I think Eminem said it best. This isn't exactly in relation to video games, but it still applies:
They say music can alter moods and talk to you, Well can it load a gun up for you, and cock it too? Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude, just tell the judge it was my fault and I'll get sued.
Think about playing GTA. What happens the first time you try to play the game?
Chances are you end up with the boys in blue on your butt and you're being beaten to a bloody pulp. Nothing misleading there.
They should select a group of jurors with no experience playing the GTA games and have them each try playing the game -- the trial will last about 90 minutes before being thrown out.
Those who insist on a "god-optional" philosophy, however, have been uniform in their lust for blood.
Well, I've long ago put away Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and their ilk, and I'm not exactly bloodthirsty.
And doing what's best for society simply makes sense -- the better the state of society, the better one's quality of life will be, given the same effort on their part.
This has NOTHING to do with religion. For example, I don't weave wrecklessly in and out of traffic, and few others do either. This isn't because of some myth, but because when people drive in a more or less orderly manner, it is easier for everyone to drive without being involved in an accident. I actively choose to participate in maintaining order on the highways because I benefit from an orderly system as much as anyone.
I am nice to people I meet because it makes my day better. I have worked in customer service enough to realize that the happier the people around me are, the easier it will be for me to relax and feel comfortable.
People actually benefit from being kind to others, from maintaining order, and from contributing to society. This is because a person's actions affect others, and their reactions have affect the person who initially acted.
Why you insist that fairy tales have anything to do with this, I'm not certain. In fact, I have described my actions as being motivated by a desire to gain the benefits of an organized, mannerly society. My morals are motivated by a desire to improve my own experience. Some might call this selfishness -- wouldn't your religion then consider my selfish actions a bad thing?
And regarding your assertion that "true morals come from God", I could just as easily assert that true morals come from Toronto, and that without Canada, we would have no sense of right and wrong. However, I'd consider that silly, without anything to back that up.
Of course, religion never seems to mind a lack of justification for silly statements.
Furthermore, you maintain that morality without religion has led to some problems in history.
Guess what? Organized religion has caused some pretty strange things to happen, too. In the name of religion, wars have been conducted. In fact, the very same Catholics who have long refused to permit two people of the same gender who love each other to commit to spending their lives together in wedlock have been known not to realize that it's immoral to fuck a little boy's butthole when he's too young to resist.
Examples of atrocity can come from either side -- the point is that whether an action is generally good for society can be determined without the aid of legend or myth.
If people would realize that their actions can and do affect others in significant ways, we'd all be a bit better off.
We are living in a "post-Christian" society, and this is the result. Ego is god.
Why do you assume that morals cannot exist without religion?
You assume that without fear of eternal damnation, people will do whatever they want and knowingly act in immoral ways.
I prefer the view that if people realize that moral behaviour really is best for the good of society, they will opt to act responsibly.
People don't want to feel as though they're hurting society -- otherwise, why would people often justify crime by downplaying the impact to others? People justify stealing music by saying that the artist really wouldn't have gained much from the sale of the album, or extortion by saying that ripping off a company is different than ripping off another person.
Religion "works" by making people afraid to act because they fear damnation. Having a sense of morality allows one to realize that their actions can and do affect society, and prepares one to "do the right thing" because they care for the good of their culture and society.
A sense of morality also doesn't depend on the belief that some mythical guy in the clouds cares what goes on down here.
SCO Authentication enables UNIX and Linux user logins to be authenticated in the same manner as Windows user logins--through Microsoft Active Directory. Users need only remember a single username and password for logging into Windows, UNIX, and Linux resources.
Does anyone else think it's odd that SCO refers to Linux and UNIX as two distinct operating systems when they claim that UNIX has so been integrated into Linux that they're inseparable technologies?
Damned good. I hadn't even thought about the DVD version. I do have many, many Floyd MP3s on a hard drive in a closet in Pittsburgh, but unfortunately I'm in Baltimore.
