I think the poster was talking about saving money by doing essentially the same thing via a cheaper method, not about saving money by spending less on the government.
I for one welcome our new cost-cutting overlords.
I read on Gamasutra that this was a reverse-engineered patch some non-Rockstar kids made anyway; that none of this content was in the game to begin with.
"Rockstar's official statement on the matter reads: "So far we have learned that the "hot coffee" modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game. In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code."
The company's release continues: "Since the 'hot coffee' scenes cannot be created without intentional and significant technical modifications and reverse engineering of the game's source code, we are currently investigating ways that we can increase the security protection of the source code and prevent the game from being altered by the 'hot coffee' modification."
Maybe Hillary should pick a fight with the mod communities. Can't let people get creative!
Seriously, though, I don't think a Senator (D) will get nominated for the presidency next time around. If it happened, it would be a colossal f-up.
The seeping of blogistan into the pages of the Times of London with regard to its own scoops seems to me a bellwether of the kinds of changes that are being produced in our information environment by the blogging phenomenon. The gatekeepers at the New York Times and the Washington Post can no longer decide whether a leak is a story or a non-story. The public decides what a story is."
An hour spent with the professor would be a good inoculation against hallucinatory ravings about the uselessness of blogs (depending on your politics, I suppose).
The tinfoiled, myself among them, will point out that even if there is a paper trail, it may never be seen if an election is not close enough. In a lot of places, manual recounts are triggered by elections being too close; if elections are decided by electronic tabulation first, we will never see a paper ballot.
That is a pile of crap. No matter how much trouble we have to go to, we should always manually count ballots in elections.
Great advances in complex immersion environments permit you to join in the beta: Middle East VR: Insurgency Morning.
Installation: To play Middle East, you will need to register online at www.goarmy.com or by phone at 1-800-USA-ARMY. While you're signing up, why not watch some videos?
Tutorial: All in-game. Just follow instructions and you'll be fine.
Monthly Fee: None. You get paid to play! Based on rank. Bonuses for exceptional skill.
Gameplay Tips: When an insurgent pops up, make sure to shoot him. Be careful not to shoot the woman with the groceries, the kid with the ball, or the police officer. Telling apart civilians from insurgents can be complicated and difficult, so make sure you have a quiet place where you can sort them out.
I saw Episode 1 on opening night (ticket 13 at the Varsity in Seattle's U District). Hated it! Then I had to see it again that weekend and actually fell asleep during the pod race. It didn't ruin my childhood since I wasn't even born when Episode 4 came out, but it ruined my young adulthood for about a week.
I did boycott Episode 2 and still haven't seen it.
I might give 2 a try on background for this new movie, since 3 has been reviewed better. It looks much darker and more appealing to me.
Seriously, though, it was a vivid, offensive image. Which is worse, the victimhood of Groklaw or the Nazihood of Groklaw's detractors? I don't know, save this kind of rhetoric for when Bill Gates is elected President or something.
They can move in and out of any software still hard wired to their system. That means that anyone we haven't unplugged is potentially an agent. Inside the Matrix, they are everyone and they are no one.
What do you mean, you didn't know about Daimler's motion to strike the Broderick affidavit?
Other Religions Have I Known
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you are thinking of Christian Science (which denies the reality of the material world) or Buddhism (which denies the importance of our attachment to the material world).
For Christians, the world overflows with meaning. How could it be otherwise? God made it.
For Christians, the material world and the spiritual world are intertwined. Everyday things, like bread and wine (water or juice, some places), take on spiritual dimensions. Our lives are less ordinary. Who could believe this and wish to escape the world?
Their reasoning goes more or less like "we do not have to worry about this life, eventually we will all die, so we should be more concerned about what comes after death."
For some irreligious people, their reasoning goes like "we do not have to worry about this death; at least we are still alive, so we should be more concerned about our life than our death." The object of their escapism is death. But so far as I know, none has yet escaped.
They don't refuse to contemplate the possibility of death and annihilation. On the contrary, they deal with it openly and honestly.
"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." (1 Cor 15)
Even if you had "religion", a final death would be an incalculable loss.
"We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you." (2 Cor 4)
Denying the worth of the whole universe is what suicides do, not martyrs.
"Jesus replied, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.'" (John 12)
"Its no wonder that many intelligent people look at the history of Christianity and reject it."
Say, rather, that there is a greater mistake that many intelligent people make with religious choice: to create straw men, tear them to shreds, and fall back into dull agnosticism.
