He feels that gamers are more dangerous than bikers.
No. That generalization of his quote is incorrect. You are correct in gernealizing from "a gamer" to "gamers" -- but you are incorrect in generalizing from his family being at risk to other families, or individuals, or all of society being at risk.
Considering that he claims a credible threat was made against him by gamers, and none by bikers, you can see his rationale for believe that *his specific family* is more threatened by gamers.
That does not mean that you can generalize his beliefs to include *gamers in general* are more dangerous than *bikers in general* regardless of the subject of the risk assessment.
The article also mentions that in his scuffle with the bikers, he claimed they had BBQ'd and eaten a cat. Then was forced to admit he made it up. Why would you give him any credibility with regards to this supposed threat he received, when he has lied about his opposition in the past?
Good point, but completely ancillary to the problem I was writing about.:)
FWIW, the bikers did indeed barbecue and eat a cat. This is no surprise -- cats are a common BBQ treat among bikies down under, second in popularity only to shrimps on the barbie [1]. He just wasn't able to prove it, and so had to recant his claim or be sued for libel/slander.
[1] Citation needed. But the recantment was in response to a threatened legal action based upon his inability to prove what he claimed.
I don't disagree that he's a whackjob. But if people bothered to RTFA (wishful thinking on my part)...
Atkinson's got very vocal opposition among biker gangs and gamers.
The reason he feels gamers are more of a threat to his family is because a gamer left a threatening note under his door one night. No biker has done that.
Put yourself in the same situation. What would you consider a more present threat to your safety -- a set of organizations who is opposing you politically (the biker gangs are putting forward their own candidate to run against him), or a set of individuals, one of which has made a threat, in writing, at your home?
Context is everything. The submitter, the editor, and all of the early posters like yourself should do yourselves a favor and (1) read the fucking quote before misattributing words to someone and (2) understand the context in which those words were said.
I'm addicted to slashdot, obviously so if you see my post history. But I'm sick of it becoming the geek tab of fark.
You're being too exclusive in your list of those who wield the real power. It's not just the old money... there's plenty of (relatively) new money there too.
It's not even a small, select list. It's the ultra-wealthy -- same as it has always been. I'm not one to advocate class warfare... but it's an entire socio-economic class on the top reaping the rewards of control of the political system. Don't exclude the Bushes or the Kennedys from your list. Don't exclude the wealthy in the banking and energy industries who are relatively anonymous. It's misleading and harmful to think that the list is limited to a few families with old money -- and it makes you seem like a conspiracy theory moonbat. Far better to "Do. The. Research. Yourself." and discover that it's a wider problem with no easy scapegoats to blame.
ndeed: in writing, one commonly samples other people's work using a moderately well-known process called "quoting". I'm mildly surprised she hasn't heard of it.
In quoting, one marks the material quoted with either in-line or block quotes, and lists the source, usually at the bottom of the page in something called a "footnote" (;-))
--dave[1]
Yeah, right. Like anyone who is well-versed with today's media culture would ever bother with that. Whatever...
[1] davecb (6256), www.slashdot.org, post #31120624, 12 February 2010.
And because it's Britain, there isn't much to worry about.
Says you. This should strike fear into the heart of every fly-tipper out there.
What the hell is fly-tipping anyway? Here in the good ol' US of A, we tip cows. Ya gotta get low for good leverage, and get yer back into it, but cow tipping is a bona fide gentleman's sport 'round these parts.
Are Brits so past weak that they can only tip flies? Surely they got cows somewhere... maybe they just need a big ol' American to show em how its done.
Streaming like last.fm and pandora are NO DIFFERENT than listening to the FM radio.
That's not true.
When I listen to FM radio, I have no control over what gets played -- except by changing stations. On Pandora (not sure about last.fm, I don't use it) I have input into the song selection. I've fine-tuned my favorite stations so that I can enjoy the music I like without ever needing to buy it. I don't have to worry about songs I like dropping off the playlists of my favorite stations (so I don't need to buy the songs if I still want to listen to them).
This is markedly different from FM radio, where the marketing arms of the labels, along with Clearchannel, decide what gets exposure.
Because the labels have less input into what I listen to on Pandora (than on FM radio), their marketing efforts are less effective. Aggregated across millions of users, what streaming services represent is a loss of control of the industry (and the marketplace!) by the labels. They want to avoid this at all costs, since technology is making their role almost exclusively marketing.
