Oh dear. "excuses for piracy". Where do you get your dictionary from? Wired?
Look, this whole idea, that copying software, or get access to the use of a software is "piracy", that is, criminal activity, is pure media selling BS. Software is a bunch of bits, and bits ought to be copied, and are copied over all the time when you're using a computer. If you release something to the public that means that practically you have no control over what the public does with their copy of the bits you originally arranged to be a computer game. If you give access to someone, and that someone shares his account with others, that's their business, that's their right. Labelling it as piracy shows that you took those anti-piracy propaganda before the films in cinemas too seriously. Publishers don't like that people share their accounts with others? Who the flying fuck cares really?
The software business gets it backwards completely. The costs of development per copy is in inverse relationship to the number of copies. That goes for most of the buy-a-license software. The software-as-service model in the case of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 is bit more honest in this department, and I laud them for this, however, forcing people to this service for multi-player is to remove the ability of players to maintain the game for their own, even after Blizzard won't care any more. If they say, that OK guys, the development costs of the game was this and this, and for any future development we need to secure a budget of $X, I'm telling you, they could get the money in no time from donations alone, as they have a great product, and people appreciate their constant attention since the SC/BW. They could secure a direct revenue stream from the gamers if they want to, without resorting to this shady practices.
I own a legal account the WoL, and I'll update my account to HoTS as well, and I also complained about this practice directly to them (that is, the lack of LAN and the enforcement of online game. I also expressed to them why I don't buy an account to D3). And you know what was their answer? Politely saying, they don't care.
Also I have to add, I used to work as a video game developer, and I think that studios, and game developers often live in a bubble. The whole business is rotten from the core, it is rotten since its conception. At some point, gamers and game developers must take proper action, take out publishers, as unnecessary middle man, start to use free (as in freedom) game engines, put consumer pressure on the major CPU/GPU manufacturers to provide complete documentation of their products, so all software platform could benefit from them. Games must leave their engine code behind that is sold over and over in different iteration, while nothing has changed. Games are mostly glorified FSMs, with large pile of artwork, and we must go for the art work, provide revenue for the artists: the game designers, the concept artists, the modellers, the musicians, the fx artists, all those who actually create our precious games, not for imaginary entities.
Nvidia cards aren't open hardware hence the open source drivers are born without proper documentation. No wonder that they aren't as good as the product of people who have access to that magic documentation. Just saying... The AMD hardware drivers should be improved, but hey, I actually remember problems with propriety software as well, even the the developer of the drivers happen to be the producer of the hardware.
If you read the EULA of majority of commercial software, including games, it is specifically forbidden to reverse engineer and modify the Product. While you're right that without distributing the modifications, it is unlikely that he gets sued, but he still did something that is against the contract of the purchase of the software license.
But also these doctors must be well aware that with the right hygiene those numbers weren't the same. So rather than endorsing this practice, that some parents choose on the grounds of the idea that masturbation should be prevented, they should rather go out and endorse hygiene education.
Yeah, pretty much this. But perhaps here lies the problem. The perception of reality is heavily influenced by the media we consume every day. For example, if all the newspapers giving frequent headlines to violent crime, people will perceive violent crime on the rise, whatever the actual facts are. Similarly, porn could give false sense of reality when it comes to sex, when it is mass produced and consumed, thus it could well be that the portrayal of women as a sex-toy would influence the attitude of porn consumer men towards women.
I do not praise however any kind of ban, and as I suggest that the problem actually lies somewhere else. You say you can make a distinction between reality and fantasy, which is great, but I get the feeling sometimes, the most of the population actually can't. It is rather the part of the human condition, if you like, because we see the majority of the human population is in to some kind of distortion of reality, such as superstition, or religion, or delusions about races, minorities, women. I would go so far, that certain genres in the film industry became popular because they are perceived as reality and thus influencing the reality. The "gangsta" life is an example of this: everything is about money, "respect" (never understood the concept of respect on these terms), rampant sexism, so on. This is a self-reinforcing pattern in a way, as films, music, music videos, celebs are produced because it draws large crowd, and is "cool", on the other hand, the a part of the crowd copy the behaviour that they see in the telly, and try to be more gangsta in their everyday life, including all the sexism, money-worshipping, violent. Similarly to the issue with religious education, this is the spreading of memes that are obviously self-reinforcing, and definitely not positive in the course of human development.
Since there's no authority on Earth, and could never possibly exist that could ban all these behaviours to be propagated, one must make a larger effort on the consumer base and also, produce, and promote high quality alternatives. No easy solutions, and not necessary successful either. The work on the consumer base would be organising our education system around critical thinking, and reducing, gradually removing the hero ethos from our public discourse, and way of educating children. The positive hero just as much harmful in this way than the negative. Also, specifically about sexuality, I think feminists, like me should rather focus on reinvent this whole thing: we live in an age where pile of old stereotypes are crumbling, the social structure based on gender aren't necessary for the success of our biological need, but stereotypes die hard, and we're just half way between finding sex as a communal, physical joy, and the firm necessity of reproduction. Instead of shying away from sexuality as an entertainment, we must should just make it normal to children to grow up in an environment where sexuality, as long as it is promoting fantasies as such, but also the natural play of bodies of lovers, there would rather to gain from it. I mean, the entertainment genres are clearly making a very unhealthy distinction here: especially, films of Hollywood promoting "clean teenagers" who only have their first sex at the graduation, and mostly coupled with the monogamistic notion of LOVE, and show nothing of the reality, either the play of bodies, neither the real events that usually leads to people to have healthy sexual life as they are. No, we want to give moral lessons of a sort that ends up being out of touch of ourselves. On the other hand, the porn industry is awashed by poor quality, again unrealistic doll-worshiper, unrealistic, promoting inconsequential behaviour. Now, while I think both extreme should be allowed, we are clearly out of proportion on both sides.
