Make no mistake, they are crooks; the captured files revealed that they were
the people responsible for several blackmail operations.
In states ruled by law, evidence that is obtained illegally is itself illegal. If we need judges to declare ways to obtain evidenc legal (when normal law would prohibit it) then you don`t have a state ruled by law, but a state ruled by judges. And I`d hate to see THEM being responsible for declaring WWIII;)
Anyway, seems to me the US has no business in setting things straight in Russia. Just like it had no business sending spyplanes over China, or tapping into European strategic, economic and diplomatic communication channels. Diplomacy, yes, action, no. If crooks are 'hiding on foreign soil' (and a crook is not a crook untill _prooven_ guilty, a fundamental human right) then they loose all form of jurisdiction and the US should tackle the problem in other ways. So that evidence smells. Besides no body had the chance to appeal the judge`s(state`s) decision in the first place. There is no constitutional ground for declaring this act legal, and the state is acting on it`s own, without foreign countries approving or being aware of this.
Crooks are to be dealth with, but I don`t believe you`ll ever get to exterminate the problem, and certainly not by engaging foreign secret operations without foreign authorities approving or even being aware of this.
Well Proton is widely spread in Belgium, a small country with very high population density/shop density, and it`s surprising but allomost any shop offering a bank-card terminal has a proton slot on it. As a matter of fact I daily buy lunch with my proton, and 7 years after introduction it`s hard to find a shop not advertising Proton next to Visa, Mastercard and Banksys.
If I`m not mistaken Proton was a tied effort by Banksys and all major banks and shoppingmalls, giving it enough weight so the smaller shops could jump on the system too. It was first introduced in leuven, a typical university city where 80% of the population is a student. From there on it gradually came allmost unnoticed and now everyone I know here locally uses it. I think it`s a big success.
Actually there is just such a way to keep quality sites up. People paying for ad campaings on sites are not just the only ones that can keep them alive, you can too. Consider it a bit like 'paying to get no banner ads tagged onto your email', only that it`s not email and that now you are expressing an appreciation or need for the content. By simply donating money to services you are fond of, people can donate money to sites they want to keep up and banner free for isntance.
Reflecting on this a bit, the problem with these kind of thing is that this model can`t work because individual payment is an uncoordinated and crude event. You can`t possibly go about and give every good site your money, and the effect you try to resort might be disproportional to what you had in mind. So maybe it`s time to build something like support.org, an organisation you are free to donate money to and which you can instruct to support a certain company with that money up to a certai degree. You can of course consult previous efforts in that direction.. the support.org runs by voting on policy issues, and those who donate cna vote and suggest policy changs. Seems like to me like a nice idea to help and sustain Open Source Projects.
Do we really want to venture into the realm where socially unacceptable knowledge is deemed through inference to be not knowledge?
Interesting question. Our Minister of Culture has just recently announced that public and universoty libraries are required to remove a black list of books from their offering. The list of books include (among other things) any book that denies the existance of the hollocaust during WWII. While I surely do not agree with that denial, I think measures like this are the first sings of radicalism and intellectual poverty.
This is not to say, of course, that I see Bin Laden on the same level as the holocaust, but apparently even though our constitution includes free speech (at least I hope so) our government can do whatever makes them happy with any kind of speech.
If you ever get to visit Antwerp, which is further up north (actually it`s a bit above Brussels, which is a little more above Paris), you`ll notice the same kind of kiosks, but they are running on WindowsNT. Can you guess how I got to discover that it was windows ?;)
I just saw "13 Days" yesterday and I was asking myself the very same question: To what extend is history rewritten or modified in order to be able to sell the movie to box offices.
My conclusion is that 13 Days is a bad movie, but a good portrayal of the sequence of historic events. It didn't have all the excitement of the cuba crisis I was told about in highschool. It's not a box office biggie, allthough I think Kostner, aside from the southern accent which doesn't really fit him, does a modestly good acting job at times. The movie lasts about 2:20, but I think it could have been done in much less than that. Not that I was boored but at times you'd expecty the politcal conflict to keep building up. That doesn't happen because historic elements keep softening the tension, so presumeable, the filmbuddies tried to romantisize this epic without damaging the historical plot too much. Of course JFK is the great american hero in this one, but unlike all other great heroes, this one actually IS smart, he doesn't just look it.
The other characters in this movie, aside from the president and his advisors, are so thin it's hard to keep watching at times. The Chroetsjov side doesn't get any attention in this movie, and maybe that's a choice to make, but it might have added some intersting elements. The whole movie is tangled into speculations which just don't bring enough adrenaline to say this is a good movie. Too many characters play too little parts to mean anything to the plot, so it's hard to sympathise with anyone else but JFK himself. The main character is the historic plot though, and I think they did everything to keep it from going off the track.. of course politics is politics, and things might have been a little different, but we'll never know.
Anyway, I've had enough of historic war-movies for a while, I think Hollywood should look at something more creative to sell. Schindler's List is undoubteldy the greatest movie in that genre and it's going to be hard to beat that one. Certainly not with 13 days, and certainly not with Pearl Harbour, a typically semi-heroic American movie, for the american public, but with enough action sequences to lure the rest of the world in buying a ticket anyway.. well it might be entertaining, maybe..
On a side note, it appears that some genre-films are allways appearing in pairs, what's up with that ?
This is very true. The last couple of games like e.g. Black and White show a trnd to move away from card-targetted games like quake to more intelligent world games like B&W. Oni was going to be just like that but apparently they never got further than decent character animation, probably because of the strategic buy of Bungie by MS(read: xbox). In any case, B&W is setting a new waypoint for gaming, and you better dig up your athlon 1.33 or intel 1.5 because they are going to smoke out loud.
