"After all, we're depriving private military, judicial, and police..."
That makes no sense. The government is charged with upholding the rights of the citizenry, and that can only be done through the courts and by force. Private implementations of force are rights violations. You're absolutely right in everything that you said except "That makes no sense." That's because by your previous definition of socialism, a govenment charged with upholding the rights of the citizenry via the application of force IS SOCIALIST. That's because the government "Takes a service, prevents private organizations from providing it, and has the government provide it instead, funded through forced taxation." In this case, that service is police, military, and a justice system.
The definition of socialism you gave in the above post is reasonable, but contrary to what you now claim, is not the one you were using previously. That one had to do with the government providing services funded by taxation. There is a huge difference.
Also, to whomever modded the grandparent off topic: sorry to have ideas that frighten or anger you.
By that definition, America has been a socialist nation since its inception. In fact, any system that's not anarcho-capitalist is apparently a socialist system by your definition. After all, we're depriving private military, judicial, and police contractors the ability to provide their services unhampered by government interference.
Of course, your definition has nothing to do with the actual definition of socialism, which is why it's completely fair for someone to call you out as parroting talking points (though I wouldn't call them Republican talking points).
Yes it would. It's painful going backwards. But in three days, the cities would run out of food, and that money would start coming back out of the mattresses. Actually, those with money would leave the country and live well because their cash just became worth a whole lot more. Those without would starve.
There'd still be jobs- people still need to eat after all. People certainly do need to eat, but there would be no investment. Most likely what you would see would be alternate fiat currency like we saw during the great depression.
That is a good thing- it's high time America stopped living on debt. Make credit completely inaccessible would be a good thing- it'd force EVERYBODY to live within their means. It would mean that we'd be in the same position as Germany pre-WW2. Either we keep paying or we default on our loans. Defaulting on our loans would cause a world-wide economic disaster, so the most likely course of action for other countries that thought we were going to do so would be to threaten to invade if we tried it.
Only if you think keeping the current standard of living on debt is sensible. Because that's the other option. It is sensible precisely because it works and doesn't cause us to ruin billions of lives by sending the entire world into a depression.
The ridiculously high rate of deflation required to reach a 1:240 increase in the value of the dollar (which is I assume what you meant) would ensure that no one ever invested because the best form of investment is to convert your money into bank notes (backed by gold, in this case) and stick it under your mattress. Basically all investment would stop and every company would be liquidated because it would be impossible to beat investing in bank notes. The economy would dry up overnight.
A modest level of inflation ensures that the best way to keep your wealth around is to invest, whether it be in bonds, stocks, commodities, etc., and that ensures that people are able to do business and keep their jobs. Try having a living wage when there are no jobs.
Also, good luck with the national debt that's now 240 times larger, and still needs interest paid on it, especially because the return on bonds would have to beat the rate of deflation, so interest rates on our debt would skyrocket.
Basically, the idea that a 1:240 increase in the value of the dollar over any reasonable time-frame would be beneficial is absolutely absurd.
Sure, and Zimbabwe does the same thing and has horrible inflation. However, in most economies, that's not how money is generated.
That's why I used the word "generally.";)
Re:Fiat currencies have several problems.
on
Bank Run in Second Life
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· Score: 5, Informative
The gold standard is terrible, leads to recessions, and in general unnecessarily constrains the economy. Here's a hint: if you think money is generally created by printing more currency, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about. Even if you understand how money is created, you still may not. For a thorough debunking of the gold standard, read this: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/goldbug.html
Considering they've only been able to pass symbolic, non-binding resolutions in defiance of the president,
That's largely true. They haven't forced the president to change, short of not totally acquiescing to his every whim, but,
one would think they'd jump at the chance to make such a loud (if ultimately inconsequential) statement.
You them fault them for not doing something that you yourself agree would be ultimately inconsequential.
They're not impeaching because it wouldn't accomplish anything, and like the Clinton impeachment, would probably turn favor against them. If it were politically advantageous, they'd do it, but they're simply not going to get a conviction, so why do it if it's not politically advantageous?
The difference is that "Santorum" wasn't a Googlebomb in the first place (though I'm not trying to say that no one ever attempted a Googlebomb of it). It was a meme started by Dan Savage to make Rick Santorum infamous, and its popularity had nothing to do with PageRank.
