Man, just about everything taken from those interviews has been discredited. The whole "Trenchcoat Mafia" thing was wrong. The whole "Marlin Manson" thing was wrong. The anti-depressant warning issued by the FDA was wrong. As for being tormented by jocks, duh, that's what jocks are for. It's a fucked up part of US highschool society, but it's been that way for decades.
No, they don't. They want the games kept out of the hands of children. They don't give a shit about whether or not adults want to play the games. But like everything in our society, parents fuck it up. The number of people in our society who are actually qualified to raise children is minimal. Generally that's not a big deal, as a fucked up kid is more of an annoyance than a burden on society, but when kids start killing other kids, the parents of the slain want the parents of the killers to be held responsible. So long as parents have the right to raise their kids any way they see fit some parents will continue to raise monsters. I don't think it is too extreme to suggest that parents should be prohibited from raising their children in certain ways. Quite a number of things are considered "abuse" and to suggest that exposing your children to hyperviolent interactive media is also abuse is hardly a stretch.
Of course, I don't have kids (thank God) so I'm more than willing to trade the rights of parents to maintain my own right to buy violent video games.
Ya know how they made Quentin Tarantino put a filter over the sword fighting scenes in Kill Bill? If he had refused he would not have received an R rating and couldn't show it in cinemas. If someone was to use a color restoration algorithm to restore those scenes to their bloody glory, and distribute them over the internet I think that would be pretty similar to "unlocking" hidden content in a video game.
Suppose Buena Vista Home Entertainment were to get wind of this and, instead of immediately sicking the lawyers onto these people who are unlawfully distributing scenes from their movie, they were to go ask Tarantino what he wanted to do. I wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino told them to do nothing, would you? So is anyone responsible for this unregulated content? What if the reason why Tarantino said it was ok was because of the financial gain he gets from people buying his film to play the mod?
No-one argues that the kids who shot up Columbine were fucked up, and that their parents were responsible for raising such fucked up kids. Violent video games were just one contributing factor in the creation of these little monsters. What parents are calling for in the US is government regulation to ensure kids get "raised right". They want kids who get raised with an attitude that violence is ok in society to be taken away from their parents. They want this to protect their children. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying that's where it is going.
Yeah, I think the next presidental election is going to be very interesting. The number one issue in the US is bad parenting. If your kid kills my kid it's your fault right? The parents in today's society want their government to protect them from other parents. Those of us who don't have kids are just caught up in the whirlwind.
Recently (Dec 2004) there's been some outspoken people saying that Free Software applications on win32 and other proprietary platforms is a bad thing. Well I'm outspoken, so here's my opinion.
People should switch to GNU/Linux because they value their freedom, not because there's more apps, or because the TCO is lower. If they switch because of these secondary reasons they will be nothing but a burden on Free Software. These people are the ones who are after a free lunch and frankly, we have enough trouble feeding each other without feeding them too. So how is Free Software on win32 a good thing then? Porting Free Software to win32 is a cheap way to give users the opportunity to experience freedom for themselves. They can directly compare their freedom to copy, modify and distribute Free Software to the tyranny of most closed source alternatives. Then they can make the choice to switch for the right reasons and be a productive member of our community.
Because parents have the right to make up their own minds about what's appropriate for their kids.
Jack Thompson would say that the kids who got shot at Columbine weren't raised by shit parents, the kids who did the shooting were.
Hillary Clinton would say it takes a village to raise a child.
Do parents really have the right to decide what is appropriate for their kids? Is it ok if they decide alcohol consumption, drug use, pornography or physical abuse are appropriate? Where's the line between what is "up to parents" and what is prohibited by society for all children?
Ok, both you and the grandparent post need to learn the difference between employer and employee, they're two different words, ok? That said, how do you find out if someone is violating your copyright? Why, you hire a lawyer, go to a judge and get a civil order to seize their source code repository. You then hire some nice big beefy "security" personal and you go over to their office and take it. Yes, believe it or not, civilians have the power to seize property in the process of investigating a civil lawsuit. If it turns out you were wrong you might want to hold onto your ass and buckle for the countersuit but frankly they don't have much recourse.
if by "trial" you mean "claim settled out of court" then yes. We're continually told that no GPL-violation has gone to court. I'm willing to hazard a guess that this is because the holders of GPL covered copyrights are willing to settle for "stop doing that and promise not to do it again." As soon as they start demanding a settlement that actually includes cash amounts up to and exceeding the cost of fighting it in court we'll actually have a hearing. Of course, at this point you might be thinking that this will never happen. I think it will. It's not just programmers that are holding copyright on GPL code these days. It's corporations like Real Media and Novell. If they feel they can crush a competitor who has tried to take a shortcut by using their code they will.
