Unsecured goods or services available for free on open grounds are meant to be used. In very much the same way you are not, cannot be, obliged to pay street musicians or performance artists, you cannot be obliged to pay for using a publicly available item.
In my opinion it doesn't matter if the wifi-signal came from a source paid from taxes or any corporation or individual. It is just a redux of the nature of positive rights, stated as "everything not forbidden is allowed". Arguing the other way around is IMHO opposing freedom and all in all pretty ridiculous.
A box of apples with no price tag and no store or salesperson near, but still available to all who pass by is free for them to take. A performance artist who can be seen by anyone is doing so for free. Suppliers for essentially free goods and services are dependent of goodwill and donations from the public. They have chosen to offer their service with no limits and no obligation to pay, so we cannot construct an artificial obligation afterwards. An unlocked car is out of the question, an unlocked bike may be but one from a box of apples or fringe bandwidth certainly IS free to take.
Everything that is freely available for everyone on open public grounds, showing no property signs, no locks and nothing else a sane person has to interpret as "do not use this resource if you are not entitled to" then the resource is free for all. End of story.
100 years in the past people were excited by horseless carriages. They made regulations for them to not exceed 30mph at all times because of the "tremendous danger" of the vehicle itself and the small sand storms each driveby sent down rural streets. To obtain a driving license you needed to know literally all or most of the technical details of your ride and you must have been able to accomplish not-so-minuscule repairs yourself on the spot. Several jurisdictions around the world even had a regulation on the books requiring each horseless carriage to have someone carrying a warning-flag before them, alerting horses and people of their coming.
And one by one these regulations were lessened. Most people around 1900 had barely ever seen a car, while people around 1920 surely had. In 1940 most people have had at least one ride in a car and by 1960 most who were old enough had driven one themselves at least once.
A large part of todays kids ride in their parents vehicle for many hours a month, learning from them and experiencing traffic, car handling, the feeling for speed, acceleration and braking and much more. That doesn't make them "responsible drivers" later on, even contrary giving them a sense of false security, but it surely has a huge positive impact on overall car handling abilities.
Long rant, short story: kids learn from experience with their parents. Was true for the horseless carriages evolving from 10mph snails to the 130mph cruise reached by almost everything now. And will be true for personal aircraft in the future. If you were driving as a small kid with mom and pop from your birth to your 18th birthday, you sure can handle 3-dimensional traffic much easier than todays commercial pilots. They may be highly educated, responsible, calm and professional - but they can never beat a generation of kids "educated" in airborne travel on every trip to the supermarket with their parents.
At first we will get severely restrictive rules, but as the experience and the technology matures, they will be lessened more and more. After all, airborne travel is IMHO much safer than land based as there is less to do, less pedestrians to run over, more visibility and clearly predictable vectors for other drivers.
Most accidents are caused by less-than-ideal ground friction, ice, water or leaves, speed differences between lanes, sharp turns, trees on the roadside, numerous maneuvers along winding roads and unpredictable traffic behavior. All eliminated with airbone vehicles. A clear course from A to B, autopilot assistance when needed, less control input without turns, intersections, lane changes etc and much more space to avoid road/air raging drivers and oncoming traffic. Never be stuck behind lame old grannies anymore. Never be bullied off the road by lunatics. Worst case: flying with zero visibility is safer than driving with zero vis, so I'm all for this.
Demonstrations, elections, court interventions, open and violent rebellion.
I cannot imagine something else to do to change a society as a whole. Is there another way? How to change something without benefitting "the powers that be" (because I agree with you that most civil actions benefits the system)
A bold statement, Mr. Know-it-all. But I have to say I found The Society of the Spectacle a rather interesting piece of philosophy. I read the first statements out of pure curiosity and was pretty much drawn to read a few chapters that evening.
Beware from judging each and everything by your opinion, it may be subjective. I recommend Guy Debord at least the "spectacle" and with a grain of salt, but still.
[...] The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From cars to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender "lonely crowds." With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image.
If that contains not at least a small truth, I don't know what to say...
I think it was a rather logical reason: if there is only one instance of this thing and another one is impossible or unlikely to exist now or in the near future, it should be written capitalized.
So as long as logic prohibits the simultaneos existence of maybe two "internets", it will be written with a capital "I". Same thing goes for God - only one instance, never will be a second one beside it/Him or whatever. Applies to trademarks, as they denote a certain brand that is "unique" in some way. Even if there could be two "Fords" or three "Cadillacs", it's not possible to have a "Ford" that doesn't come from "Ford", whatever good or bad the connotation may be that comes with that name. Tautology aside, I bet that even goes for "I", because there's only one "I" for me. "You" is often not capitalized like it was in the past, but in formal letters it still is.
Strange thing I as a German has to tell you, because in German, all nouns are always written capitalized. (Hmm, all countries and languages are also written with capital letters in English. Same property: they are unique, too).
