Your post fails to account for the 95% chance that the entrenched players will use their patent leverage to crush the upstart. After all, competition is for communists.
Make the parents culpable for what their nasty little whelps do.
If I have a dog, and it bites someone, I can be held accountable. If I have a cat, and it keeps defecating in someones petunias, I can be held accountable. If I have a pet rat, and it escapes and starts breeding, I can be held accountable.
But if I have a child, and I let it run amok, harassing, assaulting, stealing, you name it... I am not held accountable at all? For that matter, neither is my child. So we have crimes being comitted here, for which no one is being held to account. Well, there's one thing I can guarantee. If there are no consequences for an action, that action will be committed.
We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
This is feel-good nonsense that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but is ultimately bullshit.
We do have the ability to alter the course of our lives. Human beings have the ability to reason, to realise their situation in life and realise how they can alter it. You're saying that our brains are just simple machines which cannot alter their own operation. That someone is intrisically "bad" not because of the decision they made, but because they are predestined to make those decisions. It's this view which is fuzzy thinking.
The idea that someones "genes" determine if they are bad or good is simply the old calvanist ideas of "election" and "predestination" dressed up in modern scientific discoveries and jargon. We point to studies of brain physiology and simple pictures of neurons and chemicals, but in the end we are simply making an equivilent argument to Calvin's idea that some are predestined for salvation, and others danmnation. It's an outdated religious idea, expressed in modern scientific notation.
People make choices. If we argue that those choices are predestined, then there is not point in holding anyone accountable for their actions. Logically if you argue that this person is "naturally bad", then you must conclude that holding him accountable to human law is pointless, and this leads on to the argument that he should be put down like an animal, or sterilised. And these views are all expressed in the responses to my original post. But these are again the old arguments of natural class, race and eugenics dressed up in modern language.
I don't believe in eugenics, or predestination, or unconditional election. But a lot of posters in this thread do believe in them, or in slightly different version. Humans prefer simple pictures, scientists doubly so. But life is not simple, and people's fate are not set in stone by their body chemistry. They make choices, and are held to account for that reason.
You might think this is warm and fuzzy bullshit thinking. But I happen to think that believing in biological determinism is even more naive. You've simply replaced "soul" with "DNA sequence", and neither is a solid counterargument to free will.
I live in the EU. Technically, I can send goods, and especially money, from my own country to another in the union and not have to pay any customs or tarriffs. There is free trade of goods here.
Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc. The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc. The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls).
I knew someone worked for a short time in Saudi Arabia. When he arrived they slapped a sticker over his passport with the name of the company he worked in english and arabic. The message was clear. He was a vassal of that company, and the saudi government. To leave that country, he needed an exit visa. If the company wasn't prepared to give him one, he was trapped there. If the company no longer wished to employ him, his visa would expire and he would be there illegally. He was completely at the mercy of the company he worked for.
That is what passports and visas are for. The passport is a direct descendant of the lords chit, when back in the middle ages you needed your lords permission to leave his demense. In modern times we have replaces "lord" with government, or in saudi arabia, "company". Passports do not exist to protect us. They exist to control us. Governments yearn for the day when every citizen must have their papers, when we are once again serfs for private companies.
Governments are beginning to share data in this way not because their own situation has changed, but because the situation of the companies people work for has changed. Companies are now global, and they need to move their loyal employees around with them, and restrict the movement of those who displease them. Troublemakers or other undesirables are best kept hemmed in by petty rules and restrictions. Blemishes on the records of the favoured will be ignored. Parking tickets on the record of union organisers will result in revocation of their chits.
In all likelihood, our society will become like saudi arabia long before saudi arabia becomes like us. Western society is regressing, and increasingly stringent border and passport controls are a symptom of that regression.
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions. Saying someone is "born bad" is equivilant to saying that they have been possessed by Satan. It's not a valid argument.
I'll will admit that people can be born with violent temperaments. They can be born with harsh attitudes or a lack of empathy. However all but the most severely mentally disabled are born with free will and the ability to reason. People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
This is why I don't accept the argument that someone is not responsible for their actions because they've had a "hard life" or were "born bad" or live in a "bad neighbourhood". I can be sympathetic, but ultimately I must insist that people take responsibilty for the decisions they have made. I don't think it's a lot to ask.
Blaming society, or genetics, or your parents, or video games or anything else for decisions you yourself have made is an insult to everyone who does accept the consequences of their actions. It's an insult to your own dignity as you are claiming you have lost your own free will.
