Bull-fucking-shit. Nowhere does it say: "license GTA4 today!" or "Rent Crysis now!". No, it says "Buy". Buying implies ownership. Either every single game store, publisher and developer has engaged in deceptive and fraudulent advertising, or we own the software we are *BUYING*.
I am not saying that this is not what publishers want, but I am saying that this is at the very least deceptive, if not illegal.
I guess I don't consider that article news in the sense of "XYZ happened". If that'd be the case, the article would indeed be old and stale. However, that's not the case - I consider it instead to be something like a whitepaper or case study: something that stays relevant for long after it was published because of the insight that it offers.
Not to mention that what is old hat to you could be news to someone else. Or would you argue that because someone wrote about everyday physics once, no one else needs to point new people to it?
And yet, it still seems relevant. What does that tell us about the current state of gaming? Put differently, should we discount the importance of Newton's Principia Mathematica because it is 400 years old?
No worries. Subtle positions are hard to properly get across in a few sentences, and I'm ready to take my lumps on that. I'm more impressed by someone changing his mind on Slashdot.:)
More like a cut and paste of a PR release. All I saw was short blurbs about "This rocks, you ought to buy it", along with some tech buzzwords thrown in. Not a single word breathed about ergonomics, how the programmable interface actually works, the details of the customizations and how effective they actually are. Really, the summary IS the article.
Here's an interesting twist: free speech is not an inalienable right of all human beings. Just like all interaction between people, it is a social convention. Some of us just like to think that it is by far the most critical component of living together in relative harmony. Others happen to disagree - and that's what you're seeing in China.
Personally, I'm solidly in the camp of free speech. However, to treat is as some sort of god-given right (with all associated issues) makes it virtually impossible to continue the discussion. It simplify results in all sides stiffening in their positions, as the discussion has moved from a pragmatic aspect to a dogmatic aspect. This is rarely the way international disputes get resolved.
We don't treat China as a monolithic block. I (and many others) treat the Chinese government as such.
Myanmar is China's problem, the same as North Korea is China's problem: the support by the CCP of the North Korean and Myanmar dictatorships has prolonged their life far beyond their own means.
It's impressive. You've hit all the talking points that regularly come up in official CCP PR pieces and on kook websites like www.anti-cnn.com. You have some balls to talk about propaganda, considering you've swallowed chinese government propaganda hook, line and sinker. The best part of your initial comment was that this prevents China from becoming democratic.... I've yet to see such a laugher. Unless you're referring to Democracy in the current Russian style, in which case I really can't help you.
Just like changing your name, you can have a process that lets you update your PGP key. With biometric information, that's not controllable.
The point is that if someone gets a hold of your personally identifying information now, you're boned as well. Why not make the process by which that information is obtained as hard as possible?
There are plenty of services that don't need personally identifying information, but there are some that do. Encrypt information to be sent with your private PGP key, and the other entity looks up your public PGP key. If the information in clear text matches key items in the encrypted portion, you are who you say you are, and the rest of the encrypted message can be used as necessary.
I'm really curious about this fear of personal id - it already exists, except in a really bad implementation. Why not improve it?
Two things: positive ID is already required in a number of instances. The current system is just so wide open for abuse that it's unconscionable. Furthermore, the Wild West system was completely ripe for abuse - primarily because there was no real way of knowing whether what anyone said about themselves was true.
Lastly, I'd also challenge your belief that any positive ID will be used to control (in the Orwellian sense) the population. Jews snuck out because people didn't know their race when the presented false papers. This is easily remedied by not including race in the ID information.
Those are bad ideas, because they can't be changed. That's why I didn't use them. Do you have an idea on how to solve the problem of positive ID? How to prove you are you, when lots of people are trying to impersonate you? Or do you just like to cling onto an outdated idea of privacy that didn't even work well in the Wild West?
I think it goes beyond that. In the case of court filings, documents used in the case become public evidence, and as such, are required to be available publicly. At least, that's my understanding.... not sure how that applies to information that would normally be covered under HIPAA or similar privacy laws.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the information flood. As much as people hate the idea here, I think that there is a need for a federal ID piece that can be used to positively identify someone, without exclusively relying on information that's publicly available. Yes, there will still be attack vectors available, but there'd be far less. Maybe everybody gets their own private PGP key at birth?
