Yes, we'll still have Bush, but if we can a Democrat majority in Congress, especially a democrat majority with a fucking spine, Bush and them will spend the next two years fighting until we can hopefully replace all of them in '08 and start the long path of recovery...
You are joking, right? I am no Republican supporter, but you realize that Clinton and the Democrats proposed a National ID Card in the 1990s, and it was the Republicans who opposed it? And the National ID in the UK was pushed by the Labor Party, who would be far-left by U.S. standards.
Seriously, how twisted by your own propoganda do you have to be to think that Democrats are not rabid supporters of the police state? The Democrats and the Left love the idea of a police state just as much as the right.
Perhaps if the Libertarians, or the Greens, or someone else got into congress, we could begin reversing the trend. But don't try to pretend for a second that your party doesn't 100% support Totalitarianism, without reservations.
For just $59.95, I will sell you a magnetic bracelets that will protect you, as well as a quartz crystal neckless that will discharge "bad energy"!
I garantee that my solution is based on the same rigorous scientific research, and same theoretical underpinnings as the "science" in the linked article!
But seriously though, between some people wanting to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools, to people complaining about "bad vibes" coming from their toaster, to the unreasonable fear of nuclear technology, to the unreasonable fear of GM foods, to people wanting to ban research on stem cells, and the whole advent of all kinds of crazy "alternative medical treatments" like inner body massage, or yogurt enemas, or "color therapy" or whatever... the newfound popularity of fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam. the proliferation of TV psychics.
Doesn't it seem like the public is become completly anti-science and anti-rationality nowadays? People are believing in all kinds of crap that wouldn't pass the laugh test 20 years ago, and now people take this stuff seriously? And it doesn't seem to be any one political group, or religion, or country - I could understand if it was just one group of ludites or reactionaries doing it - but it seems universal! What the hell is going on?
The good: 128kbits is the "standard" for MP3s nowadays, and by not including a lot of settings in ripping, they simplified the interface. 128kbit is a good bitrate. It is pretty small, but sounds OK. Also, higher bitrate may take too much resources if you are playing an mp3 while playing a game. Because this is a game console, and not a PC, I think it is a reasonable decision.
The Bad: Anything more could have DRM implications? Perhaps making crystal clear copies of a CDs would violate some sort of copyright law, or at least piss off the RIAA or something. I haven't actually ripped any CDs on my Xbox 360, but I am assuming they are saved as a proprietary format, locked for that specific machine, so they cannot be copied, correct?
The good news is, you can set file sharing with a PC, and play MP3s ripped at any speech you want from your hard drive! The Xbox 360 HD is only 20 gigs (with a lame 13 gigs left over after the Xbox 360 stores it's system information), so I wouldn't even bother putting big audio files on the Xbox HD.
How do you expect new drugs to be developed without the pharms? I know you probably feel it is wrong to profit off of the needs of others, but what is your proposed model for drug development?
And you need to learn what the definitions of totalitarianism and fascism are my very ingorant foe.
Totalitarianism is a government that controls or regulates nearly everything in society. Most people think totalitarian means "bad", and that "I am not totalitarian, because I am not bad". But the term Totalitarian doesn't include any moral judgements. If you believe in a society where nearly everything is controlled or regulated by the government, you are totalitarian... you may percieve that the government regulation is going to make things more "safe" or more "fair", or bring about "social justice"... but those who want a highly regulated society are totalitarians, plain and simple. You can explain why your form of totalitarianism is "good", but please don't pretend not to be totalitarian.
You might not be "Facist" in the strict sense of the word "Facist", because true Facism in the strict sense of the word died after WWII. But in general speech, Facism is used to describe authoritarians, totalitarians, or other people with views of extreme state control. So, technically you are not a Facist according to the strict dictionary definition, but you agree with facists that we should trust the government implicitly to regulate political speech and support.
You do not have the right to buy the favor of your representatives and thereby disenfranchize your fellow man
I have every right to support any candidate I want, in any way I want, so long as the resources I am using are mine. If I want to endorse a politician in my blog, or give a politician my own personal money, that is absolutly my right, without question. The government has no right to tell me what causes I am and not allowed to donate my time, voice, or money to, and which ones I am not.
