"but when peaceful means fail and tyranny rears its ugly head, then blood must be spilled."
That sort of depends on who decides on the true meaning of the word 'tyranny', and to what extent you're willing to try 'peaceful means'.
Personally I've always believed that there is no point where you can justify the murder of another human being on such wishy-washy subjective justifications, which is one of the reasons why governments tend not to place overall control in the hands of one individual.
"Because I believe there may come a time where I need to defend my ideals with violence."
And this is different to white supremicists, how? Because you're in the majority?
"In no religious or political tradition is the forceful opposition of tyranny considered a sin or a crime."
Yeah, governments don't like to bite the sociological hand that feeds considering that most have come from armed uprising in the first place, but you're wrong in terms of the Roman Catholic church mandating excommunication in the case of resistence to papal bulls. Nice rhetoric, though.
"The liberals who founded America did so by violently opposing British tyranny"
*cough* Native Americans *cough*
I also have a problem with this depiction of 'British Tyranny' which does appear to be the revisionist line of history, particularly as it would have never become what it did without the help of our ancestral enemies, the French.
"empathy towards who?"
Empathy is not conditional and represents the ability to empathise or put yourself in the place of other people.
"I, like Christ Jesus, will agitate for a change in this situation until my dying day."
You should read the bible without the bits by Paul. Paul was the agitator (and a Roman citizen), whereas Jesus was more interested in people themselves. Incidentally, it's why Jesus' brother, James, was written out of the new testament. He was more a follower of the path of poverty while Paul was working on his Roman franchise. The parables were basically stories intended to make the world a better place by taking on the stories, so don't agitate, just help.
"I hope it does not come to that, but if it will, I will not run from it."
That's a fairly grandiose statement that doesn't have any basis in fact. For a start, you have a militant bearing which indicates that you have a viewpoint of the world 'as it should be', an idealism I share, but I'd never try to achieve it through the spilling of blood, because at the point where you start killing, you've lost any shred of humanity that gives you the ability to empathise.
Incidentally, it's a damn site more brave to stand up for ideals unarmed. Most people forget this.
"Whatever the administration[1] does is wrong. If there is another attack, whatever they were doing wasn't enough. If there isn't another attack, whatever they were doing was too harsh."
That's the nature of having a species made up of lots of separate bits, therefore 100% public opinion is difficult to get.
Great observation, though. Right on the button. I can see you thought that through, and the astounding thing is that a couple other people thought that it would be interesting.
Personally, having lived through the most interesting decades in the UK, I've never blamed the government for terrorist attacks, because at the same time as breathing through my nose, I understand that my government isn't responsible for knowing everything, and that demanding that they place themselves in a position that they know everything gives them an excuse to create overbroad laws.
That some people want their bottoms wiping by government isn't a problem with government, it's a problem of people who can't take responsibility for themselves.
Actually, I own a gun for one reason. To overthrow the goverment. That is my right as allowed by the constitution. There is no other reason for owning a gun.
I believe it was 'arms' and it was to protect against 'tyranny'. Mention that you have it for overthrowing government in the wrong circles and the nice men from the treasury department might pop 'round for a word. On a lighter note, the US appears to be a terrible shot if you keep missing the government every year.
The funny thing is I actually really like the US Government structure, it's just that I think the founding fathers considered a united front, rather than people testing out bulletproof vests...
Anyway, I apologise for being a horrendous prick the first time around. Bad day.
Your rant on gun violence was sadly misplaced here.
Yeah, I know. I blame a bad day. Ever get those?
He just used guns as an example, being the most obvious form of violence and killing.
Glad you put 'and killing', as most tend to suggest that guns aren't violent, people are.;)
OTOH, the USA is seen externally on a par with the Middle Eastern nations that accessorise AK47s for weddings amongst nations that don't have legal gun ownership...the kicker is that you have a moral majority in the US that thinks games are bad, but a full auto submachine gun is a constitutionally protected right. Think upon it.
"They often have a disk in the air within 20-30 minutes of a failure, worldwide."
That is good, but I'm vicariously curious as to why you don't have spares...is it because of variable products used?
"I like it because the infrastructure is there to get things handled extremely quickly."
