Re:Where are the bunkers to protect Citizens ?
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"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Emphasis on the "well-regulated" portion... the last thing I want in a disaster situation is a bunch of heavily armed random folks running around deciding what they are going to help themselves to.
Under such a scheme, open source/free/libre software would have zero liability (as it should be) because the customer would have access to the source code, and therefore would be able to (assuming sufficient skill) fix it themselves
Why should open source software get a free ride, just because the user gets the source code? If I buy a car with defective brakes and get injured, the fact that if I'm enough of a mechanic I can pull the car apart and fix the brakes is irrelevant.
Errr right OK. Maybe you should consider the fact that you don't have to stick a *nix box behind a firewall if you don't want to (although its more sensible to do so) because you can turn services off.
Hmmm... if you are under the impression that you can't turn services off in Windows, you are mistaken. Quite easy to do.
Economics really isn't that difficult when you realize that there is really no obligation for society to compensate you for your creative efforts unless you were contracted to exert that effort.
Hmmm... the problem with open source is that society doesn't have any "contract" with you to compensate you. With closed source, you produce a product, and if society finds it valuable, it compensates you. Simple economics.
Non-instanced housing I think will be amazing, for example. Seeing housing that belongs to players in a city just makes the world that much more real and identifiable.
My wife plays Star Wars: Galaxies (among other games) which has player-owned housing. Players can buy housing and put it down. There are lots of issues, e.g. you put your house down on a mountain top with a nice view, someone plops their house down and blocks you. They implemented zoning so you could control housing, but then you have to decide who gets to control the zoning. It's more problematic than you might think, and there are plenty of opportunities for grief.
I have come to deeply despise WoW players myself as a pure example of the continued dumbing down of the gaming generation.
Ok, I played EQ1 for over 5 years, including playing an enchanter to 67. So I think I know something about that game. And I've played WoW almost since inception. And I've heard that somehow "WoW dumbs it down". So please, explain, just what is being dumbed down? As far as I can tell, the spell lines are just as complex, the melee classes actually have skills and abilities that make a difference, travel is more realistic than the EQ "touch a stone and zone", the high end encounters requires raids with good coordination, etc etc etc.
WoW does get rid of a lot of the dumb problems of EQ... sitting on your fanny for 10 minutes getting health or mana after a fight. Camp checks. Losing your corpse in a wall. Ships that break down continuously. Story lines that seems utterly meaningless. Spells like CH that are ridiculously overpowered and need kludges to avoid making high end encounters meaningless....
EQ1 was a great game in its time. A great achievement. But it was not the end all and be all of MMOs. WoW is also a great game, and I feel sorry for the people who are so locked into their EQ mindset that they can't shake free.
Just to be clear: my issue is not with whether closed source software is a good or bad thing, it's with using words like "evil" in such a way that they lose their meaning. If you are going to use the word "evil" for "I bought a computer today and it came with an O/S that I don't have source for" what word will you use to describe torture in secret prisons?
So you can see that imprisonment and torture is evil, but not that enslavement when done with soft gloves and a gilded cage is? Perhaps you should think about what the essence of evil is a bit...
Perhaps YOU ought to think about the difference between not getting the full specs to something you've bought, and being forced to stand in one position until your body starts to fall apart. One may be inconvenient or annoying. The other is evil.
Realize a vast majority of the world is completely shackled to non-free and downright evil software.
I'd like to reserve the word "evil" for things that are, you know, evil. Like holding prisoners in secret prisons scattered around the world so you can torture them. Selling software without giving away source may not be the best way to produce and deliver software (or maybe it is, I don't know) but isn't "evil".
"And when you change the setting to something you don't want by mistake?"
Change it back??? (duh...)
Assuming, of course, you never accidently click on something and realize that you've changed a setting w/o being exactly sure what you've changed. Maybe that's never happened to you, but it's sure happened to me, and I've been pretty pleased to have a "Cancel" button.
As far as reboots: At work I've left Win 2K running for weeks at a time, no problem. And this is doing reasonable heavy duty development and switching between various dev environments (.Net, VB6, VS6) on a machine with pretty limited memory. So yeah, Win 95 / 98 couldn't run more than a few days w/o rebooting. And yeah, the original Mac used to crash regularly but it was OK because you got a nice smiley face. Time to enter the 21st century.
The idea that Bush might kill thousands to achieve a selfish objective is too frightening to contemplate so let's not contemplate it.
Or perhaps some of us forgot to put on our tinfoil hats so we've been overwhelmed by the NSA broadcasts from the north pole. You didn't think that the ice was melting "accidently" did you?
Has it ever occurred to you that the legislature can in principle make you a felon just by passing a law against breathing air?
Funny... that's exactly the same logic that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein might be making WMDs. He might give them to terrorists. He might buy some yellowcake.
Try this one on for size... the Soviet Union had some serious bioweapons research. Vladimir Putin might manage to completely restore the old USSR that he yearns for. Putin might in principle decide that the only way to put the USA out of the picture is a bioweapons attack. So the USA should immediately launch an all out nuclear strike now, while we still can.
