Technically, the dinosaurs didn't go anywhere. They just shrunk and grew feathers.. we know grow them in factory farms and eat them by the pound at Chik-Fil-A.
(That and worship our them as our yellow masters through PBS.)
Problem 1) Causation. Prove that it was this fellow and his activities that caused you that harm. Prove that it was not some other bot application, or that the customer could not have easily used another piece of software that was easily attainable, etc. They could try to get all the producers of this kind of software together and sue them collectively for tortious interference, but, in a game that releases new bugs on patch-day, good luck connecting terminated accounts to frustration with bot-players. Further - Blizz would have a VERY hard time proving that these guys did not in fact ENHANCE their revenue vis-a-vis the accounts Blizzard cancels for non-compliance. Many of those accounts may have been purchased specifically for the purpose of leveling and selling (not un-common), or may have cancelled long ago without the software. No clear line of effect between action and loss of value, There/4 lack of causality.
Problem 2) Damages. How much? The amount of cancelled accounts? Which ones, certainly not all the accounts cancelled since the game released.. those in which clients have specifically stated a reason for leaving that includes bots (might get a few there), at what cost - would a player who quit over this issue have otherwise continued to pay monthly fees until the next generation game was released? Forever? Make them pay for one month? Two? Even if they manage to link causation to 20,000 users, how much will court fees run? Lawyers? Experts (they'll need alot to talk about the techincal issues and to prove causation)?
Problem 3) Deep Pockets (lack thereof). These guys (the alleged tortfeasors) do not likely have that kind of money in bank accounts lying around to be taken in suit. That means that even if you win, even if the court assigns all legal expenses to the defendant, even if everything goes your way through the appeals which will probably follow - the defendant declares bankruptcy, and walks away. You still have to pay your lawyer.
It's not a perfect system, but it does more of the little guy than people think. Here's hoping they don't hit the lottery anytime soon:).
Tic-Tac-Toe:) They always quit when they realize they can't win, and then they stop killing the world like I wanted them to.
Seriously though.. Bots do a BAD job of playing in these enviroments. That's why they don't workin in games like City of Heroes that have a death peanlty. The operative term in wow for leveling is "grind." I ground my way to 60 with a druid.. and a rogue.. and a mage.. and then I stopped one day when my butt hurt and I had nothing to show for all my hours and realized I was performing a robotic repetative act and calling it "fun." If someone has to behave like a robot, let it be a computer.
1) He's not interfering with the sale of their product or the collection of profits, so tortious interfence is unlikely. (no money to be made in trial.)
2) Even if he were a participant in the contract, the contract is an adhession contract, which means that it's ability to bind the user is limited, let alone a third party.
3) It could violate the DCMA if he intercepts and interprets the signal from the wow server to drive his software. I'm out of my element here, but I believe the DCMA covers most efforts to reverse engineer thier software if the intent is to break through their security measures protecting the game data (player location, weapon stats, etc).
"true, and I hope so, but I doubt the $100 laptop will achieve that - you need the electricity and the networking infrestructure to get on the internet - something quite difficult in places these laptops are intended to go."
Where there are cell phones, there is net access, and cell phones are ubequitous there as well.
Part of the folly in this is the treatment of the African continent as one place, it is not. It is not a unified culture, or even one single bio-sphere. This is indeed the cause of many of their problems.
For instance, you mention arrid land - yes, many parts of africa are arrid, others are too wet, swamp and rainforest interferes with growing food and livestock too. The african continent is long in the wrong direction - you may note that there is a correlation between position north or south of the equater and the viability of our main food sources - wheat, rice, oats, etc. The seeds to grow these plants are artfully engineered to grow at that time of the year in which they will have the longest growing season in the weather most favorable to their needs. Works great while moving along a path parrallel to the equater - say from China to Europe to the U.S. These plants can survive and thrive anywhere within that band of distance from the equater which allows them to get the amount of sunlight the plants need, during the right part of the seasonal cycles. Move these same plants south, and they cease thriving and produce poorly. Check out "Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond for more on that.
This inability to use the common domesticated food supplies relied upon by the northern hemisphere nations puts those at different latitudes at a severe disadvantadge. They cannot trade seeds and livestock easily with neighboring nations as works for most of the rest of the world. It was a basic failure to understand the nature of the problem that doomed most of the well-meaning if misguided efforts of early decades to failure. "Let's teach them to grow corn.. man.. the soil must suck here, this corn grows poorly." Of course the native sweet beets were fine, and several breeds of potato could be adapted to grow there.. but we didn't look at it that way.. bad soil, lazy farmers - nothing we can do.