Thanks for agreeing with me. If you just download a file without uploading anything you cannot be prosecuted under the NET Act and therefore are not in violation of criminal copyright law. As this is the most extreme criminal copyright law in the world I stand by my original statement. Oh, and what we were talking about was the x86 edition of Mac OS X. This currently has no retail value as it is not available for sale.
Downloading is not capable of being copyright infringement. Uploading is. That is why the No Electronic Theft act requires an exchange of infringing materials.
Well I was talking about drug companies. Tis good to see that there are people out there who are starting to approach the problem in a more scientific way. Even if you're not engineering the substance to interfere with the protein, if you are actively selecting which protein to interfere with after studying the pathogen you're doing more than most drug companies do.
Wow, and here I was thinking that some kind of optimization to the human immune system to more effectively kill the malaria parasite was necessary. But no, you're idea about using powerful chemicals to kill a necessary part of the ecosystems sounds like a much better idea. How about running and hiding from mosquitoes? Perhaps a new kind of skin hardening spray! Then mosquitoes wouldn't be able to bite us. Or maybe some kind of mosquitoe diverting turret! It could use ladar to locate the mosquitoe, triangulate it's position and then blast it with a jet of air. The mosquitoe wouldn't come near you and it would be safe to go off and get eaten by a frog.
Of course, if we went with my original idea, improving the human immune system, we'd not only be able to defend ourselves from malaria, we'd also be able to defend ourselves from other pathogens, like ringworm and giardia lamblia (causes gastroenteritis). Not to mention bacterial infections and viruses. It kinda does make you wonder if we'll ever see an improvement to human organs (the immune system arguably being a decentralized organ). Got trouble controlling your blood sugar levels? Here's a bottle of insulin and a syringe, get ready for a lifetime of inconvenience. If you're lucky, or rich, in 20 years time we might have a working implant that can release the insulin into your bloodstream for you! What's that? Fix you? Hahaha, we don't actually fix people. That would be like the fevered dream of a madman.
Uh huh, and then after doing thousands and thousands of screenings you end up with a substance that you know is x% more effective than the original substance and yet you still have no idea how it works. So then you put it through clinical trials to try to work out how effective it is on actual patients and observe them for any unwanted side effects. Maybe you combine the substance with some other substances that counteract the side effects and after 7 years you get FDA approval and start giving it to actual suffers and wait for the reports to come in from the field about how well it works compared to the other drugs available on the market. After all that you still have no idea how it works. Then, maybe 15 years later, a microbiologist, as part of their PhD project, will do some research into exactly what part of the pathogen your drug interferes with and compare it with strains of the pathogen that have been found which are resistant to your drug and discover that your drug is only effective because the pathogen has an unnecessary chemical pathway that a single point mutation can eliminate, and will go on to show that the resistant strain of the pathogen is becoming the more provaliant in reported cases. Which, if we had taken a scientific approach in the first place, we would have discovered was the likely outcome and could have avoided by studying the pathogen and engineering a drug to interfere with a chemical pathway that is actually critical to the pathogen avoiding targets that are easily dodged by mutation.
As for troll karma.. yeah, isn't it a bitch when the truth hurts. Hopefully metamoderation will weed out these people who mod things troll just because they don't like what the person is saying.
Bah, in almost all vaccines we don't even understand how the antibodies work. "They work, it doesn't matter how" does not sound like science to me, it sounds like mysticism. That's why vaccines are so fragile. The pathogen mutates and sheds that useless little part of itself that the antibody was latching onto, you get a new outbreak and you need a new vaccine. Whereas if you were to understand the pathogen and engineer an antibody, you could make its affinity more essential, such that no non-lethal mutation can make the pathogen resistant.
We can't even kill a parasite that mosquitoes are immune to. Call me crazy, but I think the reason why we're so pathetic at medicine is because it is so low tech. We try lots of compounds until we find one that has some effect on a pathogen and we bottle it. Or we expose dead pathogens to an immune system, let it create antibodies, collect the antibodies and bottle it. There's no design, there's no engineering. It's just unscientific quackery.
Yeah, see, the kind of people who say "just reinstall" are the same kind of people who keep backups. Normal people don't backup their files. Now, if computers came standard with a tape backup and easy software to use it people might actually think about what they need backed up and what they are willing to lose if there's a harddrive crash or they need to reformat.
Slashdot Mirror
GNU/Pointless.
Man, just about everything taken from those interviews has been discredited. The whole "Trenchcoat Mafia" thing was wrong. The whole "Marlin Manson" thing was wrong. The anti-depressant warning issued by the FDA was wrong. As for being tormented by jocks, duh, that's what jocks are for. It's a fucked up part of US highschool society, but it's been that way for decades.
they feel that the games are an affront to their god, and should not be created, period, end of story.
