The reason stuff like this happens is based on the behaviour of the complex web of societies we have come to know as "the corporate world". It isn't easy to explain the nature of this world, even though we are all part of it. One thing I know, though: permission is passive, resistance is active. And the world is all about permitting the expansion of corporate rights, and resisting the expansion of individual rights.
In this feedback-based system, the more companies that notice somebody is getting away with something (eg: patents that are blantantly obvious gambits for market dominance) the more instances you will find of this behaviour. They all drive for the gap in the wall with whatever they can scrounge up, hoping to make it before the lights come on. So it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Why? Because "the system" learns. The sight of somebody getting away with looting an unprotected store during a riot is all the incentive you need to draw others into that activity. And the process of applying for patents (along with the other legal forms of attack on the common good) is not set up to handle the kind of things it has to. So it fails to effectively discern between patents of value and mere speculation. Stopping it is going to be painful, costly, and drawn out. The companies who will get hurt aren't the ones who have already done their thing, but the blundering morons to come.
The side-effect of all this happening is that by fighting to gain the legal high ground based on Intellectual Property, Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents, we end up with a society that is being transformed at the very foundations: language. We are all victims, even the people in these corporations, of an undermining public speech. Holding back medecine from those who need it, holding back innovation because it isn't in the interest of the shareholders, forcing the market to bend to their will because they have the endorsement of what is supposed to be an organ of democracy.
This will continue as long as we allow it to.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
What is a document when it is stored electronically? How long does it last, and how do I know it is valid?
There are a lot conceptual and practical issues to be dealt with when designing an information resource that is supposed to have value over an extended period. In this vein, what efforts have been directed towards understanding strategic issues like:
authentication and security
correctness of content and granting of "authority"
stability of media and life-cycle/maintainance issues
writing style, data structure, and presentation (w/ technologies like PDF, CSS, etc.)
use of "plain language" for comprehension and translation across cultures now and in the future
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
ambivalent: kinda don't care anymore
on
FASA Dies
·
· Score: 2
FASA never made good decisions with its BattleTech property. I don't know anything about their other games, but the promise of BT/Mechwarrior was wasted. It could have been much bigger, especially if they had focused on pushing it into electronic games with more vigour and vision.
In particular, the span of time between the first Mechwarrior and MWII was unbelievable. I've liked the other MWs, and even MechCommander (with all its faults), but I've never had the game I've always wanted from them. I wanted depth, role playing, and something other than "this time your in your mech and...". What about the people? What about the world around you? Is everything a fucking target, or what? At least in MW you could choose what planet you went to and sell mechs... the merest hint of a wider universe against which the game was played. In the newer stuff? Nothing.
And the Clans suck. Mostly. Deus ex Machina for the Inner Sphere stalemate. Nice try. What next? Aliens?
In the end, it doesn't matter to most of us who played, I think. Regretfully, I have no time for games anymore.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
A friend of mine just had her tubes tied. She's 20. Maybe she'll regret it later, but she says if she wants a kid THAT bad, she can always adopt.
Such wisdom from someone so young.
This has gone too far, but it's just getting started. How long until changing your phenotype becomes a fashionable, and seasonal thing?
"My, aren't Mildred's antennae fashion-forward?"
"Yes. But her husband's goat legs are so retro. Was he born in the 90's or something?"
Face it. We are slaves three times over:
slaves to our lifestyles(earn/spend social programming)
slaves to our brains(ego/emotion firmware)
slaves to our meat(DNA hard-wired instincts)
The big problem is, this is the shit that's going to make nuclear power and information technology look sick. And we're playing with it like it's fucking Lego.
Who is going to take responsibility for the monsters? Nobody. When are we going to collectively grow up? Maybe never. Frankenstein was a self-obsessed ego maniac with no compassion for his creation. He was trying to show how far he could push his knowledge. He wanted to create life so he could become a god.
Life is not a toy. What is bio-tech?
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
I'd like to start off by saying something which might not sound right to a lot of you: corporations are not people. I know you've been brainwashed by the legal "entity" and "body" metaphors for what a company is, but when you get right down to it, its a bunch of people in a specific culture, a complex system of political, economic, and personal relationships.
So to use the phrase "big bad corporation" is a sign that we have not identified the problem. The issue isn't the fact that there is a thing called a corporation, it's that there is an entire culture within and without the people of that corporation that compels them to behave a certain way. Success these days is getting harder to measure, if the dot-com stupidity is any kind of lesson. The mantra of "value for shareholders" belies a simplistic conception of the relationships that exist between the people in the company and the people outside of it.
As much as PR people would like you to believe there is such thing as The Authoritative Voice of The Company, there is only inhuman propaganda that seeks to distort facts to its advantage. Every one of them is just fulfilling a role that is expected of a "professional", and nobody cares about anything outside of that because it isn't their job to. Ethics, in the greater sense, is dead.