Security by stupidity, indeed. Because this doesn't even qualify as security through obscurity. What the hell is wrong with people to use PUBLICLY known information to do access control? It's not the worst security idea, it is absolutely no security at all. Your phone number has to be known to people, otherwise it's useless. So why use it as access control? Yes, it allows for quick bootstrapping, but that's about it.
I expect that ATT will lobby in short order for a law that will make it illegal to spoof user agent strings. Not only that, but they will then charge the spoofers and the person with the original phone number with the same crime.
A) Who is they? I was talking about lawmakers - do you think they decide who gets investigated? I thought that was the domain of law enforcement. B) What's the difference between being exempt from a law and being exempt from the enforcement? Sounds like it's very much the same.
Not sure what you got your panties all up in a bunch about.... sounds to me like what you're describing is indeed a situation where a segment of the population is above the law - and as I said, that to me is far more dangerous than a situation where everyone is a criminal. That's because that means that there is effectively no rule of law, just arbitrary application of power by those who are in power.
Let me ask you something - if everyone is guilty of something, how do government officials stay in the office? Either they can be found just as guilty of something, and then everyone's on the same footing - and Ayn Rand falls flat on her face. Or they are exempt from laws that affect the regular plebeians, and then the issue is with a complete lack of government control and rule of law - and Ayn Rand falls flat on her face. Either the problem she mentions doesn't exist, or there's a far more significant problem at hand.
And if we're looking not at an abstract concept, but at the reality of government, that idea falls even more apart. Yes, there is a reality that there are currently far more laws than necessary on the books. To attribute that to farsightedness and a long-term power grab is to attribute qualities to politicians that I have barely ever seen.
I find this quote to be one of her more ridiculous assertions. It baffles me why it keeps being trotted out.
If you punish all lawmakers who even vote for a law, they'll all be too damn scared to vote on anything.
Good. That's the idea.
Most of the other points can be addressed by a more careful proposal. Your strongest point, that of parties stacking the benches even more, can be addressed by reducing the input that political entities have on federal judges.
If you haven't figured it out, I've seriously soured on professional politician's in general. Yes, there's the fundamental problem that the voting public is largely ignorant, barely literate and completely beholden to propaganda tactics that have been honed for the last 2000 years or so. But the system is currently set up that politicians have absolutely zero responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch. The absolute worst that can happen to a lawmaker (assuming for a second they don't actually go out and break a law in public without having enough money for a good lawyer) is that they don't get reelected. Doesn't matter if they send 4000 people to their death, create laws that end the productive lives of people or generally completely fuck a region in order to make political headway.
In every other job - even the CEO job these days - you're in trouble if you neglect your fiduciary duty. I'd like to see politicians get the same treatment. Do you have a suggestion on how to accomplish this?
You know what I want to see? An amendment that states that every time someone sponsors or votes for a law that is found to be unconstitutional, they get fined their entire yearly salary, and are barred from ever holding the position of lawmaker.
I'm tired of politicians creating sham laws without any repercussion. Since they can't get voted out (judging by the amount of time that some people are in office), they need to be tossed out.
Alien life is so far outside the bounds of what we know or can conceive of that we are seeing it, but not recognizing it. Again, possible, but pointless to consider.
Actually, this is critical to consider. The harder we look, the more we expand our ability to recognize life. The less we look, the less we will be to recognize alien life.
Other people touched on other issues, but I'll just point you at various stories by Stanislaw Lem: Fiasco and various stories from The Cyberiad. From the dangers of intervention to civilizations run by helper bots to inabilities to recognize life, Lem covered it all.
The main issue really is (and again, others mentioned it already, but it's important enough to repeat): we will only survive for as long as the ability to destroy the entire home area is not available to small groups of people. We're slowly getting there, and quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me. By the time that a megaton nuke and intercontinental delivery mechanism can be constructed in someone's basement from stuff that can be ordered over the internet, I want to be able to get off the planet. If someone has the ability to make the sun go supernova, I want to be able to head to the next planetary system. Etc.
I think there's a probability gap, and we're staring at it.
This has been my experience as well, both personally and second-hand. Those who wanted to move out/up and showed an ability to do so, were moved out/up. Those who didn't got moved out to the unemployment line.
It takes a good manager to recognize this, but then again, all promotions require that.