If CDs were $5 apiece, I'd buy lots of them. I do wish, however, that copyright laws were rewritten with their original purpose in mind -- that of increasing the public domain by encouraging artists to share their work and granting a limited-time exclusive right to copy.
I wonder what a full-page New York Times ad costs... it'd be interesting to see a consumer group buy a full-page ad explaining exactly why copyright sucks, how it's against the original purpose, and maybe explaining exactly how much artists typically get from the sale of a single CD. Most people have no idea that there is a public domain...
The urban legend was that Coke had purposely sold an inferior product (New Coke) in order to either:
Boost demand for [original] Coke by producing an inferior product branded "New Coke", then switching back to the original formula when consumers complained.
Take Coke off of the market for long enough that people wouldn't notice the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. "New Coke" was rumored to be simply a distraction from the real goal of moving to a cheaper sweetener. However, this was actually started years before New Coke arrived.
However, the truth is that New Coke was generally preferred over Coke in blind taste tests, but Coca-Cola didn't anticipate everyone's knee-jerk reactions -- most consumers hated New Coke without ever having tasted it. If you're really interested, check out snopes.com -- they do a much better job than I could.
I totally agree, up to the last statement regarding the Coke/New Coke thing, which is an urban legend.
The myth is actually less interesting than the real story, which Google can provide quite easily;) As it actually happened, New Coke was supposed to taste more like Diet Coke, which was designed to taste more like Pepsi than Coke, and was an entirely new product (not just a rehash of "Classic Coke"). This brought them closer to Pepsi's flavor, and was probably easier than making Coke taste good with artificial sweetener.
Apparently, "Coke II" (as New Coke is now known) is still available, and enjoys a tiny, tiny share of the cola market. I'd like to try it -- I prefer Diet Coke to "Classic" Coke.
But I do digress. Getting back on topic, thanks for further strengthening my point, and sharing your experiences.
With the majority of the proceeds from many Beatles albums going directly to the record companies, and the rest going to Michael Jackson (who bought much of the Beatles catalog), it's hard to feel as though I'm ripping off the collective estates of the Fab Four when I download the occasional MP3.
Furthermore, the original point of copyright was to encourage the sharing of one's own work, and to allow fair compensation before the work entered the public domain. Not only is the recording industry stealing from the artists by taking most of the money which people buying CDs want to go towards the artists, but with their constant lobbying to extend copyright as far as possible, they're stealing music from the public domain.
Sometime during the late 90's I purchased a copy of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album for around $20.
Over the weekend, I was in Best Buy hell (waiting with a friend while he attempted to buy a 50" DLP HDTV without being forced into buying a $400 power strip...) and wandered over to the CD racks, having since lost the copy of The Wall which I'd bought half a decade ago.
They wanted... $33.
Fuck that -- if it were $15, I'd have considered just caving and buying the damned thing again (it's a double album, and a bloody good one at that).
If CDs were $3-$5 apiece (especially older ones), I'd have a huge legal collection. As it is, I'd rather download the MP3s for songs I bought the right to listen to years ago than to spend $33 for physical media which was doubtlessly produced for less than $3 and which cost me $20 when I legally bought it before.
This is a start, but come on, folks -- tapes used to be cheaper than this, and they cost much more to produce. I'll cheer when they're under $5 per album, and there are talks of shortening the length of copyright protection.
Does it scale up to allow large mailing lists to be run using the same commodity hardware which can currently serve them?
The problem with "sender-pays" schemes is that people often forget that there are legitimate reasons to send out thousands of messages, such as the Linux kernel mailing list.
On a broadband connection, perhaps the updates don't matter so much. But, living in rural PA, my grandmother (a) can't get broadband, and (b) doesn't want to pay broadband fees in order to just send email.