People here, who bash the feminism of the 60's should learn more about this age. I genuinely think that this is an unfinished business and there are plenty of thoughts of the 60's/70's feminism that we should learn from. We're in the limbo now but it is time to move toward freedom and equality, which can only be achieved by widespread critical thinking. That's a lot of work, and "free market" would not help in it.
As a matter of fact, many do. Ya know, there are plenty of different strands under that label, including for example, anarcha-feminists, or rather, social and individual anarchists in general. Oh, and if we go by the definition of libertarians, there's no conflict being a libertarian and a feminist at the same time.
OK, but these are different player attitudes completely. I don't think you argue that online RTS matches should be cleared from cheating, while single player stuff, is just single player stuff. Skipping over boring thing in a single player campaign, or non-competitive multi player campaign should be always available, as saving as well. Add to this, that even in SC2, with the most recent patch, you can take control of any game at any point when watching it in a replay. You download a game played by the "pros" and play out the second half.
No, not at all. But crewed space flight is very resource heavy investment, so we must make sure that if humans leave this planet for a space mission, they go for something more specific, than just being locked in a can with a few days of looking out the window to Mars. That's at the heart of the criticism of the ISS mission, but at least there there's space for experiments, and that is the first frontier to test our technology for space missions. Never the less, just to send people to see how their piss acts in space isn't really good investment IMHO.
I don't think it is wise by any standard to make half-hearted missions, while we could just "save up" for a fully committed mission, and let those people land, or stay in orbit and make valuable research.
As long as you don't put all future hope in this single mission, and we start educate the public that in the real world, even the most rigorously planned, simulated and component tested mission is subject of trial and error, than it shouldn't be a problem. It is the politics of space that is fucked up in this regard, as it was conceived in an era of national dick waving and cold war.
But, if private space industry can send humans for a flyby, perhaps for the same cost, they could just send hardware that allows for humans to land, perhaps to land a load of rocket fuel. Would make more sense, and perhaps would cost the same money. Few tons at a time... Or perhaps partner up with NASA/ESA/Whathaveyou, and send an extra month to control some probes down there, with better response time, and use this window for more detailed surface exploration just by being there. Flyby, and see the planet from the window strikes me as complete waste of resources, which aren't that abundant.
Btw, bit of a tangent, but what if in similar vein to the landing with Opportunity, would not be viable to send rocket fuel to Mars, in smaller packages, thus reducing the complication with landing a single large load, and than collect them? As I understand, it is a more resource effective to launch smaller loads many times, than launch a big load in a single launch. Perhaps a crewed Mars mission, should compromise from:
1) A space ship assembled in orbit, made of these blow-up Bigelow modules. The volume matters a lot for keeping humans sane over the mission. They need as much space as they can get. 2). the fuel and the engine. If we don't want to do things at a single launch, perhaps it is possible to shorten the length of the journey by spending more launches from Earth to orbit. 3) Launch for the rocket fuel for the return, and scatter them in to smaller packages for landing. 4) Launch the life support and scientific equipment as a separate load that goes lands before humans. 5) Send a crew and food, which could be spoiled by radiation.
I think that the idea of sending everything at once is the problem. The list above could span over decades as the biggest concern, the organic parts, humans and their food is the only one that must go in the same launch and have limits how much they can spend in space. The degradation isn't really a big problem, only for microcircuits.
Can you enlighten us then, what is capitalism for you?
I understand capitalism as an advanced commodity economy, where labour itself became a commodity. The free market is just one form of capitalism, and not a stable one either, since competition leads to winners and in the next round the free market already biased toward these winners to the point that those winners became eventually the ones who dictate the rules. All what I know about capitalism isn't in contrast of what you call "democratic socialist state", as long defining form of property is private property (even if the owner is the state), and the dominant form of production is wage labour. Social democracy, as a movement never aimed to overthrow the capitalist production, it only sought to hand over part of the production to the state, or in its radical form, Leninism/Bolshevism it sought to hand over the entire ownership to the state.
Totalitarianism is just an empty word for describing something really bad with no precise meaning. You can have totalitarianism under very different economic, political and social conditions, it never had a precise definition. If it was me for example, who describes the political-economical structure of the socialist block, I would use the term state-capitalism, where basically the backbone of the capitalist production as described above remained intact, in fact, in many ways it followed the pattern of the development of early capitalism, only that it was conducted by the ruling force of the era, the Party. Not really different than the acolytes of protestant Christianity in the wake of capitalism. The society consisted mostly workers, they bought their stuff on the market, and they sold their productive time as labour. And neo-feudalism? Please...
I don't think it is a right way to define war. There are many way to break your opposition, the enemy, and that could include economic blockade, which is not defined as war. When people however use the term war, they definitely mean to break the will of the enemy by killing and/or destroying stuff.
In any case, subtle the difference indeed, because war can't be looked in other way than destruction and all the criticism against war is focused really on this aspect.
