If you really want to prevent Nazis from gaining power again, don't outright ban them in your constitution. Codify principles incompatible with Naziism in your constitution. Freedom of religion, Freedom of Expression, etc. As long as Freedom of Expression is not protected by your constitution, it can be taken away from you. When (not if) that happens, do you really care if it was the Nazis or some other group?
Because, by definition, the american way is the only right way, isn't it? Other approaches to the issues of society are inferior, you don't even have to examine them, right?
Freedom of Speech is a valued right all over Europe. However, its place in the value system is slightly different. Instead of the american approach where it's a supreme right, it is one amongst others. We europeans have this funny idea that there are some things that could be more important. We don't even value Freedom itself as the #1 superior-to-everything value. We took the damage from the two world wars. We've become a peace-loving bunch and we're ready to restrict a few freedoms if it means preventing WW3. Funny thought, eh? Taking away the Freedom to Kill, the Freedom to Genocide and the Freedom to Oppress Everyone Else.
We value Freedom of Speech, but we understand that a society is not built on Freedom of Speech alone.
I don't know about you but I find the rationale for this type of censorship to be utterly absurd. So much for free speech.....
Yeah, how could they ever make such a law?
The allies, I mean. This law is not an invention of the german parliament. In fact, at the time it was created (right after the war), there was no german government. Germany was under allied occupation. Guess they thought those evil nazi germans couldn't handle free speech anyways. Funny how their children today think those evil nazi germans should try free speech for a change...
That makes it pretty much a no-go as far as video game villains go. You need someone who nobody sympathizes with, like aliens or nazis or corporations.
Your reasons for denying the existence of history are over now.
I take it you've never actually been to Germany and most importantly not to a german school.
Let me tell you that as kids, we got that part of history absolutely hammered into our heads, stuff down our throats, until it came out our ears. That denial you accuse us of is the worst fear of everyone in education, history, politics. As a matter of fact, I personally think they're overdoing it to the point of making kids sympathize with the Nazi ideology due to polarity response effects.
Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
Good, otherwise the same minute I saw a windos "ribbon" on my Mac, Firefox would go straight from Applications to Wastebasket.
Seriously, copying others is all cool. It's how progress is made. But you copy the good parts, not the idiocity. That's what evolution is about - copy, mutate, weed out the crap. You can't leave out the third step, they're all important.
Advise to the Firefox people: Make it an option. Then gather statistics and see how many people really prefer it. You could be wrong. I could be wrong. You don't know until you test it.
There must be some reason why the South of Japan is not one mass of Kudzu and cogongrass.
The reason is called "evolution". If you have it around long enough, animals will adapt to eat it. If nothing else works, they will during the first starvation period.
If you introduce it to a new ecosystem, you have to wait for a few ten-thousand years or so before that happens. Clearly, the governor is not a patient man.
I can think of several cryptographic approaches, depending on what exactly it is you want.
You could combine distributed keys with a one-time key system, which would of course require additional DRM on the client side, but it would solve the "secret assembly" problem.
You could set up a network of competing key holder notes, who are paid (by the consumer, of course) for their key parts. Since the key parts have value in this system, it would be irrational for them to share them with the competitors.
It would be possible to use a distributed anonymous system where no key holder knows who the other key holders are, but the key can be assembled on request. A variant of the cocain protocol comes to mind, but there are certainly other options.
Of course, I'm sure DRM fanatics are already trying to figure out quantum cryptography. After all, it provides them "for free" with their holy grail: A key that self-destructs when you view it.:-)
People usually do things for reasons, you know?:-)
We all have our reasons, and if anywhere then you'll find the "because I can" quite an ok reason among IT people. Who here has not spent several hours writing a script to automate a process that takes a few seconds each time, and thus will not recoup the invested effort in your lifetime?:-)
I hope you die young. Seriously. If we get world hunger solved, and peace eternal, people will start to complain about even less important stuff. People complain about things, it's part of human nature. Just because 500 people died in Africa today before I got out of bed doesn't mean I don't feel that particular idiot at work is a friggin' [censored].
You can't deny people's feelings with a rational appeal to global standards.