It's a massively multiplayer game where you play a pirate, and to perform duties, you play puzzles. The better you do at a puzzle, the more you contribute. This means that you two can play together, cooperatively and on the same ship, working towards a shared goal. It's also a very broad game, so if you like one puzzle and she prefers a different one, you can both play different puzzles on the same ship. The money you make can be spent in any number of different ways, and as you get better and begin to meet people, you can join a crew or form your own, buy ships, run shoppes, get involved in politics and war, take over and govern islands, or just buy yourself a really nice hat.
Don't let the graphics fool you, it's a surprisingly deep game. And, as it's Java, it runs on just about any OS out there.
For precisely that reason, it'll look worse. A 480i game will be using far less texture bandwidth to fill in all those extra pixels, so they can afford to do more processing on the pixels they have to have better effects.
Given that the hardware is all the same, in order to design a game to work well on 480i and 720p, the game will either have to cut down on graphics effects when running at 720p or simply scale down the 720p image to 480i, and waste lots of graphics work computing pixels that don't get seen, when you could be using them to create better effects.
You criticize the parent post for poor reasoning, but you offer ad hominem attacks and a straw man.
The parent post simply asked questions about the morality of the decision, and as far as I can see, he or she has a perfectly valid point.
As far as business practices go, I don't know the details of the anti-trust rulings, but the South Korean market may simply not be big enough to justify complying with the ruling. If Microsoft has no intentions of complying with the ruling, but rather withdrawing from the market if this comes to pass, I see no reason for them not to announce the fact. It may affect the ruling, which is good for their business, and if it doesn't, well, good for South Korea for standing by its laws. That's what should happen.
If its an empty threat, and South Korea calls them on it, well, it'll affect their ability to negotiate with government agencies, but the reality of the situation is that if the anti-trust case goes through and they don't pull out of the market, you can bet on them reaching some sort of compermise, which I'm guessing is half the point of the threat in the first place.
Now, if the only point of the threat is to manipulate the legal system, that's certainly questionable, morally, but it's a very nuanced situation that deserves more discussion. I'm of the opinion personally that the moral questions lie with S. Korea about whether or not they should compermise their legal integrity in the face of an economic threat.
You're entirely wrong. Groovy is another language that targets the JVM. Groovy is either compiled to Java bytecode (and from there, JIT compiled to machine code by the JVM), or it's compiled at runtime in a JIT fashion. There is no interpreter written in Java that runs Groovy code. Groovy is just another language that targets the JVM.
The benefit from all this is that in Groovy, you can interface to Java classes with literally no overhead. It's a brilliant idea for a new language because all the libraries are already there! This skips past one of the biggest stumbling blocks for new lanaguages.
All in all, Groovy's a pretty interesting language that's worth looking into, but apparently you can't be bothered to do a Google search.
I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Come on, was there ANY game like GTA 7 years ago ? Well, ok, technicaly there was the first GTA but i don't think there really were any "similar games" at that time. Some awnser to your post mention Doom, but i don't think that shooting demons and zombies ever compare to shooting people, even if they're criminals.
Aside from the original GTA, off the top of my head:
Postal: 1997. Gratuitous killing of innocents was explicitly the point of the game.
Carmageddon: 1997. Points and powerups earned for running over pedestrians.
Wolfenstein 3D: 1992. Integral to playing this game was killing human nazi soldiers. I might remind you that the nazis used conscripts. It wasn't a volunteer army.
While i'd rather be working in VIM, i use Eclipse at work and it is pretty slick. The one thing that i can say against it, however, is that it takes a huge amount of RAM. I recently upgraded to 768MB, and with Eclipse, Firefox, and Gaim running, my memory utilization gets up near 100% (and Eclipse takes the biggest slice of the memory pie). Now, i know the JVM is largely to blame, but no matter what area of the code it's in, that's still ridiculous. I look forward to some optimization in this area.
All that notwithstanding, if you have the memory to spare and you like these GUI IDEs that the kids are using these days, i have to say, Eclipse is worthwhile.
That is not ironic because WMDs (nerve gas and chemical weapons) have been found, but in very small numbers and not in the massive stockpiles as believed.
