Damn, then I must be one bad muther, because when I know I have no way of getting caught, I break the laws I don't agree with. What I object to about that language is the fact that everyone below age 18 (and often above it too) is now characterized as an empty vessel, an automaton possessing neither will nor thought which immitates virtually everything it sees and hears. People of that school of thought seem to keep pushing back the blame. It was the guy with the gun in his hand that killed, not the gun, the bullet, his parents, Uncle Carl, Universal Studios, or Eminem. If I, being 17, was half as much an animal as those abusive wretches would like everyone to believe, I probably would have turned berserk on the 15 year old that accidently punched me in the jaw during a karate promotion yesterday. I did not. No matter how much of a bad week I was having after going through a whole bunch of unrequited love BS, how much it hurt, how many times I've played Half Life's Counterstrike, or the plethora of times I've seen The Matrix, ultimately, it was my decision to make.
No one can be truly compelled to do anything. They decision is ultimately theirs to make.
If you're going to cry out for the children, please, please do not include me. I don't need your help, or your pity. For example, I can say with near-certainty I am more politically aware & opinionated and more therefore qualified to vote than the vast majority of adults. And yes, I go outside the bounds of the law sometimes, but so do a hell of a lot of people, and it is by my will and my will alone that I'm doing this.
If CNN ignored them? If CNN ignored them, they'd probably get even louder and deadlier than ever. If I had a cause I was willing to die for, I sure as hell wouldn't simply give up when nobody took any notice.
By the way, I've never even heard of "apoxiutial," and apparently, neither has the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster's, or Princeton Wordnet. Tip: Using big words to make yourself sound important only works if they're actually words.
The internet will never in the foreseeable future be shut down by anyone intentionally. It's simply too profitable. Why, to have a corporation hold the internet hostage, demanding that all users cease and desist their unlawful activities? It'd take weeks for people to comply. Meanwhile, business for what is arguably the driving force behind the American economy would simply stop dead. Yeah, that'd make the MPAA and RIAA really popular, when 90% of the population realizes they're POOR because their mutual funds just tanked, the company they're working for is considering laying them off. Correspondingly, when we don't have enough money to buy the overpriced Hello Kitty Tomigachis, movies trying to capture the roaring success and depth of Coyote Ugly, and songs that I've mouthed off at the top of my lungs to people singing them, leaving them stunned and silent, these companies sell to us they'll be deep in it too!
Is that some kind of sick joke? War on Drugs my ass. If they got the government to commit half as much resources to policing the internet as they do to fight that so-called war, they'd still be causing more of a problem than they fix.
What no one seems to understand about the War on Drugs is that it's not being won... at all. I can talk to some acquaintances of mine and get virtually any kind of drug I so desire, the only possible exception being crack, and I'm damn sure I'm not alone, because this is coming from the guy who'd rather go to a LAN party than Prom.
The music industry is growing, and still making bigger and bigger profits. Ergo, they aren't being hurt. One might say that their net growth is down 1% or so, but no rational person ever complains about that stuff - just look at the stock market - our economy's not growing at the same rate it was one, two years ago, so correspondingly, Sony can't expect to grow at the same rate either.
All of my TVs are Sharp. I had a Sony TV, but the colors bled like a muther. While this may not be the case with some behemoth 36" WEGA, not everyone wants to buy a TV that weighs more than they do.
I have a Sony Spressa USB burner (which I use for the purpose, now, of screwing SPS out of cash), whose bundled software stopped functioning when I upgraded to Win2K. Moreover, when I called them up, they basically told me I was screwed. Good products? Ha.
That's the ironic thing about a lot of electric vehicles - much of the time, the electricity powering those clean machines comes from fossil fuel anyway, not "green" methods like hydro, aero, and *scoff* solar.
Of course, we could use nuclear power more, but people are always queasy about that kinda stuff, the same way they are about genetically engineered fruit (but not quite as irrationally). We could, however, put all of what would become LN2 bottling plants out in a remote area, since once you get the stuff in a compressed container it's not too perishable.
By the same token, the public might feel jumpy about having liquid nitrogen powering their cars, no doubt because of Terminator 2 - but when it's needed, well, it's needed...
Sol is kind of a crappy name for a star - but there's always the Greek Helios, which is pretty damn cool in its on right.
