Hey, let's blur the line between speech and action enough to include computer games! Stealing MP3's is a form of speech too! Why stop there? If I drive my car at 100 miles per hour through residential streets, it's a form of speech! Support me! If someone molests a five year old, it's speech! Well, it is if he does it in front of the kid's kindergarten class. It's justified! It's the first amendment! It overrides all other moral concerns! So what if society crumbles around us, we must defend the Holy First Amendment, even as we degrade and abuse it to rationalise doing whatever we want.
Do you think computer games are some kind of cottage industry? Preventing the sale of harmful violent computer games is legislating against corporate excess.
Are you suggesting that computer games contain some form of relevant political speech? I hope not. If so, you need to get out more. Computer games aren't speech. They are products, like cars. As for downloads, I'm not worried. The number of people who would be determined enough to do this are not statistically significant. As for the Romans, surely you aren't saying that decadence caused the fall of Rome!
The eighties were the age of beat-em-up games, like Double Dragon and Golden Axe. I distinctly remember a game called Barbarian 2 which offered graphic portrayal of beheading. There was plenty of violence in those days. The early nineties saw the first fpses. Wolfenstein and Doom both came out during the period which my statistics cover.
It is my feeling that juvenile crime statistics merely plateaued in the early 90s. Indeed, incidents did not increase in number much, but they did increase in reprehensibility -- Columbine being the prime example.
It is vitally important to note that juvenile crime statistics rose sharply, with no attendant rise in adult crime statistics, but they did drop similarly. Taking adults as a control group regarding computer games, the indication is clear.
So, yes, I have proven correlation. I have disproven the article you offered. The Guardian article demonstrates causation.Opposition to the now necessary action on this problem is inexcusable.
It is unacceptable to present broad crime statistics as evidence of falsehood on this topic. The majority of crime in the US is not juvenile crime, and is not relevant here. The linked article is quite evidently biased. Here, I offer an alternative article, proving that the years in which computer games saw their greatest rise in popularity also showed a surge in juvenile crime! Since 94, juvenile violent crime statistics continued to rise, at a slower rate, until the Columbine tragedy prompted a crackdown on delinquency and antisocial behaviour among teens. So there's your proof, unencumbered by political bias.
The five years preceding 1999 showed a drop in crime statistics purely because of broader social trends, particularly a general increase in prosperity, plus a marked increase in police activity in troubled areas, such as South Central LA. (Watts is now an armed police camp, inundated with social workers.)
Witness The Rockdale County Syphilus Outbreak. This is not an isolated incident. America is losing it's teens. While parents should be regulating their children, they aren't. It's obviously up to the government.
While humans are going through their developmental years (under 18), any influences they are exposed to are bound to affect their attitudes throughout adulthood. When their primary recreation is a simulated rehearsal of a murder spree, it cannot be a good thing.
It would, of course, be dishonest to single out computer games as a source of developmental aberrations.
Television has long been a cause of increased violence, with numerous studies pointing to increases in violent behaviour as high as 150%. Advertising and music present children with role models that are actually dangerous for children to try to emulate, from ultrasadistic rappers to impossibly beautiful fashion models. Computer games, however, are even more involving than TV, more seductive than advertising and fast becoming the primary recreation for today's children.
I say, a society that does not defend itself from the corruption of it's youth is a society in decline. Parents nowadays not willing to raise their children properly, and prefer to use computer games and TV to do the job. It is time for a higher power to step in. A set of guidelines needs to be created, governing what is acceptable in computer games, TV, advertising and music. These must be followed, for the good of society.
If something like this is not implemented soon, we face a downhill slide into violence and depravity, as surely as the Roman empire collapsed into decadence.
You seem to be overlooking one important problem with this distro: It's French! I know the buy American ethos is losing it's charm for many. I don't think it is safe for the open source community to encourage this. Right now, USA dominates the open source world, but for how long, with distros like SuSE and Mandrake cutting into Redhat's market share?
When Redhat goes under, and all open source development moves offshore, you will only have yourselves to blame, just as we Americans have only ourselves to blame for the tragic failure of our auto industry. Do you really want to put the French in a position to declare French the official language of open source development? I certainly don't, but it looks to me that their greatest competitor might soon be German, instead of English, the language which made free software possible.
I urge all linux users to avoid MAndrake and SuSE distributions. They rob US open source business of vital funds, and will inevitably lead to the collapse of more and more linux businesses.
