The bias in most games is towards being one of the good guys. Personally I find this annoying as I'm generally one of the good guys in real life and the last thing I want to when I play games is extend this behavior into my entertainment time.
No, what I really want in my games is the chance to be bad. Really, really bad. Downright evil, sometimes. On occasion I even want to go around slaughtering every innocent in sight. Carnage, blood, death, destruction - here I come!
But in 99% of the games out there the game is deliberately designed to punish non-good behavior. Being 'good' almost always has a much higher payoff than being 'evil'. So the game itself, via the prejudices of the designers, rewards and punishes based on a trite moral philosophy (trite for games, that is) even if the option exists to be evil. A rational player ignores the 'evil' options because the rational player knows that the penalty will almost always outweigh the benefit.
There's definitely a message being pushed, and a pretty moronic one at that. Games are just that - games. They aren't soapboxes. And when I come home after a day of dealing with annoying, obnoxious pricks I don't want to save the world, I want to wreak havoc and doom upon the virtual inhabitants, preferably while imagining that some of my victims are the said pricks I had to put up with in a more civilized fashion in the real world.
We condemn state-funded and state-mandated abortions. It is particularly harsh to force someone who believes that abortion is murder to pay for another's abortion.
Any real libertarian (small 'l', not capital 'L') would agree that using tax dollars to fund abortions is contrary to libertarian principles. And any really libertarian would also agree that using government power to destroy choice by banning abortions is an equally evil, and anti-libertarian act.
Real libertarians are fully in support of people expressing their opinions on the topic and trying to convince others to convert to their views *without the use of government force* . Hypocrites, on the other hand, are more than willing to pretend to libertarianism when it suits their own personal preferences but to chuck it by the wayside the moment it argues against their beliefs.
You can't be a little bit libertarian any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Either you are, or you aren't. If you claim that you are but make exceptions based upon the idea that your particular brand of ethics on these topics should be forced on others via government power then you aren't, and never will be, a libertarian.
Sounds to me like this asshole properly failed to secure his computer, got hit with a virus, and now wants to go on a government-sanctioned killing rampage against everyone he believes is the source of his irritation.
Hey, if we aren't going to dick around why not just make ALL 'serious' crimes punishable by death? And while we're at it, let's harvest the organs of these evil lawbreakers and use them to save the lives of countless upright citizens! I think Niven had something to say about that....
Sounds great - so long as when a corporation commits a criminal act, each and every employee involved in that act is charged with the crime, one instance per every single person harmed. Tit for tat.
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values.
Corporations are fictitious entities. They don't exist in any real form. The people who constitute the organized group activity we apply the label to, however, are quite real.
And it's incumbant upon those people to act in an ethical fashion. Simply being part of the organization called 'a corporation' doesn't excuse immoral behavior. It's unfortunate that the courts allow the fiction of 'corporation' to shield evil-doers from prosecution in many cases and, I think, a rather clear perversion of any rational definition of the word 'person'.
Sadly, there is no penalty for dealing with brutal dictatorships, or for betraying every ideal America supposedly holds dear by assisting that dictatorship in retaining power. But it's rather hard to press home the case for blame when the government does the very same thing (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Even so, I personally think that anyone willing to betray the ideals embodied in the Constitution are traitors and vermin. That includes both the swine at Google who assist the Chinese in building their great firewall and the swine in the federal government who actively prop up the Saudi royal family. And at the end of the day it isn't a 'corporation' or a 'government' that's to blame, but the people hiding behind these labels who're actually doing the dirty work that assists these dictatorships in maintaining their power.
Perhaps, but Morrowind had one of the shittiest, buggiest, and inconsistent game systems ever developed. It was clear from the get-go that whatever playtesting had been done was minimal at best. Sure, they absolutely excelled at the open-ended environment, the story, and most (not all) of the quests; but the game system itself was an abortion the moment it hit the shelves. Even massive modding of the game simply could not fix most of the "what the fuck?!?" elements of that system.
I know, I tried. Would that I hadn't wasted the time.
Ravens and their crow cousins are exceptional in the world of birds, a fact which has been known for some time. They can and will craft tools and find ingenious solutions to problems in ways that no other bird can mimick.
They also have very distinct differences in brain morphology when compared to other birds - not to mention larger and more complex brains. It seems that over time they're specializing for something other birds aren't: more grey matter. It'd be fascinating to see how they develop over the next two or three million years.
