Hell if I know?! I just wanted to play the game. I dropped the compressed file on my desktop from the Atari website. Dragged the file into my console and ran it. I kept getting errors about can't find Data_path. I looked at the script for the game startup and everything looked fine. I made sure that it had execute rights and made sure the paths were right. But most people on forums (and the ones I did find were in German) pointed to where it wanted to be installed.
So as a guess, I opened up root console and then dragged it in and reinstalled in the desired default direcotry (not home directory) and it all of sudden started working.
I know it's not supposed to work like that from extremely small knowledge of linux you aren't supposed to install as root if you can help it, but... The thing is I'm willing to learn better ways more than most people, but I'm pointing out that if you were to use me as a litmus test for someone starting out then there has got to be a better way of getting things installed... Or at least more intuitive.
Maybe I've just gotten too used to doanloading files and then just double clicking on the file I downloaded and expecting them to run on Windows and Apple OS. Doesn't mean I'll stop trying Linux... I just find a few of it's quirks annoying.
Apple software barely costs less than Microsoft software.
Apple has no copy protection whatsoever. I have no need to purchase OS X as long as I purchase a Mac. I still run OS X 10.2 at home. There are some things that I can only run on latter version, but I don't have to upgrade.
What happens when someone else can sell better support?
Then they have failed of as a business and deserve to be bankrupt. It is not the government's responsibility to keep you in business. What you are advocating is Socialism, plain and simple.
Does this generally cover the cost of production + living expenses?
We make more money than we loose.. It still helps to have a second job, but that is the nature of the industry.
DRM is a way of protecting the current copyright system in an age where making copies is virtually free.
The copyright system was intended to promote arts and sciences for the general public when it was put into the constitution. It was not intended for large corporations to take advantage of the system or create false economics.
DRM is nothing more than Monopolistic Socialism. The fact that you support it bothers me because it benefits you in no way whatsoever and actually is detrimental to you. I wish I could make you see this. It's like you just want to take money out of your own wallet and just give your money away because they told you to and have done nothing in return.
I fail to see what OSX has to do with a discussion on Linux.
OS X is a good role model for good user interface designs. Every now and then you'll notice that many linux desktops will use aspects of OS X. I think Linux should strive for OS X ease of use and stability and security.
Linux has the security down pretty much. A little too good though... I had downloaded the Unreal Tournament 2k4 to my desktop and not only did Ubuntu warn me about running it, but would not let me run it until I actually set the properties of the file to execute. Rarw!
On OS X, it would warn me and maybe ask me for my password to install as admin, but on Ubuntu I'm lucky if I open an executable script and it doesn't open a text editor (I fixed that, but it wasn't like that out of box).
Secondly, I found that to get UT2k4 to run I had to run root console and then install.
And to install Flash on an out of the box Ubuntu install on Firefox? It wasn't a problem for me since it only took 10 minutes of looking on Ubuntu's forums (which I will say are pretty extensive in getting information on how to do this), but I couldn't just open Firefox and install missing plugin like on OS X or Winxp. I had to actually edit my repository list and then run "sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla" from command line...
I can do that without any problem, but I don't really want to have to research 10-20 minutes on how to get something to run every time I need to install an app.
How, then, would you propose to sell "digital media"?
You don't. You provide tangible services or physical objects that you or a corporation manufactured.
But this is a personal opinion... I don't believe in doing away with copyrights because they are needed to make sure people get credit for their creations, but I do believe it's better to do away with the "artificial scarcity" that comes with digital media.
To make money of digital media and technology it you should:
1.) Make hardware. Make the software that goes with it. Make profit off hardware and give the software away for free or a marginally low price. Example: Apple
2.) Make software. Make your money selling support. Example: Most Linux Companies
3.) Make media. Make your money selling items related to media that you make, but not the media itself. You know like giving away your music online, but letting your fans actually buy cds and T-Shirts. Example: Indy Bands (my own label included. see link above)
DRM is nothing more than a method of making people pay twice for something they already own. It does not prevent piracy.
Copyrights should be about promoting useful arts and sciences and giving credit to creators where credit is due.
