Just one more type of astroturfing. Not sure how much it matters really; paid schills are usually pretty obvious.
If you know someone well enough to recognize their posts out of the crowd, then it's a little obvious when they start posting contrary stuff. And if you're in a forum like Slashdot, you can check a posting history to see if a certain user is a bit too likely to throw in a pro-MS reference in their posting.
So either you're somewhere like Digg, where schilling wouldn't even be noticed against the background spam, or you're somewhere like here where the community would be likely to "out" the schill, and that would do nothing but damage the reputation of the company.
Yea, I hate that as well. Most people are dying to sell out, and when they get the opportunity to do so, they do, and then they get defensive and start rationalizing.
That's what gets me...The rationalizations. If they just said, "Yea, I'm a whore, I need the money," I'd respect that. But when they either claim they're not a whore, or that what they're doing is no different from what everyone else is doing, or that it doesn't hurt anybody, or that's it's completely no big deal...That stuff drives me up the wall.
Do what you like, but don't try and feed me a bullshit sandwich like I'm a fool.
Eh. It's not the evil magazine people moving in to corrupt the pristine blog environment. As soon as money becomes a part of the situation, people will start selling themselves.
When there was no way to profit from blogging, then blogging was pure. As soon as you could get paid for schilling, the schilling began.
One of the biggest issues with blogging is that there is no separation between the person who is writing, and the person who is trying to make money. Most other media outlets have separate departments for those things to create a division between content and advertising.
There is always friction between the two, but it is much harder to attempt to be objective when you can sit and rationalize it to yourself. This is not to say that no one has ethics stronger than their profit motive, but it's no surprise to find that the reverse often holds true.
Strawman. Obviously I am out to steal your privacy and deny you encryption, because the ridiculous outrage attendant on some easily removed metadata pisses me off. Grow up. I never even suggested it should be shut down, that's just your read on the situation.
What makes me angry are the people who have the sheer audacity to be pissed off that their DRM-free music has their fricking name on it. Not in it, not watermarked to it, no, just on it. It's the single biggest industry concession in the history of commercial online file distribution, and it's a damn good one, a good faith effort.
The group of people who are most likely to hit this site are people who are probably not acting in good faith...the real hardcore privacy junkies can already do this stuff themselves.
So pardon me if I'm not all giddy that copyright infringing 13 year olds now have a nifty tool at their disposal. It wouldn't take much to reverse this DRM-free music experiment, and I'd really rather not see that happen.
Not even that sexy. I worked out a polyalphabetic I could do in my head, but it's not sufficient to seriously protect against a determined attempt. Whole lot of security through obscurity, and some of the passwords are vulnerable to a partial dictionary attack; those passwords were not my choice, I'm afraid. Most of my passwords would be hard to decrypt just because they look about the same either way.
If someone steals my wallet I'll be in for far more bother than that. 5 credit cards, my bank account numbers, my drivers license, my insurance card which conveniently contains my SSN, actual money, my big ass list of systems passwords which are "encrypted" but which an intelligent person could read if they put their mind to it because SOME of the passwords were designed by morons.
Hell, if they start sharing my music, I'd have a better chance of catching the bastard!
But what happens when you "accidentally" dump your whole music folder to a p2p network...Why, someone might sue you, just because you infringed on their copyright! Typical Apple! They hate everyone but big business!
Blah blah blah. This shows you who is really in it because they hate the inconvenience of DRM, and who is just too stupid to figure out how to share music with easily cracked DRM on it.
Oh please. It's non-DRM music in a standard format; that's as consumer friendly as it gets. So you're name's in it, it's not like they're hiding it. It's right out there in the open, and it's easy to remove. If you were buying in good faith, it wouldn't bother you a bit.
This just pisses me off. Who really cares besides people who just want to immediately dump the file straight to a filesharing network? So it's got my name and email embedded in the file? So what? Apparently unlike a lot of people who are interested in this service, I'm not planning on sending the files to anyone, and if I burn someone a mix CD, the info will be stripped when it's converted to CDA anyhow.
