It's funny you should mention this, since Gates responded to a question by saying that what he most wished he had was Jobs' sense of taste. The crowd laughed (obviously remembering that quote), but Gates told them he wasn't joking, and went on to describe Jobs' sense of product design as "magical". Basically, he admitted something we've all known for many years: Microsoft is not as good as Apple is at making cool user interfaces.
That was pretty big of Gates. He went up in my estimation for that.
The institutional media simply cannot tell the truth about certain things. If they did, there would be a revolution in short order.
Can you imagine CNN reporting thus: "Today President Bush attempted to link Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein - this is a lie aimed at persuading Americans to support a war for oil/strategic dominance/etc."?
Yet this is the truth. Many people knew it at the time, and it was obviously correct, but you would never see this on a major network.
The media is part of the establishment. It's not a cabal of old white men who sit around deciding what the news will be, but a diffuse group of people with media power and similar interests. These are the people who tell us the way the world is. As individuals, we live in a very small world where we cannot verify most of the things we are told. Yet, we feel we must make sense of the world. Hence we turn to the media, who seem to know what "the general opinion" and "common sense" are.
So we get the old "the United States is a free country where any hardworking person can prosper" and "the United States government, while it makes mistakes, is always trying to do the decent thing" tropes. Think of all the "worldwide media events" that "everyone" watches, like Princess Diana's funeral (except it turns out that a hell of a lot of people ignored it). All of this is foisted upon us with the attempt of creating an imaginary community with imaginary norms.
Who actually believes this based on the evidence they gather outside of the media/industrial complex?
Nobody.
But who believes it nonetheless?
Most people.
Why?
Because the media gives the impression of a "common sense" point of view, such that if your own situation doesn't cohere with what they say, then it must be abnormal.
Unless you are a particularly strong willed person, you are not going to stand up for the evidence in front of your own eyes and the reasoning power of your own mind. But everyone knows on some level that the media never tells the whole truth, and never really deals with the real issues. That's because the societal myth they tell us doesn't pass fundamental tests of coherence. Even though your town is going through massive layoffs, everyone is better off than they were!!! Orwell would have been proud.
The point of 1984 is not that totalitarian state control of the media leads to false consciousness, but that control of the media by any minority leads to false consciousness.
The only possible way out of this is decentralised, participatory media. Fortunately, its hour is now at hand, and its effects are beginning to show. How many people who actively use the internet to get their information have not experienced the feeling that the political game played in the regular media is some sort of farce? In some respects I have always felt like this, but with the internet and my expanded access to information, I simply cannot avoid the feeling that the media's portrayal of politics is a ridiculous charade.
Me too. Seeing this thread made me feel really happy and pretty old at the same time.
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
The Spectrum just went to show how limited hardware resources would force game developers to write creative, original and addictive games. Knight Lore, RedHawk, Manic Miner, Heavy on the Magick, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Skooldaze, Sweevo's World and above all Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge were among the best games I have played on any platform. Shame on game developers for the formulaic crap they spew these days.
Does anyone else remember CRASH magazine? Whatever happened to those guys? It was almost worth being a spectrum owner just for that mag. Best and funniest game reviews ever, and Oliver Frey's covers were fantastic. For years I wanted to meet a girl like the one on this cover he did.
"Adults don't magically gain maturity on reaching 18 or 21."
No they don't. Some of them never do. But I tire of this so-called "argument". We can't tailor the law to every single individual, so we set an age (usually 18) where most people are considered to be responsible. If you think that is the wrong age when most people are responsible, then agitate for it to be raised or lowered. Abandoning it is not an option.
So what if we have to put up with a few mature kids being denied adult rights, or a few immature adults having them. The alternatives of everyone or no-one having them are clearly worse. Ultimately, in human affairs, lines must be drawn somewhere, whether we like it or not.
We're talking about children here. Most adults would brush off what is called cyber bullying. But a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't yet have the maturity to deal with these things. As an adult, I don't really care if people say mean things about me, and by and large people don't. But high school is a place where you are forced to go with a lot of people who often don't like each other and who spend their time inventing new and cruel ways to torture each other. Often it works because most teenagers care deeply about what the community thinks of them.
Laws against adult bullying are a lot more lax because adult bullies have a lot less opportunity to actually have an effect. Children are a lot more vulnerable to this sort of behaviour, both because of their age and the fact that they are pretty much stuck in school and not allowed out. If you hate your co-workers, you can always try to find a new job. In many societies you can't change schools that easily, if at all. Children are also more likely to engage in sociopathic behaviour towards their peers.
Yes. Having a thick skin is the price of living in a free society... but for adults, not for children.
Reasonably effective solutions already exist. It would be nice to think that providing real world consequences to trolls and griefers would help, and it would, but it is unworkable beyond current laws. Sure, the internet has its share of anonymous "fuckwads" as you put it, but things only get bad if nobody does anything, and the trolls and griefers are allowed to disrupt things enough to get their kick out of it (like in World of Warcraft).
Wikipedia has effectively solved this problem as well as it can be solved, by allowing people to edit the comments of others. Most people are not trolls or griefers, and when given the power to do so can effectively restrain the trolls and griefers from having any significant influence. Unfortunately this won't work for a model where people are supposed to own their own comments, like a blog.
But the fundamental truth here is that most people are interested reading decent content and not reading trolls and abuse. Give people the power to improve the chances of the good being read, and reduce the chances of the bad being red, and you have a solution.