Not to mention, how many animals actually verbally communicate from generation to generation
You probably want to remove this as a precondition for intelligent behavior, as you've defined it. Prairie dogs, meerkats, raccoons and a host of other social animals have been definitively shown to possess languages consisting of several hundred words, some of them rather startling in their precision and use. Clearly language isn't the sole purview of humans, although it could easily be argued that complex language is (at least for some of us).
Don't take me for some PETA idiot, though. I regularly east animals and love every single second of it. In fact, I've become quite adept at cooking a variety of tasty little critters over the years in a number of different and very yummy ways. And I have no problem whatsoever with going out and killing the animals I intend to eat.
I do make a distinction, however, based on the intelligence of the animal in question. As both a former farm boy and an animal rehabber I have a fairly decent grasp of just how intelligent a good many animals are. Sheep, cows, deer and just about any herbivore, for example, are pretty stupid as mammals go and that means they're fit to become my next meal. Dogs, raccoons, cougars, bears, any primate, etc. are bloody brilliant in comparison to their herbivore relatives and the very idea of eating something that smart icks me out. They strike me as relatives - distant relatives, but still relatives, at least in the brains department - and on the whole I try to avoid eating my relatives.
Although I do make exceptions. As any decent farmer knows pigs are often smarter than dogs are. They're also some of the biggest assholes you'll find in the animal kingdom, and that alone qualifies them for the dinner table. I'd say the same of quite a few humans but humans, alas, are riddled with compatible diseases and parasites, and besides - I hear they taste about as good as three-day-old possum roadkill....
For that kind of money I'd be willing a hire a 'terrorist' or three to blow something up just so I could propose a nifty - and very timely - security product to politicians trying to make themselves look good to the general public. The payoff is simply mindboggling, and far outweighs the risk.
Oh wait, did I just say that out loud? I was speaking purely hypothetically, of course....
Lessee...some amoral politician looking to secure reelection latches onto a non-issue like a very badly made sex scene in a video game - cut out and only accessible through an externally produced mod. A few anal-retentive assholes who see this as another good way to tell the rest of us how to live our lives, or raise our children, jump on the bandwagon.
How exactly is this news? Happens just about every goddamned day in the former land of the free, so far as I can see.
Fuck it. I'm going to load up Carmageddon and run over a few hundred screaming pedestrians, pretending all the while they're either extremist righties or extremist lefties. No sex in that game, so the politicians and their whacked out fascist-jackboot-wannabes shouldn't even life an eyebrow at the carnage....
I've known a lot of nerdy guys in their mid-20's who hadn't even kissed a girl. Partially because of this, their self-esteem was essentially zero. Of course, as many girls will tell you, a low self-esteem is not very attractive, thus perpetuating the state of not getting laid for these poor guys.
The meaning of a word is determined by the people who use it, not a self-selected group of so-called experts. I'm fairly certain that if you asked a cross-section of the public what an "anti-hero" is, at least 90% would reply Wikipedia-style and not stuffy-anal-retentive-academic-style.
When it comes to language democracy really does rule the roost, regardless of what a few of the self-important types would like to think.
A lunch break doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you want with company property. How hard is that to grasp?
Only the owner gets to decide what you can and cannot do with his property. If that bothers you then perhaps you should consider moving to a country that doesn't recognize the concept of 'personal property' - like China, or in this case, apparently Canada.
But being somebody's lying bitch and screwing the shit out of the customer in order to respect the 'chain of command', that apparently is okay. Whores abound in all walks of life, I guess.
If a company is arrogant enough to presume that it is more important than those other potential employers, then it will get exactly what it deserves: no top-end staff.
And MS is exactly that arrogant. Just talk to some of their management staff about the company; they come off as egomaniacal fanatics convinced that MS will rule the world and can do no wrong, and that anyone who opposes them should be crushed like the faithless maggots that they are.
My experiences with MS always left me with the feeling that I wasn't dealing with a business but a cult....
If I write an email to my wife that says "I love you snugglywugglykins!", my employer definately doesn't need to see that.
If you're wasting company time and company resources writing personal emails, you deserve to be shit-canned. You don't have a 'right' to do anything with company property other than what the company decides you can do with it.
If you're on my property you have two options: follow my rules or leave. The choice is entirely up to you. The fact that there isn't a third option more to your liking is just too fucking bad - for you.
They're helping me because it serves their short term interests.
And I'm helping them because it serves MY short term interests. That's called 'capitalism'. Deal with it.
There is no control on buisnesses
Riiiight. As all the businesses that have, well, GONE OUT OF BUSINESS because they couldn't get the job done to the satisfaction of their customers can attest to.