Of course, now that Windows can go several hours without a "maintenance reboot", it's much more annoying when an update wants you to reboot. With Win98, you're usually at most a few hours away from a restart anyways;)
The original poster suggested trademarking his email address and attempting to deny others the right to add his email address to their address book on the grounds that it was his trademark.
What I am suggesting is that trademark law has no provisions for controlling such fair uses of a trademarked name.
The idea of placing a unique signature to each email has nothing to do with my objection to the post, and was not what the poster was referring to when he wrote, "Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying 'This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way'?"
I think it's pretty clear that he suggested "trademarking [his] own email address", not a copyrighted signature.
Your analogy would work, assuming that you had to take your gun to a shop periodically to have it "updated". Updating your gun would be a lengthy process, and sometimes after updates it wouldn't work quite the same, and sometimes the scope wouldn't work at all afterwards.
Oh, and failure to update might cause the gun to misfire.
You see, the problem with shitty analogies is, well, yeah.
Are you suggesting that Granny should have to know what an open port is in order to send email and browse the web? For some reason, I don't recall WebTV forcing users to learn these things, and users can browse the web and send email from it.
If the poster wanted people to stop putting his address in his address book, he could just as easily ask everyone with whom he communicates not to put his address in their address book.
What does trademark, registered or not, have to do with that?
If somebody I knew started spouting off to me about how I was violating their trademark by recording their email address in my address book, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If they asked me not to put their email address in my address book because of concerns regarding trojans, that's a little less rediculous.
Again, how does the mention of trademark add anything to this?
I can't speak for a fresh install of XP, as I haven't had to do so recently.
Until spring of this year, I worked technical support for an ISP, though, and was often recruited to "fix" broken machines running Windows 2000 around the office.
It was horrible! Now, these were "older" machines, but it generally took about two hours and many, many reboots to go from a fresh install of 2k to having all of the updates installed.
IE took particularly long, something like 45 minutes to install. The downloads were generally quick (I was on a LAN at an ISP, after all), but between the hard disk chugging away and the machine rebooting several times, it took forever!
Informative, huh? What information did he provide? He said that he could be held liable for actions which he didn't do, and said something completely wrong about trademark infringement. How is this informative?
...and what of the fact that most users run as Administrator, since most Windows programs expect to be run as a priveledged user?
Users want to use computers, not administer them. I don't think it's fair to blame Granny for not shutting off ActiveX or for not downloading the latest 30MB update over her 56k connection when all she really wants is a machine that will let her send email to her grandchildren.
Let me be sure I'm getting your point here -- when you say that you'd "call relying on default settings user error", are you saying that it's unreasonable for your grandmother to expect to be able to go to a Gateway store and get a system that she can use to play games on Yahoo and send email without having to learn what ports are, or know which ones are open?
Microsoft insisted that IE is part of the OS, and it's been shown time and time again that IE is vulerable to attacks which do not affect other browsers. OE is also vulnerable to all sorts of things, and rather than redesign it, they decided to stop distributing it.
As someone pointed out elsewhere, Mutt and Pine don't seem to cause the same problems that OE does.
Solaris doesn't insist that an insecure web browser be linked to every damned thing in the OS, or that every program possible be scriptable, and so doesn't suffer from some of the security headaches and flaws of Windows, despite the fact that it may have insecure defaults.
In a response to a recent story, someone mentioned that UNIX standards were generally based upon specifications which had been made publically available for comment.
This is something that many take for granted, but it is quite important. RFCs are discussed publicly, and people review protocols independently of specific implementations. This means that the protocols themselves are refined, and implementors only have to worry about correctly coding to a given specification.
Under Windows, the specification is often "whatever works with this code is fine". This invites much less review of the protocols, and since the protocols are ill-defined, it's difficult to determine whether the protocol has been implemented correctly.
Then point them to one of the many articles out there which explains that the trojan software will fake the sender addresses.
If someone is so unreasonable that they are unwilling to understand the fact that you weren't responsible for the actions of a "virus", then they're probably pretty difficult to deal with in general, and the virus thing is just another drop in the bucket.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about playing GTA. What happens the first time you try to play the game?
