I'd just like to agree with your comment. I wish more parents would take up the white-list approach until the deem their child mature enough to deal with the consequences of their own actions. You can't blame technology for a social problem, perhaps for exacerbating it, but not for the problem itself.
That's being said I'm less than 10 years removed from being a teen and I recall how hard it really felt to be that age. The internet was a great thing for me because it was one of the few places I could access that was unstructured. I was a cleaver kid, and certainly more cleaver than my parents with a new technology in our house. But I think they used good judgment to set up a series of rules that worked to keep me safe and relatively unrestricted.
First they kept the computer in a common room, in our case it was the entertainment room in the basement where people other than myself were frequently present.
They educated me on what they felt were good morals and general security practices. Basically telling me what was acceptable for me to view and do. Why would I give out my information to someone I don't know on the internet if I wouldn't do the same to a person I don't know on the street?
They would check in on me to see what I was up to fairly often.
And they would put restrictions on the time I was able to use the computer. (It helped that we had dial-up and only one phone line, I was only able to tie up the line during certain hours).
As I grew older and became financially responsible enough to earn and save enough money for my own PC my parents allowed me to do so and keep it in my room. I still had all the foundation they had set for me and things worked out pretty well.
And how exactly were we to win this "War on Terror" in the first place? Its not a real war, its just marketing and lofty ideals. It reminds me of the "War on Drugs".
I'm really glad to see your postings in this thread.
In regards to how many civilians have been killed in Iraq in the most recent military and policing action it is conservatively estimated by Iraqi Medical Examiners, World and Iraqi Press as between 28,000 and 30,000. All of these are cases where there are confirmed civilian corpses. I would guess that the actual toll is higher, and certainly the cost in human terms is much, much greater. When you kill a person you leave their family behind. If my father was killed this afternoon as a non-militant I would most certainly feel the consequences of his death.
This study is really saying that in cases where people have been socially conditioned for a longer period of time are better able to fend off Alzheimer's for longer periods.
Genius is usually associated with strange social behavior or thinking and just a step away from madness. Educated people are predictable and controllable and well...social.
They are just more structured, maybe that structure just helps them hang on a bit longer before they fall. I get the feeling that all the commentators are mistaking "knowing things" with being intelligent.
replaces the need to quickly call or run over to someone to ask a quick question that email is overkill for
I must be robbing the company of precious seconds all the time. I mean the phone, email, and actually seeing people is just so archaic.
All joking aside...I'm sure it can come in handy in some situations. It just feels like we're trying to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the productivity stone. It makes me feel less human to work in a company that will no doubt take full advantage of this.
Also, good thing for that IM or you might not have found the time to make that post.;p
Every generation has their scapegoat. Its been demonstrated again and again in our recent history, motion pictures, comic books, rock and roll.
I think there are two factors at work. Politics and xenophobia. Every politician needs an enemy to wage war against even if that enemy is benign, so long as it can be called an "emerging threat" and tugs at the current generations insecurities. In this case I'd say it's our parents fear that they weren't / aren't good parents. They see their children raised by media to which they aren't accustomed and get a little frightened. It makes it worse when politicians capitalize on that insecurity.
Its happened before. Those people who hold power now will slowly fade away and people who aren't frightened will assume power. Ask any person who has been raised with videogames if they are concerned about the problem. They'll give the same answer as our previous generation would when asked about rock and roll.
Those people out there that question why someone would get so emotionally upset as to compare US President George Bush to Hitler haven't been exposed to unfiltered information about this war.
IraqBodyCount.net who relies on Mortuaries and Medics, the Free Press, and Iraqi Journalists reports that the estimated civilian body count is between 28,000 and 30,000. The attacks on the WTC resulted in 2,752 civilian casualties according the AP.
So by all accounts Iraq has at least suffered the effects of at least 9 to 10 September 11th attacks since the start of combat.
And Iraq's population was estimated to be about 26,074,906 in 2005 by the World Fact Book. The USAs was about 295,734,134 in 2005 by the same source. So the US population is about 11 time larger than that of Iraq.
