Slashdot has always been like this. In fact, things have arguably gotten better, as hard as that is to believe. Back in the early days, there was quite a bit of outcry over the incredibly lazy editing and numerous dupes. CmdrTaco's response? That amateurish nonsense was part of the charm of the site, and he steadfastly refused address those concerns (or pretty much any other complaints or feature requests, for that matter). Now that he's finally gone, we might see the sight getting a little more professional, but I kind of doubt it. The remaining editors are probably just as philosophically opposed to looking professional (and doing work). Making it to the point where the site is even halfway presentable is quite amazing, and I suppose we should be thankful that anything at all on this site works, given its history.
Still, linking to outright spam sites is a new low, even for Slashdot. However, Slashdot has been linking to pointless blogspam for years and years, which is only marginally better. And that's not even counting the slashvertisements...
While Kim may be greedy and potentially an asshole, he's going to win and is playing by rules far more legitimate then our current IP circus.
That's a very Machiavellian philosophy, tantamount to Realpolitik. Realpolitik is why the USA supported so many corrupt dictators and bloody warlords during the Cold War. We looked the other way when they committed human rights abuses and atrocities, because they were seen as a stabilizing influence and loyal anti-communists.
To those of you in the MPAA, RIAA, and software, mobile phone, and ISP industries. You cannot fight this. Learn and adapt or you will fail while people like Kim refuse to lay down and prosper.
If he refuses to prosper, then it should be easy to win against Kim Dotcom.
It would help if we actually had a left wing. Currently, we've got a center-right and far-right wing. I'm admittedly on the far-left, making me a bit out of step with the rest of the country, but it's deeply frustrating to any socialist when people call Barack Obama, a center-right politician, a Marxist or socialist.
Obama is very friendly to Wall Street. Very, very friendly.
Over time, most governments eventually drift toward Fascism. Fascists rarely advertise themselves as such. In fact, the word has become so diluted that it's essentially meaningless today. Orwell was particularly annoyed by this, and he was known to rant about it.
How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Regardless, I still like Wikipedia, and I contribute to it, when I notice obvious errors (increasingly rare) or poor grammar (much more common). I've even partially rewritten several articles, because the grammar and spelling were so atrocious. Although I'm philosophically what you might call a "deletionist", I'm too apathetic to actually bring up an article for deletion (or even to vote for deletion). Anyway, I figure that every article, no matter how stupid, deserves a chance to be fixed, before it's deleted.
I remember once editing an article that was being used for character assassination against some prominent NYC socialite. After I cleaned up all the personal attacks and gossip, someone accused me of being her public relations team. Ha. I have only one rule, when editing Wikipedia articles: never edit an article that you care about. It keeps stress levels minimal. If someone really thinks I care about NYC socialites, young adult romance fiction, 1980s death metal bands, or anything else in my list of Contributions, they're quite wrong. That's how I avoid burn-out, and, for that, I have to thank all the pop culture-obsessed nerds and gossipy housewives out there, for providing me stress-free articles to edit.
Intel has made ARM processors in the past (xScale), and, apparently, still retains an ARM license. Intel has manufactured RISC chips, as well (i960, for example). There is absolutely no reason why Intel wouldn't/couldn't produce an ARM chip, if they wanted to. There's just no reason to do so.
Also, using the Core i3 as an example of Intel's "low-end" is not very fair. Intel's low-end chips are the Pentium and Celeron, not the i3. The Atom is the closest thing to a competitor to the ARM chips. Pricing for Atom chips varies extensively, from $20 to $100, depending on features,
When it comes to jail, many people will spontaneously express enthusiastic support for extreme authoritarianism, even when they'd never support it otherwise. Prisoners, by virtue of having been found guilty by a court, are safe to treat as subhuman, as far as they're concerned. It may very well be an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies, but I think it's also equally likely that they're just assholes experiencing shadenfreude.
