"Words are just labels, neutral representations of concepts."
Words may be, but *names* are selected by people to reflect what they feel is important to convey to the public about a project. Having been involved in several startups and launched a few products, names become contentious issues because they are the very, very first impression of a product to the customer.
Here we have some products where the important thing was clearly the author's inability to score a date, ever, and thus an obsession they have with images of what they can't have. If that is what people want to advertise, I agree they should be allowed to... but probably not on my server. Freedom of association and freedom of speech are a balancing act, and I prefer to associate with mature people. The fact that a package name is being used for trolling isn't a big deal, but clearly nobody needs to *distribute* it and associate with the images being conjured.
But hey, how are your contributions to Pedobear Security Software going?
I'm going to have to agree with you fully on this. The *reason* I still used Firefox was the plugins, otherwise I just use Chrome recently.
Now the plugins I want are disabled, some never becoming *4* compliant and here we are with *5* and even more plugins failing. This is the opposite of progress, unless the goal is to strip the browser of the reasons I use it over the alternatives.
If this "will not happen for the vast majority" then why isn't this happening in parts of the world without a strong state presence? By "this" I mean specifically the use of this proposed "cheap security".
Genocide is far beyond my "taking of land" proposal, but there it is in the news. One would think that in the lawless areas that the raping, pillaging and burning of the communities would make such a "cheap security" a self fulfilling prophecy if it wasn't some Utopian fiction.
So, as Cyber Vandal says, you aren't selling this particularly well. The private security firm that you are paying can very easily be outclassed by a warlord as history and current events related in the stateless (or weak state) areas will attest. Really, there seems to be two outcomes historically: a strong state asserts its presence or small factions vie for domination via violence.
I wish your Utopia the best, but I suspect (even discounting statist action) Galt's Gulch will be razed and burning.
That is quite the Utopian description and quite the bit of typing, but it doesn't address the short, simple question I actually asked.
Someone is in conflict with you over your private ownership of the land. The group who disputes your ownership is not participating in a Utopia but are nothing more than organized criminals (a warlord and his muscle) looking for low hanging fruit to pluck. They are willing to use violence. In keeping with the lack of a state that can threaten violence, who is going to prevent them from taking over your land?
This isn't a theoretical question: during the heyday of the mob there were cities that were effectively ruled by warlords (mobster families). They were rooted out only with the application of force and they used force to fight against being rooted out. Mexico is under siege from internal warlords and stateless regions of our planet are rife with warlords.
Not everyone is going to internalize libertarian principles and without a way to fight those groups, I see those willing to use violence prevailing against those who spout platitudes. Your vision seems to frame criminals as individual actors that traditional (if private) policing can manage. I argue that such a Utopian society will fall prey to those organized groups without such deep thinking and fewer morals.
Returning to the direct question: who prevents your land from being taken over in this scenario?
Assuming as given the premise that the state can only exist if it is non-violent, who prevents the situation from degrading into warlords filling the violence vacuum. If you have a private police on your small chunk of land you live on, what is to stop another from simply taking your land by force? In a traditional state, we rely on the courts, police and laws (rules) thereof to establish the accepted norms and to enforce them.
Are you simply saying that your "private police" will be bigger than the aggressors?
I have followed alternative presentations of knowledge for a long time, dabbling in creating systems for pseudo-3D presentation of information, using various types of mind mapping and collaborative knowledge systems. The reality is that the web succeeded and the various competitors failed precisely because of the "poor" implementation choices of the current nightmare of kludged together technologies are "worse is better" type work. Would it be nice to have a better framework? Sure, but not at the cost of paralysis.
Xanadu wants to give strict copyright enforcement with a pay-as-you-eat system for consumption. The implementations have been plagued by pulling the rug out from under any implementer who gets "close" to a solution, usually with accusations that the implementer was trying to steal his technology. The Xanadu system is intended (as far as I have seen: the implementations never got far enough to tell for sure) to allow distributed content, but always with verification of the original source material's permissions and state. In short: the project is surrounded by control freak symptoms.
Maybe we will have such systems in the future, but they will stand along side the chaos that is the open Internet and I'm glad for it. For every neat feature I like about Xanadu, there is a control freak feature that takes away from the free-form nature of the existing Internet. Xanadu would make a great academic knowledge system, perhaps a real authoritative online Wikipedia where people with actual knowledge contributed and could avoid random yahoo intervention on their work. But I would never want to live with it as the only implementation of hyperlinking.
