So, from this, Christians have no problem with cloning as long as it has little or no possibility of killing the fetus. Then you should have no problem with cloning for gestation or cloning for slavery, as long as the clone isn't harmed and has a chance to know God, right? QED.
Bull-fucking-shit. I'm sure you're alone there. Christians like to think that if something's not in a contradictory book rewritten by the human puppets of the Catholic church all throughout the first millenium and through a great period of the second millenium, that you just flat out shouldn't do it. Cloning alone is NOT a crime, a sin or a travesty against nature, nor should it be considered as such. Your god laid out ten simple rules to live by, and as much as you'd like to, you can't easily adapt them to the science of cloning as long as it doesn't harm the fetus. And since a fertilized egg is not a fetus (remember that even a normally impregnated woman might miscarry within the first few days of impregnation and never even know it...reproduction is not the bulletproof activity we want it to be), destroying one is not murder. Your job, as a doublethinking purveyor of myth approaching a legislative solution to a scientific issue, is to define once and for all where life begins. It isn't conception, and it isn't birth. It's some stage in between when the brain has grown to the point that it can support the impulses of thought you call a soul. I'm fairly sure they don't exist until a child realises its own existance, which I'm sad to say isn't until they've been out of the womb for several years (which is why it's often hard to tell if a child is blind, or deaf, or has brain damage until they are much older).
Of course, you can also continue doing what Christian pundits are best at: fly in the face of science, reason and education and make up some cock and bull story about how god hates fags and all clones are gay or something. People like to hate homosexuals and unwed mothers -- you know, sensitive types that are easy to push around. You don't see the 700 club complaining a lot about buff gun toting lunatics who don't like being touched.
Re:Best to hold off until the bugs are worked out.
on
Send out the Clones?
·
· Score: 2
I agree. We should kill aging migrant farm workers and old people. Save me the embarrasment of having to talk to my Gran whenever she calls. Logan's Run had it right.
Yeah, that's the problem with roadrunner...there's good road runner (as available in albany) and then there's bad road runner (available in binghamton). Both our descriptions are correct -- there's a gestapo road runner and a utopian one, and for the record, they both have about equal sign up and return rates and equal bandwidth usage. There's just a lot more leeching going on under the single line, no server RRs. AOL, i'm sure, plans to unite the roadrunners under the same management...and as much as I'd wish it were my roadrunner, i'm sure they'll find some way to make the gestapo version come out on top.
What, is Time Warner / AOL just going to go away? Roadrunner is one of the best broadband services in the nation, faster than DSL in most areas (except under a load...prime time is hell), and at least around here they're very cool for service. They offer everybody three IPs, but don't bother you if you use more (i've had up to six at once); they only ask that you warn them of what servers you are running and even then don't worry to much unless you start eating BW. My father, who works for TW (but i'm not biased, he's on the CABLE side), says that they only cap users who tend to eat a lot of bandwidth in long stretches -- that "normal" users, like us people with jobs who hit the newsgroups at night and occasionally grab an ISO or three, aren't capped at all. And the fees are chump change compared to like-speed DSL...i've got a line capped at 64kb/s uplink, but that's PER SOCKET, meaning i can pump 256kb/s through it at once easily. My webserver (currently "hosted" in the basement) feeds pages at up to 25 kB/s, and all this bandwidth costs me $45/month; and when I worked my last job we had a deal to get RR for $11/month. A DSL line that was even close to this speed would run in the multihundreds per month. Granted, it would have more reliable speed and so forth, but is that worth the extra money? Not in my book, sister.
My argument is that great electronics would never need that patch. Besides, nothing says that each individual component can't be upgradable -- all pioneers have a boot mechanism that allows technicians to insert a cd, boot the device and flash the firmware. Furthurmore, my LD player didn't originally have dolby out...I added that aftermarket with some clever hardware hacking and help from the web...same with the comb filter on my shitty sharp VCR I never use.
Look, preach integration of media components all you like (BTW: you have it already and its called a goddamn laptop) but you're not going to cause any great herding towards the inevitable failure of this idea. Let us look at the facts: people who want an integrated box don't want to pay much for it. People who want this kind of quality want to be able to switch out parts when they become obsolete (my friend's $800 DVD player from 1997, for example, is inferior to today's $150 Panaphonics, Magnetboxes and Sornys) If they don't want to pay much for it, the components can't be well made or well designed, because good parts and good design cost good money. And if it isn't well designed, nobody will buy it, or at least not at the price point you'd need to support it. It's a viscious cycle that results only in mediocrity. Case in point: the Apex AD-600a DVD player. This thing did DVDs, MP3s, SVCDs and XVCDs and had great zoom and multiregion features. It also had the fastest scan time of any dvd player i've used, component or not. But it sucks. The quality of every function of the AD-600a is inferior, from the chipset which is prone to overheating to the MP3 playback which clips and has a terrible interface. Sure, they sold a lot of them, but when the AD-660 came out, none of the features were improved. In face, Apex increased stability only at the expense of some of the neatest features of the AD-600, mainly the hacked menu. Other combo boxes like the UltimateTV and the Playstation 2 have similarly cut corners, and see sagging sales and practically no profitability.
And yet, at the same time, you can't find an A-V shoppe that can hold the $800 Pioneer DV-09 in stock. This thing is flying off the shelves. It doesn't play MP3s or dial the internet. But it does do one thing better than any other player on earth: it plays DVDs. No progressive scan features, no fancy disc flipping or changer. It's a single play DVD player (okay, it's also a bangin' CD player but that's a symptom of the high quality 24 bit DAC, not a feature they set out to design).
When I started organizing a list of components for my new stereo, this was the thought I had going into it: wouldn't it be great if one box did everything I wanted it to with perfect quality and it was inexpensive and painted the guest room if I asked it to and put away its toys when it was done with them? The answer is yes, of course, but that's about as realistic as saying "were going to ban all guns because criminals can play nice." The reality is that mutliplayers are always of substandard quality to moderately priced component equivalents. So I cooled it...I replaced my AD-600a with a Pioneer DV-434, a relatively inexpensive DVD player that had better playback but no MP3. For the MP3s, I picked up a Rio handheld mp3 player, and though I lament the loss of SP/DIF, it wasn't as important to me as having a nice display and decent playback. For a receiver, I nabbed a sweet Sherwood and a pair of Energies; for digital recording, I use my old Buz box hooked up to a small BSD machine. For games and internet, I have the mac and the athlon. For progressive scan, a Sony WEGA XBR which is the jewel of my collection. Price for all this is of course moderate to huge, but it's nice stuff. When you buy nice stuff, you feel better while using it and keep it longer...hell, I don't know if I'll ever get rid of my Energy eXL-16s, they're sweet speakers for under $300. And when it becomes outdated, I can replace them...if I had some massive "box" i'd be stuck with what I had. Finally, because of the seperation of my components, I can use them in ways you couldn't use this magic box. If I want to switch between the laserdisc of star wars and an SVCD i built of it to check the quality, i don't have to start and stop the box. If I want to watch the kung fu on my VCD of Project A while playing the Clerks soundtrack, I can do that. If I want to watch the news and tape McGuyver, i'm cool. In face, if you think about it, what you want this magic box to do, the freedom you'd need it to have, you can only get from components. And if you don't like all the wires, you can learn to deal.