The funny thing is actually, that on all modern interfaces, there's an trend to make more and more use of the fuzzy search, and then, add some commands to it. The whole GUI paradigm fails on the assumption that people are visual. Communication is not visual, not 2D, but single dimension, textual. Voice communication however would not produce the same performance as written, due to its ambiguity, and hardness to process, plus the speaker has to step back and modify parts of what she said in precise places, its way suboptimal. As using a computer is nothing else than communicating commands to machine, and these commands can be and are redefined all the time, it is the text editing interface that trumps them all. To make a GUI working, you have to pin down a certain use case, and you have to be certain, that use case don't change much. In a McDonalds, or of a ticket machine, touch screen GUIs can be viable, as you don't use an actual computer, you use a ticket machine, served by a computer. Or in a restaurant, there's a limited amount of choices, barely changing over time. But when you actually get to use a computer, whether in the format of a smart phone, tablet, a laptop or a desktop, any revolutionary GUI becomes a limiting feature. Users eventually try to develop their own use cases, as these are generic devices. For example, smart phones are not phones any more. Having "apps" is an attempt to generalize their usage in many fields. The problem is, that on a phone the clear communication of commands, the CLI, has severe limitation by the lack of fast keyboard typing, which, without tactile feedback, also very inaccurate. The communication is broken with your device in your pocket. Your use cases are limited to that of the phone, and some limited information browsing/navigating. On a desktop, with access to more precise control, the copy paste is a natural use case of all information consumption. That simple thing is missing on the touch controlled systems. So people, with access to devices with proper keyboard/mouse, would feel amputated on many accounts, like proper and fast copy paste. It's like using a old fashioned dial-phone after getting used to the button versions.
Programming isn't really a job on its own right. Programmers are really experts of other fields, like computer graphics, or data organization and processing, managing work and large production capacities (that is, computing in the literal sense). Having the ability to organize and customize your use cases is the job of a computer user. A computer user must learn how to use a computer, and that is large part automation: there's no GUI paradigm for a genericloop, the most basic ability of a computer. Lacking that, the computer user is crippled for profit, plain and simple. It's not a progress in terms of ability of the individual, only progress in economy of Teh Tech Industry.
Cults like Microsoft, Apple, Android, etc. are perfect examples that how religions and ruling power appear in the course of history. The lack of understanding push people to worship the gurus, in this case the producers of the use cases, while they are being effectively controlled by their invested blind faith and not for their own benefit, but for the profit of a few.
Disappointment or not, the problem is kind of different. In fact, the problem exists quite a while ago, since people invented time-bombs, remote controlled bomb, suicide killers, and such.
The issue at hand is the following: War is about killing people and destroying stuff. People on the battlefield facing to each other turned out to be counter-productive in this regard, exemplified on many occasions in the end of 1st World Massacre. After a long period of constant threat of death, patriotism, religious fanaticism or any other ideological commitment to the slaughter will give a way to basic instinct of staying alive, and many soldiers deserted their posts, and went home. In many cases, if the officer tried to hold them back with threats, he got simply a bullet, instead of the enemy. Also, there was also a threat of that people on both side of the front would realize that they are not really enemies, they are there for killing each other in the name of others, and others' interests, so they could just simply walk home, and simply let each other live.
Ever since the Great Massacre, technology is invested in to a literal war-machine that removes this options from the war. There are no massive battles face to face. Behind the heavy artillery, bombing and armoured vehicle attacks, the troops are there for filling up the gaps. This allows to organize the army of professional combatants, and remove them from the front line, allowing them to keep their emotional distance from the enemy. It is just a work now, just like anything else. War is a business, with turnovers, wage labour, and increasing automation.
Sure, armies aren't made up of autonomous military robots yet, but the trend is clear and straight. It is not the weaponry that wins a war, but the level of fear in the population. Thus, the increasingly automated weaponry is aimed at the population at large, and, just like the weapons of mass destruction, it is aimed break the will of the combatants by keeping the population in fear, as a hostage. The same thing employed by professional armies and the ragged army of Islamist "terrorists".
Extrapolate this trend, and you'll end up with remote controlled death squads all over the world. And as for the sci-fi point, you can also see that if we would be able to mass produce autonomous robots, the 3 laws of robotics will be ignored at large, since one of the major interest and means to employ in robotics is the army.
ignores the fundamental nature of people That perhaps may be, but that doesn't really counter my argument above.
However, taking a look at your claim, here's the issue: human nature. Is there such thing? Is there such thing that binds us from the suicide bomber, the bank manager, the veggie punk in a post-hippie commune, the tribal people of the Amazonas, the Buddhist philosophers, the soldiers in the Mali war, the people of a Indian village, the guy who works next to you, the beggar in the station, the prime minister. Or further the category, after all human does not necessary include the present state but all past an future state of our race, billions and billions of individuals, fighting wars and revolutions, struggle with nature together. The guys, who are saving the entrapped people after an earthquake. I could go on for long with different categories, different times, different situations where people do behave differently, do change, do work for each other, or wage fierce battles against each other. Which one is Teh Eternal and Ethereal Human Nature?
Human nature is an idealistic philosophical concept, that is, forcing our idea of the human essence to people, and when is not applicable, a new category arises: the non-human people (look at your favourite junk newspaper of referring to child rapists). The fact is, that, unless you subscribe to the idea of some religious bullshit, "human nature" an objectively non-existent thing, and if you refer the inherent selfishness, it has been proved wrong by self-sacrificing armies of dead men, millions of them. Selfishness, in biological terms however could be part of our evolutionary heritage, but it has no further social, political, or philosophical implications: The biological selfishness drives us to create families, communities, corporations, countries, charities or die for our fellow humans. These are everyday activities, do not need any spiritual Armageddon. The entire human history is at our disposal to see how fundamentally are we able to change, individually and en mass.