I'm advocating the realization that there are a lot of things people do in their personal life that have very little influence over what they do in their public life.
This is a very good point. Part of the reason that people want to protect the innocence of children, the honor of the dead soldier, the sanctity of marriage or the authority of police is because they believe that that is the natural state of children, soldiers, husbands and wives, police, etc. They completely miss the fact that children can be just as cruel as adults, soldiers can be dishonorable, and so on... Preserving these myths by destroying evidence to the contrary makes it that much harder to deal with the actual problems by marginalizing them. If only one soldier is into furry porn, it can be dismissed as an aberration. If 30% of all soldiers are into furry porn... well, I don't really know what that would be, but I'd want to have a more serious approach than "they're just deviants who need to be shunned".
Whitewashing history is always done with a specific goal in mind. To quote Orwell: "He who controls the past, controls the future." I believe Stalin was a proponent of this as well.
For instance, "think of the children" or the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror" criminalize all sorts of rational behavior. The payoff to the government is dubious and the problems that are created for the population are huge. Tell me, are these actions the result of a government trying to make things go smoothly or are they easier to rationalize if you take a different tack with respect to the purpose of governemnt?
Or, as a third alternative, they are the result of overall incompetence; unintended (and uncared-for) consequences of hastily created laws whose primary purpose is to create the impression of action.
Finally, my definition of the purpose of a government was definitely based on political theory, not political reality - just like Ayn Rand's definition was. I understand that pretty much all existing governments do not fit that definition anymore, but that has more to do with the reality of social interactions than with abstract concepts of governments. My beef with her and her supporters is that her theories (indeed as embodied by that comment) get trotted out as actual realities. I find that that is a very shallow and fantastic view of the world.
That's what I thought. You'd like to be arbiter of good speech. Well, I think your speech sucks and ought to be prohibited, on account of being brain-damaging.
What? That's not right? I see. You get to judge, but others cannot - or only for as long as they agree with you. You don't understand why free speech is so damn important to Freedom. Get the fuck out of my country.
PS: Buttfucking is an action, not speech. I have no idea how that got into the discussion.
Err... sacrificing your happiness generally leads to sacrificing your family's happiness. The resentment that comes from that can be mind-crushing.
The real question is: how many of your needs (and your family's) are wants, and how many are actual needs? People have raised well-adjusted kids on what would now be considered abject poverty. It can be done again.
Slashdot Mirror
Bull-fucking-shit. Nowhere does it say: "license GTA4 today!" or "Rent Crysis now!". No, it says "Buy". Buying implies ownership. Either every single game store, publisher and developer has engaged in deceptive and fraudulent advertising, or we own the software we are *BUYING*.
I am not saying that this is not what publishers want, but I am saying that this is at the very least deceptive, if not illegal.
I guess I don't consider that article news in the sense of "XYZ happened". If that'd be the case, the article would indeed be old and stale. However, that's not the case - I consider it instead to be something like a whitepaper or case study: something that stays relevant for long after it was published because of the insight that it offers.
Not to mention that what is old hat to you could be news to someone else. Or would you argue that because someone wrote about everyday physics once, no one else needs to point new people to it?
And yet, it still seems relevant. What does that tell us about the current state of gaming? Put differently, should we discount the importance of Newton's Principia Mathematica because it is 400 years old?
No worries. Subtle positions are hard to properly get across in a few sentences, and I'm ready to take my lumps on that. I'm more impressed by someone changing his mind on Slashdot. :)
More like a cut and paste of a PR release. All I saw was short blurbs about "This rocks, you ought to buy it", along with some tech buzzwords thrown in. Not a single word breathed about ergonomics, how the programmable interface actually works, the details of the customizations and how effective they actually are. Really, the summary IS the article.
This is a slashvertisement if I've ever seen one.
But it will hit China in the place that it can be hurt right now: it's international status of holding the bestest Olympic Games evar.
Any other response will merely be the equivalent of an angry letter to the editor.
Here's an interesting twist: free speech is not an inalienable right of all human beings. Just like all interaction between people, it is a social convention. Some of us just like to think that it is by far the most critical component of living together in relative harmony. Others happen to disagree - and that's what you're seeing in China.
