Ross Scott

Yeah this is really at the core as to why I think some piracy is necessary. I saw a comment about this on slashdot: " ">Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that. This is what the real problem is with current copyright law. Stuff that would go to the public domain is simply locked up, never to be seen again.There is no balance anymore between the right to culture and the right to earn a living. The right to culture has been obliterated. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain.The powers that be are now stealing from the public, far more so than they are losing to "piracy." " I consider laws to allow media that at least some people are interested in to willingly die to be immoral. I think these are most at risk by bills like this because the more obscure something is, the more likely there is to be only one remaining source of it. And as others have said, for mainstream piracy, this may as well be called the "Stop Napster" bill.

I can usually go for about 10 - 20 minutes of shouting, then I only need a few hours to recover, unless I haven't done it in several weeks. This is a mostly accurate portrayal of what my lungpower is like: O8hwI-1xzo0 I promise the wait on the next one will be shorter, plus I agree with the frustration. This is actually a motivating element of me wanting to do an actual movie. The wait will be even longer, but the payoff will be much larger I think. Like imagine if instead of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Valve just went and released an all-out Half-Life 3 after another year, it's the same kind of mentality.

It's rare to see such a perfect reply like this.

Not under any circumstance, but I would say most, yes. I consider it a sliding scale of how much harm the loss of your sandwich causes you. If you have plenty of food and he is starving, then I think he has a moral right to your sandwich. If you yourself are also starving, I think he has no right to your sandwich, you're on equal ground. It can get more complicated than this, but if it's a matter of small inconvenience to you, versus life and death for him, he has more right to the sandwich. Some human beings are very irrational, some are very rational. Many change back and forth depending on their mood. Say an asteroid is coming to wipe out all life on earth. I'm the only one with missile technology who can properly deflect it in time. I refuse to launch it, because I think others don't deserve my technology and I can survive on my own private space base away from Earth, so I'm going to let everyone else die except for 3 of my friends. Am I being rational? If other people seize my missile by force, do they have any right to do so? Well say I'm working full-time in fast food earning 18k a year, living in frugally in a hellhole apartment and barely have any money leftover each month. Do you think I should pay the same 20% of my income as someone who makes 10 million per year from investing in a good company, and spends all day playing golf? You talk about fairness, but I don't see how a system like that is "fair" to the working poor. That 20% could mean the difference between heating my apartment during the winter or not. Well you keep saying "punishes", that's why. I don't necessarily see taxes as punishment. I see them as sort of a service charge for living in a state where I have police, roads, sidewalks, water, public education, etc. However, what I do consider to be punishment is any sort of system or policy that ends up making life more difficult for people who are STRUGGLING to have their basic needs met. If I'm earning 18k a year and raising taxes on me means I'll have to starve or else go homeless, I consider that to be causing suffering. I think that's COMPLETELY different than if I'm earning 10 million a year and raising taxes means I can't buy a decomissioned jet fighter. That's not causing suffering, that's causing inconvenience and limitations on my wealth. I think this is just your perception and I consider these kinds of questions irrelevant. If somebody is donating billions to help a lot of people, that's fucking great! Who cares if he's acting entitled, the end result helps a lot of people! Alternately, the only "praise" I know of for people struggling are news media fluff pieces, which don't mean anything. I consider these kinds of arguments to be tangents. I mainly just care about end results, not perception or how people act in the process. I didn't quite follow your whole argument here, but I can answer this. A loss in wealth is more moral than a gain if it leads to people being able to survive or meet basic needs, regardless of how fair it is. There's going to be unfairness in any system. It's not fair that some people are born into trust funds and other are born as crack babies. It's not fair that some people receive excellent education and others are practically in a public school penal system. Maintaining those advantages and disadvantages via rights isn't FAIR either. I don't know of any system that's completely FAIR. However, a society with enough resources can make sure EVERYONE has their basic needs met and have a much better shot of living a fulfilling life, but only if it wants to. It can just as easily allow half its population to die prematurely from poor living conditions and have a lower lifespan, while allowing the absolute richest to be 10% richer. Is the latter scenario really the greater good?