But getting back to reality, lumping felons in with religious and ethnic minorities is just plain stupid.
My problem is that the poster who quoted the "when they came for group xxx, I did nothing" is completely twisting the meaning of the quote. The whole point of the quote is to oppose government action against innocent people who are being persecuted simply for being a member of a group (a religious group, an ethnic minority, etc).
To equate someone who has committed a felony with one of those groups is to completely pervert the meaning of that saying. And by doing so, cause the original meaning to be lost.
When they came for the felons, I said nothing, because I was not a felon...
I find that thought offensive. What you're saying is "gypsy, Jew, black, convicted felon, they're all the same".
People being oppressed, simply because they belong to a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group is NOT the same as an individual whose rights are reduced because he or she commits a felony.
If you need the software *that* badly you can probably pay someone to write it for less than the cost of all those Microsoft licence fees.
Lol. Right. As an example, the last company I was at did software for a particular manufacturing industry. Our customers relied on this software to run their business. Yes, they needed it badly. No, they couldn't recreate the software for the cost of buying 50 or 100 Windows licenses. The software had hundreds of programmer-years worth of work in it.
Why weren't we running on Linux (you ask)? Well, about 5 years ago we had to get off our O/S platform and we looked at going to Linux. There was no market for our system running on Linux. It was not saleable. Believe me, if customers had wanted to buy Linux, we would have happily gone there.
Windows XP. Windows muthaf*ckin' XP Professional is installed on a machine right next to me (I am at work) and the man who uses that machine constantly (5-6 times a day) deals with a BSOD.
If he is constantly getting BSODs, it's hard to believe it isn't physical. I've run XP at home and at work for years, and the only BSOD I can recall seeing was on my wife's machine when some of her hardware died.
With the average age of a gamer being 27, I don't think you can really call gamers young adults, as that generaly infers the 16-20 age range.
I suppose it's all a matter of perspective, but I wouldn't consider a 16 or 17 year old a "young adult", I'd consider them a teenager. I'd put the "young adult" label more in the 20-25 range than the 16-20 range. So a 27 year old would be pretty close to qualifying.
Your argument could easily be applied to public roads. I don't own a car, yet I'm forced to pay for them.
And you stay within the confines of your own home 24x7x365? You never use any of those roads? And let's see, having private roads to everyone's house is a real alternative, right?
Seems like the case for "free" public net access is just a tad weaker than public roads.
It's not gaming, it's killing time.
Welcome to the casual gaming industry!
Welcome to the gaming industry. It's not like raiding the same dungeon in WoW 50 times just so you can get that last piece of armor is anything other than killing time either.
Clearly, nobody purchases fragging services in Counterstrike because that would not be fun. You'd be paying someone to play the game for you.
Exactly what you are doing when you buy gold, or leveling "services" or a prebuilt character. You are paying someone to play the game for you.
The fact that gold farmers exist, the fact that leveling services exist, these things speak to deficiencies in the game design.
That's like saying that the fact that steroids exist speak to deficiencies in baseball. What it speaks to is deficiencies in some players, not in the game.
The parent post sums it up, and ought to be modded up to the sky. All the stuff about "I have to buy gold so I can get item xxxx" is not a game problem, it's a game player problem.
Or maybe they are trying to get Linus to understand that while he is "god" as far as the one particular piece of software goes when it comes to things that effect many hundreds of pieces of software he should try and act in a cooperative manner.
My impression was that the knock on Linus is that he's "too cooperative" or "too pragmatic", that RMS and others would prefer that he took more of a hardline stance.
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Emphasis on the "well-regulated" portion... the last thing I want in a disaster situation is a bunch of heavily armed random folks running around deciding what they are going to help themselves to.
Why should open source software get a free ride, just because the user gets the source code? If I buy a car with defective brakes and get injured, the fact that if I'm enough of a mechanic I can pull the car apart and fix the brakes is irrelevant.
Hmmm... if you are under the impression that you can't turn services off in Windows, you are mistaken. Quite easy to do.
Hmmm... the problem with open source is that society doesn't have any "contract" with you to compensate you. With closed source, you produce a product, and if society finds it valuable, it compensates you. Simple economics.
My wife plays Star Wars: Galaxies (among other games) which has player-owned housing. Players can buy housing and put it down. There are lots of issues, e.g. you put your house down on a mountain top with a nice view, someone plops their house down and blocks you. They implemented zoning so you could control housing, but then you have to decide who gets to control the zoning. It's more problematic than you might think, and there are plenty of opportunities for grief.
Ok, I played EQ1 for over 5 years, including playing an enchanter to 67. So I think I know something about that game. And I've played WoW almost since inception. And I've heard that somehow "WoW dumbs it down". So please, explain, just what is being dumbed down? As far as I can tell, the spell lines are just as complex, the melee classes actually have skills and abilities that make a difference, travel is more realistic than the EQ "touch a stone and zone", the high end encounters requires raids with good coordination, etc etc etc.