Chances are you end up with the boys in blue on your butt and you're being beaten to a bloody pulp. Nothing misleading there.
They should select a group of jurors with no experience playing the GTA games and have them each try playing the game -- the trial will last about 90 minutes before being thrown out.
Screw that -- I have a greater desire now to "thin out" society than I ever did as a teen.
It's not Take2's fault that Darwin had a point.
And doing what's best for society simply makes sense -- the better the state of society, the better one's quality of life will be, given the same effort on their part.
This has NOTHING to do with religion. For example, I don't weave wrecklessly in and out of traffic, and few others do either. This isn't because of some myth, but because when people drive in a more or less orderly manner, it is easier for everyone to drive without being involved in an accident. I actively choose to participate in maintaining order on the highways because I benefit from an orderly system as much as anyone.
I am nice to people I meet because it makes my day better. I have worked in customer service enough to realize that the happier the people around me are, the easier it will be for me to relax and feel comfortable.
People actually benefit from being kind to others, from maintaining order, and from contributing to society. This is because a person's actions affect others, and their reactions have affect the person who initially acted.
Why you insist that fairy tales have anything to do with this, I'm not certain. In fact, I have described my actions as being motivated by a desire to gain the benefits of an organized, mannerly society. My morals are motivated by a desire to improve my own experience. Some might call this selfishness -- wouldn't your religion then consider my selfish actions a bad thing?
And regarding your assertion that "true morals come from God", I could just as easily assert that true morals come from Toronto, and that without Canada, we would have no sense of right and wrong. However, I'd consider that silly, without anything to back that up.
Of course, religion never seems to mind a lack of justification for silly statements.
Furthermore, you maintain that morality without religion has led to some problems in history.
Guess what? Organized religion has caused some pretty strange things to happen, too. In the name of religion, wars have been conducted. In fact, the very same Catholics who have long refused to permit two people of the same gender who love each other to commit to spending their lives together in wedlock have been known not to realize that it's immoral to fuck a little boy's butthole when he's too young to resist.
Examples of atrocity can come from either side -- the point is that whether an action is generally good for society can be determined without the aid of legend or myth.
If people would realize that their actions can and do affect others in significant ways, we'd all be a bit better off.
Babble all you want -- my assertion that morals do not require subscription to any sort of religion stands.
You assume that without fear of eternal damnation, people will do whatever they want and knowingly act in immoral ways.
I prefer the view that if people realize that moral behaviour really is best for the good of society, they will opt to act responsibly.
People don't want to feel as though they're hurting society -- otherwise, why would people often justify crime by downplaying the impact to others? People justify stealing music by saying that the artist really wouldn't have gained much from the sale of the album, or extortion by saying that ripping off a company is different than ripping off another person.
Religion "works" by making people afraid to act because they fear damnation. Having a sense of morality allows one to realize that their actions can and do affect society, and prepares one to "do the right thing" because they care for the good of their culture and society.
A sense of morality also doesn't depend on the belief that some mythical guy in the clouds cares what goes on down here.
Damned good point.
Damned good. I hadn't even thought about the DVD version. I do have many, many Floyd MP3s on a hard drive in a closet in Pittsburgh, but unfortunately I'm in Baltimore.
If CDs were $5 apiece, I'd buy lots of them. I do wish, however, that copyright laws were rewritten with their original purpose in mind -- that of increasing the public domain by encouraging artists to share their work and granting a limited-time exclusive right to copy.
I wonder what a full-page New York Times ad costs... it'd be interesting to see a consumer group buy a full-page ad explaining exactly why copyright sucks, how it's against the original purpose, and maybe explaining exactly how much artists typically get from the sale of a single CD. Most people have no idea that there is a public domain...
Boost demand for [original] Coke by producing an inferior product branded "New Coke", then switching back to the original formula when consumers complained.