Slashdot solves it in a good way. Unlike digg, not everyone can moderate (you have to gain some trust with the system before you are allowed to), so the moderation tends on the whole to be pretty good (although not perfect). Digg style moderation just leads to abuse. If you wanted my two cents, I would hope that someone would write blogging software that any blogger could use and which tracked a contributor's karma between blogs in the way that Slashdot's system does within this site. Sure the trolls might try to band together to game the system, but there simply are not enough of them to counter the number of legitimate readers, so they will always lose.
Of course the use of such a system must be voluntary, and people must still be allowed to post anonymously, but there is a penalty for doing so (posting at zero). If you wish to post at +1, then you have to give others the right to track your behaviour.
Yeah they do. I just looked at that site for questions in my field and the ones that came up were cookie cutter questions that are as common as dirt.
Professors should be asking questions about less well-known stuff, so that it's simply not worth the time for anyone to submit answers to sites like student of fortune. Those sites only make financial sense if lots of people are being asked the same questions.
I'm a professor, and student cheating in papers is pretty easy to get around. You simply keep the general knowledge of the subject questions for the in class tests, and you make sure the papers are on some particularly obscure part of the text, and require a hefty amount of the student's own argument.
Papers are supposed to test the research and argumentation skills of the students. What better way to do this than make them write ten pages on some obscure argument from Aristotle or some random lines from Milton? If I, as an expert in the field, know that it is something obscure, the students aren't going to be able to find anything to copy on the internet.
The problem here is often lazy professors who set the same paper topics every year. Then again, universities are currently set up to pass as many students as possible, rather than work them hard so that their future employers benefit.
I'm going to take the liberty of assuming you are not deliberately being a troll, and that you are not posting from Redmond.
"How can you claim that Microsoft is trying to control the music industry and Apple isn't, when Microsoft is the only one of the two who implements an open-format DRM scheme to foster interoperability?"
Very easily. Microsoft's "open format DRM scheme" is only open to anyone who wants to sell audio files to users of Microsoft Windows. It fosters interoperability between producers of audio content and devices and MICROSOFT software products. Strangely, it does not seem to foster interoperability between said producers of audio content and devices with anyone other than MICROSOFT.
Again, the point is not about DRM, but about WMA (DRMed or not). Microsoft's attempt to make WMA a standard had only one purpose: to exert proprietary control over online music and to lock out competitors by making sure that the only "interoperability" available involved sucking at the sweaty, Ballmerian Microsoft teat.
Non DRMed AAC (what Apple wants to offer and is now actually offering) does not lock users into Apple products at all. Apple products will play them, but so will other products. And you can throw away all your Apple products, buy someone else's stuff, and still play them.
Try playing your WMAs with decent quality if you decide you hate the pus filled sac that is Windows. See the difference?
I don't disagree that both Apple and Microsoft use DRM because the music industry makes them.
But my original point was not about DRM, but about a format war. On the one hand, we have formats that are available to all stores, like AAC and mp3. Neither of these formats are owned by Apple. WMA on the other hand is owned by Microsoft, and the purpose of WMA was to create a default audio format controlled by Microsoft.
As a minority marketshare holder in the computer market, Apple has an interest in making sure that the most popular formats for audio (and video) are able to play on Macs. If not, Mac users will be locked out from most content on the internet. Microsoft's shameful and half hearted attempts to make Windows Media Mac compatible are a case in point.
As the leader in marketshare among PC operating systems, Microsoft does not need to worry about its users being locked out of content. It makes no sense for any content provider to ignore Windows users. WMA does not exist for any other reason than to try to ensure that Microsoft has proprietary control over digital media content, and that "open" standards do not give users a reason to abandon Windows in favour of the Mac or some other OS.
Apple's use of media formats is primarily defensive in nature (although not always). Microsoft's is just another attempt by that company to exert monopoly power.
Yes, but I recall EMI saying that other companies would be selling DRM free music from EMI's catalogue, not just Apple.
It makes no sense to offer those downloads in WMA format. Why lock out 80% of the user base? If I was an online music retailer, I would sell mp3s. Apple doesn't care about AAC the way that Microsoft cares about WMA. WMA is Microsoft's attempt to control digital music the way they control operating systems. AAC is the format Apple used so that they could have the DRM that the labels wanted.
Today's announcement if the other labels go for it means that they have failed!!! failed!!!! FAILED!!!!!!!...at this very moment chairs are being lifted into orbit from Redmond.
The real winner here is Apple, and the potential big loser is Microsoft. This may well kill Windows Media as a digital audio format.
Think about it... If all the labels offer their music DRM free by the end of the year, then what incentive is there for any online music store, except for the Zune store, to offer music in Windows Media format, given that the iPod is incompatible with WMA and represents about 80% of the target market.
There simply isn't any reason for an online music store that isn't owned by Microsoft to offer downloads that are incompatible with around about 80% of the devices that people own.
More to the point. Microsoft is only offering the Zune as a means of pushing its own audio format. Yet even Zune customers will be now able to play DRM free tracks from the iTMS. Microsoft has just caught up to the idea that you have to have a closed system to succeed (which was never the case, as Jobs' said in his letter a couple of months back), and now they will have to go home and think again.
