a nation's laws or religious commandments or even international treaties, they are all effectively the same thing: they are one group's attempt to draw lines in the sand regarding human behavior. To act like I'm supporting some sort of totalitarianism is being disingenuous, we actually support the same thing.
In mine we are the masters of government, in yours government is our master.
You've completely misunderstood what I said. In fact I question whether you even read my last post. In the first paragraph I state that
The government in of itself doesn't know best. A well-informed populace knows best and the government is an extension of the will of the populace, therefore the government can be entrusted to act in accordance to what is "best."
If that doesn't make clear the fact that I believe we are all the masters of ourselves and each other through the government, you should really read up on the concept of a republic. I don't want to be a tyrant, nor do I want any other individual to be a tyrant. A democratic society as a whole is effectively a tyrant with regard to
itself, as to an outside observer the rules of society may be totally arbitrary. The key is that to the society itself, those rules are generally agreed upon to have a basic in logic and should be enforced.
The government I want is a bit of an ideal, I suppose. I want a government that can keep its people safe, according to what the majority of its people think warrants safety. The government in of itself doesn't know best. A well-informed populace knows best and the government is an extension of the will of the populace, therefore the government can be entrusted to act in accordance to what is "best." Now I am under no illusion that the current political climate of the United States is in line with this ideal model. I am simply stating what I believe the responsibilities of a properly functioning government should be.
I am not asking any individual or subset of individuals to make decisions for me. I am acknowledging that I am a member of a society and I am conceding the right to make policy for the benefit of the whole society to a body of representatives elected by the whole society. If the society that I lived in demonstrated radically different policy than I personally support and could abide by, it is my responsibility to find another society that I can agree with. By being a member of a group I must abide by the collective decisions of that group, this is the social contract that everyone living in a democratic society must accept.
We are human beings. Human beings are fully capable of taking actions and disregarding the consequences. No individual is perfect in that they can be totally trusted to never make a mistake in life. Most of the mistakes people make on a daily basis are relatively minor. Some of them are not. Some of the mistakes people make will cause harm not only to themselves but other people. While I believe people have a right to self-determine, I do not accept that they also have a right to make decisions (conscious or unconscious) that will hurt other people.
There's an invisible line that separates children from adults. There is a certain arbitrary point where we denote that an individual has sufficient morality and intelligence to make responsible decisions. Legally this is represented by an age line, but there is also the individual judgement that is made when you encounter someone face-to-face. There are many other arbitrary lines such as the distinction between acceptable harm (e.g. an emotional blow such as an insult) and unacceptable harm (such as punching someone in the face). There is an arbitrary distinction between an accident and willful negligence. Laws are an attempt to make a concrete definition of these arbitrary and often invisible socially defined lines (that tend to vary from culture to culture), for the purpose of making it clear what you can and cannot do in that society.
Whether someone can or cannot be trusted to make decisions is defined by more than just their status as an "adult." It is generally accepted that we cannot trust child molesters to make good decisions regarding the care of children. It is also generally accepted that we cannot trust an individual with no pilot's training to fly an airplane. There certainly are child molesters who would jump at the chance to run a day care center, and I am sure there are people with now pilot's training who would love to sit at the controls of an airplane. It is the duty of the government of a society (by definition, the governing body is the subset of society with a monopoly on violence) to ensure that these people, who the society generally agrees are making poor decisions on a particular topic, are prevented from carrying out their intent. To live without that social contract is known as anarchy, and that is a really bad thing.
Not all differences of opinion are created equal. It would not surprise me if at some point in the near future, a majority of the country thought it would be ok to legalize marijuana. I doubt that in that same time frame a majority of the country will think that heroine, cocaine, and amphetamines should be similarly legalized. In fact, I can tell you that if those substances were legalized I may personally no longer feel comfortable living in this country an
I'm ok with a government telling me (under threat of punishment) what I can and cannot put into my body, provided that said regulations are informed by medical professionals.
I'm ok will the concept of police and I believe the level of force the police use should be dependent on the danger to them in the action of arresting potential criminals. I do not believe those sorts of mistakes are "ok," but mistakes are mistakes. The best anyone can do is try to minimize them.
