"As much as Slashdotters hate everything-Facebook, I do like some games there."
Slashdotters hate facebook because it is a massive invasion of privacy and a giant spy machine. If the world ever gets into a state of war or revolt the stupid people who gave up their privacy and posted everything about themselves are going to find out the hard way that wasn't such a good idea.
"Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft."
The human mind does not work according to enlightenment reason. The monkey business of the mamallian brains of the braindead half of humanity will continue see here:
No I know you Americans you definitely implied it by bringing up Russia, it's your favorite fucking talking point and it's a simple minded unsophisticated one at that. The point is that these problems will never be solved by human beings under our current regime. The expansion of economies requires inputs from the 'real economy' known as mother nature but we don't pay the true costs at all and there's cubic fuck tonnes of evidence in the garbage dumps and toxic spills of the world that this is the case .
The free market is a descendant of enlightenment thinking unfortunately that's not how human beings work at all - the are not free, they do not make choices based on reason or rationality. Most human thought is not accessible by your awareness.
That means all descendants and enlightenment based ideologies have serious ramifications for our understanding of society and how it is structured.
"It's not a question of black and white. It's a matter of pointing out that you can't chalk pollution up to the profit motive when the worst polluters had no profit motive."
What you are doing IS black and white thinking. The profit motive is must be better because the ONLY alternative is X, that is black and white thinking.
"I'd be more impressed by this line of argument if the communist nations hadn't been worse polluters than any corporation ever dreamed of being."
Yes, the world is black and white and we're stuck with only two possible extremes and anybody who dares to not be on *my* side is obviously rooting out for that other extreme. Please spare me your inability to think critically.
"Nothing to do with capitalism - just good old fashioned geopolitics"
Nonsense, things like oil spills happen because companies are only spend the minimum they can on safety. This is a result of the PROFIT MOTIVE and hence capitalism there is massive incentive to do things as cheaply and badly as possible for maximum profit and this is common knowledge. Corporations externalize costs and download risks because the model itself fundamentally leads to such outcomes we keep learning this lesson over and over again There's REALLY EXISTING capitalism (the human beings that actually make the decisions) and there's the theoretical capitalism that exists in your head. In the real world companies will do all sorts of bullshit and this fact has never been proven wrong by those who wish for utopian capitalism. You americans are really illiterate religious bunch when it comes to free market ideology.
The problem in a nutshell is capitalism, countries will do everything to save their wealth over doing what needs to be done. This is what we get when we turn a political economic model into a religion.
"When non government organizations end up doing the tasks governments should be doing, but not doing, and end up getting prosecuted for it."
This is what happens when you become a free market ideologue and worship corporate power. When the public worships capitalism this is the natural result. Most people have never lived through times of being killed by capitalists, most americans are so ignorant and illiterate of history as to make their opinions about much of anything seriously suspect.
... since the internet became popular roughly 12 years ago. It's a miracle they survived so long. Most people hit gamespot, gamefaqs or metacritic these days or the developers/game companies forums themselves.
... it's still better then 99% of the websites you find on the internet. Slashdot is really for off-the cuff discussion anyway, there's only so much energy people have and are willing to commit to any kind of discussion and the more complicated the discussion the longer time it takes to digest even reading multiple times. Discussion forums optimize talking about rather low energy and lower effort topics because complexity naturally limits your audience and the points of view. The higher you go the less peers you have, it's just the nature of intelligence, genetics, experience and luck of how your particular mind works and where you ended up born on planet earth.
We have to remember the internet reflects the demographics that visits the site. Slashdot typically attracts americans and so is filled with americanized bias. I've seen forums suggesting slashdot has a leftwing bias, which couldn't be further from the truth.
If anything over the last few years slashdot is if anything a highly pro-free market forum that is highly critical and cynical of ANYTHING in general in which concentrated power acts unethically and without sophistication. You tend to see unintelligent right wing types talk about slashdots 'leftwing bias' if anything slashdot is more libertarian free-market but with a general trend for protecting civil rights and especially open discourse. Intellectual types tend to value open-ness and freedom from oppressive government and the corporate forces that control the congress and the government then anything else.