Steve Jobs has just succeeded in the first step of completely destroying Microsoft's music strategy, and no-one seems to have noticed. He must be chuckling to himself.
I don't really understand this. Sex is something that people don't want their children to emulate?
I can see why some forms of sex might be controversial, but is there anyone who really disagrees that two married people having really good sex is a good thing? I can't think of any sane person who does (although I'd go further and say that any two people who like each other makes it OK), yet society seems quite happy to have scenes of graphic and extreme (and in many cases sexually perverted) violence play out on screen, but people go mental if it is even suggested that you show a scene of Mr and Mrs Happily Married having a good old-fashioned fuck. If you don't want negative images of explicit sex on TV shown to children, then that is fine by me, except that a large majority seem to think that any images of sex are negative.
The argument that you don't want children to do it is silly. Most children would like to drive a car, and watch all sorts of cool cars being driven on TV all the time. Yet they know that they are not allowed to drive a car until they are older. The same goes with sex. Like all men, I could think of little else when I was 13, but I knew that going all the way at that age was likely to cause all sorts of trouble that I didn't want to be in.
Our society is full of repressed puritans who are so scared of their own sexual desires that they feel the need to repress everyone else with a socially enforced psychological chastity belt.
And it doesn't work. Every young fellow knows that the girls who put out the most and in the most enjoyable and abandoned fashion tended to be drawn from the daughters of the strictly religious.
And pretty much every kid has seen porn, so it's not as if they don't know already. Treating healthy sex as a subject of shame and guilt just confuses young people. For one thing, if you are going to protect them against real perverts, you really need to point out what kinds of sex are acceptable, and which are not.
And this is what the debate is really about. It would be nice if it were an honest debate, where the anti GW people primarily believed that the facts were wrong. As it happens, the anti GW movement is largely driven by those who realize that state action is the only plausible remedy (whether this is strong regulation, or a lighter scheme like tradeable pollution permits). The idea that state regulation will lead to some sort of "global totalitarianism" is not well-founded. But the anti-GW movement is largely driven by some libertarians and conservatives who would rather consign us to a fiery future than allow an expansion of state power. The very same people seem convinced that GW is a plot to increase state power. It's not. When people let their politics get in the way of the facts, bad things happen.
By now the scientific consensus is so overwhelming that it is simply irrational to believe that GW is not happening. And it's not the case that there is a scientists' conspiracy to install statism. Scientists are simply doing their jobs. It's up to the rest of us to deal with the facts that they have uncovered.
Instead of pretending that established facts don't exist, the right would better spend its time trying to work for its favoured solutions. For example, tradeable pollution permits are a market friendly way of helping solve the problem. In fact, those who love the market should be pushing for such a solution, since the existence of pollution is recognised by economists the world over as a market failure, Correcting for market failures makes the market work more efficiently, and what conservative could be against that? These are all reasonable political proposals. Suggesting that GW does not exist or is not man made is no longer a reasonable position.
As it is, the right is painting itself into a corner. If the right holds that GW does not exist, and the left that it does, then the left has already won and will only consolidate its victory and its favoured solutions. Better for the right to accept a strategic retreat and work for the solution they want, instead of pretending the problem doesn't exist or that we can't do anything.
For example, in Fight Night 3 one of the trainers that you sometimes need to use is the Burger King Mascot. I kid you not, you have that idiotic looking king instead of someone who looks like Eddie Futch or Angelo Dundee. It looks really lame when Marvelous Marvin Hagler is escorted to the ring by a foam headed fast food character. What's next? Sugar Ray Robinson being given advice between rounds by a giant green M&M?
My own feeling is that we should send the Marvelous One himself over to EA to beat some heads.
I agree. Apple just seems to be very good at making iPods cool and simple. Even my thesis supervisor, who suffers from technophobia, can't stop prattling on about his iPod.
However, the Creative players are much nicer and better value than the Zune, IMHO.
And you made my sig. I thought the robots comment was hilarious.
The problem is that it's Britain we're talking about. "Nuisance" crimes committed by youths seem to be more prevalent there due to the oft cited "yob" or "chav" culture. In Britain, there is an underclass of people (most of whom are white) who have absolutely no respect for the law or for other citizens.
Given the ridiculous class divisions that still pervade that country, there are few prospects for them, and so they might as well be hooligans. In some ways they aren't the worst. The English middle class are absolutely insufferable.
I can't say that I like the idea of cameras, but Britain is such a pathetic and dysfunctional country (try organizing a fucking train ride next time you are there, or getting served in a store) that I don't have much pity. It has to be the least efficient country on the planet. Even though I'm entitled to, and it would probably make me more money, I will never go back there to live.
I got fed up of it after my free month. Like almost all online competitive games, it is too easy to exploit and be an ass, so you tend to meet exploiting asses.
The problem with this is the sheer number of selfish assholes in the world. It's bad enough on trains, but being stuck on a long haul flight with these bastards would be too much.
I would never dream of holding a loud phone conversation in a quiet restaurant, or recklessly endangering people by using one while driving, or holding up a store queue by answering my phone while at a counter, or leaving the ringer on during a symphony or an exam because "my calls are important".
Yet I have seen all these things happen over and over again. The worst thing is that the people who do them have such a sense of entitlement that they believe they are doing nothing wrong, and that you are an asshole for objecting to their sociopathic behaviour.
I want to start a new political movement. Every time someone does something like this, you take their phone and smash it. Violence against the people who do it is also fully justified.
