the way blame is constantly shifted away from the actual criminals here is sickening
The fun thing about blame is that it doesn't have to unilaterally assigned to one person. Many people can share blame.
For example, if you leave a diamond the size of your fist on the table of your motel room, and I come by and relieve you of it, then, yes, I am to blame for being a thief. The motel is to blame for providing completely inadquate security.
As C.E.O. Nwabudike Morgan has pointed out, there will come a day when most of our minerals are mined on Nessus Prime. This will have the ancillary benefit of placing less strain on Planet's native ecology.
Why do you think "at conception" is the earliest *possible* point we could consider life to have begun? The Catholics, after all, still discourage birth control where possible; it's apparently their view that life begins at ejaculation.
Which would make me a genocidal monster far, far worse than Hitler, Pol Pot, and Sam Walton combined...
Also, I think Hollywood needs to do a film that illustrates the danger of the car. The plot could run something like this:
* A man and woman want to buy a car
* They consult a greasy salesman who sells it to them
* An accident by distraction, bad tires, mechanical failure, ice, etc. happens
* Illustrate the societal cost of dangerous machines.
The chief problem as I still understand is that automobile safety is still crude, with high accident rates. And by accident I mean all outcomes which result with dead, crippled, or maimed humans. It's been easy to push past the public, except for Ralph Nader and various environmental groups.
Have a driving mortality rate of one in a thousand and you'd think there's a major problem, since even the worst rate in the world of pedestrian traffic is better than that. Then there's when the lawyers get involved...
I think a well done example of how automobiles could not work out would be a service. Too bad nobody does these kinds of films in Hollywood anymore.
It seems to me that the speed of sonar through water is a physical certainty; that's why we can accurately use it to detect the distance from an object.
Internet traffic is another matter. If I tried to use a ping time to measure the geographic distance to another server, I'd be about as scientific as the Slashdot poll.
Am I wrong, or could internet latency give or take 100 ms or so from a ping, rendering the encrypted message readable by.. no one?
I'm just interested to see how long it takes the hacker community to turn these things into coolest looking Linux workstations ever.
If I ever type 'vim', and get a Green Screen of Death and the message "Please take this to Microsoft for service", then I am leaving computing. Forever. You can find me putting in applications at Hot Dog on a Stick kiosks around the nation.
Man, if overhyping is going to kill a product, what's the deal with every single OS and product shipped my M$? Talk about overhype.
There wasn't really much fanfare when Windows 98 was released; M$ kept claiming it was an "extremely minor touch-up".
Perhaps they were trying to conceal the fact that all they did was illegally bundle in their web browser and fuck up the "shut down" feature so it would hang...
Yeah, once I got a Gilette Mach 3 in the mail. When I tried to attach the blade, though, I got a message that I needed to take the razor to Gilette for service.
I can't for the life of me think of what I could possible do to help this situation.
The media suggests that we all donate blood to help the victims. However, at last count, USA Today reports that there are 2,326 wounded, split between the Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most people involved in this attack were, by Wednesday, either unscathed or dead. It occurs to me that we're going to have something like a quarter-million blood donors; I don't think everyone wounded in the bombing is going to need one hundred donors.
Beyond that, what can we do? Sign up for the military en masse, so we can kill people who had nothing to do with the attack? Go to school to get our contractors' licenses so we can help reconstruct the World Trade Center? Take a flig^H^H^H^Htrain to New York and try to dig victims out of the rubble?
There are people who are "doing something" about this tragedy because it is their job. Personally, my job is to monitor slot machines to make sure they don't break down. Sure, it doesn't sound very important, but if I and my 19 co-workers suddenly up and left for New York or Afghanistan, the State of Nevada could stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.
Maybe what we all *should* be doing is going to work every day and doing whatever the hell we want at night, whether that's watching the news, drinking heavily, or both.
The Taliban is a fundamentalist regime, and those are bad and need to be dealt with. (Look at Iraq for an example of what happens when we don't and/or can't.)
