Yeah. I wonder how charitable he would be if a group of gold farmers decided to make money by singing outside his house every night. I think his wanting peace and quiet would eventually trump their right to eat.
Oh come one! Put aside the knee-jerk tabloid reaction and think about your daily life. if you sold your computer or took an evening job, you could afford to send money to countries where people are starving and dying of curable diseases. According to sight-savers, it costs £17 to save the eyesight of someone in the developing world. Have you ever spent that much on a luxury item?
I believe everyone has the right to survival, that includes food. What on earth does that have to do with earning a living by playing WoW which is most definitely not a right. WoW is not some kind of business enterprise for the poor, it's a game.
I'll be honest and say that my personal well-being and that of people I know is more important than a stranger. Did you know that £17 would save the sight of someone in the world? Every time you spend that much money on luxury items, you're denying someone the right to sight, and therefore the right to feed themselves.
I just re-read what I wrote may seem harsh but it's honest. What you wrote is a simplistic and angry response in which the most compelling argument is an ad hominem - not very convincing.
uh, ok, for the record: if i have a complaint about an activity on slashdot that actually results in putting food on a poor guy's plate, i hereby relinquish my right to complain about that activity, and will accept it, even if it makes the slashdot experience less worthy
your turn, dimwit
For someone who has a web site that preaches tolerance, respect and the word of God, that's a pretty piss-poor way to end a post.
I really don't have much of a response to what you wrote here because it's just a cheap dig. I assume you won't be giving over the spare rooms in your house to the homeless or selling your computer any time soon.
If you're so concerned with poverty, why are you wasting your time on Slashdot. You could be selling that computer or using your spare time to take a second job and send your wages to China. If you don't believe in charity then just use the money to pay someone in China to do a job for you.
Like you said it's a fucking GAME. It's not a place for people to make a living any more than it would be acceptable for you to stroll on to a football pitch during a game so you could set-up a fair-trade stall. Most people try to do their bit to help-out their fellow man but ultimately, we care about what is closest to us.
Regarding WoW, my colourful distraction is more important than a 'poor guy' feeding himself. That poor guy is disrupting a game I pay money to play.
Yeah, I think that spam is one of the main reasons why gold farmers are hated so much. The situation has improved since the recent patch but prior to that I was reporting around 2-7 spammers a day. As you said, many of the messages were pure gibberish - most likely to try and beat the spam prevention mods.
I can't help shake the feeling that the people buying gold are the same ones who receive an email advertising "CH33P C1ALI5, BUY CHE3P MED5 NOW!!" and get their credit cards out.
When you listed the bad things about gold farming, you totally neglected to mention the gold selling companies.
What's bad about gold farming?
Gold farmers occupy areas, often en-masse, making it tricky for regular players to complete quests.
Gold farmers have to advertise and they do this by spamming in-game. That is arguably the most irritating aspect of their business. They take very intrusive approaches such as randomly inviting you to a group or filling your chat window with a wall of shite. With this in mind, would you support the poor guys in china if they were making a living by filling your email in-box with meds adverts? How about if they looked up your IM details and would randomly flood you with messages that you couldn't block because when you block one account, they'll just switch to another.
If spammers and gold farmers were to lose their jobs tonight, I'd be pretty happy. They shouldn't be feeding their families through gold farming any more than I should feed mine by setting up and autodialler in my house, asking thousands of people to each send me a dollar.
Yeah, the accusations levelled at Pope Benny are unfair for the reason you said, it was difficult to not be connected with the Hitler Youth at that time.
The church has done some good but it has a murky past and it's present isn't looking too good either. In living memory, people in Ireland can recall the suffering they went through in Catholic run schools. This isn't just the sexual abuse, which is pretty rare, but the systematic beatings. How the church can justify the beating of children with a strap of leather with a lead weight sewn in to it I don't know.
The problem with the Catholic Church is that it's not enough for it to just do "plenty of good". This is the church given to us by Jesus, whose leaders claim direct descendency (not in a biological sense) from the disciples. The church should be a beacon of hope, a shining example of God's laws being observed - clearly that has not and never will be the case. The Catholic church isn't alone in this problem, as we've seen from the fall of American evangelical preachers who simply can't live up to standard they expect their flocks to.
The Bible is lousy basis for moral guidance and the church is run by people who are just as corruptable as any none of us. The pope is no more chosen by God than the ruling Spanish monarch
The Catholic Church and Nazi connection is a complicated one. I think the biggest problem is with what they didn't do - they refused to condemn the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. While not direct support, it certainly made it easier for the Nazis to continue. They tried to keep an almost neutral stance which is pretty piss-poor considering their claim to be the church given to us by Christ.