So you say that communism is something that we did not figure out how to make work. Well as I said, it might be true. But it doesn't mean that there's no incentive for looking. And while perhaps we don't find what we are after, we surely gain something in the process. And for all intents and purposes, this is a goal that worth pursuing.
Well, we can and we should go that far once we built up a single circuit of verifying the validity of the authorship and derivative tracking is possible by large. Until then the copyright legislation should used as it reinforces the right to copy: using Share-Alike, Remix CC, GPL/LGPL and their friends. But yeah, I'm all for getting rid of the state force.
Actually, "Communism did not work" argument is a bit of a stretch since the "Communism" did not attempt to be what it claimed to be. State ownership is still private property as far as the communist argument goes, since communism is not simply against the personal ownership of things, but the use of production facilities for non-collective benefit. The state owned factories can be used for appropriate profits only for a small minority, or can be used to fund activities that directly goes against the interest of all workers: like wars.
Communism with capital C, was and is a way where capitalism has been always heading: completely socialized production (i.e. manufacturing at large, employing large crowd of workers in a single economical entity... see the development of factories in the very early capitalism) for the benefit of a small class of individuals and building social hierarchy on the basis of the production. The USSR, China weren't so much incompatible with the market-fundamentalist capitalism of the USA after all, rather a forced modernization from virtually feudal state to wage-work and socialized, industrial production of profit.
Communism with small c, is and was a movement that aimed to destroy the artificially imposed scarcity which capitalism depends on so much. It is quite characteristic that any time technology makes it possible to reduce the resource cost of production, it creates panic, meltdown, and eventually use of force to recover the scarcity (using whatever legal device is available in form of copyrights, patents, non-disclosure enforcement in the area of digital production), or actively promotes new areas of scarcity to recover the losses of profits. The tech industry is the best example how technological development in capitalism is restrained by imposing scarcity, secrecy and lies on the larger population.
Or perhaps let's go further. Since a book do suffer some degradation over time much more than a digital copy that can be copied and used for years and the information suffers no degradation as long as it is kept redundantly we should declare the whole business of selling digital products by copies completely illegal as an act of fraud. Sure, selling a DVD/BR with pretty prints and box is a different ball game, but not because of the content but the packaging.
This is not about the right of re-selling but the actual business model of selling something that comes down so distinctively differently for the production and distribution. If users can arrange the distribution on personal costs, like using bittorrent, the distribution cost is paid by the user for paying for her internet service. The production cost should be collected in a different manner... seems to me the microfunding model can produce enough for that. I wonder however, that how come that companies go an collect the production costs on microfunding websites only to sell digital copies/accounts for games and not to distribute their work properly, in their most future proof form: with enclosed source code and standard, open content formats.
I think, since games today completely separate the underlying heavy lifting code in form of engine and the rest of the system that is the content, the funding for different engines and different contents should be also separated, meaning that the gamer community would help to get their content of choice to their platform of choice, which is heavily restricted by the availability engine/middleware.
You know, once upon a time the USSR and co. was depicted as the evil big brother with extended network spies and micromanagement, that sustains a state of paranoia and thus crippling the life and freedom of all of its citizens. While it certainly wasn't true in this form never the less there was indeed a level of paranoia that pervaded the entire block, mostly the fear of foreign agents. I'm from one of these countries.
Today, it seems that the same measures updated with modern technologies are wide spread all over the world, including the Land of the Free, Western Europe and all justified by crime, terrorism. The image of the enemy: the criminal and the terrorist can be easily paralleled with the agent of the evil western forces in the state capitalist block.
There's a lot of idiot who are convinced that a few hundred domestic casualties is enough to justify the excessive security measures that run around the planet since the second half the 20th century. Borders were never so significant than today because never before was there any level of individual enforcement as there has been in the last 60 years. Every move must be documented (travelling, paying, calling, messaging, receiving any kind of service) in enormous detail. It is a leaned skill of management: just like as in a protest that is contained for its own safety, the "right to protest" is satisfied on paper, but the rest of the city doesn't encounter with the protesting crowds because the police isolates the crowd completely. Effective measure, not as bloody as it would have been 150 years ago, but at that time the government wasn't recognised as mediator, but as an outright enemy of the majority of the population, the working class and down. Today, all this detailed documentation is learned from the "worker state" USSR, which had to work under the image being the friend of the people, while doing exactly the same job as Bloody Code of England at the time. Terrorise, discipline, and coerce the population to the world of socialized production and minority benefit of capitalism.
Perhaps CS students and professional programmers know exactly that technology is not about any "Big Thing" but consistent work on real problems. A freakin' word processor and click-n-place-a-dot programs (which I was able to make on C+4 when I was 12) does not constitute any kind of big art, big thing in the computer technology, or computer science.
All those stuff did not contribute to society much, though I understand that a layman perhaps perceive a word processor as something great, given that they have no understanding what their computer is capable of, I'm sure that the media hype around this things are great because journos are interested in these software as they are so freakin' worked up about the latest iphone. Never the less, Computer Science is way beyond consumer electronics, and there's nothing Big Thing out there. Re-inventing the wheel perhaps. Rewriting history, perhaps. MacWrite, MacPaint seriously?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh dear. "excuses for piracy". Where do you get your dictionary from? Wired?
