The response many of these people have is "No, I'm not important at all! I could understand gangs wanting to stalk and harass important officials or celebrities, but why me? I have no idea." Many people who experience what they believe is organized stalking don't have a unified theory about who's doing it or why - they may be completely at a loss, just like you are. But that doesn't change their experiences. Just like with real-world phenomena, being able to rationalize something doesn't change whether it's happening or not.
Do you know how many vegetarians get admitted to the hospital each year because they don't take in enough protein and eventually become malnourished? More than a few.
o rly? Got any citations for that? Seriously. I mean, I am calling BS, but I'd also genuinely be interested in your sources if there are any.
Really? That happens to you regularly? How confident are you that you're not just misinterpreting noisy chatter (as in pareidolia) and glaring at random people? Getting glared at by a stranger would certainly make me have a reaction that might look like guilt.
I would compare your experiences with people you know, and if they can't relate, consider how likely it is that your hearing is that much better than everyone else's.
SimLife. Granted it wasn't as sexy as Spore (though it gets some leeway for being from the early 90's). However, it was both a pretty accurate representation of the basic principles of evolution and a game.
The existence of this game (by the same company, no less) definitely proves that it's possible to make a game about evolution. I guess the Spore team just decided it wouldn't be fun enough.
Language is consensus-based. There's no decision to make about whether we "wiki" language or not - language is a wiki, that's the nature of culture and people. Every speaker is a self-empowered editor and interpreter of language, and they're inevitably going to modify it to suit them.
Doesn't mean you can't complain about it, but it's sort of like complaining about how "times change". Well, yeah. That's what they do.
But fortunately, the point of speaking is still to be understood, so it's very unlikely that people will modify/destroy their understanding of language to the point that they cannot communicate - that would defeat the whole point. Even people who normally write in loltxtmsg-speak are capable of more standard communication when it's needed. So they're not really changing English, just forking a new pidgin to use instead when it's useful. Language is expanding to cover new meanings and purposes, and all you can do is complain that it's different!
The student bests the master. And thus the cycle begins anew. You are ready, young grasshopper, to face your ancient foe: those lamers in your CS101 class who think they're so smart because they know about "ports" and "mac addresses".
Go, now! Leave your mod points, they are of no use to you any more. From now on your moderations will be made in blood. The blood of inferior nerds.
Yeah, but at least they have real ads now from their corpglomerate sponsors (aka owners). All that "supported by viewers like you" crap was so tiresome.
"What Gronet envisions is solar panels installed on your average Home Depot or Ikea, generating a substantial percentage of the company's power needs right on site."
This is the best possible outcome of the energy crisis: an efficient, sustainable, and most importantly decentralized power infrastructure. Let's hope these technologies really do take hold.
Just as a followup to the military suggestion: not only is there a good chance you'll be deployed, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll be deployed as an IT or tech-related soldier. Currently the big need is for soldiers to fill combat roles in Iraq, and with the strain on the military these days it would be no surprise to find yourself being trained and deployed to do something completely unrelated to IT.
There is the possibility to make some money and get "Soldier" on your resume, which may be worth something. Just keep in mind that helping you get a civilian career is not at all a priority for the military.
If games are made out of rules, paintings are made out of brushstrokes. Nevertheless, an ordered list of brushstrokes isn't the same as a painting. And similarly, a rulebook isn't the same as a game.
Rules are simply the material used to build games, and in both a good game and a good painting, one stops thinking about the materials used and is captivated by the emergent properties of the whole work.
What you say about sysadmins is true (technical power doesn't always equal real power), but if it weren't for a whistleblowing sysadmin working at a major telecom, we wouldn't know half of what we know today about the government's illegal internet surveillance programs. His technical power to discover the wiretapping program was certainly important.
So yeah, I was thinking more of the second kind of action - inventing tools which allow people to solve problems themselves, rather than depending on a politician to solve them.
But because some geeks are put in positions of immense technical power and responsibility, taking direct action as a whistleblower or conscientious objector could sometimes be hugely important and effective - well worth the loss of a job or even prison time.
According to the criteria, I would say contributing labor to key "political" software projects such as GPG or TOR would be best. It can be done as a hobby, definitely exploits our nerdiness, and absolutely goes outside the normal channels of influence.