The linked opinion piece seems a bit hastily and sloppily written. It spends far too much time grumbling about inconsequential crap.
I think the main point is that this: it's too little, too late, and stands in the way of truly progressive legislation. The argument is that people will became complacent and develop a false sense of security. This doesn't even attack a symptom; it's simply raises a red flag whenever the symptom flares up. In the early days, raising the alarm and educating the mainstream about privacy exploits was useful and informative, but now it's just a delaying tactic used by the powers-that-be to avoid taking any real, decisive action to attack the problem. The author is advocating serious regulation, which he feels is long overdue. He's not willing to compromise on this issue any more, though he might have done so ten years ago, when there seemed to be a fair chance that the regulation he was seeking would be in place by now.
Some people favor slow, incremental changes that are studied in-depth for years before they're implemented. Some people prefer sweeping changes to be implemented NOW. This guy is tired of in-depth studies, delays, and bureaucracy. He wants change to happen NOW, and he's getting pissed off at having to compromise. Maybe he wrote some really great, philosophical essays on his beliefs and why they're important ten years ago, but he's probably tired of repeating himself, and he's perhaps coming across as bitter and childish, to those who can't understand why he's so annoyed at being offered a compromise now that he might have grudgingly accepted ten years ago.
Sometimes it's best to best to let the young firebrands to handle the PR, rather than bring out the bitter old guard. The message is the same, but the delivery is radically different.
The analogy that I prefer is that of a creepy, too-friendly neighbor who hires a private detective to thoroughly investigate you, so that it knows what kind of housewarming gift to give you.
I'm not sure that Google has plans to go all Big Brother on us (that seems more like an Apple or Microsoft thing). Google strikes me as more like an awkward, autistic person who just doesn't realize how creepy his behavior is. He means well, but he's just to damn creepy for me to be comfortable around him.
This whole problem could be resolved easily if the corporations had an automated system wherein people could license copyrighted works for use in personal, noncommercial videos (like YouTube). It wouldn't necessarily have to even cost any money, either. Simply collecting demographics would, I imagine, be valuable to the suits. If they wanted to be complete and utter assholes about it, they could charge 10 cents per license (or maybe have an unlimited subscription service for $5/month, so that you could use any of their hottest singles).
As it stands, people have no way to ask for permission and thus resort to simply violating copyright. If they at least had the opportunity to follow the law, maybe there wouldn't be so much ill will toward the suits.
This seems like quite a reasonable compromise to me.
Islam got hijacked by the fundamentalists, and they've been under the thumb of extremists ever since. It's a good example of why we need to fight against fundamentalism in the West.
The problem is that Slashdot is full of technocrats who think that we live in post-scarcity world. Arguing over whether broadband internet access is a human right or not just shows how out of touch we are with the rest of the world, which is struggling just to survive.
You didn't tell us where you live. How are we supposed to help you, if we don't even know what country you live in? Because this is Slashdot, I guess we can just assume that you're talking about the USA (possibly Canada). But then we still don't know what state (or province) you live in! I mean, I support the One World Government as much as the next Illuminati member, but until we can bring about that glorious revolution, we'll just have to deal with all these fractured governments.
First of all, I'd try contacting the local police. You weren't explicit about who owns the land that's being used as an illegal dumping ground, but, once again, I'm going to assume that it's yours. It sounds like some laws are being broken here, but because I haven't the faintest clue where you live, all I can do is guess. Second, I'd contact some environmental activists. They live for this kind of stuff. Take some pictures, set up a blog, and get really melodramatic about how the land is being despoiled and raped. You'll get a few hippies volunteering to watch the land. No video cameras needed. Hell, they might even donate a few. If you seemed like a nice enough guy and you caught me on a good day, I might even help out.
If you just want to buy new toys and play with them, then I suspect that you'll do better going to a forum more dedicated to paranoid conspiracy theories (they love this kind of spy thriller technology), hunting, and/or survivalism.
