We are seeing more violence in children because we allow them to watch violence on TV, and even participate in virtual violence in Video games that emphasize realism.
No, we are seeing more violence in children because the news media has discovered that news about violence gets ratings. Youth violence has consistently dropped in recent years, even as video games have become more graphic.
the combination of an angry child, bad parenting (or lack of parenting), and graphic violent games are not such a good thing
Of the three items, I would submit that the video games are by far the least of the problems.
You are "influcenced" every time you are exposed to any sensory input at all. What many of us are saying is that playing video games or watching a movie will not cause a formerly peace-loving individual to go on a shooting spree. There may be counterexamples involving people with mental disorders, but that does not justify censorship for the >99.9% of the population that is able to easily distinguish between fantasy and reality.
What exactly is your point? People do not base their moral values on computer games. Contrary to what Tipper Gore and friends believe, the overwhelming majority of people, including children, have no difficulty separating fantasy and reality.
But there needs to be reflection on the values that are taking place in a game like 'Diablo'.
If you insist on searching for moral values in Diablo, the primary moral is that good defeats evil.
Yes, among other things BeOS isn't multiuser. It has a POSIX layer, but then so does NT... NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server/Darwin/Mac OS X really are full BSD systems on top of Mach.
Interesting, I had heard that Perot drew pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats. And this year Nader will pull from Democrats, but Harry Browne (Libertarian) and the Constitution party will pull mainly from Republicans. But that's not the point. I would argue that voting for Bush or Gore is more of a wasted vote. First, your vote is truly lost in the noise. Who cares whether Gore gets 45,337,228 or 45,337,229 votes? Second, by supporting a "major" candidate you are implicitly giving your support to the two-party system and making it more difficult for real alternatives to emerge. Third, your vote is not going to decide the election. You have a greater chance of being killed in a traffic accident on the way to the polls than your vote does of being the deciding one.
If you honestly think that Bush or Gore is the best man for the job, by all means vote for one of them. But don't let the misguided fear of "throwing your vote away" keep you from expressing your true opinions.
In some cases, yes. Remember that the entire point of the Bill of Rights was to place certain freedoms beyond the control of majority rule. For example, I would claim that allowing a newspaper to be censored if 51% of the people desire it is a bad thing.
Big money needs to be taken out of politics, campaigns publicly financed so that they are fair, and candidates beholden to the people.
Many people keep demanding this, and either don't recognize or ignore the fact that it would require massive censorship in order to have a chance of working. Not only do you have to prevent the parties themselves from raising funds illegally (and we all know how well that's been working), you also must prevent private entities from using their own money to express their views. In other words, you must censor political speech, which I believe is a worse cure than the disease.
Unless of course they compute the checksum after they digitally alter the frame and then send it would this fail.
Which of course would be done by anyone altering the video for nefarious purposes. This is really the "trusted client" problem in reverse, with your TV as the server and the remote camera as the client. Just like a Quake server can't be certain a client's binary hasn't been hacked, you can't be sure that the video hasn't been modified.
Mac gaming is far from dead. It is true that the raw quantity of games is much higher on the PC side, but the majority of "big" games are available for the Mac (Unreal Tournament, Quake 1/2/3, Diablo 1/2, Deus Ex, etc.) If gaming is your primary purpose for buying a computer then don't get a Mac, but if it's a secondary purpose you'll probably find that there are many more Mac games that you want than you have time to play. At least that's the case with me.
BTW, Bungie did get sucked up by MS, but they have announced that Halo will be a simultaneous Mac/XBox release.
It's interesting that simultaneously invoke the Constitution and defend Medicare and public schools, seeing as how the Constitution grants no power to the federal government to be involved with health care or education.
While I don't believe additional restrictions should be put on who can vote, it is a real problem when people who pay little or no taxes have no reason to vote against more expansive government spending; after all, it (seemingly) costs them nothing. The solution is to have firm limits on what government is allowed to do; the Constitution was supposed to accomplish this, but it has been increasingly ignored.
If I write a program that mailbombs someone, there is very little legitimate use for that, therefore it would be illegal.
I really don't think we want to go down this road. What you are recommending could make it illegal to type this into your own computer:
for(i=0; i<100000; i++) {
sendEmail("foo@bar.com", "You've got spam!");
}
And there could easily be a legitimate uses for such a program, for example to test the resistance of your own network to mailbombs.