Didn't RTFA either, but there are several distributed key systems where you can send a key to X people and if Y of them (with Y=X, and it can be a specific number) come together, they can decrypt. Something like that could work in a P2P system where you could have several distributed points of authority instead of one, none of them holds "the key", and some of them can go down and you can still assemble the key from the remaining ones.
it possible that peer-to-peer networks could reemerge in the future as a viable, albeit protected, source of content."
re-emerge? they're already here, and not going away viable? check, they are today source of content? check, massively
protected? who wants that? There's no demand on the customer side. Unprotected will always win. Heck, I've downloaded cracks for games that I bought and I'm sure if I were to ask for a show of hands, it would be huge.
How about making content more convenient instead of more troublesome? Maybe then you'd stand a chance, you know?
Re:history changes, human nature doesn't
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Not so sure about that. WoW is the biggest game by far, yes. But on the company level? Have you checked out NCSoft lately? If you total all their games (and don't forget that the biggest MMORPG market isn't the west, but asia, so make sure to count in the titles that were never released in the west!), I'm not entirely sure where you'd end up.
It's just a rough idea, not a finished one. Yes, by article count might work, but I wouldn't consider it "fair". Time, maybe. I don't know.
The main part was that our technology can help us in the distribution. My browser already knows which news sites I frequent most often, or which articles I spent the most time reading. Now I could've just went shopping, it doesn't know that, but it could generate a list of suggestions for me, allowing me to spend five minutes each month to say "check, check, check, nah I was just shopping, check, that site sucked no idea why it's on this list, check, check" and have a better distribution system than GEMA. If I can set up preferences on how the list is generated, it'll be pretty close to what I actually think of the various sites' values.
Except that basic economics assumes the rational individual.
Corporations are not only rational, they are also immoral. And I mean that as a simple statement of fact, not as an insult.
So a corporation will quite happily price in virtual taxes into their product price calculations, and then never pay them. It will produce where production works best, but try not to pay taxes there. And it has many more ways available to it than a human being does (or can you split yourself up to have a permanent sub-part of yourself in a low-tax country?).
Or maybe in other words: It does not only look for the optimal solution for itself (the "rational individual" of economics theory), it will engage in actively changing the rules to its advantage (lobbying is the legal way to do that, bribery a more common one).
People "get" that pictures are representations, not reality, very quickly, and at a very young age. People do not "get" that pictures, especially photographs, do not always represent reality quite that easily. Especially not when so much of our information (news, magazines, Internet, TV) is visual and uses pictures to "tell the truth".
Because you can copy that. With a bit of surgergy, you can actually look that way. But photoshopped pictures show persons that do not and can not exist in that "perfection".
Problem is that we have almost zero media education for our youth. We don't tell them the difference between truth and bullshit when it comes to photographs, Internet, advertisement, TV news, politics and a whole lot of other things. They learn on their own, but it takes time. During those years, they believe what they see in the magazines is what "beautiful people" really look like.
It sounds crazy to an adult, but there are some pathways in the human brain that don't get activated until almost the teen years. That's the real reason for protecting children from some things. Unfortunately, parental hysteria has blown it out of proportion and into territories where kids don't need any protection.
It would not have to be voluntary. I don't mind a fixed amount of money I have to give to the media industry, as long as it satisfies two conditions:
a) it is relative to the amount I actually consume (no TV = no TV fee) b) I can decide how it gets distributed, none of this GEMA crap (GEMA is the german institution that collects and distributes royalties, usually to the top acts)
One problem is, of course, that often times you can only estimate the worth of an article after reading it.
I wouldn't mind a system that tells me at the end of the month about the top 10 news sites I've read and allows me to say "yeah, they were good, give them some money". I know I have a few regular sites that I'd give some right now if it were as easy as a PayPal link.
history changes, human nature doesn't
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,'
Funny how that drives games development until this day. It's not 3 lives, but in the MMO market, for example, few dare to deviate from the "Level 60 cap, classes, crafting and grinding" concept. And those that do are almost always the minor players.
The makers of the watch claim it gives peace of mind to parents
Yeah, because that's the most important thing in bringing up children, right?
It's called trust, parents. One evil detail about trust is that knowing is the opposite of trust. By replacing trust with knowledge, you're removing it. So if you don't trust your kids, you have to check on their every move. If you don't trust the people, you have to have surveilance everywhere. It really is the same mindset that's driving both of these developments of society.
And yes, this includes the kidnapping scenario. What, exactly, do you gain by a real-time alert that your kid has been kidnapped? It's not like it would prevent it.
Now the numbers. Yes, you read stuff like this:
Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child is reported missing or abducted.