Computers are of secondary educational importance. Computer literacy is a non-essential skill. It is becoming less important as computer become more usable. Computer education is dehumanizing at a period in a child's life where human experience is vital to development. I've spoken to various teachers in elementary schools about this, and not one of them values computing as a learning resource.
In a nation which struggles to achieve 50% literacy, isn't it a bit absurd to pursue computer literacy. Most Americans refuse to read books. Computer education is merely part of the process that encourages this "wilful illiteracy". Computers also teach students to disregard mathematical education. "Why learn to add? The computer can do it for me!"
The growing focus on computer learning is, to me, a symptom of the "children are adults in training" attitude. This warps children's developmental years, and is mostly the product of people who dislike children. People who spend time with children know that children need to act like children, not like adults. Children who spend too much time on computers often grow to be withdrawn and isolated, often preferring computer games over the company of friends. Other children strongly resist being forced to use computers, and react rebelliously, often violently.
Computers are not a part of a healthy childhood. As a computer scientist, I have seen nothing to indicate that people who were exposed to computers early in life gain any advantage over those who are introduced to them in the workplace or university. Often, long time users are at a disadvantage due to an unwillingness to learn new things about the machine.
Computers in schools reinforce an attitude that everything in life is preparation for something else. This is not healthy, and these are not the sort of values we should be imparting to our children.
I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine today, and from what she tells me, 200,000 dollar payouts are pretty scarce. After she finished law school, she was left with two choices, basically. See, like most law students, she had spent her entire stint at university engaged in an orgiastic romp through the bedrooms of half the students and staff in the faculty. Law students are basically immoral, and will drop their panties at the mention of coitus. I fucken kid you not. I unfortunately missed out on those ribald years of her life, as I did not know her then. Her friends describe her as having been a total slut, and a good fucken lay to boot. I know for a fact that she was not known for wearing panties, but from what I hear, I'm surprised she bothered with skirts. This chick spent all of her college years on all fours giving head to professors while post grads gave it to her dog style. Know what I mean?
Anyway, despite her willingness to make accommodations wherever necessary, she still only managed to scrape through with a B average, since you can't make it to class when you're washing the prof's cum out of your hair every second morning. So her options were, basically, go into shitty ACLU do-gooder jobs which don't pay, and bring you constantly into contact with the worst suburban losers you can imagine. I mean, ACLU work is fucken bullshit. You spend more effort trying not to laugh in the faces of your idiot clients than you do defending them. Fuck that.
Her other option was to suck the cocks of the HR department of every half decent law firm in the city. Let's just say that's a lot of fucken dick. It's a fucken dick-suck marathon, you know what I mean? Fucken right. But she managed to get hired by this patent lawyer who was horny as a fucken goat mainlining viagra. This was a situation unlike anything she had previously faced. This fucken priapic beast of a shyster hires her, and almost goes out of business, because he doesn't have the sense to stop fucking this dumb slut in time to actually serve his clients' interests. Fucken A, man. So now she's spending half her time bent over his desk getting a 55 year old coital pounding. The other half, she's on her knees "placating" irate clients orally.
Holy Fucken Jesus.
So I was having lunch with her today, and I casually ask if she bothered to wipe the cum off her chin before she came to see me. This fucken bitch hits the ceiling! I couldn't fucken believe it. Bitch spends all day giving head to wizened old cock, but one mildly derisive comment about her lifestyle and she's all over me about respect. Fucken cunt.
So that's that, I say to myself. I've got no more use for someone who's attitudes are that fucken twisted. You know how lawyers are, anyway. It's worse to say something than to do it. I figure you don't need to regret not having become one. You probably don't have the appetite for cock, let alone the stomach for cum. When I bade her farewell today, this bitch was trying to develop at taste for cunt as well. Why else would she order the fucken lobster, eh?
What kind of machines do you think the government uses to print money, Einstein? The patent for a money minting-machine probably expired decades ago./you must be a fucken retard.
It still strikes me as a very silly idea. A large part of the point of OO is supposed to be encapsulation. When working on a huge application, it is counter-productive to bombard a programmer with information. While C does give you a better idea of what's going on, it's dubious as to whether or not this is particularly useful when coding desktop apps. The argument could be made that you could use asm, and get a real good idea of what is going on.
The point of coding in languages like C++ is that the programmer sacrifices some control over his code in order to make coding faster and project management easier. Additionally, there are considerable advantages to sensible use of things like templates and the STL.
