Thanks for adding the clarification. That highlights another issue actually. People creating derivative works and then trying to stop others from doing what they themselves have done. Disney is one of the best examples of a company that fights strongly for stronger copyright protection while making a lot of money by reworking material that has entered the public domain.
Now take those out-of-time backwards people, and propose to them the notion that they cannot legally publicly perform a traditional, popular, well-known song without paying someone for the privilege. They'd probably all consider that asinine and offensive. Yep, that's a classic of people disregarding a silly law, quite correctly in my opinion. I've no problem with the song being protected for a reasonable period of time, but the idea that a song written in 1935 should still be protected by copyright is a bit of a stretch.
Disk caches can be pretty big. Sometimes, when I wind back to the beginning of a track to hear it again, that entire track will be played from cache. Was that an illegal copy I just played? Good example. Caches could probably be taken in to account when writing laws, but technology is changing too quickly. Either the laws will try to keep up, becomming horribly complicated in the process, or we need less restrictive laws in the first place. If copyright law in the UK simply allowed a reasonable level of fair-use, we wouldn't have found ourselves in a situation where many thousands of iPod/mp3 player/minidisc owners were unwittingly breaking the law just to listen to music that they purchased. Any law that regulates the behaviour of the average man needs to make sense to them. If the majority disregard the law or don't see why it should be there, then the law probably needs to be examined very closely to see exactly who it's serving.
Yep, that statement is dodgy as hell, yet allows her a nice get-out clause if she's asked to justify her belief.
It's my personal belief that you are Larry Hagman. It's also my person belief that homeopathy is scientifically proven and a great replacement for boring conventional medicine.
Nope, because they don't see any possible issues with what they're saying. Take this wonderful example from NBC/Universal's counsel.
"NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead."
I think the best way to view these people is to imagine what happen if someone from the distant past were to come in to our time. For example, Jews from 1000BC or a Kansas school board from 2006. Both groups would have some bizarre views of the world, probably arguing with passion that heliocentrism and evolution are totally false. They may even advocate burning at the stake for people consorting with evil by using post-it notes or computers.
The legal counsel and the PR departments of these record companies face a similar handicap, in that they can't possible adjust to our time. We need to develop a time machine so we can return them to a time they understand
Do you find, as I do, that it's rare for people to actually ask about gender? In a few years of playing female characters in WoW, the only people who have asked are total strangers. Guild mates generally don't ask, although I do say if they ask.
It's been funny when a total stranger asks "Are you girl in RL?" and when I tell then no, they seem a bit disappointed. Even if I was female, I doubt I would look anything like the character I'm playing anyway.
Could it be the games you're playing? Everyone knows that 99% of meals contain beef. I've seen in in three different restaurants.
Of course, I forgot to mention that the three restaurants are Harry's House of Beef, Tom's Beef Shack, and International House of Beef.
I tend to play female characters in WoW and know quite a few real women who play the game (I checked), and none of them behaved the way you said. I've no doubt that scamming goes on but it probably depends on the games and the crowd you hang around in.
Yep, it worked well in Ireland with the Christian Brothers whacking the hell out of children. Organised religion neither creates psychopaths nor discourages them, it's just a handy justification for some people who want to do some pretty nasty things.
Christians, on the whole are reasonable people, but they will chose the scripture that best backs up what they want to do. No-one could honestly claim to abide by every example or law set in The Bible since it's impossible due to the contradictions.
You could take the gospels specifically as an authority since their authors describe the life and teachings of Jesus, but even the gospels are not consistent with each other.
The danger comes when people elevate The Bible to some kind of divine level. It has some interesting (if slightly unoriginal ideas in some places) but it should be criticised and pulled apart just like any other text.
Cheers, very good response there. I agree with you that there is definitely a lot of background knowledge needed to understand the meaning of what is in those books, the biggest problem being that the learned experts often disagree among themselves.
If there is a God, I really hope he releases a revised version of the Bible in pamphlet form with very clear instructions.
I'm at work so It's not safe for me to look up references. I'd consider the following areas a bit dodgy though.
