I do think, however, consumers should be informed about the content of games, particularly in the case of games being bought for children. Context matters, and understanding context requires experience that children are, of course, in the process of acquiring. Also, children can be badly upset by things that wouldn't much trouble an adult, and it takes some knowledge of a child to assess what's appropriate.
My partner and I often watch "The Colbert Report," and our two boys like to watch it with us. A few months ago, checking in with our younger boy, we found that he hadn't realized that Colbert's argument had been satire. He was old enough to understand what sarcasm was, but not old enough to recognize political satire; we needed to explain it to him.
A young child can recognize that the context of the arena fights in Pokemon is of a sporting event. An older child can understand rebels fighting against tyrants. It takes a fair amount of maturity to deal with moral ambiguity, or to sympathize with someone while recognizing that they are in the wrong. (There are quite a few adults who can't seem to manage it.)
My wife and I were seriously looking at our mobile phone options this weekend, given that T-Mobile was having a sale on smartphones, and we concluded that even though the smartphones were "free," the data plans were too expensive. At $30/month, per phone, on top of the basic fees for the mobile phone account, it would be cheaper to buy an old laptop computer, a bona fide general purpose computer with a proper keyboard and more processing power than a smartphone, and make use of the abundant wifi networks in urban areas, than to subscribe to a smartphone data plan for a year.
Compared to the cost of the data plans, the cost of the smartphone is almost irrelevant -- which is, I expect, why mobile phone companies steeply discount the phones.
Consequently, I have a hard time understanding the popularity of smartphones.
I'm really hoping that there was something actually interesting in this research, some sort of hardware-abstraction mechanism to allow data from one robot to be applicable to robots that aren't physically identical, say; because otherwise this would seem to be "Mechanism by which machines may obtain firmware updates from the internet, just like they've been doing for years and years now, without fanfare".
Assuming this only works for similar robots, I'd guess it'd basically amount to a limited form of distributed computing -- Roombas exchanging pathfinding solutions, or something like that.
You've missed the mass demonstrations of millions of people in Egypt. That's an historically significant public display of dissent, and the government is near to collapse because of it.
Keeping the Internet open is an important political goal, but it would not be the end of public dissent if the Internet was totally locked down. Other means used to organize dissent, that have been used in the past, are still available.
That has been the highest priority for every faction coup, revolution or uprising, pro or contra, for the last century. The Internet is just a newer medium but the same principle applies.
Indeed. It also follows that while the general strategy remains, the tactics change depending upon the technologies in play. It's very hard to control all the mobile phones, but not as hard to control all the border routers.
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
I assume you're talking about an article on net neutrality. I think most supporters of net neutrality in the US also oppose the US President having an "Internet kill switch," and these two positions are consistent.
There's a principle, in classic liberalism, of dividing up authority so that every authority is limited -- most famously, there are the "checks and balances" of the three branches of the US government, but I believe the principle goes well beyond that. The democratic principle is that the ultimate authority is the citizenry, and that is limited by the principle of civil rights, in which there are individual rights that are not to be taken away. The thing to be guarded against is unchecked power, in any hands.
The point of the FCC regulating ISPs to enforce a policy of "net neutrality" is a check on corporate power, but it isn't a grant of unlimited authority over the Internet to the FCC. An Internet kill switch does sound like unlimited authority over the Internet.
Being a nerd or a geek, to me, was not in the first place about liking Dungeons & Dragons or computers. It was about getting the shit beaten out of me, every day, by popular kids. It was about my parents telling me I deserved to be beaten up, because I was weak and effeminate. It was about the first-grade teacher angrily sending me back to the classroom on my first day in a new school because I didn't know what "offsides" or "first down" meant. (I'm still not sure what "first down" means.) It was about school administrators calling me in to the office and asking me what I was doing to provoke other kids into beating me up, and how I could change so that I would stop provoking them.
Being a geek was about enjoying reading because it was my own private pleasure that no one could take from me, except that one time another kid took my book and tore it up. It was about spending hours in the safety of the library. It was about spending hours alone at the creek, watching the aquatic insects, and identifying them from a guidebook. It was about learning to fly a plane via Flight Simulator II, even though I never got a driver's license and could barely handle a bicycle. It was about teaching myself to program in BASIC, years before I knew anyone else with a computer.
