Absolutely, and can we really say that we're surprised by this, with a name like "Homeland Security?" America is not a "Fatherland," "Motherland," or "Homeland." "Homeland" is so Orwellian it makes your blood run cold. So it was only a matter of time before this repressive agency became in deed what it already was in name.
For some time I've thought that gaming is an enormous engine for innovation that has not been tapped. It started when I watched my girlfriend become a kick-ass SimCity builder after her first year of grad school in Urban Policy, and I wondered if it might not also flow in the other direction. That is, informed experts are likely to excel in games somewhat in their area of expertise, but might not amateurs who excel at games not also be able to arrive at scenarios/solutions that could inform experts' work?
My specific thought was that if you had a networked SimCity game/competition with city factors based off real, current tax, crime statistics, environmental studies, etc., then participants would actually be gaming out scenarios that could inform real-world urban policy.
Yes, a lot depends on the underlying logic of the game. And people aren't algorithms. And the idea of Skippy the boy next door winning the prize to re-design the neighborhood park is odd.
But it could also produce some excellent, creative solutions. Citizens might feel more directly involved with the direction of their communities. Kids and people of all ages might be inspired to learn more about math, programming, engineering, government, etc. Best of all, the process would feel like entertainment but also actually produce something useful in the end.
As a passenger transport taking a dirigible would be awesome, since you could dock it in a city center instead of having to land in the great back of beyond Long Island and deal with either cabs or the silly AirTrain, or (shudder) Newark. You don't have to fly as high as a 747 so you might actually get to see what you're flying over. Sure it takes longer, and if you're a business traveller you'd probably always opt for the 747. But (and I don't know what the economics of what a ticket would work out to be) maybe the fact that you're using gas instead of thrust to produce lift might translate into cheaper tickets, which would work pretty well in places where people can't afford regular airfare.
You might also arguably create an air cruise line that takes you around to various ports of call. that would be pretty cool too.
Then there are law-enforcement/utility uses too, like hovering in the sky to watch traffic or something. Bet that's much cheaper to do than run a chopper.
Then there are the industrial uses of cargo transport. Yes, a supertanker can carry more, but they can only go seaport to seaport. Then you have to unload/transfer to rolling stock or semis. What about places that are landlocked and/or have poor roads? Central Asia leaps to mind. Dirigibles might make yurts cheaper and more available than ever before.
There's probably many more applications for blimps, but those are just a few off the top of my head.
Another thing I don't get about why people don't like dirigibles is the Hindenburg disaster. Every time something comes out about blimps, every Tom, Dick, and Harry screams "Hindenburg." It doesn't make sense that one crash would doom an entire, civilized way to travel. When passenger jets are mentioned, no one screams "Lockerbie" or "9/11" as a reason why we shouldn't fly in airplanes anymore. They just go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make it safer/better. Why are dirigibles held to a different standard? It would be really nice to see people break out of groupthink on this one.
But believe me when I say that lawmakers are far, far more unsettled by a group of ornery citizens than they are by an irate corporation. You have friends and family in the district (most likely, even today in our mobile societies), and your word counts so, so much more than a newspaper, radio, or TV ad paid for by the corporation. You can get up off your couch and canvass the neighbors on your block if you're motivated enough; the corporation doesn't care enough or have money enough to match you. I don't care if the corporation in question is Star Media or Mega Multiplex Something-or-other. Their execs don't live with your neighbors like you do. They don't empty their garbage on your street when you do, and can't strike up random conversations the way you can. They don't and can't match your ability to influence.
Trust me, I'm in advertising on Madison Avenue and corporations would love, love, love to equal the influence you have over your neighbors, but they don't and never will. Your ability to effect change, whether in Canada or not, remains sacrosanct.
Please, please, don't talk yourself out of the chance to play a pivotal role in world freedom because this that or another thing is happening in the U.S. You can and you are. Just bring a couple friends along with you.