Frankly, I consider Sun's adoption of Gnome to be a kiss-of-death. They seem to have a history of adopting UIs and watching them crash and burn.
If you were a "KDE or Gnome person", you'd remember things like this.
You claim to speak for both camps. Did you confer with them first, or did you just assume everyone accepted your point of view? This despite the fact that you have nothing to do with either.
If KDE people liked gnome, they'd develop for it. The fact that they don't proves that I am right.
2.4.7 is not only a dramatic improvement over 2.4.6, it is a whole new paradigm in linux computing. I urge any linux users to update with all haste. You simply must not miss out on the transition, or you will be left behind. From now on, we won't be asking "Got 2.4.6?" No, now it's "Got 2.4.7?"
The minor changes to USB will definitely rock your world, and you'll love what "initialize page->age" will do to your swap cache. I think Linus said it best, when he said "semaphores are not good swap handlers."
Where did I say Gnome is shit? I believe I expressed the opinion that KDE is superior, and gave several reasons, from poor integration, to downright dog-ugliness. YOU need to learn to moderate with your brain, not with your heart, my friend.
I seem to have expressed the incorrect opinion once again. How can I make amends? Ah! Of course:
With this new release of unstoppable GNU/Linux software, Linux will surely replace Windows on the desktop. The unparalleled brilliance of the Open Source development methodology has produced another example of robust software superior in every way to the primitive and poorly written Micro$loth versions. I know we've been saying this for the last four years, but every time this happens, I feel more certain that within the next four years, Linux will rule the desktop market.
Of the two scripts that were offered, both were rejected purely because they sucked ass. PG-13 had nothing to do with it, and sounds like a half-hearted effort to make excuses for the games failure to make the transition to the big screen.
The thing most sci-fi geeks don't understand about the movie industry is that, in moviespeak, "in development" means, "in hell". Every time word gets out that a film is in development, based on a computer game, RPG or popular late night sci-fi TV show, the assumption is instantly made that this means it will be made. In fact, the chances of a film that is "in development" being made are actually less than 1%. Do not expect to see Doom on the big screen. I'll go further, and point out that Doom lacks the plot elements necessary to make a film adaptation easy, and the game is too old to have market appeal.
Actually, since most multinats are run by Germans, Brits, Frenchmen, Japanese, Koreans or even Canadians, you are absolutely right. Glad someone else out there sees through the globalist lies.
Frankly, I don't see this technology being within the budget of the common user for at least another 30 years. That leaves us with a serious problem: around twenty years of growing obsolescence. Add to that the problem that HD tech and processor technologies are fast reaching their particular dead ends as well, and that means we'll be in a computing backwater for much of the forseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, let's blur the line between speech and action enough to include computer games! Stealing MP3's is a form of speech too! Why stop there? If I drive my car at 100 miles per hour through residential streets, it's a form of speech! Support me! If someone molests a five year old, it's speech! Well, it is if he does it in front of the kid's kindergarten class. It's justified! It's the first amendment! It overrides all other moral concerns! So what if society crumbles around us, we must defend the Holy First Amendment, even as we degrade and abuse it to rationalise doing whatever we want.
Do you think computer games are some kind of cottage industry? Preventing the sale of harmful violent computer games is legislating against corporate excess.
Are you suggesting that computer games contain some form of relevant political speech? I hope not. If so, you need to get out more. Computer games aren't speech. They are products, like cars. As for downloads, I'm not worried. The number of people who would be determined enough to do this are not statistically significant. As for the Romans, surely you aren't saying that decadence caused the fall of Rome!
It is my feeling that juvenile crime statistics merely plateaued in the early 90s. Indeed, incidents did not increase in number much, but they did increase in reprehensibility -- Columbine being the prime example.
It is vitally important to note that juvenile crime statistics rose sharply, with no attendant rise in adult crime statistics, but they did drop similarly. Taking adults as a control group regarding computer games, the indication is clear.
So, yes, I have proven correlation. I have disproven the article you offered. The Guardian article demonstrates causation.Opposition to the now necessary action on this problem is inexcusable.
The five years preceding 1999 showed a drop in crime statistics purely because of broader social trends, particularly a general increase in prosperity, plus a marked increase in police activity in troubled areas, such as South Central LA. (Watts is now an armed police camp, inundated with social workers.)
Witness The Rockdale County Syphilus Outbreak. This is not an isolated incident. America is losing it's teens. While parents should be regulating their children, they aren't. It's obviously up to the government.