That's fair enough. I've tended to move more towards reliability and support than cheapness myself in most fields. I think experience teaches that after a while.
"I don't agree with them keeping hush-hush about this vuln though, they should totally have a blurb up on their front page."
That's what worries me. There's far too much incentive these days to *not* upset the stock price by announcing fu**ups, mistakes or just plain bad luck which echoes government practice in terms of keeping things quiet until the only alternative is to announce things. But then I've always had a problem regulating economy with a couple of enormous positive feedback loops.
You're right, of course, I was banging out verbage way too fast this morning. I blame the sugar.
"Theres no such thing as the 14 day cooling off period if the goods were purchased in the shop."
Doesn't the purchase count as a contract of sale, because cooling off is one of the things enshrined less formally by returning items to the shop?
"There is no such thing as a statutory warranty period"
I was under the impression that this was the statutory period as stated in the sale of goods act...okay, I checked, and I was more wrong than you were;
http://www.dti.gov.uk/ccp/topics1/facts/salegoodsa ct.htm
This is in part because I was relying on the 1964 Sale of Goods act which included implied warranties rather than 1979 which didn't.
"Why? Because they feel entitled to the games they play and continue to steal them as opposed to paying for them."
There's always going to be an element that do these things, as there's always going to be corrupt politicians, cops, smackhead lawyers and other people with a lot more power to do harm other than download a game. Given some of the more ludicrous things that are going on (such as Electronic Arts monopolising, or the astounding mismanagement of Interplay), there is the temptation for people to blame the guys that can't answer back.
Just to raise an interesting point. If I buy a game, then they reduce the price of the game, is the publisher stealing from me, telling me that their product is not worth as much or simply selling it cheaper to get more people to buy it? If you're going to use a word like 'stealing', you're going to have to pick your way through semantics.
"All this talk about personal convenience and mythical lost sales is just behavior that enables and encourages the software thieves to keep up their game."
That's right, and if they stopped talking about the mythical sales losses, and reduced the overall price to something more reasonable than the cost of 3 DVDs, they may sell a lot more. There are some incredibly good independent producers springing up in the wake of the monolithic companies going under.
"good guy than the bad guys."
You didn't explain the sides there. The thing is that it's wrong to think about sides in such a...naive...manner, simply because it's easy to hate on a company, and I'd really challenge you to state that you'd not hated on a company. What is happening is the single person is being rapidly marginalised into the position of consumer, with the old adage of 'voting with your feet' being turned around into a situation where companies don't really care about people not using their services...later they'll get munged when they find objections and content floating around, but they don't have to change their attitudes because the cash is rolling in. In fact, although people have pointed out that McDonalds food is bad for you (including the salads), only the film 'Supersize me' has prompted a UK media blitz by the multinational before the film opens.
The thing is that in a environ where ethics are something other people do, can you really be surprised when a generation grows up in ethical and moral grey areas?
"people who have money and don't have time to be jerked around with nonsense."
High five, low five, catch it on the rebound.
This is one of the first times that someone 'in the industry' has hit the nail on the head with regards to my personal experience of gaming; it's not that I'm short of the cash, I just really don't want to prop up a copy protection industry that has slimed into place based on the fact that piracy is happening, but the protestations have hit fever pitch because they can be tracked. It's like the figures that get promoted that X activity costs X dollars per year in lost revenues. Figures like that are fictional guesstimates that are intended to cause round-eyed disbelief in people that don't normally deal with _really big numbers_, especially connected with the idea that a downloaded game is a lost sale. It's horribly arrogant to assume that downloaded copy will survive a quick review or that the person downloading it would have bought the game if the download wasn't possible.
It's the PR spin that annoys me the most, both from the perspective of holding demos until after the release rush (early adopters get raped every which way, and it's mostly a peer issue), releasing buggy software to match a given release date, or buying advertising space and calling it 'reviews'.
It's gratifying to see someone _actually_ mention these things in relation to their own business, and while I have little use for the object desktop, the sheer display of Mr Wardell's ethics is enough for me to consider supporting his company.
"However for global organizations with multiple high-bandwidth links between branches, for example, for whom downtime costs many thousands of dollars per hour, there aren't very many options. It's a good thing that what options there are are very solid."
