Then, after I had succeeded in hiring a good lawyer, and maybe a bodyguard, depending on who I thought was after me... start posting whatever it was I saw to every communal blog and forum I could think of, then start spamming newspapers with it, too. If I've done nothing wrong, why hide?
While I was never more than a fiddler, and this was also obviously like a decade ago (can't believe it's really been that long!), all my experience with real modding was in the original Starcraft.
The original Starcraft did actually have a pretty respectable map editor, complete with a scripting engine that, while not the most user-friendly ever, was technically still Turing-complete. But there was still a lot you couldn't do (natively). Well, by the end, there was almost -nothing- you couldn't do. Anyone else remember Camelot Systems with fondness? I especially remember how they said there were some things you were just never going to be able to do (add new custom action buttons, for instance), because it would require hacking the actual exe, which would have been far too complicated and prone to breaking things, then less than a year after they said that, they released StarGraft, which did just that.
I'd argue that, while having first-party tools for editing data would be nice in general, it's probably enough if a game just doesn't intentionally -prevent- third-party modding applications from working.
I actually -do- read all the billboards I happen to see. Not because I stop - just because they're there, they have words on them, therefore, I read them. I have no problem with it, either. Sometimes I even see advertising for things (usually movies) that seem interesting, but that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise (since I do block out most other forms of advertising, because they -do- waste my time), and that I then go look up.
I have no problem with advertising per se, only with advertising that wastes my time. Advertising on busses or billboards don't at all.
Website advertising, on the other hand, is frequently obnoxious, and often the cause of pages loading way slower. So screw them all, I adblock everything except on a couple sites. And only a couple. And if they let even one obnoxious or nonfunctional ad through, they're back on the list.
Amusingly, the case that I finally did get called to be a potential jury for, as I was sitting in the room waiting to get questioned, they came to a settlement. I'd been given a potential case at that point, so I was back out of the pool. So much for that!
I wanted very badly to be on a jury, too. I thought it would be extremely interesting. Then I got called in the town I was born while I was at college. I was not going to travel several hours and miss school, so I filed for "I don't live here". So then of course the next year I got another jury summons for where I went to school, during the summer. Doh! Finally I got a summons after I graduated, was all excited until I learned that if you're called to show up on a day, you don't get paid anything, work won't cover it, and you probably won't even get on a jury. And if you do get on a jury, you're then paid literally dollars a day (why do they pay you -anything- at that point?)
If work would give me paid time off instead of unpaid, I'd be all like "hell yeah, let me on one of those!" I'm given to understand most don't, though, so you should probably feel kind of lucky.
"Take for example the statement "legitimate assault." It makes no sense; there is no legitimate reason to assault someone, that's why it is a crime.""
Incorrect. He is not -saying- that there are legitimate reasons to rape someone; he is saying that there are things which are legitimately termed "rape", and things which aren't legitimately termed "rape" but which people use that term for anyway, and he is considering only the latter, because that is what the study is focusing on. Or at least that's what it sounds like to me, from the summary. Maybe he -is- using it in a way that makes no sense, but there still -is- a way that -does- make sense.
For instance, something which is not "legitimate" rape, the case where a 16 year old and a 20 year old engage in consensual intercourse. Or the case where two people of the same age engage in consensual intercourse, then one of them lies about the nature of it later to get the other in legal trouble.
By the same token, there are certainly cases which would appear at first glance to warrant assault charges, but doesn't actually. (Consent would, in fact, be a significant factor in both cases.)
Fair enough. Wikipedia states that arson is "the crime of intentionally or maliciously lighting structures, wildland areas, cars or other property on fire." I always just think of the "maliciously" version specifically.
Amusingly, then I looked it up on dictionary.com, which had to say: "the malicious burning of another's house or property, or in some statutes, the burning of one's own house or property, as to collect insurance." So apparently you might or might not be correct, depending on the state.:p
It is true that one common meaning of the word "legitimate" is "lawful". But another common use of the word "legitimate" is to imply merely that it actually -happened-. For instance: a legitimate arson would be one where a guy burned a building down for fun. A non-legitimate arson would be where a guy burned down a building because the owner of the building paid him to as part of an attempt at insurance fraud. Similarly, a "legitimate rape" would be one in which nonconsensual sex was forced on someone. An illegitimate rape would be "girl pretends that consensual sex wasn't to get back at her boyfriend". Neither of those situations are pleasant, but they do both occur.