Granted, this has nothing to do with getting a politician elected, but that's exactly the point. Taking direct action to solve the problems of privacy and government surveillance increases our "effective voting power" many times over, because we don't have to hope that whatever shmuck we put in office will do what we elected him to do. In a certain sense it makes us even more powerful than the president.
I guess my point is that the most powerful things nerds have done to change the political landscape haven't had anything to do (directly) with elections. Because our power and potential is bigger than any politician.
Early mmorpg Underlight allowed high-level players to control mobs and attack players in much the way you're suggesting. Of course, they weren't just run of the mill baddies, they were special "boss" mobs.
The main exploit I see in a system like that is people playing mobs deliberately badly, to let their friends make easy kills.
Video recording cops isn't that dangerous. Me and people I know have done it as a policy, in a fairly confrontational way for years now.
Sure, the cops get pissed off, sure they threaten to arrest you, but if you stand your ground, don't interfere with their "crime scene", and make it clear you know your rights, they don't do anything serious.
There's a lot of advice, but the main thing is to make sure you have someone else with you, preferably with another camera, to hang back and record any interaction the cops have with you, the copwatcher.
Your analogy is flawed, because obviously any individual has the right to abuse themselves with alcohol as much as they like.
More appropriately, should the pawn shop be blamed for doing business with known gang members who want to exchange carloads of (pretty obviously stolen) TVs and watches for firearms?
You may say no, because you're a personal responsibility fetishist. And here I will disagree. I also hold individuals and insitutions to their actions, and there's a line between "innocent business partner", and "accomplice to crime". In US law, that line is generally drawn over the question of whether the person/institution knew its actions would facilitate crime.
We have documents from Shell proving they knew that Nigerians were being killed in order to enable Shell operations in sensitive areas. Shell supported and enabled these killings. That's not an unusual case. When it comes to African conflicts, many, many businesses cross that line between business partner and criminal, and at that point they share the blame for the crimes. To claim otherwise would be to fail to "hold them to their actions", as you do so strictly when it comes to African people themselves.
Oh, and it's "fomenting unrest", not "fermenting". Unless they were trying to make some kind of unrest liquor, which would be badass.
There are no more "African people" than there are "European people". That's a George W. Bush mistake. Now, there are "black people", but I'm sure you didn't mean to generalize about an entire race as though they all share the same situation and problems.
If you thought that was funny, wait 'till you hear this: Last week, cops in my city shot a black guy in the back and killed him! You know, 'cause he was black!
Get it? People of African descent are subhuman! Now that's +funny!
It's funny that you have a fairly extensive post explaining "the trouble with Africa", and the only people you mention are the Africans themselves.
What about the ex-soviets and westerners selling military-grade weaponry to militia organizations and known human-rights abusing regimes? What about the chinese and western corporations actively encouraging conflicts and backing certain players in order to create more favorable commodity prices? What about those companies buying resources that are known to have been the product of slave labor, from groups that are known to use the profits to buy the aforementioned weaponry? Where's the grim realpolitik analysis of/their/ human nature?
I mean sure, Africans are definitely a part of the problem. But it takes two to tango. And to be perfectly frank, we're one of the two.
Uh, no. You have little to no knowledge of the conflicts over diamonds, and should learn some more before making such proclamations. The "gvmnt. of that country" is not the only party responsible for most resource conflicts in Africa. In many cases it's not even a significant player.
We're not talking about Iraq here, a country which had a stable government until the US showed up. We're talking about a situation where various militant factions and warlords ally themselves with transnational export companies in order to fund their weapons and equipment, and in this case use forced labor to supply the export companies with what they want.
So in short, it doesn't matter worth a damn whether you show them a better way and have them elect their own government, because their neighbors are members of an armed militia which operates completely independently of the government, and may someday decide to enslave them.
Sure, ultimately you want to be able to analyze the "primary documents" yourself and determine what you think yourself. But that's what the internet at large is for, you don't need a special web site for that. In the same way you don't want to depend on one Wikipedia page, you wouldn't want to depend on knol.google.com for all your sources either, would you?