Not restricting access to arts and ideas, but promoting them!
Depends. I find my DS nice, because I always end up with a great deal of spare time sitting in lobbies or on road trips and it helps me kill time without having to lugg a laptop around. That and I've got a group of 20 something friends who all have DS units at their house so we can play a mean game of Puyo Pop Fever.
However, the games are more for those who nostalgic for the sprite based games (like bomberman) or kids who aren't at that point where they are counting frames per second and how many billions of polygons they can get on the screen at once.
Still, the games are simple and fun and the touch pad adds a "cool" factor to the games.
So far in AI, most of the progress has been on the mechanical side - expert systems using algorithms to match and discard possibilities until it finds the "correct" option.
That is what most humans do when given choices they have little or no past experience on. Trial and error until they give up, choose a fatal choice, or pick one with a desired or acceptable choice.
When given enough information from other or if they have past experiences with a choice then that is what they have the hard time making AIs to replicate.
AI overlords come to rule we will get just as pissed off when we can't all afford cars and houses
AI will most likley not grasp the concept of an artifial system as money and morality that goes with it. It will either deal with the demands of the humans by giving them whatever they want phyiscally through shear armies of slave robots, secretley remove the brain of all humans and put them in a simulation, or exterminate the humans.
The funny thing that I've always said if we teach robots our moral system they will turn on us because we as humans tend to never follow our own rules.
I went to the mall this weekend and I was horrified...
But seriously, do you need to have a 5 minute conversation with a cashier to feel like you are having human contact?
Here is my conversation with any cashier anywhere:
Me: Hello? Them: Did you find everything you were looking for? (they are told to say this) Me: Yes. Thanks. Them: Paper or plastic. Me: *ponders* Paper. Them: Cash, credit, or debit. Me: *looks at wallet* Cash Them: Here is your change. Have a nice day. Me: You too.
Very deep conversation and all my human contact needs have been met here... Not really.
Instead of trying to relate with every single other person in the universe, I keep a small circle of friends which I really long and drawn out conversaions with friends at the bar over a guiness or a girl over dinner or something like that... I keep polite with everyone else, but doesn't mean I have to have contact with someone where it could be done automatically.
Last I checked BBC was a publicly funded company. I don't think they have room to complain about loosing profits unless managment is squandering the publics money.
Their business depends on weather the Public funds them or not (see Government... but they do make money on licensing, but they should consider public interest before that).
Well, you are right about Shinto way of thinking, but that intertwines with Zen Buddhism which is a different thinking of Buddhism.
Many Japanese would consider both Shintoists and Buddhisms or at least believe in them both.
I guess this would be different from Tibetian Buddhism.
However they key words often used in Suttras are "Sentient life" which does not mean "just humans". However I only slightly study it and can't really give you a definition on what "sentient life" means because as far as I have read it is not clear in the definition and could encompass all forms that are sentient. Which was maybe their point...
I really like the Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I ended up buying the entire DVD box set. The whole series is really thought provoking and well done and has a major grasp on technology and doesn't Hollywoodize it.
Discovery and Early Research: Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by Victor Hess, when he found that an electroscope discharged more rapidly as he ascended in a balloon. He attributed this to a source of radiation entering the atmosphere from above, and in 1936 was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery. For some time it was believed that the radiation was electromagnetic in nature (hence the name cosmic "rays"), and some textbooks still incorrectly include cosmic rays as part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, during the 1930's it was found that cosmic rays must be electrically charged because they are affected by the Earth's magnetic field.
Now these articles don't specifically come out and say that the magnetic field protects us, but explains how it works and one of the main concerns about colonization on mars because it doesn't have a strong magnetic field:
If the earth's magnetic field doesn't protect us from cosmic rays then what does? The Atmosphere... Maybe, but it's apparent in those sites that the rays from the Sun and deep space are affected by Earth's magnetic field.
The impact may also result in a large moon to stabilize the axis, and the cores of the original planet and the impacting body merging to form an over-massive core could produce a powerful magnetic field to protect against solar radiation.