That is incorrect. I believe firmly that everyone should and generally does have the right to free speech, and this does include online (rather, if you post it on someone else's site, in this case facebook, -facebook- has every right to do what they like with it and with your account, but that should still not be a criminal issue). But just as your right to swing your fist ends where the other guy's nose starts, your right to go spewing crazy ends when you start threatening to decapitate people. That is the law, and I don't have much of a problem with it.
I would certainly support that label. I have nothing against GMOs per -se-, but I do have a lot against the particular practices of particular companies that support their use.
Heh. I'm on a tv show site too, it's pretty amazing. I'm not even going to post anonymously, cause screw that. I'm not going to say where it is, though, cause they don't really like that much.
Then don't use it? Granted, I wouldn't use it either if it messed with my hormones. But condoms suck royal donkey balls, and from the summary, it sounds like the whole reason it's taken so long for proper male oral contraceptives is because they were holding out for something that -wouldn't- mess with your hormone levels.
For men who are just in it for the sex, I suppose it wouldn't be an issue, but I like to think positive and imagine that isn't "most" men. Many, perhaps, but I like to think not "most". For those of us in actual relationships who don't want kids at the moment, but who wouldn't just say "oh well" and ditch the person if something happened, this would be pretty great (if it -doesn't- muck around with hormone levels, being a distinct disadvantage of existing pills for the purpose.) It's not a financial issue, it's a "you have a kid, congratulations, you now have no time!" issue.
I wouldn't use it if the side effects were as significant as they are for women, though.
I do a lot of file management. I do a decent bit of it at work (managing files in subversion repositories, for which tortoisesvn, and by extension, a file manager, is by far the most convenient tool). I do a lot of it at home, because I'm always adding to my music collection, and I like keeping my music tagged and sorted. Sorted according to my own weird scheme, that is, into folders, not in itunes or anything.
Am I in a minority for that? Probably. Is it a -tiny- minority? Clearly it's a big enough one to support a good handful of not-free-as-in-beer replacement Windows file managers... (none of which are perfect; I've tried out most of them at this point.)
Really, the various Windows-default GUIs themselves -don't- offer you much over Win95. Win2k had a much nicer search interfaces, then they took it out again. Other than that, Win95 was where it was at, UI-wise. Of course, Win95 was unstable as all frack. Hence, pretty much everyone who cares at all about such things agrees, XP was the best (stable, -and- still basically the same if-it-works-don't-fix-it UI from Win95).
On the other hand, various non-default UIs, even the ones that for the most part still look the same (which I like - again, why fix what works?), do have features that would be nice if Windows would make native. Tabbed and/or multipane browsing, for instance, or proper non-borken batched file copy/move, or better search.
Find some trustworthy high schooler who has study hall each period. Let that student hang out in the computer lab instead of study hall, in exchange for monitoring obviously inappropriate websites. Give them a line to a teacher if some douche is looking at porn and won't stop when they tell them to.
This is what my high school did; I was a computer lab monitor sometimes and it worked out pretty great. Only rarely even had to do anything (there was totally one moron who kept looking at stuff that he tried to claim wasn't softcore porn even though it really obviously was. He did get in trouble for it eventually.)
As for why you block porn in school - it isn't because kids shouldn't be allowed to see it if they want. I truly believe that you should block elementary schoolers from seeing that kind of garbage, but if you want to see it in junior high (i.e. after you've at least hit puberty), go ahead. You block porn in school because most people -don't- really want to see it, and it's a public space. Go view it in your bedroom by yourself.
I don't think there's really much you can do about blocking peoples' ability to give away information they shouldn't, without going crazy and blocking damn near fracking everything...
Oh, I totally agree copyright shouldn't last as long as it does. I'd be fine with 10 years, I'd be fine with a bit longer, but definitely nowhere near as it is now (also with slightly more explicit fair use exemptions, and ones people, including lawyers, knew about and respected. But that's another story.)
I'm also often happy to pay money to authors of works even after they've copylefted/public domain'd it. Sometimes moreso!
