You mean that when I use an electronic network to transfer information, that information travels in orderly patterns that can be tracked? What happenned to the magical fairy of the internet that made all things miraculously anonymous?(/sarcasm)
Information can be property. Aka anything copyrighted, or electronic funds. If i transfer all the money in your bank account to mine, it's still considered theft, despite the fact that all i did was alter some numbers, which is technically just vandalism. I'm assuming this is something similar.
Parents already have an excellent control over what games their child plays. they own the house. And everything the child posesses. And the computer. If a parent needs a state (or federal, or municipal) law to do their job in the realm of their own home, then they have achieved an unprecedented level of incompetence and should be isolated and studied by the CDC. And then shot, just in case they're contagious.
A lot of games are extremely violent and offensive, and reward indiscriminant violence.
... Because they are fantasy. By definition, you do things in an imaginary setting that you don't do in meatspace.
If you can't distinguish fantasy from reality, then I'd say you're already pretty much doomed. Chess and checkers are wholesale glorifications of violence and death, and in chess's case the game advocates a strict caste system which is regarded by most of the world as offensive. The behaviors these games encourage (sacrificing the lives of one's inferiors for one's own personal gain, killing people of a different color indiscriminantly, etc.) are pretty much 100% revolting to the average modern mind.
I think that this assumption that shiny moving colors make things more important and powerful is a greater danger to humanity than children playing soldier in online games with electrons instead of the old quarry with sticks. Maybe that's just me, though.
Just wanted to point out that the idea isn't to stop violent games at the production end, it's to stop it at the supply end. This is called "hitting the pocketbook": reduced business (paying business, not losers who are too lame to support the companies that make the products they like) for types of games will lead to them being produced in smaller quantities. If there are fewer games of the objectionable type being made, its less likely that one of them will be good enough to attract the attention of minors.
I have my doubts that this will work, but I'm pretty sure it's what's being attempted.
What kind of crime can one enact with a video game, exactly? Are they afraid the kids will sharpen the edges of the install cds and slash throats? Beat their girlfirend with a heavy player's guide? Or are they afraid that the use of the games will train the kids in the pressing buttons in a predefined order skills that are so necessary for the successful terrorist, or, worse, stenographer?
Seriously, though, it can't be the implicit encouragement of the use of violence to solve problems presented in many games. If that were the case, minors would have been banned from watching professional sports long, long ago.
Windows does what I want it to, when I want it to. It runs the stuff I need, and it runs the games I want. It has decent support, meaning I only have to do very general things to keep it from dying, roughly analogous to not driving a car off a bridge into a tree. The interface is simple, and designed so that I don't have to memorize different command sets to access bits of different programs.
To suck, windows would have to be insufficient for my purposes: that is, it would have to either lack one of the above capacities, or it would have to exhibit some flaw that posed enough of a problem that it presented an actual threat to my well-being and was not easily avoidable. Frankly, spyware and viruses can be prevented by the simple expedient of "not being an idiot", which I've generally gotten the hang of. (And when I slip up, there's this thing called "third party software" that makes repairing what damage I cause fairly easy. I mean, really. It's not like running the OS prevents you from running programs not published by Microsoft.)
Basically, I'm quite happy with my windows machine.
Ok, I'm done feeding the troll^H^H^H^H^Harticle now.
You might want to replace "creatives" with "people under the illusion that they're creative". If they were actually creative, then they wouldn't form a distinct marketing segment, as they'd have a variety of needs wider than one narrow product set could satisfy.
So you want to switch from a system in which a monopoly stems from a decent product being pushed by a relatively unremarkable marketing scheme to a system of complete economic totalitarianism run by the same people that brought you efficient, sensible things like the US tax system and the billion-dollar deficit?
Not to be a troll, but since when did children need a strong teacher/student relationship? Back in high school, one of my favorite teachers showed up at the beginning of class, handed us lab sheets and reading assignments, then went out for coffee. And of the 10 home-schooled kids I know, fully five of them couldn't handle real college and ended up in local community colleges to stay close to their parents. I'd say a strong connection to one's teachers is as likely to be harmful as useful.
I'm going to take the obvious parallel to driver's licenses here, and finish your post:
And if you use any p2p program on which copyrighted material is illegally shared, you lose your lisence.