It is simply greed. Limiting culture through copyright is the same thing to a society as putting a copyright on the use of the letter "E" would be to language. Language is how individuals communicate with each other. Culture (inclusive of music, literature, etc.) is how a society communicates with itself about its values, aspirations, and innovations. If you freeze culture in the straitjacket of copyright, then you necessarily freeze the ability of a society to dream, improve, and innovate.
There is a reason why the Founding Fathers fought about copyright. In a limited fashion, it could promote innovation, as creators would have the economic incentive to create. Unrestricted, it would stifle innovation as surely as unrestricted reproduction would. We now find ourselves proving out the naysayers in that original debate.
Children of the RIAA will argue that copyright has been a boon to the U.S. But if we had honored it from the first the American Industrial Revolution would have been long delayed because the engineers and entrepreneurs of the Republic would not have been able to copy British innovations. If we had honored it from the first then the evolution of an American voice in literature would have been delayed because many early novelists borrowed liberally from Imperial British sources. And, most famously of all, especially here on Slashdot, this country would not even have had a national anthem if Francis Scott Key had not lifted the melody of the Star-Spangled Banner wholesale from a British comic opera.
So consider that carefully, children of the RIAA. Much of what you associate with American strength would not now exist if you had ruled then. Many of the things, the rights, the freedoms, the material comforts, the power, and the influence would not now be yours to cast away if you sat in a council of influence then. It simply would not have come to be.
Human societies and cultures live and die on innovation, which is wholly dependant on the free flow of information.
So, what are you doing about it? Are you a thinking, educated, informed, and motivated human being? If you are, you can make an enormous difference.
I kept bitching on sites like Slashdot for years and ultimately found it uniquely unsatisfying. Nothing changed. So 18 months ago I started a grassroots political organization in New York. 8 months ago there was a reform package put before the state legislature that had the audacity to require legislators to actually be present to vote, and many, many other good things. One of our state assemblypeople in NYC came out four-square against the reforms. So I gathered four people from our organization, went out on a Saturday and handed out 300 flyers in 2.5 hours in front of 2 supermarkets in the woman's district. Our 300 flyers generated roughly 80 phone calls to the lawmaker in question. Her chief of staff left a message on our machine the next day calling us all kinds of unholy names. But in the end she did a 180 and voted for the reforms.
Point? I did it, and you can too. Easily. So do. Go out and do.
Amen and Amen! People think that defending freedom is a task that's outsourced to the military and cops and maybe the intelligence services. In fact, it's the duty of every human being who wants to be able to say what they want, go where they want, believe what they want, and become what they want.
But let's bring it down to the level of the every day. Good candidates for office are out there. They're constantly hurting for money, but even more than that, expert help. If you can give either, it is your duty to do so. Many Slashdotters will think nothing of spending $5/day on coffee. Multiply that by a five day work week and you're spending $1,250/yr. on coffee. For that price, you can give a real shot in the arm to the fine aspiring public servant of your choice. A city council race in NYC, for example, typically has a budget of $20K. Forego your daily cup of joe and you can single-handedly account for 5% of a great candidate's warchest. And suddenly you'll have someone representing you who will keep your streets patched, your neighborhood regularly patrolled and cleaned, and larger, abstract things like affordable housing defended. And if you can take the Board of Elections data, crunch it into a list of likely voters, and help your candidate allocate his/her resources efficiently, then you've saved them the $25K it costs to procure the leading commercial software solution.
In short, the power to create change/improvement in the political scene is eminently in your hands. And like all things, the better the candidates you help elect to local office, the finer the pool of choices you have when fighting for higher state and federal offices. After all, there are always outliers who go from zero to Congress in one try, but mostly it works like a farm team system.
Think about it, consider, and act. If you don't, the schmuck who lives down the street who's out to screw you and everyone else certainly will, and you will be very, very unhappy with the result.