I'm ok with records being kept, government or otherwise, of cold medicine purchases. Personally I'm not at all concerned about what someone (the government included) will do with records of what cold medicines I've purchased.
I'm not ok with "constant eroding of rights," though that is really a loaded statement. The generally agreed upon collection of rights is very often changing as time passes and society changes.
I'm not ok with people getting arrested on faulty charges, though that falls in with what I said previously about mistakes.
Personally I would be a lot more comfortable with the policing of drug use and many other things if there were fewer mistakes. There are limits to what a member of society should be allowed to do, as being of a member of society the way they live their life will have an effect on everyone else. I'm all for justice and ensuring the safety of the general population, within reason. It's generally considered appropriate to prevent people from committing suicide. By doing so you are attempting to save someone from a poor decision, to save someone from themselves. I apply the same reasoning to preventing people from taking seriously harmful drugs. The tactics used to achieve that probably need to be reexamined, but I still agree with the principle nonetheless.
You know every series of troubleshooting steps I ever went through for what seemed like hardware issue with my old Power Mac 7100 had zapping the PRAM at some point. I don't think it ever actually did anything.
Well to be fair, Minecraft's "story" is really over the top. I never, ever want to beat the dragon again because of the incredibly long and creepy narrative that played at the end.
Also I can't believe I haven't seen anyone else mention Half-Life 2 here. The Half-Life series has a very strong central story, with a lot of effort put into cinematic experience and voice acting. Among my friends are I those are the best games we've ever played.
Slashdot Mirror
The firmware on the router still has all the IPv6 support that it's always had. The new UI just doesn't support accessing those features.
The Airport Utility 6.0 actually has a whole lot less administration features than the 5.6 utility. In fact Apple has a download on their site for 5.6 if you want to use some of those features that are missing. As far as I can tell 6.0 is pretty much a Beta version. It's got an entirely different interface philosophy than 5.6 and most other router administration panels. I suspect that a lot of the missing functionality will be added soon, including ipv6.
I have no idea what "heel/toe" means but I think I know what you're talking about. When I downshift my manual, after depressing the clutch and engaging the lower gear I rev the engine up high enough that it meshes smoothly and thus you don't feel any change in speed. I taught myself how to drive stick by driving it home after a couple minutes of explanation from the previous owner. Sometimes (for instance when I'm taking an off ramp on a parkway) I downshift from 4th or even 5th to 2nd. With a decent amount of distance before the ramp I disengage and coast off the exit, then if necessary I brake a little to get it down into range for 2nd gear, rev and reengage it. I have no idea if that's what you're supposed to do but I've gotten good at it and the transmission doesn't make any unpleasant noises so I figure it's ok.
I can't say I've ever tried stomping on both pedals at the same time, but I would figure that the engine would stall out if it was engaged, revving at maximum with the car going nowhere... I can say from learning experience that a manual will definitely stall if you're dead stopped and the engine is engaged.
I drive a manual and I've done the EXACT same thing with the cruise control, though the road was long and empty. My sudden stop instinct in that car is to slam on both the brake and the clutch at the same time. After a second or so of being startled from the car suddenly lurching forward that's exactly what I did.
In my '96 Camry I can only go between Drive and Neutral without pressing the button on the selector. I figure that's to prevent accidentally slipping it into Reverse.
Ah, good idea. I've been renicing srcds to be more aggressive than minecraft. Wish I could find a better minecraft server manager though. Currently using McMyAdmin, which is a Windows program for which the Linux instructions consist of running "mono mcmyadmin.exe"...
It can't possibly help that Minecraft is written entirely in Java.
Tell me about it! The Minecraft servers I run each use more CPU time and memory sitting idle with no players than one of the Team Fortress 2 servers does when it's half full. Every so often they like to suddenly grab a ton of CPU time and cause lag spikes in TF2.
Of course that's a great solution. Of course the textbook publishers will never want to do that because then schools will buy new editions less often.
Of course that's a great solution. Heck the publisher probably has such a program that generates the questions and answers that end up in the book and solution manual for a particular edition. As I recall, different editions have different questions and answers, so part of making the next edition is running the random number generator again. But of course that's exactly how the textbook publisher wants it. As it is, if the school needs new problems they have to purchase the new edition.
