He obviously never MUDded or played any BBS games, either, so just being older is hardly an excuse. It's quite possible to develop strong emotional ties even in a game with people you never meet physically. You can argue whether this is healthy, but a lot of us have been able to do that without avoiding RL friends.
I can almost see his point for less involved multiplayer, such as Halo. Still, it doesn't quite stand up to even the most basic scrutiny as a broad principle. There are thousands and thousands of people who play it and make friends without meeting them. Still others, like me, used it as a way to play with friends from RL who live far away.
This is a pointless article, really. He doesn't like multiplayer. Ok, great. I don't think he had a single convincing reason that it's unimportant broadly, just because he prefers to play with someone in the same room.
But, most importantly, he whines about getting beat. That means the GP was right -- this guy's a N00B... No matter how long he's been gaming, he's a N00B!
I'm really only talking about simulation games where you're a human of some sort, and I'm not claiming that race/skin color is the only thing that determines my comfort level. As I've used as an example in another post, if I'm a samurai in feudal Japan, I'd much rather my character be Japanese simply because it's more consistent with the story. If I'm playing a game set in a mixed culture area of the modern world, though, I'd opt for a Caucasian character simply due to familiarity. However, consistency with the rest of the game world is most important IMO.
Fighting games are a special case... They've got SO much disbelief to be suspended... I mean, if you're expected not to question whether a top-heavy 5'2" girl could possibly KO a 6'10" 320 lb guy through brute force, I don't think you'll be worrying about the socio-economic implications of skin color in the back story.:-)
I think you answered your own question. For many (perhaps most, but at least many) games, it doesn't matter. For some, it does. As I said, when it's not significant to the story of the game (or if the game has a loose or none), it'd be great to be configurable. If it's not possible, I'd rather play as a race/gender that's compatible with the rest of the story. It's easier to imagine myself as a Japanese guy if I'm playing as a samurai than it would be for me to imagine that somehow my honky ass is accepted by the townsfolk without question in feudal Japan.
I don't particularly care about it in real life (beyond a small amount at a subconscious level -- I would love to ditch this, but it's hard). However, I do find it easier to relate to a character who looks like me. That is, I'm most comfortable playing a Caucasian male character. It's easier to get into that character than others. For this reason, I think it'd be nice to be able to define your own character's qualities, but that's not always sensible in a game.
As for other characters, I find I don't really care about their races other than disliking obvious "affirmative action" approaches where the NPC cast is a rainbow of races, obviously only to be PC. I'd rather have consistency between races and storyline. That's the most important thing -- basically, race should not be a distracting feature.
While that's kind of true, I don't think that the GPL is as selfish as that sound bite description makes it sound. The GPL is still about what happens to *your* code -- it only imposes its restrictions on *other people* who want to derive their project from *your* code. Basically, the BSD license gives everything away in exchange for credit whereas the GPL gives it away in exchange for access to any distributed derived work. Just because the GPL is not as generous a license as the BSD license doesn't mean it's not generous at all. They're both less generous than a public domain release and more than standard proprietary releases.
Code shared under the GPL is like a gift with strings attached. The recipient is free to decide whether accepting the gift is worth being tied by the strings. If not, he's no worse off than he was before.
Anyway, I can't tell from your statement whether you're trying to make an anti-GPL statement or just describing the focus of the license in a cute way. Please don't take my comment the wrong way.
As I said, the laws are not drafted in a vacuum. All the debate and discussion about a bill is transcribed and the bills frequently explain what their intention is. Judges can look to this to determine the intention of a law. Interpreting these secondary sources is important when dealing with odd corner cases where it's not clear what the law meant. I'm really not suggesting that the court has the power to question the "goodness" of a law (other than its Constitutionality), merely that when the facts of a case appear to materially differ from the circumstances considered as the basis for the law (based, again, on the records of the legislative background), reading only the literal letter of the law is not always the approach most likely to result in justice being served.
It's almost unheard of for an appeals court to revisit factual determinations of a lower court. Appeals deal almost exclusively with questions of the interpretation and application of laws.
This MUST be allowed because to do otherwise makes drafting of good, sensible laws essentially impossible. You simply can't delineate every reasonable exception to a law and expect justice to be served.
Do you think justice is served by this court upholding the letter of the law? Remember, I'm asking whether it's JUST, not whether the law is being obeyed.
Literal readings of laws without regard for the context in which they were passed leads to problems. First, you end up with loopholes -- behavior that is clearly intended to be illegal but which is technically within the letter of the law. Second, you end up with cases (like this one, perhaps) where activities that were not intended to be criminal are inadvertently illegal. This could be considered a reverse loophole -- one that gets you INTO trouble rather than out of it.