Correct. He no doubt weeds his files for the normal patterns of random similarity, because even ONE of these would make the contest a farce (you could replace the bytes very easily). But there must be other alternatives to simple dictionary replacement, alternatives like dictionary on a bit shift (you're guaranteed to find some stuff that way, though the compression will be slow as hell), fractal decompression (match a sequence of the random to some buildable equation and save that equation) or possibly compression of a matrix of the file itself. Of course, for each of these methods I mention, Mike has probably generated a file that's taken these into account, and that's the point of this: he wants to see the magical next step in compression, which doesn't rely on these simple notions that things are repeated or can be rerepresented. There's some elusive technology he wants us to uncover, and hence the $5000 (and why he wouldn't pay up on that sham of a compression scheme Pat generated...converting "5" to an EOF does not constitute compressing.)
Well, this isn't just a bet. It's like a research grant. Mike wants to see compression -- meaning, the file takes less disc space -- and that isn't what he got. He got a bunch of files that no doubt took up more disc space due to the file information headers...basically, he did the same thing as those cheater programs back in the '80s that would "compress" files by moving the EOF up to the front of the file, and storing the real bits in the free space area. The trick here was in the file system, and on a file system that included the size of the header in the file size (like MacOS) it would be obvious he failed. Don't try and milk Mike's grant money for a shuyster who did nothing other than lie in an attempt to win(which is what this was...even if it wasn't especially shiftless). EVERYBODY knows the purpose of this challenge is compression, not rhetorical trickery, and the advancement of computer science is a bit more important than a scientist's offhanded approach to definition. I agree that he was careless, but science *IS* a world where things are fair...and in this case, fairness precludes and should preclude honor.
My rant wasn't about the centralized pc idea, it was the offshoot concept of hotswappable workstations. With non-distributed windows PCs (which is what I work with, please don't hand me a "go UN*X line" because I will write you off as a troll who doesn't understand my work environment), this means no installing programs on your machine, no customizing settings, no nothing -- because if you get even so much as a dead harddrive, out goes your machine, in comes a new one. Of course, this could be offset with common backups, but backups of a lot of user machines is kind of a useless process...
This might be a good idea if combined with a type of REVRDIST, to backup anything that isn't on a centralized application mirror to a user folder for movement back to a new local machine. Theoretically, with this combination, IT could take out the busted-ass machine, stick in a new one, re-dist the custom info and have you back up with a clone of your previous machine, all in the time it takes to wander down the hall and get a packet of cheez-its.
When a customer or client needs a machine NOW, and the only one that is available is guaranteed to shut down because we haven't taken a simple step to fix it, I do not feel justified in telling that user "I'm sorry, this computer is available, but will crash because Dell will not admit it is broken and we will not fix it because we are trying to prove a point."
They didn't, by the way, fix it without a word...they bitched constantly about it and eventually the machines all died while in use and added up to one of the worst decisions we ever made. There are those in this department who will not buy celeron machines ever, despite their superior P/P ratio, because of this batch of lemons. So what did they cost us? $1400 per machine for 40 machines, plus an additional $200-$400 for every new box we buy since mg'mt won't okay celerons. Not to mention the intangible loss and increase in frustrations when our clients got bluescreens (which, on these machines, happened multiple times, daily. don't deal me this "all MS machines crash" shit, because this machine has NEVER BSOD'd and neither have any of our other dev boxes, some of which are repurposed celerons). All of this could have been fixed by a simple piece of software...but we wanted to prove a point. I guarantee you that the customer's didn't care about our quixotian pursuit of justice...they cared about their lost data.
First off, this isn't a thin client. It's simply a smallish PC that sits 200 yards away. Nothing, except for the lack of a floppy or CD-ROM drive, and group polices, will prevent you from installing your software.
Any time you talk about hotswappable machines, you're restricted to a thin client. Can't install a lot of software if you get a new machine every time you bluescreen.
Secondly, "multiple browsers, spam silencers, adbusters, and scripts" don't exactly seem that prodctive to me. Unless you're a web developer, I don't see why you'd need multiple browsers. You shouldn't be getting that much spam on your corporate email address, and Outlook has filtering rules to help with the ones you do get. If you're really making good use of an adbuster, then you're spending too much time on the Internet. Get to work. Scripts? Well, that depends what kind of scripts we're talking about here, but, in general, scripts are a potential security threat.
Fuck security -- internally, security causes more messes for file sharing and application sharing than it will ever catch. Firewall, VPN, and then call it quits. As for multiple browsers: everybody in the house needs them, because when we put out a fire we need every step of the process from tech support to affiliate support to QA to be on the same plane. If they aren't, we're not going to solve a thing.
Spyware is much less an issue, but it's once again IT's job. They monitor our machines for licensing issues, viruses and illicit connections across the network, and it's all done autonomously...they don't do squat unless something breaks. And realplayer, alas, isn't an option...we all need it because we server realmedia content! Even if it wasn't, it's easy for IT to say "we dont' support it," but that's not their fucking JOB. Their job is to find out where the incompatibility is and to make sure they have a solution or a workaround. Simply locking it down or ignoring it won't make the problem go away...and there's not an It manager on earth with the balls to tell the CEO he can't listen to the baseball game over Real Networks while he goes over the employee records to see who's expendable and who isn't because the software isn't supported.
Lockdowns breed stupidity. C'mon, how are you supposed to tell if you screwed something up or if you're just not supposed to do it. And a registry hacker like yourself knows as well as anybody that there are always loopholes, always tricks to tunnel through. We had an old mac print station that didn't get rid of the desktop hook to a disk if you ejected using the Special menu, the vulcan mac meld (Open Apple - SHIFT - 1), or a "paperclip" to eject, as many of the PC paradigm people who consider tactile ejecting the only solution to removing data from a machine are wont to do. Which meant when you'd insert a new disc, the mac thought "great, i'll use the hook I already have and associate the data with the disc again." If you ejected "Charles," and the new disc was called "Martinez," you couldn't access it until you properly Option-dot'd through the error messages and dragged the disc to the trash (the real way to get anything out of a mac, if only i could drag this shitty ATI video card to it). All in all, it was an involved, confusing process...all because the mac admin didn't want users to be able to fully interact with the desktop and, hence, the main volume of the machine.
We switched to a much more simple "print from anywhere, then authenticate from a single station" interface which has become so popular, we've got a paper problem: we're using fifteen times as much. Mac users who needed to print weren't doing so because it was too confusing.
Moral: if you restrict a user from doing something once, they begin to fear the boundary. Users who fear machines are not going to learn anything -- they gain a mystique, which is the last thing you want from a supportability standpoint. Though I love walking up to a mac with a stuck disc, and whispering "My mind to your mind; my thoughts to your thoughts...COME OUT!" as I, unseen to the hapless user, press SHIFT-Open Aapl-1...