While I agree with almost all of your points...Dude, CISCO have a vulnerability to malformed packets and they appear to be staying quiet about it. How solid are you trying to tell people is solid? Have you ever tried to get Cisco out to swap out a router? Don't you know about the word 'redundancy'? Don't you even consider that this faith in a company with an 800 number is....umm....naive?
A sane expression of the protection of ideas rather than the current system.
"enemy such as Microsoft."
Jesus. Slashdot can be so damned blinkered at times it's daft. Is your hatred of a corporate entity down to their business, their ubiquity or simply their alignment against der widdle penguin?
"UK at least, almost ALL non-perishable goods can be returned"
If the goods are unfit for the purpose for which they were bought, you can return them for a full refund within fourteen days ('cooling off'), which also applies to most contracts signed for goods. There is a statutory warranty period of twelve months (from date of purchase) that covers faulty or low quality merchandise and is not gotten around by disclaimers. Which is fun.
"nice but unknown one is anything you buy on the internet can be returned within 30 days ("cooling off period") for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER."
Fourteen days. It's one of the reasons there was hooha over the fact that the cooling off period is sometimes shorter than the delivery time, but it's taken from the time you take posession of the goods. Trouble is that getting the OFT to take action is difficult because the guys are snowed under with all kinds of claims.
"good luck getting a review that hasn't been bought, if not with money then "exclusive access" deals."
True enough, and nobody has pointed to the falling magazine revenue figures as a measure of piracy when it's down to that most sociological of reasons in that they're fairly direct and often inaccurate advertising rags.
"I've been hearing that since my Amiga gaming days,"
I've been hearing it since my ZX Spectrum days, so that means ooohhhh twenty-four years?
I wonder whether they pass this on in a gilt envelope marked with 'the piracy excuse'.
One thing that I have noticed is that the PC Games Market is shrinking with relation to the console market. Do you think anyone's realised that you have a finite number of games that can be sold, and people rarely buy for more then one platform?
I was actually using a McAfee thing that got ditched faster than a cardigan on a beach. The other implication was that my system, which claimed to have all the hotfixes to date, was vulnerable. I believe I spit feathers on Slashdot at the time, but I've heard of other patches being 'applied' without being 'applied'.
According to the Internet Storm Center, I was gratified to have been in the first six hours of the propogation.
You live and learn, especially with computers, which is one of the reasons that the calls for 'courses' in computers before you own them is so funny.
Oh, don't bother about that with me. Personally I think some things should be censored, or at least have large warning stickers suggesting that the contents of a given book are 'garbage'. I'm a lot less libertarian in my old age because my optimistic youth has given rise to the current state of affairs.
" How hard would that be to code, really?"
It's more about the game balance itself, although I'll agree that there is a market out there for non-'Director' games without a violent bent, but how much of a market?
Well, I can't really speak for anyone else, but between you and me I suspect that the number of 'IT Professionals' on here has been sinking rapidly. As for bashing Microsoft, it's something I do on as frequent a basis as bigging them up for the things they do right, which isn't much. That's a personal viewpoint, as I'm not connected to the hive mind right now.
"No, I just had access to the beta trial (as did thousands of people - it's not exactly prestigious), so I was running it before the fabled 2600 release"
Fair enough. I personally don't touch Betas because, being an IT Professional, I have to have a fairly stable platform to actually work on.
In your opinion which was the flamebaity bit?
Recovering from Spyware - The easy method
on
The Spyware Inferno
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"You can get a system that is so hosed that it will not boot, not even into safe mode, even under XP."
For crying out loud; Boot from the CD, go through the motions of installing Windows XP, choose 'repair this installation'.
You can now recycle the extra verbage for other things.
"the constant need to fight monsters both teaches bad lessons, and detracts from the enjoyment of the game."
What lessons are those? That mythical monsters need hitting?
Your daughter is a lot smarter than you think, and you should check out the value system being promoted in advertising and media before coming down hard on games. After all, I'm willing to bet that you found the sight of a cat being viciously pummelled by a mouse amusing the first time around? I know I did.
"If I can't shoot virtual people when I get home, I'm going to have to shoot real ones."
Thank Christ for gun ownership. If you didn't have the gun, you'd have to go and talk at them or something.