Well, this certainly doesn't seem well thought-out. Three points:
1. Iraq is not a fundamentalist regime.
2. America *did* attempt to deal with it, by sending some sixty thousand air strikes against civilian targets.
3. The attacks on New York and Washington were a direct result of the way America "dealt" with Iraq's "regime"; not only Bin Laden, but millions of arabs, felt that Americans had imposed imperialism, responded disproportionately to a regional struggle, and despoiled the holy land.
Iraq invaded a country that it felt it may have some historical claim to. America disagreed, and so they bombed thousands of civilian buildings, slaughtered tens of thousands, crippled Iraq's economy, and made sure they stayed as weak as possible. What we saw on Tuesday was not an invasion; it was perceived as retribution for what the muslims perceived as American war crimes. Now, Americans are up in arms about seeking retribution for what they perceive as Muslim terrorism.
When will someone finally decide to turn the other cheek? Will the two ideologies take sides "retaliating" against one another until there's no one left to retaliate?
Hey, does anyone remember just a year ago, when the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was Napster and the RIAA?
No permanent story was created, but at least two stories were posted every three days. Eventually people were blocking all "music" headlines or going onto the newsgroups and spending karma just to scream to everyone that there were other things going on in the world.
We got by. The last thing I want is for Rob to stick a big vertical frame down the middle of Slashdot and caption one column "Technical news" and the other "Terrorism discussion". I'm sure that Jon Katz has enough hot air left in him to write us a fresh story to make fun of every day for the next three or four years until we run out of steam.
Some famous music critic once remarked that "only seven songs have ever been written in the history of rock music; most bands just learn one and play it over and over."
This statement especially holds true for video games. Once a game breaks into the mainstream, thousands of imitations will appear, merely tweaking a theme or giving a boost to graphics performance. Primary examples:
1. Super Mario Brothers - side scroller
2. Street Fighter 2 - head-to-head side scroller
3. Doom - First Person shooter
4. Warcraft 2 - Realtime Strategy
5. Dragon Warrior - Overhead RPG
6. Pole Position - First person race
I'm not sure that it would be unfair to say that 75% of video games ever written were based on one of these six themes. Sure, there are plenty of others, like Tetris-style puzzles and Koei-style map-based war games, but in my mind, these are the big five.
I just wonder - will there be enough imitators of Mario Kart to make it the "seventh rock song ever written"?
Be practical here - no-one knows enough about tone, pitch, rhythm, lyrics and music theory to be able to come up with a good album. It isn't possible.
Wow, I have to be totally offtopic and lose Karma, but I feel my religion compels me to, whatever my religion may be.
TONE: I'm a trained musician. I have no idea what the hell there is to know about tone. A guitar sounds like a guitar; a piano sounds like a piano. You don't have to invent the harpsichord to play music.
PITCH: Play an E on a keyboard (it's the white key right after any pair of black keys) and tune your guitar's low string to it. This did not take me six years at Harvard to accomplish.
RHYTHM: Study in this will make for very interesting music (try the album "Take 5" by Dave Brubeck), but most rock bands, even those considered "good", use some variation on a 4/4 "bass hat snare hat" beat, which can be taught to a monkey in ten minutes. I don't think Fiona Apple or Paula Abdul have ever used anything else.
LYRICS: Personally, I think "classes" in lyrics are bogus. Anyone who reads and who has some sense of creativity knows what kind of lyric is powerful to them and what kind of lyric is weak. And anyone can identify a throwaway lyric ("lollipop, lollipop, oh, lolli lolli lolli"), which the majority of the population can enjoy anyway.
MUSIC THEORY: You don't need to know music theory to be a successful band. Most songs are written in C or G, sometimes E, depending on the style; an average person can pick up all the chords in these keys in a week or two, and learn from a buddy, or the internet. If you want to write complicated, interesting rock, 2-3 years of music theory classes at a university wouldn't be a bad idea. If you want to be Beethoven, you need to go a little further, but most rock groups don't even *like* Beethoven.
One of the appeals of rock music is that it's music for the people, by the people. (This is, of course, as opposed to pop music, which is music for the consumers, by the corporations.) Given a year or two of casual study, anyone can write a song like "House of the Rising Sun". Whether it is "good" is more a matter of personal creativity and public opinion than anything else.