I disagree. I think it most certainly does apply to the Internet. If I choose to disallow Javascript from running on my browser, or I choose not to load certain images, that's my right. Nobody has the right to force my computer to follow instructions that I dislike. This is especially true on the Internet. This kind of attitude was very popular up until the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it became subversive (and downright unpatriotic) to assert that these rights exist.
I don't know about you guys, but I always hated how traditional mass media was completely passive and out of my control. Even with the telephone and physical mail, I was pretty much locked out of having any kind of say. Don't want to receive sales calls at dinner time? Too bad. However, now that I finally have some say in the matter, I'm going to passively sat there while my privacy is violated, CPU time is hijacked, and my storage space is wasted. Obviously, it's the principle of the matter, because none of these are actually all that important. However, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up even 0.1% of my CPU time to some jerkoff marketing guy -- the same guy who thinks it's his God-given right to call me at dinner time, fill up my mailbox, and plaster the wilderness with crass advertisements.
For every guy like me, there's ten that doesn't give a shit about any of this stuff. They'd sell out their neighbors' privacy for a coupon or free gift. I'm no threat to corporate America. Just leave me alone, and I'll keep my anarchist ranting limited to indignant posts on obscure web sites. Piss me off, and you'll just motivate me to break through my apathy and became more extreme. Hell, I might even vote, if you push me far enough.
I'll admit that Slashdot's moderation system is conducive to groupthink (and very susceptible to social engineering), but it's harmless enough that I really don't care. If my comments get modded up, then I shrug. When they get modded down, I shrug. If someone actually cares, then I think they're taking this way too seriously.
It's always nice to have the validation of someone thinking that your comments are insightful or interesting, but the same people who are posting goatse links are moderating. You have to keep that in mind.
I'd say that the moderation system is working well. I've been banned from moderating for years now. My karma is probably just about infinite, but I like to balance out every (+5, interesting) with a (-1, troll). It makes life interesting.
Some of his arguments are good, while some of them are stupid. Yes, I admit that, in a moment of weakness, I actually read the linked article. I promise never to do this again.
His first point is probably his weakest and stupidest. It's a paranoid fantasy (involving some kind of uber-nerd/uber-hipster cross) about the government coming down harder on witnesses of a crime than the actual perpetrator. He also loads it with emotional appeals. It's not really very compelling, and it almost caused me to stop reading the article right there. It reminded me of the over-the-top, paranoid fantasies and fallacies that were popular during the time of SOPA. Anyone who dared to call people out on that was labeled a fascist sympathizer, or sometimes just a "concern troll". It bothered me a lot more to be labeled a "concern troll", because the underlying message was that it was perfectly OK to use logical fallacies and propaganda in the service of a greater good. I reject this, and I think using these techniques just hurts a movement. There's always a better argument against authoritarianism than simplistic logical fallacies, such as the slippery slope or appeal to emotion. It's lazy.
The rest of his arguments were actually a lot better. He made some pretty decent points, including the fact that free speech necessarily opposes censorship of even the most offensive speech. He also brings up age of consent laws and the recent spate of "no tolerance" cases against teens who have sent naked pictures to each other. Obviously, there are some problems with the law here. My own personal solution is to lower the age of majority, but I think that's going to be way too contentious. Since nobody is likely to support that, I'd say that we should enact so-called "Romeo and Juliet" laws, which allow teens to screw around with each other without fear of being charged with rape or child porn.
Anyways, it's pretty much standard for progressive politics, and I've seen the same arguments from many people. As a progressive, I generally agree. This wasn't a particularly insightful or well-written example, but it's still good to see that there are progressives out there, spreading the message.
1) All policy must be done at locations that are under 24 hour surveillance. This would have to be enforced with very strict laws, defining exactly what constitutes policy and what doesn't.
2) 24 hour surveillance of all politicians.
