this is what happens when you let free markets thrive, and don't bog them down in regulations and laws. You get nice steady improvements, and cheaper prices.
Now if only they lifted antitrust regulations, so that AMD and Intel could form a cartel and stop all this silly competition that's hindering technical progress!
Open source is communism, not democracy. All are equal, but some are more equal than others:)
Open source is a near-post-scarcity economy. Everything can be dublicated effortlessly and endlessly, and is free for the taking. The only thing still scarce is the skill to modify stuff to better suit you and come up with new stuff, but even that is changing with the advent of new programming languages and ever-smarter compilers. Rather than working for money, people (well, some of them) work for prestige and for fun.
That's what our society will look like once nanomanufacturing, strong AI and other future-tech stuff comes to pass. We'll all be doing whatever we damn well want to rather than whatever puts bread on the table. Of course we'll also be fighting Monsonto's patent lawyers claiming that the molecular structure of bread our nanobots just manufactured is derivative of their patents and we should thus pay them for nothing, but that's IP law for you;).
No. Remember I was comparing the national debt to *personal* debt of $130,000 on credit cards.
And I'm comparing the national economy to the workshop.
Sell-off the workshop either as one piece or as pieces (tools) on ebay, use the proceeds to pay off my $130,000 credit card debt, cut unnecessary luxuries like cable/cellphone, maybe rent out the former space, and pay-down that debt to zero as fast as possible. Bottom Line: You're cutting expenses that are wasteful to avoid personal bankruptcy.
So who were you planning on selling the national economy to? China?
Let my workshop go bankrupt. Other, stronger workshops with better finances (i.e. with savings rather than $130,000 debt) will weather the storm, survive the Depression, and thereby rebuild an economy based on strength, not weakness.
Oh yes, and those stronger workshops are known as Europe, China and India.
This is what happened in the Depression of 1920-21, and it worked brilliantly.
Um, what? The Great Depression started when the poorly regulated stock market overheated and crashed, lasted a decade, helped Hitler to rise to power and only ended with the help of massive government spending on World War II (which it helped cause in the first place). That is your idea of "worked brilliantly"?
On the good side, the GD drove home the need for market regulation, which, once implemented, kept the economy in steady growth - until some laserbrains in love with libertarian ideology removed these regulations, resulting in the current mess.
The idea that preventative care (spending $1000-2000 a year to visit the doctor and repair various ailments) is cheaper than catastrophic care is a myth. It makes about as much sense as me repainting my car every year to prevent rust. It makes much more sense to wait for the rust, and THEN repaint my car. The same is true with your body.
As it happens, it makes most sense to fix any scratches in the paint immediately, before the rust can set in and spread. That can be done easily and cheaply with a paint stick service stations sell. Waiting until the rust has spread will turn a 5-minute paintjob into an hour-long one involving metalworking. So I guess you picked a good analogue, and thus disproved your own point:).
Of course I'm sure my mechanic would LOVE it if I threw-away my money repainting my car every year. Ditto my doctor. It's extra income for their pockets.
The point is that you don't need a mechanic to fix small problems like scratched paint. You can fix them yourself. Similarly, you don't need a specialist doctor and lots of expensive equipment to fix small medical problems, a general practitioner - sometimes even a nurse - can fix them easily. Skin cancer is a perfect example: have that mole removed as soon as it starts acting up, and it takes five minutes and a band-aid; wait until it develops into an actual cancer and it takes chemo, radiotherapy, and intensive care unit and could still easily kill you.
they will defend it like they do Medicare and Social Security.
Yes and like the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme, they are doomed to collapse as the number of recipients exceed the number of new entrants to the pyramid. I certainly won't defend either of these programs.
Social Security and Medicare are not ponzi schemes any more than, say, road maintenance is. A ponzi scheme collapses because everyone expects to get out of it more money than they paid into it and there is no productive activity being done with the money (if there is, it's a normal and legitimate investment firm). A social scurity program is simply a state-run (and often tax-funded) insurance program, where the average participant ends up putting in as much or more money than withdrawing.
So of course they're interested in changing Chinese culture, as much as possible, to earn themselves more money.