Long story short, streaming services where the listener has control over what content gets played spell the end of the big label era. The big labels fighting tooth and claw for their survival.
Yes, he does. Unfortunately, you need a six-panel display to render the avatar due to size.
Furthermore, the advice you're likely to get from the CowboyNeal office assistant may be somewhat suspect.
It looks like you're trying to set a tabstop. Would you like some help with that? Options: Link to BBW pron Link to mature porn Link to hirsute porn Link to horseporn No thanks, I'm good.
That's not the kind of office assistant most of us could use.
Hah. You win the award for the indiscriminate offending of people on both sides of the aisle in one slashdot story -- one post modded troll for making fun of Democrats, one post modded troll for making fun of Republicans.
Care to go for the trifecta and offend independents?
Lots of posters (especially NYCL) have already made the answers to most of your questions clear.
Whatever happened to due process and not being able to stand trial for the same crime twice? Is this new trial a civil suit where the first two trials were criminal suits?
All the trials have been civil suits. There has not been any criminal suit in this case... if there were, the plaintiff would be the state, not the RIAA member companies.
Every now and then I think perhaps I'm a pretender on slashdot, since it's been ages since I've done computer stuff as a hobby or profession. Sure, I use computers constantly, but only really as an end-user. At home, I spend more time on carpentry, or even painting, then I spend tinkering with my PCs or media server.
Then someone like you comes along and reaffirms my membership in the greater geek community.
And the alternative is to let an idiot keep his false belief -- and worse, to allow the spread of that misbelief.
And for what it's worth, I spelled out in a successive post why I believe that the all-the-good-but-none-of-the-drawbacks status of the ISPs is a bad thing... so hopefully the more in-depth consideration merits your approval:)
DIFI's[1] report was written by Hypatia, a Norwegian consultancy specializing in standardization and software accessibility.
Strange, that the name of the consultancy is Hypatia. She, after all, was a mathematician-philosopher who ascribed to Plotinus's ideal... that empirical research is inherently flawed, and only logic and mathematics can achieve truth.
I mean, there's a clear relationship here that I find very amusing. Microsoft's OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office, is not logically more interoperable due to the nature of what MS has done to the "open" standard.
Delicious allegory.
[1] DIFI is the Norwegian Agency responsible for the decision.
And there's the people that have Hanukkah bushes...
Surely that would be a fire hazard, right? Or am I thinking of the wrong prophet? Or does it mean that they don't groom "down there" for eight days?
I know plenty of Jews who have Christmas trees... they say it's so their kids don't feel left out. I dunno. Two hundred years ago very few Christians not of German descent had Christmas trees... I wonder what holiday traditions will look like in another two hundred years.
Yes, they are. Demonstrably. They would have long ago forced ISPs to filter if they weren't.
Please show me the documentation demonstrating that any single ISP, or any group of ISPs, or ISPs in general, have common carrier status.
The modern ISP marketplace is defined by the very fact that they are NOT common carriers, and thus not subject to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act. This is why we do not have choice in broadband suppliers at the local level.
Instead, some of the benefits of common carrier status have been conferred upon ISPs via the Communications Decency Act, which made them not liable for 3rd-party communications across their networks. Common-carrier status, however, has not been ascribed.
The key here is that ISPs get most of the benefits of common carrier status, without any of the drawbacks. They escape the kind of regulation that opens them up to competition in providing data service, and the kind of oversight that would require them to provide decent service... yet they can pick and choose what packets get delivered at what speed (if at all) and at what cost.
If ISPs had common carrier status, they could not throttle certain users based upon inequitable usage. They could not choose to deprecate certain kinds of data. Data transmission would need to be 100% content-agnostic. I think it makes sense -- but they'd need to shift to a different pricing model, a tiered one based on usage volume, to make it work.
The Long Winded Anecdote With No Point (Napping Crane Style) is no match for the Everending Rehashment Of Stale Joke (Slashdottian Ape Style):
Now, I'm not sure that the ISR joke above is actually funny -- not sure that people will understand that the reason to stop beating a dead horse is because it's boring. I think it is funny, slightly -- but the great thing is, I'm not concerned. Because anyone who finds it not funny will be bored by it, and therefore will be nudged slightly closer to a premature death. And anyone who has read this far into my post is surely even more bored by now. Mwuah-ha-ha-ha.
I was questioning this OP's saying it was now a requirement for us all, and that is simply not the case.