I disagree with your penultimate statement. I am quite happy to pay the original creators for work I enjoyed regardless of how old it, or they, happen to be. I see no reason to make that distinction. (Though I would be less likely to feel the need to pay for something a hundred years old so the creator's grandkid could live a life of leisure off his brilliant dad granddad's work.)
Games are different, in my view, only because they're quite frequently true abandonware - I feel even less guilty pirating things than normal, if the thing only gives me the choice between pirating and nothing, the original legal content not even being available for purchase.
I agree completely with the rest of your statements. I pirate most of my tv, but almost none of my books or music. Why? Cause authors and musicians (at least most of the musicians -I- listen to) get at least a decent bit of the money I'm trying to send them.
I'm watching that show right now! It's a fantastic show, and it's crazy that I'd never really heard anything about it until quite recently. They're bringing it back for another season next year, too!
But yeah, that doesn't sound like a particularly memorable line. Nor does it seem to have a terribly large amount of relevance to the topic at hand.
Arizona does pretty much suck, though. I'll grant that.
Really sounds like a euphemism for something. I was extremely curious what it was a euphemism for (my guess was "puking"), so I had to click on this thread. I was then let down horribly.
In traditional slashdot fashion, I'm posting this without actually reading the article rather than just the summary, but according to the summary, apparently what will cost you your life is if you decide to make a grand-but-probably-ultimately-pointless gesture and commit suicide to protest something, which is kind of tautologically true regardless of what you're protesting, or where.
Meanwhile, everyone also already knows that in Vietnam, you can get thrown in jail for doing just about anything, or nothing, so also in traditional slashdot fashion, I will say: "this is news?"
"Who do you vote for?" Nobody, cause it's not worth bothering? Seems pretty obvious.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, politicians are all crazy, just in different ways, and all crooked, just in different ways, so I might as well vote for a guy who only sucks a bit and might win, as opposed to a guy who sucks slightly less, but still sucks, and won't win.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, after I had succeeded in hiring a good lawyer, and maybe a bodyguard, depending on who I thought was after me... start posting whatever it was I saw to every communal blog and forum I could think of, then start spamming newspapers with it, too. If I've done nothing wrong, why hide?
While I was never more than a fiddler, and this was also obviously like a decade ago (can't believe it's really been that long!), all my experience with real modding was in the original Starcraft.
The original Starcraft did actually have a pretty respectable map editor, complete with a scripting engine that, while not the most user-friendly ever, was technically still Turing-complete. But there was still a lot you couldn't do (natively). Well, by the end, there was almost -nothing- you couldn't do. Anyone else remember Camelot Systems with fondness? I especially remember how they said there were some things you were just never going to be able to do (add new custom action buttons, for instance), because it would require hacking the actual exe, which would have been far too complicated and prone to breaking things, then less than a year after they said that, they released StarGraft, which did just that.
I'd argue that, while having first-party tools for editing data would be nice in general, it's probably enough if a game just doesn't intentionally -prevent- third-party modding applications from working.
I actually -do- read all the billboards I happen to see. Not because I stop - just because they're there, they have words on them, therefore, I read them. I have no problem with it, either. Sometimes I even see advertising for things (usually movies) that seem interesting, but that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise (since I do block out most other forms of advertising, because they -do- waste my time), and that I then go look up.
I have no problem with advertising per se, only with advertising that wastes my time. Advertising on busses or billboards don't at all.
Website advertising, on the other hand, is frequently obnoxious, and often the cause of pages loading way slower. So screw them all, I adblock everything except on a couple sites. And only a couple. And if they let even one obnoxious or nonfunctional ad through, they're back on the list.
A picture can be worth a thousand words... unless you're behind a filter that blocks most images.
Amusingly, the case that I finally did get called to be a potential jury for, as I was sitting in the room waiting to get questioned, they came to a settlement. I'd been given a potential case at that point, so I was back out of the pool. So much for that!
I wanted very badly to be on a jury, too. I thought it would be extremely interesting. Then I got called in the town I was born while I was at college. I was not going to travel several hours and miss school, so I filed for "I don't live here". So then of course the next year I got another jury summons for where I went to school, during the summer. Doh! Finally I got a summons after I graduated, was all excited until I learned that if you're called to show up on a day, you don't get paid anything, work won't cover it, and you probably won't even get on a jury. And if you do get on a jury, you're then paid literally dollars a day (why do they pay you -anything- at that point?)