I don't give a fuck about Karma. I'd rather you mod me down instead of trying to search for reasons not to.
as you allready mentioned, you agree with my basic message, and yes my arguments were too strong or imprecise. But that wouldn't make this post flamebait just yet.
When I mentioned lawvoting for instance, I was aware of the fact that laws don't work in the same way everywhere else. I didn't mean it specifically, I meant that parents should use (as in "change") the legal system in general wherever possible to protect children from mental abuses. And since law is what makes democracy work, aside from all the obvious sarcasm, you have to take the downsides with that. The fact that laws are a contemporary reflection of a society is not a downside imho. The fact that they are very static is, and if you'd let me run the world I'd go for self regulation wherever possible too, but that's not how it works today, otherwise ISP's would never have gotten this far.
You also seem to think that I implied that ISP's should be the ones controling the content, but that is not my opinion by far. The problem is mentality, value degeneration and social acceptance of extravaganza and decadence, because hey, we're supposed to be modern kapitalists. Not that I don't want to be modern, but that doesn't have to mean there should not be any limits to what people are putting online for hard cash. Because no one else other than parents are contesting those actions, that's where the initial reaction should also start, not on any other level. But here AOL blurrs the lines ofcourse, because it's so huge and counts so many households. I can partly understand it but I still think any kind of censory is bad.
I don't think practically excercising sex in classrooms is going to do the trick here (nice try though), just like parents probably are only giving kids half the stuff they need to know. Kids find out a whole lot by themselves, just from watching tv which screams "sex, anger and violence" every evening. Imho they'll educate themselves more than anyone dares to say out loud. What is needed is a stable and comfortable environment of schools, parents, friends to explore what relationships are, that raises questions to questionable issues (shape limits in the head of the child, rather than set them for the child -> it's still his world!!), and encourages mental stability for the child..
Even if the puritunic movement has historic roots, it's basicly wrong and leads to mental abuse. The fact that AOL seems to feel a need to play that cultural shared opinion of US citizens can only mean AOL is desperately looking for new clients in the (elder) republican wing. So as allways, this isn't really in the interest of kids or parents, but in the interest of AOL itself. And presto, there you have your kapitalistic value degeneration again..
Aside from my dreadfull spellin I hope this time everything is right-on target.
Funny how we Americans are such tightwads when it comes to sexual content. After visiting Europe last year I saw people were a slightly bit more laid back, even
though pornography is shown on television just about every night. Wow I'm surprised Parents all over the USA aren't condemning Europeans for being sexually free.
Here's a suggestion for some parents: How about talking to your kids before placing mental handcuffs on them?
Not just handcuffs, they`re actually REPEATING what the Catholic Church did (I could also have used Hitler here) way back in europe: creating a black list of things that one should not do . And if there is one thing modern people in society do no longer accept, it`s paternalism and secrecy. For one because people are usually drawn towards the "sins of life". And more importantly, censoring a part of human culture and behaviour is proof that there are people who claim to have the right to guard the moral, human and cultural baggage from all evil. Darwin would have called such an evolution 'extinction', which ofcourse has to be seen on the psychological level in this case.
The fact that people are censoring is only beneficial to those who are "selling the drama". The right solution is to educate and free people from mental chains, so that they will make the right decission when the next "ethical challenge" comes within their generation timeframe, so yes, this applies to young people too. This is not done by shielding (running away) from "tough" choices, leaving internet goodies to filter the bad from the world. This is done by parents making time for their children to talk about these (obviously) important issues. When things go wrong, (see: "news"), the inability to deal with conflict or temptation is THE factor that leads to bigger problems.
Europeans are no more sexually free than americans are. You have all sorts of people here too, but atleast, we don`t make a g*dd*mn circus out of it like puritanic churches do in the US. I have nothing against believing in whatever, but we`re all human and "things happen(tm)". Including Sex. And Sex is not "a bad thing". Not even at age 12, as long as children know the consequences of whatever they do. It`s a fundamental part of grwonig up. If we are ashamed to show whatever goes round on the net to our children, then why the hell CAN ISP`s ever be responsible for putting up all that junk? They should not have been able to do so in the first place. It`s not AOL that has to play cia here, it`s us, the parents that have to do something about it. Not by easily shopping the AOL neural net caboodle, but by voting fair stable and decent laws, by raising their kids with a healthy awareness that "yes there`s a lot of crap out there which is all maffia shit", and by fighting for good ethics and values (without overreacting) amongst adults themselves (i.e. a bit of social control). Money can surely do a lot for them, but I`m convinced parents can and will do more, if only they`d have a few minutes of their precious time to spare for these things..
having kids feeling uncool, boored, frustrated and easy to have a grip on, obviously.
It`s them having to search for cool alternatives on the web, like how to make H bombs and blow the pentagon or how to hack microsoft.be (again).
It`s them having to see these beautifull all-american documentaries (in technicolor) on tv or in the theatre on how to kill your neighbour in 30 movie shots.
It`s them sneaking around with books that no-on should read, including their own parents at age 16, but hey, they did so anyway.
One wonders what the point is of lawsystems and education if lawyers have even lost grip on the difference between imagination and reality.
I have been trashed with huge quantities of dangerous FPS radiation myself, yet, I wouldn`t ever think of actually shooting anyone. Come to think of it, where could I possible get a gun ? Fuck!.. Must be the shitty strict gun-license policies in my shitty country. Ah well..
This is a story about life in America's schools these days for people who are "different," who live at the mercy of jerks
and cover-your-butt administrators.