If the Catholic leadership had any kind of conscience, they'd dissolve themselves and start again - giving all of their assets to the people they've screwed (quite literally) over the years.
Gimp is still pretty rough and in all honesty, I won't use it until I leave my job and lose my access to a site licenced copy of Photoshop.
Like with my other examples though, all it takes is for a company or a dedicate group of developers to come together and build a nice front-end for it. Open Office was a better example actually, particularly since there are developers building an Aqua interface.
Once the applications fit in with the rest of the OS, they'll get a lot more business since the transition won't be as painful.
arminw, I have nothing to confess to your God any more than I should feel the need to apologise to Satan for being too nice or Allah for eating pork. You mentioned 'death of the soul' but it's a little more than that. Mark 13:40-41 states that the Jesus will command his minions to throw sinners in to a furnace of fire, the eternal flames as it's described elsewhere.
Even if we accept that the Christian god exists, the only reason I can see to worship him is so that I can avoid the punishment he'd otherwise give me. I've read most of the Bible and that's one reason why I couldn't in good conscience worship a god so downright nasty. If he does exist then we're all in trouble.
What you have here looks a lot like Stockholm syndrome. Your jailor (God) put you in your situation of having to obey idiotic rules yet you have somehow bonded with him as your only way to avoid the fate he knew was coming. God has a habit of meddling with our free-will. You yourself mention that he will give us "the DESIRE and the power to live according to the law of love". His 'hardening' of Pharoah's heart is a more well known example.
I don't need God to change me. Despite the fact that I have only a short mortal life, I believe I've a better moral code.
Modern Christianity tends to be a buffer religion - they chose the bits that they believe apply. Looking at the rules of the Bible, it really is impossible to determine which rules God considers to be the most important. Working on the sabbath, murder and being rude to parents are crimes punished by the same penalty - death. Yehweh is not a flexible deity so his rules should be treated that way. Either you obey them all to the letter or you are damned. Since the Bible is a mess of contradictions and interesting translations, it's incredibly difficult to know if you are following the rules correctly.
If the Bible is held to be the immutable truth of God then God himself is a bit confused and in some cases, downright wrong. You may as well base a religion on a game of Chinese whispers.
As an avid Old Testament reader, I'd also have to ask where we would be without incest, mass-murder and rape?
Religious people have done some good but that doesn't mean that religion itself should be thanked for this. Religion is just a tool, it's entirely down to people how they ues it.
The fact that religion has given us some benefits does not mean that we need it to continue. By the way, Mother Theresa is a piss-poor example of a good person.
I don't know about the Japanese shrine but it's pretty obvious why Sony wouldn't make an alien blasting game set in Mecca; Muslims would be in the streets burning flags and killing each other in riots. It's simply not worth the hassle. Christians tend to be a bit more civilised, even so it's not like the game is set in the vatican is it? There's a big difference between a cathedral and Mecca. How many Anglicans even know much about this cathedral anyway?
The principle is the same though. You can't give something special status simply because some people consider it sacred. Create the game, release it and let the market decide whether or not it's a good idea. There's absolutely no reason why a church be given special status. It's a lovely building but nothing more.
Yeah, important stuff should be encrypted anyway. No reason why the kid couldn't watch a database server without being able to actually see the data stored in it. As as long as the kid doesn't feel that he has a free reign, you'd hope he'd be fairly responsible - particularly if he's had a talk from someone who knows what they're doing.
I think the main cause of failure would have to be when the kid is the only one who really knows what they're doing and there's no greybeard around to say "oi, stay away from that machine".
It's going to be a case of chosing their responsibilities wisely. Only an idiot would hand over all the keys to an enthusiastic kid, no matter how good he may seem. Mind you, that applies to adults anyway.
if it's done right, both parties benefit. The kid gets some useful work experience and the school get reduced support costs. The former should the be the priority though - otherwise you may as well have the poor sod just doing photocopying all day, as I did with my 'valuable' week of work experience. I was stuck in that damn room until someone realise I wasn't bad around computers and then I got to do some fun data entry.
It can work but you have to be very careful to avoid boss's son syndrome. The kid comes in, builds some systems and then can't be found when you need help because he's at school or summer camp. As long as the kid isn't touching anything confidential or something better handled by a regular worker, it's cheap and very nice experience for the kid. If I had a chance like that when I was at school I'd have jumped at it.