The thing that will disenfranchize my fellow man is when the government has total control over what resources candidates recieve, as you advocate. For your vision to work, the government would have to be absolutly impartial and uncorrupt in how it distributes candidate resources. Do you trust G. W. Bush, and a Republican Congress, and a Republican Senate, to have the sole responsibility for deciding who gets what campaign resources? Are you telling me that a party, if it was in power, could be trusted to fairly distribute financial support to it's rivals? Come on man. Government control of campaign resources is a one way ticket to dictatorship.
Stop worshiping the government. Allowing the government to control political donations and censor political advertisments is only going to give the corrupt people in power MORE POWER, not restrict them in any way. The small parties in America, who don't get a cent from corporations or special interest groups, are finding themselves in all sorts of legal and financial problems, when the big parties like the Democrats and Republicans it is buisness as usual. "Campaign Finance Reform" should be called "Third Party Elimination".
How about this: I earned my money, I paid my taxes on the money, and I should be allowed to give it to whoever I want, for any reason I want, no matter what facists and totalitarians such as yourself think!
And if I see one damned ad on TV, I want tougher regulations. That's intrusive. Like all this damned political spam. One deserves to be unregulated and one deserves to be banned.
TV ads are no more intrusive than web pages. You do not have to watch stations with commercial advertisments if you dont want to. You could watch cable stations without commercial advertisments (or, ones that don't accept political adverts)... you could watch DVDs, etc. Throwing out the Bill of Rights because you don't like TV ads is a little extreme (the Bill of Rights makes no exceptions for political advertisment, and while things like pornography might be debateable there is no debate whatsoever that the First Amendment was supposed to cover paid political advertising. Paid political advertisments are political speech and undebatably protected by the First Amendment.)
The real danger when it comes to political propoganda is public education, not TV commercials. It really is debatable if TV commercials are all that effective. But no-one can deny the effectiveness of the public school system in molding political thought and changing political beliefs... and in most places, public education is compulsary, unlike TV ads.
A small portion of computers at home are running XP. A lot of people are running 98 and ME, and a lot of people are running 95. Probably more people are still running pre-XP versions of Windows... plus a lot of people running a version of NT or Windows 2000 or something.
But even assuming it is the case that everyone is running XP, XP or XP Pro isn't enough to run this mod. You need Windows XP MEDIA EDITION. No-one is running Windows Media Edition. Only a few lame boxes that are supposed to be set-top PCs or something.
This is not an emulator for the Xbox 360. It is being emulated on the Windows Media Edition PC, and "streamed" to the Xbox 360.
First, who the hell has Windows Media Edition? People who use Windows because they have to use Windows XP Pro or something like that, low end home users use XP, and everyone else uses Linux / OSX... but really, Windows Media Edition is for Media PCs that you hook up in your living room, and why not then just run your emulator directly.
A NES emulator on Xbox 360 would be cool, but this is not it! Now, if Microsoft didn't intentionally cripple their products, and let XP or XP Pro users stream to the Xbox, that would at least be something. But no-one I know actually owns Windows Media Edition, and I certainly am not going to buy it or set it up just to play NES games.
What about Krakatoa? What about Pompeii?! What about Asian Tsunami? History has shown us the terrible dangers of geothermal energy! Geology has killed far more people than even the satanic nuclear power!
How do we know that careless drilling into the molten subsurface of the Earth will not cause Iceland to explode in a fiery, flaming, orgy of death that will make Krakatoa look like a birthday candle? How do we know that it won't trigger some subsurface earthquake, and create a tsunami that will destroy the shoreline cities of North America and Europe?
This is the same kind of careless arogance that cause disasters like Chernobyl to happen! 3-Mile Island should be a warning to us all! Please, think of the children, and stop this madness before it is too late! I am going to write a letter to the UN, the EU, and to Greenpeace, and tell them that this kind of reckless endangerment of the enviorment and or people should be banned, worldwide! There can be no compromise! There can be no middle ground! This kind of geo-thermal-terrorism must be stopped!
If Hollywood is failing (they are making huge profits, just not as huge as they want to make), I think it is probably because they have lost touch with the common man... Like you said, the working class today isn't the working class of 20+ years ago.
But I don't think Hollywood is failing because they choose to entertain the masses instead of making "artistic" and "important" films.
Also, i really don't think people "pretend" to enjoy an "unbearable" film to seem to be superior... Perhaps they just don't share the same taste as you?
