Perhaps these children are actually more in touch with reality than more educated people. Yes you can publish an article the government would not approve of but it will never happen in reality. It is in the interest of the Newspaper to censor themselves in order to maintain close ties with the military industrial complex which grant them access to needed stories. It is much less expensive for a paper to simply report on a government press conference they were invited to rather than alienate, say the Bush administration, and publish harsh criticism of government policy. Criticism of public policy is allowable if it falls within the accepted realm of debate. Hence papers are allowed to question the method by which American Empire should be allowed to function, however questioning whether or not the military industrial complex is even something that is beneficial to Americans is not allowed to be questioned. Honestly, we have congressmen who are put in office by the contributions of large corporate donors, which leaves them beholden to these companies. Does this ever make front page? No, instead we have front page news about who a senator is sleeping with. Wake up people, what these kids are talking about is reality. No matter how much you stick your head in the sand the filtering of public discourse is real.
Didn't the RIAA push the DMCA through congress? If they are making laws that put industry rights over consumer rights I think that shows them to be extremely relevant no matter what your position on copyrights is.
Quite funny, however the UK has not dictated anything to the US since before WWII. It has been the other way around.
Re:What a stupid question....
on
No Pictures, Thanks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The police don't necessarily care about photos when they are beating people. In many cases they are following orders. For instance, when the police are sent in to break up a peaceful demonstration they go in with full riot gear and Billy clubs. The NYC Republican convention protests are a great example of this.
Throughout the 19th century there are many examples of authorites ordered to repress civilians of america. The 1932 Bonus Army in which the US military was dispatched against peaceful civilian demonstrators. From 1920 to 1940 police were used extensively to break up peaceful and violent union picket lines. Often times these actions resulted in the death of american civilians.
It's not one or two "bad cops". It is a purposefully placed systematic corruption aimed at benefiting the powerful.
Another example of abuse of innocents by our American government is the Abu Ghraib Prison scandals. The jailors were not ashamed of what they did. They were just following orders. Hell, they took pictures of themselves doing it. Were the people they were raping with broomsticks (yes there are documented cases of this) Hanging up in chains, beating with fists, attacking with dogs and even prisoners beaten to death. Were these people innocent? We will never know as they were never given a trial.
But back to my point. No cop is a bad cop when the entire system is corrupt.
"Innovating" is an interesting word. When did invention become innovation? Invention is the process of creating, of producing. Innovation is something a little different. Innovation can be taking an invention that you purchased and then remarketing it. You didn't invent the idea, however you innovated it. Somewhere along the course our society has taken innovation is what get compensated, not invention.
Actually I believe the -only- reason people innovate is profit. The reason people invent can be a little more varied.
The fact that Slashdot in particular and the general public at large are using the word innovate when they mean invent is a very interesting trend.
Please allow me to be the first to say that I don't care for Orson Scott cards work. Enders Game was a great book, simply outstanding in its brevity intensity and pure gung ho military appeal. But it was all downhill from there. I read speaker for the dead and was left wondering what doppelganger had eaten the author of enders game and then pooped out that drivel some call the second novel of the series, Speaker for the Carebears. I also read the second Enders game, Beans Revenge. I rate that one about half the book Enders Game was. I then read the NEXT Beans Revenge book, entitled Montezuma's Revenge, which seemed a flimsy attempt at a contemporary spy novel set in the future. I got about half way through it and threw it down in disgust. And this is a book I paid 8 dollars for NEW (who in their right mind buys new books anyways? Not me ever again!).
Anyways to summarize, Orson Scott Card is a mediocre author with one outstanding work that he has been cashing in on for 20 years by selling utter crap sequels.
The end.
Oh yah to keep this on topic, I would never play an Orson Scott Card based MMO
Re:Americans have brought much of this on ourselve
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
"The U.S. took a real beating on the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index"
From the site, (http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/) economic freedom is partly a measure how much a government interferes with business. Those pesky things like minimum wages, overtime pay, and regulated safe working conditions. You know, those things that make America a desirable place to live? The more of those you have in a country the lower that country rates on the "economic freedom" scale. So "economic freedom" is a euphemism for "oppressed citizenry". Personally I thank god that our country scores poorly on "economic freedom".
The parent then goes on to cite ways he would like to improve our country, such as removing social safety nets: "Get rid of Social Security and Medicare and make employees responsible for their own medical care and retirement." Because of course poor people are just lazy, never mind that many people work two part time jobs totaling over 40 hours a week and are thus ineligible for healthcare. But their poor, right? So who cares!
Another gem from the parent article: "With retirement accounts it is possible to come out much richer than one would get with SS."
Because economic markets are so stable! Let's just try to forget all the people who lost all their savings with companies' deceitful accounting and the dot com crash.