That's 17% of the reported cases where something serious is actually going on. But that's just the surface. Actual crime statistics show a better picture:
In 1999, only 115 children were abducted by strangers with the intent to keep, kill or hold them for ransom.
Now that's a very different figure (almost the same year, though). It does exclude sexual abuse, which accounts for a fair share and is certainly almost as frightening to a parent than a murder. However:
"Family kidnapping" accounts for nearly 50% of all child kidnappings.
(same source)
Now we're getting somewhere. Look, in the "reported missing" as well as in the "involuntary" cases above, one very common case is fully included, as if it were equal to a kidnap-rape-and-kill case: That of one parent in a divorce taking the child without the other parent's knowledge or consent. Yepp, legally that's a kidnapping.
So if you throw enough stuff together under the same label, you can get big enough numbers to frighten parents senseless with. Which you can then use to sell them stuff, pass new laws or whatever it is that was your original intend.
Because you could get paid for doing it. Obviously, the payment for unpopular jobs would have to be high enough to find people who want the money badly enough.
Remember, it's just a basic income. Most of us would have lifestyle desires that require additional income, i.e. a job.
So if you didn't have to work -- and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
You don't have to be reach to be able to do what you want. The idea of Basic Income is getting widespread support and the movement has been growing for some years. What if you didn't have to work? I have a flyer on my desk right now with the exact same question (in german).
Indeed, most of us would probably pursue their hobby projects, and find out that people are willing to pay for them. I make money with hobby stuff. Not enough for a living, but some here and some there. It's surprising what people are willing to pay for if they don't need every cent for the rent.
You probably don't want them in your car, either, much less pay for them.
Yet when you crash and survive because of them, you'll be glad you had them. It's simple, really - if the "invisible hand" doesn't work, apply a visible hand. I'm all for trying the invisible one first, but if after 2000 years, it still hasn't ended war and poverty and the general misery of mankind, it might be time to reconsider the facts.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to prevent Nazis from gaining power again, don't outright ban them in your constitution. Codify principles incompatible with Naziism in your constitution. Freedom of religion, Freedom of Expression, etc. As long as Freedom of Expression is not protected by your constitution, it can be taken away from you. When (not if) that happens, do you really care if it was the Nazis or some other group?
Because, by definition, the american way is the only right way, isn't it? Other approaches to the issues of society are inferior, you don't even have to examine them, right?
Freedom of Speech is a valued right all over Europe. However, its place in the value system is slightly different. Instead of the american approach where it's a supreme right, it is one amongst others. We europeans have this funny idea that there are some things that could be more important. We don't even value Freedom itself as the #1 superior-to-everything value. We took the damage from the two world wars. We've become a peace-loving bunch and we're ready to restrict a few freedoms if it means preventing WW3. Funny thought, eh? Taking away the Freedom to Kill, the Freedom to Genocide and the Freedom to Oppress Everyone Else.
We value Freedom of Speech, but we understand that a society is not built on Freedom of Speech alone.
I don't know about you but I find the rationale for this type of censorship to be utterly absurd. So much for free speech.....
Yeah, how could they ever make such a law?
The allies, I mean. This law is not an invention of the german parliament. In fact, at the time it was created (right after the war), there was no german government. Germany was under allied occupation. Guess they thought those evil nazi germans couldn't handle free speech anyways. Funny how their children today think those evil nazi germans should try free speech for a change...
That makes it pretty much a no-go as far as video game villains go. You need someone who nobody sympathizes with, like aliens or nazis or corporations.
Lawyers?
Your reasons for denying the existence of history are over now.
I take it you've never actually been to Germany and most importantly not to a german school.
Let me tell you that as kids, we got that part of history absolutely hammered into our heads, stuff down our throats, until it came out our ears. That denial you accuse us of is the worst fear of everyone in education, history, politics. As a matter of fact, I personally think they're overdoing it to the point of making kids sympathize with the Nazi ideology due to polarity response effects.
Limi notes, too, that Linux and Mac versions are unaffected by the change.
Good, otherwise the same minute I saw a windos "ribbon" on my Mac, Firefox would go straight from Applications to Wastebasket.
Seriously, copying others is all cool. It's how progress is made. But you copy the good parts, not the idiocity. That's what evolution is about - copy, mutate, weed out the crap. You can't leave out the third step, they're all important.
Advise to the Firefox people: Make it an option. Then gather statistics and see how many people really prefer it. You could be wrong. I could be wrong. You don't know until you test it.