I always thought the ancient Greeks were much better at science, had cooler names for things, and were much less debauchery-prone than the Romans, myself.:)
The rich have two basic goals in life.: 1) Maintain wealth and power. 2) Increase the aformentioned quantities. Chiefly, they can accomplish these goals by lowering production costs, raising sale prices, and encouraging economic growth. The first can be accomplished by moving operations overseas - THEY are the real losers in the whole business, and the IMF and World Bank don't help in that regard either. The second can be accomplished by pricing conspiracies (see Napster's case, sneaker prices, ect), and of course there's the fashion industry's self-perpetuation complex. Lastly, as any captain of industry from the Industrial Revolution can tell you, boom/bust cycles are great for making money. While Greenspan seems to be fairly wise in this respect (not letting the economy boom out of control, which usually leads to a massive correction), there's no guarantee that the next Federal Reserve Chairman will be of that mind.
Who cares? As long as they're doing it consensually, and their actions are not infringing upon the rights of others, I see no problem. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don't need anyone, let alone some old, self-absorbed politician, telling me what I can and cannot do. The fundamental flaw with government as it is now is that it tries to legislate my beliefs and values, and I resent that. Why should anyone stop me, as a mentally stable and concenting adult, from doing something I want to do, if it does not harm anyone else? Hypothetically speaking, who gives a shit if I smoke a joint? I'm only harming myself, and i'm doing it of my own free will. Last time I checked there was no law against hitting yourself on the head with a tire-iron, so why should any other purely self-destructive act be illegal? For that matter, who gives a shit if I sell joints? I'm not forcing people to smoke them, just like, contrary to popular opinion, the evil tobbacco industry has not tied me up, tortured me, and forced me to smoke, Clockwork Orange-style. And, finally, if somebody has their heart set on becoming a heroin junkie, if you're not going to tackle the root of the problem which is not the widespread availiability of drugs but more often than not a family difficulty, let them do it. I realize that the drug issue is somewhat offtopic, but it is a prime example of a private matter being legislated by an enept politician trying to get reelected.
The Libertarian philosophy states that if you are not harming a nonconsensual person with your actions, then there is no reason to outlaw them. Air pollution is harmful to everyone, consensual or not. Two concenting adults killing each other is harmful, but they want to kill each other, so let them be. Not only should you be able to showcase it, you should be able to profit from it; it's called boxing.
I haven't read that book of yours yet, but here are some of my own thoughts on the matter.
The founding fathers intended for there to be a kind of peaceful revolution between political parties, should one become oppressive or totalitarian; you can simply vote them out of office if their policies are harmful. However, this does not occur anymore. Representative democracy only works when a number of conditions are met: the population understands the issues, there is a difference of opinion among the prominent leaders, and when information can be distributed freely and easily. For this very reason, democracy is rather effective on a small scale, but it is decidedly ineffective in America.
Sure, I'd like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what's going on and what's going wrong in Washington, and the majority of Slashdot readers seem pretty opinionated, but your average American does not; in fact, most of us work so hard with our jobs, families, and other considerations that we don't have time to become aware of these things. A person usually takes at least a passing interest in local issues: mass transit, roads, zoning, the schools, public works, and the like. Who has the time to research the impact of the myriad laws and regulations governing our nation? I can barely fathom the broad issues. Thus, people generally choose a candidate based on myths about the major parties: if they're feeling a little bit guilty for all the poor, they vote democratic, and if they believe in smaller government, they vote republican.
Fundamentally, while the democrats and republicans seem to have striking differences on issues such as gun control, government size, abortion, they're really much more alike than different on larger issues, most of which are never even discussed. Both parties support globalism, which in turn means brutal serfdom for third-world countries, appeasing China's regime, police actions against sovereign nations which amount to terrorism (seriously, I find it hard to believe that the NATO countries would bomb Serbia out of the kindness of their hearts), environmental rape, and corporate domination. Both parties support the futile war on drugs, which has over its thirty-odd year reign brought nothing to the American people but urban strife, gang violence, absurd and misleading add campaigns, unconstitutional search and seizure, the imprisonment of people whose only crime is smoking a joint, and the imprisonment of people as drug dealers with no material evidence to substantiate the accusations. And of course, both parties support the expansion of the government; the republicans do not believe in smaller government relative to where it is now, they're actually stating that the government will only grow at a rate of 3% per year rather than the democrat's 5%.
There's not really a place on television where you can hear a truly contrary opinion (except, on rare occasions, C-Span); ABC/Disney, NBC/Microsoft, CNN/Time Warner are all controlled by a few people with similar political agendas. The same people who control the media control most web portals and automatically-assigned home pages, so your average AOLer with a 56K will probably never see anything he wouldn't see on Time Warner's networks, let alone Slashdot. Even then, there's simply no way to reach those without computers; major networks are too busy talking about the weather, the stock market, smiling celebrities, and faceless-suit politicians to report any real news.