There are people in this world who were born with physical and mental disabilities. People who have suffered accidents, abuse, insult, poverty and hardship of every kind. Even people who play video games. And most of these people live their lives, despite having to work that much harder at them. They overcome their problems, make an honest living and contribute to the society they live in. Often they contribute more than other more fortunate individuals. Even people with violent personalities or troubled pasts can still find a positive place in society.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
This kid could have lead a better life. He chose not to. It had nothing to do with his mental chemistry. That was solid enough to allow him to dress himself every morning, walk without stumbling and converse with people when he needed to. He wasn't born bad. He chose to be bad. His parents didn't make that choice. Neither did his genes, or his playstation, or his neighbourhood. He did. Anything else is just an excuse.
We need a game on abortion, where you can choose to either be a pro-life activist blowing up clinics or a pro-choice activist force aborting fetuses!!
Seriously, people play video games to get away from all the horseshit of real life. No one is censoring controvertial issue from video games, they were never put there to begin with. People plays games to have fun, not digest a hyperbole laden message.
About the closest video games ever get to addressing real world issues is by metaphor and allegory. The Gulliver's Travel's model works well in the game setting, but again the primary purpose of games is to play them, not get a poor mans plot along the way. Developers should stick to addressing real world issues by subsituting aliens and fantasy realms for real world events. The moment some explicit moral message begins flashing on screen to a dramatic score, is the moment I regret the hours of play I've put in.
There is one exception to this. If your game is really, really, really good, and you can integrate the concept without fundamentally altering the setting, then you can start to preach. Just not too much thanks. A game that did this rather well was the original Metal Gear Solid, which had a very clear anti-nuclear proliferation message that fitted smoothly into the entire game.
The real issue of censorship in video games is not the messages they convey, but the actions they still consider taboo. The greatest addition that could be made to a game like GTA would be to put children in as pedestrians, because we've all felt that urge to strangle some screaming brat at least once in our lives. This will never happen because if it did, exaggerated public outrage would quickly follow from people who've never even seen the game.
Let's face it. Taboos still exist in our society and moreover we still do not have the freedom to challenge them. We've let our fear and other people's outrage, continue to keep the status quo.
Still very shady legally, and you can't have a society where people just trespass for whatever reason. However, he did very intelligently target it and accomplished a good thing. He was a better man than those that make us have laws, and that says something. At least, so far.
He's an informer of the worst kind. What's the difference between this guy and people who spied on their neighbours for the gestapo and stasi? He did it for the children? Keep telling yourself that when your frienda and neighbours start getting hauled away on fantasy charges.
I'm not saying the evidence shouldn't be counted, but I do think calling Brett a "hero" for reading thousands of peoples e-mails for years on end is absurd.
I think the evidence shouldn't be counted. It was obtained illegally, by a vigilante. What kind of a precedent are we setting here. That some self righteous group of private citizens will take it upon themselves to police everyone else. There's a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.
Brett isn't a hero. He's a zealot. A criminal zealot. I don't care how may witches^Dpedophiles may or may not walk free. Frankly I will trust the pedophile before I trust vigilantes, because at least with the pedophiles you know where they stand.
Vigilantes are just hungry for blood and power. Guilt, innocence and even the crime itself are secondary concerns to them.
I hate to break it to you, but humans are animals, and physical and mental domination and the rituals used to establish it are part of our nature. What zero tolerance does is remove the ritual that evolved to limit the damage caused in establishing dominance.
I hate to break it to you, but humans have developed this thing called "society" in the last few thousand years. In it, people who walk around trying to pull off monkey dominance rituals tend to get a) arrested b) ostracised c) killed. If some shmuck walks around pawing the ground in public, people look at it as entertainment, not a threat. Our societial structure is based on wealth and positions of authority, not grandstanding, except in rare circumstances.
Your logic assumes that second level institutions are accurate representations of society. They are not. They are degenerate sub societies where none of the usual rules apply.
Complete and utter Bull Shit(tm). Pornogrophy is addictive. To everybody? Of course not. But I know personally of lives and marriages ruined by porn addiction.
Addiction is not a valid concept. See Rat Park. What you know of is people who have made their own choices. Choices they made of their own free will.
Re:It may be time for me to make this choice soon.
on
From Bess to Worse
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The thing that's a little sad is that at eight, I've got to prepare him for the adult world. Swearing, hardcore sex, and bizarre YouTube slapping videos isn't really something I'd like to expose him to just yet. Innocence is a rarity in this day and age and I'd rather have him just be a kid for a few years longer.