The courts should make every effort to err on the side of the defendant when interpreting laws, I believe. This is consistent with the "innocent until proven guilty" doctrine. This means that loopholes, while unfortunate, will be respected until they're closed by additional legislation. It also means that reverse loopholes should NOT be treated with the full force of law simply because a law was poorly crafted.
Laws are not passed in a vacuum. There are transcripts of the debates and discussions that occurred, and the bills that introduce these laws frequently explain the reasons for instituting them. The courts SHOULD use this information to divine the intent of the legislature when faced with a case where a literal reading appears not to lead to a just outcome.
In this case, a minority felt that the legislature did not intend to criminalize this behavior based on the history of the law. I can't say first-hand, but I'm inclined to believe they did their homework before penning that opinion. Given that, I would argue that the majority who chose to throw the book at these teens are the ones "legislating from the bench." Sure, they've got the letter of the law behind them, but it doesn't appear that the legislature crafted the law they intended to craft, at least based on the minority's opinion. Given that the judge's law is to uphold justice, the majority has simply failed in their duty.
Literal readings of the laws (e.g., your "anyone" keyword) are utterly impractical. The intention of laws is (supposed to be) upholding justice, not simply ensuring that everyone jumps through the right hoop at the right time. You don't have to have an arbitrary dividing line. There are sentient beings involved in the legal process and it's quite possible to determine whether a nominal crime (i.e., a broken law) is one that should be prosecuted.
Here, this is clearly a case that should not be prosecuted. How is justice served by throwing the book at two minors who consensually broke a law designed to protect them from exploitation by adults? If, as in your last example, one had demonstrably coerced the other, then it would be sensible to prosecute the case. Note that it would ONLY make sense to prosecute one of them -- there's NO way it's sensible to prosecute them both just because the letter of the law allows it.
I think the parent's point is that there's no sense in standardizing systems that won't interact very closely. Now that distances are "shorter" than they used to be, there is much more opportunity for interactions and lack of standardization becomes a problem. 200 years ago, it didn't matter at all if New York and Georgia used different record-keeping systems -- they'd compare records so rarely that it was easier just to figure out how to cross-reference them each time it came up. If they're sharing information on a continuous basis, however, there's a lot more benefit to having them use the same standard system. Add to this the other 48 states and their home-grown systems and it gets a lot more attractive to have everyone agree on a single standard.
I'm not saying I think it's a good idea to force the states to standardize, merely that I don't buy your argument that increased interaction makes standardization less necessary.
Isn't that why the designation "Act of God" exists? I realize that you're considering the "accident" to be the bus crash which is only indirectly caused by the truly random occurrence, but I think that would be a direct enough result of the meteorite strike to be considered an effect of that act. It's "God's" fault.
So, unless her surgery was caused by an earthquake at the moment of incision, an accident during surgery was the doctor's fault.
I'd consider all of these reasons to be laziness or ineptitude. In the case of the string that's displayed, "dangerous" characters have escape codes that allow them to be safely displayed -- that's why I can type without actually making a link. Just take a few minutes and write a function to filter these. At least allow hyphens, periods, commas, and other standard punctuation that can't break HTML.
My bank did this a bit after ING did. They were a little better -- they at least had a blurb about its being a security feature. They also, as most seem to do, let you specify a short string to be displayed. I tend to insert something rude there, but it was rejected at first. Not because it was rude, but because it had disallowed punctuation (a hyphen, I think). That's something I do not understand -- this comes up in passwords and the like all the time. Why limit the character set that a user can use on arbitrary criteria?
The only even remotely legitimate reason is that it makes it harder to tell someone their password, but that's a REAL stretch for legitimacy given that this should never be done, ever. Any other reason is just that it's somehow technically difficult or the designer thinks he knows what's going to be easier for the user. In the former case... well, if you can't deal with this, then are you really qualified to be designing security systems? In the latter case, I find it extremely convenient to be able to use anything on the keyboard as part of my passwords and I come up with more forgettable ones when I'm subject to constraints.
Hard has more than one meaning. Here, we mean intellectually difficult, not physically (or emotionally) exhausting or whatever you take it to mean in your examples.
Well, I agree that I have sympathy for the guy -- I'd probably lose my cool, too. But, if I acted as unprofessionally as he did, I'd deserve to lose my job. Part of doing a job is doing it professionally, even if that is difficult.
Well, not having direct experience with such a situation, I don't know for sure. I've just observed a few companies being very careful about keeping paper trails about this sort of thing. Given how easy it would be to keep there from being a trail that indicates discrimination, I suspect that a seemingly arbitrary firing of a member of a protected group would be scrutinized pretty closely if a complaint were filed. Otherwise, these laws would be utterly ineffectual.