Lot's repeated drunken incest. The concubine that was dismembered and popped in to the post. The kind gentlemen who gave his daughter to an angry mob to save two angels from being soddomised. Jesus telling us to give away our posessions if asked to do so. Jesus, rather coldly refusing to help a woman whose child was posessed until she convinced him with a clever argument. Numerous executions for petty infractions, such a gathering firewood on the sabbath Pillage, rape and kidnapping - all cheered on by God
The main reason I'd label them dodgy is that most Christians I meet fall in to the 'Jesus loves us and he's a swell guy' category. Most of them are ignoring the behaviour of their god, as described in The Bible. I went through a Catholic education and grew up thinking that God was a nice guy but when I actually read The Bible for myself, that illusion was totally shattered and it was a genuinally upsetting experience. There are some good morals to be found in The Bible but overall, it's a poor source of moral guidance.
Heh heh. I've done the same thing with The Koran and it's pretty difficult to find a page that doesn't mention violence or provide guidance on how to deal with unbelievers. I'm hard pushed to come up with a non-violent religion, at least among the Abrahamic faiths. Even the elderly woman sitting at her parish meeting is following a religion based on one of the most violent books ever compiled. It's quite funny to raise some of more dodgy sections of The Bible and find that they didn't even know they were in there. Jesus may be portrayed as this nice bearded guy but his dad is a total arse hole.
Some parts of The Bible are definitely relevent today, in fact many parts contain pretty good, if unoriginal advice. The problems begin when people believe The Bible to be the word of God. As well as the sensible advice, there are plenty of delusions and downright nasty things.
We can compare The Bible to the Star Wars series of films.
I watch Star Wars and think that there are some good moral messages in there. That's good and well but what happens if I believe that Star Wars is factual?
If I accept it as factual, I get a lot more than the 'good will overcome evil' message. I will have to believe in the existence of wookies, star destroyers and Darth Vader. Since Darth Vader's redemption was completed by his death, I might apply that to others. John, my next door neighbour, seems a bit evil to me so I'd better kill him in order to save him from the dark side. Obi Wan became 'more powerful than you can possibly imagine' when he was killed by Darth Vader. With that in mind, I'll go get myself killed so I can become powerful. When you look at what the religious are doing, this silly example doesn't seem very funny. The Bible may have served a purpose in the past but we have better ways to teach good moral behaviour.
Timothy isn't one of the gospels but it's certainly part of the New Testament - presumably because God wants it there.
Based on his style of writing and it's resemblence to The Daily Mail (a British newspaper aimed at the middle-class closet nazi who thinks that things aren't as good as they used to be), I'd say he's trapped somewhere in the fictional 1950s. You can't blame him for missing the 80s, he hasn't even reached them yet.
I suspect that had the blogger been writing 30 years ago, he'd be pretty annoyed about having Good 'ol G.I. Joe associatin' with them coloured folks. Still can't decide whether the blog is real or a parody though.
Definitely. Timothy 6:1 is very relevant to me, assuming that slavery is permitted and I find myself serving another. I find the advice on the handling of demonic possession to be pretty useful as long as there happens to be a nearby herd of pigs.
You'll find similar relevence if read Homer's Odyssey or The Epic of Gilgamesh. Simple reason is because they are all stories about men that were written by men (I use the term men to refer to the species, not the gender). Also, you may be inspired by the text, particularly if you can convince yourself that Homer was the son of Zeus or that The Epic of Gilgamesh was written by followers of Kumarbi.
Slashdot does that to us all. On my wedding day when my fiancee said 'I do', I suspected it was part an embrace and extend strategy. Turns out I was right in that case.
Blizzard have a pretty long history of releasing decenty written hybrid releases. Based on that, I suspect that they would certainly make little changes to help the Linux users.
Well put. If everyone else understood this principle, it'd be far harder for people to try to defend things like closed-source DRM and even closed-source electronic voting systems.
Yep, and that alone will lead to loud cheers in the BSD world, particularly among OpenBSD developers.
Even if OpenBSD isn't commonly used for gaming, it's going to save a lot of reverse engineering and remove the need for blobs. This will only work though if AMD are honest about their specifications and list the bugs rather than posting specs and pretending that everything works perfectly.
