the reason i havent posted in over a month is frankly there was too much stuff i felt like i could post on. i got overwhelmed, though no one was reading this stuff anyway, and gave up for awhile. this is still pretty much true. however after having been accused of writing nonsense (not really), i feel like i should update again. adrian wants a post on the recent SL "Terrorism".
can terrorists use SL to train? sure they can, for certain values of train. they arent going to hone their aim with real ak47's in there. but they can go over procedure and protocol as much as they want to, and probably get some practice flying stuff. they could build a mock white house, bomb the shit out of it, and repeat as many times as they wanted to.
"zomg!!! shut down SL NOW!!!11!1" right? please. we can't limit our own tools just because they have the potential to be abused. and SL is a tremendous tool for various reasons that i'm not going into (just wiki it).
"ok!! lets throw lots of taxpayer dollars into government programs designed to infiltrate virtual terrorist cells so we can get those bastards!!!" eh. having some presence in virtual worlds may be valuable. but i'm not convinced. there's a ton of problems here and i only feel like going into a few of them. how do you determine who's actually a terrorist and who's using the whole not-reality of this medium to just play at one (there's a huge difference there, and the slippery slope applies too. maybe we should go after everyone who plays a terrorist in CS as well?). tracking down the people behind the avatars would also be a nightmare, even if they were in the states (just ask RIAA). finally, blowing up the ABC building in SL is not terrorism; it was probably some guy who loves all the geeky things about SL and doesnt appreciate it being hijacked by marketers trying to sell him stuff. i mean, i kinda feel like blowing up a virtual whitehouse right now, with all the bullshit gonzo's spewing out etc. (data mine that, suckers!).
so call me underwhelmed on this one, i really just don't care. they could make a facebook group. "i joined al'qaida and all i got was this crappy facebook group". i still wouldnt care. cause that group is gonna be populated mostly be retarded highschool kids going through the whole "stick it to the man" phase.
other thoughts:
today outside my office some people were marching for affordable housing. i mentioned i wouldnt mind if my rent was lower, and my boss said that the way to acheive that would be to get rid of affordable housing and let the free market do its thing. with a higher supply of market-rate housing my rent would go down (this is most likely true, there are people in my complex paying $800 a month for glorious 3BR's, just cause they've been there since 1930).
should we let the free market do its thing and determine value? why should i pay more rent just so some old lady doesnt have to? does her husband serving in WWII affect that? should it?
the next place to go with this is medicine of course. i'm really not sure about it. i believe the free market works and is a good way of doing things. but it also feels so heartless at times, and i'm not sure how to reconcile that.
rugby is awesome. the rugby world cup is coming up, and i'm psyched.
uh.. i bought a ps3 and enjoy it so far. i feel like i outgrew nintendo a decade ago and havent felt the urge to go back since then. the Wii just seems too much like novelty to me. Wii sports is fun for 15 mins, then you're done.
Apple's iPhone commercials are starting to bother me (people who know me in person will not find this surprising). the first batch i saw just demo'd the features (this is the one like "say you're watching pirates of the carribean and you decide you want calamari hey ok lets look up seafood oh theres the closest". a paraphrase, of course.) but now they're like "never before has an ipod been able to do this" while it shows the guy flipping through his fucking music library or playing a video. really?!? than wtf was the video ipod doing all these years??
but thats not as bad as the most recent offender in the ads-spreading-ignorance campaign. Time Warner Cable, who i'm pretty much forced to use, has one that makes fun of verizon's latest campaign about fiber optics. TWC claims to have been "using fiber for decades, get with the program!". and its true, TWC has been using fiber optics for probably that long. of course, that has nothing to do with what verizon is advertising. TWC is talking about the internet backbone, the absurdly high-speed "tubes" that handle large amounts of traffic. verizon's talking about the "last mile" (wiki it), the part that runs off those larger lines and into your house. does TWC offer fiber optics for the last mile? no. is verizon, by doing so, offering you faster speeds? yes.
i hate deceptive advertising, particularly in this arena.
UPDATE:
ha, i should clearly read full aritcles before commenting on them. the ABC building in SL went down due to a "computer error" rather than a bomb. but should someone bomb it, i still maintain its more likely to be some dweeb making a statement than a "terrorist". thats my take on the Second Life Liberation Army, anyway
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5 comments:
oh good! i'm so glad i started posting again, so i could get solicitations for sketchy url's in my comments seconds! sweet justification!
Wow. You took that completely wrong! Which is likely my own fault. The nonsense I was referring to and the apology was for the comment I made not your post.
actually i suspected as much, but pretending to be offended fueled a post, so i went with it
you should post more nonsense by the way, as it is quite amusing
Wow, you wrote an epic.
If counterstrike was a serious training space, you'd have seal team 6 sniping with .50 caliber desert eagle pistols and steyr TMPs.
I don't like the free market in medicine. I don't like people profiting off my disease.
so how do you provide incentive to develope new drugs? its an extremely exspensive process?
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