'When you've got kids laughing at videos of violence I think we've got a problem.'
Why? I'd counter that when those kids are laughing while committing acts of violence you have a problem. Attitudes and sense of humor don't hurt anyone, baseball bats do. It really doesn't matter what kids are laughing at so long as they continue to understand the consequences (and I don't merely mean legal) of their actions.
'Is this why we've got so much crime in the US?'
Certainly not, there is no reason to believe this contributes to crime in the slightest. The single largest reason we have so much crime in the US is that we as a society have chosen to try to regulate personal choices of individuals. See drug 'crimes' and statutory 'rape'.
'My point was that if you want to convey the message that war, for example, is wrong then convey those exact consequences you describe.'
My point was that the generation protesting in the streets about the war in Iraq WAS the video game generation. You can talk about how you believe violence in games affects people but there has been violence in video games for decades and the reality runs contrary to your opinions. If anything, people are more cautious about bringing violence to bear today than ever before.
'Will people finally be turned off when we get ultra-realistic graphics? I doubt it, but I do think the fight over violence in games will become even more passionate.'
Why on earth should they? If there were some connection between video game violence and desensitization and real violence then perhaps. But so far there is no reason to believe in such a connection and even correlation to an overall decrease in willingness to resort to violence.
'I don't see how civil liberties are directly affected when things are publicized other than the over-reaction by policy makers and the hysterical members of the public who enable them.'
The civil liberties of the accused and the victims are violated by the hysterical public include their jurors, judges, employers, friends, family, etc. Since the hysteria is predictable and it prevents the normal course of the trial and alters the verdict it is a serious breach of civil liberties.
It isn't the civil liberties of the public at large that are at issue here.
'So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?'
How about the fact that the law is wrong in the first place. Had he been convicted his address would have been kept on record and his picture displayed in public information television stations alongside the pedophile who sodomized a three year old boy. His life would have been ruined and it and it would have been impossible for him to attend college or get a job.
Legal or illegal does NOT define right and wrong (or in practice even have a relation to it) but when laws are shown to be wrong in almost every instance (i.e. daddy's revenge law, statutory rape) it should be fixed.
'Not that I expect people to go out and start torturing people, but merely that they'll end up even more desensitized than they already are.'
Sensitization is a form of ignorance caused by lack of exposure. The brain is a learning machine and it learns by input and exposure. If desensitization is what it learns after exposure then that is a good thing.
'But put the average person in front of one of these games and they'll be completely and utterly shocked and likely agree with the calls for banning the game.'
A hundred years ago your average lady would faint if she witnessed a man punched or heard too many words that were labeled as 'bad'. Again, desensitization is a good thing.
'And that's not even touching on games which depict actual crime.'
Go stand in front of the court house. All day long you can watch 'actual crime' be committed without anyone, including the police showing the slightest bit of concern. I promise you, this callus disregard for jaywalking existed before video game violence and is equally disturbing.
'And there's another thing I notice time and again in both movies and games as opposed to real life. In real life there's constant criticism of military action. The US is being the aggressor, for example. There's no justifiable reason for way, there's no threat to the nation, etc.'
I can only assume you are referring to the war in Iraq, yet you say there is no reason why people are upset or damage to the nation. That war is sending our children to die and commit acts of terror and aggression against that nation. Leaving a string of thousands of weeping mothers, widows, and orphans. It is further damaging our own nation, first by the harm it is doing to the children we send over to commit these acts and second the obscene financial cost.
It is not the act of violence and the sight of gore we should be sensitive to. The less easily we are offended and upset the better. What we need to be sensitive to are the CONSEQUENCES of actions. The less emotional attachment you have the actions themselves the more levelly you can evaluate their consequences.
Neutral and True Neutral are the same alignment and amoral isn't even on the list?
You have LN,CN,NN and L and C variants of good and evil.
You've also mistaken other points. Lawful in AD&D really isn't synonymous with obeying the law of the land. It is about believing in an ordered structure. For instance, devils are Lawful Evil because of their adherence to an ordered structure but will break the rules of even that structure.
NE will sometimes side with order and sometimes not, all with regard to their own self interest.
CE do not ignore their own self-interest. Their interests just include bringing down the establishment. They simply ignore the rules altogether and do what they want.
Re:Asheron's Call already had this quest...
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
True neutral doesn't merely act without concern to good or evil but actually actively attempts to seek out balance in the universe.
Chaotic Neutral would be closer except that a CN still believes there should be balance in the world.
'How are you saying that Vista isn't worth using, but that I'm wrong saying you shouldn't put Vista on a 4 year old box because it's not worth the money.'
Vista isn't worth using because it is a slow resource hog. The fact that it is a slow resource hog is demonstrated by the fact that it doesn't run well on the up to 4yr old hardware that might have been upgraded to use it had Vista been a quality and fit (by the already heavily bloated Microsoft standards).