Take Coke off of the market for long enough that people wouldn't notice the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. "New Coke" was rumored to be simply a distraction from the real goal of moving to a cheaper sweetener. However, this was actually started years before New Coke arrived.
;-)
However, the truth is that New Coke was generally preferred over Coke in blind taste tests, but Coca-Cola didn't anticipate everyone's knee-jerk reactions -- most consumers hated New Coke without ever having tasted it.
If you're really interested, check out snopes.com -- they do a much better job than I could.
Snopes.com rocks
I totally agree, up to the last statement regarding the Coke/New Coke thing, which is an urban legend.
;) As it actually happened, New Coke was supposed to taste more like Diet Coke, which was designed to taste more like Pepsi than Coke, and was an entirely new product (not just a rehash of "Classic Coke"). This brought them closer to Pepsi's flavor, and was probably easier than making Coke taste good with artificial sweetener.
The myth is actually less interesting than the real story, which Google can provide quite easily
Apparently, "Coke II" (as New Coke is now known) is still available, and enjoys a tiny, tiny share of the cola market. I'd like to try it -- I prefer Diet Coke to "Classic" Coke.
But I do digress. Getting back on topic, thanks for further strengthening my point, and sharing your experiences.
With the majority of the proceeds from many Beatles albums going directly to the record companies, and the rest going to Michael Jackson (who bought much of the Beatles catalog), it's hard to feel as though I'm ripping off the collective estates of the Fab Four when I download the occasional MP3.
Furthermore, the original point of copyright was to encourage the sharing of one's own work, and to allow fair compensation before the work entered the public domain. Not only is the recording industry stealing from the artists by taking most of the money which people buying CDs want to go towards the artists, but with their constant lobbying to extend copyright as far as possible, they're stealing music from the public domain.
Best Buy can suck it.
Sometime during the late 90's I purchased a copy of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" album for around $20.
Over the weekend, I was in Best Buy hell (waiting with a friend while he attempted to buy a 50" DLP HDTV without being forced into buying a $400 power strip...) and wandered over to the CD racks, having since lost the copy of The Wall which I'd bought half a decade ago.
They wanted... $33.
Fuck that -- if it were $15, I'd have considered just caving and buying the damned thing again (it's a double album, and a bloody good one at that).
If CDs were $3-$5 apiece (especially older ones), I'd have a huge legal collection. As it is, I'd rather download the MP3s for songs I bought the right to listen to years ago than to spend $33 for physical media which was doubtlessly produced for less than $3 and which cost me $20 when I legally bought it before.
This is a start, but come on, folks -- tapes used to be cheaper than this, and they cost much more to produce. I'll cheer when they're under $5 per album, and there are talks of shortening the length of copyright protection.
Does it scale up to allow large mailing lists to be run using the same commodity hardware which can currently serve them?
The problem with "sender-pays" schemes is that people often forget that there are legitimate reasons to send out thousands of messages, such as the Linux kernel mailing list.
On a broadband connection, perhaps the updates don't matter so much. But, living in rural PA, my grandmother (a) can't get broadband, and (b) doesn't want to pay broadband fees in order to just send email.
;)
Of course, now that Windows can go several hours without a "maintenance reboot", it's much more annoying when an update wants you to reboot. With Win98, you're usually at most a few hours away from a restart anyways
The original poster suggested trademarking his email address and attempting to deny others the right to add his email address to their address book on the grounds that it was his trademark.
What I am suggesting is that trademark law has no provisions for controlling such fair uses of a trademarked name.
The idea of placing a unique signature to each email has nothing to do with my objection to the post, and was not what the poster was referring to when he wrote, "Do I now have to trademark my own email address or something and then include a disclaimer in my email saying 'This email address is my trademark, you are not allowed to add me to your address book in any way'?"
I think it's pretty clear that he suggested "trademarking [his] own email address", not a copyrighted signature.
