I doubt it. It's probably his "my shit don't stink" mentality. It's easy to imagine he has, or will, at some point in his life, have an avoidable close call.
Why can't he believe that stupidity has a price even if he has done something stupid? Is there no room in your worldview for someone to have a belief and recognize that it applies to themselves as much as it applies to anyone else?
You automatically assume blatant hypocrisy before anything like this occurs to you. I wonder if you appreciate what that means.
Put another way: There is not a statistic out there that says nobody who knows how to configure a web-server has ever been hit by a car.
Web servers have nothing to do with it, which must be why you're the first to mention them. There's only one kind of contrast here whether it comes from observing the world around you or having your own personal near-miss. One person thinks this is a product of chance or luck if they think about it at all. They are the higher-risk category. Another takes a look at the behaviors and decisions made that contributed to the event and made it more likely than necessary. They are the lower-risk category. This is straight observation. There is no claim of perfection in any of it.
Back to the topic, this means that ever since some pedestrians have gotten killed this way, anyone who didn' t already know can learn, from their example, that paying attention is important when interacting with traffic.
Now, you mentioned a "my shit don't stink" mentality. I'm reluctant to say it but you produced a bit of shit there yourself. It smells like someone who cannot understand a viewpoint that isn't his own, not because he has found a serious flaw in it, but because he doesn't like it. So you argue against an imaginary claim to personal perfection that no one was making. Does anyone see how that works? It's usually unintentional but unfortunately it's a common pattern in discussions everywhere.
How about people who are deaf like me? Will we get written up for walking around in a dangerous fashion and relying only upon our eyes to stay alive on the streets?
If the pedestrians in question (who are not deaf) had relied upon their eyes as you do, there'd be no controversy here because there would have been no dead pedestrians.
This isn't about being able to hear. This is about stupidity versus what is sometimes called "common sense".
And many people don't have enough assets to sue for.
In an ideal world you'd be referring to the parents of the little bastards who actually walk out in front of cars on purpose. In the event that something happened, the driver should be able to successfully sue them for damage to his/her vehicle, any medical bills (for any occupants of the car), and emotional harm from having to find the best way to remove blood and brains from clear coat. They so clearly failed their duty as parents to instill any degree of sense into their children that they should be liable for all such damages.
And don't give me that "how can anyone sue grieving parents" crap. The time to care about them is when they're still alive and can be taught better than that. It shouldn't take a smaller-than-standard coffin to make them wake up and realize that the TV wasn't such a great babysitter. Really, I'm tired of shitty parenting and the society of broken, whimpering, dependent, passive, shallow, childish, impatient people it's been producing.
Some of you bleeding-heart types may think that's inflammatory. I'm not going to make you feel better. I'm going to tell you to get over it because it's the fuckin' truth. All I'm saying is this: if your kids think that deliberately walking out into traffic and scaring the hell out of drivers or maybe making them have an accident is great fun, while risking their own lives to do it, then yeah you've failed as a parent. That's exactly the sort of stupidity and bad decision-making you're supposed to have equipped them to identify. Really the whole immediate-self-preservation thing is one of the more obvious ones.
Shit man, if we're not careful people may even have to start paying attention when dealing with potentially dangerous situations. That'd be a real bummer, as it would waste a little precious time that could be spent on texting, music, and games. Thank God people have their priorities straight!
It's also a great thing that laws could be made to sort this out. That would work like a charm, of course. It's only natural that people don't care if poor decision-making gets them killed, but they'll wise up really quick when it might get them fined.
The fact that Australia has politicians who are even willing to test the waters by floating such ideas says a lot by itself.
Far be it for me to defend politicians, but this little bit of "policy" as you'd like to call it has come from a not-for-profit group that pretty much amounts to a "Club for Pedestrians".
The Pedestrian Council of Australia is a non-profit organisation whose objectives are: the continuing improvement of the safety, amenity, access, health and environment of all pedestrians throughout Australia.
Sounds a lot like the Women's Christian Temperence Union. So perhaps I jumped the gun a bit; the politicians are the ones who follow shortly after.
You've done your part and the guy is alive, but not all drivers pay attention like you do, they expect pedestrians to behave like their counterparts from Carmageddon, and make way regardless. I know lots of drivers get pissed off when you pass on green and don't walk fast enough, or almost squish you on the crossing and scream their heads off that it's your fault.
That makes me re-appreciate the joys of not living in a densely populated area.
Seems like all the news coming from there is about less freedom.
It's largely because all the news is bullshit.
Australia does not have an internet filter.
Nothing is happening in regards to this story
Somebody making a noise about something, even if that person is a politician in government, is not the same as them actually doing something.