"what makes them think video games are more harmful then say movies or even the public education system?"
Substitute 'a gun' for 'movies' or 'public education system' and you might have a clue. American culture is about diverting attention away from a raging fetishism for a power symbol while quietly burying people and defending a method of projecting a steel-jacketed lead slug into someone's body. All the talk about 'defence' is a fairly obtuse way of removing the responsibility for extending a situation where a five day waiting time is considered bad for owning a device that only has one purpose. Two if you count opening bottles at a distance.
And yes, I'm expecting the 'flamebait' mod, but to be really honest I'm getting bored with the debate around it, or the whinging that you have to have a gun to protect your home. Personally I go for strong locks.
Sorry you got caught with that one. Interesting day so far.
"At least for me, there were virtually no attacks when I used that 56k-modem. And that is only a few months ago."
Dialups tend to use a single gateway machine, whereas broadband is a range of IP addresses with a fairly low latency. There's also the purpose of the hack; the majority of recent worms have been leveraging parasitic services...zombies for spam or DDoS, storage or more spreading. Dialup is a bit terrible for spewing marketing emails and is a darned sight more noticeable.
" Ive personally seen XP machines get infected with Blaster, Sasser, etc, during the install of Windows."
Your use of the plural tends to indicate that at no time did you volunteer the information that airgapping the NIC would be a 'good thing(tm)'. You going to shout up next time?
Slashdot Mirror
"but when peaceful means fail and tyranny rears its ugly head, then blood must be spilled."
That sort of depends on who decides on the true meaning of the word 'tyranny', and to what extent you're willing to try 'peaceful means'.
Personally I've always believed that there is no point where you can justify the murder of another human being on such wishy-washy subjective justifications, which is one of the reasons why governments tend not to place overall control in the hands of one individual.
"Because I believe there may come a time where I need to defend my ideals with violence."
And this is different to white supremicists, how? Because you're in the majority?
"In no religious or political tradition is the forceful opposition of tyranny considered a sin or a crime."
Yeah, governments don't like to bite the sociological hand that feeds considering that most have come from armed uprising in the first place, but you're wrong in terms of the Roman Catholic church mandating excommunication in the case of resistence to papal bulls. Nice rhetoric, though.
"The liberals who founded America did so by violently opposing British tyranny"
*cough* Native Americans *cough*
I also have a problem with this depiction of 'British Tyranny' which does appear to be the revisionist line of history, particularly as it would have never become what it did without the help of our ancestral enemies, the French.
"empathy towards who?"
Empathy is not conditional and represents the ability to empathise or put yourself in the place of other people.
"I, like Christ Jesus, will agitate for a change in this situation until my dying day."
You should read the bible without the bits by Paul. Paul was the agitator (and a Roman citizen), whereas Jesus was more interested in people themselves. Incidentally, it's why Jesus' brother, James, was written out of the new testament. He was more a follower of the path of poverty while Paul was working on his Roman franchise. The parables were basically stories intended to make the world a better place by taking on the stories, so don't agitate, just help.
"I hope it does not come to that, but if it will, I will not run from it."
That's a fairly grandiose statement that doesn't have any basis in fact. For a start, you have a militant bearing which indicates that you have a viewpoint of the world 'as it should be', an idealism I share, but I'd never try to achieve it through the spilling of blood, because at the point where you start killing, you've lost any shred of humanity that gives you the ability to empathise.
Incidentally, it's a damn site more brave to stand up for ideals unarmed. Most people forget this.
"Damn I remember when people were fat, drunk, gay, disruptive and Communist of their own volition."
So, a decade ago?
"Now everything is a malady, issue and disease."
Which is a hell of a cycle when you consider that 'fat, drunk and gay' only just slid out of the DSM for personality disorders.
On the other hand, there is a fashion for victimhood that pisses me off. What happened to simply getting on with things?
"Whatever the administration[1] does is wrong. If there is another attack, whatever they were doing wasn't enough. If there isn't another attack, whatever they were doing was too harsh."
That's the nature of having a species made up of lots of separate bits, therefore 100% public opinion is difficult to get.
Great observation, though. Right on the button. I can see you thought that through, and the astounding thing is that a couple other people thought that it would be interesting.