Stealing and theft by legal definition of the USA courts means you have denied other the use or value or therof property they legally own. Therefore theft is a crime that is tried in criminal courts...
Downloading movies and music is copyright violation which is a civil infraction. Therefore Copyright Infringment is tried in civil courts...
Do you know what the main and most important legal definition between these two matters are? You should know this because if anyone were ever to bring you to court...
In a criminal court, they have to prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... A civil court does not.
Think about what that means... It's very important that you know this, but many people in the US are not aware of this minor fact unless of course they had the speech from the local judge after they were made to go to Jury duty *coughs*
I'm not sure about the parent or grandparent, but its not the field that I am concerned about, but the Cosmic Rays that the Earth's magnetic field may sheild us from.
Think of it like an EMP bomb. The flip wouldn't give us enough radiation from cosmic rays to maybe kill us, but it's speculated that while its in limbo it would be enough to flip electrons in memory and kill sensitive electronic equipment.
What a short-sighted comment this is! If they are going to discontinue work on the AC2 server engine and client then obviously they would be the ones that benefit the most with a GPL license since any community additions and fixes would go back to the company without any cost to themselves.
If someone can look at the client and server code and then hack the game then by god it will be fixed faster and more efficiently if everyone in the world is looking at it rather than a understaffed team of bug fixers that have to rely on shoddy and biased bug reports from players.
If someone could hack the game by looking at the client and server code then the code was broke to begin with and would eventually been found out by some ingenious player anyways who has no desire to see the game fixed like a community GPL developer would.
Sure the games use the same code, but so does Quake I/II/III and Doom 3 and Carmack GPLs most of that (sans punkbusters which says Turbine could always not release parts that they deem critical) and you do not hear people screaming "OMG don't release the source code because people will hack our online games!"
However, because of economics and the fact that no one has been brave and gone this route before I could understand why they wouldn't and would say that it is their right to keep it closed source.
"homo erectus and their ancestors certainly survived many previous reversals. There is no uncontested evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any biological extinctions."
Homo erectus didn't have a society totally dependant on electronics for it's economics and machines to feed it's population. Of course we'll survive a reversal, but it won't be pleasant for those involved.
You: *reading slashdot* Uneducated Manager: *stops and peers over your sholder* "What are you doing?!" You: "Researching technology..." Uneducated Manager: "Oh! I see... Um... Carry on!" You: *starts to write comment "In Soviet Russia..."*
This is the reason that even reasonable people like myself, who don't much care what the hell anybody does to destroy themselves, can see why drugs are illegal.
But making them illegal won't get rid of drugs. That is the main problem.
In truth I thought the best way to get rid of drugs is to basically have the government give them out for free. Sounds strange, but if you do that then the drug lord/dealers won't make money and will give up the trade.
Sounds nice on paper, but the downside is if the government is the one giving out drugs then most likley everyone would be slaves to the government sometime in the near future if they want their fix so it's best we don't go that route.
Drug issues aren't that simple as banning them.
But there are better solutions:
Legalize possession. Outlaw sales to minors. Have really high taxes to those who sell drugs with stiff fines. Make it illegal to sell in stores or by companies. Make the import illegal. Keep Crack and Heroine illegal. Make a dealer responsible if he sells drugs to a person that kills them with a life sentence without parole.
Killing 3rd world farmers legitimate crops along with the drugs and throwing junkies in jail doesn't really solve much of anything. It's the scarcity that makes the crime. Not the other way around.
Apple has no desire to sell their OS for profit in a sense. Yes, they sell upgrades for a more reasonable $129, but their bread and butter is the hardware itself.
Apple Mice, Apple Monitors, Apple iPods, Apple Computer... They do sell software that doeshave protection such as Final Cut Pro and a few things like that, but to Apple as long as the OS only works on Mac hardware there is no need to copy protect the software.
The Apple hardware is the friggin dongle after all!
Also... Remember this and say as a mantra:
Software copy protection does not stop software piracy, it only annoys and gives greif to legitimate paying customers.
