"I asserted that a man with a university degree tends to be more conformist, not that a university degree makes a man more conformist."
And you could read what I wrote as a demand to prove that the likelihood of individual conformism rises with a degree, not necessarily that the process of going through a degree changes the conformist nature of an individual.
Either way, people with degrees are more 'conformist' in your mind. You still fail to provide anything other than your own wittering as evidence.
It's still bullshit and you're still mentally masturbating with some ferocity.
Societal effects and personal feelings are very different.
Regardless of who it was available to, who it benefited, how society would change and morph - if it is ever available to me I will take it.
I don't necessarily agree that immortality for all would require infinite resources, it would depend how it was managed with respect to procreation, and (if we're talking about sci-fi scenarios) expansion to other worlds.
I can't disagree with your other point though, if it's of limited availability or even under some sort of moral veto we'll likely see those rich enough to be politically influential and the weaselly politicians granting themselves immortality, whilst it will be denied to others. Then we won't even be able to look forward to the ageing and eventual death of the powerful to refresh society and usher in change.
Maybe belief in the supernatural correlates well with fear of death.
Maybe if you're shit-scared of death all the time you find refuge in faith.
Me, I have a university degree and an IQ in the genius range (I don't think I'm a genius). Count me as someone that is educated, reasonably intelligent and scared of death. Isn't fear of death natural? I mean, I don't want to imagine a world without me, I won't be there. And that's leaving out the part in which you actually die, which isn't going to be any fun either.
Hacking the console for homebrew means letting the system run code that hasn't been signed by Sony. Some of this code is 'backup managers' that run iso files from hard drive, yes. Other stuff is other games, emulators for older consoles and other systems, anything you like really. Linux has been re-enabled this way too, though as yet there's no graphics support IIRC.
I see this all the time, yet I don't subscribe to it.
It's nonsense. Civil disobedience doesn't mean you can't also fight the consequences. Civil disobedience means disobeying. It may fit some strategies to calmly accept censure and imprisonment, but it's not like there's some sort of rule about civil disobedience.
I mostly see this from people who disagree with any sort of civil disobedience and grudgingly accept that if it must be done then 'we' the establishment, get to do what we want with you.
I don't know the details of the particular case you're talking about, but I do know the general them of your rant, that Europeans are somehow torpedoing good, honest US businesses who just want a level playing field in the EU.
Except they're not, the EU is just better at protecting it's people from abusive business practice than the US, and many of the companies the EU has gone after (Intel, MS anyone?) have a history of abusive and anti-competitive actions.
And you're saying Google doesn't have a practical monopoly on search? Hell, you don't even need a monopoly to fall foul of anti-trust anyway.
BTW - It's not pedantry of Nazism to ask you to write in a way that is easy to understand.
And I didn't say I don't like the USA, I said that your argument that everywhere else was a class-ridden mess whilst the USA was perfectly egalitarian and meritocratic was bullshit.
Some people go to the US for the money, though that's less of a thing now. And if you really believe that -
1. The US is free of any sort of social stratification 2. That the rest of the first world still believes that social class governs everything
Then you need to get out more.
The USA *is* a great country. It's not the only one though, and the government and people of the US are prone to acting like a petulant bully based on their own perceived 'rightness'. They aren't the only ones, by far, but the USA does 'holier than thou' like nobody else on earth.
Do you really think that in the name of 'friendship' with the US, european nations ought to just let US firms create and then abuse monopoly status in european markets?
That the EU ought to say "Oh, they're American, let's no subject them to the same laws as we subject EU companies"?
1. Learn better grammar, your post was painful to read 2. Grow up
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
"In that situation if someone kept going, wouldn't you call that rape?"
Kinda yes, kinda no.
I don't know why I feel compelled to comment here but I will. It doesn't have the same ethical feel to it as the perp jumping someone in a dark alley. But when it comes down to it, if he restrained her and carried on...
All this is a personal thing and should be worked out with the state of Sweden and the parties involved. It makes no difference to what wikileaks are doing. I almost agree with the folks calling for him to step down - wikileaks is best as semi-anonymous org without a figurehead. Unfortunately the enemies of wikileaks need a figurehead to attack, so they've created one.
"In order for that to work you either have to have everyone switch to your registries"
Which, IIRC, is what I said in my original post. You have to get people to switch DNS servers to yours, but it's perfectly (technically) possible to do so and to compete with ICANN.
"The people who are buying Wiis clearly disagree with your assessment. and that the audience that Nintendo is actually trying to court is quite happy?"
They may be or may not. Very hard to tell. All the Wii owners I know love it for a couple of months and then leave the machine alone (until a big game like Mario Kart shows up, sure). It's more than possible others don't go through that.
