I have to ask, why does someone need an outlet for killing people. The idea that we need such an outlet is a sign of serious problems in our society, and I am starting the beleive that our media is a big part of the problem.
You see, violence (or rather the desire to apply it) is a natural human instinct which people have been able to suppress in our "civilised" society. It's not a thing created by the media, nor is it possible to get rid of it for ever.
Although just anecdotal, I can tell you that I'm not a violent person in the least - but there have been a few times (two) where I've actually wanted to kill people, yes, and in gruesome ways at that. Luckily, I am able to not do that. Partly since our society has taught us killing is wrong and set up punishment for it, and partly because it really is a bad thing to do - considering the people left behind.
Some people don't have the mental blocks to stop them, and go about killing people. Klebold/Harris comes to mind, and I've been thinking; had they not been able to separate reality from fiction they would not have killed themselves. I think people in situations like this kill themselves because they know they'll get caught (or shot) in the end, and choose to end it themselves to be sure to die without pain. Regret might also be in the mix somewhere. One thing is certain, though: They knew they had killed real people with real lives, not characters in a game.
My point is that you can't get rid of violence. You can't have good without the bad. It's funny, since I'm really a "hippie" peace-and-love kinda guy, but with added realism. There can never be all love all the time. We sure as hell could make more good and less bad though. Bad seems to be stronger these days.
find it even more disturbing that someone would think being arrest for killing a person is a petty quarrel.
A bit too tongue-in-cheek for you? Lighten up, my friend!
[...] when we "try" to emulate the real world so that the breaking of the law is very close, as society, we need to step in a stop this. It sends the wrong message.
Mr. Thompson? Jack? Is that you?
You can have your cute games with their colored walls. I think what the "realistic" games do is allow an outlet for things that should not be let out in public. Like killing people, or walking around randomly pissing on folks. It's safer to do it in-game, and you also avoid running into petty quarrels with those law enforcement people.
I support the idea that the parents are ultimately responsible for what input their kids recieve in the fragile little minds of theirs. There will always be people doing bad things because - well, they do bad things. The reasons are many and complicated, but games (as TV before them) are not the one and only cause of this. A catalyst, perhaps, not the reason.
Another SVI user:) My first computer was the SVI-738. Microsoft Disk Basic 1.0, baby. Disk Basic 'cause it had an internal 3.5" floppy! I didn't know it at the time, but understood it immediately after I heard it; the MSX machines are apparently considered as having the best arcade conversions out there. And man, were the games good.
I just (today) inherited a TRS-80 Model 100 (the portable one). Don't know if I'll keep it or just throw it away... It'll fit nicely in with the 738 and the SparcStation Classic:)
Sure, but the bible also has quite a number of passages in it where the slaying of non-believers is preached. Even the most radical right-wing Christians in the US (and other places) don't follow this, however much they want to deep down inside.
Because there are consequences to them for doing so. In radical Islamic countries, there is no such consequence - you might be applauded for executing such a feat as killing a Christian or Jew.
"If you had been Danish, we'd kill you." - some Lebanese protester to a Norwegian journalist.
Also, correct me if i'm wrong, but they are angry cause they cartoons are depicting Muhammad as a terrorist among one of the cartoons correct?
Correct. The caricatures depict Islam as a hateful, intolerant and violent religion.
Of course, they (the vocal, radical few) protest by burning buildings, killing and issuing bounties on people, and generally cause riot.
The problem is that while Islam as practised by the majority of Muslims is peaceful and tolerant, countries like Iran - which has been governed by radical priests for too long - have been brainwashed and now live in a cultural age resembling our middle ages.
They have stayed like this for so long, I don't think they even understand the concept of free speech and why it's such a great thing. They retaliate with action, not words, because of this. It's all about showing strength in numbers and loudness.
The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers.
Networking Company: "Hey, you better start paying us for using our lines!" Google: "But we already pay for using your lines!" NC: "But we never anticipated you'd be using them for business! Pay more! Besides, you use too much bandwidth!" Google: "We're paying you to use your bandwidth already!" NC: "But we didn't think you'd use that much! Pay more or see yourselves offline!"
Is this the gist of it? The NC's are just getting greedy? I would think the cost of maintenance/upgrades were covered in the fees companies already pay?