So what's the privacy problem? It's like someone stealing my wallet. Hell yea that's a privacy concern! What's the solution? Someone steals my iPod and they'll be able to figure out my name?!? They'll also be able to figure out what my house, wife, car, and kid look like because of the pictures on the damn thing, and don't even get me going about documents I store on the damn thing...They'll also be able to figure out my Slashdot handle, because the damn thing has "Satanic Puppy" engraved on the back.
So do I actually care that my info is in the file header? Hell no! It's my goddamn file, it should have my goddamn name on it! And if I wanted to go breach some copyright, I'd at least have the stones to strip the info myself. How fricking lazy do you have to be?
When I wanted DRM-free music, I wanted it because I fricking hated not being able to listen to my damn music wherever the hell I wanted to without jumping through hoops. I've got that, and that's all I care about. Far as I'm concerned the service is fine (though a bit pricey).
I skimmed it. Looked to me like FL was being hyper-careful, and extremely protective of their IP, and that Sony was happy to be able to make some cash off of it, and bulk up their whole Station Pass thing with another title.
Lot of people here are clearly still massively bitter about SWG. The whole Vanguard/Sigil thing I don't see as a "This is Sony being evil" thing so much as Sony getting fed up with the crap and taking over the bankrupt company. Not like they could have done much worse.
I can almost guarantee my boss read this, and he's been pushing for wireless for a while now. This is an excellent heads up, as far as I'm concerned.
My biggest problem with the wireless he wants isn't even the wireless...I can deal with that. It's the fact that he wants to do the wireless to make up for the deficiencies of the wired network. But of course, he's not paying for the fiber drops we're going to need, so we're going to have massive network bottlenecks. Oy vey. Everyone thinks they can get something for nothing.
Nah. They're not selling their IP, they're just contracting with SOE for distribution and hosting.
Sounds like a good deal for all involved; Flying Labs keeps absolute creative control, and assumes the bulk of the financial risks. SOE makes money on the front end, and skims some off the top for hosting...If it flops, they've got very little stake in it, and if it doesn't they'll get a nice bit of cash, as well as positioning themselves as a friend to the independent MMO developer.
Shrug. So you have an education. I have one too; it's actually quite similar. Computer Science, Philosophy, English. I've read the bible cover to cover more than once. Apparently I am super-qualified to be a priest. Who knew?
Shrug. It is a stereotype, I admit, but it is none-the-less accurate in terms of religious education in most of the modern "born again" churches. There is no set requirement for education, no othodoxy. My stepfather's sister was in with this group who would be best described as a cult, complete with faith healers and religious visions. That's fringe even for the baptists, but it's within their church structure, and I find that to be appalling.
As for a strawman, I assume you're referring to my accusation of anti-intellectualism. I would welcome any evidence of a scientific study done by a modern evangelical church, or even public support of a scientific theory.
Did I say all? I think I said, most. And while I was raised Catholic, I'm not one now...Still I have more respect for a priest who has to study for eight years, rather than some joker who doesn't even have to finish high school.
It's all part and parcel with the anti-intellectual stance of the evangelicals; ID is just another example of that. Their attempts to skew or subvert all knowledge that they don't agree with is their least savory trait.
There are countless cases like this. I'd argue that it is wholly irrelevant to an animal wanting to be something different.
I myself have seen a cow that thought he was a dog. Notice, he thought he was a dog. He didn't want to be a dog. He didn't strive to be a dog. He just thought he was a dog. These cases are just imprinting and not a particularly interesting counterexample.
No, I'm really looking for a thing. If we ever manage to nail down the universe, account for all the forces and all the masses, and the only way it works is if you add a meaningless "magic" constant to it, then there is a god. But if it all adds up straight, then there's not.
I'm more into the idea of a first cause, myself. That idea is all the way back to Plato, and it's a thing that we'll likely never be able to understand, because it's the one thing that happens before the beginning.