I'm not unhappy with my Wii, I just really, really dislike this "If the graphics were better the gameplay would be worse" meme that almost makes it sound like a technical limitation. Even as a budgetary thing it's pretty much nonsense, because those big, pretty games that Wii players claim not to like, those probably have ten times the 'gameplay' and story budget of a given Wii game.
You can say that such a huge budget often goes to waste as they turn out crap anyway, but that just goes to show even more that gameplay and budget are disjoint.
Meh. The Wii has a lot of really poor games too. The people who are over the moon with the Wii likely stuck to the first party titles with very few exceptions.
Asimov... Generally he foresaw one big computer. There's even an intro he wrote for a short story compilation in which he talks about it, from the perspective of 20 years or so after writing.
He says "Basically I didn't see miniaturisation coming, so I missed out on computers becoming small or ubiquitous". So he thought of computers occupying whole cities, planets or even systems. I *think* that's the situation in the story you mention too. One huge computer.
Of course as networking and distributed computing take hold it may yet turn out that he's right, and we do end up with effectively one huge computer.
Well, it kind of all depends on whether or not you are focused on the gameplay or how pretty the backgrounds are and how anal you are."
It really doesn't. The Wii's GFX output looks pretty dreadful on any decent display. It doesn't even need improvements that would make more work for developers (so they can spend more budget on that precious gameplay that people seem to think the Wii excels at), just stick in a graphics chip that can do some proper anti-aliasing and cope with higher resolutions, so we don't have to put up with angular, pixelly Miis.
(Yes, that was a jibe at the "you don't need graphics when you have gameplay" crowd. Outside a few first party games I don't find the Wii to be the home of compelling or addictive gameplay.)
"You can't have a competing.com,.net,.org registry"
Sure you can. Did you young folks never hear of AlterNIC ?
(OK, you young folks might be an exaggeration, you have a slightly lower UID and I'm only 32, but still)
All you have to do is persuade people to use your name servers instead of the normal ones. There's an infrastructure cost associated with that of course, but there it is. ICANN might kick and scream and maybe even sue, but there's nothing to stop the net being usurped by an enterprising newcomer. It would lead to namespace fragmentation and all sorts of interesting user effects, but it's a possibility.
I quite like the idea of us geeks using one lot and the general public using another. They can have their own internet with the facebooks and packet shaping and the september that never ends. And we'll have ours and reset it to 1995 style...
I suppose I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to keep going. Maybe they don't enjoy life as much as I do. Maybe it's just the way different people are wired. Very, very odd.
I shall read those links at some point. Question though - is this at the stage where it's basically wishful thinking and quackery or are things being done in a scientific manner as far as you can see? New fields, especially ones offering such possibilities, are often prone to that sort of thing.
"Imagine living for just 150 years. Pretty much everyone you've known is going to be dead. You'll have the opportunity to meet new people, sure, but if you know that all the people you'll ever meet will be lost to you at some point (when they die), what's the incentive to live forever?"
To continue to experience things.
It would be horribly sad if all my friends died over that time period. Whether that's necessary in a world where life extension is possible I'm not sure, if I can live forever then surely others can. I'm very unlikely to be the only one that wanted to.
I already know that all the people I meet will be lost to me at some point. Life is transitory, people move away, move on, do other things, change themselves and their surrounds. What 'life' is about for me is enjoying the time I'm with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances or even complete strangers. Not try to cling onto them.
I just moved across the world, away from almost everyone I know, for the experience. I suspect I'll do it again. It's a regret that I don't have time to spend a decade on every continent as I'm already too old. Even if we discount Antarctica.
Continue living, continue experiencing... forever. Sign me up.
For the most part, most of us live long enough. What is necessary is a substantial increase in the quality of our lives, not an increase in the length of it.
Speak for yourself. I want to live forever.
If a therapy can be designed that not only regenerates the major body organs but stimulates the brain as well (and it sounds like this does) then holy, moley - yes please!
Obviously there are big problems with applying this to humans (cancer), but still.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL.
"I asserted that a man with a university degree tends to be more conformist, not that a university degree makes a man more conformist."
And you could read what I wrote as a demand to prove that the likelihood of individual conformism rises with a degree, not necessarily that the process of going through a degree changes the conformist nature of an individual.
Either way, people with degrees are more 'conformist' in your mind. You still fail to provide anything other than your own wittering as evidence.
It's still bullshit and you're still mentally masturbating with some ferocity.
Societal effects and personal feelings are very different.
Regardless of who it was available to, who it benefited, how society would change and morph - if it is ever available to me I will take it.