Confidentiality/liability may be an issue. I'm pretty sure that minors aren't able to enter in to legal agreements. That could make it tricky to prove that you're observing the relevant data protection laws.
No, that's the problem with a shyster of a salesman who's going to try to sell you as much stuff as possible. You'll get the same treatment from them, regardless of the product being bought whether it's a PC, Mac, car or a new roof.
Here's another example of a partially quoted sentence from my post.
"plenty of examples of other people coming"
Sounds messy but it wasn't what it meant in its original context, just like your quote.
MySQL and vi are always going to be niche products but take Open Office as a better one. Gimp as well, since it's a lot easier now to to install it via pre-built binaries or via a package manager. Even Apache in OS X is a decent example since it's an apache server but with a very easy to use interface.
I could argue that apache 1.x has a pretty hefty market-share yet does not receive a higher number of exploits. The problem though is that it's a mix of things. Bad design decisions in Windows and poor user knowledge. Most people installing apache will either know what they're doing or they'll just stick with the standard and relatively locked-down configuration. Far too many Windows users (and computer users in general) are using a tool that they know very little about. Ooo, purple monkey on my desktop, I'll install that!
And this, people, is why Linux will *never* own significant acrege in the desktop market: The people who drive most Linux development *are not* interested in desktop usability and *user* experience. This is not a troll / flamebait / cut, it's simply the truth, the definition of "usability" is very different from Linux developer to "average Joe User".
It's true that the core project may be driven by die-hard techies but there are plenty of examples of other people coming along and deciding to adapt the tool for more widespread use. GUIs for vi and mysql for example. Plenty of people are totally put-off when they visit a sourceforge page and realise they'll need to build the software themselves. Along comes someone else who helpfully creates binaries and puts them in an installer package. Unfortunately, not all projects are fortunate enough to get this kind of attention.
Finding a group interesting in tarting up an entire distro is a hard one. Definitely more work than making some nicely packaged mysql binaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I wonder how charitable he would be if a group of gold farmers decided to make money by singing outside his house every night. I think his wanting peace and quiet would eventually trump their right to eat.
Oh come one! Put aside the knee-jerk tabloid reaction and think about your daily life. if you sold your computer or took an evening job, you could afford to send money to countries where people are starving and dying of curable diseases. According to sight-savers, it costs £17 to save the eyesight of someone in the developing world. Have you ever spent that much on a luxury item?
I believe everyone has the right to survival, that includes food. What on earth does that have to do with earning a living by playing WoW which is most definitely not a right. WoW is not some kind of business enterprise for the poor, it's a game.
I'll be honest and say that my personal well-being and that of people I know is more important than a stranger. Did you know that £17 would save the sight of someone in the world? Every time you spend that much money on luxury items, you're denying someone the right to sight, and therefore the right to feed themselves.
I just re-read what I wrote may seem harsh but it's honest. What you wrote is a simplistic and angry response in which the most compelling argument is an ad hominem - not very convincing.
uh, ok, for the record: if i have a complaint about an activity on slashdot that actually results in putting food on a poor guy's plate, i hereby relinquish my right to complain about that activity, and will accept it, even if it makes the slashdot experience less worthy
your turn, dimwit
For someone who has a web site that preaches tolerance, respect and the word of God, that's a pretty piss-poor way to end a post.
I really don't have much of a response to what you wrote here because it's just a cheap dig. I assume you won't be giving over the spare rooms in your house to the homeless or selling your computer any time soon.
If you're so concerned with poverty, why are you wasting your time on Slashdot. You could be selling that computer or using your spare time to take a second job and send your wages to China. If you don't believe in charity then just use the money to pay someone in China to do a job for you.
Like you said it's a fucking GAME. It's not a place for people to make a living any more than it would be acceptable for you to stroll on to a football pitch during a game so you could set-up a fair-trade stall. Most people try to do their bit to help-out their fellow man but ultimately, we care about what is closest to us.
Regarding WoW, my colourful distraction is more important than a 'poor guy' feeding himself. That poor guy is disrupting a game I pay money to play.
Yeah, I think that spam is one of the main reasons why gold farmers are hated so much. The situation has improved since the recent patch but prior to that I was reporting around 2-7 spammers a day. As you said, many of the messages were pure gibberish - most likely to try and beat the spam prevention mods.
I can't help shake the feeling that the people buying gold are the same ones who receive an email advertising "CH33P C1ALI5, BUY CHE3P MED5 NOW!!" and get their credit cards out.