If you remove my head, I stop functioning. Does that make me irreducibly complex? If you remove a gear from a clock, it stops working, does that make it irreducibly complex?
Answer: No.
For every supposedly "irreducible" thing there is always an exception. Take a part away, and it's not a part of that thing anymore, but it is often quite similar to something else.
ID people are obsessed with stuff just popping out of the ground. Like one day there was a protozoa and then next day, poof it's human. We have things in our cells that are shockingly similar to little things still floating around in the ocean. Is it so impossible to imagine that out of countless little cells floating around, two of them got together in a partnership? Then maybe picked up a third, and passed that beneficial partnership down to their descendants? Like the accretion of a sun or a planet from a cloud of mixed dust, complex life emerges from simple parts.
But where did the first little cell come from? The funny thing is, you can't even ask that question, because as far as you're concerned everything appeared out of whole cloth. Poof. Just because nothing else in the world works that way, who cares?
--You're judged by the majority. What you're asking me to do is judge by the minority, which is the exact thing you're accusing me of doing in the same breath.
--Read the trial transcripts, and try not to let your prejudices overwhelm your judgment, as the conservative christian judge didn't when he ruled against ID.
--Neither are fairies.
--I find the picking and choosing of parts of evolution to be absurd. Either you believe micro and macro, or you're deluding yourself.
--I think you should actually learn something about the fossil record before you call it "incredibly incomplete". We have a vast amount of data about a vast number of species. So far man isn't one of them. Religious types make a big deal out of this.
--Primitive designers aren't exactly intelligent. Calling the bellybutton vestigial is calling the umbilical cord vestigial, and it's not. Find an actual purpose to the spleen, then tell me about how it's useful.
--Finally, you've got no positive evidence. None. Zero. You talk about the fossil record being spotty? At least it exists. What do you have? Not one thing in the world suggests that we were created by aliens (or god) except for the fact that you don't like evolution. As long as that is the whole foundation of your argument, it's worthless. Find an alien bio-lab orbiting the moon, or, you know, god and call me. Until then you're just spouting fantasies.
Long answer: Does the Theory of Gravity require faith? You know what the answer is? It's yes. We have to have faith that the universe is going to stay the way it's been up until now. We don't know if it will...No earthly idea. It probably will. I'd bet it will.
But it might not.
So if the universe changes over night, then yea, everything is out the window. Otherwise, evolution is as solid as gravity.
The amount of evidence in support of evolution is literally incalculable. It has predictive power; micro evolution has been demonstrated over and over again. No one disagrees with micro. The problem with macro is that it generally happens over thousands of years, so it doesn't really lend itself to experiment...We have a massive fossil record of it happening with species after species over the whole history of the planet, but we can't replicate it in the lab at this time.
Some people think that means it's wrong. But we can't make gravity in a lab either.
It's a common misconception to put forth the Theory of Evolution like its of no moment, with only a smattering of evidence. Like one day it will grow up, and move on to the next stage...the Truth of Evolution, or something.
Theory is, in fact, the last step. The Theory of Evolution is about as likely to be disproved as the Theory of Gravity; we understand more about the mechanics of evolution than we do of gravity.
So while neither one can be "proven" because scientific theories are pretty much impossible to "prove" as you mean it, they're both as close to "true" as it is possible for a scientific theory to be.
In what way? Do you think frogs dream of greatness, or that men don't?
Our whole history is one of envy. We envy the tiger its claws, so we learn to make our own out of stone. We envy the deer its speed, so we domesticate the horse. We envy the fish their abilities with the sea, so we invent boats, and then submarines. We envy the birds the sky, so we invent the airplane.
Was all that enough? No. We launch our crazy asses into outer fucking space.
We are not a complacent species. There is never going to be a point where we say, "Enough." Do you know where that's going to lead...I mean, clearly you think you do, but do you know?
Slashdot Mirror
Just one more type of astroturfing. Not sure how much it matters really; paid schills are usually pretty obvious.