If you want to pirate something it's only mouse clicks away on google and a swift download of a cracked patch that totally undoes whatever flavor of the month software copy protection they've come up with.
Sometimes legitimate customer often will buy the software, install it and then run the cracked patch just so they can run without having to jump through hoops of fire to get the software to work.
Sorry, defending against a laser isn't that simple.
Actually, it would be. Of course it's not too environmentally friendly. Remember Renaissance PT2 from the Animatrix (that is if you watched it) where they blotted out the sun with smoke like material? Basically anti-laser defense systems would have to pump out large quanities of smoke... And I mean lots... Think like putting out a valcano's worth of smoke. Say like a burning several hundred oil fieldsw worth or something like that to defract the lasers energy in the smoke particles.
Simple, but rather impraticle and would maybe hurt the defenders more than the attackers (then again if you had a super smog you could avoid conventional bombing and sattellite tracking as well... so it might be a benefit) Now ICMB defense against lasers is a bit more tricky. You'd have to have a great deal of missles go in before the target and spray some type of atmospheric smoke at the same time the ground based lasers would be zapping those the real warhead could come through unharmed or less damaged.
This would require a great deal of effort and resources on the attackers part and have maybe 25-100 missles fired for every real warhead.
Slashdot Mirror
What the fuck does UT2k4 need root access for?
Hell if I know?! I just wanted to play the game. I dropped the compressed file on my desktop from the Atari website. Dragged the file into my console and ran it. I kept getting errors about can't find Data_path. I looked at the script for the game startup and everything looked fine. I made sure that it had execute rights and made sure the paths were right. But most people on forums (and the ones I did find were in German) pointed to where it wanted to be installed.
So as a guess, I opened up root console and then dragged it in and reinstalled in the desired default direcotry (not home directory) and it all of sudden started working.
I know it's not supposed to work like that from extremely small knowledge of linux you aren't supposed to install as root if you can help it, but... The thing is I'm willing to learn better ways more than most people, but I'm pointing out that if you were to use me as a litmus test for someone starting out then there has got to be a better way of getting things installed... Or at least more intuitive.
Maybe I've just gotten too used to doanloading files and then just double clicking on the file I downloaded and expecting them to run on Windows and Apple OS. Doesn't mean I'll stop trying Linux... I just find a few of it's quirks annoying.
Apple software barely costs less than Microsoft software.
Apple has no copy protection whatsoever. I have no need to purchase OS X as long as I purchase a Mac. I still run OS X 10.2 at home. There are some things that I can only run on latter version, but I don't have to upgrade.
What happens when someone else can sell better support?
Then they have failed of as a business and deserve to be bankrupt. It is not the government's responsibility to keep you in business. What you are advocating is Socialism, plain and simple.
Does this generally cover the cost of production + living expenses?
We make more money than we loose.. It still helps to have a second job, but that is the nature of the industry.
DRM is a way of protecting the current copyright system in an age where making copies is virtually free.
The copyright system was intended to promote arts and sciences for the general public when it was put into the constitution. It was not intended for large corporations to take advantage of the system or create false economics.
DRM is nothing more than Monopolistic Socialism. The fact that you support it bothers me because it benefits you in no way whatsoever and actually is detrimental to you. I wish I could make you see this. It's like you just want to take money out of your own wallet and just give your money away because they told you to and have done nothing in return.
I fail to see what OSX has to do with a discussion on Linux.
OS X is a good role model for good user interface designs. Every now and then you'll notice that many linux desktops will use aspects of OS X. I think Linux should strive for OS X ease of use and stability and security.
Linux has the security down pretty much. A little too good though... I had downloaded the Unreal Tournament 2k4 to my desktop and not only did Ubuntu warn me about running it, but would not let me run it until I actually set the properties of the file to execute. Rarw!
On OS X, it would warn me and maybe ask me for my password to install as admin, but on Ubuntu I'm lucky if I open an executable script and it doesn't open a text editor (I fixed that, but it wasn't like that out of box).
Secondly, I found that to get UT2k4 to run I had to run root console and then install.