Look, this whole idea, that copying software, or get access to the use of a software is "piracy", that is, criminal activity, is pure media selling BS. Software is a bunch of bits, and bits ought to be copied, and are copied over all the time when you're using a computer. If you release something to the public that means that practically you have no control over what the public does with their copy of the bits you originally arranged to be a computer game. If you give access to someone, and that someone shares his account with others, that's their business, that's their right. Labelling it as piracy shows that you took those anti-piracy propaganda before the films in cinemas too seriously. Publishers don't like that people share their accounts with others? Who the flying fuck cares really?
The software business gets it backwards completely. The costs of development per copy is in inverse relationship to the number of copies. That goes for most of the buy-a-license software. The software-as-service model in the case of Blizzard's Starcraft 2 is bit more honest in this department, and I laud them for this, however, forcing people to this service for multi-player is to remove the ability of players to maintain the game for their own, even after Blizzard won't care any more. If they say, that OK guys, the development costs of the game was this and this, and for any future development we need to secure a budget of $X, I'm telling you, they could get the money in no time from donations alone, as they have a great product, and people appreciate their constant attention since the SC/BW. They could secure a direct revenue stream from the gamers if they want to, without resorting to this shady practices.
I own a legal account the WoL, and I'll update my account to HoTS as well, and I also complained about this practice directly to them (that is, the lack of LAN and the enforcement of online game. I also expressed to them why I don't buy an account to D3). And you know what was their answer? Politely saying, they don't care.
Also I have to add, I used to work as a video game developer, and I think that studios, and game developers often live in a bubble. The whole business is rotten from the core, it is rotten since its conception. At some point, gamers and game developers must take proper action, take out publishers, as unnecessary middle man, start to use free (as in freedom) game engines, put consumer pressure on the major CPU/GPU manufacturers to provide complete documentation of their products, so all software platform could benefit from them. Games must leave their engine code behind that is sold over and over in different iteration, while nothing has changed. Games are mostly glorified FSMs, with large pile of artwork, and we must go for the art work, provide revenue for the artists: the game designers, the concept artists, the modellers, the musicians, the fx artists, all those who actually create our precious games, not for imaginary entities.
Nvidia cards aren't open hardware hence the open source drivers are born without proper documentation. No wonder that they aren't as good as the product of people who have access to that magic documentation. Just saying... The AMD hardware drivers should be improved, but hey, I actually remember problems with propriety software as well, even the the developer of the drivers happen to be the producer of the hardware.
If you read the EULA of majority of commercial software, including games, it is specifically forbidden to reverse engineer and modify the Product. While you're right that without distributing the modifications, it is unlikely that he gets sued, but he still did something that is against the contract of the purchase of the software license.
But also these doctors must be well aware that with the right hygiene those numbers weren't the same. So rather than endorsing this practice, that some parents choose on the grounds of the idea that masturbation should be prevented, they should rather go out and endorse hygiene education.
Yeah, pretty much this. But perhaps here lies the problem. The perception of reality is heavily influenced by the media we consume every day. For example, if all the newspapers giving frequent headlines to violent crime, people will perceive violent crime on the rise, whatever the actual facts are. Similarly, porn could give false sense of reality when it comes to sex, when it is mass produced and consumed, thus it could well be that the portrayal of women as a sex-toy would influence the attitude of porn consumer men towards women.
I do not praise however any kind of ban, and as I suggest that the problem actually lies somewhere else. You say you can make a distinction between reality and fantasy, which is great, but I get the feeling sometimes, the most of the population actually can't. It is rather the part of the human condition, if you like, because we see the majority of the human population is in to some kind of distortion of reality, such as superstition, or religion, or delusions about races, minorities, women. I would go so far, that certain genres in the film industry became popular because they are perceived as reality and thus influencing the reality. The "gangsta" life is an example of this: everything is about money, "respect" (never understood the concept of respect on these terms), rampant sexism, so on. This is a self-reinforcing pattern in a way, as films, music, music videos, celebs are produced because it draws large crowd, and is "cool", on the other hand, the a part of the crowd copy the behaviour that they see in the telly, and try to be more gangsta in their everyday life, including all the sexism, money-worshipping, violent. Similarly to the issue with religious education, this is the spreading of memes that are obviously self-reinforcing, and definitely not positive in the course of human development.
Since there's no authority on Earth, and could never possibly exist that could ban all these behaviours to be propagated, one must make a larger effort on the consumer base and also, produce, and promote high quality alternatives. No easy solutions, and not necessary successful either. The work on the consumer base would be organising our education system around critical thinking, and reducing, gradually removing the hero ethos from our public discourse, and way of educating children. The positive hero just as much harmful in this way than the negative. Also, specifically about sexuality, I think feminists, like me should rather focus on reinvent this whole thing: we live in an age where pile of old stereotypes are crumbling, the social structure based on gender aren't necessary for the success of our biological need, but stereotypes die hard, and we're just half way between finding sex as a communal, physical joy, and the firm necessity of reproduction. Instead of shying away from sexuality as an entertainment, we must should just make it normal to children to grow up in an environment where sexuality, as long as it is promoting fantasies as such, but also the natural play of bodies of lovers, there would rather to gain from it. I mean, the entertainment genres are clearly making a very unhealthy distinction here: especially, films of Hollywood promoting "clean teenagers" who only have their first sex at the graduation, and mostly coupled with the monogamistic notion of LOVE, and show nothing of the reality, either the play of bodies, neither the real events that usually leads to people to have healthy sexual life as they are. No, we want to give moral lessons of a sort that ends up being out of touch of ourselves. On the other hand, the porn industry is awashed by poor quality, again unrealistic doll-worshiper, unrealistic, promoting inconsequential behaviour. Now, while I think both extreme should be allowed, we are clearly out of proportion on both sides.