I am exasurating a bit, for effect. There are lots of art movies that I really enjoy and I am sure others enjoy too. But that being said, just go to a showing at your local "art cinema", and talk to some of the people there, and they will tell you that a film is "difficult" (i.e., not very enjoyable to watch), but it is an "important work" (i.e. they want to be able to tell their friends they have seen the film to seem smart or more cultured). The language I am using to describe things might be a little extreme or inflamitory, in order to be heard over the general noise level of Slashdot... but I think you know what I am talking about.
The terrible truth tho, is that the industry desires little more than sales.
The wonderful truth is that the movie industry desires little more than sales! I can't imagine anything worse than if Hollywood was a some god-aweful government subsidized closed world of "serious artists". There is a reason why people watch Hollywood movies, or Bollywood movies, or Hong Kong action flicks, or cheap Italian western or horror movies, and they don't watch say French art films.
In this way the can appear socially conscious and upwardly mobile while still ripping off the consumer.
Well, they are certainly upwardly mobile, because they are all millionares and are making even more millions, but it is interesting that you used a term that describes money and finance to describe art. That seems to really be the reason why people think that Hollywood movies are "crap" (or fast food, or whatever). Most Hollywood movies are for the masses... for the working class. They are a celebration of working class, common man, values. So, to the "cultured elite", or upper classes, they are not "good". By pretending to enjoy some unbearable art film, a person can show themselves as "superior" to the common man, and distingush themselves as being a "higher" social class.
Virtually every community in the U.S. will extradite you with a quickness. There is nowhere near the kind of scrutiny when extraditing between cities within a state, or even state within the U.S., than there is extraditing someone to another country.
And they wouldn't need to extradite you, they could just hire a bounty hunter to bring you in (totally legal in the U.S.).
It is not saying that local oppression is good, and federal oppression is bad, it is saying that local oppression doesn't justify federal oppression.
For example, a country might consider it unethical to torture people. It would be constradictory to make a law against torture, and then make the punishment for torture be torture. If we feel torture to be univsersally unethical, then we wouldn't torture anyone, even if that person themselves was a torturer.
If a person feels it is unethical for the government to define obcenity, then it is unethical. The Federal government might be more tolerant than a local government at defining obcensity, but it is still unethical for the Federal government to define obcenity. If the Supreme Court wants to declare all obcentiy laws unconstitutional, then all Libertarians would be rejoicing. No Libertarian would have any problem with that. But if the Supreme Court declares it has the right to decide what is obcene or not obscene, then that is bad, even though I trust the Supreme Court of the U.S. to have more reasonable views that some small town judge. And remember, it could go the other way... if the Supreme Court has the power to determine what is obscene or what is not, the court may be more tolerant than the city court of Tunany Alabama, but they might be less tolerant that the court of San Fransico California. If the person in Tunany doesn't like the censorship of Tunany, they can at least move to San Fransico. But if they don't like the censorship of the Supereme Court or the Federal Government, they are screwed!
Yeah, if you are part of the older generation like me, we would read the manual, because the manual was actually a big thick book, with lots of information, backstory, etc.
Nowadays, manuals are largly irrelevent. Story can be told in the game... and there is usually a tutorial in the game for how to play.
But there are plenty of games which are based on randomness and emergent behavior that isn't canned. For example, the Sims/Sims2 and Sim City narrative isn't canned. The game simply provides a sandbox that the player is able to create their own story in. Same goes for games like the Civ games, or The Movies. MMPOGs have narrative that comes from player interaction. Even the new Elder Scrolls: Oblivion game gives you a whole dynamic world that you can create all sorts of unscripted stories in (although it also includes scripted stories... so many that it creates the illusion of them being almost unscripted). Even GTA, which most of the story goals are canned, it allows for completely uncanned ways to accomplish those goals within the world (most players of the GTA have done all sorts of crazy things that the origional programmers never intended, that are completly new and emergent).
It only stands to reason that as machines become more powerful, that there will be even more ways to allow for a dynamic story. Some sort of cellular automata of narrative elements, or something like that.
There are plenty of linear, canned option games out there... but the real power of the game as a medium is the open endedness of it.
The stories about it specificly said that they would never be sold to people in the west, that they would only be sold to governments. Since a lot of poor people would rather have $100 in food instead of a laptop, and would be willing to sell these things, we can only assume that the governments that purchase these and give them away will make some sort of law about selling these things. You are correct that it didn't mention some sort of world-wide ban.