Um, no. They're undermining Chinese dictatorship's ability to keep its people in the dark. It has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with someone being scared of losing his power.
We here in the West think that free and open access to information is a good thing, so we view Google's actions as altruistic to a certain degree. In China, free and open access to information is viewed as dangerous, so they view Google's actions as nothing more than an attempt to change their culture purely to make money.
Is viewed as dangerous by whom? The regular Chinese? I doubt that, and even if it was, why should I listen to someone who's opinion is based on the lies he's been told? I shouldn't, I should show that poor bastard the truth, thus setting him free to form opinions based on actual facts rather than party propaganda.
Or is it the Chinese government which views free access to information dangerous? Now why is that? Do they perhaps think that the regular Chinese - indeed, the very Chinese culture - would condemn them if they knew the truth of their activities?
But isn't it up to the Chinese people to decide how they want to be governed?
I couldn't agree more. It's truly a pity that the Chinese government disagrees, and makes panicked accusations against Google for attempting to give them this power.
Yes, to my eyes over here in the West, they look like they're being oppressed. But how do the folks in China feel? Are they unhappy enough to actually rebel against the government and create something new?
Why no, the Chinese people know that they are citizens of the most glorious, free and prosperous nation on Earth, just like North Koreans are and Soviet citizens were! Any information saying anything else is dangerous, contagious propaganda from eeeeevil Western corporations - but thankfully the Chinese officials are always ready to prevent their citizens from seeing such vile lies and to re-educate anyone who has!
But the government has all the tanks and guns and stuff! Surely any attempt at revolution would just fail utterly, right? We ought to roll in there with our tanks and guns and put in a shiny new democracy, right?
No, I say let the Chinese people free access to information, at which point they can decide if their current leaders are ruling in accordance to the values of Chinese people and culture. Based on said leaders reaction, I'd guess the answer would be a Big No.
Actually it's more like having a workshop, which has already gone bankrupt, and then trying to save it with an emergency loan. It's like throwing good money after bad, and ultimately won't do anything productive.
That's certainly a better example than the roof one; and as it happens, it's actually a good plan. If the workshop (national economy) goes bankrupt, you're screwed, whether you have even more debt or not, so take the risk and try to save it.
No. I used the example that came to my head, since I was thinking of *personal* debt it made sense to use a personal example - i.e. an upgrade to my house. No different than Cash for Clunkers or Cash for First-time Homebuyers.
The difference between you buying a roof and the government buying a roof is that in the first case you're out of the money spent, while in the latter one the money stays in the national economy. These are different situations, despite looking similar at surface.
Thinking of national economy in terms of your personal economy might be useful in some cases, but in this one it's a misleading oversimplification.
"But we have to KEEP SPENDING because we're in a depression! Now is not the time to cut spending." - typical Democrat or Obama supporter. To me this is equivalent to my family carrying a $130,000 credit card debt and saying that I need to go buy a new roof for my house, when in reality I should be canceling my cable/cellphone/internet and other extraneous expenses to pay-off the debt & weather the current storm.
No, it's the equivalent of taking out a loan so you can build a workshop and (hopefully) use the profit from stuff you produce there to pay off both debts.
Since this is kinda obvious - the extra spending is supposed to encourage investment into production facilities that are useful even after the initial spending is done, while the root is not going to produce anything - I'm guessing that you're using a purposefully flawed analogue in an attempt to make a strawman argument against people you dislike for ideological reasons. That's fine, this is just a discussion forum for the nerds, but don't expect anyone who actually wields any power over anything to listen to such rubbish. So drop the strawmen, or resolve to spend the rest of your life complaining that nobody important cares about your opinion.
Of course Google is trying to impose "American Values" on China. As it stands, they can't gain enough power to control things there. If China becomes more like America, then Google (and other companies) will have a bigger say in the government, and will be able to make more money.
Yes, obviously. It can't possibly have anything to do with Google's value coming from allowing people access to information and Chinese government's power coming from denying people access to information. Clearly, this is not about Chinese government wanting to keep its Ministry of Truth running and Google being a threat to that, but instead it's about Google trying to control Chinese government.
I guess every puppetmaster's worst nightmare is for the strings to get cut...