Too bad the flashcrap-part is the only content actually updated on the site, Mr. Smart.
Their flash looks like crap on my system and as I usually get to see far too many ads and commercials working "correctly" here, I seriously doubt it's my machine that is to blame.
The flash screen is misaligned on my screen, showing only the lower half of it, thereby missing most of the buttons and texts. Sound and flashy-flashy is still there but who cares if I can't fucking read anything there.
Whatever, just call it "users fault", but I won't buy Doom3 anyway.
The multiplayer is hardly more than a joke and playing against a computer-controlled enemy was boring long before always-on DSL and Cable, but now it's just laughable. Name one huge success for a singleplayer-only game in the last 3-4 years and you'll see the pattern. These were Max Payne, FarCry, Hitman, Splinter Cell and were all atmospheric-esoteric-adventurous egoshooters. And Doom3 is gonna break *records* eh? In what, genre repetition?
I'm waiting for a convergence of realistic tactical shooters (aka America's Army), "multi-role-combat"-games (Battlefield 42 & nam), a strategic commanding interface (aka C&C series, only you're guiding the human players so they don't lose the goal in useless deathmatches) and all that inside a MMORPG world. Real combat, real-time, real strategic, "worldwide", always-on and interdependent - I'd even buy subscriptions for that and no I'm not retarded enough to consider joining the US Army anytime soon. "War is evil, but the sound is cool!" - who says online roleplaying games must always stay on the beaten meme of bows, arrows & magic. Who says we can't buy tanks, helicopters & armaments instead of castles, platemails, longswords and battle horses?
Understand you quite a bit, especially the "why did it broke"-part;) - although it's on home electronics, computers & software for me even if I had some success on car and bike repair. And I confess, I've been sharing music over digital media long before cd-burners were under 1500$ or mp3 and napster was thought of on 3.5" floppy discs and plain vanilla harddiscs;)
Thanks and keep postin', we will need alternatives for the current political system and advancements for democracy in general soon enough, I fear. The corruption is happening in other parts of "the west", too and we shouldn't be left with only the alternative "socialism" (which didn't work) and "capital elected dictatorship"...
Even more true and the first real idea for changing the democratic system to the better I had read in a long time. (makes note on this to self...)
But it may be of no improvement, if the bureaucrats are accepting bribes etc. then just for being "adopted" by this or that corporation after their last office term is over. Seems we can't run a fair state without fair people and huge bribes make 98% of all people weak if the sum is high enough...
The real question is: revolution or reformation, what is better?
Italians experienced a terrorism series of very much the same goals and in the same ways (albeit of very smaller scale). Here is an excerpt from one of their philosophical reasoning behind the scenes. Not for the faint of heart, I suppose, but reading it gave me a strong deja-vu concerning 9-11, especially since this text was written more than 20 years ago in 1980.
So you are advocating being uneducated, "because it doesn't matter anyway if we are"? Few people can have more impact than you'd ever dream of, I can tell you. Science, history and culture is full of events, where only one person, one small group has changed *everything* some day.
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come" - if we stop discussing ideas we will stop changing the times to the better.
Try posting your comment not anon and I'd have added you to my friends list for this classic civil liberty embracing post. Thank you anyway.;)
If you are afraid of what you say and hide your name deliberately "then the _censors_ will have already won";) - oppression only works if all people have the *impression* that public dissent is considered insane from a "majority" and may even be outright dangerous.
If you can't criticize "the ruling party" without fearing crippling ridicule from others (even if it's the "Freepers" et al.) or incarceration by the authorities, it's only a matter of time before real dictatorship is established. Just because it shows no swastika it can be fascism anyway.
And in commemoration of "D-Day" tomorrow, I need to say as a German: thank you for the liberation *but* please make sure your nation does never transform into a fascism. The media cartels and its almost obvious manipulations are making me nervous and the military-industrial complex is already elected vice-president. Please, Americans, learn from German history on what NOT to do and when NOT to remain silent. If the totalitarian trend apparent in all branches of the US government continues I think it could soon be worse than we realize yet.
I think Slashdot may be a not-so-bad place to look for answers from real people. An anonymous but large crowd of like-minded individuals can come up with astounding infos on any given subject, at least in my experience here on this site. I don't know how, but most of the times I read "Ask Slashdot", at least 3-4 real gems were among the comments.
Books, experts and respective communities (a specific forum or group etc.) can give only one side of the affair and a medium sized crowd of "John Does" gives you the other. Sometimes an unconnected outsiders view may be the most refreshing thing you can get.
You could get a better self-respect by meeting a "crowd" in the forum and then realizing that there is a not-so-small-number of people with the same concerns like you. So at least you know you're not alone...
