>I.e. I can own a gun or not own a gun based on
>my choice. If I do not have that choice, I can
>vote politicians into office that affirm my
>right. If I do not have that choice, I can
>petition the people, organize strikes and other
>forms of civil protest. If I do not have that
>choice, I can take up armed struggle against my
>government.
this is true as an example of representative democracy, not necesarrily civil liberties. You can follow the same logic to say "i can steal a car or not by my choice. if i do not have that choice , i can vote..." etc.
I'm talking about use, not ownership when i make the distinction:
the use of a videogame is entertainment. psychological damage, real or imagined, that stems from this entertainment is an issue to be considered by the user.
the use of a handgun is violence. the physical damage that stems from this violence is an issue to be considered by society.
society has the right to ban guns, not games.
>At least we have the right to freely discuss
>this issue on slashdot and the right to
>disagree....
Although i find it really interesting and unfortunate that the Red Hat counterproposal simply slipped under the public radar. If there had been a little more publicity about it, it could have put microsoft into some pretty serious hot water.
what's more, i think that it would simply be a much more valuable learning experience for kids to be able to develop linux familiarity in schools. Sure, in today's workplace, windows familiarity is an important employment skill, but contact with windowsOS is almost unavoidable. Linux experience would provide a very important degree of breadth to the conception todays children have of computers.
>As for the Aussies, they are down the path of
>giving up personal liberties for the "greater
>good". Since they banned guns theircrime rate
>has steadily risen. Good job!
I understand that censorship is bad and that deciding what constitutes reasonable entertainment is not the governments job. But i entirely disagree with your use of term "personal liberties" especially when referring to guns and when putting down Australia.
The idea of civil liberties is basically that all those actions which do not cause direct harm to others should be permitted and the government does not have the right to intrude into the personal life of it's citizens. In this field the U.S. is perhaps the worse offender among democratic nations. I would draw your attention particularily to the Anti-Terrorist Bill which has been pushed through in the past few months which basically signs away the rights and liberties of every American in the name of national security.
The right to own a video game is an issue of civil liberties. It involves deciding what you want to do in the privacy of your own home to entertain yourself.
The right to own a handgun is not an issue of civil liberties. A handgun, unlike a videogame, is a machine made to kill human beings, it serves no other purpose. This is not a machine that anyone should be permitted to carry around with them, and you can shout about personal freedom all you want. The "right to bear arms" is a freak of American Legislation born from the fact that America is a nation founded upon a violent revolution. It is NOT a basic human right.
And as for your figures about Australia's crime rate: The crime rate has only increased because of the number of people who have been arrested for illegally owning handguns. The number of handgun related murders has steadily decreased since the ban was instated.
i am getting sick of all this anti-trust talk. i am as anti-microsoft as anyone else, but it has recently become clear to me that microsoft will inevitably lose it's market dominance in it's own due time(a matter of years not decades).
all this trouble going into knocking down the giant could be avoided if people just waited until after it had cut it's ownlegs off.
absolutely. It has been rather obvious for a long time that smart homes are an inevitability. maybe not for everybody, but at least for the average suburbite with a disposable income. The stars all have fully wired houses, the public isn't far behind.
It only makes sense that we would start to see a shift towards the computer in the living room. Let's face it, even with chat rooms, solitaire and free pr0n, the average person still spends more time at home in front of the TV than the computer. As people start to realize the potential of the computer to perform tasks other than "computer tasks" like word processing and web surfing(this goes well with yesterday's article about Turing), they will tend to bring it into the most central location of the house.
I think that moving the computer into the living room and using it to control your tv and stereo is just a logical step to be followed by a few others:
1. dumb terminals in all the bedrooms for e-mail and web access.
2. sleek looking wall mount servers to look snazzy and serve the home entertainment as well as internet needs
3. new homes being built with an upgradable server already installed behind a wall and fibre-optics running throughout the house.
4. people replacing typical hardware solutions like doorbells and thermostats with software that runs on the integrated server they already use for movies, music and e-mail.
suddenly, everyone is living in a smart house and they didn't even notice it happening.
i found his choice of programming languages very interesting myself. he really seems to be a big fan of elegance. personally i've always found the idea of thinking of code as art to be rather offensive. i mean: i code and i appreciate art. i think to suggest that there is a crossover demeans both. not to mention that he praises the hypercard scripting language and i have something of a vendetta against it having spent several months once trying to update a massive piece of edu-software written entirely in uncommented hypercard script. blech.