And if your computer is running anything that detects as "undesirable software", you lose your lisence.
And if you're caught in a room with an open beer, and are under 21 years of age, you lose your lisence.
And if you download porn while under the legal age of consent (in most states) you lose your lisence.
And if you've violated whatever unintelligible ordinance the town you're passing through feels like imposing, you lose your lisence.
Yeah, I'm not buying this one. Keep government out of things it's only going to abuse anyhow. Besides, who would enforce this stuff? The UN has no real authority over anything, and inconsistencies in national policy would just make the net even more chaotic and give lawyers a lot of my tax money.
The menu structure is actually more difficult to deal with than a case of cds and a cd player. So the iPod isn't either easier to use or more efficient, from my perspective, except perhaps in terms of space. That pretty much leaves "cool" as the only reason for me to buy one.
Yeah, I'm seeing this as "all shipping at a set price per year, unless you want to change the adress to which the packages are sent." I don't really see why they put it in terms of family members. If you're sharing an account, the account will only get charged once anyhow.
You mean ads actually have a persuasive effect? I was under the impression that the point of the celebrity was to grab a viewer's attention, and make them notice that Pepsi does, in fact, exist, in case he wants one.
(1) Occasiionally I see an ad for something I need or want, making them useful.
(2) The plot qualities of television ads, and the literary qualities of print ads, generally surpass those of the television show or magazine in which they are embedded. Example: Any Geico commercial airing during an episode of "Friends": the commercial is approximately 40X as entertaining, and has a plot of approximately 100X better quality.
Not if the downloads are included in the price of cable internet... hell, the cable company is charging you to supply both tv and internet, allowing you to save to hard-drive probably wouldn't touch their profits at all, and could knock some competitors out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you were in North America, anyhow. (dunno how that got deleted from the original post.. crazy internet.)
You'd be realizing it instead.
You mean that when I use an electronic network to transfer information, that information travels in orderly patterns that can be tracked? What happenned to the magical fairy of the internet that made all things miraculously anonymous?(/sarcasm)
Really? I was under the impression that Arabic does not use the Latin alphabet at all.
Their goal is to make Scrooge-McDuck style lakes of cash. They have done so. Achieving one's goals effectively pretty much defines competence.
you have to pay some amount of money to the patent holder to use their design, i believe.
Information can be property. Aka anything copyrighted, or electronic funds. If i transfer all the money in your bank account to mine, it's still considered theft, despite the fact that all i did was alter some numbers, which is technically just vandalism. I'm assuming this is something similar.
Much of the technology used in the automotive industry comes straight from NASA. Space -> Civics, not Civics->Space. :p
Parents already have an excellent control over what games their child plays. they own the house. And everything the child posesses. And the computer. If a parent needs a state (or federal, or municipal) law to do their job in the realm of their own home, then they have achieved an unprecedented level of incompetence and should be isolated and studied by the CDC. And then shot, just in case they're contagious.
A lot of games are extremely violent and offensive, and reward indiscriminant violence.
... Because they are fantasy. By definition, you do things in an imaginary setting that you don't do in meatspace.
If you can't distinguish fantasy from reality, then I'd say you're already pretty much doomed. Chess and checkers are wholesale glorifications of violence and death, and in chess's case the game advocates a strict caste system which is regarded by most of the world as offensive. The behaviors these games encourage (sacrificing the lives of one's inferiors for one's own personal gain, killing people of a different color indiscriminantly, etc.) are pretty much 100% revolting to the average modern mind.
I think that this assumption that shiny moving colors make things more important and powerful is a greater danger to humanity than children playing soldier in online games with electrons instead of the old quarry with sticks. Maybe that's just me, though.
Just wanted to point out that the idea isn't to stop violent games at the production end, it's to stop it at the supply end. This is called "hitting the pocketbook": reduced business (paying business, not losers who are too lame to support the companies that make the products they like) for types of games will lead to them being produced in smaller quantities. If there are fewer games of the objectionable type being made, its less likely that one of them will be good enough to attract the attention of minors.
I have my doubts that this will work, but I'm pretty sure it's what's being attempted.
