This woman has a typical American grasp of ethics. "How DARE he try to tell me what to do and when to do it IN MY OWN HOME!" What she fails to grasp is the very nature of ethics and why they're needed.
She indeed should be allowed to do whatever the hell she wants in her own home, AS LONG AS what she does doesn't escape those four walls with a potential to infringe on someone else's "pursuit of happiness". She's broadcasting EM radiation that indeed is escaping those walls. WHAT IF the guy actually has the sensitivity he claims in this case? WHAT IF instead his complaint was that her signals were interfering with some DEVICE of his IN HIS OWN HOME? Alternatively, what if this was about a loud stereo? It "sounds" as if she might have displayed a typical knee-jerk anti-ethical reaction. I know that reaction all too well.
When we live and interact the way we do, no one actually has the complete freedom of action that they (Americans?) think they do, and have been ritually brainwashed to believe they should. Ethics exist precisely to govern and moderate human INTERACTIONS; if we all lived on our own private islands and had no contact, then ethics would be moot. How many of us live that way? The more densely humans live and the more they interact, the greater the ethical framework needed to govern that. It's only gonna get worse for most of us. For a few, who get to buy those private islands or those 40 acres out in the country, they indeed do get to do almost anything they want.
The rest of us SHOULD be considering the effects of our actions on others and whether those effects can be mitigated, every minute of the day. I turn the car stereo down at stoplights, take 3 or 4 carts into stores from the parking lot, walk softly like a ballerina on the second floor of my row house, and don't slam anything. If there's a chance my behavior might diminish someone else's happiness, then I change or stop the behavior if the cost isn't too great. Isn't this what a certain authors have called "enlightened self interest"? It's neither impossible nor impractical; it just requires less brainwashing and indoctrination to the contrary.
It should have gone without saying that I meant "the perfect game within a particular narrow genre", like 4X games for instance. There would be more than one perfect game in total, if such things actually existed. Endless replayability with well randomized maps/scenarios would be one of the most important criteria for the perfect game.
Yeah, in my own mind I inserted that extra word in the title, and I was disappointed that it wasn't about that at all. I'd like to see an article about that, describing how the "perfect" game would be an economic Bad Idea, and including interviews with game developers who finally admit that they deliberately repeat old shortcomings and mistakes and stop short of perfection, knowing that the perfect game would completely destroy the market for next year's game. I can think of one or two that actually tried to damn the torpedoes and thwart this dynamic, but ultimately they got shut down by the suits holding the purse strings.
I always thought cliches like "absolute power corrupts" included this concept well enough, but I must disclaim that I'm not an academic with a department to promote who feels in danger of perishing unless he publishes....
I happen to be altruistic enough to think that an entire economy could be based on open source, but only if *everyone* pays it forward. It would be like an open-ended barter system where everyone gives what they're best at, with the understanding that they'll receive in return later (or earlier) some of the things they're not themselves good at. A system of unilateral rather than mutual transactions, in other words. Of course it won't work if there's even one greedy rooster in the henhouse, so for now we can only dream.
In the meantime I don't see anything terribly wrong with a company that open-sources its older work but keeps its ongoing work proprietary; it suggests a desire to be as altruistic as I described, but tempered with a knowledge of the human economic reality. Open-sourcing old work in that way is in keeping with the stated intent of the copyright system to benefit the Common Good, balancing the interests of the creator with those of the society that fostered the creativity.
Hopefully Nexuiz proves to be something like that.
This demonstrates an abuse of open source philosophy. It's an example of deliberately starting an open source project with no intention of keeping it open source: the intention is to milk the unpaid participation of others until the project reaches a certain critical mass - profitability - and then cordon it off. So here we have an open source project that isn't really, to go hand in hand with a "green revolution" that isn't really (because it's all just marketing)?
The FS operations simply need to happen at a slowed pace that favors the user at all times; why should that cause loss of data integrity? A file system that demands a minimum effective data rate below which bits are lost or corrupted?! That would certainly be a poorly designed file system or interface to it, wouldn't it? No wonder we need redundant (R)AID and backup solutions!
I'm not a stranger to virtualization and the like. I was just observing yet another "old" thing that has one again become new in a different set of clothes.