Assuming(as was stated) that these boys are planning to eventually get into the tech field. I wonder if anyone has pointed them in the direction of the yet.
I mean besides being a good read, there is some pretty useful information in there from a linguistic point of view.
>but I do wonder how they assigned the date "of >at least 6000 years ago" to this.
no doubt by checking the log files on their mainframes, silly.
don't you know that any newly discovered ancient civilization is bound to have been centuries ahead of it's time in technology. don't you watch movies?
The best thing about the super-customizable characters is the ability to put your favorite PHB on a skateboard and drive him into the bucket of molten steel on the Foundry level...
no, neither MarioKart64 or MarioKartAdvance count... trust me, sometimes you just have to be a purist.
On a slightly more reasonable note, Tony Hawk 3(for PS2) is a pretty fresh pick, and I mean who could get tired of more Tony Hawk(and the character customization is ridiculously cool... nothing is quite as much fun as watching a 3d-modelled person who looks JUST LIKE YOU do a 900 off of an 18-foot ramp and then fall flat on his face, smearing blood everywhere).
I can't help but think that this is all stuff that everyone reading slashdot already knows. Nothing new or exciting here.
As always, the real trouble is simply overcoming consumer momentum("but we ran our LAST network on Windows") and overcoming the support problem("but were is the analogous army of MSCEs?"). Linux may be the best solution, but that doesn't mean that people will choose it. On the other hand, it's always nice to see a little exposure: No such thing as bad press, and all that.
I can already hear the people complaining about the article not mentioning Debian.
The reason for video over a phone is simply to improve communication (oh and of course to show you advertisements so the companies can make more money;). With "video phones" another dimension will be added to distance impaired personal communications. Actually seeing the person you are talking to (their facial expressions) is what
makes face-to-face communication so desireable,
but when that is not possible, video-phones will be the next best thing.
I work for a broadband provider and one of the big products being developed is video conferencing over an IP/VPN. People want to see the people they are talking to. It's the next logical step after standard voice communications.
I question all of this(except for the fact that you work for a broadband provider, that I believe.)
I think that the statement that seeing someones facial expressions is what makes face to face communication so desirable is absurd. If i may be a hippie for a moment: I'm pretty sure that a lot of what makes F2F desirable is the physical prescence of another human being, that feeling of not being alone, etc.
But of course all of that is irrelevant, what i am calling on here is emperical evidence: Every previous attempt to introduce video-phone has failed. The reasons for this are not mysterious, they are well-documented.
things that despite what you may have heard are NOT the reason video phones failed:
1. People are resistant to change
2. The bandwidth required was too expensive
3. The existing telephone infrastructure would be too difficult to replace.
things that ARE the reason video phones failed:
1. People don't like the idea of other people being able to see their surrounding(their home).
2. People like to do all sorts of things while on the phone without the other person knowing about it(read, cook, pick their nose).
Large test groups were assembled several times for the video phone project and every time the results came back that the vast majority of people had no real desire for the service and that many of those who thought they did found it distasteful when finally presented with it. It is for this reason that I hope(for their sake) that Cingular has either done massive market research which suggested a significant shift in popular feeling on the subject or that their real long-term plan is related to providing PDA and laptop bandwidth or (scary scary thought) free ad-based cellular service: just watch this forty second AOL commercial and talk for five minutes free of charge.
As a fellow techie/punk-rocker I can't help but feel inclined to find the irony amusing in the combination of a "hardcore".sig-line and a comment complaining about unreliable and low-bandwidth wireless support for PDAs(Personal Damnation Accessory).
No Offence meant, really. Just one of those cheap observational humour things.
Asimov coined the term positron with his description of positronic nets, which were also a brilliant insight into the way in which neural nets and dynamical systems would develop.
However, most of the posts i have seen have been along the lines of authors predicting things that ended up actually happening. The intent of the original post appeared to be more interested in science fiction actually AFFECTING the paths of science.
In this regard, I would still point to Asimov. Asimov's three laws of robotics have become so embedded in our society, that some people don't even know that they originate in fiction. I can say it is reasonably certain that once we start to have stronger weak-AI devices(def'n; weak AI - systems made to imitate intelligence in order to achieve tasks. compare: strong AI - systems made to actually BE intelligent, to BE human) becoming extremely common and intereacting directly with people on a regular basis we will see either an industry standard, or more likely legislation, enforcing the hard-coding of something very similar to Asimov's laws.
