Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
I agree with you up to the end part.
If people are influenced to pay money to skip portions of a game (leveling up, or whatever), that would seem to indicate a flaw in the game's design that needs to be corrected.
One solution regarding 'leveling up' would be to bring in the prospect of 'age.' So you could auto-set your character to do a task for a certain amount of time, with a percentage chance that he will be robbed, killed in the process etc. But the task executes immediatly in realtime. Your character gains the experience he wants, (or is killed automatically if luck is against him) and pays by losing a few months or years of his character's life.
Working tradeoffs like this into a game would help remove the boring parts that some people want to skip over.
(provided most of the siphoned money stays there and isn't funneled back into our pockets)
Yes and no. I'll take China because that's one economy that I understand. The workers there work for subsitinance wages. The money goes to
1. The foreign firms. 2. The local factory owners.
The local factory owners use this money to buy more industrial equipment. It creates a stronger China, industrially and millitarily and creates a few fantastically wealthy and powerful individuals like Robber Barons from early 20th century US capitalism, but it helps the factory worker only slightly.
The 'worse alternatives' in China exist in part because the Chinese government forces agricultural workers to sell their crops at below market prices in order to fund this industrial growth and the growth of Chinese cities, (not to mention getting foreign currency in order to buy weapons.)
Churchill seems to be a very odd choice to head your message. He was far more adept in war than in peacetime, and then mostly because he recognized Nazi Germany for what it would become and placed himself at the head of the charge when others were smarting from WWI and looking for 'peace in our time' and appeasment. If it weren't for WWII, it's doubtful anyone would remember Churchill's name, and if so then only for his failings in strategy during "WWI" (soft underbelly of europe, etc.)
One of Churchill's more famous speeches;
"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
If something like this were released, I suppose the only way to 'hide' it would be to release a bunch of false copies so the information was not reliable.
They will as soon as the guys over at the National Security Agency will tell them how to use it.
What do you think all this 'information sharing' is about, anyways.
It's just a secret plot to rope the guys at the NSA into doing tech support for the other departments.
"URLs? Um... the CIA told me that they were a mountain range in Western Russia.... Yeah, they seemed pretty sure sir, but I keep typing that in the little white box and it doesn't seem to be able to find them... No sir, I don't know why we're looking for them on the computer. Yes sir, It probably would be easier just to use a map."
Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative. It's environmental. There's no absolute goods, no absolute bads.
While I fundamentally agree with what you've said elsewhere in your post, I don't think that 'moral relativity' is the predominant philosophy on Slashdot. I've never heard someone say that morality was relative on here, though they might have said it. I think Slashdotters generally recognize when a person is being harmed and consider that bad.
I think a lot of folks here just grew up being smarter than their teachers and 'leaders' or at least believing that they were. So they resent authority in general, particularly when that authority is not 'merit based' in their minds. A lot of people have called Slashdot 'libertarian' but I think the general tone is closer to anarchist - questioning any concentration of power and working against it if it doesn't meet up with their moral standards.
... Of course, the US also has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet. Locking people up only solves the problem for as long as they're in jail if you don't rehabilitate them. And in the US we don't effectivly rehabilitate our criminals. Locking someone up in jail is breifly effective and insanely expensive. And it only happens after the crime has been committed. It's worth the cost to do a little counseling to give criminals the parenting a lot of them never got so they don't just wind up in jail.
I'm not against punishing wrong as harshly as we need to, but we also have to provide some guidance as a society or people will be in and out of jail their whole lives. The fact that there are repeat criminals illustrates that some people just aren't detered by jail, and we have to find different ways of dealing with them besides just locking them up. Some kind of 'behavior modification'.
A lot of folks just don't know how to handle their problems.
The problem is that you're forgetting that a "system" can be defined at multiple levels.... and that according to game theory, everything is a game provided it has some kind of rules and a desired outcome, whether they're game rules or social rules.
I totally agree with you, though I do think that if you're playing a single player game and cheating, some cheats can take a lot of the challenge and fun out of things.
If you get two of those nigerian mail scams in one day, tell them both you have a friend who could help them, but they have to be very discreet about their offer and get to know the person first. Then send them the mail of the other spammer.
Supposedly, if I don't agree with the shrinkwrap I'm supposed to be able to return the product. That was going to be the law under UCITA (an otherwise horrid peice of legislation which, I believe and hope, has been rewritten before being passed.)