BUT, if they did sell these things like the wind up radios that you mentioned, in the first world, in order to subsidize giving them away in the third world, it could change my mind about the project. I would still be sceptical about the thing, but since the project would be subsidize by disposable income of wealthy people in the west, instead of government funds of poor countries, it probably wouldn't hurt anyone. And since it would open them up to development from free software developers in the west, it would have much more software, and much more potential uses. But I highly suspect the people running the project want that.
I would not mind having a higher storage disk for storing computer files (but nowadays, one can just buy a USB hardrive for moving or backing up files), but having a locked restricted format that won't give me any benifits more than a standard DVD for movies or media (and is actually designed to degrade my eperience if I don't have the newest equipment)... man, I hope both these bastard fucking formats die a horrible death. I don't care which one is better! This isn't like VHS or Beta, because VHS and Beta weren't activly trying to restrict what I am able to do on machines I own with media that I own, or force me to purchase a new television to play movies.
Surf the web? How are they going to surf the web without any sort of internet access? These things are designed for places were there isn't electricity, let alone a wireless access point to connect to.
So, they won't be good for running a wide variety of software, won't be good for web surfing... these are basicly glorified e-book readers. By the time they get governments to purchase enough of these to begin production and hit the $100 price point, and tool up factories, and then start distributing these things, and all the politics and red tape and awards cermonies involved, McDonalds will be giving away more powerful machines as prizes in Happy Meals. Cereal companies are researching how to use e-paper to make electronic animated cereral boxes.
This is a bad idea. You know that $100 can build several wells? That $100 dollars can buy enough food to feed a family for a year? In a lot of places, $100 can pay a kid's tution to a good school? And some guy at MIT thinks it will be a good idea to get poor countries to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on laptops?
Did you ever hear the saying, "Let them eat cake!"?
So what you are saying is that the government should be allowed to take our constitutional rights away, and only people with millions of dollars to spend in legal fees should be allowed to fight it?
We've seen linux and MAME running on an ipod. Linux + a few OSS apps on a cheap laptop sounds easy in comparison. The laptops can run certain OSS apps, that is not the problem.
The problem is that since these laptops are not available for purchase, they are only available to third world governments, and are only supposed to be distributed to children, there isn't going to be an open source community for these things.
Sure, perhaps certain governments might develop certain software for it, in hugely effient and needs fufilling way that most governments do (you can sense my sarcasm, right), or perhaps there will be a few people in the first world willing to work on software via emulators for the thing... but the critical mass of OSS support that your average PC linux user has will not be there.
You see MAME running on Ipods, because people with money and leisure time are allowed to purchase Ipods and experiment with them. These $100 laptops are strictly off limits to geeks.
Drop 100,000 ipods into the third world to people with no programing knowledge (who might not even know what an ipod is), make it illegal for anybody outside the third world to use the ipod, and don't give them any training or resources to develop software on an ipod, and then lets see how quick they get MAME running on their ipods. And that will give you an idea of some of the problems with the whole $100 laptop idea.
I live in Canada, and I can tell you that people are not conservative Christians, but are just as rabid for the nannie state (banning smoking, gambling, alchol is only allowed to be sold in highly regulated government outlets where I live, all movies, TV, or video games sold must be approved by the government)... and Canada and the U.S. are nothing compared to what is happening in the U.K. (ALL cars will be computer tracked on the roads, it is illegal to say things that "offend religion", they have a new thing called something like "anti-social behavior orders" which allow your neighbors to have judges restrict you from legal behavior, without a trial or you being present, because they think it is "anti-social").
The whole nannie-state thing seems to be happening everywhere in Western World. The Christian thing is simply the U.S. flavor of totalitarianism.
And, the side benifit is that the government will have us locked into a single universal form of communication that they control.
I mean, why develop high-speed packet radio, or cheaper sat based internet, or some sort of packet microwave network, or airship based relays, when the government can pay to lay cable all over rural areas... and since it is economically unviable to maintain, communication is wholly and completly dependent on the government.
Of course, it will be no big deal when the government says "Yeah, we will give you funding to build these lines, but we must have the ability to spy on people if you want the funding". And the feds will have huge leverage to threaten communities with ("you need that fiber optic funding, so don't jepordise it by going against my other bills!").
The government can have a glorious, highly controlled, highly tracked, form of communication that doesn't threaten the status quo.
Yeah, it is comforting to know that what FEMA did for New Orleans, the government is going to do for all of us when it comes to communications.
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Yes, we'll still have Bush, but if we can a Democrat majority in Congress, especially a democrat majority with a fucking spine, Bush and them will spend the next two years fighting until we can hopefully replace all of them in '08 and start the long path of recovery...