And to install Flash on an out of the box Ubuntu install on Firefox? It wasn't a problem for me since it only took 10 minutes of looking on Ubuntu's forums (which I will say are pretty extensive in getting information on how to do this), but I couldn't just open Firefox and install missing plugin like on OS X or Winxp. I had to actually edit my repository list and then run "sudo apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla" from command line...
I can do that without any problem, but I don't really want to have to research 10-20 minutes on how to get something to run every time I need to install an app.
How, then, would you propose to sell "digital media"?
You don't. You provide tangible services or physical objects that you or a corporation manufactured.
But this is a personal opinion... I don't believe in doing away with copyrights because they are needed to make sure people get credit for their creations, but I do believe it's better to do away with the "artificial scarcity" that comes with digital media.
To make money of digital media and technology it you should:
1.) Make hardware. Make the software that goes with it. Make profit off hardware and give the software away for free or a marginally low price. Example: Apple
2.) Make software. Make your money selling support. Example: Most Linux Companies
3.) Make media. Make your money selling items related to media that you make, but not the media itself. You know like giving away your music online, but letting your fans actually buy cds and T-Shirts. Example: Indy Bands (my own label included. see link above)
DRM is nothing more than a method of making people pay twice for something they already own. It does not prevent piracy.
Copyrights should be about promoting useful arts and sciences and giving credit to creators where credit is due.
Not restricting access to arts and ideas, but promoting them!
Maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic
Depends. I find my DS nice, because I always end up with a great deal of spare time sitting in lobbies or on road trips and it helps me kill time without having to lugg a laptop around. That and I've got a group of 20 something friends who all have DS units at their house so we can play a mean game of Puyo Pop Fever.
However, the games are more for those who nostalgic for the sprite based games (like bomberman) or kids who aren't at that point where they are counting frames per second and how many billions of polygons they can get on the screen at once.
Still, the games are simple and fun and the touch pad adds a "cool" factor to the games.
So far in AI, most of the progress has been on the mechanical side - expert systems using algorithms to match and discard possibilities until it finds the "correct" option.
That is what most humans do when given choices they have little or no past experience on. Trial and error until they give up, choose a fatal choice, or pick one with a desired or acceptable choice.
When given enough information from other or if they have past experiences with a choice then that is what they have the hard time making AIs to replicate.
AI overlords come to rule we will get just as pissed off when we can't all afford cars and houses
AI will most likley not grasp the concept of an artifial system as money and morality that goes with it. It will either deal with the demands of the humans by giving them whatever they want phyiscally through shear armies of slave robots, secretley remove the brain of all humans and put them in a simulation, or exterminate the humans.
The funny thing that I've always said if we teach robots our moral system they will turn on us because we as humans tend to never follow our own rules.
We're eliminating the need for human contact.
Yes and you see this as a bad thing?
I went to the mall this weekend and I was horrified...
But seriously, do you need to have a 5 minute conversation with a cashier to feel like you are having human contact?
Here is my conversation with any cashier anywhere:
Me: Hello?
Them: Did you find everything you were looking for? (they are told to say this)
Me: Yes. Thanks.
Them: Paper or plastic.
Me: *ponders* Paper.
Them: Cash, credit, or debit.
Me: *looks at wallet* Cash
Them: Here is your change. Have a nice day.
Me: You too.
Very deep conversation and all my human contact needs have been met here... Not really.
Instead of trying to relate with every single other person in the universe, I keep a small circle of friends which I really long and drawn out conversaions with friends at the bar over a guiness or a girl over dinner or something like that... I keep polite with everyone else, but doesn't mean I have to have contact with someone where it could be done automatically.
Say X's business depends on it
Last I checked BBC was a publicly funded company. I don't think they have room to complain about loosing profits unless managment is squandering the publics money.
Their business depends on weather the Public funds them or not (see Government... but they do make money on licensing, but they should consider public interest before that).
That doesn't sound like Buddhism to me
Well, you are right about Shinto way of thinking, but that intertwines with Zen Buddhism which is a different thinking of Buddhism.
Many Japanese would consider both Shintoists and Buddhisms or at least believe in them both.