Keep in mind that only one member of the Beatles (and, for that matter, one member of R.E.M.) could even read music.
Also, keep in mind that many people are in love with what might be considered "bad" voices (Bob Dylan, Thom Yorke).
Anyway, this has nothing to do with junkyard wars - I just hate to see people being heretical.
Remember all those industrial revolution fables of man versus machine, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry? If I recall correctly, the moral of the stories was that even the best of any field were eventually beaten by machines that anyone could wield, and that the old-fashioned way of doing things eventually died out.
So, now we have a machine that can theoretically pitch better than any pitcher, living or dead - that will always place the ball wherever it wants, and that can keep a database on each player's weak pitches and patterns that screw them up.
The question is - why keep pitchers at all? When society realized that it was better to plow with a tractor than a bunch of oxen, we got rid of the oxen. When we realized that it was better to manufacture and box crayons with robotics than with third-world child labor, we did that, too. So -
What is the intrigue of seeing someone pitch a baseball, now, in a fashion that we know is not the best?
Those fsking things run hot enough to cauterize a severed limb. It's like having your own personal autoclave. Few fungi can survive 400 degree temperatures.
I know this is obvious, but no one has really pointed out yet that the entire selling point of the Gameboy Advance is portability.
Yes, Nintendo is going to get their panties in a bunch about this, but Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal. Yes, you can put it on a laptop, but I doubt most parents trust any kid under 14 with a laptop, plus, you just can't slip a laptop into your coat pocket and then whip it out, turn it on, and play a five minute game of Tetris - if you're running Winders 9x, it'd take almost that long to boot.
If there were a flawless PS/2 emulator that ran on a Pentium II, that would be (well, besides being, AFAIK, a violation of the laws of physics) a major threat to anyone trying to profit from their work. But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators. No one is going to make purchasing decisions based on it.
Re:What are the ethical implications here?
on
BoyCott Advance
·
· Score: 5
I hate answering ethical questions, but I love posing 'em. So, are the following scenarios ethical or unethical? You decide.
1. Adam downloads Boycott and plays it until the Gameboy Advance becomes available in his country, at which point he buys the system and deletes the emulator.
2. Bob downloads Boycott and a few ROMs to see whether it's worth buying the Gameboy Advance. After a few weeks, he decides he may as well stick with his Gameboy Color - and deletes the program.
3. Carl works a low-end retail job and doesn't even have enough money to eat through the pay period, half the time. He downloads Boycott because, the hell with it, he'd never buy it anyway.
4. Dave, who has way too much spare time on his hands, downloads Boycott and all the ROMS, and then alters them significantly in ways he thinks the game developers should have thought of in the first place, and then posts the altered ROMs to his website.
5. Eddie buys the Gameboy Advance and downloads Boycott to preview all the games to decide whether they're worth buying.
6. Frank works a commission job selling game systems. He downloads Boycott and two ROMS, writes them to 300 blank CDs, writes "Preview the Gameboy Advance!" on them, and hands them out for free to customers, along with his business card.
7. Gary buys a Gameboy Advance, but it breaks after two weeks, so he decides to just download Boycott because the Advance is such a crappy piece of hardware.
8. Henry works for Nintendo. He slaps a lawsuits against Frank and sends Dave a threatening cease-and-desist.
Okay, now the pop quiz - can you order these eight guys from least ethical to most ethical? No cheating.
So, you believe that the troubles in the world are all due to concentration of wealth rather than evil human beings?
No. I believe that most of the troubles in the world are due to extremism. Boolean thought works well for processing data, but not so well in the real world - very, very rarely is anything "true" or "false".
Consider this question: "True or False: A government should skim heavily from the rich to give the poor a better quality of life and a chance to succeed."
In my mind, the answer is simple. The answer is that there are intelligent minds that would say "true", and there are intelligent minds that would say "false", and so, chances are, they both have valid points, and therefore the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Bleeding-heart liberals ignore the fact that productivity requires incentive - that if someone feels that all the fruits of his labor will go to others, he usually won't perform the labor in the first place.