I especially hate those people who are pro DRM and pro removing of our rights and then go on to whine about 'entitlement' if anything today the vast majority of the citizenry is so brainwashed and intellectually bankrupt they would vote in a dictatorship just to remove people who offend their sensibilities either morally, politically or otherwise. Despite my own misgivings about the more misinformed members of slashdot regarding the history of capitalism. I'm still disturbed at how illiterate typical internet commenters are about history and what most little people had to go through to gain any amount of protection from both corporations and government.
But I'm glad that at least here I see there is a deep cynicism against all forms of concentrated power. "Business" and "government" are just labels for groups of people with power, one rules through force of property and price and the threat of joblessness and deprivation and the other rules by force and law protecting the corporate social order. Unfortunately they've always been in bed together throughout history commerce and men of wealth have always been intertwined with government, the fact that americans can be so brainwashed to be 'anti government' instead of 'anti-bad government' is a testament the effectiveness of corporate marketing.
Many governments were originally instituted to protect the weak from the strong to begin with, over time all human institutions decay or become corrupted because the quality of human beings that enter those positions can't be guaranteed through the randomness of human breeding and the fact that good people tend to out number bad people on planet earth by a large margin and as is reflected in the history of mankind.
There is also the problem of generational gaps and change. There is I imagine a lot of age skew, young people tend to be more clueless then older people in areas of history and so depending on their inborn temperament they will adopt a political ideology that is appealing to their nature whether that be aggressively egotistical (libertarian free market types) or those who lean towards kindness and selflessness, who learn the hardway through bullying and being on the end of severe behavior either from family or school which ends up directing their politics to become more moderate when it comes to trade and having strong views based on protecting the weak from the strong and who are historically unaware and clueless of all bloodshed in capitalism name.
"Will the excess of bundles mean that developers lose more profitable sales? Or do these bundles help by getting indie titles into the hands of people who would normally buy mainstream games, and so not really diminish their usual audience?"
Considering the state of the game industry with heavy handed DRM, the fact that you get a games SOURCE CODE which you can modify/update/change is downright RADICAL in an age of corporate feudalism and creeping fascism. One only has to look at SOPA to see this.
Whether or not you get tired of the bundles these are people we should want around and to keep in business. More money = they have more money to invest in making their games better. While not all games on the bundle are good, it's not like gamers have many options for DRM free gaming AND being respected as a gamer and enthusiast (getting the source). So that 10 years down the line on windows 12 the game you bought can stilll be played with some coder just updating the code without any stupid emulation.
Think about all the hoops we have to go through to run old classic games - needing emulators, etc, etc. Wouldn't the world be a wonderful place if customers actually got to OWN what they bought from entertainment software vendors?
I have never agreed with software licensing without any ownership stakes for customers and ability to get souce-code after the sales window of said softwareespecially FOR games. Licensing is one of those big bullshit lies greedy corporatized and indoctrinated bastards believe in and we've seen what that kind of mentality does to our rights and freedoms in society.
Audio shouldn't take up much space at all and the framerate/resolution at which you record video can easily be minimized. As far as I know I don't know of any corporate products off hand but either way it's either an untapped market or will be tapped soon enough. Point being is that it's not impossible to keep a record of these dealings it's just a matter of having (or developing) the right software.
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement."
What a bunch of garbage. The vast majority of people have to work for a living and there are plenty of people without jobs who've been looking for ages. The whole IDEA that it's just 'lazyness' is simple minded bullshit.
"But... he argues for liberal and progressive thought."
Which has nothing to do with the fact that human reasoning is not literal, it does not 'fit the world'. This is a scientific fact that you cannot deny. I did not link to that video for his politics, rather his science - which is accurate. My point being is that all human beings are terribly unaware of how bad their minds really are at thinking and perceiving the world as it is and that the truth is hard beyond the low hanging fruit.
The fact that I can even post this is more then enough that I've done the research into my own thought processes and have a good understanding of how limited your mind really is.
You don't think based on reason or rationality, you are a creature of emotion and sentiment and sentiments are easily turned into justifications for self delusion. Human beings are people of their age and their background. It's highly unlikely you came to your opinion after much study and toil, rather you are emotionally transfixed to your narrow point of view because you are too in experienced to make sound judgement of what I have said.
Nice red herring and avoidance of biblical teaching, when the bible proves your liberal view of religion wrong, pull up a red herring. Religion has always been superstition, filth and lies for the most basest of minds.