Since a quick google search turned up nothing, I'd try to ask here: is dirindex a kind of improvement on ext3, is there a possibility to upgrade without re-creating the entire partition or what else is there to know on how to use this filesystem? Google is almost empty on this subject, I fear...
Microsoft is entering the entertainment market. Pushing WMV9 as the new video standard, opening its own music store, acquiring numerous statewide cable network providers and trying to open the market for PCs and X-Boxen as the sole "Media Center" in the living rooms of everyone. In short: gain notable market share in distribution and licensing entertainment products, mostly benefitting from "software" revenues via licenses and controlled DRManaged downloads.
Is it possible that Microsoft would hurt itself by selling WiFi-Products? After all, they can and will be used to share entertainment files rather anonymously. They could even be used for the grassroots movement building a kind of wireless fido-net - totally to the contrary of what Microsoft would like to reach: monopolization of the entertainment and audio/video distribution market. A one-to-many market would be the extension of the classic MS business model into another branch. Wireless LAN could seriously hurt that if widely established with enough privacy measures.
That's why they stopped selling it. Sony faced a similar dilemma with MP3/MD players on one side and its media branch, the film studio and recording company on the other.
Why sell a product that cuts deep in your revenues once enough people have one? The usefulness of an access point benefits from a network effect similar to fax machines and instant messengers. Once there are many of them, the numbers will skyrocket. But you can't earn much if the Chinese enter the market, while a centralized control on the internet and entertainment market will vanish.
Enough of a rant, but someone had to point that out, sorry;)
I second that, Microsoft mice are simply the best. The optical one has now turned 4 years before I retired it from active gaming use. (mousewheel damaged after dropping it, still fine for the secondary box) - And now I got another one, the successor with even better optical sensor.
The Microsoft keyboards I don't mind, I find them generally unappealing, even worse for the "natural" ones. Used a lot of Microsoft mice at work, albeit the conventional ones and they are working great.
Dunno if they really are rebranded Logitech products, they are different enough and better I think. Ambidetrous and symmetric 5 button mice are hard to come by to make them usable for left handed friends.
But I fear the time for sleek and unobtrusive looking hardware is over. The new generation of desktop-all-in-ones and even the microsoft mice are totally styled and ultra-hip.
Nothing else that bears the name "Microsoft" is that good, unobtrusive, reliable and cheap. Did I mention their hull is even dishwasher safe?;)
That's just not true, it was actually not really hard. Not harder than Monkey Island 1 and certainly not hard as other adventures, that is...
Some things were pretty hard to guess, but all in all it had very consistent and logic puzzles. Sam&Max and the Maniac Mansion series were much more complicating for me, because they relied on a pretty twisted brain on the player side. Since when is a causal connection between a car wash and a coming thunderstorm logical?;)
Maniac Mansion was unbearable for me and I grew impatient rather quickly - the rest of the puzzles was equally wierd. Sam&Max was a bit better but still too obsessed with "sick" humor so it wasn't so funny it was supposed to be.
In MonkeyIsland they were successful in doing a good story with a twist, good puzzles, sick humor that really was funny and a nice atmosphere. LucasArts tried to repeat that success and I think they spoiled the other stories a bit in order to make them "haha-is-that-funny-just-like-Monkey-Island".
Besides, Indiana Jones 4 and Monkey Island 1 & 2 were (and still are, I think) great genre classics. Loom also was pretty good and had a distinct atmosphere, so I'd recommend anyone to search some abandonware-sites right now;).
Sierre adventures on the other hand were confusing unfunny and ugly games where the only challenge was in the fact that you could easily bring yourself in an unsolvable situation, not knowing it for an hour or so and because of constant "thousand death"-fear, you'd overwrite all savegames you had before that "epic" mistake an hour ago. So you'd wind up having only hopeless savegames and being forced to start all over again. Yikes.
I didn't even mention Westwoods "Kyrandia" adventures or oddball "Schnibble of Azimuth" because they were just a collection of things already seen on Sierra or LucasArts games;) Now that I have praised LucasArts and bashed Sierra, you can bring on the flamebait-mods if you like.
The critical question is: do you have to PAY a second time to view your already paid DVD? No one entered a licensing contract for the player technology when they bought a DVD. I'm very sceptical about the idea that you can restrict consumers to view their paid in full DVDs...
Most kids have cellphones anyway. What about the old-fashioned method of meeting like calling the kid and asking "can we meet at the X building in 15 minutes?" An even older fashion would be to tell your kids "if anything goes wrong, we meet at location X every half an hour" or "Talk to a park official if you get lost, so they can help us finding each other"
Sometimes I wonder how I have survived a youth without being tracked in a theme park.
Ah come on, you don't need to rar these files. Would be a huge waste of cpu time as you gain nothing and lose the ability to play them directly via winamp or xmms. Bad idea I say.