The 100 dollar lap top program is part of a new wave of efforts that aren't designed to solve the problems of Africa (and other poor areas) for their inhabitants, but rather to arm them with the tools they need to produce their own solutions. Along with micro-lending and new U.N. lead efforts to get farmers organized around native plant products, there is a sea change occouring in how help is offered. It is both foolish and wrongheaded to say that this tool, which is given freely by those who are not skilled to provide other toosl, will not help. The 100 dollar laptop may not cause a revolution in African life, but it may help two or three students become entrapeneurs who start the businesses that DO change Africa forever.
It's been awhile since I was in a comp. sci class (8 years?) but I don't remember seeing any women in my classes.
Given how very few choice jobs there are in the game market, how often does skill, interest, and gender line up?
-GiH
Bring on the trains!
So many of our national problems in cities and out in the rural areas can be tied to cars. Ex-urban migration depends on cars. The nightmare of city traffic as all those suburbans come in to work. Think of all the room we give up to highways and byways that could be parks and landfills (okay, land-fills aren't pretty.. but they are clearner than highways as often as not).
Moreover (getting back on topic) cars waste so much fuel! Why do we need to move a half-ton of steel 50 miles every day to go to work? Car pooling helps, but none of those methods approach the efficiency that could be reached by a well regulated system of light and commercial rail and bus service.
So, bring on the trains!
-GiH
*Bullshit. Even christian propaganda science books don't say this. Besides, the myth is that men have one less rib.*
Thus reaching the second problem with anecdotal evidence. "It happened", "No it didn't!!"
Anyway, older text books do perpetatute this and other myths, for all the same reasons that creationism remains a viable alternative to evolution in the public commons. People want to belive, and they'll cook the books to do it.
(Also, yeah, you're right, Men are supposed to have one less.. >shrug)
-GiH
So, you want to have the government pay for the privledge of building a system to manage and oversee companies that will administer schools for-profit? You want the tax payers to pay for the additional cost of all that testing and management AS WELL as paying cost-plus for the teaching??
Wow..
-GiH
"Well, it turns out the public high school I went to constantly got new books, at a turn over rate of about 5 years or so."
Good for YOU.
Unfortunately statistics are not generated out of one person's experience. I've done volunteer work at schools (public schools) that didn't have enough books for all their students. The books they had were twenty years old.
Did you know that men have one more rib than women? All these kids did. It's in their books.
But hey, that's not a statistic or a trend, just another anecdote. And HEY! what do you know! All my expereinces support my current position.. meaning my annecdotes are a half inch off of just saying "I'm right.. trust me." Boy, I bet people would make fun of me if I made that argument.
When was the last time you needed to read a manual to boot a PC? Those comercials are about 10 years behind the times. Sure, PCs still freeze marginally more often than Macs, but that has more to do with Virues and an Overabundance of bad software than the machine itself. While the Mac is more likely to come pre-loaded with pretty software, most of the stuff a person will actually use (aka Microsoft Word) can be pre-installed on your PC, and the rest of the crap (ex: Image Archival tools) are built into the OS. So what.. Mac's have Itunes? Great.. my PC comes pre-loaded with Media Player 10 that includes links to 10 different software download sites. I should be glad that Mac is trying to force me to use thier online music store?
I suppose we should be glad their PR guy didn't call it an "IBM" computer..
That being said, I picked up an iBook last year, and it's a very solid piece of hardware. These machines have it where it counts, I just wish the advertisements would emphasize that, might help justifying the additional expense to the parents of all those college kids Apple is trying to attract with thier stupid campaign.
Mac addicts need to remember that as their obession continues to go mainstream it's going to loose some of that "cool" in exchange for some of that "dependable, useful, ruggeded, trustworthy" crap.
Even the best FPS is still just a damn First Person Shooter...
FPS games have a torqued out product cycle, once the graphics and game play are smooth - why upgrade? Story? Yeah.. sure.
Sure, at first each new generation brought real improvement over the last - smoother curves however, do not a revolution in gaming make.
On the console side we're seeing a greater amount of depth, 3D platformers, puzzle games, role playing.. and of course, First Person Shooters.