Frivilous lawsuits are a behaviour, and one that the system rewards on a daily basis. Law is the new battleground, where only ideas matter, and actual physical assets are secondary. To buy a word is insanity (I want "the"), but we are edging closer and closer to that insanity every day. I wouldn't fault etoy for attacking eToys, they are just following Sun Tzu's advice: "attack where you are strong and the enemy is weak".
The ability to abstract is important. The inability to see things for what they are is killing us. We believe anything that confirms our previous views. We disbelieve anything that requires introspection, dialogue, and genuine selflessness to explore.
Corporations are the new power in the world. Forget about what you've been told about democracy: the power to direct the energy of the human population lies in the hands of the elite. This has been true for thousands of years, and has never been otherwise (except for a brief time in Spain...). The fact that one class of elite has been usurped by another, over and over, century after century, is just detail. The new elite is establishing itself on the amoral ground of Law, and this is where the power will flow from.
From Antigua, from Singapore, from offshore. The fight is not with each other (ie: company A vs. company B), but for the dominance of the new paradigm: the corporate "We" over the democratic "We".
Play the game. Surrender to your greed, your hate. Join the Dark Side. You have no idea of its power...
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
This is weird. I've been looking for an Atari system for the past two weeks, and I've already got a small collection of carts, and I'm homing in on some possible 2600 systems.
Then this. Wow.
The idea of getting UNOPENED games seems slightly pornographic, but even better are those sweet Atari t-shirts. I'm all over that. And my girlfriend is gonna freak when she gets a Pac-man t-shirt for her birthday.
I think severance packages are sort of a "goodbye kiss" in the professional world. Kind of "we'll miss you, we can still be friends, let's not hurt each other, ok?" with stock options and such.
The head geek at a notorious gaming company I used to work at got a BIG FAT kiss off. They gave him pretty much everything he asked for, and he asked for a LOT. He even asked for the hundred-odd AAA batteries he had in his office (I think it was for a Palm or something).
A not-so-31337 geek left the same company about a month later. They sat down and asked him what he expected in his severance package. He said "I think I'm worth around half of what [head geek] got."
They laughed him out of the room. Laughed out loud. I believe he got SFA for a package, as a matter of fact.
What have we learned here? That people who can help you the most, that are the most valuable to you as partners, are the ones you try REALLY hard to keep happy when they leave. Because they know your secrets. And they probably went to school on how NOT to run a company by watching you (the management) fuck up over and over again...
Beyond being able to rejuvenate existing tissue (which is Very Big, don't get me wrong), this could also mean we can skip over using living beings (ie: animals) as mediums for growing tissue. We could grow replacement organs (skin, bones, muscle, etc.) without using pigs and monkeys to be the host. Just produce them in "vats" that are constantly supplied with the nutrients and drugs required.
The non-obvious importance is that we can start "growing" meat and other kinds of animal tissue (perhaps vegetable as well?) on an industrial scale...
It won't be a hundred years before we stop raising cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. and start eating artificial food that can be engineered to spec. I'm sure it would be more efficient from a thermodynamic viewpoint.
The bad news is that the rich will live forever. The good news is that you won't have to eat tofu.
"I" is in the upper case because other wise it looks like it's pronounced like "i" in "kick", and is too difficult to read. Other pronouns don't need it so they don't get it.
You're warm. It *does* have something to do with it being harder to read...
In olden days, when English was emerging from its Germanic roots, the first person pronoun "ich" was shortened to "i". But this was a problem, since people spelled words in a really weird way: they seperated syllables with a space. So "i" was just left there in this stream of short letter groups, and could easily be mistaken for part of another word. They adopted the capitalization rule so it would stand out more.
Periods go outside of parens if what is inside is not a complete sentence (not an extra comment). (This, for example is a complete sentence in parentheses.)
And as for "supressed", I should also have said "I am a writer": my own mistakes are often invisible to me. Which is what gives me the sense of shame and guilt I need to edit.
I'm lucky, I only read the original, and never bothered reading the rest. I found Rendezvous to be a really engrossing read: it had the awesome sense of scale (both time and physical size), and a deep mystery. I enjoyed playing the text game Planetfall for the same reason. Plus it had the ironic twist that I love in SF. It was like a long short story.
I think this story would make a good movie: it's filled with potential for cool visuals, and it only needs a handful of actors. Perfect.
The only problem is that putting big name actors in it will ruin it fer sure.
You are correct that semicolons should always go outside of quotation marks, but contrary to what others may tell you, there is no general rule about puntuation going inside or outside. Your use should depend on a couple of factors: whether you use "American style" or British, and whether the material in quotation marks is, in fact, a quote of some sort.
If the material is being quoted from an original source, and that source contains punctuation, then the Brits would put it inside (unless its a colon or semicolon, in which case it is supressed). Otherwise, it goes outside.
The Yanks ALWAYS put periods and commas before terminal quotation marks, and other punctuation after, unless they are part of a quote. (You can see how the American style is simply the British style with a special case for "." and ",".)