Strange, but I find myself in a position to speak from the other perspective for the first time in my life. I hate advertising. Hate, hate, hate it. I have stopped watching TV because of those annoying banners along the bottom of the programs that they run now. I stopped buying magazines and stopped listening to radio years ago because of too many ads. Yet now I'm building up an interactive marketing division within one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.
What I am finding is that most of the people who work there hate the annoying ads as much as everyone replying to this post. They are constantly focused instead on creating something that's cool that they wouldn't mind watching, i.e. entertaining in some way. But we're slowly trying to train them, almost all of whom come from the traditional print, TV and radio world, that on the Internet in order to be successful an ad either has to be immediately entertaining or relevant/useful. People fled other media because they got to be too damn annoying. The options available to them on the Internet have multiplied exponentially, and if you don't stick to those two guidelines you've lost them, and more importantly, wasted your marketing budget.
It's called New Democratic Majority, newdemmajority.org. It's a progressive (in the Teddy Roosevelt/Harry Truman/Elliot Spitzer sense) grassroots organization. Our main goals are to replace neo-conservatives with progressive candidates and revitalize the Democratic party. This year our electoral focus is on the mid-term congressional elections and the NY State Senate, where Republicans have a narrowing 4-seat majority (thanks to what we did last year).
If you're interested in helping us out, drop me an email spowell@newdemmajority.org.
If that's true, then how come geeks aren't smart enough to realize that complaining about socio-political issues is even more useless than trying to do something about it? Really, not doing something about something that bugs the hell out of you smacks either of cowardice or laziness, neither of which add up to a winning philosophy.
True, maintaining an honest, effective government requires constant vigilance and effort. But then so does maintaining your bank balance. Why is it people need to believe in an utopian end-state in order to act? It makes as much sense as thinking you only have to eat one big meal and then never have to worry about food again.
Sorry, but I just can't think of a better term. Everytime this sort of Big Brother article comes along, one of the two major memes that pops up is, "gee, the wording of the law/policy/whitepaper/directive says this, but it doesn't say that, so by simply reworking the protocol stack or implementing this kind of encryption stored in SeaLand we can perform a simple end-run around it." It's basically, right-wing neo-fascist does this, so I'm going to do that in an attempt to run, hide, and sneak around them. And I'm sorry, but this sort of attitude is a molly-coddled, namby-pamby Harvey milquetoast response that likely stems from the "I've been bullied/abused/neglected all my life" meme. Basically it's fascists whomp some area of the countertop and everyone runs for cover response.
In truth, if we're talking about a war for the freedom of information, then Slashdotters collectively are the best possible warriors to prosecute that fight. In the rest of your life, you may have felt powerless--physically intimidated or socially out-classed. But in this realm you are the gods of the age. You must do something.
There are myriad offline groups out there that are fighting their guts out against this sort of thing. You can help them. They all need I.T. systems that help them organize, raise money, and fight. You can sign up to code a system that will enable them to do so. You can give money from your above-average I.T. salary to support their efforts. Or you can get creative and blow everyone away. You can do so much, which is for you relatively little, and you will make an enormous difference.
Still not sure what to do or where to channel your energies? Send me a message via Slashdot and I will be happy to give you some leads. For one, I started a grassroots political group in NY that has won several elections but still needs help with its website and volunteer organization system. We could use your help. Drop me a line and let's do something.
The wildest thing about this statement is that it buys the *AAs' underlying premise completely, namely that culture is a commodity. It's an absurd notion when seen within the context of human development.
Culture is how a society communicates. Demanding that we as a society should pay royalties for the right to have a culture is as weird and unnatural on the macro level as it is on the micro-level to insist that you pay royalties for speaking English because some corporation owns the rights.
When an individual is deprived of language it is called aphasia and is considered a disease. If a society is deprived of its language, culture, might that also not be a variety of disease?
And on the other side, the astonishing thing to me about a post like this is that you've bought the *AA's underlying premise that culture is property. It's so wildly absurd in the context of human evolution. Culture is how a society communicates. Saying that a society should have to pay royalties for instances of its culture is as absurd on the macro level as it would be on the micro level to insist that you pay royalties to some corporation everytime you speak a word, because they've bought the rights to the English language. Think about it.