Well, i agree with that. But think about this: user friendly doesn't mean not having to learn anything, but not having to learn anything TWICE. Which is one of the reasons UN*X has completely missed the boat from a UI perspective. Like the button placement of one application? Well, short of rewriting the others, you'll never see it again. As stupidly named as the FILE and EDIT menus are, they institute a layer of elelementary conformity which makes the utilization of a new application that much easier.
But you've GOT to learn it that first time...make that first step. You can't get mad (as I have for years) at your mother for being confused as to where the START bar went because you use Autohide on your desktop, because she looks for the bar, not cues as to where it went.
I love my mother, but she's a complete idiot when it comes to computation. I think that if we can get her to understand anything about the internet, PCs or even printing from Create-a-Card, UI will finally be in the golden age.
True: that is a different environment and i'm sure you have a pretty high user turnaround time. But consider this: if even one user realises that they can speed up their day by running "Autodial.exe" off the start->run bar rather than hunting for it on the harddrive, you've sped up the day's productivity. And if they speed up theirs, chances are they'll educate their fellows on the same process. It's stepwise procedural efficiency increases that are far more valuable to a company than weeks of tech training that are soon forgotten, because they are free and do not require any R&D hours. Of course, flashy scripts and access reports are nice, but if your workers are willing to do the same thing with a SQL script (even if they don't know exactly what the script does), the company is better off.
So you're a loser for not knowing how to print. Great. Sorry the whole world doesn't have a degree in computer science, but sometimes it isn't as easy as you may think it is. Take a windows environment. You're a new user who's never touched a PC and you need to print a document to a network with no printer set up on the machine and no "icon" based printing in the app. Are you going to know to browse network neighbourhood, right click the printer and select install printer, and then select "print" off the file menu (printing, i might add, doesn't seem to have anything to do with "files").
Remember, tech support is education, and whether you like it or not you're going to deal with "know nothings" just trying to get their fucking job done. And if you can't explain it to them so that they understand and don't do it again, it's entirely your fault, and you have no right to complain. If a monkey can be trained to hit buttons in the right order, so can ANY person.
Perfect for the lazy IT folks, except none of them will use it. And why should they? They need their boxes to do anything they need them too, and they shouldn't have to jump through the same hoops as the rest of us shmoes who just want to install Napster and Warez at work...
Bullshit. Nobody needs this. The reason you have a desktop rather than a thin client is that you need the ability to improvise in the course of your day. We have finance folks that use SQL scripts to generate usage reports, developers who use MS Word and Excel quite a bit, and management folks who use a wide array of tools, each in their own distinct manner. Corporate IT was shocked to discover that people had not only installed software on their machines that they (IT) hadn't anticipated them needing, but that they had done so flawlessly and used the software in the course of their day -- software like multiple browsers, spam silencers, adbusters and scripts. These are NORMAL people, mind you, not technuts -- secretaries and production folks who wouldn't know a hard disk from a hard disk-shaped rock -- who had tricked out both their hardware and their software to make their days run smoother and their user interface more intuitive.
Of course, occasionally one of them screws up -- we're all human -- and something goes wrong. Next comes the IT lecture, as they shlep themselves the three hundred feet from their technology arena to the floor of the poor saps forced to live under their auspice. With screwdriver in hand they poke about trying to fix the problem, blaming the user the whole time, and justifying solutions like thin clients and so forth by saying these interface enhancements only "create more work." More bullshit -- it's obvious they save a lot of work by using the PC's ability to multitask to make up for a lack of human space. We don't have the manpower we need, so we're all a little bit tech support, a little bit developer, a little bit graphic designer. A thin client in most offices where people actively USE computers is like cutting hands off at the wrist, and making people rely more heavily on the most unreliable element of any company -- other employees. All for the sake of making the job of the IT folks a bit easier. Call me jaded, but I've worked for IT departments and seen firsthand the type of laziness the industry enjoys. We had a director at my last job who knew he had a bank of machines that were prone to overheating and bluescreens, and yet he did nothing to fix it because he wanted Dell to admit they sold us lemons and give us better boxes. A quick jab at the OS showed the simply running CPUIdle on these boxes stopped the problems, but that solution died in its infancy. IT folks, who didn't want to increase the size of the GHOST image by even 300k to save the heartache of machines that were known to die in the middle of peoples' work, axed it. Screw the rackmount idea...screw networked computing. Give everybody their own box, let them do what they will, and when they break it, do your job and fix the fricking thing. My plumber doesn't bitch when I clog pipes, and my V-dub mechanic doesn't complain about my rusty muffler.
I'm sick of surreal and ironic essays written in the vein of "A Modest Proposal." For one thing, they aren't funny as a general rule (definitely not funnier than the original), and since their impact is based in their humour, they're relatively low impact. They're often very smug and tongue in cheek, a type of platform that went out with Oscar Wilde back in the 19th Century. And they never add any true insight into the issue, never clarify arguments or solidify policies and they never solve our problems. At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likely to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
But of course, since nobody who matters reads anymore, "modest proposals" really don't have any affect anybody except that said group of odd moderates who think everything is silly anyway...especially Slashdot. Where Geeks Meet to Discuss Utopian Ethics, the Ellusive Freedom of Information, the Excesses of a Free Market Economy and Them Fly Anime Bitches.
In school, I remember reading this terribly bloody book and wondering why parents wouldn't stop it. It was full of treachery and death, and gave me nightmares for weeks. Maybe you've heard of it, it's called "King Lear."
Jesus Christ, you see worse violence in any hallway in any school in america than you do in your average FPS -- in fact, FPS games (in part because of graphic gibbing and horrible deaths) are much less realistic. Nobody thinks that the goofy characters from Quake 3 are real...and no player (no matter how hard they get smacked) I've ever played with, from ages 8 to 30, has ever taken violent steps against somebody they played. In fact, I've seen more friendly faces and handshakes after a good and bloody round of CtF than I have after any of the "cultural awareness" or "it's okay to be different" rallies I've been to.
It's easy to say "violent images make a child violent," in a clockwork orange solution to the problem at hand. But it isn't the truth -- violent images alone are no different from non-violent images. A kid who gets worked up over a round of Quake is a kid who would get worked up over a round of touch football, and it has little if nothing to do with the media at hand. Sure, violence desensitizes people, but in a good way: it dillutes the illusory cloud of invulnerability that surrounds a teenager's perception.
This is a whole lot of scapegoating and reactivity -- no reason has gone into the arguments that violent video games cause violence. If anything in media causes violence, it's not the hideous but obviously fake images from video games -- it's the real looking but totally fake actions of professional wrestling. Now, I know that you wrestling losers are going to protest, but come on -- how many of you can honestly say you've never thrown a hold on somebody emulating what you've seen on TV? I used to dread Fridays in middle school, when kids would come in, fresh from Thursday's wrestling matches and ready to try them on anybody who won't fight back. Conceptually speaking, the anarchistic human violence of pro wrestling will always be more dangerous than computer violence. After all, Quake without the killing is just Laser Arena, and Laser Arena is just 3d tag or 3d hockey. Wrestling without the stories (and no, the weak stories and character setups do not and should not justify the violence they portray -- having another man kiss yout skanky show wife shouldn't give you the right to hit him over the back with a chair) is thoughtless mayhem, and if they hadn't gone through years of training to learn how to get hit with chairs and thrown around we'd see a bunch of dead and hurt men after Smackdown.