The first one doesn't really stop any collusions from occurring -- it just punishes people for it. The second one is a massive invasion of privacy that would alienate even the most radical open government advocates. I imagine that few people would actually be in favor of stripping all privacy from politicians, even though it does sound kind of tempting to force them into the same kind of situation that they keeping pushing for in our lives.
The disturbing thing is that you see a few people in every Wikileaks story saying that we have no right to know what our government is doing. We are the government! We have every right to know, and I firmly believe that politicians should be hounded by investigative reporters like paparazzi hound vapid celebrities. However, as a society, we are more interested in who Tom Cruise is currently dating (or if he's secretly gay) than we are how much money a state Senator is embezzling. Even when we do get any kind of investigative reporting, it's usually just sex scandals. Wikipedia even keeps a list of them.
Wikileaks isn't exactly my ideal candidate, but it's one of the few organizations that's willing to actually shine a light at something important. Everyone else is either too scared or compensated not to do so.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement that may or may not sell out to the mainstream. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents (or even grandparents, if you're young enough) will start making references to it. My 60 year old mother talks about preparing for the "zombie apocalypse", when she goes out shopping for canned food. All you can do is grit your teeth and wait for the fourth wave, which is an ironic deconstruction. This will bring the hipsters back, unfortunately, but it will also cause people to recognize how intensely stupid and insipid the third wave was. Hopefully. After this, it can go in any direction, and there have been some cases where the ironic deconstruction was misinterpreted and turned into a big influence on the genre.
Roger Corman once dismissed the term "genre film", saying that people who use that phrase are simply unable to admit to themselves that they're making exploitation movies. This is why I like Roger Corman's work: he knows that he's making crap, and he doesn't have pretensions toward art. He's very self-aware. As long as we have people producing "genre fiction" or "genre films", we'll have hacks with delusions of artistic merit barfing out insipid, derivative work. This tends to pop up in the second wave of any fad and dominate the third wave.
According to the project FAQ, Open Morrowind uses the original game assets. They have not created any of their own art. You need to have Morrowind installed on your computer, because this is just the engine. It will natively run on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux, and they're looking to fix longstanding bugs in the MW engine, as well as extend it. Some of the proposed extensions to the engine sound ridiculously complex and/or like they'd break the game, but it's definitely interesting. I'd be curious to see what it looks like in a few more revisions, when it's finally playable.
There are incredibly replacement textures for Morrowind and Oblivion that make even these older games look beautiful and semi-modern. I wouldn't put down the efforts of modders, though I agree that sometimes open source games have rather lackluster graphics. Part of the problem is that modders are more interested in playing polished, commercial games, which they can touch up, rather than contributing to an incomplete, open source game that has no assets at all. It's quite understandable, really, because one is a hobby, and the other is a full-time job.
Do these sorts of "adults are computer illiterate" stories bother anyone else? It can't just be me. I've been hearing them since the 1970s, when I was kid. Back then, I was apparently a computer genius. In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, I suddenly became a dangerous computer hacker. In the 1990s, my computer skills were apparently starting to falter, as I had hit my 20s, and I was no longer hot shit. Still, I was a dot com millionaire, and that's got to count for something. In the 2000s and 2010s, I've become a doddering old fool who can't even click his mouse on an icon. Wait, "icon" might be a bit too complex. Let's just call it "the little picture on the TV part of the computer".
I can only imagine what doddering old fools my parents must be. I mean, they're almost retirement age. I bet they can't even figure out how to turn on their computer. Nevermind that they've been using Linux exclusively for over ten years now, without any tech support from me.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot has always been like this. In fact, things have arguably gotten better, as hard as that is to believe. Back in the early days, there was quite a bit of outcry over the incredibly lazy editing and numerous dupes. CmdrTaco's response? That amateurish nonsense was part of the charm of the site, and he steadfastly refused address those concerns (or pretty much any other complaints or feature requests, for that matter). Now that he's finally gone, we might see the sight getting a little more professional, but I kind of doubt it. The remaining editors are probably just as philosophically opposed to looking professional (and doing work). Making it to the point where the site is even halfway presentable is quite amazing, and I suppose we should be thankful that anything at all on this site works, given its history.