I don't necessarily agree that immortality for all would require infinite resources, it would depend how it was managed with respect to procreation, and (if we're talking about sci-fi scenarios) expansion to other worlds.
I can't disagree with your other point though, if it's of limited availability or even under some sort of moral veto we'll likely see those rich enough to be politically influential and the weaselly politicians granting themselves immortality, whilst it will be denied to others. Then we won't even be able to look forward to the ageing and eventual death of the powerful to refresh society and usher in change.
Four nines, last time I tested, which was in the middle of my dope smoking years.
At the end I hope to be drugged out of my tiny little mind. And yes, I will be scared, I don't wish to stop existing.
Oh what utter rot.
Have any proof to back up your unfounded assertions that having a degree makes you more conformist?
Philosophy iss interesting, sometimes, but an awful lot of it is just mental masturbation.
Maybe belief in the supernatural correlates well with fear of death.
Maybe if you're shit-scared of death all the time you find refuge in faith.
Me, I have a university degree and an IQ in the genius range (I don't think I'm a genius). Count me as someone that is educated, reasonably intelligent and scared of death. Isn't fear of death natural? I mean, I don't want to imagine a world without me, I won't be there. And that's leaving out the part in which you actually die, which isn't going to be any fun either.
Sign me up for immortality treatment please.
Homebrew == non-approved software.
Hacking the console for homebrew means letting the system run code that hasn't been signed by Sony. Some of this code is 'backup managers' that run iso files from hard drive, yes. Other stuff is other games, emulators for older consoles and other systems, anything you like really. Linux has been re-enabled this way too, though as yet there's no graphics support IIRC.
I see this all the time, yet I don't subscribe to it.
It's nonsense. Civil disobedience doesn't mean you can't also fight the consequences. Civil disobedience means disobeying. It may fit some strategies to calmly accept censure and imprisonment, but it's not like there's some sort of rule about civil disobedience.
I mostly see this from people who disagree with any sort of civil disobedience and grudgingly accept that if it must be done then 'we' the establishment, get to do what we want with you.
I don't know the details of the particular case you're talking about, but I do know the general them of your rant, that Europeans are somehow torpedoing good, honest US businesses who just want a level playing field in the EU.
Except they're not, the EU is just better at protecting it's people from abusive business practice than the US, and many of the companies the EU has gone after (Intel, MS anyone?) have a history of abusive and anti-competitive actions.
And you're saying Google doesn't have a practical monopoly on search?
Hell, you don't even need a monopoly to fall foul of anti-trust anyway.
BTW - It's not pedantry of Nazism to ask you to write in a way that is easy to understand.
And I didn't say I don't like the USA, I said that your argument that everywhere else was a class-ridden mess whilst the USA was perfectly egalitarian and meritocratic was bullshit.
Which it is.
Bullshit.
Yah, right.
Some people go to the US for the money, though that's less of a thing now. And if you really believe that -
1. The US is free of any sort of social stratification
2. That the rest of the first world still believes that social class governs everything
Then you need to get out more.
The USA *is* a great country. It's not the only one though, and the government and people of the US are prone to acting like a petulant bully based on their own perceived 'rightness'. They aren't the only ones, by far, but the USA does 'holier than thou' like nobody else on earth.
Ummmm....
Do you really think that in the name of 'friendship' with the US, european nations ought to just let US firms create and then abuse monopoly status in european markets?
That the EU ought to say "Oh, they're American, let's no subject them to the same laws as we subject EU companies"?
1. Learn better grammar, your post was painful to read
2. Grow up
They should be in the public domain.
Works that are not in active circulation will likely be forgotten and effectively lost to the world if they are not allowed to transition into the public domain in a timely fashion.
Copyright needs reformation.
"In that situation if someone kept going, wouldn't you call that rape?"
Kinda yes, kinda no.
I don't know why I feel compelled to comment here but I will. It doesn't have the same ethical feel to it as the perp jumping someone in a dark alley. But when it comes down to it, if he restrained her and carried on...
All this is a personal thing and should be worked out with the state of Sweden and the parties involved. It makes no difference to what wikileaks are doing. I almost agree with the folks calling for him to step down - wikileaks is best as semi-anonymous org without a figurehead. Unfortunately the enemies of wikileaks need a figurehead to attack, so they've created one.
"In order for that to work you either have to have everyone switch to your registries"
Which, IIRC, is what I said in my original post. You have to get people to switch DNS servers to yours, but it's perfectly (technically) possible to do so and to compete with ICANN.
That does sound like a cool idea... Dolphin emulator?
Does it work well? Wiimote support fully there?
I guess you'd need an alternative 'sensor' bar too. I know you can get battery powered ones.
"The people who are buying Wiis clearly disagree with your assessment. and that the audience that Nintendo is actually trying to court is quite happy?"