These anti-violence naysayers want to get into the violence encouraged in other sports, more legitimate ones like football or hockey, because that doesn't make any sense...there are millions of idiots in this country who love to wag fingers at the gaming industry but shy away the second you accuse their precious bloodsports of any wrongdoing. "They encourage teamwork"...right...like the teams of lacrosse idiots who used to beat us across the back with their titanium sticks in gym back in high school because we would talk about discordianism or particle physics. I say that CTF encourages teamwork...football encourages muscles over thought, and a type of follow-the-leader conformity essential to a sport that relies on plays. Football players are, essentially, robots -- they follow orders, run up against the other side, and are expected to work on a strictly stimulus-response reaction sceme. And I think this is the reason these pundits are up in arms -- football teaches violence while at the same time it purports to teach discipline (though those who support this have never dealt with these sports heroes outside of the arena). Video games, especially violent FPS style games, teach nothing that is apparent to the pundits. But it's apparent to the gamers -- we learn problems solving, how to scheme and how to assess our opponents because the field in an FPS is level -- nobody is stronger than anybody else. And when the level is upset, FPS players have ways of levelling it again -- team up against the guy with the armor or the guy with the tank. FPS games teach thought in ways that no outside activity can, and what these pundits need to understand is that there is more than one way to teach it.
My final thought is this: when a child who has been taunted incessantly kills his taunters, why do we blame video games and his parents? Why do we place no blame at all on the deceased, who hurt the child so much that the child saw no recourse but to strike back with extreme force? The media has a position that the victim shouldn't be blamed unless they match a certain pattern of vileness(husband of a battered wife, a rapist father, a blackmailer). Well, what could be more vile than verbally attacking an adolescent? It's the most fragile time of life, and to put someone down during this period when they're so unsure of themselves is probably the most damaging thing you can do to them psychologically. Let's contrast here...surely, the blame of any incident should be on the catalyst of the incident as well as the reactive entity. Don't blame the powderkeg and let the spark go untainted.
Pay out the nose for archaic information you can get almost anywhere else? It's nice to see the dotcom business model of exclusive, up to the minute information for free turned totally on its ear. But I'll bet they make a lot of money...this is the kind of thing the average I-went-to-school-for-computers-and-all-I-got-was-a -lousy-MCSE IS Manager wets himself over (ours has a poster talking about different hacker techniques, including the popular "social engineering" methods such as "The Lady In Red" and "Lost Password." It also warns the reader to be careful of email viruses and activeX DoS attacks when visiting hacker websites like the Hacker's Layer and L0pht heavy industries).
Um, as a worker for a bitchincool online newspaper company, I can say that you are WAY off track here. Newspapers *NEED* their advertisements -- that's where most of their money comes from. If they didn't advertise, your average paper would be between five and ten dollars more expensive, and the least of that expense is printing costs. When papers go online, they're at an even bigger loss because banners are so much easier to ignore than print ads. After all, when you look at the paper, the ads are always in your peripheral vision. While you're reading, a word in them might catch your eye -- let's say, for example, you're reading the comics and you notice the word "Furniture." If you need a new couch, you'll read the ad and hit the store if the deal looks good. Mission accomplished. But on the web, ads aren't in your vision...you scroll past them before you even get into the story text. Skyscraper ads aren't a bad idea to reduce this, but a lot of people use small viewports when they go online. Mine is 600wx300h so i can have textpad open in the back.
Since people can ignore online ads, don't pay subscription services and most newspapers have no other revenue streams, the web is a very dangerous investment to them. There's just no cash. And whereas they understand that some users are like you and ignore them anyway, there are more than enough people who read and even respect advertisements in print to make the model worthwhile. Online...well, the userbase is different, the ads aren't as valuable and the danger for content leachers like webclipping.com is very great (a paper can make a load of money selling its archives to researchers like Lexis-nexus or MLA), even that disappears once you get people pulling all your content into their own databases.
As much as you hate them, new media advertisements may be the only way for the web to work for content sites like newspapers -- they're easier on the user than the necesarily pricey subscriptions and easier to sell to advertisers. Subscription models won't work...consider that if you want to have a 40 person newsroom working for an average of $30k each (very conservative i think) to an audience of roughly 10,000 subscribers, you'd have to charge each of them $120 a year. That doesn't sound so bad...but remember that you have to fight with giant media sites like news.com giving away the same news for free, albeit with a few fancy ads taking time out of your viewing. I think I'd go for free...
Way to reinvent the wheel. Sites have been using sponsors for years, and while they're a very valuable way to advertise they too are slowly dying. You see, sponsorship is no guarantee of content flow -- it's only a bit more productive than a banner -- but the price is often much higher. Besides, sponsorship has different nuances than banners. You can have an advertisement for something on a page and it's considered to be unrelated to the content. A sponsorship is basically an endorsement from the content provider of the advertiser, or at least it seems that way to the viewer. Works fine for most advertisers, but consider this: your tech page is sponsored by Nvidia, and you decide to criticize their smear campaign against the Kyro II. Nvidia, when they find out, will surely pull the sponsorship unless you drop the critique. Now, it would be possible to run an advertisement (banner ad, flash ad, skyscraper, &tc) while running that article, because you're not endorsing the product -- you're just announcing it. Kinda like the full page GE "don't dredge the Hudson River because it'll cost us a billion dollars and we're greedy polluting fucks" ad in my local newsrag, which sits across from a dozen editorials criticizing their management. If, instead, GE was sponsoring the news media (as happens often with NPR programmes), there's no way those editorials would have been published.
Advertisers have enough control over content already with their desire to reduce page sizes and limit subjects. Sponsorships just give them total power -- and since sponsorships are more difficult to get commitments for, this power is much more acute.
1) If you hate a kid because he is different, say he claimed to want to kill you. He will be expelled and nobody will check your facts. Apparently, you can shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
2) If people beat on you, do and say nothing. Accept their abuse. If you try to stop them, you will be expelled.
3) If you want to be liked, do what everybody else likes. Difference is okay, but be different in a way that's respected.
4) Schools are full of people who want what's best for the people who are most like them. Students who need help passing through social situations are to be removed at all costs.
Oh, and the school's web page is here. You can email the administrators and let them know how you feel.
As a whacko, I fear cancer causing, mind controlling, alien lifeforce contacting wireless devices. I require payphones in order to contact other members of my militia. The fact that they are disappearing in my hometown of Albany is proof positive that the jewish-scientologist-communist-Micro$oft conspiracy has gotten to our beloved mayor jennings. First it was disappearing handsets and the bus station, then they were allowed to paint all the fire hydrants with that dangerous aluminum based yellow paint. How far will it go before they own us all?
Well, let's not deal in definitions, because there's no possibility for agreement. Like I said, I'm a hideous fair use leech and am proud of it. But as a thought experiment, consider how much we REALLY get out of it...I think you'll agree that derivation is less the essence of art than imitation, and of course the true innovators are always those who are imitated.