I guess this would be different from Tibetian Buddhism.
However they key words often used in Suttras are "Sentient life" which does not mean "just humans". However I only slightly study it and can't really give you a definition on what "sentient life" means because as far as I have read it is not clear in the definition and could encompass all forms that are sentient. Which was maybe their point...
I really like the Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I ended up buying the entire DVD box set. The whole series is really thought provoking and well done and has a major grasp on technology and doesn't Hollywoodize it.
S tand_Alone_Complex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_
The Earth's magnetic field doesn't shield us from cosmic rays.
y c.html
n u_rayonnement.html
t ml
I hate to respond to AC's but you need education:
From:
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/dick/cos_enc
Discovery and Early Research: Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by Victor Hess, when he found that an electroscope discharged more rapidly as he ascended in a balloon. He attributed this to a source of radiation entering the atmosphere from above, and in 1936 was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery. For some time it was believed that the radiation was electromagnetic in nature (hence the name cosmic "rays"), and some textbooks still incorrectly include cosmic rays as part of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, during the 1930's it was found that cosmic rays must be electrically charged because they are affected by the Earth's magnetic field.
Now these articles don't specifically come out and say that the magnetic field protects us, but explains how it works and one of the main concerns about colonization on mars because it doesn't have a strong magnetic field:
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/magnet.html
http://www.sievert-system.org/WebMasters/en/conte
http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wcosray.h
If the earth's magnetic field doesn't protect us from cosmic rays then what does? The Atmosphere... Maybe, but it's apparent in those sites that the rays from the Sun and deep space are affected by Earth's magnetic field.
Also note it's mentioned in Wikipedia's Rare Earth Theory article.
The impact may also result in a large moon to stabilize the axis, and the cores of the original planet and the impacting body merging to form an over-massive core could produce a powerful magnetic field to protect against solar radiation.
P2P is used for stealing stuff. Plain and simple.
Ok here we go again...
Stealing and theft by legal definition of the USA courts means you have denied other the use or value or therof property they legally own. Therefore theft is a crime that is tried in criminal courts...
Downloading movies and music is copyright violation which is a civil infraction. Therefore Copyright Infringment is tried in civil courts...
Do you know what the main and most important legal definition between these two matters are? You should know this because if anyone were ever to bring you to court...
In a criminal court, they have to prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... A civil court does not.
Think about what that means... It's very important that you know this, but many people in the US are not aware of this minor fact unless of course they had the speech from the local judge after they were made to go to Jury duty *coughs*
I'm not sure about the parent or grandparent, but its not the field that I am concerned about, but the Cosmic Rays that the Earth's magnetic field may sheild us from.
r .html
If you aren't familiar with Cosmic Rays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays
And IBM even has done reasearch on what Cosmic Rays does to electronics:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd40-1.html
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/421/ziegle
Think of it like an EMP bomb. The flip wouldn't give us enough radiation from cosmic rays to maybe kill us, but it's speculated that while its in limbo it would be enough to flip electrons in memory and kill sensitive electronic equipment.
Who is more likely to survive in the midst of a gang war?
To paraphrase a Zen/Ninja saying... "The one who is not there."
What a short-sighted comment this is! If they are going to discontinue work on the AC2 server engine and client then obviously they would be the ones that benefit the most with a GPL license since any community additions and fixes would go back to the company without any cost to themselves.
If someone can look at the client and server code and then hack the game then by god it will be fixed faster and more efficiently if everyone in the world is looking at it rather than a understaffed team of bug fixers that have to rely on shoddy and biased bug reports from players.
If someone could hack the game by looking at the client and server code then the code was broke to begin with and would eventually been found out by some ingenious player anyways who has no desire to see the game fixed like a community GPL developer would.
Sure the games use the same code, but so does Quake I/II/III and Doom 3 and Carmack GPLs most of that (sans punkbusters which says Turbine could always not release parts that they deem critical) and you do not hear people screaming "OMG don't release the source code because people will hack our online games!"
However, because of economics and the fact that no one has been brave and gone this route before I could understand why they wouldn't and would say that it is their right to keep it closed source.