Dungeons & Dragons was about being in a forest or a cave, finding secrets, finding out that you mattered because you had potential. My first encounter with it, and still my lasting image of it, was seeing the title page illustration from the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, of a wise old gnome, sitting on a giant die beneath a tree, peacefully smoking a pipe and reading a book. Why was he smiling? What did he know? Could I ask him, somehow?
So I'm married and have stepsons now. The older is fourteen, plays volleyball and tennis, skateboards, plays World of Warcraft and Halo III with his friends, and is constantly exchanging text messages with his girlfriend. Once, he said he and his friends were "cool geeks." Lucky for him, he'll never fully understand what an oxymoron that is.
There was some sickness in children's culture in the 1980s, and I can't entirely account for it. The good parts, the semi-popular culture that has gradually become more popular, is not the full story.
That gets brought up every time. A: Reclaiming those address spaces will be difficult. It would take extensive internal auditing and network reorganization to free up those address spaces. B: At current rates, it would only buy us an extra month or two.
If you read the headlines carefully, you'd have noticed a pattern:
2001: IPv4 address space will run out in ten years. 2002: IPv4 address space will run out in nine years.... 2010: IPv4 address space will run out next year. 2011: Last Available IPv4 Blocks Assigned. IPv4 address space will run out later this year.
For there to be a democratic outcome in Egypt, it will have to be implemented by the people of Egyptian people, democratically.
Should the US government intervene on behalf of a political faction in Egypt, it would raise questions about the legitimacy of that faction -- even if the US government intervened with the best of intentions. The world in general, and the Middle East in particular, has far too much experience with foreign countries intervening in internal struggles for their own interests, and the US has been the most notorious for doing so in the region since the end of World War II, so suspicions of US government intervention would not be unfounded.
That's not to say that expressions of popular support by the US people for the Egyptian people is out of line.
In Indonesia, a U.S. company, Freeport McMoram, has been accused of dumping more than 110,000 tons of mining waste into local rivers every day. When the Indonesian populace protested the devastation to its land, Indonesian troops, hired to protect Freeport McMoram, moved in and cracked down on the protesters. Human rights groups estimate that the army has killed nearly 2,000 people in the region in the two decades the company has been in residence.
In general, what I find most tedious about these discussions is that a lot of the participants seem to want to hit upon some simple rule, "Government is always evil," "Corporations are always evil," or "Any organization of any kind is always evil," as if they can find such a simple rule, apply it in all cases, and never have to trouble with thinking again, much less looking at historical trends and internal conflicts, and making tactical and strategic assessments of what's going on in a given context.
When I was young, I heard new music on my favorite radio station, mostly. The last time I listened to that station a few years ago, they still had a station slogan along the lines of, "Fresh, new alternative rock," and were literally playing the same music in heavy rotation that they had started playing twenty years previously.
Radio is so dead, the flies have abandoned its corpse.
Most of the new music I listen to, I discover via online music sites -- Jamendo, last.fm, and I used to use eMusic. My older stepson listens to a pretty wide range of music -- his starting point was the parental music collection, and he's expanded from there using online streaming music sites. I don't think he's listened to much broadcast radio at all.
There are lots of sources of alternative media, on the Internet especially.
Beyond that, many people in the US have personal ties to people elsewhere in the world. Many of my co-workers and fellow students have friends and relatives elsewhere in the world, and those friends and relatives pass on both first-hand accounts and news from their parts of the world. The grapevine is not reliable, but it does shake up complacency with mainstream US media from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
These days, how often is it the case that anyone who isn't an administrator or an admin-in-training is going to use "grep" at a command line?
Su to root, solve the problem, get out. I don't see what isn't methodical about that?
By using sudo, you get to skip the last step.
Thinking out one's actions often involves taking reasonable precautions to minimize the dangers of a mistake.
You don't just leave the root prompt lying around where someone can spill "rm -rf *" on it.
"sudoedit" is underappreciated.
And yes, it's extra keystrokes, but most of them are on the home row, and it unites two steps, "sudo" and "vim", into one.
Assuming you've defined EDITOR, of course.
Why "sudo -s" instead of "sudo -i"?
I'm against censorship in general.