Personally, I'm solidly in the camp of free speech. However, to treat is as some sort of god-given right (with all associated issues) makes it virtually impossible to continue the discussion. It simplify results in all sides stiffening in their positions, as the discussion has moved from a pragmatic aspect to a dogmatic aspect. This is rarely the way international disputes get resolved.
Access by one person does not equal open access.
We don't treat China as a monolithic block. I (and many others) treat the Chinese government as such.
Myanmar is China's problem, the same as North Korea is China's problem: the support by the CCP of the North Korean and Myanmar dictatorships has prolonged their life far beyond their own means.
It's impressive. You've hit all the talking points that regularly come up in official CCP PR pieces and on kook websites like www.anti-cnn.com. You have some balls to talk about propaganda, considering you've swallowed chinese government propaganda hook, line and sinker. The best part of your initial comment was that this prevents China from becoming democratic.... I've yet to see such a laugher. Unless you're referring to Democracy in the current Russian style, in which case I really can't help you.
Just like changing your name, you can have a process that lets you update your PGP key. With biometric information, that's not controllable.
The point is that if someone gets a hold of your personally identifying information now, you're boned as well. Why not make the process by which that information is obtained as hard as possible?
There are plenty of services that don't need personally identifying information, but there are some that do. Encrypt information to be sent with your private PGP key, and the other entity looks up your public PGP key. If the information in clear text matches key items in the encrypted portion, you are who you say you are, and the rest of the encrypted message can be used as necessary.
I'm really curious about this fear of personal id - it already exists, except in a really bad implementation. Why not improve it?
Two things: positive ID is already required in a number of instances. The current system is just so wide open for abuse that it's unconscionable. Furthermore, the Wild West system was completely ripe for abuse - primarily because there was no real way of knowing whether what anyone said about themselves was true.
Lastly, I'd also challenge your belief that any positive ID will be used to control (in the Orwellian sense) the population. Jews snuck out because people didn't know their race when the presented false papers. This is easily remedied by not including race in the ID information.
Those are bad ideas, because they can't be changed. That's why I didn't use them. Do you have an idea on how to solve the problem of positive ID? How to prove you are you, when lots of people are trying to impersonate you? Or do you just like to cling onto an outdated idea of privacy that didn't even work well in the Wild West?
I think it goes beyond that. In the case of court filings, documents used in the case become public evidence, and as such, are required to be available publicly. At least, that's my understanding.... not sure how that applies to information that would normally be covered under HIPAA or similar privacy laws.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the information flood. As much as people hate the idea here, I think that there is a need for a federal ID piece that can be used to positively identify someone, without exclusively relying on information that's publicly available. Yes, there will still be attack vectors available, but there'd be far less. Maybe everybody gets their own private PGP key at birth?
Security by stupidity, indeed. Because this doesn't even qualify as security through obscurity. What the hell is wrong with people to use PUBLICLY known information to do access control? It's not the worst security idea, it is absolutely no security at all. Your phone number has to be known to people, otherwise it's useless. So why use it as access control? Yes, it allows for quick bootstrapping, but that's about it.
I expect that ATT will lobby in short order for a law that will make it illegal to spoof user agent strings. Not only that, but they will then charge the spoofers and the person with the original phone number with the same crime.
That's just insane. I hadn't heard about that. Note to self: avoid Australia as much as possible.
A) Who is they? I was talking about lawmakers - do you think they decide who gets investigated? I thought that was the domain of law enforcement.
B) What's the difference between being exempt from a law and being exempt from the enforcement? Sounds like it's very much the same.
Not sure what you got your panties all up in a bunch about.... sounds to me like what you're describing is indeed a situation where a segment of the population is above the law - and as I said, that to me is far more dangerous than a situation where everyone is a criminal. That's because that means that there is effectively no rule of law, just arbitrary application of power by those who are in power.
Let me ask you something - if everyone is guilty of something, how do government officials stay in the office? Either they can be found just as guilty of something, and then everyone's on the same footing - and Ayn Rand falls flat on her face. Or they are exempt from laws that affect the regular plebeians, and then the issue is with a complete lack of government control and rule of law - and Ayn Rand falls flat on her face. Either the problem she mentions doesn't exist, or there's a far more significant problem at hand.