It may be that a company can pull it off a time or two, but it wouldn't be hard to notice a complete absence of members of that class or a pattern of firing members without documented cause.
Note, also, that firing someone for being homosexual is perfectly legal in many states.
[Bill] Gates [responded to] questions in an [unusually] candid [interview]. For [some reason] most [of] his [words] were [interjected] by the editor. This [seemed] somewhat [odd and] excessive [to me]. Did [anyone else] notice [this]? [I] mean, a[n occasional] edit for [clarity] is pretty [normal], but it [seemed] like [every other] word was [inserted later].
Companies I've known are very careful to collect a paper trail before firing in order to justify exactly why it is that an employee is being let go. If a worker were fired and sued for discrimination, the company is going to need some evidence to explain why it was that they fired the employee. Even if they're technically free to fire an employee at any time, for any (non-discriminatory) reason, they can't just wake up and decide to let someone go for this reason.
I don't think this is unreasonable -- it'd be rare for a company to legitimately want to fire an otherwise productive, well-behaved employee. If he's not productive or well-behaved, then it won't be difficult to come up with the documented reason for termination.
If it's just a layoff (i.e., financially necessary firing), then things may be a little different. These wouldn't be for any cause. However, if a round of layoffs consists of entirely workers, the company will have a problem. Again, documentation will be important, probably of reasons for selection. This is why layoffs often go along senority grounds -- it's easy to explain that the least senior member of each group was let go, even if he's not the least-productive. That's clearly a non-discriminatory rationale. This is an unfortunate approach, though, and isn't always the case...
I damn well expect to be able to trust my employer. I would not work for someone whom I felt I could not trust. However, one has to be reasonable about what that means. You can't "trust" them not to have to fire you if you screw up badly, not to have to lay you off if times get rough, etc. That's not dishonest, that's just part of the job, and trust or not, they may have to do that.
Personally, I only grudgingly run Windows at all and really have no interest in Vista. I just think it's a funny thing to suggest that everyone should wait to be second in line, just as a matter of logic.
Slashdot Mirror
He obviously never MUDded or played any BBS games, either, so just being older is hardly an excuse. It's quite possible to develop strong emotional ties even in a game with people you never meet physically. You can argue whether this is healthy, but a lot of us have been able to do that without avoiding RL friends.
I can almost see his point for less involved multiplayer, such as Halo. Still, it doesn't quite stand up to even the most basic scrutiny as a broad principle. There are thousands and thousands of people who play it and make friends without meeting them. Still others, like me, used it as a way to play with friends from RL who live far away.
This is a pointless article, really. He doesn't like multiplayer. Ok, great. I don't think he had a single convincing reason that it's unimportant broadly, just because he prefers to play with someone in the same room.
But, most importantly, he whines about getting beat. That means the GP was right -- this guy's a N00B... No matter how long he's been gaming, he's a N00B!
haha... to be honest, I had more trouble picturing Tom Cruise kicking ass with a sword than I did with the racial question... :-)
I'm really only talking about simulation games where you're a human of some sort, and I'm not claiming that race/skin color is the only thing that determines my comfort level. As I've used as an example in another post, if I'm a samurai in feudal Japan, I'd much rather my character be Japanese simply because it's more consistent with the story. If I'm playing a game set in a mixed culture area of the modern world, though, I'd opt for a Caucasian character simply due to familiarity. However, consistency with the rest of the game world is most important IMO.
Fighting games are a special case... They've got SO much disbelief to be suspended... I mean, if you're expected not to question whether a top-heavy 5'2" girl could possibly KO a 6'10" 320 lb guy through brute force, I don't think you'll be worrying about the socio-economic implications of skin color in the back story. :-)
I think you answered your own question. For many (perhaps most, but at least many) games, it doesn't matter. For some, it does. As I said, when it's not significant to the story of the game (or if the game has a loose or none), it'd be great to be configurable. If it's not possible, I'd rather play as a race/gender that's compatible with the rest of the story. It's easier to imagine myself as a Japanese guy if I'm playing as a samurai than it would be for me to imagine that somehow my honky ass is accepted by the townsfolk without question in feudal Japan.
I don't particularly care about it in real life (beyond a small amount at a subconscious level -- I would love to ditch this, but it's hard). However, I do find it easier to relate to a character who looks like me. That is, I'm most comfortable playing a Caucasian male character. It's easier to get into that character than others. For this reason, I think it'd be nice to be able to define your own character's qualities, but that's not always sensible in a game.