I think it may be the case, to a certain degree. If society-at-large punishes (effectively) those who act without social responsibility, then self-interest determines that social responsibility is required. It's a bit of gameplay to make social responsibility dependent on self-interest, but that's how societies work. The trick is to make sure that anti-social behavior is punished -- so far, I don't think we're doing a good enough job of it -- social inequity is harming most people, and I think that is far from ideal. The amount of cash at the highest level is high enough that even generational dilution won't be enough to stimulate responsible action at that level (not that we can really afford to wait a generation or two to fix the system).
I'm digressing quite a bit here... but just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I believe that marginal tax rate at the highest level should be close to 90%, and that we need to have citizenship requirements for owners and executives of businesses operating in the US.
Looking out for one's own interests above all others is a natural instinct that comes with humans. This "social responsibility" is a new rule on me...did this just recently trump the old paradigm of individualism, survival of the fittest, etc?
Ah, Social Darwinism and Randroidism, all wrapped up in one.
Social responsibility has been known to be a fundamental part of human nature for some time (if you believe the sociologists who make it their life work to study such things). There have been numerous articles explaining the relative genetic advantage posed by social responsibility in tribal systems, and by extension, in modern society (since we're fundamentally the same creature we were 10,000 years ago).
But, if you wish, you can continue to consider only the information that supports your childish and misinformed worldview that you use to justify antisocial behavior. It's no skin off my back if you ignore philosophical and sociological works that present clarifying or contradicting information. It's no big deal to me if you choose not to seek out such information -- the cognitive dissonance that would arise from it would surely make you either disregard it out of hand, or lead to you having some sort of apoplexy.
But ignoring all the contrary evidence is vital to you maintaining your unrealistic worldview, so I suggest if you want to keep believing as you do, that you don't seek out any modern thought on it, that you don't take any behavioral science classes, that you don't read any real scholarly works written on the subject of social responsibility in the last, oh, 30 years. Because otherwise you might need to re-examine your conceptions.
And if you think it's fake because it's over commercialized, would you consider Christmas or Hanukkah fake holidays?
In their present incarnations? Yes. (Although not sure about Hanukkah -- don't know how commercialized it's become).
I celebrate commercial holidays in a commercial manner to please my wife. I could not care less about christmas stockings and trees or valentine's day flowers or halloween candy or easter baskets or fourth of july pageantry.
The only holidays I truly respect are memorial day and thanksgiving. And I respect them more for the reflection I do on those days than for the traditions associated with them.
Slashdot Mirror
No. That generalization of his quote is incorrect. You are correct in gernealizing from "a gamer" to "gamers" -- but you are incorrect in generalizing from his family being at risk to other families, or individuals, or all of society being at risk.
Considering that he claims a credible threat was made against him by gamers, and none by bikers, you can see his rationale for believe that *his specific family* is more threatened by gamers.
That does not mean that you can generalize his beliefs to include *gamers in general* are more dangerous than *bikers in general* regardless of the subject of the risk assessment.
Good point, but completely ancillary to the problem I was writing about. :)
FWIW, the bikers did indeed barbecue and eat a cat. This is no surprise -- cats are a common BBQ treat among bikies down under, second in popularity only to shrimps on the barbie [1]. He just wasn't able to prove it, and so had to recant his claim or be sued for libel/slander.
[1] Citation needed. But the recantment was in response to a threatened legal action based upon his inability to prove what he claimed.
I don't disagree that he's a whackjob. But if people bothered to RTFA (wishful thinking on my part)...
Atkinson's got very vocal opposition among biker gangs and gamers.
The reason he feels gamers are more of a threat to his family is because a gamer left a threatening note under his door one night. No biker has done that.
Put yourself in the same situation. What would you consider a more present threat to your safety -- a set of organizations who is opposing you politically (the biker gangs are putting forward their own candidate to run against him), or a set of individuals, one of which has made a threat, in writing, at your home?
Context is everything. The submitter, the editor, and all of the early posters like yourself should do yourselves a favor and (1) read the fucking quote before misattributing words to someone and (2) understand the context in which those words were said.
I'm addicted to slashdot, obviously so if you see my post history. But I'm sick of it becoming the geek tab of fark.
If you are a paid subscriber and log in, you can see the entire posting history, not just the n number of recent posts.
I'm not a subscriber, so I can't verify your claim... maybe someone who has paid their fee could do so?
You're being too exclusive in your list of those who wield the real power. It's not just the old money... there's plenty of (relatively) new money there too.