Excuse me? I most certainly recognize the industry's product cycle. I happen to believe that the consumer industry moves forward way too fast. I don't have any expectation that I should be able to drop an i7 into an LGA 775 socket and expect it to work. Rather I think it's irresponsible of the manufacturers to switch gears and discontinue technologies so quickly, particularly with the consumer market. Intel has moved through, what, four desktop CPU sockets in the past three years? Before the 2nd gen Core architecture the LGA 775 socket was current for at least four year, right?
If a collection of midrange Core 2 Quad hardware (hell the Q6600 was pretty low-end) is providing more than sufficient computing power for some pretty substantial enthusiast tasks then clearly hardware of that generation is not obsolete by lack of use cases. It's obsolete because there is a general tendency to toss technology simply because there is a newer version out now. I try to get as much use as I can out of a piece of equipment before I look into replacing it. Now I'm not against buying the latest and the greatest. I recently put an nVidia GTX 470 in this machine, but I was replacing an 8800 GT that wasn't able to handle the games I wanted to play.
The frustrating part is that capability-wise, the midrange CPUs of today have changed very little from the midrange CPUs of four years ago. Meanwhile going from the earliest CPUs (Pentium 4s) to the latest CPUs (Core 2 Quads) using LGA 775 there was a massive increase in computing power and efficiency. The consumer tech market of the last few years has been a mess of hype and upselling.
I remember my high school had to throw out a whole bunch of math textbooks and either buy the latest edition or buy a totally different series altogether because a student found a copy of the solution manual online and passed it around. Since practically every student in the classes that used that particular book suddenly started turning in the exact same "textbook" solutions to the homework, the teacher caught on immediately. Sadly, it made the book useless for assigning homework.
If a Q6600 is adequate for my current usage, why should I want to "upgrade" prematurely? All it means is that I'm spending money for hardware that I don't need yet that won't last as long. When I do get around to upgrading my system, I'll want to buy another mid to high-end combination to ensure that the new system lasts for as long as possible. Some of us are most definitely NOT made of money. I'll probably be forced to replace my T7700 laptop pretty soon as it has been experiencing numerous hardware problems lately.
I've gotta second this. My Q6600 is still chugging right along quite happily running just about everything. I can play the latest games in Win7 and I do video rendering and transcoding from time to time in Mac OS X Lion (hackintosher :D). I've got 6GB of RAM (used to be 8, but one of the sticks failed) and a new stick of DRR2 2GB would cost about 2.5x the price of a new stick of DDR3 2GB. At this point I know I don't want to buy any new hardware until I upgrade the mobo/CPU/RAM as will probably become necessary within the next year or two. Until then, this 5 year old CPU setup does quite well for me. Actually I'd imagine that the real bottleneck on my system is the 667 MHz bus. When I do get around to replacing this hardware, I know I want to get a new hardware combination that would last for another four years at least.
@#$%ing John Scully...
Sure those could be hate crimes. Acts of violence become hate crimes when there is a malicious reason that they are targeting a subset of people. Burglars intentionally targeting elderly people because they are easier to burgle is not a hate crime. The same burglars targeting elderly people because they think that anyone over the age of 65 does not have a right to live is a hate crime.
There is of course a difference of degree between beating up black people and beating up fans of the Dallas Cowboys. There are probably more people who would go out and beat up black people if they could get away with it. Not to mention parts of this country have a history of violence against black people. Hence hate crimes against black people tend to get more air time than hate crimes against fans of the Dallas Cowboys.
The difference between a hate crime and a bar fight is that one is that neo-nazis who have beaten up a black man think that they have some duty to beat up black men. A bar fight is typically the result of intoxication and impulsive emotions. After the incident, the people who were fighting will probably have regrets and remorse, while the neo-nazis will proclaim that the police are being controlled by jews or some such and that they were/are trying to preserve the moral fabric of society by assaulting minorities. Even beyond the simple fact that the neo-nazis are more likely to go back out and organize more attacks, there's a line between what can be considered an accident or a poor decision and a conscious, willful attempt to hurt people.
The PS3 is NOT the top selling console in the world. Of the current generation consoles, it's the worst selling. Overall, the PS1 and PS2 are the top selling, but that was a very different time.
