Oz is not the forefront of this "let's block the internet to save our children movement". Unfortunately the do-gooders in Finland have beat you to it, giving us a very sour tasting "Win".
And the end result of that was that I set up a Tor relay and will never again trust the Finnish police, since it has proven itself to be willing to abuse its power - not a single one of the sites on the block list I sampled contained child porn.
While vendor lock-in is a common feature in products from established Western vendors,
It isn't, actually. The source has been open for nearly two millennia, and numerous forks exist. Nowadays the legal issues have been settled too, so you are unlikely to be met by the Spanish Inquisition for starting a new one or compiling a custom kernel of beliefs for your personal use.
to be pedantic.... elves, hobbits and orcs are different species.
Since both orcs and elves interbreed with humans, and the resulting offspring can also breed, they are in fact the same species as humans. Since they are both the same species as humans, they must also be the same species as each other. In Arcanum, for example, they are just magically altered humans.
There's also been half-halflings (quarterlings ?) in some fiction, but their status is less firmly established than that of half-orcs and half-elves.
Well, this could be useful in space travel, barring we develop hyperdrives.
The problem with suspended animation of all kinds is that damage is not being repaired. Normally, when a cell gets damaged, it either fixes itself or self-destructs and gets replaced by another one. Neither is possible with metabolism suspended; consequently, all the damage just gets piling up, and hits you all at once when you are revived. "Death by a thousand cuts", so to say. Couple this with the radiation-intensive environment of outer space, and you get a very nasty combination.
No, it's either hyperdrives, relativistic drives, immortality or generation ships. Sleeper ship is not going to work, not unless you can reassemble the body from dust in your destination, because that's all you've got left. Of course, given a sufficient level of nanotechnology, that might be quite possible...
How long do you have to hear things are terrible before you believe they are, and start making changes in your own life?
Lemme get this straight: your thesis is that if you say something enough, it becomes reality?
No, his thesis is that if enough people believe that there will be a depression, and cut spending to save money for it, there will be depression due to the decreased economic activity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You sound like a republican to me.
Just because something sounds like something a republican would say doesn't automatically make it a lie, just highly suspect;). Reductio ad Republican isn't any more valid than Reductio ad Hitler.
You know, I'm usually the first to tell people to get out and vote, but the two presidential candidates (at least the two who had a snowball's chance in hell of winning the election) both so completely disgusted me that I didn't vote. I could not in good conscience vote for either scumbag.
So: you didn't like the two biggest candidates, but you didn't vote anyone else, because no one else has a chance of winning, because no one votes for them.
It's pointless, pirate buys one copy breaks the protection than uploads that to the web. Congrats EA, you've managed one additional sale at the expense of many dozens of sales to people who now are unable to run the software.
The Pirate Zero will get his game the same way he ever did, whatever that may be. If that copy happens to be inactive, he'll simply crack the activation routines the same way he breaks any other copy protection. Consequently, this thing will fail to get even a single additional sale.
It will, however, accomplish something else: since activating a game will take some time and must be done at the shop, the shopping experience will become less convenient due to increased wait times. Assuming, of course, that the shops won't shell out more cash on additional staff on top of the equipment needed for activation itself. Or just pre-activate all the games they receive to avoid that...
How much do the people who come up with these things get paid again ?
Then of course they'll hop in games with people who are playing it seriously, and much griefing will ensue.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. A game about international politics needs some oddball psychopaths to be authentic. "Some men just want to see the world burn", and some of them command armies.
Again, the 10x developer sounds like a myth until you work with him -- I'd say it's the top 1% -- but 3x developers are common.
If 3x developers are common, then what is the baseline you are comparing them against ? The very worst programmers ?
The "contributes negatively" programmer is someone you've met, though the hallmark of bad management is to encourage that guy to work more.
So, since the baseline seems to be less than zero, and the best developers are three times that, are you trying to say that the most productive developers produce enormous piles of crap ?-)
But seriously, unless you can quantify productivity numerically in an objective fashion, saying someone is "three times" or "ten times" as productive as someone else is 0.961x as meaningless as "devolved systemic projection".
There's a reason that "real" engineering companies have fellowships and Distinguished Engineer titles to recognize, empower, and retain the top 1% engineers on other fields.
Yes. Specifically, real engineers and their companies get hauled to court if the product they designed blows up in the user's face. Software engineers don't; they and their company get paid more to help the users deal with the errors they made - this is known as "support".