More to the root problem, though, why the hell would they alter the well-established criteria for a dangerous fall to reduce the load on their ambulance network? Why in god's name didn't they get more frickin ambulances?!
That costs money, which can be better used for bonuses for the leaders.
All I can say is, welcome to government managed health care, where the least important person in the system is the patient.
This is different from how private insurance firms operate how?
Face it, in any system run by humans, if you are injured, sick or otherwise incapacipated, your wellbeing depends on someone else giving a shit about it - and that someone else is a complete stranger who's more interested in getting his shift over with and going home than your life or death. The only difference between a government service and private company is that the government service regards you as a statistic while the private company regards you as a liability to get rid of on whatever flimsy excuse.
Not true. Put another way, if this really becomes an issue, think about the army of servants that a wealthy family might've had in the late 19th century. The challenge is creating a demand for that, but frankly, I would much rather have more tax dollars with which to hire, say, a housekeeper, than have my tax dollars go to a paper pusher, given the choice.
Of course you would. And I'm pretty sure that most people would prefer pushing papers in an office to being a housekeeper to you. That's why they fight to keep paper-pushing jobs around. Besides, we already have automatic vacuum-cleaners, so it's not like the job of a housekeepr will stay around for much longer either.
In any case, I don't think that our current economic model can survive the ongoing technological revolution. Job insecurity and resulting stress about your survival when the society is wealthier than ever is an insane combination; sooner or later something will give. Compete, compete, compete in an endless rat race or hope Wal-Mart is hiring; screw that. The only question is whether the change is peaceful and constructive one, leading to a new era of prosperity and cooperation without compulsion, or a total social collapse. Could go either way...
Or it could be that, if we ever invent a machine to clean roadkill instead, he should bite the bullet and find what to him might be a "shit job", but which hasn't (yet) been replaced by machines.
So basically such a machine would change his life for the worse. And as the word "yet" indicates, it's just one step in the endless downward slide. I guess he would fight pretty hard to keep such a machine from being used, just like paper-pushers fight for their jobs.
He may not hold the political office anymore but he may become what Jack Thompson has been for us Americans. A real pain in the ass that doesn't seem to know how to stay down.
Thompson is hardly a pain in the ass, as that would require him to be somewhat effective. If anything, his lunatic raving has worked in favour of game players and -publishers, since he makes the anti-gaming side look bad by association.
Eliminate the risk of death due to failure, and you will have a lot more folk attempt something new.
True, but 1 out of 1000 people will become a couch potato, which will prompt lawmakers to focus the entire system towards trying to flush them out. This, in turn, will tear the safety net full of holes which everyone else will have to waste their time fighting against.
More importantly, the libertarians and other right-wing assholes will scream bloody murder at anything that seems to benefit the people rather than corporations, especially if it benefits the poor most.
(And while you're at it, toss the minimum wage laws. No reason to put an artificual floor on wages if you have a seperate mechanism to make sure everyone has food and shelter.)
If everyone has guaranteed food and shelter, no one's willing to work for McDonalds or Wal-Mart for 1 penny per hour (and quite a few people for any pay), resulting in effective minimum wage laws.
Yes, and I learned C while making a variant of it. Nethack is not an adventure game. It is a roguelike game. It has absolutely nothing to do with Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, or any other adventure game. So what's your point?
1. The notions that adventure games disappeared because people are dumb, was false all the time. The adventure games market was actually a growing market when it got dumped by the publishers. There never was as much as a dip in sales, it went up each year... then nearly went extinct.
Adventure games went extinct because they are, to put it bluntly, a horrible game format. At each and every point of the game you're trying to guess how the adventure maker wants this puzzle to be solved. You (usually) can't use common sense, you (usually) can't use real-world problem-solving, you (never) can't use creativity; you simply have to guess what to do in order for the game to process.
Some of these new-fangled physics simulators might allow adventure games to become big again, but I suspect it'll take real strong AI that can model the results of unpredictable player actions in order to really happen. Then again, that shouldn't be more than a few years away...
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I have simply decided that there are some things I won't do; you know, the whole Nietzschean self-actualization thing: I might be a pathetic failure as a human being in many ways, but I'm still not sinking to certain depths. It's not so much about good or bad as it is about not being an invertebrate (such as a CEO, politician or a lawyer).