I understand the problem and I feel sympathy for the father and the kid, but that last line was just too much for me. If we are going to put people in boxes and label them, we`re just as guilty as the taggers that put kids through their misery. Not knowing slashdot is not a crime, btw.
IMHO making a model out of the father and the kid of 'what essentially is wrong with the system' is A) not very empathically, let alone very intelligent in regard to the child and B) will not change anything. I know the father asked the question directly, but nonetheless the answers he will find here will be good theory but poor practice. The answer to all the social problems must be found in the attention parents/government and society devote to raising their kids, 10 or 20 years AGO. Our social economic model is becoming very child unfriendly and we have to make exceptions to laws in order to protect and sustain the natural growth and education process of our children. Any good programmer knows the raised red flag, signaling that the design of such a system is flawed. Slashdot can`t ever dream to fix that with a good tasty discussion.
If I were that father I would probably not have aired this so much, but I would also have tried to pull my son out of the system just like he did. My guess is that this kid will now be shielded from the terror inflicted on his psyche, and I`m afraid unless he learns to face and deal with his 'opponents' successfully, we won`t quickly recover from what`s happened to him. What he needs is something to excell in, and a bit of vocabulary and clues about how to cope with the pests.
If slashdot is all about free speech and free attitude, then the above statement is essentially wrong imho.
Why must mozilla bashing always take place? It has crashed for me at the most in the last month twice. It does not load faster for me. Im using mozilla.81. What makes me extremely
angry is when people(albeit not here) say mozilla is "unstable, buggy, crashes, bloated..." when they have no idea, simply repeat what others say. I've been using mozilla since.6 as my
only browser with _no_ problems.
Well, I`ll say it here:it`s untable, buggy, crashes and bloated, and I do have an idea. I`ve used the overhyped and totally dreadfull N6 and slightly previous versions of mozilla before that one came out, and I was so disappointed from what I got that I`m still using N4.6 today. Unless people can actually say mozilla is light, easy and stable, I`ll have a go, but a 20Meg app that doesn`t react as it should and crashes doesn`t need nice words from me, regardless the source.
There is no need for me to use IE. It crashes and has nasty features which bug me. N4.6 also crashes (alot), but atleast it does everything, securely, and just that, no more, with me in full control. Mozilla is promising but unless they got their bugs worked out and their package cleaned up, I won`t have another go at it. Face it. It`s not a webbrowser, it`s a pack of nice dreams thrown together, without really having a normal product goal, like e.g. stability and ease of use. Instead of filling up a dreamcastle with goodies, why not build a solid house and go from there? Not a big mistery this one, but the question remains.
Real icq users know their numbers by heart;) Anyway, the trouble is usually with remembering your 7 years old password when retrying your equally old number, not so much the number..
But, as allways, given enough 'obligatory' excercise.. =)
First up it`s not really my cause. I just have *some* sympathy for what their ideas are.
It`s not nearly my intention to get elected, I just wanted to see if someone had some good experiences/recolections with/of non-violent protests on the internet that were effective.
Gene Sharp has been studying the politics of nonviolent action. There's an interview with him. Since you can't coerce someone over a T-1 line, you have to use
nonviolent action. I'm a pacifist. Welcome to my world.:-)
Thanks, it`s interesting to know people actually studied this. It`s a little out of date ofcourse, and the net is a new kind of world where new rules emerge. Spamming, virri and emailbombs are quite common today allready, and in some way they represent the protest acts of individuals or groups too. Some people have grown tolerant to a certain extend to these 'mallicious' acts, some take them very seriously. I`m curious how this will evolve, and where the limits and benefits really are.
I have no problem with pacifist protests, regardless what they are about. It`s a way to ventilate someone`s r a group`s opinion and it`s necessary to keep decision-making going in the right directions. I was just wondering if there is anything you can do on the net that has any effect, appart from the obvious organising benefit it brings.
Are you really going to expect me to believe that DirectX always does what is expected, and that SDL/OpenGL frequently do not?
To be honest I don't have that much experience with SDL but I know openGL can, or was rather, a pain in the neck to get the same output on every machine. This has improved. From my brief surfing, SDL looks like a basic mm-extended glut layer that is portable. I don't doubt linux as a server OS, but on a graphics level I do have my reservations, from experience. I'm not a linux guru though..
[++dists==conformity risks] This is a huge FUD argument, and I'm dissapointed you felt it necessary to resort to it.
FUD argument or not, it's gonna be used to linux-games's disadvantage, and people are going to go along with it. If linux grows into a mainstream OS, home-users are going to want a certain level of conformity. The fact that there are more distributions means companies need to put extra work testing and ironing, and that's not a plus, regardless of the argument being FUD or not. Oh and I know: MS puts out more "distributions" than anyone could ever asked for. But the interface hasn't really changed in years.
This is a joke, right? I'm not sure if I should argue, or just laugh.
Anyway, since my roomate is a heavy player of Win games, I know for a fact that this is BS. And having seen the number of patches released
because of problems with DirectX, I conclude your earlier point about DX always "doing what it is supposed to" is also BS.
I really don't play that many DX games since my pc can't run most of them swiftly, but my code runs as expected on most pc's. That's all I can say. Looking at the SDL and knowing openGL, I admitt that I didn't have a point saying that. Agreed.
I still think people easily diss on DX, while it's a good API and offers game companies the dreamed stable platform for developping games. I like openGL better myself, but that's just a matter of taste, and in some cases, shortcomings/additional features supported in either or both. Actually, comparing SDL to DX is BS. DX does a lot more/is a lot more complex than SDL, and you can see the good an bad of that. Surely DX raises issues and problems that SDL doesn't and vice versa. When I was talking about API's, I meant linux API's in general, and more specifically the X-Protocol. I didn't even know SDL existed untill the thread mentioned it. Now that I know what it is, I realise I regret having made claims about [it] as the 2 can't really be compared fully.