If you know someone well enough to recognize their posts out of the crowd, then it's a little obvious when they start posting contrary stuff. And if you're in a forum like Slashdot, you can check a posting history to see if a certain user is a bit too likely to throw in a pro-MS reference in their posting.
So either you're somewhere like Digg, where schilling wouldn't even be noticed against the background spam, or you're somewhere like here where the community would be likely to "out" the schill, and that would do nothing but damage the reputation of the company.
Yea, I hate that as well. Most people are dying to sell out, and when they get the opportunity to do so, they do, and then they get defensive and start rationalizing.
That's what gets me...The rationalizations. If they just said, "Yea, I'm a whore, I need the money," I'd respect that. But when they either claim they're not a whore, or that what they're doing is no different from what everyone else is doing, or that it doesn't hurt anybody, or that's it's completely no big deal...That stuff drives me up the wall.
Do what you like, but don't try and feed me a bullshit sandwich like I'm a fool.
Eh. It's not the evil magazine people moving in to corrupt the pristine blog environment. As soon as money becomes a part of the situation, people will start selling themselves.
When there was no way to profit from blogging, then blogging was pure. As soon as you could get paid for schilling, the schilling began.
What is a bug but an undocumented feature?
It's a series of significant hardware bugs, some of which are exploitable from userland, which may or may not be easily correctable with a bios patch.
That is why it's news. I've been watching this since it broke, and I'm interested in this thread. I doubt I'm the only one.
One of the biggest issues with blogging is that there is no separation between the person who is writing, and the person who is trying to make money. Most other media outlets have separate departments for those things to create a division between content and advertising.
There is always friction between the two, but it is much harder to attempt to be objective when you can sit and rationalize it to yourself. This is not to say that no one has ethics stronger than their profit motive, but it's no surprise to find that the reverse often holds true.
Strawman. Obviously I am out to steal your privacy and deny you encryption, because the ridiculous outrage attendant on some easily removed metadata pisses me off. Grow up. I never even suggested it should be shut down, that's just your read on the situation.
What makes me angry are the people who have the sheer audacity to be pissed off that their DRM-free music has their fricking name on it. Not in it, not watermarked to it, no, just on it. It's the single biggest industry concession in the history of commercial online file distribution, and it's a damn good one, a good faith effort.
The group of people who are most likely to hit this site are people who are probably not acting in good faith...the real hardcore privacy junkies can already do this stuff themselves.
So pardon me if I'm not all giddy that copyright infringing 13 year olds now have a nifty tool at their disposal. It wouldn't take much to reverse this DRM-free music experiment, and I'd really rather not see that happen.
Not even that sexy. I worked out a polyalphabetic I could do in my head, but it's not sufficient to seriously protect against a determined attempt. Whole lot of security through obscurity, and some of the passwords are vulnerable to a partial dictionary attack; those passwords were not my choice, I'm afraid. Most of my passwords would be hard to decrypt just because they look about the same either way.
Blah blah paranoia.
If someone steals my wallet I'll be in for far more bother than that. 5 credit cards, my bank account numbers, my drivers license, my insurance card which conveniently contains my SSN, actual money, my big ass list of systems passwords which are "encrypted" but which an intelligent person could read if they put their mind to it because SOME of the passwords were designed by morons.
Hell, if they start sharing my music, I'd have a better chance of catching the bastard!
But what happens when you "accidentally" dump your whole music folder to a p2p network...Why, someone might sue you, just because you infringed on their copyright! Typical Apple! They hate everyone but big business!
Blah blah blah. This shows you who is really in it because they hate the inconvenience of DRM, and who is just too stupid to figure out how to share music with easily cracked DRM on it.
Oh please. It's non-DRM music in a standard format; that's as consumer friendly as it gets. So you're name's in it, it's not like they're hiding it. It's right out there in the open, and it's easy to remove. If you were buying in good faith, it wouldn't bother you a bit.