There must be some reason why the South of Japan is not one mass of Kudzu and cogongrass.
The reason is called "evolution". If you have it around long enough, animals will adapt to eat it. If nothing else works, they will during the first starvation period.
If you introduce it to a new ecosystem, you have to wait for a few ten-thousand years or so before that happens. Clearly, the governor is not a patient man.
I can think of several cryptographic approaches, depending on what exactly it is you want.
You could combine distributed keys with a one-time key system, which would of course require additional DRM on the client side, but it would solve the "secret assembly" problem.
You could set up a network of competing key holder notes, who are paid (by the consumer, of course) for their key parts. Since the key parts have value in this system, it would be irrational for them to share them with the competitors.
It would be possible to use a distributed anonymous system where no key holder knows who the other key holders are, but the key can be assembled on request. A variant of the cocain protocol comes to mind, but there are certainly other options.
Of course, I'm sure DRM fanatics are already trying to figure out quantum cryptography. After all, it provides them "for free" with their holy grail: A key that self-destructs when you view it. :-)
Sometimes, I hate HTML.
Of course it has to be Y <= X - aka Y less than or equal to X. That's the whole point. With Y=X that would a trivial.
People usually do things for reasons, you know? :-)
We all have our reasons, and if anywhere then you'll find the "because I can" quite an ok reason among IT people. Who here has not spent several hours writing a script to automate a process that takes a few seconds each time, and thus will not recoup the invested effort in your lifetime? :-)
I hope you die young. Seriously. If we get world hunger solved, and peace eternal, people will start to complain about even less important stuff. People complain about things, it's part of human nature. Just because 500 people died in Africa today before I got out of bed doesn't mean I don't feel that particular idiot at work is a friggin' [censored].
You can't deny people's feelings with a rational appeal to global standards.
Because so far, they've been very successul in forcing expensive shit down people's throats while free alternatives were available.
Except that they still haven't adopted for a world with Internet. :-)
Didn't RTFA either, but there are several distributed key systems where you can send a key to X people and if Y of them (with Y=X, and it can be a specific number) come together, they can decrypt. Something like that could work in a P2P system where you could have several distributed points of authority instead of one, none of them holds "the key", and some of them can go down and you can still assemble the key from the remaining ones.
"embrace" and all that?
Look:
it possible that peer-to-peer networks could reemerge in the future as a viable, albeit protected, source of content."
re-emerge? they're already here, and not going away
viable? check, they are today
source of content? check, massively
protected? who wants that? There's no demand on the customer side. Unprotected will always win. Heck, I've downloaded cracks for games that I bought and I'm sure if I were to ask for a show of hands, it would be huge.
How about making content more convenient instead of more troublesome? Maybe then you'd stand a chance, you know?
Not so sure about that. WoW is the biggest game by far, yes. But on the company level? Have you checked out NCSoft lately? If you total all their games (and don't forget that the biggest MMORPG market isn't the west, but asia, so make sure to count in the titles that were never released in the west!), I'm not entirely sure where you'd end up.
It's just a rough idea, not a finished one. Yes, by article count might work, but I wouldn't consider it "fair". Time, maybe. I don't know.
The main part was that our technology can help us in the distribution. My browser already knows which news sites I frequent most often, or which articles I spent the most time reading. Now I could've just went shopping, it doesn't know that, but it could generate a list of suggestions for me, allowing me to spend five minutes each month to say "check, check, check, nah I was just shopping, check, that site sucked no idea why it's on this list, check, check" and have a better distribution system than GEMA. If I can set up preferences on how the list is generated, it'll be pretty close to what I actually think of the various sites' values.
Except that basic economics assumes the rational individual.
Corporations are not only rational, they are also immoral. And I mean that as a simple statement of fact, not as an insult.
So a corporation will quite happily price in virtual taxes into their product price calculations, and then never pay them. It will produce where production works best, but try not to pay taxes there. And it has many more ways available to it than a human being does (or can you split yourself up to have a permanent sub-part of yourself in a low-tax country?).
Or maybe in other words: It does not only look for the optimal solution for itself (the "rational individual" of economics theory), it will engage in actively changing the rules to its advantage (lobbying is the legal way to do that, bribery a more common one).
Funny, but misleading.
People "get" that pictures are representations, not reality, very quickly, and at a very young age. People do not "get" that pictures, especially photographs, do not always represent reality quite that easily. Especially not when so much of our information (news, magazines, Internet, TV) is visual and uses pictures to "tell the truth".