No. What's tragic is that you've got an eight year old you you want to be an infant for as long as possible.
I can't understand people's views on this. Growing up isn't a tradgey of some kind. Children aren't going to lose some kind of "innosense" and "purity" at midnight of their 13th birthday. Every day you see your child learn something new, grow a little taller and generally take another step on the road to adulthood is a day you should be thankful for. Instead people lament the "loss" of their "little angels". How screwed up is that?
You know what I remember about being a kid? Wanting to grow up. Childhood is not the perfect, magical wonderland that people have convinced themselves it was. How many times did you say to yourself, "When I'm older, I'll eat all the junk food I want.", or words to that effect? Imagine the guilt trips children are put on today when their tearful parent practically mourns their passing in front of them.
Talk to your kid. Explain honestly to him that there's stuff out there that you think you influence him negatively. Be explicit. Accept that he will come across it. Accept that he will go out looking for it. Accept that this is in itself unlikely to serious negatively affect him. Tell him all this, but make it clear you'd rather he spent his time more productively.
Don't bother with censorware, because it's a solution looking for a problem. You haven't got a problem. You won't have a problem. You've got a kid. You're getting an adult. Don't try to keep a grip of the kid, because then you'll never get the adult.
The right to privacy may only be implied and not specifically granted in our constitution, but it is still widely held.
It's not about privacy. It's about human dignity.
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10:
10. Human dignity
Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.
I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
OK, lavc won't actually work with b-frames at the moment, but there are ways around this. My point is that increasing the size of the disc content is not going to prevent encoders tuning everything down to a very acceptable quality for a download.
HD. No one cares. Especially people who get most of their movies from torrents.
You're not being an authoritative parent. You're being an authoritarian one. There's a substantial difference.
It's true. You do have to put your foot down. You do have to set limits. And you do have to keep your eye on them. But you should never forget that all the while, you are raising them so that eventually you won't have to do all that anymore.
It's very ironic that the very time most parents should be relaxing retrictions and allowing more autonomy, the teenage years, is the time that many parents instead choose to increase retrictions and oversight. At the time when they should be discussing things with their children and also listening to their opinions, many parents choose instead to insist on absolute obedience and dismiss their near-adults views. Sometimes they are even well meaning, but this is all what is referred to in software quality circles as "A Failure of Process".
Don't let your processes be a failure. Make them a success.
Until we can control who breeds and who doesn't breed, laws regulating parenting tactics will continue to grow more numerous in response to irresponsible parents.
And wait, lemme guess. Once we do have those laws, paragraph 3 subsection 7 will state that FatSean(18753) gets his nice fat Hareem made up of the women who would otherwise have bread with the unworthy. How noble of you to do your part in raising a more mature generation.
I don't remember the schools doing abortions. Have things changed?
Oh Yeah! They do all kinds of stuff now. Abortions, orgies, satanic rituals, weegie boards, sleepovers, wedding receptions, the works. Also we're putting covers on the TPS reports now. Did you get that memo?
Most of it is incest, pedophilia, necrophila or bestiality (and thats not an exclusive-or)........And amazingly enough, most of it seems to be generated from within the USA.
Unsurprising. There's this book called "The Bible" with all that and then some. They sell it at Walmart for $6.71. You can even get it on MP3 in the same location for $13.62. No age ID required!
Amoung the unwashed masses of "casual" gamers, I assume that this person is somewhat of a celebrity. People who play games for lifestyle reasons need celebrities to promote and endorse their lifestyle. Game journalists are about the only thing the video game community has for a celebrity profession.
Those of use who still value games for their intrinsic value, rather than for their conspicuous consumption status, have never been very fond of game journalists, and especially not TV game journalists. We wince every time they dumb down and misrepresent game after game in an effort to attract people who really just don't care. It's like those astronomy shows with the TV Movie soundtrack to make things more "dramatic". When the ominous low chords hum at the display of the black hole, I feel just as patronised as I do when the "game" show presenter skips onstage to the CG backdropped "Review Zone".
I'm old, but I've felt this way since I was about 12. TV has a way of taking something interesting and profaning it to a level just low enough so that the people who were actually interested turn it off. When you dumb down a presentation of something, you're slapping your audience in the face.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post fails to account for the 95% chance that the entrenched players will use their patent leverage to crush the upstart. After all, competition is for communists.