Sometimes I'm very glad I live in a country with fewer inhabitants than some of the USA's larger cities:)
Although there was a slow uptake of DSL in the beginning, the infrastructure is now very good - everyone but the most remotely located people (think the appalachian mountains) can get it.
I think it's because of this we enjoy uncapped, fixed-rate DSL. As far as I know not one single ISP throttles any kind of traffic. The lines generally work at the speed they're advertised. I know they do in my neighborhood, and most people keep their lines quite saturated, I tell ya.
Once, a few years ago, the largest provider decided to apply traffic-based pricing. Everyone in the business was baffled. I was not surprised - ever since they got listed on NASDAQ, their business practices has become more and more "US corporation"-like. You know what I mean - it's what you're talking about right here - exploitation and general ass-fucking of customers for the shareholders' benefit. It lasted about six months before they went back to fixed rates.
Same here, the tabs was the feature that sold me (and all the others I've shown it to and installed it for). although Opera had them, there was something about the Opera UI that I disliked (and still do - it's too cluttered!)
I don't use many extensions (AdBlock, FilterSet.G, BugMeNot, Aardvark and Download Statusbar) but I like the feature. What makes me keep using it still is its exceptional standards compliance. And it's FAST!
It is said that the KHTML rendering engine is better (and it does render the Acid2 test correctly) but Konqueror is just sooooo daaaaamn slooooow...
On a side note, I hope - oh $deity I hope, that IE 7 will be able to read application/xhtml+xml... As a web developer obsessed with standards, and after having read the XHTML 1.1 Strict / CSS2 specs religiously, I've quit bugfixing my CSS and XHTML just to cater to the IE lusers. It's just too much damn work! If they want to view my pages, they should get a decent browser, and they're told so when they come to the site.
You're correct, in that graphic artists should save images as JPEG using "save as..." and 90% quality or so. But "Save for web" is not made for large photos or print material.
The really, really nice thing about "Save for web..." is that, for the web designer, you can see exactly what the compression does before you save it, and it has superb tweaking options for the end result to be the perfect compromise between size and looks. The result need not be crap, you just have to know what you're doing.
If a graphic designer uses "save for web" in the way I think you mean ("gee, i'm uploading this to a web site, so I should use save for web, right?"), they should really read more Photoshop documentation.
Somehow I assume you know this already, and that I'm just preaching to the congregation here... oh well.
On a side note, I try out the Gimp once in a while, but I can never seem to get around the interface. I know that's because I've been using PS since version 3, and the workflow of Gimp is just different.
Still, some of the ways of doing things in the Gimp seems cumbersome and unnecessary. I'm talking about selections, copy/paste etc. And can you actually use polygonal selection in the Gimp? If it's there, I haven't found it. And that's the tool I use the most in PS.
Sure, magnetic lasso and freehand selection is fine, but there's nothing like the accuracy of zooming in to 600% or more to cut something out pixel by pixel by pixel:)
Most, at least here in Norway. My K750 uses USB, no worries. Without USB, can't your phones send pictures via Bluetooth?
Are the cell providers in the US completely destroying the original phone software to prohibit copying? I hear many can't put MP3's to/from their phones without going through some DRM-adding crap software. The Scandinavian firmware for the SE K750 allows _everything_ - silent camera use (not allowed some places. UK?), copying of MP3's (albeit not those downloaded from SE themselves), multiple Bluetooth connections etc.
Newer phones like the SonyEricsson K750 are usually XHTML-compatible. The T630 was in theory but had some but causing it to not understand anything of it. Specific WAP pages are a hassle and not as pretty (although pretty is not the number one concern when surfing on such a small screen).
On the K750 I get the standard XHTML version of Gmail and Personalised Home. It works great, even on such a small screen.
As has been said over and over and over again by quite a few people on/. in the many ID debates: Maintaining a belief is not incompatible with being well educated, logical and analytical.
Quoth Albert Einstein (again): "God does not play dice".
Disclaimer: I do not partake in any religion, and I'm not fond of how ID is being tried shoehorned into the school system. But neither am I an atheist; I'm agnostic. The concept of ID itself is, at best, a philosophical mindtwister. The problem as I see it is that the way ID is presented by the proponents is one-sided, and it appears as just another means to push the belief that "The One True God, Thy Lord" created this hole mess a few thousand years ago.
What about people believing that our souls are parts of the universe learning about itself? Or that The Flying Spaghetti Monster is here with his all-encompassing Noodly Appendage? Karma?
