The most important thing about this program is that it is building a censorship infrastructure in Canada. Once all ISPs have implemented a national blacklist (supposedly only of child porn sites), it is simple enough to expand it to include other sites.
Child Porn is just a MacGuffin, a universally despised act that is easy enough to strike up paranoia about. Unlike Terrorism, or Drugs, or Global Warming, or other issues, it has universal political support for legislation dealing with the problem.
Here is how the system is going to be expanded in Canada:
1. Block Child Porn Sites (after all, only a filthy disgusting pedophile would be against blocking child porn sites). 2. Block "Hate" Sites (after all, only a filthy digusting Nazi would be against blocking hate sites). 3. Block Political "Advertising" (After all, we don't want people with lots of money advertising on the internet, and corrupting our democracy!) 4. Block Dangerous Information (after all, why does someone really need to know how to build a gun, or a bomb, or manufacture drugs) 5. Block Sites that Compete Unfairly (after all, Google has a monopoly on search engines! Canadians shouldn't use an American monopoly, they should use a Canadian search engine, run by the CBC!) 6. Block Sites that Exploit Women (after all, we don't want women to be exploited... that is why we need to ban the Miss Universe pagent website!) 7. Block 'Bad' News Sites (after all, Fox News or Al Jazeera are highly biased news channels... they could confuse the minds of Canadians with their one-sided programs).
And so on, and so forth. Once the infrastructure is in place, it costs NOTHING to expand the list of blocked sites - and it is always easy enough to come up with some sort of reasonable arguement why certain sites should be blocked. Once this system is in place and works well, every political party will be screaming to have something they don't like banned - and without any real Libertarian minority in Canada, the only arguement will be over what things should be banned.
XNA allows you to create software with the intention to sell it (with integration into the Xbox Live Marketplace), where as the PS3 Linux is more for hackers.
The vast majority of PS3 users are not going to install linux, and if they do they are not doing it to play games. Where as the majority of Xbox 360 owners also have Xbox live, and can go online to purchase Xbox Live Marketplace games right now.
If you are a small game developer, looking to develope a product for PROFIT, then the Linux PS3 is not an option. Where as, XNA and Xbox Live, it is quite easy - so long as you are OK with only selling on Xbox Live, and Microsoft gives you the licence to sell on Xbox Live.
XNA is designed so that there are plenty of downloadable games on Xbox Live, that Microsoft can sell for a percentage of the profit... and since this is really one of the most profitable kind of sales for Microsoft (Microsoft doesn't have to front anything for development costs, or for packaging, or for marketing, then let the developers take the risk and they simply host the game and collect the money), Microsoft has a huge incentive to allow people to create games for the 360.
What is Microsoft's profit motive for promoting DRM? Sure, Microsoft has been pushing DRM, mostly from extreme pressure from the music and movie industry... but clearly, it would be in Microsoft's interests to see DRM fail. Music downloading has sold millions of Windows equipped PCs. People on Slashdot are geeks, so they might not realize that a lot of people purchased computers in the last few years primarily to download music.
Tech companies have everything to gain from free downloadable music on the internet. The people who make the music players, the people who make the PCs, the service providers and the people who provide bandwidth. DRM is only desirable to the people who sell music.
Microsoft has to make an effort with DRM, because the RIAA and media companies are standing by ready to sue. But that is a far cry from imagining that Microsoft is on the forefront of promoting DRM.
What do YOU expect when you support a system of nationalized government science funding where a single political entity headed by man who can't pronounce "Nuclear" is in charge of science funding?
All that money that comes from the federal government for research, comes at a price. If you take the King's gold, you do what the King says! That's why they call it "selling out"!
What if the Church provided most of the funding for science, regulated science, etc.. Science would have never escaped the control of the church, it would have stagnated. Fortunatly, so much science was being done outside church institutions, and science continued and thrived.
Now the government provides most of the funding for science, regulates science, etc. As long as science is controlled and funded by the political system, it must first and foremost serve the political goals of whatever the ruling party is. Science can't go on as a free and independent institution while it is a vessel of the political system.
Just like there is (or at least, there is supposed to be) a strict seperation between church and state, there should be the same strict seperation between science and state. OF COURSE scientists who work for the government are going to be pressured to come up with results that reinforce the policies of the ruling party - that is how politics work! Remove the politics from science, by making sure institutionally they are in no way connected.