Universities are made responsible for traffic on their networks. Universities receive public funding and the taxpayers outcry about the extremely extreme expensive bandwith;) wasted will stop critics in their tracks. Taxpaying filesharers may find it outraging to have a small part their taxes going to bad lazy students for breaking the law, so they may implement countermeasures without real opposition.
And then (to bring up the slippery slope argument again) you have pretty much paved the way to a little bit more control on other campus networks, small ISPs, small town community networks etc. - and then the notion of "the owner of the wires" being responsible for what other people do with these wires may be "acceptable" enough for the general public to not start the revolution when they try this on a large ISP. "After all, it's their own network!" people will say (as they already have here on Slashdot) and nobody will ever question the fact that filesharing may not be illegal at all or that the RIAA may illegally be in control of so much music or that there may not even be such a thing as intellectual property in the age of 0.10$ CD-Rs.
They are relocating the battlefield away from issues of freedom and monopoly to the one of taxpayers and "responsibility". Not really good news for us, because every piece of infrastructure designed to catch intellectual property infringing data transfers can be used to against the freedom of speech or to crack down political dissent. If there is a mechanism that can filter bits and bytes, it is for very technical centralized and could be misused by a very small group of oppressors unlike e.g. the police or even the FBI. (As there are more humans involved that can blow a whistle if forced to do unconstitutional things. A server will have no remorse tracking enemies of the state)
Yeah, bring out the tinfoil jokes, but prove me wrong if you like.
YOU gave the state the right to regulate traffic for you. Not the other way around. It is the people that own, govern and use the country, the land and the roads. The people paid for them with their tax dollars and the people elected representatives to govern the use of these shared resources.
You have mistaken a very fundamental fact in this debate and I'll hope I can convince you from my view. You said
You have no inherent right to drive an automobile, it is written nowhere that at birth you have the fundamental right to drive.
and I think it's really the other way around: *everybody* is permitted to drive his own automobile, *except* otherwise stated in the law.
You see, our "democratic society" has a positive rights system: everything that is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. When a law doesn't state "Thing X is forbidden" it is allowed. Now you'd say it all boils down to the same situation, but that's not exactly true: We all have the inherent right to do whatever we want to. All the time. *As long* as we are not hurting the freedom of others. This is very subjective, so go figure about the statement.
The right to travel freely has nothing to do with the means of doing so. The only cause for regulation in public traffic is the danger and the pollution caused by driving that car. "We the people" decided as a whole that it is better to only let trained people drive cars and to have them obey speed and safety limits. We still own the streets, the cars and we appoint the lawmakers.
Stop thinking about each and every freedom you have as a privilege. It is a *right*, the most natural thing in the world. You are allowed to do anything that doesn't interferes with other people's rights. Kings grant privileges. Free men grant their government regulatory power. See the pattern?
I agree, pepper spray has it uses. I carry one with me, as this is the strongest personal defense allowed in my legislation.
But this site is not instantly invalidated because there are some exxagerations.
Sparying pepper would be the first and "safest" method of self defense up close. After all, I'm sure most sane people will have regrets if they'd killed someone, even if that person was a criminal that threatened them. Sane people regret every loss of life caused by them.
I don't like to recount every argument from the pro-gun side, but I can hardly dismiss the logic behind their claim that a criminal can't easily pick a single unarmed victim out of a populace of randomly armed persons.
It may be true, that you have to rely on other measures, if the crook is close enough, that they may take your gun, too or that mere money is not worth a fight - true, true and true. But not always. Sometimes, you may just pull the gun to get your wallet back, sometimes there's a witness the criminal did not notice who can interact or you may had enough time to draw the gun.
Whatever happens, the risks for "successful muggin" go up as the percentage of armed potential victims goes up.
As I am from Germany, I can tell you for sure, that criminals will always have guns. Private gun ownership is totally regulated here up to the point that there are almost none in private hands. Loaded or concealed carrying bring you more jail than actually the mugging people. Criminal gangs still have theirs. Police routinely busts neonazis, that sometimes even have machine guns and other heavy artillery.
Let me conclude: not guns are the problem, the people are. People that are uneducated or immoral, that cannot judge the consequences of their actions are to blame. I admit, I don't want the current population to be able to buy guns at the local supermarket. They are largely too dumb or ignorant to care what these things can cause.
My vision would be a population educated and compassionate and caring enough so they can be trusted to handle these guns safely. Then everyone could (and should) carry a gun for their own and others safety against criminals.
But if the population were so brightly educated, we'd have no crime in the first place, so there's still ample room to debate this further. But not only on single issues and special situations pro or contra.
Free men own guns, slaves don't. I second that. If the current kind of people in your country or mine cannot be trusted to own guns, I'd rather say they (or we all) are already slaves of some kind...