I think it's a cool idea, personally. But I grew up in Montana and ranchers turn into gibbering madmen everytime the subject of reintroducing native species like wolves or bison is raised (wolves kill cows, bison infect cows with bucellosis).
On the other hand, if we can convince the ranchers it's easier to grow steaks in a vat while being able to hunt big game, serengetti style, without leaving 'merica, perhaps this could work.
Re:I would strongly disagree
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Power Up
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· Score: 2, Interesting
(It's a Friday afternoon and I'm playing out the clock...)
Yes, Japanese story telling focuses on character development, but it's never from anything to anything. It's all situational. As such it conforms to Japanese ideals like kibun tenkan (submersing the self to fit the situation). It's excellent for a culture that prioritizes conformity, but quite frustrating for people from cultures that stress individuality. Thus, as a person who grew up in the latter, Japanese story telling, by and large, is unsatisfying.
So, although it might be interesting to realize in playing shogi (Japanese chess) that you're not actually killing your enemy's troops, but flipping them over to your side, it just doesn't have the punch or meaning that a good solid checkmate has in Western chess. And Japanese anime, manga, and video games feel the same way.
Japanese Gaming Aesthetic
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Power Up
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· Score: 2, Interesting
is a fascinating example of a micro-cultural competitive advantage. It's like the dominance of Russian figure skaters or Kenyan marathon runners. Japanese animators start early--seems like every Japanese school kid can draw a respectable comic strip. Whereas you'd catch American teenagers scribbling lyrics or rock band logos on their notebooks in class, Japanese kids would be free-hand drawing Dragonball Z.
Somehow the cultural meme has sprung up in Japan that places relative importance on illustration, and it bears fruit in the gaming, anime, manga, and toy industries. Interesting to contemplate how a society could consciously create other micro-cultures for competitive advantage.
Narrative is the weakest point
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Power Up
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· Score: 2, Insightful
in Japanese games, at least seen through Western eyes. The same is true of manga and anime, where nothing is ever definitively resolved nor plotlines clearly delineated. The ambiguity is rooted in Japanese culture, which is great, but after you've fought the final boss in Devil May Cry six times in a row because he simply refuses to die, no matter how spectacularly he blows up on each successive occasion, or after neo-Tokyo blows up twice in a row without explanation at the end of Akira, it becomes a little tedious and pointless. With all apologies to/. anime-philes, the perfect game would marry Japanese visual genius and gameplay with Western writers.
If the President is allowed to know exactly where my butt is at any one time, will I, his employer, be able to track where his butt is at any one time? No? Then buzz off.
The problem with all this surveillance and Big Brother stuff is that it does nothing to deter the determined malefactor. It will only erase the freedom and privacy of the innocent. And the more of this crap they push through, the more of the innocent will get fed up and become malefactors because the government will not listen. Imagine dozens of Timothy McVeighs striking everywhere, without warning.
You know, some of my fondest game playing memories are from AD&D, esp. DM'ing adventures. I've played a lot of RPG video games since, everything from Wizardry to Bard's Tale and everything afterward, and not one of them comes even close to D&D.
Sure, some of the video games are great, and the networked games are a step in the right direction, but nothing beats a room full of people rolling dice, hamming it up, and generally having a great time.
At the end of the day, there's really no substitute for good ol' fashioned human interaction.
Oh hail the subtlety! Really, really great. This TFA is like one big pressure valve for all the grammar/spelling nazis out there in/. land.
It's a collective venting of years of irritation built up over seeing posters write "loose" when they really mean to say "lose," as in, "He will lose his lunch." ("loose" means to untie something and let it go slack, not to no longer have possession of something)
Really brilliant. Truly/. editors are becoming Jedi masters of cat herding. Bravo!