Yes, we still have a lot of freedoms in America, thank God, but they're being abridged very, very quickly; in the past, we've had true conflict between parties: Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, Democrats and Lincoln's Whigs, and Progressivism against the establishment earlier in the century. But now, the baby boomers who were the so-called opposition in the 70's have become the establishment, and have embraced fully the ideas which threaten the liberty of every American citizen. A man from Georgia had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, after being accused by one of his employees of selling drugs. This employee was facing a lengthily jail term himself after being caught selling, and the only way he could reduce his sentence was by ratting out, by doing the witch hunt thing. As stated above, the man was convicted with no material evidence, only the testimony of a man who had every reason to lie. In defense of this man, a friend wrote to a Georgia senator, who politely refused to even lift a finger for this obviously innocent man; the senator's own son was later caught with copious amounts of marijuana on the way back from England, but only recieved a $500 fine. Is America no longer a land of the people, but a land of the bureaucrats, the wealthy, and the corporations? It sure as hell looks like it's headed that way, at least to me.
Many academy awards seem to have more to do with politics than the actual quality of the movie. Good acting seems to irrevocably entail some profound endictment of the percieved status quo and establishment. They're politically correct to the point of a fault, and it gets on my nerves.
The Holier Than Thou attitude is annoying, as well. They go out of their way to shun popular opinion - how the hell do we know what's good, what makes us laugh and cry, we're not uppity, overdressed, and overcultured slime can decide for us? The Matrix and Titanic (as much as I'd hate to admit the latter) are two recent examples - both were lauded for technical expertise, but the acting was outright ignored.
You'd be surprised how much someone can know about MP3's and how inept they can be in terms of hardware. A friend of mine actually discovered Napster before I did, but didn't know how to use the aux input jacks on his stereo.
Then again, it might be ideal for a car stereo, provided it was compact, simple to remove/connect, and had a lot of space.
Re:This Must Be More Complex Than It Sounds . . .
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Rock-Paper-Scissors
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· Score: 1
Most people will probably include some analysis code, and may "bend" probability if the opponent seems particularly redundent.
However, if you have a contestant which analyzes the opponent's strategy, you can also have one which deliberately tries to trick that software - feint a pattern, then switch to a counter-strategy based on what the opponent is likely to respond with.
For example, one could choose Rock, Paper, Scissors in that order twice, and then the opponent program would sense that it's more likely that you'd choose Rock on the next move - therefore, it would respond with Paper, and you would cut it to pieces with Scissors!
Yeah, I can't really see Bungie/Microsoft not releasing Halo for the PC platform; Billy has never been one to turn down cash, and there's no doubt that Halo will be a bestseller on the PC. As well, porting the game to either platform would be incredibly easy; there aren't many big differences between the PC and the X-Box (same CPU, probably stardard GPU, similar networking in all likelihood).
Besides, I don't think Billy would abandon the PC, not when he owns so many of our asses already.
Looking at the MP3 phenomenon from a pragmatic standpoint, nobody can say it's going to kill the record industry. It is very inconveniant to have all of your music on a computer unless you spend most of your time in a dorm room, and even with the plummeting prices on burners, everyone who's played mp3's on real speakers knows that the encoding pretty much kills the treble and the bass.
Even with that in mind, for reasons that are apparently beyond rational explanation, some people just have to have the CD. The major demographic i'm exposed to most now - screaming teenage girls - are particularly insistent. If they were the only consumers in the market, the music industry could probably still pull a profit - just look at MTV's TRL. They're as surely obsessive as the guy who washes his hands eighty times an hour. From what I can summize, those who are too cheap to buy a $20 music cd when a $1 CDR is almost as good, are few and far between.
And, much to the music industry's benefit, Napster operates as a try before you buy service. How do people decide to buy music? They hear it on the radio, or listen to a friend's copy, and can now download it, possibly turning them on to something which they may not previously have bought. The lineup on MTV and most radio stations is about as homogenus as algae plants (biology humor); it's exasperating at times, and I don't know what i'll do if they engineer another hit boy band.
This may be just my dilusional opinion, but the internet sure isn't what it used to be. Corporate influence, and the absurdity that that inevitably brings to us, is playing a big role in the Net's development. Remember the etoys.com fiasco this winter, the sickening patent claims, and especially the browser wars?