(Off of rant mode now.) A well reasoned response, and I don't disagree. Unfortunately history has shown that when the government gets extra money, its impulse is to spend. I would be happy with a plan that allocated 80% of the surplus for debt reduction and 20% for tax cuts or something along those lines. What I absolutely do not want to see is more government spending, but that's the most likely scenario since GWB and Gore are buying votes with promises of free prescription drugs, more education funding, etc.
Last I saw, Gore's plan was to spend all the surplus on new entitlement programs. Also, if you think Gore has economic sense, could you explain his defense of the fraudulent Ponzi scheme known as Social Security?
<rant>Why the *%^# does a tax cut have to be "economically needed"? It's our money, we earned it, how about the government showing that it's "economically needed" for taxes to be at the highest peacetime level in history?</rant>
"Legalizing alcohol will make it only easier for drunkards to sell their booze on our streets, and to children". Obviously, this is not the case. Coors and Budweiser do not engage in turf wars with Uzis, and they don't send pushers into schools to recruit customers. They have a legal marketplace in which to exist, and engaging in urban warfare is not good for profits. And I'm pretty sure alcohol is still the most popular "date rape" drug. (Of course, rape would be illegal in a libertarian world. And since there would be more room in prisons once nonviolent drug offenders were released, rapists would actually serve their full sentence.)
I don't know what you're talking about in terms of libertarians and religion. The ACLU is most definitely not a libertarian organization, as witnessed by (among many other things) their hostility toward any privatization of the school system, such as vouchers which would allow parents to choose religious or secular private schools. Libertarians view religion as independent of government; it should be neither promoted nor disparaged, just like the 1st Amendment says.
Almost every instance of abusive corporate behavior is aided and abetted by government. Look at the DMCA and UCITA; both of these are cases of corporations buying legislation and would not have occurred with Libertarian governments. Remember, the MPAA can't arrest you for distributing DeCSS, but the FBI can.
Having said that, if you really believe that socialism is the answer then by all means vote for Nader. Although I firmly disagree with him, at least he has principles, unlike the two major candidates.
Wow. I just wrote a message on the latest Carnivore thread saying that opposition to Carnivore does not mean opposition to all law enforcement. I will repeat myself here: there is a difference between arguing that taxes are too high and advocating the elimination of all government. Do you really believe that everything you pay in taxes goes to the public good? Do you believe that everything the government does is absolutely essential for the survival of its citizens? Yes, government does perform some necessary functions. It also wastes a tremendous amount of money. Or do you approve of spending hundreds of billions for corporate welfare and defense pork?
Nobody is suggesting removing all power from law enforcement, so you can dispense with that strawman. What those of us opposed to Carnivore are requesting is simply that law enforcement obey the Constitution. Sadly that position has become less popular as people allow themselves to be convinced of the imminent peril of hordes of pedophiles and terrorists using the Internet to prey on their children.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, the FBI can already obtain information about suspects by serving their ISPs with court orders. Carnivore is equivalent to installing cameras in everyone's homes, but promising they'll only look at the bad people. Given their history, you'll excuse me if I have my doubts.
Absolutely. Another important factor is that federal, state, and local taxes take close to half half of the average worker's salary, not including the hidden costs of corporate taxes and regulation. So in many cases, the government essentially forces both parents to work, causing them to not be able to care for their children as effectively, causing them to look to government for solutions. Nice vicious cycle.
Except that as you have just pointed out, virtually nobody obeys speed limits because they are completely bogus. That is, they are set not according to saftey principles but to generate revenue. Drivers generally find a balance between driving at the maximum safe speed (generally significantly higher than the posted limit) and not going fast enough to get caught. Yes, I know there are some maniacs who really do drive way too fast, and they should be penalized. But most people stopped for doing 10 mph above the limit were not doing anything unsafe, they are just victims of what is essentially a negative lottery.
Why is prostitution illegal - women should be able to earn money any way they want, right?
Correct. It's a voluntary exchange of services for money and harms no one. Keeping it illegal threatens women's lives, as they have no legal recourse against abusive cusotmers or employers.
Why are drugs illegal - people should have the freedom to destroy their health, right?
Correct. Unless you'd also like to ban red meat and McDonalds.
The fact is that some people need some guidance and protection. As far as gambling is concerned, I have met people who gamble a lot, and they don't know anything about statistics; they don't even know that the odds are against them (in all gambling games) and the more they play the more they will loose.
Those people are idiots. If they couldn't gamble they would probably find some other equally stupid way to waste their money.
Gambling and going to the movies are not the same thing. Gambling is addictive, it has destroyed families, lives, and fortunes.
s/gambling/alchohol. Just about anything can be taken to excess; that does not mean we need a nanny-state government to protect us from ourselves.