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely, and can we really say that we're surprised by this, with a name like "Homeland Security?" America is not a "Fatherland," "Motherland," or "Homeland." "Homeland" is so Orwellian it makes your blood run cold. So it was only a matter of time before this repressive agency became in deed what it already was in name.
For some time I've thought that gaming is an enormous engine for innovation that has not been tapped. It started when I watched my girlfriend become a kick-ass SimCity builder after her first year of grad school in Urban Policy, and I wondered if it might not also flow in the other direction. That is, informed experts are likely to excel in games somewhat in their area of expertise, but might not amateurs who excel at games not also be able to arrive at scenarios/solutions that could inform experts' work?
My specific thought was that if you had a networked SimCity game/competition with city factors based off real, current tax, crime statistics, environmental studies, etc., then participants would actually be gaming out scenarios that could inform real-world urban policy.
Yes, a lot depends on the underlying logic of the game. And people aren't algorithms. And the idea of Skippy the boy next door winning the prize to re-design the neighborhood park is odd.
But it could also produce some excellent, creative solutions. Citizens might feel more directly involved with the direction of their communities. Kids and people of all ages might be inspired to learn more about math, programming, engineering, government, etc. Best of all, the process would feel like entertainment but also actually produce something useful in the end.
Well, I can think of a few.
As a passenger transport taking a dirigible would be awesome, since you could dock it in a city center instead of having to land in the great back of beyond Long Island and deal with either cabs or the silly AirTrain, or (shudder) Newark. You don't have to fly as high as a 747 so you might actually get to see what you're flying over. Sure it takes longer, and if you're a business traveller you'd probably always opt for the 747. But (and I don't know what the economics of what a ticket would work out to be) maybe the fact that you're using gas instead of thrust to produce lift might translate into cheaper tickets, which would work pretty well in places where people can't afford regular airfare.
You might also arguably create an air cruise line that takes you around to various ports of call. that would be pretty cool too.
Then there are law-enforcement/utility uses too, like hovering in the sky to watch traffic or something. Bet that's much cheaper to do than run a chopper.
Then there are the industrial uses of cargo transport. Yes, a supertanker can carry more, but they can only go seaport to seaport. Then you have to unload/transfer to rolling stock or semis. What about places that are landlocked and/or have poor roads? Central Asia leaps to mind. Dirigibles might make yurts cheaper and more available than ever before.
There's probably many more applications for blimps, but those are just a few off the top of my head.
Another thing I don't get about why people don't like dirigibles is the Hindenburg disaster. Every time something comes out about blimps, every Tom, Dick, and Harry screams "Hindenburg." It doesn't make sense that one crash would doom an entire, civilized way to travel. When passenger jets are mentioned, no one screams "Lockerbie" or "9/11" as a reason why we shouldn't fly in airplanes anymore. They just go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make it safer/better. Why are dirigibles held to a different standard? It would be really nice to see people break out of groupthink on this one.
It's as if a half dozen users of IE on Mac cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
is who these geniuses are who are coming up with these big brother innovations so that we can all go to their house and beat them up.
That they believe in Creationism. After all, living in Kansas they're probably convinced the world is flat, too...
That's great, and god bless you.
But believe me when I say that lawmakers are far, far more unsettled by a group of ornery citizens than they are by an irate corporation. You have friends and family in the district (most likely, even today in our mobile societies), and your word counts so, so much more than a newspaper, radio, or TV ad paid for by the corporation. You can get up off your couch and canvass the neighbors on your block if you're motivated enough; the corporation doesn't care enough or have money enough to match you. I don't care if the corporation in question is Star Media or Mega Multiplex Something-or-other. Their execs don't live with your neighbors like you do. They don't empty their garbage on your street when you do, and can't strike up random conversations the way you can. They don't and can't match your ability to influence.
Trust me, I'm in advertising on Madison Avenue and corporations would love, love, love to equal the influence you have over your neighbors, but they don't and never will. Your ability to effect change, whether in Canada or not, remains sacrosanct.