People always complain that the world is nasty. It isn't; it's completely neutral, on account of being not self-aware. It's human beings who are nasty, but there's no reason why that needs to be the case. A lot more can be accomplished by cooperation than selfish profit-seeking, so why not band together and conquer the stars and our own limits?
You've got the same amount of total information to memorize no matter what when it comes to learning a new language.
True. However, if that language uses an alphapet you're familiar with, you can learn it with a dictionary in one hand (that's how I learned English (I'm a native Finnish-speaker)). On the other hand, with Chinese (or Japanese or whatever), how will you look up unfamiliar words? Sure, you could have a dictionary, but how will you know where to open it, when you don't know the alphapetic-equivalent, much less the equivalent of alphaphetical order? That's the real barrier to learning these languages.
If anyone has good ways of passing that, I'd be really grateful to hear them. I've long wanted to learn Japanese, but this has been a pretty efficient roadblock...
And Gelbooru, Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, 4chan, and who knows how many other places.
Or, if we really put it bluntly, Disney, built itself on movies about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and other fairytales they didn't come up with (yes, even Steamboat Willy is a direct ripoff of a pre-existing movie), and Pixar, which comes up with somewhat original stories but bases them on pre-existing concepts and popular culture.
There's nothign new under the Sun, therefore copyright is dumb.
Your usage of the term "Vulcan" in reference to the phrase "the needs of the few coming before the needs of the many" violates the copyright of CBS Corporation. Cease and desist immediately.
Yo parent, I just want to clarify your position here. Are you saying that "copyrights" are unamerican (I would agree), or that "fighting [against] copyrights" is unamerican (as GP sarcastically suggests)?:3
Copyrights (at least in the current absurdly powerful form) are unamerican by the original conception of the USA, since they infringe on freedom. Fighting against copyrights is unamerican by the current conception of the USA, since that infringes on ultra-capitalist need to privatize everything.
I can kinda understand why one would equate hard-line capitalism with freedom when half the world was ruled by the Soviet Union, but it's long gone now, so we really need to drop the rethoric and admit that social good needs to be considered too. We especially need to understand that a megacorporation is not a private entity, but something that's close to a government in power, and as such must be fettered by laws just like the government least it oppresses actual human beings for profit.
I know what 4chan is, and having seen its like many times before over the years have no intrest in visiting/b/
I'm impressed by your clairvoyant ability to judge a site you imply to not have visited. But why are you posting in a discussion about the future of a website you don't care about?
I didn't feel the need to behave like a 12yr old when I was 12, and still don't decades later.
It is interesting that you would associate vandalism and other negative behaviour with being 12 years old. It's also interesting that you associate "rigid conformity" with it, despite claiming that you were different and thus didn't conform.
I wonder if you were ostracized by your peers at around that age, and developed these fantasies of being better in order to cope? That would also explain why you felt the need to beat your chest about that supposed superiority to total strangers.
No nerds visit/b/, they can't stand the rigid conformity of its visitors.
I'm a selfish bastard who relishes in the misery of others. I work in IT security and before that, I was in tech support.
It's always nice when people find positions that fit their personality.
I have a LOT of karma to burn.
Real Life alignment system is closer to Mass Effect than D&D: good and evil don't cancel each other, they're counted separately, and the accumulated total of either can never go down. Oh, and only bad karma counts.
Does this mean that 4chan will go through a phase with randomly distributed resize widgets spread about the screen?
No, it means that 4chan will copy the "enlarge all images" scriplet from 7chan. This is cue for 7channers to complain about 4chan and "party hard", that is, make the background change colors in rabid strobo effect to supposedly drive "niggertitters" out. Expect lots of epic drama as two sets of losers badmouth each other over nothing; in other words, information age entertainment at its best:).
Well I can't speak for anybody else but for me Windows 7 actually...of what is it called...oh yeah, actually worked. No tweaking, no hassles, the most I had to do was install a driver for my USB TV tuner for Win7 x64, and that was it.
Ditto, all I had to do was to override my monitor's EDID info to disable 60Hz modes.