Still, linking to outright spam sites is a new low, even for Slashdot. However, Slashdot has been linking to pointless blogspam for years and years, which is only marginally better. And that's not even counting the slashvertisements...
While Kim may be greedy and potentially an asshole, he's going to win and is playing by rules far more legitimate then our current IP circus.
That's a very Machiavellian philosophy, tantamount to Realpolitik. Realpolitik is why the USA supported so many corrupt dictators and bloody warlords during the Cold War. We looked the other way when they committed human rights abuses and atrocities, because they were seen as a stabilizing influence and loyal anti-communists.
To those of you in the MPAA, RIAA, and software, mobile phone, and ISP industries. You cannot fight this. Learn and adapt or you will fail while people like Kim refuse to lay down and prosper.
If he refuses to prosper, then it should be easy to win against Kim Dotcom.
It would help if we actually had a left wing. Currently, we've got a center-right and far-right wing. I'm admittedly on the far-left, making me a bit out of step with the rest of the country, but it's deeply frustrating to any socialist when people call Barack Obama, a center-right politician, a Marxist or socialist.
Obama is very friendly to Wall Street. Very, very friendly.
Over time, most governments eventually drift toward Fascism. Fascists rarely advertise themselves as such. In fact, the word has become so diluted that it's essentially meaningless today. Orwell was particularly annoyed by this, and he was known to rant about it.
How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Regardless, I still like Wikipedia, and I contribute to it, when I notice obvious errors (increasingly rare) or poor grammar (much more common). I've even partially rewritten several articles, because the grammar and spelling were so atrocious. Although I'm philosophically what you might call a "deletionist", I'm too apathetic to actually bring up an article for deletion (or even to vote for deletion). Anyway, I figure that every article, no matter how stupid, deserves a chance to be fixed, before it's deleted.
I remember once editing an article that was being used for character assassination against some prominent NYC socialite. After I cleaned up all the personal attacks and gossip, someone accused me of being her public relations team. Ha. I have only one rule, when editing Wikipedia articles: never edit an article that you care about. It keeps stress levels minimal. If someone really thinks I care about NYC socialites, young adult romance fiction, 1980s death metal bands, or anything else in my list of Contributions, they're quite wrong. That's how I avoid burn-out, and, for that, I have to thank all the pop culture-obsessed nerds and gossipy housewives out there, for providing me stress-free articles to edit.
Intel has made ARM processors in the past (xScale), and, apparently, still retains an ARM license. Intel has manufactured RISC chips, as well (i960, for example). There is absolutely no reason why Intel wouldn't/couldn't produce an ARM chip, if they wanted to. There's just no reason to do so.
Also, using the Core i3 as an example of Intel's "low-end" is not very fair. Intel's low-end chips are the Pentium and Celeron, not the i3. The Atom is the closest thing to a competitor to the ARM chips. Pricing for Atom chips varies extensively, from $20 to $100, depending on features,
When it comes to jail, many people will spontaneously express enthusiastic support for extreme authoritarianism, even when they'd never support it otherwise. Prisoners, by virtue of having been found guilty by a court, are safe to treat as subhuman, as far as they're concerned. It may very well be an outlet for their authoritarian tendencies, but I think it's also equally likely that they're just assholes experiencing shadenfreude.
The linked opinion piece seems a bit hastily and sloppily written. It spends far too much time grumbling about inconsequential crap.