I support linux gaming. In fact there is a reason to believe linux gaming still has a future. Clearly X-Box is MS's way out to untangle Windows&Apps from it's copy-crazy gaming community, while still maintaining some sort of 'backward compatibility'. If MS intends to shut down gaming on windows, Linux gaming has a future.
You probably mean Metal Gear Solid I, which originally was a console game on the Playstation I. Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2 is just about to arrive on PS2 this fall, and I don't think Kojima will allow any pc-port to happen anytime soon.
hehe, I never said no games ever needed patches on windows. Playing Unreal, I know I was making a moot point that would be critized. Lately, games can 'depend' on the net if something needs to be updated, but in the previous everything-windows era, they either worked or didn`t make it at all. This has changed into: let`s build a society around a working beta run from there. In fact this makes window and linux not that much different, but a large portion of the wingame industry is still centered around that "perfect product" idea.
OpenGL isn`t used as much (and that`s really a statent from the past) because A) it wasn`t an orginal windows technology, so it needed time to proove itself, and B) because it wasn`t all that full-featured and hardware specific as it is today. DX still has that (very small) advantage because it`s IN the OS, not on top of it, but technology-wise, I`d choose OpenGL any-day now. I`ve never used used SDL before, but looking at the trackrecord and the API reference it looks like a simple but portable lib. I don`t know if comparing is all that sensible though. DX simply does much more than SDL. E.g. how would you port a D3D game to linux ? Maybe I missed that but something comparable isn`t in the spec.
Forget products
Forget distributions
Forget boxed games on the shelves
This is what will happen:
You donwload the installer of your favourite game, install the thing on your fancy OS of choice, start it up, enter your VISA/Mastercard number, and wait a few seconds for the game to contact servers. Once the necessay stuff is donwloaded, you can play. When you`re done, the game erases everything except savegames.
This will work, but only when net congestion ramps down and everybody can say broadband 5 times in a sentence. Essentially it`s SUNs EJB or MSs.NET vision.
There is just no way people are going to survive on freeware, shareware, or a business model that sells products in the strores to a market that doesn`t really want to buy. See red-hat, breaking even, fnially charging money for it`s agent service. That stuff works, but only because they target the right people (companies) in the right way (easy & clean).
Even if the parent`s attitude sucks, he`s still right on the directX AND market issue. It might not be very insightfull or anything, but he`s right. DirectX is only parallelled by expensive proprietry SDK`s for e.g. PS2, so the gaming industry embraces free API`s like DX easily. Allthough linux is "open", the API`s are not as straightforward in use as DX is (im not talking performance or design here), and they allways work as predicted. The large number of Linux distributions confuses and potentially compromise compatibility. DX supports most, if not all, top of the bill hardware, whereas Linux hw-drivers will usually lag a little. The potential user base is much larger, and unlike linux software, windows games rarely need (debug) patches afterwards, free or not.
You may not like what is, but that`s not a reason to kill a man`s opinion.
The nature of the linux crowd simply is a bit difficult to target by game companies, because they don`t know if they need to play the good guy`s with the sensible OS approach (VERY small market), or the pinguin braindeads that fly up whenever somebody insults a word ending on ux (substantially bigger, but still small, market).
I mean, we all know that Kutaragi has had a rough time to put his Playstation on track. Everybody knows he was first producing sound hardware elements for Nintendo, and gradually added to his inventory of usuable parts until his machine was sort-of "conceived". On itself, it`s a bit like Jobs and his Apple. It`s an achievement, a milestone. But if you look in IBM`s history I think you`ll find many of these kinds of achievements, and no one will give a rats-ass about the people behind them.
Putting a whorship-book together on the details of this story is probably another attempt to help playstation II fend off the X-Box. Now we can even believe that Sony, as short-sighted as their management probably is, will still make the 'right' decisions for us happy bunch, so we should stick with them. Don`t buy it folks, you won`t learn anything from this "success' story. I bet the book doesn`t mention the number of malfunctioning PSII`s out there.
So it`s ok to be aware of market tactics principles and to approve or disapprove, but to actually NOT buy a graphics card which is superior to others because it makes the other businesses go slower ?
That`s definately NOT the right angle. In fact, if nVidia gets to sell this card as hot as the previous 2 versions, it can set (and raise) the standard in 3d lighting again, and frankly that`s what I want. Ofcourse monopolistic situations like e.g. Soundblaster are absolutely bad to competition (and quality) in the market, but that`s because a Soundblaster (could als have used Windows here) is a good product, just not top of the line. That doesn`t mean there are no other soundcards out there which are actually better, only that you`ll have to pay more for those and go out and look for them.
I support ATI and to a lesser extend, Matrox, because they are the only rivals left in the field. But If I had to buy a card today, it wouldn`t be either of those 2, because I simply want a 'standard' compliant full fledged and top of the line game experience, not the feeling that I did something good for market competition. In the end I might financially regret that choice, but if nVidia creates the best cards at the end of the day, I`m only happy to spend some cash on them. If someone else can do the same or top them AND has less expensive cards, obviously that`s a thing to consider. But today I cheer for nVidia, as I have more pro than con.
Slashdot Mirror
Make no mistake, they are crooks; the captured files revealed that they were the people responsible for several blackmail operations.