In the capitalist world, money is power - in the Maoist world, the government is power; so when you get right down to it, is there much of a difference? Sure, there are still places like slashdot where we can voice our opinions, but that "we" is a minority. Sure, there are always going to be free-thinkers, even in China, but they're terribly few and terribly vulnerable even with their ideas on the net. Before their ideas can affect change, they have to get the hits, which is a whole other matter entirely.
Likewise, in America, even with tens of millions on the net, how many are looking for an enriching, mind-expanding, liberating experience? Theirs can easily become corporate sterility, between links picked up from the TV (which all have the firm goal of selling you something), and big-name news sites that feed you the same watered-down garbage you get on the damn TV! Then, making it even harder to find something meaningful, you have the porn, and the sheer, gargantuan quantities of utter nonsense and crap.
I am, of course, exaggerating, but judging by the times it's headed that way. Somehow, after pondering all of that, content control in China doesn't seem as bad, though the inevitable use of the net to track down aspiring dissentents is somewhat disconcerting. There are still ways to avoid detection, and a good hacker will always find them, but the free-thinkers remain a minority. One begins to wonder if it would make a difference if there were no government restrictions at all in China.
At this rate, by the year 2012, the following terms will be copyrighted by major corporations:
Sex (Microsoft) God (Procter & Gamble) Love (MTV) Computer (Packard Bell) Internet (AOL)
Of course, my company decided to take a preemptive move; we've announced plans to copyright all letters of alphabet, the numbers 1 and 0, and using communication via verbal utterances. Anyone who henceforth writes, speaks, uses any sort of technology, adds, or thinks is subject to our prosecution.
Enough satyr, though; any person of reasonable intellect can see that what i've said above is completely absurd, just like the etoy.com issue and the leonardo issue. What we've got here is the blind leading the blind; crusty old bureacrats understand the internet as much as a meridian of longitude understands superstring theory, yet they can legislate for it.
While politicians doing stupid things is nothing new, it's just become easier and more effective. A republic only works when the people holding office are, on the whole, more intelligent and possess a great deal more moral fiber than the general public. While i'm not going to comment on the world's intellectual pros and cons for fear of being lynched by an unruly mob of angry 'individualists,' we can say for certain that the pigs in my legislature are so damned afraid of touching their new goose, eCommerce that they'd cast free speech and will to the wind so long as it gets them another term in office and another fat ol' paycheck.
So the economy's good. I'm the first to admit that I wouldn't care at all about free speech if there wasn't food on the plate and gas in the car, but we've got to strike some sort of a balance here!
THE GOLDEN RULE: The man with the gold makes the rules. Floods and attacks, as much as I'd hate to admit it, don't do a damn bit of good against a business; they're just going to use it as another reason to say that the internet should be some censored, dumbed-down, uninteresting and bland medium. We're going to have to vote with our dollars, and make sure that the...persons... at etoys.com don't get a red cent of our money. This incident marks one of the inherit shortcomings of a free market and capitalism: you can buy almost anything, including justice. I'm not trying to bash our system, since it's the best one so far, but it's still something we have to be concerned about. It's a given that politics and economics go hand in hand; look at the internet taxation bills. Their decisions are not by any means rooted in a desire for free speech (which some politicians outright despise), it's to keep the economy running smoothly along. This means, unfortunately, that arts & humanities get the proverbial shaft; the interests of culture are woefully undermined by the interests of business.
If things do get as diabolically boring as the root article says - with supercomputers, AI business moguls, and genetic cleansing - we'll probably cause utter social apocalypse, somehow.
No system so stagnant could ever continue to exist, by reason of the natural, chaotic nature of the universe. The problem with such a vision (or nightmare, as it were) and indeed, the Orwellian dictatorships feared by all, is that somewhere along the line, a link in the chain will snap, bringing the entire culture to its knees.
On that note, I'd like to believe that if we don't totally obliterate ourselves in the near future, that a simple, dark-age society would be all that's left standing, with their religion founded upon some old fart's half-crazed memories of a computer game mixed in with supreme being ideology.
Now that's irony; humanity would be serving a 'devine being' that is more literally of our own fabrication than many atheists argue modern religion to be.
Yeah, woolies can be dangerous with their hundreds of dagger-like teeth, ability to run faster than a buick, razor-sharp retractable claws and blinding snot rockets. Why not? They're no more dangerous than an elephant, and those aren't very hard to subdue from the air or a distance.