So if you want to see the equivalent effect in the US you would have to take September 11th, multiply it by a conservative 9 times to bring it up the Iraqi civilian casualty toll, then multiply it again by 11 times to adjust it accordingly to the population. That comes out to about 272,448 civilians dying in the US in order to convey the scope of what Iraq has been going through since the start of the Iraq war. That's 272,448 and look at how devastated we were when we lost 2,752.
So while I wouldn't compare Bush to Hitler myself I can understand why some people may feel that way.
I think you're overstating the ease of accomplishing something like this.
The system would have to be specifically designed to deliver streaming audio from a distributed unreliable decentralized network. The reason bit torrent like technologies don't support streaming content is because they block, transmit, and verify smaller portions of larger files out of sequence based on availability.
If you tried to do this with streaming content you would run into issues. In the best of cases with an entirely new P2P system the content would be delayed from the first level peers on down through the network. What I would suspect would happen is that you would end up with out of sequence content with long delays and pauses. P2P networking is sort of like TCP and Streaming content is UDP, they don't really overlay.
So there's some technical issues.
The best option I think we have at the moment would be creating podcasting networks. You would just have to download full programs over BT using a client that could determine the playlisting of the programs. I think it might be difficult to create an actual business around this because people have demonstrated their willingness to create content for free and the actual service wouldn't have much to offer over what the average Joe can do with iTunes. That and it still has the legal barrier you were speaking of if dealing with licensing.
I can think of a few reasons that this could be handy.
I think itunes is a bit resource greedy. This is just a proof of concept release so it'll be some time till we know for sure but it would be nice to have a music app that's similar to itunes but lighter. I don't think there is native support for itunes under linux, once this guy is released on a cross platform basis there will be another advantage.
So yea, they are probably pushing this too soon. And hopefully they will come up with less abrasive wording for their later marketing pushes.
I haven't read the articles associated with this story, just the public reaction, and this is the impression I have been getting.
Blizzard had warned, and potentially banned, individuals that had set up a guild based on the concept of not discriminating and harassing other players based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The logic used to justify the action was that it was in violation of the harassment section of their EULA.
That is to say, that this guild which specifically says they will not harass based on sexual orientation and gender identity will draw the attention of people who will and therefore should not be allowed to openly exist.
Those upholding the terms of the agreement were chastised for the potential reaction of those that would not.
Am I correct?
To those players its an issue of their very ability to exist and carry identity traits from real life to the game in a non-hostile guild environment. I think the intent of Blizzards harassment section of their EULA was to ensure that all players could enjoy themselves without feeling like they are being targeted. Blizzard slipped up.
My friend organizes photo-scavenger hunts a few times a year and I've had this happen to me before.
Most of the malls in my area have at least one jewelry store. We were taking ridiculous photos with people in the corridor somewhere around one of these stores and an employee had contacted security thinking that we were suspicious. At the time it was enough of a reasonable explanation that they assumed we might be taking photos of their store layout and security system to decide to move along. We were in costume as part of the scavenger hunt but it was not hiding our faces and was definitely more goofy than sinister (we were a group of singing hobos).
I still feel very bitter about the whole thing despite my fortune of not being assaulted or losing property. I didn't like being cast under suspicion and I most definitely did not enjoy the surveillance they placed on us. We were not asked to leave the mall directly, we were just followed by mall security till we felt unwelcome enough to leave on our own. It just seems unethical to me and I would rather they had just asked us to leave.
I know we were causing a disruption in the normal operation of their mall but we had not harassed anyone and could hardly be mistaken for starting a riot of any sort. Everyone who had helped us with our photos left with a smile and there was obviously no ill will from anyone who was too shy to. It would have been nice to feel even the slightest spark of community from the mall staff itself. We live in a culture of suspicion and terror and I worry that people are forgetting how to enjoy their lives.
There aren't many people out there that, while thinking clearly and unemotionally, would say the US fits our classic perception of a police state.
The concern comes from the fact that our policies are tending more and more towards that end of the spectrum.