Yes, Vista sucks. Yes, The new Microsoft OS should have run comfortably on the system I gave specs for previously. That is basically what a Dell value PC would have been 4 yrs ago.
As for consumer electronics. The average business changes out its desktops on a 4-5yr lifecycle and those systems aren't expected merely to browse the web but to handle productivity applications. There are no shortage of home users who have lighter loads and smaller budgets than that and keep systems running longer.
'I don't really believe software that's 'good enough' doesn't need support at all, but I do think it's realistic to assume that the better software gets the less people will be asking for help.'
The great thing about support contracts is that you get paid whether they are utilized or not. The 'asking for help' you refer to only adds to the cost of providing the support. Every corporate entity using the software will have a support contract because the data that product is moving is worth millions and they need a lifeline. If they never use that lifeline then that is one less Indian making $.50/hr. That is cash money right back into the corporate overlords pockets!
That's a reason not to use the BSD license. Not to avoid the GPL.
Of course everything you'd want to merge into your BSD project is going to be GPL'd... the community developing derivatives of your BSD licensed project probably don't even bother to tell you, let alone open the code.
Personally, I prefer not to work for Sun or Microsoft's bottom line without some form of compensation.
Because if you are running millions of data through mission critical servers you hire the guys who wrote/own the software to support it. Not some random asshat who says 'pick me'.
Sun should stop being greedy and controlling. Let the community control the software, stop trying to profit on the software itself. Sun just can not get this concept through their thick skulls. There is plenty of room to profit from the support contracts.
XP chugged at 128mb ram, it runs without chugging for grandma with 256mb, and it runs fine for most power user tasks at 512mb. At 1gb you could game with XP a year ago.
4 years ago 256mb was the standard config on most value PC's. Including those from Dell.
The point being that a smoking dual core athlon with 2 gigs of ram shouldn't be a requirement to browse the a little pr0n without the system chugging.
'It's about whether you should pay $150 to downgrade your brand new PC(which realistically is going to be as powerful as the one in question) to XP.'
The word is upgrade.
The fact of the matter is that aside from a few sparkles in the UI, Vista doesn't contain any compelling advantages over XP. There are no shortage of people who don't care about sparkles in the UI. They care about problems, application compatibility, and last but not least performance. Win98 outperformed XP on low end hardware around the time SP1 was rolling out. But that was okay because there was a cutoff point at which XP outperformed 98. If you were below it you continued to use 98 and if you were above it you upgraded. That point doesn't exist with Vista. XP is far more stable and speedy on the same hardware.
The only substantial advantage with Vista is more memory and the amount of RAM we are talking about certainly wouldn't be utilized in the desktop world outside of the imagination of a few gamers.
Vista offloaded a huge amount of visual processing onto the GPU, this should have given it the same huge performance boost seen in Linux and OSX when they did the same. But nope.
'Yes, but this isn't about whether you should upgrade your 4 year old dell to use Vista(you shouldn't, it's not worth the cash).'
Says you. And for you it may not be. Many people make an informed decision to the contrary. For them, having the ability to run more current software is the only reason to upgrade the OS. They aren't gaming, editing videos, or simply getting a hardon over having the latest hardware. They are just browsing the web and getting email. It takes longer for them to realize the value they invested in their machine.
Historically, this is a minimum benchmark and the specs I mentioned would be right in line with where Vista should have fallen in the reqs progression if it had maintained the historical progression. Vista was intentionally bloated for the purpose of selling ridiculous hardware.
A 4 year old consumer desktop is just reaching the point where it is due to have a little ram tossed in it and an OS upgrade.
The average consumer is not a PC power user, they don't play games (other than some spider solitaire), they email, and they browse a little porn. That's pretty much it. The $600-800 they laid out for that desktop was a major purchase for them, another $150 to keep that computer alive for another year or two makes sense to some of them.
'And you can qualify this statement with evidence?'
Back at you.
The exact amount of swap varies but the principle remains the same. I've been a PC Technician for about 15yrs now and Windows has a long history of useless disk thrashing. Vista carries on with this fine tradition.
Slashdot Mirror
'When you've got kids laughing at videos of violence I think we've got a problem.'
Why? I'd counter that when those kids are laughing while committing acts of violence you have a problem. Attitudes and sense of humor don't hurt anyone, baseball bats do. It really doesn't matter what kids are laughing at so long as they continue to understand the consequences (and I don't merely mean legal) of their actions.
'Is this why we've got so much crime in the US?'
Certainly not, there is no reason to believe this contributes to crime in the slightest. The single largest reason we have so much crime in the US is that we as a society have chosen to try to regulate personal choices of individuals. See drug 'crimes' and statutory 'rape'.