What's wrong with at least some operating systems doesn't even have anything to do with multiple cores per se. They're simply designing the OS and its UI incorrectly, assigning the wrong priorities to events. No event should EVER supersede the ability of a user to interact and intercede with the operating system (and applications). Nothing should EVER happen to prevent a user being able to move the mouse, access the start menu, etc., yet this still happens in both Windows and Linux distributions. That's a fucked-up set of priorities, when the user sitting in front of the damned box - who probably paid for it - gets second billing when it comes to CPU cycles.
It doesn't matter if there's one CPU core or a hundred. It's the fundamental design priorities that are screwed up. Hell should freeze over before a user is denied the ability to interact, intercede, or override, regardless how many cores are present. Apparently hell has already frozen over and I just didn't get the memo?
I think the better question to ask (to rephrase my point in my parent comment) is: what isn't insidious these days? We're drowning in insidiousness, but like the proverbial frog in the pot many people don't even realize it. There aren't enough Ralph Naders in the world calling attention to it. Hell, even Ralph Nader isn't Ralph Nader any more.
Who's going to listen? I could tell you about the scam that Church & Dwight perpetrated on consumers when it quietly decided to abandon the decades-old standard* for diameter of toothpaste tube mouth and cap, for no other reason than to maneuver people into using more toothpaste, but you would you even listen? Would you actually make different decisions based on that revelation? Would you rebel and make your own toothpaste? No? I didn't think so. Are average consumers, even after hearing/reading this, really going to change their behavior and choose not to consume these 3D movies?
There are SO MANY such corporate "scams" that they're actually the rule, not the exception. When it comes to imagining ways to divest people of money, corporations have NO ethics at all short of that codified as "law". That Libertarian "no force, no fraud" refrain is a joke. The corporate world IS ALL ABOUT FRAUD. Even a diligent consumer like me has a hard time keeping track of all of them; what of less educated or dedicated consumers?
* (It was such a de facto standard that third parties could make products like a "backpacker's toothbrush" that included a miniature tube that could be refilled by threading a regular toothpaste tube onto it. Imagine my surprise to discover that my latest tube of Aim Toothpaste no longer fit the opening of my backpacker toothbrush that I bought at REI in the 80s. Toothpaste and toothbrushes have become a ridiculously manipulative market in the last few decades. They even went so far as to add extra static brush surface to some of the oscillating brushes - Crest, I'm looking at YOU - in the hope that people would mindlessly cover all of it with toothpaste, thus using more than actually necessary. Isn't it ironic that corporations are going "green" even while still encouraging waste and premature obsolescence?)
If you look at the region with more than a passing "gee, neat" glance, you will notice that a stream winds its way around what should be the highest apparent point, the rim. Since when do rivers or creeks follow the rims of craters?
It would be far better to use Google Earth to view it, which should provide elevation data for points under the mouse, unlike Google Maps. I'd also like to see it in NASA's World Wind, which allows viewing the same region with imagery from multiple different (satellite) sources and might provide extra insight. I suspect this will prove to be some sort of plateau or mesa that just happens to have a rather familiar geometric shape, rather than an ancient impact crater.
Right, because parents have NEVER been known to recklessly endanger or deliberately kill their own children?
After reading TFA, I have the same suspicions that Eldavojohn does; I won't be surprised if one or both parents conspired to rid themselves of a child they perceived as damaged or otherwise a burden they didn't want to bear. At the very least this guy was a freaking whackjob who went out of his way to obtain a game controller that was a much more lifelike replica of a real weapon than any game controller needs to be... so lifelike in fact that the child's own mother sitting three feet away couldn't tell the real thing from the controller. Also, the man was the child's stepfather: in the wild kingdom males are known to kill their female's offspring not sired by themselves, in order to increase the dominance of their own seed. Some humans truly are still that animalistic.
At the very least this incident is the parental version of a Darwin Award, and at worst a despicable premeditated act, or conspiracy.
You keep thinking I'm some flawed hypocrite if you want. I don't drink beer; I can't stand the taste and the alcoholic buzz is unpleasant. I don't squander my fifty dollars on some other frivolous B.S., because I don't have it to squander. I don't own a cellphone because I don't have the $30+ a month. Squandering $120 or more in a year on a game is out of the question.