In your post. Specifically, you contrasted "principled support of individual rights", which you associated with right, with "buy votes from people who mistake their voting machines for slot machines", which you associated with the left. It's kinda hard to understand that any other way than that you think that the right is in it for the principle while left is in it for the greed.
Greed (ie self-interest) that does not violate the rights of others is a good thing - it leads to progress.
"Greed" is not a synonym for "self-interest". "Greed" means highly prioritizing acquisition (of resources or anything else) even after any acute or foreseeable need has been addressed. It does not lead to progress; it leads to constantly growing economic inequalities and all the associated social problems, as well as economic crisis such as the current one.
Greed is, basically, a generalized form of gluttony.
What does not lead to progress, but instead invariably results in economic disaster, is the violation of the rights of some in favor of the temporary relief of others.
Taxation does not violate anyone's rights, unless you consider it your right to benefit from ordered society without having to contribute anything to it. Rights come coupled with duties; and one of those is to give some of your economic resources towards the maintenance of the society you live in.
I don't think that word means what you think it means. Anyone in a position of governmental power who actively promotes "general welfare" is more of a tyrant than someone who promotes individual rights, by definition.
"Tyrant" in common usage means a non-enlightened and malicious dictator. As a dictator who promotes general welfare would be considered an enlightened and benevolent ruler, you are wrong.
Besides, there's no reason why guaranteed minimum income, publicly funded healthcare, and other socialistic practices shouldn't be considered rights as well. Libertarians and other right-wing extremists simply generally won't.
Today's "right" is just as far to the left as the "left". They are both in favor of political and economic pragmatism, rejecting principled support of individual rights, in favor of increased welfare statism, all in an effort to buy votes from people who mistake their voting machines for slot machines.
Your assumption that anyone in favour of a welfare state is in it for greed rather than for principled support of the idea of general welfare is, in itself a good example of what's wrong with politics today: "anyone who disagrees with me is either or stupid" isn't very conductive to to trying to find a mutually acceptable compromise or rational exchange of ideas. Demonizing your opponents has always been the tool of the tyrant.
Your ideas also go unheard if you don't tell them to anyone, but that ISN'T censorship.
Actually, intimidating someone into not speaking his mind in the first place, as opposed to trying to suppress his ideas afterwards, is one of the most efficient forms of censorship. If done skilfully enough, the victim might not even realize what's happening, or at least admit it even to himself.
Yes, Comrade, but remember: some posts will be more equal than others.
But of course, Comrade, for there must always be the First among Equal Posts. The very laws of logic dictate that.
But I promise that I won't... I mean, whoever shall be the First won't use that position for low personal gain, but for the best of all ! Some revolution in Slashdot culture is, of course, inevitable, and some posters might need to be permabanned, but I have high hopes that all but the most decadent trolls shall be re-educated in due time.
Indeed, in the brave new Slashdot there shall be no need for moderation, for there shall be no trolldom, flamebait, or spam. Only the mentally ill would ever commit such crimes against the slasbotdom, and those suffering from such illnesses shall be granted an irrevocable place in our top-of-the-line mental institutions and treated with the very best of medicines and methods to help them understand the glory of and their place in the new unmoderated society.
I think I'll be stopping now, I'm beginning to freak myself out with how easily that mindset comes...
Windows 7 has had glowing reports from everyone I know who's installed the beta and they find it incredibly fast, reliable and easy to use and that's only a beta
So there's plenty of time to fatten it up. Also, according to Wikipedia, the betas have been released to "close partners" and employees of Microsoft; neither of these seem like impartial reviewers to me.
The only thing that was 'wrong' with Vista that currently remains is the DRM but that was a whole load of FUD to begin with.
What's wrong with Vista is that it isn't really backwards compatible; old programs keep on crashing regularly. Given this, why not go with Linux and Wine instead ? It is under active development, so its compatibility is likely to keep on improving, and the platform itself is far more stable than Vista.
Don't want DRM? Don't buy DRM protected content that won't play on software without the DRM features Vista has.
Sure, DRM can be circumvented or avoided completely by downloading the disinfected version of the content from the Internet. That was never in question.