Because you can copy that. With a bit of surgergy, you can actually look that way. But photoshopped pictures show persons that do not and can not exist in that "perfection".
Problem is that we have almost zero media education for our youth. We don't tell them the difference between truth and bullshit when it comes to photographs, Internet, advertisement, TV news, politics and a whole lot of other things. They learn on their own, but it takes time. During those years, they believe what they see in the magazines is what "beautiful people" really look like.
It sounds crazy to an adult, but there are some pathways in the human brain that don't get activated until almost the teen years. That's the real reason for protecting children from some things. Unfortunately, parental hysteria has blown it out of proportion and into territories where kids don't need any protection.
It would not have to be voluntary. I don't mind a fixed amount of money I have to give to the media industry, as long as it satisfies two conditions:
a) it is relative to the amount I actually consume (no TV = no TV fee)
b) I can decide how it gets distributed, none of this GEMA crap (GEMA is the german institution that collects and distributes royalties, usually to the top acts)
The technology exists.
One problem is, of course, that often times you can only estimate the worth of an article after reading it.
I wouldn't mind a system that tells me at the end of the month about the top 10 news sites I've read and allows me to say "yeah, they were good, give them some money". I know I have a few regular sites that I'd give some right now if it were as easy as a PayPal link.
'They just didn't get it; they wanted a high score and they wanted players to have three lives,'
Funny how that drives games development until this day. It's not 3 lives, but in the MMO market, for example, few dare to deviate from the "Level 60 cap, classes, crafting and grinding" concept. And those that do are almost always the minor players.
The makers of the watch claim it gives peace of mind to parents
Yeah, because that's the most important thing in bringing up children, right?
It's called trust, parents. One evil detail about trust is that knowing is the opposite of trust. By replacing trust with knowledge, you're removing it. So if you don't trust your kids, you have to check on their every move. If you don't trust the people, you have to have surveilance everywhere. It really is the same mindset that's driving both of these developments of society.
And yes, this includes the kidnapping scenario. What, exactly, do you gain by a real-time alert that your kid has been kidnapped? It's not like it would prevent it.
Now the numbers. Yes, you read stuff like this:
Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child is reported missing or abducted.
(source)
Note the words "is reported missing". If you dig into the numbers a little deeper, you find that:
152,265 [of 876,213] of the persons reported missing in 2000 were categorized as either endangered or involuntary.
(source)
That's 17% of the reported cases where something serious is actually going on. But that's just the surface. Actual crime statistics show a better picture:
In 1999, only 115 children were abducted by strangers with the intent to keep, kill or hold them for ransom.
(source)
Now that's a very different figure (almost the same year, though). It does exclude sexual abuse, which accounts for a fair share and is certainly almost as frightening to a parent than a murder. However:
"Family kidnapping" accounts for nearly 50% of all child kidnappings.
(same source)
Now we're getting somewhere. Look, in the "reported missing" as well as in the "involuntary" cases above, one very common case is fully included, as if it were equal to a kidnap-rape-and-kill case: That of one parent in a divorce taking the child without the other parent's knowledge or consent. Yepp, legally that's a kidnapping.
So if you throw enough stuff together under the same label, you can get big enough numbers to frighten parents senseless with. Which you can then use to sell them stuff, pass new laws or whatever it is that was your original intend.
Because you could get paid for doing it. Obviously, the payment for unpopular jobs would have to be high enough to find people who want the money badly enough.
Remember, it's just a basic income. Most of us would have lifestyle desires that require additional income, i.e. a job.
So if you didn't have to work -- and had more money than George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
You don't have to be reach to be able to do what you want. The idea of Basic Income is getting widespread support and the movement has been growing for some years. What if you didn't have to work? I have a flyer on my desk right now with the exact same question (in german).
Indeed, most of us would probably pursue their hobby projects, and find out that people are willing to pay for them. I make money with hobby stuff. Not enough for a living, but some here and some there. It's surprising what people are willing to pay for if they don't need every cent for the rent.
You probably don't want them in your car, either, much less pay for them.
Yet when you crash and survive because of them, you'll be glad you had them. It's simple, really - if the "invisible hand" doesn't work, apply a visible hand. I'm all for trying the invisible one first, but if after 2000 years, it still hasn't ended war and poverty and the general misery of mankind, it might be time to reconsider the facts.