Enjoy your luxury, but don't you dare call me a hypocrite because you assume I must be like you.
I've never played an MMO, and don't intend to start. I prefer to spend once for my entertainment, especially games, and even then most don't have replayability to justify $50 price tags so I wait a couple years until they hit the bargain bins.
I don't "want" this; I'm perfectly happy removing the undesirable ads (and content) myself. It should be THEY who want it, not me. I would happily go along with such a system and use it, if they bothered to provide it. Which they don't, and won't, because the motivations are exactly as I described.
I don't know what other people do, but I tune my ad-blocking solutions for each site, using pattern matching and turning their own standardized HTML and CSS against them where needed. I sometimes use the same pattern matching to remove other page elements that simply aren't relevant to me.
My ability to remove the offensive and distracting ads and the irrelevant content actually works in favor of the sites I so modify, because it makes it more likely I will choose to visit repeatedly.
Why do this? In large part because there's no effective means to give feedback to each site about which ads or ad spaces are offensive and which ones aren't. Many sites now have systems in place for rating the actual content, but how many offer a system to "mod" the delivered advertising? NONE. Not a single one. Not even Slashdot nor ARS Technica. If the site operators knew statistically which ads were doing more harm than good, they in turn could tune their ad delivery to reduce the offensiveness. Apparently it's never occurred to anyone but ME to implement such a system?! Why? Is is because I'm that much of a genius? No. It's because they just don't give a flying fuck if the ads are offensive to their visitors or not. So instead of implementing a feedback system for the advertising, they implement "enforcement" schemes to thwart ad-blocking and try to make the ads even more attention-getting.
When you find a site that actually cares enough what its visitors think of its advertising to implement a feedback system for it, get back to me and we can have a more substantive discussion about the ethics of ad blocking.
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This woman has a typical American grasp of ethics. "How DARE he try to tell me what to do and when to do it IN MY OWN HOME!" What she fails to grasp is the very nature of ethics and why they're needed.
She indeed should be allowed to do whatever the hell she wants in her own home, AS LONG AS what she does doesn't escape those four walls with a potential to infringe on someone else's "pursuit of happiness". She's broadcasting EM radiation that indeed is escaping those walls. WHAT IF the guy actually has the sensitivity he claims in this case? WHAT IF instead his complaint was that her signals were interfering with some DEVICE of his IN HIS OWN HOME? Alternatively, what if this was about a loud stereo? It "sounds" as if she might have displayed a typical knee-jerk anti-ethical reaction. I know that reaction all too well.
When we live and interact the way we do, no one actually has the complete freedom of action that they (Americans?) think they do, and have been ritually brainwashed to believe they should. Ethics exist precisely to govern and moderate human INTERACTIONS; if we all lived on our own private islands and had no contact, then ethics would be moot. How many of us live that way? The more densely humans live and the more they interact, the greater the ethical framework needed to govern that. It's only gonna get worse for most of us. For a few, who get to buy those private islands or those 40 acres out in the country, they indeed do get to do almost anything they want.
The rest of us SHOULD be considering the effects of our actions on others and whether those effects can be mitigated, every minute of the day. I turn the car stereo down at stoplights, take 3 or 4 carts into stores from the parking lot, walk softly like a ballerina on the second floor of my row house, and don't slam anything. If there's a chance my behavior might diminish someone else's happiness, then I change or stop the behavior if the cost isn't too great. Isn't this what a certain authors have called "enlightened self interest"? It's neither impossible nor impractical; it just requires less brainwashing and indoctrination to the contrary.
I'm sorry, no. Dorks just aren't that suckable, not even if I can has cheezeburger.
It should have gone without saying that I meant "the perfect game within a particular narrow genre", like 4X games for instance. There would be more than one perfect game in total, if such things actually existed. Endless replayability with well randomized maps/scenarios would be one of the most important criteria for the perfect game.
Yeah, in my own mind I inserted that extra word in the title, and I was disappointed that it wasn't about that at all. I'd like to see an article about that, describing how the "perfect" game would be an economic Bad Idea, and including interviews with game developers who finally admit that they deliberately repeat old shortcomings and mistakes and stop short of perfection, knowing that the perfect game would completely destroy the market for next year's game. I can think of one or two that actually tried to damn the torpedoes and thwart this dynamic, but ultimately they got shut down by the suits holding the purse strings.
