That's like saying that the gun kills, and not the person holding the gun. So much for another Slashdot article title.
Thats one slippery slope mostly because if the person who kills with the gun was hired by someone else then that person is also responsible, but what if that person is a business or government.
Things aren't as black as white as it seems when you place blame...
If a government sends off soldiers to war and a soldier accidently shoots a civilian by accident, then is it the gun fault for a bad saftey catch, the soldier carelessness of handling the gun, improper training of his superior officers, or maybe it was the government's fault for buying crappy guns or not paying for enough instructions on gun handling.
Or maybe it was the people's fault for electing such a cheap skate government?
Who knows... But what you are saying is that people maliciously use guns to shoot people which is not the same because these people aren't digging up fiber lines on purpose or for criminal intent or gains.
If you are middle class or lower, you should think carefully about whether you're helping to build technology that will allow the upper class to do away with you.
I jest about the "filty luddite" part, but now that I've got your attention...
If the wealthy can get robots to do anything for free, that is fine and dandy, but doesn't that make everything at a $0.00 value? And if everything costs $0.00 to do as a service or produce when you have an army of robots to do it for you then doesn't that make capitalism a moot point.
Whether you have a billion dollars or zero dollars (or even if you are in debt) it will be worthless in a sense that money no longer is the motivation for you to do anything.
Hence, a technological singularity (in which we have armies of robots doing the bidding of engineers and scientists and geeks) makes capitalism a moot system.
It won't be the wealthy that rule the world at this point, it will be those who run the machines... You know... The scientists and engineers and people who troll slashdot.
This - unfortunately - just isn't true. If a player doesn't know current events and can't understand basic English or refuses to communicate, they don't belong in a group with me.
Maybe they just typed in/mute Southpaw or/ignore Southpaw
So tell us what do you really want? Do you want a US server that disallows all foreign IP addresses?
Or people who can't speak English?
Or maybe both? Because if you are accusing all foreigners of being farmers then this is your solution, becaues I can't think of any other other than better group managment (and that is your personal responsibility).
Seems to me that one good reason to have an English test would be to keep illiterate asshats from ruining your group...
Why not have potential groupers submit disertations and book reviews on 19th century Jane Austin books and then perform the Gettysburg address from memory.
Or maybe explain Einstein's spooky distance idea in 1000 words or less or why the Communists won the Russian Civil war in 1921 and what was the economic results of it was in turkey.
Just because you know how to read and write correctly doesn't make you a well rounded person. You have to do something with that ability. (and I jest because I have poor grammar and hate Jane Austin)
If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their native language server.
I don't know about you, but when UO was released in Japan and Korea, a great many US players played on those servers.
1. Because there was a chance to actually have a place to put a house. 2. Most of the US servers were overcrowded and laggy at times. 3. It was soon discovered that the influx of foreign "noobs" were ripe for the theifs and player killers.
Ever have some guy scream at you in ghost language in Korean... No? Well... Its the same as US ghosts screaming at you in anger. Oh raiding Covetous dungeons... Those were days.
The funny thing was when we were building up newbie characters in the woods on the Ariang server and out of the blue (no pun intended) a red jumped out and went "cor por cor por!" and killed my friend and I shouted "wait wait! don't kill us we are americans!"
And the PK said... "Oh my bad" Rezzed my friend and went on his way.
So yeah... What you are saying works both ways. I bet a few Americans on WoW go on Asian servers to grief and their gaming sites are complaining about the American greifers.
Once all the bullets are expelled or all the maintenance fluids are used up, most weapons are useless. You can't fight a global war with knives, and you can defend yourself much easier in communities against warlords if you take the machine guns and flamethrowers out of the equation.
I for one welcome our new sword bearing, spear wielding, homemade musket, phalanx marching, trebuchet community destroying overlords.
Seriously, mankind is not going to very easily forget how to make gun powder and makes swords. The first warlord to mass produce muskets and cannons will probaly build himself an empire of sorts. Just because we loose our infrastructure doesn't mean people will forget about prior innovations.
Most people wish to live in a world where everything is going to end up ok, where science will save us, where the doomsday predictions are not true. Not that this necessarily mean he is right; but we do need to take this with some amount of seriousness.
This why the technological singularity is preferable and unavoidable if you or I wish to continue to exist.
If the singularity does not happen, we will not be around to observe this fact making any debate on the environment a moot point.