"Although Christianity teaches that violence is wrong, it has been perverted"
These examples you cite are perversions of Christianity, not the thing itself; on what basis, then, can you reject Christianity?
"... therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee..." A good deal of religion is a confrontation of death, or a working out of the problem of good and evil, or a quest for the meaning of life; it's all the same issue, however you want to put it. Christianity, at least, confronts these all head-on. Christians have to think about death, have to explain themselves, have to provide the meaning... even the meaning of the horrible events you are talking about.
But you don't. You are willing to condemn a religion for things you think might have happened ("perhaps this is legend I don't know"). Just sling the mud, then tell people to move along, nothing to see here.
Christianity is rich in culture, and history, and yes, even faith. But if you want the nickel answers, continue asking the 5 cent questions.
I'm married and I have the same problem as the poster. I am reduced to playing Super Street Fighter 2 for half an hour some nights and bemoaning my lost youth. Oh woe, youth!
My s-m-r-t solution is to get a job making games.
Play games for fun... ??? (Do lots of hard work)... Profit!
Somebody, sometime, is going to offer an ISP a boatload of money to do this, and the ISP is going to calculate that the probable cost of interfering in connection usage (P2P monitoring or whatever it is) is dwarfed by the amount of revenue they're getting for a sweetheart deal like this.
If the ISP is a major nationwide network, the monitoring could be a huge burden, but the cash rewards could be just as huge.
"Some might argue that capital punishment has moral costs and benefits beyond its practical consequences in terms of lives lost and lives saved. Those who make such arguments will want to modify a lot of the calculations in this column."
You can count me among those. However, I would be wary of talking about moral "costs" and "benefits"; that's economics-speak, not morality-speak.
"As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality. In this, I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty."
This is where I part ways with the president of the United States and this article. The article is about an imposition of morality, about the way we calculate the value of a human life in money. But this entire research frame is morally suspect, if life and death are really about more than dollars and cents.
Further, policy debates like this one are full of different methods of decision calculus. This economics-inspired utilitarian accounting of the probable increase or decrease in human lives is just the most popular one, the one you learn in Political Science school and war-planning school. These are ethical methods and moralities too; it's not like policy-centered utilitarianism is "science" and deontology (or some other ethical framework) is "morality".
This utilitarian flavor in political science has real effects at the political level. For example, one woman went to nuclear war-planning school and learned to do this, but found that the decision-making methods used to fight nuclear wars are dehumanizing and illogical, not to mention immoral. Why should it surprise us that more of this warped kind of thinking should lead to warped conclusions?
Other ways to talk about life and death are possible in public policy debate; they're just not permissible. They're also not as tangible and easy to use in mathematics and write up in the annual budget. But who said they should be?
"But this essential point remains: Governments exist largely to supply protections that, for one reason or another, we can't purchase in the marketplace. Those governments perform best when they supply the protections we value most. We can measure their performance only if we are willing to calculate costs and benefits and to respect what our calculations tell us, even when it's counterintuitive. Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy."
Perhaps this kind of measurement is unnecessary... and perhaps it is flawed... and perhaps, when we learn that it is "counterintuitive" but true that we should kill computer hackers to save money, we should not only seriously question our calculations, we should seriously question our sources of inspiration.
I, for one, would be pleased to have policymakers who are unserious, according to this columnist, who will appeal to the heart's reasons, who think that life is valuable beyond a cash settlement. For "The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know." This is what Pascal was talking about: not that the heart's reasons are inferior to the demands of logic, but that they are superior.
Re:Same thing's coming with Harry P
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
Oh, I agree with you entirely about the books. I was raised on science fiction and fantasy, sometimes violent, often human. I can't get enough of it, and I can hardly call the kettle black. I don't agree at all with my friends who seem to think they promote demonic forces as genres (and refuse to read them for that reason!).
I think Harry Potter is great reading, even for somewhat younger readers. I forget if it was Tolkien or Chesterton (or someone else) who said that innocent kids like the unsanitized versions of fairy tales, where the bad guy dies gruesomely, but world-weary adults prefer tales with less justice.
Unfortunately, somewhat less literary families (TV heads) who haven't read Harry Potter (I speculate) will be taking their young kids (even younger than 10-11; it's not rated PG-13) to the next movies. The first movies won't really have prepared them for these next ones, because the emotional content and the suspense just ratchets up in every installment. I bet there'll be screaming kids when we go see movie 3, and kids who won't understand what's going on. That's probably par for the course, though.
But anyway, some nice things happened in my family too. One of my sisters read the first book to my other sister aloud, and now of course they have read them all. Their reading keeps branching out too!