When you listed the bad things about gold farming, you totally neglected to mention the gold selling companies.
What's bad about gold farming?
Gold farmers occupy areas, often en-masse, making it tricky for regular players to complete quests.
Gold farmers have to advertise and they do this by spamming in-game. That is arguably the most irritating aspect of their business. They take very intrusive approaches such as randomly inviting you to a group or filling your chat window with a wall of shite. With this in mind, would you support the poor guys in china if they were making a living by filling your email in-box with meds adverts? How about if they looked up your IM details and would randomly flood you with messages that you couldn't block because when you block one account, they'll just switch to another.
If spammers and gold farmers were to lose their jobs tonight, I'd be pretty happy. They shouldn't be feeding their families through gold farming any more than I should feed mine by setting up and autodialler in my house, asking thousands of people to each send me a dollar.
Yeah, the accusations levelled at Pope Benny are unfair for the reason you said, it was difficult to not be connected with the Hitler Youth at that time.
The church has done some good but it has a murky past and it's present isn't looking too good either. In living memory, people in Ireland can recall the suffering they went through in Catholic run schools. This isn't just the sexual abuse, which is pretty rare, but the systematic beatings. How the church can justify the beating of children with a strap of leather with a lead weight sewn in to it I don't know.
The problem with the Catholic Church is that it's not enough for it to just do "plenty of good". This is the church given to us by Jesus, whose leaders claim direct descendency (not in a biological sense) from the disciples. The church should be a beacon of hope, a shining example of God's laws being observed - clearly that has not and never will be the case. The Catholic church isn't alone in this problem, as we've seen from the fall of American evangelical preachers who simply can't live up to standard they expect their flocks to.
The Bible is lousy basis for moral guidance and the church is run by people who are just as corruptable as any none of us. The pope is no more chosen by God than the ruling Spanish monarch
The Catholic Church and Nazi connection is a complicated one. I think the biggest problem is with what they didn't do - they refused to condemn the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. While not direct support, it certainly made it easier for the Nazis to continue. They tried to keep an almost neutral stance which is pretty piss-poor considering their claim to be the church given to us by Christ.
If the Catholic leadership had any kind of conscience, they'd dissolve themselves and start again - giving all of their assets to the people they've screwed (quite literally) over the years.
Gimp is still pretty rough and in all honesty, I won't use it until I leave my job and lose my access to a site licenced copy of Photoshop.
Like with my other examples though, all it takes is for a company or a dedicate group of developers to come together and build a nice front-end for it. Open Office was a better example actually, particularly since there are developers building an Aqua interface.
Once the applications fit in with the rest of the OS, they'll get a lot more business since the transition won't be as painful.
arminw, I have nothing to confess to your God any more than I should feel the need to apologise to Satan for being too nice or Allah for eating pork. You mentioned 'death of the soul' but it's a little more than that. Mark 13:40-41 states that the Jesus will command his minions to throw sinners in to a furnace of fire, the eternal flames as it's described elsewhere.
Even if we accept that the Christian god exists, the only reason I can see to worship him is so that I can avoid the punishment he'd otherwise give me. I've read most of the Bible and that's one reason why I couldn't in good conscience worship a god so downright nasty. If he does exist then we're all in trouble.
What you have here looks a lot like Stockholm syndrome. Your jailor (God) put you in your situation of having to obey idiotic rules yet you have somehow bonded with him as your only way to avoid the fate he knew was coming. God has a habit of meddling with our free-will. You yourself mention that he will give us "the DESIRE and the power to live according to the law of love". His 'hardening' of Pharoah's heart is a more well known example.
I don't need God to change me. Despite the fact that I have only a short mortal life, I believe I've a better moral code.
I've always found the fact that religion is cultural, almost inherited, to be one of the most damning pieces of evidence against it.
Yep, like genes religion tends runs in the family. Funny coincidence that.
This is the key point really.
Modern Christianity tends to be a buffer religion - they chose the bits that they believe apply. Looking at the rules of the Bible, it really is impossible to determine which rules God considers to be the most important. Working on the sabbath, murder and being rude to parents are crimes punished by the same penalty - death. Yehweh is not a flexible deity so his rules should be treated that way. Either you obey them all to the letter or you are damned. Since the Bible is a mess of contradictions and interesting translations, it's incredibly difficult to know if you are following the rules correctly.
If the Bible is held to be the immutable truth of God then God himself is a bit confused and in some cases, downright wrong. You may as well base a religion on a game of Chinese whispers.