Slashdot Mirror
Unsecured goods or services available for free on open grounds are meant to be used. In very much the same way you are not, cannot be, obliged to pay street musicians or performance artists, you cannot be obliged to pay for using a publicly available item.
In my opinion it doesn't matter if the wifi-signal came from a source paid from taxes or any corporation or individual. It is just a redux of the nature of positive rights, stated as "everything not forbidden is allowed". Arguing the other way around is IMHO opposing freedom and all in all pretty ridiculous.
A box of apples with no price tag and no store or salesperson near, but still available to all who pass by is free for them to take. A performance artist who can be seen by anyone is doing so for free. Suppliers for essentially free goods and services are dependent of goodwill and donations from the public. They have chosen to offer their service with no limits and no obligation to pay, so we cannot construct an artificial obligation afterwards. An unlocked car is out of the question, an unlocked bike may be but one from a box of apples or fringe bandwidth certainly IS free to take.
Everything that is freely available for everyone on open public grounds, showing no property signs, no locks and nothing else a sane person has to interpret as "do not use this resource if you are not entitled to" then the resource is free for all. End of story.
100 years in the past people were excited by horseless carriages. They made regulations for them to not exceed 30mph at all times because of the "tremendous danger" of the vehicle itself and the small sand storms each driveby sent down rural streets. To obtain a driving license you needed to know literally all or most of the technical details of your ride and you must have been able to accomplish not-so-minuscule repairs yourself on the spot. Several jurisdictions around the world even had a regulation on the books requiring each horseless carriage to have someone carrying a warning-flag before them, alerting horses and people of their coming.
And one by one these regulations were lessened. Most people around 1900 had barely ever seen a car, while people around 1920 surely had. In 1940 most people have had at least one ride in a car and by 1960 most who were old enough had driven one themselves at least once.
A large part of todays kids ride in their parents vehicle for many hours a month, learning from them and experiencing traffic, car handling, the feeling for speed, acceleration and braking and much more. That doesn't make them "responsible drivers" later on, even contrary giving them a sense of false security, but it surely has a huge positive impact on overall car handling abilities.
Long rant, short story: kids learn from experience with their parents. Was true for the horseless carriages evolving from 10mph snails to the 130mph cruise reached by almost everything now. And will be true for personal aircraft in the future. If you were driving as a small kid with mom and pop from your birth to your 18th birthday, you sure can handle 3-dimensional traffic much easier than todays commercial pilots. They may be highly educated, responsible, calm and professional - but they can never beat a generation of kids "educated" in airborne travel on every trip to the supermarket with their parents.
At first we will get severely restrictive rules, but as the experience and the technology matures, they will be lessened more and more. After all, airborne travel is IMHO much safer than land based as there is less to do, less pedestrians to run over, more visibility and clearly predictable vectors for other drivers.
Most accidents are caused by less-than-ideal ground friction, ice, water or leaves, speed differences between lanes, sharp turns, trees on the roadside, numerous maneuvers along winding roads and unpredictable traffic behavior. All eliminated with airbone vehicles. A clear course from A to B, autopilot assistance when needed, less control input without turns, intersections, lane changes etc and much more space to avoid road/air raging drivers and oncoming traffic. Never be stuck behind lame old grannies anymore. Never be bullied off the road by lunatics. Worst case: flying with zero visibility is safer than driving with zero vis, so I'm all for this.
What do you suppose then?
Demonstrations, elections, court interventions, open and violent rebellion.
I cannot imagine something else to do to change a society as a whole. Is there another way? How to change something without benefitting "the powers that be" (because I agree with you that most civil actions benefits the system)
A bold statement, Mr. Know-it-all. But I have to say I found The Society of the Spectacle a rather interesting piece of philosophy. I read the first statements out of pure curiosity and was pretty much drawn to read a few chapters that evening.
Beware from judging each and everything by your opinion, it may be subjective. I recommend Guy Debord at least the "spectacle" and with a grain of salt, but still.
[...] The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From cars to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender "lonely crowds." With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image.
If that contains not at least a small truth, I don't know what to say...
I think it was a rather logical reason: if there is only one instance of this thing and another one is impossible or unlikely to exist now or in the near future, it should be written capitalized.
So as long as logic prohibits the simultaneos existence of maybe two "internets", it will be written with a capital "I". Same thing goes for God - only one instance, never will be a second one beside it/Him or whatever. Applies to trademarks, as they denote a certain brand that is "unique" in some way. Even if there could be two "Fords" or three "Cadillacs", it's not possible to have a "Ford" that doesn't come from "Ford", whatever good or bad the connotation may be that comes with that name. Tautology aside, I bet that even goes for "I", because there's only one "I" for me. "You" is often not capitalized like it was in the past, but in formal letters it still is.
Strange thing I as a German has to tell you, because in German, all nouns are always written capitalized. (Hmm, all countries and languages are also written with capital letters in English. Same property: they are unique, too).