If work would give me paid time off instead of unpaid, I'd be all like "hell yeah, let me on one of those!" I'm given to understand most don't, though, so you should probably feel kind of lucky.
I would have been far more interested to know what kind of crazy planet was capable of devouring stars.
"Take for example the statement "legitimate assault." It makes no sense; there is no legitimate reason to assault someone, that's why it is a crime.""
Incorrect. He is not -saying- that there are legitimate reasons to rape someone; he is saying that there are things which are legitimately termed "rape", and things which aren't legitimately termed "rape" but which people use that term for anyway, and he is considering only the latter, because that is what the study is focusing on. Or at least that's what it sounds like to me, from the summary. Maybe he -is- using it in a way that makes no sense, but there still -is- a way that -does- make sense.
For instance, something which is not "legitimate" rape, the case where a 16 year old and a 20 year old engage in consensual intercourse. Or the case where two people of the same age engage in consensual intercourse, then one of them lies about the nature of it later to get the other in legal trouble.
By the same token, there are certainly cases which would appear at first glance to warrant assault charges, but doesn't actually. (Consent would, in fact, be a significant factor in both cases.)
Fair enough. Wikipedia states that arson is "the crime of intentionally or maliciously lighting structures, wildland areas, cars or other property on fire." I always just think of the "maliciously" version specifically.
Amusingly, then I looked it up on dictionary.com, which had to say: "the malicious burning of another's house or property, or in some statutes, the burning of one's own house or property, as to collect insurance." So apparently you might or might not be correct, depending on the state. :p
It is true that one common meaning of the word "legitimate" is "lawful". But another common use of the word "legitimate" is to imply merely that it actually -happened-. For instance: a legitimate arson would be one where a guy burned a building down for fun. A non-legitimate arson would be where a guy burned down a building because the owner of the building paid him to as part of an attempt at insurance fraud. Similarly,
a "legitimate rape" would be one in which nonconsensual sex was forced on someone. An illegitimate rape would be "girl pretends that consensual sex wasn't to get back at her boyfriend". Neither of those situations are pleasant, but they do both occur.
That is incorrect. I believe firmly that everyone should and generally does have the right to free speech, and this does include online (rather, if you post it on someone else's site, in this case facebook, -facebook- has every right to do what they like with it and with your account, but that should still not be a criminal issue). But just as your right to swing your fist ends where the other guy's nose starts, your right to go spewing crazy ends when you start threatening to decapitate people. That is the law, and I don't have much of a problem with it.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_threatening
I would certainly support that label. I have nothing against GMOs per -se-, but I do have a lot against the particular practices of particular companies that support their use.
Heh. I'm on a tv show site too, it's pretty amazing. I'm not even going to post anonymously, cause screw that. I'm not going to say where it is, though, cause they don't really like that much.
For everything else... I just use google. :p
Then don't use it? Granted, I wouldn't use it either if it messed with my hormones. But condoms suck royal donkey balls, and from the summary, it sounds like the whole reason it's taken so long for proper male oral contraceptives is because they were holding out for something that -wouldn't- mess with your hormone levels.
For men who are just in it for the sex, I suppose it wouldn't be an issue, but I like to think positive and imagine that isn't "most" men. Many, perhaps, but I like to think not "most". For those of us in actual relationships who don't want kids at the moment, but who wouldn't just say "oh well" and ditch the person if something happened, this would be pretty great (if it -doesn't- muck around with hormone levels, being a distinct disadvantage of existing pills for the purpose.) It's not a financial issue, it's a "you have a kid, congratulations, you now have no time!" issue.
I wouldn't use it if the side effects were as significant as they are for women, though.
I do a lot of file management. I do a decent bit of it at work (managing files in subversion repositories, for which tortoisesvn, and by extension, a file manager, is by far the most convenient tool). I do a lot of it at home, because I'm always adding to my music collection, and I like keeping my music tagged and sorted. Sorted according to my own weird scheme, that is, into folders, not in itunes or anything.
Am I in a minority for that? Probably. Is it a -tiny- minority? Clearly it's a big enough one to support a good handful of not-free-as-in-beer replacement Windows file managers... (none of which are perfect; I've tried out most of them at this point.)