For the record I'm not religious but was raised religious so I know all the in's and outs of apologetics of the fundies and the liberal religious folk alike. You're all just incredibly stpid.
"I never get a decent enough answer. Maybe because they're wrong and can't spot allegory (Genesis) if it came up and slapped them in the face."
You're wrong unfortunately fundamentalists know that if there is no sin, there is no reason for christianity at all. Christ serves no purpose in the new testament without the sin and the fall.
Any serious fundamentalist would have countered you easily and thusly:
Romans 5:12 - Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
Sin can't "enter the world through one man" if evolution is true, sorry but the fundies win here and the liberal christians are just atheists who failed logic 101. While fundamentalists try to grasp an error prone work of man as works of god at least they understand biblical teaching better then you liberal christians.
Romans 5:14 - Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
The bible is very clear what early christians believed - that the bible was history, modern liberal christians just can't give up their addiction to magical thinking and mythology. The problem is the whole purpose of christ is to redeem mankind from sin, no disobedience (in an evolutionary world) there is no sin, no fall no way for "death to enter into the world through one man".
Liberal christians are even more credulous then their fundamentalist counterparts.
WTF is this garbage? Conservatives and the fox machine has turned socialism into a dirty word there never has been socialism, there has been only mixed economies on behalf of violent struggle of workers. Seriously are americans THIS historically illiterate?
Slashdot Mirror
"It *is* possible for people to like things that the /, groupmind dislikes without them being paid to do so."
It's also possible they are clueless and have bad taste. There is such a thing you know.
"As much as Slashdotters hate everything-Facebook, I do like some games there."
Slashdotters hate facebook because it is a massive invasion of privacy and a giant spy machine. If the world ever gets into a state of war or revolt the stupid people who gave up their privacy and posted everything about themselves are going to find out the hard way that wasn't such a good idea.
"Okay, seriously: no, it is not. Copyright infringement is not theft."
The human mind does not work according to enlightenment reason. The monkey business of the mamallian brains of the braindead half of humanity will continue see here:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"May the Maths Be with you!"
May the understanding of reason be with you:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
No I know you Americans you definitely implied it by bringing up Russia, it's your favorite fucking talking point and it's a simple minded unsophisticated one at that. The point is that these problems will never be solved by human beings under our current regime. The expansion of economies requires inputs from the 'real economy' known as mother nature but we don't pay the true costs at all and there's cubic fuck tonnes of evidence in the garbage dumps and toxic spills of the world that this is the case .
The free market is a descendant of enlightenment thinking unfortunately that's not how human beings work at all - the are not free, they do not make choices based on reason or rationality. Most human thought is not accessible by your awareness.
That means all descendants and enlightenment based ideologies have serious ramifications for our understanding of society and how it is structured.
See here on human reason:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
I know this I was merely pointing out why SOMEONE ELSE would think that. See here please:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"It's not a question of black and white. It's a matter of pointing out that you can't chalk pollution up to the profit motive when the worst polluters had no profit motive."
What you are doing IS black and white thinking. The profit motive is must be better because the ONLY alternative is X, that is black and white thinking.
"I'd be more impressed by this line of argument if the communist nations hadn't been worse polluters than any corporation ever dreamed of being."
Yes, the world is black and white and we're stuck with only two possible extremes and anybody who dares to not be on *my* side is obviously rooting out for that other extreme. Please spare me your inability to think critically.
"Nothing to do with capitalism - just good old fashioned geopolitics"
Nonsense, things like oil spills happen because companies are only spend the minimum they can on safety. This is a result of the PROFIT MOTIVE and hence capitalism there is massive incentive to do things as cheaply and badly as possible for maximum profit and this is common knowledge. Corporations externalize costs and download risks because the model itself fundamentally leads to such outcomes we keep learning this lesson over and over again There's REALLY EXISTING capitalism (the human beings that actually make the decisions) and there's the theoretical capitalism that exists in your head. In the real world companies will do all sorts of bullshit and this fact has never been proven wrong by those who wish for utopian capitalism. You americans are really illiterate religious bunch when it comes to free market ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
It's like you've learned nothing from the bailout:
See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP362CWj2fo
Here:
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html
And here:
http://www.dailybail.com/
You need to get a clue buddy. Your ignorance of what has occurred just recently is off the charts.