Where the fuck do you think the megacorporations of the 21st century get their non-economic power? They get it from GOVERNMENT. Buy enough politicians and the corporation can even get armies deployed to far-off shitholes to do their bidding. The corporations themselves have no such power; they have to purchase it, and they can only do so from strong, centralized governments - whose rulers are more than eager to sell, often for not much more than a weekend in the Carribean with a couple of teen hookers.
If government were WEAK, corporations would also be weak. This isn't fucking rocket science.
And in local elections, your vote *does* matter.
Ah, yes. I get to choose between the shithead sellout that calls himself a 'Democrat', and the shithead sellout that calls himself a 'Republican'. Both are for sale - just not to me. My vote might determine which team wins the playoffs, but the game is still football at the end of the day.
Corporations are the dictators of the 20th century. They have almost unlimited power when compared to the ordinary human being.
The only reason corporations have this power is because the government has this power, and it's for sale to anyone who has enough money. Pull the teeth of government and you pull the teeth of the corporations.
The only reason they aren't dictators in fact is that they have no army. And the only reason they don't is because the government wouldn't allow it.
Jesus H., just how naive can you be? They don't need an army because they can rent the one the government fields. If you think otherwise, there are quite a few countries around the world that would disagree with you. Here's a hint: think "oil" and "polynesia", "bananas" and "central America", "coffee" and "south America", etc.
Look at the laws they buy (DCMA, broadcast flag, pork barrel projects, etc). None of these benefit you, they benefit themselves. The only thing we can use is the one power we have left- the government.
You just admitted they can buy any laws or application of force they wish from the government, then proposed we use that same government to limit the abuse of power. Are you on crack?
Sure, Neanderthals *may* have been more intelligent, but the evidence points *against* it, or at least, doesn't support it.
The fossil evidence is pretty clear: Neanderthals had bigger brains than homo sapiens. In the human line, bigger almost always means smarter where brains are concerned.
As for the 'evidence' presented from digs, the proponents generally tend to gloss over several key influencing factors. Here's a few:
a) Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than human ones. This was a necessity imposed by the requirement that they gather most of their food in the form of meat. Larger human tribes could afford to have individuals specialize in non-survival activities; Neanderthals could not. Simple economics, although the apologists don't seem to be able to grasp this one.
b) Hunting is much more energy and time intensive than gathering. Neanderthals collected 90% of their calories through hunting, while humans only collected 10% of their calories this way. Humans, on the whole, spent a great deal less time collecting food. That means more free time for other non-essential activities like making pretty beads. Again, pretty obvious when you think about it.
c) Neanderthal tools were no less effective than human tools for their environment and the way they collected food. Some have tried to make this claim, but there isn't a single shred of evidence that proves that this is the case. Neanderthals didn't change their tools because they didn't NEED to change their tools - unlike migratory homo sapiens. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And they didn't have a whole lot of time to innovate anyway (see b above).
d) There are only two decent Neanderthal sites excavated to date. Hardly representative. Because Neanderthals lived in much smaller groups their 'footprint' means less chance of finding a representative sample of their living conditions. We don't have anything close to such a sample, so making assumptions based upon those sites is not only unscientific, it's ludicrous.
It seems that the people fervently against the idea of Neanderthals being smarter than homo sapiens (despite the clear fossil evidence of a larger brain) are desperate to believe that homo sapiens have been, are, and always will be the most intelligent thing on Earth. The very thought that this might not be the case seems to be disturbing to them on a personal level. Odd, given that evolution is bound to produce something smarter and better than h. sapiens over time, and that eventually we'll occupy the same place in history as homo erectus: a bright ape, but no genius by any stretch of the imagination.
If you find no value in general Western ideals of freedom, democracy, equality, and liberty, then I am saddened for you.
You mean the very freedom, democracy, equality and liberty that many Americans seem hell-bent on giving up with abominations like the Orwellian-named PATRIOT Act? *Those* ideals?
The real enemy isn't a bunch of whacked-out lunatics who get their rocks off killing people, it's the power-mongers who profit off the fear that follows and the idiots who cower in their basements and do nothing to stop them - or hell, even encourage them in the false belief that doing so will provide them some measure of safety. The fools and morons who actually think that if they just give up enough liberty and enough democracy that somehow the government will be able to protect them.