And another thing, Wikipedia has both a "talk" section for each article, and an exhaustive history of edits to the article. Between these two resources, you should be able to hone in on any controversy or differing perspectives the article's authors have, and do all the "synthesizing" you want.
Haha, surely you're being ironic, right? Imagine your entire nation being in the path of powerful, violent hurricanes which come very year. And that every so often, will decimate a large developed area in your nation.
Right, of course. So if instead of illegal drugs we were talking about some perfectly legal industry like, say, tropical fruit, or petroleum, or diamonds, then the violence would be absent. And yet.
And I know you can keep coming back with convoluted explanations of how governments are even remotely involved in any real world example, thereby saddling them with all the blame. It's funny how every real world bad thing is due to the small role the government played, but all sorts of real world good things are due to the small role the market played.
I admire your the purity and elegance of your economic theory, it has the satisfaction of a good math proof or emergent behavior algorithm - it's possible I've studied it even more than you. But there comes a time when it must be reconciled with reality. Because those who continue to place faith in clean, elegant models of the world even when they don't mirror reality are poor scientists indeed.
Businesses are smart. Building an army is expensive and difficult, better left to a separate entity who can specialize in it (the military). Then, when a business is in need of some physical force, they "outsource" the violence to this third party without having to get their own hands dirty.
Good point, people always try to misrepresent themselves. But in a real-life, face to face interaction, it's much more difficult. The rules of physical interactions make such deception more difficult, and make it more likely the person you're interacting with is actually somewhat the way they seem.
So if you like to have "fantasy" interactions where you pretend you and the people you're around aren't who they actually are, then online interactions are ideal. But if you prefer authenticity, face-to-face is definitely the best.
Slashdot Mirror
The response many of these people have is "No, I'm not important at all! I could understand gangs wanting to stalk and harass important officials or celebrities, but why me? I have no idea." Many people who experience what they believe is organized stalking don't have a unified theory about who's doing it or why - they may be completely at a loss, just like you are. But that doesn't change their experiences. Just like with real-world phenomena, being able to rationalize something doesn't change whether it's happening or not.
Do you know how many vegetarians get admitted to the hospital each year because they don't take in enough protein and eventually become malnourished? More than a few.
o rly? Got any citations for that? Seriously. I mean, I am calling BS, but I'd also genuinely be interested in your sources if there are any.
Really? That happens to you regularly? How confident are you that you're not just misinterpreting noisy chatter (as in pareidolia) and glaring at random people? Getting glared at by a stranger would certainly make me have a reaction that might look like guilt.
I would compare your experiences with people you know, and if they can't relate, consider how likely it is that your hearing is that much better than everyone else's.
Yeah, because everyone knows that when one person in a company is handling sensitive info, it always stays with that person and that person alone.
SimLife. Granted it wasn't as sexy as Spore (though it gets some leeway for being from the early 90's). However, it was both a pretty accurate representation of the basic principles of evolution and a game.
The existence of this game (by the same company, no less) definitely proves that it's possible to make a game about evolution. I guess the Spore team just decided it wouldn't be fun enough.
Language is consensus-based. There's no decision to make about whether we "wiki" language or not - language is a wiki, that's the nature of culture and people. Every speaker is a self-empowered editor and interpreter of language, and they're inevitably going to modify it to suit them.
Doesn't mean you can't complain about it, but it's sort of like complaining about how "times change". Well, yeah. That's what they do.
But fortunately, the point of speaking is still to be understood, so it's very unlikely that people will modify/destroy their understanding of language to the point that they cannot communicate - that would defeat the whole point. Even people who normally write in loltxtmsg-speak are capable of more standard communication when it's needed. So they're not really changing English, just forking a new pidgin to use instead when it's useful. Language is expanding to cover new meanings and purposes, and all you can do is complain that it's different!
The student bests the master. And thus the cycle begins anew. You are ready, young grasshopper, to face your ancient foe: those lamers in your CS101 class who think they're so smart because they know about "ports" and "mac addresses".
Go, now! Leave your mod points, they are of no use to you any more. From now on your moderations will be made in blood. The blood of inferior nerds.
Yeah, but at least they have real ads now from their corpglomerate sponsors (aka owners). All that "supported by viewers like you" crap was so tiresome.