The fact that Australia has politicians who are even willing to test the waters by floating such ideas says a lot by itself. It's how they wet their finger to feel which way the wind is blowing. If the idea shows support they run with it. If not, they distance themselves from it and the impression they leave is the one you express there.
Really? REALLY? This is insightful? The best 5+ slashdot can offer? A kindergartener's level of understanding of life, where "what goes around comes around?" Oh yeah, that's about right.
There are times when the kindergartner is right. Some things are so simple they get overlooked, not so complex that no one can figure them out. This may or may not be one of those times; that's up to the reader to decide. The point is, that isn't an instantaneous slam-dunk dismissal no matter how badly you want it to be.
If a simple rephrasing such as "the caste system associated with the Hindus" is enough to destroy your objection, and it is, then you're making a big deal out of nothing, and you are. Good day.
Older folks (you know, a large part of electorate) are traditionaly sceptical of new fangled toys; don't search for your deamons in what is simply categring to preexisting sentiments of many voters.
I believe you missed the point. There are lots of "new fangled toys" produced by a number of manufacturers. Yet of all those toys produced by all of those manufacturers, it's the foreign manufacturer that is targeted.
To the people you described an XBoX360 would be just as "new fangled".
Incidentally this is a reason why collecting Social Security should mean you surrender your right to vote. Perhaps then Social Security would be something other than a Ponzi scheme doomed to collapse under its own weight since it would no longer be political suicide to fix it. As a bonus, the tendency you have highlighted would be irrelevant and no longer an input towards decision-making.
The Xboxes, our society giving more rights to criminals, gun control laws that embolden said criminals, lack of police power. There is enough blame to go around but it starts out with parents not wanting to at least keep an eye on their kids and send them outside.
Yes, there is a lot of work to running a house, no one has to tell me this, but don't blame the XBox or Playstation or Wii when your kid gets fat from sitting in the house all day.
If they *really* want the government to take an active role in dealing with this problem, it's simple enough. It should happen on the state level and the feds should stay the hell out of it. All the states would have to do is charge parents of obese and morbidly obese children with negligence and/or child abuse.
It makes perfect sense. Obesity really does pose a threat to their health, so material harm can be observed. The parent really does have complete control over what they feed the child, so responsibility can be established. The only remainder would be to ensure that the school-provided lunches are reasonably healthy but most states already have such programs (if anything they tend to go overboard).
Assuming that last condition is true, it would be entirely logical and self-consistent to start arresting parents who manifestly don't care about the health of their children. That's if you want the government to be involved in this problem. Unlike placing blame on inanimate objects like gaming consoles, this would actually be effective.
It's likely that to a normal firewall (i.e. one that a home user might have) the connection the game makes to be able to play is the same as the ones it makes to torrent stuff to other people. While it may be theoretically possible to isolate the handful of IP adresses that a given game actually needs to access to work, good luck finding a firewall that will actually let you restrict that game to those addresses, and that doesn't even begin to tackle games with a multiplayer mode which just hook individual users together (not sure how many still do that now, but there are bound to be some).
Yes, but at that point it's no longer a stealth P2P client. That transfers it out of the realm of a technical problem and into the realm of a problem of the marketplace. Then a user can knowingly choose to purchase from such companies or not, and that's the point. It's the "stealth" or "buried in page 111 of the EULA" part that's the real problem here.
As far as "good luck finding a game that will actually let you restrict that game to those IP addresses", any firewall worthy of the name lets you match traffic by IP address. You can do that with or without any ability to consider what program on your machine is opening the sockets.
What follows is just an aside and not my main point. Still, I never really liked the trend for Windows firewalls to do little more than maintain a list of.EXE files that are or are not allowed to open certain sockets. That's more like an ACL applied to a narrow set of system calls. A proper firewall is for the management of IP traffic and doesn't necessarily need to know anything about specific processes, though that can be an extra feature (i.e. the Linux firewall's optional "owner" module). It always struck me as a kludge for nontechnical users who know little or nothing about network protocols but do recognize labels like "firefox.exe". With a proper stateful firewall and some networking know-how it's trivial to restrict traffic to a set of known IP addresses and you may still be able to recognize and allow things like multiplayer modes that connect individual users together.
OK, I know that Blizzard uses BitTorrent, but they're fairly upfront about it.
Someone else has mentioned Dungeons and Dragons Online, but they again mention it.
I know for a fact that the Final Fantasy XIV Beta uses P2P but makes no mention of it (thanks, firewall!), but thanks to the NDA, I can't tell you about that. Or I could post AC.
So can we name names and make a list of companies that mislead customers about P2P and waste their bandwidth? We can start with:
SQUARE ENIX: Final Fantasy XIV (no indication)
Of course this wouldn't work for an MMORPG that inherently requires network access. In my case, the few Windows games I play are single-player and run well under WINE on my Linux machine. I don't trust them in the slightest. I'll detail some of the measures I take:
I run Wine as a separate user account that isn't ever used for anything else.
