There are far too many people who levelled their characters on their own who don't know how to play. True story: There was a level 60 druid in my guild who didn't know that druids had an aquatic or bear form. He never did the quests for them (and no, I have it on good authority from the people who leveled with him that the character wasn't bought or power-levelled).
Actually, it's worse than that. It's a blog that can't provide any actual evidence that anything they claim is true. As far as we know, the entire story is bogus because the blogger has provided nothing to prove that any of his claims are true.
As someone pointed out above, they actually do that, but it seems someone has managed to figure out the alternate IP addresses that they use to verify the search engine results and spoofed those as well.
It could be an ex-employee (either fired, quit, or possibly a contractor) who's sold the information to some black hats, or it could be any number of other things. There's money to be made by subverting Google's index, so you have to know that there are people working on ways to do so all the time.
I suppose that's because it's easy to make things worse, and difficult to make things better. Sweden's got a lot of stuff going for it beyond outlawing pimps and johns (though, that should be an effective tool that prostitutes can use against people who try to exploit them). They also have one the world's largest and most effective welfare systems which ensures that women are not forced to choose between prostitution and starvation. They have free education, a socialized medical system, and even free dental care for anyone under the age of 20.
It's not a simple problem to beat, but if what you say is true, then we should all be looking a little more closely at what Sweden's doing right.
As I understand it, the main benefits of legalizing prostitution is legal protection and economic prosperity for prostitutes. Why are these the main benefits? Because prohibition doesn't work. There are always going to be men who prefer to have sex with someone else rather masturbate, and they're going to be willing to pay for it. There's also likely to always be women who are willing to have sex for money.
You can't stop that exchange from occuring by making it illegal.
Now, I should also recognize that there are different "levels" of prostitution. The ones who are most likely to be dehumanized by their customers are the ones who hang around on street corners waiting for a John to pick them up. The least likely are the self-employed "escorts" who have a regular clientele.
I'm not sure if that indicates the same thing to you as it does to me. Making prostitution legal might actually make it less available to bad Johns who treat the women poorly. Why? Economic prosperity enhances the ability of the prostitute to refuse a client she dislikes because she is less desperate for the money. It also might reduce drug addiction problems among the poorest prostitutes, depending on how the regulations to govern prostitution were written.
In the end, it's a difficult problem because many people agree with you. They think that the law shouldn't allow something that we don't think is right to occur. I agree with you that sex is an intimacy that should be shared with someone you love, however, I also have to recognize that there are a lot of people who don't view it that way. I have to recognize that even though it's illegal, prostitution is a thriving industry everywhere. There are even Islamic prostitutes in places such as Iran where the punishment for being caught is death. Of course, if the alternative to being stoned for prostitution is dying of starvation, at least you have a chance against the morality police.
The most fundamental aspect of the prostitution problem is probably this: If prostitution is the last thing a woman wants to end up doing, then by making it illegal you force any woman who would become a prostitute into this choice: Become a criminal or die.
Actually, I think that's a nonstandard viewpoint. One the Catholicism and Christianity are actively fighting as it lessens God's role in the universe. If I remember correctly it is explicitly considered heretical. It even has a name, it's called Deism. And it's the belief that there is a creator god, but that he or she is dead, gone or refusing to meddle in his (or her) creation. That belief is essentially compatible with atheism, the atheist and the deist may disagree over where it was God or nature that started the ball rolling, but it's really a minor disagreement compared to the disagreements they have with everyone else.
The problem with a Christian Deist is that an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good being has no reason to create a universe that contains evil. He's omnipotent and omniscient, therefore he knows the way to reach whatever goal he wishes to reach without the existence of evil and the power to do it the way he wants to. But that's just the basic counter-evidence that Christianity, in particular, is wrong about God.
The majority of Christians seem to believe in a God who controls everyone except for themselves to form a sort of ad-lib play where they're the add-libbing star and everyone else is following a script produced, written and directed by God. Actually, it's a little worse than that, they seem to think they're the only live person in a show of God's puppets. These are the people who believe in that greatest of conceits, that "everything happens for a reason" or "everything is part of God's plan".