Now as for Vista? oh Lord help the poor bastard trapped on that OS. And before anybody goes 'oh poo poo, that was only in the beta, poo poo" my experiences were on SP1, which is when I finally said "fuck this mess" and went back to XP X64.
Vista is decent, if you have a beefy machine and don't mind a constant deluge of insignificant notifications. Of course, even XP had the "there are unused icons on the desktop" -message popping up constantly; luckily, Win7 seems to have scrapped this, and hasn't this far given me much grief. In fact, if I got virtual desktops and Bash (and assorted command line utilities), I might consider sticking to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only they lifted antitrust regulations, so that AMD and Intel could form a cartel and stop all this silly competition that's hindering technical progress!
Open source is a near-post-scarcity economy. Everything can be dublicated effortlessly and endlessly, and is free for the taking. The only thing still scarce is the skill to modify stuff to better suit you and come up with new stuff, but even that is changing with the advent of new programming languages and ever-smarter compilers. Rather than working for money, people (well, some of them) work for prestige and for fun.
That's what our society will look like once nanomanufacturing, strong AI and other future-tech stuff comes to pass. We'll all be doing whatever we damn well want to rather than whatever puts bread on the table. Of course we'll also be fighting Monsonto's patent lawyers claiming that the molecular structure of bread our nanobots just manufactured is derivative of their patents and we should thus pay them for nothing, but that's IP law for you ;).
And I'm comparing the national economy to the workshop.
So who were you planning on selling the national economy to? China?
Oh yes, and those stronger workshops are known as Europe, China and India.
Um, what? The Great Depression started when the poorly regulated stock market overheated and crashed, lasted a decade, helped Hitler to rise to power and only ended with the help of massive government spending on World War II (which it helped cause in the first place). That is your idea of "worked brilliantly"?
On the good side, the GD drove home the need for market regulation, which, once implemented, kept the economy in steady growth - until some laserbrains in love with libertarian ideology removed these regulations, resulting in the current mess.
As it happens, it makes most sense to fix any scratches in the paint immediately, before the rust can set in and spread. That can be done easily and cheaply with a paint stick service stations sell. Waiting until the rust has spread will turn a 5-minute paintjob into an hour-long one involving metalworking. So I guess you picked a good analogue, and thus disproved your own point :).
The point is that you don't need a mechanic to fix small problems like scratched paint. You can fix them yourself. Similarly, you don't need a specialist doctor and lots of expensive equipment to fix small medical problems, a general practitioner - sometimes even a nurse - can fix them easily. Skin cancer is a perfect example: have that mole removed as soon as it starts acting up, and it takes five minutes and a band-aid; wait until it develops into an actual cancer and it takes chemo, radiotherapy, and intensive care unit and could still easily kill you.
Social Security and Medicare are not ponzi schemes any more than, say, road maintenance is. A ponzi scheme collapses because everyone expects to get out of it more money than they paid into it and there is no productive activity being done with the money (if there is, it's a normal and legitimate investment firm). A social scurity program is simply a state-run (and often tax-funded) insurance program, where the average participant ends up putting in as much or more money than withdrawing.
Um, no. They're undermining Chinese dictatorship's ability to keep its people in the dark. It has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with someone being scared of losing his power.
Is viewed as dangerous by whom? The regular Chinese? I doubt that, and even if it was, why should I listen to someone who's opinion is based on the lies he's been told? I shouldn't, I should show that poor bastard the truth, thus setting him free to form opinions based on actual facts rather than party propaganda.
Or is it the Chinese government which views free access to information dangerous? Now why is that? Do they perhaps think that the regular Chinese - indeed, the very Chinese culture - would condemn them if they knew the truth of their activities?
I couldn't agree more. It's truly a pity that the Chinese government disagrees, and makes panicked accusations against Google for attempting to give them this power.
Why no, the Chinese people know that they are citizens of the most glorious, free and prosperous nation on Earth, just like North Koreans are and Soviet citizens were! Any information saying anything else is dangerous, contagious propaganda from eeeeevil Western corporations - but thankfully the Chinese officials are always ready to prevent their citizens from seeing such vile lies and to re-educate anyone who has!