I use iptables (with --match owner) to prevent that account from having any sort of network access. It cannot even ping google.com.
For several others reasons I use a PaX/Grsecurity kernel. It has an option that prevents normal users from seeing any processes except their own, which I use.
That last one was handy back when I played WoW since the need for some network access meant I couldn't fully use the second security measure. The WoW client has a piece of spyware intended as an anti-cheating device. It takes a list of all running processes on the computer as an attempt at detecting common cheat programs, like those that enable unauthorized automation of gameplay. It reports these results back to Blizzard.
With that feature of PaX/Grsecurity, that WoW client would only see itself and a few WINE-related processes (like wineserver and winedevice). On a more standard Linux system, any process belonging to any user can view every processes belonging to every user (as you can verify with the 'ps' command). I consider cheating to be Blizzard's problem. I didn't consider the processes I choose to run to be Blizzard's business, though I'm willing to reconsider if they ever give me a user account on their servers and let me see what I can see.
It's surprising in some ways and utterly unsurprising in others when I consider how much more control I have over these things with WINE and Linux than anyone running these games under real Windows. More than that, I have a much greater assurance that my control won't be undermined because at no point am I having to trust the good intentions of Blizzard or any other game company. Instead, I deny them everything and then allow them the few things I decide they have a legitimate need to do. This is how it should be. If that were the norm there would be no "stealth p2p clients".
You can.
Pull plug out of ethernet jack.
Put plug into ethernet jack.
What more do you want?:P
I know you were speaking tongue-in-cheek but really, this is why both ingress and egress firewalling with a default-deny policy for each is a good idea.
Then it's not so simple for a company to help themselves to your bandwidth. That, by the way, should be illegal unless they first negotiate with you and obtain your explicit written permission to do so. Like anything else, they're not the ones paying for it so they don't automatically have some claim to use it. The failure to recognize that is generally known as "theft of services".
If the companies really think this is acceptable, perhaps they wouldn't mind several tens of thousands of browsers refreshing their home pages as quickly as possible? After all, they think it's acceptable to do as you please with another's bandwidth without their express consent... I have the feeling they wouldn't like that at all. In fact I have the feeling they'd use every legal means available to go after anyone who arranged that.
This is one of those things. It's not so terribly complex that it defies any attempt to figure it out. Rather, it's so utterly simple that we constantly overlook it.
I view having a particular idea or vision of beauty as a mistake. It naturally makes one want to draw a distinction between that vision and the reality that is immediately apprehendable.
I view real beauty as something that is discovered, not envisioned. Once discovered and seen clearly, it can be found everywhere. It's a subtle underlying essence of this very mysterious universe in which we find ourselves.
That's the difference between a product of ego and its imagination versus a witnessing of something far beyond oneself. It's no wonder that people who don't understand this have a serious risk of becoming entangled.
I've met some people that do seem to be able imagine a world where virtue is the norm, and yet they still don't choose it. Maybe its because they intellectually understand what virtuous behavior would be and what the implications would be, but they are in some motivational sense unable to feel it. When the opportunity comes to betray for advantage, they can not resist.
That's because they give lip service to virtue but are not willing to apply it when it really counts.
I can't say I totally understand this, but I do experience something like it. I'm certain that its possible for a world to be vastly better than ours, and I know something of what it feels like. But another more vicious part of my mind still desires things that I'm pretty sure are inconsistent with that vision. And no amount of arguing with it seems to change its nature. Seeing how limited I am in my ability to change myself, I really don't know what other people are capable of.
The level of honesty you show here is the real value of this kind of conversation. For that I am grateful. This means that when you claim to know something of what virtue feels like, I know you are telling me the truth.
The principle here is that without temptation, there is no claim to virtue. The way to change yourself is to experience the pain of realizing how powerless and limited you truly are. No ego ever wants to do this for any purpose, so you can be assured this is something beyond ego or your nominal sense of "yourself". It taps into something greater than that, the idea that no man is an island, the interconnectedness of all things.
It's not a matter of arguing with it. If it worked that way, we'd have constructed by now a logical argument against the evils of the world and created Paradise. Human civilization has been around long enough that we've had more than enough time. Instead, we keep repeating the same mistakes.
Like I said, no man is an island. You're limited quite a bit, but only if your own personal resources are the only ones available to you. You say that you don't know what other people are capable of. Other people also don' t know what you are capable of. This may mean you have something in common with other people.
The juxtaposition of my own ugliness with my awareness of beauty causes a kind of destructive psychological stress, both internally and in relation to other people. It appears that most people try to deal with the stress by denying the possibility of virtue, and also by denying their own imperfection.