This just pisses me off. Who really cares besides people who just want to immediately dump the file straight to a filesharing network? So it's got my name and email embedded in the file? So what? Apparently unlike a lot of people who are interested in this service, I'm not planning on sending the files to anyone, and if I burn someone a mix CD, the info will be stripped when it's converted to CDA anyhow.
So what's the privacy problem? It's like someone stealing my wallet. Hell yea that's a privacy concern! What's the solution? Someone steals my iPod and they'll be able to figure out my name?!? They'll also be able to figure out what my house, wife, car, and kid look like because of the pictures on the damn thing, and don't even get me going about documents I store on the damn thing...They'll also be able to figure out my Slashdot handle, because the damn thing has "Satanic Puppy" engraved on the back.
So do I actually care that my info is in the file header? Hell no! It's my goddamn file, it should have my goddamn name on it! And if I wanted to go breach some copyright, I'd at least have the stones to strip the info myself. How fricking lazy do you have to be?
When I wanted DRM-free music, I wanted it because I fricking hated not being able to listen to my damn music wherever the hell I wanted to without jumping through hoops. I've got that, and that's all I care about. Far as I'm concerned the service is fine (though a bit pricey).
I skimmed it. Looked to me like FL was being hyper-careful, and extremely protective of their IP, and that Sony was happy to be able to make some cash off of it, and bulk up their whole Station Pass thing with another title.
Lot of people here are clearly still massively bitter about SWG. The whole Vanguard/Sigil thing I don't see as a "This is Sony being evil" thing so much as Sony getting fed up with the crap and taking over the bankrupt company. Not like they could have done much worse.
I can almost guarantee my boss read this, and he's been pushing for wireless for a while now. This is an excellent heads up, as far as I'm concerned.
My biggest problem with the wireless he wants isn't even the wireless...I can deal with that. It's the fact that he wants to do the wireless to make up for the deficiencies of the wired network. But of course, he's not paying for the fiber drops we're going to need, so we're going to have massive network bottlenecks. Oy vey. Everyone thinks they can get something for nothing.
Nah. They're not selling their IP, they're just contracting with SOE for distribution and hosting.
Sounds like a good deal for all involved; Flying Labs keeps absolute creative control, and assumes the bulk of the financial risks. SOE makes money on the front end, and skims some off the top for hosting...If it flops, they've got very little stake in it, and if it doesn't they'll get a nice bit of cash, as well as positioning themselves as a friend to the independent MMO developer.
Shrug. So you have an education. I have one too; it's actually quite similar. Computer Science, Philosophy, English. I've read the bible cover to cover more than once. Apparently I am super-qualified to be a priest. Who knew?
Shrug. It is a stereotype, I admit, but it is none-the-less accurate in terms of religious education in most of the modern "born again" churches. There is no set requirement for education, no othodoxy. My stepfather's sister was in with this group who would be best described as a cult, complete with faith healers and religious visions. That's fringe even for the baptists, but it's within their church structure, and I find that to be appalling.
As for a strawman, I assume you're referring to my accusation of anti-intellectualism. I would welcome any evidence of a scientific study done by a modern evangelical church, or even public support of a scientific theory.
Did I say all? I think I said, most. And while I was raised Catholic, I'm not one now...Still I have more respect for a priest who has to study for eight years, rather than some joker who doesn't even have to finish high school.
It's all part and parcel with the anti-intellectual stance of the evangelicals; ID is just another example of that. Their attempts to skew or subvert all knowledge that they don't agree with is their least savory trait.
There are countless cases like this. I'd argue that it is wholly irrelevant to an animal wanting to be something different.
I myself have seen a cow that thought he was a dog. Notice, he thought he was a dog. He didn't want to be a dog. He didn't strive to be a dog. He just thought he was a dog. These cases are just imprinting and not a particularly interesting counterexample.
No, I'm really looking for a thing. If we ever manage to nail down the universe, account for all the forces and all the masses, and the only way it works is if you add a meaningless "magic" constant to it, then there is a god. But if it all adds up straight, then there's not.