Where do you get this stuff from?
or the jocks that made their lives living hell,
That was my initial reaction, but it's the easy way out. They didn't just kill jocks, they killed anyone they could.
No, they don't. They want the games kept out of the hands of children. They don't give a shit about whether or not adults want to play the games. But like everything in our society, parents fuck it up. The number of people in our society who are actually qualified to raise children is minimal. Generally that's not a big deal, as a fucked up kid is more of an annoyance than a burden on society, but when kids start killing other kids, the parents of the slain want the parents of the killers to be held responsible. So long as parents have the right to raise their kids any way they see fit some parents will continue to raise monsters. I don't think it is too extreme to suggest that parents should be prohibited from raising their children in certain ways. Quite a number of things are considered "abuse" and to suggest that exposing your children to hyperviolent interactive media is also abuse is hardly a stretch.
Of course, I don't have kids (thank God) so I'm more than willing to trade the rights of parents to maintain my own right to buy violent video games.
Ya know how they made Quentin Tarantino put a filter over the sword fighting scenes in Kill Bill? If he had refused he would not have received an R rating and couldn't show it in cinemas. If someone was to use a color restoration algorithm to restore those scenes to their bloody glory, and distribute them over the internet I think that would be pretty similar to "unlocking" hidden content in a video game.
Suppose Buena Vista Home Entertainment were to get wind of this and, instead of immediately sicking the lawyers onto these people who are unlawfully distributing scenes from their movie, they were to go ask Tarantino what he wanted to do. I wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino told them to do nothing, would you? So is anyone responsible for this unregulated content? What if the reason why Tarantino said it was ok was because of the financial gain he gets from people buying his film to play the mod?
No-one argues that the kids who shot up Columbine were fucked up, and that their parents were responsible for raising such fucked up kids. Violent video games were just one contributing factor in the creation of these little monsters. What parents are calling for in the US is government regulation to ensure kids get "raised right". They want kids who get raised with an attitude that violence is ok in society to be taken away from their parents. They want this to protect their children. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying that's where it is going.
and jack thompson is a twat so what of it?
He has more impact on the Hill than you do, that's what.
Yeah, I think the next presidental election is going to be very interesting. The number one issue in the US is bad parenting. If your kid kills my kid it's your fault right? The parents in today's society want their government to protect them from other parents. Those of us who don't have kids are just caught up in the whirlwind.
Recently (Dec 2004) there's been some outspoken people saying that Free Software applications on win32 and other proprietary platforms is a bad thing. Well I'm outspoken, so here's my opinion.
People should switch to GNU/Linux because they value their freedom, not because there's more apps, or because the TCO is lower. If they switch because of these secondary reasons they will be nothing but a burden on Free Software. These people are the ones who are after a free lunch and frankly, we have enough trouble feeding each other without feeding them too. So how is Free Software on win32 a good thing then? Porting Free Software to win32 is a cheap way to give users the opportunity to experience freedom for themselves. They can directly compare their freedom to copy, modify and distribute Free Software to the tyranny of most closed source alternatives. Then they can make the choice to switch for the right reasons and be a productive member of our community.
Heh, really? I would have thought The Bascketball Diaries would have encouraged suicide, not murder. Most depressing film ever.
Because parents have the right to make up their own minds about what's appropriate for their kids.
Jack Thompson would say that the kids who got shot at Columbine weren't raised by shit parents, the kids who did the shooting were.
Hillary Clinton would say it takes a village to raise a child.
Do parents really have the right to decide what is appropriate for their kids? Is it ok if they decide alcohol consumption, drug use, pornography or physical abuse are appropriate? Where's the line between what is "up to parents" and what is prohibited by society for all children?
Ok, both you and the grandparent post need to learn the difference between employer and employee, they're two different words, ok? That said, how do you find out if someone is violating your copyright? Why, you hire a lawyer, go to a judge and get a civil order to seize their source code repository. You then hire some nice big beefy "security" personal and you go over to their office and take it. Yes, believe it or not, civilians have the power to seize property in the process of investigating a civil lawsuit. If it turns out you were wrong you might want to hold onto your ass and buckle for the countersuit but frankly they don't have much recourse.
if by "trial" you mean "claim settled out of court" then yes. We're continually told that no GPL-violation has gone to court. I'm willing to hazard a guess that this is because the holders of GPL covered copyrights are willing to settle for "stop doing that and promise not to do it again." As soon as they start demanding a settlement that actually includes cash amounts up to and exceeding the cost of fighting it in court we'll actually have a hearing. Of course, at this point you might be thinking that this will never happen. I think it will. It's not just programmers that are holding copyright on GPL code these days. It's corporations like Real Media and Novell. If they feel they can crush a competitor who has tried to take a shortcut by using their code they will.