One has to wonder if there are significant frozen specimens of other animals - dire wolves and sabre-toothed tigers come to mind. The latter might be a mistake; those kitties actively hunted humans. And people complain about cuegers *shiver*.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, then I must be one bad muther, because when I know I have no way of getting caught, I break the laws I don't agree with. What I object to about that language is the fact that everyone below age 18 (and often above it too) is now characterized as an empty vessel, an automaton possessing neither will nor thought which immitates virtually everything it sees and hears. People of that school of thought seem to keep pushing back the blame. It was the guy with the gun in his hand that killed, not the gun, the bullet, his parents, Uncle Carl, Universal Studios, or Eminem. If I, being 17, was half as much an animal as those abusive wretches would like everyone to believe, I probably would have turned berserk on the 15 year old that accidently punched me in the jaw during a karate promotion yesterday. I did not. No matter how much of a bad week I was having after going through a whole bunch of unrequited love BS, how much it hurt, how many times I've played Half Life's Counterstrike, or the plethora of times I've seen The Matrix, ultimately, it was my decision to make.
No one can be truly compelled to do anything. They decision is ultimately theirs to make.
If you're going to cry out for the children, please, please do not include me. I don't need your help, or your pity. For example, I can say with near-certainty I am more politically aware & opinionated and more therefore qualified to vote than the vast majority of adults. And yes, I go outside the bounds of the law sometimes, but so do a hell of a lot of people, and it is by my will and my will alone that I'm doing this.
If CNN ignored them? If CNN ignored them, they'd probably get even louder and deadlier than ever. If I had a cause I was willing to die for, I sure as hell wouldn't simply give up when nobody took any notice.
By the way, I've never even heard of "apoxiutial," and apparently, neither has the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster's, or Princeton Wordnet. Tip: Using big words to make yourself sound important only works if they're actually words.
The internet will never in the foreseeable future be shut down by anyone intentionally. It's simply too profitable. Why, to have a corporation hold the internet hostage, demanding that all users cease and desist their unlawful activities? It'd take weeks for people to comply. Meanwhile, business for what is arguably the driving force behind the American economy would simply stop dead. Yeah, that'd make the MPAA and RIAA really popular, when 90% of the population realizes they're POOR because their mutual funds just tanked, the company they're working for is considering laying them off. Correspondingly, when we don't have enough money to buy the overpriced Hello Kitty Tomigachis, movies trying to capture the roaring success and depth of Coyote Ugly, and songs that I've mouthed off at the top of my lungs to people singing them, leaving them stunned and silent, these companies sell to us they'll be deep in it too!
Is that some kind of sick joke? War on Drugs my ass. If they got the government to commit half as much resources to policing the internet as they do to fight that so-called war, they'd still be causing more of a problem than they fix.
What no one seems to understand about the War on Drugs is that it's not being won... at all. I can talk to some acquaintances of mine and get virtually any kind of drug I so desire, the only possible exception being crack, and I'm damn sure I'm not alone, because this is coming from the guy who'd rather go to a LAN party than Prom.
The music industry is growing, and still making bigger and bigger profits. Ergo, they aren't being hurt. One might say that their net growth is down 1% or so, but no rational person ever complains about that stuff - just look at the stock market - our economy's not growing at the same rate it was one, two years ago, so correspondingly, Sony can't expect to grow at the same rate either.
All of my TVs are Sharp. I had a Sony TV, but the colors bled like a muther. While this may not be the case with some behemoth 36" WEGA, not everyone wants to buy a TV that weighs more than they do. I have a Sony Spressa USB burner (which I use for the purpose, now, of screwing SPS out of cash), whose bundled software stopped functioning when I upgraded to Win2K. Moreover, when I called them up, they basically told me I was screwed. Good products? Ha.
That's the ironic thing about a lot of electric vehicles - much of the time, the electricity powering those clean machines comes from fossil fuel anyway, not "green" methods like hydro, aero, and *scoff* solar. Of course, we could use nuclear power more, but people are always queasy about that kinda stuff, the same way they are about genetically engineered fruit (but not quite as irrationally). We could, however, put all of what would become LN2 bottling plants out in a remote area, since once you get the stuff in a compressed container it's not too perishable. By the same token, the public might feel jumpy about having liquid nitrogen powering their cars, no doubt because of Terminator 2 - but when it's needed, well, it's needed...
