That's a very socialistic idea of a human right. The problem is how do you suppose the government is going to protect that basic right? It can easily protect rights such as speech, religion, etc by merely not acting.
The government MUST act to protect the right to a standard of living. And to do so, it either must find people willing to give charitably to help others, or it must use force to do so (in the form of taxes, etc). When you cross that line, you are arguing that taking one man's property forcibly to uphold the "right to a standard of living" of another is moral and just. It seems that there's some contradiction there.
Part of the reason it is a political wedge issue, is that there are different conceptions of the people being helped. Whether the primary recipients of such care are deserving or not is a very difficult to resolve issue.
You argue that society can bear the burden of those who don't want to work, but fail to recognize that society can bear many unjust burdens. Just because it can does not mean it should.
If you can't pick up the basics of a programming language in a week, get out of this industry. If you choose a programming language so complex no one can pick up the basics in a week, get out of this industry.
If people heeded either of these tips, C++ would be a lot less popular.
If you break into my home and try to steal my stuff, I will kill you. If you have a bazooka or a fishing pole it is irrelevant, I will use whatever is at my disposal to do so. If you do not like it, don't try to steal my stuff.
The idea that you should be impaired from protecting your property or life by keeping the fight "fair" (for what else could keeping the force "reasonable" mean?) is ludicrous. You are protecting yourself and hard-earned belongings from someone who clearly has no regard for other people or the law.
Hopefully someone will read this considering I'm posting this after the first 20 minutes...
My parents are sick of windows crashing and would desperately like to move to linux, however, the big thing stopping them is they really like some of the things AOL has to offer (its saturated with non-techie content people)... AOL in WINE has been a flop really, so I'd really like to get them over to this.
The problem lies in the fact that techpages.com has blacked out their webpage (my guess is due to AOL lawyer emails) and I cannot download this software...anyone got a link to it? Please?
Also, is anyone going to post anything besides jokes about the level of intelligence of AOL users? There are maybe 4 comments about how this will lead to the AOL settop box, and the rest are flames that are all modded up. Personally, I'd like to see the ability to select several fields in a moderation (flamebait, funny, offtopic) and maybe add a "lack of useful content field" but then again, I'm just complaining.
Initially it sounds stupid, because who among us would use it, right?
But, corel had the right idea...make a specialized version of linux that is easy for anyone to install, and does the basic things non-techies need: spreadsheets, wordprocessing, and AOL.
Most of the non-geek people I know use AOL and most of them have specifically asked me if they could find a way to use the AOL software in linux - there are some features that are just easier to use through the aol client software (and semi-notcrappy if you use it through a cablemodem or DSL).
Anyone else think we could get widespread linux acceptance if AOL came out with a series of Internet Appliances with Linux and an AOL client and some form of office software? Or just an AOLinux distrobution that did the same thing? Hell, this would be a wonderful thing for them to do with the (is it indreama thats making the linux settop box? i cannot remember, but whoever it is, put their name here).
Something like this could only help....you don't displace old systems by emulating them...you displace them by offering something they do not have.
The problem is he's not suing for the amount that was "stolen" from him...instead he's suing for 100,000 dollars per infringement. Kind of extreme, but this is to scare people....the odds of taking every (or even as high as 2%) of people who have downloaded his bad music into court and winning is remote in the extreme.
Then again, maybe these fees are to pay the bills after his pissed fanbase leaves him.
I read most of the comments 2 and up on here and then decided to play the game for myself. My initial response was the same, "What the hell are these giant bugs and frogs doing killing me? Why is it choppy?" But after playing it a while i began to get decent (crouch to kill the frogs with fist, shoot the mosquitos with that gun, shoot the alligators while running backwards) and i think there is actually some kind of sinister plot (anyone else hear metal hitting the ground when you killed the animals?? and then seeing them running out of the fortress in swarms??) Maybe this game is not that bad, it just gets off to a rocky start. We can't always start off running with a shotgun and 80+ monsters. If they would just get better lighting!!! I've shut all the windows, turned off all the lights and pumped my monitor WAY up and i can STILL barely see where I am going. Oh well.
He was doing something about it, writing an article to a website with the following of slashdot saying "this needs to be done" is in effect greatly helping to get "this" done.