No, I say let the Chinese people free access to information, at which point they can decide if their current leaders are ruling in accordance to the values of Chinese people and culture. Based on said leaders reaction, I'd guess the answer would be a Big No.
That's certainly a better example than the roof one; and as it happens, it's actually a good plan. If the workshop (national economy) goes bankrupt, you're screwed, whether you have even more debt or not, so take the risk and try to save it.
The difference between you buying a roof and the government buying a roof is that in the first case you're out of the money spent, while in the latter one the money stays in the national economy. These are different situations, despite looking similar at surface.
Thinking of national economy in terms of your personal economy might be useful in some cases, but in this one it's a misleading oversimplification.
No, it's the equivalent of taking out a loan so you can build a workshop and (hopefully) use the profit from stuff you produce there to pay off both debts.
Since this is kinda obvious - the extra spending is supposed to encourage investment into production facilities that are useful even after the initial spending is done, while the root is not going to produce anything - I'm guessing that you're using a purposefully flawed analogue in an attempt to make a strawman argument against people you dislike for ideological reasons. That's fine, this is just a discussion forum for the nerds, but don't expect anyone who actually wields any power over anything to listen to such rubbish. So drop the strawmen, or resolve to spend the rest of your life complaining that nobody important cares about your opinion.
Yes, obviously. It can't possibly have anything to do with Google's value coming from allowing people access to information and Chinese government's power coming from denying people access to information. Clearly, this is not about Chinese government wanting to keep its Ministry of Truth running and Google being a threat to that, but instead it's about Google trying to control Chinese government.
I guess every puppetmaster's worst nightmare is for the strings to get cut...
That costs money, which can be better used for bonuses for the leaders.
This is different from how private insurance firms operate how?
Face it, in any system run by humans, if you are injured, sick or otherwise incapacipated, your wellbeing depends on someone else giving a shit about it - and that someone else is a complete stranger who's more interested in getting his shift over with and going home than your life or death. The only difference between a government service and private company is that the government service regards you as a statistic while the private company regards you as a liability to get rid of on whatever flimsy excuse.
Of course you would. And I'm pretty sure that most people would prefer pushing papers in an office to being a housekeeper to you. That's why they fight to keep paper-pushing jobs around. Besides, we already have automatic vacuum-cleaners, so it's not like the job of a housekeepr will stay around for much longer either.
In any case, I don't think that our current economic model can survive the ongoing technological revolution. Job insecurity and resulting stress about your survival when the society is wealthier than ever is an insane combination; sooner or later something will give. Compete, compete, compete in an endless rat race or hope Wal-Mart is hiring; screw that. The only question is whether the change is peaceful and constructive one, leading to a new era of prosperity and cooperation without compulsion, or a total social collapse. Could go either way...
So basically such a machine would change his life for the worse. And as the word "yet" indicates, it's just one step in the endless downward slide. I guess he would fight pretty hard to keep such a machine from being used, just like paper-pushers fight for their jobs.
Thompson is hardly a pain in the ass, as that would require him to be somewhat effective. If anything, his lunatic raving has worked in favour of game players and -publishers, since he makes the anti-gaming side look bad by association.
True, but 1 out of 1000 people will become a couch potato, which will prompt lawmakers to focus the entire system towards trying to flush them out. This, in turn, will tear the safety net full of holes which everyone else will have to waste their time fighting against.
More importantly, the libertarians and other right-wing assholes will scream bloody murder at anything that seems to benefit the people rather than corporations, especially if it benefits the poor most.
If everyone has guaranteed food and shelter, no one's willing to work for McDonalds or Wal-Mart for 1 penny per hour (and quite a few people for any pay), resulting in effective minimum wage laws.
No, the middle is by definition mean. Average is the sum of all data points divided by their number. Please stop confusing the two.
Yes, and I learned C while making a variant of it. Nethack is not an adventure game. It is a roguelike game. It has absolutely nothing to do with Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, or any other adventure game. So what's your point?
Adventure games went extinct because they are, to put it bluntly, a horrible game format. At each and every point of the game you're trying to guess how the adventure maker wants this puzzle to be solved. You (usually) can't use common sense, you (usually) can't use real-world problem-solving, you (never) can't use creativity; you simply have to guess what to do in order for the game to process.