I swore and oath to protect the Constitution above all other things, against enemies foreign AND domestic. The so-called terrorist - really, no different than any other psychotic mass murderer - doesn't threaten freedom or democracy or the Constitution. But it does seem that the Terrorist(TM) is an excellent excuse for giving power to those that think the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper to wipe their asses with. Those people are the REAL enemy, and they're entirely domestic. They are, in fact, fellow Americans, although it shames me to say so. Almost as much as it shames me to say that many of my countrymen are such spineless cowards they prize the illusion of safety over liberty, and will gladly give up the Constitution to the wolves in their midst for false promises.
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
Because there is no grand, shadowy conspiracy of American-hating terrorists working on elaborate and devious schemes to bring down the U.S. The guys who destroyed the World Trade Center weren't particularly bright or cunning - in fact, they screwed up numerous times prior to the hijacking - it's just that our own intelligence agencies were even more incompetent than they were.
Our precious government is trying to get us to believe that there's a vast network of American-hating terrorists just waiting to be activated so they can descend into an orgy of death on the streets of U.S.A. Town. Right. Pull the other leg and I'll kick you in the teeth, asshole.
There are no 'terrorists'. Just psychotic losers who like committing murder. Some psychotic losers climb clock towers and start shooting people; others send bombs in the mail; still others pick a specific sort of person (e.g., children, red hair, whatever) to butcher. A very, very few manage to get together with other psychotic losers and work together to score a bigger body count, as if life were a Lovecraftian video game. But these aren't the 'terrorist' boogeyman the government made up to scare the gullible and the stupid; they're just lunatics who think killing is fun, no different than McVeigh or Bundy or Manson.
Criminals. The nastiest sort (barring, perhaps, the average politician) but still - just criminals. No need to get worked up about them anymore than we shit our pants after McVeigh. Anyone who does needs to attend "How Not To Be A Spineless Pussy 101".
They didn't. It's a myth that Neanderthal ate meat and meat only. In reality about 90% of their diet was meat.
This wasn't due to a lack of technology or knowledge. It's clear they knew which plants were good eatin' and which weren't. But like modern bodybuilders and weightlifters Neanderthal had to eat a lot of meat to maintain their mass. And unlike modern bodybuilders and weightlighters they couldn't opt to eat less meat and slough off all the muscle; it came with the package and they either had to maintain it or die.
Neanderthals had a diet of 90% meat/10% plant matter because their own physiology REQUIRED this if they didn't want to starve to death. This presents huge problems if the ecology you're adapted to living in begins to shrink and your smaller, stupider, but more omnivorous (and far more numerous) relatives start moving into the neighborhood.
and being relatively successful if they have greater intelligence and/or weaponry.
There isn't any evidence of either. If anything, it appears that Neanderthals might have been somewhat more intelligent than we are.
But you don't need intelligence or better weapons to kill off a competitor who is, individually, your superior. All you need is numbers. And humans definitely had numbers over Neanderthals, primarily because humans were gatherers and Neanderthals were hunters. A square mile of territory will support *a lot* more plant eaters than meat eaters.
There has been a lot of research into the theory that one reason we made it out of our ancient roots is because we threw so well.
Homo sapiens satisfied 90% of their nutritional needs through gathering and ony 10% through hunting. Overall humans were incredibly shitty hunters.
Neanderthal numbers are switched: 90% of their food was meat, only 10% of it came in the form of fruit and vegetables. This was necessary, due to both their bulk (the weakest could break Arnie in his prime in two) and the environment they lived in. Neanderthals were very, very good hunters - the best the wide human line as ever produced, by a huge margin.
I sincerely doubt the Neanderthals were incapable of mastering the art of 'throwing', especially since it appears they might actually have been a bit smarter than us. And I've never once heard this argument until today, here, on Slashdot, despite a fair amount of research into Neanderthal and other human relatives.
In fact, the prevailing theory concerning Neanderthal extinction has to do with a) the reduction in suitable climate, b) the relative inability to concentrate numbers because they couldn't support themselves on plant matter like homo sapiens did, and c) the inability to drive off homo sapien encroachment for this very reason (e.g., valley X could only support Y members of Neanderthal tribe, but 5Y of H. Sapiens tribe, meaning that Neanderthals were badly outnumbered in conflicts with H. Sapiens. Strength hardly matters if you're outnumbered 5 to 1).
Slashdot Mirror
The bias in most games is towards being one of the good guys. Personally I find this annoying as I'm generally one of the good guys in real life and the last thing I want to when I play games is extend this behavior into my entertainment time.
