The guns don't kill people argument works like this:
We can divide laws into two sorts. Let's call them first hand laws and second hand laws.
First hand laws say e.g. "thou shalt not kill". They are laws that express prohibitions on doing things that we generally agree are bad.
These are fair enough. You run into some difficulties when the population is more divided on whether something is bad or not (e.g. "Thou shalt not inject heroin") but in general these are good and reasonable laws.
Then you have enforcement laws. These exist in order to help the judical system enforce the moral laws. For example, guns are an enabling technology for murder, so in theory banning guns should reduce the murder rate.
However, two flaws with that.
Flaw one is that if you are prepared to ignore the first hand law and murder people, then the second hand law holds little fear for you. So we see that in countries like the UK, where guns are mostly illegal, lots of criminals have guns.
Flaw two is that sometimes these technologies have significant non-infringing usages. One might collect guns out of an interest in them, or use them for hunting, or to protect your fmaily from criminals, or use them to overthrow your government in the event that it becomes totalitarain. These are all valid uses that are blocked by the second hand law.
So the argument is valid both for Guns and Kazaa. It is unfair to ban something in a second-hand law while there are significant non-infringing uses, and the legislature should be very wary of such bans.
That God exists is not a requirement for one to play God, in the same way that the non-existance of Superman did not prevent Christopher Reeve from playing him.
Yes, it takes me about a minute to eject the magazine from my expensive tape autochanger, whereas my $20 removeable disk caddy pops out in about 10 seconds.;-)
Can you get hold of Doom 1 now? Course you can, it's in your local game store for $5.
Ditto HL2 in 6 years. Anything this good is going to be around on budget/discout labels for a good while.
Heck, I have 2 copies of HL one because I bought a second one in a bundle with OpFor and BlueShift for a few quid. It's just sitting in my drawer. (No, you can't have the CD key.)
While I'm surprised that it doesn't look like a shoe, I think it's too early to make assumptions it is going to be crap.
But the discussion brings me back to something I've been thinking about for a while.
Why does Hollywood pay what is no doubt a huge ammount of money for rights to a book, and then make somethign completely different.
Take I, Robot, for example. I can't imagine the rights were cheap. But they made a film that takes from that work the name of one character and pretty much nothing else; in fact they made a film that is practically an anti-asimov film. Why?
I mean, surely you can divide the world into two classes of people. Asimov fans won't go to see it just because of the name because 5 seconds of the trailer is enough for you to realise it has no relationship to Asimovs ideas and work. And people who aren't azimov fans are people who want to see Will Smith kicking robot butt around, and so they'll go whatever you call the love interest. So why? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
And don't get me started on making a John Constantine movie and casting Neo in it. (Although I guess WB do get the license on the cheap in that instance)
It was all done with cups of tea, ZooLook, all done with tea. And, to paraphrase another great comic writer, "Just think readers, a pound of tea can be bought for just a few shillings".
You're new around here, aren't you? Because, and I am saying this with a lot of love, Slashdot readers are not exactly the best example of the public's clothes buying habits.
I disagree, it's more complex than that. In the early days, PalmOS was market leader because their OS was designed to run well on the current hardware. The early PPCs ran like treacle.
Now, in fact, they could probaly have kept the hardware the same and still did alright - a Palm M500 is not all that different from a V.
But then hardware finally advance to the stage where it could run PPC. And then Palm had to play "match the check boxes". Look at my Tungsten - C; it's spec is clearly excessive, clearly an attempt to match PPC specs.
Mind you, the sucess of the T-E and Zire shows Palm have not entirely forgotten that they make basic PDAs very well.
But the market is changin a lot too - look at all the big PPC manufacturers pulling out of the market. It looks like PDA/phone convergence is where it is heading too, which I don't like because i prefer seperate devices. I like my phone to be cheap and tiny, my PDA to be powerful and to have a big screen, and my music player to be an ipod. Maybe that's the reason Palm have slipped to #2 - if they are putting all tehir effort into thier Treo smartphone line in anticipation of the PDA market dying...