They may be or may not. Very hard to tell. All the Wii owners I know love it for a couple of months and then leave the machine alone (until a big game like Mario Kart shows up, sure). It's more than possible others don't go through that.
I'm not unhappy with my Wii, I just really, really dislike this "If the graphics were better the gameplay would be worse" meme that almost makes it sound like a technical limitation. Even as a budgetary thing it's pretty much nonsense, because those big, pretty games that Wii players claim not to like, those probably have ten times the 'gameplay' and story budget of a given Wii game.
You can say that such a huge budget often goes to waste as they turn out crap anyway, but that just goes to show even more that gameplay and budget are disjoint.
Meh. The Wii has a lot of really poor games too. The people who are over the moon with the Wii likely stuck to the first party titles with very few exceptions.
Asimov... Generally he foresaw one big computer. There's even an intro he wrote for a short story compilation in which he talks about it, from the perspective of 20 years or so after writing.
He says "Basically I didn't see miniaturisation coming, so I missed out on computers becoming small or ubiquitous". So he thought of computers occupying whole cities, planets or even systems. I *think* that's the situation in the story you mention too. One huge computer.
Of course as networking and distributed computing take hold it may yet turn out that he's right, and we do end up with effectively one huge computer.
Yawn.
Linux has a much higher percentage of the server and embedded spaces.
Windows had a near total monopoly on the desktop so vista only getting 20% (and the PR nightmare around vista) is a failure.
See, numbers have context too.
Well, it kind of all depends on whether or not you are focused on the gameplay or how pretty the backgrounds are and how anal you are."
It really doesn't. The Wii's GFX output looks pretty dreadful on any decent display. It doesn't even need improvements that would make more work for developers (so they can spend more budget on that precious gameplay that people seem to think the Wii excels at), just stick in a graphics chip that can do some proper anti-aliasing and cope with higher resolutions, so we don't have to put up with angular, pixelly Miis.
(Yes, that was a jibe at the "you don't need graphics when you have gameplay" crowd. Outside a few first party games I don't find the Wii to be the home of compelling or addictive gameplay.)
"You can't have a competing .com, .net, .org registry"
Sure you can. Did you young folks never hear of AlterNIC ?
(OK, you young folks might be an exaggeration, you have a slightly lower UID and I'm only 32, but still)
All you have to do is persuade people to use your name servers instead of the normal ones. There's an infrastructure cost associated with that of course, but there it is. ICANN might kick and scream and maybe even sue, but there's nothing to stop the net being usurped by an enterprising newcomer. It would lead to namespace fragmentation and all sorts of interesting user effects, but it's a possibility.
I quite like the idea of us geeks using one lot and the general public using another. They can have their own internet with the facebooks and packet shaping and the september that never ends. And we'll have ours and reset it to 1995 style...
I totally did not expect that!
Weird reaction.
I suppose I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to keep going. Maybe they don't enjoy life as much as I do. Maybe it's just the way different people are wired.
Very, very odd.
I shall read those links at some point. Question though - is this at the stage where it's basically wishful thinking and quackery or are things being done in a scientific manner as far as you can see? New fields, especially ones offering such possibilities, are often prone to that sort of thing.
"Imagine living for just 150 years. Pretty much everyone you've known is going to be dead. You'll have the opportunity to meet new people, sure, but if you know that all the people you'll ever meet will be lost to you at some point (when they die), what's the incentive to live forever?"
To continue to experience things.
It would be horribly sad if all my friends died over that time period. Whether that's necessary in a world where life extension is possible I'm not sure, if I can live forever then surely others can. I'm very unlikely to be the only one that wanted to.
I already know that all the people I meet will be lost to me at some point. Life is transitory, people move away, move on, do other things, change themselves and their surrounds. What 'life' is about for me is enjoying the time I'm with friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances or even complete strangers. Not try to cling onto them.
I just moved across the world, away from almost everyone I know, for the experience. I suspect I'll do it again. It's a regret that I don't have time to spend a decade on every continent as I'm already too old. Even if we discount Antarctica.
Continue living, continue experiencing... forever. Sign me up.
Still sounds preferable to me.
There may be widespread societal effects from that sort of thing, but on a personal level I'd love it.
MMmmmmm. Mice bread.
Goes well with cheese.
For the most part, most of us live long enough. What is necessary is a substantial increase in the quality of our lives, not an increase in the length of it.
Speak for yourself. I want to live forever.
If a therapy can be designed that not only regenerates the major body organs but stimulates the brain as well (and it sounds like this does) then holy, moley - yes please!
Obviously there are big problems with applying this to humans (cancer), but still.