I'm really REALLY sick of seeing everyone bashing Jon Katz. If you do not like him do not read his columns. There are a lot of other articles that I could not give a flip about, however, I merely skip them rather than making myself mad. That said...
Credits to Jon...not only is this one of the most well thought out (and grammatically organized;)) essays he has written, but it also strikes a chord with me. He's right. Thousands are downloading and stockpiling mp3's to add to their collections. Many of them are legal (hey I LOVE mp3.com) but many are not. Either way, it is having the same effect that the "evils" of software piracy have...if the music/software is good then people who downloaded it for free often go out to buy it both to get the "real thing" and to help the artist/programmer who made the thing. There are atleast 8 artists from mp3.com that I would have normally NEVER heard of, yet, now that I have about half the songs on each of their cd's I have begun to buy several of these artists cds. Wow, by downloading their music...I....gave...them....money...they would not have gotten if their music was not online! Anyway, enough ranting for me.
You are right, there are a lot of holes in sterling's work, and you hit it on the head when you say that it is talking about things that are today's issues. This is not an article about his prediction of the future. Read his books for that. This is a satire of the problems of today with corporatism and environmental distruction amplified to show their horrors. Everything was so extreme it cannot possibly be a prediction of 35 years from now, instead it simply ridicules the way things are today.
I occasionally flip through my newspaper (in houston here so it is the houston chronicle).
Problem is: either I've gotten the info already from another quicker (online) source already, don't care (food sections, local news, and sports are just fluff to me and if i cared the first and third would fall to online too), or it is TOO DUMBED DOWN FOR THE MASSES.
Every sunday (I think) the houston chronicle posts a "technology" section which is usually tips on word and the latest release of quicken, or, if it is anything about new tech I MIGHT care about, I've already heard it months before it hits there.
The newspaper used to be the only means for people to get their news, hence it covered everything happening very generally. This changed. They did not. They need to make the newspaper contain interesting things that I may not have known, or information in addition to what people have already seen online or on tv. They need to assume people already know and only give a short summary before they splurge into details that tv does NOT cover. Also, a tech section that is written for tech people would be nice.
People are not drawn to read online for any reason other than the vastness and speed of information. I read slashdot, and lately www.kiro5hin.org mainly because i see information there that interests me. If the newspaper did that, I would read it more often as well.
There is a huge difference between business and corporatism. Business is making a quality product, marketing it to the group that would use it, selling it, making money, etc. Corporatism is a large company acting only on its interest in the bottom line and ignoring privacy, free-speech, and creating bland media for a good buying environment (look at the 3 big networks in the U.S. and tell me that is not bland crap stuck around commercials).
As sexist as it sounds, the author here must be out of their mind for saying 50% of gamers are girls. I would really say it is more like 20%. There is definately a female segment, however it really is very small. (Guys, how many girls do you know who have ever played quake? I have met maybe 1 in real life). These magazines are also primarily read by teenage gamers. Combine 80% male with mostly teenage and sex just sells.
The other issue is that the "huge market" for girl games was almost a buzzword several years ago. That pretty much died. Why? Try to think of a game that is targetted towards only girls. It's really really hard. The closest you can get is games that have little violence (action) like simcity and myst and are therefore equal before the sexes. When the girl-games idea was beat about a few years back I sat down and tried to brainstorm what a girl would like to play, and I really could not think of a single decent idea. Existing genres are strategy and fighting games... there really is no "dolls" game that wouldn't suck (ooh im going to get flamed for that one, but I'm really talking about the young audience here).
Most girls I know also don't spend the time guys do at gaming. They tend to find more social ways to have fun with a computer, such as chat rooms and message boards, which is why the female to male ratio is much higher in these sections.
To my knowledge Corel has done an incredible amount of work on the Wine project and really helped to bolster development there. Seems like I remember the Wine group calling their contributions "very significant."
Just for kicks i clicked the link to the AFA's Website. What shocks me the most is the blatant disregard for the opinion of anyone but their extremist own. They want to silence anyone who does not agree with them, after all they have no right to speak. Jesus says so. Any group trying to achieve political might (like them, check out some of the site also) really should consider not using biggoted terms like "feminazi". My favorite though is the article on the evils of Disney. If these people really want to protect themselves and their youth from the "evils of satan" that apparently have corrupted our society (and I just don't see it because I'm tainted by those evil homosexuals) then they should just shut up and not spend their money where they don't want to. The thing that shocks me about most of these extremist christian groups is that while their religion is based upon tolerance and love for man, and not judging each other just allowing god to do that, they are the complete opposite. Hypocritical bigots. Oh well. Off my box.