I understand why the bookstore did what they did, but they and the company still had an obligation and I contacted the company directly. If the company can't fufill their obligations, they should put the contracts on the outside of the wrapping, which is what they should have done in the first place. Assuming that a customer agrees to a contract that they never saw and allowing them no way to back out once they've made the purchase is just plain wrong. I mean, I know most folks don't read the damn things, but still, it violates the whole concept of "consent"...
At the least, I needed to document my disagreement with the EULA's "you cannot use this version of the software for commercial purposes" clause just in case they had some way to come after one of my clients because for using the output of supposedly non-commercial software for commercial purposes. Unlikely, but I didn't want to put my clients at risk.
And I'd paid for the software, so I was damn well going to use it for what I intended.
First of all, the Republican and Democratic parties may have a base of conservatives and liberals respectivly, but that's not the same as saying that they are conservative or liberal. The goals of both parties are the aquisition and retention of power. Serving their base is the means to that end.
Similarly, I see the Republican vs. Democrat dichotomy to be a false dichotomy akin to the con game (no pun intended) of 'lets you and he fight.' Both parties are advocates, ulitmatly, of the increasing centralization of power. The Republicans advocate increasing the power of institutions like the millitary and the CIA, with their buddies in the defense industry profiting. The Democrats advocate bringing in the Gov. to solve one social problem or another, which creates jobs they can distribute to their friends.
The alternative would be an anarcho-libertarian approach; having an inherant distrust of any centralization of power be it corporate or governmental ( though some centralization is necessary in both areas ) The reasoning behind this view is that seats of power will ultimatly be corrupted or else used to undermine democracy in favor of their own organizational interests. While I've heard both Republicans and Democrats effectivly employ this type of rhetoric, very few have followed through with across the board action. Usually it's more a matter of 'attacking the other side while protecting your own base' and plundering the enemy's larder to better stock your own. It's hard to ask people with power to take a stand against power.
To clarifiy things just a bit, we weren't monitoring someone's personal life, we were monitoring their work behavior for the purpose of covering our own asses in case they decided to sue for wrongful termination.The person in question was both a woman and a minority. She was being paid $70,000 yearly and producing nothing whatsoever. My boss, incidentally, was also a woman with more of a view to policing people's personal lives than I agreed with.
I understood the need to document the employee's failures in order to help our client cover their asses in case the woman decided to go legal. I was in favor of giving the boss of the company we were working for a less detailed review of her activities, but I wasn't the man in charge.
Yeah, I don't like shrinkware either. The stuff should be illegal. EULAs aren't really what I had in mind when I said 'up front.' I've tried to return software because I didn't agree with the EULA before, but they wouldn't do it. I even contacted the company directly, but still no dice. I just kept a record of the whole thing in case anything ever came up. (The software was Flash, bought at the bookstore with an educational discount. When I got home I got the notice that the program could not be used for commercial purposes, which is what i needed it for. No warning about that prior to purchase.)
We were required to report on her activities at work. She spent all her time chatting instead of working. I was against including any of the personal information, but my boss wasn't (they outsourced their tech dept. to our company.)
She really didn't keep her personal life that personal anyways. She'd offered to buy sex toys for other office workers, etc.
I don't see what you're arguing with. The grandparent post isn't disagreeing with what you said.
He said people should be free to talk about their personal lives. i.e. I had one coworker who had several boyfriends and her very religious boss found out about it. He fired her. There were other reasons too, but that was kindof the straw that broke the camel's back.
Thing was, we did it from keystroke logs on her comp at work (legally obtained)
Slashdot Mirror
The real question, though, is "can it get you chicks?"
Let me also pre-empt the replies that will say playing a game should be about enjoying the experience and the ride, not a power-trip toward getting an uber character and the ultimate foozle power: I agree. I'd never buy something in an MMORPG. That doesn't mean time doesn't have value and that buyers are necessarily evil.
I agree with you up to the end part.
If people are influenced to pay money to skip portions of a game (leveling up, or whatever), that would seem to indicate a flaw in the game's design that needs to be corrected.
One solution regarding 'leveling up' would be to bring in the prospect of 'age.' So you could auto-set your character to do a task for a certain amount of time, with a percentage chance that he will be robbed, killed in the process etc. But the task executes immediatly in realtime. Your character gains the experience he wants, (or is killed automatically if luck is against him) and pays by losing a few months or years of his character's life.
