Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, etc.? These were great adventure stories. For that matter, most of Nintendo's games are too -- think of every Mario, Zelda, or Metroid game ever made. As games go, these are high-brow entertainment; they aren't catering to boob-obsessed 15 year-old boys, like the DOA franchise, and they aren't catering to violence-obsessed 13-35 year-old men either.
I'll even attempt a defense of GTA. Perhaps it isn't fine art, but as a social commentary, it definitely has its moments -- and hasn't social commentary been taken as art (or at least non-low-brow entertainment), at times? Look at various philosophically and/or politically-motivated comedy shows (Daily Show, Colbert Report, late-night comedy TV, etc.) and cartoon strips (Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, etc.).
Now, Mortal Kombat doesn't have much to offer in terms of artfulness -- it's just 2 guys beating the crap out of each other, with no pretenses of high-brow snobbery...
In America, the Government is the People. All of us. You and me. We get to voice our opintion on things. If we do not like something, we change it by voting.
Awww, isn't it cute at their age? So naive and innocent...
If you live in America however, you have no excuses if you chose not to participate.
Participation is pointless if your side doesn't win. You can vote Libertarian or Green or Socialist or whatever, but your vote is wasted if you don't win. Winning is everything; win, or don't waste your time.
To understand why voting is stupid and irrational, you need to understand economics and the concept of "spheres of influence"...
Say you don't like the good folks at the White House; who's stopping you from writing to your Senator, going door-to-door to get the vote out, starting up a collection for your favorite party.
The realistic choices are a false dichotomy of idiotic, corrupt parties: Republican or Democrat.
Also, have you EVER tried writing your congressmen? Do you have any idea what kind of response you actually get?
You get a form letter saying "Thank you for writing. We are working very hard to promote interest X. Thank you for your support." -- even if you wrote in calling the congressman a dick-sucking piece of shit and disagreed with everything he said.
Power in Washington grows out of a barrel of money. Include a $10,000 check in your letter next time, and maybe somebody will actually spend more than 1 second glancing-over it for the topic so they can select the particular topic of the form letter to send back to you...
Starting up your own damn party, if you don't like any existing one.
Yeah, the Libertarian Party has had TONS of success at that!
Yes, I understand it is hard work, and it is much easier to sit at home instead of trying to change the system, but at least folks like you should have the courtesy not to stop being a whiney little bitch!
We're just waiting for things to get so bad that America undergoes one of the societal upheavals it undergoes every 70 years or so...
(Disclaimer: I voted in the 2004 elections, and in the congressional primary, in both cases for losing (and loser) candidate, because he was less-bad than all the others. Both voting events were a complete waste of my time.)
The classic example of a "tragedy of the commons" (in my mind) is graffitti on the walls and seats of public transit buses and trains. Other examples include pollution of lakes, rivers, etc..
In the case of the publicly-owned computer, the computer is being allocated to what is arguably a sub-optimal purpose: surfing MySpace, rather than being used for research.
Assuming surfing MySpace (or other non-research sites) is considered of lesser value than other, "better" sites, then by definition, such a use of the computer is a "tragedy of the commons", because it's being misused. (Whether or not it's *actually* being misused, regardless of what the statute or conventional wisdom says, is a different story. See below.)
No one is telling you not to access that site, they are just telling you that you cant do it from publicaly funded computers.
Congratulations: you just contradicted yourself. On one hand, you're being told you can't access a particular website from a public computer; on the other hand, you're saying that nobody is telling you that you can't access a particular website from a public computer. Which is it?
You may not be restricted from a particular site *entirely* by law, just within a library.
But who decides what purposes are important? Who decides what content is legitimate for viewing on a public computer, and which is not? Who decides whether surfing MySpace really *is* less important than academic research?
Indeed, academic research may not be more important. Consider that a homeless teen might be using MySpace to hook up with a wealthy mate in love: were they to get married, this reduces the chances that homeless person will wind up on welfare rolls, costing taxpayers even more money. Other examples could include somebody using MySpace (or other sites, if MySpace bans it) for commercial purposes -- perhaps their profit exceeds the profit you would make on your research.
In that light, in an efficient market, their use of the public computer is more-valuable than yours is, and thus ought not be restricted merely by the belief that your purpose is somehow more important (and plenty of academic research clearly isn't worth the paper it's printed on).
Also, stating that if you have to wait for a computer at the library, you can just go home and use your owne is somewhat contrary to the entire argument as we have been discussing the fact that not everyone has a computer at their house.
True, not everybody has a computer at their house. But about 70% of Americans do, and with desktops as cheap as $200 (and less, if bought used) these days, there is no reason why any particular adult in this country can't afford one, unless they have are one of the members of the long-term unemployed (which is largely comprised of mentally-handicapped and physically-disabled people).
Not to mention the fact that many library computers have access to academic jurnals, library card decks and specific software which is not avalable outside the library.
This is your best argument so far.
But even here, libraries have typically segregated the computers used for searching for materials from the computers used for general-purpose tasks (web, email, document writing, spreadsheets, etc.), thus alleviating the burden on people searching for such materials.