While humans are going through their developmental years (under 18), any influences they are exposed to are bound to affect their attitudes throughout adulthood. When their primary recreation is a simulated rehearsal of a murder spree, it cannot be a good thing.
It would, of course, be dishonest to single out computer games as a source of developmental aberrations.
Television has long been a cause of increased violence, with numerous studies pointing to increases in violent behaviour as high as 150%. Advertising and music present children with role models that are actually dangerous for children to try to emulate, from ultrasadistic rappers to impossibly beautiful fashion models. Computer games, however, are even more involving than TV, more seductive than advertising and fast becoming the primary recreation for today's children.
I say, a society that does not defend itself from the corruption of it's youth is a society in decline. Parents nowadays not willing to raise their children properly, and prefer to use computer games and TV to do the job. It is time for a higher power to step in. A set of guidelines needs to be created, governing what is acceptable in computer games, TV, advertising and music. These must be followed, for the good of society.
If something like this is not implemented soon, we face a downhill slide into violence and depravity, as surely as the Roman empire collapsed into decadence.
When Redhat goes under, and all open source development moves offshore, you will only have yourselves to blame, just as we Americans have only ourselves to blame for the tragic failure of our auto industry. Do you really want to put the French in a position to declare French the official language of open source development? I certainly don't, but it looks to me that their greatest competitor might soon be German, instead of English, the language which made free software possible.
I urge all linux users to avoid MAndrake and SuSE distributions. They rob US open source business of vital funds, and will inevitably lead to the collapse of more and more linux businesses.
No, I didn't. I think you missed my point. Retard.
Computers are of secondary educational importance. Computer literacy is a non-essential skill. It is becoming less important as computer become more usable. Computer education is dehumanizing at a period in a child's life where human experience is vital to development. I've spoken to various teachers in elementary schools about this, and not one of them values computing as a learning resource.
In a nation which struggles to achieve 50% literacy, isn't it a bit absurd to pursue computer literacy. Most Americans refuse to read books. Computer education is merely part of the process that encourages this "wilful illiteracy". Computers also teach students to disregard mathematical education. "Why learn to add? The computer can do it for me!"
The growing focus on computer learning is, to me, a symptom of the "children are adults in training" attitude. This warps children's developmental years, and is mostly the product of people who dislike children. People who spend time with children know that children need to act like children, not like adults. Children who spend too much time on computers often grow to be withdrawn and isolated, often preferring computer games over the company of friends. Other children strongly resist being forced to use computers, and react rebelliously, often violently.
Computers are not a part of a healthy childhood. As a computer scientist, I have seen nothing to indicate that people who were exposed to computers early in life gain any advantage over those who are introduced to them in the workplace or university. Often, long time users are at a disadvantage due to an unwillingness to learn new things about the machine.
Computers in schools reinforce an attitude that everything in life is preparation for something else. This is not healthy, and these are not the sort of values we should be imparting to our children.
I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine today, and from what she tells me, 200,000 dollar payouts are pretty scarce. After she finished law school, she was left with two choices, basically. See, like most law students, she had spent her entire stint at university engaged in an orgiastic romp through the bedrooms of half the students and staff in the faculty. Law students are basically immoral, and will drop their panties at the mention of coitus. I fucken kid you not. I unfortunately missed out on those ribald years of her life, as I did not know her then. Her friends describe her as having been a total slut, and a good fucken lay to boot. I know for a fact that she was not known for wearing panties, but from what I hear, I'm surprised she bothered with skirts. This chick spent all of her college years on all fours giving head to professors while post grads gave it to her dog style. Know what I mean?
Anyway, despite her willingness to make accommodations wherever necessary, she still only managed to scrape through with a B average, since you can't make it to class when you're washing the prof's cum out of your hair every second morning. So her options were, basically, go into shitty ACLU do-gooder jobs which don't pay, and bring you constantly into contact with the worst suburban losers you can imagine. I mean, ACLU work is fucken bullshit. You spend more effort trying not to laugh in the faces of your idiot clients than you do defending them. Fuck that.
Her other option was to suck the cocks of the HR department of every half decent law firm in the city. Let's just say that's a lot of fucken dick. It's a fucken dick-suck marathon, you know what I mean? Fucken right. But she managed to get hired by this patent lawyer who was horny as a fucken goat mainlining viagra. This was a situation unlike anything she had previously faced. This fucken priapic beast of a shyster hires her, and almost goes out of business, because he doesn't have the sense to stop fucking this dumb slut in time to actually serve his clients' interests. Fucken A, man. So now she's spending half her time bent over his desk getting a 55 year old coital pounding. The other half, she's on her knees "placating" irate clients orally.