If that psychological stress is destructive, then to whom? To your thought-idea of who you are and what your goals in life are about? To the notion that you are happy if you get what you want and miserable if you don't?
It's not about perfection and imperfection. It's about the fact that you are a be-coming "evolving" type of being. You are moving in a direction. Unless you were frozen in Carbonite like Han Solo then you can't sit still. You are either improving and becoming more so or you are decaying and becoming less so.
Thus, it's not about experiencing absolute perfection right now. Likewise, you have your flaws but you are not experiencing absolute imperfection right now, for some things you do are successful. It's about the direction towards which you are heading. It's not about attaining total perfection. It's about moving towards it even when completely confident you may never firmly reach it. It's not the destination that counts; it is the journey.
For you to be satisfied 'not being a part of the problem' seems to me to imply some sort of awareness of or faith in beauty as a transcendent reality, unaltered by our current condition.
Absolutely. I either provide an undeniable example of that beauty, right here and right now, in front of your face, on Earth and not in some specu
I find the easiest way to identify a dumb person is by seeing who makes narcissistic, holier-than-thou posts on Slashdot.
The mods got it right this time, you are indeed a troll. But what the hell... Isn't that what you're doing by failing to dispute a single point I made and instead going for the ad-hominem? If I'm so dumb, why can't you successfully contradict my position?
Tell me, how would you define "stupid" if you would exclude useless behaviors that accomplish nothing for the person performing them (otherwise they'd just be selfish) and are also a detriment to everyone around them?
It's no mystery you were unable to dispute what I said, for my reasoning was sound. So you dislike what you were unable to find fault with. That's inherently irrational. But wait, it gets better. Like the narcissist you accuse me of being, you operate out of an assumption that anything you dislike must be faulty, since in your (narcissistic) view your discomfort upon reading my words couldn't possibly indicate a fault within you. So all you can do to retaliate against me who would dare say something you don't like is to call me names. How classy.
You don't see the hypocrisy of that, do you? I'm no fan of modern psychology, but what you're doing there is called Freudian projection.
The difference between you and I is that I can and did back up what I am saying with sound reason. The "holier-than-thou" person is the one who doesn't recognize the burden of proof that comes with making an accusation, as though the fact that they have declared something to be true should be good enough for anybody. If you don't wish to understand that, you won't, and that will be your loss. It's really no concern of mine if you want to live the rest of your life this way. No matter what you do, I'm not wasting my time because his might be valuable for anyone else who reads this and has to deal with people like you.
It's not even about common sense, it's more a problem with discretion. I cannot believe some of the things people tweet or post about on Facebook--things that I would think any self-respecting person would know better than to share with the world. It's like it's a contest to see who has the most embarrassing dirty laundry. Then there are the people who think their every stray thought is worth a Facebook status update. Well, it isn't. Odds are, no one cares.
Most people would be better off if they just kept their mouths shut and their keyboards silent.
Discretion is not compatible with the narcissism and vanity that drives a person to think that the world needs to know every last detail about their personal lives, as though they were a celebrity who can hardly shop at a grocery store without having it published in the tabloids. That's why the people with discretion are relatively silent compared to the ones you're talking about.
Common sense does not begin to enter the picture until well after vanity is recognized as the empty and useless pursuit that it is and rejected on those terms. Until then, any satisfaction derived from personal exhibitionism is hollow and fleeting which is why the person must engage in more and more of it to maintain the sense that they are "somebody". If it accomplished anything or had any lasting value, then there would not be the need you have recognized to sink lower and lower and engage in it more and more intensely. It is, as they say, a chasing after the wind.
Now, I really enjoy and appreciate freedom. I recognize that this includes the right to do something self-defeating and stupid as long as you don't force others to participate. So I believe it would be wrong to lift a finger towards trying to stop anyone from doing this. The point is, there are very good reasons why I haven't jumped on this bandwagon. It is not just a matter of personal taste or preference no matter how badly some want to legitimize it by portraying it that way.
Her “peers” are, logically, people who are just as dumb as she is... and what better way to flush out dumb people than by posting something dumb on facebook and seeing who “likes” it?
Dumb people aren't all that hard to identify. They're usually rather eager to advertise this fact about themselves, though unwittingly.
There's nothing like a good old car(-related) analogy so I'll give a driving analogy as an example. A lot of people don't seem to understand that the long turning lanes on many major roads are there for a purpose. They exist so that a driver doesn't have to start slowing down for the turn until after going into the turning lane, eliminating the need to slow down all of the traffic behind them just to make a turn. Yet a lot of drivers don't understand this and will gladly slow down everyone behind them, needlessly, completely oblivious to how their actions affect others. If you ever see traffic slow to a crawl on a day when there aren't that many cars on the road, it's because of a multitude of people who may be several miles ahead doing inconsiderate things like this.