I thought it was pretty funny. AFAIK, nobody reliable has confirmed the quote (I meant the post in half-jest)... But then, with people like Dan Rather, Lou Dobbs, and the entire FOX News staff on the payrolls, since when is the MSM a collective bastion of reliability either?:)
What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"
You would rather think that X is true -- even if you know that X is not true?
As Dilbert once said to a girl while on a date after she said she believed in something that most of us know to be crazy, "since when did belief become a substitute for fact?"
Why should elected officials give a damn about you? Look at Congress: they have a 92% re-election rate. If you had an "A"-grade chance of re-election, would you be particularly-concerned with what a few of your paranoid, nuttier constituents think? Of course not. If you care at all about your constituency, you follow what the majority wants and give it to them: pork-barrel projects and security from whatever boogeyman-of-the-week may be.
Elected officals have very little incentive to look out for you or your freedoms. The history of the U.S., to say nothing of the history of virtually every other nation in the world, ought to be evidence of that. And the history of un-elected officials is even worse.
Go start a religion if you cannot handle reality. You can't handle the truth. But to answer the question: there's nothing you can do. See below.
Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia?
I am between the ages of 18-25. Do I qualify as a member of the "new generation"?
If I do, then I can say that the sort of post-9/11 pro-security, anti-privacy, anti-freedom paranoia is rampant among my generation. We saw 9/11 and said "where's Big Brother to save us? We've got to do whatever it takes to stop all terrorism!!" (yes, I actually had one person my age say this to me) -- as if that is somehow an achievable goal. I make my usual libertarian arguments, and I occasionally find people who are sympathetic, but by and large, people my age don't give a rat's ass about privacy, and will routinely make fun of privacy-minded people (like me, natch).
Terrorism is the new communism, and it's easier to be blinded by emotion than to run life through the filter of rational, critical, unemotional thought, and so the fear of terrorists overtakes the fear of information abuse that results from invasion of privacy.
Of course, over time -- and by that, I mean over the course of 3-4 years or more -- I find more and more of them very-slowly coming to the conclusions about privacy I came to a decade ago; only, I came to them deductively and predictively, not reactively; I haven't yet been severely-burned by a lack of privacy, whereas some of them have. ("The best revenge is living well", I suppose.)
But none have approached my level of distrust for authority (whether government or business), and I'm not nearly as paranoid as many people on Slashdot: I don't wear tinfoil hats, I don't route my Internet traffic through Tor, I don't reject the advancement of RFID chips in ID cards (although I vehemently oppose national ID systems, such as the U.S.'s REAL ID Act, and the national IDs of most other nations around the world). I no longer GPG-sign my email, and no longer run a node for encrypted, application-layer-routed P2P network. I use encryption whenever possible, but I don't demand that friends and family use PGP/GPG, nor that they use encrypted IM clients. They will never adhere to such demands, and requiring them would leave me friendless.
All my most privacy-conscious friends/family are computer geeks; all my least privacy-conscious friends/family are (largely) computer-illiterate. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.
The truth of the world is that you cannot trust anybody until they prove themselves
You don't like what the kid on the computer is doing with it? Boo hoo, get your own damn PC and Internet access.
Your argument holds no water. Public terminals in schools and libraries placed strictly for academic purposes? This is no more true than our roadways are made strictly for driving to/from work; they are also used for vacations, traveling to the homes of friends and family, and are even (gasp!) enjoyed, legally, for the simple purpose of the pure pleasure of driving.
You are taking the computer security practitioner's view of "that which is not expressly permitted is prohibited." This is a fine philosophy in a totalitarian nation, such as the former Soviet Union, or modern-day China or North Korea, or on a privately-owned or security-sensitive government network.
But this is the United States of America. Here, supposedly, we prefer the freedom to choose; the freedom to do as we please so long as our actions do not harm other people. Ideally, on these grounds, there ought not even *be* a publicly-owned PC available to all in libraries and universities, but we are far from such ideals...
You might argue that the kid's surfing MySpace interferes with your ability to do research. But if he has also signed-out that block of time he is using, that is his time on that public resource, and he was there first -- and you aren't worth a shred of sympathy as a result, because it is your failure to respond positively to what amounts to a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem...
Bend over and accept said Constitution being wadded-up and shoved up your nether-region. Failure to comply shall result in no less than a trip to sunny Gitmo...
I don't know if T-Mobile is in Canada yet, but here in the States, they offer all-you-can-eat data for $30, over GPRS/EDGE and at their Hotspot locations (Starbucks, Borders, etc.. I hardly ever use their Hotspots though; EDGE is good enough for me). I've been pretty happy with them.
The greatest app to enter my life in the last 5 years is Google Maps on my recently-acquired T-Mobile SDA phone.
For the $30/mo I pay for T-Mo's unlimited GPRS/EDGE + T-Mo Hotspot access, I have found my way to too many locations using Google Maps to count.
Now that they've added traffic-density functionality, my drive can only get better......If only the "Show traffic" function (the "#" key) didn't peg the CPU and lock up the app.:(
Other than that, the app is great and I love Google.
What about the music from KMFDM? They made some music that was licensed exclusively for Prey, and thus they haven't been permitted to release it to the world.