I have to admit that it is impossible to prove that a powerful and intelligent being that does not interfere in our life does not exist outside the universe. However, I know of no religion that teaches that such a being exists. Certainly the Christian God is all-powerful, all-knowing and absolutely good, except when he's not and he interferes randomly and arbitrarily in the world.
Athiests are mostly against belief in the supernatural. We can't know for sure whether there's an afterlife because we're not dead, but we do know for sure that anyone who tells you there is an afterlife is lying about knowing that it exists, because they can't know either.
His one weakness being slow starts? I liked Judas Unchained, though it appears that he's writing a sequel (possibly a duology) set somewhere in the (far) future of the Commonwealth.
The guy's a solid science fiction author with sometimes amazing ideas on the possibilities of technology.
No, I'm afraid not. He's shameless agrandizing the company he helms because it's good for business to do so. He has no knowledge of the history of computing and doesn't care to learn it either. As far as he's concerned everything good is a result of Microsoft's hard work. Learning more about the actual history would only make it harder for him to say the things stuff like this with a straight face.
Oh that's easy. Paper trails are "bad" because people counting ballots are more expensive and less accurate than digital counting*.
* barring the presence of any bad actors in the simulation.
It's always the caveats that get you. See these guys are interested in "resilience against corruption". They're only interested in cheaper and more accurate because that's the only thing that supports their position.
I have to agree with you, the whole article screams "Industry Shills".
You could, but without the GPL I don't think open source would be as popular as it is. Companies are companies and by their very nature competitive not cooperative. So, without a legal framework to force them to share with others, they will avoid doing so. Why? Because some middle-manager will say "No, that's our IP now, we're not sharing it with anybody we don't have to" and he'd be right, the company has to worry about competitors and potential competitors. They have to worry about the guy who will be more selfish then them and simply take their competitive advantages and give nothing in return. The GPL is all about making sure that all companies have to share their "improvements" to open source software with the world, rather than simply taking the code and letting the improvements moulder in the darkness. This both benefits and hinders companies but, perhaps more importantly, it forces every company to play by the same rules, thus ensuring that no company looses more than it gains by sharing.
I think that's kind of the point. They're deliberately provoking Muslims to show what their reaction is. The reasonable response is "No, fuck you" not "I will kill everyone you've ever met".
As I understand much of the current Chaos in Iraq is directly tied to Bush's (and his cronies') incompetence. One of Bush's cronies ended up making the decision to disband the Iraqi army after the invasion. It was something that was expressly against the political and the miliary plans for Iraq. But no one knows how this guy ended up in charge, and no one tried to countermand his orders even though they were obviously wrong. They just let it happen and now there's 400,000 more armed men in Iraq who don't work for the government because some dipshit who's friends with Bush screwed up and forgot the not in "DO NOT DISBAND THE ARMY".
This is the legacy of Bush. When you elect a moron you get idiots in charge and they will truly screw everything up.
I have my doubts about Fox News being accurate. They are after all the company that won a lawsuit declaring they had no duty to be truthful to their viewers and therefore had the legal right to terminate-with-cause employees who refuse to knowingly lie on camera.
Then again, it's not like I'd trust any other American news source.
The issue seems to me that it is very easy to build a web site with Ruby on Rails, but when you want to go beyond what they specifically designed RoR to do you cross over into hell. I've heard of some attempts to build a web site with RoR where the expedient way to extend the functionality of the site was to start over in PHP.
It's not the automatic copyright that's the problem, it's the term extension. You used to own a copyright for 14 years, and if you paid for it, you could extend that copyright another 14 years. Now it's effectively perpetual becasue it's life + 75 years + the number of extensions that congress sells to raise money for election campaigns.
Now, if you want a rational, absolute moral code you can start with Humanism particularly Secular Humanism.