Also the [Gibson ---> modern internet] connection is good.
Absolutely, every couple of months there is a new news article about a ground-breaking new type of computer. But each time, it's basically just "hey look, we managed to get this to do something that kinda looks like basic computer operations". Quantom computers sound really cool, DNA computers sound really cool, but where is a reasonable long term plan? Where's something to actually get excited about?
I can build AND, NOT and XOR gates out of cats, mice and string. I can string a thousand of these gates together... but i won't be able to install an OS on it in any practical way.
I'll be excited when one of these test-tubes can play mp3s, compile my kernel, and send me instant messages telling me what website i can see AVIs of Britney Spears being ravaged by high school football players at. Until then, i just don't care.
The abiility to do FLOPs does not a Turing Machine make.
on the other hand, you can get your hands on a working super nintendo for under $20, and while we're considering buying unsupported consoles, why not go with one that has an almost limitless library of games available for it.
although I'd be really impressed if anyone managed to get linux running on a snes.
I'm sure other people will be more than happy to point this out, but world government is the exact opposite of the direction that we should headed.
So many of the problems that we hear being complained about everyday on/. either directly or indirectly result from government centralization. It is the sheer size and power of the U.S. government that allows it to hand over so much power to corporations. I'll tell you one thing, world government certainly means no more data havens and no more numbered swiss bank accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
i think that techies would have learned how to spell bankruptcy by now. [grin]
well done hemos
>I.e. I can own a gun or not own a gun based on
>my choice. If I do not have that choice, I can
>vote politicians into office that affirm my
>right. If I do not have that choice, I can
>petition the people, organize strikes and other
>forms of civil protest. If I do not have that
>choice, I can take up armed struggle against my
>government.
this is true as an example of representative democracy, not necesarrily civil liberties. You can follow the same logic to say "i can steal a car or not by my choice. if i do not have that choice , i can vote..." etc.
I'm talking about use, not ownership when i make the distinction:
the use of a videogame is entertainment. psychological damage, real or imagined, that stems from this entertainment is an issue to be considered by the user.
the use of a handgun is violence. the physical damage that stems from this violence is an issue to be considered by society.
society has the right to ban guns, not games.
>At least we have the right to freely discuss
>this issue on slashdot and the right to
>disagree....
i couldn't agree with you more. [grin]
Although i find it really interesting and unfortunate that the Red Hat counterproposal simply slipped under the public radar. If there had been a little more publicity about it, it could have put microsoft into some pretty serious hot water.
what's more, i think that it would simply be a much more valuable learning experience for kids to be able to develop linux familiarity in schools. Sure, in today's workplace, windows familiarity is an important employment skill, but contact with windowsOS is almost unavoidable. Linux experience would provide a very important degree of breadth to the conception todays children have of computers.
>As for the Aussies, they are down the path of
>giving up personal liberties for the "greater
>good". Since they banned guns theircrime rate
>has steadily risen. Good job!
I understand that censorship is bad and that deciding what constitutes reasonable entertainment is not the governments job. But i entirely disagree with your use of term "personal liberties" especially when referring to guns and when putting down Australia.
The idea of civil liberties is basically that all those actions which do not cause direct harm to others should be permitted and the government does not have the right to intrude into the personal life of it's citizens. In this field the U.S. is perhaps the worse offender among democratic nations. I would draw your attention particularily to the Anti-Terrorist Bill which has been pushed through in the past few months which basically signs away the rights and liberties of every American in the name of national security.
The right to own a video game is an issue of civil liberties. It involves deciding what you want to do in the privacy of your own home to entertain yourself.
The right to own a handgun is not an issue of civil liberties. A handgun, unlike a videogame, is a machine made to kill human beings, it serves no other purpose. This is not a machine that anyone should be permitted to carry around with them, and you can shout about personal freedom all you want. The "right to bear arms" is a freak of American Legislation born from the fact that America is a nation founded upon a violent revolution. It is NOT a basic human right.