You are joking, right? I am no Republican supporter, but you realize that Clinton and the Democrats proposed a National ID Card in the 1990s, and it was the Republicans who opposed it? And the National ID in the UK was pushed by the Labor Party, who would be far-left by U.S. standards.
Seriously, how twisted by your own propoganda do you have to be to think that Democrats are not rabid supporters of the police state? The Democrats and the Left love the idea of a police state just as much as the right.
Perhaps if the Libertarians, or the Greens, or someone else got into congress, we could begin reversing the trend. But don't try to pretend for a second that your party doesn't 100% support Totalitarianism, without reservations.
For just $59.95, I will sell you a magnetic bracelets that will protect you, as well as a quartz crystal neckless that will discharge "bad energy"!
I garantee that my solution is based on the same rigorous scientific research, and same theoretical underpinnings as the "science" in the linked article!
But seriously though, between some people wanting to teach "Intelligent Design" in schools, to people complaining about "bad vibes" coming from their toaster, to the unreasonable fear of nuclear technology, to the unreasonable fear of GM foods, to people wanting to ban research on stem cells, and the whole advent of all kinds of crazy "alternative medical treatments" like inner body massage, or yogurt enemas, or "color therapy" or whatever... the newfound popularity of fundamentalist Christianity or fundamentalist Islam. the proliferation of TV psychics.
Doesn't it seem like the public is become completly anti-science and anti-rationality nowadays? People are believing in all kinds of crap that wouldn't pass the laugh test 20 years ago, and now people take this stuff seriously? And it doesn't seem to be any one political group, or religion, or country - I could understand if it was just one group of ludites or reactionaries doing it - but it seems universal! What the hell is going on?
There are several reasons... some good, some bad.
The good: 128kbits is the "standard" for MP3s nowadays, and by not including a lot of settings in ripping, they simplified the interface. 128kbit is a good bitrate. It is pretty small, but sounds OK. Also, higher bitrate may take too much resources if you are playing an mp3 while playing a game. Because this is a game console, and not a PC, I think it is a reasonable decision.
The Bad: Anything more could have DRM implications? Perhaps making crystal clear copies of a CDs would violate some sort of copyright law, or at least piss off the RIAA or something. I haven't actually ripped any CDs on my Xbox 360, but I am assuming they are saved as a proprietary format, locked for that specific machine, so they cannot be copied, correct?
The good news is, you can set file sharing with a PC, and play MP3s ripped at any speech you want from your hard drive! The Xbox 360 HD is only 20 gigs (with a lame 13 gigs left over after the Xbox 360 stores it's system information), so I wouldn't even bother putting big audio files on the Xbox HD.
How do you expect new drugs to be developed without the pharms? I know you probably feel it is wrong to profit off of the needs of others, but what is your proposed model for drug development?
And you need to learn what the definitions of totalitarianism and fascism are my very ingorant foe.
Totalitarianism is a government that controls or regulates nearly everything in society. Most people think totalitarian means "bad", and that "I am not totalitarian, because I am not bad". But the term Totalitarian doesn't include any moral judgements. If you believe in a society where nearly everything is controlled or regulated by the government, you are totalitarian... you may percieve that the government regulation is going to make things more "safe" or more "fair", or bring about "social justice"... but those who want a highly regulated society are totalitarians, plain and simple. You can explain why your form of totalitarianism is "good", but please don't pretend not to be totalitarian.
You might not be "Facist" in the strict sense of the word "Facist", because true Facism in the strict sense of the word died after WWII. But in general speech, Facism is used to describe authoritarians, totalitarians, or other people with views of extreme state control. So, technically you are not a Facist according to the strict dictionary definition, but you agree with facists that we should trust the government implicitly to regulate political speech and support.
You do not have the right to buy the favor of your representatives and thereby disenfranchize your fellow man
I have every right to support any candidate I want, in any way I want, so long as the resources I am using are mine. If I want to endorse a politician in my blog, or give a politician my own personal money, that is absolutly my right, without question. The government has no right to tell me what causes I am and not allowed to donate my time, voice, or money to, and which ones I am not.