That's generally the mark of stupid people everywhere. They are capricious, self-serving, and do not act in a deliberate fashion with a full awareness of how their actions affect others. Most of them are not malicious because malice would require intent and an ability to plan one's actions according to that intent, something the stupid are generally unable or unwilling to do. A juror who, if not for this judge, would have conducted a jury trial with an obvious bias without regard for the jeopardy the accused is in would be another iteration of the same pattern.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't he believe that stupidity has a price even if he has done something stupid? Is there no room in your worldview for someone to have a belief and recognize that it applies to themselves as much as it applies to anyone else?
You automatically assume blatant hypocrisy before anything like this occurs to you. I wonder if you appreciate what that means.
Web servers have nothing to do with it, which must be why you're the first to mention them. There's only one kind of contrast here whether it comes from observing the world around you or having your own personal near-miss. One person thinks this is a product of chance or luck if they think about it at all. They are the higher-risk category. Another takes a look at the behaviors and decisions made that contributed to the event and made it more likely than necessary. They are the lower-risk category. This is straight observation. There is no claim of perfection in any of it.
Back to the topic, this means that ever since some pedestrians have gotten killed this way, anyone who didn' t already know can learn, from their example, that paying attention is important when interacting with traffic.
Now, you mentioned a "my shit don't stink" mentality. I'm reluctant to say it but you produced a bit of shit there yourself. It smells like someone who cannot understand a viewpoint that isn't his own, not because he has found a serious flaw in it, but because he doesn't like it. So you argue against an imaginary claim to personal perfection that no one was making. Does anyone see how that works? It's usually unintentional but unfortunately it's a common pattern in discussions everywhere.
How about people who are deaf like me? Will we get written up for walking around in a dangerous fashion and relying only upon our eyes to stay alive on the streets?
If the pedestrians in question (who are not deaf) had relied upon their eyes as you do, there'd be no controversy here because there would have been no dead pedestrians.
This isn't about being able to hear. This is about stupidity versus what is sometimes called "common sense".
In an ideal world you'd be referring to the parents of the little bastards who actually walk out in front of cars on purpose. In the event that something happened, the driver should be able to successfully sue them for damage to his/her vehicle, any medical bills (for any occupants of the car), and emotional harm from having to find the best way to remove blood and brains from clear coat. They so clearly failed their duty as parents to instill any degree of sense into their children that they should be liable for all such damages.
And don't give me that "how can anyone sue grieving parents" crap. The time to care about them is when they're still alive and can be taught better than that. It shouldn't take a smaller-than-standard coffin to make them wake up and realize that the TV wasn't such a great babysitter. Really, I'm tired of shitty parenting and the society of broken, whimpering, dependent, passive, shallow, childish, impatient people it's been producing.
Some of you bleeding-heart types may think that's inflammatory. I'm not going to make you feel better. I'm going to tell you to get over it because it's the fuckin' truth. All I'm saying is this: if your kids think that deliberately walking out into traffic and scaring the hell out of drivers or maybe making them have an accident is great fun, while risking their own lives to do it, then yeah you've failed as a parent. That's exactly the sort of stupidity and bad decision-making you're supposed to have equipped them to identify. Really the whole immediate-self-preservation thing is one of the more obvious ones.
Shit man, if we're not careful people may even have to start paying attention when dealing with potentially dangerous situations. That'd be a real bummer, as it would waste a little precious time that could be spent on texting, music, and games. Thank God people have their priorities straight!
It's also a great thing that laws could be made to sort this out. That would work like a charm, of course. It's only natural that people don't care if poor decision-making gets them killed, but they'll wise up really quick when it might get them fined.
Far be it for me to defend politicians, but this little bit of "policy" as you'd like to call it has come from a not-for-profit group that pretty much amounts to a "Club for Pedestrians".
To wit:
Sounds a lot like the Women's Christian Temperence Union. So perhaps I jumped the gun a bit; the politicians are the ones who follow shortly after.
It is a penal colony. You have to expect that the rules and regulations are going to be stronger.
Yeah, and the USA is still a British colony that answers to the King George III.
Really, who modded this "Informative"?
You've done your part and the guy is alive, but not all drivers pay attention like you do, they expect pedestrians to behave like their counterparts from Carmageddon, and make way regardless. I know lots of drivers get pissed off when you pass on green and don't walk fast enough, or almost squish you on the crossing and scream their heads off that it's your fault.
That makes me re-appreciate the joys of not living in a densely populated area.
As long as they're eradicated before they breed I see no reason to interfere in this natural and culturally benevolent phenomenon.