People here, who bash the feminism of the 60's should learn more about this age. I genuinely think that this is an unfinished business and there are plenty of thoughts of the 60's/70's feminism that we should learn from. We're in the limbo now but it is time to move toward freedom and equality, which can only be achieved by widespread critical thinking. That's a lot of work, and "free market" would not help in it.
As a matter of fact, many do. Ya know, there are plenty of different strands under that label, including for example, anarcha-feminists, or rather, social and individual anarchists in general. Oh, and if we go by the definition of libertarians, there's no conflict being a libertarian and a feminist at the same time.
Data mining?
OK, but these are different player attitudes completely. I don't think you argue that online RTS matches should be cleared from cheating, while single player stuff, is just single player stuff. Skipping over boring thing in a single player campaign, or non-competitive multi player campaign should be always available, as saving as well. Add to this, that even in SC2, with the most recent patch, you can take control of any game at any point when watching it in a replay. You download a game played by the "pros" and play out the second half.
"Of course, you could always buy a gamepad for $20-50 to your PC... "
That's the real power of PC really...
Also, that way there would be a chance that we would have a larger part of the population that is capable to contribute to space exploration.
No, not at all. But crewed space flight is very resource heavy investment, so we must make sure that if humans leave this planet for a space mission, they go for something more specific, than just being locked in a can with a few days of looking out the window to Mars. That's at the heart of the criticism of the ISS mission, but at least there there's space for experiments, and that is the first frontier to test our technology for space missions. Never the less, just to send people to see how their piss acts in space isn't really good investment IMHO.
I don't think it is wise by any standard to make half-hearted missions, while we could just "save up" for a fully committed mission, and let those people land, or stay in orbit and make valuable research.
As long as you don't put all future hope in this single mission, and we start educate the public that in the real world, even the most rigorously planned, simulated and component tested mission is subject of trial and error, than it shouldn't be a problem. It is the politics of space that is fucked up in this regard, as it was conceived in an era of national dick waving and cold war.
But, if private space industry can send humans for a flyby, perhaps for the same cost, they could just send hardware that allows for humans to land, perhaps to land a load of rocket fuel. Would make more sense, and perhaps would cost the same money. Few tons at a time... Or perhaps partner up with NASA/ESA/Whathaveyou, and send an extra month to control some probes down there, with better response time, and use this window for more detailed surface exploration just by being there. Flyby, and see the planet from the window strikes me as complete waste of resources, which aren't that abundant.
Btw, bit of a tangent, but what if in similar vein to the landing with Opportunity, would not be viable to send rocket fuel to Mars, in smaller packages, thus reducing the complication with landing a single large load, and than collect them?
As I understand, it is a more resource effective to launch smaller loads many times, than launch a big load in a single launch. Perhaps a crewed Mars mission, should compromise from:
1) A space ship assembled in orbit, made of these blow-up Bigelow modules. The volume matters a lot for keeping humans sane over the mission. They need as much space as they can get.
2). the fuel and the engine. If we don't want to do things at a single launch, perhaps it is possible to shorten the length of the journey by spending more launches from Earth to orbit.
3) Launch for the rocket fuel for the return, and scatter them in to smaller packages for landing.
4) Launch the life support and scientific equipment as a separate load that goes lands before humans.
5) Send a crew and food, which could be spoiled by radiation.
I think that the idea of sending everything at once is the problem. The list above could span over decades as the biggest concern, the organic parts, humans and their food is the only one that must go in the same launch and have limits how much they can spend in space. The degradation isn't really a big problem, only for microcircuits.
Can you enlighten us then, what is capitalism for you?
I understand capitalism as an advanced commodity economy, where labour itself became a commodity. The free market is just one form of capitalism, and not a stable one either, since competition leads to winners and in the next round the free market already biased toward these winners to the point that those winners became eventually the ones who dictate the rules. All what I know about capitalism isn't in contrast of what you call "democratic socialist state", as long defining form of property is private property (even if the owner is the state), and the dominant form of production is wage labour. Social democracy, as a movement never aimed to overthrow the capitalist production, it only sought to hand over part of the production to the state, or in its radical form, Leninism/Bolshevism it sought to hand over the entire ownership to the state.
Totalitarianism is just an empty word for describing something really bad with no precise meaning. You can have totalitarianism under very different economic, political and social conditions, it never had a precise definition. If it was me for example, who describes the political-economical structure of the socialist block, I would use the term state-capitalism, where basically the backbone of the capitalist production as described above remained intact, in fact, in many ways it followed the pattern of the development of early capitalism, only that it was conducted by the ruling force of the era, the Party. Not really different than the acolytes of protestant Christianity in the wake of capitalism. The society consisted mostly workers, they bought their stuff on the market, and they sold their productive time as labour. And neo-feudalism? Please...
I don't think it is a right way to define war. There are many way to break your opposition, the enemy, and that could include economic blockade, which is not defined as war. When people however use the term war, they definitely mean to break the will of the enemy by killing and/or destroying stuff.
In any case, subtle the difference indeed, because war can't be looked in other way than destruction and all the criticism against war is focused really on this aspect.
The funny thing is actually, that on all modern interfaces, there's an trend to make more and more use of the fuzzy search, and then, add some commands to it. The whole GUI paradigm fails on the assumption that people are visual. Communication is not visual, not 2D, but single dimension, textual. Voice communication however would not produce the same performance as written, due to its ambiguity, and hardness to process, plus the speaker has to step back and modify parts of what she said in precise places, its way suboptimal.