They're freaky & they're fruity, mysteriously into dookie, they're all together spooning, The Goatsee Family.
Oh that made my day!
I can imagine the situation. The goatse family sitting there browsing the web and gran ma says "Hey, I recognise that lower colon!"
It's not illegal. You just have to fill out so many forms beforehand that no-one can be bothered.
As an avid Old Testament reader, I'd also have to ask where we would be without incest, mass-murder and rape?
Religious people have done some good but that doesn't mean that religion itself should be thanked for this. Religion is just a tool, it's entirely down to people how they ues it.
The fact that religion has given us some benefits does not mean that we need it to continue. By the way, Mother Theresa is a piss-poor example of a good person.
I don't know about the Japanese shrine but it's pretty obvious why Sony wouldn't make an alien blasting game set in Mecca; Muslims would be in the streets burning flags and killing each other in riots. It's simply not worth the hassle. Christians tend to be a bit more civilised, even so it's not like the game is set in the vatican is it? There's a big difference between a cathedral and Mecca. How many Anglicans even know much about this cathedral anyway?
The principle is the same though. You can't give something special status simply because some people consider it sacred. Create the game, release it and let the market decide whether or not it's a good idea. There's absolutely no reason why a church be given special status. It's a lovely building but nothing more.
If the game depicts Christianity in a bad light, they could try the UK blasphemy law.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3753408.stm
Yeah, important stuff should be encrypted anyway. No reason why the kid couldn't watch a database server without being able to actually see the data stored in it. As as long as the kid doesn't feel that he has a free reign, you'd hope he'd be fairly responsible - particularly if he's had a talk from someone who knows what they're doing.
I think the main cause of failure would have to be when the kid is the only one who really knows what they're doing and there's no greybeard around to say "oi, stay away from that machine".
It's going to be a case of chosing their responsibilities wisely. Only an idiot would hand over all the keys to an enthusiastic kid, no matter how good he may seem. Mind you, that applies to adults anyway.
if it's done right, both parties benefit. The kid gets some useful work experience and the school get reduced support costs. The former should the be the priority though - otherwise you may as well have the poor sod just doing photocopying all day, as I did with my 'valuable' week of work experience. I was stuck in that damn room until someone realise I wasn't bad around computers and then I got to do some fun data entry.
It can work but you have to be very careful to avoid boss's son syndrome. The kid comes in, builds some systems and then can't be found when you need help because he's at school or summer camp. As long as the kid isn't touching anything confidential or something better handled by a regular worker, it's cheap and very nice experience for the kid. If I had a chance like that when I was at school I'd have jumped at it.
Confidentiality/liability may be an issue. I'm pretty sure that minors aren't able to enter in to legal agreements. That could make it tricky to prove that you're observing the relevant data protection laws.
No, that's the problem with a shyster of a salesman who's going to try to sell you as much stuff as possible. You'll get the same treatment from them, regardless of the product being bought whether it's a PC, Mac, car or a new roof.
Here's another example of a partially quoted sentence from my post.
"plenty of examples of other people coming"
Sounds messy but it wasn't what it meant in its original context, just like your quote.
MySQL and vi are always going to be niche products but take Open Office as a better one. Gimp as well, since it's a lot easier now to to install it via pre-built binaries or via a package manager. Even Apache in OS X is a decent example since it's an apache server but with a very easy to use interface.
I could argue that apache 1.x has a pretty hefty market-share yet does not receive a higher number of exploits. The problem though is that it's a mix of things. Bad design decisions in Windows and poor user knowledge. Most people installing apache will either know what they're doing or they'll just stick with the standard and relatively locked-down configuration. Far too many Windows users (and computer users in general) are using a tool that they know very little about. Ooo, purple monkey on my desktop, I'll install that!
And this, people, is why Linux will *never* own significant acrege in the desktop market: The people who drive most Linux development *are not* interested in desktop usability and *user* experience. This is not a troll / flamebait / cut, it's simply the truth, the definition of "usability" is very different from Linux developer to "average Joe User".
It's true that the core project may be driven by die-hard techies but there are plenty of examples of other people coming along and deciding to adapt the tool for more widespread use. GUIs for vi and mysql for example. Plenty of people are totally put-off when they visit a sourceforge page and realise they'll need to build the software themselves. Along comes someone else who helpfully creates binaries and puts them in an installer package. Unfortunately, not all projects are fortunate enough to get this kind of attention.
Finding a group interesting in tarting up an entire distro is a hard one. Definitely more work than making some nicely packaged mysql binaries.