This is the heart of the matter. Corporations are *better* off than people under the law because the people inside a corporation can commit crimes and the *corporation* suffers the consequences of their crimes. Piercing the corporate veil is hard and generally only possible when "an example" is being made.
Using the "funding a movie" context from another branch of this thread, a corporation can be formed to create a movie which is nothing but libelous nonsense about someone disliked by the founders. Properly structured, this corporation won't have any money left once the movie has been released. This is done by paying other corporations excessive amounts for all of the production costs. (Those other companies usually have overlapping owners to the primary company, but buried under a few layers of shell company registrations.) When the victim "wins" the lawsuit, the corporation folds and the people behind it are free to form a new corporation to continue their harassment campaign, untouchable by law.
Perhaps some expendable hire who was used to write the script is fed to the legal machine, but the actual malcontents are free to go.
This example can be extended to all kinds of things that, as an individual would land one in jail, but as a corporation simply causes "another unfortunate corporate failure which drains the economy of jobs".
Maybe after Steam gave an online mode to allow the military to use their stuff while deployed, the cheese eating surrender monkeys (it is a French company) decided to strike back by making an even worse arrangement for those who serve.
All you need to know:
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I know of only two instances where I've ever definitely been infected with spyware. I don't do stupid things like downloading and running strange programs from third-party sites, so I think both infections were probably caused by a site exploiting a security hole in Internet Explorer, or in a plug-in like Adobe Acrobat or the Flash player. Both times, once I noticed I was infected, I got rid of the infection with Malwarebytes, but I don't know how much damage the spyware did in the meantime.
Malwarebytes is good software, but as you point out you don't know how much damage was done. Secondary infections can easily be missed, and many malware programs open your machine to further exploitation. As tired as the suggestion is, you needed to do what you did with your website: revert the machine to a known good backup of the system state, formatting first. Anything less and you *should* have that nagging doubt that you haven't actually cleaned everything up. There are ways to diminish the concern: inspecting the machine for unexpected packet flows, using anti-rootkit tool, etc... but only by formatting and restoring a know clean state or formatting and just restoring your data files will you be confident).
"That's the second thing that's wrong with it. It punishes success."
How right you are. We should return to the model where the failures pay for everything. Just rename the poor as peasants, set the various city, county, state and federal tax collectors up with cool names like the Baron, Duke and Lord and we will have returned to a classic system that didn't punish success.
Of course if that is too extreme, you could always try to be successful in a failed state. I hear that openings for local warlord are surprisingly common.
Where do I get all these magical digital freedoms? You make it sound like the Broadcast Flag and DMCA magically vanish with over the air transmission, and the content providers are going to sing Kumbaya with us as we rip their content in the ways we want to.
"Issues of fundamental fairness are for a judge or appellate court to decide, not a jury. Had I been sitting on any of the above juries, I would have brought a conviction- because that is what the rule of law requires."
So you support a rigid enforcement of even immoral actions carried out under the guise of enforcement of the law? Totalitarian and corrupt governments love spineless yes men: they make day to day operations of the machines of injustice operating under the *name* of "justice" so much easier.
"The funny thing I've noticed is that contrary to many claims when speed limits are raised to more normal speeds people do not continue going 10+ over but rather drive a comfortable speed which is what most "speeders" do today anyway."
I call bull: I live in an area that raised the limit to 75 over a stretch I drive with great regularity (I10 Phoenix to Tucson and back). Now there are freight trains of cars doing 85 in the fast lane and campers shell trucks doing 55 in the slow lane... and that's all the lanes we've got. Exciting times, exciting times.
The only point where people will stop doing ten over is when they can't press the pedal any further down (campers) or the limit is actually enforced (which they threatened, but failed to execute on). In the meantime, I measure my trips in number of attempts on my life as I try to adhere to the limit.
For such a low user ID, your thread reading skills are a bit rusty. Caylus has a random element in the setup, after that it doesn't. I didn't even mention 1830. My comment was directed at the collection of dice heavy games mentioned by the *parent* comment... not your comment. I didn't even *read* your comment.