Personally, having lived through the most interesting decades in the UK, I've never blamed the government for terrorist attacks, because at the same time as breathing through my nose, I understand that my government isn't responsible for knowing everything, and that demanding that they place themselves in a position that they know everything gives them an excuse to create overbroad laws.
That some people want their bottoms wiping by government isn't a problem with government, it's a problem of people who can't take responsibility for themselves.
"I only want to slightly wound them."
I'm with you there, except I'd rather use a fork.
Actually, I own a gun for one reason. To overthrow the goverment. That is my right as allowed by the constitution. There is no other reason for owning a gun.
I believe it was 'arms' and it was to protect against 'tyranny'. Mention that you have it for overthrowing government in the wrong circles and the nice men from the treasury department might pop 'round for a word. On a lighter note, the US appears to be a terrible shot if you keep missing the government every year.
The funny thing is I actually really like the US Government structure, it's just that I think the founding fathers considered a united front, rather than people testing out bulletproof vests...
Anyway, I apologise for being a horrendous prick the first time around. Bad day.
Your rant on gun violence was sadly misplaced here.
;)
Yeah, I know. I blame a bad day. Ever get those?
He just used guns as an example, being the most obvious form of violence and killing.
Glad you put 'and killing', as most tend to suggest that guns aren't violent, people are.
OTOH, the USA is seen externally on a par with the Middle Eastern nations that accessorise AK47s for weddings amongst nations that don't have legal gun ownership...the kicker is that you have a moral majority in the US that thinks games are bad, but a full auto submachine gun is a constitutionally protected right. Think upon it.
"They often have a disk in the air within 20-30 minutes of a failure, worldwide."
That is good, but I'm vicariously curious as to why you don't have spares...is it because of variable products used?
"I like it because the infrastructure is there to get things handled extremely quickly."
That's fair enough. I've tended to move more towards reliability and support than cheapness myself in most fields. I think experience teaches that after a while.
"I don't agree with them keeping hush-hush about this vuln though, they should totally have a blurb up on their front page."
That's what worries me. There's far too much incentive these days to *not* upset the stock price by announcing fu**ups, mistakes or just plain bad luck which echoes government practice in terms of keeping things quiet until the only alternative is to announce things. But then I've always had a problem regulating economy with a couple of enormous positive feedback loops.
"Subtle but massive difference."
a ct.htm
You're right, of course, I was banging out verbage way too fast this morning. I blame the sugar.
"Theres no such thing as the 14 day cooling off period if the goods were purchased in the shop."
Doesn't the purchase count as a contract of sale, because cooling off is one of the things enshrined less formally by returning items to the shop?
"There is no such thing as a statutory warranty period"
I was under the impression that this was the statutory period as stated in the sale of goods act...okay, I checked, and I was more wrong than you were;
http://www.dti.gov.uk/ccp/topics1/facts/salegoods
This is in part because I was relying on the 1964 Sale of Goods act which included implied warranties rather than 1979 which didn't.
"Why? Because they feel entitled to the games they play and continue to steal them as opposed to paying for them."
There's always going to be an element that do these things, as there's always going to be corrupt politicians, cops, smackhead lawyers and other people with a lot more power to do harm other than download a game. Given some of the more ludicrous things that are going on (such as Electronic Arts monopolising, or the astounding mismanagement of Interplay), there is the temptation for people to blame the guys that can't answer back.
Just to raise an interesting point. If I buy a game, then they reduce the price of the game, is the publisher stealing from me, telling me that their product is not worth as much or simply selling it cheaper to get more people to buy it? If you're going to use a word like 'stealing', you're going to have to pick your way through semantics.
"All this talk about personal convenience and mythical lost sales is just behavior that enables and encourages the software thieves to keep up their game."
That's right, and if they stopped talking about the mythical sales losses, and reduced the overall price to something more reasonable than the cost of 3 DVDs, they may sell a lot more. There are some incredibly good independent producers springing up in the wake of the monolithic companies going under.
"good guy than the bad guys."