I do think, however, consumers should be informed about the content of games, particularly in the case of games being bought for children. Context matters, and understanding context requires experience that children are, of course, in the process of acquiring. Also, children can be badly upset by things that wouldn't much trouble an adult, and it takes some knowledge of a child to assess what's appropriate.
My partner and I often watch "The Colbert Report," and our two boys like to watch it with us. A few months ago, checking in with our younger boy, we found that he hadn't realized that Colbert's argument had been satire. He was old enough to understand what sarcasm was, but not old enough to recognize political satire; we needed to explain it to him.
A young child can recognize that the context of the arena fights in Pokemon is of a sporting event. An older child can understand rebels fighting against tyrants. It takes a fair amount of maturity to deal with moral ambiguity, or to sympathize with someone while recognizing that they are in the wrong. (There are quite a few adults who can't seem to manage it.)
I don't get it.
My wife and I were seriously looking at our mobile phone options this weekend, given that T-Mobile was having a sale on smartphones, and we concluded that even though the smartphones were "free," the data plans were too expensive. At $30/month, per phone, on top of the basic fees for the mobile phone account, it would be cheaper to buy an old laptop computer, a bona fide general purpose computer with a proper keyboard and more processing power than a smartphone, and make use of the abundant wifi networks in urban areas, than to subscribe to a smartphone data plan for a year.
Compared to the cost of the data plans, the cost of the smartphone is almost irrelevant -- which is, I expect, why mobile phone companies steeply discount the phones.
Consequently, I have a hard time understanding the popularity of smartphones.
Yes.
I'm not sure why you're pointing that one out, in particular.
I'm really hoping that there was something actually interesting in this research, some sort of hardware-abstraction mechanism to allow data from one robot to be applicable to robots that aren't physically identical, say; because otherwise this would seem to be "Mechanism by which machines may obtain firmware updates from the internet, just like they've been doing for years and years now, without fanfare".
Assuming this only works for similar robots, I'd guess it'd basically amount to a limited form of distributed computing -- Roombas exchanging pathfinding solutions, or something like that.
You've missed the mass demonstrations of millions of people in Egypt. That's an historically significant public display of dissent, and the government is near to collapse because of it.
Keeping the Internet open is an important political goal, but it would not be the end of public dissent if the Internet was totally locked down. Other means used to organize dissent, that have been used in the past, are still available.
That has been the highest priority for every faction coup, revolution or uprising, pro or contra, for the last century. The Internet is just a newer medium but the same principle applies.
Indeed. It also follows that while the general strategy remains, the tactics change depending upon the technologies in play. It's very hard to control all the mobile phones, but not as hard to control all the border routers.
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
I assume you're talking about an article on net neutrality. I think most supporters of net neutrality in the US also oppose the US President having an "Internet kill switch," and these two positions are consistent.
There's a principle, in classic liberalism, of dividing up authority so that every authority is limited -- most famously, there are the "checks and balances" of the three branches of the US government, but I believe the principle goes well beyond that. The democratic principle is that the ultimate authority is the citizenry, and that is limited by the principle of civil rights, in which there are individual rights that are not to be taken away. The thing to be guarded against is unchecked power, in any hands.
The point of the FCC regulating ISPs to enforce a policy of "net neutrality" is a check on corporate power, but it isn't a grant of unlimited authority over the Internet to the FCC. An Internet kill switch does sound like unlimited authority over the Internet.
As in, distributed computing? That surprises me a bit, as I'd begun to think of them as almost counterposed concepts.
You're missing the part of the paradigm in which there are organizations that provide cloud services. These servers are for cloud service providers.
Being a nerd or a geek, to me, was not in the first place about liking Dungeons & Dragons or computers. It was about getting the shit beaten out of me, every day, by popular kids. It was about my parents telling me I deserved to be beaten up, because I was weak and effeminate. It was about the first-grade teacher angrily sending me back to the classroom on my first day in a new school because I didn't know what "offsides" or "first down" meant. (I'm still not sure what "first down" means.) It was about school administrators calling me in to the office and asking me what I was doing to provoke other kids into beating me up, and how I could change so that I would stop provoking them.
Being a geek was about enjoying reading because it was my own private pleasure that no one could take from me, except that one time another kid took my book and tore it up. It was about spending hours in the safety of the library. It was about spending hours alone at the creek, watching the aquatic insects, and identifying them from a guidebook. It was about learning to fly a plane via Flight Simulator II, even though I never got a driver's license and could barely handle a bicycle. It was about teaching myself to program in BASIC, years before I knew anyone else with a computer.