"This concept of yours is based on..."
Quebec nationalism see the Meech lake accord:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meech_Lake_Accord
And...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_nationalism
"Here's the problem in a nutshell"
The problem in a nutshell is capitalism, countries will do everything to save their wealth over doing what needs to be done. This is what we get when we turn a political economic model into a religion.
And this is the human races fundamental problem - we have too many assholes on planet earth.
"When non government organizations end up doing the tasks governments should be doing, but not doing, and end up getting prosecuted for it."
This is what happens when you become a free market ideologue and worship corporate power. When the public worships capitalism this is the natural result. Most people have never lived through times of being killed by capitalists, most americans are so ignorant and illiterate of history as to make their opinions about much of anything seriously suspect.
No sir, it's you who needs to learn. You can start with canadian banking here:
http://www.ohcanadamovie.com/
... since the internet became popular roughly 12 years ago. It's a miracle they survived so long. Most people hit gamespot, gamefaqs or metacritic these days or the developers/game companies forums themselves.
... it's still better then 99% of the websites you find on the internet. Slashdot is really for off-the cuff discussion anyway, there's only so much energy people have and are willing to commit to any kind of discussion and the more complicated the discussion the longer time it takes to digest even reading multiple times. Discussion forums optimize talking about rather low energy and lower effort topics because complexity naturally limits your audience and the points of view. The higher you go the less peers you have, it's just the nature of intelligence, genetics, experience and luck of how your particular mind works and where you ended up born on planet earth.
We have to remember the internet reflects the demographics that visits the site. Slashdot typically attracts americans and so is filled with americanized bias. I've seen forums suggesting slashdot has a leftwing bias, which couldn't be further from the truth.
If anything over the last few years slashdot is if anything a highly pro-free market forum that is highly critical and cynical of ANYTHING in general in which concentrated power acts unethically and without sophistication. You tend to see unintelligent right wing types talk about slashdots 'leftwing bias' if anything slashdot is more libertarian free-market but with a general trend for protecting civil rights and especially open discourse. Intellectual types tend to value open-ness and freedom from oppressive government and the corporate forces that control the congress and the government then anything else.
I especially hate those people who are pro DRM and pro removing of our rights and then go on to whine about 'entitlement' if anything today the vast majority of the citizenry is so brainwashed and intellectually bankrupt they would vote in a dictatorship just to remove people who offend their sensibilities either morally, politically or otherwise. Despite my own misgivings about the more misinformed members of slashdot regarding the history of capitalism. I'm still disturbed at how illiterate typical internet commenters are about history and what most little people had to go through to gain any amount of protection from both corporations and government.
But I'm glad that at least here I see there is a deep cynicism against all forms of concentrated power. "Business" and "government" are just labels for groups of people with power, one rules through force of property and price and the threat of joblessness and deprivation and the other rules by force and law protecting the corporate social order. Unfortunately they've always been in bed together throughout history commerce and men of wealth have always been intertwined with government, the fact that americans can be so brainwashed to be 'anti government' instead of 'anti-bad government' is a testament the effectiveness of corporate marketing.
Many governments were originally instituted to protect the weak from the strong to begin with, over time all human institutions decay or become corrupted because the quality of human beings that enter those positions can't be guaranteed through the randomness of human breeding and the fact that good people tend to out number bad people on planet earth by a large margin and as is reflected in the history of mankind.
There is also the problem of generational gaps and change. There is I imagine a lot of age skew, young people tend to be more clueless then older people in areas of history and so depending on their inborn temperament they will adopt a political ideology that is appealing to their nature whether that be aggressively egotistical (libertarian free market types) or those who lean towards kindness and selflessness, who learn the hardway through bullying and being on the end of severe behavior either from family or school which ends up directing their politics to become more moderate when it comes to trade and having strong views based on protecting the weak from the strong and who are historically unaware and clueless of all bloodshed in capitalism name.
"Will the excess of bundles mean that developers lose more profitable sales? Or do these bundles help by getting indie titles into the hands of people who would normally buy mainstream games, and so not really diminish their usual audience?"