The thing that will disenfranchize my fellow man is when the government has total control over what resources candidates recieve, as you advocate. For your vision to work, the government would have to be absolutly impartial and uncorrupt in how it distributes candidate resources. Do you trust G. W. Bush, and a Republican Congress, and a Republican Senate, to have the sole responsibility for deciding who gets what campaign resources? Are you telling me that a party, if it was in power, could be trusted to fairly distribute financial support to it's rivals? Come on man. Government control of campaign resources is a one way ticket to dictatorship.
Stop worshiping the government. Allowing the government to control political donations and censor political advertisments is only going to give the corrupt people in power MORE POWER, not restrict them in any way. The small parties in America, who don't get a cent from corporations or special interest groups, are finding themselves in all sorts of legal and financial problems, when the big parties like the Democrats and Republicans it is buisness as usual. "Campaign Finance Reform" should be called "Third Party Elimination".
How about this: I earned my money, I paid my taxes on the money, and I should be allowed to give it to whoever I want, for any reason I want, no matter what facists and totalitarians such as yourself think!
And if I see one damned ad on TV, I want tougher regulations. That's intrusive. Like all this damned political spam. One deserves to be unregulated and one deserves to be banned.
TV ads are no more intrusive than web pages. You do not have to watch stations with commercial advertisments if you dont want to. You could watch cable stations without commercial advertisments (or, ones that don't accept political adverts)... you could watch DVDs, etc. Throwing out the Bill of Rights because you don't like TV ads is a little extreme (the Bill of Rights makes no exceptions for political advertisment, and while things like pornography might be debateable there is no debate whatsoever that the First Amendment was supposed to cover paid political advertising. Paid political advertisments are political speech and undebatably protected by the First Amendment.)
The real danger when it comes to political propoganda is public education, not TV commercials. It really is debatable if TV commercials are all that effective. But no-one can deny the effectiveness of the public school system in molding political thought and changing political beliefs... and in most places, public education is compulsary, unlike TV ads.
A small portion of computers at home are running XP. A lot of people are running 98 and ME, and a lot of people are running 95. Probably more people are still running pre-XP versions of Windows... plus a lot of people running a version of NT or Windows 2000 or something.
But even assuming it is the case that everyone is running XP, XP or XP Pro isn't enough to run this mod. You need Windows XP MEDIA EDITION. No-one is running Windows Media Edition. Only a few lame boxes that are supposed to be set-top PCs or something.
This is not an emulator for the Xbox 360. It is being emulated on the Windows Media Edition PC, and "streamed" to the Xbox 360.
First, who the hell has Windows Media Edition? People who use Windows because they have to use Windows XP Pro or something like that, low end home users use XP, and everyone else uses Linux / OSX... but really, Windows Media Edition is for Media PCs that you hook up in your living room, and why not then just run your emulator directly.
A NES emulator on Xbox 360 would be cool, but this is not it! Now, if Microsoft didn't intentionally cripple their products, and let XP or XP Pro users stream to the Xbox, that would at least be something. But no-one I know actually owns Windows Media Edition, and I certainly am not going to buy it or set it up just to play NES games.
What about Krakatoa? What about Pompeii?! What about Asian Tsunami? History has shown us the terrible dangers of geothermal energy! Geology has killed far more people than even the satanic nuclear power!
How do we know that careless drilling into the molten subsurface of the Earth will not cause Iceland to explode in a fiery, flaming, orgy of death that will make Krakatoa look like a birthday candle? How do we know that it won't trigger some subsurface earthquake, and create a tsunami that will destroy the shoreline cities of North America and Europe?
This is the same kind of careless arogance that cause disasters like Chernobyl to happen! 3-Mile Island should be a warning to us all! Please, think of the children, and stop this madness before it is too late! I am going to write a letter to the UN, the EU, and to Greenpeace, and tell them that this kind of reckless endangerment of the enviorment and or people should be banned, worldwide! There can be no compromise! There can be no middle ground! This kind of geo-thermal-terrorism must be stopped!
If Hollywood is failing (they are making huge profits, just not as huge as they want to make), I think it is probably because they have lost touch with the common man... Like you said, the working class today isn't the working class of 20+ years ago.
But I don't think Hollywood is failing because they choose to entertain the masses instead of making "artistic" and "important" films.
Also, i really don't think people "pretend" to enjoy an "unbearable" film to seem to be superior... Perhaps they just don't share the same taste as you?