;)
In states ruled by law, evidence that is obtained illegally is itself illegal. If we need judges to declare ways to obtain evidenc legal (when normal law would prohibit it) then you don`t have a state ruled by law, but a state ruled by judges. And I`d hate to see THEM being responsible for declaring WWIII
Anyway, seems to me the US has no business in setting things straight in Russia. Just like it had no business sending spyplanes over China, or tapping into European strategic, economic and diplomatic communication channels. Diplomacy, yes, action, no. If crooks are 'hiding on foreign soil' (and a crook is not a crook untill _prooven_ guilty, a fundamental human right) then they loose all form of jurisdiction and the US should tackle the problem in other ways. So that evidence smells. Besides no body had the chance to appeal the judge`s(state`s) decision in the first place. There is no constitutional ground for declaring this act legal, and the state is acting on it`s own, without foreign countries approving or being aware of this.
Crooks are to be dealth with, but I don`t believe you`ll ever get to exterminate the problem, and certainly not by engaging foreign secret operations without foreign authorities approving or even being aware of this.
Well Proton is widely spread in Belgium, a small country with very high population density/shop density, and it`s surprising but allomost any shop offering a bank-card terminal has a proton slot on it. As a matter of fact I daily buy lunch with my proton, and 7 years after introduction it`s hard to find a shop not advertising Proton next to Visa, Mastercard and Banksys.
If I`m not mistaken Proton was a tied effort by Banksys and all major banks and shoppingmalls, giving it enough weight so the smaller shops could jump on the system too. It was first introduced in leuven, a typical university city where 80% of the population is a student. From there on it gradually came allmost unnoticed and now everyone I know here locally uses it. I think it`s a big success.
Actually there is just such a way to keep quality sites up. People paying for ad campaings on sites are not just the only ones that can keep them alive, you can too. Consider it a bit like 'paying to get no banner ads tagged onto your email', only that it`s not email and that now you are expressing an appreciation or need for the content. By simply donating money to services you are fond of, people can donate money to sites they want to keep up and banner free for isntance.
Reflecting on this a bit, the problem with these kind of thing is that this model can`t work because individual payment is an uncoordinated and crude event. You can`t possibly go about and give every good site your money, and the effect you try to resort might be disproportional to what you had in mind. So maybe it`s time to build something like support.org, an organisation you are free to donate money to and which you can instruct to support a certain company with that money up to a certai degree. You can of course consult previous efforts in that direction.. the support.org runs by voting on policy issues, and those who donate cna vote and suggest policy changs. Seems like to me like a nice idea to help and sustain Open Source Projects.
Flaws? Comments?
Do we really want to venture into the realm where socially unacceptable knowledge is deemed through inference to be not knowledge?
Interesting question. Our Minister of Culture has just recently announced that public and universoty libraries are required to remove a black list of books from their offering. The list of books include (among other things) any book that denies the existance of the hollocaust during WWII. While I surely do not agree with that denial, I think measures like this are the first sings of radicalism and intellectual poverty.
This is not to say, of course, that I see Bin Laden on the same level as the holocaust, but apparently even though our constitution includes free speech (at least I hope so) our government can do whatever makes them happy with any kind of speech.
If you ever get to visit Antwerp, which is further up north (actually it`s a bit above Brussels, which is a little more above Paris), you`ll notice the same kind of kiosks, but they are running on WindowsNT. Can you guess how I got to discover that it was windows ? ;)
I just saw "13 Days" yesterday and I was asking myself the very same question: To what extend is history rewritten or modified in order to be able to sell the movie to box offices.
My conclusion is that 13 Days is a bad movie, but a good portrayal of the sequence of historic events. It didn't have all the excitement of the cuba crisis I was told about in highschool. It's not a box office biggie, allthough I think Kostner, aside from the southern accent which doesn't really fit him, does a modestly good acting job at times. The movie lasts about 2:20, but I think it could have been done in much less than that. Not that I was boored but at times you'd expecty the politcal conflict to keep building up. That doesn't happen because historic elements keep softening the tension, so presumeable, the filmbuddies tried to romantisize this epic without damaging the historical plot too much. Of course JFK is the great american hero in this one, but unlike all other great heroes, this one actually IS smart, he doesn't just look it.
The other characters in this movie, aside from the president and his advisors, are so thin it's hard to keep watching at times. The Chroetsjov side doesn't get any attention in this movie, and maybe that's a choice to make, but it might have added some intersting elements. The whole movie is tangled into speculations which just don't bring enough adrenaline to say this is a good movie. Too many characters play too little parts to mean anything to the plot, so it's hard to sympathise with anyone else but JFK himself. The main character is the historic plot though, and I think they did everything to keep it from going off the track.. of course politics is politics, and things might have been a little different, but we'll never know.
Anyway, I've had enough of historic war-movies for a while, I think Hollywood should look at something more creative to sell. Schindler's List is undoubteldy the greatest movie in that genre and it's going to be hard to beat that one. Certainly not with 13 days, and certainly not with Pearl Harbour, a typically semi-heroic American movie, for the american public, but with enough action sequences to lure the rest of the world in buying a ticket anyway.. well it might be entertaining, maybe..
On a side note, it appears that some genre-films are allways appearing in pairs, what's up with that ?
Actually I searched for a label but I can`t find it anywhere. Where should it be ?
thanks.
This is very true. The last couple of games like e.g. Black and White show a trnd to move away from card-targetted games like quake to more intelligent world games like B&W. Oni was going to be just like that but apparently they never got further than decent character animation, probably because of the strategic buy of Bungie by MS(read: xbox). In any case, B&W is setting a new waypoint for gaming, and you better dig up your athlon 1.33 or intel 1.5 because they are going to smoke out loud.
