Nevermind. I hadn't realized this whole time that the website's tally was already including the Kickstarter funds. WOW. They're doing far worse than I thought. This whole time, I was thinking "holy shit, they are going to reach most of their extended goals by the end, with almost four million raised already!".
With only about $3m raised, I would hope they would just focus on one solid game and worry about a fucking linux port when and if the main platform is successful and justifies the expense.
Yeah, I don't get the age thing. If you can still play a professional sport at 40+ (boxers, baseball players, etc), then why the fuck couldn't you sit in a chair and peck at a keyboard at 40, 50, 60?
Why wouldn't 16:10 be advocated? It's more real-estate. Why would you want to pay just as much money for the 16:9 monitors you're forced to buy today (because they're about 95% of the market) than for the 16:10 you bought half a dozen years ago? Part of the reason I still haven't replaced my 30" ACDs is that it's getting very difficult to find a high quality monitor these days that is not 16:9 and that isn't a mere 27". It's like we're going fucking backwards
And as to the reason we have for wider than taller or square (as some people seem to be wanting) is that it's a hell of a lot easier for me to move my head left and right on a 30" display in front of me than to move it up and down the same distance over great periods of time.
Advocating for 16:9 "because that's what movies and television use" is just . . . kind of pointless. I'm not writing code, surfing the net, or playing strategy games on my television.
It's really cute how you guys are all still spending your days going to voting booths. It's jsut so . . . QUAINT!
In Oregon, we've been voting by mail for more than thirty years and in federal elections for twenty years. We haven't had voting booths or polling centers for two decades.
I have a hard time believing people are actually sitting around googling each other. I have never done a search on anyone I know in real life. Not a boss, not a colleague, not a neighbor, not a friend, not a girlfriend, not a date. Nothing. Why would I? What could I possibly gain from it other than finding them blathering inanity in one place or another that colored my judgement of people who are otherwise nice to be around?
I also don't befriend people I really know on social networks, either. Nor family members. I don't even know if my family members have social networking accounts (including immediate family). I assume maybe they do. But I know them in real life and if I want to talk to them, I just talk to them. I don't need a social network to keep in touch with them (nor do I need to be bombarded with constant streams of everything from every person in my life -- especially family).
And imagine what I might think of someone if I *did* google them and found some random posts somewhere from some vengeful ex or ex-colleage or something? Someone that felt wronged and took it upon themselves to accuse them of things in some random post somewhere? Why do I need that in my head when interacting with someone?
The fact that Obama and Romney are the only viable choices is enough of an indication that it's rigged.
As for UN observation -- who cares? We support international observation of elections in other nations. When it comes to us, it's only fair-play to say "sure, have at it". In fact, having nations observe each other's elections on-the-ground seems like it can only be a good thing. Certainly not going to get my panties in a twist all "durp durp murkin soil durp durp fer'ners durp!". *shrug*
It's not like Netflix is known for attention to detail. Most of their television series are completely screwed up, to the viewer's great frustration. If they can't even be bothered to make sure the episodes of a show are in the right order, I sure don't expect them to bother to read through the subtitles that they're lifting from questionable sources.
They don't have to prove anything. As far as I know, the legal system is never involved. They also don't seem to make the legal distinction between "downloading" and "providing/uploading". Or, for that matter, between "something that happened over your network" and "something you did". If you want to protest, go back to dial-up, I guess.
In the US, this wouldn't be a risk, because all of your strikes will be taken care of by your ISP. Who also just happens to probably be one of the major copyright holders and proponents, themselves. And your accusation, guilt, and penalty will all be taken care of conveniently and easily by your ISP. No need to involve those pesky legal systems, beginning with re-educating you with copyright propaganda classes and ending with restricted or no internet access.
Foxconn's internal investigation came after a Chinese media report and New York-based China Labor Watch said students from the ages of 14 to 16 were interning at Foxconn's factory in the Chinese coastal city of Yantai. Chinese labor laws prohibit companies from recruiting workers under the age of 16.
I'm not a non-interventionalist. I mean, I believe we insert ourselves into far more situations than we need to and should general stay the hell out, but not as a hard and strict rule. However, I have to ask . . . why is this our problem? China is massive. What are they, one and a half billion people, by now? While some places are just small backwoods villages, they also have some of the largest and most modern cities around. They have their own businesses, government, law, citizens, workers, and probably activists, lobbies, and unions. If they feel that they have a problem with the way businesses are treating their citizens -- and even taking into account the history of China's treatment of their own citizens and dissidents -- isn't that their problem? We're not talking about some little country with a defunct government that is controlled by warlords that is possessed by lawless anarchy.