Same thing's coming with Harry P
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
The books start getting older and darker (some of the stuff with Voldemort in book 4, I associate loosely with necromancy and devil-worship), but the movies started out basically kid-friendly. I will be curious to see the direction they take it when Prisoner of Azkaban comes out next month.
There will probably be screaming kids at that one too.
You're probably right... I did get my feelings confused, having just read that other thread. Seeing Shrek 2 didn't fill me with moral outrage (movies rarely do), but for a PG movie there were enough things to explain to the average 10 year old... things that pass right over the head of your 3 year old.
I'm not trying to tell you how to parent or anything... I obviously have less experience than you. These parental questions just keep coming up for me.
And I thought the story wasn't as tightly constructed as the first movie. Everything flows naturally from the opening scenes, in Shrek 1, but in Shrek 2, everything comes from all directions, like the gingerbread man ex machina.
Sorry about the screaming kids. We have our first on the way and I swear none of our kids will scream at the movies (to the best of my ability; that's the best I can do).
I've had to sit back and think about this for a while. There is a curious intersection of the "religious" and secular here;/.ers are speaking two different languages. I've caught this flavor a couple of times on Slashdot today (for instance, also in the thread on Bozell's sexy games editorial). This secular argument goes, these kids are biologically ready for sex, it's the most natural thing in the world, your mom had sex, everybody's doing it, it doesn't hurt anything.
I hear this and I go, these guys just don't see sex the way I do. As a grown-up married guy, of course I know sex is all those things they say it is. I see this as a major cheapening of what sex means (because it doesn't mean anything; if sex does mean something, then the secular attitude is a dangerous one). Put it another way: I am going to keep guys trained in this viewpoint of sex away from my daughter (switch the genders and the same is true again).
Sexy adult jokes in kids' cartoon movies cheapen sex again, shoot another "it's ok, it's natural" across the bow of my parenting. That's what the grandparent post was talking about. Because he cares about stuff like this, in the future that guy would be wise to preview the movies his kids are going to see, or at least check a parent-friendly movie review site like ScreenIt. Here's the Shrek 2 review. The specific content is at the bottom of the page.
But I agree with you too, that the thong was not the most sensitive thing in that movie.
So much potential energy converted into electrical energy converted into mechanical energy converted into Gibbs free energy converted into metabolic energy converted into so much mental energy for thinking about ways to convert nuclear energy into electrical energy.
Mr. William Gibson announced through his counsel today that he is suing the Sony Corporation (SNE) for patent infringement in its forthcoming "Cyber World" technology.
"Our client holds the prior art for all forms of cyberspace, jacking in, and networked virtual worlds," said David Boies, citingNeuromancer (1984).
"William Gibson is in the enviable position of owning the Internet," said Boies, in an interview with eWeek Tuesday. "It is clear from our stand point that we have an extremely compelling case against Sony. Mr. Gibson has millions of circulating copies and defending these ideas is as important today as the day they were published."
When asked if Gibson was contemplating further lawsuits, Boies replied "Right now we're focused on Sony. It's not that there's a shortage of companies in violation but, in terms of our resolve issues, we are not trying to announce a litigation path. For now, we are trying to get things resolved with Sony."
Slashdot Mirror
I think the poster was talking about saving money by doing essentially the same thing via a cheaper method, not about saving money by spending less on the government. I for one welcome our new cost-cutting overlords.
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." This is clearly the exception that proves the rule.
Seriously, though, I don't think a Senator (D) will get nominated for the presidency next time around. If it happened, it would be a colossal f-up.
Let's point out the obvious too: the FEC was taking comments recently about whether or not to exempt bloggers from campaign finance laws. It became an issue because citizen media are getting too big to ignore.
That is a pile of crap. No matter how much trouble we have to go to, we should always manually count ballots in elections.
Installation: To play Middle East, you will need to register online at www.goarmy.com or by phone at 1-800-USA-ARMY. While you're signing up, why not watch some videos?
Tutorial: All in-game. Just follow instructions and you'll be fine.
Monthly Fee: None. You get paid to play! Based on rank. Bonuses for exceptional skill.
Gameplay Tips: When an insurgent pops up, make sure to shoot him. Be careful not to shoot the woman with the groceries, the kid with the ball, or the police officer. Telling apart civilians from insurgents can be complicated and difficult, so make sure you have a quiet place where you can sort them out.