Your analogy would work, assuming that you had to take your gun to a shop periodically to have it "updated". Updating your gun would be a lengthy process, and sometimes after updates it wouldn't work quite the same, and sometimes the scope wouldn't work at all afterwards.
Oh, and failure to update might cause the gun to misfire.
You see, the problem with shitty analogies is, well, yeah.
Are you suggesting that Granny should have to know what an open port is in order to send email and browse the web? For some reason, I don't recall WebTV forcing users to learn these things, and users can browse the web and send email from it.
What the hell does trademark have to do with it?
If the poster wanted people to stop putting his address in his address book, he could just as easily ask everyone with whom he communicates not to put his address in their address book.
What does trademark, registered or not, have to do with that?
If somebody I knew started spouting off to me about how I was violating their trademark by recording their email address in my address book, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves. If they asked me not to put their email address in my address book because of concerns regarding trojans, that's a little less rediculous.
Again, how does the mention of trademark add anything to this?
Not sure -- all the more reason for me to watch it again soon.
Thanks for the response!
I always read replies ;)
I can't speak for a fresh install of XP, as I haven't had to do so recently.
Until spring of this year, I worked technical support for an ISP, though, and was often recruited to "fix" broken machines running Windows 2000 around the office.
It was horrible! Now, these were "older" machines, but it generally took about two hours and many, many reboots to go from a fresh install of 2k to having all of the updates installed.
IE took particularly long, something like 45 minutes to install. The downloads were generally quick (I was on a LAN at an ISP, after all), but between the hard disk chugging away and the machine rebooting several times, it took forever!
Informative, huh? What information did he provide? He said that he could be held liable for actions which he didn't do, and said something completely wrong about trademark infringement. How is this informative?
...and what of the fact that most users run as Administrator, since most Windows programs expect to be run as a priveledged user?
Users want to use computers, not administer them. I don't think it's fair to blame Granny for not shutting off ActiveX or for not downloading the latest 30MB update over her 56k connection when all she really wants is a machine that will let her send email to her grandchildren.
Let me be sure I'm getting your point here -- when you say that you'd "call relying on default settings user error", are you saying that it's unreasonable for your grandmother to expect to be able to go to a Gateway store and get a system that she can use to play games on Yahoo and send email without having to learn what ports are, or know which ones are open?
Microsoft insisted that IE is part of the OS, and it's been shown time and time again that IE is vulerable to attacks which do not affect other browsers. OE is also vulnerable to all sorts of things, and rather than redesign it, they decided to stop distributing it.
As someone pointed out elsewhere, Mutt and Pine don't seem to cause the same problems that OE does.
Solaris doesn't insist that an insecure web browser be linked to every damned thing in the OS, or that every program possible be scriptable, and so doesn't suffer from some of the security headaches and flaws of Windows, despite the fact that it may have insecure defaults.
In a response to a recent story, someone mentioned that UNIX standards were generally based upon specifications which had been made publically available for comment.
This is something that many take for granted, but it is quite important. RFCs are discussed publicly, and people review protocols independently of specific implementations. This means that the protocols themselves are refined, and implementors only have to worry about correctly coding to a given specification.
Under Windows, the specification is often "whatever works with this code is fine". This invites much less review of the protocols, and since the protocols are ill-defined, it's difficult to determine whether the protocol has been implemented correctly.
Windows [is] ... designed to work on a wide range of hardware...
Yeah, hardware ranging from Intel hardware to... clones of Intel hardware.
How this didn't get a +5, Funny I'll never know.
Debian -- seamless upgrades for the masses.
:(
It's too bad that the installation program has stagnated so
Then point them to one of the many articles out there which explains that the trojan software will fake the sender addresses.
If someone is so unreasonable that they are unwilling to understand the fact that you weren't responsible for the actions of a "virus", then they're probably pretty difficult to deal with in general, and the virus thing is just another drop in the bucket.
This is doubly true in the case of a girlfriend.