Sure there might be survivors of an environmental apocalypse, but if their descendants do not acheive a singularity then they will end up dying to eventually (be it meteor, loss of magnetic field, solar flar, neutron star drifting by our solar system or eventually the sun dying or expanding past our current location or heck they might even self inflict their own demise)
But if they do no one will be around to observe it so it will be a moot point.
And knowning China and her relationship with Microsoft, this may be interesting to see how Chinese government will react to this plausable senario.
China may dislike the RoC's government more than most nations, but I doubt they'll be handing over all lucrative contracts over to Microsoft when they have more than enough home grown solutions.
Its a bit different now, but I knew fansubbing clubs back in teh 90's that would only release things that weren't released State side. Mostly because they were aware of copyright violations and internet p2p hadn't taken off then.
From my recolection many series would not have been released in the states if it had not been for the Fansubbers and the reaction to those tapes going around. Even if you did get a VHS copy from Japan you still wouldn't know what they are saying.
But today we have the internet and things are generally released within a year of being released in Japan now so there isn't that 5-10 year lag between releases in Japan and the States.
But like all piracy, I say that theoretical sales losses are bunk and made up arbitrary numbers by people who have no clue how widespread (or little spread) it is. I'd say piracy affects real sales in a minimal way because most people who pirate that much would never be able to afford all those items with their actual income. Not that I would know anything about internet piracy or what not... I actually bought the whole DVD series and got the nice tin can box for SAC.
In 500 years technology would have reached a point there were radioactive material is a moot point. If man hasn't acheived such technology by then we would have suffered a great catastrophe resulting in perhaps the ned of the world or something that prevent the current population growth to reach 1 trillion people (which the earth will probaly not support with even 2006 technology).
So it is imperative that we increase technology by any means needed in ordery to acheive a point where radioactive material handling is a moot point. If this means we have to build 10,000 nuclear reactors before we find out how to create fusion then so be it.
Of course, that situation may very well change, if they do not get their act together. Then, like any other scarce resource, electricity will become very wisely efficiently allocated by the market.
No. If the electricity bills go too high it will me a public shift of opinon of "ok fuck it... lets go nuclear".
People will bitch and moan about the environment until it hits there pockets or vice versa in which people will complain and moan about how electricity is to high but when they can't breath outside because of the smog they'll change their mind.
What I am trying to say, nothing will happen to the majority of people are affected directly one way or another.
Re:Picking and choosing...
on
God Mode
·
· Score: 1
From the article: "Many people seem to have this misconception that somehow Christian means nonviolent.
However, there was this guy named Jesus who said: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Thats nice, but apparently many so called Christians do not live by that code. A true Christian would not seek vengence for any misdeed by another party.
This would mean murder of a love one, attack by another nation, nor attacking anyone else because you fear them or want their things.
Even if they steal your holy land... Or drive planes into your buildings.
A true Christian would say "Such is the will of god. I will forgive them for their sins and I shall be rewarded in the afterlife by the grace of god and my faith no matter what anyone does to me".
It is not Christian to seek revenge or force others to convert, thus I don't think we have many true Christians amoung us especially those in power.
Personally, I have found Buddhism to be more compatible with Jesus's teachings than modern day Christian Chruch dogma.
However, I'm a maltheist singularitan with streaks of Catharism who has feeble attempts at praticing lay Buddhism so you shouldn't take my advice with a grain of salt. You know... Like a Muslim telling a Jew that he isn't praticing Judaism very correctly.
It would be more like if TiVo started inserting their own ads while you watched tv. And I'm pretty sure the tv companies wouldn't be happy about that either.
My local cable company does this... I often see them cut out commericals and replace them with local ads. However, they might have an agreement with the people they buy the tv from.
Secondly, this isn't TV. The players aren't actors and you aren't generating live copyrighted material. If you record a match of a CS game is this copyright of valves? It's like someone who bought a copy of maya 3d or 3d max and found every time they made something it belonged to May or 3dmax parent companies.
This of course is a bit different since they are using copyrighted material such as the artwork and models, but the display of the game engine and what you do with it is not copyrighted by valve.
Lets put it this way... You take someones music and remix it and then add your own lyrics etc. The original is copyrighted and you technically owe them a royalty, but they do not own a copyright on what you produced. Trust me its fuzzy, but what you see on a gaming server is not directly copyrighted by valve. Their stuff in the engine is, but they can't say what you add on to it.
If you bought the game and paid the license and then added onto what your paid a license for then they don't own the copyright to what you added on nor what you produced with their engine.
If I was providing downloads of a popular TV show and inserting my own commercials in it, the producer of that show would expect compensation.