Meanwhile, in the realm where PCs have the edge, adventure games and RTS titles.. nothing.
That's why PC gaming is dying.
-GiH
2nd ) I said callerd ID and Number Forwarding - Number forwarding is what allows that number to be traced / appear on a bill. If it is disabled, a call can be traced back to the trunk of origin, and there logs are kept that can be dug up by the sending phone company, if the requestor has the legal athority to demand them.
3rd ) the article referenced was not the one you just quoted (nice try) but rather it was This one. Which refers to the ANI system, which is limited to the 800 service and its children (888 etc).
Your assumptions of the technological ommniscience of the phone companies is amusing, and baseless.
First - there are legal barriers that allow you to strip a call of identifying headers. You can press a phone code to turn off your call id, and number forwarding, so that the recieving party cannot trace you. (in the u.s.) This was done so that victims of abuse could call home without fear of being traced. The phone company dosen't get that number either.
Second - as any technologist could tell you, just because a system "should" work a certain way, dosen't mean that the programer who implemented it didn't hack together a fix overnight which worked, so it became a permanent part of the system.
Third and Finally - Even though TV tells you that cell phone triangulation is a common practice, it's not. Triangulating on a cell phone call requires police, on foot, with three antennas, to find the right signal and take a measurement, from there they sit down with a map and work it out. This isn't built into the phone system, and its certainly not automatic. One reason for this is that one of the better ways to triangulate a signal is to measure the signal strength - if cell phone providers measured signal strength at all their towers consumer groups could gain access to those records durring the disclosure period of a civil suit to prove that large regions of their networks do not work sufficently.
Screw WoW - it competes in the PC market for RPG dollars, which is not the majority of console sales. What about Game Fly?
I used to buy one or two console games a month. Now I get two or three console games delievered every couple weeks, I almost immediately send back the ones that aren't worth beating, and keep one or two gems for a few weeks to play through the end. It lets me try out alot of games, without paying the price for console game adventuring - which is that the majority of console games are rehashes of other games with less care given to design and features.
There are a few games (either Fable or Halo2 was the last one I preordered) I expect to be good, and I still buy those up front. Most of the time, I just wait for the mail guy to bring to them to me at a nice flat 20$ a month rate.
I sat down and worked it out once.. and I think I was saving about $1200 a year using game fly.
-GiH
While your assumptions about my age and gaming habits are amusing, I don't play EA games. They don't pay their workers enough for the sacrafice they demand, and my money goes elsewhere. I also prefer fantasy warfare generally, but my wargaming is usally of a higher sort involving spreadsheets of vehicle data and maps of foreign countries.
That being said, China is building up militarily, and they have been consistently aggresive in their sphere of interest (Tibet, No. Korea durring the Korean war, and let us not forget the role they played in Vietnam). As she becomes more powerful, China will do what all regional powers do as they expand, and attempt to exert influence on the surrounding terrirtories. China does not like the U.S. pressence on Japan, our support of Taiwan, or our intrests in SE asia. The Realist theory of foreign policy would dictate that war is inevitable due to our conflicting intrests in those areas. Liberal theory would suggest that the U.S. use international law to hem in China's expansion, but China has a seat on the U.N. security council, and will not allow any resolution to pass against her interests.
Whereas the U.S. and Russia were antagonists only in their mutual fear of one another, and their mutual desires to assume the role of global hegemon, China and the U.S. are more directly conflicted - we have territorial disputes. This greatly increases the danger of war, as does the relative independence of the chinese military within the governmental structures of China.
Well, Plate Techtonics will have a roll in the long term fall out of any climate change. The plates shift up and down as the plastic layers become warmer or cooler. Many techtonic plates exist only as highly plastic super-dense superheated bubbles of rock beneath other plates. As these shift upwards and downwards the surface plates (even the ones under the oceans) can move "rapidly", perhaps causing such changes in sea level and ocean currents.
The bulk of the earth is in motion, and very little is static. If humanity wants to survive over the millenias to come, we will have to embrace a culture of response to shifts in environment. We should for instance begin hardening the coast lines and making long-term plans for food production once large swaths of the mid-west have completed their current desertification. We could even start seeding programs to return those territories to their natural state and thus provide land for cattle raising and human habitation... but that would require sacrafice and a broad vision of the future.
Logically speaking you can't prove anything either positively or negatively.