You didn't explain the sides there. The thing is that it's wrong to think about sides in such a...naive...manner, simply because it's easy to hate on a company, and I'd really challenge you to state that you'd not hated on a company. What is happening is the single person is being rapidly marginalised into the position of consumer, with the old adage of 'voting with your feet' being turned around into a situation where companies don't really care about people not using their services...later they'll get munged when they find objections and content floating around, but they don't have to change their attitudes because the cash is rolling in. In fact, although people have pointed out that McDonalds food is bad for you (including the salads), only the film 'Supersize me' has prompted a UK media blitz by the multinational before the film opens.
The thing is that in a environ where ethics are something other people do, can you really be surprised when a generation grows up in ethical and moral grey areas?
"people who have money and don't have time to be jerked around with nonsense."
High five, low five, catch it on the rebound.
This is one of the first times that someone 'in the industry' has hit the nail on the head with regards to my personal experience of gaming; it's not that I'm short of the cash, I just really don't want to prop up a copy protection industry that has slimed into place based on the fact that piracy is happening, but the protestations have hit fever pitch because they can be tracked. It's like the figures that get promoted that X activity costs X dollars per year in lost revenues. Figures like that are fictional guesstimates that are intended to cause round-eyed disbelief in people that don't normally deal with _really big numbers_, especially connected with the idea that a downloaded game is a lost sale. It's horribly arrogant to assume that downloaded copy will survive a quick review or that the person downloading it would have bought the game if the download wasn't possible.
It's the PR spin that annoys me the most, both from the perspective of holding demos until after the release rush (early adopters get raped every which way, and it's mostly a peer issue), releasing buggy software to match a given release date, or buying advertising space and calling it 'reviews'.
It's gratifying to see someone _actually_ mention these things in relation to their own business, and while I have little use for the object desktop, the sheer display of Mr Wardell's ethics is enough for me to consider supporting his company.
"The Spectrum was launched in '82."
Ya got me. I was trying to remember which Christmas I unwrapped it along with 'Jetpac'.
"However for global organizations with multiple high-bandwidth links between branches, for example, for whom downtime costs many thousands of dollars per hour, there aren't very many options. It's a good thing that what options there are are very solid."
While I agree with almost all of your points...Dude, CISCO have a vulnerability to malformed packets and they appear to be staying quiet about it. How solid are you trying to tell people is solid? Have you ever tried to get Cisco out to swap out a router? Don't you know about the word 'redundancy'? Don't you even consider that this faith in a company with an 800 number is....umm....naive?
"After all, who are we supposed to root for?"
A sane expression of the protection of ideas rather than the current system.
"enemy such as Microsoft."
Jesus. Slashdot can be so damned blinkered at times it's daft. Is your hatred of a corporate entity down to their business, their ubiquity or simply their alignment against der widdle penguin?
"UK at least, almost ALL non-perishable goods can be returned"
If the goods are unfit for the purpose for which they were bought, you can return them for a full refund within fourteen days ('cooling off'), which also applies to most contracts signed for goods. There is a statutory warranty period of twelve months (from date of purchase) that covers faulty or low quality merchandise and is not gotten around by disclaimers. Which is fun.
"nice but unknown one is anything you buy on the internet can be returned within 30 days ("cooling off period") for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER."
Fourteen days. It's one of the reasons there was hooha over the fact that the cooling off period is sometimes shorter than the delivery time, but it's taken from the time you take posession of the goods. Trouble is that getting the OFT to take action is difficult because the guys are snowed under with all kinds of claims.
"good luck getting a review that hasn't been bought, if not with money then "exclusive access" deals."
True enough, and nobody has pointed to the falling magazine revenue figures as a measure of piracy when it's down to that most sociological of reasons in that they're fairly direct and often inaccurate advertising rags.
"I've been hearing that since my Amiga gaming days,"
I've been hearing it since my ZX Spectrum days, so that means ooohhhh twenty-four years?
I wonder whether they pass this on in a gilt envelope marked with 'the piracy excuse'.
One thing that I have noticed is that the PC Games Market is shrinking with relation to the console market. Do you think anyone's realised that you have a finite number of games that can be sold, and people rarely buy for more then one platform?
"But patching without RPC?"
No, you change the service to restart itself. It restarts itself rather than restarting the machine, which was the 30 second countdown.
By the way, randomly sticking the word COULD in caps did absolutely nothing to enhance the readability of your message.
Have an excellent day.