I would agree with most critics that these types of things happened in the past, but that doesn't make them correct. And for what ever reason, either apathy or lack of evidence, they were not pushed. It doesn't mean offenses like this should be ignored and tolerated...we have evidence now, and enough people feel the current administration has stepped out of their bounds. So it doesn't seem unreasonable given the these situations that they push back.
Even if the lawsuit isn't effective in curtailing the act it should make a show that we as citizens do not like whats going on.
Freedoms are seldom taken away outright. Its usually a slow process of erosion.
You seem like a nice guy. So I don't want to give the impression that I don't like you. I'm just so damn tired of the Nintendo is for Kids line and tend to get hostile.
Troll...blah
I really wish I could get into the PSP. I wish Sony didn't insist on crippling the damn thing. Seems like a nice media player if not for that. It also seems like many of their developers haven't quite figured out how to deal with mobile gaming yet. Lots of near direct ports.
As for the 360, if it has the titles you want and the price isn't a factor that's great.
The community seems pretty crappy to me. I'm sure there are good people out there playing but you have to sift through the waves a**holes to get to them. And when I think of first round 360 purchasers I think more of the 16 year old G4 fan down the streets and less of the 30+ guys I use to play tribes with.
People keep saying that to Nintendo fans "graphics don't matter"...even the parents Nintendo fan. I can see where you're going with the PS3, however...the GameCube kicks the PS2s ass in terms of graphical performance. Sad that the titles just never made it over.
Not to knock Sony here, but I'll probibly never own a PSP. The reason is simple. The problem is its Sony, meaning flaky hardware, insane locked down platforms, and shitty ps2 ports. These aren't the features I want out of a console, and this will probably be the only reason I'll get a next gen Nintendo DS. To me, its no the titles available, its the quality of those titles.
And as for the xbox 360, I know what crowd dominates that market. I've played Halo 2 on Live. I'm just trying to imagine being 30+ and still wanting to play cs type games with the 12 year olds that put sprays of their nuts on the walls. And don't think its going to be better on a console, they're pushing the webcams for the 360.
I think Nintendo is courting older gamers with this system. People who don't have tons of time to invest in gaming because of work and family. Hense the price and their features.
They offer their entire first party back catalog for the nastolgic at a reasonable price. I know kids are going to put up with the graphics from the first Zelda when they've been playing WoW and Doom 3. And who cares that you can't play Mariokart 64 at 1080p resolution?
Nintendo is obviously foolish. Their biggest selling points to me was that you would be able to play their entire back catalog. Now I don't know. I can't imagine playing Mario 3 without my HD hardware.
When digitally distributed content matches the quality and usability of its retail counterpart I am willing to pay the same amount as I would for that retail counterpart. I want it at full quality and I want to own what I am paying for. A good example is hl-2 on Steam. Same content, same quality, same price.
About $1.00 for a CD quality audio track with no DRM.
About $2.00 for an temporary movie rental at full DVD quality (Netflix price).
About $15.00 -$20.00 for a movie purchased at full DVD quality with no DRM.
About $45.00 - $60.00 for a video game with full content.
Now if they want to offer their content at a lesser quality with more restrictions that's fine so long as it is at a discounted price. Then I have an option.
But why would they do that when the perceived value of the degraded content is equal to that of the actual media?
Agreed.
theory - A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
Evolution is a theory, meaning it is a hypothesis that has been tested and never been proven wrong once. If it's proven wrong it is changed to incorporate the new information. Intelligent design on the other hand can not be tested, hence is not a scientific theory. Evolution deals in natural laws, Intelligent Design in spiritual.
I know plenty of people that believe in Intelligent Design. But smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for silly reasons. It's your right to believe what you want and I don't want to keep you from believing. I'm saying is that in science the term "theory" means something different than how the layman uses it, and intelligent design simply isn't a scientific theory. The end.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to agree with your comment. I wish more parents would take up the white-list approach until the deem their child mature enough to deal with the consequences of their own actions. You can't blame technology for a social problem, perhaps for exacerbating it, but not for the problem itself.