Too bad the flashcrap-part is the only content actually updated on the site, Mr. Smart.
Their flash looks like crap on my system and as I usually get to see far too many ads and commercials working "correctly" here, I seriously doubt it's my machine that is to blame.
The flash screen is misaligned on my screen, showing only the lower half of it, thereby missing most of the buttons and texts. Sound and flashy-flashy is still there but who cares if I can't fucking read anything there.
Whatever, just call it "users fault", but I won't buy Doom3 anyway.
The multiplayer is hardly more than a joke and playing against a computer-controlled enemy was boring long before always-on DSL and Cable, but now it's just laughable. Name one huge success for a singleplayer-only game in the last 3-4 years and you'll see the pattern. These were Max Payne, FarCry, Hitman, Splinter Cell and were all atmospheric-esoteric-adventurous egoshooters. And Doom3 is gonna break *records* eh? In what, genre repetition?
I'm waiting for a convergence of realistic tactical shooters (aka America's Army), "multi-role-combat"-games (Battlefield 42 & nam), a strategic commanding interface (aka C&C series, only you're guiding the human players so they don't lose the goal in useless deathmatches) and all that inside a MMORPG world. Real combat, real-time, real strategic, "worldwide", always-on and interdependent - I'd even buy subscriptions for that and no I'm not retarded enough to consider joining the US Army anytime soon. "War is evil, but the sound is cool!" - who says online roleplaying games must always stay on the beaten meme of bows, arrows & magic. Who says we can't buy tanks, helicopters & armaments instead of castles, platemails, longswords and battle horses?
Understand you quite a bit, especially the "why did it broke"-part ;) - although it's on home electronics, computers & software for me even if I had some success on car and bike repair. And I confess, I've been sharing music over digital media long before cd-burners were under 1500$ or mp3 and napster was thought of on 3.5" floppy discs and plain vanilla harddiscs ;)
Thanks and keep postin', we will need alternatives for the current political system and advancements for democracy in general soon enough, I fear. The corruption is happening in other parts of "the west", too and we shouldn't be left with only the alternative "socialism" (which didn't work) and "capital elected dictatorship"...
Even more true and the first real idea for changing the democratic system to the better I had read in a long time. (makes note on this to self...)
But it may be of no improvement, if the bureaucrats are accepting bribes etc. then just for being "adopted" by this or that corporation after their last office term is over. Seems we can't run a fair state without fair people and huge bribes make 98% of all people weak if the sum is high enough...
The real question is: revolution or reformation, what is better?
So true, I wish I had saved up some mod points...
Using civil airliners may even "work" better.
Italians experienced a terrorism series of very much the same goals and in the same ways (albeit of very smaller scale). Here is an excerpt from one of their philosophical reasoning behind the scenes. Not for the faint of heart, I suppose, but reading it gave me a strong deja-vu concerning 9-11, especially since this text was written more than 20 years ago in 1980.
So you are advocating being uneducated, "because it doesn't matter anyway if we are"? Few people can have more impact than you'd ever dream of, I can tell you. Science, history and culture is full of events, where only one person, one small group has changed *everything* some day.
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come" - if we stop discussing ideas we will stop changing the times to the better.
Mod up please.
;)
;) - oppression only works if all people have the *impression* that public dissent is considered insane from a "majority" and may even be outright dangerous.
Try posting your comment not anon and I'd have added you to my friends list for this classic civil liberty embracing post. Thank you anyway.
If you are afraid of what you say and hide your name deliberately "then the _censors_ will have already won"
If you can't criticize "the ruling party" without fearing crippling ridicule from others (even if it's the "Freepers" et al.) or incarceration by the authorities, it's only a matter of time before real dictatorship is established. Just because it shows no swastika it can be fascism anyway.
And in commemoration of "D-Day" tomorrow, I need to say as a German: thank you for the liberation *but* please make sure your nation does never transform into a fascism. The media cartels and its almost obvious manipulations are making me nervous and the military-industrial complex is already elected vice-president. Please, Americans, learn from German history on what NOT to do and when NOT to remain silent. If the totalitarian trend apparent in all branches of the US government continues I think it could soon be worse than we realize yet.
I think Slashdot may be a not-so-bad place to look for answers from real people. An anonymous but large crowd of like-minded individuals can come up with astounding infos on any given subject, at least in my experience here on this site. I don't know how, but most of the times I read "Ask Slashdot", at least 3-4 real gems were among the comments.
;)
Books, experts and respective communities (a specific forum or group etc.) can give only one side of the affair and a medium sized crowd of "John Does" gives you the other. Sometimes an unconnected outsiders view may be the most refreshing thing you can get.
You could get a better self-respect by meeting a "crowd" in the forum and then realizing that there is a not-so-small-number of people with the same concerns like you. So at least you know you're not alone...