I always thought cliches like "absolute power corrupts" included this concept well enough, but I must disclaim that I'm not an academic with a department to promote who feels in danger of perishing unless he publishes....
I happen to be altruistic enough to think that an entire economy could be based on open source, but only if *everyone* pays it forward. It would be like an open-ended barter system where everyone gives what they're best at, with the understanding that they'll receive in return later (or earlier) some of the things they're not themselves good at. A system of unilateral rather than mutual transactions, in other words. Of course it won't work if there's even one greedy rooster in the henhouse, so for now we can only dream.
In the meantime I don't see anything terribly wrong with a company that open-sources its older work but keeps its ongoing work proprietary; it suggests a desire to be as altruistic as I described, but tempered with a knowledge of the human economic reality. Open-sourcing old work in that way is in keeping with the stated intent of the copyright system to benefit the Common Good, balancing the interests of the creator with those of the society that fostered the creativity.
Hopefully Nexuiz proves to be something like that.
It might be less evil if the founders intended to SHARE the profits with all the contributors, but Hell's not cold enough for that yet, is it?
This demonstrates an abuse of open source philosophy. It's an example of deliberately starting an open source project with no intention of keeping it open source: the intention is to milk the unpaid participation of others until the project reaches a certain critical mass - profitability - and then cordon it off. So here we have an open source project that isn't really, to go hand in hand with a "green revolution" that isn't really (because it's all just marketing)?
The FS operations simply need to happen at a slowed pace that favors the user at all times; why should that cause loss of data integrity? A file system that demands a minimum effective data rate below which bits are lost or corrupted?! That would certainly be a poorly designed file system or interface to it, wouldn't it? No wonder we need redundant (R)AID and backup solutions!
I'm not a stranger to virtualization and the like. I was just observing yet another "old" thing that has one again become new in a different set of clothes.
So now my personal microcomputer is becoming a time-shared minicomputer again...? Should I dig out my corduroy bell-bottom pants, too?
What's wrong with at least some operating systems doesn't even have anything to do with multiple cores per se. They're simply designing the OS and its UI incorrectly, assigning the wrong priorities to events. No event should EVER supersede the ability of a user to interact and intercede with the operating system (and applications). Nothing should EVER happen to prevent a user being able to move the mouse, access the start menu, etc., yet this still happens in both Windows and Linux distributions. That's a fucked-up set of priorities, when the user sitting in front of the damned box - who probably paid for it - gets second billing when it comes to CPU cycles.
It doesn't matter if there's one CPU core or a hundred. It's the fundamental design priorities that are screwed up. Hell should freeze over before a user is denied the ability to interact, intercede, or override, regardless how many cores are present. Apparently hell has already frozen over and I just didn't get the memo?
I think the better question to ask (to rephrase my point in my parent comment) is: what isn't insidious these days? We're drowning in insidiousness, but like the proverbial frog in the pot many people don't even realize it. There aren't enough Ralph Naders in the world calling attention to it. Hell, even Ralph Nader isn't Ralph Nader any more.
Who's going to listen? I could tell you about the scam that Church & Dwight perpetrated on consumers when it quietly decided to abandon the decades-old standard* for diameter of toothpaste tube mouth and cap, for no other reason than to maneuver people into using more toothpaste, but you would you even listen? Would you actually make different decisions based on that revelation? Would you rebel and make your own toothpaste? No? I didn't think so. Are average consumers, even after hearing/reading this, really going to change their behavior and choose not to consume these 3D movies?
There are SO MANY such corporate "scams" that they're actually the rule, not the exception. When it comes to imagining ways to divest people of money, corporations have NO ethics at all short of that codified as "law". That Libertarian "no force, no fraud" refrain is a joke. The corporate world IS ALL ABOUT FRAUD. Even a diligent consumer like me has a hard time keeping track of all of them; what of less educated or dedicated consumers?