So to reiterate: NOBODY puts ":" or ";" inside quotation marks. Except us anarchists in Canada, and especially writers from B.C..);P
IAAE. (I am an editor.) Our next lesson will review the use of punctuation in parentheses.
While this first-gen stuff may be a little weak, this is something I've been wishing for. Everyone can whine all they like about it, but it is still a big step in the right direction. Once the density and ruggedness goes up a bit, and the camera systems get a bit more advanced, this is going to be KILLER. Gigs and gigs of storage, with all the coolness of the MiniDisc form.
And as for the aforementioned "first gen" slagging: it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good, and in your hands. I could have a lot of fun with one of these, and I doubt there will be much better for the next 18 months.
I've been waiting for this for a while now (since 97). It seems the obvious next step, since most games these days are already community-oriented (ie: tribes, everquest, even the battle sims) and people are going to WANT to increase the level of risk.
The question isn't *if* these guys are going to get rich (they might, they might not), but who is going to be the first to do it right.
Forget about "legality". There are ways around that, and to start off with, nobody will notice this shit building in the background. Not until there is a huge splash in the press about some mum who thinks her kid is becoming obsessed (...blah blah blah: you should all know the pattern by now). By the time that there is a move control it through special legislation, it will have become too popular to stop by fiat. Besides, with servers in Antigua, who gives a fsck what the Americans think?
So the issues to be addressed are: what business models to use, what kind of games are most "immersive"/addictive, and can you turn this kind of thing into (virtual) reality TV? I mean, once you have "star" players and teams, will people be interested enough to either lurk and watch the pros at work, or sit back and watch it on cable with some popcorn. The potential for drama and soap-opera appeal should NOT be underestimated here.
Personally, I want the Mechwarrior universe online, with battles on Solaris and House feuds, etc. Any genre is open for exploitation here, with its own audience. Gamblers and cheaters will just add spice. (besides, if you're a smart game service, you HIRE the cheaters to work FOR you).
Give it time. It'll happen. And don't worry about all the naysayers. They don't understand what's happening here.
Since no big population of business (small or big, but mostly big) care to reinvest in a whole new bunch of domain names, I don't think anybody will be driving hard to have new TLDs pushed through the process. If the big money cared, it would happen, but they don't, so they'll be quite happy for the process to drag out in bureaucratic minutiae.
And since the US government is pretty firmly in the pocket of corporate interest, there isn't going to be a lot anybody can do about that. Sit back and wait, kids.
No matter what they may say, what their friends may say, and what the people who love Microsoft (I don't talk to these people... I pretend not to care) say, the reasons Linux (and the BSDs) has become popular are not going to change.
Unless and until (ie: never) MS puts out an OS that is cheap/free, open (or mostly so), and much more geared to security and maintainability (as opposed to backwards compatibility with dumb MS decisions of the past decade), they will HAVE to spend money to keep market share.
Those who know will make up their own minds about the relative merits of this OS vs. that OS. The truly enlightened will even use MS products in their proper place. Nobody but executives cares about what marketing says. And even they are starting to see why "free as in beer" makes a lot of sense.
Now, if we could only beat into their tiny minds why the other "free" has a place in industry, too...
There is also a (remote) possibility of a moon orbiting in a plane that is sufficiently perpendicular to the orbital plane of the "parent" that it is not occluded.
I suppose tidal forces (from both planet and star) might make this a short-lived orbit.
As if a national government could do anything about it through regulation... I laugh: HAH! And again: HAH! HAH!
Seriously, if there is going to be ANY regulation of the kind he envisions (and I am all for authentication, tracability, and holding the editors accountable for their content), it would have to be the result of a global/multinational concensus. I doubt the U.N. is up to it, and I don't know what organization could even begin approach the problem.
So it's pretty much DIW until we have an international IT standards committee.
But I doubt the Americans are likely to go along with losing control of "their" Internet.
The only workable solution is a community-based one; like the moderation/"consumer reports"/vetting models already suggested. Many bottom-up solutions to this (pretty) well-defined problem would be more organic and less likely to fail, because of the decentralized nature of the process of consensus.
I realize that in any attempt to "regulate" content on the Net that there would be a normalizing effect which would marginalize some speech (even on Slashdot), but making information obscure isn't the same as banning or destroying it. And letting the people on the margins talk shit is small price to pay for an Open Society.
I am reminded of an exchange I had with a senior Journalism prof from the University of British Columbia last year at the launch of the "Journalism in the New Millennium" book. She said that the growth of Net journalism had caused a shocking drop in the standards of writing and editing, which made the entire profession look bad. I asked her what was wrong with people practicing their craft in the public eye, and making a fool of themselves? Did she want to restrict speech to those with professional certification? She looked shocked that I could even ask such a question, and her lack of a response said to me that she had never thought of the problem that way. (I do distinctly recall someone in the small Chapters crowd cheering my question with a "yeah!"... so at least one of other shit disturber was at the event.)