"Many of the people who have no insurance and rely on Medicare could afford private insurance if they give up amenities like cable TV, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food."
I agree! Considering that many working families live on 1000$ a month net pay and the last quote I saw for private insurance was 400$ a month, It is very easy! (If you're a Vietnamese person sharing a one bedroom studio with 30 of your closest relatives)
"There are also many charities that support those who can't..."
Oh yah, the charity to fund peoples hernia operations. They just helped me out with mine...
"Americans will cost a lot less to hire." Let me point out another country where labor is extremely cheap. MEXICO! You're right; we should model our economy on the example of a third world country.
I hope to god that the above poster was trolling and doesn't actually believe what he wrote.
____________________ As a side note, pvp in level up games is lame and always will be. There is just no way to ever deal with the situation where one person has lower level skills then the other person. Either you have to softcap a players power early on, or just remove the level/skill barrier and keep everyone equally. Otherwise you are just stuck with a guy who put more time into his char then you who's going to win no matter what you do, which is no fun, even if you are the higher level player. ____________________
There are some ways to control this. One is to have a level cap that people can reach that will even out high level PvP (in a game where power is primarily determined by level). Another way is to impliment item decay, where your items do not last forever (in a game where power is determined by items).
You're right though, most people do see this as detrimental. However, some people see it differently. There are those who see it as assurance that even though they lack skills their dedication to the game ensures victory. Other people who are on the short end of the stick see it as adding a danger element to the game. That type of thing is not for everyone but there is a die hard element to MMOG's that enjoy it, which is why most games have seperate PVP servers.
Stealing murdering and cheating, slandering backstabbing and insulting; these are the bread and butter of any good story. What would Star Wars have been without a sinister lying backstabbing Vader to vanquish? What kind of story would the Indiana Jones movies have been without the evil Nazi presence? Even in Greek and Roman mythology the gods competed and backstabbed each other. Without conflict these stories are not worth telling, and without real conflict MMO's are not worth playing.
Why play a game and experience this conflict in the third person, through washed out scripted plots (quests) where you play a peripheral third party role when you can experience it in the first person and actually be a part of the plot. Sure everyone hates a griefer who steals people's loot and kills player characters over and over again. But everyone loves to team up on a griefer and kill him. I recall a story about original UO pvp that I read on the SWG forums. There was a particularly nasty guild of greifers that were terrorizing the server. Their victims teamed up together and killed one of the griefers by using a mob of low level characters and stole his house key. In that characters house they found the keys to every house the guild owned and stole every item they had. It was an aboslute victory for the good guys. This battle is -legendary- in MMO history and has all the ingredients people are trying to take out of MMOG's; stealing, murdering, griefing, and player killing.
Would you rather do the same quest that 200,000 other people have done, including finding the spoiler online and doing step A, step B, step, C, rinse, repeat, etc, on to infinity, or would you rather contribute to the unique history of your game; creating legends that people will talk about for months or years to come.
A couple tips for removing spyware from windows. Run both ad-aware and spybot - search and destroy. after you run them you might still have some spyware. If this happens turn off system restore (at your own risk)and then reboot into safe-mode and run the checkers again. This can remove some of the hangers on. Also a great utility is www.doxdesk.com. It shows you how to manually unregister DLL files and also does a web based check for some common spyware.
What The Bubble Got Right: a long winded cry for a bygone era.
It is the VC money that drove the internet boom, not any great innovation on the part of the young college graduates. The internet boom only changed the flow of VC money from the established business types who would normally receive it into the hands of technical graduates who normally would not see it. That trend is at an end and the capital is again flowing along the traditional paths. In fact the trend of CS majors getting rich has reversed as the market has become flooded with technically degreed college graduates who all hoped to get rich. The irony of it is that the jobs that would have been available are disappearing through the medium the author has assisted in popularizing, in that technically competent people can be outsourced cheaply through off shoring via the internet.
[H]ard OCP posted a review of the phantom console detailing Phantoms liberal use of Hot glue in its construction and the lack of appeal of a subscription based console among other things. http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjU3
Also [H]ardOCP posted an editorial about the failed history of other ventures that the CEO of Infinium Labs, Timothy M. Roberts, has attempted.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEyLDE=
This during the time when Infinium Labs was (and still is) attempting to raise capitol to start production of the Phantom. Understandably Infinium Labs sued [H]ardOCP for slander.
I like [H]ard OCP because they stay true to their roots and post mostly about motherboards and stories interesting to the [H]ardware community while other hardware sites are now posting useless reviews of webcams, PDA's and wireless routers which have little to do with making your game machine be all it can be.(anandtech and tomshardwareguide).