I'm not a KMFDM fan (anymore), but I was always curious to hear what they made for an FPS...
It's only an anecdotal example, but I'm typing this post on a Toshiba Satellite I received as an X-mas gift back in Dec. 2003. Aside from the BIOS config being poorly-designed and needing to remove the dust from the HSF area every year or so, I've had no problems with it.
A friend of mine had a similar machine die on him in 2-3 years. But he treats his electronics *much* less-gently than I do.
Apple and IBM/Lenovo do make solid laptops, without a doubt (HP and the formerly-separate Compaq, OTOH, are a different story. I had a Compaq laptop I got for free because it was "dead" (bad HDD), which I repaired for cheap, whose seemingly-fine LCD died 6 months later). But my experience with Toshiba thus-far has been that, while they have some fair annoyances (like getting audio working under Linux), they are at least reliable if you treat them with just a tiny bit of respect and care...
Open the doors on the NSA wiretapping. Government must always and everywhere be transparent to its people, if the government is to remain anywhere close to the ideal of being free of the stench of corruption and abuse of power.
If government has no skeletons to hide, then it should have nothing to worry about opening its closet doors either.
Why isn't it about what he's trying to accomplish by protecting the American people from another terrorist act? Since this is his claim, and it's a reasonable claim, why are you so suspicious to think the President is lying about it?
Perhaps because Bush has lied before? Once a liar, always a liar in my book (and that includes former President Clinton. Actually, it includes nearly every politician to ever get elected into office).
...why are you so suspicious to think the President is lying about it? Do you think he implemented such a program for other reasons? Or do you accept his explaination and question his methods? If the former, then you're more concerned with bashing him than actually getting answers. If the latter, then you can not say he's hiding anything, but simply trying to protect the information that gives sensitive details about a program used to protect Americans (and probably others in the world).
Just because one suspects Bush has implemented the NSA wiretapping for reasons other than the claimed reason of national security, does not result in a desire (necessarily) to bash Bush.
You have drawn a conclusion following the overly-simplistic logic of "if (suspectOtherReasonsThanStated), then suspiciousPersonIsBashingThePresident = true". It does not logically follow, because there are other possible cases than this single case described here; because there are other possible cases, your logic is too simple to model the real world. If you were writing code, you would need a block of nested "if" statements to make the determination, based on further criteria [1], that the person is simply bashing Bush.
Is there no reason why somebody could desire to hold the President's program accountable; to ensure that the program's purpose actually aligns with its design and output? Is there no reason why somebody concerned with following and enforcing the law might be concerned with ensuring that the NSA wiretapping is within the bounds of the law?
Of course there are such reasons. Yet, you have tried to exclude them from the debate by leaning on the same logical fallacy of false dichotomy that Bush himself used several years ago: "either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists."
Admit it: in stating (as you have) that questioning Bush's motives is just "bashing" him, you have admitted that you are an ideological defender of President Bush.
[1] e.g. the person promotes Green/leftist/communist economic ideals, person dislikes theocracy, person dislikes socialistic government spending (which has exceeded that of even Lyndon B. Johnson, whose "Great Society" programs stand as monuments to socialism in America), person dislikes corporate welfare, person dislikes Medicare welfare for the elderly, person dresses up as Bush for Halloween, etc..
Why not? Bush attends church, though not very regularly. He holds many of the same hypocrises that Christians do (e.g. "believe in freedom of and freedom from religion, while imposing the code of our religion domestically through the law"). He holds the same illogical belief in an unproveable, invisible friend that Christians do (and as do practitioners of any religion (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, athieism, etc.). I don't discriminate; I hate all religions, though with varying levels of disgust, depending on which one is responsible for the brainwashing and/or murder of more people in a given week).
Moreover, Christians generally love Bush because he does things that align well with their moral code: attempts to ban homosexual marriage, stem-cell research, and taxpayer-funded faith-based initiatives being the main examples.
IMO, Christians must be demonized almost as much as President Bush, because they have been his greatest supporters in elections. More than anybody else, they are responsible for putting this ignoramus in office. "So as ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Bush is a Christian, albeit a weak one; Christians elected Bush, and now Bush represents the Christians, working as a torch-bearer for their causes, having elected him into office.
Unfortunately, Christians, like all religious people, are goddamn dolts, and when they elect people to represent them, we get similarly-doltish people like President Bush.
Not considering the sunk costs they have in their current designs (based around the over 100 year-old combustion engine) and manufacturing facilities... And their persistant incompetence at building smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles to compete with those from Japan. You'd think American car companies would have learned from the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways, they have: American cars now start on the first key-twist, they don't explode into a giant fireball when rear-ended, they're cheap, and reasonably fuel-efficient.
But Japanese makers still beat the Americans on small, efficient cars, because they've been doing it longer and have focused on the longer-run issues of depleting oil supplies more than American car copmanies have, so fond of their SUVs to the exclusion of fuel-efficient vehicles they were until just 2-3 years ago...
Frankly, if one of the "Big Three" ends up being swallowed by another car company, or going bankrupt altogether -- preferably without a government bailout this time (thank you Jimmy Carter) -- not only will I not be disappointed, I might even be mildly-happy...