Please, please, don't talk yourself out of the chance to play a pivotal role in world freedom because this that or another thing is happening in the U.S. You can and you are. Just bring a couple friends along with you.
It is simply greed. Limiting culture through copyright is the same thing to a society as putting a copyright on the use of the letter "E" would be to language. Language is how individuals communicate with each other. Culture (inclusive of music, literature, etc.) is how a society communicates with itself about its values, aspirations, and innovations. If you freeze culture in the straitjacket of copyright, then you necessarily freeze the ability of a society to dream, improve, and innovate.
There is a reason why the Founding Fathers fought about copyright. In a limited fashion, it could promote innovation, as creators would have the economic incentive to create. Unrestricted, it would stifle innovation as surely as unrestricted reproduction would. We now find ourselves proving out the naysayers in that original debate.
Children of the RIAA will argue that copyright has been a boon to the U.S. But if we had honored it from the first the American Industrial Revolution would have been long delayed because the engineers and entrepreneurs of the Republic would not have been able to copy British innovations. If we had honored it from the first then the evolution of an American voice in literature would have been delayed because many early novelists borrowed liberally from Imperial British sources. And, most famously of all, especially here on Slashdot, this country would not even have had a national anthem if Francis Scott Key had not lifted the melody of the Star-Spangled Banner wholesale from a British comic opera.
So consider that carefully, children of the RIAA. Much of what you associate with American strength would not now exist if you had ruled then. Many of the things, the rights, the freedoms, the material comforts, the power, and the influence would not now be yours to cast away if you sat in a council of influence then. It simply would not have come to be.
Human societies and cultures live and die on innovation, which is wholly dependant on the free flow of information.
So, what are you doing about it? Are you a thinking, educated, informed, and motivated human being? If you are, you can make an enormous difference.
I kept bitching on sites like Slashdot for years and ultimately found it uniquely unsatisfying. Nothing changed. So 18 months ago I started a grassroots political organization in New York. 8 months ago there was a reform package put before the state legislature that had the audacity to require legislators to actually be present to vote, and many, many other good things. One of our state assemblypeople in NYC came out four-square against the reforms. So I gathered four people from our organization, went out on a Saturday and handed out 300 flyers in 2.5 hours in front of 2 supermarkets in the woman's district. Our 300 flyers generated roughly 80 phone calls to the lawmaker in question. Her chief of staff left a message on our machine the next day calling us all kinds of unholy names. But in the end she did a 180 and voted for the reforms.
Point? I did it, and you can too. Easily. So do. Go out and do.
Amen and Amen! People think that defending freedom is a task that's outsourced to the military and cops and maybe the intelligence services. In fact, it's the duty of every human being who wants to be able to say what they want, go where they want, believe what they want, and become what they want.
But let's bring it down to the level of the every day. Good candidates for office are out there. They're constantly hurting for money, but even more than that, expert help. If you can give either, it is your duty to do so. Many Slashdotters will think nothing of spending $5/day on coffee. Multiply that by a five day work week and you're spending $1,250/yr. on coffee. For that price, you can give a real shot in the arm to the fine aspiring public servant of your choice. A city council race in NYC, for example, typically has a budget of $20K. Forego your daily cup of joe and you can single-handedly account for 5% of a great candidate's warchest. And suddenly you'll have someone representing you who will keep your streets patched, your neighborhood regularly patrolled and cleaned, and larger, abstract things like affordable housing defended. And if you can take the Board of Elections data, crunch it into a list of likely voters, and help your candidate allocate his/her resources efficiently, then you've saved them the $25K it costs to procure the leading commercial software solution.
In short, the power to create change/improvement in the political scene is eminently in your hands. And like all things, the better the candidates you help elect to local office, the finer the pool of choices you have when fighting for higher state and federal offices. After all, there are always outliers who go from zero to Congress in one try, but mostly it works like a farm team system.
Think about it, consider, and act. If you don't, the schmuck who lives down the street who's out to screw you and everyone else certainly will, and you will be very, very unhappy with the result.