The problem is that the market does not always make informed decisions. It has always tended to support "the name brand" over smaller, lesser known products (that may be superior). This rational expectations theory that the market should determine everything forgets that the populace determine the market and the populace is for the most part, completely uninformed, usually ignorant, and fiercely clingy to anything they recognize (the name brand).
I'd just like to add brief commentary on the two points you made. And please don't flame me, I'm merely providing skepticism for discourse:)
1st point was that the supernatural is impossible to disprove. While this may be technically true, it is also true by this rational that invisible elephants are walking down the street, that there really are witches, and hordes of other blatantly wrong yet unprovable things. If something does not exist but by definition cannot be proven to exist it can only be proven to exist by existing, therefore, if it is never proven to exist, many choose not to believe in it so as to not fall into a trap.
2nd point was: physicalism doesn't account for some things which we observe about ourselves. We may not understanding everything about our world right now, however, look at history. Almost every great discovery about the world around us has disproven some line of superstition already in place to disprove it. The world was flat and we'll fall off? no its round. The world is a few thousand years old? no its much older. The sun was a god flying around the world? NO its a star we orbit. add your own slew of superstitions and old religious beliefs. Following this model you can assume we may not ever understand everything around us, but it's another trap to try to simply say "if I cannot explain it using science, there MUST be a supernatural explanation."
In conclusion, just because something doesn't make sense now doesn't mean try to explain it using religion, it means we need to put more money into research and maybe THEN we'll understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
When someone says ``I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done,'' give him a lollipop.
-- Alan Perlis
You are an utter moron and a bad person.
While it is a classic problem, I don't see how an implementation of the "Towers of Hanoi" would take more than 5 minutes or be over 10 lines of code.
How about the Sieve of Eratosthenes, matrix decomposition, or a recursive descent parser? None of these should take more than 20 or 30 minutes.
That's a very socialistic idea of a human right. The problem is how do you suppose the government is going to protect that basic right? It can easily protect rights such as speech, religion, etc by merely not acting.
The government MUST act to protect the right to a standard of living. And to do so, it either must find people willing to give charitably to help others, or it must use force to do so (in the form of taxes, etc). When you cross that line, you are arguing that taking one man's property forcibly to uphold the "right to a standard of living" of another is moral and just. It seems that there's some contradiction there.
Part of the reason it is a political wedge issue, is that there are different conceptions of the people being helped. Whether the primary recipients of such care are deserving or not is a very difficult to resolve issue.
You argue that society can bear the burden of those who don't want to work, but fail to recognize that society can bear many unjust burdens. Just because it can does not mean it should.
If you can't pick up the basics of a programming language in a week, get out of this industry. If you choose a programming language so complex no one can pick up the basics in a week, get out of this industry.
If people heeded either of these tips, C++ would be a lot less popular.
I may be wrong (to you), but they would be dead. And in many US states and countries, the legal system would side with me.
Must be a cultural thing.
If you break into my home and try to steal my stuff, I will kill you. If you have a bazooka or a fishing pole it is irrelevant, I will use whatever is at my disposal to do so. If you do not like it, don't try to steal my stuff.
The idea that you should be impaired from protecting your property or life by keeping the fight "fair" (for what else could keeping the force "reasonable" mean?) is ludicrous. You are protecting yourself and hard-earned belongings from someone who clearly has no regard for other people or the law.
anyone else think of this while they read it?
Hopefully someone will read this considering I'm posting this after the first 20 minutes...
My parents are sick of windows crashing and would desperately like to move to linux, however, the big thing stopping them is they really like some of the things AOL has to offer (its saturated with non-techie content people)... AOL in WINE has been a flop really, so I'd really like to get them over to this.
The problem lies in the fact that techpages.com has blacked out their webpage (my guess is due to AOL lawyer emails) and I cannot download this software...anyone got a link to it? Please?