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps these children are actually more in touch with reality than more educated people. Yes you can publish an article the government would not approve of but it will never happen in reality. It is in the interest of the Newspaper to censor themselves in order to maintain close ties with the military industrial complex which grant them access to needed stories. It is much less expensive for a paper to simply report on a government press conference they were invited to rather than alienate, say the Bush administration, and publish harsh criticism of government policy.
Criticism of public policy is allowable if it falls within the accepted realm of debate. Hence papers are allowed to question the method by which American Empire should be allowed to function, however questioning whether or not the military industrial complex is even something that is beneficial to Americans is not allowed to be questioned.
Honestly, we have congressmen who are put in office by the contributions of large corporate donors, which leaves them beholden to these companies. Does this ever make front page? No, instead we have front page news about who a senator is sleeping with.
Wake up people, what these kids are talking about is reality. No matter how much you stick your head in the sand the filtering of public discourse is real.
Didn't the RIAA push the DMCA through congress? If they are making laws that put industry rights over consumer rights I think that shows them to be extremely relevant no matter what your position on copyrights is.
Quite funny, however the UK has not dictated anything to the US since before WWII. It has been the other way around.
The police don't necessarily care about photos when they are beating people. In many cases they are following orders. For instance, when the police are sent in to break up a peaceful demonstration they go in with full riot gear and Billy clubs. The NYC Republican convention protests are a great example of this. Throughout the 19th century there are many examples of authorites ordered to repress civilians of america. The 1932 Bonus Army in which the US military was dispatched against peaceful civilian demonstrators. From 1920 to 1940 police were used extensively to break up peaceful and violent union picket lines. Often times these actions resulted in the death of american civilians. It's not one or two "bad cops". It is a purposefully placed systematic corruption aimed at benefiting the powerful. Another example of abuse of innocents by our American government is the Abu Ghraib Prison scandals. The jailors were not ashamed of what they did. They were just following orders. Hell, they took pictures of themselves doing it. Were the people they were raping with broomsticks (yes there are documented cases of this) Hanging up in chains, beating with fists, attacking with dogs and even prisoners beaten to death. Were these people innocent? We will never know as they were never given a trial. But back to my point. No cop is a bad cop when the entire system is corrupt.
"Innovating" is an interesting word. When did invention become innovation? Invention is the process of creating, of producing. Innovation is something a little different. Innovation can be taking an invention that you purchased and then remarketing it. You didn't invent the idea, however you innovated it. Somewhere along the course our society has taken innovation is what get compensated, not invention.
Actually I believe the -only- reason people innovate is profit. The reason people invent can be a little more varied.
The fact that Slashdot in particular and the general public at large are using the word innovate when they mean invent is a very interesting trend.
http://www.tron-sector.com/images/troncostl.jpg
This will change the definition of E-penis!
5 dollars says they will take out Alai's muslim religious beliefs, entirely removing all references to "salaam"
Note to moderators, please mod this -1 troll
Oh, of course someone says they don't like an author it's an obvious troll! Nevermind his other books actually DID suck.
Please allow me to be the first to say that I don't care for Orson Scott cards work. Enders Game was a great book, simply outstanding in its brevity intensity and pure gung ho military appeal. But it was all downhill from there. I read speaker for the dead and was left wondering what doppelganger had eaten the author of enders game and then pooped out that drivel some call the second novel of the series, Speaker for the Carebears. I also read the second Enders game, Beans Revenge. I rate that one about half the book Enders Game was. I then read the NEXT Beans Revenge book, entitled Montezuma's Revenge, which seemed a flimsy attempt at a contemporary spy novel set in the future. I got about half way through it and threw it down in disgust. And this is a book I paid 8 dollars for NEW (who in their right mind buys new books anyways? Not me ever again!). Anyways to summarize, Orson Scott Card is a mediocre author with one outstanding work that he has been cashing in on for 20 years by selling utter crap sequels. The end. Oh yah to keep this on topic, I would never play an Orson Scott Card based MMO
"The U.S. took a real beating on the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index"
) economic freedom is partly a measure how much a government interferes with business. Those pesky things like minimum wages, overtime pay, and regulated safe working conditions. You know, those things that make America a desirable place to live? The more of those you have in a country the lower that country rates on the "economic freedom" scale. So "economic freedom" is a euphemism for "oppressed citizenry". Personally I thank god that our country scores poorly on "economic freedom".
From the site, (http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/
The parent then goes on to cite ways he would like to improve our country, such as removing social safety nets:
"Get rid of Social Security and Medicare and make employees responsible for their own medical care and retirement."
Because of course poor people are just lazy, never mind that many people work two part time jobs totaling over 40 hours a week and are thus ineligible for healthcare. But their poor, right? So who cares!
Another gem from the parent article:
"With retirement accounts it is possible to come out much richer than one would get with SS."
Because economic markets are so stable! Let's just try to forget all the people who lost all their savings with companies' deceitful accounting and the dot com crash.