That approach was pretty common in the old days, particularly on the Amiga but it was easier to do back then. Taking the Amiga as an example, it was a fairly static and standardised platform. Design a booter and basic OS that will run on the Amiga 500 and then you can reasonably expect it to work on the vast majority of machines out there. The problem comes when the hardware changes, as another poster pointed out. Even designing games to run in a regular host OS is tricky at times when OS writers move the goal posts around or if you use some hacks to squeeze a bit of performance out of the machine.
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Thanks for adding the clarification. That highlights another issue actually. People creating derivative works and then trying to stop others from doing what they themselves have done. Disney is one of the best examples of a company that fights strongly for stronger copyright protection while making a lot of money by reworking material that has entered the public domain.
That's spooky. By accident, I become far more accurate than Sylvia Browne has ever been.
Yep, that statement is dodgy as hell, yet allows her a nice get-out clause if she's asked to justify her belief.
It's my personal belief that you are Larry Hagman. It's also my person belief that homeopathy is scientifically proven and a great replacement for boring conventional medicine.
Nope, because they don't see any possible issues with what they're saying. Take this wonderful example from NBC/Universal's counsel.
"NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070615-copyright-coalition-piracy-more-serious-than-burglary-fraud-bank-robbery.html?bub
I think the best way to view these people is to imagine what happen if someone from the distant past were to come in to our time. For example, Jews from 1000BC or a Kansas school board from 2006. Both groups would have some bizarre views of the world, probably arguing with passion that heliocentrism and evolution are totally false. They may even advocate burning at the stake for people consorting with evil by using post-it notes or computers.
The legal counsel and the PR departments of these record companies face a similar handicap, in that they can't possible adjust to our time. We need to develop a time machine so we can return them to a time they understand
Do you find, as I do, that it's rare for people to actually ask about gender? In a few years of playing female characters in WoW, the only people who have asked are total strangers. Guild mates generally don't ask, although I do say if they ask.
It's been funny when a total stranger asks "Are you girl in RL?" and when I tell then no, they seem a bit disappointed. Even if I was female, I doubt I would look anything like the character I'm playing anyway.
It's very easy if you claim to be a muslim. The devs would suffer pretty horribly if they said "Sorry love, you'll need to take that mask off"
Could it be the games you're playing? Everyone knows that 99% of meals contain beef. I've seen in in three different restaurants.
Of course, I forgot to mention that the three restaurants are Harry's House of Beef, Tom's Beef Shack, and International House of Beef.
I tend to play female characters in WoW and know quite a few real women who play the game (I checked), and none of them behaved the way you said. I've no doubt that scamming goes on but it probably depends on the games and the crowd you hang around in.
Yep, it worked well in Ireland with the Christian Brothers whacking the hell out of children. Organised religion neither creates psychopaths nor discourages them, it's just a handy justification for some people who want to do some pretty nasty things.
Christians, on the whole are reasonable people, but they will chose the scripture that best backs up what they want to do. No-one could honestly claim to abide by every example or law set in The Bible since it's impossible due to the contradictions.
You could take the gospels specifically as an authority since their authors describe the life and teachings of Jesus, but even the gospels are not consistent with each other.
The danger comes when people elevate The Bible to some kind of divine level. It has some interesting (if slightly unoriginal ideas in some places) but it should be criticised and pulled apart just like any other text.
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Cheers, very good response there. I agree with you that there is definitely a lot of background knowledge needed to understand the meaning of what is in those books, the biggest problem being that the learned experts often disagree among themselves.
If there is a God, I really hope he releases a revised version of the Bible in pamphlet form with very clear instructions.
I'm at work so It's not safe for me to look up references. I'd consider the following areas a bit dodgy though.
Lot's repeated drunken incest.
The concubine that was dismembered and popped in to the post.
The kind gentlemen who gave his daughter to an angry mob to save two angels from being soddomised.
Jesus telling us to give away our posessions if asked to do so.
Jesus, rather coldly refusing to help a woman whose child was posessed until she convinced him with a clever argument.
Numerous executions for petty infractions, such a gathering firewood on the sabbath
Pillage, rape and kidnapping - all cheered on by God
The main reason I'd label them dodgy is that most Christians I meet fall in to the 'Jesus loves us and he's a swell guy' category. Most of them are ignoring the behaviour of their god, as described in The Bible. I went through a Catholic education and grew up thinking that God was a nice guy but when I actually read The Bible for myself, that illusion was totally shattered and it was a genuinally upsetting experience. There are some good morals to be found in The Bible but overall, it's a poor source of moral guidance.