I am exasurating a bit, for effect. There are lots of art movies that I really enjoy and I am sure others enjoy too. But that being said, just go to a showing at your local "art cinema", and talk to some of the people there, and they will tell you that a film is "difficult" (i.e., not very enjoyable to watch), but it is an "important work" (i.e. they want to be able to tell their friends they have seen the film to seem smart or more cultured). The language I am using to describe things might be a little extreme or inflamitory, in order to be heard over the general noise level of Slashdot... but I think you know what I am talking about.
The terrible truth tho, is that the industry desires little more than sales.
The wonderful truth is that the movie industry desires little more than sales! I can't imagine anything worse than if Hollywood was a some god-aweful government subsidized closed world of "serious artists". There is a reason why people watch Hollywood movies, or Bollywood movies, or Hong Kong action flicks, or cheap Italian western or horror movies, and they don't watch say French art films.
In this way the can appear socially conscious and upwardly mobile while still ripping off the consumer.
Well, they are certainly upwardly mobile, because they are all millionares and are making even more millions, but it is interesting that you used a term that describes money and finance to describe art. That seems to really be the reason why people think that Hollywood movies are "crap" (or fast food, or whatever). Most Hollywood movies are for the masses... for the working class. They are a celebration of working class, common man, values. So, to the "cultured elite", or upper classes, they are not "good". By pretending to enjoy some unbearable art film, a person can show themselves as "superior" to the common man, and distingush themselves as being a "higher" social class.
Virtually every community in the U.S. will extradite you with a quickness. There is nowhere near the kind of scrutiny when extraditing between cities within a state, or even state within the U.S., than there is extraditing someone to another country.
And they wouldn't need to extradite you, they could just hire a bounty hunter to bring you in (totally legal in the U.S.).
It is not saying that local oppression is good, and federal oppression is bad, it is saying that local oppression doesn't justify federal oppression.
For example, a country might consider it unethical to torture people. It would be constradictory to make a law against torture, and then make the punishment for torture be torture. If we feel torture to be univsersally unethical, then we wouldn't torture anyone, even if that person themselves was a torturer.
If a person feels it is unethical for the government to define obcenity, then it is unethical. The Federal government might be more tolerant than a local government at defining obcensity, but it is still unethical for the Federal government to define obcenity. If the Supreme Court wants to declare all obcentiy laws unconstitutional, then all Libertarians would be rejoicing. No Libertarian would have any problem with that. But if the Supreme Court declares it has the right to decide what is obcene or not obscene, then that is bad, even though I trust the Supreme Court of the U.S. to have more reasonable views that some small town judge. And remember, it could go the other way... if the Supreme Court has the power to determine what is obscene or what is not, the court may be more tolerant than the city court of Tunany Alabama, but they might be less tolerant that the court of San Fransico California. If the person in Tunany doesn't like the censorship of Tunany, they can at least move to San Fransico. But if they don't like the censorship of the Supereme Court or the Federal Government, they are screwed!
Yeah, if you are part of the older generation like me, we would read the manual, because the manual was actually a big thick book, with lots of information, backstory, etc.
Nowadays, manuals are largly irrelevent. Story can be told in the game... and there is usually a tutorial in the game for how to play.
In most games, what you are saying is correct.
But there are plenty of games which are based on randomness and emergent behavior that isn't canned. For example, the Sims/Sims2 and Sim City narrative isn't canned. The game simply provides a sandbox that the player is able to create their own story in. Same goes for games like the Civ games, or The Movies. MMPOGs have narrative that comes from player interaction. Even the new Elder Scrolls: Oblivion game gives you a whole dynamic world that you can create all sorts of unscripted stories in (although it also includes scripted stories... so many that it creates the illusion of them being almost unscripted). Even GTA, which most of the story goals are canned, it allows for completely uncanned ways to accomplish those goals within the world (most players of the GTA have done all sorts of crazy things that the origional programmers never intended, that are completly new and emergent).
It only stands to reason that as machines become more powerful, that there will be even more ways to allow for a dynamic story. Some sort of cellular automata of narrative elements, or something like that.
There are plenty of linear, canned option games out there... but the real power of the game as a medium is the open endedness of it.
The stories about it specificly said that they would never be sold to people in the west, that they would only be sold to governments. Since a lot of poor people would rather have $100 in food instead of a laptop, and would be willing to sell these things, we can only assume that the governments that purchase these and give them away will make some sort of law about selling these things. You are correct that it didn't mention some sort of world-wide ban.