And as for your figures about Australia's crime rate: The crime rate has only increased because of the number of people who have been arrested for illegally owning handguns. The number of handgun related murders has steadily decreased since the ban was instated.
i am getting sick of all this anti-trust talk. i am as anti-microsoft as anyone else, but it has recently become clear to me that microsoft will inevitably lose it's market dominance in it's own due time(a matter of years not decades).
all this trouble going into knocking down the giant could be avoided if people just waited until after it had cut it's ownlegs off.
absolutely. It has been rather obvious for a long time that smart homes are an inevitability. maybe not for everybody, but at least for the average suburbite with a disposable income. The stars all have fully wired houses, the public isn't far behind.
It only makes sense that we would start to see a shift towards the computer in the living room. Let's face it, even with chat rooms, solitaire and free pr0n, the average person still spends more time at home in front of the TV than the computer. As people start to realize the potential of the computer to perform tasks other than "computer tasks" like word processing and web surfing(this goes well with yesterday's article about Turing), they will tend to bring it into the most central location of the house.
I think that moving the computer into the living room and using it to control your tv and stereo is just a logical step to be followed by a few others:
1. dumb terminals in all the bedrooms for e-mail and web access.
2. sleek looking wall mount servers to look snazzy and serve the home entertainment as well as internet needs
3. new homes being built with an upgradable server already installed behind a wall and fibre-optics running throughout the house.
4. people replacing typical hardware solutions like doorbells and thermostats with software that runs on the integrated server they already use for movies, music and e-mail.
suddenly, everyone is living in a smart house and they didn't even notice it happening.
i found his choice of programming languages very interesting myself. he really seems to be a big fan of elegance. personally i've always found the idea of thinking of code as art to be rather offensive. i mean: i code and i appreciate art. i think to suggest that there is a crossover demeans both. not to mention that he praises the hypercard scripting language and i have something of a vendetta against it having spent several months once trying to update a massive piece of edu-software written entirely in uncommented hypercard script. blech.
sorry. that's what i get for not previewing. the link is to the Jargon File and the sentence should read "...direction of the jargon file yet"
Assuming(as was stated) that these boys are planning to eventually get into the tech field. I wonder if anyone has pointed them in the direction of the yet.
I mean besides being a good read, there is some pretty useful information in there from a linguistic point of view.
>but I do wonder how they assigned the date "of >at least 6000 years ago" to this.
no doubt by checking the log files on their mainframes, silly.
don't you know that any newly discovered ancient civilization is bound to have been centuries ahead of it's time in technology. don't you watch movies?
The best thing about the super-customizable characters is the ability to put your favorite PHB on a skateboard and drive him into the bucket of molten steel on the Foundry level...
Super Mario Kart 2!!!!!
please.... somebody, anybody...
no, neither MarioKart64 or MarioKartAdvance count... trust me, sometimes you just have to be a purist.
On a slightly more reasonable note, Tony Hawk 3(for PS2) is a pretty fresh pick, and I mean who could get tired of more Tony Hawk(and the character customization is ridiculously cool... nothing is quite as much fun as watching a 3d-modelled person who looks JUST LIKE YOU do a 900 off of an 18-foot ramp and then fall flat on his face, smearing blood everywhere).
i've made about 20 posts in the last two hours... slow day at work... this is a short off-topic rant about the moderation scheme.
moderation total:
offtopic 1
funny 3
overrated 1
underrated 1
total score (3, offtopic)
i just don't get it, how is off-topic the relevant feature here?
not that i'm really complaining, I would have modded this post (-1, stupid/not funny). I'm just confused
I can't help but think that this is all stuff that everyone reading slashdot already knows. Nothing new or exciting here.
As always, the real trouble is simply overcoming consumer momentum("but we ran our LAST network on Windows") and overcoming the support problem("but were is the analogous army of MSCEs?"). Linux may be the best solution, but that doesn't mean that people will choose it. On the other hand, it's always nice to see a little exposure: No such thing as bad press, and all that.
I can already hear the people complaining about the article not mentioning Debian.
The reason for video over a phone is simply to improve communication (oh and of course to show you advertisements so the companies can make more money ;). With "video phones" another dimension will be added to distance impaired personal communications. Actually seeing the person you are talking to (their facial expressions) is what
makes face-to-face communication so desireable,
but when that is not possible, video-phones will be the next best thing.
I work for a broadband provider and one of the big products being developed is video conferencing over an IP/VPN. People want to see the people they are talking to. It's the next logical step after standard voice communications.
I question all of this(except for the fact that you work for a broadband provider, that I believe.)