Online games are not TV shows. First off... Valve wrote the egine... (TV camera and the world), but they aren't the ones recording and trasnmitted the video (the game servers) nor are they writing the script and paying the actors (the players)
The programs and artwork are copyrighted, but its like saying you can't buy a movie poster, take it home, and modify it to have an add and then get sued because your friends saw it.
Don't play in other people's backyards, you will only get kicked out, especially thanks to Steam nowdays.
If they owned the servers, then I think they should have the right to put ads in the servers. If they don't... Then this is to be handled by the server admins.
Either way, we shouldn't be fighting in court over this.
Its like I made a paintball game in a field in my backyard and put up a billboard on my own property and then the paint ball gun owners sued me just because we used their gear to play the game with.
"When you have millions of people romping through your creation they're going to do all kinds of crazy, unanticipated things, many of which can allow them to become tiny gods if left unchecked."
I'm sure god has contemplated the same thing when man split the atom at the Trinity site.
Telling "It will work out in the future, somehow" is the best motivation-killer.
So is end of the world scenarios, destroyed environment, and doomsday predictions in which we might as well just fuck up everything anyways so we might as well sit around and indulge in the last few years of life.
Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future?
Because it is better than accepting the status quo.
If we don't dream of a better world than what is the point? We might as well go back to caves if we aren't going to better our world.
I'd love to see a discussion of futurists' predictions that HAVE been surprisingly accurate.
You mean Moore's law? Or Kurzweil's accelerating returns... If you haven't read The Singularity is Near then you should take a read.
Yes it is a bit optimistic, but he does point out things in a realistic light. Most of his predictions are based of past observation or existing technologies that are here and now. It is a good read nonetheless if you want to least look at the potential philosophical aspect of technological change even if it might not happen in our lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying that the gun kills, and not the person holding the gun. So much for another Slashdot article title.
Thats one slippery slope mostly because if the person who kills with the gun was hired by someone else then that person is also responsible, but what if that person is a business or government.
Things aren't as black as white as it seems when you place blame...
If a government sends off soldiers to war and a soldier accidently shoots a civilian by accident, then is it the gun fault for a bad saftey catch, the soldier carelessness of handling the gun, improper training of his superior officers, or maybe it was the government's fault for buying crappy guns or not paying for enough instructions on gun handling.
Or maybe it was the people's fault for electing such a cheap skate government?
Who knows... But what you are saying is that people maliciously use guns to shoot people which is not the same because these people aren't digging up fiber lines on purpose or for criminal intent or gains.
At least I hope not.
VOIP has many problems, e.g. unlike regular telephones on regular telephone lines, they do not work during power cuts.
Neither does anything else in the house.
Except candles and books... Oh and a cell phone.
And where do the Europeans fit in here? What sort of robots do they want?
;)
The kind you put your penis in.
If you are middle class or lower, you should think carefully about whether you're helping to build technology that will allow the upper class to do away with you.
I jest about the "filty luddite" part, but now that I've got your attention...
If the wealthy can get robots to do anything for free, that is fine and dandy, but doesn't that make everything at a $0.00 value? And if everything costs $0.00 to do as a service or produce when you have an army of robots to do it for you then doesn't that make capitalism a moot point.
Whether you have a billion dollars or zero dollars (or even if you are in debt) it will be worthless in a sense that money no longer is the motivation for you to do anything.
Hence, a technological singularity (in which we have armies of robots doing the bidding of engineers and scientists and geeks) makes capitalism a moot system.
It won't be the wealthy that rule the world at this point, it will be those who run the machines... You know... The scientists and engineers and people who troll slashdot.
Not the wealthy nor the poor.
If you're just going to turn warfare into a little game, just have some humans play an existing game to solve your problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
This - unfortunately - just isn't true. If a player doesn't know current events and can't understand basic English or refuses to communicate, they don't belong in a group with me.
/mute Southpaw or /ignore Southpaw
Maybe they just typed in
So tell us what do you really want? Do you want a US server that disallows all foreign IP addresses?
Or people who can't speak English?
Or maybe both? Because if you are accusing all foreigners of being farmers then this is your solution, becaues I can't think of any other other than better group managment (and that is your personal responsibility).
Do you think Blizzard would agree to do this?
No? Well maybe it is a moot point then.
Seems to me that one good reason to have an English test would be to keep illiterate asshats from ruining your group...
Why not have potential groupers submit disertations and book reviews on 19th century Jane Austin books and then perform the Gettysburg address from memory.
Or maybe explain Einstein's spooky distance idea in 1000 words or less or why the Communists won the Russian Civil war in 1921 and what was the economic results of it was in turkey.