All of the games you mention are very to mildly luck (via dice) driven. There are people who play nothing but abstracts (chess, go, twixt, etc.), and there are people who play very low-luck games such as Caylus. Personally, I play all of the above *and* the games on your list, but there are some who are more focused. Fluxx is very, very luck based, so for those who play no to low luck games, it is really annoying.
Check out the highly rated games at boardgamegeek.com for a very diverse group of good games.
I rock climb. Every pound of flab you gain decreases your performance and requires you to work harder. The mental challenge of discovery and assessment keeps your alert. Finally, the extreme balance aspect keeps you limber. Highly recommended, but not much of a spectator sport.
Actually, I find that participation is the defining line. Armchair, stadium chair... not a lot of difference in terms of passive entertainment as far as I'm concerned. I prefer the armchair over the stadium, as well as other amenities, if I'm going to watch others. The stadium is for you, which is fine. I am not entertained by crowds.Interestingly, it is people watching from home that caused the institution of the blackouts of local broadcasting of games that don't sell out. Too many people were staying home to watch the games, harming the revenue of the teams.
Frankly, I'm not a sports fan. The day that the stadiums are empty because everyone has become shut-ins, I won't be crying over the loss of a few leagues here or there.
"This game will be fun to people that have never played starfox, but for me it really was a huge disapointment."
I have played every version of Star Fox and I found Command to be quite refreshing compared to Assault and Adventures. I couldn't believe how well the control system worked on the DS. I do miss the rails style missions though: someone must think that "free flight" is manditory or something. Nevertheless, I will take this over the Game Cube versions.
It would appear from the page that they plan on starting with the existing Wikipedia and then spidering it for changes. How quickly will that end up running afoul the "Server Hog" clause of the bots rules? It seems pretty weak to say they are "forking" when it appears what they are really doing is "sponging":
A "progressive fork" works like this: we will begin with all of Wikipedia's articles, so that the Citizendium will begin as, simply, a mirror of Wikipedia. Then people start making changes to articles in the Citizendium. On a very regular basis, we will refresh our copies of Wikipedia articles. If an entry in the Citizendium has never changed since being copied from Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia version has, then we upload the most recent Wikipedia article. But if the Citizendium has changed an article, then it is not refreshed. Tools will no doubt be written that will allow users to compare the differences between the Wikipedia article and the Citizendium article side-by-side. In addition, of course, people will be able to start brand new articles on topics Wikipedia has not yet covered.
Slashdot Mirror
"Words are just labels, neutral representations of concepts."
Words may be, but *names* are selected by people to reflect what they feel is important to convey to the public about a project. Having been involved in several startups and launched a few products, names become contentious issues because they are the very, very first impression of a product to the customer.
Here we have some products where the important thing was clearly the author's inability to score a date, ever, and thus an obsession they have with images of what they can't have. If that is what people want to advertise, I agree they should be allowed to... but probably not on my server. Freedom of association and freedom of speech are a balancing act, and I prefer to associate with mature people. The fact that a package name is being used for trolling isn't a big deal, but clearly nobody needs to *distribute* it and associate with the images being conjured.
But hey, how are your contributions to Pedobear Security Software going?
I'm going to have to agree with you fully on this. The *reason* I still used Firefox was the plugins, otherwise I just use Chrome recently.
Now the plugins I want are disabled, some never becoming *4* compliant and here we are with *5* and even more plugins failing. This is the opposite of progress, unless the goal is to strip the browser of the reasons I use it over the alternatives.
Yes, it is a security problem. So why is this OK: https://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/#graphics (specificially: "Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU").
It isn't a security vulnerability when Silverlight gains access to the GPU. Hhmmm.
If this "will not happen for the vast majority" then why isn't this happening in parts of the world without a strong state presence? By "this" I mean specifically the use of this proposed "cheap security".
Genocide is far beyond my "taking of land" proposal, but there it is in the news. One would think that in the lawless areas that the raping, pillaging and burning of the communities would make such a "cheap security" a self fulfilling prophecy if it wasn't some Utopian fiction.
So, as Cyber Vandal says, you aren't selling this particularly well. The private security firm that you are paying can very easily be outclassed by a warlord as history and current events related in the stateless (or weak state) areas will attest. Really, there seems to be two outcomes historically: a strong state asserts its presence or small factions vie for domination via violence.