Yet, backwards conservatives ignore the fact that it takes an investment in a person to allow him to produce - no one can develop into an educated, free-thinking, happy, productive individual if his entire life is an uphill battle to survive.
And, finally, most world governments seem to be "getting it" - acknowledging that both financial rewards and social programs are a necessity.
What actually makes it work, though, somewhat saddens me. Very few congressmen come out and admit this - they preach either black or white, and then they push so hard against each other that we end up with gray.
I saw an article on American economic progress yesterday. People were polled on the issue: "Who is better for the economy, the Republicans or Democrats?" Very few picked the answer that was actually correct: neither. The American economy has historically grown three times as fast in periods of gridlock than in periods where a party controlled the entire government.
Right now, with our Republican-controlled presidency, senate, house, and supreme court, I am very worried. But no more so worried than if they were all controlled by Democrats. There are so few free-thinking politicians out there that we literally require conflict and compromise to come to the right answer.
Funny you should compare genetic manipulation to coding. It's all ok until someone writes buggy code, and then we have people who pass out because they smelled canned peaches
And then the next thing you know, the Russians are creating an army of fertile amazon women whose body odor smells like canned peaches.
...to CORRECT an infertility problem. On an overpopulated planet. Great.
Did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps there's a REASON some people are infertile?
What we need, really, is fewer infertile women and far, far more lesbians.
This win-win situation will alleviate population growth concerns while at the same time lowering the cost of porn. As hard drive capacity increases, the need to maintain the porn-to-capacity cost ratio becomes more and more pressing.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, then, why don't we just each give each other $300 and call it a wash?
the way blame is constantly shifted away from the actual criminals here is sickening
The fun thing about blame is that it doesn't have to unilaterally assigned to one person. Many people can share blame.
For example, if you leave a diamond the size of your fist on the table of your motel room, and I come by and relieve you of it, then, yes, I am to blame for being a thief. The motel is to blame for providing completely inadquate security.
And you are to blame for being a moron.
As C.E.O. Nwabudike Morgan has pointed out, there will come a day when most of our minerals are mined on Nessus Prime. This will have the ancillary benefit of placing less strain on Planet's native ecology.
Why do you think "at conception" is the earliest *possible* point we could consider life to have begun? The Catholics, after all, still discourage birth control where possible; it's apparently their view that life begins at ejaculation.
Which would make me a genocidal monster far, far worse than Hitler, Pol Pot, and Sam Walton combined...
Also, I think Hollywood needs to do a film that illustrates the danger of the car. The plot could run something like this:
* A man and woman want to buy a car
* They consult a greasy salesman who sells it to them
* An accident by distraction, bad tires, mechanical failure, ice, etc. happens
* Illustrate the societal cost of dangerous machines.
The chief problem as I still understand is that automobile safety is still crude, with high accident rates. And by accident I mean all outcomes which result with dead, crippled, or maimed humans. It's been easy to push past the public, except for Ralph Nader and various environmental groups.
Have a driving mortality rate of one in a thousand and you'd think there's a major problem, since even the worst rate in the world of pedestrian traffic is better than that. Then there's when the lawyers get involved...
I think a well done example of how automobiles could not work out would be a service. Too bad nobody does these kinds of films in Hollywood anymore.
It seems to me that the speed of sonar through water is a physical certainty; that's why we can accurately use it to detect the distance from an object.
Internet traffic is another matter. If I tried to use a ping time to measure the geographic distance to another server, I'd be about as scientific as the Slashdot poll.
Am I wrong, or could internet latency give or take 100 ms or so from a ping, rendering the encrypted message readable by.. no one?
I'm just interested to see how long it takes the hacker community to turn these things into coolest looking Linux workstations ever.
If I ever type 'vim', and get a Green Screen of Death and the message "Please take this to Microsoft for service", then I am leaving computing. Forever. You can find me putting in applications at Hot Dog on a Stick kiosks around the nation.