I think the main point is that this: it's too little, too late, and stands in the way of truly progressive legislation. The argument is that people will became complacent and develop a false sense of security. This doesn't even attack a symptom; it's simply raises a red flag whenever the symptom flares up. In the early days, raising the alarm and educating the mainstream about privacy exploits was useful and informative, but now it's just a delaying tactic used by the powers-that-be to avoid taking any real, decisive action to attack the problem. The author is advocating serious regulation, which he feels is long overdue. He's not willing to compromise on this issue any more, though he might have done so ten years ago, when there seemed to be a fair chance that the regulation he was seeking would be in place by now.
Some people favor slow, incremental changes that are studied in-depth for years before they're implemented. Some people prefer sweeping changes to be implemented NOW. This guy is tired of in-depth studies, delays, and bureaucracy. He wants change to happen NOW, and he's getting pissed off at having to compromise. Maybe he wrote some really great, philosophical essays on his beliefs and why they're important ten years ago, but he's probably tired of repeating himself, and he's perhaps coming across as bitter and childish, to those who can't understand why he's so annoyed at being offered a compromise now that he might have grudgingly accepted ten years ago.
Sometimes it's best to best to let the young firebrands to handle the PR, rather than bring out the bitter old guard. The message is the same, but the delivery is radically different.
The analogy that I prefer is that of a creepy, too-friendly neighbor who hires a private detective to thoroughly investigate you, so that it knows what kind of housewarming gift to give you.
I'm not sure that Google has plans to go all Big Brother on us (that seems more like an Apple or Microsoft thing). Google strikes me as more like an awkward, autistic person who just doesn't realize how creepy his behavior is. He means well, but he's just to damn creepy for me to be comfortable around him.
This whole problem could be resolved easily if the corporations had an automated system wherein people could license copyrighted works for use in personal, noncommercial videos (like YouTube). It wouldn't necessarily have to even cost any money, either. Simply collecting demographics would, I imagine, be valuable to the suits. If they wanted to be complete and utter assholes about it, they could charge 10 cents per license (or maybe have an unlimited subscription service for $5/month, so that you could use any of their hottest singles).
As it stands, people have no way to ask for permission and thus resort to simply violating copyright. If they at least had the opportunity to follow the law, maybe there wouldn't be so much ill will toward the suits.
This seems like quite a reasonable compromise to me.
Islam got hijacked by the fundamentalists, and they've been under the thumb of extremists ever since. It's a good example of why we need to fight against fundamentalism in the West.
The problem is that Slashdot is full of technocrats who think that we live in post-scarcity world. Arguing over whether broadband internet access is a human right or not just shows how out of touch we are with the rest of the world, which is struggling just to survive.
You didn't tell us where you live. How are we supposed to help you, if we don't even know what country you live in? Because this is Slashdot, I guess we can just assume that you're talking about the USA (possibly Canada). But then we still don't know what state (or province) you live in! I mean, I support the One World Government as much as the next Illuminati member, but until we can bring about that glorious revolution, we'll just have to deal with all these fractured governments.
First of all, I'd try contacting the local police. You weren't explicit about who owns the land that's being used as an illegal dumping ground, but, once again, I'm going to assume that it's yours. It sounds like some laws are being broken here, but because I haven't the faintest clue where you live, all I can do is guess. Second, I'd contact some environmental activists. They live for this kind of stuff. Take some pictures, set up a blog, and get really melodramatic about how the land is being despoiled and raped. You'll get a few hippies volunteering to watch the land. No video cameras needed. Hell, they might even donate a few. If you seemed like a nice enough guy and you caught me on a good day, I might even help out.
If you just want to buy new toys and play with them, then I suspect that you'll do better going to a forum more dedicated to paranoid conspiracy theories (they love this kind of spy thriller technology), hunting, and/or survivalism.
I disagree. I think it most certainly does apply to the Internet. If I choose to disallow Javascript from running on my browser, or I choose not to load certain images, that's my right. Nobody has the right to force my computer to follow instructions that I dislike. This is especially true on the Internet. This kind of attitude was very popular up until the rapid commercialization of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it became subversive (and downright unpatriotic) to assert that these rights exist.