Some of these new-fangled physics simulators might allow adventure games to become big again, but I suspect it'll take real strong AI that can model the results of unpredictable player actions in order to really happen. Then again, that shouldn't be more than a few years away...
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I have simply decided that there are some things I won't do; you know, the whole Nietzschean self-actualization thing: I might be a pathetic failure as a human being in many ways, but I'm still not sinking to certain depths. It's not so much about good or bad as it is about not being an invertebrate (such as a CEO, politician or a lawyer).
People always complain that the world is nasty. It isn't; it's completely neutral, on account of being not self-aware. It's human beings who are nasty, but there's no reason why that needs to be the case. A lot more can be accomplished by cooperation than selfish profit-seeking, so why not band together and conquer the stars and our own limits?
True. However, if that language uses an alphapet you're familiar with, you can learn it with a dictionary in one hand (that's how I learned English (I'm a native Finnish-speaker)). On the other hand, with Chinese (or Japanese or whatever), how will you look up unfamiliar words? Sure, you could have a dictionary, but how will you know where to open it, when you don't know the alphapetic-equivalent, much less the equivalent of alphaphetical order? That's the real barrier to learning these languages.
If anyone has good ways of passing that, I'd be really grateful to hear them. I've long wanted to learn Japanese, but this has been a pretty efficient roadblock...
You don't have to imagine, it's called "Youtube".
And Gelbooru, Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt, 4chan, and who knows how many other places.
Or, if we really put it bluntly, Disney, built itself on movies about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and other fairytales they didn't come up with (yes, even Steamboat Willy is a direct ripoff of a pre-existing movie), and Pixar, which comes up with somewhat original stories but bases them on pre-existing concepts and popular culture.
There's nothign new under the Sun, therefore copyright is dumb.
Your usage of the term "Vulcan" in reference to the phrase "the needs of the few coming before the needs of the many" violates the copyright of CBS Corporation. Cease and desist immediately.
Copyrights (at least in the current absurdly powerful form) are unamerican by the original conception of the USA, since they infringe on freedom. Fighting against copyrights is unamerican by the current conception of the USA, since that infringes on ultra-capitalist need to privatize everything.
I can kinda understand why one would equate hard-line capitalism with freedom when half the world was ruled by the Soviet Union, but it's long gone now, so we really need to drop the rethoric and admit that social good needs to be considered too. We especially need to understand that a megacorporation is not a private entity, but something that's close to a government in power, and as such must be fettered by laws just like the government least it oppresses actual human beings for profit.
I'm impressed by your clairvoyant ability to judge a site you imply to not have visited. But why are you posting in a discussion about the future of a website you don't care about?
It is interesting that you would associate vandalism and other negative behaviour with being 12 years old. It's also interesting that you associate "rigid conformity" with it, despite claiming that you were different and thus didn't conform.
I wonder if you were ostracized by your peers at around that age, and developed these fantasies of being better in order to cope? That would also explain why you felt the need to beat your chest about that supposed superiority to total strangers.
Indeed, no true Scotsman would conform!
Are you a troll, a poor abuse victim, or just bad at logic?
It's always nice when people find positions that fit their personality.
Real Life alignment system is closer to Mass Effect than D&D: good and evil don't cancel each other, they're counted separately, and the accumulated total of either can never go down. Oh, and only bad karma counts.
No, it means that 4chan will copy the "enlarge all images" scriplet from 7chan. This is cue for 7channers to complain about 4chan and "party hard", that is, make the background change colors in rabid strobo effect to supposedly drive "niggertitters" out. Expect lots of epic drama as two sets of losers badmouth each other over nothing; in other words, information age entertainment at its best :).
Ditto, all I had to do was to override my monitor's EDID info to disable 60Hz modes.
Vista is decent, if you have a beefy machine and don't mind a constant deluge of insignificant notifications. Of course, even XP had the "there are unused icons on the desktop" -message popping up constantly; luckily, Win7 seems to have scrapped this, and hasn't this far given me much grief. In fact, if I got virtual desktops and Bash (and assorted command line utilities), I might consider sticking to it.