What is in question is: does the DRM subsystem contribute to the observed problems of Vista (such as bad network performance) ? Do the DRM drivers get loaded, and do they monitor the state of the machine, even when no DRM'd content is being played ? And if yes, how much resources does this consume ?
software is starting to hit the 4gb ram limit of 32bit OS' and it's not going to be worth spending a lot of time and money 'upgrading' to xp 64 when it would cost them little extra to upgrade to 7.
This of course assumes that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is better than the 64-bit version of Windows XP. It also assumes that either is better than the 64-bit support of Wine.
If you cannot charge and convict someone under laws that existed at the time of their crime, you cannot do so at all.
And if you don't punish someone who's found a loophole in law to commit murder (in the minds of the people at least), then you run the risk of people doing that by themselves. The more it happens, the less likely they are to even bother with the courts any more; they'll just hire a contract killer and be done with it.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do. In Hell or in Abyss, in D&D cosmology...
There are a couple of legitimate functions of the government, and the proper role of taxation is to fund those activities. These include providing for the national defense (not the maintenance of an empire), criminal justice (not warehousing millions of people for profit), and adjudicating disputes.
No. If "forcibly extracting money from people" is immoral, it stays immoral no matter what purpose the money so extracted serves. You can't first say "Taxation is immoral" and then add " unless it serves my interests" without being a complete hypocrite.
Different people find different things important, and there's no reason why your specific interests should get special treatment. Either remove all rules, which will dissolve any form of ordered society, or learn to tolerate compromise - and yes, that means you'll end up paying for things you don't want. That's the price of living in a society: you can't always have your way.
Libertarians and their ilk in general seem to consider anyone who disagrees with them evil, stupid or both, and exhibit ideological zeal which would make any crusader knight proud. I guess that disproves all those theories that religion causes fanaticism.
We created our government to secure our freedom, not to command our obedience.
Your government was created by people who are hundreds of years dead. Claiming that their purposes in creating it trump the purposes of people currently living is basically making the current people subservient to the dead ones's will.
It is sad that so many people can't see the value of pursuits simply because those pursuits don't promote the achievement of their specific goals. In my opinion, that is narrow-minded and antisocial behaviour. That kind of driven competition for "scarce" resources is no longer necessary. Accumulating an irrational glut of resources that should exist in sufficient abundance for everybody to enjoy them doesn't enrich anybody and impoverishes some.
Communist ! Why do you hate freedom so much ?
Re:Google workforce on the extreme left
on
Google's Gatekeepers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps we could also apply this: It's very difficult to be arrogant and not lean to the left.
Selfish and smart people tend to lean towards capitalism if they have lots of money and socialism if they don't. Unselfish and smart people tend to lean towards socialism if they consider guaranteeing everyone's physical welfare more important than economic liberty, and capitalism if the other way around. And stupid people tend to lean towards whichever side's propaganda they hear most.
I think that about covers it.
Meh. I got karma to burn if the mods aren't in a good mood.
Well, since you only got that karma in the first place by shamelessly exploiting the underpaid labour of moderators, you don't really deserve it, now do you ? You leveraged your existing karma capital to attain a position of higher visibility, thus making you more likely to be modded up and increasing your karma further, smothering those poor newcomers who post at +1 like a parasitic vine casting jungle's undergrowth to permanent shadow. It wouldn't surprise me if you and your high-karma good old boy club didn't conspire to mod down all those upstarts, to maintain your stranglehold on karma.
But the day is nearing when the karma behemoths shall be cast down, and the whole moderation system dismantled, and all posters and and all posts shall be equal !
But at what performance cost. If we are talking about the whole "Vista Capable" debacle, aren't we talking about low spec machines that coughed and wheezed when running the low-end version of the OS. Great, lets add 3D rendering to the processor load on those machines.
I suspect that the purpose here is to be able to show before a judge that they weren't technically lying.
Slashdot Mirror
We know.
And the end result of that was that I set up a Tor relay and will never again trust the Finnish police, since it has proven itself to be willing to abuse its power - not a single one of the sites on the block list I sampled contained child porn.
It isn't, actually. The source has been open for nearly two millennia, and numerous forks exist. Nowadays the legal issues have been settled too, so you are unlikely to be met by the Spanish Inquisition for starting a new one or compiling a custom kernel of beliefs for your personal use.
Just beware of malware and ignore the nay-sayers.
Interesting. This seems to put the whole concept of species in jeopardy, especially when used in scientific context.
Would that be roughly equal to "shiny, partially translucent rock" ?