If I have a dog, and it bites someone, I can be held accountable. If I have a cat, and it keeps defecating in someones petunias, I can be held accountable. If I have a pet rat, and it escapes and starts breeding, I can be held accountable.
But if I have a child, and I let it run amok, harassing, assaulting, stealing, you name it... I am not held accountable at all? For that matter, neither is my child. So we have crimes being comitted here, for which no one is being held to account. Well, there's one thing I can guarantee. If there are no consequences for an action, that action will be committed.
We do have the ability to alter the course of our lives. Human beings have the ability to reason, to realise their situation in life and realise how they can alter it. You're saying that our brains are just simple machines which cannot alter their own operation. That someone is intrisically "bad" not because of the decision they made, but because they are predestined to make those decisions. It's this view which is fuzzy thinking.
The idea that someones "genes" determine if they are bad or good is simply the old calvanist ideas of "election" and "predestination" dressed up in modern scientific discoveries and jargon. We point to studies of brain physiology and simple pictures of neurons and chemicals, but in the end we are simply making an equivilent argument to Calvin's idea that some are predestined for salvation, and others danmnation. It's an outdated religious idea, expressed in modern scientific notation.
People make choices. If we argue that those choices are predestined, then there is not point in holding anyone accountable for their actions. Logically if you argue that this person is "naturally bad", then you must conclude that holding him accountable to human law is pointless, and this leads on to the argument that he should be put down like an animal, or sterilised. And these views are all expressed in the responses to my original post. But these are again the old arguments of natural class, race and eugenics dressed up in modern language.
I don't believe in eugenics, or predestination, or unconditional election. But a lot of posters in this thread do believe in them, or in slightly different version. Humans prefer simple pictures, scientists doubly so. But life is not simple, and people's fate are not set in stone by their body chemistry. They make choices, and are held to account for that reason.
You might think this is warm and fuzzy bullshit thinking. But I happen to think that believing in biological determinism is even more naive. You've simply replaced "soul" with "DNA sequence", and neither is a solid counterargument to free will.
I live in the EU. Technically, I can send goods, and especially money, from my own country to another in the union and not have to pay any customs or tarriffs. There is free trade of goods here.
Technically, there is also free movement of people, but this is a sham. Even before the 9/11 hysteria began, you still needed a passport to go just about anywhere. Every time I travel in this suppossedly free union, I have to present my papers and declare my goods etc. The stated purpose for these controls is protecting us from terrorism, immigration, criminals, etc, etc, etc. The reality is that government want to show that we only enter and leave countries by their say so. Plebs have no right of free travel. (Big businessmen and polititians on the other hand, regularly find themselves exempt from border controls).
I knew someone worked for a short time in Saudi Arabia. When he arrived they slapped a sticker over his passport with the name of the company he worked in english and arabic. The message was clear. He was a vassal of that company, and the saudi government. To leave that country, he needed an exit visa. If the company wasn't prepared to give him one, he was trapped there. If the company no longer wished to employ him, his visa would expire and he would be there illegally. He was completely at the mercy of the company he worked for.
That is what passports and visas are for. The passport is a direct descendant of the lords chit, when back in the middle ages you needed your lords permission to leave his demense. In modern times we have replaces "lord" with government, or in saudi arabia, "company". Passports do not exist to protect us. They exist to control us. Governments yearn for the day when every citizen must have their papers, when we are once again serfs for private companies.
Governments are beginning to share data in this way not because their own situation has changed, but because the situation of the companies people work for has changed. Companies are now global, and they need to move their loyal employees around with them, and restrict the movement of those who displease them. Troublemakers or other undesirables are best kept hemmed in by petty rules and restrictions. Blemishes on the records of the favoured will be ignored. Parking tickets on the record of union organisers will result in revocation of their chits.
In all likelihood, our society will become like saudi arabia long before saudi arabia becomes like us. Western society is regressing, and increasingly stringent border and passport controls are a symptom of that regression.
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions. Saying someone is "born bad" is equivilant to saying that they have been possessed by Satan. It's not a valid argument.
I'll will admit that people can be born with violent temperaments. They can be born with harsh attitudes or a lack of empathy. However all but the most severely mentally disabled are born with free will and the ability to reason. People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
This is why I don't accept the argument that someone is not responsible for their actions because they've had a "hard life" or were "born bad" or live in a "bad neighbourhood". I can be sympathetic, but ultimately I must insist that people take responsibilty for the decisions they have made. I don't think it's a lot to ask.