Or if I seriously believed that a giant rubber ducky created the universe by way of a purposeful squeak? And that we're all guided by His Quacks, they're just so loud we don't hear them? It's all valid ID beliefs, but they're just that - beliefs.
A good scientist will not let his beliefs get in the way of finding Truth. Should the newfound Truth disagree with what he believed, a true scientist would adjust those beliefs. Just as the religious majority was in time forced to acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun.
Frr writes to tell us that CNN has a rather disturbing confirmation of what many of us have already seen in practice.
From my point of view, based not only on reading Slashdot but other sites also, there has been a noticeable degradation in literacy over the past five to six years. The fact that new (uid 500K up) users are younger than us "old farts" (and looking at my uid I'm not that much of an oldie here) is not an excuse.
It has been ranted about too many times to mention, but the articulation in comments on this site are, I think, a good indication of the literacy of people in general. Many younger people just don't understand basic grammar! Exempli gratia: The use of the apostrophe to omit letters from a combination and contraction of words; the you're/your error, they're/there et cetera.
I'm not saying it's the individual's fault. I personally think it's a combination of unskilled and unmotivated teachers, laziness and distraction. The USA is not the only country with this problem; Norway, where I live, is in my opinion following the exact same path of degradation. Kids here often make mistakes in applying certain grammatical rules. A certain sound, even, is fast disappearing from the language (for you Norwegians out there: og/å errors, the "kj" sound).
I've resigned and begun to accept this as a natural evolving of the languages in question, but I'm still quite opposed to it and wish everybody could just use proper grammar. Old fart syndrome, that.
Before you start your flaming, let me just say that I know my English is not impeccable, nor will it ever be, but I dare say I write more correctly than some Americans and Englishmen out there. At least I know the difference between there, they're and their.
Lol, until I got DSL again three months ago, I browsed slashdot via cell-phone dial-up (9600 Kbps baby!) and later via GPRS on the same phone (38400 Kbps baby).
I thanked His Holyness The FSM that Slashdot is mostly text:)
Slashdot Mirror
Although just anecdotal, I can tell you that I'm not a violent person in the least - but there have been a few times (two) where I've actually wanted to kill people, yes, and in gruesome ways at that. Luckily, I am able to not do that. Partly since our society has taught us killing is wrong and set up punishment for it, and partly because it really is a bad thing to do - considering the people left behind.
Some people don't have the mental blocks to stop them, and go about killing people. Klebold/Harris comes to mind, and I've been thinking; had they not been able to separate reality from fiction they would not have killed themselves. I think people in situations like this kill themselves because they know they'll get caught (or shot) in the end, and choose to end it themselves to be sure to die without pain. Regret might also be in the mix somewhere. One thing is certain, though: They knew they had killed real people with real lives, not characters in a game.
My point is that you can't get rid of violence. You can't have good without the bad. It's funny, since I'm really a "hippie" peace-and-love kinda guy, but with added realism. There can never be all love all the time. We sure as hell could make more good and less bad though. Bad seems to be stronger these days.
A bit too tongue-in-cheek for you? Lighten up, my friend!Mr. Thompson? Jack? Is that you?
You can have your cute games with their colored walls. I think what the "realistic" games do is allow an outlet for things that should not be let out in public. Like killing people, or walking around randomly pissing on folks. It's safer to do it in-game, and you also avoid running into petty quarrels with those law enforcement people.
I support the idea that the parents are ultimately responsible for what input their kids recieve in the fragile little minds of theirs. There will always be people doing bad things because - well, they do bad things. The reasons are many and complicated, but games (as TV before them) are not the one and only cause of this. A catalyst, perhaps, not the reason.
Another SVI user :) My first computer was the SVI-738. Microsoft Disk Basic 1.0, baby. Disk Basic 'cause it had an internal 3.5" floppy! I didn't know it at the time, but understood it immediately after I heard it; the MSX machines are apparently considered as having the best arcade conversions out there. And man, were the games good.
:)
I just (today) inherited a TRS-80 Model 100 (the portable one). Don't know if I'll keep it or just throw it away... It'll fit nicely in with the 738 and the SparcStation Classic
Lol! Victor Buono! Victor Buono MP3 on 356 Days Project (scroll a bit down)
Sure, but the bible also has quite a number of passages in it where the slaying of non-believers is preached. Even the most radical right-wing Christians in the US (and other places) don't follow this, however much they want to deep down inside.