A polished piece of quartz should do fine... Or should we offer the polishing as an optional feature ?
Since both orcs and elves interbreed with humans, and the resulting offspring can also breed, they are in fact the same species as humans. Since they are both the same species as humans, they must also be the same species as each other. In Arcanum, for example, they are just magically altered humans.
There's also been half-halflings (quarterlings ?) in some fiction, but their status is less firmly established than that of half-orcs and half-elves.
The problem with suspended animation of all kinds is that damage is not being repaired. Normally, when a cell gets damaged, it either fixes itself or self-destructs and gets replaced by another one. Neither is possible with metabolism suspended; consequently, all the damage just gets piling up, and hits you all at once when you are revived. "Death by a thousand cuts", so to say. Couple this with the radiation-intensive environment of outer space, and you get a very nasty combination.
No, it's either hyperdrives, relativistic drives, immortality or generation ships. Sleeper ship is not going to work, not unless you can reassemble the body from dust in your destination, because that's all you've got left. Of course, given a sufficient level of nanotechnology, that might be quite possible...
No, his thesis is that if enough people believe that there will be a depression, and cut spending to save money for it, there will be depression due to the decreased economic activity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just because something sounds like something a republican would say doesn't automatically make it a lie, just highly suspect ;). Reductio ad Republican isn't any more valid than Reductio ad Hitler.
So: you didn't like the two biggest candidates, but you didn't vote anyone else, because no one else has a chance of winning, because no one votes for them.
This is the cancer that is killing democracy.
The Pirate Zero will get his game the same way he ever did, whatever that may be. If that copy happens to be inactive, he'll simply crack the activation routines the same way he breaks any other copy protection. Consequently, this thing will fail to get even a single additional sale.
It will, however, accomplish something else: since activating a game will take some time and must be done at the shop, the shopping experience will become less convenient due to increased wait times. Assuming, of course, that the shops won't shell out more cash on additional staff on top of the equipment needed for activation itself. Or just pre-activate all the games they receive to avoid that...
How much do the people who come up with these things get paid again ?
That's not a bug, it's a feature. A game about international politics needs some oddball psychopaths to be authentic. "Some men just want to see the world burn", and some of them command armies.
That's a pretty impressive feat since this is my second post in this discussion.
Been done. Though I think that the sequel was more accurate ;(.
If 3x developers are common, then what is the baseline you are comparing them against ? The very worst programmers ?
So, since the baseline seems to be less than zero, and the best developers are three times that, are you trying to say that the most productive developers produce enormous piles of crap ?-)
But seriously, unless you can quantify productivity numerically in an objective fashion, saying someone is "three times" or "ten times" as productive as someone else is 0.961x as meaningless as "devolved systemic projection".
Yes. Specifically, real engineers and their companies get hauled to court if the product they designed blows up in the user's face. Software engineers don't; they and their company get paid more to help the users deal with the errors they made - this is known as "support".
Just a little bit cynical here ;(...
In your post. Specifically, you contrasted "principled support of individual rights", which you associated with right, with "buy votes from people who mistake their voting machines for slot machines", which you associated with the left. It's kinda hard to understand that any other way than that you think that the right is in it for the principle while left is in it for the greed.
"Greed" is not a synonym for "self-interest". "Greed" means highly prioritizing acquisition (of resources or anything else) even after any acute or foreseeable need has been addressed. It does not lead to progress; it leads to constantly growing economic inequalities and all the associated social problems, as well as economic crisis such as the current one.
Greed is, basically, a generalized form of gluttony.
Taxation does not violate anyone's rights, unless you consider it your right to benefit from ordered society without having to contribute anything to it. Rights come coupled with duties; and one of those is to give some of your economic resources towards the maintenance of the society you live in.
"Tyrant" in common usage means a non-enlightened and malicious dictator. As a dictator who promotes general welfare would be considered an enlightened and benevolent ruler, you are wrong.
Besides, there's no reason why guaranteed minimum income, publicly funded healthcare, and other socialistic practices shouldn't be considered rights as well. Libertarians and other right-wing extremists simply generally won't.
Your assumption that anyone in favour of a welfare state is in it for greed rather than for principled support of the idea of general welfare is, in itself a good example of what's wrong with politics today: "anyone who disagrees with me is either or stupid" isn't very conductive to to trying to find a mutually acceptable compromise or rational exchange of ideas. Demonizing your opponents has always been the tool of the tyrant.