The downside is all the perfectly good cars that might get damaged. I guess failing to account for that is why you were marked "Troll".
It's largely because all the news is bullshit. Australia does not have an internet filter. Nothing is happening in regards to this story Somebody making a noise about something, even if that person is a politician in government, is not the same as them actually doing something.
The fact that Australia has politicians who are even willing to test the waters by floating such ideas says a lot by itself. It's how they wet their finger to feel which way the wind is blowing. If the idea shows support they run with it. If not, they distance themselves from it and the impression they leave is the one you express there.
Darn - Australia has gone to goodie two shoes fascists. Seems like all the news coming from there is about less freedom.
They are either following America's example, or they are showing America how to do it right.
Really? REALLY? This is insightful? The best 5+ slashdot can offer? A kindergartener's level of understanding of life, where "what goes around comes around?" Oh yeah, that's about right.
There are times when the kindergartner is right. Some things are so simple they get overlooked, not so complex that no one can figure them out. This may or may not be one of those times; that's up to the reader to decide. The point is, that isn't an instantaneous slam-dunk dismissal no matter how badly you want it to be.
[citation needed]
Too often this means [google search needed] *cough*
If a simple rephrasing such as "the caste system associated with the Hindus" is enough to destroy your objection, and it is, then you're making a big deal out of nothing, and you are. Good day.
No posts after this one, please.
Ok.
Older folks (you know, a large part of electorate) are traditionaly sceptical of new fangled toys; don't search for your deamons in what is simply categring to preexisting sentiments of many voters.
I believe you missed the point. There are lots of "new fangled toys" produced by a number of manufacturers. Yet of all those toys produced by all of those manufacturers, it's the foreign manufacturer that is targeted.
To the people you described an XBoX360 would be just as "new fangled".
Incidentally this is a reason why collecting Social Security should mean you surrender your right to vote. Perhaps then Social Security would be something other than a Ponzi scheme doomed to collapse under its own weight since it would no longer be political suicide to fix it. As a bonus, the tendency you have highlighted would be irrelevant and no longer an input towards decision-making.
The Xboxes, our society giving more rights to criminals, gun control laws that embolden said criminals, lack of police power. There is enough blame to go around but it starts out with parents not wanting to at least keep an eye on their kids and send them outside.
Yes, there is a lot of work to running a house, no one has to tell me this, but don't blame the XBox or Playstation or Wii when your kid gets fat from sitting in the house all day.
If they *really* want the government to take an active role in dealing with this problem, it's simple enough. It should happen on the state level and the feds should stay the hell out of it. All the states would have to do is charge parents of obese and morbidly obese children with negligence and/or child abuse.
It makes perfect sense. Obesity really does pose a threat to their health, so material harm can be observed. The parent really does have complete control over what they feed the child, so responsibility can be established. The only remainder would be to ensure that the school-provided lunches are reasonably healthy but most states already have such programs (if anything they tend to go overboard).
Assuming that last condition is true, it would be entirely logical and self-consistent to start arresting parents who manifestly don't care about the health of their children. That's if you want the government to be involved in this problem. Unlike placing blame on inanimate objects like gaming consoles, this would actually be effective.
if only I had some mod points for ya !
"-1 Predictable" isn't a moderation option. The closest you can get is Redundant.
It's likely that to a normal firewall (i.e. one that a home user might have) the connection the game makes to be able to play is the same as the ones it makes to torrent stuff to other people. While it may be theoretically possible to isolate the handful of IP adresses that a given game actually needs to access to work, good luck finding a firewall that will actually let you restrict that game to those addresses, and that doesn't even begin to tackle games with a multiplayer mode which just hook individual users together (not sure how many still do that now, but there are bound to be some).
Yes, but at that point it's no longer a stealth P2P client. That transfers it out of the realm of a technical problem and into the realm of a problem of the marketplace. Then a user can knowingly choose to purchase from such companies or not, and that's the point. It's the "stealth" or "buried in page 111 of the EULA" part that's the real problem here.
.EXE files that are or are not allowed to open certain sockets. That's more like an ACL applied to a narrow set of system calls. A proper firewall is for the management of IP traffic and doesn't necessarily need to know anything about specific processes, though that can be an extra feature (i.e. the Linux firewall's optional "owner" module). It always struck me as a kludge for nontechnical users who know little or nothing about network protocols but do recognize labels like "firefox.exe". With a proper stateful firewall and some networking know-how it's trivial to restrict traffic to a set of known IP addresses and you may still be able to recognize and allow things like multiplayer modes that connect individual users together.
As far as "good luck finding a game that will actually let you restrict that game to those IP addresses", any firewall worthy of the name lets you match traffic by IP address. You can do that with or without any ability to consider what program on your machine is opening the sockets.