The major issue is that no one has yet to develop a "fool-proof" moral code that can be adhered to and never goes wrong. Moral Pluralism says it's impossible to do because there are actually multiple different absolute moral codes. Moral Absolutism says the absolute code exists, we just don't know what it is, Moral Naturalism says it can be derived solely from the natural world, Moral Realism says that moral facts exist (which is subset of Moral Absolutism). On the other hand Moral Relativism says morality is in the eye of the beholder. If you want to work your way into a concrete moral code, start with Moral Absolutism and read the works of some of the Absolutist philosophers, that should help you find the path you're looking for.
Well yes, ancient people would tell stories about their heroes. However if you've ever played telephone you'd know that stories mutate as they're retold. The heroes almost invariably end up as deities to justify the amazing powers that get grafted on as the story is retold. It is the advent of writing that allows these stories to be effectively frozen so that they no longer change and grow.
The question of atheism being first or second is not easily put to bed. The answer differs based on which theory of religion you subscribe to. If you believe in the memetic evolution of religion, then that belief requires that atheists exist before theists. If you believe in the biological underpining of religion, then superstition must still come first, and here I'm fuzzy on the exact definition of religion we're using. The biological nature would mean that the rise of superstition would be fast and widespread, but that still leaves the question of the codification of superstition into religion.
Actually, atheism as a name is younger than atheism as a philosophy. The name was coined in the 18th century. Previous to that they were more likely to be called Epicureans.
As anyone who knows anything about the Religion debate, the lack of evidence for atheists existing 4000 years ago, does not preclude their existence. Of course, athiests would likely have been surpressed by ancient governments seeing as the basis for their right to rule was commonly attributed to the Gods. In case you didn't know, it was common for each city to have it's own God and the God was the ultimate owner of all land within the city. So to publically pronounce yourself as an athiest would be tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of the law and the rulers of your home city. A situation that might encourage circumspection by self-censorship or by funerary example.
Slashdot Mirror
There are far too many people who levelled their characters on their own who don't know how to play. True story: There was a level 60 druid in my guild who didn't know that druids had an aquatic or bear form. He never did the quests for them (and no, I have it on good authority from the people who leveled with him that the character wasn't bought or power-levelled).
Actually, it's worse than that. It's a blog that can't provide any actual evidence that anything they claim is true. As far as we know, the entire story is bogus because the blogger has provided nothing to prove that any of his claims are true.
As someone pointed out above, they actually do that, but it seems someone has managed to figure out the alternate IP addresses that they use to verify the search engine results and spoofed those as well.
It could be an ex-employee (either fired, quit, or possibly a contractor) who's sold the information to some black hats, or it could be any number of other things. There's money to be made by subverting Google's index, so you have to know that there are people working on ways to do so all the time.
Well obviously he'll be tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. Yeesh, some people just don't think these things through...
I suppose that's because it's easy to make things worse, and difficult to make things better. Sweden's got a lot of stuff going for it beyond outlawing pimps and johns (though, that should be an effective tool that prostitutes can use against people who try to exploit them). They also have one the world's largest and most effective welfare systems which ensures that women are not forced to choose between prostitution and starvation. They have free education, a socialized medical system, and even free dental care for anyone under the age of 20.
It's not a simple problem to beat, but if what you say is true, then we should all be looking a little more closely at what Sweden's doing right.
As I understand it, the main benefits of legalizing prostitution is legal protection and economic prosperity for prostitutes. Why are these the main benefits? Because prohibition doesn't work. There are always going to be men who prefer to have sex with someone else rather masturbate, and they're going to be willing to pay for it. There's also likely to always be women who are willing to have sex for money.
You can't stop that exchange from occuring by making it illegal.
Now, I should also recognize that there are different "levels" of prostitution. The ones who are most likely to be dehumanized by their customers are the ones who hang around on street corners waiting for a John to pick them up. The least likely are the self-employed "escorts" who have a regular clientele.
I'm not sure if that indicates the same thing to you as it does to me. Making prostitution legal might actually make it less available to bad Johns who treat the women poorly. Why? Economic prosperity enhances the ability of the prostitute to refuse a client she dislikes because she is less desperate for the money. It also might reduce drug addiction problems among the poorest prostitutes, depending on how the regulations to govern prostitution were written.