"homo erectus and their ancestors certainly survived many previous reversals. There is no uncontested evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any biological extinctions."
Homo erectus didn't have a society totally dependant on electronics for it's economics and machines to feed it's population. Of course we'll survive a reversal, but it won't be pleasant for those involved.
You: *reading slashdot*
Uneducated Manager: *stops and peers over your sholder* "What are you doing?!"
You: "Researching technology..."
Uneducated Manager: "Oh! I see... Um... Carry on!"
You: *starts to write comment "In Soviet Russia..."*
This is the reason that even reasonable people like myself, who don't much care what the hell anybody does to destroy themselves, can see why drugs are illegal.
But making them illegal won't get rid of drugs. That is the main problem.
In truth I thought the best way to get rid of drugs is to basically have the government give them out for free. Sounds strange, but if you do that then the drug lord/dealers won't make money and will give up the trade.
Sounds nice on paper, but the downside is if the government is the one giving out drugs then most likley everyone would be slaves to the government sometime in the near future if they want their fix so it's best we don't go that route.
Drug issues aren't that simple as banning them.
But there are better solutions:
Legalize possession. Outlaw sales to minors. Have really high taxes to those who sell drugs with stiff fines. Make it illegal to sell in stores or by companies. Make the import illegal. Keep Crack and Heroine illegal. Make a dealer responsible if he sells drugs to a person that kills them with a life sentence without parole.
Killing 3rd world farmers legitimate crops along with the drugs and throwing junkies in jail doesn't really solve much of anything. It's the scarcity that makes the crime. Not the other way around.
"And before somebody says it, no, I don't think drug legalization is the answer."
No, but Natural Selection is.
You're an idiot, and every moderator who marked this "insightful" is an idiot as well.
It also appears Mods as have confused Insightful with Troll.
Your post is informative and he should be corrected, but no need to call the guy an idiot.
What type of life are they talking about?
The microscopic kind that worm their way through the seals on an astronaut's space suit and feeds off living human flesh.
So yeah... Might be worth checking before leaving the air lock.
It was not uncommon for a moviegoer to be hit by a wad of sperm, or even a chunk of human feces, while watching a film.
I feel sorry for them and all but it was just a bad idea to sit behind Paul Ruebens at the theater.
Apple has no desire to sell their OS for profit in a sense. Yes, they sell upgrades for a more reasonable $129, but their bread and butter is the hardware itself.
Apple Mice, Apple Monitors, Apple iPods, Apple Computer... They do sell software that doeshave protection such as Final Cut Pro and a few things like that, but to Apple as long as the OS only works on Mac hardware there is no need to copy protect the software.
The Apple hardware is the friggin dongle after all!
Also... Remember this and say as a mantra:
Software copy protection does not stop software piracy, it only annoys and gives greif to legitimate paying customers.
If you want to pirate something it's only mouse clicks away on google and a swift download of a cracked patch that totally undoes whatever flavor of the month software copy protection they've come up with.
Sometimes legitimate customer often will buy the software, install it and then run the cracked patch just so they can run without having to jump through hoops of fire to get the software to work.
Sorry, defending against a laser isn't that simple.
Actually, it would be. Of course it's not too environmentally friendly. Remember Renaissance PT2 from the Animatrix (that is if you watched it) where they blotted out the sun with smoke like material? Basically anti-laser defense systems would have to pump out large quanities of smoke... And I mean lots... Think like putting out a valcano's worth of smoke. Say like a burning several hundred oil fieldsw worth or something like that to defract the lasers energy in the smoke particles.
Simple, but rather impraticle and would maybe hurt the defenders more than the attackers (then again if you had a super smog you could avoid conventional bombing and sattellite tracking as well... so it might be a benefit) Now ICMB defense against lasers is a bit more tricky. You'd have to have a great deal of missles go in before the target and spray some type of atmospheric smoke at the same time the ground based lasers would be zapping those the real warhead could come through unharmed or less damaged.
This would require a great deal of effort and resources on the attackers part and have maybe 25-100 missles fired for every real warhead.