Sol is kind of a crappy name for a star - but there's always the Greek Helios, which is pretty damn cool in its on right. I always thought the ancient Greeks were much better at science, had cooler names for things, and were much less debauchery-prone than the Romans, myself. :)
The rich have two basic goals in life.: 1) Maintain wealth and power. 2) Increase the aformentioned quantities. Chiefly, they can accomplish these goals by lowering production costs, raising sale prices, and encouraging economic growth. The first can be accomplished by moving operations overseas - THEY are the real losers in the whole business, and the IMF and World Bank don't help in that regard either. The second can be accomplished by pricing conspiracies (see Napster's case, sneaker prices, ect), and of course there's the fashion industry's self-perpetuation complex. Lastly, as any captain of industry from the Industrial Revolution can tell you, boom/bust cycles are great for making money. While Greenspan seems to be fairly wise in this respect (not letting the economy boom out of control, which usually leads to a massive correction), there's no guarantee that the next Federal Reserve Chairman will be of that mind.
Who cares? As long as they're doing it consensually, and their actions are not infringing upon the rights of others, I see no problem. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don't need anyone, let alone some old, self-absorbed politician, telling me what I can and cannot do. The fundamental flaw with government as it is now is that it tries to legislate my beliefs and values, and I resent that. Why should anyone stop me, as a mentally stable and concenting adult, from doing something I want to do, if it does not harm anyone else? Hypothetically speaking, who gives a shit if I smoke a joint? I'm only harming myself, and i'm doing it of my own free will. Last time I checked there was no law against hitting yourself on the head with a tire-iron, so why should any other purely self-destructive act be illegal? For that matter, who gives a shit if I sell joints? I'm not forcing people to smoke them, just like, contrary to popular opinion, the evil tobbacco industry has not tied me up, tortured me, and forced me to smoke, Clockwork Orange-style. And, finally, if somebody has their heart set on becoming a heroin junkie, if you're not going to tackle the root of the problem which is not the widespread availiability of drugs but more often than not a family difficulty, let them do it. I realize that the drug issue is somewhat offtopic, but it is a prime example of a private matter being legislated by an enept politician trying to get reelected.
The Libertarian philosophy states that if you are not harming a nonconsensual person with your actions, then there is no reason to outlaw them. Air pollution is harmful to everyone, consensual or not. Two concenting adults killing each other is harmful, but they want to kill each other, so let them be. Not only should you be able to showcase it, you should be able to profit from it; it's called boxing.
I haven't read that book of yours yet, but here are some of my own thoughts on the matter.
The founding fathers intended for there to be a kind of peaceful revolution between political parties, should one become oppressive or totalitarian; you can simply vote them out of office if their policies are harmful. However, this does not occur anymore. Representative democracy only works when a number of conditions are met: the population understands the issues, there is a difference of opinion among the prominent leaders, and when information can be distributed freely and easily. For this very reason, democracy is rather effective on a small scale, but it is decidedly ineffective in America.
Sure, I'd like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what's going on and what's going wrong in Washington, and the majority of Slashdot readers seem pretty opinionated, but your average American does not; in fact, most of us work so hard with our jobs, families, and other considerations that we don't have time to become aware of these things. A person usually takes at least a passing interest in local issues: mass transit, roads, zoning, the schools, public works, and the like. Who has the time to research the impact of the myriad laws and regulations governing our nation? I can barely fathom the broad issues. Thus, people generally choose a candidate based on myths about the major parties: if they're feeling a little bit guilty for all the poor, they vote democratic, and if they believe in smaller government, they vote republican.
Fundamentally, while the democrats and republicans seem to have striking differences on issues such as gun control, government size, abortion, they're really much more alike than different on larger issues, most of which are never even discussed. Both parties support globalism, which in turn means brutal serfdom for third-world countries, appeasing China's regime, police actions against sovereign nations which amount to terrorism (seriously, I find it hard to believe that the NATO countries would bomb Serbia out of the kindness of their hearts), environmental rape, and corporate domination. Both parties support the futile war on drugs, which has over its thirty-odd year reign brought nothing to the American people but urban strife, gang violence, absurd and misleading add campaigns, unconstitutional search and seizure, the imprisonment of people whose only crime is smoking a joint, and the imprisonment of people as drug dealers with no material evidence to substantiate the accusations. And of course, both parties support the expansion of the government; the republicans do not believe in smaller government relative to where it is now, they're actually stating that the government will only grow at a rate of 3% per year rather than the democrat's 5%.
There's not really a place on television where you can hear a truly contrary opinion (except, on rare occasions, C-Span); ABC/Disney, NBC/Microsoft, CNN/Time Warner are all controlled by a few people with similar political agendas. The same people who control the media control most web portals and automatically-assigned home pages, so your average AOLer with a 56K will probably never see anything he wouldn't see on Time Warner's networks, let alone Slashdot. Even then, there's simply no way to reach those without computers; major networks are too busy talking about the weather, the stock market, smiling celebrities, and faceless-suit politicians to report any real news.