As David Hume explained, the cornerstone of such statments is the expectation that what has happened previously will recour. Simple repetition of a response is not sufficient to prove that that response will happen again. For instance: the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life does not prove that it will rise again tommorow. Causation breaks down unless one accepts that the future will follow the dictates of the past. Logically, there is no such thing as causation, and all theories based on past observation are therefore not deductive, but inductive proofs - that is to say, they may be reasonable, but they are never logical.
-GiH
From the post: "MacWorld summarizes an article published in the U.K., stating that Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day..."
You don't see anything about them working more than 50 hours a week? So you think they only work three days a week?
It's more likely that they work either 90 or 105 hours a week, since there is no reason to give them a weekend if you're already placing them in these circumstances. I know asking folks to do outside research for a slashdot article is alot, so let me sumarise it for you: China is still a land that forces its citizens to have abortions. China is a communist state in which the people are not free to choose where they live, and may be forced to work at state run factories. China is a brutal autocracy ruled by a powerful and violent elite, who supress and abuse their subjects.
One day the U.S. will have to fight China. Our best shot at avoiding this is to place the Chinese people in a position of power within their own nation. The U.S. state department should be encouraging fair labor laws within China as a matter of national security. China has *the* fastest growing military in the world. The Chinese navy is already large enough to challenge the pacific fleet. The Chinese intend to have a larger military machine than the united states. The Chinese have stolen many of our secret military technologies, and employed them in their own war machines, which makes them a fair match for an equal sized U.S. fleet. And of course, the oft forgotten problem, the chinese military owns a significant portion of the Chinese factories and companies - often as a shareholder so that the company does not appear to be government owned. This means that our purchase dollars are directly funding the most dangerous and radical arm of the chinese government.
After this, how could one have faith enough to serve an inept institution?"
This is a common misstatement made by those who think joining the armed services is about service to the army, or the navy, or the president. Joining one of the U.S.A.'s armed services is about serving your country, not the individuals in control of it. It's about protecting your homeland from invaders. It's about getting a shot at the brass ring of U.S. citizenship through sacrifice. It's about putting yourself on the line for your brother, your friend, your mother, your future, etc.
When I apply for a job in the states, I do so based on my ability to trust my employer to treat me responsibly. I would refuse a job that didn't pay well, or one where my employment would be degrading or unduly dangerous. Joining any military is a distinctly different sort of employment. It's an inherently dangerous job, one in which you can expect abuse from your employer, rigorous and painful training, and eventual combat duty.
So, in short, while this article is certainly a sign that our government is abusing our troops, one should honor those who do so despite the obvious risks inherent in service. Rather than wondering who would serve, we should wonder who would treat so poorly those who give so much. We ought (as in a moral ought) to respect and honor those who risk their lives to defend our way of life. We ought (again, moral ought) to hold in deepest revulsion those who abuse them, or send out the troops over petty personal desires and greed.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh.. more like vulture from what Discovery Channel tells me :).
-GiH
Technically, the dinosaurs didn't go anywhere. They just shrunk and grew feathers.. we know grow them in factory farms and eat them by the pound at Chik-Fil-A.
(That and worship our them as our yellow masters through PBS.)
-GiH
Problem 2) Damages. How much? The amount of cancelled accounts? Which ones, certainly not all the accounts cancelled since the game released.. those in which clients have specifically stated a reason for leaving that includes bots (might get a few there), at what cost - would a player who quit over this issue have otherwise continued to pay monthly fees until the next generation game was released? Forever? Make them pay for one month? Two? Even if they manage to link causation to 20,000 users, how much will court fees run? Lawyers? Experts (they'll need alot to talk about the techincal issues and to prove causation)?
Problem 3) Deep Pockets (lack thereof). These guys (the alleged tortfeasors) do not likely have that kind of money in bank accounts lying around to be taken in suit. That means that even if you win, even if the court assigns all legal expenses to the defendant, even if everything goes your way through the appeals which will probably follow - the defendant declares bankruptcy, and walks away. You still have to pay your lawyer.
It's not a perfect system, but it does more of the little guy than people think. Here's hoping they don't hit the lottery anytime soon :).
-GiH
Seriously though.. Bots do a BAD job of playing in these enviroments. That's why they don't workin in games like City of Heroes that have a death peanlty. The operative term in wow for leveling is "grind." I ground my way to 60 with a druid.. and a rogue.. and a mage.. and then I stopped one day when my butt hurt and I had nothing to show for all my hours and realized I was performing a robotic repetative act and calling it "fun." If someone has to behave like a robot, let it be a computer.