And if we're looking not at an abstract concept, but at the reality of government, that idea falls even more apart. Yes, there is a reality that there are currently far more laws than necessary on the books. To attribute that to farsightedness and a long-term power grab is to attribute qualities to politicians that I have barely ever seen.
I find this quote to be one of her more ridiculous assertions. It baffles me why it keeps being trotted out.
Good. That's the idea.
Most of the other points can be addressed by a more careful proposal. Your strongest point, that of parties stacking the benches even more, can be addressed by reducing the input that political entities have on federal judges.
If you haven't figured it out, I've seriously soured on professional politician's in general. Yes, there's the fundamental problem that the voting public is largely ignorant, barely literate and completely beholden to propaganda tactics that have been honed for the last 2000 years or so. But the system is currently set up that politicians have absolutely zero responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch. The absolute worst that can happen to a lawmaker (assuming for a second they don't actually go out and break a law in public without having enough money for a good lawyer) is that they don't get reelected. Doesn't matter if they send 4000 people to their death, create laws that end the productive lives of people or generally completely fuck a region in order to make political headway.
In every other job - even the CEO job these days - you're in trouble if you neglect your fiduciary duty. I'd like to see politicians get the same treatment. Do you have a suggestion on how to accomplish this?
Doesn't stop idiot lawmakers from trying.
You know what I want to see? An amendment that states that every time someone sponsors or votes for a law that is found to be unconstitutional, they get fined their entire yearly salary, and are barred from ever holding the position of lawmaker.
I'm tired of politicians creating sham laws without any repercussion. Since they can't get voted out (judging by the amount of time that some people are in office), they need to be tossed out.
Actually, this is critical to consider. The harder we look, the more we expand our ability to recognize life. The less we look, the less we will be to recognize alien life.
Other people touched on other issues, but I'll just point you at various stories by Stanislaw Lem: Fiasco and various stories from The Cyberiad. From the dangers of intervention to civilizations run by helper bots to inabilities to recognize life, Lem covered it all.
The main issue really is (and again, others mentioned it already, but it's important enough to repeat): we will only survive for as long as the ability to destroy the entire home area is not available to small groups of people. We're slowly getting there, and quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me. By the time that a megaton nuke and intercontinental delivery mechanism can be constructed in someone's basement from stuff that can be ordered over the internet, I want to be able to get off the planet. If someone has the ability to make the sun go supernova, I want to be able to head to the next planetary system. Etc.
I think there's a probability gap, and we're staring at it.
This has been my experience as well, both personally and second-hand. Those who wanted to move out/up and showed an ability to do so, were moved out/up. Those who didn't got moved out to the unemployment line.
It takes a good manager to recognize this, but then again, all promotions require that.
This is a very good point. Part of the reason that people want to protect the innocence of children, the honor of the dead soldier, the sanctity of marriage or the authority of police is because they believe that that is the natural state of children, soldiers, husbands and wives, police, etc. They completely miss the fact that children can be just as cruel as adults, soldiers can be dishonorable, and so on... Preserving these myths by destroying evidence to the contrary makes it that much harder to deal with the actual problems by marginalizing them. If only one soldier is into furry porn, it can be dismissed as an aberration. If 30% of all soldiers are into furry porn... well, I don't really know what that would be, but I'd want to have a more serious approach than "they're just deviants who need to be shunned".
Whitewashing history is always done with a specific goal in mind. To quote Orwell: "He who controls the past, controls the future." I believe Stalin was a proponent of this as well.
Or, as a third alternative, they are the result of overall incompetence; unintended (and uncared-for) consequences of hastily created laws whose primary purpose is to create the impression of action.
Finally, my definition of the purpose of a government was definitely based on political theory, not political reality - just like Ayn Rand's definition was. I understand that pretty much all existing governments do not fit that definition anymore, but that has more to do with the reality of social interactions than with abstract concepts of governments. My beef with her and her supporters is that her theories (indeed as embodied by that comment) get trotted out as actual realities. I find that that is a very shallow and fantastic view of the world.
And this is why I normally ignore ACs. I guess there's something to be (re-)learned from this.
Err... sacrificing your happiness generally leads to sacrificing your family's happiness. The resentment that comes from that can be mind-crushing.
The real question is: how many of your needs (and your family's) are wants, and how many are actual needs? People have raised well-adjusted kids on what would now be considered abject poverty. It can be done again.