Man, if overhyping is going to kill a product, what's the deal with every single OS and product shipped my M$? Talk about overhype.
There wasn't really much fanfare when Windows 98 was released; M$ kept claiming it was an "extremely minor touch-up".
Perhaps they were trying to conceal the fact that all they did was illegally bundle in their web browser and fuck up the "shut down" feature so it would hang...
Ever hear "give away the razor, sell the blades"?
Yeah, once I got a Gilette Mach 3 in the mail. When I tried to attach the blade, though, I got a message that I needed to take the razor to Gilette for service.
That's why the Xbox would make an ideal web server
I don't know, man. I read an article somewhere that says that the Xbox crashes!
I can't for the life of me think of what I could possible do to help this situation.
The media suggests that we all donate blood to help the victims. However, at last count, USA Today reports that there are 2,326 wounded, split between the Trade Center and the Pentagon. Most people involved in this attack were, by Wednesday, either unscathed or dead. It occurs to me that we're going to have something like a quarter-million blood donors; I don't think everyone wounded in the bombing is going to need one hundred donors.
Beyond that, what can we do? Sign up for the military en masse, so we can kill people who had nothing to do with the attack? Go to school to get our contractors' licenses so we can help reconstruct the World Trade Center? Take a flig^H^H^H^Htrain to New York and try to dig victims out of the rubble?
There are people who are "doing something" about this tragedy because it is their job. Personally, my job is to monitor slot machines to make sure they don't break down. Sure, it doesn't sound very important, but if I and my 19 co-workers suddenly up and left for New York or Afghanistan, the State of Nevada could stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.
Maybe what we all *should* be doing is going to work every day and doing whatever the hell we want at night, whether that's watching the news, drinking heavily, or both.
The Taliban is a fundamentalist regime, and those are bad and need to be dealt with. (Look at Iraq for an example of what happens when we don't and/or can't.)
Well, this certainly doesn't seem well thought-out. Three points:
1. Iraq is not a fundamentalist regime.
2. America *did* attempt to deal with it, by sending some sixty thousand air strikes against civilian targets.
3. The attacks on New York and Washington were a direct result of the way America "dealt" with Iraq's "regime"; not only Bin Laden, but millions of arabs, felt that Americans had imposed imperialism, responded disproportionately to a regional struggle, and despoiled the holy land.
Iraq invaded a country that it felt it may have some historical claim to. America disagreed, and so they bombed thousands of civilian buildings, slaughtered tens of thousands, crippled Iraq's economy, and made sure they stayed as weak as possible. What we saw on Tuesday was not an invasion; it was perceived as retribution for what the muslims perceived as American war crimes. Now, Americans are up in arms about seeking retribution for what they perceive as Muslim terrorism.
When will someone finally decide to turn the other cheek? Will the two ideologies take sides "retaliating" against one another until there's no one left to retaliate?
Hey, does anyone remember just a year ago, when the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was Napster and the RIAA?
No permanent story was created, but at least two stories were posted every three days. Eventually people were blocking all "music" headlines or going onto the newsgroups and spending karma just to scream to everyone that there were other things going on in the world.
We got by. The last thing I want is for Rob to stick a big vertical frame down the middle of Slashdot and caption one column "Technical news" and the other "Terrorism discussion". I'm sure that Jon Katz has enough hot air left in him to write us a fresh story to make fun of every day for the next three or four years until we run out of steam.
Some famous music critic once remarked that "only seven songs have ever been written in the history of rock music; most bands just learn one and play it over and over."
This statement especially holds true for video games. Once a game breaks into the mainstream, thousands of imitations will appear, merely tweaking a theme or giving a boost to graphics performance. Primary examples:
1. Super Mario Brothers - side scroller
2. Street Fighter 2 - head-to-head side scroller
3. Doom - First Person shooter
4. Warcraft 2 - Realtime Strategy
5. Dragon Warrior - Overhead RPG
6. Pole Position - First person race
I'm not sure that it would be unfair to say that 75% of video games ever written were based on one of these six themes. Sure, there are plenty of others, like Tetris-style puzzles and Koei-style map-based war games, but in my mind, these are the big five.