Slashdot Mirror
So, from this, Christians have no problem with cloning as long as it has little or no possibility of killing the fetus. Then you should have no problem with cloning for gestation or cloning for slavery, as long as the clone isn't harmed and has a chance to know God, right? QED.
Bull-fucking-shit. I'm sure you're alone there. Christians like to think that if something's not in a contradictory book rewritten by the human puppets of the Catholic church all throughout the first millenium and through a great period of the second millenium, that you just flat out shouldn't do it. Cloning alone is NOT a crime, a sin or a travesty against nature, nor should it be considered as such. Your god laid out ten simple rules to live by, and as much as you'd like to, you can't easily adapt them to the science of cloning as long as it doesn't harm the fetus. And since a fertilized egg is not a fetus (remember that even a normally impregnated woman might miscarry within the first few days of impregnation and never even know it...reproduction is not the bulletproof activity we want it to be), destroying one is not murder. Your job, as a doublethinking purveyor of myth approaching a legislative solution to a scientific issue, is to define once and for all where life begins. It isn't conception, and it isn't birth. It's some stage in between when the brain has grown to the point that it can support the impulses of thought you call a soul. I'm fairly sure they don't exist until a child realises its own existance, which I'm sad to say isn't until they've been out of the womb for several years (which is why it's often hard to tell if a child is blind, or deaf, or has brain damage until they are much older).
Of course, you can also continue doing what Christian pundits are best at: fly in the face of science, reason and education and make up some cock and bull story about how god hates fags and all clones are gay or something. People like to hate homosexuals and unwed mothers -- you know, sensitive types that are easy to push around. You don't see the 700 club complaining a lot about buff gun toting lunatics who don't like being touched.
I agree. We should kill aging migrant farm workers and old people. Save me the embarrasment of having to talk to my Gran whenever she calls. Logan's Run had it right.
Oh, and by the way...</joke>
The world will hate and fear them because of some factor of their genetics...just like the X-men!
Once again, the whole world proves Stan Lee right, like it did with Ghost Rider!
Yeah, that's the problem with roadrunner...there's good road runner (as available in albany) and then there's bad road runner (available in binghamton). Both our descriptions are correct -- there's a gestapo road runner and a utopian one, and for the record, they both have about equal sign up and return rates and equal bandwidth usage. There's just a lot more leeching going on under the single line, no server RRs. AOL, i'm sure, plans to unite the roadrunners under the same management...and as much as I'd wish it were my roadrunner, i'm sure they'll find some way to make the gestapo version come out on top.
What, is Time Warner / AOL just going to go away? Roadrunner is one of the best broadband services in the nation, faster than DSL in most areas (except under a load...prime time is hell), and at least around here they're very cool for service. They offer everybody three IPs, but don't bother you if you use more (i've had up to six at once); they only ask that you warn them of what servers you are running and even then don't worry to much unless you start eating BW. My father, who works for TW (but i'm not biased, he's on the CABLE side), says that they only cap users who tend to eat a lot of bandwidth in long stretches -- that "normal" users, like us people with jobs who hit the newsgroups at night and occasionally grab an ISO or three, aren't capped at all. And the fees are chump change compared to like-speed DSL...i've got a line capped at 64kb/s uplink, but that's PER SOCKET, meaning i can pump 256kb/s through it at once easily. My webserver (currently "hosted" in the basement) feeds pages at up to 25 kB/s, and all this bandwidth costs me $45/month; and when I worked my last job we had a deal to get RR for $11/month. A DSL line that was even close to this speed would run in the multihundreds per month. Granted, it would have more reliable speed and so forth, but is that worth the extra money? Not in my book, sister.
My argument is that great electronics would never need that patch. Besides, nothing says that each individual component can't be upgradable -- all pioneers have a boot mechanism that allows technicians to insert a cd, boot the device and flash the firmware. Furthurmore, my LD player didn't originally have dolby out...I added that aftermarket with some clever hardware hacking and help from the web...same with the comb filter on my shitty sharp VCR I never use.
Look, preach integration of media components all you like (BTW: you have it already and its called a goddamn laptop) but you're not going to cause any great herding towards the inevitable failure of this idea. Let us look at the facts: people who want an integrated box don't want to pay much for it. People who want this kind of quality want to be able to switch out parts when they become obsolete (my friend's $800 DVD player from 1997, for example, is inferior to today's $150 Panaphonics, Magnetboxes and Sornys) If they don't want to pay much for it, the components can't be well made or well designed, because good parts and good design cost good money. And if it isn't well designed, nobody will buy it, or at least not at the price point you'd need to support it. It's a viscious cycle that results only in mediocrity. Case in point: the Apex AD-600a DVD player. This thing did DVDs, MP3s, SVCDs and XVCDs and had great zoom and multiregion features. It also had the fastest scan time of any dvd player i've used, component or not. But it sucks. The quality of every function of the AD-600a is inferior, from the chipset which is prone to overheating to the MP3 playback which clips and has a terrible interface. Sure, they sold a lot of them, but when the AD-660 came out, none of the features were improved. In face, Apex increased stability only at the expense of some of the neatest features of the AD-600, mainly the hacked menu. Other combo boxes like the UltimateTV and the Playstation 2 have similarly cut corners, and see sagging sales and practically no profitability.
And yet, at the same time, you can't find an A-V shoppe that can hold the $800 Pioneer DV-09 in stock. This thing is flying off the shelves. It doesn't play MP3s or dial the internet. But it does do one thing better than any other player on earth: it plays DVDs. No progressive scan features, no fancy disc flipping or changer. It's a single play DVD player (okay, it's also a bangin' CD player but that's a symptom of the high quality 24 bit DAC, not a feature they set out to design).
When I started organizing a list of components for my new stereo, this was the thought I had going into it: wouldn't it be great if one box did everything I wanted it to with perfect quality and it was inexpensive and painted the guest room if I asked it to and put away its toys when it was done with them? The answer is yes, of course, but that's about as realistic as saying "were going to ban all guns because criminals can play nice." The reality is that mutliplayers are always of substandard quality to moderately priced component equivalents. So I cooled it...I replaced my AD-600a with a Pioneer DV-434, a relatively inexpensive DVD player that had better playback but no MP3. For the MP3s, I picked up a Rio handheld mp3 player, and though I lament the loss of SP/DIF, it wasn't as important to me as having a nice display and decent playback. For a receiver, I nabbed a sweet Sherwood and a pair of Energies; for digital recording, I use my old Buz box hooked up to a small BSD machine. For games and internet, I have the mac and the athlon. For progressive scan, a Sony WEGA XBR which is the jewel of my collection. Price for all this is of course moderate to huge, but it's nice stuff. When you buy nice stuff, you feel better while using it and keep it longer...hell, I don't know if I'll ever get rid of my Energy eXL-16s, they're sweet speakers for under $300. And when it becomes outdated, I can replace them...if I had some massive "box" i'd be stuck with what I had. Finally, because of the seperation of my components, I can use them in ways you couldn't use this magic box. If I want to switch between the laserdisc of star wars and an SVCD i built of it to check the quality, i don't have to start and stop the box. If I want to watch the kung fu on my VCD of Project A while playing the Clerks soundtrack, I can do that. If I want to watch the news and tape McGuyver, i'm cool. In face, if you think about it, what you want this magic box to do, the freedom you'd need it to have, you can only get from components. And if you don't like all the wires, you can learn to deal.