Because there are consequences to them for doing so. In radical Islamic countries, there is no such consequence - you might be applauded for executing such a feat as killing a Christian or Jew.
"If you had been Danish, we'd kill you." - some Lebanese protester to a Norwegian journalist.
Correct. The caricatures depict Islam as a hateful, intolerant and violent religion.
Of course, they (the vocal, radical few) protest by burning buildings, killing and issuing bounties on people, and generally cause riot.
The problem is that while Islam as practised by the majority of Muslims is peaceful and tolerant, countries like Iran - which has been governed by radical priests for too long - have been brainwashed and now live in a cultural age resembling our middle ages.
They have stayed like this for so long, I don't think they even understand the concept of free speech and why it's such a great thing. They retaliate with action, not words, because of this. It's all about showing strength in numbers and loudness.
Yeah, but they don't burn down buildings and kill people and promise 5 Kg in gold for killing people related to the blasphemy.
Networking Company: "Hey, you better start paying us for using our lines!"
Google: "But we already pay for using your lines!"
NC: "But we never anticipated you'd be using them for business! Pay more! Besides, you use too much bandwidth!"
Google: "We're paying you to use your bandwidth already!"
NC: "But we didn't think you'd use that much! Pay more or see yourselves offline!"
Is this the gist of it? The NC's are just getting greedy? I would think the cost of maintenance/upgrades were covered in the fees companies already pay?
They do this just because they can, don't they?
Lol, New York then? Pardon my ignorance :) I really thought more cities had that large of a population.
Norway, pop. approx. 4,590,000 :)
Well they probably used the dinosaurs as babysitters!
Man, thanks a lot for that link - finally something interesting to read :)
Sometimes I'm very glad I live in a country with fewer inhabitants than some of the USA's larger cities :)
Although there was a slow uptake of DSL in the beginning, the infrastructure is now very good - everyone but the most remotely located people (think the appalachian mountains) can get it.
I think it's because of this we enjoy uncapped, fixed-rate DSL. As far as I know not one single ISP throttles any kind of traffic. The lines generally work at the speed they're advertised. I know they do in my neighborhood, and most people keep their lines quite saturated, I tell ya.
Once, a few years ago, the largest provider decided to apply traffic-based pricing. Everyone in the business was baffled. I was not surprised - ever since they got listed on NASDAQ, their business practices has become more and more "US corporation"-like. You know what I mean - it's what you're talking about right here - exploitation and general ass-fucking of customers for the shareholders' benefit. It lasted about six months before they went back to fixed rates.
This deserves a funny mod :)
Same here, the tabs was the feature that sold me (and all the others I've shown it to and installed it for). although Opera had them, there was something about the Opera UI that I disliked (and still do - it's too cluttered!)
I don't use many extensions (AdBlock, FilterSet.G, BugMeNot, Aardvark and Download Statusbar) but I like the feature. What makes me keep using it still is its exceptional standards compliance. And it's FAST!
It is said that the KHTML rendering engine is better (and it does render the Acid2 test correctly) but Konqueror is just sooooo daaaaamn slooooow...
On a side note, I hope - oh $deity I hope, that IE 7 will be able to read application/xhtml+xml... As a web developer obsessed with standards, and after having read the XHTML 1.1 Strict / CSS2 specs religiously, I've quit bugfixing my CSS and XHTML just to cater to the IE lusers. It's just too much damn work! If they want to view my pages, they should get a decent browser, and they're told so when they come to the site.
But I'm ranting, as always. Pardon.
You're correct, in that graphic artists should save images as JPEG using "save as..." and 90% quality or so. But "Save for web" is not made for large photos or print material.
:)
The really, really nice thing about "Save for web..." is that, for the web designer, you can see exactly what the compression does before you save it, and it has superb tweaking options for the end result to be the perfect compromise between size and looks. The result need not be crap, you just have to know what you're doing.
If a graphic designer uses "save for web" in the way I think you mean ("gee, i'm uploading this to a web site, so I should use save for web, right?"), they should really read more Photoshop documentation.
Somehow I assume you know this already, and that I'm just preaching to the congregation here... oh well.
On a side note, I try out the Gimp once in a while, but I can never seem to get around the interface. I know that's because I've been using PS since version 3, and the workflow of Gimp is just different.