As for other characters, I find I don't really care about their races other than disliking obvious "affirmative action" approaches where the NPC cast is a rainbow of races, obviously only to be PC. I'd rather have consistency between races and storyline. That's the most important thing -- basically, race should not be a distracting feature.
While that's kind of true, I don't think that the GPL is as selfish as that sound bite description makes it sound. The GPL is still about what happens to *your* code -- it only imposes its restrictions on *other people* who want to derive their project from *your* code. Basically, the BSD license gives everything away in exchange for credit whereas the GPL gives it away in exchange for access to any distributed derived work. Just because the GPL is not as generous a license as the BSD license doesn't mean it's not generous at all. They're both less generous than a public domain release and more than standard proprietary releases.
Code shared under the GPL is like a gift with strings attached. The recipient is free to decide whether accepting the gift is worth being tied by the strings. If not, he's no worse off than he was before.
Anyway, I can't tell from your statement whether you're trying to make an anti-GPL statement or just describing the focus of the license in a cute way. Please don't take my comment the wrong way.
As I said, the laws are not drafted in a vacuum. All the debate and discussion about a bill is transcribed and the bills frequently explain what their intention is. Judges can look to this to determine the intention of a law. Interpreting these secondary sources is important when dealing with odd corner cases where it's not clear what the law meant. I'm really not suggesting that the court has the power to question the "goodness" of a law (other than its Constitutionality), merely that when the facts of a case appear to materially differ from the circumstances considered as the basis for the law (based, again, on the records of the legislative background), reading only the literal letter of the law is not always the approach most likely to result in justice being served.
It's almost unheard of for an appeals court to revisit factual determinations of a lower court. Appeals deal almost exclusively with questions of the interpretation and application of laws.
This MUST be allowed because to do otherwise makes drafting of good, sensible laws essentially impossible. You simply can't delineate every reasonable exception to a law and expect justice to be served.
Do you think justice is served by this court upholding the letter of the law? Remember, I'm asking whether it's JUST, not whether the law is being obeyed.
Literal readings of laws without regard for the context in which they were passed leads to problems. First, you end up with loopholes -- behavior that is clearly intended to be illegal but which is technically within the letter of the law. Second, you end up with cases (like this one, perhaps) where activities that were not intended to be criminal are inadvertently illegal. This could be considered a reverse loophole -- one that gets you INTO trouble rather than out of it.
The courts should make every effort to err on the side of the defendant when interpreting laws, I believe. This is consistent with the "innocent until proven guilty" doctrine. This means that loopholes, while unfortunate, will be respected until they're closed by additional legislation. It also means that reverse loopholes should NOT be treated with the full force of law simply because a law was poorly crafted.
Laws are not passed in a vacuum. There are transcripts of the debates and discussions that occurred, and the bills that introduce these laws frequently explain the reasons for instituting them. The courts SHOULD use this information to divine the intent of the legislature when faced with a case where a literal reading appears not to lead to a just outcome.
In this case, a minority felt that the legislature did not intend to criminalize this behavior based on the history of the law. I can't say first-hand, but I'm inclined to believe they did their homework before penning that opinion. Given that, I would argue that the majority who chose to throw the book at these teens are the ones "legislating from the bench." Sure, they've got the letter of the law behind them, but it doesn't appear that the legislature crafted the law they intended to craft, at least based on the minority's opinion. Given that the judge's law is to uphold justice, the majority has simply failed in their duty.
Literal readings of the laws (e.g., your "anyone" keyword) are utterly impractical. The intention of laws is (supposed to be) upholding justice, not simply ensuring that everyone jumps through the right hoop at the right time. You don't have to have an arbitrary dividing line. There are sentient beings involved in the legal process and it's quite possible to determine whether a nominal crime (i.e., a broken law) is one that should be prosecuted.
Here, this is clearly a case that should not be prosecuted. How is justice served by throwing the book at two minors who consensually broke a law designed to protect them from exploitation by adults? If, as in your last example, one had demonstrably coerced the other, then it would be sensible to prosecute the case. Note that it would ONLY make sense to prosecute one of them -- there's NO way it's sensible to prosecute them both just because the letter of the law allows it.
I think the parent's point is that there's no sense in standardizing systems that won't interact very closely. Now that distances are "shorter" than they used to be, there is much more opportunity for interactions and lack of standardization becomes a problem. 200 years ago, it didn't matter at all if New York and Georgia used different record-keeping systems -- they'd compare records so rarely that it was easier just to figure out how to cross-reference them each time it came up. If they're sharing information on a continuous basis, however, there's a lot more benefit to having them use the same standard system. Add to this the other 48 states and their home-grown systems and it gets a lot more attractive to have everyone agree on a single standard.