Correct. He no doubt weeds his files for the normal patterns of random similarity, because even ONE of these would make the contest a farce (you could replace the bytes very easily). But there must be other alternatives to simple dictionary replacement, alternatives like dictionary on a bit shift (you're guaranteed to find some stuff that way, though the compression will be slow as hell), fractal decompression (match a sequence of the random to some buildable equation and save that equation) or possibly compression of a matrix of the file itself. Of course, for each of these methods I mention, Mike has probably generated a file that's taken these into account, and that's the point of this: he wants to see the magical next step in compression, which doesn't rely on these simple notions that things are repeated or can be rerepresented. There's some elusive technology he wants us to uncover, and hence the $5000 (and why he wouldn't pay up on that sham of a compression scheme Pat generated...converting "5" to an EOF does not constitute compressing.)
Well, this isn't just a bet. It's like a research grant. Mike wants to see compression -- meaning, the file takes less disc space -- and that isn't what he got. He got a bunch of files that no doubt took up more disc space due to the file information headers...basically, he did the same thing as those cheater programs back in the '80s that would "compress" files by moving the EOF up to the front of the file, and storing the real bits in the free space area. The trick here was in the file system, and on a file system that included the size of the header in the file size (like MacOS) it would be obvious he failed. Don't try and milk Mike's grant money for a shuyster who did nothing other than lie in an attempt to win(which is what this was...even if it wasn't especially shiftless). EVERYBODY knows the purpose of this challenge is compression, not rhetorical trickery, and the advancement of computer science is a bit more important than a scientist's offhanded approach to definition. I agree that he was careless, but science *IS* a world where things are fair...and in this case, fairness precludes and should preclude honor.
My rant wasn't about the centralized pc idea, it was the offshoot concept of hotswappable workstations. With non-distributed windows PCs (which is what I work with, please don't hand me a "go UN*X line" because I will write you off as a troll who doesn't understand my work environment), this means no installing programs on your machine, no customizing settings, no nothing -- because if you get even so much as a dead harddrive, out goes your machine, in comes a new one. Of course, this could be offset with common backups, but backups of a lot of user machines is kind of a useless process...
This might be a good idea if combined with a type of REVRDIST, to backup anything that isn't on a centralized application mirror to a user folder for movement back to a new local machine. Theoretically, with this combination, IT could take out the busted-ass machine, stick in a new one, re-dist the custom info and have you back up with a clone of your previous machine, all in the time it takes to wander down the hall and get a packet of cheez-its.
When a customer or client needs a machine NOW, and the only one that is available is guaranteed to shut down because we haven't taken a simple step to fix it, I do not feel justified in telling that user "I'm sorry, this computer is available, but will crash because Dell will not admit it is broken and we will not fix it because we are trying to prove a point."
They didn't, by the way, fix it without a word...they bitched constantly about it and eventually the machines all died while in use and added up to one of the worst decisions we ever made. There are those in this department who will not buy celeron machines ever, despite their superior P/P ratio, because of this batch of lemons. So what did they cost us? $1400 per machine for 40 machines, plus an additional $200-$400 for every new box we buy since mg'mt won't okay celerons. Not to mention the intangible loss and increase in frustrations when our clients got bluescreens (which, on these machines, happened multiple times, daily. don't deal me this "all MS machines crash" shit, because this machine has NEVER BSOD'd and neither have any of our other dev boxes, some of which are repurposed celerons). All of this could have been fixed by a simple piece of software...but we wanted to prove a point. I guarantee you that the customer's didn't care about our quixotian pursuit of justice...they cared about their lost data.
Any time you talk about hotswappable machines, you're restricted to a thin client. Can't install a lot of software if you get a new machine every time you bluescreen.
Fuck security -- internally, security causes more messes for file sharing and application sharing than it will ever catch. Firewall, VPN, and then call it quits. As for multiple browsers: everybody in the house needs them, because when we put out a fire we need every step of the process from tech support to affiliate support to QA to be on the same plane. If they aren't, we're not going to solve a thing.
Spyware is much less an issue, but it's once again IT's job. They monitor our machines for licensing issues, viruses and illicit connections across the network, and it's all done autonomously...they don't do squat unless something breaks. And realplayer, alas, isn't an option...we all need it because we server realmedia content! Even if it wasn't, it's easy for IT to say "we dont' support it," but that's not their fucking JOB. Their job is to find out where the incompatibility is and to make sure they have a solution or a workaround. Simply locking it down or ignoring it won't make the problem go away...and there's not an It manager on earth with the balls to tell the CEO he can't listen to the baseball game over Real Networks while he goes over the employee records to see who's expendable and who isn't because the software isn't supported.
Lockdowns breed stupidity. C'mon, how are you supposed to tell if you screwed something up or if you're just not supposed to do it. And a registry hacker like yourself knows as well as anybody that there are always loopholes, always tricks to tunnel through. We had an old mac print station that didn't get rid of the desktop hook to a disk if you ejected using the Special menu, the vulcan mac meld (Open Apple - SHIFT - 1), or a "paperclip" to eject, as many of the PC paradigm people who consider tactile ejecting the only solution to removing data from a machine are wont to do. Which meant when you'd insert a new disc, the mac thought "great, i'll use the hook I already have and associate the data with the disc again." If you ejected "Charles," and the new disc was called "Martinez," you couldn't access it until you properly Option-dot'd through the error messages and dragged the disc to the trash (the real way to get anything out of a mac, if only i could drag this shitty ATI video card to it). All in all, it was an involved, confusing process...all because the mac admin didn't want users to be able to fully interact with the desktop and, hence, the main volume of the machine.
We switched to a much more simple "print from anywhere, then authenticate from a single station" interface which has become so popular, we've got a paper problem: we're using fifteen times as much. Mac users who needed to print weren't doing so because it was too confusing.
Moral: if you restrict a user from doing something once, they begin to fear the boundary. Users who fear machines are not going to learn anything -- they gain a mystique, which is the last thing you want from a supportability standpoint. Though I love walking up to a mac with a stuck disc, and whispering "My mind to your mind; my thoughts to your thoughts...COME OUT!" as I, unseen to the hapless user, press SHIFT-Open Aapl-1...
Well, i agree with that. But think about this: user friendly doesn't mean not having to learn anything, but not having to learn anything TWICE. Which is one of the reasons UN*X has completely missed the boat from a UI perspective. Like the button placement of one application? Well, short of rewriting the others, you'll never see it again. As stupidly named as the FILE and EDIT menus are, they institute a layer of elelementary conformity which makes the utilization of a new application that much easier.