No, what I really want in my games is the chance to be bad. Really, really bad. Downright evil, sometimes. On occasion I even want to go around slaughtering every innocent in sight. Carnage, blood, death, destruction - here I come!
But in 99% of the games out there the game is deliberately designed to punish non-good behavior. Being 'good' almost always has a much higher payoff than being 'evil'. So the game itself, via the prejudices of the designers, rewards and punishes based on a trite moral philosophy (trite for games, that is) even if the option exists to be evil. A rational player ignores the 'evil' options because the rational player knows that the penalty will almost always outweigh the benefit.
There's definitely a message being pushed, and a pretty moronic one at that. Games are just that - games. They aren't soapboxes. And when I come home after a day of dealing with annoying, obnoxious pricks I don't want to save the world, I want to wreak havoc and doom upon the virtual inhabitants, preferably while imagining that some of my victims are the said pricks I had to put up with in a more civilized fashion in the real world.
Max
We condemn state-funded and state-mandated abortions. It is particularly harsh to force someone who believes that abortion is murder to pay for another's abortion.
Any real libertarian (small 'l', not capital 'L') would agree that using tax dollars to fund abortions is contrary to libertarian principles. And any really libertarian would also agree that using government power to destroy choice by banning abortions is an equally evil, and anti-libertarian act.
Real libertarians are fully in support of people expressing their opinions on the topic and trying to convince others to convert to their views *without the use of government force* . Hypocrites, on the other hand, are more than willing to pretend to libertarianism when it suits their own personal preferences but to chuck it by the wayside the moment it argues against their beliefs.
You can't be a little bit libertarian any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Either you are, or you aren't. If you claim that you are but make exceptions based upon the idea that your particular brand of ethics on these topics should be forced on others via government power then you aren't, and never will be, a libertarian.
Max
Sounds to me like this asshole properly failed to secure his computer, got hit with a virus, and now wants to go on a government-sanctioned killing rampage against everyone he believes is the source of his irritation.
Hey, if we aren't going to dick around why not just make ALL 'serious' crimes punishable by death? And while we're at it, let's harvest the organs of these evil lawbreakers and use them to save the lives of countless upright citizens! I think Niven had something to say about that....
Max
Sounds great - so long as when a corporation commits a criminal act, each and every employee involved in that act is charged with the crime, one instance per every single person harmed. Tit for tat.
Max
Companies are there to make money not for moral or social values.
Corporations are fictitious entities. They don't exist in any real form. The people who constitute the organized group activity we apply the label to, however, are quite real.
And it's incumbant upon those people to act in an ethical fashion. Simply being part of the organization called 'a corporation' doesn't excuse immoral behavior. It's unfortunate that the courts allow the fiction of 'corporation' to shield evil-doers from prosecution in many cases and, I think, a rather clear perversion of any rational definition of the word 'person'.
Sadly, there is no penalty for dealing with brutal dictatorships, or for betraying every ideal America supposedly holds dear by assisting that dictatorship in retaining power. But it's rather hard to press home the case for blame when the government does the very same thing (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Even so, I personally think that anyone willing to betray the ideals embodied in the Constitution are traitors and vermin. That includes both the swine at Google who assist the Chinese in building their great firewall and the swine in the federal government who actively prop up the Saudi royal family. And at the end of the day it isn't a 'corporation' or a 'government' that's to blame, but the people hiding behind these labels who're actually doing the dirty work that assists these dictatorships in maintaining their power.
Max
Perhaps, but Morrowind had one of the shittiest, buggiest, and inconsistent game systems ever developed. It was clear from the get-go that whatever playtesting had been done was minimal at best. Sure, they absolutely excelled at the open-ended environment, the story, and most (not all) of the quests; but the game system itself was an abortion the moment it hit the shelves. Even massive modding of the game simply could not fix most of the "what the fuck?!?" elements of that system.
I know, I tried. Would that I hadn't wasted the time.
Max
Ravens and their crow cousins are exceptional in the world of birds, a fact which has been known for some time. They can and will craft tools and find ingenious solutions to problems in ways that no other bird can mimick.
They also have very distinct differences in brain morphology when compared to other birds - not to mention larger and more complex brains. It seems that over time they're specializing for something other birds aren't: more grey matter. It'd be fascinating to see how they develop over the next two or three million years.
Max
Not to mention, how many animals actually verbally communicate from generation to generation
You probably want to remove this as a precondition for intelligent behavior, as you've defined it. Prairie dogs, meerkats, raccoons and a host of other social animals have been definitively shown to possess languages consisting of several hundred words, some of them rather startling in their precision and use. Clearly language isn't the sole purview of humans, although it could easily be argued that complex language is (at least for some of us).