WoW does get rid of a lot of the dumb problems of EQ... sitting on your fanny for 10 minutes getting health or mana after a fight. Camp checks. Losing your corpse in a wall. Ships that break down continuously. Story lines that seems utterly meaningless. Spells like CH that are ridiculously overpowered and need kludges to avoid making high end encounters meaningless....
EQ1 was a great game in its time. A great achievement. But it was not the end all and be all of MMOs. WoW is also a great game, and I feel sorry for the people who are so locked into their EQ mindset that they can't shake free.
Just to be clear: my issue is not with whether closed source software is a good or bad thing, it's with using words like "evil" in such a way that they lose their meaning. If you are going to use the word "evil" for "I bought a computer today and it came with an O/S that I don't have source for" what word will you use to describe torture in secret prisons?
Perhaps YOU ought to think about the difference between not getting the full specs to something you've bought, and being forced to stand in one position until your body starts to fall apart. One may be inconvenient or annoying. The other is evil.
I'd like to reserve the word "evil" for things that are, you know, evil. Like holding prisoners in secret prisons scattered around the world so you can torture them. Selling software without giving away source may not be the best way to produce and deliver software (or maybe it is, I don't know) but isn't "evil".
Assuming, of course, you never accidently click on something and realize that you've changed a setting w/o being exactly sure what you've changed. Maybe that's never happened to you, but it's sure happened to me, and I've been pretty pleased to have a "Cancel" button.
As far as reboots: At work I've left Win 2K running for weeks at a time, no problem. And this is doing reasonable heavy duty development and switching between various dev environments (.Net, VB6, VS6) on a machine with pretty limited memory. So yeah, Win 95 / 98 couldn't run more than a few days w/o rebooting. And yeah, the original Mac used to crash regularly but it was OK because you got a nice smiley face. Time to enter the 21st century.
Or perhaps some of us forgot to put on our tinfoil hats so we've been overwhelmed by the NSA broadcasts from the north pole. You didn't think that the ice was melting "accidently" did you?
Cue the black helicopters
That's right. Which is why applying it to individuals who commit felonies is truly perverting the meaning.
Funny... that's exactly the same logic that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein might be making WMDs. He might give them to terrorists. He might buy some yellowcake.
Try this one on for size... the Soviet Union had some serious bioweapons research. Vladimir Putin might manage to completely restore the old USSR that he yearns for. Putin might in principle decide that the only way to put the USA out of the picture is a bioweapons attack. So the USA should immediately launch an all out nuclear strike now, while we still can.
But getting back to reality, lumping felons in with religious and ethnic minorities is just plain stupid.
My problem is that the poster who quoted the "when they came for group xxx, I did nothing" is completely twisting the meaning of the quote. The whole point of the quote is to oppose government action against innocent people who are being persecuted simply for being a member of a group (a religious group, an ethnic minority, etc).
To equate someone who has committed a felony with one of those groups is to completely pervert the meaning of that saying. And by doing so, cause the original meaning to be lost.
I find that thought offensive. What you're saying is "gypsy, Jew, black, convicted felon, they're all the same".
People being oppressed, simply because they belong to a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group is NOT the same as an individual whose rights are reduced because he or she commits a felony.
Lol. Right. As an example, the last company I was at did software for a particular manufacturing industry. Our customers relied on this software to run their business. Yes, they needed it badly. No, they couldn't recreate the software for the cost of buying 50 or 100 Windows licenses. The software had hundreds of programmer-years worth of work in it.
Why weren't we running on Linux (you ask)? Well, about 5 years ago we had to get off our O/S platform and we looked at going to Linux. There was no market for our system running on Linux. It was not saleable. Believe me, if customers had wanted to buy Linux, we would have happily gone there.
If he is constantly getting BSODs, it's hard to believe it isn't physical. I've run XP at home and at work for years, and the only BSOD I can recall seeing was on my wife's machine when some of her hardware died.
I suppose it's all a matter of perspective, but I wouldn't consider a 16 or 17 year old a "young adult", I'd consider them a teenager. I'd put the "young adult" label more in the 20-25 range than the 16-20 range. So a 27 year old would be pretty close to qualifying.
And you stay within the confines of your own home 24x7x365? You never use any of those roads? And let's see, having private roads to everyone's house is a real alternative, right?
Seems like the case for "free" public net access is just a tad weaker than public roads.
Welcome to the gaming industry. It's not like raiding the same dungeon in WoW 50 times just so you can get that last piece of armor is anything other than killing time either.
I wish I had mod points so I could mod the parent up. It captures the whole issue in 2 short sentences.
Exactly what you are doing when you buy gold, or leveling "services" or a prebuilt character. You are paying someone to play the game for you.
That's like saying that the fact that steroids exist speak to deficiencies in baseball. What it speaks to is deficiencies in some players, not in the game.
The parent post sums it up, and ought to be modded up to the sky. All the stuff about "I have to buy gold so I can get item xxxx" is not a game problem, it's a game player problem.
My impression was that the knock on Linus is that he's "too cooperative" or "too pragmatic", that RMS and others would prefer that he took more of a hardline stance.