(Of course, there is the massive dislocation of the employees of whichever of those companies goes under, and that is a problem that frankly requires 2 efforts: one on the part of those people to save for their own "rainy days", and the other on the part of government, charity, and businesses to provide re-training, job-finding assistance, etc.. And, of course, many of those workers would no doubt be re-employed under new corporate management anyway, to help remaining companies pick up the market slack left behind by the recently-deceased auto corporation...)
He also suggests that 'the PS3 would be more than 35% of the monthly household income' of average families in some world territories.
He's comparing a one-time fixed-cost (the price of the PS3) to a variable (albeit slowly-increasing) rate (household income)?
He should try again. Now, if he's comparing estimated monthly expenditures on games to monthly income -- *then* you have a rate vs. rate comparison which is arithmetically-sound.
But to follow the logic of his comparison, why don't we take a house purchase -- which is generally several times the *annual* income of a household -- and compare it to the individual annual income of a 10 year-old? Then you have a comparison that looks atrocious (and it is even for adults, which is why most people get loans and mortgages)...
None of this is to suggest that IMO, the PS3 isn't going to be intolerably expensive, even for those of us gainfully-employed in a professional capacity, and especially since those of us who can afford it haven't the time to play games, usually. I love every Metal Gear game ever made for NES, MSX, PS1, and PS2 (haven't played the others), but I will wait quite a while to buy MGS4 if it requires buying a $400 console to play it on...
Mod me -1, Redundant, but the last time I looked (over 2 years ago), you could buy a decent used laptop for less than $400. Now you can get new ones for that much from Dell. And that's a laptop, not a desktop, which, with Wal-Mart selling new desktops for under $200, are even cheaper.
Get yourself a used 1GHz, 512MB RAM, 60-80GByte HDD desktop and a cheap used CRT. This shouldn't total more than probably $100 or so, if that. This rig will get you through any classes a university will throw at you, barring possibly some engineering or graphics-design applications (e.g. Matlab, AutoCAD for the former, Photoshop for the latter).
Certainly it will suffice if you are a Computer Science major or a major in any of the non-technical fields...
<sarcasm>Great! I'll get mom, dad, and my popular sister with 60 of her bestest friends on AIM using anonymous email and Freenet in no time!</sarcasm>
Seriously though, the reason these apps haven't taken-off is because they face a chicken-and-egg problem: they aren't standards de facto or de jure.
I've tried getting my friends to use encrypted AIM, via GAIM, Trillian, etc.. Of course they don't use it, (except for another Slashdotter friend of mine): it's "too hard" and (so they say) if you have nothing to hide, then what's the concern over privacy about? (and then I sigh: "He who does not learn from the past, is doomed to repeat it...")
I have relatives who are privacy nuts, and one close to me is even somewhat technically-competent and very well-educated. Yet, mention "PGP", and his eyes glaze over.
If even the privacy-concerned intelligentsia don't want to put forth the effort to protect their privacy, then isn't the battle, as a defacto matter, basically lost?
I think privacy is, has, and will always be, a lost cause. It takes:
Political and/or economic/business intelligence to understand its value
A historian's knowledge to understand the historical examples of privacy loss
Mathematical sophistication to have a theoretical conception of the potential growth in instances of knowledge of one's personal information by others via the network effects of private information's spread
A network-connected computer geek's (like most of us Slashdotters) understanding of how quickly that information actually *does* spread on the Internet to understand and demonstrate the reality of the privacy situation
Few people outside of many computer scientists, and some in the hard sciences and math, and maybe a few lawyers, are competent to fully-grasp the implications of privacy loss. Most people are not so intelligent, nor nearly patient enough to understand the subject -- and so, most people don't give a rat's ass.
The reality of privacy around the world is that Scott McNeely was right some 10 years ago, when he proclaimed that "privacy is dead." I cannot think of a single period in time in which the U.S. or Britain have undergone periods in which privacy could be said to have generally *increased*. [1] Germany arguably improved after the fall of East German socialism, having eliminated the Stasi in the process, but that's like switching from a Yugo to a GM-made econocar for one's personal transportation -- it's a big improvement, but still very far from what is wanted.
Those of us who care about privacy can and do use such applications. The rest of the unwashed masses will be tracked and eventually hunted-down by governments, corporations, and sophisticated black-market criminal organizations like the goddamn cattle they are (and, if East German, Iraqi, Chinese, North Korean, and American communist history -- as well as the history of various black market businesses (drug cartels, the Mafia, etc.) -- is any indicator, murdered much the same).
It doesn't help either that privacy apps have typically not worked particularly-well. Freenet is a great example: it hogs RAM and CPU and in the end, content-retrieval is painfully-slow. Not to mention that Freenet, like PGP, is basically a big red flashing neon sign to law-enforcement suggesting a high probability of illegal activity (and I think those of us who genuinely run/ran it for the political purpose of keeping free-speech and privacy alive really are/were in the minority -- just as those with whom you can talk intelligently to on USENET, or anywhere else on the Internet or in real life, are in the minority)...