Working tradeoffs like this into a game would help remove the boring parts that some people want to skip over.
(provided most of the siphoned money stays there and isn't funneled back into our pockets)
Yes and no. I'll take China because that's one economy that I understand. The workers there work for subsitinance wages. The money goes to
1. The foreign firms.
2. The local factory owners.
The local factory owners use this money to buy more industrial equipment. It creates a stronger China, industrially and millitarily and creates a few fantastically wealthy and powerful individuals like Robber Barons from early 20th century US capitalism, but it helps the factory worker only slightly.
The 'worse alternatives' in China exist in part because the Chinese government forces agricultural workers to sell their crops at below market prices in order to fund this industrial growth and the growth of Chinese cities, (not to mention getting foreign currency in order to buy weapons.)
Churchill seems to be a very odd choice to head your message. He was far more adept in war than in peacetime, and then mostly because he recognized Nazi Germany for what it would become and placed himself at the head of the charge when others were smarting from WWI and looking for 'peace in our time' and appeasment. If it weren't for WWII, it's doubtful anyone would remember Churchill's name, and if so then only for his failings in strategy during "WWI" (soft underbelly of europe, etc.)
One of Churchill's more famous speeches;
"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.
The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
No, those corpses are still fresh.
If we're lucky, we can still get another war out of them before they're cold and forgotten.
Or at least a few covert operations\assassinations.
If something like this were released, I suppose the only way to 'hide' it would be to release a bunch of false copies so the information was not reliable.
Not to mention the fact that the people doing this spying would probably be over 40 by now. yuck
In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" a Communist agent has sex with one of the heroines and takes pictures for the purpose of blackmail.
Kundera was sufficiently acquainted with communist regeimes to know what he was writing about.
So nyahh.
So this is what the editors from Social Text are doing now that nobody reads their publications anymore.
</remove tounge from cheek>
They will as soon as the guys over at the National Security Agency will tell them how to use it.
What do you think all this 'information sharing' is about, anyways.
It's just a secret plot to rope the guys at the NSA into doing tech support for the other departments.
"URLs? Um... the CIA told me that they were a mountain range in Western Russia.... Yeah, they seemed pretty sure sir, but I keep typing that in the little white box and it doesn't seem to be able to find them... No sir, I don't know why we're looking for them on the computer. Yes sir, It probably would be easier just to use a map."
Who wouldn't want to have sex with a spy?
You could play some James Bond theme song in the background for added effect, and even wear an eyepatch.
Every time the subject of morality comes up on Slashdot (typically someone imposing their morality on someone else), people come out of the woodwork declaring that morality is all just relative. It's environmental. There's no absolute goods, no absolute bads.
While I fundamentally agree with what you've said elsewhere in your post, I don't think that 'moral relativity' is the predominant philosophy on Slashdot. I've never heard someone say that morality was relative on here, though they might have said it. I think Slashdotters generally recognize when a person is being harmed and consider that bad.
I think a lot of folks here just grew up being smarter than their teachers and 'leaders' or at least believing that they were. So they resent authority in general, particularly when that authority is not 'merit based' in their minds. A lot of people have called Slashdot 'libertarian' but I think the general tone is closer to anarchist - questioning any concentration of power and working against it if it doesn't meet up with their moral standards.
... Of course, the US also has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet. Locking people up only solves the problem for as long as they're in jail if you don't rehabilitate them. And in the US we don't effectivly rehabilitate our criminals. Locking someone up in jail is breifly effective and insanely expensive. And it only happens after the crime has been committed. It's worth the cost to do a little counseling to give criminals the parenting a lot of them never got so they don't just wind up in jail.
I'm not against punishing wrong as harshly as we need to, but we also have to provide some guidance as a society or people will be in and out of jail their whole lives. The fact that there are repeat criminals illustrates that some people just aren't detered by jail, and we have to find different ways of dealing with them besides just locking them up. Some kind of 'behavior modification'.
A lot of folks just don't know how to handle their problems.
Thanks!
Is there any way to set up a 'RAID of DVDs' so that errors on one disk are fixed if not present on other disks?
The problem is that you're forgetting that a "system" can be defined at multiple levels. ... and that according to game theory, everything is a game provided it has some kind of rules and a desired outcome, whether they're game rules or social rules.