As using a computer is nothing else than communicating commands to machine, and these commands can be and are redefined all the time, it is the text editing interface that trumps them all. To make a GUI working, you have to pin down a certain use case, and you have to be certain, that use case don't change much. In a McDonalds, or of a ticket machine, touch screen GUIs can be viable, as you don't use an actual computer, you use a ticket machine, served by a computer. Or in a restaurant, there's a limited amount of choices, barely changing over time.
But when you actually get to use a computer, whether in the format of a smart phone, tablet, a laptop or a desktop, any revolutionary GUI becomes a limiting feature. Users eventually try to develop their own use cases, as these are generic devices. For example, smart phones are not phones any more. Having "apps" is an attempt to generalize their usage in many fields. The problem is, that on a phone the clear communication of commands, the CLI, has severe limitation by the lack of fast keyboard typing, which, without tactile feedback, also very inaccurate. The communication is broken with your device in your pocket. Your use cases are limited to that of the phone, and some limited information browsing/navigating. On a desktop, with access to more precise control, the copy paste is a natural use case of all information consumption. That simple thing is missing on the touch controlled systems. So people, with access to devices with proper keyboard/mouse, would feel amputated on many accounts, like proper and fast copy paste. It's like using a old fashioned dial-phone after getting used to the button versions.
Programming isn't really a job on its own right. Programmers are really experts of other fields, like computer graphics, or data organization and processing, managing work and large production capacities (that is, computing in the literal sense). Having the ability to organize and customize your use cases is the job of a computer user. A computer user must learn how to use a computer, and that is large part automation: there's no GUI paradigm for a genericloop, the most basic ability of a computer. Lacking that, the computer user is crippled for profit, plain and simple. It's not a progress in terms of ability of the individual, only progress in economy of Teh Tech Industry.
Cults like Microsoft, Apple, Android, etc. are perfect examples that how religions and ruling power appear in the course of history. The lack of understanding push people to worship the gurus, in this case the producers of the use cases, while they are being effectively controlled by their invested blind faith and not for their own benefit, but for the profit of a few.
And to extend that, as long as a lot of non-combatants are killed, you make sure the replacement of the "insurgents". Vicious circle as it is.
Disappointment or not, the problem is kind of different. In fact, the problem exists quite a while ago, since people invented time-bombs, remote controlled bomb, suicide killers, and such.
The issue at hand is the following: War is about killing people and destroying stuff. People on the battlefield facing to each other turned out to be counter-productive in this regard, exemplified on many occasions in the end of 1st World Massacre. After a long period of constant threat of death, patriotism, religious fanaticism or any other ideological commitment to the slaughter will give a way to basic instinct of staying alive, and many soldiers deserted their posts, and went home. In many cases, if the officer tried to hold them back with threats, he got simply a bullet, instead of the enemy. Also, there was also a threat of that people on both side of the front would realize that they are not really enemies, they are there for killing each other in the name of others, and others' interests, so they could just simply walk home, and simply let each other live.
Ever since the Great Massacre, technology is invested in to a literal war-machine that removes this options from the war. There are no massive battles face to face. Behind the heavy artillery, bombing and armoured vehicle attacks, the troops are there for filling up the gaps. This allows to organize the army of professional combatants, and remove them from the front line, allowing them to keep their emotional distance from the enemy. It is just a work now, just like anything else. War is a business, with turnovers, wage labour, and increasing automation.
Sure, armies aren't made up of autonomous military robots yet, but the trend is clear and straight. It is not the weaponry that wins a war, but the level of fear in the population. Thus, the increasingly automated weaponry is aimed at the population at large, and, just like the weapons of mass destruction, it is aimed break the will of the combatants by keeping the population in fear, as a hostage. The same thing employed by professional armies and the ragged army of Islamist "terrorists".
Extrapolate this trend, and you'll end up with remote controlled death squads all over the world. And as for the sci-fi point, you can also see that if we would be able to mass produce autonomous robots, the 3 laws of robotics will be ignored at large, since one of the major interest and means to employ in robotics is the army.
ignores the fundamental nature of people
That perhaps may be, but that doesn't really counter my argument above.
However, taking a look at your claim, here's the issue: human nature. Is there such thing? Is there such thing that binds us from the suicide bomber, the bank manager, the veggie punk in a post-hippie commune, the tribal people of the Amazonas, the Buddhist philosophers, the soldiers in the Mali war, the people of a Indian village, the guy who works next to you, the beggar in the station, the prime minister. Or further the category, after all human does not necessary include the present state but all past an future state of our race, billions and billions of individuals, fighting wars and revolutions, struggle with nature together. The guys, who are saving the entrapped people after an earthquake. I could go on for long with different categories, different times, different situations where people do behave differently, do change, do work for each other, or wage fierce battles against each other. Which one is Teh Eternal and Ethereal Human Nature?
Human nature is an idealistic philosophical concept, that is, forcing our idea of the human essence to people, and when is not applicable, a new category arises: the non-human people (look at your favourite junk newspaper of referring to child rapists). The fact is, that, unless you subscribe to the idea of some religious bullshit, "human nature" an objectively non-existent thing, and if you refer the inherent selfishness, it has been proved wrong by self-sacrificing armies of dead men, millions of them. Selfishness, in biological terms however could be part of our evolutionary heritage, but it has no further social, political, or philosophical implications: The biological selfishness drives us to create families, communities, corporations, countries, charities or die for our fellow humans. These are everyday activities, do not need any spiritual Armageddon. The entire human history is at our disposal to see how fundamentally are we able to change, individually and en mass.