If you always lose it can be dispiriting (I rolled Alliance), but the mark of a good game is that a loss is still better than not playing for the loser. Most good games are like this, obviously so, since people still play them.
World of Warcraft is not a very good PvP game (on the other hand the PvE more than makes up for it). Gear and levels matter so much in PvP that even modest inequalities will give the average player a hard time against an opponent. Allowing such inequalities has the perverse effect of making PvP less frequent and less fun for everyone.
If you have played on any WoW server in the first two weeks of its existence, you will understand this to be true. When most people are roughly the same level, world PvP bloodbaths are frequent and relatively even. I remember huge battles of level 20-30s on the Astraanar/Barrens road. Once you get a significant number of very high level characters on the server, this stops. The reason is that a couple of level 60s could turn up to a mass battle of level 20s-30s and completely cream them in short order. Thus, levelling on a PvP server is not the fun bloodbath it should be, but tends to be skulking around and hiding from gankers and babysitters. Even if you do manage to kill someone your own level, chances are that he or she will send a level 60 friend after you. The open PvP system in WoW has the perverse effect of suppressing world PvP.
Battlegrounds are more fun, since they are at least segregated by level. Even if we ignore the design problems (AV is biased in favour of Alliance, AB in favour of Horde, but slightly less so), they don't work as well as they should. At level 60 the difference between the geared and the non geared is so great as to make it no contest assuming the players are of roughly equal ability. Similarly, lack of restrictions on enchants has ruined the BGs from levels 10-39 unless you are a rogue with an alt that has a lot of gold to twink you.
More to the point, some idiot at Blizzard decided to allow premade groups to face pugs, with the inevitable BG scouting and pug farming that follows. That's just no fun for the losers and robs them of incentives to queue.
The only really good PvP in WoW in my experience occurs on new servers, and in the 40-59 BGs. Enchants don't make that much difference, gear differentials are not that great, and as long as you aren't facing a premade you can have some really good games.
How can a game with so much promise only deliver in certain specific situations?
I don't know what they can do to save world PvP other than make it zonal, with you being flagged only to people below the zone's upper level limit. I suspect that Blizzard will never do this, since I don't think that the PvP servers are really about PvP. IMHO they are really intended as "tard self-segregation servers". Every time I log on to a PvP server, the average IQ seems to drop about 20 points and the number of asshats per square mile increases tenfold. I wonder if that is why they are there...
Please not the "security through obscurity" argument again. It's unsubstantiated waffle. One might just as well claim that the fact that OS X has not been the victim of viruses or malware would spur virus writers and malware creators to be the "first". As it stands, the most recent "terrible breach in OS X security" was caused by a couple of guys who had to cheat to hack a MacBook.
If OS X was to be less of a target because of its marketshare, reasonable people would expect the picture to be the same as it was with the Classic Mac OS. That had a hundred or more viruses IIRC. Of course that's nothing compared to what Windows had at the same time, and you could probably put that down to marketshare, since the Classic Mac OS was not renowned for its security.
But OS X has not had a single virus in the wild AFAIK, nor do OS X users suffer from malware. It stands to reason that there must be other factors preventing the spread of malicious software on the OS X platform. Why can't people simply admit that Apple has released a pretty secure platform?
Microsoft on the other hand has released a Swiss cheese operating system that simply can't compete with OS X security wise, marketshare differences or not.
Now let's be fair. I actually (and perhaps naively) believe that Vista will fix a lot of the security problems the Windows platform has faced. It's not going to be perfect, but Windows users should be quite a bit better off than they were. When this happens, the same marketshare trolls will be trumpeting how superior Windows is to OS X security-wise. People can't have it both ways, no matter how much they try.
I think the point is that Linux can out-Windows Windows.
Windows won the OS war because it was cheaper because it could be installed on pretty much any manufacturer's desktop PC. IMHO Apple made the superior product (and I think it still does, but YMMV). But Wintel was "good enough" and cheaper. Apple is never going to compete at the bargain basement cheap box level, but then again the people who buy those sorts of computers are unlikely to care about the OS as long as it works and it is "good enough".
Windows has been and will be hard to dislodge simply because it has a virtual monopoly on compatibility. You "need" Windows because almost everyone else has it, and you need to run the things they do. The more that apps come via the web, the less reason you have to use any particular OS other than its intrinsic merits (and most Windows users don't use Windows for that reason). At that point Linux becomes good enough, and since it is pretty much free, Microsoft cannot compete. Hence Microsoft's obsession with creating "standards" that it controls. So far, they are losing. Google owns search and Apple owns online music (and shortly online movies).
But everyone knows this. If Microsoft cannot stop the increasing flood of OS independent applications, they will bleed money because most people won't need them. They may as well focus on games, because at least there is a need for them there.
These were the beginnings of Middle East terrorist organizations specifically targetting the U.S. You can try to blame it on Islam having not progressed beyond the time of the Crusades and anyone who does not follow Islam having to be converted or killed.but that is a cover-up for the real reason. The fact is, U.S meddling in Mid-east affairs.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny you should mention this, since Gates responded to a question by saying that what he most wished he had was Jobs' sense of taste. The crowd laughed (obviously remembering that quote), but Gates told them he wasn't joking, and went on to describe Jobs' sense of product design as "magical". Basically, he admitted something we've all known for many years: Microsoft is not as good as Apple is at making cool user interfaces.