Considering the state of the game industry with heavy handed DRM, the fact that you get a games SOURCE CODE which you can modify/update/change is downright RADICAL in an age of corporate feudalism and creeping fascism. One only has to look at SOPA to see this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
Whether or not you get tired of the bundles these are people we should want around and to keep in business. More money = they have more money to invest in making their games better. While not all games on the bundle are good, it's not like gamers have many options for DRM free gaming AND being respected as a gamer and enthusiast (getting the source). So that 10 years down the line on windows 12 the game you bought can stilll be played with some coder just updating the code without any stupid emulation.
Think about all the hoops we have to go through to run old classic games - needing emulators, etc, etc. Wouldn't the world be a wonderful place if customers actually got to OWN what they bought from entertainment software vendors?
I have never agreed with software licensing without any ownership stakes for customers and ability to get souce-code after the sales window of said softwareespecially FOR games. Licensing is one of those big bullshit lies greedy corporatized and indoctrinated bastards believe in and we've seen what that kind of mentality does to our rights and freedoms in society.
Audio shouldn't take up much space at all and the framerate/resolution at which you record video can easily be minimized. As far as I know I don't know of any corporate products off hand but either way it's either an untapped market or will be tapped soon enough. Point being is that it's not impossible to keep a record of these dealings it's just a matter of having (or developing) the right software.
"And if - one day - there is a lawsuit about your work for the client, there is no proof what you did, what you told them or who authorized it..."
Always use screen capture software to record your skype/internet video calls...
Allcapture
http://www.allcapture.com/eng/index.php
Camstudio (open source)
http://camstudio.org/
If any of you know any better ones list them in a reply.
"Repairing even the wilderness trails is too expensive in a society that prefers to pay the skill-less to sit idle and collect the dole rather than actually lift a finger, let a lone a bag of cement."
What a bunch of garbage. The vast majority of people have to work for a living and there are plenty of people without jobs who've been looking for ages. The whole IDEA that it's just 'lazyness' is simple minded bullshit.
"But ... he argues for liberal and progressive thought."
Which has nothing to do with the fact that human reasoning is not literal, it does not 'fit the world'. This is a scientific fact that you cannot deny. I did not link to that video for his politics, rather his science - which is accurate. My point being is that all human beings are terribly unaware of how bad their minds really are at thinking and perceiving the world as it is and that the truth is hard beyond the low hanging fruit.
Look my brain isn't broken you should learn about how limited your own mind is first:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
The fact that I can even post this is more then enough that I've done the research into my own thought processes and have a good understanding of how limited your mind really is.
You don't think based on reason or rationality, you are a creature of emotion and sentiment and sentiments are easily turned into justifications for self delusion. Human beings are people of their age and their background. It's highly unlikely you came to your opinion after much study and toil, rather you are emotionally transfixed to your narrow point of view because you are too in experienced to make sound judgement of what I have said.
Nice red herring and avoidance of biblical teaching, when the bible proves your liberal view of religion wrong, pull up a red herring. Religion has always been superstition, filth and lies for the most basest of minds.
For the record I'm not religious but was raised religious so I know all the in's and outs of apologetics of the fundies and the liberal religious folk alike. You're all just incredibly stpid.
"I never get a decent enough answer. Maybe because they're wrong and can't spot allegory (Genesis) if it came up and slapped them in the face."
You're wrong unfortunately fundamentalists know that if there is no sin, there is no reason for christianity at all. Christ serves no purpose in the new testament without the sin and the fall.
Any serious fundamentalist would have countered you easily and thusly:
Romans 5:12 - Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned--
Sin can't "enter the world through one man" if evolution is true, sorry but the fundies win here and the liberal christians are just atheists who failed logic 101. While fundamentalists try to grasp an error prone work of man as works of god at least they understand biblical teaching better then you liberal christians.
Romans 5:14 - Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
The bible is very clear what early christians believed - that the bible was history, modern liberal christians just can't give up their addiction to magical thinking and mythology. The problem is the whole purpose of christ is to redeem mankind from sin, no disobedience (in an evolutionary world) there is no sin, no fall no way for "death to enter into the world through one man".
Liberal christians are even more credulous then their fundamentalist counterparts.
"naturally this is a kind of socialism"
WTF is this garbage? Conservatives and the fox machine has turned socialism into a dirty word there never has been socialism, there has been only mixed economies on behalf of violent struggle of workers. Seriously are americans THIS historically illiterate?