I think the real problem she and others in her profession have with this trend is that it points out how UNRELIABLE even the most "professional" sources can be. The public would soon learn that they can't believe everything they read, which would be disastrous for writers who have come to rely on the Voice of Authority alone, and have forgotten how to properly source and fact-check.
I would further argue that a "standards-less" Internet would force an evolution of humanity, since people would either learn to be critical, learn how to balance conflicting reports, or they would just give up and take themselves out of the loop. The wilderness of the Web would reveal to us the true diversity of human thought--from the arcane, to the mundane, to the absurd--and force us to see the same Big Picture.
It is the promise of the next stage in Human consciousness, moving away from idealism and utopianism, towards a more functional approach of scepticism, dialectic, and imagination: using the opposition of memes to resolve contradictions and point the way to new areas of inquiry.
To me, certainty is death. Control is an illusion. Give up and accept that THERE IS NO SIGNAL, just amplified noise that's been passed through a filter. My credo has always been "Truth is built one lie at a time." Who can say that we don't learn more from exloring fiction than from sticking to the facts?
As someone who was born during the summer of the Apollo 11 mission (and someone who very much LOVES the Apollo missions in general), it is hard for me to agree... but I do.
The one-shot approach to interplanetary travel is dumb. We should be creating "shipyards" in orbit, maybe even at L5 or L4 so they benefit from being farther up the gravity well. We could mine water on the moon, along with needed metals and whatever. Setting our sites on Mars too soon is going to leave us with an Apollo-esque hangover, where we don't begin colonizing the Red Planet in earnest for another hundred years anyhow, so why be in a big rush?
I think the "send robots" contingent is mostly right: there is no reason to have humans there, unless you send them to live there. Solar System Tourism should NOT be part of NASA's mandate... they should be focused on doing good science and creating a viable infrastructure that we can build on for the next few centuries instead.
So, I say...
Start robot-mining on Luna, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Mars for sure, and maybe Venus and Mercury when the technology becomes a little more sturdy. Setting up operations in the asteroid belt would be smart too.
I don't think you got modded down for having a dissenting opinion, I think you got modded down for bringing up a subject which was only tangentially related to the "PS2 for Iraqis" story. As much as I agree with the main points of your original post, I've found the tolerence for political discourse on this site to be minimal: geeks either don't want to talk about politics (as they conceive it... mostly US-centric, of course), or they are fiercely right-libertarian and couldn't care less about other societies, just intellectual rights, crypto, OpenSource, etc.. Starvation, human rights violations, and genocide are not welcome topics for discussion.
So let me know if you find a site that tolerates both technology and social discourse on the human condition... cos it aint Slashdot. Look at all the slagging Katz gets for talking about things that don't require tech knowledge.
From what I saw of the Roton project, it always looked like a winner: low cost, reusable, and based on a simple (if not conventional) principle. I'm not saying that it's the BEST solution, and I'm sure plenty of right-wing "the invisible hand of the free market is never wrong" crew will tell me different, but I'd like to see more diversity of vision in this field.
I mean, using rotating wings to maneuver in the atmosphere is hardly revolutionary, it just hasn't been applied to (sub)orbital craft. And $150 for the whole project? That's not exactly a lot of money. I guess the investment climate is pretty chilly, or maybe the execs didn't market effectively, but there should be SOMEONE in this world with the vision and cash to back this thing. I mean, Gates could stand to gamble a quarter Bil on extending his monopoly into orbit (oh, right, he already has).
Of course, I always preferred the idea to use a mountain near the equator to launch vehicles in an evacuated magnetic catapult, but with more variety in engineering solutions the more lessons we'll learn.
Cheaper, lighter, simpler. Even if it does flop, it still beats the hell out of the Shuttle.
I agree that a lot of people who keep their kids home to "educate" them themselves are pretty marginal and weird. And that a borderline bi-polar mom becoming the focus of her kid's life 24/7 is not a good thing.
But what is wrong with secular humanism? People can worship or not worship whatever they like in their religious communities, but to complain that kids aren't being properly indoctrinated into one religious tradition or another in the public educational system is a little hypocritical. I don't buy the argument that secular education destroys or diminishes the value of religious convictions. I would prefer to see religion taught at home and in the community, not in state-funded institutions.
My main problem with your position though, is that you think interacting with "peers" is a purely positive thing. I would argue that the artificial way we stratify peer groups damages society: how can kids identify with the wider social context when the only culture they know comes from what is popular within their own age group (+/- one year)? What is wrong with kids socializing with younger and older humans, and hearing the stories of a wider group? I think a lot of youth culture's shallowness has to do with the lack of any foundation: each generation leaves nothing behind, because they have no ties to the generation before or after them. The "generation gap" is precisely that: a chasm between humans based solely on when they were born, seperating them from the experiences of others who may have similar interests, values, and problems and forcing them to surrender to the elitist power structures that function even in the lower grades. (being a reject from the system, I have seen first hand what happens when you don't "fit in"... and the former bullies are always the first to complain "What are they whining about? EVERYONE gets teased, it's no big deal.")