It's not even a small, select list. It's the ultra-wealthy -- same as it has always been. I'm not one to advocate class warfare... but it's an entire socio-economic class on the top reaping the rewards of control of the political system. Don't exclude the Bushes or the Kennedys from your list. Don't exclude the wealthy in the banking and energy industries who are relatively anonymous. It's misleading and harmful to think that the list is limited to a few families with old money -- and it makes you seem like a conspiracy theory moonbat. Far better to "Do. The. Research. Yourself." and discover that it's a wider problem with no easy scapegoats to blame.
So then we update the targeting software with the new effective frequencies.
Booyah! Take that, Science!
Intelligent design triumphs over evolution once again!
Yeah, right. Like anyone who is well-versed with today's media culture would ever bother with that. Whatever...
[1] davecb (6256), www.slashdot.org, post #31120624, 12 February 2010.
Says you. This should strike fear into the heart of every fly-tipper out there.
What the hell is fly-tipping anyway? Here in the good ol' US of A, we tip cows. Ya gotta get low for good leverage, and get yer back into it, but cow tipping is a bona fide gentleman's sport 'round these parts.
Are Brits so past weak that they can only tip flies? Surely they got cows somewhere... maybe they just need a big ol' American to show em how its done.
Is there some "reason" why you chose particular "words" to put in "quotes"?
It makes your "writing" seem juvenile and not worth reading.
That's not true.
When I listen to FM radio, I have no control over what gets played -- except by changing stations. On Pandora (not sure about last.fm, I don't use it) I have input into the song selection. I've fine-tuned my favorite stations so that I can enjoy the music I like without ever needing to buy it. I don't have to worry about songs I like dropping off the playlists of my favorite stations (so I don't need to buy the songs if I still want to listen to them).
This is markedly different from FM radio, where the marketing arms of the labels, along with Clearchannel, decide what gets exposure.
Because the labels have less input into what I listen to on Pandora (than on FM radio), their marketing efforts are less effective. Aggregated across millions of users, what streaming services represent is a loss of control of the industry (and the marketplace!) by the labels. They want to avoid this at all costs, since technology is making their role almost exclusively marketing.
Long story short, streaming services where the listener has control over what content gets played spell the end of the big label era. The big labels fighting tooth and claw for their survival.
Bravo
Yes, he does. Unfortunately, you need a six-panel display to render the avatar due to size.
Furthermore, the advice you're likely to get from the CowboyNeal office assistant may be somewhat suspect.
It looks like you're trying to set a tabstop. Would you like some help with that?
Options:
Link to BBW pron
Link to mature porn
Link to hirsute porn
Link to horseporn
No thanks, I'm good.
That's not the kind of office assistant most of us could use.
Hah. You win the award for the indiscriminate offending of people on both sides of the aisle in one slashdot story -- one post modded troll for making fun of Democrats, one post modded troll for making fun of Republicans.
Care to go for the trifecta and offend independents?
Hollywood schmollywood.
Your geeksense should tell you that EMP weapons are superior for fighting robotic opponents.
Besides, these are not robotic spiders. Spiders have six legs, these only have six. For now, these are robotic ants.
Let us hope they do not teach themselves how to accumulate armor and learn to fly, lest they become robotic beetles.
At any rate, we should prepare ourselves for the possibility they become robotic fleas by learning to leap.
All the trials have been civil suits. There has not been any criminal suit in this case... if there were, the plaintiff would be the state, not the RIAA member companies.
Every now and then I think perhaps I'm a pretender on slashdot, since it's been ages since I've done computer stuff as a hobby or profession. Sure, I use computers constantly, but only really as an end-user. At home, I spend more time on carpentry, or even painting, then I spend tinkering with my PCs or media server.
Then someone like you comes along and reaffirms my membership in the greater geek community.
Thanks.
And the alternative is to let an idiot keep his false belief -- and worse, to allow the spread of that misbelief.
:)
And for what it's worth, I spelled out in a successive post why I believe that the all-the-good-but-none-of-the-drawbacks status of the ISPs is a bad thing... so hopefully the more in-depth consideration merits your approval
Strange, that the name of the consultancy is Hypatia. She, after all, was a mathematician-philosopher who ascribed to Plotinus's ideal... that empirical research is inherently flawed, and only logic and mathematics can achieve truth.
I mean, there's a clear relationship here that I find very amusing. Microsoft's OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office, is not logically more interoperable due to the nature of what MS has done to the "open" standard.
Delicious allegory.