"What Gronet envisions is solar panels installed on your average Home Depot or Ikea, generating a substantial percentage of the company's power needs right on site."
This is the best possible outcome of the energy crisis: an efficient, sustainable, and most importantly decentralized power infrastructure. Let's hope these technologies really do take hold.
Just as a followup to the military suggestion: not only is there a good chance you'll be deployed, there's absolutely no guarantee that you'll be deployed as an IT or tech-related soldier. Currently the big need is for soldiers to fill combat roles in Iraq, and with the strain on the military these days it would be no surprise to find yourself being trained and deployed to do something completely unrelated to IT.
There is the possibility to make some money and get "Soldier" on your resume, which may be worth something. Just keep in mind that helping you get a civilian career is not at all a priority for the military.
If games are made out of rules, paintings are made out of brushstrokes. Nevertheless, an ordered list of brushstrokes isn't the same as a painting. And similarly, a rulebook isn't the same as a game.
Rules are simply the material used to build games, and in both a good game and a good painting, one stops thinking about the materials used and is captivated by the emergent properties of the whole work.
What you say about sysadmins is true (technical power doesn't always equal real power), but if it weren't for a whistleblowing sysadmin working at a major telecom, we wouldn't know half of what we know today about the government's illegal internet surveillance programs. His technical power to discover the wiretapping program was certainly important.
So yeah, I was thinking more of the second kind of action - inventing tools which allow people to solve problems themselves, rather than depending on a politician to solve them.
But because some geeks are put in positions of immense technical power and responsibility, taking direct action as a whistleblower or conscientious objector could sometimes be hugely important and effective - well worth the loss of a job or even prison time.
According to the criteria, I would say contributing labor to key "political" software projects such as GPG or TOR would be best. It can be done as a hobby, definitely exploits our nerdiness, and absolutely goes outside the normal channels of influence.
Granted, this has nothing to do with getting a politician elected, but that's exactly the point. Taking direct action to solve the problems of privacy and government surveillance increases our "effective voting power" many times over, because we don't have to hope that whatever shmuck we put in office will do what we elected him to do. In a certain sense it makes us even more powerful than the president.
I guess my point is that the most powerful things nerds have done to change the political landscape haven't had anything to do (directly) with elections. Because our power and potential is bigger than any politician.
Early mmorpg Underlight allowed high-level players to control mobs and attack players in much the way you're suggesting. Of course, they weren't just run of the mill baddies, they were special "boss" mobs. The main exploit I see in a system like that is people playing mobs deliberately badly, to let their friends make easy kills.
Video recording cops isn't that dangerous. Me and people I know have done it as a policy, in a fairly confrontational way for years now.
Sure, the cops get pissed off, sure they threaten to arrest you, but if you stand your ground, don't interfere with their "crime scene", and make it clear you know your rights, they don't do anything serious.
You can learn about smart/effective ways to record the police here: http://www.copwatch.net/forums/
There's a lot of advice, but the main thing is to make sure you have someone else with you, preferably with another camera, to hang back and record any interaction the cops have with you, the copwatcher.
Your analogy is flawed, because obviously any individual has the right to abuse themselves with alcohol as much as they like.
More appropriately, should the pawn shop be blamed for doing business with known gang members who want to exchange carloads of (pretty obviously stolen) TVs and watches for firearms?
You may say no, because you're a personal responsibility fetishist. And here I will disagree. I also hold individuals and insitutions to their actions, and there's a line between "innocent business partner", and "accomplice to crime". In US law, that line is generally drawn over the question of whether the person/institution knew its actions would facilitate crime.
We have documents from Shell proving they knew that Nigerians were being killed in order to enable Shell operations in sensitive areas. Shell supported and enabled these killings. That's not an unusual case. When it comes to African conflicts, many, many businesses cross that line between business partner and criminal, and at that point they share the blame for the crimes. To claim otherwise would be to fail to "hold them to their actions", as you do so strictly when it comes to African people themselves.
Oh, and it's "fomenting unrest", not "fermenting". Unless they were trying to make some kind of unrest liquor, which would be badass.