Setting a few things straight here:
I don't give a fuck about Karma. I'd rather you mod me down instead of trying to search for reasons not to.
as you allready mentioned, you agree with my basic message, and yes my arguments were too strong or imprecise. But that wouldn't make this post flamebait just yet.
When I mentioned lawvoting for instance, I was aware of the fact that laws don't work in the same way everywhere else. I didn't mean it specifically, I meant that parents should use (as in "change") the legal system in general wherever possible to protect children from mental abuses. And since law is what makes democracy work, aside from all the obvious sarcasm, you have to take the downsides with that. The fact that laws are a contemporary reflection of a society is not a downside imho. The fact that they are very static is, and if you'd let me run the world I'd go for self regulation wherever possible too, but that's not how it works today, otherwise ISP's would never have gotten this far.
You also seem to think that I implied that ISP's should be the ones controling the content, but that is not my opinion by far. The problem is mentality, value degeneration and social acceptance of extravaganza and decadence, because hey, we're supposed to be modern kapitalists. Not that I don't want to be modern, but that doesn't have to mean there should not be any limits to what people are putting online for hard cash. Because no one else other than parents are contesting those actions, that's where the initial reaction should also start, not on any other level. But here AOL blurrs the lines ofcourse, because it's so huge and counts so many households. I can partly understand it but I still think any kind of censory is bad.
I don't think practically excercising sex in classrooms is going to do the trick here (nice try though), just like parents probably are only giving kids half the stuff they need to know. Kids find out a whole lot by themselves, just from watching tv which screams "sex, anger and violence" every evening. Imho they'll educate themselves more than anyone dares to say out loud. What is needed is a stable and comfortable environment of schools, parents, friends to explore what relationships are, that raises questions to questionable issues (shape limits in the head of the child, rather than set them for the child -> it's still his world!!), and encourages mental stability for the child..
Even if the puritunic movement has historic roots, it's basicly wrong and leads to mental abuse. The fact that AOL seems to feel a need to play that cultural shared opinion of US citizens can only mean AOL is desperately looking for new clients in the (elder) republican wing. So as allways, this isn't really in the interest of kids or parents, but in the interest of AOL itself. And presto, there you have your kapitalistic value degeneration again..
Aside from my dreadfull spellin I hope this time everything is right-on target.
Funny how we Americans are such tightwads when it comes to sexual content. After visiting Europe last year I saw people were a slightly bit more laid back, even though pornography is shown on television just about every night. Wow I'm surprised Parents all over the USA aren't condemning Europeans for being sexually free.
Here's a suggestion for some parents: How about talking to your kids before placing mental handcuffs on them?
Not just handcuffs, they`re actually REPEATING what the Catholic Church did (I could also have used Hitler here) way back in europe: creating a black list of things that one should not do . And if there is one thing modern people in society do no longer accept, it`s paternalism and secrecy. For one because people are usually drawn towards the "sins of life". And more importantly, censoring a part of human culture and behaviour is proof that there are people who claim to have the right to guard the moral, human and cultural baggage from all evil. Darwin would have called such an evolution 'extinction', which ofcourse has to be seen on the psychological level in this case.
The fact that people are censoring is only beneficial to those who are "selling the drama". The right solution is to educate and free people from mental chains, so that they will make the right decission when the next "ethical challenge" comes within their generation timeframe, so yes, this applies to young people too. This is not done by shielding (running away) from "tough" choices, leaving internet goodies to filter the bad from the world. This is done by parents making time for their children to talk about these (obviously) important issues. When things go wrong, (see: "news"), the inability to deal with conflict or temptation is THE factor that leads to bigger problems.
Europeans are no more sexually free than americans are. You have all sorts of people here too, but atleast, we don`t make a g*dd*mn circus out of it like puritanic churches do in the US. I have nothing against believing in whatever, but we`re all human and "things happen(tm)". Including Sex. And Sex is not "a bad thing". Not even at age 12, as long as children know the consequences of whatever they do. It`s a fundamental part of grwonig up. If we are ashamed to show whatever goes round on the net to our children, then why the hell CAN ISP`s ever be responsible for putting up all that junk? They should not have been able to do so in the first place. It`s not AOL that has to play cia here, it`s us, the parents that have to do something about it. Not by easily shopping the AOL neural net caboodle, but by voting fair stable and decent laws, by raising their kids with a healthy awareness that "yes there`s a lot of crap out there which is all maffia shit", and by fighting for good ethics and values (without overreacting) amongst adults themselves (i.e. a bit of social control). Money can surely do a lot for them, but I`m convinced parents can and will do more, if only they`d have a few minutes of their precious time to spare for these things..
Sorry i got carried away for a bit..
I`m living in belgium/europe
ignorance is bliss
:)
Hi Otis!
Not having kids play cool video games is
having kids feeling uncool, boored, frustrated and easy to have a grip on, obviously.
It`s them having to search for cool alternatives on the web, like how to make H bombs and blow the pentagon or how to hack microsoft.be (again).
It`s them having to see these beautifull all-american documentaries (in technicolor) on tv or in the theatre on how to kill your neighbour in 30 movie shots.
It`s them sneaking around with books that no-on should read, including their own parents at age 16, but hey, they did so anyway.
One wonders what the point is of lawsystems and education if lawyers have even lost grip on the difference between imagination and reality.
I have been trashed with huge quantities of dangerous FPS radiation myself, yet, I wouldn`t ever think of actually shooting anyone. Come to think of it, where could I possible get a gun ? Fuck!.. Must be the shitty strict gun-license policies in my shitty country. Ah well..