[1] Then again, how does one measure privacy? By the number of surveillance cameras, public and private? By the number of records per individual being analyzed out of databases? By the number of doors kicked-down on the basis of information obtained via a breach of privacy? By th
...tell me how many Average Joes are going to lie down to drive their car on the road?
Just *try* getting your grandparents to do so.
(Yes, of course this achievement might be improved and translated into something more practical later. So why don't we recognize the achievement when that time comes, instead of recognizing it now?)
Slashdot Mirror
Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, etc.? These were great adventure stories. For that matter, most of Nintendo's games are too -- think of every Mario, Zelda, or Metroid game ever made. As games go, these are high-brow entertainment; they aren't catering to boob-obsessed 15 year-old boys, like the DOA franchise, and they aren't catering to violence-obsessed 13-35 year-old men either.
I'll even attempt a defense of GTA. Perhaps it isn't fine art, but as a social commentary, it definitely has its moments -- and hasn't social commentary been taken as art (or at least non-low-brow entertainment), at times? Look at various philosophically and/or politically-motivated comedy shows (Daily Show, Colbert Report, late-night comedy TV, etc.) and cartoon strips (Doonesbury, Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, etc.).
Now, Mortal Kombat doesn't have much to offer in terms of artfulness -- it's just 2 guys beating the crap out of each other, with no pretenses of high-brow snobbery...
Awww, isn't it cute at their age? So naive and innocent...
Participation is pointless if your side doesn't win. You can vote Libertarian or Green or Socialist or whatever, but your vote is wasted if you don't win. Winning is everything; win, or don't waste your time.
To understand why voting is stupid and irrational, you need to understand economics and the concept of "spheres of influence"...
The realistic choices are a false dichotomy of idiotic, corrupt parties: Republican or Democrat.
Also, have you EVER tried writing your congressmen? Do you have any idea what kind of response you actually get?
You get a form letter saying "Thank you for writing. We are working very hard to promote interest X. Thank you for your support." -- even if you wrote in calling the congressman a dick-sucking piece of shit and disagreed with everything he said.
Power in Washington grows out of a barrel of money. Include a $10,000 check in your letter next time, and maybe somebody will actually spend more than 1 second glancing-over it for the topic so they can select the particular topic of the form letter to send back to you...
Yeah, the Libertarian Party has had TONS of success at that!
We're just waiting for things to get so bad that America undergoes one of the societal upheavals it undergoes every 70 years or so...
(Disclaimer: I voted in the 2004 elections, and in the congressional primary, in both cases for losing (and loser) candidate, because he was less-bad than all the others. Both voting events were a complete waste of my time.)
1) misused, because there is no incentive to use it in a more-proper manner, or,
2) overexploited, because there is no incentive to maintain the resource in a sustainable fashion
(Google's definitions are here.)
The classic example of a "tragedy of the commons" (in my mind) is graffitti on the walls and seats of public transit buses and trains. Other examples include pollution of lakes, rivers, etc..
In the case of the publicly-owned computer, the computer is being allocated to what is arguably a sub-optimal purpose: surfing MySpace, rather than being used for research.
Assuming surfing MySpace (or other non-research sites) is considered of lesser value than other, "better" sites, then by definition, such a use of the computer is a "tragedy of the commons", because it's being misused. (Whether or not it's *actually* being misused, regardless of what the statute or conventional wisdom says, is a different story. See below.)
Congratulations: you just contradicted yourself. On one hand, you're being told you can't access a particular website from a public computer; on the other hand, you're saying that nobody is telling you that you can't access a particular website from a public computer. Which is it?
You may not be restricted from a particular site *entirely* by law, just within a library.
But who decides what purposes are important? Who decides what content is legitimate for viewing on a public computer, and which is not? Who decides whether surfing MySpace really *is* less important than academic research?
Indeed, academic research may not be more important. Consider that a homeless teen might be using MySpace to hook up with a wealthy mate in love: were they to get married, this reduces the chances that homeless person will wind up on welfare rolls, costing taxpayers even more money. Other examples could include somebody using MySpace (or other sites, if MySpace bans it) for commercial purposes -- perhaps their profit exceeds the profit you would make on your research.
In that light, in an efficient market, their use of the public computer is more-valuable than yours is, and thus ought not be restricted merely by the belief that your purpose is somehow more important (and plenty of academic research clearly isn't worth the paper it's printed on).
True, not everybody has a computer at their house. But about 70% of Americans do, and with desktops as cheap as $200 (and less, if bought used) these days, there is no reason why any particular adult in this country can't afford one, unless they have are one of the members of the long-term unemployed (which is largely comprised of mentally-handicapped and physically-disabled people).
This is your best argument so far.
But even here, libraries have typically segregated the computers used for searching for materials from the computers used for general-purpose tasks (web, email, document writing, spreadsheets, etc.), thus alleviating the burden on people searching for such materials.
If it were up to me, I would gladly legalize all of those things.
In fact, I wouldn't just legalize marijuana, I'd legalize other drugs as well...
Don't expect such radical moves in the U.S. anytime soon though. We're too Puritanical for any of those things (particularly the latter).