The government also has the responsibility to protect its citizens
The government should protect citizen A from citizen B. It should not attempt to micromange citizen A's life and stop him from doing anything it thinks is "bad" for him.
With freedom comes responsibility. Some people will make poor choices, and hopefully they will learn from them.
There are physical limits on how much you can brute-force. A perfect cryptosystem takes O(2^N) time to crack an N-bit key, so doubling the key length tremendously increases the difficulty.
Let's assume ASCII White has some top-secret algorithm that lets it check 10 keys per floating point operation. That's 128 trillion keys per second, or around 2^48. This is how long it would take to brute-force various key lengths: 56 bits: 2^8 seconds, or 4 minutes. No problem. 64 bits: 2^16 seconds, less than a day. Still not too bad. 80 bits: 2^32 seconds, around 100 years (I think). Not very easy. 128 bits: 2^80 seconds, 3.8*10^16 years. Not gonna happen.
Of course specific algorithms are likely to have weaknesses, but the point is that pure brute-force does not work with sufficiently large keys.
Pure democracy is a bad thing when your rights can be trampled because 51% of the voters elected demagogues. This is the reasoning behind the U.S. Constitution and similar documents that place certain freedoms beyond the control of government.
Australia is a democracy; the Liberals are in power because they represent the majority. If you think they should not do what they are doing, and are actively working to hamper them in so doing, then you are an enemy of democracy, plain and simple.
Applying that reasoning the following are enemies of democracy:
German Jews who resisted Hitler (who was elected)
Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, and countless other civil rights leaders who opposed discriminatory laws passed by elected officials
The ACLU and other free speech groups that oppose democratically passed censorship laws
You are correct in that minors have limited (not no) rights, but your conception of democracy and freedom is seriously flawed. The phrase "tyranny of the majority" comes to mind.
That doesn't make any sense at all. Apple releases sources for all GPLed software they use, Steve Jobs constantly mentions that the core of OS X is BSD Unix, and they freely distribute Darwin, a complete open-source system containing lots of Apple-original code. What do you want them to do, have bash print "Copyright Free Software Foundation, All Hail RMS" at every prompt?
And WebObjects definitely does not suck. It has the best API out there for mapping databases to objects and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we are seeing more violence in children because the news media has discovered that news about violence gets ratings. Youth violence has consistently dropped in recent years, even as video games have become more graphic.
the combination of an angry child, bad parenting (or lack of parenting), and graphic violent games are not such a good thing
Of the three items, I would submit that the video games are by far the least of the problems.
You are "influcenced" every time you are exposed to any sensory input at all. What many of us are saying is that playing video games or watching a movie will not cause a formerly peace-loving individual to go on a shooting spree. There may be counterexamples involving people with mental disorders, but that does not justify censorship for the >99.9% of the population that is able to easily distinguish between fantasy and reality.
But there needs to be reflection on the values that are taking place in a game like 'Diablo'.
If you insist on searching for moral values in Diablo, the primary moral is that good defeats evil.
Actually, iCab works great with Java in my experience. Like IE, it uses Apple's MRJ runtime if you have it installed.
Yes, among other things BeOS isn't multiuser. It has a POSIX layer, but then so does NT... NeXTStep/OpenStep/Mac OS X Server/Darwin/Mac OS X really are full BSD systems on top of Mach.
If you honestly think that Bush or Gore is the best man for the job, by all means vote for one of them. But don't let the misguided fear of "throwing your vote away" keep you from expressing your true opinions.
In some cases, yes. Remember that the entire point of the Bill of Rights was to place certain freedoms beyond the control of majority rule. For example, I would claim that allowing a newspaper to be censored if 51% of the people desire it is a bad thing.
Big money needs to be taken out of politics, campaigns publicly financed so that they are fair, and candidates beholden to the people.
Many people keep demanding this, and either don't recognize or ignore the fact that it would require massive censorship in order to have a chance of working. Not only do you have to prevent the parties themselves from raising funds illegally (and we all know how well that's been working), you also must prevent private entities from using their own money to express their views. In other words, you must censor political speech, which I believe is a worse cure than the disease.
Which of course would be done by anyone altering the video for nefarious purposes. This is really the "trusted client" problem in reverse, with your TV as the server and the remote camera as the client. Just like a Quake server can't be certain a client's binary hasn't been hacked, you can't be sure that the video hasn't been modified.
No they do not, at least not in an unlimited manner. See the concepts of "fair use" and "first sale".