I totally agree with you, though I do think that if you're playing a single player game and cheating, some cheats can take a lot of the challenge and fun out of things.
If you get two of those nigerian mail scams in one day, tell them both you have a friend who could help them, but they have to be very discreet about their offer and get to know the person first. Then send them the mail of the other spammer.
The comment refers to Kurt Vonnegut, but the comment wasn't mine.
I take it you hate Doonesbury and like Vonnegut?
Supposedly, if I don't agree with the shrinkwrap I'm supposed to be able to return the product.
That was going to be the law under UCITA (an otherwise horrid peice of legislation which, I believe and hope, has been rewritten before being passed.)
I understand why the bookstore did what they did, but they and the company still had an obligation and I contacted the company directly. If the company can't fufill their obligations, they should put the contracts on the outside of the wrapping, which is what they should have done in the first place. Assuming that a customer agrees to a contract that they never saw and allowing them no way to back out once they've made the purchase is just plain wrong. I mean, I know most folks don't read the damn things, but still, it violates the whole concept of "consent"...
At the least, I needed to document my disagreement with the EULA's "you cannot use this version of the software for commercial purposes" clause just in case they had some way to come after one of my clients because for using the output of supposedly non-commercial software for commercial purposes. Unlikely, but I didn't want to put my clients at risk.
And I'd paid for the software, so I was damn well going to use it for what I intended.
I'm not sure that I agree...
First of all, the Republican and Democratic parties may have a base of conservatives and liberals respectivly, but that's not the same as saying that they are conservative or liberal. The goals of both parties are the aquisition and retention of power. Serving their base is the means to that end.
Similarly, I see the Republican vs. Democrat dichotomy to be a false dichotomy akin to the con game (no pun intended) of 'lets you and he fight.' Both parties are advocates, ulitmatly, of the increasing centralization of power. The Republicans advocate increasing the power of institutions like the millitary and the CIA, with their buddies in the defense industry profiting. The Democrats advocate bringing in the Gov. to solve one social problem or another, which creates jobs they can distribute to their friends.
The alternative would be an anarcho-libertarian approach; having an inherant distrust of any centralization of power be it corporate or governmental ( though some centralization is necessary in both areas ) The reasoning behind this view is that seats of power will ultimatly be corrupted or else used to undermine democracy in favor of their own organizational interests. While I've heard both Republicans and Democrats effectivly employ this type of rhetoric, very few have followed through with across the board action. Usually it's more a matter of 'attacking the other side while protecting your own base' and plundering the enemy's larder to better stock your own. It's hard to ask people with power to take a stand against power.
To clarifiy things just a bit, we weren't monitoring someone's personal life, we were monitoring their work behavior for the purpose of covering our own asses in case they decided to sue for wrongful termination.The person in question was both a woman and a minority. She was being paid $70,000 yearly and producing nothing whatsoever. My boss, incidentally, was also a woman with more of a view to policing people's personal lives than I agreed with.
I understood the need to document the employee's failures in order to help our client cover their asses in case the woman decided to go legal. I was in favor of giving the boss of the company we were working for a less detailed review of her activities, but I wasn't the man in charge.
Yeah, I don't like shrinkware either. The stuff should be illegal. EULAs aren't really what I had in mind when I said 'up front.' I've tried to return software because I didn't agree with the EULA before, but they wouldn't do it. I even contacted the company directly, but still no dice. I just kept a record of the whole thing in case anything ever came up. (The software was Flash, bought at the bookstore with an educational discount. When I got home I got the notice that the program could not be used for commercial purposes, which is what i needed it for. No warning about that prior to purchase.)
We were required to report on her activities at work. She spent all her time chatting instead of working. I was against including any of the personal information, but my boss wasn't (they outsourced their tech dept. to our company.)
She really didn't keep her personal life that personal anyways. She'd offered to buy sex toys for other office workers, etc.
I don't mind, as long as employers are upfront about it when they hire you. They should have the right to set the terms of your employment.
Springing stuff on you suddenly after you're employed is a different matter entirely.
I don't see what you're arguing with. The grandparent post isn't disagreeing with what you said.
He said people should be free to talk about their personal lives. i.e. I had one coworker who had several boyfriends and her very religious boss found out about it. He fired her. There were other reasons too, but that was kindof the straw that broke the camel's back.
Thing was, we did it from keystroke logs on her comp at work (legally obtained)