That was pretty big of Gates. He went up in my estimation for that.
The institutional media simply cannot tell the truth about certain things. If they did, there would be a revolution in short order.
Can you imagine CNN reporting thus: "Today President Bush attempted to link Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein - this is a lie aimed at persuading Americans to support a war for oil/strategic dominance/etc."?
Yet this is the truth. Many people knew it at the time, and it was obviously correct, but you would never see this on a major network.
The media is part of the establishment. It's not a cabal of old white men who sit around deciding what the news will be, but a diffuse group of people with media power and similar interests. These are the people who tell us the way the world is. As individuals, we live in a very small world where we cannot verify most of the things we are told. Yet, we feel we must make sense of the world. Hence we turn to the media, who seem to know what "the general opinion" and "common sense" are.
So we get the old "the United States is a free country where any hardworking person can prosper" and "the United States government, while it makes mistakes, is always trying to do the decent thing" tropes. Think of all the "worldwide media events" that "everyone" watches, like Princess Diana's funeral (except it turns out that a hell of a lot of people ignored it). All of this is foisted upon us with the attempt of creating an imaginary community with imaginary norms.
Who actually believes this based on the evidence they gather outside of the media/industrial complex?
Nobody.
But who believes it nonetheless?
Most people.
Why?
Because the media gives the impression of a "common sense" point of view, such that if your own situation doesn't cohere with what they say, then it must be abnormal.
Unless you are a particularly strong willed person, you are not going to stand up for the evidence in front of your own eyes and the reasoning power of your own mind. But everyone knows on some level that the media never tells the whole truth, and never really deals with the real issues. That's because the societal myth they tell us doesn't pass fundamental tests of coherence. Even though your town is going through massive layoffs, everyone is better off than they were!!! Orwell would have been proud.
The point of 1984 is not that totalitarian state control of the media leads to false consciousness, but that control of the media by any minority leads to false consciousness.
The only possible way out of this is decentralised, participatory media. Fortunately, its hour is now at hand, and its effects are beginning to show. How many people who actively use the internet to get their information have not experienced the feeling that the political game played in the regular media is some sort of farce? In some respects I have always felt like this, but with the internet and my expanded access to information, I simply cannot avoid the feeling that the media's portrayal of politics is a ridiculous charade.
Me too. Seeing this thread made me feel really happy and pretty old at the same time.
n es/Crash/Issue18/CRCover18.jpg
A 48K Spectrum was my second computer after a ZX81. I don't think I ever got so much pleasure out of any other possession I had as a child (and I didn't even have Sam Fox Strip Poker [props to those who actually remember her, and double to those who remember the game]).
The Spectrum just went to show how limited hardware resources would force game developers to write creative, original and addictive games. Knight Lore, RedHawk, Manic Miner, Heavy on the Magick, Spellbound, Knight Tyme, Skooldaze, Sweevo's World and above all Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge were among the best games I have played on any platform. Shame on game developers for the formulaic crap they spew these days.
Does anyone else remember CRASH magazine? Whatever happened to those guys? It was almost worth being a spectrum owner just for that mag. Best and funniest game reviews ever, and Oliver Frey's covers were fantastic. For years I wanted to meet a girl like the one on this cover he did.
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/magazi
"Adults don't magically gain maturity on reaching 18 or 21."
No they don't. Some of them never do. But I tire of this so-called "argument". We can't tailor the law to every single individual, so we set an age (usually 18) where most people are considered to be responsible. If you think that is the wrong age when most people are responsible, then agitate for it to be raised or lowered. Abandoning it is not an option.
So what if we have to put up with a few mature kids being denied adult rights, or a few immature adults having them. The alternatives of everyone or no-one having them are clearly worse. Ultimately, in human affairs, lines must be drawn somewhere, whether we like it or not.
We're talking about children here. Most adults would brush off what is called cyber bullying. But a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't yet have the maturity to deal with these things. As an adult, I don't really care if people say mean things about me, and by and large people don't. But high school is a place where you are forced to go with a lot of people who often don't like each other and who spend their time inventing new and cruel ways to torture each other. Often it works because most teenagers care deeply about what the community thinks of them.
For example: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Laws against adult bullying are a lot more lax because adult bullies have a lot less opportunity to actually have an effect. Children are a lot more vulnerable to this sort of behaviour, both because of their age and the fact that they are pretty much stuck in school and not allowed out. If you hate your co-workers, you can always try to find a new job. In many societies you can't change schools that easily, if at all. Children are also more likely to engage in sociopathic behaviour towards their peers.
Yes. Having a thick skin is the price of living in a free society... but for adults, not for children.
Reasonably effective solutions already exist. It would be nice to think that providing real world consequences to trolls and griefers would help, and it would, but it is unworkable beyond current laws. Sure, the internet has its share of anonymous "fuckwads" as you put it, but things only get bad if nobody does anything, and the trolls and griefers are allowed to disrupt things enough to get their kick out of it (like in World of Warcraft).
Wikipedia has effectively solved this problem as well as it can be solved, by allowing people to edit the comments of others. Most people are not trolls or griefers, and when given the power to do so can effectively restrain the trolls and griefers from having any significant influence. Unfortunately this won't work for a model where people are supposed to own their own comments, like a blog.