BTW, Bungie did get sucked up by MS, but they have announced that Halo will be a simultaneous Mac/XBox release.
While I don't believe additional restrictions should be put on who can vote, it is a real problem when people who pay little or no taxes have no reason to vote against more expansive government spending; after all, it (seemingly) costs them nothing. The solution is to have firm limits on what government is allowed to do; the Constitution was supposed to accomplish this, but it has been increasingly ignored.
I really don't think we want to go down this road. What you are recommending could make it illegal to type this into your own computer:
for(i=0; i<100000; i++) {
sendEmail("foo@bar.com", "You've got spam!");
}
And there could easily be a legitimate uses for such a program, for example to test the resistance of your own network to mailbombs.
(Off of rant mode now.) A well reasoned response, and I don't disagree. Unfortunately history has shown that when the government gets extra money, its impulse is to spend. I would be happy with a plan that allocated 80% of the surplus for debt reduction and 20% for tax cuts or something along those lines. What I absolutely do not want to see is more government spending, but that's the most likely scenario since GWB and Gore are buying votes with promises of free prescription drugs, more education funding, etc.
<rant>Why the *%^# does a tax cut have to be "economically needed"? It's our money, we earned it, how about the government showing that it's "economically needed" for taxes to be at the highest peacetime level in history?</rant>
I don't know what you're talking about in terms of libertarians and religion. The ACLU is most definitely not a libertarian organization, as witnessed by (among many other things) their hostility toward any privatization of the school system, such as vouchers which would allow parents to choose religious or secular private schools. Libertarians view religion as independent of government; it should be neither promoted nor disparaged, just like the 1st Amendment says.
Having said that, if you really believe that socialism is the answer then by all means vote for Nader. Although I firmly disagree with him, at least he has principles, unlike the two major candidates.
Wow. I just wrote a message on the latest Carnivore thread saying that opposition to Carnivore does not mean opposition to all law enforcement. I will repeat myself here: there is a difference between arguing that taxes are too high and advocating the elimination of all government. Do you really believe that everything you pay in taxes goes to the public good? Do you believe that everything the government does is absolutely essential for the survival of its citizens? Yes, government does perform some necessary functions. It also wastes a tremendous amount of money. Or do you approve of spending hundreds of billions for corporate welfare and defense pork?
As has been repeatedly pointed out, the FBI can already obtain information about suspects by serving their ISPs with court orders. Carnivore is equivalent to installing cameras in everyone's homes, but promising they'll only look at the bad people. Given their history, you'll excuse me if I have my doubts.
Absolutely. Another important factor is that federal, state, and local taxes take close to half half of the average worker's salary, not including the hidden costs of corporate taxes and regulation. So in many cases, the government essentially forces both parents to work, causing them to not be able to care for their children as effectively, causing them to look to government for solutions. Nice vicious cycle.
Except that as you have just pointed out, virtually nobody obeys speed limits because they are completely bogus. That is, they are set not according to saftey principles but to generate revenue. Drivers generally find a balance between driving at the maximum safe speed (generally significantly higher than the posted limit) and not going fast enough to get caught. Yes, I know there are some maniacs who really do drive way too fast, and they should be penalized. But most people stopped for doing 10 mph above the limit were not doing anything unsafe, they are just victims of what is essentially a negative lottery.
With freedom comes responsibility. Some people will make poor choices, and hopefully they will learn from them.
Let's assume ASCII White has some top-secret algorithm that lets it check 10 keys per floating point operation. That's 128 trillion keys per second, or around 2^48. This is how long it would take to brute-force various key lengths:
56 bits: 2^8 seconds, or 4 minutes. No problem.
64 bits: 2^16 seconds, less than a day. Still not too bad.
80 bits: 2^32 seconds, around 100 years (I think). Not very easy.
128 bits: 2^80 seconds, 3.8*10^16 years. Not gonna happen.
Of course specific algorithms are likely to have weaknesses, but the point is that pure brute-force does not work with sufficiently large keys.
- German Jews who resisted Hitler (who was elected)
- Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, and countless other civil rights leaders who opposed discriminatory laws passed by elected officials
- The ACLU and other free speech groups that oppose democratically passed censorship laws
You are correct in that minors have limited (not no) rights, but your conception of democracy and freedom is seriously flawed. The phrase "tyranny of the majority" comes to mind.And WebObjects definitely does not suck. It has the best API out there for mapping databases to objects and vice versa.
Another difference: One of these languages, not the one ending in '#'. has multiplatform open-source implementations available. See http://kaffe.org.