Don't take me for some PETA idiot, though. I regularly east animals and love every single second of it. In fact, I've become quite adept at cooking a variety of tasty little critters over the years in a number of different and very yummy ways. And I have no problem whatsoever with going out and killing the animals I intend to eat.
I do make a distinction, however, based on the intelligence of the animal in question. As both a former farm boy and an animal rehabber I have a fairly decent grasp of just how intelligent a good many animals are. Sheep, cows, deer and just about any herbivore, for example, are pretty stupid as mammals go and that means they're fit to become my next meal. Dogs, raccoons, cougars, bears, any primate, etc. are bloody brilliant in comparison to their herbivore relatives and the very idea of eating something that smart icks me out. They strike me as relatives - distant relatives, but still relatives, at least in the brains department - and on the whole I try to avoid eating my relatives.
Although I do make exceptions. As any decent farmer knows pigs are often smarter than dogs are. They're also some of the biggest assholes you'll find in the animal kingdom, and that alone qualifies them for the dinner table. I'd say the same of quite a few humans but humans, alas, are riddled with compatible diseases and parasites, and besides - I hear they taste about as good as three-day-old possum roadkill....
Max
For that kind of money I'd be willing a hire a 'terrorist' or three to blow something up just so I could propose a nifty - and very timely - security product to politicians trying to make themselves look good to the general public. The payoff is simply mindboggling, and far outweighs the risk.
Oh wait, did I just say that out loud? I was speaking purely hypothetically, of course....
Max
Lessee...some amoral politician looking to secure reelection latches onto a non-issue like a very badly made sex scene in a video game - cut out and only accessible through an externally produced mod. A few anal-retentive assholes who see this as another good way to tell the rest of us how to live our lives, or raise our children, jump on the bandwagon.
How exactly is this news? Happens just about every goddamned day in the former land of the free, so far as I can see.
Fuck it. I'm going to load up Carmageddon and run over a few hundred screaming pedestrians, pretending all the while they're either extremist righties or extremist lefties. No sex in that game, so the politicians and their whacked out fascist-jackboot-wannabes shouldn't even life an eyebrow at the carnage....
Max
I've known a lot of nerdy guys in their mid-20's who hadn't even kissed a girl. Partially because of this, their self-esteem was essentially zero. Of course, as many girls will tell you, a low self-esteem is not very attractive, thus perpetuating the state of not getting laid for these poor guys.
Yeah, we have a word for these guys: "losers".
Max
The meaning of a word is determined by the people who use it, not a self-selected group of so-called experts. I'm fairly certain that if you asked a cross-section of the public what an "anti-hero" is, at least 90% would reply Wikipedia-style and not stuffy-anal-retentive-academic-style.
When it comes to language democracy really does rule the roost, regardless of what a few of the self-important types would like to think.
Max
A lunch break doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you want with company property. How hard is that to grasp?
Only the owner gets to decide what you can and cannot do with his property. If that bothers you then perhaps you should consider moving to a country that doesn't recognize the concept of 'personal property' - like China, or in this case, apparently Canada.
Max
But being somebody's lying bitch and screwing the shit out of the customer in order to respect the 'chain of command', that apparently is okay. Whores abound in all walks of life, I guess.
Max
If a company is arrogant enough to presume that it is more important than those other potential employers, then it will get exactly what it deserves: no top-end staff.
And MS is exactly that arrogant. Just talk to some of their management staff about the company; they come off as egomaniacal fanatics convinced that MS will rule the world and can do no wrong, and that anyone who opposes them should be crushed like the faithless maggots that they are.
My experiences with MS always left me with the feeling that I wasn't dealing with a business but a cult....
Max
Why would anybody secretly want to know what their employees were doing? Didn't they trust them?
Perhaps because their employees were fucking off on company time? Like, by posting to Slashdot or surfing porn on the company dime?
Max
If I write an email to my wife that says "I love you snugglywugglykins!", my employer definately doesn't need to see that.
If you're wasting company time and company resources writing personal emails, you deserve to be shit-canned. You don't have a 'right' to do anything with company property other than what the company decides you can do with it.
Max
If you're on my property you have two options: follow my rules or leave. The choice is entirely up to you. The fact that there isn't a third option more to your liking is just too fucking bad - for you.
Max
They're helping me because it serves their short term interests.