Woah there, I'm an systems admin and I don't want to be a programmer, but that doesn't mean I'd rather point and click than learn a programming language.
The reason I don't want to write code is that a coder spends most of the day sitting in front of a computer writing code. I spend my day interacting with human beings so I can make their computers work for them better.
And I do get my hands dirty writing code sometimes, all part of the rich variety of the sa's job. (And I do get my hands dirty, because my Perl scripts are skanky)
Didn't he arrive on the carrier in a Navy Jet though? In which case, surely a flight suit is an appropriate thing to wear, particularly since he is an ex-fighter pilot himself, and so would feel comfortable in one.
Careless, they should have patented selling over a digital network to creatures that breathe, got that lucrative domestic market too.
Why don't the patent office develop a mechanism where people can point out "the monkeys stuffed up on this one guys, you might need a dolphin to review this one"
They are used a lot more than you'd think, because if you still have Win9x boxes on your network (and lots do - I discontinued my last Win95 box last month) then you have to use LM hashes.
We have a contract with the state; we give it power over us so it can improve our quality of life. But states are made of humans, and humans are failable, and corruptable. So we put curbs and controls in place to the state's power.
Now, the current Govt. in the UK seems to have made the thought process: "unwritten constituion=we can do anything we want" and has gone beserk with vague and ill thought out constitutional change.
Look at Hunting. They intend to use the Parliament act to force it through the Lords. Think about that for a moment. The Lords is a mechanism to prevent Parliament enacting bad law. The Parliament act is a way to overrule that check in an emergency - for example if the Lords is blocking a Finance act and so preventing the Govt doing anything. The hunting bill isn't an emergency. Regardless of it's merits either way, it's not an emergency. What it is, is politically necessary for Tony Blair to keep control of activists in his party. Not the same thing.
Anyway, dragging myself closer to the topic:
Is it pretty unlikely to be added to the list of terrorists? Ask Ted Kennedy about that one.;-)
Is it going to be compulsory? You yourself insist that it should be needed to get health care or to buy a beer in a pub or to get a job. That sounds pretty compulsory to me.
The expense will be huge. I cannot recall a major computer system implementation in the UK that has not been a complete disaster. Air traffic control? Disaster. Magistrate Court? Disaster. Passport Office? Disaster. Criminal background checks on School employees? Disaster. and on and on.
In fact, my objections to this scheme are almost entirely theoretical because I don't reckon they have the ability to implment it.;-)
Here's another point: what about the guy who just got jailed for providing information from the DVLA databases to terrorists? Or the temp, who used to work for a newspaper, that got employed by the Cabinet Office, and is being investigated for leaking to the press? You trust people with that kind of hiring record?
We must envisage worst case scenarios. Hitler was democratically elected. to return to my first point: every Govt. is corrupt in one way or another, because it is full of people.
Actually, I rather bet it doesn't, at least not fully.
I expect that, in the same way that you can't just mount the ipod as a disk and move music to it, but have to use software that updates the ipod's database, the iPron probably also can only get photos loaded into it using itunes. So the Belkin can only use the iPron to store, not display.
But seriously guys, even if you consider the photo system to be crap, it's a 60Gb iPod with a color screen!!! 60Gb!!!
Re:BT can't do away with all their phoneboxes...
on
MP3s From The Phone Box
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a big problem for BT. They are required to maintain the phone box network (and rightly so, about 15% of 999 calls - 911 calls for our American friends - are made using those), but now everyone has a mobile phone there's no way to make money on all but a few boxes at Railway stations etc. They've managed to get the Govt. to allow them to close a lot of phone boxes, but lots remain. It costs £2500 a year to maintain a rural phone box...
Hence the proliferation of ingeniuos ways to make more money. e-mail in phone boxes; putting city mobile phone masts on top of them; now this.
Certainly there is no day to day operational control. But Hutton showed that a determined government can get rid of the Director General, and that means there is a degree of control.
Also, there are regular reviews of the license fee - one is due soon - at which the Govt can negotiate changes it wants.