I would think geeks in particular can see how damaging this is: do you think that a 12 year old, a 16 year old, and a 20 year old are ever going to be able to make a connection and interact in a positive way? No, because we actively discourage children from interacting with other age groups (both younger and older) for fear of the things that we were too afraid to educate them about in the first place (ie: sex, drugs, crime, etc.). I think kids have a lot to contribute to society, but we force them to take a passive role, denying them a voice in the media and society in general.
Of course, all this makes them much easier to market to, to control and pacify via the culture of conspicuous consumption, and we even play them against their parents, teachers, and other authority figures to "win them over" to our commercial messages. You should be more concerned about the culture of alienation that our school systems are reinforcing than what kids are (or are not) being taught in class, or what they're being taught at home.
According to someone who does phone support on a contract with NetZero, they have to constantly change their software to stay ahead of the banner ad cracks. Well, not ahead of the cracking, per se, more the APPEARANCE of cracking, in that they don't want their advertisers (who are quite happy forking out cash to NetZero per ad viewed) from getting wind of what is really an inevitable result: people will abuse this stuff, because they can and it's easy.
This has the unavoidable effect of screwing over the less with-it customers of NetZero, who get caught in the "I upgraded to 3.1, but it doesn't work, and I can't go back to 3.0, so what do I do?" They used to tell people to re-install Bindows... until they realized that most people will be completely up the creek, without disks to reinstall their appz.
So now they just pass the buck and pretend there is not problem. Which is hard when you a) can't get a net connection anymore, b) don't have any alternate connection, and c) don't have the original software on disk. And they don't want to send out thousands of CDs to people, either.
I'm just glad I don't have to do phone support for these boneheads.
I kinda think that if anybody was out of line and tried to shut down Slashdot, there would be some mysterious and completely untraceable attacks launched on the parties involved.
Then there would be a "it's not our fault, we don't condone, we implore the parties responsible, blah blah blah" statement from Slashdot.
But by that point, people might start to get the point that you can't stop a determined and capable population of geeks with threats of litigation. At some point, lawyers will be pissing themselves at the thought of incurring the Wrath of A Thousand Cruel and Faceless SysAdmins.
Forget Fight Club. Terrorism doesn't require explosives. Just maniacs with a common goal.
Slashdot Mirror
In this feedback-based system, the more companies that notice somebody is getting away with something (eg: patents that are blantantly obvious gambits for market dominance) the more instances you will find of this behaviour. They all drive for the gap in the wall with whatever they can scrounge up, hoping to make it before the lights come on. So it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Why? Because "the system" learns. The sight of somebody getting away with looting an unprotected store during a riot is all the incentive you need to draw others into that activity. And the process of applying for patents (along with the other legal forms of attack on the common good) is not set up to handle the kind of things it has to. So it fails to effectively discern between patents of value and mere speculation. Stopping it is going to be painful, costly, and drawn out. The companies who will get hurt aren't the ones who have already done their thing, but the blundering morons to come.
The side-effect of all this happening is that by fighting to gain the legal high ground based on Intellectual Property, Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents, we end up with a society that is being transformed at the very foundations: language. We are all victims, even the people in these corporations, of an undermining public speech. Holding back medecine from those who need it, holding back innovation because it isn't in the interest of the shareholders, forcing the market to bend to their will because they have the endorsement of what is supposed to be an organ of democracy.
This will continue as long as we allow it to.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
There are a lot conceptual and practical issues to be dealt with when designing an information resource that is supposed to have value over an extended period. In this vein, what efforts have been directed towards understanding strategic issues like:
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
In particular, the span of time between the first Mechwarrior and MWII was unbelievable. I've liked the other MWs, and even MechCommander (with all its faults), but I've never had the game I've always wanted from them. I wanted depth, role playing, and something other than "this time your in your mech and...". What about the people? What about the world around you? Is everything a fucking target, or what? At least in MW you could choose what planet you went to and sell mechs... the merest hint of a wider universe against which the game was played. In the newer stuff? Nothing.
And the Clans suck. Mostly. Deus ex Machina for the Inner Sphere stalemate. Nice try. What next? Aliens?
In the end, it doesn't matter to most of us who played, I think. Regretfully, I have no time for games anymore.
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Such wisdom from someone so young.
This has gone too far, but it's just getting started. How long until changing your phenotype becomes a fashionable, and seasonal thing?
"My, aren't Mildred's antennae fashion-forward?"
"Yes. But her husband's goat legs are so retro. Was he born in the 90's or something?"