-GiH
2) Even if he were a participant in the contract, the contract is an adhession contract, which means that it's ability to bind the user is limited, let alone a third party.
3) It could violate the DCMA if he intercepts and interprets the signal from the wow server to drive his software. I'm out of my element here, but I believe the DCMA covers most efforts to reverse engineer thier software if the intent is to break through their security measures protecting the game data (player location, weapon stats, etc).
Meh,
-GiH
Where there are cell phones, there is net access, and cell phones are ubequitous there as well.
Part of the folly in this is the treatment of the African continent as one place, it is not. It is not a unified culture, or even one single bio-sphere. This is indeed the cause of many of their problems.
For instance, you mention arrid land - yes, many parts of africa are arrid, others are too wet, swamp and rainforest interferes with growing food and livestock too. The african continent is long in the wrong direction - you may note that there is a correlation between position north or south of the equater and the viability of our main food sources - wheat, rice, oats, etc. The seeds to grow these plants are artfully engineered to grow at that time of the year in which they will have the longest growing season in the weather most favorable to their needs. Works great while moving along a path parrallel to the equater - say from China to Europe to the U.S. These plants can survive and thrive anywhere within that band of distance from the equater which allows them to get the amount of sunlight the plants need, during the right part of the seasonal cycles. Move these same plants south, and they cease thriving and produce poorly. Check out "Guns Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond for more on that.
This inability to use the common domesticated food supplies relied upon by the northern hemisphere nations puts those at different latitudes at a severe disadvantadge. They cannot trade seeds and livestock easily with neighboring nations as works for most of the rest of the world. It was a basic failure to understand the nature of the problem that doomed most of the well-meaning if misguided efforts of early decades to failure. "Let's teach them to grow corn.. man.. the soil must suck here, this corn grows poorly." Of course the native sweet beets were fine, and several breeds of potato could be adapted to grow there.. but we didn't look at it that way.. bad soil, lazy farmers - nothing we can do.
The 100 dollar lap top program is part of a new wave of efforts that aren't designed to solve the problems of Africa (and other poor areas) for their inhabitants, but rather to arm them with the tools they need to produce their own solutions. Along with micro-lending and new U.N. lead efforts to get farmers organized around native plant products, there is a sea change occouring in how help is offered. It is both foolish and wrongheaded to say that this tool, which is given freely by those who are not skilled to provide other toosl, will not help. The 100 dollar laptop may not cause a revolution in African life, but it may help two or three students become entrapeneurs who start the businesses that DO change Africa forever.
-GiH
It's been awhile since I was in a comp. sci class (8 years?) but I don't remember seeing any women in my classes.
Given how very few choice jobs there are in the game market, how often does skill, interest, and gender line up?
-GiH
>nod Possibly the greatest crime perpetrated by man outside of warfare. -GiH
Bring on the trains! So many of our national problems in cities and out in the rural areas can be tied to cars. Ex-urban migration depends on cars. The nightmare of city traffic as all those suburbans come in to work. Think of all the room we give up to highways and byways that could be parks and landfills (okay, land-fills aren't pretty.. but they are clearner than highways as often as not). Moreover (getting back on topic) cars waste so much fuel! Why do we need to move a half-ton of steel 50 miles every day to go to work? Car pooling helps, but none of those methods approach the efficiency that could be reached by a well regulated system of light and commercial rail and bus service. So, bring on the trains! -GiH
*Bullshit. Even christian propaganda science books don't say this. Besides, the myth is that men have one less rib.* Thus reaching the second problem with anecdotal evidence. "It happened", "No it didn't!!" Anyway, older text books do perpetatute this and other myths, for all the same reasons that creationism remains a viable alternative to evolution in the public commons. People want to belive, and they'll cook the books to do it. (Also, yeah, you're right, Men are supposed to have one less.. >shrug) -GiH
So, you want to have the government pay for the privledge of building a system to manage and oversee companies that will administer schools for-profit? You want the tax payers to pay for the additional cost of all that testing and management AS WELL as paying cost-plus for the teaching?? Wow.. -GiH
"Well, it turns out the public high school I went to constantly got new books, at a turn over rate of about 5 years or so."
Good for YOU.