For my money, their streaming services are one of the current things the BBC does superbly - along with their Radio and some of their new comissioning. If they conclude new technology is need to improve these services, I'm in favour of it.
I'm against their attempts to ape comercial TV - Eastenders sucks at the moment, why keep pushing it? Who needs another reality show, or game show?
But another Office, or Little Britain - unconventional TV comedy that commerical TV would consider too much of a risk - that's what I like.
I consider it to be no coincidence that all the British programs that really engage me at the moment come out of Channel 4 and the BBC - the state-owned TV stations. Except maybe Corrie, but it's formula pre-dates everything, so it's an exception.
Well, no harm in there not being HL2 multiplayer, given how much base HL1 multiplayer sucked - to the extent that even Valve put their name to mods (TFC, Ricochet - both excellent but underplayed games in my opinion). HL2 is for single player, and steam is just a convenient way to get it.
As for CS:Source, there's a history of people wanting to migrate popular mods to new, improved engines, and not doing it because it was such enormous work. I have a theory that migrating a HL mod to Source is going to be easy - CS:Source was ready before HL2 was - and so in this way the huge installed base of HL mods will shortly be ported. Any HL mod developers got a look at the Source SDK? Can you confirm this?
Truth be told, most of the multiplayer FPSs I really enjoy are on the HL engine. Which is pretty much the Q2 engine underneath.
Upgrading them to a shiny new engine to use all the features on those expensive graphics cards we bought in order to look at pitch black rooms in Doom III sounds like a good revenue stream to me.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you haven't quite got it straight.
The guns don't kill people argument works like this:
We can divide laws into two sorts. Let's call them first hand laws and second hand laws.
First hand laws say e.g. "thou shalt not kill". They are laws that express prohibitions on doing things that we generally agree are bad.
These are fair enough. You run into some difficulties when the population is more divided on whether something is bad or not (e.g. "Thou shalt not inject heroin") but in general these are good and reasonable laws.
Then you have enforcement laws. These exist in order to help the judical system enforce the moral laws. For example, guns are an enabling technology for murder, so in theory banning guns should reduce the murder rate.
However, two flaws with that.
Flaw one is that if you are prepared to ignore the first hand law and murder people, then the second hand law holds little fear for you. So we see that in countries like the UK, where guns are mostly illegal, lots of criminals have guns.
Flaw two is that sometimes these technologies have significant non-infringing usages. One might collect guns out of an interest in them, or use them for hunting, or to protect your fmaily from criminals, or use them to overthrow your government in the event that it becomes totalitarain. These are all valid uses that are blocked by the second hand law.
So the argument is valid both for Guns and Kazaa. It is unfair to ban something in a second-hand law while there are significant non-infringing uses, and the legislature should be very wary of such bans.
That God exists is not a requirement for one to play God, in the same way that the non-existance of Superman did not prevent Christopher Reeve from playing him.
You're not trying to detonate it, you're trying to blow it up, which is not the same thing.
Yes, it takes me about a minute to eject the magazine from my expensive tape autochanger, whereas my $20 removeable disk caddy pops out in about 10 seconds. ;-)
Can you get hold of Doom 1 now? Course you can, it's in your local game store for $5.
Ditto HL2 in 6 years. Anything this good is going to be around on budget/discout labels for a good while.
Heck, I have 2 copies of HL one because I bought a second one in a bundle with OpFor and BlueShift for a few quid. It's just sitting in my drawer. (No, you can't have the CD key.)
While I'm surprised that it doesn't look like a shoe, I think it's too early to make assumptions it is going to be crap.
But the discussion brings me back to something I've been thinking about for a while.
Why does Hollywood pay what is no doubt a huge ammount of money for rights to a book, and then make somethign completely different.
Take I, Robot, for example. I can't imagine the rights were cheap. But they made a film that takes from that work the name of one character and pretty much nothing else; in fact they made a film that is practically an anti-asimov film. Why?