So you say that communism is something that we did not figure out how to make work. Well as I said, it might be true. But it doesn't mean that there's no incentive for looking. And while perhaps we don't find what we are after, we surely gain something in the process. And for all intents and purposes, this is a goal that worth pursuing.
Well, we can and we should go that far once we built up a single circuit of verifying the validity of the authorship and derivative tracking is possible by large. Until then the copyright legislation should used as it reinforces the right to copy: using Share-Alike, Remix CC, GPL/LGPL and their friends.
But yeah, I'm all for getting rid of the state force.
Actually, "Communism did not work" argument is a bit of a stretch since the "Communism" did not attempt to be what it claimed to be. State ownership is still private property as far as the communist argument goes, since communism is not simply against the personal ownership of things, but the use of production facilities for non-collective benefit. The state owned factories can be used for appropriate profits only for a small minority, or can be used to fund activities that directly goes against the interest of all workers: like wars.
Communism with capital C, was and is a way where capitalism has been always heading: completely socialized production (i.e. manufacturing at large, employing large crowd of workers in a single economical entity... see the development of factories in the very early capitalism) for the benefit of a small class of individuals and building social hierarchy on the basis of the production. The USSR, China weren't so much incompatible with the market-fundamentalist capitalism of the USA after all, rather a forced modernization from virtually feudal state to wage-work and socialized, industrial production of profit.
Communism with small c, is and was a movement that aimed to destroy the artificially imposed scarcity which capitalism depends on so much. It is quite characteristic that any time technology makes it possible to reduce the resource cost of production, it creates panic, meltdown, and eventually use of force to recover the scarcity (using whatever legal device is available in form of copyrights, patents, non-disclosure enforcement in the area of digital production), or actively promotes new areas of scarcity to recover the losses of profits. The tech industry is the best example how technological development in capitalism is restrained by imposing scarcity, secrecy and lies on the larger population.
Or perhaps let's go further. Since a book do suffer some degradation over time much more than a digital copy that can be copied and used for years and the information suffers no degradation as long as it is kept redundantly we should declare the whole business of selling digital products by copies completely illegal as an act of fraud. Sure, selling a DVD/BR with pretty prints and box is a different ball game, but not because of the content but the packaging.
This is not about the right of re-selling but the actual business model of selling something that comes down so distinctively differently for the production and distribution. If users can arrange the distribution on personal costs, like using bittorrent, the distribution cost is paid by the user for paying for her internet service. The production cost should be collected in a different manner... seems to me the microfunding model can produce enough for that. I wonder however, that how come that companies go an collect the production costs on microfunding websites only to sell digital copies/accounts for games and not to distribute their work properly, in their most future proof form: with enclosed source code and standard, open content formats.
I think, since games today completely separate the underlying heavy lifting code in form of engine and the rest of the system that is the content, the funding for different engines and different contents should be also separated, meaning that the gamer community would help to get their content of choice to their platform of choice, which is heavily restricted by the availability engine/middleware.
I missed out on that one, what happened with Prometheus?
You know, once upon a time the USSR and co. was depicted as the evil big brother with extended network spies and micromanagement, that sustains a state of paranoia and thus crippling the life and freedom of all of its citizens. While it certainly wasn't true in this form never the less there was indeed a level of paranoia that pervaded the entire block, mostly the fear of foreign agents. I'm from one of these countries.
Today, it seems that the same measures updated with modern technologies are wide spread all over the world, including the Land of the Free, Western Europe and all justified by crime, terrorism. The image of the enemy: the criminal and the terrorist can be easily paralleled with the agent of the evil western forces in the state capitalist block.
There's a lot of idiot who are convinced that a few hundred domestic casualties is enough to justify the excessive security measures that run around the planet since the second half the 20th century. Borders were never so significant than today because never before was there any level of individual enforcement as there has been in the last 60 years. Every move must be documented (travelling, paying, calling, messaging, receiving any kind of service) in enormous detail. It is a leaned skill of management: just like as in a protest that is contained for its own safety, the "right to protest" is satisfied on paper, but the rest of the city doesn't encounter with the protesting crowds because the police isolates the crowd completely. Effective measure, not as bloody as it would have been 150 years ago, but at that time the government wasn't recognised as mediator, but as an outright enemy of the majority of the population, the working class and down. Today, all this detailed documentation is learned from the "worker state" USSR, which had to work under the image being the friend of the people, while doing exactly the same job as Bloody Code of England at the time. Terrorise, discipline, and coerce the population to the world of socialized production and minority benefit of capitalism.
Perhaps CS students and professional programmers know exactly that technology is not about any "Big Thing" but consistent work on real problems. A freakin' word processor and click-n-place-a-dot programs (which I was able to make on C+4 when I was 12) does not constitute any kind of big art, big thing in the computer technology, or computer science.
All those stuff did not contribute to society much, though I understand that a layman perhaps perceive a word processor as something great, given that they have no understanding what their computer is capable of, I'm sure that the media hype around this things are great because journos are interested in these software as they are so freakin' worked up about the latest iphone. Never the less, Computer Science is way beyond consumer electronics, and there's nothing Big Thing out there. Re-inventing the wheel perhaps. Rewriting history, perhaps. MacWrite, MacPaint seriously?