"how about turning on the built in firewall"
I was actually using a McAfee thing that got ditched faster than a cardigan on a beach. The other implication was that my system, which claimed to have all the hotfixes to date, was vulnerable. I believe I spit feathers on Slashdot at the time, but I've heard of other patches being 'applied' without being 'applied'.
According to the Internet Storm Center, I was gratified to have been in the first six hours of the propogation.
You live and learn, especially with computers, which is one of the reasons that the calls for 'courses' in computers before you own them is so funny.
"I am not advocating or justifying censorship."
Oh, don't bother about that with me. Personally I think some things should be censored, or at least have large warning stickers suggesting that the contents of a given book are 'garbage'. I'm a lot less libertarian in my old age because my optimistic youth has given rise to the current state of affairs.
" How hard would that be to code, really?"
It's more about the game balance itself, although I'll agree that there is a market out there for non-'Director' games without a violent bent, but how much of a market?
"So we're nerds when it suits us"
Well, I can't really speak for anyone else, but between you and me I suspect that the number of 'IT Professionals' on here has been sinking rapidly. As for bashing Microsoft, it's something I do on as frequent a basis as bigging them up for the things they do right, which isn't much. That's a personal viewpoint, as I'm not connected to the hive mind right now.
"No, I just had access to the beta trial (as did thousands of people - it's not exactly prestigious), so I was running it before the fabled 2600 release"
Fair enough. I personally don't touch Betas because, being an IT Professional, I have to have a fairly stable platform to actually work on.
In your opinion which was the flamebaity bit?
"You can get a system that is so hosed that it will not boot, not even into safe mode, even under XP."
For crying out loud; Boot from the CD, go through the motions of installing Windows XP, choose 'repair this installation'.
You can now recycle the extra verbage for other things.
"the constant need to fight monsters both teaches bad lessons, and detracts from the enjoyment of the game."
What lessons are those? That mythical monsters need hitting?
Your daughter is a lot smarter than you think, and you should check out the value system being promoted in advertising and media before coming down hard on games. After all, I'm willing to bet that you found the sight of a cat being viciously pummelled by a mouse amusing the first time around? I know I did.
"If I can't shoot virtual people when I get home, I'm going to have to shoot real ones."
Thank Christ for gun ownership. If you didn't have the gun, you'd have to go and talk at them or something.
"what makes them think video games are more harmful then say movies or even the public education system?"
Substitute 'a gun' for 'movies' or 'public education system' and you might have a clue. American culture is about diverting attention away from a raging fetishism for a power symbol while quietly burying people and defending a method of projecting a steel-jacketed lead slug into someone's body. All the talk about 'defence' is a fairly obtuse way of removing the responsibility for extending a situation where a five day waiting time is considered bad for owning a device that only has one purpose. Two if you count opening bottles at a distance.
And yes, I'm expecting the 'flamebait' mod, but to be really honest I'm getting bored with the debate around it, or the whinging that you have to have a gun to protect your home. Personally I go for strong locks.
Sorry you got caught with that one. Interesting day so far.
"now being 24 and still playing I have no desire to go around and destroy things or kill people."
I'm eight years ahead of you, and the only thing I do is listen to repetitive music in the dark and munch vitamin pills and fruit.
Yes, I butchered the joke much in the same way I let Lemming after Lemming eat flaming death.
"I thought we were supposed to be IT professionals here?"
No, we're Nerds. Third word along under 'Slashdot'.
"The only possible reasons no-one has mentioned it are"
I'd like to invoke the 'bloody obvious' clause.
"I've been running XP since before it came out"
And you're the fifth Beatle?
"At least for me, there were virtually no attacks when I used that 56k-modem. And that is only a few months ago."
Dialups tend to use a single gateway machine, whereas broadband is a range of IP addresses with a fairly low latency. There's also the purpose of the hack; the majority of recent worms have been leveraging parasitic services...zombies for spam or DDoS, storage or more spreading. Dialup is a bit terrible for spewing marketing emails and is a darned sight more noticeable.
" Ive personally seen XP machines get infected with Blaster, Sasser, etc, during the install of Windows."
Your use of the plural tends to indicate that at no time did you volunteer the information that airgapping the NIC would be a 'good thing(tm)'. You going to shout up next time?