I mean, surely you can divide the world into two classes of people. Asimov fans won't go to see it just because of the name because 5 seconds of the trailer is enough for you to realise it has no relationship to Asimovs ideas and work. And people who aren't azimov fans are people who want to see Will Smith kicking robot butt around, and so they'll go whatever you call the love interest. So why? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
And don't get me started on making a John Constantine movie and casting Neo in it. (Although I guess WB do get the license on the cheap in that instance)
It was all done with cups of tea, ZooLook, all done with tea. And, to paraphrase another great comic writer, "Just think readers, a pound of tea can be bought for just a few shillings".
You're new around here, aren't you? Because, and I am saying this with a lot of love, Slashdot readers are not exactly the best example of the public's clothes buying habits.
I disagree, it's more complex than that. In the early days, PalmOS was market leader because their OS was designed to run well on the current hardware. The early PPCs ran like treacle.
Now, in fact, they could probaly have kept the hardware the same and still did alright - a Palm M500 is not all that different from a V.
But then hardware finally advance to the stage where it could run PPC. And then Palm had to play "match the check boxes". Look at my Tungsten - C; it's spec is clearly excessive, clearly an attempt to match PPC specs.
Mind you, the sucess of the T-E and Zire shows Palm have not entirely forgotten that they make basic PDAs very well.
But the market is changin a lot too - look at all the big PPC manufacturers pulling out of the market. It looks like PDA/phone convergence is where it is heading too, which I don't like because i prefer seperate devices. I like my phone to be cheap and tiny, my PDA to be powerful and to have a big screen, and my music player to be an ipod. Maybe that's the reason Palm have slipped to #2 - if they are putting all tehir effort into thier Treo smartphone line in anticipation of the PDA market dying...
I reckon anyone who fills a position based on choosing the candidate with the lowest slashdot id gets exactly what they deserve.
Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
Woah there, I'm an systems admin and I don't want to be a programmer, but that doesn't mean I'd rather point and click than learn a programming language.
The reason I don't want to write code is that a coder spends most of the day sitting in front of a computer writing code. I spend my day interacting with human beings so I can make their computers work for them better.
And I do get my hands dirty writing code sometimes, all part of the rich variety of the sa's job. (And I do get my hands dirty, because my Perl scripts are skanky)
Didn't he arrive on the carrier in a Navy Jet though? In which case, surely a flight suit is an appropriate thing to wear, particularly since he is an ex-fighter pilot himself, and so would feel comfortable in one.
Careless, they should have patented selling over a digital network to creatures that breathe, got that lucrative domestic market too.
Why don't the patent office develop a mechanism where people can point out "the monkeys stuffed up on this one guys, you might need a dolphin to review this one"
Didn't you have backups? Oh, wait, you're a Computer Scientist. Never mind!
I mean, under WinXP I just mount my pod as a disk, make sure that (as always) I have show hidden files enabled, and copy the files off.
They are used a lot more than you'd think, because if you still have Win9x boxes on your network (and lots do - I discontinued my last Win95 box last month) then you have to use LM hashes.
We have a contract with the state; we give it power over us so it can improve our quality of life. But states are made of humans, and humans are failable, and corruptable. So we put curbs and controls in place to the state's power.
;-)
;-)
Now, the current Govt. in the UK seems to have made the thought process:
"unwritten constituion=we can do anything we want" and has gone beserk with vague and ill thought out constitutional change.
Look at Hunting. They intend to use the Parliament act to force it through the Lords. Think about that for a moment. The Lords is a mechanism to prevent Parliament enacting bad law. The Parliament act is a way to overrule that check in an emergency - for example if the Lords is blocking a Finance act and so preventing the Govt doing anything. The hunting bill isn't an emergency. Regardless of it's merits either way, it's not an emergency. What it is, is politically necessary for Tony Blair to keep control of activists in his party. Not the same thing.
Anyway, dragging myself closer to the topic:
Is it pretty unlikely to be added to the list of terrorists? Ask Ted Kennedy about that one.
Is it going to be compulsory? You yourself insist that it should be needed to get health care or to buy a beer in a pub or to get a job. That sounds pretty compulsory to me.
The expense will be huge. I cannot recall a major computer system implementation in the UK that has not been a complete disaster. Air traffic control? Disaster. Magistrate Court? Disaster. Passport Office? Disaster. Criminal background checks on School employees? Disaster. and on and on.