Are you kidding me? I'm voiding a couple mods I made but I just had to respond to this... utterly false statement. Have you ever done any iOS development at all? How about any Mac OS X development? Have you ever seen the Xcode developer tools? How about the Interface Builder component of Xcode? I've got a hunch that you haven't so I'm going to describe what it's like.
Interface builder is a WYSIWIG UI layout tool that generates XML files defining an application's interface to be loaded at runtime. Just about every app written for iOS has at least one of these interface files. The programmer uses Interface Building by dragging and dropping UI elements onto a sample device screen. You can resize and remask any element, as well as define new object templates with different appearance and behaviors. UIView objects, the base type of any interface element in the API, can be tweaked in an uncountable number of ways, as well as nested in other UIViews. The UI elements are linked to an Objective-C class that they are considered members of through a graphical relationship view.
Merely playing around with Interface Building for ten minutes will show you just how well iOS handles graphical scaling. Every piece of the UI kit is vector graphics and runtime rendering. Your uninformed conjecture has no basis in fact. Slashdot really needs a -1 wrong mod.
"I believe that Government is should, in fact, act as Mother and Father according to the will of the majority. We should not be allowed to act as we wish, only as we are allowed by Mother and Father. Regardless of whether or not our actions bring harm to others."
You just totally ignored what I actually said. I said specifically that our actions should be policed when they do bring harm to others. My point was that the definition of "harm" is arbitrary and totally dependent on what society you're a part of.
My statement about "violence" is more abstract that literally meaning to break down someone's door and haul them off to prison, or however you seem to have interpreted it. The concept of the "monopoly on violence" means that the US Government is the only body in this country that is legally allowed to coerce anyone to do anything. They do of course grant that right to groups that are not technically part of the government, but the point is that you or I have no true legal authority to force anyone to do anything. The best we can do and still be totally clear in the eyes of the law is inform others that the law is on my side and that they must cease breaking it or we will contact authorities and get the authorities to force them to stop. The defining feature of a governed society is that there is a group that has a monopoly on violence, be it direct physical violence, incarceration, fines, or other penalties. If you refuse to pay a bill the collection agency (hopefully) doesn't send men to break your kneecaps, they are supposed to use the law to hold you accountable.
There are no such thing as basic rights. Arguably, the only way there could be undeniable natural-born rights would be for some deity or extra-terrestrial authority responsible for creating the human race appeared and told us what we should be doing. As long as humans are a self-determined species, we have to agree on things like basic rights. If someone were to step up and dictate precisely what every other person's rights are, they are by definition a tyrant as they are dictating arbitrary rules.
Not at all am I saying that a government should "give us permission" for every little thing. Your believe that the "proper role of government is to defend our basic rights" is the exact same thing, we just disagree on how those rights should be determined. Whether those rights are described by a nation's laws or religious commandments or even international treaties, they are all effectively the same thing: they are one group's attempt to draw lines in the sand regarding human behavior. To act like I'm supporting some sort of totalitarianism is being disingenuous, we actually support the same thing.
In mine we are the masters of government, in yours government is our master.
You've completely misunderstood what I said. In fact I question whether you even read my last post. In the first paragraph I state that
The government in of itself doesn't know best. A well-informed populace knows best and the government is an extension of the will of the populace, therefore the government can be entrusted to act in accordance to what is "best."
If that doesn't make clear the fact that I believe we are all the masters of ourselves and each other through the government, you should really read up on the concept of a republic. I don't want to be a tyrant, nor do I want any other individual to be a tyrant. A democratic society as a whole is effectively a tyrant with regard to itself, as to an outside observer the rules of society may be totally arbitrary. The key is that to the society itself, those rules are generally agreed upon to have a basic in logic and should be enforced.
The government I want is a bit of an ideal, I suppose. I want a government that can keep its people safe, according to what the majority of its people think warrants safety. The government in of itself doesn't know best. A well-informed populace knows best and the government is an extension of the will of the populace, therefore the government can be entrusted to act in accordance to what is "best." Now I am under no illusion that the current political climate of the United States is in line with this ideal model. I am simply stating what I believe the responsibilities of a properly functioning government should be.