Because a business in another country sub-contracts business out to them, everyone is supposed to feel a great deal of guilt over something that their own businesses and government don't have a problem with? Are parents selling their children to Foxconn who then takes them away and locks them in rooms with chained and barred doors and forced into slave labor doing stuff that'll cause them to lose limbs and digits?
Their own labor laws say they can't recruit workers under the age of sixteen (though I had my first job in America at 12 and my first real job at 14). So let their government and system of law deal with it. If you feel the reports are true, report it to their government.
The Tea Party essentially started off as a Libertarian movement, of sorts. It was co-opted by the republicans. The right has nothing to do with libertarians any more than the left does (other than some people who are clearly libertarians are subscribed to the republicans or democrats, simply because that's the only way to have a real chance of being part of the process, sadly).
No, everything out of a libertarian's mouth boils down to "fuck you, politicians and government, let us pursue ours, get ours, enjoy ours, and do what we all want as long as it doesn't negatively impact another unwilling person".
But, you know, if you want to keep having your money taken and keep having people tell you who it is okay to marry and who it is or isn't okay to pray to and what you can and can't consume (in every sense of the word), then the two existing parties have you covered.
This is essentially what Sherlock Holmes did, right? Massive knowledge of soil, mud, water, tobacco, etc -- allowing him to determine where a person has been merely from a hint of dirt on the cuff of their trousers? Or pallywags or whatever it is they call pants across the pond.
This sort of censorship is exactly the kind of thing the "anti-bully" organizations are actually seeking, under the guise of something we all can sympathize with (horrendous bullying). Except, instead of dealing with the actual problems and realistic solutions that can be implemented by getting adults in positions of authority to actually do something about bullying, they constantly frame it as a problem only to be dealt with by stripping anonymity and privacy on the internet along with creating laws (like seen in Britain) that make being a verbal meanie "criminal".
Good luck with that. We've been working on it for 200+ years. Maybe we'll overcome an uninformed public that tends to vote based on selfish gain or fear, some day. And maybe it'll overcome the issue of any viable candidate only being viable if he has been vetted by the same aristocracy that essentially has to throw the bulk of their support behind the two parties every election, ever (when both of the dogs in the fight belong to you, it's pretty impossible to lose). One of these days. Yep. All we need to do is vote the right guy(s) in this time around and everything will totally change.
This is the same line of bullshit that gets fed to people with these "vote or die" campaigns. This naive, insincere, undermining, pointless noise of "no matter what, you need to vote -- that's your civic duty -- even if you're stupid, ignorant, selfish and voting based on who smiled more on stage, hold your head up high because you did your good deed for the year by scratching in a check-box!".
The fact is that those lobbying against freedom, liberty, self-determination, and basic sanity do so with a massive war-chest and a full-time dedicated army of lawyers, politicians, corporations, marketers, journalists, and others behind them. The citizens who are impacted by this are too busy working to pay their bills and pre-occupied with their families, sports teams, television shows, and the general bullshit and obligations of life to even be well-informed, much less active in any way (even voting) and only the smallest fraction -- in comparison to those eroding all of these things against our interests -- are in some way able to dedicate themselves full time against this.
Ultimately, these obstacles are insurmountable. Even if we are capable of the never-ending vigilance required by citizens and society to protect their rights from being stripped, we never will. And those lapses in-between moments of national-giving-a-fuck-outcry are ideal for these ever-vigilant attackers to gain ground. In the end, they will always win. The only hope against them is to maintain technological superiority and hope that it can somehow always outpace the law, which I also fear may be coming to an end, eventually (as opposed to the current status where many things escape existing laws, because they were devices to focus on things like print or VHS tapes).
My only problem with this whole thing is that it seems to be getting more attention, coverage, and certainly live-internet views than landing an SUV on fucking Mars did. And people are covering it like it's "the next SpaceX accomplishment" or something. It's impressive. It's cool. However, it's just a dude in a pressurized suit flopping out of a platform strung to a balloon. This may push the limits of a man, but I don't know what it exactly pushes technologically or explorationally[*].
Except for the couple of years immediately after the president insisted we needed to go to the moon, where NASA consumed more than 4% of the national budget (but still wasn't very much), it has almost never accounted for a significant part of the budget in any way. For the entire life of the agency, the average budget (in 2007's dollars) has been something like $17,000,000,000/yr.