I don't know about you guys, but I always hated how traditional mass media was completely passive and out of my control. Even with the telephone and physical mail, I was pretty much locked out of having any kind of say. Don't want to receive sales calls at dinner time? Too bad. However, now that I finally have some say in the matter, I'm going to passively sat there while my privacy is violated, CPU time is hijacked, and my storage space is wasted. Obviously, it's the principle of the matter, because none of these are actually all that important. However, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up even 0.1% of my CPU time to some jerkoff marketing guy -- the same guy who thinks it's his God-given right to call me at dinner time, fill up my mailbox, and plaster the wilderness with crass advertisements.
For every guy like me, there's ten that doesn't give a shit about any of this stuff. They'd sell out their neighbors' privacy for a coupon or free gift. I'm no threat to corporate America. Just leave me alone, and I'll keep my anarchist ranting limited to indignant posts on obscure web sites. Piss me off, and you'll just motivate me to break through my apathy and became more extreme. Hell, I might even vote, if you push me far enough.
People like to speculate, and, in the absence of any facts, they'll speculate wildly.
I agree with you, though. Most politicians are opportunists, and they'll never let a good tragedy or outrage go to waste.
That's not nearly as witty as you think it is.
Yeah, but who takes the moderation seriously?
I'll admit that Slashdot's moderation system is conducive to groupthink (and very susceptible to social engineering), but it's harmless enough that I really don't care. If my comments get modded up, then I shrug. When they get modded down, I shrug. If someone actually cares, then I think they're taking this way too seriously.
It's always nice to have the validation of someone thinking that your comments are insightful or interesting, but the same people who are posting goatse links are moderating. You have to keep that in mind.
I'd say that the moderation system is working well. I've been banned from moderating for years now. My karma is probably just about infinite, but I like to balance out every (+5, interesting) with a (-1, troll). It makes life interesting.
And, yes, I have been diagnosed as bipolar.
Some of his arguments are good, while some of them are stupid. Yes, I admit that, in a moment of weakness, I actually read the linked article. I promise never to do this again.
His first point is probably his weakest and stupidest. It's a paranoid fantasy (involving some kind of uber-nerd/uber-hipster cross) about the government coming down harder on witnesses of a crime than the actual perpetrator. He also loads it with emotional appeals. It's not really very compelling, and it almost caused me to stop reading the article right there. It reminded me of the over-the-top, paranoid fantasies and fallacies that were popular during the time of SOPA. Anyone who dared to call people out on that was labeled a fascist sympathizer, or sometimes just a "concern troll". It bothered me a lot more to be labeled a "concern troll", because the underlying message was that it was perfectly OK to use logical fallacies and propaganda in the service of a greater good. I reject this, and I think using these techniques just hurts a movement. There's always a better argument against authoritarianism than simplistic logical fallacies, such as the slippery slope or appeal to emotion. It's lazy.
The rest of his arguments were actually a lot better. He made some pretty decent points, including the fact that free speech necessarily opposes censorship of even the most offensive speech. He also brings up age of consent laws and the recent spate of "no tolerance" cases against teens who have sent naked pictures to each other. Obviously, there are some problems with the law here. My own personal solution is to lower the age of majority, but I think that's going to be way too contentious. Since nobody is likely to support that, I'd say that we should enact so-called "Romeo and Juliet" laws, which allow teens to screw around with each other without fear of being charged with rape or child porn.
Anyways, it's pretty much standard for progressive politics, and I've seen the same arguments from many people. As a progressive, I generally agree. This wasn't a particularly insightful or well-written example, but it's still good to see that there are progressives out there, spreading the message.
I see only two ways to deal with this.
1) All policy must be done at locations that are under 24 hour surveillance. This would have to be enforced with very strict laws, defining exactly what constitutes policy and what doesn't.
2) 24 hour surveillance of all politicians.