Dungeons & Dragons was about being in a forest or a cave, finding secrets, finding out that you mattered because you had potential. My first encounter with it, and still my lasting image of it, was seeing the title page illustration from the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, of a wise old gnome, sitting on a giant die beneath a tree, peacefully smoking a pipe and reading a book. Why was he smiling? What did he know? Could I ask him, somehow?
So I'm married and have stepsons now. The older is fourteen, plays volleyball and tennis, skateboards, plays World of Warcraft and Halo III with his friends, and is constantly exchanging text messages with his girlfriend. Once, he said he and his friends were "cool geeks." Lucky for him, he'll never fully understand what an oxymoron that is.
There was some sickness in children's culture in the 1980s, and I can't entirely account for it. The good parts, the semi-popular culture that has gradually become more popular, is not the full story.
That gets brought up every time.
A: Reclaiming those address spaces will be difficult. It would take extensive internal auditing and network reorganization to free up those address spaces.
B: At current rates, it would only buy us an extra month or two.
If you read the headlines carefully, you'd have noticed a pattern:
2001: IPv4 address space will run out in ten years. ...
2002: IPv4 address space will run out in nine years.
2010: IPv4 address space will run out next year.
2011: Last Available IPv4 Blocks Assigned. IPv4 address space will run out later this year.
There are no more unallocated blocks. That's the point.
For there to be a democratic outcome in Egypt, it will have to be implemented by the people of Egyptian people, democratically.
Should the US government intervene on behalf of a political faction in Egypt, it would raise questions about the legitimacy of that faction -- even if the US government intervened with the best of intentions. The world in general, and the Middle East in particular, has far too much experience with foreign countries intervening in internal struggles for their own interests, and the US has been the most notorious for doing so in the region since the end of World War II, so suspicions of US government intervention would not be unfounded.
That's not to say that expressions of popular support by the US people for the Egyptian people is out of line.
If you give the government an inch, they take a mile.
As does ANY unchecked power bloc, including various non-state and semi-state actors.
Did I miss something?
You missed the part where the helicopter gunship opened fire on people trying to load wounded civilians in a van to get them to safety.
As a Non-US citizen, is there some deep and meaningful message in the drivel that I'm not understanding?
The message is that some journalists are bad writers with superficial knowledge, working under tight deadlines.
It's not like you have to look to the past to find examples:
Mercenary Armies in Service to Global Corporations:
In Indonesia, a U.S. company, Freeport McMoram, has been accused of dumping more than 110,000 tons of mining waste into local rivers every day. When the Indonesian populace protested the devastation to its land, Indonesian troops, hired to protect Freeport McMoram, moved in and cracked down on the protesters. Human rights groups estimate that the army has killed nearly 2,000 people in the region in the two decades the company has been in residence.
In general, what I find most tedious about these discussions is that a lot of the participants seem to want to hit upon some simple rule, "Government is always evil," "Corporations are always evil," or "Any organization of any kind is always evil," as if they can find such a simple rule, apply it in all cases, and never have to trouble with thinking again, much less looking at historical trends and internal conflicts, and making tactical and strategic assessments of what's going on in a given context.
I'm not young anymore.
When I was young, I heard new music on my favorite radio station, mostly. The last time I listened to that station a few years ago, they still had a station slogan along the lines of, "Fresh, new alternative rock," and were literally playing the same music in heavy rotation that they had started playing twenty years previously.
Radio is so dead, the flies have abandoned its corpse.
Most of the new music I listen to, I discover via online music sites -- Jamendo, last.fm, and I used to use eMusic. My older stepson listens to a pretty wide range of music -- his starting point was the parental music collection, and he's expanded from there using online streaming music sites. I don't think he's listened to much broadcast radio at all.
There are lots of sources of alternative media, on the Internet especially.
Beyond that, many people in the US have personal ties to people elsewhere in the world. Many of my co-workers and fellow students have friends and relatives elsewhere in the world, and those friends and relatives pass on both first-hand accounts and news from their parts of the world. The grapevine is not reliable, but it does shake up complacency with mainstream US media from time to time.