What kind of crime can one enact with a video game, exactly? Are they afraid the kids will sharpen the edges of the install cds and slash throats? Beat their girlfirend with a heavy player's guide? Or are they afraid that the use of the games will train the kids in the pressing buttons in a predefined order skills that are so necessary for the successful terrorist, or, worse, stenographer?
Seriously, though, it can't be the implicit encouragement of the use of violence to solve problems presented in many games. If that were the case, minors would have been banned from watching professional sports long, long ago.
Windows does what I want it to, when I want it to. It runs the stuff I need, and it runs the games I want. It has decent support, meaning I only have to do very general things to keep it from dying, roughly analogous to not driving a car off a bridge into a tree. The interface is simple, and designed so that I don't have to memorize different command sets to access bits of different programs.
To suck, windows would have to be insufficient for my purposes: that is, it would have to either lack one of the above capacities, or it would have to exhibit some flaw that posed enough of a problem that it presented an actual threat to my well-being and was not easily avoidable. Frankly, spyware and viruses can be prevented by the simple expedient of "not being an idiot", which I've generally gotten the hang of. (And when I slip up, there's this thing called "third party software" that makes repairing what damage I cause fairly easy. I mean, really. It's not like running the OS prevents you from running programs not published by Microsoft.)
Basically, I'm quite happy with my windows machine.
Ok, I'm done feeding the troll^H^H^H^H^Harticle now.
You might want to replace "creatives" with "people under the illusion that they're creative". If they were actually creative, then they wouldn't form a distinct marketing segment, as they'd have a variety of needs wider than one narrow product set could satisfy.
So you want to switch from a system in which a monopoly stems from a decent product being pushed by a relatively unremarkable marketing scheme to a system of complete economic totalitarianism run by the same people that brought you efficient, sensible things like the US tax system and the billion-dollar deficit?
Not to be a troll, but since when did children need a strong teacher/student relationship? Back in high school, one of my favorite teachers showed up at the beginning of class, handed us lab sheets and reading assignments, then went out for coffee. And of the 10 home-schooled kids I know, fully five of them couldn't handle real college and ended up in local community colleges to stay close to their parents. I'd say a strong connection to one's teachers is as likely to be harmful as useful.
You can click that little box thing by the spam and press "delete". I mean, really.
I'm going to take the obvious parallel to driver's licenses here, and finish your post:
And if you use any p2p program on which copyrighted material is illegally shared, you lose your lisence.
And if your computer is running anything that detects as "undesirable software", you lose your lisence.
And if you're caught in a room with an open beer, and are under 21 years of age, you lose your lisence.
And if you download porn while under the legal age of consent (in most states) you lose your lisence.
And if you've violated whatever unintelligible ordinance the town you're passing through feels like imposing, you lose your lisence.
Yeah, I'm not buying this one. Keep government out of things it's only going to abuse anyhow. Besides, who would enforce this stuff? The UN has no real authority over anything, and inconsistencies in national policy would just make the net even more chaotic and give lawyers a lot of my tax money.
200 CDs worth? Where are you taking the bus that calls for that?
The menu structure is actually more difficult to deal with than a case of cds and a cd player. So the iPod isn't either easier to use or more efficient, from my perspective, except perhaps in terms of space. That pretty much leaves "cool" as the only reason for me to buy one.
Yeah, I'm seeing this as "all shipping at a set price per year, unless you want to change the adress to which the packages are sent." I don't really see why they put it in terms of family members. If you're sharing an account, the account will only get charged once anyhow.
You mean ads actually have a persuasive effect? I was under the impression that the point of the celebrity was to grab a viewer's attention, and make them notice that Pepsi does, in fact, exist, in case he wants one.
Two points, here
(1) Occasiionally I see an ad for something I need or want, making them useful.
(2) The plot qualities of television ads, and the literary qualities of print ads, generally surpass those of the television show or magazine in which they are embedded. Example: Any Geico commercial airing during an episode of "Friends": the commercial is approximately 40X as entertaining, and has a plot of approximately 100X better quality.
Not if the downloads are included in the price of cable internet... hell, the cable company is charging you to supply both tv and internet, allowing you to save to hard-drive probably wouldn't touch their profits at all, and could knock some competitors out of business.
I slept through most of sophomore year of high school and the two summers surrounding it, does that count?