Yes, we still have a lot of freedoms in America, thank God, but they're being abridged very, very quickly; in the past, we've had true conflict between parties: Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, Democrats and Lincoln's Whigs, and Progressivism against the establishment earlier in the century. But now, the baby boomers who were the so-called opposition in the 70's have become the establishment, and have embraced fully the ideas which threaten the liberty of every American citizen. A man from Georgia had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, after being accused by one of his employees of selling drugs. This employee was facing a lengthily jail term himself after being caught selling, and the only way he could reduce his sentence was by ratting out, by doing the witch hunt thing. As stated above, the man was convicted with no material evidence, only the testimony of a man who had every reason to lie. In defense of this man, a friend wrote to a Georgia senator, who politely refused to even lift a finger for this obviously innocent man; the senator's own son was later caught with copious amounts of marijuana on the way back from England, but only recieved a $500 fine. Is America no longer a land of the people, but a land of the bureaucrats, the wealthy, and the corporations? It sure as hell looks like it's headed that way, at least to me.
Many academy awards seem to have more to do with politics than the actual quality of the movie. Good acting seems to irrevocably entail some profound endictment of the percieved status quo and establishment. They're politically correct to the point of a fault, and it gets on my nerves.
The Holier Than Thou attitude is annoying, as well. They go out of their way to shun popular opinion - how the hell do we know what's good, what makes us laugh and cry, we're not uppity, overdressed, and overcultured slime can decide for us? The Matrix and Titanic (as much as I'd hate to admit the latter) are two recent examples - both were lauded for technical expertise, but the acting was outright ignored.
You'd be surprised how much someone can know about MP3's and how inept they can be in terms of hardware. A friend of mine actually discovered Napster before I did, but didn't know how to use the aux input jacks on his stereo.
Then again, it might be ideal for a car stereo, provided it was compact, simple to remove/connect, and had a lot of space.
Most people will probably include some analysis code, and may "bend" probability if the opponent seems particularly redundent.
However, if you have a contestant which analyzes the opponent's strategy, you can also have one which deliberately tries to trick that software - feint a pattern, then switch to a counter-strategy based on what the opponent is likely to respond with.
For example, one could choose Rock, Paper, Scissors in that order twice, and then the opponent program would sense that it's more likely that you'd choose Rock on the next move - therefore, it would respond with Paper, and you would cut it to pieces with Scissors!
Ah i'm insane anyway.
Yeah, I can't really see Bungie/Microsoft not releasing Halo for the PC platform; Billy has never been one to turn down cash, and there's no doubt that Halo will be a bestseller on the PC. As well, porting the game to either platform would be incredibly easy; there aren't many big differences between the PC and the X-Box (same CPU, probably stardard GPU, similar networking in all likelihood).
Besides, I don't think Billy would abandon the PC, not when he owns so many of our asses already.
Looking at the MP3 phenomenon from a pragmatic standpoint, nobody can say it's going to kill the record industry. It is very inconveniant to have all of your music on a computer unless you spend most of your time in a dorm room, and even with the plummeting prices on burners, everyone who's played mp3's on real speakers knows that the encoding pretty much kills the treble and the bass.
Even with that in mind, for reasons that are apparently beyond rational explanation, some people just have to have the CD. The major demographic i'm exposed to most now - screaming teenage girls - are particularly insistent. If they were the only consumers in the market, the music industry could probably still pull a profit - just look at MTV's TRL. They're as surely obsessive as the guy who washes his hands eighty times an hour. From what I can summize, those who are too cheap to buy a $20 music cd when a $1 CDR is almost as good, are few and far between.
And, much to the music industry's benefit, Napster operates as a try before you buy service. How do people decide to buy music? They hear it on the radio, or listen to a friend's copy, and can now download it, possibly turning them on to something which they may not previously have bought. The lineup on MTV and most radio stations is about as homogenus as algae plants (biology humor); it's exasperating at times, and I don't know what i'll do if they engineer another hit boy band.
This may be just my dilusional opinion, but the internet sure isn't what it used to be. Corporate influence, and the absurdity that that inevitably brings to us, is playing a big role in the Net's development. Remember the etoys.com fiasco this winter, the sickening patent claims, and especially the browser wars?