But you've GOT to learn it that first time...make that first step. You can't get mad (as I have for years) at your mother for being confused as to where the START bar went because you use Autohide on your desktop, because she looks for the bar, not cues as to where it went.
I love my mother, but she's a complete idiot when it comes to computation. I think that if we can get her to understand anything about the internet, PCs or even printing from Create-a-Card, UI will finally be in the golden age.
True: that is a different environment and i'm sure you have a pretty high user turnaround time. But consider this: if even one user realises that they can speed up their day by running "Autodial.exe" off the start->run bar rather than hunting for it on the harddrive, you've sped up the day's productivity. And if they speed up theirs, chances are they'll educate their fellows on the same process. It's stepwise procedural efficiency increases that are far more valuable to a company than weeks of tech training that are soon forgotten, because they are free and do not require any R&D hours. Of course, flashy scripts and access reports are nice, but if your workers are willing to do the same thing with a SQL script (even if they don't know exactly what the script does), the company is better off.
So you're a loser for not knowing how to print. Great. Sorry the whole world doesn't have a degree in computer science, but sometimes it isn't as easy as you may think it is. Take a windows environment. You're a new user who's never touched a PC and you need to print a document to a network with no printer set up on the machine and no "icon" based printing in the app. Are you going to know to browse network neighbourhood, right click the printer and select install printer, and then select "print" off the file menu (printing, i might add, doesn't seem to have anything to do with "files").
Remember, tech support is education, and whether you like it or not you're going to deal with "know nothings" just trying to get their fucking job done. And if you can't explain it to them so that they understand and don't do it again, it's entirely your fault, and you have no right to complain. If a monkey can be trained to hit buttons in the right order, so can ANY person.
Perfect for the lazy IT folks, except none of them will use it. And why should they? They need their boxes to do anything they need them too, and they shouldn't have to jump through the same hoops as the rest of us shmoes who just want to install Napster and Warez at work...
Bullshit. Nobody needs this. The reason you have a desktop rather than a thin client is that you need the ability to improvise in the course of your day. We have finance folks that use SQL scripts to generate usage reports, developers who use MS Word and Excel quite a bit, and management folks who use a wide array of tools, each in their own distinct manner. Corporate IT was shocked to discover that people had not only installed software on their machines that they (IT) hadn't anticipated them needing, but that they had done so flawlessly and used the software in the course of their day -- software like multiple browsers, spam silencers, adbusters and scripts. These are NORMAL people, mind you, not technuts -- secretaries and production folks who wouldn't know a hard disk from a hard disk-shaped rock -- who had tricked out both their hardware and their software to make their days run smoother and their user interface more intuitive.
Of course, occasionally one of them screws up -- we're all human -- and something goes wrong. Next comes the IT lecture, as they shlep themselves the three hundred feet from their technology arena to the floor of the poor saps forced to live under their auspice. With screwdriver in hand they poke about trying to fix the problem, blaming the user the whole time, and justifying solutions like thin clients and so forth by saying these interface enhancements only "create more work." More bullshit -- it's obvious they save a lot of work by using the PC's ability to multitask to make up for a lack of human space. We don't have the manpower we need, so we're all a little bit tech support, a little bit developer, a little bit graphic designer. A thin client in most offices where people actively USE computers is like cutting hands off at the wrist, and making people rely more heavily on the most unreliable element of any company -- other employees. All for the sake of making the job of the IT folks a bit easier. Call me jaded, but I've worked for IT departments and seen firsthand the type of laziness the industry enjoys. We had a director at my last job who knew he had a bank of machines that were prone to overheating and bluescreens, and yet he did nothing to fix it because he wanted Dell to admit they sold us lemons and give us better boxes. A quick jab at the OS showed the simply running CPUIdle on these boxes stopped the problems, but that solution died in its infancy. IT folks, who didn't want to increase the size of the GHOST image by even 300k to save the heartache of machines that were known to die in the middle of peoples' work, axed it. Screw the rackmount idea...screw networked computing. Give everybody their own box, let them do what they will, and when they break it, do your job and fix the fricking thing. My plumber doesn't bitch when I clog pipes, and my V-dub mechanic doesn't complain about my rusty muffler.
I'm sick of surreal and ironic essays written in the vein of "A Modest Proposal." For one thing, they aren't funny as a general rule (definitely not funnier than the original), and since their impact is based in their humour, they're relatively low impact. They're often very smug and tongue in cheek, a type of platform that went out with Oscar Wilde back in the 19th Century. And they never add any true insight into the issue, never clarify arguments or solidify policies and they never solve our problems. At most, they give us a quick, half hearted chuckle between deep analysis of more lurid texts on the same subject. So, in essence, they break beneficial arguments and derail the thought process with the only benefit of making the moderates who think the whole thing is a bit silly feel even more assured in their own superiority, and therefore less likely to consider a truly modest solution to the matter at hand.
But of course, since nobody who matters reads anymore, "modest proposals" really don't have any affect anybody except that said group of odd moderates who think everything is silly anyway...especially Slashdot. Where Geeks Meet to Discuss Utopian Ethics, the Ellusive Freedom of Information, the Excesses of a Free Market Economy and Them Fly Anime Bitches.
In school, I remember reading this terribly bloody book and wondering why parents wouldn't stop it. It was full of treachery and death, and gave me nightmares for weeks. Maybe you've heard of it, it's called "King Lear."
Jesus Christ, you see worse violence in any hallway in any school in america than you do in your average FPS -- in fact, FPS games (in part because of graphic gibbing and horrible deaths) are much less realistic. Nobody thinks that the goofy characters from Quake 3 are real...and no player (no matter how hard they get smacked) I've ever played with, from ages 8 to 30, has ever taken violent steps against somebody they played. In fact, I've seen more friendly faces and handshakes after a good and bloody round of CtF than I have after any of the "cultural awareness" or "it's okay to be different" rallies I've been to.
It's easy to say "violent images make a child violent," in a clockwork orange solution to the problem at hand. But it isn't the truth -- violent images alone are no different from non-violent images. A kid who gets worked up over a round of Quake is a kid who would get worked up over a round of touch football, and it has little if nothing to do with the media at hand. Sure, violence desensitizes people, but in a good way: it dillutes the illusory cloud of invulnerability that surrounds a teenager's perception.
This is a whole lot of scapegoating and reactivity -- no reason has gone into the arguments that violent video games cause violence. If anything in media causes violence, it's not the hideous but obviously fake images from video games -- it's the real looking but totally fake actions of professional wrestling. Now, I know that you wrestling losers are going to protest, but come on -- how many of you can honestly say you've never thrown a hold on somebody emulating what you've seen on TV? I used to dread Fridays in middle school, when kids would come in, fresh from Thursday's wrestling matches and ready to try them on anybody who won't fight back. Conceptually speaking, the anarchistic human violence of pro wrestling will always be more dangerous than computer violence. After all, Quake without the killing is just Laser Arena, and Laser Arena is just 3d tag or 3d hockey. Wrestling without the stories (and no, the weak stories and character setups do not and should not justify the violence they portray -- having another man kiss yout skanky show wife shouldn't give you the right to hit him over the back with a chair) is thoughtless mayhem, and if they hadn't gone through years of training to learn how to get hit with chairs and thrown around we'd see a bunch of dead and hurt men after Smackdown.