Hell, since 9/11, we have spent TWICE as much conducting war in the middle east as NASA has spent in its entire fifty-five year live time, in which it developed rocket technology. Developed shuttle technology. Helped improve countless other technologies (including those for the military). Helped generate entire new private industries. Shot a man into space. Shot around the moon. Landed men on the moon several times. Built space-suit-jets for men in space. Conducted space walks. Built a space car. Built and deployed a telescope to see to the beginning of time. Built and manned a space station. Built one (wait, two?) little RC cars that we landed on the surface of Mars. Then built an SUV that we landed on Mars. Not to mention the satellites above our heads. The satellites far out in space, exploring the universe for decades, now. . .
All of that is in *today's* dollars.
So, let's not fool ourselves into believing NASA has ever had a "ton of funding". But, just think what we could accomplish if we blew up a few less brown people or facilitated a few fewer corporate (Haliburtin, KDR, etc) contracts in Afghanistan or Iraq with government resources and just funneled that little bit of money to NASA. Maybe push 5% of that "searchin' for WMDs" money over to NASA. Who knows what fucking amazing shit we could do?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Private industry yadda yadda. That'd be fine, if we apply that consistently. But if we're going to be debating what's worth funding, how the fuck is pursuing one of the most primitive needs of mankind not near the top of the list?
Instead, we have to bank the whole of our space exploration on the guy who ships books and kindles to your doorstep, the guy behind Doom and Rage, and the guy behind PayPal. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but . . .
Keep quiet about science or the religious people who are already undermining science in favor of magic-sky-mannery will get upset and undermine science!
You can't be part of the system unless you're a viable candidate, which you can't be until you're a part of the system, which you can't be unless you're a viable candidate.
The system locks out anything that isn't the status-quo and then entertains those dumb enough to think that the status-quo is different if it's wearing a blue or a red shirt, when it's the same thing.
It's a moot point. Corporations don't particularly care about giving money to fund a libertarian candidate, because they are only interested in buying-off the gratitude and consideration of the candidates who have a chance to win. Backing a guy who can never win, by dint of not wearing a red or blue jersey, means you will never get a return on your investment. A guy who isn't in office can't help your interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind. I hadn't realized this whole time that the website's tally was already including the Kickstarter funds. WOW. They're doing far worse than I thought. This whole time, I was thinking "holy shit, they are going to reach most of their extended goals by the end, with almost four million raised already!".
With only about $3m raised, I would hope they would just focus on one solid game and worry about a fucking linux port when and if the main platform is successful and justifies the expense.
It's at about $3.8m right now, $900k of which is just from the Kickstarter page.
Yeah, I don't get the age thing. If you can still play a professional sport at 40+ (boxers, baseball players, etc), then why the fuck couldn't you sit in a chair and peck at a keyboard at 40, 50, 60?
Why wouldn't 16:10 be advocated? It's more real-estate. Why would you want to pay just as much money for the 16:9 monitors you're forced to buy today (because they're about 95% of the market) than for the 16:10 you bought half a dozen years ago? Part of the reason I still haven't replaced my 30" ACDs is that it's getting very difficult to find a high quality monitor these days that is not 16:9 and that isn't a mere 27". It's like we're going fucking backwards
And as to the reason we have for wider than taller or square (as some people seem to be wanting) is that it's a hell of a lot easier for me to move my head left and right on a 30" display in front of me than to move it up and down the same distance over great periods of time.
Advocating for 16:9 "because that's what movies and television use" is just . . . kind of pointless. I'm not writing code, surfing the net, or playing strategy games on my television.
I won't want any of these idiots and am not voting for them, so it doesn't matter. At any rate, you missed the point.
It's really cute how you guys are all still spending your days going to voting booths. It's jsut so . . . QUAINT!
In Oregon, we've been voting by mail for more than thirty years and in federal elections for twenty years. We haven't had voting booths or polling centers for two decades.
I have a hard time believing people are actually sitting around googling each other. I have never done a search on anyone I know in real life. Not a boss, not a colleague, not a neighbor, not a friend, not a girlfriend, not a date. Nothing. Why would I? What could I possibly gain from it other than finding them blathering inanity in one place or another that colored my judgement of people who are otherwise nice to be around?
I also don't befriend people I really know on social networks, either. Nor family members. I don't even know if my family members have social networking accounts (including immediate family). I assume maybe they do. But I know them in real life and if I want to talk to them, I just talk to them. I don't need a social network to keep in touch with them (nor do I need to be bombarded with constant streams of everything from every person in my life -- especially family).