That's not at all why it's not ironic. It's not ironic because irony is the use of words to convey a meaning opposite of what they literally meant. A lie is intended to convey the same meaning literally that it connotes.
And nerve gas and chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They've got tactical uses, but a can of teargas or a gallon of sarin is not significantly more deadly than an AK-47. Pretending that the phrase "weapon of mass destruction" applies to much outside of nuclear and biological weapons is either naive or dishonest.
Speaking of oversimplifications and things he's wrong about:
"...why gamers cast aside the ethical quandaries brought up by games like Grand Theft Auto (they're playing the game mechanics, not the fiction surrounding the mechanics)."
I mean, this is somewhat true. There's definitely a distinction between the two, but to think that they're entirely seperable, and that the narrative elements don't matter at all is purely ridiculous. If what he says is true, then the only important differences between GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA would be the feature changes. While those may be big differences, it's ridiculous to claim that the Godfather 2 setting of GTA:VC has no bearing on play experience, or that people aren't interacting with the subject matter on some level. I think playing GTA:VC doesn't make people horribly violent for the same reason that watching the Godfather 2 doesn't make people horribly violent -- because there's no reason it should. Representations of violence and simulations of violence are not themselves violence.
If you want to argue Media Effects, that's fine, but not the point i'm trying to make. The point i'm trying to make is that the fact that playing violent games does not mean the players are violent people does not necessarilly lead us to the conclusion that we ignore the "story" elements of violence in games.
As someone who spends a great deal of his time in the scholarly study of videogames, i take an admittedly high-falootin' stance on all this.
I have the same first impression of this book that i would of a book called "A Theory of Prettiness for Painting." Which is not to say that i think fun isn't important or desirable in games (i love Tetris, for instance), but i think the medium has potential for greater things, too. It doesn't help that i see this man's work as being very incremental. The same problems that he was working on in UO and SWG have been dealt with for years in MUDs.
On the other hand, i think that this seems like a fairly accurate description of what actually goes on, and what he's working on. When Raph Koster describes the book as something he could give to non-industry types to describe what he does, i think that he probably hit the nail on the head. I just wish that people would see this more as the way it is, not the way it should be.
I also see posting this on slashdot as similar to posting a review about "A Theory of Prettiness for Painting" on a message board for paint makers, but i know there are a lot of open minded, smart people on here, so hopefully we'll get some interesting discourse out of it.
That's hillarious. You think Bush gives a damn about Fair Use rights? No way. He's a neocon, and thus will side with big business. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please, inform me.
Even if you buy into the whole "liberal media" argument, this wouldn't make sense. Yes, revenge does exist in politics, but to encourage repealing the DMCA would piss off tech companies, as well as media conglomerates (Disney and News Corp being two of the largest and two with decidedly right-wing politics). It's far too broad a stroke to get back at these companies, even if he did want to. The standard and easiest way is to give preferential treatment to the news divisions of companies that play nice with and don't badmouth the government. Every source from the government that's not a press conferance or press release is a favor: leverage for later when things need to be covered up or just not emphasised. The republicans and democrats are both in bed with big media alike. It's the way politics is played (and as Jon Stewart would say, it's hurting America).
Not that i think Kerry will do a damn thing about the DMCA either. Even if it were up to the president at all, both parties are corporate shills. And it's justifiable both from an "economic freedom" perspective (buyer beware: there's no reason you shouldn't be aware of the terms under which you're getting that product) and from a regulated perspective (regulating piracy).
It's sickening, and if you really think Bush is any different on this front from Kerry, i think you've been duped by the news media that has pandered to his administration these last four years.
Disclaimer: i'm only the brother of an astrophysicist, and don't know much outside of what he's told me.
The idea of independent frames of reference only holds for velocity. Rotation of an object involves acceleration towards the center of that object. Each point on a rotating circle moves tangentially to the circle, but that velocity is changed (accelerated) as it goes, because the tangent to the circle is different at each point it moves through. Thus, there is no rotating frame of reference for the earth.
To test this idea in simpler terms: if you're in a zero gravity environment, and you're spinning, what happens when you pull your arms in? You start spinning faster, right (conservation of angular momentum and all that)? Well, if instead, you're stationary and the thing you're in starts spinning, what happens when you pull your arms in? Nothing! It's the rotating thing, not you, thus you have no angular momentum to conserve. If rotation was just another frame of reference, then to be consitant, when you pulled your arms in, the same thing would have to happen: the relative rotational speed would have to increase.