Strange, but I find myself in a position to speak from the other perspective for the first time in my life. I hate advertising. Hate, hate, hate it. I have stopped watching TV because of those annoying banners along the bottom of the programs that they run now. I stopped buying magazines and stopped listening to radio years ago because of too many ads. Yet now I'm building up an interactive marketing division within one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.
What I am finding is that most of the people who work there hate the annoying ads as much as everyone replying to this post. They are constantly focused instead on creating something that's cool that they wouldn't mind watching, i.e. entertaining in some way. But we're slowly trying to train them, almost all of whom come from the traditional print, TV and radio world, that on the Internet in order to be successful an ad either has to be immediately entertaining or relevant/useful. People fled other media because they got to be too damn annoying. The options available to them on the Internet have multiplied exponentially, and if you don't stick to those two guidelines you've lost them, and more importantly, wasted your marketing budget.
It's called New Democratic Majority, newdemmajority.org. It's a progressive (in the Teddy Roosevelt/Harry Truman/Elliot Spitzer sense) grassroots organization. Our main goals are to replace neo-conservatives with progressive candidates and revitalize the Democratic party. This year our electoral focus is on the mid-term congressional elections and the NY State Senate, where Republicans have a narrowing 4-seat majority (thanks to what we did last year).
If you're interested in helping us out, drop me an email spowell@newdemmajority.org.
If that's true, then how come geeks aren't smart enough to realize that complaining about socio-political issues is even more useless than trying to do something about it? Really, not doing something about something that bugs the hell out of you smacks either of cowardice or laziness, neither of which add up to a winning philosophy.
True, maintaining an honest, effective government requires constant vigilance and effort. But then so does maintaining your bank balance. Why is it people need to believe in an utopian end-state in order to act? It makes as much sense as thinking you only have to eat one big meal and then never have to worry about food again.
Sorry, but I just can't think of a better term. Everytime this sort of Big Brother article comes along, one of the two major memes that pops up is, "gee, the wording of the law/policy/whitepaper/directive says this, but it doesn't say that, so by simply reworking the protocol stack or implementing this kind of encryption stored in SeaLand we can perform a simple end-run around it." It's basically, right-wing neo-fascist does this, so I'm going to do that in an attempt to run, hide, and sneak around them. And I'm sorry, but this sort of attitude is a molly-coddled, namby-pamby Harvey milquetoast response that likely stems from the "I've been bullied/abused/neglected all my life" meme. Basically it's fascists whomp some area of the countertop and everyone runs for cover response.
In truth, if we're talking about a war for the freedom of information, then Slashdotters collectively are the best possible warriors to prosecute that fight. In the rest of your life, you may have felt powerless--physically intimidated or socially out-classed. But in this realm you are the gods of the age. You must do something.
There are myriad offline groups out there that are fighting their guts out against this sort of thing. You can help them. They all need I.T. systems that help them organize, raise money, and fight. You can sign up to code a system that will enable them to do so. You can give money from your above-average I.T. salary to support their efforts. Or you can get creative and blow everyone away. You can do so much, which is for you relatively little, and you will make an enormous difference.
Still not sure what to do or where to channel your energies? Send me a message via Slashdot and I will be happy to give you some leads. For one, I started a grassroots political group in NY that has won several elections but still needs help with its website and volunteer organization system. We could use your help. Drop me a line and let's do something.
They're also going to roll this out as keychain fobs that you can tap on the reader.
The wildest thing about this statement is that it buys the *AAs' underlying premise completely, namely that culture is a commodity. It's an absurd notion when seen within the context of human development.
Culture is how a society communicates. Demanding that we as a society should pay royalties for the right to have a culture is as weird and unnatural on the macro level as it is on the micro-level to insist that you pay royalties for speaking English because some corporation owns the rights.
When an individual is deprived of language it is called aphasia and is considered a disease. If a society is deprived of its language, culture, might that also not be a variety of disease?