And imagine what I might think of someone if I *did* google them and found some random posts somewhere from some vengeful ex or ex-colleage or something? Someone that felt wronged and took it upon themselves to accuse them of things in some random post somewhere? Why do I need that in my head when interacting with someone?
The fact that Obama and Romney are the only viable choices is enough of an indication that it's rigged.
As for UN observation -- who cares? We support international observation of elections in other nations. When it comes to us, it's only fair-play to say "sure, have at it". In fact, having nations observe each other's elections on-the-ground seems like it can only be a good thing. Certainly not going to get my panties in a twist all "durp durp murkin soil durp durp fer'ners durp!". *shrug*
I'm fairly certain that if all I did was write Perl, I'd go insane
And that's the point when you officially become a perl hacker.
It's not like Netflix is known for attention to detail. Most of their television series are completely screwed up, to the viewer's great frustration. If they can't even be bothered to make sure the episodes of a show are in the right order, I sure don't expect them to bother to read through the subtitles that they're lifting from questionable sources.
They don't have to prove anything. As far as I know, the legal system is never involved. They also don't seem to make the legal distinction between "downloading" and "providing/uploading". Or, for that matter, between "something that happened over your network" and "something you did". If you want to protest, go back to dial-up, I guess.
Will all of the science experiments on ISS from that point on be syrup based?
Today, I learned: Canada has as Space Agency.
In the US, this wouldn't be a risk, because all of your strikes will be taken care of by your ISP. Who also just happens to probably be one of the major copyright holders and proponents, themselves. And your accusation, guilt, and penalty will all be taken care of conveniently and easily by your ISP. No need to involve those pesky legal systems, beginning with re-educating you with copyright propaganda classes and ending with restricted or no internet access.
Foxconn's internal investigation came after a Chinese media report and New York-based China Labor Watch said students from the ages of 14 to 16 were interning at Foxconn's factory in the Chinese coastal city of Yantai. Chinese labor laws prohibit companies from recruiting workers under the age of 16.
I'm not a non-interventionalist. I mean, I believe we insert ourselves into far more situations than we need to and should general stay the hell out, but not as a hard and strict rule. However, I have to ask . . . why is this our problem? China is massive. What are they, one and a half billion people, by now? While some places are just small backwoods villages, they also have some of the largest and most modern cities around. They have their own businesses, government, law, citizens, workers, and probably activists, lobbies, and unions. If they feel that they have a problem with the way businesses are treating their citizens -- and even taking into account the history of China's treatment of their own citizens and dissidents -- isn't that their problem? We're not talking about some little country with a defunct government that is controlled by warlords that is possessed by lawless anarchy.
Because a business in another country sub-contracts business out to them, everyone is supposed to feel a great deal of guilt over something that their own businesses and government don't have a problem with? Are parents selling their children to Foxconn who then takes them away and locks them in rooms with chained and barred doors and forced into slave labor doing stuff that'll cause them to lose limbs and digits?
Their own labor laws say they can't recruit workers under the age of sixteen (though I had my first job in America at 12 and my first real job at 14). So let their government and system of law deal with it. If you feel the reports are true, report it to their government.
The Tea Party essentially started off as a Libertarian movement, of sorts. It was co-opted by the republicans. The right has nothing to do with libertarians any more than the left does (other than some people who are clearly libertarians are subscribed to the republicans or democrats, simply because that's the only way to have a real chance of being part of the process, sadly).
No, everything out of a libertarian's mouth boils down to "fuck you, politicians and government, let us pursue ours, get ours, enjoy ours, and do what we all want as long as it doesn't negatively impact another unwilling person".
But, you know, if you want to keep having your money taken and keep having people tell you who it is okay to marry and who it is or isn't okay to pray to and what you can and can't consume (in every sense of the word), then the two existing parties have you covered.
This is essentially what Sherlock Holmes did, right? Massive knowledge of soil, mud, water, tobacco, etc -- allowing him to determine where a person has been merely from a hint of dirt on the cuff of their trousers? Or pallywags or whatever it is they call pants across the pond.
This sort of censorship is exactly the kind of thing the "anti-bully" organizations are actually seeking, under the guise of something we all can sympathize with (horrendous bullying). Except, instead of dealing with the actual problems and realistic solutions that can be implemented by getting adults in positions of authority to actually do something about bullying, they constantly frame it as a problem only to be dealt with by stripping anonymity and privacy on the internet along with creating laws (like seen in Britain) that make being a verbal meanie "criminal".