Face it. We are slaves three times over:
- slaves to our lifestyles(earn/spend social programming)
- slaves to our brains(ego/emotion firmware)
- slaves to our meat(DNA hard-wired instincts)
The big problem is, this is the shit that's going to make nuclear power and information technology look sick. And we're playing with it like it's fucking Lego.Who is going to take responsibility for the monsters? Nobody. When are we going to collectively grow up? Maybe never. Frankenstein was a self-obsessed ego maniac with no compassion for his creation. He was trying to show how far he could push his knowledge. He wanted to create life so he could become a god.
Life is not a toy. What is bio-tech?
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
So to use the phrase "big bad corporation" is a sign that we have not identified the problem. The issue isn't the fact that there is a thing called a corporation, it's that there is an entire culture within and without the people of that corporation that compels them to behave a certain way. Success these days is getting harder to measure, if the dot-com stupidity is any kind of lesson. The mantra of "value for shareholders" belies a simplistic conception of the relationships that exist between the people in the company and the people outside of it.
As much as PR people would like you to believe there is such thing as The Authoritative Voice of The Company, there is only inhuman propaganda that seeks to distort facts to its advantage. Every one of them is just fulfilling a role that is expected of a "professional", and nobody cares about anything outside of that because it isn't their job to. Ethics, in the greater sense, is dead.
Frivilous lawsuits are a behaviour, and one that the system rewards on a daily basis. Law is the new battleground, where only ideas matter, and actual physical assets are secondary. To buy a word is insanity (I want "the"), but we are edging closer and closer to that insanity every day. I wouldn't fault etoy for attacking eToys, they are just following Sun Tzu's advice: "attack where you are strong and the enemy is weak".
The ability to abstract is important. The inability to see things for what they are is killing us. We believe anything that confirms our previous views. We disbelieve anything that requires introspection, dialogue, and genuine selflessness to explore.
Corporations are the new power in the world. Forget about what you've been told about democracy: the power to direct the energy of the human population lies in the hands of the elite. This has been true for thousands of years, and has never been otherwise (except for a brief time in Spain...). The fact that one class of elite has been usurped by another, over and over, century after century, is just detail. The new elite is establishing itself on the amoral ground of Law, and this is where the power will flow from.
From Antigua, from Singapore, from offshore. The fight is not with each other (ie: company A vs. company B), but for the dominance of the new paradigm: the corporate "We" over the democratic "We".
Play the game. Surrender to your greed, your hate. Join the Dark Side. You have no idea of its power...
We thieves, we liars, we vandals, and poets. Networked agents of Cthulhu Borealis.
Then this. Wow.
The idea of getting UNOPENED games seems slightly pornographic, but even better are those sweet Atari t-shirts. I'm all over that. And my girlfriend is gonna freak when she gets a Pac-man t-shirt for her birthday.
Thank you geeks!
The head geek at a notorious gaming company I used to work at got a BIG FAT kiss off. They gave him pretty much everything he asked for, and he asked for a LOT. He even asked for the hundred-odd AAA batteries he had in his office (I think it was for a Palm or something).
A not-so-31337 geek left the same company about a month later. They sat down and asked him what he expected in his severance package. He said "I think I'm worth around half of what [head geek] got."
They laughed him out of the room. Laughed out loud. I believe he got SFA for a package, as a matter of fact.
What have we learned here? That people who can help you the most, that are the most valuable to you as partners, are the ones you try REALLY hard to keep happy when they leave. Because they know your secrets. And they probably went to school on how NOT to run a company by watching you (the management) fuck up over and over again...
The non-obvious importance is that we can start "growing" meat and other kinds of animal tissue (perhaps vegetable as well?) on an industrial scale...
It won't be a hundred years before we stop raising cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. and start eating artificial food that can be engineered to spec. I'm sure it would be more efficient from a thermodynamic viewpoint.
The bad news is that the rich will live forever. The good news is that you won't have to eat tofu.
You're warm. It *does* have something to do with it being harder to read...
In olden days, when English was emerging from its Germanic roots, the first person pronoun "ich" was shortened to "i". But this was a problem, since people spelled words in a really weird way: they seperated syllables with a space. So "i" was just left there in this stream of short letter groups, and could easily be mistaken for part of another word. They adopted the capitalization rule so it would stand out more.
Periods go outside of parens if what is inside is not a complete sentence (not an extra comment). (This, for example is a complete sentence in parentheses.)
And as for "supressed", I should also have said "I am a writer": my own mistakes are often invisible to me. Which is what gives me the sense of shame and guilt I need to edit.
i'll give a lollipop to the first person who can tell me the correct reason why "I" is the only pronoun that is always capitalized.
I think this story would make a good movie: it's filled with potential for cool visuals, and it only needs a handful of actors. Perfect.
The only problem is that putting big name actors in it will ruin it fer sure.
You are correct that semicolons should always go outside of quotation marks, but contrary to what others may tell you, there is no general rule about puntuation going inside or outside. Your use should depend on a couple of factors: whether you use "American style" or British, and whether the material in quotation marks is, in fact, a quote of some sort.