This is a story about life in America's schools these days for people who are "different," who live at the mercy of jerks and cover-your-butt administrators.
I understand the problem and I feel sympathy for the father and the kid, but that last line was just too much for me. If we are going to put people in boxes and label them, we`re just as guilty as the taggers that put kids through their misery. Not knowing slashdot is not a crime, btw.
IMHO making a model out of the father and the kid of 'what essentially is wrong with the system' is A) not very empathically, let alone very intelligent in regard to the child and B) will not change anything. I know the father asked the question directly, but nonetheless the answers he will find here will be good theory but poor practice. The answer to all the social problems must be found in the attention parents/government and society devote to raising their kids, 10 or 20 years AGO. Our social economic model is becoming very child unfriendly and we have to make exceptions to laws in order to protect and sustain the natural growth and education process of our children. Any good programmer knows the raised red flag, signaling that the design of such a system is flawed. Slashdot can`t ever dream to fix that with a good tasty discussion.
If I were that father I would probably not have aired this so much, but I would also have tried to pull my son out of the system just like he did. My guess is that this kid will now be shielded from the terror inflicted on his psyche, and I`m afraid unless he learns to face and deal with his 'opponents' successfully, we won`t quickly recover from what`s happened to him. What he needs is something to excell in, and a bit of vocabulary and clues about how to cope with the pests.
If slashdot is all about free speech and free attitude, then the above statement is essentially wrong imho.
Why must mozilla bashing always take place? It has crashed for me at the most in the last month twice. It does not load faster for me. Im using mozilla .81. What makes me extremely
angry is when people(albeit not here) say mozilla is "unstable, buggy, crashes, bloated..." when they have no idea, simply repeat what others say. I've been using mozilla since .6 as my
only browser with _no_ problems.
:it`s untable, buggy, crashes and bloated, and I do have an idea. I`ve used the overhyped and totally dreadfull N6 and slightly previous versions of mozilla before that one came out, and I was so disappointed from what I got that I`m still using N4.6 today. Unless people can actually say mozilla is light, easy and stable, I`ll have a go, but a 20Meg app that doesn`t react as it should and crashes doesn`t need nice words from me, regardless the source.
Well, I`ll say it here
There is no need for me to use IE. It crashes and has nasty features which bug me. N4.6 also crashes (alot), but atleast it does everything, securely, and just that, no more, with me in full control. Mozilla is promising but unless they got their bugs worked out and their package cleaned up, I won`t have another go at it. Face it. It`s not a webbrowser, it`s a pack of nice dreams thrown together, without really having a normal product goal, like e.g. stability and ease of use. Instead of filling up a dreamcastle with goodies, why not build a solid house and go from there? Not a big mistery this one, but the question remains.
Real icq users know their numbers by heart ;) Anyway, the trouble is usually with remembering your 7 years old password when retrying your equally old number, not so much the number..
But, as allways, given enough 'obligatory' excercise.. =)
First up it`s not really my cause. I just have *some* sympathy for what their ideas are.
It`s not nearly my intention to get elected, I just wanted to see if someone had some good experiences/recolections with/of non-violent protests on the internet that were effective.
Gene Sharp has been studying the politics of nonviolent action. There's an interview with him. Since you can't coerce someone over a T-1 line, you have to use nonviolent action. I'm a pacifist. Welcome to my world. :-)
Thanks, it`s interesting to know people actually studied this. It`s a little out of date ofcourse, and the net is a new kind of world where new rules emerge. Spamming, virri and emailbombs are quite common today allready, and in some way they represent the protest acts of individuals or groups too. Some people have grown tolerant to a certain extend to these 'mallicious' acts, some take them very seriously. I`m curious how this will evolve, and where the limits and benefits really are.
I have no problem with pacifist protests, regardless what they are about. It`s a way to ventilate someone`s r a group`s opinion and it`s necessary to keep decision-making going in the right directions. I was just wondering if there is anything you can do on the net that has any effect, appart from the obvious organising benefit it brings.
Are you really going to expect me to believe that DirectX always does what is expected, and that SDL/OpenGL frequently do not?
To be honest I don't have that much experience with SDL but I know openGL can, or was rather, a pain in the neck to get the same output on every machine. This has improved. From my brief surfing, SDL looks like a basic mm-extended glut layer that is portable. I don't doubt linux as a server OS, but on a graphics level I do have my reservations, from experience. I'm not a linux guru though..
[++dists==conformity risks] This is a huge FUD argument, and I'm dissapointed you felt it necessary to resort to it.
FUD argument or not, it's gonna be used to linux-games's disadvantage, and people are going to go along with it. If linux grows into a mainstream OS, home-users are going to want a certain level of conformity. The fact that there are more distributions means companies need to put extra work testing and ironing, and that's not a plus, regardless of the argument being FUD or not. Oh and I know: MS puts out more "distributions" than anyone could ever asked for. But the interface hasn't really changed in years.
This is a joke, right? I'm not sure if I should argue, or just laugh. Anyway, since my roomate is a heavy player of Win games, I know for a fact that this is BS. And having seen the number of patches released because of problems with DirectX, I conclude your earlier point about DX always "doing what it is supposed to" is also BS.
I really don't play that many DX games since my pc can't run most of them swiftly, but my code runs as expected on most pc's. That's all I can say. Looking at the SDL and knowing openGL, I admitt that I didn't have a point saying that. Agreed.