Incidentally, that's also why we can definitely say that we orbit the sun, not the other way around.
As a loyal Transgaming subscriber, i have to refute this argument. You say that "We are sunk if [running Windows games via wine] becomes the norm and all game development becomes ms windows centric." Guess what? Almost all of it already is. Wine allows those of us who want to play specific computer games to do it under Linux instead of Windows. I buy the Linux version of games that have them, though in the case of Neverwinter Nights, for example, i still need wine to run the editor tools (and the native binary is rather unstable, crashing about every two hours for me).
Because of this, Wine helps grow the potential gaming market on Linux so that when native releases do happen, there are more of us to buy them. If Wine were to work perfectly, why care if games aren't developed for Linux natively? The fact of the matter is that it doesn't, which means that native ports will always be preferable, and thus there will be a market for them. Right now, i know of few to no companies that make money on sales of their Linux client ports, and most games that have Linux ports have them because someone within the company wanted one. I'm hoping this changes, but it won't without a larger gaming community on Linux and Wine helps that by providing a more viable platform for gamers.
Saying that we demand native ports right now is putting the cart before the horse. Native ports are great, but the market needs to grow before we'll impress anyone with Linux sales, so just sit back for now, buy the Linux games that have native ports and emulate whatever you need in the mean time rather than dual-booting.
In addition to this, add on WebmailCompose (previously GmailCompose) and you've got pretty much the full functionality of this gmail toolbar, plus it's cross-platform, for those of you who use several platforms and want a more unified computing experience.
For the record, i've been terribly happy with this combination for a while. Together with the great featureset of Gmail, it makes Webmail actually pleasant to use!
Yeah, except if you actually had a phone book, and looked up "AXA" in both yellow and white pages, you might get a hit in the white pages -- under which would only be people and companies with the legal rights to that name -- and you wouldn't get any results from the yellow pages, 'cause they're sorted by category rather than name.
My point is not that one side's right or the other's wrong, legally or morally. My point is simply that the phonebook analogy is a bad one precisely because it avoids the issue of linking ads for businesses to their competitor's names.
Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be good at analogies? The yellow pages are indexed by general terms like "plumbing." Look up "Geico" in the yellow pages and you won't find anything, but look up "car insurance" and you might.
To put it another way, your analogy would be valid if AXA was suing for being listed next to a competitor when someone searches for life insurance. Alternately, you'd also be right if i could take out an ad in the white pages, and list my service under a competitor's registered trademark.
I don't really know how i feel about this suit, but i do know some faulty rhetoric when i see it.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes no sense. The government is charged with upholding the rights of the citizenry, and that can only be done through the courts and by force. Private implementations of force are rights violations. You're absolutely right in everything that you said except "That makes no sense." That's because by your previous definition of socialism, a govenment charged with upholding the rights of the citizenry via the application of force IS SOCIALIST. That's because the government "Takes a service, prevents private organizations from providing it, and has the government provide it instead, funded through forced taxation." In this case, that service is police, military, and a justice system.
The definition of socialism you gave in the above post is reasonable, but contrary to what you now claim, is not the one you were using previously. That one had to do with the government providing services funded by taxation. There is a huge difference.
Also, to whomever modded the grandparent off topic: sorry to have ideas that frighten or anger you.
By that definition, America has been a socialist nation since its inception. In fact, any system that's not anarcho-capitalist is apparently a socialist system by your definition. After all, we're depriving private military, judicial, and police contractors the ability to provide their services unhampered by government interference.
Of course, your definition has nothing to do with the actual definition of socialism, which is why it's completely fair for someone to call you out as parroting talking points (though I wouldn't call them Republican talking points).
The ridiculously high rate of deflation required to reach a 1:240 increase in the value of the dollar (which is I assume what you meant) would ensure that no one ever invested because the best form of investment is to convert your money into bank notes (backed by gold, in this case) and stick it under your mattress. Basically all investment would stop and every company would be liquidated because it would be impossible to beat investing in bank notes. The economy would dry up overnight.
A modest level of inflation ensures that the best way to keep your wealth around is to invest, whether it be in bonds, stocks, commodities, etc., and that ensures that people are able to do business and keep their jobs. Try having a living wage when there are no jobs.