Heh heh. I've done the same thing with The Koran and it's pretty difficult to find a page that doesn't mention violence or provide guidance on how to deal with unbelievers. I'm hard pushed to come up with a non-violent religion, at least among the Abrahamic faiths.
Even the elderly woman sitting at her parish meeting is following a religion based on one of the most violent books ever compiled. It's quite funny to raise some of more dodgy sections of The Bible and find that they didn't even know they were in there. Jesus may be portrayed as this nice bearded guy but his dad is a total arse hole.
Some parts of The Bible are definitely relevent today, in fact many parts contain pretty good, if unoriginal advice. The problems begin when people believe The Bible to be the word of God. As well as the sensible advice, there are plenty of delusions and downright nasty things.
We can compare The Bible to the Star Wars series of films.
I watch Star Wars and think that there are some good moral messages in there. That's good and well but what happens if I believe that Star Wars is factual?
If I accept it as factual, I get a lot more than the 'good will overcome evil' message. I will have to believe in the existence of wookies, star destroyers and Darth Vader. Since Darth Vader's redemption was completed by his death, I might apply that to others. John, my next door neighbour, seems a bit evil to me so I'd better kill him in order to save him from the dark side. Obi Wan became 'more powerful than you can possibly imagine' when he was killed by Darth Vader. With that in mind, I'll go get myself killed so I can become powerful. When you look at what the religious are doing, this silly example doesn't seem very funny. The Bible may have served a purpose in the past but we have better ways to teach good moral behaviour.
Timothy isn't one of the gospels but it's certainly part of the New Testament - presumably because God wants it there.
Based on his style of writing and it's resemblence to The Daily Mail (a British newspaper aimed at the middle-class closet nazi who thinks that things aren't as good as they used to be), I'd say he's trapped somewhere in the fictional 1950s. You can't blame him for missing the 80s, he hasn't even reached them yet.
They've already entered into the realm of multiculturalism by celebrating the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Airmen, black airmen who fought during www2.
I suspect that had the blogger been writing 30 years ago, he'd be pretty annoyed about having Good 'ol G.I. Joe associatin' with them coloured folks. Still can't decide whether the blog is real or a parody though.
Definitely. Timothy 6:1 is very relevant to me, assuming that slavery is permitted and I find myself serving another. I find the advice on the handling of demonic possession to be pretty useful as long as there happens to be a nearby herd of pigs.
You'll find similar relevence if read Homer's Odyssey or The Epic of Gilgamesh. Simple reason is because they are all stories about men that were written by men (I use the term men to refer to the species, not the gender). Also, you may be inspired by the text, particularly if you can convince yourself that Homer was the son of Zeus or that The Epic of Gilgamesh was written by followers of Kumarbi.
Slashdot does that to us all. On my wedding day when my fiancee said 'I do', I suspected it was part an embrace and extend strategy. Turns out I was right in that case.
Blizzard have a pretty long history of releasing decenty written hybrid releases. Based on that, I suspect that they would certainly make little changes to help the Linux users.
It would be understandble if they need to edit the documents or have the legal team review them.
Well put. If everyone else understood this principle, it'd be far harder for people to try to defend things like closed-source DRM and even closed-source electronic voting systems.
Yep, and that alone will lead to loud cheers in the BSD world, particularly among OpenBSD developers.
Even if OpenBSD isn't commonly used for gaming, it's going to save a lot of reverse engineering and remove the need for blobs. This will only work though if AMD are honest about their specifications and list the bugs rather than posting specs and pretending that everything works perfectly.
That approach was pretty common in the old days, particularly on the Amiga but it was easier to do back then. Taking the Amiga as an example, it was a fairly static and standardised platform. Design a booter and basic OS that will run on the Amiga 500 and then you can reasonably expect it to work on the vast majority of machines out there. The problem comes when the hardware changes, as another poster pointed out. Even designing games to run in a regular host OS is tricky at times when OS writers move the goal posts around or if you use some hacks to squeeze a bit of performance out of the machine.
Real geeks use telnet to mail their Star Wars fan fiction to their friends.
People working in marketing are eligible to moderate, just like us humans.