I'm more into the idea of a first cause, myself. That idea is all the way back to Plato, and it's a thing that we'll likely never be able to understand, because it's the one thing that happens before the beginning.
If you remove my head, I stop functioning. Does that make me irreducibly complex? If you remove a gear from a clock, it stops working, does that make it irreducibly complex?
Answer: No.
For every supposedly "irreducible" thing there is always an exception. Take a part away, and it's not a part of that thing anymore, but it is often quite similar to something else.
ID people are obsessed with stuff just popping out of the ground. Like one day there was a protozoa and then next day, poof it's human. We have things in our cells that are shockingly similar to little things still floating around in the ocean. Is it so impossible to imagine that out of countless little cells floating around, two of them got together in a partnership? Then maybe picked up a third, and passed that beneficial partnership down to their descendants? Like the accretion of a sun or a planet from a cloud of mixed dust, complex life emerges from simple parts.
But where did the first little cell come from? The funny thing is, you can't even ask that question, because as far as you're concerned everything appeared out of whole cloth. Poof. Just because nothing else in the world works that way, who cares?
Quickly:
--You're judged by the majority. What you're asking me to do is judge by the minority, which is the exact thing you're accusing me of doing in the same breath.
--Read the trial transcripts, and try not to let your prejudices overwhelm your judgment, as the conservative christian judge didn't when he ruled against ID.
--Neither are fairies.
--I find the picking and choosing of parts of evolution to be absurd. Either you believe micro and macro, or you're deluding yourself.
--I think you should actually learn something about the fossil record before you call it "incredibly incomplete". We have a vast amount of data about a vast number of species. So far man isn't one of them. Religious types make a big deal out of this.
--Primitive designers aren't exactly intelligent. Calling the bellybutton vestigial is calling the umbilical cord vestigial, and it's not. Find an actual purpose to the spleen, then tell me about how it's useful.
--Finally, you've got no positive evidence. None. Zero. You talk about the fossil record being spotty? At least it exists. What do you have? Not one thing in the world suggests that we were created by aliens (or god) except for the fact that you don't like evolution. As long as that is the whole foundation of your argument, it's worthless. Find an alien bio-lab orbiting the moon, or, you know, god and call me. Until then you're just spouting fantasies.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Does the Theory of Gravity require faith? You know what the answer is? It's yes. We have to have faith that the universe is going to stay the way it's been up until now. We don't know if it will...No earthly idea. It probably will. I'd bet it will.
But it might not.
So if the universe changes over night, then yea, everything is out the window. Otherwise, evolution is as solid as gravity.
The amount of evidence in support of evolution is literally incalculable. It has predictive power; micro evolution has been demonstrated over and over again. No one disagrees with micro. The problem with macro is that it generally happens over thousands of years, so it doesn't really lend itself to experiment...We have a massive fossil record of it happening with species after species over the whole history of the planet, but we can't replicate it in the lab at this time.
Some people think that means it's wrong. But we can't make gravity in a lab either.
It's a common misconception to put forth the Theory of Evolution like its of no moment, with only a smattering of evidence. Like one day it will grow up, and move on to the next stage...the Truth of Evolution, or something.
Theory is, in fact, the last step. The Theory of Evolution is about as likely to be disproved as the Theory of Gravity; we understand more about the mechanics of evolution than we do of gravity.
So while neither one can be "proven" because scientific theories are pretty much impossible to "prove" as you mean it, they're both as close to "true" as it is possible for a scientific theory to be.
In what way? Do you think frogs dream of greatness, or that men don't?
Our whole history is one of envy. We envy the tiger its claws, so we learn to make our own out of stone. We envy the deer its speed, so we domesticate the horse. We envy the fish their abilities with the sea, so we invent boats, and then submarines. We envy the birds the sky, so we invent the airplane.
Was all that enough? No. We launch our crazy asses into outer fucking space.
We are not a complacent species. There is never going to be a point where we say, "Enough." Do you know where that's going to lead...I mean, clearly you think you do, but do you know?