But the fundamental truth here is that most people are interested reading decent content and not reading trolls and abuse. Give people the power to improve the chances of the good being read, and reduce the chances of the bad being red, and you have a solution.
Slashdot solves it in a good way. Unlike digg, not everyone can moderate (you have to gain some trust with the system before you are allowed to), so the moderation tends on the whole to be pretty good (although not perfect). Digg style moderation just leads to abuse. If you wanted my two cents, I would hope that someone would write blogging software that any blogger could use and which tracked a contributor's karma between blogs in the way that Slashdot's system does within this site. Sure the trolls might try to band together to game the system, but there simply are not enough of them to counter the number of legitimate readers, so they will always lose.
Of course the use of such a system must be voluntary, and people must still be allowed to post anonymously, but there is a penalty for doing so (posting at zero). If you wish to post at +1, then you have to give others the right to track your behaviour.
Yeah they do. I just looked at that site for questions in my field and the ones that came up were cookie cutter questions that are as common as dirt.
Professors should be asking questions about less well-known stuff, so that it's simply not worth the time for anyone to submit answers to sites like student of fortune. Those sites only make financial sense if lots of people are being asked the same questions.
I'm a professor, and student cheating in papers is pretty easy to get around. You simply keep the general knowledge of the subject questions for the in class tests, and you make sure the papers are on some particularly obscure part of the text, and require a hefty amount of the student's own argument.
Papers are supposed to test the research and argumentation skills of the students. What better way to do this than make them write ten pages on some obscure argument from Aristotle or some random lines from Milton? If I, as an expert in the field, know that it is something obscure, the students aren't going to be able to find anything to copy on the internet.
The problem here is often lazy professors who set the same paper topics every year. Then again, universities are currently set up to pass as many students as possible, rather than work them hard so that their future employers benefit.
I'm going to take the liberty of assuming you are not deliberately being a troll, and that you are not posting from Redmond.
"How can you claim that Microsoft is trying to control the music industry and Apple isn't, when Microsoft is the only one of the two who implements an open-format DRM scheme to foster interoperability?"
Very easily. Microsoft's "open format DRM scheme" is only open to anyone who wants to sell audio files to users of Microsoft Windows. It fosters interoperability between producers of audio content and devices and MICROSOFT software products. Strangely, it does not seem to foster interoperability between said producers of audio content and devices with anyone other than MICROSOFT.
Again, the point is not about DRM, but about WMA (DRMed or not). Microsoft's attempt to make WMA a standard had only one purpose: to exert proprietary control over online music and to lock out competitors by making sure that the only "interoperability" available involved sucking at the sweaty, Ballmerian Microsoft teat.
Non DRMed AAC (what Apple wants to offer and is now actually offering) does not lock users into Apple products at all. Apple products will play them, but so will other products. And you can throw away all your Apple products, buy someone else's stuff, and still play them.
Try playing your WMAs with decent quality if you decide you hate the pus filled sac that is Windows. See the difference?
I don't disagree that both Apple and Microsoft use DRM because the music industry makes them.
But my original point was not about DRM, but about a format war. On the one hand, we have formats that are available to all stores, like AAC and mp3. Neither of these formats are owned by Apple. WMA on the other hand is owned by Microsoft, and the purpose of WMA was to create a default audio format controlled by Microsoft.
As a minority marketshare holder in the computer market, Apple has an interest in making sure that the most popular formats for audio (and video) are able to play on Macs. If not, Mac users will be locked out from most content on the internet. Microsoft's shameful and half hearted attempts to make Windows Media Mac compatible are a case in point.
As the leader in marketshare among PC operating systems, Microsoft does not need to worry about its users being locked out of content. It makes no sense for any content provider to ignore Windows users. WMA does not exist for any other reason than to try to ensure that Microsoft has proprietary control over digital media content, and that "open" standards do not give users a reason to abandon Windows in favour of the Mac or some other OS.
Apple's use of media formats is primarily defensive in nature (although not always). Microsoft's is just another attempt by that company to exert monopoly power.
Yes, but I recall EMI saying that other companies would be selling DRM free music from EMI's catalogue, not just Apple.
...at this very moment chairs are being lifted into orbit from Redmond.
It makes no sense to offer those downloads in WMA format. Why lock out 80% of the user base? If I was an online music retailer, I would sell mp3s. Apple doesn't care about AAC the way that Microsoft cares about WMA. WMA is Microsoft's attempt to control digital music the way they control operating systems. AAC is the format Apple used so that they could have the DRM that the labels wanted.
Today's announcement if the other labels go for it means that they have failed!!! failed!!!! FAILED!!!!!!!
The real winner here is Apple, and the potential big loser is Microsoft. This may well kill Windows Media as a digital audio format.
Think about it... If all the labels offer their music DRM free by the end of the year, then what incentive is there for any online music store, except for the Zune store, to offer music in Windows Media format, given that the iPod is incompatible with WMA and represents about 80% of the target market.
There simply isn't any reason for an online music store that isn't owned by Microsoft to offer downloads that are incompatible with around about 80% of the devices that people own.
More to the point. Microsoft is only offering the Zune as a means of pushing its own audio format. Yet even Zune customers will be now able to play DRM free tracks from the iTMS. Microsoft has just caught up to the idea that you have to have a closed system to succeed (which was never the case, as Jobs' said in his letter a couple of months back), and now they will have to go home and think again.
