In short; it doesn't. If there is some marker that, logically, makes a thing unethical, then it's reasonable to make rules against it. But right now we deal with the difference between sex and violence like we used to deal with the difference in races; sure, one is sex and the other is just violence, and it happens that we're comfortable with violence, but not sex. But how much of that comfort is the result of exposure, and not the supposed underlying 'betterness' of it? Arguably, depiction of sex ought to be more acceptable, as it has little to do, in general, with hurting people - something that is clearly unethical.

If there was a good case to be made against the depiction of child molestation (and, given that it's a real problem, I'm not sure there is), then one might make policy against it. One might also make policy if it is decided that increasing the exposure to such things encourages it - but if that is the case, then we ought to seriously examine violence. And greed. And a host of other human sins that we readily portray, even glorify, but have no policy against.

But then, I come from a stance wherein I think that the safety of civilization comes from it's consistency in treatment of citizens. Inconsistency leads to injustice, which in turn spawns injustice - because if you can't count on the system to protect you, how can the system count on you to support it?

Child exploitation depicted in Manga is no more ok than person on person violence depicted in literally any TV show is. The fact is that in the United States we get very crazy about certain types of inhuman, unethical or immoral behavior and totally ignore others.

Since I'm not willing to ban the depiction of all human violence, I find it unethical to ban the depiction of (however monstrous) human lust. How about you? Do you feel that the depiction or examination of a depiction of any immoral act is cause for legal recourse?

The ad right below this article is an ad for Scientology. WTF /.?

Wait, wait, wait... stop right there. That's one assumption too many. Who says anyone here is a grown man? And if they happen to be so foolish, I challenge them to cite evidence... evidence sufficient to counter 99.97% of all /. posts ever.

Assumptions you make:

1. It is easier for a corporation to change their filtration practices than it is for the subset of individuals who break CFL bulbs to clean them up.
2. That a brief exposure to concentrated mercury does more harm to you as an (adult) individual than constant blanket pollution of diffuse mercury in the environment.

Corporations are not willing to change. They want less regulation, not more. They don't have a natural impulse to guard individual welfare.

Mercury exposure is not super dangerous to adults. It's not good, but the biggest problem with mercury is when it's in your food and stunts the brain growth of children.

The real question is; if most people agree that CFLs are the better way to go, why is it that you disagree? Is it because of legitimate concerns, or is some part of your identity bound up in some aspect of your objection?

Actually, most geeks are under the faith-based assumption that at some point, this is entirely possible. That Transporter Pads or Jump Drives or simple Teleportation is merely a question of time. It is so inculcated our geek culture that certain things will simply come easy once the elegant solution appears, as if by magic. Further, I think it affects how we view most problems.

Take environmentalism. Clearly the solution is greener products; things that will fit into a sustainable economy. But it's a binary clause; if your entire product can be green, then it should be. Otherwise, who are you fooling!? There is no sense of bootstrapping, of having to replace pieces as you can.

The subset of the culture that subscribes heavily to this stance tends to be against refactoring code, and for simply writing programs wholesale by themselves in their attic. They're against good test procedures and using older technologies because they're not shiny enough. Ironically, they're also the sorts who probably haven't written their own libraries - or even approached the idea. They buy most of their stuff, because whatever their realm of expertise, it's limited in scope. Fix plumbing? Hell no! Drill something, or saw something? What is the point - something you pay for is clearly going to be better, and in the end that arbitrary sense of idealistic quality is all that matters.

I hope that as we move forward we get more geeks like you, value_added, who recognize that it's not about suddenly being in Nirvana. It's about constantly changing the little bits that are pain points once any better solution becomes available, rather than holding out for some mythical day brought about in some opaque fashion wherein everything is just right of it's own accord.

In the end it's simple economics; the time-value of progress suggests that a little 'money' or 'value' now, and a little later, and a little later will yield a total greater value than a simple lump sum at the end.

I'm going to go ahead and note that most courses cover Big-O by using sorting algorithms as examples. If you don't understand the sorting algorithm, can you really be expected to understand how the Big-O is different?

Parroting quicksort is useless. But learning to write a sorting algorithm is a gateway to very fundamentally useful topics, such as recursion. It's not so much that the particular example (sort) is useful, it's that it teaches tricky but fundamentally useful ways of thinking.

Then you're thinking inside a box you've clearly been well-trained to inhabit.

Simply because someone is in the minority doesn't mean they're wrong. In fact, effectively all correct notions started out being held only by a minority. A good education would have taught this. But your education seems to have stopped at some point, because you're under the delusion that government and education are businesses, in the traditional sense of utilizing capital to generate profit. In fact, these two types of institutions generally realize 'profit' as something very different from money or resources. Namely, having a population of people who don't believe that all true notions spring fully-formed into the heads of an entire populace.

There is no doubt that more knowledge will be pushed over the internet, rather than in person. But what this article, and you I think, are missing is that there is more to understanding than simple knowledge. Hopefully the savings in terms of capital that electronic resources and tools can provide will be spent on developing understanding, rather than on simply spending less capital.