If the material is being quoted from an original source, and that source contains punctuation, then the Brits would put it inside (unless its a colon or semicolon, in which case it is supressed). Otherwise, it goes outside.
The Yanks ALWAYS put periods and commas before terminal quotation marks, and other punctuation after, unless they are part of a quote. (You can see how the American style is simply the British style with a special case for "." and ",".)
So to reiterate: NOBODY puts ":" or ";" inside quotation marks. Except us anarchists in Canada, and especially writers from B.C..) ;P
IAAE. (I am an editor.) Our next lesson will review the use of punctuation in parentheses.
And as for the aforementioned "first gen" slagging: it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good, and in your hands. I could have a lot of fun with one of these, and I doubt there will be much better for the next 18 months.
The question isn't *if* these guys are going to get rich (they might, they might not), but who is going to be the first to do it right.
Forget about "legality". There are ways around that, and to start off with, nobody will notice this shit building in the background. Not until there is a huge splash in the press about some mum who thinks her kid is becoming obsessed (...blah blah blah: you should all know the pattern by now). By the time that there is a move control it through special legislation, it will have become too popular to stop by fiat. Besides, with servers in Antigua, who gives a fsck what the Americans think?
So the issues to be addressed are: what business models to use, what kind of games are most "immersive"/addictive, and can you turn this kind of thing into (virtual) reality TV? I mean, once you have "star" players and teams, will people be interested enough to either lurk and watch the pros at work, or sit back and watch it on cable with some popcorn. The potential for drama and soap-opera appeal should NOT be underestimated here.
Personally, I want the Mechwarrior universe online, with battles on Solaris and House feuds, etc. Any genre is open for exploitation here, with its own audience. Gamblers and cheaters will just add spice. (besides, if you're a smart game service, you HIRE the cheaters to work FOR you).
Give it time. It'll happen. And don't worry about all the naysayers. They don't understand what's happening here.
And since the US government is pretty firmly in the pocket of corporate interest, there isn't going to be a lot anybody can do about that. Sit back and wait, kids.
Unless and until (ie: never) MS puts out an OS that is cheap/free, open (or mostly so), and much more geared to security and maintainability (as opposed to backwards compatibility with dumb MS decisions of the past decade), they will HAVE to spend money to keep market share.
Those who know will make up their own minds about the relative merits of this OS vs. that OS. The truly enlightened will even use MS products in their proper place. Nobody but executives cares about what marketing says. And even they are starting to see why "free as in beer" makes a lot of sense.
Now, if we could only beat into their tiny minds why the other "free" has a place in industry, too...
I suppose tidal forces (from both planet and star) might make this a short-lived orbit.
Seriously, if there is going to be ANY regulation of the kind he envisions (and I am all for authentication, tracability, and holding the editors accountable for their content), it would have to be the result of a global/multinational concensus. I doubt the U.N. is up to it, and I don't know what organization could even begin approach the problem.
So it's pretty much DIW until we have an international IT standards committee. But I doubt the Americans are likely to go along with losing control of "their" Internet.
The only workable solution is a community-based one; like the moderation/"consumer reports"/vetting models already suggested. Many bottom-up solutions to this (pretty) well-defined problem would be more organic and less likely to fail, because of the decentralized nature of the process of consensus.
I realize that in any attempt to "regulate" content on the Net that there would be a normalizing effect which would marginalize some speech (even on Slashdot), but making information obscure isn't the same as banning or destroying it. And letting the people on the margins talk shit is small price to pay for an Open Society.
I am reminded of an exchange I had with a senior Journalism prof from the University of British Columbia last year at the launch of the "Journalism in the New Millennium" book. She said that the growth of Net journalism had caused a shocking drop in the standards of writing and editing, which made the entire profession look bad. I asked her what was wrong with people practicing their craft in the public eye, and making a fool of themselves? Did she want to restrict speech to those with professional certification? She looked shocked that I could even ask such a question, and her lack of a response said to me that she had never thought of the problem that way. (I do distinctly recall someone in the small Chapters crowd cheering my question with a "yeah!"... so at least one of other shit disturber was at the event.)
I think the real problem she and others in her profession have with this trend is that it points out how UNRELIABLE even the most "professional" sources can be. The public would soon learn that they can't believe everything they read, which would be disastrous for writers who have come to rely on the Voice of Authority alone, and have forgotten how to properly source and fact-check.
I would further argue that a "standards-less" Internet would force an evolution of humanity, since people would either learn to be critical, learn how to balance conflicting reports, or they would just give up and take themselves out of the loop. The wilderness of the Web would reveal to us the true diversity of human thought--from the arcane, to the mundane, to the absurd--and force us to see the same Big Picture.
It is the promise of the next stage in Human consciousness, moving away from idealism and utopianism, towards a more functional approach of scepticism, dialectic, and imagination: using the opposition of memes to resolve contradictions and point the way to new areas of inquiry.