'My point was that if you want to convey the message that war, for example, is wrong then convey those exact consequences you describe.'
My point was that the generation protesting in the streets about the war in Iraq WAS the video game generation. You can talk about how you believe violence in games affects people but there has been violence in video games for decades and the reality runs contrary to your opinions. If anything, people are more cautious about bringing violence to bear today than ever before.
'Will people finally be turned off when we get ultra-realistic graphics? I doubt it, but I do think the fight over violence in games will become even more passionate.'
Why on earth should they? If there were some connection between video game violence and desensitization and real violence then perhaps. But so far there is no reason to believe in such a connection and even correlation to an overall decrease in willingness to resort to violence.
An eleven year old boy isn't sexually (physically) mature now is he? A 17 year old girl is and has been for 6 or 7 years.
'I don't see how civil liberties are directly affected when things are publicized other than the over-reaction by policy makers and the hysterical members of the public who enable them.'
The civil liberties of the accused and the victims are violated by the hysterical public include their jurors, judges, employers, friends, family, etc. Since the hysteria is predictable and it prevents the normal course of the trial and alters the verdict it is a serious breach of civil liberties.
It isn't the civil liberties of the public at large that are at issue here.
'So, what are you trying to say here? That a person commits statutory rape, (by your own admission you state this to be true) and is then arrested for it, and suffers consequences for it?'
How about the fact that the law is wrong in the first place. Had he been convicted his address would have been kept on record and his picture displayed in public information television stations alongside the pedophile who sodomized a three year old boy. His life would have been ruined and it and it would have been impossible for him to attend college or get a job.
Legal or illegal does NOT define right and wrong (or in practice even have a relation to it) but when laws are shown to be wrong in almost every instance (i.e. daddy's revenge law, statutory rape) it should be fixed.
The lesson here is that it shouldn't be illegal for anyone to fuck a 17yr old girl.
'Not that I expect people to go out and start torturing people, but merely that they'll end up even more desensitized than they already are.'
Sensitization is a form of ignorance caused by lack of exposure. The brain is a learning machine and it learns by input and exposure. If desensitization is what it learns after exposure then that is a good thing.
'But put the average person in front of one of these games and they'll be completely and utterly shocked and likely agree with the calls for banning the game.'
A hundred years ago your average lady would faint if she witnessed a man punched or heard too many words that were labeled as 'bad'. Again, desensitization is a good thing.
'And that's not even touching on games which depict actual crime.'
Go stand in front of the court house. All day long you can watch 'actual crime' be committed without anyone, including the police showing the slightest bit of concern. I promise you, this callus disregard for jaywalking existed before video game violence and is equally disturbing.
'And there's another thing I notice time and again in both movies and games as opposed to real life. In real life there's constant criticism of military action. The US is being the aggressor, for example. There's no justifiable reason for way, there's no threat to the nation, etc.'
I can only assume you are referring to the war in Iraq, yet you say there is no reason why people are upset or damage to the nation. That war is sending our children to die and commit acts of terror and aggression against that nation. Leaving a string of thousands of weeping mothers, widows, and orphans. It is further damaging our own nation, first by the harm it is doing to the children we send over to commit these acts and second the obscene financial cost.
It is not the act of violence and the sight of gore we should be sensitive to. The less easily we are offended and upset the better. What we need to be sensitive to are the CONSEQUENCES of actions. The less emotional attachment you have the actions themselves the more levelly you can evaluate their consequences.
There aren't any titles with country music?
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1063621&cid=26136193
Neutral and True Neutral are the same alignment and amoral isn't even on the list?
You have LN,CN,NN and L and C variants of good and evil.
You've also mistaken other points. Lawful in AD&D really isn't synonymous with obeying the law of the land. It is about believing in an ordered structure. For instance, devils are Lawful Evil because of their adherence to an ordered structure but will break the rules of even that structure.
NE will sometimes side with order and sometimes not, all with regard to their own self interest.
CE do not ignore their own self-interest. Their interests just include bringing down the establishment. They simply ignore the rules altogether and do what they want.
True neutral doesn't merely act without concern to good or evil but actually actively attempts to seek out balance in the universe.
Chaotic Neutral would be closer except that a CN still believes there should be balance in the world.
begone postgre troll
'How are you saying that Vista isn't worth using, but that I'm wrong saying you shouldn't put Vista on a 4 year old box because it's not worth the money.'
Vista isn't worth using because it is a slow resource hog. The fact that it is a slow resource hog is demonstrated by the fact that it doesn't run well on the up to 4yr old hardware that might have been upgraded to use it had Vista been a quality and fit (by the already heavily bloated Microsoft standards).
Yes, Vista sucks.