I just wonder - will there be enough imitators of Mario Kart to make it the "seventh rock song ever written"?
Wow, $30 for an MP3? Forget that - I'm just going to go steal the CD the old-fashioned way.
Be practical here - no-one knows enough about tone, pitch, rhythm, lyrics and music theory to be able to come up with a good album. It isn't possible.
Wow, I have to be totally offtopic and lose Karma, but I feel my religion compels me to, whatever my religion may be.
TONE: I'm a trained musician. I have no idea what the hell there is to know about tone. A guitar sounds like a guitar; a piano sounds like a piano. You don't have to invent the harpsichord to play music.
PITCH: Play an E on a keyboard (it's the white key right after any pair of black keys) and tune your guitar's low string to it. This did not take me six years at Harvard to accomplish.
RHYTHM: Study in this will make for very interesting music (try the album "Take 5" by Dave Brubeck), but most rock bands, even those considered "good", use some variation on a 4/4 "bass hat snare hat" beat, which can be taught to a monkey in ten minutes. I don't think Fiona Apple or Paula Abdul have ever used anything else.
LYRICS: Personally, I think "classes" in lyrics are bogus. Anyone who reads and who has some sense of creativity knows what kind of lyric is powerful to them and what kind of lyric is weak. And anyone can identify a throwaway lyric ("lollipop, lollipop, oh, lolli lolli lolli"), which the majority of the population can enjoy anyway.
MUSIC THEORY: You don't need to know music theory to be a successful band. Most songs are written in C or G, sometimes E, depending on the style; an average person can pick up all the chords in these keys in a week or two, and learn from a buddy, or the internet. If you want to write complicated, interesting rock, 2-3 years of music theory classes at a university wouldn't be a bad idea. If you want to be Beethoven, you need to go a little further, but most rock groups don't even *like* Beethoven.
One of the appeals of rock music is that it's music for the people, by the people. (This is, of course, as opposed to pop music, which is music for the consumers, by the corporations.) Given a year or two of casual study, anyone can write a song like "House of the Rising Sun". Whether it is "good" is more a matter of personal creativity and public opinion than anything else.
Keep in mind that only one member of the Beatles (and, for that matter, one member of R.E.M.) could even read music.
Also, keep in mind that many people are in love with what might be considered "bad" voices (Bob Dylan, Thom Yorke).
Anyway, this has nothing to do with junkyard wars - I just hate to see people being heretical.
Remember all those industrial revolution fables of man versus machine, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry? If I recall correctly, the moral of the stories was that even the best of any field were eventually beaten by machines that anyone could wield, and that the old-fashioned way of doing things eventually died out.
So, now we have a machine that can theoretically pitch better than any pitcher, living or dead - that will always place the ball wherever it wants, and that can keep a database on each player's weak pitches and patterns that screw them up.
The question is - why keep pitchers at all? When society realized that it was better to plow with a tractor than a bunch of oxen, we got rid of the oxen. When we realized that it was better to manufacture and box crayons with robotics than with third-world child labor, we did that, too. So -
What is the intrigue of seeing someone pitch a baseball, now, in a fashion that we know is not the best?
However, if you do get this to work, I say the first targets should be anyone using cell phones in the car, while driving.
Sure, because cell phones are far more distracting than taking a flying metal AOL CD in the face.
What an earth-shattering headline!!
Reminds me of the Simpsons where Rod and Todd print a paper with the headlne "Playtime is Fun".
Those fsking things run hot enough to cauterize a severed limb. It's like having your own personal autoclave. Few fungi can survive 400 degree temperatures.
I know this is obvious, but no one has really pointed out yet that the entire selling point of the Gameboy Advance is portability.
Yes, Nintendo is going to get their panties in a bunch about this, but Boycott isn't something that 10-year-old kids are going to be playing in an airport terminal. Yes, you can put it on a laptop, but I doubt most parents trust any kid under 14 with a laptop, plus, you just can't slip a laptop into your coat pocket and then whip it out, turn it on, and play a five minute game of Tetris - if you're running Winders 9x, it'd take almost that long to boot.