I still think people easily diss on DX, while it's a good API and offers game companies the dreamed stable platform for developping games. I like openGL better myself, but that's just a matter of taste, and in some cases, shortcomings/additional features supported in either or both. Actually, comparing SDL to DX is BS. DX does a lot more/is a lot more complex than SDL, and you can see the good an bad of that. Surely DX raises issues and problems that SDL doesn't and vice versa. When I was talking about API's, I meant linux API's in general, and more specifically the X-Protocol. I didn't even know SDL existed untill the thread mentioned it. Now that I know what it is, I realise I regret having made claims about [it] as the 2 can't really be compared fully.
I support linux gaming. In fact there is a reason to believe linux gaming still has a future. Clearly X-Box is MS's way out to untangle Windows&Apps from it's copy-crazy gaming community, while still maintaining some sort of 'backward compatibility'. If MS intends to shut down gaming on windows, Linux gaming has a future.
cheers,
You probably mean Metal Gear Solid I, which originally was a console game on the Playstation I. Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2 is just about to arrive on PS2 this fall, and I don't think Kojima will allow any pc-port to happen anytime soon.
hehe, I never said no games ever needed patches on windows. Playing Unreal, I know I was making a moot point that would be critized. Lately, games can 'depend' on the net if something needs to be updated, but in the previous everything-windows era, they either worked or didn`t make it at all. This has changed into: let`s build a society around a working beta run from there. In fact this makes window and linux not that much different, but a large portion of the wingame industry is still centered around that "perfect product" idea.
OpenGL isn`t used as much (and that`s really a statent from the past) because A) it wasn`t an orginal windows technology, so it needed time to proove itself, and B) because it wasn`t all that full-featured and hardware specific as it is today. DX still has that (very small) advantage because it`s IN the OS, not on top of it, but technology-wise, I`d choose OpenGL any-day now. I`ve never used used SDL before, but looking at the trackrecord and the API reference it looks like a simple but portable lib. I don`t know if comparing is all that sensible though. DX simply does much more than SDL. E.g. how would you port a D3D game to linux ? Maybe I missed that but something comparable isn`t in the spec.
It`s acually very simple:
.NET vision.
Forget products
Forget distributions
Forget boxed games on the shelves
This is what will happen:
You donwload the installer of your favourite game, install the thing on your fancy OS of choice, start it up, enter your VISA/Mastercard number, and wait a few seconds for the game to contact servers. Once the necessay stuff is donwloaded, you can play. When you`re done, the game erases everything except savegames.
This will work, but only when net congestion ramps down and everybody can say broadband 5 times in a sentence. Essentially it`s SUNs EJB or MSs
There is just no way people are going to survive on freeware, shareware, or a business model that sells products in the strores to a market that doesn`t really want to buy. See red-hat, breaking even, fnially charging money for it`s agent service. That stuff works, but only because they target the right people (companies) in the right way (easy & clean).
Even if the parent`s attitude sucks, he`s still right on the directX AND market issue. It might not be very insightfull or anything, but he`s right. DirectX is only parallelled by expensive proprietry SDK`s for e.g. PS2, so the gaming industry embraces free API`s like DX easily. Allthough linux is "open", the API`s are not as straightforward in use as DX is (im not talking performance or design here), and they allways work as predicted. The large number of Linux distributions confuses and potentially compromise compatibility. DX supports most, if not all, top of the bill hardware, whereas Linux hw-drivers will usually lag a little. The potential user base is much larger, and unlike linux software, windows games rarely need (debug) patches afterwards, free or not.
You may not like what is, but that`s not a reason to kill a man`s opinion.
The nature of the linux crowd simply is a bit difficult to target by game companies, because they don`t know if they need to play the good guy`s with the sensible OS approach (VERY small market), or the pinguin braindeads that fly up whenever somebody insults a word ending on ux (substantially bigger, but still small, market).
Piece.
I mean, we all know that Kutaragi has had a rough time to put his Playstation on track. Everybody knows he was first producing sound hardware elements for Nintendo, and gradually added to his inventory of usuable parts until his machine was sort-of "conceived". On itself, it`s a bit like Jobs and his Apple. It`s an achievement, a milestone. But if you look in IBM`s history I think you`ll find many of these kinds of achievements, and no one will give a rats-ass about the people behind them.
Putting a whorship-book together on the details of this story is probably another attempt to help playstation II fend off the X-Box. Now we can even believe that Sony, as short-sighted as their management probably is, will still make the 'right' decisions for us happy bunch, so we should stick with them. Don`t buy it folks, you won`t learn anything from this "success' story. I bet the book doesn`t mention the number of malfunctioning PSII`s out there.
So it`s ok to be aware of market tactics principles and to approve or disapprove, but to actually NOT buy a graphics card which is superior to others because it makes the other businesses go slower ?
That`s definately NOT the right angle. In fact, if nVidia gets to sell this card as hot as the previous 2 versions, it can set (and raise) the standard in 3d lighting again, and frankly that`s what I want. Ofcourse monopolistic situations like e.g. Soundblaster are absolutely bad to competition (and quality) in the market, but that`s because a Soundblaster (could als have used Windows here) is a good product, just not top of the line. That doesn`t mean there are no other soundcards out there which are actually better, only that you`ll have to pay more for those and go out and look for them.
I support ATI and to a lesser extend, Matrox, because they are the only rivals left in the field. But If I had to buy a card today, it wouldn`t be either of those 2, because I simply want a 'standard' compliant full fledged and top of the line game experience, not the feeling that I did something good for market competition. In the end I might financially regret that choice, but if nVidia creates the best cards at the end of the day, I`m only happy to spend some cash on them. If someone else can do the same or top them AND has less expensive cards, obviously that`s a thing to consider. But today I cheer for nVidia, as I have more pro than con.