I thought it was pretty funny. AFAIK, nobody reliable has confirmed the quote (I meant the post in half-jest)... But then, with people like Dan Rather, Lou Dobbs, and the entire FOX News staff on the payrolls, since when is the MSM a collective bastion of reliability either? :)
You would rather think that X is true -- even if you know that X is not true?
As Dilbert once said to a girl while on a date after she said she believed in something that most of us know to be crazy, "since when did belief become a substitute for fact?"
Why should elected officials give a damn about you? Look at Congress: they have a 92% re-election rate. If you had an "A"-grade chance of re-election, would you be particularly-concerned with what a few of your paranoid, nuttier constituents think? Of course not. If you care at all about your constituency, you follow what the majority wants and give it to them: pork-barrel projects and security from whatever boogeyman-of-the-week may be.
Elected officals have very little incentive to look out for you or your freedoms. The history of the U.S., to say nothing of the history of virtually every other nation in the world, ought to be evidence of that. And the history of un-elected officials is even worse.
Go start a religion if you cannot handle reality. You can't handle the truth. But to answer the question: there's nothing you can do. See below.
I am between the ages of 18-25. Do I qualify as a member of the "new generation"?
If I do, then I can say that the sort of post-9/11 pro-security, anti-privacy, anti-freedom paranoia is rampant among my generation. We saw 9/11 and said "where's Big Brother to save us? We've got to do whatever it takes to stop all terrorism!!" (yes, I actually had one person my age say this to me) -- as if that is somehow an achievable goal. I make my usual libertarian arguments, and I occasionally find people who are sympathetic, but by and large, people my age don't give a rat's ass about privacy, and will routinely make fun of privacy-minded people (like me, natch).
Terrorism is the new communism, and it's easier to be blinded by emotion than to run life through the filter of rational, critical, unemotional thought, and so the fear of terrorists overtakes the fear of information abuse that results from invasion of privacy.
Of course, over time -- and by that, I mean over the course of 3-4 years or more -- I find more and more of them very-slowly coming to the conclusions about privacy I came to a decade ago; only, I came to them deductively and predictively, not reactively; I haven't yet been severely-burned by a lack of privacy, whereas some of them have. ("The best revenge is living well", I suppose.)
But none have approached my level of distrust for authority (whether government or business), and I'm not nearly as paranoid as many people on Slashdot: I don't wear tinfoil hats, I don't route my Internet traffic through Tor, I don't reject the advancement of RFID chips in ID cards (although I vehemently oppose national ID systems, such as the U.S.'s REAL ID Act, and the national IDs of most other nations around the world). I no longer GPG-sign my email, and no longer run a node for encrypted, application-layer-routed P2P network. I use encryption whenever possible, but I don't demand that friends and family use PGP/GPG, nor that they use encrypted IM clients. They will never adhere to such demands, and requiring them would leave me friendless.
All my most privacy-conscious friends/family are computer geeks; all my least privacy-conscious friends/family are (largely) computer-illiterate. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.
The truth of the world is that you cannot trust anybody until they prove themselves
You're right, that is sad... I'm really curious what he imagines is the libertarian justification for his support.
You don't like what the kid on the computer is doing with it? Boo hoo, get your own damn PC and Internet access.
Your argument holds no water. Public terminals in schools and libraries placed strictly for academic purposes? This is no more true than our roadways are made strictly for driving to/from work; they are also used for vacations, traveling to the homes of friends and family, and are even (gasp!) enjoyed, legally, for the simple purpose of the pure pleasure of driving.
You are taking the computer security practitioner's view of "that which is not expressly permitted is prohibited." This is a fine philosophy in a totalitarian nation, such as the former Soviet Union, or modern-day China or North Korea, or on a privately-owned or security-sensitive government network.
But this is the United States of America. Here, supposedly, we prefer the freedom to choose; the freedom to do as we please so long as our actions do not harm other people. Ideally, on these grounds, there ought not even *be* a publicly-owned PC available to all in libraries and universities, but we are far from such ideals...
You might argue that the kid's surfing MySpace interferes with your ability to do research. But if he has also signed-out that block of time he is using, that is his time on that public resource, and he was there first -- and you aren't worth a shred of sympathy as a result, because it is your failure to respond positively to what amounts to a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem...
Quiet you un-American! The Constitution is "just a goddamn piece of paper!"
Bend over and accept said Constitution being wadded-up and shoved up your nether-region. Failure to comply shall result in no less than a trip to sunny Gitmo...
I don't know if T-Mobile is in Canada yet, but here in the States, they offer all-you-can-eat data for $30, over GPRS/EDGE and at their Hotspot locations (Starbucks, Borders, etc.. I hardly ever use their Hotspots though; EDGE is good enough for me). I've been pretty happy with them.
The greatest app to enter my life in the last 5 years is Google Maps on my recently-acquired T-Mobile SDA phone.
...If only the "Show traffic" function (the "#" key) didn't peg the CPU and lock up the app. :(
For the $30/mo I pay for T-Mo's unlimited GPRS/EDGE + T-Mo Hotspot access, I have found my way to too many locations using Google Maps to count.
Now that they've added traffic-density functionality, my drive can only get better...
Other than that, the app is great and I love Google.