[1] DIFI is the Norwegian Agency responsible for the decision.
Surely that would be a fire hazard, right? Or am I thinking of the wrong prophet?
Or does it mean that they don't groom "down there" for eight days?
I know plenty of Jews who have Christmas trees... they say it's so their kids don't feel left out. I dunno. Two hundred years ago very few Christians not of German descent had Christmas trees... I wonder what holiday traditions will look like in another two hundred years.
Please show me the documentation demonstrating that any single ISP, or any group of ISPs, or ISPs in general, have common carrier status.
The modern ISP marketplace is defined by the very fact that they are NOT common carriers, and thus not subject to regulation under Title II of the Communications Act. This is why we do not have choice in broadband suppliers at the local level.
Instead, some of the benefits of common carrier status have been conferred upon ISPs via the Communications Decency Act, which made them not liable for 3rd-party communications across their networks. Common-carrier status, however, has not been ascribed.
The key here is that ISPs get most of the benefits of common carrier status, without any of the drawbacks. They escape the kind of regulation that opens them up to competition in providing data service, and the kind of oversight that would require them to provide decent service... yet they can pick and choose what packets get delivered at what speed (if at all) and at what cost.
If ISPs had common carrier status, they could not throttle certain users based upon inequitable usage. They could not choose to deprecate certain kinds of data. Data transmission would need to be 100% content-agnostic. I think it makes sense -- but they'd need to shift to a different pricing model, a tiered one based on usage volume, to make it work.
No, no, no.
In Soviet Russia, dead horse beats you.
The Long Winded Anecdote With No Point (Napping Crane Style) is no match for the Everending Rehashment Of Stale Joke (Slashdottian Ape Style):
Now, I'm not sure that the ISR joke above is actually funny -- not sure that people will understand that the reason to stop beating a dead horse is because it's boring. I think it is funny, slightly -- but the great thing is, I'm not concerned. Because anyone who finds it not funny will be bored by it, and therefore will be nudged slightly closer to a premature death. And anyone who has read this far into my post is surely even more bored by now. Mwuah-ha-ha-ha.
I think it may be the case, to a certain degree. If society-at-large punishes (effectively) those who act without social responsibility, then self-interest determines that social responsibility is required. It's a bit of gameplay to make social responsibility dependent on self-interest, but that's how societies work. The trick is to make sure that anti-social behavior is punished -- so far, I don't think we're doing a good enough job of it -- social inequity is harming most people, and I think that is far from ideal. The amount of cash at the highest level is high enough that even generational dilution won't be enough to stimulate responsible action at that level (not that we can really afford to wait a generation or two to fix the system).
I'm digressing quite a bit here... but just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I believe that marginal tax rate at the highest level should be close to 90%, and that we need to have citizenship requirements for owners and executives of businesses operating in the US.
Ah, Social Darwinism and Randroidism, all wrapped up in one.
Social responsibility has been known to be a fundamental part of human nature for some time (if you believe the sociologists who make it their life work to study such things). There have been numerous articles explaining the relative genetic advantage posed by social responsibility in tribal systems, and by extension, in modern society (since we're fundamentally the same creature we were 10,000 years ago).
But, if you wish, you can continue to consider only the information that supports your childish and misinformed worldview that you use to justify antisocial behavior. It's no skin off my back if you ignore philosophical and sociological works that present clarifying or contradicting information. It's no big deal to me if you choose not to seek out such information -- the cognitive dissonance that would arise from it would surely make you either disregard it out of hand, or lead to you having some sort of apoplexy.
But ignoring all the contrary evidence is vital to you maintaining your unrealistic worldview, so I suggest if you want to keep believing as you do, that you don't seek out any modern thought on it, that you don't take any behavioral science classes, that you don't read any real scholarly works written on the subject of social responsibility in the last, oh, 30 years. Because otherwise you might need to re-examine your conceptions.
ISPs do not have common carrier status.
That's a myth you need to drop belief in.
Why do you think net neutrality is such a big issue? If they had common carrier status, it would be a moot point.
In their present incarnations? Yes. (Although not sure about Hanukkah -- don't know how commercialized it's become).
I celebrate commercial holidays in a commercial manner to please my wife. I could not care less about christmas stockings and trees or valentine's day flowers or halloween candy or easter baskets or fourth of july pageantry.
The only holidays I truly respect are memorial day and thanksgiving. And I respect them more for the reflection I do on those days than for the traditions associated with them.