* (It was such a de facto standard that third parties could make products like a "backpacker's toothbrush" that included a miniature tube that could be refilled by threading a regular toothpaste tube onto it. Imagine my surprise to discover that my latest tube of Aim Toothpaste no longer fit the opening of my backpacker toothbrush that I bought at REI in the 80s. Toothpaste and toothbrushes have become a ridiculously manipulative market in the last few decades. They even went so far as to add extra static brush surface to some of the oscillating brushes - Crest, I'm looking at YOU - in the hope that people would mindlessly cover all of it with toothpaste, thus using more than actually necessary. Isn't it ironic that corporations are going "green" even while still encouraging waste and premature obsolescence?)
As if character count is the real worry with how Big Pharma markets their wares? Talk about misdirection and misframing....
If you look at the region with more than a passing "gee, neat" glance, you will notice that a stream winds its way around what should be the highest apparent point, the rim. Since when do rivers or creeks follow the rims of craters?
It would be far better to use Google Earth to view it, which should provide elevation data for points under the mouse, unlike Google Maps. I'd also like to see it in NASA's World Wind, which allows viewing the same region with imagery from multiple different (satellite) sources and might provide extra insight. I suspect this will prove to be some sort of plateau or mesa that just happens to have a rather familiar geometric shape, rather than an ancient impact crater.
Right, because parents have NEVER been known to recklessly endanger or deliberately kill their own children?
After reading TFA, I have the same suspicions that Eldavojohn does; I won't be surprised if one or both parents conspired to rid themselves of a child they perceived as damaged or otherwise a burden they didn't want to bear. At the very least this guy was a freaking whackjob who went out of his way to obtain a game controller that was a much more lifelike replica of a real weapon than any game controller needs to be... so lifelike in fact that the child's own mother sitting three feet away couldn't tell the real thing from the controller. Also, the man was the child's stepfather: in the wild kingdom males are known to kill their female's offspring not sired by themselves, in order to increase the dominance of their own seed. Some humans truly are still that animalistic.
At the very least this incident is the parental version of a Darwin Award, and at worst a despicable premeditated act, or conspiracy.
You keep thinking I'm some flawed hypocrite if you want. I don't drink beer; I can't stand the taste and the alcoholic buzz is unpleasant. I don't squander my fifty dollars on some other frivolous B.S., because I don't have it to squander. I don't own a cellphone because I don't have the $30+ a month. Squandering $120 or more in a year on a game is out of the question.
Enjoy your luxury, but don't you dare call me a hypocrite because you assume I must be like you.
I've never played an MMO, and don't intend to start. I prefer to spend once for my entertainment, especially games, and even then most don't have replayability to justify $50 price tags so I wait a couple years until they hit the bargain bins.
That's not a 'jetpack'... it's a VTOL without the jet. And just as noisy... it's a boom box car that breaks wind.
YouTube, then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kyoYL6uJD8
Are you gonna cum all over yourself when you learn that she was a stripper and wrote a book about it?
She was a stripper, is there anything else I need to know? I probably won't hear anything else after the word stripper, anyway....
I'll be here all night.
I don't "want" this; I'm perfectly happy removing the undesirable ads (and content) myself. It should be THEY who want it, not me. I would happily go along with such a system and use it, if they bothered to provide it. Which they don't, and won't, because the motivations are exactly as I described.
I don't know what other people do, but I tune my ad-blocking solutions for each site, using pattern matching and turning their own standardized HTML and CSS against them where needed. I sometimes use the same pattern matching to remove other page elements that simply aren't relevant to me.
My ability to remove the offensive and distracting ads and the irrelevant content actually works in favor of the sites I so modify, because it makes it more likely I will choose to visit repeatedly.
Why do this? In large part because there's no effective means to give feedback to each site about which ads or ad spaces are offensive and which ones aren't. Many sites now have systems in place for rating the actual content, but how many offer a system to "mod" the delivered advertising? NONE. Not a single one. Not even Slashdot nor ARS Technica. If the site operators knew statistically which ads were doing more harm than good, they in turn could tune their ad delivery to reduce the offensiveness. Apparently it's never occurred to anyone but ME to implement such a system?! Why? Is is because I'm that much of a genius? No. It's because they just don't give a flying fuck if the ads are offensive to their visitors or not. So instead of implementing a feedback system for the advertising, they implement "enforcement" schemes to thwart ad-blocking and try to make the ads even more attention-getting.
When you find a site that actually cares enough what its visitors think of its advertising to implement a feedback system for it, get back to me and we can have a more substantive discussion about the ethics of ad blocking.