Still, some of the ways of doing things in the Gimp seems cumbersome and unnecessary. I'm talking about selections, copy/paste etc. And can you actually use polygonal selection in the Gimp? If it's there, I haven't found it. And that's the tool I use the most in PS.
Sure, magnetic lasso and freehand selection is fine, but there's nothing like the accuracy of zooming in to 600% or more to cut something out pixel by pixel by pixel
Most, at least here in Norway. My K750 uses USB, no worries. Without USB, can't your phones send pictures via Bluetooth?
Are the cell providers in the US completely destroying the original phone software to prohibit copying? I hear many can't put MP3's to/from their phones without going through some DRM-adding crap software. The Scandinavian firmware for the SE K750 allows _everything_ - silent camera use (not allowed some places. UK?), copying of MP3's (albeit not those downloaded from SE themselves), multiple Bluetooth connections etc.
Newer phones like the SonyEricsson K750 are usually XHTML-compatible. The T630 was in theory but had some but causing it to not understand anything of it. Specific WAP pages are a hassle and not as pretty (although pretty is not the number one concern when surfing on such a small screen).
On the K750 I get the standard XHTML version of Gmail and Personalised Home. It works great, even on such a small screen.
It took me a minute to realise this is a satire site, and that I'd seen it sometime before. That scared me a bit.
'Cause it _is_ a joke, is it not?
Mod point! Mod point! My left pinkie for a frickin' mod point!
As has been said over and over and over again by quite a few people on /. in the many ID debates: Maintaining a belief is not incompatible with being well educated, logical and analytical.
Quoth Albert Einstein (again): "God does not play dice".
Disclaimer: I do not partake in any religion, and I'm not fond of how ID is being tried shoehorned into the school system. But neither am I an atheist; I'm agnostic. The concept of ID itself is, at best, a philosophical mindtwister. The problem as I see it is that the way ID is presented by the proponents is one-sided, and it appears as just another means to push the belief that "The One True God, Thy Lord" created this hole mess a few thousand years ago.
What about people believing that our souls are parts of the universe learning about itself? Or that The Flying Spaghetti Monster is here with his all-encompassing Noodly Appendage? Karma?
Or if I seriously believed that a giant rubber ducky created the universe by way of a purposeful squeak? And that we're all guided by His Quacks, they're just so loud we don't hear them? It's all valid ID beliefs, but they're just that - beliefs.
A good scientist will not let his beliefs get in the way of finding Truth. Should the newfound Truth disagree with what he believed, a true scientist would adjust those beliefs. Just as the religious majority was in time forced to acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun.
Now why did I just use my mod points for something else? You have good point in this comment and the grandparent.
In reply to myself, I realise my annoying nitpicking is not about illiteracy per se, but smaller grammar errors.
However, that's how it starts, people. Small grammar errors now, complete lack of understanding of the language in the future.
From my point of view, based not only on reading Slashdot but other sites also, there has been a noticeable degradation in literacy over the past five to six years. The fact that new (uid 500K up) users are younger than us "old farts" (and looking at my uid I'm not that much of an oldie here) is not an excuse.
It has been ranted about too many times to mention, but the articulation in comments on this site are, I think, a good indication of the literacy of people in general. Many younger people just don't understand basic grammar! Exempli gratia: The use of the apostrophe to omit letters from a combination and contraction of words; the you're/your error, they're/there et cetera.
I'm not saying it's the individual's fault. I personally think it's a combination of unskilled and unmotivated teachers, laziness and distraction. The USA is not the only country with this problem; Norway, where I live, is in my opinion following the exact same path of degradation. Kids here often make mistakes in applying certain grammatical rules. A certain sound, even, is fast disappearing from the language (for you Norwegians out there: og/å errors, the "kj" sound).
I've resigned and begun to accept this as a natural evolving of the languages in question, but I'm still quite opposed to it and wish everybody could just use proper grammar. Old fart syndrome, that.
Before you start your flaming, let me just say that I know my English is not impeccable, nor will it ever be, but I dare say I write more correctly than some Americans and Englishmen out there. At least I know the difference between there, they're and their.
Rant over. Let the flamewar commence!
Lol, until I got DSL again three months ago, I browsed slashdot via cell-phone dial-up (9600 Kbps baby!) and later via GPRS on the same phone (38400 Kbps baby).
:)
I thanked His Holyness The FSM that Slashdot is mostly text