The only change that has been happening recently is that science is now almost completly absorbed by the government, which means science is almost completly at the whims of the ruling party, where as 50-60 years ago there was plenty of independent scientists.
They didn't say it was OK to kill Muslims. No where in the game are people killing muslims in and of itself. People are killing "servants of satan" who have "muslim sounding names".
But if you are ideologically opposed to profit, and believe the Root Of All Evil in the world is profit, then your brain won't be able to comprehend the solutions you are mentioning. They will think of it as "exploiting" the dolphins.
How do you "protect" it? Do you post military on the river, and shoot anyone who does anything that looks suspicious? Do you conduct paramilitary raids in homes, buisnesses, etc., looking for evidence of dolphin destruction? Do you forceably move millions of people who live and work near the habitat and ship them off somewhere else? You want real action, what kind of real action are you looking for?
How many billions of dollars, human lives, and how much of a move towards a vicious police state is acceptable to protect these dolphins? I am not being sarcastic or facetious. It is a real choice you have to make. Just what kind of sacrifices are you willing to make (or rather, you want the Chinese people to make), both in economics, and that in civil liberties? Because there is a cost in economics and civil liberties everytime the government decides "this crap needs to change".
Realize that quoting from "Endgame" is like quoting from the Bible. It is something you do when you are hanging out with your own group of True-Believers in the One True Way. But with quotes like this: "we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves.", you definitly aren't going to convince any rational person of anything about a serious scientific topic like the enviornment. I mean, quote scientific journals, quote magazine articles, quote newspaper articles, quote documentaries... but don't quote this stuff.
Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it's like to live in the real world.
The trouble is, so-called enviornmentalists are not concerned about the enviornment either. They are concerned with having the state control the economy, and they are using enviornmental fears to get people to agree to Soviet style central planning under the assumption that it will be better for the enviornment.
This is why enviornmentalism is now associated with the left, when in 1970 it was called "conservation" and was a very non-partisan issue. You can't claim socialism helps the working class anymore (because obviously it is socialist and former socialist countries where capitalists look to go to exploit labor nowadays, because labor is too hard to exploit in capitalist countries). So you claim that socialism is the only way to stop immenient enviornmental disaster, and you claim that anyone who doesn't support your goals to have the state control the economy is somehow against protecting the enviornment.
While this law mention in the article is a disgusting afront to freedom of speech, Americans still enjoy far more freedom of speech than Europeans, who can go to jail for simply saying something that offends a protected group.
They aren't giving their whole lives to their employers... they are giving their whole lives to their expensive houses, expensive cars, and expensive clothing. The employer is just a means to an end.
But the whole idea of the $100 dollar laptop is NOT to pay more than $100 for a laptop. You are assuming the choice is between a $600 laptop and a $100 laptop. The choice is often between a max $100 per laptop, and NO laptop. The idea of the $100 laptop is that they are affordable to purchase for millions of kids in third world countries... Once you start talking spending $600-$1000 per laptop, shit even the United States or Western Europe would have a hard time affording that.
When rich western people in the first world are trying to get third world governments to spend $1000 on a laptop, when those same first world countries would do no such thing for themselves, then shouldn't there be some concern?. It is not unusual for self-rightious rich westerns on a mission to "save the children" to get third world countries to spend money in extremly stupid ways. Some people find Jesus, other people find Computers, but both have missionaries trying to say each is the solution to problems that they might not particularly solve.
Well, he figured that the only way they would FIX the security hole was to make it public. He didn't consider that Soviet style suppression of information would be how the U.S. government chooses to solve it's security problems.
The trouble is, if you have an Xbox 360 you can download and play Bejeweled, Pac-Man, etc., right now. For the Mac console to compete on casual games (which Microsoft is already building a big library of...), they would have to make the console a "casual" price. If they would be charging $600 for a new console to play Bejeweled, people will probably just choose another console.
All of those things were done by the government, stupid. All of them were based on public policies pushed as part of a progressive agenda ("Promoting Democracy In the Middle East", "Providing Aid to Poorer Countries", "Protecting Peoples Intellectual Rights"), that gave the ultra rich the pretense and power to have the government enact those policies on their behalf.