Also, good luck with the national debt that's now 240 times larger, and still needs interest paid on it, especially because the return on bonds would have to beat the rate of deflation, so interest rates on our debt would skyrocket.
Basically, the idea that a 1:240 increase in the value of the dollar over any reasonable time-frame would be beneficial is absolutely absurd.
Sure, and Zimbabwe does the same thing and has horrible inflation. However, in most economies, that's not how money is generated.
;)
That's why I used the word "generally."
The gold standard is terrible, leads to recessions, and in general unnecessarily constrains the economy. Here's a hint: if you think money is generally created by printing more currency, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about. Even if you understand how money is created, you still may not. For a thorough debunking of the gold standard, read this: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/goldbug.html
l
For an introduction on how money is created, try this: http://ingrimayne.com/econ/Banking/Commodity2.htm
That's largely true. They haven't forced the president to change, short of not totally acquiescing to his every whim, but,
You them fault them for not doing something that you yourself agree would be ultimately inconsequential.
They're not impeaching because it wouldn't accomplish anything, and like the Clinton impeachment, would probably turn favor against them. If it were politically advantageous, they'd do it, but they're simply not going to get a conviction, so why do it if it's not politically advantageous?
The difference is that "Santorum" wasn't a Googlebomb in the first place (though I'm not trying to say that no one ever attempted a Googlebomb of it). It was a meme started by Dan Savage to make Rick Santorum infamous, and its popularity had nothing to do with PageRank.
My girlfriend and I play Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates together.
It's a massively multiplayer game where you play a pirate, and to perform duties, you play puzzles. The better you do at a puzzle, the more you contribute. This means that you two can play together, cooperatively and on the same ship, working towards a shared goal. It's also a very broad game, so if you like one puzzle and she prefers a different one, you can both play different puzzles on the same ship. The money you make can be spent in any number of different ways, and as you get better and begin to meet people, you can join a crew or form your own, buy ships, run shoppes, get involved in politics and war, take over and govern islands, or just buy yourself a really nice hat.
Don't let the graphics fool you, it's a surprisingly deep game. And, as it's Java, it runs on just about any OS out there.
Hope to see ye on the high seas!
For precisely that reason, it'll look worse. A 480i game will be using far less texture bandwidth to fill in all those extra pixels, so they can afford to do more processing on the pixels they have to have better effects.
Given that the hardware is all the same, in order to design a game to work well on 480i and 720p, the game will either have to cut down on graphics effects when running at 720p or simply scale down the 720p image to 480i, and waste lots of graphics work computing pixels that don't get seen, when you could be using them to create better effects.
You criticize the parent post for poor reasoning, but you offer ad hominem attacks and a straw man.
The parent post simply asked questions about the morality of the decision, and as far as I can see, he or she has a perfectly valid point.
As far as business practices go, I don't know the details of the anti-trust rulings, but the South Korean market may simply not be big enough to justify complying with the ruling. If Microsoft has no intentions of complying with the ruling, but rather withdrawing from the market if this comes to pass, I see no reason for them not to announce the fact. It may affect the ruling, which is good for their business, and if it doesn't, well, good for South Korea for standing by its laws. That's what should happen.
If its an empty threat, and South Korea calls them on it, well, it'll affect their ability to negotiate with government agencies, but the reality of the situation is that if the anti-trust case goes through and they don't pull out of the market, you can bet on them reaching some sort of compermise, which I'm guessing is half the point of the threat in the first place.
Now, if the only point of the threat is to manipulate the legal system, that's certainly questionable, morally, but it's a very nuanced situation that deserves more discussion. I'm of the opinion personally that the moral questions lie with S. Korea about whether or not they should compermise their legal integrity in the face of an economic threat.
You're entirely wrong. Groovy is another language that targets the JVM. Groovy is either compiled to Java bytecode (and from there, JIT compiled to machine code by the JVM), or it's compiled at runtime in a JIT fashion. There is no interpreter written in Java that runs Groovy code. Groovy is just another language that targets the JVM.
The benefit from all this is that in Groovy, you can interface to Java classes with literally no overhead. It's a brilliant idea for a new language because all the libraries are already there! This skips past one of the biggest stumbling blocks for new lanaguages.