That's being said I'm less than 10 years removed from being a teen and I recall how hard it really felt to be that age. The internet was a great thing for me because it was one of the few places I could access that was unstructured. I was a cleaver kid, and certainly more cleaver than my parents with a new technology in our house. But I think they used good judgment to set up a series of rules that worked to keep me safe and relatively unrestricted.
First they kept the computer in a common room, in our case it was the entertainment room in the basement where people other than myself were frequently present.
They educated me on what they felt were good morals and general security practices. Basically telling me what was acceptable for me to view and do. Why would I give out my information to someone I don't know on the internet if I wouldn't do the same to a person I don't know on the street?
They would check in on me to see what I was up to fairly often.
And they would put restrictions on the time I was able to use the computer. (It helped that we had dial-up and only one phone line, I was only able to tie up the line during certain hours).
As I grew older and became financially responsible enough to earn and save enough money for my own PC my parents allowed me to do so and keep it in my room. I still had all the foundation they had set for me and things worked out pretty well.
And how exactly were we to win this "War on Terror" in the first place? Its not a real war, its just marketing and lofty ideals. It reminds me of the "War on Drugs".
I'm really glad to see your postings in this thread.
In regards to how many civilians have been killed in Iraq in the most recent military and policing action it is conservatively estimated by Iraqi Medical Examiners, World and Iraqi Press as between 28,000 and 30,000. All of these are cases where there are confirmed civilian corpses. I would guess that the actual toll is higher, and certainly the cost in human terms is much, much greater. When you kill a person you leave their family behind. If my father was killed this afternoon as a non-militant I would most certainly feel the consequences of his death.
Please don't mistake education for intelligence.
This study is really saying that in cases where people have been socially conditioned for a longer period of time are better able to fend off Alzheimer's for longer periods.
Genius is usually associated with strange social behavior or thinking and just a step away from madness. Educated people are predictable and controllable and well...social.
They are just more structured, maybe that structure just helps them hang on a bit longer before they fall. I get the feeling that all the commentators are mistaking "knowing things" with being intelligent.
I give up.
;p
replaces the need to quickly call or run over to someone to ask a quick question that email is overkill for
I must be robbing the company of precious seconds all the time. I mean the phone, email, and actually seeing people is just so archaic.
All joking aside...I'm sure it can come in handy in some situations. It just feels like we're trying to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the productivity stone. It makes me feel less human to work in a company that will no doubt take full advantage of this.
Also, good thing for that IM or you might not have found the time to make that post.
Every generation has their scapegoat. Its been demonstrated again and again in our recent history, motion pictures, comic books, rock and roll.
I think there are two factors at work. Politics and xenophobia. Every politician needs an enemy to wage war against even if that enemy is benign, so long as it can be called an "emerging threat" and tugs at the current generations insecurities. In this case I'd say it's our parents fear that they weren't / aren't good parents. They see their children raised by media to which they aren't accustomed and get a little frightened. It makes it worse when politicians capitalize on that insecurity.
Its happened before. Those people who hold power now will slowly fade away and people who aren't frightened will assume power. Ask any person who has been raised with videogames if they are concerned about the problem. They'll give the same answer as our previous generation would when asked about rock and roll.
but with it being leading-edge hardware, it'll probably explode in my lap and permanently neuter me...
No genitals eah? Is this the part of OSX security I keep hearing about that prevents viral attack and infection?
I really am not an expert but I thought that the evolutionary theory doesn't deal with the ape to man idea. I thought it dealt with common ancestry.
Off topic, sorry...
Those people out there that question why someone would get so emotionally upset as to compare US President George Bush to Hitler haven't been exposed to unfiltered information about this war.
IraqBodyCount.net who relies on Mortuaries and Medics, the Free Press, and Iraqi Journalists reports that the estimated civilian body count is between 28,000 and 30,000. The attacks on the WTC resulted in 2,752 civilian casualties according the AP.
So by all accounts Iraq has at least suffered the effects of at least 9 to 10 September 11th attacks since the start of combat.
And Iraq's population was estimated to be about 26,074,906 in 2005 by the World Fact Book. The USAs was about 295,734,134 in 2005 by the same source. So the US population is about 11 time larger than that of Iraq.