Don't ask for law advice, though
Since a quick google search turned up nothing, I'd try to ask here: is dirindex a kind of improvement on ext3, is there a possibility to upgrade without re-creating the entire partition or what else is there to know on how to use this filesystem? Google is almost empty on this subject, I fear...
Ok, set and off we go:
;)
Microsoft is entering the entertainment market. Pushing WMV9 as the new video standard, opening its own music store, acquiring numerous statewide cable network providers and trying to open the market for PCs and X-Boxen as the sole "Media Center" in the living rooms of everyone. In short: gain notable market share in distribution and licensing entertainment products, mostly benefitting from "software" revenues via licenses and controlled DRManaged downloads.
Is it possible that Microsoft would hurt itself by selling WiFi-Products? After all, they can and will be used to share entertainment files rather anonymously. They could even be used for the grassroots movement building a kind of wireless fido-net - totally to the contrary of what Microsoft would like to reach: monopolization of the entertainment and audio/video distribution market. A one-to-many market would be the extension of the classic MS business model into another branch. Wireless LAN could seriously hurt that if widely established with enough privacy measures.
That's why they stopped selling it. Sony faced a similar dilemma with MP3/MD players on one side and its media branch, the film studio and recording company on the other.
Why sell a product that cuts deep in your revenues once enough people have one? The usefulness of an access point benefits from a network effect similar to fax machines and instant messengers. Once there are many of them, the numbers will skyrocket. But you can't earn much if the Chinese enter the market, while a centralized control on the internet and entertainment market will vanish.
Enough of a rant, but someone had to point that out, sorry
I second that, Microsoft mice are simply the best. The optical one has now turned 4 years before I retired it from active gaming use. (mousewheel damaged after dropping it, still fine for the secondary box) - And now I got another one, the successor with even better optical sensor.
;)
The Microsoft keyboards I don't mind, I find them generally unappealing, even worse for the "natural" ones. Used a lot of Microsoft mice at work, albeit the conventional ones and they are working great.
Dunno if they really are rebranded Logitech products, they are different enough and better I think. Ambidetrous and symmetric 5 button mice are hard to come by to make them usable for left handed friends.
But I fear the time for sleek and unobtrusive looking hardware is over. The new generation of desktop-all-in-ones and even the microsoft mice are totally styled and ultra-hip.
Nothing else that bears the name "Microsoft" is that good, unobtrusive, reliable and cheap. Did I mention their hull is even dishwasher safe?
That's just not true, it was actually not really hard. Not harder than Monkey Island 1 and certainly not hard as other adventures, that is...
;)
;).
;) Now that I have praised LucasArts and bashed Sierra, you can bring on the flamebait-mods if you like.
Some things were pretty hard to guess, but all in all it had very consistent and logic puzzles. Sam&Max and the Maniac Mansion series were much more complicating for me, because they relied on a pretty twisted brain on the player side. Since when is a causal connection between a car wash and a coming thunderstorm logical?
Maniac Mansion was unbearable for me and I grew impatient rather quickly - the rest of the puzzles was equally wierd. Sam&Max was a bit better but still too obsessed with "sick" humor so it wasn't so funny it was supposed to be.
In MonkeyIsland they were successful in doing a good story with a twist, good puzzles, sick humor that really was funny and a nice atmosphere. LucasArts tried to repeat that success and I think they spoiled the other stories a bit in order to make them "haha-is-that-funny-just-like-Monkey-Island".
Besides, Indiana Jones 4 and Monkey Island 1 & 2 were (and still are, I think) great genre classics. Loom also was pretty good and had a distinct atmosphere, so I'd recommend anyone to search some abandonware-sites right now
Sierre adventures on the other hand were confusing unfunny and ugly games where the only challenge was in the fact that you could easily bring yourself in an unsolvable situation, not knowing it for an hour or so and because of constant "thousand death"-fear, you'd overwrite all savegames you had before that "epic" mistake an hour ago. So you'd wind up having only hopeless savegames and being forced to start all over again. Yikes.
I didn't even mention Westwoods "Kyrandia" adventures or oddball "Schnibble of Azimuth" because they were just a collection of things already seen on Sierra or LucasArts games
The critical question is: do you have to PAY a second time to view your already paid DVD? No one entered a licensing contract for the player technology when they bought a DVD. I'm very sceptical about the idea that you can restrict consumers to view their paid in full DVDs...
Most kids have cellphones anyway. What about the old-fashioned method of meeting like calling the kid and asking "can we meet at the X building in 15 minutes?" An even older fashion would be to tell your kids "if anything goes wrong, we meet at location X every half an hour" or "Talk to a park official if you get lost, so they can help us finding each other"
Sometimes I wonder how I have survived a youth without being tracked in a theme park.