And I'm helping them because it serves MY short term interests. That's called 'capitalism'. Deal with it.
There is no control on buisnesses
Riiiight. As all the businesses that have, well, GONE OUT OF BUSINESS because they couldn't get the job done to the satisfaction of their customers can attest to.
Where the fuck do you think the megacorporations of the 21st century get their non-economic power? They get it from GOVERNMENT. Buy enough politicians and the corporation can even get armies deployed to far-off shitholes to do their bidding. The corporations themselves have no such power; they have to purchase it, and they can only do so from strong, centralized governments - whose rulers are more than eager to sell, often for not much more than a weekend in the Carribean with a couple of teen hookers.
If government were WEAK, corporations would also be weak. This isn't fucking rocket science.
And in local elections, your vote *does* matter.
Ah, yes. I get to choose between the shithead sellout that calls himself a 'Democrat', and the shithead sellout that calls himself a 'Republican'. Both are for sale - just not to me. My vote might determine which team wins the playoffs, but the game is still football at the end of the day.
Corporations are the dictators of the 20th century. They have almost unlimited power when compared to the ordinary human being.
The only reason corporations have this power is because the government has this power, and it's for sale to anyone who has enough money. Pull the teeth of government and you pull the teeth of the corporations.
The only reason they aren't dictators in fact is that they have no army. And the only reason they don't is because the government wouldn't allow it.
Jesus H., just how naive can you be? They don't need an army because they can rent the one the government fields. If you think otherwise, there are quite a few countries around the world that would disagree with you. Here's a hint: think "oil" and "polynesia", "bananas" and "central America", "coffee" and "south America", etc.
Look at the laws they buy (DCMA, broadcast flag, pork barrel projects, etc). None of these benefit you, they benefit themselves. The only thing we can use is the one power we have left- the government.
You just admitted they can buy any laws or application of force they wish from the government, then proposed we use that same government to limit the abuse of power. Are you on crack?
Max
Sure, Neanderthals *may* have been more intelligent, but the evidence points *against* it, or at least, doesn't support it.
The fossil evidence is pretty clear: Neanderthals had bigger brains than homo sapiens. In the human line, bigger almost always means smarter where brains are concerned.
As for the 'evidence' presented from digs, the proponents generally tend to gloss over several key influencing factors. Here's a few:
a) Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than human ones. This was a necessity imposed by the requirement that they gather most of their food in the form of meat. Larger human tribes could afford to have individuals specialize in non-survival activities; Neanderthals could not. Simple economics, although the apologists don't seem to be able to grasp this one.
b) Hunting is much more energy and time intensive than gathering. Neanderthals collected 90% of their calories through hunting, while humans only collected 10% of their calories this way. Humans, on the whole, spent a great deal less time collecting food. That means more free time for other non-essential activities like making pretty beads. Again, pretty obvious when you think about it.
c) Neanderthal tools were no less effective than human tools for their environment and the way they collected food. Some have tried to make this claim, but there isn't a single shred of evidence that proves that this is the case. Neanderthals didn't change their tools because they didn't NEED to change their tools - unlike migratory homo sapiens. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And they didn't have a whole lot of time to innovate anyway (see b above).
d) There are only two decent Neanderthal sites excavated to date. Hardly representative. Because Neanderthals lived in much smaller groups their 'footprint' means less chance of finding a representative sample of their living conditions. We don't have anything close to such a sample, so making assumptions based upon those sites is not only unscientific, it's ludicrous.
It seems that the people fervently against the idea of Neanderthals being smarter than homo sapiens (despite the clear fossil evidence of a larger brain) are desperate to believe that homo sapiens have been, are, and always will be the most intelligent thing on Earth. The very thought that this might not be the case seems to be disturbing to them on a personal level. Odd, given that evolution is bound to produce something smarter and better than h. sapiens over time, and that eventually we'll occupy the same place in history as homo erectus: a bright ape, but no genius by any stretch of the imagination.
Max
If you find no value in general Western ideals of freedom, democracy, equality, and liberty, then I am saddened for you.
You mean the very freedom, democracy, equality and liberty that many Americans seem hell-bent on giving up with abominations like the Orwellian-named PATRIOT Act? *Those* ideals?
The real enemy isn't a bunch of whacked-out lunatics who get their rocks off killing people, it's the power-mongers who profit off the fear that follows and the idiots who cower in their basements and do nothing to stop them - or hell, even encourage them in the false belief that doing so will provide them some measure of safety. The fools and morons who actually think that if they just give up enough liberty and enough democracy that somehow the government will be able to protect them.