So if you want to see the equivalent effect in the US you would have to take September 11th, multiply it by a conservative 9 times to bring it up the Iraqi civilian casualty toll, then multiply it again by 11 times to adjust it accordingly to the population. That comes out to about 272,448 civilians dying in the US in order to convey the scope of what Iraq has been going through since the start of the Iraq war. That's 272,448 and look at how devastated we were when we lost 2,752.
So while I wouldn't compare Bush to Hitler myself I can understand why some people may feel that way.
I think you're overstating the ease of accomplishing something like this.
The system would have to be specifically designed to deliver streaming audio from a distributed unreliable decentralized network. The reason bit torrent like technologies don't support streaming content is because they block, transmit, and verify smaller portions of larger files out of sequence based on availability.
If you tried to do this with streaming content you would run into issues. In the best of cases with an entirely new P2P system the content would be delayed from the first level peers on down through the network. What I would suspect would happen is that you would end up with out of sequence content with long delays and pauses. P2P networking is sort of like TCP and Streaming content is UDP, they don't really overlay.
So there's some technical issues.
The best option I think we have at the moment would be creating podcasting networks. You would just have to download full programs over BT using a client that could determine the playlisting of the programs. I think it might be difficult to create an actual business around this because people have demonstrated their willingness to create content for free and the actual service wouldn't have much to offer over what the average Joe can do with iTunes. That and it still has the legal barrier you were speaking of if dealing with licensing.
I can think of a few reasons that this could be handy.
I think itunes is a bit resource greedy. This is just a proof of concept release so it'll be some time till we know for sure but it would be nice to have a music app that's similar to itunes but lighter. I don't think there is native support for itunes under linux, once this guy is released on a cross platform basis there will be another advantage.
So yea, they are probably pushing this too soon. And hopefully they will come up with less abrasive wording for their later marketing pushes.
I haven't read the articles associated with this story, just the public reaction, and this is the impression I have been getting.
Blizzard had warned, and potentially banned, individuals that had set up a guild based on the concept of not discriminating and harassing other players based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. The logic used to justify the action was that it was in violation of the harassment section of their EULA.
That is to say, that this guild which specifically says they will not harass based on sexual orientation and gender identity will draw the attention of people who will and therefore should not be allowed to openly exist.
Those upholding the terms of the agreement were chastised for the potential reaction of those that would not.
Am I correct?
To those players its an issue of their very ability to exist and carry identity traits from real life to the game in a non-hostile guild environment. I think the intent of Blizzards harassment section of their EULA was to ensure that all players could enjoy themselves without feeling like they are being targeted. Blizzard slipped up.
Am I the first one to think that I wouldn't want one of these if I had a child?
Imagine getting out of the shower in the morning to see that your 5 year old took your car for a joy ride looking for Sesame Street.
My friend organizes photo-scavenger hunts a few times a year and I've had this happen to me before.
Most of the malls in my area have at least one jewelry store. We were taking ridiculous photos with people in the corridor somewhere around one of these stores and an employee had contacted security thinking that we were suspicious. At the time it was enough of a reasonable explanation that they assumed we might be taking photos of their store layout and security system to decide to move along. We were in costume as part of the scavenger hunt but it was not hiding our faces and was definitely more goofy than sinister (we were a group of singing hobos).
I still feel very bitter about the whole thing despite my fortune of not being assaulted or losing property. I didn't like being cast under suspicion and I most definitely did not enjoy the surveillance they placed on us. We were not asked to leave the mall directly, we were just followed by mall security till we felt unwelcome enough to leave on our own. It just seems unethical to me and I would rather they had just asked us to leave.
I know we were causing a disruption in the normal operation of their mall but we had not harassed anyone and could hardly be mistaken for starting a riot of any sort. Everyone who had helped us with our photos left with a smile and there was obviously no ill will from anyone who was too shy to. It would have been nice to feel even the slightest spark of community from the mall staff itself. We live in a culture of suspicion and terror and I worry that people are forgetting how to enjoy their lives.