Courts don't like infringers, as a rule,
No, they prefer their corporate paymasters.
Thanks for agreeing with me. If you just download a file without uploading anything you cannot be prosecuted under the NET Act and therefore are not in violation of criminal copyright law. As this is the most extreme criminal copyright law in the world I stand by my original statement. Oh, and what we were talking about was the x86 edition of Mac OS X. This currently has no retail value as it is not available for sale.
Downloading is not capable of being copyright infringement. Uploading is. That is why the No Electronic Theft act requires an exchange of infringing materials.
Well I was talking about drug companies. Tis good to see that there are people out there who are starting to approach the problem in a more scientific way. Even if you're not engineering the substance to interfere with the protein, if you are actively selecting which protein to interfere with after studying the pathogen you're doing more than most drug companies do.
Wow, and here I was thinking that some kind of optimization to the human immune system to more effectively kill the malaria parasite was necessary. But no, you're idea about using powerful chemicals to kill a necessary part of the ecosystems sounds like a much better idea. How about running and hiding from mosquitoes? Perhaps a new kind of skin hardening spray! Then mosquitoes wouldn't be able to bite us. Or maybe some kind of mosquitoe diverting turret! It could use ladar to locate the mosquitoe, triangulate it's position and then blast it with a jet of air. The mosquitoe wouldn't come near you and it would be safe to go off and get eaten by a frog.
Of course, if we went with my original idea, improving the human immune system, we'd not only be able to defend ourselves from malaria, we'd also be able to defend ourselves from other pathogens, like ringworm and giardia lamblia (causes gastroenteritis). Not to mention bacterial infections and viruses. It kinda does make you wonder if we'll ever see an improvement to human organs (the immune system arguably being a decentralized organ). Got trouble controlling your blood sugar levels? Here's a bottle of insulin and a syringe, get ready for a lifetime of inconvenience. If you're lucky, or rich, in 20 years time we might have a working implant that can release the insulin into your bloodstream for you! What's that? Fix you? Hahaha, we don't actually fix people. That would be like the fevered dream of a madman.
Uh huh, and then after doing thousands and thousands of screenings you end up with a substance that you know is x% more effective than the original substance and yet you still have no idea how it works. So then you put it through clinical trials to try to work out how effective it is on actual patients and observe them for any unwanted side effects. Maybe you combine the substance with some other substances that counteract the side effects and after 7 years you get FDA approval and start giving it to actual suffers and wait for the reports to come in from the field about how well it works compared to the other drugs available on the market. After all that you still have no idea how it works. Then, maybe 15 years later, a microbiologist, as part of their PhD project, will do some research into exactly what part of the pathogen your drug interferes with and compare it with strains of the pathogen that have been found which are resistant to your drug and discover that your drug is only effective because the pathogen has an unnecessary chemical pathway that a single point mutation can eliminate, and will go on to show that the resistant strain of the pathogen is becoming the more provaliant in reported cases. Which, if we had taken a scientific approach in the first place, we would have discovered was the likely outcome and could have avoided by studying the pathogen and engineering a drug to interfere with a chemical pathway that is actually critical to the pathogen avoiding targets that are easily dodged by mutation.
As for troll karma.. yeah, isn't it a bitch when the truth hurts. Hopefully metamoderation will weed out these people who mod things troll just because they don't like what the person is saying.
Sounds like something Bill Gates should be spending his money on.
Bah, in almost all vaccines we don't even understand how the antibodies work. "They work, it doesn't matter how" does not sound like science to me, it sounds like mysticism. That's why vaccines are so fragile. The pathogen mutates and sheds that useless little part of itself that the antibody was latching onto, you get a new outbreak and you need a new vaccine. Whereas if you were to understand the pathogen and engineer an antibody, you could make its affinity more essential, such that no non-lethal mutation can make the pathogen resistant.
We can't even kill a parasite that mosquitoes are immune to. Call me crazy, but I think the reason why we're so pathetic at medicine is because it is so low tech. We try lots of compounds until we find one that has some effect on a pathogen and we bottle it. Or we expose dead pathogens to an immune system, let it create antibodies, collect the antibodies and bottle it. There's no design, there's no engineering. It's just unscientific quackery.
Yeah, see, the kind of people who say "just reinstall" are the same kind of people who keep backups. Normal people don't backup their files. Now, if computers came standard with a tape backup and easy software to use it people might actually think about what they need backed up and what they are willing to lose if there's a harddrive crash or they need to reformat.
Next time how about fixing the BLATANT errors in the story BEFORE you post it?
If I was a Slashdot subscriber I'd ask for my money back.
Stop smoking the crack.