Just because you know how to read and write correctly doesn't make you a well rounded person. You have to do something with that ability. (and I jest because I have poor grammar and hate Jane Austin)
If they weren't farmers, they'd be on their native language server.
I don't know about you, but when UO was released in Japan and Korea, a great many US players played on those servers.
1. Because there was a chance to actually have a place to put a house.
2. Most of the US servers were overcrowded and laggy at times.
3. It was soon discovered that the influx of foreign "noobs" were ripe for the theifs and player killers.
Ever have some guy scream at you in ghost language in Korean... No? Well... Its the same as US ghosts screaming at you in anger. Oh raiding Covetous dungeons... Those were days.
The funny thing was when we were building up newbie characters in the woods on the Ariang server and out of the blue (no pun intended) a red jumped out and went "cor por cor por!" and killed my friend and I shouted "wait wait! don't kill us we are americans!"
And the PK said... "Oh my bad" Rezzed my friend and went on his way.
So yeah... What you are saying works both ways. I bet a few Americans on WoW go on Asian servers to grief and their gaming sites are complaining about the American greifers.
Well I'll be damned... 27 years and I didn't know. Thanks slashdot.
Of course wiki says that Al Capone and Mohammed Ali were also born on this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_17
No it's the reverse of a space shuttle.
The part of it that launches the space craft flies back to earth, while the space craft comes back like it would a regular rocket via chutes.
Think of it as a rocket that piggy backs a jet airliner and launching from 100km up.
Sounds a good deal like Spaceship One.
Maybe its better than firing rockets straight up.
Are they going to separate you from your family for months/years at a time?
I take you have never played WoW.
Once all the bullets are expelled or all the maintenance fluids are used up, most weapons are useless. You can't fight a global war with knives, and you can defend yourself much easier in communities against warlords if you take the machine guns and flamethrowers out of the equation.
I for one welcome our new sword bearing, spear wielding, homemade musket, phalanx marching, trebuchet community destroying overlords.
Seriously, mankind is not going to very easily forget how to make gun powder and makes swords. The first warlord to mass produce muskets and cannons will probaly build himself an empire of sorts. Just because we loose our infrastructure doesn't mean people will forget about prior innovations.
Most people wish to live in a world where everything is going to end up ok, where science will save us, where the doomsday predictions are not true. Not that this necessarily mean he is right; but we do need to take this with some amount of seriousness.
This why the technological singularity is preferable and unavoidable if you or I wish to continue to exist.
Lets put it in the same light as the Anthropic Principal.
If the singularity does not happen, we will not be around to observe this fact making any debate on the environment a moot point.
Sure there might be survivors of an environmental apocalypse, but if their descendants do not acheive a singularity then they will end up dying to eventually (be it meteor, loss of magnetic field, solar flar, neutron star drifting by our solar system or eventually the sun dying or expanding past our current location or heck they might even self inflict their own demise)
But if they do no one will be around to observe it so it will be a moot point.
And knowning China and her relationship with Microsoft, this may be interesting to see how Chinese government will react to this plausable senario.
China may dislike the RoC's government more than most nations, but I doubt they'll be handing over all lucrative contracts over to Microsoft when they have more than enough home grown solutions.
Its a bit different now, but I knew fansubbing clubs back in teh 90's that would only release things that weren't released State side. Mostly because they were aware of copyright violations and internet p2p hadn't taken off then.
From my recolection many series would not have been released in the states if it had not been for the Fansubbers and the reaction to those tapes going around. Even if you did get a VHS copy from Japan you still wouldn't know what they are saying.
But today we have the internet and things are generally released within a year of being released in Japan now so there isn't that 5-10 year lag between releases in Japan and the States.
But like all piracy, I say that theoretical sales losses are bunk and made up arbitrary numbers by people who have no clue how widespread (or little spread) it is. I'd say piracy affects real sales in a minimal way because most people who pirate that much would never be able to afford all those items with their actual income. Not that I would know anything about internet piracy or what not... I actually bought the whole DVD series and got the nice tin can box for SAC.
Does that sound like a 500+ year solution to you?
In 500 years technology would have reached a point there were radioactive material is a moot point. If man hasn't acheived such technology by then we would have suffered a great catastrophe resulting in perhaps the ned of the world or something that prevent the current population growth to reach 1 trillion people (which the earth will probaly not support with even 2006 technology).
So it is imperative that we increase technology by any means needed in ordery to acheive a point where radioactive material handling is a moot point. If this means we have to build 10,000 nuclear reactors before we find out how to create fusion then so be it.