In fact, my objections to this scheme are almost entirely theoretical because I don't reckon they have the ability to implment it.
Here's another point: what about the guy who just got jailed for providing information from the DVLA databases to terrorists? Or the temp, who used to work for a newspaper, that got employed by the Cabinet Office, and is being investigated for leaking to the press? You trust people with that kind of hiring record?
We must envisage worst case scenarios. Hitler was democratically elected. to return to my first point: every Govt. is corrupt in one way or another, because it is full of people.
Actually, I rather bet it doesn't, at least not fully.
I expect that, in the same way that you can't just mount the ipod as a disk and move music to it, but have to use software that updates the ipod's database, the iPron probably also can only get photos loaded into it using itunes. So the Belkin can only use the iPron to store, not display.
But seriously guys, even if you consider the photo system to be crap, it's a 60Gb iPod with a color screen!!! 60Gb!!!
It's a big problem for BT. They are required to maintain the phone box network (and rightly so, about 15% of 999 calls - 911 calls for our American friends - are made using those), but now everyone has a mobile phone there's no way to make money on all but a few boxes at Railway stations etc. They've managed to get the Govt. to allow them to close a lot of phone boxes, but lots remain. It costs £2500 a year to maintain a rural phone box...
Hence the proliferation of ingeniuos ways to make more money. e-mail in phone boxes; putting city mobile phone masts on top of them; now this.
Not to whore for karma, but it is presimably called Shinux because the company that make the Medallion is called Shinco, and it's their own distro.
Interesting that they made their own distro rather than just installing an existing one, they must have a lot of Linux geeks.
I guess they'll sell a lot to Linux evangleists. "What's Linux" "Let me plug my jewelery into your PC and show you!"
Except anyone mad enough for that probably already has a keychain drive.
Well, there are two possible reasons why he hasn't bought an ibook.
a) He's so incredibly stupid that he's never heard of laptops.
b) He needs a portable desktop because a laptop doesn't meet his requirements.
Oh, wait, pardon my sarcasm, re-reading your post I realise you haven't read his post, and so are answering a different question. Sorry.
Certainly there is no day to day operational control. But Hutton showed that a determined government can get rid of the Director General, and that means there is a degree of control.
Also, there are regular reviews of the license fee - one is due soon - at which the Govt can negotiate changes it wants.
For my money, their streaming services are one of the current things the BBC does superbly - along with their Radio and some of their new comissioning. If they conclude new technology is need to improve these services, I'm in favour of it.
I'm against their attempts to ape comercial TV - Eastenders sucks at the moment, why keep pushing it? Who needs another reality show, or game show?
But another Office, or Little Britain - unconventional TV comedy that commerical TV would consider too much of a risk - that's what I like.
I consider it to be no coincidence that all the British programs that really engage me at the moment come out of Channel 4 and the BBC - the state-owned TV stations. Except maybe Corrie, but it's formula pre-dates everything, so it's an exception.
Well, no harm in there not being HL2 multiplayer, given how much base HL1 multiplayer sucked - to the extent that even Valve put their name to mods (TFC, Ricochet - both excellent but underplayed games in my opinion). HL2 is for single player, and steam is just a convenient way to get it.
As for CS:Source, there's a history of people wanting to migrate popular mods to new, improved engines, and not doing it because it was such enormous work. I have a theory that migrating a HL mod to Source is going to be easy - CS:Source was ready before HL2 was - and so in this way the huge installed base of HL mods will shortly be ported. Any HL mod developers got a look at the Source SDK? Can you confirm this?
Truth be told, most of the multiplayer FPSs I really enjoy are on the HL engine. Which is pretty much the Q2 engine underneath.
Upgrading them to a shiny new engine to use all the features on those expensive graphics cards we bought in order to look at pitch black rooms in Doom III sounds like a good revenue stream to me.
It's not quite going to repalce my ipod though, is it?
Be fair, Alioth, your parents didn't get really upset with you until you decided to find out how your little brother worked....