All in all, Groovy's a pretty interesting language that's worth looking into, but apparently you can't be bothered to do a Google search.
I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence.
Aside from the original GTA, off the top of my head:
Postal: 1997. Gratuitous killing of innocents was explicitly the point of the game.
Carmageddon: 1997. Points and powerups earned for running over pedestrians.
Wolfenstein 3D: 1992. Integral to playing this game was killing human nazi soldiers. I might remind you that the nazis used conscripts. It wasn't a volunteer army.
And of course, don't make me invoke Custer's Revenge.
b.c
While i'd rather be working in VIM, i use Eclipse at work and it is pretty slick. The one thing that i can say against it, however, is that it takes a huge amount of RAM. I recently upgraded to 768MB, and with Eclipse, Firefox, and Gaim running, my memory utilization gets up near 100% (and Eclipse takes the biggest slice of the memory pie). Now, i know the JVM is largely to blame, but no matter what area of the code it's in, that's still ridiculous. I look forward to some optimization in this area.
All that notwithstanding, if you have the memory to spare and you like these GUI IDEs that the kids are using these days, i have to say, Eclipse is worthwhile.
b.c
That's not at all why it's not ironic. It's not ironic because irony is the use of words to convey a meaning opposite of what they literally meant. A lie is intended to convey the same meaning literally that it connotes.
And nerve gas and chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They've got tactical uses, but a can of teargas or a gallon of sarin is not significantly more deadly than an AK-47. Pretending that the phrase "weapon of mass destruction" applies to much outside of nuclear and biological weapons is either naive or dishonest.
Excellent.
Sorry, i guess i was attacking the seeming opinion of the reviewer rather than your own arguments, since i haven't read the book myself.
Speaking of oversimplifications and things he's wrong about:
"...why gamers cast aside the ethical quandaries brought up by games like Grand Theft Auto (they're playing the game mechanics, not the fiction surrounding the mechanics)."
I mean, this is somewhat true. There's definitely a distinction between the two, but to think that they're entirely seperable, and that the narrative elements don't matter at all is purely ridiculous. If what he says is true, then the only important differences between GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA would be the feature changes. While those may be big differences, it's ridiculous to claim that the Godfather 2 setting of GTA:VC has no bearing on play experience, or that people aren't interacting with the subject matter on some level. I think playing GTA:VC doesn't make people horribly violent for the same reason that watching the Godfather 2 doesn't make people horribly violent -- because there's no reason it should. Representations of violence and simulations of violence are not themselves violence.
If you want to argue Media Effects, that's fine, but not the point i'm trying to make. The point i'm trying to make is that the fact that playing violent games does not mean the players are violent people does not necessarilly lead us to the conclusion that we ignore the "story" elements of violence in games.
Would GTA sell as well if the story was nonsense?
b.c
As someone who spends a great deal of his time in the scholarly study of videogames, i take an admittedly high-falootin' stance on all this.
I have the same first impression of this book that i would of a book called "A Theory of Prettiness for Painting." Which is not to say that i think fun isn't important or desirable in games (i love Tetris, for instance), but i think the medium has potential for greater things, too. It doesn't help that i see this man's work as being very incremental. The same problems that he was working on in UO and SWG have been dealt with for years in MUDs.
On the other hand, i think that this seems like a fairly accurate description of what actually goes on, and what he's working on. When Raph Koster describes the book as something he could give to non-industry types to describe what he does, i think that he probably hit the nail on the head. I just wish that people would see this more as the way it is, not the way it should be.
I also see posting this on slashdot as similar to posting a review about "A Theory of Prettiness for Painting" on a message board for paint makers, but i know there are a lot of open minded, smart people on here, so hopefully we'll get some interesting discourse out of it.
b.c
That's hillarious. You think Bush gives a damn about Fair Use rights? No way. He's a neocon, and thus will side with big business. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please, inform me.
Even if you buy into the whole "liberal media" argument, this wouldn't make sense. Yes, revenge does exist in politics, but to encourage repealing the DMCA would piss off tech companies, as well as media conglomerates (Disney and News Corp being two of the largest and two with decidedly right-wing politics). It's far too broad a stroke to get back at these companies, even if he did want to. The standard and easiest way is to give preferential treatment to the news divisions of companies that play nice with and don't badmouth the government. Every source from the government that's not a press conferance or press release is a favor: leverage for later when things need to be covered up or just not emphasised. The republicans and democrats are both in bed with big media alike. It's the way politics is played (and as Jon Stewart would say, it's hurting America).