I wish your Utopia the best, but I suspect (even discounting statist action) Galt's Gulch will be razed and burning.
That is quite the Utopian description and quite the bit of typing, but it doesn't address the short, simple question I actually asked.
Someone is in conflict with you over your private ownership of the land. The group who disputes your ownership is not participating in a Utopia but are nothing more than organized criminals (a warlord and his muscle) looking for low hanging fruit to pluck. They are willing to use violence. In keeping with the lack of a state that can threaten violence, who is going to prevent them from taking over your land?
This isn't a theoretical question: during the heyday of the mob there were cities that were effectively ruled by warlords (mobster families). They were rooted out only with the application of force and they used force to fight against being rooted out. Mexico is under siege from internal warlords and stateless regions of our planet are rife with warlords.
Not everyone is going to internalize libertarian principles and without a way to fight those groups, I see those willing to use violence prevailing against those who spout platitudes. Your vision seems to frame criminals as individual actors that traditional (if private) policing can manage. I argue that such a Utopian society will fall prey to those organized groups without such deep thinking and fewer morals.
Returning to the direct question: who prevents your land from being taken over in this scenario?
Assuming as given the premise that the state can only exist if it is non-violent, who prevents the situation from degrading into warlords filling the violence vacuum. If you have a private police on your small chunk of land you live on, what is to stop another from simply taking your land by force? In a traditional state, we rely on the courts, police and laws (rules) thereof to establish the accepted norms and to enforce them.
Are you simply saying that your "private police" will be bigger than the aggressors?
I have followed alternative presentations of knowledge for a long time, dabbling in creating systems for pseudo-3D presentation of information, using various types of mind mapping and collaborative knowledge systems. The reality is that the web succeeded and the various competitors failed precisely because of the "poor" implementation choices of the current nightmare of kludged together technologies are "worse is better" type work. Would it be nice to have a better framework? Sure, but not at the cost of paralysis.
Xanadu wants to give strict copyright enforcement with a pay-as-you-eat system for consumption. The implementations have been plagued by pulling the rug out from under any implementer who gets "close" to a solution, usually with accusations that the implementer was trying to steal his technology. The Xanadu system is intended (as far as I have seen: the implementations never got far enough to tell for sure) to allow distributed content, but always with verification of the original source material's permissions and state. In short: the project is surrounded by control freak symptoms.
Maybe we will have such systems in the future, but they will stand along side the chaos that is the open Internet and I'm glad for it. For every neat feature I like about Xanadu, there is a control freak feature that takes away from the free-form nature of the existing Internet. Xanadu would make a great academic knowledge system, perhaps a real authoritative online Wikipedia where people with actual knowledge contributed and could avoid random yahoo intervention on their work. But I would never want to live with it as the only implementation of hyperlinking.
This is the heart of the matter. Corporations are *better* off than people under the law because the people inside a corporation can commit crimes and the *corporation* suffers the consequences of their crimes. Piercing the corporate veil is hard and generally only possible when "an example" is being made.
Using the "funding a movie" context from another branch of this thread, a corporation can be formed to create a movie which is nothing but libelous nonsense about someone disliked by the founders. Properly structured, this corporation won't have any money left once the movie has been released. This is done by paying other corporations excessive amounts for all of the production costs. (Those other companies usually have overlapping owners to the primary company, but buried under a few layers of shell company registrations.) When the victim "wins" the lawsuit, the corporation folds and the people behind it are free to form a new corporation to continue their harassment campaign, untouchable by law.
Perhaps some expendable hire who was used to write the script is fed to the legal machine, but the actual malcontents are free to go.
This example can be extended to all kinds of things that, as an individual would land one in jail, but as a corporation simply causes "another unfortunate corporate failure which drains the economy of jobs".
Chart 2 is the "also ran" chart. Try chart 1: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
Maybe after Steam gave an online mode to allow the military to use their stuff while deployed, the cheese eating surrender monkeys (it is a French company) decided to strike back by making an even worse arrangement for those who serve.
