Unarmed men who have access to diesel fuel, styrofoam, and a hardware store need not remain unarmed for long.

And the governments in question really don't like that I can say that legally.

Won't help. You're looking for An Introduction to Sarcasm for Aspberger Syndrome Patients.

I'm going to hire the kid that has 100% of all available badges, including those that were only available for a limited time before s/he was born and those that are mutually exclusive because it's physically impossible to be in 3 places at once.

That kid understands computers and the system.

Fuck fuck fuck and FUCK you you miserable sack of shit.

See that date? I didn't live here then. Now go fuck yourself.

The subject is not developed countries. The subject is countries where 700,000 children die of cholera. And yeah, Roman standards of sanitation are a BIG step up.

Dipshit.

Brilliant!

The only way you'd ever know is if there is a glitch in The Matrix...

rgb

:-)

BTW, nice recursively demonstrative 1337 handle...;-)

rgb

Little did he know his idle speculations would turn into a bona fide fetish, with a named category on porn sites.

Sure there is. There is no start. He/she will always be his/her own parents because he/she has always been his/her own parents.

If that bothers you, consider any circle. Where is the beginning of the arc?

Everybody would at least be trying to be a net positive part of the solution instead of neutral to net negative. As I said elsewhere in the thread, the ideal is probably neither Charles Manson or Mother Teresa, it is probably more like the Boy Scouts -- do a good turn daily and try to be no worse than neutral otherwise. And don't be a butt. Very important that.

rgb

Amen. Line by line, actually. Especially your summary sentence. Although I'd take issue with "become" -- it has always been that way. It is arguably "un-becoming" fucked up, but a glacial pace compared to our capabilities and opposed by the MIC sociopaths and organized crime, who are not necessarily disparate groups.

rgb

Oh, don't worry. This is /. I'm a nerd/geek. I've spent far, far too many hours over the last two weeks playing the Android Icewind Dale remix. And I did my time with the e-cocaine known as minecraft, only quitting when I had built towers from the bottom of the world to its top and realized suddenly that I was bored to tears. Even now I can't get myself motivated to revisit it.

That's how I know that it is doing nothing but skipping sleep.

As for the vanity of the world and the pit of existential despair, hey, minecraft is a better way to cope with it than some I can think of. But I think not the best way.

rgb

And the Sudoku puzzle is good for your brain, and hence isn't all that bad for society to the extent that people with healthy logical brains are better than the alternative. Probably true of minecraft as well -- I certainly enjoyed it for a month or three, just as I enjoyed second life more briefly, World of Warcraft in its day, and am currently enjoying the rebirth of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale on my tablet. But at some point all of these things -- even Sudoku -- become a form of e-crack, a means of withdrawal from the world, a kind of meditation that replaces the struggle with a dirty scary largely unknowable world with something clean and relaxing.

In the end, it's a matter of ethical balance. If you are working long and hard enough to support yourself, far be it from me to criticize what you do with your elective time outside of that (and vice versa) as long as it isn't things like torturing puppies or crafting kiddy porn. Also, as many have pointed out, one individual probably can't fix all of the ills of the world, and so in a sense it is wasteful of your life to devote all of your elective energy in trying at the expense of all joy and diversion. Still, I think that in between spending all of one's life in a drug or mindcraft-induced haze of complete avoidance of the real world and becoming Mother Teresa there is an ethical optimum, probably quite broad, of doing no particular harm, being as responsible for supporting your own personal life and its self-assumed obligations (like children and pets) as circumstance and ability permits, and yeah, out of sheer self-interest if nothing else spending some of your elective energy on making the world a better place for everyone because that makes it a better, safer place for you yourself. It needn't even be false or religious altruism, in other words, even if your personal ethos is a single life to live, no god, no afterlife, most of us would prefer to live in a world that minimized the personal risk of being burned alive by religious zealots, being beaten or killed by thugs and bullies, starving to death because some accident robbed us of the ability to work for and feed ourselves -- and so in a very deep sense fulfilling a "social obligation" to help others is part of an optimized selfish ethic, a way of buying "insurance" through one's actions insuring others.

So how much Sudoku, or Minecraft, or WoW/BG/IWD or Diablo II Expansion is too much, compared to doing something more constructive with some part of that time? That's the choice of each individual, but I think that it is arguable that if you get to where you are building word processors out of Minecraft you m-i-i-g-h-t be a hair over the line...;-)

      rgb

Thank you for so effectively demonstrating the existential ennui that paralyzes our entire civilization. Of course if you look carefully at your replies and actually think for a moment, the answers to each and every one are obvious and there are a rather large number of talented individuals who demonstrate this every day by their actions.

The tragedy is the many competent persons who would rather build giant virtual word processors or make armor to sell in WoW than to take up arms against the world's sea of trouble and, by opposing, end them. All that it takes for evil to prevail is for good persons to do nothing, and honestly, building Minecraft engines is as close to doing nothing as it is possible to do and still breathe.

rgb

ROTFL. Ah, shades of mongo.

rgb