Of course, that situation may very well change, if they do not get their act together. Then, like any other scarce resource, electricity will become very wisely efficiently allocated by the market.
No. If the electricity bills go too high it will me a public shift of opinon of "ok fuck it... lets go nuclear".
People will bitch and moan about the environment until it hits there pockets or vice versa in which people will complain and moan about how electricity is to high but when they can't breath outside because of the smog they'll change their mind.
What I am trying to say, nothing will happen to the majority of people are affected directly one way or another.
From the article: "Many people seem to have this misconception that somehow Christian means nonviolent.
However, there was this guy named Jesus who said:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Thats nice, but apparently many so called Christians do not live by that code. A true Christian would not seek vengence for any misdeed by another party.
This would mean murder of a love one, attack by another nation, nor attacking anyone else because you fear them or want their things.
Even if they steal your holy land... Or drive planes into your buildings.
A true Christian would say "Such is the will of god. I will forgive them for their sins and I shall be rewarded in the afterlife by the grace of god and my faith no matter what anyone does to me".
It is not Christian to seek revenge or force others to convert, thus I don't think we have many true Christians amoung us especially those in power.
Personally, I have found Buddhism to be more compatible with Jesus's teachings than modern day Christian Chruch dogma.
However, I'm a maltheist singularitan with streaks of Catharism who has feeble attempts at praticing lay Buddhism so you shouldn't take my advice with a grain of salt. You know... Like a Muslim telling a Jew that he isn't praticing Judaism very correctly.
It would be more like if TiVo started inserting their own ads while you watched tv. And I'm pretty sure the tv companies wouldn't be happy about that either.
My local cable company does this... I often see them cut out commericals and replace them with local ads. However, they might have an agreement with the people they buy the tv from.
Secondly, this isn't TV. The players aren't actors and you aren't generating live copyrighted material. If you record a match of a CS game is this copyright of valves? It's like someone who bought a copy of maya 3d or 3d max and found every time they made something it belonged to May or 3dmax parent companies.
This of course is a bit different since they are using copyrighted material such as the artwork and models, but the display of the game engine and what you do with it is not copyrighted by valve.
Lets put it this way... You take someones music and remix it and then add your own lyrics etc. The original is copyrighted and you technically owe them a royalty, but they do not own a copyright on what you produced. Trust me its fuzzy, but what you see on a gaming server is not directly copyrighted by valve. Their stuff in the engine is, but they can't say what you add on to it.
If you bought the game and paid the license and then added onto what your paid a license for then they don't own the copyright to what you added on nor what you produced with their engine.
If I was providing downloads of a popular TV show and inserting my own commercials in it, the producer of that show would expect compensation.
Online games are not TV shows. First off... Valve wrote the egine... (TV camera and the world), but they aren't the ones recording and trasnmitted the video (the game servers) nor are they writing the script and paying the actors (the players)
The programs and artwork are copyrighted, but its like saying you can't buy a movie poster, take it home, and modify it to have an add and then get sued because your friends saw it.
Don't play in other people's backyards, you will only get kicked out, especially thanks to Steam nowdays.
If they owned the servers, then I think they should have the right to put ads in the servers. If they don't... Then this is to be handled by the server admins.
Either way, we shouldn't be fighting in court over this.
Its like I made a paintball game in a field in my backyard and put up a billboard on my own property and then the paint ball gun owners sued me just because we used their gear to play the game with.
"When you have millions of people romping through your creation they're going to do all kinds of crazy, unanticipated things, many of which can allow them to become tiny gods if left unchecked."
I'm sure god has contemplated the same thing when man split the atom at the Trinity site.
Telling "It will work out in the future, somehow" is the best motivation-killer.
So is end of the world scenarios, destroyed environment, and doomsday predictions in which we might as well just fuck up everything anyways so we might as well sit around and indulge in the last few years of life.
It can go both ways.
Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future?
Because it is better than accepting the status quo.
If we don't dream of a better world than what is the point? We might as well go back to caves if we aren't going to better our world.
I'd love to see a discussion of futurists' predictions that HAVE been surprisingly accurate.
You mean Moore's law? Or Kurzweil's accelerating returns... If you haven't read The Singularity is Near then you should take a read.
Yes it is a bit optimistic, but he does point out things in a realistic light. Most of his predictions are based of past observation or existing technologies that are here and now. It is a good read nonetheless if you want to least look at the potential philosophical aspect of technological change even if it might not happen in our lifetime.