The first one doesn't really stop any collusions from occurring -- it just punishes people for it. The second one is a massive invasion of privacy that would alienate even the most radical open government advocates. I imagine that few people would actually be in favor of stripping all privacy from politicians, even though it does sound kind of tempting to force them into the same kind of situation that they keeping pushing for in our lives.
The disturbing thing is that you see a few people in every Wikileaks story saying that we have no right to know what our government is doing. We are the government! We have every right to know, and I firmly believe that politicians should be hounded by investigative reporters like paparazzi hound vapid celebrities. However, as a society, we are more interested in who Tom Cruise is currently dating (or if he's secretly gay) than we are how much money a state Senator is embezzling. Even when we do get any kind of investigative reporting, it's usually just sex scandals. Wikipedia even keeps a list of them.
Wikileaks isn't exactly my ideal candidate, but it's one of the few organizations that's willing to actually shine a light at something important. Everyone else is either too scared or compensated not to do so.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the way that pop culture works. The first wave is exciting, new, and creative. The second wave is a refinement that may or may not sell out to the mainstream. The third wave is cheap and crass commercialization, almost entirely populated by hacks and fad-chasers. Around this time, all the hipsters will abandon it, and your parents (or even grandparents, if you're young enough) will start making references to it. My 60 year old mother talks about preparing for the "zombie apocalypse", when she goes out shopping for canned food. All you can do is grit your teeth and wait for the fourth wave, which is an ironic deconstruction. This will bring the hipsters back, unfortunately, but it will also cause people to recognize how intensely stupid and insipid the third wave was. Hopefully. After this, it can go in any direction, and there have been some cases where the ironic deconstruction was misinterpreted and turned into a big influence on the genre.
Roger Corman once dismissed the term "genre film", saying that people who use that phrase are simply unable to admit to themselves that they're making exploitation movies. This is why I like Roger Corman's work: he knows that he's making crap, and he doesn't have pretensions toward art. He's very self-aware. As long as we have people producing "genre fiction" or "genre films", we'll have hacks with delusions of artistic merit barfing out insipid, derivative work. This tends to pop up in the second wave of any fad and dominate the third wave.
According to the project FAQ, Open Morrowind uses the original game assets. They have not created any of their own art. You need to have Morrowind installed on your computer, because this is just the engine. It will natively run on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux, and they're looking to fix longstanding bugs in the MW engine, as well as extend it. Some of the proposed extensions to the engine sound ridiculously complex and/or like they'd break the game, but it's definitely interesting. I'd be curious to see what it looks like in a few more revisions, when it's finally playable.
There are incredibly replacement textures for Morrowind and Oblivion that make even these older games look beautiful and semi-modern. I wouldn't put down the efforts of modders, though I agree that sometimes open source games have rather lackluster graphics. Part of the problem is that modders are more interested in playing polished, commercial games, which they can touch up, rather than contributing to an incomplete, open source game that has no assets at all. It's quite understandable, really, because one is a hobby, and the other is a full-time job.
What? That's only 30 years. I don't know about you, but I plan on being alive in 30 years. In fact, I'm hoping to reach 80 or 90.
Do these sorts of "adults are computer illiterate" stories bother anyone else? It can't just be me. I've been hearing them since the 1970s, when I was kid. Back then, I was apparently a computer genius. In the 1980s, when I was a teenager, I suddenly became a dangerous computer hacker. In the 1990s, my computer skills were apparently starting to falter, as I had hit my 20s, and I was no longer hot shit. Still, I was a dot com millionaire, and that's got to count for something. In the 2000s and 2010s, I've become a doddering old fool who can't even click his mouse on an icon. Wait, "icon" might be a bit too complex. Let's just call it "the little picture on the TV part of the computer".
I can only imagine what doddering old fools my parents must be. I mean, they're almost retirement age. I bet they can't even figure out how to turn on their computer. Nevermind that they've been using Linux exclusively for over ten years now, without any tech support from me.