I swore and oath to protect the Constitution above all other things, against enemies foreign AND domestic. The so-called terrorist - really, no different than any other psychotic mass murderer - doesn't threaten freedom or democracy or the Constitution. But it does seem that the Terrorist(TM) is an excellent excuse for giving power to those that think the Constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper to wipe their asses with. Those people are the REAL enemy, and they're entirely domestic. They are, in fact, fellow Americans, although it shames me to say so. Almost as much as it shames me to say that many of my countrymen are such spineless cowards they prize the illusion of safety over liberty, and will gladly give up the Constitution to the wolves in their midst for false promises.
Max
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
Because there is no grand, shadowy conspiracy of American-hating terrorists working on elaborate and devious schemes to bring down the U.S. The guys who destroyed the World Trade Center weren't particularly bright or cunning - in fact, they screwed up numerous times prior to the hijacking - it's just that our own intelligence agencies were even more incompetent than they were.
Our precious government is trying to get us to believe that there's a vast network of American-hating terrorists just waiting to be activated so they can descend into an orgy of death on the streets of U.S.A. Town. Right. Pull the other leg and I'll kick you in the teeth, asshole.
There are no 'terrorists'. Just psychotic losers who like committing murder. Some psychotic losers climb clock towers and start shooting people; others send bombs in the mail; still others pick a specific sort of person (e.g., children, red hair, whatever) to butcher. A very, very few manage to get together with other psychotic losers and work together to score a bigger body count, as if life were a Lovecraftian video game. But these aren't the 'terrorist' boogeyman the government made up to scare the gullible and the stupid; they're just lunatics who think killing is fun, no different than McVeigh or Bundy or Manson.
Criminals. The nastiest sort (barring, perhaps, the average politician) but still - just criminals. No need to get worked up about them anymore than we shit our pants after McVeigh. Anyone who does needs to attend "How Not To Be A Spineless Pussy 101".
Max
They didn't. It's a myth that Neanderthal ate meat and meat only. In reality about 90% of their diet was meat.
This wasn't due to a lack of technology or knowledge. It's clear they knew which plants were good eatin' and which weren't. But like modern bodybuilders and weightlifters Neanderthal had to eat a lot of meat to maintain their mass. And unlike modern bodybuilders and weightlighters they couldn't opt to eat less meat and slough off all the muscle; it came with the package and they either had to maintain it or die.
Neanderthals had a diet of 90% meat/10% plant matter because their own physiology REQUIRED this if they didn't want to starve to death. This presents huge problems if the ecology you're adapted to living in begins to shrink and your smaller, stupider, but more omnivorous (and far more numerous) relatives start moving into the neighborhood.
Max
and being relatively successful if they have greater intelligence and/or weaponry.
There isn't any evidence of either. If anything, it appears that Neanderthals might have been somewhat more intelligent than we are.
But you don't need intelligence or better weapons to kill off a competitor who is, individually, your superior. All you need is numbers. And humans definitely had numbers over Neanderthals, primarily because humans were gatherers and Neanderthals were hunters. A square mile of territory will support *a lot* more plant eaters than meat eaters.
Max
There has been a lot of research into the theory that one reason we made it out of our ancient roots is because we threw so well.
Homo sapiens satisfied 90% of their nutritional needs through gathering and ony 10% through hunting. Overall humans were incredibly shitty hunters.
Neanderthal numbers are switched: 90% of their food was meat, only 10% of it came in the form of fruit and vegetables. This was necessary, due to both their bulk (the weakest could break Arnie in his prime in two) and the environment they lived in. Neanderthals were very, very good hunters - the best the wide human line as ever produced, by a huge margin.
I sincerely doubt the Neanderthals were incapable of mastering the art of 'throwing', especially since it appears they might actually have been a bit smarter than us. And I've never once heard this argument until today, here, on Slashdot, despite a fair amount of research into Neanderthal and other human relatives.
In fact, the prevailing theory concerning Neanderthal extinction has to do with a) the reduction in suitable climate, b) the relative inability to concentrate numbers because they couldn't support themselves on plant matter like homo sapiens did, and c) the inability to drive off homo sapien encroachment for this very reason (e.g., valley X could only support Y members of Neanderthal tribe, but 5Y of H. Sapiens tribe, meaning that Neanderthals were badly outnumbered in conflicts with H. Sapiens. Strength hardly matters if you're outnumbered 5 to 1).
Max