What follows is just an aside and not my main point. Still, I never really liked the trend for Windows firewalls to do little more than maintain a list of
OK, I know that Blizzard uses BitTorrent, but they're fairly upfront about it.
Someone else has mentioned Dungeons and Dragons Online, but they again mention it.
I know for a fact that the Final Fantasy XIV Beta uses P2P but makes no mention of it (thanks, firewall!), but thanks to the NDA, I can't tell you about that. Or I could post AC.
So can we name names and make a list of companies that mislead customers about P2P and waste their bandwidth? We can start with:
SQUARE ENIX: Final Fantasy XIV (no indication)
Of course this wouldn't work for an MMORPG that inherently requires network access. In my case, the few Windows games I play are single-player and run well under WINE on my Linux machine. I don't trust them in the slightest. I'll detail some of the measures I take:
That last one was handy back when I played WoW since the need for some network access meant I couldn't fully use the second security measure. The WoW client has a piece of spyware intended as an anti-cheating device. It takes a list of all running processes on the computer as an attempt at detecting common cheat programs, like those that enable unauthorized automation of gameplay. It reports these results back to Blizzard.
With that feature of PaX/Grsecurity, that WoW client would only see itself and a few WINE-related processes (like wineserver and winedevice). On a more standard Linux system, any process belonging to any user can view every processes belonging to every user (as you can verify with the 'ps' command). I consider cheating to be Blizzard's problem. I didn't consider the processes I choose to run to be Blizzard's business, though I'm willing to reconsider if they ever give me a user account on their servers and let me see what I can see.
It's surprising in some ways and utterly unsurprising in others when I consider how much more control I have over these things with WINE and Linux than anyone running these games under real Windows. More than that, I have a much greater assurance that my control won't be undermined because at no point am I having to trust the good intentions of Blizzard or any other game company. Instead, I deny them everything and then allow them the few things I decide they have a legitimate need to do. This is how it should be. If that were the norm there would be no "stealth p2p clients".
You can. Pull plug out of ethernet jack. Put plug into ethernet jack. What more do you want? :P
I know you were speaking tongue-in-cheek but really, this is why both ingress and egress firewalling with a default-deny policy for each is a good idea.
Then it's not so simple for a company to help themselves to your bandwidth. That, by the way, should be illegal unless they first negotiate with you and obtain your explicit written permission to do so. Like anything else, they're not the ones paying for it so they don't automatically have some claim to use it. The failure to recognize that is generally known as "theft of services".
If the companies really think this is acceptable, perhaps they wouldn't mind several tens of thousands of browsers refreshing their home pages as quickly as possible? After all, they think it's acceptable to do as you please with another's bandwidth without their express consent... I have the feeling they wouldn't like that at all. In fact I have the feeling they'd use every legal means available to go after anyone who arranged that.
This is one of those things. It's not so terribly complex that it defies any attempt to figure it out. Rather, it's so utterly simple that we constantly overlook it.
I view having a particular idea or vision of beauty as a mistake. It naturally makes one want to draw a distinction between that vision and the reality that is immediately apprehendable.
I view real beauty as something that is discovered, not envisioned. Once discovered and seen clearly, it can be found everywhere. It's a subtle underlying essence of this very mysterious universe in which we find ourselves.
That's the difference between a product of ego and its imagination versus a witnessing of something far beyond oneself. It's no wonder that people who don't understand this have a serious risk of becoming entangled.
That's because they give lip service to virtue but are not willing to apply it when it really counts.
The level of honesty you show here is the real value of this kind of conversation. For that I am grateful. This means that when you claim to know something of what virtue feels like, I know you are telling me the truth.
The principle here is that without temptation, there is no claim to virtue. The way to change yourself is to experience the pain of realizing how powerless and limited you truly are. No ego ever wants to do this for any purpose, so you can be assured this is something beyond ego or your nominal sense of "yourself". It taps into something greater than that, the idea that no man is an island, the interconnectedness of all things.
It's not a matter of arguing with it. If it worked that way, we'd have constructed by now a logical argument against the evils of the world and created Paradise. Human civilization has been around long enough that we've had more than enough time. Instead, we keep repeating the same mistakes.
Like I said, no man is an island. You're limited quite a bit, but only if your own personal resources are the only ones available to you. You say that you don't know what other people are capable of. Other people also don' t know what you are capable of. This may mean you have something in common with other people.
If that psychological stress is destructive, then to whom? To your thought-idea of who you are and what your goals in life are about? To the notion that you are happy if you get what you want and miserable if you don't?
It's not about perfection and imperfection. It's about the fact that you are a be-coming "evolving" type of being. You are moving in a direction. Unless you were frozen in Carbonite like Han Solo then you can't sit still. You are either improving and becoming more so or you are decaying and becoming less so.
