Re: The Sims 3 PC Cheats, Unlockables and Hint Codes

Alastir — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:38:51 -0000

I can't get moveObjets to work. I have a bathtub trapped in my hall that I cannot move no matter what I try. It says that it cannot be moved because it is in use.
Can anyone help me, I’m getting desperate.

Re: Embrace Surveillance! Not to be its Slave, but to Become its Master

Alastir — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 12:45:58 -0000

All
argument in this article are based on fear and fuelled by paranoia. True the
treat of terrorist attack will always exist. But a terrorist attack is always
the cause of a strong powers unwillingness to hear a weak party’s blight, and
the weak party’s inability to fight on equal term. When you cannot defend
yourself against the strong, you attack the strong where he is weak, his
public. This is the real reason behind terrorism. All violence is caused by
diplomatic failure, and there are many reasons why diplomacy would fail, but
the most common is an asymmetry of power.

Now what is
surveillance? It is fundamentally distrust, distrust by the government in its
people. Now I agree that the government must do whatever it takes to maintain
them monopoly of violence, and the solution is simply restrict the use of 3D
printers.

I live in Denmark an in my native country the access
to firearms are extremely restrictive. It would not only be easy to introduce
laws to restrict the access to technologies such as 3D printers that could pose
a danger to others, BUT more importantly, but it would not violate the
fundamental right of privacy that ALL humans have. We do not need to be
accountable to others as long as our actions do not endanger others and we most
certainly do not need to be accountable to machines.

Another
problem with this article is a false belief in technological innovation. There
is great skeptice in many circles whether technological singularity could ever
be acquired, and if it does it will be at least a hundred years in the future,
not just thirty.

And it is
furthermore doubtful whether such a singularity would even be beneficial for
mankind.

The author
seems to have the misconception that everything that can be done, should be
done. It is always good to be cautious and we should never surrender our
privacy to a machine. But what he is talking about is worse, he is talking
about mandatory surveillance.

There was a
time when the Britons were free, there was a time when you sang that you would
never be slaves, but no longer, already today Englishmen especially in London are being violated by the
suffocating surveillance, who are increasingly being hidden from public eye.

Britton
goes to war, offensive wars, crusaderlike wars against weak states in the middle
east, humiliating the once proud Islamic nations. And then after you bomb their
cities, enslave their people, you wonder why some of them wants to hit back.

Britain and USA have no business in the middle
east, and should interfere in their sovereign right to govern themselves.

Yes Islamic
belief and Sharia does not conform to our WESTERN ideals individual freedom.
But when they do not want it, we should not enforce it. Besides individuals
aren’t the only things that matter, there are also collectives, and with our
obsessive focus on the self we lose track of everyting else.

And yes
there are dangers in the world, there will always be danger, and there will
always be these that do not agree with us. That is why there must be room for
this disagreement, and there will never be consensus that surveillance is good,
therefore there will always be people that are violated by it. And violated
people tend to get violent.

No what we
need is to go in the opposite direction; a total dismantlement of ALL CCTV cameras
and a ban on their use in the public sphere.

As I said
it is about trust, and if we want a good society we must believe in people and
trust them.

Robert
Caldini, a famous American psychologist on what influence people, came with a
good example in his book “Influence Science and Practice” about trust.

He mentions
two different university libraries. One library uses heavy surveillance of the
book, with a strong control system and a very restrictive access to its old and
rare books.

The other
library is much freer, the students check out the books themselves, and no one
stops them if they should forget and even the rare tomes are easy to access.

Can you
guess which of these two libraries had the greatest loss of books per year? If
you guessed on the open trusting library you guessed correctly.

The
constant feeling of surveillance made people feel disassociated with the
library. The distrust breads distrust, and that is how things usually goes.

Your
system, even if it can be made real, would constantly have to have its power
enchanted and become more and more oppressive in order to prevent a total
collapse.

And by
total collapse I mean the end of Britain as a state.

You may
think that it will never happen, but it will, all states fall eventually and
for many different reasons. Many different civil wars have been fought in England alone due to political
disagreements. The idea of your AI surveillance is basically based on the idea
that we can always reach a diplomatic solution, but that is a lie. There would
not be diplomatic crisis if there were not a fear that diplomacy would fail,
and there would not be wars and armed conflicts if people could reach a
peaceful solution and these are only between nations. True many disruptions of
peace inside a nation is just ordinary crimes, but some are ideologically
fuelled and these are not simply wrong. It is of course a complicated question
what a state should do against political enemies, and their nature is very
different from a mere criminal who only acts for personal gain, even if they
both course personal and material damage.

We need to acknowledge
that we as human are not perfect, that nothing we create can ever be perfect.
We need to put trust in each other and ourselves, instead of creating an automaton
that can act as our guardian and Big Brother.

Re: Embrace Surveillance! Not to be its Slave, but to Become its Master

Alastir — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 05:52:33 -0000

I think the problem with the AISS is that it can only TRULY exist in a totalitarian state. That any state that tries to implement it will naturally become totalitarian.
It is ironic that Brittain have become so close to the nightmare vision that George Orwell wrote about in the classic novel 1984.
Surveilliance is not only avoidable it is an evil that we have to fight.
Mass surveillance can never be voluntary and the only reason it exist in Britain is because the nation is not truly democratic anymore.
Without proportional representation the people have no voice.
And in Switzerland, the most democratic country on earth, something like what we see in Britain today, can never happen.

Re: Indentured Servitude: Why Student Loans Won’t Go Away

Alastir — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 07:58:37 -0000

I have to disagree with this. Indentured servitude is a contract signed between an indenture and an investor. The indenture gets a lump sum of money in return for a fixed number of years of servitude, usually between 10 and 15, in which time the investor owns the indentured servant.
BUT once that fixed amount of time is over the indenture is free, his contract fulfilled.
Therefore an indentured servants were in a far better position then this, so these kind of loans are much closer to slavery then you would be if you had "only" been an indentured servant.

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Re: The Sims 3 PC Cheats, Unlockables and Hint Codes

Re: Embrace Surveillance! Not to be its Slave, but to Become its Master

Re: Embrace Surveillance! Not to be its Slave, but to Become its Master

Re: Indentured Servitude: Why Student Loans Won’t Go Away