No, that's not really what I said. It depends on the scale. On a macro-level, I'm literally incapabale of fixing this problem on my own. My sandwich won't help millions of starving people. On a micro-scale (me finding some guy starving in the woods), I think it IS immoral to eat when he clearly need the food more than I do AND I know I won't starve either. However, I do NOT think doing nothing about the problem is necessary, like you say. Again, if there was some magic fund to feed EVERYONE who needed the help and took away a certain percentage of my income (along with everyone else's who could afford it), I would absolutely be in favor of that. Minor redistribution of wealth to help people from starving to death I consider a good thing. See this is actually one of the big arguments made by the OWS crowd. Almost the top earners don't get the majority of their income through wages, but rather through dividends earnings. This is taxed a lot lower (15%) than the majority of tax brackets. So why should someone who earns 30k a year be paying more percentage-wise in taxes than someone earning 30 million?Also would you agree that if you have 30k a year, giving up say, 20% of your income affects you life more drastically than if you have 30 million or 300k? Since when is being successful financially an indicator of virtue? It's no indicator of how kind, helpful, productive, or beneficial to society they are. Also if you're only earning 15k year and trying to survive, do these people really need additional punishment? So is "dry ice." The two words individually combined don't make sense, but as a whole, they mean a separate concept. To clarify, here's a definiton off wikipedia: "Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate" In layman's terms, this means that if you're not earning wages, you're screwed. I don't see that as a desirable system. If you're in a situation where you can't work, I think ideally you shouldn't have to worry about whether you'll have enough money for food, medical care, not being homeless, etc. I mean tell me this, what's the problem in having a system where if you're not working, you're still guaranteed a certain baseline existence by the society you live in. You can have a dwelling that's yours, food, water, access to healthcare, etc. Nothing luxurious, just adequate. If you DO work, you can earn income to spend on whatever you want, like luxury items and services, a TV, a car, a better home, the ability to save money to start your own business, etc. Yes, some of your income would be taken away to fund the basic services for everyone, but by the same token, you're also guaranteeing yourself (along with everyone else) a safety net in case you ever do find yourself in unfortunate circumstances. Why is this system worse than one where a person who can't earn enough wages will end up homeless?

I plan on playing this once I upgrade, though I'll probably use mods. I like the idea of a survival setting where it's more in your interest to avoid hordes of zombies rather than try and mow down every one you can find.

For everyone worried about spoilers, don't be. If people don't want spoilers, they can watch the episode before reading comments about it, I see it more as a common sense issue.

Would YOU pick up something that just killed two people who were holding it? If yes, you might want to watch this clip: dCeD2gF9jUo

Download 848x480 MKV (93MB) At long last, here's the next episode of Freeman's Mind. This episode got delayed for dozens of reasons, none of them especially interesting. It mostly has to do with me attempting too many things at once. I'll try and get more FM episodes out as soon as I can. People who are very familiar with Half-Life may notice this episode doesn't play out how the game normally does. Normally, there's a sequence you have to initiate before the game will progress, but here, it's already happening by the time Freeman shows up to it. You can blame this on Half-Life: Source. All I did was load a saved game I had, and the events played out as you see them, every time I tried. I wasn't able to find a workaround for this, but I don't think it really matters in this case anyway.

I haven't watched this video, but I'm familiar with this experiment. Well you can chalk me up as partially evil then; I'm pretty sure I'd zap the guys and laugh at hearing the yelps (at lower voltages anyway). However I'd stop right up to the point where the test subjects were saying to stop the shocks or else where I thought the voltage was too dangerous to their health. I really can't see any authority figure making me go farther than that though, short of putting a gun to my head. EDIT: I watched some snippets of the video, I think my evil cutoff point is around 120 volts.

Well, I think as a nation we have more immediate problems facing us than space travel. We're becoming barely competent enough to manage our own country; last year we not only threatened to shut down the government, but also came way too close to defaulting on the national debt, which would have rapidly accelerated a global economic depression. We have more than enough resources to fund space travel for a long time, it's just a matter of distribution and what our government sees as a priority for allocating funds. The War in Iraq alone could have funded quite a bit of additional efforts in the space program. Space travel is the sort of thing that is ultimately necessary for the survival of humanity and a great thing to strive for, but it's also the sort of thing we could put off for a million years and still have plenty of time to do something. I personally would like to see a LOT more resources devoted to spotting as many incoming asteroids as possible. I see something like that as the best insurance policy for humanity we can have.

This video explains almost every single concern I have over the state of society and civilization and its sustainability. To top it off, the whole thing is animated. To the best of my knowledge, all the information in here is completely accurate (though I was confused by one statement on how much of the sun we use). It starts off talking about oil, but later goes into other energy and resources and general, plus food production and long term economic viability. I feel like it covers almost every topic that threatens modern civilization. I really recommend watching it. It is 35 minutes though, I watched it over the span of a couple days while I was eating: VOMWzjrRiBg

That's really surprising, I've never heard of a company offering so many of their products for free like that without an insane catch. I guess I'll have to grab Daz Studio and look at it.

Would be nice if they added guides for antialiasing for 3D games. I've had to look up a lot of obscure stuff getting it working on making games.

Wanted to make some clarifications. Calling nuclear power plants clean is kind of a dichotomy. In most practices, it's quite clean, but it has the potential to be the dirtiest power imaginable. By far the biggest potential safety threat to modern nuclear reactors is waste disposal. The problem with radioactive waste from reactors is that it's extremely dangerous exposed and the half-life is so long in practical terms it never goes away. So sure, you can have complete confidence in the waste's future 10 years from now, but 50? 100? 10,000? I guess it won't matter since we'll all be dead, but there's at least some potential risk, especially in regions that may be less stable. Nuclear energy isn't an end-all solution, but I'll take it over no energy production easily.