Progressive politics and socialism is not the antithesis of inequality and power held by the rich, it is the catalyst. It is left wing politics that increased the power of the state as such that the ultra-rich could use it to exploit people and consolidate power. The concentration of capital is a direct result of government regulation of capital. As government increases, so does power in the hands of the rich. Socialism and the left are fundamental parts of the attempt by the ultra-rich to control society.
While I agree with you, there are other ways to acomplish banning problem users, they are harder to police and implement than having a paid account. For example, you could include a hardware ID number in each console, and ban the ID number of a particular console... but what happens when someone sells the console on Ebay and then the purchaser can't play online with the console they just purchased? Or, if games have registration number, how do you buy and sell used games? (Unlike PC games, console games actually have a used game market).
But even if banning wasn't an issue, even just paying $50 a year helps with a lot of problems. It means that every user has to at least be willing to make the investment of $50 to play... and it means that everyone considers their account to be worth at least $50 dollars. People who could care less about online gaming and who just want to jump on and mess around because it is free are excluded. Young kids without credit cards are excluded unless they get a parent to pay for it. You are also more likely to protect your account. $50 a year is kind of like the fee you pay to join a private club - It keeps out some of the riff raff (except in this case, Xbox Live doesn't have the snooty connotations that being a member of a private country club or something does).
I have played free multiplayer games on PC, and now pay the $50 for xbox live, and I can tell you that just being able to block users you don't like, report users who are abusing the system, etc., is well worth the $50.
Free means that anyone can sign up, create an account, abuse the system all they like, and then sign up for another free account with no cost. $50 a year means that if someone abuses the system, and has their account disabled - well, it costs them another $50 to come back on. At that rate, it is not financially viable for them to abuse the system too much.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important thing about this program is that it is building a censorship infrastructure in Canada. Once all ISPs have implemented a national blacklist (supposedly only of child porn sites), it is simple enough to expand it to include other sites.
Child Porn is just a MacGuffin, a universally despised act that is easy enough to strike up paranoia about. Unlike Terrorism, or Drugs, or Global Warming, or other issues, it has universal political support for legislation dealing with the problem.
Here is how the system is going to be expanded in Canada:
1. Block Child Porn Sites (after all, only a filthy disgusting pedophile would be against blocking child porn sites).
2. Block "Hate" Sites (after all, only a filthy digusting Nazi would be against blocking hate sites).
3. Block Political "Advertising" (After all, we don't want people with lots of money advertising on the internet, and corrupting our democracy!)
4. Block Dangerous Information (after all, why does someone really need to know how to build a gun, or a bomb, or manufacture drugs)
5. Block Sites that Compete Unfairly (after all, Google has a monopoly on search engines! Canadians shouldn't use an American monopoly, they should use a Canadian search engine, run by the CBC!)
6. Block Sites that Exploit Women (after all, we don't want women to be exploited... that is why we need to ban the Miss Universe pagent website!)
7. Block 'Bad' News Sites (after all, Fox News or Al Jazeera are highly biased news channels... they could confuse the minds of Canadians with their one-sided programs).
And so on, and so forth. Once the infrastructure is in place, it costs NOTHING to expand the list of blocked sites - and it is always easy enough to come up with some sort of reasonable arguement why certain sites should be blocked. Once this system is in place and works well, every political party will be screaming to have something they don't like banned - and without any real Libertarian minority in Canada, the only arguement will be over what things should be banned.
XNA allows you to create software with the intention to sell it (with integration into the Xbox Live Marketplace), where as the PS3 Linux is more for hackers.
The vast majority of PS3 users are not going to install linux, and if they do they are not doing it to play games. Where as the majority of Xbox 360 owners also have Xbox live, and can go online to purchase Xbox Live Marketplace games right now.
If you are a small game developer, looking to develope a product for PROFIT, then the Linux PS3 is not an option. Where as, XNA and Xbox Live, it is quite easy - so long as you are OK with only selling on Xbox Live, and Microsoft gives you the licence to sell on Xbox Live.