What about the music from KMFDM? They made some music that was licensed exclusively for Prey, and thus they haven't been permitted to release it to the world.
I'm not a KMFDM fan (anymore), but I was always curious to hear what they made for an FPS...
It's only an anecdotal example, but I'm typing this post on a Toshiba Satellite I received as an X-mas gift back in Dec. 2003. Aside from the BIOS config being poorly-designed and needing to remove the dust from the HSF area every year or so, I've had no problems with it.
A friend of mine had a similar machine die on him in 2-3 years. But he treats his electronics *much* less-gently than I do.
Apple and IBM/Lenovo do make solid laptops, without a doubt (HP and the formerly-separate Compaq, OTOH, are a different story. I had a Compaq laptop I got for free because it was "dead" (bad HDD), which I repaired for cheap, whose seemingly-fine LCD died 6 months later). But my experience with Toshiba thus-far has been that, while they have some fair annoyances (like getting audio working under Linux), they are at least reliable if you treat them with just a tiny bit of respect and care...
Open the doors on the NSA wiretapping. Government must always and everywhere be transparent to its people, if the government is to remain anywhere close to the ideal of being free of the stench of corruption and abuse of power.
If government has no skeletons to hide, then it should have nothing to worry about opening its closet doors either.
Perhaps because Bush has lied before? Once a liar, always a liar in my book (and that includes former President Clinton. Actually, it includes nearly every politician to ever get elected into office).
Just because one suspects Bush has implemented the NSA wiretapping for reasons other than the claimed reason of national security, does not result in a desire (necessarily) to bash Bush.
You have drawn a conclusion following the overly-simplistic logic of "if (suspectOtherReasonsThanStated), then suspiciousPersonIsBashingThePresident = true". It does not logically follow, because there are other possible cases than this single case described here; because there are other possible cases, your logic is too simple to model the real world. If you were writing code, you would need a block of nested "if" statements to make the determination, based on further criteria [1], that the person is simply bashing Bush.
Is there no reason why somebody could desire to hold the President's program accountable; to ensure that the program's purpose actually aligns with its design and output? Is there no reason why somebody concerned with following and enforcing the law might be concerned with ensuring that the NSA wiretapping is within the bounds of the law?
Of course there are such reasons. Yet, you have tried to exclude them from the debate by leaning on the same logical fallacy of false dichotomy that Bush himself used several years ago: "either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists."
Admit it: in stating (as you have) that questioning Bush's motives is just "bashing" him, you have admitted that you are an ideological defender of President Bush.
[1] e.g. the person promotes Green/leftist/communist economic ideals, person dislikes theocracy, person dislikes socialistic government spending (which has exceeded that of even Lyndon B. Johnson, whose "Great Society" programs stand as monuments to socialism in America), person dislikes corporate welfare, person dislikes Medicare welfare for the elderly, person dresses up as Bush for Halloween, etc..
Why not? Bush attends church, though not very regularly. He holds many of the same hypocrises that Christians do (e.g. "believe in freedom of and freedom from religion, while imposing the code of our religion domestically through the law"). He holds the same illogical belief in an unproveable, invisible friend that Christians do (and as do practitioners of any religion (Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, athieism, etc.). I don't discriminate; I hate all religions, though with varying levels of disgust, depending on which one is responsible for the brainwashing and/or murder of more people in a given week).
Moreover, Christians generally love Bush because he does things that align well with their moral code: attempts to ban homosexual marriage, stem-cell research, and taxpayer-funded faith-based initiatives being the main examples.
Moreover, look at the voting patterns of church-goers vs. non-church-goers. People who go to church prefer conservative Republicans at the ballot box - like Bush.
IMO, Christians must be demonized almost as much as President Bush, because they have been his greatest supporters in elections. More than anybody else, they are responsible for putting this ignoramus in office. "So as ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Bush is a Christian, albeit a weak one; Christians elected Bush, and now Bush represents the Christians, working as a torch-bearer for their causes, having elected him into office.
Unfortunately, Christians, like all religious people, are goddamn dolts, and when they elect people to represent them, we get similarly-doltish people like President Bush.
How could I have forgotten about that one?
Good catch...
Not considering the sunk costs they have in their current designs (based around the over 100 year-old combustion engine) and manufacturing facilities... And their persistant incompetence at building smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles to compete with those from Japan. You'd think American car companies would have learned from the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s, and in many ways, they have: American cars now start on the first key-twist, they don't explode into a giant fireball when rear-ended, they're cheap, and reasonably fuel-efficient.
But Japanese makers still beat the Americans on small, efficient cars, because they've been doing it longer and have focused on the longer-run issues of depleting oil supplies more than American car copmanies have, so fond of their SUVs to the exclusion of fuel-efficient vehicles they were until just 2-3 years ago...
Frankly, if one of the "Big Three" ends up being swallowed by another car company, or going bankrupt altogether -- preferably without a government bailout this time (thank you Jimmy Carter) -- not only will I not be disappointed, I might even be mildly-happy...