BUT, if they did sell these things like the wind up radios that you mentioned, in the first world, in order to subsidize giving them away in the third world, it could change my mind about the project. I would still be sceptical about the thing, but since the project would be subsidize by disposable income of wealthy people in the west, instead of government funds of poor countries, it probably wouldn't hurt anyone. And since it would open them up to development from free software developers in the west, it would have much more software, and much more potential uses. But I highly suspect the people running the project want that.
I would not mind having a higher storage disk for storing computer files (but nowadays, one can just buy a USB hardrive for moving or backing up files), but having a locked restricted format that won't give me any benifits more than a standard DVD for movies or media (and is actually designed to degrade my eperience if I don't have the newest equipment)... man, I hope both these bastard fucking formats die a horrible death. I don't care which one is better! This isn't like VHS or Beta, because VHS and Beta weren't activly trying to restrict what I am able to do on machines I own with media that I own, or force me to purchase a new television to play movies.
Surf the web? How are they going to surf the web without any sort of internet access? These things are designed for places were there isn't electricity, let alone a wireless access point to connect to.
So, they won't be good for running a wide variety of software, won't be good for web surfing... these are basicly glorified e-book readers. By the time they get governments to purchase enough of these to begin production and hit the $100 price point, and tool up factories, and then start distributing these things, and all the politics and red tape and awards cermonies involved, McDonalds will be giving away more powerful machines as prizes in Happy Meals. Cereal companies are researching how to use e-paper to make electronic animated cereral boxes.
This is a bad idea. You know that $100 can build several wells? That $100 dollars can buy enough food to feed a family for a year? In a lot of places, $100 can pay a kid's tution to a good school? And some guy at MIT thinks it will be a good idea to get poor countries to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on laptops?
Did you ever hear the saying, "Let them eat cake!"?
So what you are saying is that the government should be allowed to take our constitutional rights away, and only people with millions of dollars to spend in legal fees should be allowed to fight it?
What is it a "competent politician" does that you are willing to give up your first amendment right of freedom of speech to support?
We've seen linux and MAME running on an ipod. Linux + a few OSS apps on a cheap laptop sounds easy in comparison.
The laptops can run certain OSS apps, that is not the problem.
The problem is that since these laptops are not available for purchase, they are only available to third world governments, and are only supposed to be distributed to children, there isn't going to be an open source community for these things.
Sure, perhaps certain governments might develop certain software for it, in hugely effient and needs fufilling way that most governments do (you can sense my sarcasm, right), or perhaps there will be a few people in the first world willing to work on software via emulators for the thing... but the critical mass of OSS support that your average PC linux user has will not be there.
You see MAME running on Ipods, because people with money and leisure time are allowed to purchase Ipods and experiment with them. These $100 laptops are strictly off limits to geeks.
Drop 100,000 ipods into the third world to people with no programing knowledge (who might not even know what an ipod is), make it illegal for anybody outside the third world to use the ipod, and don't give them any training or resources to develop software on an ipod, and then lets see how quick they get MAME running on their ipods. And that will give you an idea of some of the problems with the whole $100 laptop idea.
I live in Canada, and I can tell you that people are not conservative Christians, but are just as rabid for the nannie state (banning smoking, gambling, alchol is only allowed to be sold in highly regulated government outlets where I live, all movies, TV, or video games sold must be approved by the government)... and Canada and the U.S. are nothing compared to what is happening in the U.K. (ALL cars will be computer tracked on the roads, it is illegal to say things that "offend religion", they have a new thing called something like "anti-social behavior orders" which allow your neighbors to have judges restrict you from legal behavior, without a trial or you being present, because they think it is "anti-social").
The whole nannie-state thing seems to be happening everywhere in Western World. The Christian thing is simply the U.S. flavor of totalitarianism.
And, the side benifit is that the government will have us locked into a single universal form of communication that they control.
I mean, why develop high-speed packet radio, or cheaper sat based internet, or some sort of packet microwave network, or airship based relays, when the government can pay to lay cable all over rural areas... and since it is economically unviable to maintain, communication is wholly and completly dependent on the government.
Of course, it will be no big deal when the government says "Yeah, we will give you funding to build these lines, but we must have the ability to spy on people if you want the funding". And the feds will have huge leverage to threaten communities with ("you need that fiber optic funding, so don't jepordise it by going against my other bills!").
The government can have a glorious, highly controlled, highly tracked, form of communication that doesn't threaten the status quo.
Yeah, it is comforting to know that what FEMA did for New Orleans, the government is going to do for all of us when it comes to communications.