Unfortunately statistics are not generated out of one person's experience. I've done volunteer work at schools (public schools) that didn't have enough books for all their students. The books they had were twenty years old.
Did you know that men have one more rib than women? All these kids did. It's in their books.
But hey, that's not a statistic or a trend, just another anecdote. And HEY! what do you know! All my expereinces support my current position.. meaning my annecdotes are a half inch off of just saying "I'm right.. trust me." Boy, I bet people would make fun of me if I made that argument.
-GiH
When was the last time you needed to read a manual to boot a PC? Those comercials are about 10 years behind the times. Sure, PCs still freeze marginally more often than Macs, but that has more to do with Virues and an Overabundance of bad software than the machine itself. While the Mac is more likely to come pre-loaded with pretty software, most of the stuff a person will actually use (aka Microsoft Word) can be pre-installed on your PC, and the rest of the crap (ex: Image Archival tools) are built into the OS. So what.. Mac's have Itunes? Great.. my PC comes pre-loaded with Media Player 10 that includes links to 10 different software download sites. I should be glad that Mac is trying to force me to use thier online music store?
I suppose we should be glad their PR guy didn't call it an "IBM" computer..
That being said, I picked up an iBook last year, and it's a very solid piece of hardware. These machines have it where it counts, I just wish the advertisements would emphasize that, might help justifying the additional expense to the parents of all those college kids Apple is trying to attract with thier stupid campaign.
-GiH
Mac addicts need to remember that as their obession continues to go mainstream it's going to loose some of that "cool" in exchange for some of that "dependable, useful, ruggeded, trustworthy" crap.
-GiH
Even the best FPS is still just a damn First Person Shooter... FPS games have a torqued out product cycle, once the graphics and game play are smooth - why upgrade? Story? Yeah.. sure. Sure, at first each new generation brought real improvement over the last - smoother curves however, do not a revolution in gaming make. On the console side we're seeing a greater amount of depth, 3D platformers, puzzle games, role playing.. and of course, First Person Shooters. Meanwhile, in the realm where PCs have the edge, adventure games and RTS titles.. nothing. That's why PC gaming is dying. -GiH
1st ) I didn't reference wikipedia he (you?) did.
2nd ) I said callerd ID and Number Forwarding - Number forwarding is what allows that number to be traced / appear on a bill. If it is disabled, a call can be traced back to the trunk of origin, and there logs are kept that can be dug up by the sending phone company, if the requestor has the legal athority to demand them.
3rd ) the article referenced was not the one you just quoted (nice try) but rather it was This one. Which refers to the ANI system, which is limited to the 800 service and its children (888 etc).
Troll often?
-GiH
Yes, you're right.. if you're calling a frigging 800 number!!! Moron. -GiH
First - there are legal barriers that allow you to strip a call of identifying headers. You can press a phone code to turn off your call id, and number forwarding, so that the recieving party cannot trace you. (in the u.s.) This was done so that victims of abuse could call home without fear of being traced. The phone company dosen't get that number either.
Second - as any technologist could tell you, just because a system "should" work a certain way, dosen't mean that the programer who implemented it didn't hack together a fix overnight which worked, so it became a permanent part of the system.
Third and Finally - Even though TV tells you that cell phone triangulation is a common practice, it's not. Triangulating on a cell phone call requires police, on foot, with three antennas, to find the right signal and take a measurement, from there they sit down with a map and work it out. This isn't built into the phone system, and its certainly not automatic. One reason for this is that one of the better ways to triangulate a signal is to measure the signal strength - if cell phone providers measured signal strength at all their towers consumer groups could gain access to those records durring the disclosure period of a civil suit to prove that large regions of their networks do not work sufficently.
Remember, Technology /= Magic.