(Of course, there is the massive dislocation of the employees of whichever of those companies goes under, and that is a problem that frankly requires 2 efforts: one on the part of those people to save for their own "rainy days", and the other on the part of government, charity, and businesses to provide re-training, job-finding assistance, etc.. And, of course, many of those workers would no doubt be re-employed under new corporate management anyway, to help remaining companies pick up the market slack left behind by the recently-deceased auto corporation...)
He's comparing a one-time fixed-cost (the price of the PS3) to a variable (albeit slowly-increasing) rate (household income)?
He should try again. Now, if he's comparing estimated monthly expenditures on games to monthly income -- *then* you have a rate vs. rate comparison which is arithmetically-sound.
But to follow the logic of his comparison, why don't we take a house purchase -- which is generally several times the *annual* income of a household -- and compare it to the individual annual income of a 10 year-old? Then you have a comparison that looks atrocious (and it is even for adults, which is why most people get loans and mortgages)...
None of this is to suggest that IMO, the PS3 isn't going to be intolerably expensive, even for those of us gainfully-employed in a professional capacity, and especially since those of us who can afford it haven't the time to play games, usually. I love every Metal Gear game ever made for NES, MSX, PS1, and PS2 (haven't played the others), but I will wait quite a while to buy MGS4 if it requires buying a $400 console to play it on...
You know, like Sun and IBM offer in their servers? Hot-swappable CPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc...
Well, that's quite a paradox!
It seems then that the only way of escaping this paradox is to go into business for yourself, isn't it?
(So says the junior developer who has yet to discover one of these mythical, unicorn-like "good managers" who is neither stupid nor incompetent...)
You mean there's a difference between robots and the people in the CS dept?
Mod me -1, Redundant, but the last time I looked (over 2 years ago), you could buy a decent used laptop for less than $400. Now you can get new ones for that much from Dell. And that's a laptop, not a desktop, which, with Wal-Mart selling new desktops for under $200, are even cheaper.
Get yourself a used 1GHz, 512MB RAM, 60-80GByte HDD desktop and a cheap used CRT. This shouldn't total more than probably $100 or so, if that. This rig will get you through any classes a university will throw at you, barring possibly some engineering or graphics-design applications (e.g. Matlab, AutoCAD for the former, Photoshop for the latter).
Certainly it will suffice if you are a Computer Science major or a major in any of the non-technical fields...
1) So the Earth is warming up. The consequences -- negative *and* positive -- of this are...?
2) How about some better empirics?
Seriously though, the reason these apps haven't taken-off is because they face a chicken-and-egg problem: they aren't standards de facto or de jure.
I've tried getting my friends to use encrypted AIM, via GAIM, Trillian, etc.. Of course they don't use it, (except for another Slashdotter friend of mine): it's "too hard" and (so they say) if you have nothing to hide, then what's the concern over privacy about? (and then I sigh: "He who does not learn from the past, is doomed to repeat it...")
I have relatives who are privacy nuts, and one close to me is even somewhat technically-competent and very well-educated. Yet, mention "PGP", and his eyes glaze over.
If even the privacy-concerned intelligentsia don't want to put forth the effort to protect their privacy, then isn't the battle, as a defacto matter, basically lost?
I think privacy is, has, and will always be, a lost cause. It takes:
Few people outside of many computer scientists, and some in the hard sciences and math, and maybe a few lawyers, are competent to fully-grasp the implications of privacy loss. Most people are not so intelligent, nor nearly patient enough to understand the subject -- and so, most people don't give a rat's ass.
The reality of privacy around the world is that Scott McNeely was right some 10 years ago, when he proclaimed that "privacy is dead." I cannot think of a single period in time in which the U.S. or Britain have undergone periods in which privacy could be said to have generally *increased*. [1] Germany arguably improved after the fall of East German socialism, having eliminated the Stasi in the process, but that's like switching from a Yugo to a GM-made econocar for one's personal transportation -- it's a big improvement, but still very far from what is wanted.
Those of us who care about privacy can and do use such applications. The rest of the unwashed masses will be tracked and eventually hunted-down by governments, corporations, and sophisticated black-market criminal organizations like the goddamn cattle they are (and, if East German, Iraqi, Chinese, North Korean, and American communist history -- as well as the history of various black market businesses (drug cartels, the Mafia, etc.) -- is any indicator, murdered much the same).
It doesn't help either that privacy apps have typically not worked particularly-well. Freenet is a great example: it hogs RAM and CPU and in the end, content-retrieval is painfully-slow. Not to mention that Freenet, like PGP, is basically a big red flashing neon sign to law-enforcement suggesting a high probability of illegal activity (and I think those of us who genuinely run/ran it for the political purpose of keeping free-speech and privacy alive really are/were in the minority -- just as those with whom you can talk intelligently to on USENET, or anywhere else on the Internet or in real life, are in the minority)...
[1] Then again, how does one measure privacy? By the number of surveillance cameras, public and private? By the number of records per individual being analyzed out of databases? By the number of doors kicked-down on the basis of information obtained via a breach of privacy? By th
...tell me how many Average Joes are going to lie down to drive their car on the road?
Just *try* getting your grandparents to do so.
(Yes, of course this achievement might be improved and translated into something more practical later. So why don't we recognize the achievement when that time comes, instead of recognizing it now?)