Ah come on, you don't need to rar these files. Would be a huge waste of cpu time as you gain nothing and lose the ability to play them directly via winamp or xmms. Bad idea I say.
Universities are made responsible for traffic on their networks. Universities receive public funding and the taxpayers outcry about the extremely extreme expensive bandwith ;) wasted will stop critics in their tracks. Taxpaying filesharers may find it outraging to have a small part their taxes going to bad lazy students for breaking the law, so they may implement countermeasures without real opposition.
And then (to bring up the slippery slope argument again) you have pretty much paved the way to a little bit more control on other campus networks, small ISPs, small town community networks etc. - and then the notion of "the owner of the wires" being responsible for what other people do with these wires may be "acceptable" enough for the general public to not start the revolution when they try this on a large ISP. "After all, it's their own network!" people will say (as they already have here on Slashdot) and nobody will ever question the fact that filesharing may not be illegal at all or that the RIAA may illegally be in control of so much music or that there may not even be such a thing as intellectual property in the age of 0.10$ CD-Rs.
They are relocating the battlefield away from issues of freedom and monopoly to the one of taxpayers and "responsibility". Not really good news for us, because every piece of infrastructure designed to catch intellectual property infringing data transfers can be used to against the freedom of speech or to crack down political dissent. If there is a mechanism that can filter bits and bytes, it is for very technical centralized and could be misused by a very small group of oppressors unlike e.g. the police or even the FBI. (As there are more humans involved that can blow a whistle if forced to do unconstitutional things. A server will have no remorse tracking enemies of the state)
Yeah, bring out the tinfoil jokes, but prove me wrong if you like.
You have mistaken a very fundamental fact in this debate and I'll hope I can convince you from my view. You said and I think it's really the other way around: *everybody* is permitted to drive his own automobile, *except* otherwise stated in the law.
You see, our "democratic society" has a positive rights system: everything that is not explicitly forbidden is allowed. When a law doesn't state "Thing X is forbidden" it is allowed. Now you'd say it all boils down to the same situation, but that's not exactly true: We all have the inherent right to do whatever we want to. All the time. *As long* as we are not hurting the freedom of others. This is very subjective, so go figure about the statement.
The right to travel freely has nothing to do with the means of doing so. The only cause for regulation in public traffic is the danger and the pollution caused by driving that car. "We the people" decided as a whole that it is better to only let trained people drive cars and to have them obey speed and safety limits. We still own the streets, the cars and we appoint the lawmakers.
Stop thinking about each and every freedom you have as a privilege. It is a *right*, the most natural thing in the world. You are allowed to do anything that doesn't interferes with other people's rights. Kings grant privileges. Free men grant their government regulatory power. See the pattern?
Ah I clicked that "post anon" checkbox in error. Sorry :)
I agree, pepper spray has it uses. I carry one with me, as this is the strongest personal defense allowed in my legislation.
But this site is not instantly invalidated because there are some exxagerations.
Sparying pepper would be the first and "safest" method of self defense up close. After all, I'm sure most sane people will have regrets if they'd killed someone, even if that person was a criminal that threatened them. Sane people regret every loss of life caused by them.
I don't like to recount every argument from the pro-gun side, but I can hardly dismiss the logic behind their claim that a criminal can't easily pick a single unarmed victim out of a populace of randomly armed persons.
It may be true, that you have to rely on other measures, if the crook is close enough, that they may take your gun, too or that mere money is not worth a fight - true, true and true. But not always. Sometimes, you may just pull the gun to get your wallet back, sometimes there's a witness the criminal did not notice who can interact or you may had enough time to draw the gun.
Whatever happens, the risks for "successful muggin" go up as the percentage of armed potential victims goes up.
As I am from Germany, I can tell you for sure, that criminals will always have guns. Private gun ownership is totally regulated here up to the point that there are almost none in private hands. Loaded or concealed carrying bring you more jail than actually the mugging people. Criminal gangs still have theirs. Police routinely busts neonazis, that sometimes even have machine guns and other heavy artillery.
Let me conclude: not guns are the problem, the people are. People that are uneducated or immoral, that cannot judge the consequences of their actions are to blame. I admit, I don't want the current population to be able to buy guns at the local supermarket. They are largely too dumb or ignorant to care what these things can cause.
My vision would be a population educated and compassionate and caring enough so they can be trusted to handle these guns safely. Then everyone could (and should) carry a gun for their own and others safety against criminals.
But if the population were so brightly educated, we'd have no crime in the first place, so there's still ample room to debate this further. But not only on single issues and special situations pro or contra.
Free men own guns, slaves don't. I second that. If the current kind of people in your country or mine cannot be trusted to own guns, I'd rather say they (or we all) are already slaves of some kind...
You might be interesting in this rather biased site about armed self-defense. Click!