Blaming society, or genetics, or your parents, or video games or anything else for decisions you yourself have made is an insult to everyone who does accept the consequences of their actions. It's an insult to your own dignity as you are claiming you have lost your own free will.
There are people in this world who were born with physical and mental disabilities. People who have suffered accidents, abuse, insult, poverty and hardship of every kind. Even people who play video games. And most of these people live their lives, despite having to work that much harder at them. They overcome their problems, make an honest living and contribute to the society they live in. Often they contribute more than other more fortunate individuals. Even people with violent personalities or troubled pasts can still find a positive place in society.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
This kid could have lead a better life. He chose not to. It had nothing to do with his mental chemistry. That was solid enough to allow him to dress himself every morning, walk without stumbling and converse with people when he needed to. He wasn't born bad. He chose to be bad. His parents didn't make that choice. Neither did his genes, or his playstation, or his neighbourhood. He did. Anything else is just an excuse.
We need a game on abortion, where you can choose to either be a pro-life activist blowing up clinics or a pro-choice activist force aborting fetuses!!
Seriously, people play video games to get away from all the horseshit of real life. No one is censoring controvertial issue from video games, they were never put there to begin with. People plays games to have fun, not digest a hyperbole laden message.
About the closest video games ever get to addressing real world issues is by metaphor and allegory. The Gulliver's Travel's model works well in the game setting, but again the primary purpose of games is to play them, not get a poor mans plot along the way. Developers should stick to addressing real world issues by subsituting aliens and fantasy realms for real world events. The moment some explicit moral message begins flashing on screen to a dramatic score, is the moment I regret the hours of play I've put in.
There is one exception to this. If your game is really, really, really good, and you can integrate the concept without fundamentally altering the setting, then you can start to preach. Just not too much thanks. A game that did this rather well was the original Metal Gear Solid, which had a very clear anti-nuclear proliferation message that fitted smoothly into the entire game.
The real issue of censorship in video games is not the messages they convey, but the actions they still consider taboo. The greatest addition that could be made to a game like GTA would be to put children in as pedestrians, because we've all felt that urge to strangle some screaming brat at least once in our lives. This will never happen because if it did, exaggerated public outrage would quickly follow from people who've never even seen the game.
Let's face it. Taboos still exist in our society and moreover we still do not have the freedom to challenge them. We've let our fear and other people's outrage, continue to keep the status quo.
People like you are the greatest threat western society has faced in over 60 years.
He's an informer of the worst kind. What's the difference between this guy and people who spied on their neighbours for the gestapo and stasi? He did it for the children? Keep telling yourself that when your frienda and neighbours start getting hauled away on fantasy charges.
I think the evidence shouldn't be counted. It was obtained illegally, by a vigilante. What kind of a precedent are we setting here. That some self righteous group of private citizens will take it upon themselves to police everyone else. There's a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.
Brett isn't a hero. He's a zealot. A criminal zealot. I don't care how may witches^Dpedophiles may or may not walk free. Frankly I will trust the pedophile before I trust vigilantes, because at least with the pedophiles you know where they stand.
Vigilantes are just hungry for blood and power. Guilt, innocence and even the crime itself are secondary concerns to them.
I hate to break it to you, but humans have developed this thing called "society" in the last few thousand years. In it, people who walk around trying to pull off monkey dominance rituals tend to get a) arrested b) ostracised c) killed. If some shmuck walks around pawing the ground in public, people look at it as entertainment, not a threat. Our societial structure is based on wealth and positions of authority, not grandstanding, except in rare circumstances.
Your logic assumes that second level institutions are accurate representations of society. They are not. They are degenerate sub societies where none of the usual rules apply.
Addiction is not a valid concept. See Rat Park. What you know of is people who have made their own choices. Choices they made of their own free will.
No. What's tragic is that you've got an eight year old you you want to be an infant for as long as possible.
I can't understand people's views on this. Growing up isn't a tradgey of some kind. Children aren't going to lose some kind of "innosense" and "purity" at midnight of their 13th birthday. Every day you see your child learn something new, grow a little taller and generally take another step on the road to adulthood is a day you should be thankful for. Instead people lament the "loss" of their "little angels". How screwed up is that?
You know what I remember about being a kid? Wanting to grow up. Childhood is not the perfect, magical wonderland that people have convinced themselves it was. How many times did you say to yourself, "When I'm older, I'll eat all the junk food I want.", or words to that effect? Imagine the guilt trips children are put on today when their tearful parent practically mourns their passing in front of them.