In the capitalist world, money is power - in the Maoist world, the government is power; so when you get right down to it, is there much of a difference? Sure, there are still places like slashdot where we can voice our opinions, but that "we" is a minority. Sure, there are always going to be free-thinkers, even in China, but they're terribly few and terribly vulnerable even with their ideas on the net. Before their ideas can affect change, they have to get the hits, which is a whole other matter entirely.
Likewise, in America, even with tens of millions on the net, how many are looking for an enriching, mind-expanding, liberating experience? Theirs can easily become corporate sterility, between links picked up from the TV (which all have the firm goal of selling you something), and big-name news sites that feed you the same watered-down garbage you get on the damn TV! Then, making it even harder to find something meaningful, you have the porn, and the sheer, gargantuan quantities of utter nonsense and crap.
I am, of course, exaggerating, but judging by the times it's headed that way. Somehow, after pondering all of that, content control in China doesn't seem as bad, though the inevitable use of the net to track down aspiring dissentents is somewhat disconcerting. There are still ways to avoid detection, and a good hacker will always find them, but the free-thinkers remain a minority. One begins to wonder if it would make a difference if there were no government restrictions at all in China.
EvilSoloman
At this rate, by the year 2012, the following terms will be copyrighted by major corporations:
Sex (Microsoft)
God (Procter & Gamble)
Love (MTV)
Computer (Packard Bell)
Internet (AOL)
Of course, my company decided to take a preemptive move; we've announced plans to copyright all letters of alphabet, the numbers 1 and 0, and using communication via verbal utterances. Anyone who henceforth writes, speaks, uses any sort of technology, adds, or thinks is subject to our prosecution.
Enough satyr, though; any person of reasonable intellect can see that what i've said above is completely absurd, just like the etoy.com issue and the leonardo issue. What we've got here is the blind leading the blind; crusty old bureacrats understand the internet as much as a meridian of longitude understands superstring theory, yet they can legislate for it.
While politicians doing stupid things is nothing new, it's just become easier and more effective. A republic only works when the people holding office are, on the whole, more intelligent and possess a great deal more moral fiber than the general public. While i'm not going to comment on the world's intellectual pros and cons for fear of being lynched by an unruly mob of angry 'individualists,' we can say for certain that the pigs in my legislature are so damned afraid of touching their new goose, eCommerce that they'd cast free speech and will to the wind so long as it gets them another term in office and another fat ol' paycheck.
So the economy's good. I'm the first to admit that I wouldn't care at all about free speech if there wasn't food on the plate and gas in the car, but we've got to strike some sort of a balance here!
THE GOLDEN RULE: The man with the gold makes the rules. Floods and attacks, as much as I'd hate to admit it, don't do a damn bit of good against a business; they're just going to use it as another reason to say that the internet should be some censored, dumbed-down, uninteresting and bland medium. We're going to have to vote with our dollars, and make sure that the ...persons... at etoys.com don't get a red cent of our money. This incident marks one of the inherit shortcomings of a free market and capitalism: you can buy almost anything, including justice. I'm not trying to bash our system, since it's the best one so far, but it's still something we have to be concerned about. It's a given that politics and economics go hand in hand; look at the internet taxation bills. Their decisions are not by any means rooted in a desire for free speech (which some politicians outright despise), it's to keep the economy running smoothly along. This means, unfortunately, that arts & humanities get the proverbial shaft; the interests of culture are woefully undermined by the interests of business.
If things do get as diabolically boring as the root article says - with supercomputers, AI business moguls, and genetic cleansing - we'll probably cause utter social apocalypse, somehow.
No system so stagnant could ever continue to exist, by reason of the natural, chaotic nature of the universe. The problem with such a vision (or nightmare, as it were) and indeed, the Orwellian dictatorships feared by all, is that somewhere along the line, a link in the chain will snap, bringing the entire culture to its knees.
On that note, I'd like to believe that if we don't totally obliterate ourselves in the near future, that a simple, dark-age society would be all that's left standing, with their religion founded upon some old fart's half-crazed memories of a computer game mixed in with supreme being ideology.
Now that's irony; humanity would be serving a 'devine being' that is more literally of our own fabrication than many atheists argue modern religion to be.
Yeah, woolies can be dangerous with their hundreds of dagger-like teeth, ability to run faster than a buick, razor-sharp retractable claws and blinding snot rockets. Why not? They're no more dangerous than an elephant, and those aren't very hard to subdue from the air or a distance.
One has to wonder if there are significant frozen specimens of other animals - dire wolves and sabre-toothed tigers come to mind. The latter might be a mistake; those kitties actively hunted humans. And people complain about cuegers *shiver*.