This may be my favorite game of the last 5 years or so. Here's an easy distinction between puzzle games and adventure games. Puzzle games have JUST puzzles. As soon as you finish one, you move to the next. They often have almost no story, but not always . Adventure games let you move around, look at things, interact in different ways, and almost always have a storyline to it. It all depends on your preference, for me, Myst is the Halo of adventure games. It's alright, but I never got why some people were so fanatical about it. It had good atmosphere, but was relatively light on story compared to most adventure games out there. For that time period I enjoyed The Journeyman Project a lot more.

Actually I forgot, I have played through Chrono Trigger because I know someone who's practically based his identity around the game. It's pretty good, though in general I'm not a big fan of jRPGs.

I generally can't stand RPGs with turn-based combat. It slows things down too much for me and feels more like a chore. I either like all-out combat or else none at all (like graphic adventure games). The only turn-based ones I've gotten through have been Fallout 1 because the game was so good in every other aspect it made up for it. My favorites: Gothic Diablo Dungeon Siege Played, but haven't finished: Final Fantasy 6 (I completely gave up when the big dramatic scene looked like fisher price dolls bumping against a wall, falling down, then repeating) Revenant (definitely plan to finish) Planescape: Torment (plan to finish) Hard To Be A God (will probably finish, interesting story) Drakensang: The Dark Eye (combat was turn-based-ish, fantastic visuals, very generic writing) Plan to play once I upgrade: Risen Gothic 4 Divinity 2 Two Worlds 2 Nehrim Mod

Well okay, but if you accept that list, then you can't ignore the others. I'm not sure he would accept all of these: - - - Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Article 26. (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Article 29. (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. - - - 25 in particular is saying a right to food, clothing, housing, medical care. Those all require the labor and resources of others if you can't provide for them yourself. I don't think he would agree that people have a RIGHT to those for that exact reason. Unless I've misunderstood him, he would say that it's invalid because making it a right would violate the rights of the people providing those things.

Sound editing is usually handled by someone else these days, that means someone else is working on the episode. I've been fixing some issues the new flyby had. As for the dialogue, it can take a while. I basically write it, record it multiple times, then edit it down all in one take. I know it seems unfathomable, but if I'm getting 2 or more minutes recorded and edited for an episode in a day, that's not bad for me. For Episode 41 or 42 I'm thinking I'll try and completely document how much time goes into each step to see how long it actually takes.

It's mainly me just saying the lines not as well or cutting off abruptly. FM is pretty sterile and robotic as far as the recording, there's almost nothing that would be that entertaining for outtakes. Civil Protection has some from recording that I've kept for Craig, Fred, and myself. I plan on releasing those once there are some more updates to the website.

Yes, AFTER. I think if the Industrial Revolution continued without labor laws and rights for workers, it might not have changed much. I think there's some misunderstanding. I agree with you. I DON'T think its the descendants fault for the poor's problems nor is it their fault. What I'm saying is, it erodes the concept of a person's right to property for me when it's the direct result of property acquired through immoral means. Yes, the descendant of a slave is still free to earn money, but if they were illiterate for generations, then discriminated against through a good portion of the 20th century, that puts them at a big disadvantage in becoming prosperous compared to someone from a wealthy or middle-class background. I'm not saying affirmative action is the answer, what I'm saying is the "every man for himself" mentality doesn't resolve that problem. It's like having a race where one runner gets to run in professional sports shoes and has a personal coach + training, and the other person gets to run barefoot with one foot tied behind his back. No, he doesn't need all the advantages the other person has, but it would be a better race if you at least untie his foot and get him a pair of shoes. See, I put the right to life ABOVE property rights, like in the belladonna berry example. You seem to think they're the same, though I think that logic is flawed. Afterall, you can live without property, but you can't have property without your life. As for property rights being a human right, I doublechecked in the dictionary as to the definition: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human%20rights They're saying rights that fundamentally belong to ALL persons. To me (and the dictionary), that's not property rights. Take a prisoner who has been locked up. He has no right to property, he could be very dangerous with whatever you give him and he's being punished. However, he has a right not to be tortured, has a right to have food and water, and other basic needs met. Not providing him THOSE rights most of humanity would consider to be inhumane, even for prisoners. You're saying property rights are a basic human right. What about highly dangerous criminals or mental patients? Should they be allowed to possess property when the only thing they'll do with it is hurt themselves or others? Because a HUMAN right means ALL people are entitled to it. Actually I'm not, I'm saying it's society's responsibility, so to some degree it's then everyone's (within their means). The rich have a lot more means than everyone else so they get more attention. See this isn't how I'm interpreting it at all, which I think is part of what leads to our disagreement. What I see the OWS movement being about is that SOMETHING is wrong with our system. The rich getting richer while everyone else gets poorer is a SYMPTOM of this. Wealth level isn't important in itself, but not having a system that provides basic needs for its citizens and can allow for wage slavery IS. To make it muddier, SOME of the rich ARE responsible for this, but certainly not all, or even the majority. Like if you're paying lobbyists to railroad a special interest clause in your bill that ensures your company is getting preferential government treatment, then yes, you're a big part of the problem. However, the fact that this is happening on such a large scale now means maybe there are bigger problems with our whole system. I personally think our government's now largely corrupt and not really doing its job of representing the people's interest. Government is supposed to be the power to stand against the elite, because it's a representative democracy. If it's just another tool OF the elite, then that leaves a lot of people kind of screwed and not knowing what to do about it. The OWS movement I think is just sort of an existential manifestation of that, because people don't know what to do. Anyway, that's my interpretation of the LEGITIMATE claims of OWS. Obviously if some guy is protesting because he majored in Classical Literature then is shocked when he can only get a job working at a coffee shop, that doesn't mean too much.