XNA is designed so that there are plenty of downloadable games on Xbox Live, that Microsoft can sell for a percentage of the profit... and since this is really one of the most profitable kind of sales for Microsoft (Microsoft doesn't have to front anything for development costs, or for packaging, or for marketing, then let the developers take the risk and they simply host the game and collect the money), Microsoft has a huge incentive to allow people to create games for the 360.
What is Microsoft's profit motive for promoting DRM? Sure, Microsoft has been pushing DRM, mostly from extreme pressure from the music and movie industry... but clearly, it would be in Microsoft's interests to see DRM fail. Music downloading has sold millions of Windows equipped PCs. People on Slashdot are geeks, so they might not realize that a lot of people purchased computers in the last few years primarily to download music.
Tech companies have everything to gain from free downloadable music on the internet. The people who make the music players, the people who make the PCs, the service providers and the people who provide bandwidth. DRM is only desirable to the people who sell music.
Microsoft has to make an effort with DRM, because the RIAA and media companies are standing by ready to sue. But that is a far cry from imagining that Microsoft is on the forefront of promoting DRM.
... the Beta Testers demanded basic features that are included in like every single other multiplayer game.
What do YOU expect when you support a system of nationalized government science funding where a single political entity headed by man who can't pronounce "Nuclear" is in charge of science funding?
All that money that comes from the federal government for research, comes at a price. If you take the King's gold, you do what the King says! That's why they call it "selling out"!
What if the Church provided most of the funding for science, regulated science, etc.. Science would have never escaped the control of the church, it would have stagnated. Fortunatly, so much science was being done outside church institutions, and science continued and thrived.
Now the government provides most of the funding for science, regulates science, etc. As long as science is controlled and funded by the political system, it must first and foremost serve the political goals of whatever the ruling party is. Science can't go on as a free and independent institution while it is a vessel of the political system.
Just like there is (or at least, there is supposed to be) a strict seperation between church and state, there should be the same strict seperation between science and state. OF COURSE scientists who work for the government are going to be pressured to come up with results that reinforce the policies of the ruling party - that is how politics work! Remove the politics from science, by making sure institutionally they are in no way connected.
The only change that has been happening recently is that science is now almost completly absorbed by the government, which means science is almost completly at the whims of the ruling party, where as 50-60 years ago there was plenty of independent scientists.
They didn't say it was OK to kill Muslims. No where in the game are people killing muslims in and of itself. People are killing "servants of satan" who have "muslim sounding names".
Um, actually the hard-working advertising executive hates viral marketing, and prefers rather traditional (and very expensive) TV commercials.
But if you are ideologically opposed to profit, and believe the Root Of All Evil in the world is profit, then your brain won't be able to comprehend the solutions you are mentioning. They will think of it as "exploiting" the dolphins.
How do you "protect" it? Do you post military on the river, and shoot anyone who does anything that looks suspicious? Do you conduct paramilitary raids in homes, buisnesses, etc., looking for evidence of dolphin destruction? Do you forceably move millions of people who live and work near the habitat and ship them off somewhere else? You want real action, what kind of real action are you looking for?
How many billions of dollars, human lives, and how much of a move towards a vicious police state is acceptable to protect these dolphins? I am not being sarcastic or facetious. It is a real choice you have to make. Just what kind of sacrifices are you willing to make (or rather, you want the Chinese people to make), both in economics, and that in civil liberties? Because there is a cost in economics and civil liberties everytime the government decides "this crap needs to change".
Realize that quoting from "Endgame" is like quoting from the Bible. It is something you do when you are hanging out with your own group of True-Believers in the One True Way. But with quotes like this: "we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves.", you definitly aren't going to convince any rational person of anything about a serious scientific topic like the enviornment. I mean, quote scientific journals, quote magazine articles, quote newspaper articles, quote documentaries... but don't quote this stuff.
Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it's like to live in the real world.
I mean, seriously man, seriously.
The trouble is, so-called enviornmentalists are not concerned about the enviornment either. They are concerned with having the state control the economy, and they are using enviornmental fears to get people to agree to Soviet style central planning under the assumption that it will be better for the enviornment.
This is why enviornmentalism is now associated with the left, when in 1970 it was called "conservation" and was a very non-partisan issue. You can't claim socialism helps the working class anymore (because obviously it is socialist and former socialist countries where capitalists look to go to exploit labor nowadays, because labor is too hard to exploit in capitalist countries). So you claim that socialism is the only way to stop immenient enviornmental disaster, and you claim that anyone who doesn't support your goals to have the state control the economy is somehow against protecting the enviornment.