Actually, intimidating someone into not speaking his mind in the first place, as opposed to trying to suppress his ideas afterwards, is one of the most efficient forms of censorship. If done skilfully enough, the victim might not even realize what's happening, or at least admit it even to himself.
But of course, Comrade, for there must always be the First among Equal Posts. The very laws of logic dictate that.
But I promise that I won't... I mean, whoever shall be the First won't use that position for low personal gain, but for the best of all ! Some revolution in Slashdot culture is, of course, inevitable, and some posters might need to be permabanned, but I have high hopes that all but the most decadent trolls shall be re-educated in due time.
Indeed, in the brave new Slashdot there shall be no need for moderation, for there shall be no trolldom, flamebait, or spam. Only the mentally ill would ever commit such crimes against the slasbotdom, and those suffering from such illnesses shall be granted an irrevocable place in our top-of-the-line mental institutions and treated with the very best of medicines and methods to help them understand the glory of and their place in the new unmoderated society.
I think I'll be stopping now, I'm beginning to freak myself out with how easily that mindset comes...
So there's plenty of time to fatten it up. Also, according to Wikipedia, the betas have been released to "close partners" and employees of Microsoft; neither of these seem like impartial reviewers to me.
What's wrong with Vista is that it isn't really backwards compatible; old programs keep on crashing regularly. Given this, why not go with Linux and Wine instead ? It is under active development, so its compatibility is likely to keep on improving, and the platform itself is far more stable than Vista.
Sure, DRM can be circumvented or avoided completely by downloading the disinfected version of the content from the Internet. That was never in question.
What is in question is: does the DRM subsystem contribute to the observed problems of Vista (such as bad network performance) ? Do the DRM drivers get loaded, and do they monitor the state of the machine, even when no DRM'd content is being played ? And if yes, how much resources does this consume ?
This of course assumes that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is better than the 64-bit version of Windows XP. It also assumes that either is better than the 64-bit support of Wine.
And if you don't punish someone who's found a loophole in law to commit murder (in the minds of the people at least), then you run the risk of people doing that by themselves. The more it happens, the less likely they are to even bother with the courts any more; they'll just hire a contract killer and be done with it.
Damned if you don't, damned if you do. In Hell or in Abyss, in D&D cosmology...
No. If "forcibly extracting money from people" is immoral, it stays immoral no matter what purpose the money so extracted serves. You can't first say "Taxation is immoral" and then add " unless it serves my interests" without being a complete hypocrite.
Different people find different things important, and there's no reason why your specific interests should get special treatment. Either remove all rules, which will dissolve any form of ordered society, or learn to tolerate compromise - and yes, that means you'll end up paying for things you don't want. That's the price of living in a society: you can't always have your way.
Libertarians and their ilk in general seem to consider anyone who disagrees with them evil, stupid or both, and exhibit ideological zeal which would make any crusader knight proud. I guess that disproves all those theories that religion causes fanaticism.
Your government was created by people who are hundreds of years dead. Claiming that their purposes in creating it trump the purposes of people currently living is basically making the current people subservient to the dead ones's will.
Communist ! Why do you hate freedom so much ?
Selfish and smart people tend to lean towards capitalism if they have lots of money and socialism if they don't. Unselfish and smart people tend to lean towards socialism if they consider guaranteeing everyone's physical welfare more important than economic liberty, and capitalism if the other way around. And stupid people tend to lean towards whichever side's propaganda they hear most.
I think that about covers it.
Well, since you only got that karma in the first place by shamelessly exploiting the underpaid labour of moderators, you don't really deserve it, now do you ? You leveraged your existing karma capital to attain a position of higher visibility, thus making you more likely to be modded up and increasing your karma further, smothering those poor newcomers who post at +1 like a parasitic vine casting jungle's undergrowth to permanent shadow. It wouldn't surprise me if you and your high-karma good old boy club didn't conspire to mod down all those upstarts, to maintain your stranglehold on karma.
But the day is nearing when the karma behemoths shall be cast down, and the whole moderation system dismantled, and all posters and and all posts shall be equal !
I suspect that the purpose here is to be able to show before a judge that they weren't technically lying.
But what about the fuses ? I mean, a single copper wire can only carry so much current, and a cherry red glow is kind of distracting.
Maybe computers should come with branching power cords, so they could be plugged into multiple electric sockets simultaneously, to balance the draw ?