And on the other side, the astonishing thing to me about a post like this is that you've bought the *AA's underlying premise that culture is property. It's so wildly absurd in the context of human evolution. Culture is how a society communicates. Saying that a society should have to pay royalties for instances of its culture is as absurd on the macro level as it would be on the micro level to insist that you pay royalties to some corporation everytime you speak a word, because they've bought the rights to the English language. Think about it.
I think it's a cool idea, personally. But I grew up in Montana and ranchers turn into gibbering madmen everytime the subject of reintroducing native species like wolves or bison is raised (wolves kill cows, bison infect cows with bucellosis).
On the other hand, if we can convince the ranchers it's easier to grow steaks in a vat while being able to hunt big game, serengetti style, without leaving 'merica, perhaps this could work.
(It's a Friday afternoon and I'm playing out the clock...)
Yes, Japanese story telling focuses on character development, but it's never from anything to anything. It's all situational. As such it conforms to Japanese ideals like kibun tenkan (submersing the self to fit the situation). It's excellent for a culture that prioritizes conformity, but quite frustrating for people from cultures that stress individuality. Thus, as a person who grew up in the latter, Japanese story telling, by and large, is unsatisfying.
So, although it might be interesting to realize in playing shogi (Japanese chess) that you're not actually killing your enemy's troops, but flipping them over to your side, it just doesn't have the punch or meaning that a good solid checkmate has in Western chess. And Japanese anime, manga, and video games feel the same way.
is a fascinating example of a micro-cultural competitive advantage. It's like the dominance of Russian figure skaters or Kenyan marathon runners. Japanese animators start early--seems like every Japanese school kid can draw a respectable comic strip. Whereas you'd catch American teenagers scribbling lyrics or rock band logos on their notebooks in class, Japanese kids would be free-hand drawing Dragonball Z.
Somehow the cultural meme has sprung up in Japan that places relative importance on illustration, and it bears fruit in the gaming, anime, manga, and toy industries. Interesting to contemplate how a society could consciously create other micro-cultures for competitive advantage.
in Japanese games, at least seen through Western eyes. The same is true of manga and anime, where nothing is ever definitively resolved nor plotlines clearly delineated. The ambiguity is rooted in Japanese culture, which is great, but after you've fought the final boss in Devil May Cry six times in a row because he simply refuses to die, no matter how spectacularly he blows up on each successive occasion, or after neo-Tokyo blows up twice in a row without explanation at the end of Akira, it becomes a little tedious and pointless. With all apologies to /. anime-philes, the perfect game would marry Japanese visual genius and gameplay with Western writers.
If the President is allowed to know exactly where my butt is at any one time, will I, his employer, be able to track where his butt is at any one time? No? Then buzz off.
The problem with all this surveillance and Big Brother stuff is that it does nothing to deter the determined malefactor. It will only erase the freedom and privacy of the innocent. And the more of this crap they push through, the more of the innocent will get fed up and become malefactors because the government will not listen. Imagine dozens of Timothy McVeighs striking everywhere, without warning.
This is the wrong road to be heading down, folks.
You know, some of my fondest game playing memories are from AD&D, esp. DM'ing adventures. I've played a lot of RPG video games since, everything from Wizardry to Bard's Tale and everything afterward, and not one of them comes even close to D&D.
Sure, some of the video games are great, and the networked games are a step in the right direction, but nothing beats a room full of people rolling dice, hamming it up, and generally having a great time.
At the end of the day, there's really no substitute for good ol' fashioned human interaction.
Oh hail the subtlety! Really, really great. This TFA is like one big pressure valve for all the grammar/spelling nazis out there in /. land.
/. editors are becoming Jedi masters of cat herding. Bravo!
It's a collective venting of years of irritation built up over seeing posters write "loose" when they really mean to say "lose," as in, "He will lose his lunch." ("loose" means to untie something and let it go slack, not to no longer have possession of something)
Really brilliant. Truly