Also, is anyone going to post anything besides jokes about the level of intelligence of AOL users? There are maybe 4 comments about how this will lead to the AOL settop box, and the rest are flames that are all modded up. Personally, I'd like to see the ability to select several fields in a moderation (flamebait, funny, offtopic) and maybe add a "lack of useful content field" but then again, I'm just complaining.
Initially it sounds stupid, because who among us would use it, right?
But, corel had the right idea...make a specialized version of linux that is easy for anyone to install, and does the basic things non-techies need: spreadsheets, wordprocessing, and AOL.
Most of the non-geek people I know use AOL and most of them have specifically asked me if they could find a way to use the AOL software in linux - there are some features that are just easier to use through the aol client software (and semi-notcrappy if you use it through a cablemodem or DSL).
Anyone else think we could get widespread linux acceptance if AOL came out with a series of Internet Appliances with Linux and an AOL client and some form of office software? Or just an AOLinux distrobution that did the same thing? Hell, this would be a wonderful thing for them to do with the (is it indreama thats making the linux settop box? i cannot remember, but whoever it is, put their name here).
Something like this could only help....you don't displace old systems by emulating them...you displace them by offering something they do not have.
The problem is he's not suing for the amount that was "stolen" from him...instead he's suing for 100,000 dollars per infringement. Kind of extreme, but this is to scare people....the odds of taking every (or even as high as 2%) of people who have downloaded his bad music into court and winning is remote in the extreme.
Then again, maybe these fees are to pay the bills after his pissed fanbase leaves him.
I read most of the comments 2 and up on here and then decided to play the game for myself. My initial response was the same, "What the hell are these giant bugs and frogs doing killing me? Why is it choppy?" But after playing it a while i began to get decent (crouch to kill the frogs with fist, shoot the mosquitos with that gun, shoot the alligators while running backwards) and i think there is actually some kind of sinister plot (anyone else hear metal hitting the ground when you killed the animals?? and then seeing them running out of the fortress in swarms??) Maybe this game is not that bad, it just gets off to a rocky start. We can't always start off running with a shotgun and 80+ monsters. If they would just get better lighting!!! I've shut all the windows, turned off all the lights and pumped my monitor WAY up and i can STILL barely see where I am going. Oh well.
He was doing something about it, writing an article to a website with the following of slashdot saying "this needs to be done" is in effect greatly helping to get "this" done.
;)) essays he has written, but it also strikes a chord with me. He's right. Thousands are downloading and stockpiling mp3's to add to their collections. Many of them are legal (hey I LOVE mp3.com) but many are not. Either way, it is having the same effect that the "evils" of software piracy have...if the music/software is good then people who downloaded it for free often go out to buy it both to get the "real thing" and to help the artist/programmer who made the thing. There are atleast 8 artists from mp3.com that I would have normally NEVER heard of, yet, now that I have about half the songs on each of their cd's I have begun to buy several of these artists cds. Wow, by downloading their music...I....gave...them....money...they would not have gotten if their music was not online! Anyway, enough ranting for me.
I'm really REALLY sick of seeing everyone bashing Jon Katz. If you do not like him do not read his columns. There are a lot of other articles that I could not give a flip about, however, I merely skip them rather than making myself mad. That said...
Credits to Jon...not only is this one of the most well thought out (and grammatically organized
You are right, there are a lot of holes in sterling's work, and you hit it on the head when you say that it is talking about things that are today's issues. This is not an article about his prediction of the future. Read his books for that. This is a satire of the problems of today with corporatism and environmental distruction amplified to show their horrors. Everything was so extreme it cannot possibly be a prediction of 35 years from now, instead it simply ridicules the way things are today.
I occasionally flip through my newspaper (in houston here so it is the houston chronicle).
Problem is: either I've gotten the info already from another quicker (online) source already, don't care (food sections, local news, and sports are just fluff to me and if i cared the first and third would fall to online too), or it is TOO DUMBED DOWN FOR THE MASSES.
Every sunday (I think) the houston chronicle posts a "technology" section which is usually tips on word and the latest release of quicken, or, if it is anything about new tech I MIGHT care about, I've already heard it months before it hits there.