In the end, it's a difficult problem because many people agree with you. They think that the law shouldn't allow something that we don't think is right to occur. I agree with you that sex is an intimacy that should be shared with someone you love, however, I also have to recognize that there are a lot of people who don't view it that way. I have to recognize that even though it's illegal, prostitution is a thriving industry everywhere. There are even Islamic prostitutes in places such as Iran where the punishment for being caught is death. Of course, if the alternative to being stoned for prostitution is dying of starvation, at least you have a chance against the morality police.
The most fundamental aspect of the prostitution problem is probably this:
If prostitution is the last thing a woman wants to end up doing, then by making it illegal you force any woman who would become a prostitute into this choice: Become a criminal or die.
According to the article he did, several times. The police were apparently a little too busy to listen, apparently.
Actually, I think that's a nonstandard viewpoint. One the Catholicism and Christianity are actively fighting as it lessens God's role in the universe. If I remember correctly it is explicitly considered heretical. It even has a name, it's called Deism. And it's the belief that there is a creator god, but that he or she is dead, gone or refusing to meddle in his (or her) creation. That belief is essentially compatible with atheism, the atheist and the deist may disagree over where it was God or nature that started the ball rolling, but it's really a minor disagreement compared to the disagreements they have with everyone else.
The problem with a Christian Deist is that an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good being has no reason to create a universe that contains evil. He's omnipotent and omniscient, therefore he knows the way to reach whatever goal he wishes to reach without the existence of evil and the power to do it the way he wants to. But that's just the basic counter-evidence that Christianity, in particular, is wrong about God.
The majority of Christians seem to believe in a God who controls everyone except for themselves to form a sort of ad-lib play where they're the add-libbing star and everyone else is following a script produced, written and directed by God. Actually, it's a little worse than that, they seem to think they're the only live person in a show of God's puppets. These are the people who believe in that greatest of conceits, that "everything happens for a reason" or "everything is part of God's plan".
I have to admit that it is impossible to prove that a powerful and intelligent being that does not interfere in our life does not exist outside the universe. However, I know of no religion that teaches that such a being exists. Certainly the Christian God is all-powerful, all-knowing and absolutely good, except when he's not and he interferes randomly and arbitrarily in the world.
Athiests are mostly against belief in the supernatural. We can't know for sure whether there's an afterlife because we're not dead, but we do know for sure that anyone who tells you there is an afterlife is lying about knowing that it exists, because they can't know either.
Well you've got a point there, that was more than a little strange. I think the ending for Judas Unleashed is better.
His one weakness being slow starts? I liked Judas Unchained, though it appears that he's writing a sequel (possibly a duology) set somewhere in the (far) future of the Commonwealth.
The guy's a solid science fiction author with sometimes amazing ideas on the possibilities of technology.
No, I'm afraid not. He's shameless agrandizing the company he helms because it's good for business to do so. He has no knowledge of the history of computing and doesn't care to learn it either. As far as he's concerned everything good is a result of Microsoft's hard work. Learning more about the actual history would only make it harder for him to say the things stuff like this with a straight face.
Oh that's easy. Paper trails are "bad" because people counting ballots are more expensive and less accurate than digital counting*.
* barring the presence of any bad actors in the simulation.
It's always the caveats that get you. See these guys are interested in "resilience against corruption". They're only interested in cheaper and more accurate because that's the only thing that supports their position.
I have to agree with you, the whole article screams "Industry Shills".
You could, but without the GPL I don't think open source would be as popular as it is. Companies are companies and by their very nature competitive not cooperative. So, without a legal framework to force them to share with others, they will avoid doing so. Why? Because some middle-manager will say "No, that's our IP now, we're not sharing it with anybody we don't have to" and he'd be right, the company has to worry about competitors and potential competitors. They have to worry about the guy who will be more selfish then them and simply take their competitive advantages and give nothing in return. The GPL is all about making sure that all companies have to share their "improvements" to open source software with the world, rather than simply taking the code and letting the improvements moulder in the darkness. This both benefits and hinders companies but, perhaps more importantly, it forces every company to play by the same rules, thus ensuring that no company looses more than it gains by sharing.