Talk to your kid. Explain honestly to him that there's stuff out there that you think you influence him negatively. Be explicit. Accept that he will come across it. Accept that he will go out looking for it. Accept that this is in itself unlikely to serious negatively affect him. Tell him all this, but make it clear you'd rather he spent his time more productively.
Don't bother with censorware, because it's a solution looking for a problem. You haven't got a problem. You won't have a problem. You've got a kid. You're getting an adult. Don't try to keep a grip of the kid, because then you'll never get the adult.
s/methamphetamine/caffine/
s/prostitutes/roleplayers/
s/tequila/jolt/
s/Rhonda/goat.cx/
The constant monitoring, surveillance, identification, numbering and tagging of people in our society is an affront to human dignity. It's an affront not only to those being numbered and tagged, though they are the ones most offended, it's also a stain on the dignity of any state that permits it. Anyone who disagrees should ask people who have been tagged, with a barcode.
But the interesting fact is, human dignity is not a universally recognised right. We've got rights to our property, lives and liberty, but not in most cases to our dignity. This is only something that has recently been awknowladged.
The word "dignity" dows not even appear in the US constitution(enacted 1787). US citizens do not have a constitutional right to it. The Irish constitution(enacted 1937) does mention in the preamble that it is being adopted in part "...so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured". But this is only in the preamble.
Interestingly, the constitution of South Africa (enacted 1996), explicitly and unabiguously guarantees a right to dignity in Chapter 2: Section 10: I guess decades of having their dignity denied to them taught South Africans that this right doesn't really go without saying. This is one ammendment I would dearly love to see in my country's constitution. (Actually the SA constitution also guarantees the right to privacy and even the right to private communications. It's an extremely progressive document which unfortunately hasn't influenced older constitutions in the way that it should.)
Privacy in public is obviously a fallacy. But we should at least not have to suffer affronts to our dignity by being scanned and checked at every turn, or have our clothing seen through at every security checkpoint. Laws forcing Jews to wear stars or Muslims to wear crescents would probably still be constitutional in a lot of countries. A dignity ammendment would make what we know is wrong explicitly wrong. Humans aren't like animals. We have more needs than simply life, liberty and property. Dignity is one of those other needs.
In Korea, only Old People know about responsibility..... oh wait.
Now check your answers by putting them back into the original equation.
$for pass in `seq 1 2`
do
mencoder -dvd-device
-x264encopts subq=7:4x4mv:8x8dct:me=3:frameref=6:bframes=6:b_a
-of lavc -o pretty_small_file_by_comparision.mp4
done
OK, lavc won't actually work with b-frames at the moment, but there are ways around this. My point is that increasing the size of the disc content is not going to prevent encoders tuning everything down to a very acceptable quality for a download.
HD. No one cares. Especially people who get most of their movies from torrents.
Why are they even paying this man?
You're not being an authoritative parent. You're being an authoritarian one. There's a substantial difference.
It's true. You do have to put your foot down. You do have to set limits. And you do have to keep your eye on them. But you should never forget that all the while, you are raising them so that eventually you won't have to do all that anymore.
It's very ironic that the very time most parents should be relaxing retrictions and allowing more autonomy, the teenage years, is the time that many parents instead choose to increase retrictions and oversight. At the time when they should be discussing things with their children and also listening to their opinions, many parents choose instead to insist on absolute obedience and dismiss their near-adults views. Sometimes they are even well meaning, but this is all what is referred to in software quality circles as "A Failure of Process".
Don't let your processes be a failure. Make them a success.
That country is depraved.
Amoung the unwashed masses of "casual" gamers, I assume that this person is somewhat of a celebrity. People who play games for lifestyle reasons need celebrities to promote and endorse their lifestyle. Game journalists are about the only thing the video game community has for a celebrity profession.
Those of use who still value games for their intrinsic value, rather than for their conspicuous consumption status, have never been very fond of game journalists, and especially not TV game journalists. We wince every time they dumb down and misrepresent game after game in an effort to attract people who really just don't care. It's like those astronomy shows with the TV Movie soundtrack to make things more "dramatic". When the ominous low chords hum at the display of the black hole, I feel just as patronised as I do when the "game" show presenter skips onstage to the CG backdropped "Review Zone".
I'm old, but I've felt this way since I was about 12. TV has a way of taking something interesting and profaning it to a level just low enough so that the people who were actually interested turn it off. When you dumb down a presentation of something, you're slapping your audience in the face.