There are no more "African people" than there are "European people". That's a George W. Bush mistake. Now, there are "black people", but I'm sure you didn't mean to generalize about an entire race as though they all share the same situation and problems.
If you thought that was funny, wait 'till you hear this: Last week, cops in my city shot a black guy in the back and killed him! You know, 'cause he was black!
Get it? People of African descent are subhuman! Now that's +funny!
It's funny that you have a fairly extensive post explaining "the trouble with Africa", and the only people you mention are the Africans themselves.
/their/ human nature?
What about the ex-soviets and westerners selling military-grade weaponry to militia organizations and known human-rights abusing regimes? What about the chinese and western corporations actively encouraging conflicts and backing certain players in order to create more favorable commodity prices? What about those companies buying resources that are known to have been the product of slave labor, from groups that are known to use the profits to buy the aforementioned weaponry? Where's the grim realpolitik analysis of
I mean sure, Africans are definitely a part of the problem. But it takes two to tango. And to be perfectly frank, we're one of the two.
Uh, no. You have little to no knowledge of the conflicts over diamonds, and should learn some more before making such proclamations. The "gvmnt. of that country" is not the only party responsible for most resource conflicts in Africa. In many cases it's not even a significant player.
We're not talking about Iraq here, a country which had a stable government until the US showed up. We're talking about a situation where various militant factions and warlords ally themselves with transnational export companies in order to fund their weapons and equipment, and in this case use forced labor to supply the export companies with what they want.
So in short, it doesn't matter worth a damn whether you show them a better way and have them elect their own government, because their neighbors are members of an armed militia which operates completely independently of the government, and may someday decide to enslave them.
Sure, ultimately you want to be able to analyze the "primary documents" yourself and determine what you think yourself. But that's what the internet at large is for, you don't need a special web site for that. In the same way you don't want to depend on one Wikipedia page, you wouldn't want to depend on knol.google.com for all your sources either, would you? And another thing, Wikipedia has both a "talk" section for each article, and an exhaustive history of edits to the article. Between these two resources, you should be able to hone in on any controversy or differing perspectives the article's authors have, and do all the "synthesizing" you want.
gentle tropical island weather
Haha, surely you're being ironic, right? Imagine your entire nation being in the path of powerful, violent hurricanes which come very year. And that every so often, will decimate a large developed area in your nation.
Gentle weather, indeed.
Right, of course. So if instead of illegal drugs we were talking about some perfectly legal industry like, say, tropical fruit, or petroleum, or diamonds, then the violence would be absent. And yet.
And I know you can keep coming back with convoluted explanations of how governments are even remotely involved in any real world example, thereby saddling them with all the blame. It's funny how every real world bad thing is due to the small role the government played, but all sorts of real world good things are due to the small role the market played.
I admire your the purity and elegance of your economic theory, it has the satisfaction of a good math proof or emergent behavior algorithm - it's possible I've studied it even more than you. But there comes a time when it must be reconciled with reality. Because those who continue to place faith in clean, elegant models of the world even when they don't mirror reality are poor scientists indeed.
Maybe it is counter-intuitive but physical violence has never been a feature of trade ... unless governments have been involved.
First of all: drug cartels.
Second, above-ground businesses themselves don't have armies, so I guess it's technically true to say that they rarely commit violence themselves. They're more than happy to hire someone else to do it for them, though. Look at the number of wars that have been exclusively fomented by business interests, invasions that have been conducted for the benefit of specific companies, and guerrilla groups that have been formed or directly financed by businesses. If you're more of the "economic theory" type rather than the "history" type, here are some examples to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_fruit_company#Banana_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombian_paramilitaries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Nigeria
Businesses are smart. Building an army is expensive and difficult, better left to a separate entity who can specialize in it (the military). Then, when a business is in need of some physical force, they "outsource" the violence to this third party without having to get their own hands dirty.
Good point, people always try to misrepresent themselves. But in a real-life, face to face interaction, it's much more difficult. The rules of physical interactions make such deception more difficult, and make it more likely the person you're interacting with is actually somewhat the way they seem. So if you like to have "fantasy" interactions where you pretend you and the people you're around aren't who they actually are, then online interactions are ideal. But if you prefer authenticity, face-to-face is definitely the best.