I think that the statement that seeing someones facial expressions is what makes face to face communication so desirable is absurd. If i may be a hippie for a moment: I'm pretty sure that a lot of what makes F2F desirable is the physical prescence of another human being, that feeling of not being alone, etc.
But of course all of that is irrelevant, what i am calling on here is emperical evidence: Every previous attempt to introduce video-phone has failed. The reasons for this are not mysterious, they are well-documented.
things that despite what you may have heard are NOT the reason video phones failed:
1. People are resistant to change
2. The bandwidth required was too expensive
3. The existing telephone infrastructure would be too difficult to replace.
things that ARE the reason video phones failed:
1. People don't like the idea of other people being able to see their surrounding(their home).
2. People like to do all sorts of things while on the phone without the other person knowing about it(read, cook, pick their nose).
Large test groups were assembled several times for the video phone project and every time the results came back that the vast majority of people had no real desire for the service and that many of those who thought they did found it distasteful when finally presented with it. It is for this reason that I hope(for their sake) that Cingular has either done massive market research which suggested a significant shift in popular feeling on the subject or that their real long-term plan is related to providing PDA and laptop bandwidth or (scary scary thought) free ad-based cellular service: just watch this forty second AOL commercial and talk for five minutes free of charge.
i agree. my apologies. I officially refuse any responsibility if people foolishy mod this up for funny.
As a fellow techie/punk-rocker I can't help but feel inclined to find the irony amusing in the combination of a "hardcore" .sig-line and a comment complaining about unreliable and low-bandwidth wireless support for PDAs(Personal Damnation Accessory).
No Offence meant, really. Just one of those cheap observational humour things.
my true love bought for me:
five video cell-phones
four sega dreamcasts
three thinkgeek shirts
two copys of The Hobbit*
and 2.4.15 on a CD
*One copy to read, another to keep under the mousepad for luck.
Asimov coined the term positron with his description of positronic nets, which were also a brilliant insight into the way in which neural nets and dynamical systems would develop.
However, most of the posts i have seen have been along the lines of authors predicting things that ended up actually happening. The intent of the original post appeared to be more interested in science fiction actually AFFECTING the paths of science.
In this regard, I would still point to Asimov. Asimov's three laws of robotics have become so embedded in our society, that some people don't even know that they originate in fiction. I can say it is reasonably certain that once we start to have stronger weak-AI devices(def'n; weak AI - systems made to imitate intelligence in order to achieve tasks. compare: strong AI - systems made to actually BE intelligent, to BE human) becoming extremely common and intereacting directly with people on a regular basis we will see either an industry standard, or more likely legislation, enforcing the hard-coding of something very similar to Asimov's laws.
Also the [Gibson ---> modern internet] connection is good.
Absolutely, every couple of months there is a new news article about a ground-breaking new type of computer. But each time, it's basically just "hey look, we managed to get this to do something that kinda looks like basic computer operations". Quantom computers sound really cool, DNA computers sound really cool, but where is a reasonable long term plan? Where's something to actually get excited about?
I can build AND, NOT and XOR gates out of cats, mice and string. I can string a thousand of these gates together... but i won't be able to install an OS on it in any practical way.
I'll be excited when one of these test-tubes can play mp3s, compile my kernel, and send me instant messages telling me what website i can see AVIs of Britney Spears being ravaged by high school football players at. Until then, i just don't care.
The abiility to do FLOPs does not a Turing Machine make.
oh come on, how card could it be to take apart a really crappy old game(NBA JAM?) and hack your software onto it.
THAT is a challenge.
on the other hand, you can get your hands on a working super nintendo for under $20, and while we're considering buying unsupported consoles, why not go with one that has an almost limitless library of games available for it.
although I'd be really impressed if anyone managed to get linux running on a snes.
i've been boycotting Comdex ever since i realized they were never going to feature an upgraded mainboard for my dual processor 486....
and it looks like this year is no exception.
I'm sure other people will be more than happy to point this out, but world government is the exact opposite of the direction that we should headed.
/. either directly or indirectly result from government centralization. It is the sheer size and power of the U.S. government that allows it to hand over so much power to corporations. I'll tell you one thing, world government certainly means no more data havens and no more numbered swiss bank accounts.
So many of the problems that we hear being complained about everyday on
Globalization is the problem, not the solution.
nothing i love more than having faceless corporations deide the way my life will proceed.