Steve Jobs has just succeeded in the first step of completely destroying Microsoft's music strategy, and no-one seems to have noticed. He must be chuckling to himself.
I don't really understand this. Sex is something that people don't want their children to emulate?
I can see why some forms of sex might be controversial, but is there anyone who really disagrees that two married people having really good sex is a good thing? I can't think of any sane person who does (although I'd go further and say that any two people who like each other makes it OK), yet society seems quite happy to have scenes of graphic and extreme (and in many cases sexually perverted) violence play out on screen, but people go mental if it is even suggested that you show a scene of Mr and Mrs Happily Married having a good old-fashioned fuck. If you don't want negative images of explicit sex on TV shown to children, then that is fine by me, except that a large majority seem to think that any images of sex are negative.
The argument that you don't want children to do it is silly. Most children would like to drive a car, and watch all sorts of cool cars being driven on TV all the time. Yet they know that they are not allowed to drive a car until they are older. The same goes with sex. Like all men, I could think of little else when I was 13, but I knew that going all the way at that age was likely to cause all sorts of trouble that I didn't want to be in.
Our society is full of repressed puritans who are so scared of their own sexual desires that they feel the need to repress everyone else with a socially enforced psychological chastity belt.
And it doesn't work. Every young fellow knows that the girls who put out the most and in the most enjoyable and abandoned fashion tended to be drawn from the daughters of the strictly religious.
And pretty much every kid has seen porn, so it's not as if they don't know already. Treating healthy sex as a subject of shame and guilt just confuses young people. For one thing, if you are going to protect them against real perverts, you really need to point out what kinds of sex are acceptable, and which are not.
And this is what the debate is really about. It would be nice if it were an honest debate, where the anti GW people primarily believed that the facts were wrong. As it happens, the anti GW movement is largely driven by those who realize that state action is the only plausible remedy (whether this is strong regulation, or a lighter scheme like tradeable pollution permits). The idea that state regulation will lead to some sort of "global totalitarianism" is not well-founded. But the anti-GW movement is largely driven by some libertarians and conservatives who would rather consign us to a fiery future than allow an expansion of state power. The very same people seem convinced that GW is a plot to increase state power. It's not. When people let their politics get in the way of the facts, bad things happen.
By now the scientific consensus is so overwhelming that it is simply irrational to believe that GW is not happening. And it's not the case that there is a scientists' conspiracy to install statism. Scientists are simply doing their jobs. It's up to the rest of us to deal with the facts that they have uncovered.
Instead of pretending that established facts don't exist, the right would better spend its time trying to work for its favoured solutions. For example, tradeable pollution permits are a market friendly way of helping solve the problem. In fact, those who love the market should be pushing for such a solution, since the existence of pollution is recognised by economists the world over as a market failure, Correcting for market failures makes the market work more efficiently, and what conservative could be against that? These are all reasonable political proposals. Suggesting that GW does not exist or is not man made is no longer a reasonable position.
As it is, the right is painting itself into a corner. If the right holds that GW does not exist, and the left that it does, then the left has already won and will only consolidate its victory and its favoured solutions. Better for the right to accept a strategic retreat and work for the solution they want, instead of pretending the problem doesn't exist or that we can't do anything.
Some of it is just plain undignified.
For example, in Fight Night 3 one of the trainers that you sometimes need to use is the Burger King Mascot. I kid you not, you have that idiotic looking king instead of someone who looks like Eddie Futch or Angelo Dundee. It looks really lame when Marvelous Marvin Hagler is escorted to the ring by a foam headed fast food character. What's next? Sugar Ray Robinson being given advice between rounds by a giant green M&M?
My own feeling is that we should send the Marvelous One himself over to EA to beat some heads.
I agree. Apple just seems to be very good at making iPods cool and simple. Even my thesis supervisor, who suffers from technophobia, can't stop prattling on about his iPod.
However, the Creative players are much nicer and better value than the Zune, IMHO.
And you made my sig. I thought the robots comment was hilarious.
The problem is that it's Britain we're talking about. "Nuisance" crimes committed by youths seem to be more prevalent there due to the oft cited "yob" or "chav" culture. In Britain, there is an underclass of people (most of whom are white) who have absolutely no respect for the law or for other citizens.
Given the ridiculous class divisions that still pervade that country, there are few prospects for them, and so they might as well be hooligans. In some ways they aren't the worst. The English middle class are absolutely insufferable.
I can't say that I like the idea of cameras, but Britain is such a pathetic and dysfunctional country (try organizing a fucking train ride next time you are there, or getting served in a store) that I don't have much pity. It has to be the least efficient country on the planet. Even though I'm entitled to, and it would probably make me more money, I will never go back there to live.
It doesn't work.
I got fed up of it after my free month. Like almost all online competitive games, it is too easy to exploit and be an ass, so you tend to meet exploiting asses.
Smacking the hell out of these scum, or watching a cop do it would sure feel good though.
The problem with this is the sheer number of selfish assholes in the world. It's bad enough on trains, but being stuck on a long haul flight with these bastards would be too much.
I would never dream of holding a loud phone conversation in a quiet restaurant, or recklessly endangering people by using one while driving, or holding up a store queue by answering my phone while at a counter, or leaving the ringer on during a symphony or an exam because "my calls are important".