Really, the various Windows-default GUIs themselves -don't- offer you much over Win95. Win2k had a much nicer search interfaces, then they took it out again. Other than that, Win95 was where it was at, UI-wise. Of course, Win95 was unstable as all frack. Hence, pretty much everyone who cares at all about such things agrees, XP was the best (stable, -and- still basically the same if-it-works-don't-fix-it UI from Win95).
On the other hand, various non-default UIs, even the ones that for the most part still look the same (which I like - again, why fix what works?), do have features that would be nice if Windows would make native. Tabbed and/or multipane browsing, for instance, or proper non-borken batched file copy/move, or better search.
Find some trustworthy high schooler who has study hall each period. Let that student hang out in the computer lab instead of study hall, in exchange for monitoring obviously inappropriate websites. Give them a line to a teacher if some douche is looking at porn and won't stop when they tell them to.
This is what my high school did; I was a computer lab monitor sometimes and it worked out pretty great. Only rarely even had to do anything (there was totally one moron who kept looking at stuff that he tried to claim wasn't softcore porn even though it really obviously was. He did get in trouble for it eventually.)
As for why you block porn in school - it isn't because kids shouldn't be allowed to see it if they want. I truly believe that you should block elementary schoolers from seeing that kind of garbage, but if you want to see it in junior high (i.e. after you've at least hit puberty), go ahead. You block porn in school because most people -don't- really want to see it, and it's a public space. Go view it in your bedroom by yourself.
I don't think there's really much you can do about blocking peoples' ability to give away information they shouldn't, without going crazy and blocking damn near fracking everything...
Oh, I totally agree copyright shouldn't last as long as it does. I'd be fine with 10 years, I'd be fine with a bit longer, but definitely nowhere near as it is now (also with slightly more explicit fair use exemptions, and ones people, including lawyers, knew about and respected. But that's another story.)
I'm also often happy to pay money to authors of works even after they've copylefted/public domain'd it. Sometimes moreso!
Bill Posters is innocent!
I disagree with your penultimate statement. I am quite happy to pay the original creators for work I enjoyed regardless of how old it, or they, happen to be. I see no reason to make that distinction. (Though I would be less likely to feel the need to pay for something a hundred years old so the creator's grandkid could live a life of leisure off his brilliant dad granddad's work.)
Games are different, in my view, only because they're quite frequently true abandonware - I feel even less guilty pirating things than normal, if the thing only gives me the choice between pirating and nothing, the original legal content not even being available for purchase.
I agree completely with the rest of your statements. I pirate most of my tv, but almost none of my books or music. Why? Cause authors and musicians (at least most of the musicians -I- listen to) get at least a decent bit of the money I'm trying to send them.
I'm watching that show right now! It's a fantastic show, and it's crazy that I'd never really heard anything about it until quite recently. They're bringing it back for another season next year, too!
But yeah, that doesn't sound like a particularly memorable line. Nor does it seem to have a terribly large amount of relevance to the topic at hand.
Arizona does pretty much suck, though. I'll grant that.
Before I looked at the date of the post you linked to, I thought you were joking about the "minor differences", and were instead going to have linked to something like this: http://slashdot.org/story/03/05/02/188215/microsoft-rolls-out-iloo
Cause that's what -I- thought of, when I saw the thread title: "maybe he decided it was a good idea after all?"
Really sounds like a euphemism for something. I was extremely curious what it was a euphemism for (my guess was "puking"), so I had to click on this thread. I was then let down horribly.
In traditional slashdot fashion, I'm posting this without actually reading the article rather than just the summary, but according to the summary, apparently what will cost you your life is if you decide to make a grand-but-probably-ultimately-pointless gesture and commit suicide to protest something, which is kind of tautologically true regardless of what you're protesting, or where.
Meanwhile, everyone also already knows that in Vietnam, you can get thrown in jail for doing just about anything, or nothing, so also in traditional slashdot fashion, I will say: "this is news?"
"Who do you vote for?" Nobody, cause it's not worth bothering? Seems pretty obvious.
Anyway, as far as I can tell, politicians are all crazy, just in different ways, and all crooked, just in different ways, so I might as well vote for a guy who only sucks a bit and might win, as opposed to a guy who sucks slightly less, but still sucks, and won't win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don't_stuff_beans_up_your_nose