*shrug* I'm not convinced that Java is all that more complicated or time-consuming for the developer. And since 1.6, with annotations and generics, I'm not sure that the complaint about inflexibility is really there.

Suffice to say, I don't think that Python is the crystal clear choice. On the other hand, I'm not sure the differences are significant - so it probably is up to your coding (team's?) preference and style.

While your two links are interesting, I think you have to do more work to make your point. Can you cite why those links prove the superiority of Python? And what specifically do you mean by 'rewrite the bible'?

Regarding efficiency, I give you this. The relevant sentence: "I decided to redo several of the tests with updated versions of Python (2.5) and the JDK (Java 6). And indeed, my suspicions were confirmed: Java has made huge speed improvements, and is now faster than Python in almost all cases."

a) Our broadcasting power is quite a bit more powerful now.

b) While transmissions do disperse, and are thus correspondingly harder to read, that does not mean that they're impossible. Just harder - you'd need better equipment of some sort, be it telescopes or computers to interpolate data, or something else entirely. The point still stands; alien civilizations are unlikely not to have contacted us because it's to hard to get to us. Chances are they haven't contacted us because it just hasn't been a physical likelihood yet - and that due to distance.

One of the nice things about the universe is that it's actually pretty hard to hide phenomenon. We, for instance, have been making no attempt to not blatantly broadcast our location and existence - while the sample size is small, do you really think any other civilization is going to have their first thought upon discovering radio waves be "Damn, better be careful about using lest an impossibly distant alien race finds out where we are!"?

No, far more likely is that if there is life out there, it's simply far enough away (or, correspondingly, too young) that we haven't had the chance to see any evidence of them. But to assume that 'if there is life, of course they see us', is entirely illogical.

Ah, but this isn't true. We buy lots of things that we have no expectation of being able to resell it. If our hypothetical person X buys a cup of coffee, walks into his office and is fired - can he sell the cup of coffee? It would be rare circumstance in which he could.

Anything personalized falls into this category; I don't want to buy your business cards off you, your nameplate, any of that. I might spend a lot of money on a portrait of my family, but there isn't going to be much chance anyone is going to buy that from me. One can buy cell phone service plans, house insurance, food, gourmet food, rose bulbs, club memberships, magazines - never with the thought that these things will be able to be traded in for something else if your circumstance changes.

Now, the fact that you can't resell something naturally reduces it's value to you, and in turn should reduce it's market price, ceterus paribus. But there is nothing inherently wrong with creating a product (or service) that is not resellable. It is only your expectation that is suggesting otherwise. But that should simply be reflected in price, not a moralistic rant against the whole idea.

That is an assumption on your part. Networking back-ends can be complicated; maybe Steam provides an actual component that is most realistically hosted with them. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's not an unreasonable possibility given the ability to save ones games remotely, and so on. They've added capabilities, not just taken them away. For that matter, I see the Steam client as essential to get at what they're offering - painless updates, ability to load up my games anywhere, ability to browse a bunch of games from home, regardless of many other distinctions between them.

Where did your use of the phrasing "sell [a] game 'on'" come from? It's odd.

A game that requires x thing - in this case Steam - is not really a new thing. Games require the Windows operating system at times. Or Direct X version 47. Or 'at least an Intel 486 Processor'. Or a CD ROM drive. Or some other game - unless expansions don't count? From an abstract perspective the complaint that you need something 'extra' doesn't hold much water. The extra thing has changed, but how does that inherently make a difference? Why does this thing cause a problem and not some other thing.

Second Hand Markets. Ok, so you're saying you want to buy a game for some period of time, and then sell it, recouping some money. How is that different from a 'service'? And if the game were to simply drop in cost, would that mean your complaint here would go away?

Frankly, I don't see the sentiment of "DRM should not in any way inconvenience the user" as being particularly salient. The world is inconveniencing. Why don't I get all games ever made now, in the past or in the future, in my head right now? It's inconvenient that I don't. Hell, that I have to work to pay for games - second hand or not - is inconvenient. The world is full of limitations. There may be a way around this one, but on the other hand there is an opportunity cost for everything, and being sad that there that is true is like being sad we don't all get what we wish for, and a pony.

Right now, the opportunity cost derives from the fact that developers need to retain some ability to pay for food. Or buy other games. It's sort of a headache for the rest of us... but if you're willing to pay for the game at a certain price, where exactly are your rights getting trampled? You even seem to be implying you'd eventually offload a game - so why are you worried about when Steam goes away as a company?

(Never mind the irony that you're both advocating this and complaining about it.)

My point is this; we're entering a new way of looking at property. Treating it as a physical item is becoming increasingly silly. Second hand markets are a reflection of the limits of physical items; I'm only going to be able to make so many tables. There are simply only so many trees in the world, and they become increasingly expensive the more I use. Eventually people will only be able to afford second hand tables. This does not hold for data. Data is no more expensive to send across the internet the 6 billionth time (total population of the Earth) than it is the first. If anything, it's cheaper.

So your complaint really seems to be; why can't you get a price reduction because you don't want to buy the game 'forever'? Am I wrong?