I saw Episode 1 on opening night (ticket 13 at the Varsity in Seattle's U District). Hated it! Then I had to see it again that weekend and actually fell asleep during the pod race. It didn't ruin my childhood since I wasn't even born when Episode 4 came out, but it ruined my young adulthood for about a week.
I did boycott Episode 2 and still haven't seen it.
I might give 2 a try on background for this new movie, since 3 has been reviewed better. It looks much darker and more appealing to me.
Seriously, though, it was a vivid, offensive image. Which is worse, the victimhood of Groklaw or the Nazihood of Groklaw's detractors? I don't know, save this kind of rhetoric for when Bill Gates is elected President or something.
if there was some common solution to both our problems?
50k+ to start
No experience necessary
Excellent benefits
Traveling allowances
Desire to kill a must
Inquiries should be directed to:
is my toothpaste gay?
Courage: The World's Terrorist Supply Is Fading Fast
Mushroom cloud, shmushroom cloud
Hint:
G R O K L A W
What do you mean, you didn't know about Daimler's motion to strike the Broderick affidavit?
For Christians, the world overflows with meaning. How could it be otherwise? God made it.
For Christians, the material world and the spiritual world are intertwined. Everyday things, like bread and wine (water or juice, some places), take on spiritual dimensions. Our lives are less ordinary. Who could believe this and wish to escape the world?
For some irreligious people, their reasoning goes like "we do not have to worry about this death; at least we are still alive, so we should be more concerned about our life than our death." The object of their escapism is death. But so far as I know, none has yet escaped.
They don't refuse to contemplate the possibility of death and annihilation. On the contrary, they deal with it openly and honestly.
"If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." (1 Cor 15)
Even if you had "religion", a final death would be an incalculable loss.
"We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you." (2 Cor 4)
Denying the worth of the whole universe is what suicides do, not martyrs.
"Jesus replied, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.'" (John 12)
Say, rather, that there is a greater mistake that many intelligent people make with religious choice: to create straw men, tear them to shreds, and fall back into dull agnosticism.
These examples you cite are perversions of Christianity, not the thing itself; on what basis, then, can you reject Christianity?
"... therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..." A good deal of religion is a confrontation of death, or a working out of the problem of good and evil, or a quest for the meaning of life; it's all the same issue, however you want to put it. Christianity, at least, confronts these all head-on. Christians have to think about death, have to explain themselves, have to provide the meaning... even the meaning of the horrible events you are talking about.
But you don't. You are willing to condemn a religion for things you think might have happened ("perhaps this is legend I don't know"). Just sling the mud, then tell people to move along, nothing to see here.
Christianity is rich in culture, and history, and yes, even faith. But if you want the nickel answers, continue asking the 5 cent questions.
I'm married and I have the same problem as the poster. I am reduced to playing Super Street Fighter 2 for half an hour some nights and bemoaning my lost youth. Oh woe, youth!
My s-m-r-t solution is to get a job making games.
Play games for fun... ??? (Do lots of hard work) ... Profit!
Somebody, sometime, is going to offer an ISP a boatload of money to do this, and the ISP is going to calculate that the probable cost of interfering in connection usage (P2P monitoring or whatever it is) is dwarfed by the amount of revenue they're getting for a sweetheart deal like this.
If the ISP is a major nationwide network, the monitoring could be a huge burden, but the cash rewards could be just as huge.
At least it'll create a few hundred IT jobs.
You can count me among those. However, I would be wary of talking about moral "costs" and "benefits"; that's economics-speak, not morality-speak.
This is where I part ways with the president of the United States and this article. The article is about an imposition of morality, about the way we calculate the value of a human life in money. But this entire research frame is morally suspect, if life and death are really about more than dollars and cents.
Further, policy debates like this one are full of different methods of decision calculus. This economics-inspired utilitarian accounting of the probable increase or decrease in human lives is just the most popular one, the one you learn in Political Science school and war-planning school. These are ethical methods and moralities too; it's not like policy-centered utilitarianism is "science" and deontology (or some other ethical framework) is "morality".
This utilitarian flavor in political science has real effects at the political level. For example, one woman went to nuclear war-planning school and learned to do this, but found that the decision-making methods used to fight nuclear wars are dehumanizing and illogical, not to mention immoral. Why should it surprise us that more of this warped kind of thinking should lead to warped conclusions?
Other ways to talk about life and death are possible in public policy debate; they're just not permissible. They're also not as tangible and easy to use in mathematics and write up in the annual budget. But who said they should be?