I think that's kind of the point. They're deliberately provoking Muslims to show what their reaction is. The reasonable response is "No, fuck you" not "I will kill everyone you've ever met".
I thought everyone knew the Shipwreck and Gung Ho were a couple?
And less effective at defending them too.
Everything has both advantages and drawbacks. Be sure to enumerate both in the future.
As I understand much of the current Chaos in Iraq is directly tied to Bush's (and his cronies') incompetence. One of Bush's cronies ended up making the decision to disband the Iraqi army after the invasion. It was something that was expressly against the political and the miliary plans for Iraq. But no one knows how this guy ended up in charge, and no one tried to countermand his orders even though they were obviously wrong. They just let it happen and now there's 400,000 more armed men in Iraq who don't work for the government because some dipshit who's friends with Bush screwed up and forgot the not in "DO NOT DISBAND THE ARMY".
This is the legacy of Bush. When you elect a moron you get idiots in charge and they will truly screw everything up.
I have my doubts about Fox News being accurate. They are after all the company that won a lawsuit declaring they had no duty to be truthful to their viewers and therefore had the legal right to terminate-with-cause employees who refuse to knowingly lie on camera.
Then again, it's not like I'd trust any other American news source.
Don't tell me you missed PETA's Pokemon Freedom Day where they encourage kids to empty their Pokedex's and let the digital animals roam free?
The issue seems to me that it is very easy to build a web site with Ruby on Rails, but when you want to go beyond what they specifically designed RoR to do you cross over into hell. I've heard of some attempts to build a web site with RoR where the expedient way to extend the functionality of the site was to start over in PHP.
It's not the automatic copyright that's the problem, it's the term extension. You used to own a copyright for 14 years, and if you paid for it, you could extend that copyright another 14 years. Now it's effectively perpetual becasue it's life + 75 years + the number of extensions that congress sells to raise money for election campaigns.
That is, I think one of the great questions of ethics. There are actually at many different possibilities:
Moral Relativism,
Moral Pluralism,
Moral Absolutism,
Moral Objectivism,
Moral Naturalism,
and
Moral Realism
Now, if you want a rational, absolute moral code you can start with Humanism particularly Secular Humanism.
The major issue is that no one has yet to develop a "fool-proof" moral code that can be adhered to and never goes wrong. Moral Pluralism says it's impossible to do because there are actually multiple different absolute moral codes. Moral Absolutism says the absolute code exists, we just don't know what it is, Moral Naturalism says it can be derived solely from the natural world, Moral Realism says that moral facts exist (which is subset of Moral Absolutism). On the other hand Moral Relativism says morality is in the eye of the beholder. If you want to work your way into a concrete moral code, start with Moral Absolutism and read the works of some of the Absolutist philosophers, that should help you find the path you're looking for.
Well yes, ancient people would tell stories about their heroes. However if you've ever played telephone you'd know that stories mutate as they're retold. The heroes almost invariably end up as deities to justify the amazing powers that get grafted on as the story is retold. It is the advent of writing that allows these stories to be effectively frozen so that they no longer change and grow.
The question of atheism being first or second is not easily put to bed. The answer differs based on which theory of religion you subscribe to. If you believe in the memetic evolution of religion, then that belief requires that atheists exist before theists. If you believe in the biological underpining of religion, then superstition must still come first, and here I'm fuzzy on the exact definition of religion we're using. The biological nature would mean that the rise of superstition would be fast and widespread, but that still leaves the question of the codification of superstition into religion.
Actually, atheism as a name is younger than atheism as a philosophy. The name was coined in the 18th century. Previous to that they were more likely to be called Epicureans.
As anyone who knows anything about the Religion debate, the lack of evidence for atheists existing 4000 years ago, does not preclude their existence. Of course, athiests would likely have been surpressed by ancient governments seeing as the basis for their right to rule was commonly attributed to the Gods. In case you didn't know, it was common for each city to have it's own God and the God was the ultimate owner of all land within the city. So to publically pronounce yourself as an athiest would be tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of the law and the rulers of your home city. A situation that might encourage circumspection by self-censorship or by funerary example.