But see, it is a perfect concept! The post-apocolyptic world would probably really be inhabited by psychotic idiots!
Tactical combat will be a bitch. What are you going to do - make every person in the world take turns?
Have you played Fallout Tactics? It had realtime tactical gameplay that worked very well.
While this law mention in the article is a disgusting afront to freedom of speech, Americans still enjoy far more freedom of speech than Europeans, who can go to jail for simply saying something that offends a protected group.
In fact, I am pretty sure more than a few "reviews" on Slashdot are just paid advertising.
Or, to be more exact:
If your employer is unwilling to pay for a driver, the email is not important enough to look at en route.
They aren't giving their whole lives to their employers... they are giving their whole lives to their expensive houses, expensive cars, and expensive clothing. The employer is just a means to an end.
But the whole idea of the $100 dollar laptop is NOT to pay more than $100 for a laptop. You are assuming the choice is between a $600 laptop and a $100 laptop. The choice is often between a max $100 per laptop, and NO laptop. The idea of the $100 laptop is that they are affordable to purchase for millions of kids in third world countries... Once you start talking spending $600-$1000 per laptop, shit even the United States or Western Europe would have a hard time affording that.
When rich western people in the first world are trying to get third world governments to spend $1000 on a laptop, when those same first world countries would do no such thing for themselves, then shouldn't there be some concern?. It is not unusual for self-rightious rich westerns on a mission to "save the children" to get third world countries to spend money in extremly stupid ways. Some people find Jesus, other people find Computers, but both have missionaries trying to say each is the solution to problems that they might not particularly solve.
Well, he figured that the only way they would FIX the security hole was to make it public. He didn't consider that Soviet style suppression of information would be how the U.S. government chooses to solve it's security problems.
The trouble is, if you have an Xbox 360 you can download and play Bejeweled, Pac-Man, etc., right now. For the Mac console to compete on casual games (which Microsoft is already building a big library of...), they would have to make the console a "casual" price. If they would be charging $600 for a new console to play Bejeweled, people will probably just choose another console.
All of those things were done by the government, stupid. All of them were based on public policies pushed as part of a progressive agenda ("Promoting Democracy In the Middle East", "Providing Aid to Poorer Countries", "Protecting Peoples Intellectual Rights"), that gave the ultra rich the pretense and power to have the government enact those policies on their behalf.
Progressive politics and socialism is not the antithesis of inequality and power held by the rich, it is the catalyst. It is left wing politics that increased the power of the state as such that the ultra-rich could use it to exploit people and consolidate power. The concentration of capital is a direct result of government regulation of capital. As government increases, so does power in the hands of the rich. Socialism and the left are fundamental parts of the attempt by the ultra-rich to control society.
While I agree with you, there are other ways to acomplish banning problem users, they are harder to police and implement than having a paid account. For example, you could include a hardware ID number in each console, and ban the ID number of a particular console... but what happens when someone sells the console on Ebay and then the purchaser can't play online with the console they just purchased? Or, if games have registration number, how do you buy and sell used games? (Unlike PC games, console games actually have a used game market).
But even if banning wasn't an issue, even just paying $50 a year helps with a lot of problems. It means that every user has to at least be willing to make the investment of $50 to play... and it means that everyone considers their account to be worth at least $50 dollars. People who could care less about online gaming and who just want to jump on and mess around because it is free are excluded. Young kids without credit cards are excluded unless they get a parent to pay for it. You are also more likely to protect your account. $50 a year is kind of like the fee you pay to join a private club - It keeps out some of the riff raff (except in this case, Xbox Live doesn't have the snooty connotations that being a member of a private country club or something does).
I have played free multiplayer games on PC, and now pay the $50 for xbox live, and I can tell you that just being able to block users you don't like, report users who are abusing the system, etc., is well worth the $50.
Free means that anyone can sign up, create an account, abuse the system all they like, and then sign up for another free account with no cost. $50 a year means that if someone abuses the system, and has their account disabled - well, it costs them another $50 to come back on. At that rate, it is not financially viable for them to abuse the system too much.