I'm not saying I think it's a good idea to force the states to standardize, merely that I don't buy your argument that increased interaction makes standardization less necessary.
Isn't that why the designation "Act of God" exists? I realize that you're considering the "accident" to be the bus crash which is only indirectly caused by the truly random occurrence, but I think that would be a direct enough result of the meteorite strike to be considered an effect of that act. It's "God's" fault.
So, unless her surgery was caused by an earthquake at the moment of incision, an accident during surgery was the doctor's fault.
I'd consider all of these reasons to be laziness or ineptitude. In the case of the string that's displayed, "dangerous" characters have escape codes that allow them to be safely displayed -- that's why I can type without actually making a link. Just take a few minutes and write a function to filter these. At least allow hyphens, periods, commas, and other standard punctuation that can't break HTML.
My bank did this a bit after ING did. They were a little better -- they at least had a blurb about its being a security feature. They also, as most seem to do, let you specify a short string to be displayed. I tend to insert something rude there, but it was rejected at first. Not because it was rude, but because it had disallowed punctuation (a hyphen, I think). That's something I do not understand -- this comes up in passwords and the like all the time. Why limit the character set that a user can use on arbitrary criteria?
The only even remotely legitimate reason is that it makes it harder to tell someone their password, but that's a REAL stretch for legitimacy given that this should never be done, ever. Any other reason is just that it's somehow technically difficult or the designer thinks he knows what's going to be easier for the user. In the former case... well, if you can't deal with this, then are you really qualified to be designing security systems? In the latter case, I find it extremely convenient to be able to use anything on the keyboard as part of my passwords and I come up with more forgettable ones when I'm subject to constraints.
Yes, it's.
Granite is hard.
Marble is hard.
Diamonds are hard.
Therefore, writing programs is not hard?
Hard has more than one meaning. Here, we mean intellectually difficult, not physically (or emotionally) exhausting or whatever you take it to mean in your examples.
Well, I agree that I have sympathy for the guy -- I'd probably lose my cool, too. But, if I acted as unprofessionally as he did, I'd deserve to lose my job. Part of doing a job is doing it professionally, even if that is difficult.
Well, not having direct experience with such a situation, I don't know for sure. I've just observed a few companies being very careful about keeping paper trails about this sort of thing. Given how easy it would be to keep there from being a trail that indicates discrimination, I suspect that a seemingly arbitrary firing of a member of a protected group would be scrutinized pretty closely if a complaint were filed. Otherwise, these laws would be utterly ineffectual.
It may be that a company can pull it off a time or two, but it wouldn't be hard to notice a complete absence of members of that class or a pattern of firing members without documented cause.
Note, also, that firing someone for being homosexual is perfectly legal in many states.
[Bill] Gates [responded to] questions in an [unusually] candid [interview]. For [some reason] most [of] his [words] were [interjected] by the editor. This [seemed] somewhat [odd and] excessive [to me]. Did [anyone else] notice [this]? [I] mean, a[n occasional] edit for [clarity] is pretty [normal], but it [seemed] like [every other] word was [inserted later].
Companies I've known are very careful to collect a paper trail before firing in order to justify exactly why it is that an employee is being let go. If a worker were fired and sued for discrimination, the company is going to need some evidence to explain why it was that they fired the employee. Even if they're technically free to fire an employee at any time, for any (non-discriminatory) reason, they can't just wake up and decide to let someone go for this reason.
I don't think this is unreasonable -- it'd be rare for a company to legitimately want to fire an otherwise productive, well-behaved employee. If he's not productive or well-behaved, then it won't be difficult to come up with the documented reason for termination.
If it's just a layoff (i.e., financially necessary firing), then things may be a little different. These wouldn't be for any cause. However, if a round of layoffs consists of entirely workers, the company will have a problem. Again, documentation will be important, probably of reasons for selection. This is why layoffs often go along senority grounds -- it's easy to explain that the least senior member of each group was let go, even if he's not the least-productive. That's clearly a non-discriminatory rationale. This is an unfortunate approach, though, and isn't always the case...
I damn well expect to be able to trust my employer. I would not work for someone whom I felt I could not trust. However, one has to be reasonable about what that means. You can't "trust" them not to have to fire you if you screw up badly, not to have to lay you off if times get rough, etc. That's not dishonest, that's just part of the job, and trust or not, they may have to do that.
That's pretty terrifying.
Personally, I only grudgingly run Windows at all and really have no interest in Vista. I just think it's a funny thing to suggest that everyone should wait to be second in line, just as a matter of logic.
Good point. Believe me, I'm not signing up to be a guinea pig...