My favorite FPSs: System Shock 2 Deus Ex Strife Painkiller series (haven't played redemption) Serious Sam series (haven't played 3 yet) Unreal Tournament 2004 SiN series Half-Life (though doing the videos may have taken some of the fun out of it) I also think Unreal had fantastic music and atmosphere, but I found the gameplay pretty so-so FPSs I plan on playing: System Shock with mouse aiming mod Realms of The Haunting CyberMage: Darklight Awakening After I upgrade my videocard: Bulletstorm Crysis Singularity Hard Reset The Ball

I don't think this is a good measure of prosperity. India is a good modern day example of a nation that has extreme poverty, but an incredible population. Infant mortality rates are generally a much better indicator of how prosperous a society is. Also I'm not saying capitalism is 100% evil and detrimental, I'm saying I think unchecked capitalism fails to address some serious societal problems and can create some serious problems that wouldn't exist otherwise. Okay, I have two questions related to this. You're saying what right do people have to make claims on the rich. Part of my question, is what right do people have to be rich in the first place? Say a person is born into a rich family that has been rich for generations. Also say the family originally got rich from slave labor back in the 1700s and 1800s and since then members of the family have used their advantages to invest in companies to remain rich. I think we would both agree that using slaves isn't considered right, but the wealth exists today as a result of their work. So this family may work hard at business (or it may not and simply reap from investing), but it also had advantages from slavery that the vast majority of people have not. Why does this family have a "right" to retain their wealth, when descendents of slaves were at a disadvantage for generations and could be working just as hard or not harder than the wealthy families who acquired their wealth by clearly unjust means? By that reasoning what "right" do most Americans have to be here, when most of our conquest is the result of bloodshed or betrayal against Native Americans, Mexicans, and other European colonies? Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should try to undo history and correct all wrongs, it's endlessly complex and a fool's errand; but at the same time, I feel like by placing so much emphasis on the individual's property rights, a sometimes very unjust history has to be taken into account. From a philosophical perspective, it can be seen as affirming the actions of ancestors, no matter how wrong they might be. Holding the value of property rights above all else I feel is a way of maintaining a status quo for those that come from wealthy backgrounds and intentionally leaving things more difficult for those who are not as fortunate REGARDLESS of how hard they works or what their ability is. In fact I saw a related demotivator to this recently: So anyway, sorry it's so long-winded, but that's essentially my first question. Why should we promote a system that determines your fortune in life often as much or even moreso by your birth than by your work ethic or abilities? It's of course not 100% dictated that way, like it was during feudal times, but it's still quite a real factor. Here's my second question (again, sorry about the length). Aside from the bailouts, you think the OWS people are being unfair towards the rich in who they're blaming. I am in agreement that I think their grievances should be more directed towards government. Anyway, let's take a hypothetical situation. Pretend government in the USA became extremely small and reduced taxes further, offered far less services, definitely didn't have bailouts and more or less let the free market do what it wanted. Just as hypothetical, let's say that for whatever reason, it doesn't even matter, the class divide got far worse. The upper 1% now got substantially richer, the middle class almost didn't exist, and the working class got much poorer, more comparable to what 3rd world countries have. Finally, let's say private charities existed much in the same capacity they did now. Helping many, but only had the resources to deal with a fraction of the people who were suffering. Everyone who was interested in helping was doing so to the maximum capacity they were willing or able to help with. In this hypothetical scenario, what would you propose as being the solution to improving the quality of life for the 90% or more in the working class, living like peasants? Would this even be a concern from your perspective in this scenario?