Yet I have seen all these things happen over and over again. The worst thing is that the people who do them have such a sense of entitlement that they believe they are doing nothing wrong, and that you are an asshole for objecting to their sociopathic behaviour.
I want to start a new political movement. Every time someone does something like this, you take their phone and smash it. Violence against the people who do it is also fully justified.
I'm not sure this is true.
If you always lose it can be dispiriting (I rolled Alliance), but the mark of a good game is that a loss is still better than not playing for the loser. Most good games are like this, obviously so, since people still play them.
World of Warcraft is not a very good PvP game (on the other hand the PvE more than makes up for it). Gear and levels matter so much in PvP that even modest inequalities will give the average player a hard time against an opponent. Allowing such inequalities has the perverse effect of making PvP less frequent and less fun for everyone.
If you have played on any WoW server in the first two weeks of its existence, you will understand this to be true. When most people are roughly the same level, world PvP bloodbaths are frequent and relatively even. I remember huge battles of level 20-30s on the Astraanar/Barrens road. Once you get a significant number of very high level characters on the server, this stops. The reason is that a couple of level 60s could turn up to a mass battle of level 20s-30s and completely cream them in short order. Thus, levelling on a PvP server is not the fun bloodbath it should be, but tends to be skulking around and hiding from gankers and babysitters. Even if you do manage to kill someone your own level, chances are that he or she will send a level 60 friend after you. The open PvP system in WoW has the perverse effect of suppressing world PvP.
Battlegrounds are more fun, since they are at least segregated by level. Even if we ignore the design problems (AV is biased in favour of Alliance, AB in favour of Horde, but slightly less so), they don't work as well as they should. At level 60 the difference between the geared and the non geared is so great as to make it no contest assuming the players are of roughly equal ability. Similarly, lack of restrictions on enchants has ruined the BGs from levels 10-39 unless you are a rogue with an alt that has a lot of gold to twink you.
More to the point, some idiot at Blizzard decided to allow premade groups to face pugs, with the inevitable BG scouting and pug farming that follows. That's just no fun for the losers and robs them of incentives to queue.
The only really good PvP in WoW in my experience occurs on new servers, and in the 40-59 BGs. Enchants don't make that much difference, gear differentials are not that great, and as long as you aren't facing a premade you can have some really good games.
How can a game with so much promise only deliver in certain specific situations?
I don't know what they can do to save world PvP other than make it zonal, with you being flagged only to people below the zone's upper level limit. I suspect that Blizzard will never do this, since I don't think that the PvP servers are really about PvP. IMHO they are really intended as "tard self-segregation servers". Every time I log on to a PvP server, the average IQ seems to drop about 20 points and the number of asshats per square mile increases tenfold. I wonder if that is why they are there...
Please not the "security through obscurity" argument again. It's unsubstantiated waffle. One might just as well claim that the fact that OS X has not been the victim of viruses or malware would spur virus writers and malware creators to be the "first". As it stands, the most recent "terrible breach in OS X security" was caused by a couple of guys who had to cheat to hack a MacBook.
If OS X was to be less of a target because of its marketshare, reasonable people would expect the picture to be the same as it was with the Classic Mac OS. That had a hundred or more viruses IIRC. Of course that's nothing compared to what Windows had at the same time, and you could probably put that down to marketshare, since the Classic Mac OS was not renowned for its security.
But OS X has not had a single virus in the wild AFAIK, nor do OS X users suffer from malware. It stands to reason that there must be other factors preventing the spread of malicious software on the OS X platform. Why can't people simply admit that Apple has released a pretty secure platform?
Microsoft on the other hand has released a Swiss cheese operating system that simply can't compete with OS X security wise, marketshare differences or not.
Now let's be fair. I actually (and perhaps naively) believe that Vista will fix a lot of the security problems the Windows platform has faced. It's not going to be perfect, but Windows users should be quite a bit better off than they were. When this happens, the same marketshare trolls will be trumpeting how superior Windows is to OS X security-wise. People can't have it both ways, no matter how much they try.
I think the point is that Linux can out-Windows Windows.
Windows won the OS war because it was cheaper because it could be installed on pretty much any manufacturer's desktop PC. IMHO Apple made the superior product (and I think it still does, but YMMV). But Wintel was "good enough" and cheaper. Apple is never going to compete at the bargain basement cheap box level, but then again the people who buy those sorts of computers are unlikely to care about the OS as long as it works and it is "good enough".
Windows has been and will be hard to dislodge simply because it has a virtual monopoly on compatibility. You "need" Windows because almost everyone else has it, and you need to run the things they do. The more that apps come via the web, the less reason you have to use any particular OS other than its intrinsic merits (and most Windows users don't use Windows for that reason). At that point Linux becomes good enough, and since it is pretty much free, Microsoft cannot compete. Hence Microsoft's obsession with creating "standards" that it controls. So far, they are losing. Google owns search and Apple owns online music (and shortly online movies).
But everyone knows this. If Microsoft cannot stop the increasing flood of OS independent applications, they will bleed money because most people won't need them. They may as well focus on games, because at least there is a need for them there.
These were the beginnings of Middle East terrorist organizations specifically targetting the U.S. You can try to blame it on Islam having not progressed beyond the time of the Crusades and anyone who does not follow Islam having to be converted or killed.but that is a cover-up for the real reason. The fact is, U.S meddling in Mid-east affairs.
;)
Corrected.
Yeah, they already know this and they do it.