Not that i think Kerry will do a damn thing about the DMCA either. Even if it were up to the president at all, both parties are corporate shills. And it's justifiable both from an "economic freedom" perspective (buyer beware: there's no reason you shouldn't be aware of the terms under which you're getting that product) and from a regulated perspective (regulating piracy).
It's sickening, and if you really think Bush is any different on this front from Kerry, i think you've been duped by the news media that has pandered to his administration these last four years.
Disclaimer: i'm only the brother of an astrophysicist, and don't know much outside of what he's told me.
The idea of independent frames of reference only holds for velocity. Rotation of an object involves acceleration towards the center of that object. Each point on a rotating circle moves tangentially to the circle, but that velocity is changed (accelerated) as it goes, because the tangent to the circle is different at each point it moves through. Thus, there is no rotating frame of reference for the earth.
To test this idea in simpler terms: if you're in a zero gravity environment, and you're spinning, what happens when you pull your arms in? You start spinning faster, right (conservation of angular momentum and all that)? Well, if instead, you're stationary and the thing you're in starts spinning, what happens when you pull your arms in? Nothing! It's the rotating thing, not you, thus you have no angular momentum to conserve. If rotation was just another frame of reference, then to be consitant, when you pulled your arms in, the same thing would have to happen: the relative rotational speed would have to increase.
Incidentally, that's also why we can definitely say that we orbit the sun, not the other way around.
I hope that clears that up.
b.c
As a loyal Transgaming subscriber, i have to refute this argument. You say that "We are sunk if [running Windows games via wine] becomes the norm and all game development becomes ms windows centric." Guess what? Almost all of it already is. Wine allows those of us who want to play specific computer games to do it under Linux instead of Windows. I buy the Linux version of games that have them, though in the case of Neverwinter Nights, for example, i still need wine to run the editor tools (and the native binary is rather unstable, crashing about every two hours for me).
Because of this, Wine helps grow the potential gaming market on Linux so that when native releases do happen, there are more of us to buy them. If Wine were to work perfectly, why care if games aren't developed for Linux natively? The fact of the matter is that it doesn't, which means that native ports will always be preferable, and thus there will be a market for them. Right now, i know of few to no companies that make money on sales of their Linux client ports, and most games that have Linux ports have them because someone within the company wanted one. I'm hoping this changes, but it won't without a larger gaming community on Linux and Wine helps that by providing a more viable platform for gamers.
Saying that we demand native ports right now is putting the cart before the horse. Native ports are great, but the market needs to grow before we'll impress anyone with Linux sales, so just sit back for now, buy the Linux games that have native ports and emulate whatever you need in the mean time rather than dual-booting.
b.c
Heh, beat me to it!
In addition to this, add on WebmailCompose (previously GmailCompose) and you've got pretty much the full functionality of this gmail toolbar, plus it's cross-platform, for those of you who use several platforms and want a more unified computing experience.
For the record, i've been terribly happy with this combination for a while. Together with the great featureset of Gmail, it makes Webmail actually pleasant to use!
Yeah, except if you actually had a phone book, and looked up "AXA" in both yellow and white pages, you might get a hit in the white pages -- under which would only be people and companies with the legal rights to that name -- and you wouldn't get any results from the yellow pages, 'cause they're sorted by category rather than name.
My point is not that one side's right or the other's wrong, legally or morally. My point is simply that the phonebook analogy is a bad one precisely because it avoids the issue of linking ads for businesses to their competitor's names.
b.c
Aren't people on Slashdot supposed to be good at analogies? The yellow pages are indexed by general terms like "plumbing." Look up "Geico" in the yellow pages and you won't find anything, but look up "car insurance" and you might.
To put it another way, your analogy would be valid if AXA was suing for being listed next to a competitor when someone searches for life insurance. Alternately, you'd also be right if i could take out an ad in the white pages, and list my service under a competitor's registered trademark.
I don't really know how i feel about this suit, but i do know some faulty rhetoric when i see it.
b.c