There aren't many people out there that, while thinking clearly and unemotionally, would say the US fits our classic perception of a police state. The concern comes from the fact that our policies are tending more and more towards that end of the spectrum.
I would agree with most critics that these types of things happened in the past, but that doesn't make them correct. And for what ever reason, either apathy or lack of evidence, they were not pushed. It doesn't mean offenses like this should be ignored and tolerated...we have evidence now, and enough people feel the current administration has stepped out of their bounds. So it doesn't seem unreasonable given the these situations that they push back.
Even if the lawsuit isn't effective in curtailing the act it should make a show that we as citizens do not like whats going on.
Freedoms are seldom taken away outright. Its usually a slow process of erosion.
You seem like a nice guy. So I don't want to give the impression that I don't like you. I'm just so damn tired of the Nintendo is for Kids line and tend to get hostile.
Troll...blah
I really wish I could get into the PSP. I wish Sony didn't insist on crippling the damn thing. Seems like a nice media player if not for that. It also seems like many of their developers haven't quite figured out how to deal with mobile gaming yet. Lots of near direct ports.
As for the 360, if it has the titles you want and the price isn't a factor that's great.
The community seems pretty crappy to me. I'm sure there are good people out there playing but you have to sift through the waves a**holes to get to them. And when I think of first round 360 purchasers I think more of the 16 year old G4 fan down the streets and less of the 30+ guys I use to play tribes with.
People keep saying that to Nintendo fans "graphics don't matter"...even the parents Nintendo fan. I can see where you're going with the PS3, however...the GameCube kicks the PS2s ass in terms of graphical performance. Sad that the titles just never made it over.
Not to knock Sony here, but I'll probibly never own a PSP. The reason is simple. The problem is its Sony, meaning flaky hardware, insane locked down platforms, and shitty ps2 ports. These aren't the features I want out of a console, and this will probably be the only reason I'll get a next gen Nintendo DS. To me, its no the titles available, its the quality of those titles.
And as for the xbox 360, I know what crowd dominates that market. I've played Halo 2 on Live. I'm just trying to imagine being 30+ and still wanting to play cs type games with the 12 year olds that put sprays of their nuts on the walls. And don't think its going to be better on a console, they're pushing the webcams for the 360.
I think Nintendo is courting older gamers with this system. People who don't have tons of time to invest in gaming because of work and family. Hense the price and their features.
They offer their entire first party back catalog for the nastolgic at a reasonable price. I know kids are going to put up with the graphics from the first Zelda when they've been playing WoW and Doom 3. And who cares that you can't play Mariokart 64 at 1080p resolution?
Nintendo is obviously foolish. Their biggest selling points to me was that you would be able to play their entire back catalog. Now I don't know. I can't imagine playing Mario 3 without my HD hardware.
When digitally distributed content matches the quality and usability of its retail counterpart I am willing to pay the same amount as I would for that retail counterpart. I want it at full quality and I want to own what I am paying for. A good example is hl-2 on Steam. Same content, same quality, same price.
About $1.00 for a CD quality audio track with no DRM.
About $2.00 for an temporary movie rental at full DVD quality (Netflix price).
About $15.00 -$20.00 for a movie purchased at full DVD quality with no DRM.
About $45.00 - $60.00 for a video game with full content.
Now if they want to offer their content at a lesser quality with more restrictions that's fine so long as it is at a discounted price. Then I have an option.
But why would they do that when the perceived value of the degraded content is equal to that of the actual media?
Agreed. theory - A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. Evolution is a theory, meaning it is a hypothesis that has been tested and never been proven wrong once. If it's proven wrong it is changed to incorporate the new information. Intelligent design on the other hand can not be tested, hence is not a scientific theory. Evolution deals in natural laws, Intelligent Design in spiritual. I know plenty of people that believe in Intelligent Design. But smart people are very good at rationalizing things they came to believe for silly reasons. It's your right to believe what you want and I don't want to keep you from believing. I'm saying is that in science the term "theory" means something different than how the layman uses it, and intelligent design simply isn't a scientific theory. The end.