Good luck with that. We've been working on it for 200+ years. Maybe we'll overcome an uninformed public that tends to vote based on selfish gain or fear, some day. And maybe it'll overcome the issue of any viable candidate only being viable if he has been vetted by the same aristocracy that essentially has to throw the bulk of their support behind the two parties every election, ever (when both of the dogs in the fight belong to you, it's pretty impossible to lose). One of these days. Yep. All we need to do is vote the right guy(s) in this time around and everything will totally change.
This is the same line of bullshit that gets fed to people with these "vote or die" campaigns. This naive, insincere, undermining, pointless noise of "no matter what, you need to vote -- that's your civic duty -- even if you're stupid, ignorant, selfish and voting based on who smiled more on stage, hold your head up high because you did your good deed for the year by scratching in a check-box!".
The fact is that those lobbying against freedom, liberty, self-determination, and basic sanity do so with a massive war-chest and a full-time dedicated army of lawyers, politicians, corporations, marketers, journalists, and others behind them. The citizens who are impacted by this are too busy working to pay their bills and pre-occupied with their families, sports teams, television shows, and the general bullshit and obligations of life to even be well-informed, much less active in any way (even voting) and only the smallest fraction -- in comparison to those eroding all of these things against our interests -- are in some way able to dedicate themselves full time against this.
Ultimately, these obstacles are insurmountable. Even if we are capable of the never-ending vigilance required by citizens and society to protect their rights from being stripped, we never will. And those lapses in-between moments of national-giving-a-fuck-outcry are ideal for these ever-vigilant attackers to gain ground. In the end, they will always win. The only hope against them is to maintain technological superiority and hope that it can somehow always outpace the law, which I also fear may be coming to an end, eventually (as opposed to the current status where many things escape existing laws, because they were devices to focus on things like print or VHS tapes).
My only problem with this whole thing is that it seems to be getting more attention, coverage, and certainly live-internet views than landing an SUV on fucking Mars did. And people are covering it like it's "the next SpaceX accomplishment" or something. It's impressive. It's cool. However, it's just a dude in a pressurized suit flopping out of a platform strung to a balloon. This may push the limits of a man, but I don't know what it exactly pushes technologically or explorationally[*].
[*] I don't think that's a word, but whatever.
Except for the couple of years immediately after the president insisted we needed to go to the moon, where NASA consumed more than 4% of the national budget (but still wasn't very much), it has almost never accounted for a significant part of the budget in any way. For the entire life of the agency, the average budget (in 2007's dollars) has been something like $17,000,000,000/yr.
Hell, since 9/11, we have spent TWICE as much conducting war in the middle east as NASA has spent in its entire fifty-five year live time, in which it developed rocket technology. Developed shuttle technology. Helped improve countless other technologies (including those for the military). Helped generate entire new private industries. Shot a man into space. Shot around the moon. Landed men on the moon several times. Built space-suit-jets for men in space. Conducted space walks. Built a space car. Built and deployed a telescope to see to the beginning of time. Built and manned a space station. Built one (wait, two?) little RC cars that we landed on the surface of Mars. Then built an SUV that we landed on Mars. Not to mention the satellites above our heads. The satellites far out in space, exploring the universe for decades, now. . .
All of that is in *today's* dollars.
So, let's not fool ourselves into believing NASA has ever had a "ton of funding". But, just think what we could accomplish if we blew up a few less brown people or facilitated a few fewer corporate (Haliburtin, KDR, etc) contracts in Afghanistan or Iraq with government resources and just funneled that little bit of money to NASA. Maybe push 5% of that "searchin' for WMDs" money over to NASA. Who knows what fucking amazing shit we could do?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Private industry yadda yadda. That'd be fine, if we apply that consistently. But if we're going to be debating what's worth funding, how the fuck is pursuing one of the most primitive needs of mankind not near the top of the list?
Instead, we have to bank the whole of our space exploration on the guy who ships books and kindles to your doorstep, the guy behind Doom and Rage, and the guy behind PayPal. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but . . .
Keep quiet about science or the religious people who are already undermining science in favor of magic-sky-mannery will get upset and undermine science!
You can't be part of the system unless you're a viable candidate, which you can't be until you're a part of the system, which you can't be unless you're a viable candidate.
The system locks out anything that isn't the status-quo and then entertains those dumb enough to think that the status-quo is different if it's wearing a blue or a red shirt, when it's the same thing.
It's a moot point. Corporations don't particularly care about giving money to fund a libertarian candidate, because they are only interested in buying-off the gratitude and consideration of the candidates who have a chance to win. Backing a guy who can never win, by dint of not wearing a red or blue jersey, means you will never get a return on your investment. A guy who isn't in office can't help your interests.