These anti-violence naysayers want to get into the violence encouraged in other sports, more legitimate ones like football or hockey, because that doesn't make any sense...there are millions of idiots in this country who love to wag fingers at the gaming industry but shy away the second you accuse their precious bloodsports of any wrongdoing. "They encourage teamwork"...right...like the teams of lacrosse idiots who used to beat us across the back with their titanium sticks in gym back in high school because we would talk about discordianism or particle physics. I say that CTF encourages teamwork...football encourages muscles over thought, and a type of follow-the-leader conformity essential to a sport that relies on plays. Football players are, essentially, robots -- they follow orders, run up against the other side, and are expected to work on a strictly stimulus-response reaction sceme. And I think this is the reason these pundits are up in arms -- football teaches violence while at the same time it purports to teach discipline (though those who support this have never dealt with these sports heroes outside of the arena). Video games, especially violent FPS style games, teach nothing that is apparent to the pundits. But it's apparent to the gamers -- we learn problems solving, how to scheme and how to assess our opponents because the field in an FPS is level -- nobody is stronger than anybody else. And when the level is upset, FPS players have ways of levelling it again -- team up against the guy with the armor or the guy with the tank. FPS games teach thought in ways that no outside activity can, and what these pundits need to understand is that there is more than one way to teach it.
My final thought is this: when a child who has been taunted incessantly kills his taunters, why do we blame video games and his parents? Why do we place no blame at all on the deceased, who hurt the child so much that the child saw no recourse but to strike back with extreme force? The media has a position that the victim shouldn't be blamed unless they match a certain pattern of vileness(husband of a battered wife, a rapist father, a blackmailer). Well, what could be more vile than verbally attacking an adolescent? It's the most fragile time of life, and to put someone down during this period when they're so unsure of themselves is probably the most damaging thing you can do to them psychologically. Let's contrast here...surely, the blame of any incident should be on the catalyst of the incident as well as the reactive entity. Don't blame the powderkeg and let the spark go untainted.
Pay out the nose for archaic information you can get almost anywhere else? It's nice to see the dotcom business model of exclusive, up to the minute information for free turned totally on its ear. But I'll bet they make a lot of money...this is the kind of thing the average I-went-to-school-for-computers-and-all-I-got-was-a -lousy-MCSE IS Manager wets himself over (ours has a poster talking about different hacker techniques, including the popular "social engineering" methods such as "The Lady In Red" and "Lost Password." It also warns the reader to be careful of email viruses and activeX DoS attacks when visiting hacker websites like the Hacker's Layer and L0pht heavy industries).
Um, as a worker for a bitchincool online newspaper company, I can say that you are WAY off track here. Newspapers *NEED* their advertisements -- that's where most of their money comes from. If they didn't advertise, your average paper would be between five and ten dollars more expensive, and the least of that expense is printing costs. When papers go online, they're at an even bigger loss because banners are so much easier to ignore than print ads. After all, when you look at the paper, the ads are always in your peripheral vision. While you're reading, a word in them might catch your eye -- let's say, for example, you're reading the comics and you notice the word "Furniture." If you need a new couch, you'll read the ad and hit the store if the deal looks good. Mission accomplished. But on the web, ads aren't in your vision...you scroll past them before you even get into the story text. Skyscraper ads aren't a bad idea to reduce this, but a lot of people use small viewports when they go online. Mine is 600wx300h so i can have textpad open in the back.
Since people can ignore online ads, don't pay subscription services and most newspapers have no other revenue streams, the web is a very dangerous investment to them. There's just no cash. And whereas they understand that some users are like you and ignore them anyway, there are more than enough people who read and even respect advertisements in print to make the model worthwhile. Online...well, the userbase is different, the ads aren't as valuable and the danger for content leachers like webclipping.com is very great (a paper can make a load of money selling its archives to researchers like Lexis-nexus or MLA), even that disappears once you get people pulling all your content into their own databases.
As much as you hate them, new media advertisements may be the only way for the web to work for content sites like newspapers -- they're easier on the user than the necesarily pricey subscriptions and easier to sell to advertisers. Subscription models won't work...consider that if you want to have a 40 person newsroom working for an average of $30k each (very conservative i think) to an audience of roughly 10,000 subscribers, you'd have to charge each of them $120 a year. That doesn't sound so bad...but remember that you have to fight with giant media sites like news.com giving away the same news for free, albeit with a few fancy ads taking time out of your viewing. I think I'd go for free...
Way to reinvent the wheel. Sites have been using sponsors for years, and while they're a very valuable way to advertise they too are slowly dying. You see, sponsorship is no guarantee of content flow -- it's only a bit more productive than a banner -- but the price is often much higher. Besides, sponsorship has different nuances than banners. You can have an advertisement for something on a page and it's considered to be unrelated to the content. A sponsorship is basically an endorsement from the content provider of the advertiser, or at least it seems that way to the viewer. Works fine for most advertisers, but consider this: your tech page is sponsored by Nvidia, and you decide to criticize their smear campaign against the Kyro II. Nvidia, when they find out, will surely pull the sponsorship unless you drop the critique. Now, it would be possible to run an advertisement (banner ad, flash ad, skyscraper, &tc) while running that article, because you're not endorsing the product -- you're just announcing it. Kinda like the full page GE "don't dredge the Hudson River because it'll cost us a billion dollars and we're greedy polluting fucks" ad in my local newsrag, which sits across from a dozen editorials criticizing their management. If, instead, GE was sponsoring the news media (as happens often with NPR programmes), there's no way those editorials would have been published.
Advertisers have enough control over content already with their desire to reduce page sizes and limit subjects. Sponsorships just give them total power -- and since sponsorships are more difficult to get commitments for, this power is much more acute.
So, what have we learned here?
1) If you hate a kid because he is different, say he claimed to want to kill you. He will be expelled and nobody will check your facts. Apparently, you can shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.
2) If people beat on you, do and say nothing. Accept their abuse. If you try to stop them, you will be expelled.
3) If you want to be liked, do what everybody else likes. Difference is okay, but be different in a way that's respected.
4) Schools are full of people who want what's best for the people who are most like them. Students who need help passing through social situations are to be removed at all costs.
Oh, and the school's web page is here. You can email the administrators and let them know how you feel.
As a whacko, I fear cancer causing, mind controlling, alien lifeforce contacting wireless devices. I require payphones in order to contact other members of my militia. The fact that they are disappearing in my hometown of Albany is proof positive that the jewish-scientologist-communist-Micro$oft conspiracy has gotten to our beloved mayor jennings. First it was disappearing handsets and the bus station, then they were allowed to paint all the fire hydrants with that dangerous aluminum based yellow paint. How far will it go before they own us all?
Well, let's not deal in definitions, because there's no possibility for agreement. Like I said, I'm a hideous fair use leech and am proud of it. But as a thought experiment, consider how much we REALLY get out of it...I think you'll agree that derivation is less the essence of art than imitation, and of course the true innovators are always those who are imitated.