I am not asking any individual or subset of individuals to make decisions for me. I am acknowledging that I am a member of a society and I am conceding the right to make policy for the benefit of the whole society to a body of representatives elected by the whole society. If the society that I lived in demonstrated radically different policy than I personally support and could abide by, it is my responsibility to find another society that I can agree with. By being a member of a group I must abide by the collective decisions of that group, this is the social contract that everyone living in a democratic society must accept.
We are human beings. Human beings are fully capable of taking actions and disregarding the consequences. No individual is perfect in that they can be totally trusted to never make a mistake in life. Most of the mistakes people make on a daily basis are relatively minor. Some of them are not. Some of the mistakes people make will cause harm not only to themselves but other people. While I believe people have a right to self-determine, I do not accept that they also have a right to make decisions (conscious or unconscious) that will hurt other people.
There's an invisible line that separates children from adults. There is a certain arbitrary point where we denote that an individual has sufficient morality and intelligence to make responsible decisions. Legally this is represented by an age line, but there is also the individual judgement that is made when you encounter someone face-to-face. There are many other arbitrary lines such as the distinction between acceptable harm (e.g. an emotional blow such as an insult) and unacceptable harm (such as punching someone in the face). There is an arbitrary distinction between an accident and willful negligence. Laws are an attempt to make a concrete definition of these arbitrary and often invisible socially defined lines (that tend to vary from culture to culture), for the purpose of making it clear what you can and cannot do in that society.
Whether someone can or cannot be trusted to make decisions is defined by more than just their status as an "adult." It is generally accepted that we cannot trust child molesters to make good decisions regarding the care of children. It is also generally accepted that we cannot trust an individual with no pilot's training to fly an airplane. There certainly are child molesters who would jump at the chance to run a day care center, and I am sure there are people with now pilot's training who would love to sit at the controls of an airplane. It is the duty of the government of a society (by definition, the governing body is the subset of society with a monopoly on violence) to ensure that these people, who the society generally agrees are making poor decisions on a particular topic, are prevented from carrying out their intent. To live without that social contract is known as anarchy, and that is a really bad thing.
Not all differences of opinion are created equal. It would not surprise me if at some point in the near future, a majority of the country thought it would be ok to legalize marijuana. I doubt that in that same time frame a majority of the country will think that heroine, cocaine, and amphetamines should be similarly legalized. In fact, I can tell you that if those substances were legalized I may personally no longer feel comfortable living in this country an
I'm ok with a government telling me (under threat of punishment) what I can and cannot put into my body, provided that said regulations are informed by medical professionals.
I'm ok will the concept of police and I believe the level of force the police use should be dependent on the danger to them in the action of arresting potential criminals. I do not believe those sorts of mistakes are "ok," but mistakes are mistakes. The best anyone can do is try to minimize them.
I'm ok with records being kept, government or otherwise, of cold medicine purchases. Personally I'm not at all concerned about what someone (the government included) will do with records of what cold medicines I've purchased.
I'm not ok with "constant eroding of rights," though that is really a loaded statement. The generally agreed upon collection of rights is very often changing as time passes and society changes.
I'm not ok with people getting arrested on faulty charges, though that falls in with what I said previously about mistakes.
Personally I would be a lot more comfortable with the policing of drug use and many other things if there were fewer mistakes. There are limits to what a member of society should be allowed to do, as being of a member of society the way they live their life will have an effect on everyone else. I'm all for justice and ensuring the safety of the general population, within reason. It's generally considered appropriate to prevent people from committing suicide. By doing so you are attempting to save someone from a poor decision, to save someone from themselves. I apply the same reasoning to preventing people from taking seriously harmful drugs. The tactics used to achieve that probably need to be reexamined, but I still agree with the principle nonetheless.
You know every series of troubleshooting steps I ever went through for what seemed like hardware issue with my old Power Mac 7100 had zapping the PRAM at some point. I don't think it ever actually did anything.
Well to be fair, Minecraft's "story" is really over the top. I never, ever want to beat the dragon again because of the incredibly long and creepy narrative that played at the end.
Also I can't believe I haven't seen anyone else mention Half-Life 2 here. The Half-Life series has a very strong central story, with a lot of effort put into cinematic experience and voice acting. Among my friends are I those are the best games we've ever played.