"Many of the people who have no insurance and rely on Medicare could afford private insurance if they give up amenities like cable TV, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food."
I agree! Considering that many working families live on 1000$ a month net pay and the last quote I saw for private insurance was 400$ a month, It is very easy! (If you're a Vietnamese person sharing a one bedroom studio with 30 of your closest relatives)
"There are also many charities that support those who can't..."
Oh yah, the charity to fund peoples hernia operations. They just helped me out with mine...
"Americans will cost a lot less to hire."
Let me point out another country where labor is extremely cheap. MEXICO! You're right; we should model our economy on the example of a third world country.
I hope to god that the above poster was trolling and doesn't actually believe what he wrote.
Long live Sullon Zek! oh wait nevermind...
____________________
As a side note, pvp in level up games is lame and always will be. There is just no way to ever deal with the situation where one person has lower level skills then the other person. Either you have to softcap a players power early on, or just remove the level/skill barrier and keep everyone equally. Otherwise you are just stuck with a guy who put more time into his char then you who's going to win no matter what you do, which is no fun, even if you are the higher level player.
____________________
There are some ways to control this. One is to have a level cap that people can reach that will even out high level PvP (in a game where power is primarily determined by level). Another way is to impliment item decay, where your items do not last forever (in a game where power is determined by items).
You're right though, most people do see this as detrimental. However, some people see it differently. There are those who see it as assurance that even though they lack skills their dedication to the game ensures victory. Other people who are on the short end of the stick see it as adding a danger element to the game. That type of thing is not for everyone but there is a die hard element to MMOG's that enjoy it, which is why most games have seperate PVP servers.
Stealing murdering and cheating, slandering backstabbing and insulting; these are the bread and butter of any good story. What would Star Wars have been without a sinister lying backstabbing Vader to vanquish? What kind of story would the Indiana Jones movies have been without the evil Nazi presence? Even in Greek and Roman mythology the gods competed and backstabbed each other. Without conflict these stories are not worth telling, and without real conflict MMO's are not worth playing.
Why play a game and experience this conflict in the third person, through washed out scripted plots (quests) where you play a peripheral third party role when you can experience it in the first person and actually be a part of the plot. Sure everyone hates a griefer who steals people's loot and kills player characters over and over again. But everyone loves to team up on a griefer and kill him. I recall a story about original UO pvp that I read on the SWG forums. There was a particularly nasty guild of greifers that were terrorizing the server. Their victims teamed up together and killed one of the griefers by using a mob of low level characters and stole his house key. In that characters house they found the keys to every house the guild owned and stole every item they had. It was an aboslute victory for the good guys. This battle is -legendary- in MMO history and has all the ingredients people are trying to take out of MMOG's; stealing, murdering, griefing, and player killing.
Would you rather do the same quest that 200,000 other people have done, including finding the spoiler online and doing step A, step B, step, C, rinse, repeat, etc, on to infinity, or would you rather contribute to the unique history of your game; creating legends that people will talk about for months or years to come.
Except that Yahoo's toolbar is likely to include it's own version of spyware.
A couple tips for removing spyware from windows. Run both ad-aware and spybot - search and destroy. after you run them you might still have some spyware. If this happens turn off system restore (at your own risk)and then reboot into safe-mode and run the checkers again. This can remove some of the hangers on. Also a great utility is www.doxdesk.com. It shows you how to manually unregister DLL files and also does a web based check for some common spyware.
What The Bubble Got Right: a long winded cry for a bygone era. It is the VC money that drove the internet boom, not any great innovation on the part of the young college graduates. The internet boom only changed the flow of VC money from the established business types who would normally receive it into the hands of technical graduates who normally would not see it. That trend is at an end and the capital is again flowing along the traditional paths. In fact the trend of CS majors getting rich has reversed as the market has become flooded with technically degreed college graduates who all hoped to get rich. The irony of it is that the jobs that would have been available are disappearing through the medium the author has assisted in popularizing, in that technically competent people can be outsourced cheaply through off shoring via the internet.
[H]ard OCP posted a review of the phantom console detailing Phantoms liberal use of Hot glue in its construction and the lack of appeal of a subscription based console among other things. http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjU3 Also [H]ardOCP posted an editorial about the failed history of other ventures that the CEO of Infinium Labs, Timothy M. Roberts, has attempted. http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTEyLDE= This during the time when Infinium Labs was (and still is) attempting to raise capitol to start production of the Phantom. Understandably Infinium Labs sued [H]ardOCP for slander.
I like [H]ard OCP because they stay true to their roots and post mostly about motherboards and stories interesting to the [H]ardware community while other hardware sites are now posting useless reviews of webcams, PDA's and wireless routers which have little to do with making your game machine be all it can be.(anandtech and tomshardwareguide).