Thus, it's not about experiencing absolute perfection right now. Likewise, you have your flaws but you are not experiencing absolute imperfection right now, for some things you do are successful. It's about the direction towards which you are heading. It's not about attaining total perfection. It's about moving towards it even when completely confident you may never firmly reach it. It's not the destination that counts; it is the journey.
Absolutely. I either provide an undeniable example of that beauty, right here and right now, in front of your face, on Earth and not in some specu
I find the easiest way to identify a dumb person is by seeing who makes narcissistic, holier-than-thou posts on Slashdot.
The mods got it right this time, you are indeed a troll. But what the hell... Isn't that what you're doing by failing to dispute a single point I made and instead going for the ad-hominem? If I'm so dumb, why can't you successfully contradict my position?
Tell me, how would you define "stupid" if you would exclude useless behaviors that accomplish nothing for the person performing them (otherwise they'd just be selfish) and are also a detriment to everyone around them?
It's no mystery you were unable to dispute what I said, for my reasoning was sound. So you dislike what you were unable to find fault with. That's inherently irrational. But wait, it gets better. Like the narcissist you accuse me of being, you operate out of an assumption that anything you dislike must be faulty, since in your (narcissistic) view your discomfort upon reading my words couldn't possibly indicate a fault within you. So all you can do to retaliate against me who would dare say something you don't like is to call me names. How classy.
You don't see the hypocrisy of that, do you? I'm no fan of modern psychology, but what you're doing there is called Freudian projection.
The difference between you and I is that I can and did back up what I am saying with sound reason. The "holier-than-thou" person is the one who doesn't recognize the burden of proof that comes with making an accusation, as though the fact that they have declared something to be true should be good enough for anybody. If you don't wish to understand that, you won't, and that will be your loss. It's really no concern of mine if you want to live the rest of your life this way. No matter what you do, I'm not wasting my time because his might be valuable for anyone else who reads this and has to deal with people like you.
It's not even about common sense, it's more a problem with discretion. I cannot believe some of the things people tweet or post about on Facebook--things that I would think any self-respecting person would know better than to share with the world. It's like it's a contest to see who has the most embarrassing dirty laundry. Then there are the people who think their every stray thought is worth a Facebook status update. Well, it isn't. Odds are, no one cares.
Most people would be better off if they just kept their mouths shut and their keyboards silent.
Discretion is not compatible with the narcissism and vanity that drives a person to think that the world needs to know every last detail about their personal lives, as though they were a celebrity who can hardly shop at a grocery store without having it published in the tabloids. That's why the people with discretion are relatively silent compared to the ones you're talking about.
Common sense does not begin to enter the picture until well after vanity is recognized as the empty and useless pursuit that it is and rejected on those terms. Until then, any satisfaction derived from personal exhibitionism is hollow and fleeting which is why the person must engage in more and more of it to maintain the sense that they are "somebody". If it accomplished anything or had any lasting value, then there would not be the need you have recognized to sink lower and lower and engage in it more and more intensely. It is, as they say, a chasing after the wind.
Now, I really enjoy and appreciate freedom. I recognize that this includes the right to do something self-defeating and stupid as long as you don't force others to participate. So I believe it would be wrong to lift a finger towards trying to stop anyone from doing this. The point is, there are very good reasons why I haven't jumped on this bandwagon. It is not just a matter of personal taste or preference no matter how badly some want to legitimize it by portraying it that way.
Yeah, I know, but this is still a whoosh...
Her “peers” are, logically, people who are just as dumb as she is... and what better way to flush out dumb people than by posting something dumb on facebook and seeing who “likes” it?
Dumb people aren't all that hard to identify. They're usually rather eager to advertise this fact about themselves, though unwittingly.
There's nothing like a good old car(-related) analogy so I'll give a driving analogy as an example. A lot of people don't seem to understand that the long turning lanes on many major roads are there for a purpose. They exist so that a driver doesn't have to start slowing down for the turn until after going into the turning lane, eliminating the need to slow down all of the traffic behind them just to make a turn. Yet a lot of drivers don't understand this and will gladly slow down everyone behind them, needlessly, completely oblivious to how their actions affect others. If you ever see traffic slow to a crawl on a day when there aren't that many cars on the road, it's because of a multitude of people who may be several miles ahead doing inconsiderate things like this.
That's generally the mark of stupid people everywhere. They are capricious, self-serving, and do not act in a deliberate fashion with a full awareness of how their actions affect others. Most of them are not malicious because malice would require intent and an ability to plan one's actions according to that intent, something the stupid are generally unable or unwilling to do. A juror who, if not for this judge, would have conducted a jury trial with an obvious bias without regard for the jeopardy the accused is in would be another iteration of the same pattern.