Yes, The new Microsoft OS should have run comfortably on the system I gave specs for previously. That is basically what a Dell value PC would have been 4 yrs ago.
As for consumer electronics. The average business changes out its desktops on a 4-5yr lifecycle and those systems aren't expected merely to browse the web but to handle productivity applications. There are no shortage of home users who have lighter loads and smaller budgets than that and keep systems running longer.
I'm well aware of the debates. Nothing about the topic being debated changes the truth of what I just said.
Yes, and in order to use NDISWrapper you need the windows drivers. Hence my comment that you still need windows wireless drivers.
'I don't really believe software that's 'good enough' doesn't need support at all, but I do think it's realistic to assume that the better software gets the less people will be asking for help.'
The great thing about support contracts is that you get paid whether they are utilized or not. The 'asking for help' you refer to only adds to the cost of providing the support. Every corporate entity using the software will have a support contract because the data that product is moving is worth millions and they need a lifeline. If they never use that lifeline then that is one less Indian making $.50/hr. That is cash money right back into the corporate overlords pockets!
That's a reason not to use the BSD license. Not to avoid the GPL.
Of course everything you'd want to merge into your BSD project is going to be GPL'd... the community developing derivatives of your BSD licensed project probably don't even bother to tell you, let alone open the code.
Personally, I prefer not to work for Sun or Microsoft's bottom line without some form of compensation.
Because if you are running millions of data through mission critical servers you hire the guys who wrote/own the software to support it. Not some random asshat who says 'pick me'.
Sun should stop being greedy and controlling. Let the community control the software, stop trying to profit on the software itself. Sun just can not get this concept through their thick skulls. There is plenty of room to profit from the support contracts.
XP chugged at 128mb ram, it runs without chugging for grandma with 256mb, and it runs fine for most power user tasks at 512mb. At 1gb you could game with XP a year ago.
4 years ago 256mb was the standard config on most value PC's. Including those from Dell.
The point being that a smoking dual core athlon with 2 gigs of ram shouldn't be a requirement to browse the a little pr0n without the system chugging.
'It's about whether you should pay $150 to downgrade your brand new PC(which realistically is going to be as powerful as the one in question) to XP.'
The word is upgrade.
The fact of the matter is that aside from a few sparkles in the UI, Vista doesn't contain any compelling advantages over XP. There are no shortage of people who don't care about sparkles in the UI. They care about problems, application compatibility, and last but not least performance. Win98 outperformed XP on low end hardware around the time SP1 was rolling out. But that was okay because there was a cutoff point at which XP outperformed 98. If you were below it you continued to use 98 and if you were above it you upgraded. That point doesn't exist with Vista. XP is far more stable and speedy on the same hardware.
The only substantial advantage with Vista is more memory and the amount of RAM we are talking about certainly wouldn't be utilized in the desktop world outside of the imagination of a few gamers.
Vista offloaded a huge amount of visual processing onto the GPU, this should have given it the same huge performance boost seen in Linux and OSX when they did the same. But nope.
'Yes, but this isn't about whether you should upgrade your 4 year old dell to use Vista(you shouldn't, it's not worth the cash).'
Says you. And for you it may not be. Many people make an informed decision to the contrary. For them, having the ability to run more current software is the only reason to upgrade the OS. They aren't gaming, editing videos, or simply getting a hardon over having the latest hardware. They are just browsing the web and getting email. It takes longer for them to realize the value they invested in their machine.
Historically, this is a minimum benchmark and the specs I mentioned would be right in line with where Vista should have fallen in the reqs progression if it had maintained the historical progression. Vista was intentionally bloated for the purpose of selling ridiculous hardware.
bad troll
A 4 year old consumer desktop is just reaching the point where it is due to have a little ram tossed in it and an OS upgrade.
The average consumer is not a PC power user, they don't play games (other than some spider solitaire), they email, and they browse a little porn. That's pretty much it. The $600-800 they laid out for that desktop was a major purchase for them, another $150 to keep that computer alive for another year or two makes sense to some of them.
'Think a Pentium 2, 400 Mhz, with 256GB of RAM'
I've never seen a p2 board that supports 256gb of ram. Not that I'm saying you don't have one. ;)
You can run *nix on a wristwatch. I was trying to be fair, you can't expect windows to compete with Linux ;)
'And you can qualify this statement with evidence?'
Back at you.
The exact amount of swap varies but the principle remains the same. I've been a PC Technician for about 15yrs now and Windows has a long history of useless disk thrashing. Vista carries on with this fine tradition.
It's Microsoft pressuring Dell. Dell has no particular interest either way.
'"How about a *nix that's as good as OSX?". '
I dunno, maybe Fedora? Personally, I use Ubuntu for my *nix desktops and it blows OSX away.