-GiH
Screw WoW - it competes in the PC market for RPG dollars, which is not the majority of console sales. What about Game Fly? I used to buy one or two console games a month. Now I get two or three console games delievered every couple weeks, I almost immediately send back the ones that aren't worth beating, and keep one or two gems for a few weeks to play through the end. It lets me try out alot of games, without paying the price for console game adventuring - which is that the majority of console games are rehashes of other games with less care given to design and features. There are a few games (either Fable or Halo2 was the last one I preordered) I expect to be good, and I still buy those up front. Most of the time, I just wait for the mail guy to bring to them to me at a nice flat 20$ a month rate. I sat down and worked it out once.. and I think I was saving about $1200 a year using game fly. -GiH
That being said, China is building up militarily, and they have been consistently aggresive in their sphere of interest (Tibet, No. Korea durring the Korean war, and let us not forget the role they played in Vietnam). As she becomes more powerful, China will do what all regional powers do as they expand, and attempt to exert influence on the surrounding terrirtories. China does not like the U.S. pressence on Japan, our support of Taiwan, or our intrests in SE asia. The Realist theory of foreign policy would dictate that war is inevitable due to our conflicting intrests in those areas. Liberal theory would suggest that the U.S. use international law to hem in China's expansion, but China has a seat on the U.N. security council, and will not allow any resolution to pass against her interests.
Whereas the U.S. and Russia were antagonists only in their mutual fear of one another, and their mutual desires to assume the role of global hegemon, China and the U.S. are more directly conflicted - we have territorial disputes. This greatly increases the danger of war, as does the relative independence of the chinese military within the governmental structures of China.
-GiH
The bulk of the earth is in motion, and very little is static. If humanity wants to survive over the millenias to come, we will have to embrace a culture of response to shifts in environment. We should for instance begin hardening the coast lines and making long-term plans for food production once large swaths of the mid-west have completed their current desertification. We could even start seeding programs to return those territories to their natural state and thus provide land for cattle raising and human habitation... but that would require sacrafice and a broad vision of the future.
-GiH
I don't want to work forever.
-GiH
Logically speaking you can't prove anything either positively or negatively. As David Hume explained, the cornerstone of such statments is the expectation that what has happened previously will recour. Simple repetition of a response is not sufficient to prove that that response will happen again. For instance: the fact that the sun has risen every day of my life does not prove that it will rise again tommorow. Causation breaks down unless one accepts that the future will follow the dictates of the past. Logically, there is no such thing as causation, and all theories based on past observation are therefore not deductive, but inductive proofs - that is to say, they may be reasonable, but they are never logical. -GiH
From the post: "MacWorld summarizes an article published in the U.K., stating that Apple's iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day..."
You don't see anything about them working more than 50 hours a week? So you think they only work three days a week? It's more likely that they work either 90 or 105 hours a week, since there is no reason to give them a weekend if you're already placing them in these circumstances. I know asking folks to do outside research for a slashdot article is alot, so let me sumarise it for you: China is still a land that forces its citizens to have abortions. China is a communist state in which the people are not free to choose where they live, and may be forced to work at state run factories. China is a brutal autocracy ruled by a powerful and violent elite, who supress and abuse their subjects.
One day the U.S. will have to fight China. Our best shot at avoiding this is to place the Chinese people in a position of power within their own nation. The U.S. state department should be encouraging fair labor laws within China as a matter of national security. China has *the* fastest growing military in the world. The Chinese navy is already large enough to challenge the pacific fleet. The Chinese intend to have a larger military machine than the united states. The Chinese have stolen many of our secret military technologies, and employed them in their own war machines, which makes them a fair match for an equal sized U.S. fleet. And of course, the oft forgotten problem, the chinese military owns a significant portion of the Chinese factories and companies - often as a shareholder so that the company does not appear to be government owned. This means that our purchase dollars are directly funding the most dangerous and radical arm of the chinese government.
-GiH
This is a common misstatement made by those who think joining the armed services is about service to the army, or the navy, or the president. Joining one of the U.S.A.'s armed services is about serving your country, not the individuals in control of it. It's about protecting your homeland from invaders. It's about getting a shot at the brass ring of U.S. citizenship through sacrifice. It's about putting yourself on the line for your brother, your friend, your mother, your future, etc.
When I apply for a job in the states, I do so based on my ability to trust my employer to treat me responsibly. I would refuse a job that didn't pay well, or one where my employment would be degrading or unduly dangerous. Joining any military is a distinctly different sort of employment. It's an inherently dangerous job, one in which you can expect abuse from your employer, rigorous and painful training, and eventual combat duty.
So, in short, while this article is certainly a sign that our government is abusing our troops, one should honor those who do so despite the obvious risks inherent in service. Rather than wondering who would serve, we should wonder who would treat so poorly those who give so much. We ought (as in a moral ought) to respect and honor those who risk their lives to defend our way of life. We ought (again, moral ought) to hold in deepest revulsion those who abuse them, or send out the troops over petty personal desires and greed.
-GiH