The newspaper used to be the only means for people to get their news, hence it covered everything happening very generally. This changed. They did not. They need to make the newspaper contain interesting things that I may not have known, or information in addition to what people have already seen online or on tv. They need to assume people already know and only give a short summary before they splurge into details that tv does NOT cover. Also, a tech section that is written for tech people would be nice.
People are not drawn to read online for any reason other than the vastness and speed of information. I read slashdot, and lately www.kiro5hin.org mainly because i see information there that interests me. If the newspaper did that, I would read it more often as well.
There is a huge difference between business and corporatism. Business is making a quality product, marketing it to the group that would use it, selling it, making money, etc. Corporatism is a large company acting only on its interest in the bottom line and ignoring privacy, free-speech, and creating bland media for a good buying environment (look at the 3 big networks in the U.S. and tell me that is not bland crap stuck around commercials).
flamesuit = on;
As sexist as it sounds, the author here must be out of their mind for saying 50% of gamers are girls. I would really say it is more like 20%. There is definately a female segment, however it really is very small. (Guys, how many girls do you know who have ever played quake? I have met maybe 1 in real life). These magazines are also primarily read by teenage gamers. Combine 80% male with mostly teenage and sex just sells.
The other issue is that the "huge market" for girl games was almost a buzzword several years ago. That pretty much died. Why? Try to think of a game that is targetted towards only girls. It's really really hard. The closest you can get is games that have little violence (action) like simcity and myst and are therefore equal before the sexes. When the girl-games idea was beat about a few years back I sat down and tried to brainstorm what a girl would like to play, and I really could not think of a single decent idea. Existing genres are strategy and fighting games... there really is no "dolls" game that wouldn't suck (ooh im going to get flamed for that one, but I'm really talking about the young audience here).
Most girls I know also don't spend the time guys do at gaming. They tend to find more social ways to have fun with a computer, such as chat rooms and message boards, which is why the female to male ratio is much higher in these sections.
flamesuit = off;
To my knowledge Corel has done an incredible amount of work on the Wine project and really helped to bolster development there. Seems like I remember the Wine group calling their contributions "very significant."
Just for kicks i clicked the link to the AFA's Website. What shocks me the most is the blatant disregard for the opinion of anyone but their extremist own. They want to silence anyone who does not agree with them, after all they have no right to speak. Jesus says so. Any group trying to achieve political might (like them, check out some of the site also) really should consider not using biggoted terms like "feminazi". My favorite though is the article on the evils of Disney. If these people really want to protect themselves and their youth from the "evils of satan" that apparently have corrupted our society (and I just don't see it because I'm tainted by those evil homosexuals) then they should just shut up and not spend their money where they don't want to. The thing that shocks me about most of these extremist christian groups is that while their religion is based upon tolerance and love for man, and not judging each other just allowing god to do that, they are the complete opposite. Hypocritical bigots. Oh well. Off my box.
The problem is that the market does not always make informed decisions. It has always tended to support "the name brand" over smaller, lesser known products (that may be superior). This rational expectations theory that the market should determine everything forgets that the populace determine the market and the populace is for the most part, completely uninformed, usually ignorant, and fiercely clingy to anything they recognize (the name brand).
I'd just like to add brief commentary on the two points you made. And please don't flame me, I'm merely providing skepticism for discourse :)
1st point was that the supernatural is impossible to disprove. While this may be technically true, it is also true by this rational that invisible elephants are walking down the street, that there really are witches, and hordes of other blatantly wrong yet unprovable things. If something does not exist but by definition cannot be proven to exist it can only be proven to exist by existing, therefore, if it is never proven to exist, many choose not to believe in it so as to not fall into a trap.
2nd point was: physicalism doesn't account for some things which we observe about ourselves. We may not understanding everything about our world right now, however, look at history. Almost every great discovery about the world around us has disproven some line of superstition already in place to disprove it. The world was flat and we'll fall off? no its round. The world is a few thousand years old? no its much older. The sun was a god flying around the world? NO its a star we orbit. add your own slew of superstitions and old religious beliefs. Following this model you can assume we may not ever understand everything around us, but it's another trap to try to simply say "if I cannot explain it using science, there MUST be a supernatural explanation."
In conclusion, just because something doesn't make sense now doesn't mean try to explain it using religion, it means we need to put more money into research and maybe THEN we'll understand it.