Perhaps this kind of measurement is unnecessary... and perhaps it is flawed... and perhaps, when we learn that it is "counterintuitive" but true that we should kill computer hackers to save money, we should not only seriously question our calculations, we should seriously question our sources of inspiration.
I, for one, would be pleased to have policymakers who are unserious, according to this columnist, who will appeal to the heart's reasons, who think that life is valuable beyond a cash settlement. For "The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know." This is what Pascal was talking about: not that the heart's reasons are inferior to the demands of logic, but that they are superior.
Oh, I agree with you entirely about the books. I was raised on science fiction and fantasy, sometimes violent, often human. I can't get enough of it, and I can hardly call the kettle black. I don't agree at all with my friends who seem to think they promote demonic forces as genres (and refuse to read them for that reason!).
I think Harry Potter is great reading, even for somewhat younger readers. I forget if it was Tolkien or Chesterton (or someone else) who said that innocent kids like the unsanitized versions of fairy tales, where the bad guy dies gruesomely, but world-weary adults prefer tales with less justice.
Unfortunately, somewhat less literary families (TV heads) who haven't read Harry Potter (I speculate) will be taking their young kids (even younger than 10-11; it's not rated PG-13) to the next movies. The first movies won't really have prepared them for these next ones, because the emotional content and the suspense just ratchets up in every installment. I bet there'll be screaming kids when we go see movie 3, and kids who won't understand what's going on. That's probably par for the course, though.
But anyway, some nice things happened in my family too. One of my sisters read the first book to my other sister aloud, and now of course they have read them all. Their reading keeps branching out too!
The books start getting older and darker (some of the stuff with Voldemort in book 4, I associate loosely with necromancy and devil-worship), but the movies started out basically kid-friendly. I will be curious to see the direction they take it when Prisoner of Azkaban comes out next month.
There will probably be screaming kids at that one too.
You're probably right... I did get my feelings confused, having just read that other thread. Seeing Shrek 2 didn't fill me with moral outrage (movies rarely do), but for a PG movie there were enough things to explain to the average 10 year old... things that pass right over the head of your 3 year old.
I'm not trying to tell you how to parent or anything... I obviously have less experience than you. These parental questions just keep coming up for me.
And I thought the story wasn't as tightly constructed as the first movie. Everything flows naturally from the opening scenes, in Shrek 1, but in Shrek 2, everything comes from all directions, like the gingerbread man ex machina.
Sorry about the screaming kids. We have our first on the way and I swear none of our kids will scream at the movies (to the best of my ability; that's the best I can do).
I've had to sit back and think about this for a while. There is a curious intersection of the "religious" and secular here; /.ers are speaking two different languages. I've caught this flavor a couple of times on Slashdot today (for instance, also in the thread on Bozell's sexy games editorial). This secular argument goes, these kids are biologically ready for sex, it's the most natural thing in the world, your mom had sex, everybody's doing it, it doesn't hurt anything.
I hear this and I go, these guys just don't see sex the way I do. As a grown-up married guy, of course I know sex is all those things they say it is. I see this as a major cheapening of what sex means (because it doesn't mean anything; if sex does mean something, then the secular attitude is a dangerous one). Put it another way: I am going to keep guys trained in this viewpoint of sex away from my daughter (switch the genders and the same is true again).
Sexy adult jokes in kids' cartoon movies cheapen sex again, shoot another "it's ok, it's natural" across the bow of my parenting. That's what the grandparent post was talking about. Because he cares about stuff like this, in the future that guy would be wise to preview the movies his kids are going to see, or at least check a parent-friendly movie review site like ScreenIt. Here's the Shrek 2 review. The specific content is at the bottom of the page.
But I agree with you too, that the thong was not the most sensitive thing in that movie.
Its
Or
Next.
Come on, you know the rest!
:o) jk
Mr. William Gibson announced through his counsel today that he is suing the Sony Corporation (SNE) for patent infringement in its forthcoming "Cyber World" technology.
"Our client holds the prior art for all forms of cyberspace, jacking in, and networked virtual worlds," said David Boies, citing Neuromancer (1984).
"William Gibson is in the enviable position of owning the Internet," said Boies, in an interview with eWeek Tuesday. "It is clear from our stand point that we have an extremely compelling case against Sony. Mr. Gibson has millions of circulating copies and defending these ideas is as important today as the day they were published."
When asked if Gibson was contemplating further lawsuits, Boies replied "Right now we're focused on Sony. It's not that there's a shortage of companies in violation but, in terms of our resolve issues, we are not trying to announce a litigation path. For now, we are trying to get things resolved with Sony."