To me, certainty is death. Control is an illusion. Give up and accept that THERE IS NO SIGNAL, just amplified noise that's been passed through a filter. My credo has always been "Truth is built one lie at a time." Who can say that we don't learn more from exloring fiction than from sticking to the facts?
The one-shot approach to interplanetary travel is dumb. We should be creating "shipyards" in orbit, maybe even at L5 or L4 so they benefit from being farther up the gravity well. We could mine water on the moon, along with needed metals and whatever. Setting our sites on Mars too soon is going to leave us with an Apollo-esque hangover, where we don't begin colonizing the Red Planet in earnest for another hundred years anyhow, so why be in a big rush?
I think the "send robots" contingent is mostly right: there is no reason to have humans there, unless you send them to live there. Solar System Tourism should NOT be part of NASA's mandate... they should be focused on doing good science and creating a viable infrastructure that we can build on for the next few centuries instead.
So, I say... Start robot-mining on Luna, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, Mars for sure, and maybe Venus and Mercury when the technology becomes a little more sturdy. Setting up operations in the asteroid belt would be smart too.
So let me know if you find a site that tolerates both technology and social discourse on the human condition... cos it aint Slashdot. Look at all the slagging Katz gets for talking about things that don't require tech knowledge.
I mean, using rotating wings to maneuver in the atmosphere is hardly revolutionary, it just hasn't been applied to (sub)orbital craft. And $150 for the whole project? That's not exactly a lot of money. I guess the investment climate is pretty chilly, or maybe the execs didn't market effectively, but there should be SOMEONE in this world with the vision and cash to back this thing. I mean, Gates could stand to gamble a quarter Bil on extending his monopoly into orbit (oh, right, he already has).
Of course, I always preferred the idea to use a mountain near the equator to launch vehicles in an evacuated magnetic catapult, but with more variety in engineering solutions the more lessons we'll learn.
Cheaper, lighter, simpler. Even if it does flop, it still beats the hell out of the Shuttle.
But what is wrong with secular humanism? People can worship or not worship whatever they like in their religious communities, but to complain that kids aren't being properly indoctrinated into one religious tradition or another in the public educational system is a little hypocritical. I don't buy the argument that secular education destroys or diminishes the value of religious convictions. I would prefer to see religion taught at home and in the community, not in state-funded institutions.
My main problem with your position though, is that you think interacting with "peers" is a purely positive thing. I would argue that the artificial way we stratify peer groups damages society: how can kids identify with the wider social context when the only culture they know comes from what is popular within their own age group (+/- one year)? What is wrong with kids socializing with younger and older humans, and hearing the stories of a wider group? I think a lot of youth culture's shallowness has to do with the lack of any foundation: each generation leaves nothing behind, because they have no ties to the generation before or after them. The "generation gap" is precisely that: a chasm between humans based solely on when they were born, seperating them from the experiences of others who may have similar interests, values, and problems and forcing them to surrender to the elitist power structures that function even in the lower grades. (being a reject from the system, I have seen first hand what happens when you don't "fit in"... and the former bullies are always the first to complain "What are they whining about? EVERYONE gets teased, it's no big deal.")
I would think geeks in particular can see how damaging this is: do you think that a 12 year old, a 16 year old, and a 20 year old are ever going to be able to make a connection and interact in a positive way? No, because we actively discourage children from interacting with other age groups (both younger and older) for fear of the things that we were too afraid to educate them about in the first place (ie: sex, drugs, crime, etc.). I think kids have a lot to contribute to society, but we force them to take a passive role, denying them a voice in the media and society in general.
Of course, all this makes them much easier to market to, to control and pacify via the culture of conspicuous consumption, and we even play them against their parents, teachers, and other authority figures to "win them over" to our commercial messages. You should be more concerned about the culture of alienation that our school systems are reinforcing than what kids are (or are not) being taught in class, or what they're being taught at home.
This has the unavoidable effect of screwing over the less with-it customers of NetZero, who get caught in the "I upgraded to 3.1, but it doesn't work, and I can't go back to 3.0, so what do I do?" They used to tell people to re-install Bindows... until they realized that most people will be completely up the creek, without disks to reinstall their appz.
So now they just pass the buck and pretend there is not problem. Which is hard when you a) can't get a net connection anymore, b) don't have any alternate connection, and c) don't have the original software on disk. And they don't want to send out thousands of CDs to people, either.
I'm just glad I don't have to do phone support for these boneheads.
Then there would be a "it's not our fault, we don't condone, we implore the parties responsible, blah blah blah" statement from Slashdot.
But by that point, people might start to get the point that you can't stop a determined and capable population of geeks with threats of litigation. At some point, lawyers will be pissing themselves at the thought of incurring the Wrath of A Thousand Cruel and Faceless SysAdmins.
Forget Fight Club. Terrorism doesn't require explosives. Just maniacs with a common goal.