Assume a Spherical Cow
Malwarebytes is good software, but as you point out you don't know how much damage was done. Secondary infections can easily be missed, and many malware programs open your machine to further exploitation. As tired as the suggestion is, you needed to do what you did with your website: revert the machine to a known good backup of the system state, formatting first. Anything less and you *should* have that nagging doubt that you haven't actually cleaned everything up. There are ways to diminish the concern: inspecting the machine for unexpected packet flows, using anti-rootkit tool, etc... but only by formatting and restoring a know clean state or formatting and just restoring your data files will you be confident).
"That's the second thing that's wrong with it. It punishes success."
How right you are. We should return to the model where the failures pay for everything. Just rename the poor as peasants, set the various city, county, state and federal tax collectors up with cool names like the Baron, Duke and Lord and we will have returned to a classic system that didn't punish success.
Of course if that is too extreme, you could always try to be successful in a failed state. I hear that openings for local warlord are surprisingly common.
Where do I get all these magical digital freedoms? You make it sound like the Broadcast Flag and DMCA magically vanish with over the air transmission, and the content providers are going to sing Kumbaya with us as we rip their content in the ways we want to.
I have my doubts.
"There are plenty of things I consider inherently immoral- (the law against murder, to take a random example)"
I think I will just go away now, nothing here to discuss.
"Issues of fundamental fairness are for a judge or appellate court to decide, not a jury. Had I been sitting on any of the above juries, I would have brought a conviction- because that is what the rule of law requires."
So you support a rigid enforcement of even immoral actions carried out under the guise of enforcement of the law? Totalitarian and corrupt governments love spineless yes men: they make day to day operations of the machines of injustice operating under the *name* of "justice" so much easier.
"The funny thing I've noticed is that contrary to many claims when speed limits are raised to more normal speeds people do not continue going 10+ over but rather drive a comfortable speed which is what most "speeders" do today anyway."
I call bull: I live in an area that raised the limit to 75 over a stretch I drive with great regularity (I10 Phoenix to Tucson and back). Now there are freight trains of cars doing 85 in the fast lane and campers shell trucks doing 55 in the slow lane... and that's all the lanes we've got. Exciting times, exciting times.
The only point where people will stop doing ten over is when they can't press the pedal any further down (campers) or the limit is actually enforced (which they threatened, but failed to execute on). In the meantime, I measure my trips in number of attempts on my life as I try to adhere to the limit.
Added to Foes. Reason: Moron.
Comment 172927690 by "Godeke" has parent 17292058 written by "Shadow Wrought".
Haven't got the hang of threading yet? Unless *any* comment under one of yours magically is a reply to you, I didn't reply to you.
For such a low user ID, your thread reading skills are a bit rusty. Caylus has a random element in the setup, after that it doesn't. I didn't even mention 1830. My comment was directed at the collection of dice heavy games mentioned by the *parent* comment... not your comment. I didn't even *read* your comment.
All of the games you mention are very to mildly luck (via dice) driven. There are people who play nothing but abstracts (chess, go, twixt, etc.), and there are people who play very low-luck games such as Caylus. Personally, I play all of the above *and* the games on your list, but there are some who are more focused. Fluxx is very, very luck based, so for those who play no to low luck games, it is really annoying.
Check out the highly rated games at boardgamegeek.com for a very diverse group of good games.
I rock climb. Every pound of flab you gain decreases your performance and requires you to work harder. The mental challenge of discovery and assessment keeps your alert. Finally, the extreme balance aspect keeps you limber. Highly recommended, but not much of a spectator sport.
Actually, I find that participation is the defining line. Armchair, stadium chair... not a lot of difference in terms of passive entertainment as far as I'm concerned. I prefer the armchair over the stadium, as well as other amenities, if I'm going to watch others. The stadium is for you, which is fine. I am not entertained by crowds.Interestingly, it is people watching from home that caused the institution of the blackouts of local broadcasting of games that don't sell out. Too many people were staying home to watch the games, harming the revenue of the teams.
Frankly, I'm not a sports fan. The day that the stadiums are empty because everyone has become shut-ins, I won't be crying over the loss of a few leagues here or there.
"This game will be fun to people that have never played starfox, but for me it really was a huge disapointment."
I have played every version of Star Fox and I found Command to be quite refreshing compared to Assault and Adventures. I couldn't believe how well the control system worked on the DS. I do miss the rails style missions though: someone must think that "free flight" is manditory or something. Nevertheless, I will take this over the Game Cube versions.