If there were a flawless PS/2 emulator that ran on a Pentium II, that would be (well, besides being, AFAIK, a violation of the laws of physics) a major threat to anyone trying to profit from their work. But in this case, the emulator probably isn't even much of a bigger deal than the original NES emulators. No one is going to make purchasing decisions based on it.
I hate answering ethical questions, but I love posing 'em. So, are the following scenarios ethical or unethical? You decide.
1. Adam downloads Boycott and plays it until the Gameboy Advance becomes available in his country, at which point he buys the system and deletes the emulator.
2. Bob downloads Boycott and a few ROMs to see whether it's worth buying the Gameboy Advance. After a few weeks, he decides he may as well stick with his Gameboy Color - and deletes the program.
3. Carl works a low-end retail job and doesn't even have enough money to eat through the pay period, half the time. He downloads Boycott because, the hell with it, he'd never buy it anyway.
4. Dave, who has way too much spare time on his hands, downloads Boycott and all the ROMS, and then alters them significantly in ways he thinks the game developers should have thought of in the first place, and then posts the altered ROMs to his website.
5. Eddie buys the Gameboy Advance and downloads Boycott to preview all the games to decide whether they're worth buying.
6. Frank works a commission job selling game systems. He downloads Boycott and two ROMS, writes them to 300 blank CDs, writes "Preview the Gameboy Advance!" on them, and hands them out for free to customers, along with his business card.
7. Gary buys a Gameboy Advance, but it breaks after two weeks, so he decides to just download Boycott because the Advance is such a crappy piece of hardware.
8. Henry works for Nintendo. He slaps a lawsuits against Frank and sends Dave a threatening cease-and-desist.
Okay, now the pop quiz - can you order these eight guys from least ethical to most ethical? No cheating.
So, you believe that the troubles in the world are all due to concentration of wealth rather than evil human beings?
No. I believe that most of the troubles in the world are due to extremism. Boolean thought works well for processing data, but not so well in the real world - very, very rarely is anything "true" or "false".
Consider this question: "True or False: A government should skim heavily from the rich to give the poor a better quality of life and a chance to succeed."
In my mind, the answer is simple. The answer is that there are intelligent minds that would say "true", and there are intelligent minds that would say "false", and so, chances are, they both have valid points, and therefore the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Bleeding-heart liberals ignore the fact that productivity requires incentive - that if someone feels that all the fruits of his labor will go to others, he usually won't perform the labor in the first place.
Yet, backwards conservatives ignore the fact that it takes an investment in a person to allow him to produce - no one can develop into an educated, free-thinking, happy, productive individual if his entire life is an uphill battle to survive.
And, finally, most world governments seem to be "getting it" - acknowledging that both financial rewards and social programs are a necessity.
What actually makes it work, though, somewhat saddens me. Very few congressmen come out and admit this - they preach either black or white, and then they push so hard against each other that we end up with gray.
I saw an article on American economic progress yesterday. People were polled on the issue: "Who is better for the economy, the Republicans or Democrats?" Very few picked the answer that was actually correct: neither. The American economy has historically grown three times as fast in periods of gridlock than in periods where a party controlled the entire government.
Right now, with our Republican-controlled presidency, senate, house, and supreme court, I am very worried. But no more so worried than if they were all controlled by Democrats. There are so few free-thinking politicians out there that we literally require conflict and compromise to come to the right answer.
Funny you should compare genetic manipulation to coding. It's all ok until someone writes buggy code, and then we have people who pass out because they smelled canned peaches
And then the next thing you know, the Russians are creating an army of fertile amazon women whose body odor smells like canned peaches.
...to CORRECT an infertility problem. On an overpopulated planet. Great. Did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps there's a REASON some people are infertile?
What we need, really, is fewer infertile women and far, far more lesbians.
This win-win situation will alleviate population growth concerns while at the same time lowering the cost of porn. As hard drive capacity increases, the need to maintain the porn-to-capacity cost ratio becomes more and more pressing.