Holy Fucken Jesus.
So I was having lunch with her today, and I casually ask if she bothered to wipe the cum off her chin before she came to see me. This fucken bitch hits the ceiling! I couldn't fucken believe it. Bitch spends all day giving head to wizened old cock, but one mildly derisive comment about her lifestyle and she's all over me about respect. Fucken cunt.
So that's that, I say to myself. I've got no more use for someone who's attitudes are that fucken twisted. You know how lawyers are, anyway. It's worse to say something than to do it. I figure you don't need to regret not having become one. You probably don't have the appetite for cock, let alone the stomach for cum. When I bade her farewell today, this bitch was trying to develop at taste for cunt as well. Why else would she order the fucken lobster, eh?
What kind of machines do you think the government uses to print money, Einstein? The patent for a money minting-machine probably expired decades ago. /you must be a fucken retard.
You love it, you know you do.
It's all absolutely true, except for the bit about Alan Cox. Nothing is uglier than Alan Cox.
It still strikes me as a very silly idea. A large part of the point of OO is supposed to be encapsulation. When working on a huge application, it is counter-productive to bombard a programmer with information. While C does give you a better idea of what's going on, it's dubious as to whether or not this is particularly useful when coding desktop apps. The argument could be made that you could use asm, and get a real good idea of what is going on.
The point of coding in languages like C++ is that the programmer sacrifices some control over his code in order to make coding faster and project management easier. Additionally, there are considerable advantages to sensible use of things like templates and the STL.
Frankly, I consider Sun's adoption of Gnome to be a kiss-of-death. They seem to have a history of adopting UIs and watching them crash and burn.
If you were a "KDE or Gnome person", you'd remember things like this.
You claim to speak for both camps. Did you confer with them first, or did you just assume everyone accepted your point of view? This despite the fact that you have nothing to do with either.
If KDE people liked gnome, they'd develop for it. The fact that they don't proves that I am right.
You are not a developer. The "WE" in your title is ill-applied.
2.4.7 is not only a dramatic improvement over 2.4.6, it is a whole new paradigm in linux computing. I urge any linux users to update with all haste. You simply must not miss out on the transition, or you will be left behind. From now on, we won't be asking "Got 2.4.6?" No, now it's "Got 2.4.7?"
The minor changes to USB will definitely rock your world, and you'll love what "initialize page->age" will do to your swap cache. I think Linus said it best, when he said "semaphores are not good swap handlers."
Remember: 2.4.7, a quantum leap forward.
Where did I say Gnome is shit? I believe I expressed the opinion that KDE is superior, and gave several reasons, from poor integration, to downright dog-ugliness. YOU need to learn to moderate with your brain, not with your heart, my friend.
I seem to have expressed the incorrect opinion once again. How can I make amends? Ah! Of course:
With this new release of unstoppable GNU/Linux software, Linux will surely replace Windows on the desktop. The unparalleled brilliance of the Open Source development methodology has produced another example of robust software superior in every way to the primitive and poorly written Micro$loth versions. I know we've been saying this for the last four years, but every time this happens, I feel more certain that within the next four years, Linux will rule the desktop market.
Nope.
Of the two scripts that were offered, both were rejected purely because they sucked ass. PG-13 had nothing to do with it, and sounds like a half-hearted effort to make excuses for the games failure to make the transition to the big screen.
The thing most sci-fi geeks don't understand about the movie industry is that, in moviespeak, "in development" means, "in hell". Every time word gets out that a film is in development, based on a computer game, RPG or popular late night sci-fi TV show, the assumption is instantly made that this means it will be made. In fact, the chances of a film that is "in development" being made are actually less than 1%. Do not expect to see Doom on the big screen. I'll go further, and point out that Doom lacks the plot elements necessary to make a film adaptation easy, and the game is too old to have market appeal.
Actually, since most multinats are run by Germans, Brits, Frenchmen, Japanese, Koreans or even Canadians, you are absolutely right. Glad someone else out there sees through the globalist lies.
Frankly, I don't see this technology being within the budget of the common user for at least another 30 years. That leaves us with a serious problem: around twenty years of growing obsolescence. Add to that the problem that HD tech and processor technologies are fast reaching their particular dead ends as well, and that means we'll be in a computing backwater for much of the forseeable future.