When you have rulers, or any sort of power hierarchy, you don't have anarchy.
Wrong.
You have anarchy when you don't have a government.
A government is a monopoly on the use of force. It requires one 'force user', or group of force users, that if other people start using force, it will step in and stop them.
If there is no monopoly, it's anarchy. If there are multiple groups asserting the right to use force, and all of them appear to be able to use force as they wish, it is anarchy.
You can perhaps argue that some long-lasting duopoly on force that have existed in a quasi-permanent state should graduate to 'government' status (Like Hezbollah and the Lebanon government), and I won't argue much with that, and of course a war with two specific monopolies arguing over who has the right to use force in a certain area isn't really an 'anarchy'.
But 'strongmen' certainly are, no matter how you want to pretend that they magically become a government, and thus aren't anarchy. If it's not a monopoly on the use of force, it's not a government.
But if we humour your definition and assume that tomorrow America became a land of magic cooperative anarchy, it wouldn't take 5 minutes for the power vacuum to devolve into Somalia.
No, don't argue his stupid definitions. Anarchy is the lack of government. Government is a monopoly on the use of force. If there is no monopoly on the use of force, there is no government, and, hence, it's an anarchy. It's simple logic, the only vague area is what we mean by 'monopoly'. But strongmen certainly aren't it.
Only idiots use 'anarchy' to mean 'no use of force, ever, or it's magically not anarchy.'.
Government has only one purpose, one motivation for its existence, and one moral justification for its operation: Defending the rights of individuals against those who would violate them, whether foreign or domestic.
The US government, strangely enough, was founded on philosophical grounds...but, sadly for glibertarians, not those philosophical grounds. It was founded on the idea that, when a government does not meet certain requirements, when certain rights are not upheld, said government can, and should, be removed and replaced by a government that does...
...but it says nothing about governments that provide more than those rights, not does it say a government is unjust when it does any action besides further those requirements.
You can argue that a government should not provide the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a paper hat every Tuesday, that providing the last is unwise or even immoral, and you can even make that argument on philosophical grounds based on what you think a government should be.
But you have to actually make that argument, you can't just tritely say it and imagine that it's magically correct.
Any form of society that does not have a functioning government is anarchy, by definition. (Or a functioning 'leadership' of some sort, even if not backed by force.)
Anarchy does not 'deteriorate' into rule by strongmen, rule by (competing) strongman is form of anarchy. (Rule by just one strongman who has a monopoly on force is, of course, 'a government'.)
You can't just define anarchy to be 'near-magical cooperative anarchy'.
The reason that Amtrak has such low ridership is a few things, all things where it should have the advantages over air, but we've managed to break it:
Amtrak has to inexplicably wait for freight to get out of the way, resulting in random delays. Freight often has priority thanks to idiotic railway agreements. With planes, passenger planes have priority, and there actually isn't that much air freight.
They've managed to turn it into airport style security and hassle, resulting in you having to get there early. The entire point of train travel is that you didn't have to do that, and hence you could actually get places faster than a plane. Can't anymore. As you cannot hijack a train, and if you wanted to blow one up, blowing up a packed subway car in the middle of the city would make a hell of a lot more sense than blowing up a half empty train in the middle of nowhere.
As these two problems are so stupid, I am forced to conclude that they are almost certainly deliberate attempts to break passenger rail. Laws could trivially fix them and cause no problems whatsoever.
And there are a few infrastructure problems that would be more work to fix:
They refuse to build the system in any sane way, requiring people to get into a town to get on the train. For example, if I want to get on Amtrak, I have to go to downtown Atlanta. Trains need to end in large cities, but you need to be able to enter the system on the outsides of said cities, so you don't have to deal with the fucking traffic of the town you're trying to leave.Yet again, another thing that should be an advantage of rail, totally ignored.
Sane setups would pick up additional car as they leave a town or assemble trains out of cars from suburbs, but heaven forbid Amtrak be designed with any sort of sanity.
Likewise, at least here, getting from the subway to the train is not as easy as you'd think. A sane system would have the two trains pull up parallel to each other, and you just walk across. Perhaps you could even purchase train tickets on the subway, or at least once you get across.
Here, you lug your bags up to a whole nother floor, stand in line to buy tickets, go through a security screening (Which I already mentioned is nonsensical.), file into the train as they check said ticket, and then take a seat. Instead of a 60 second process, it's at least ten minutes. (Granted, it'd be a while anyway, as you'd have to wait for the train schedule, but ten minutes gets added to each trip, on average. And running around trying to buy tickets is much more annoying than just sitting on the train.)
Buying tickets probably deserves a special mention. For some reason, we've gotten rid of the tried and true method of handing tickets, which was that you could buy your ticket on the train, usually before it got underway, but occasionally people would make it on without tickets and couldn't or wouldn't pay, and hence got ejected at the next stop. It was actually less work than getting on the subway. You just walk on, sit down, and a guy would come around and ask to see your ticket. You didn't have it, you paid cash then and there, or got off the train. It was a perfectly workable and reasonable system, and even better now that everyone has credit cards and can actually pay $70 randomly.
But suddenly, gasp, terrorism was all over the place, and now we have to fucking ID check and security screen everyone because they might decided to blow up a train by riding on it. (As opposed to, you know, driving a car into a passing train at a crossing. That would just make too much sense.)
It's honestly amazing how libertarians will somehow make the shortsightedness of businesses into a government problem, like there's some magical special tax on R&D or something, and that companies would happily have less profit if it wasn't for big bad government taxes.
This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever, and in fact a lot of R&D is because of the tax structure which rewards companies 'wasting' money on stuff like that, (Because only profits are taxed, so if they can turn some profit into 'research' spending, it is taxed less.) but in a libertarian's head, everything is the government's fault.
The reason companies are shortsighted is that the stock market has become a roulette where the entire point of companies is to raise the stock prices. The point is no longer to make a profit, or invest long term, it is to simply for the CEO to cause the stock to go up, cash in his bonus, and run for the door.
The reason only start-ups can develop new tech is they do it before they go public, before a board of directors that only cares about their stock price goes out and hires a CEO that only cares about the stock price.
All this could be fixed with a trivial government regulation, namely, requiring everyone to hold on to purchased stock for six months or so. Make it where stockholders make 95% of their money by dividends, and you'll suddenly see companies thinking about profits, and companies that think about profits think long-term.
Oh, and incidentally, all this 'making money reselling stock' is because of tax laws deliberately structured to tax it less, aka, capital gains tax. The system is deliberately set up to turn our corporations into a fucking price-jumping gambling short-term nonsense, with the price of stock entirely disconnected from reality, instead of simply rewarding people who own pieces of money-making corporations with a percentage of that money, which would be the sane way to operate an economy, and the entire damn original point of stocks.
The way to stop malaria is to remove malaria from humans and mosquitoes, period.
Spreading a house with DDT doesn't solve the problem.
The only way to stop malaria is to kill all infected mosquitoes (Which is essentially all mosquitoes in certain areas.) and treat infected people. (You could kill them too, but we frown on that.)
If all you do is stop mosquitoes from biting people, they will happily go off and attack other animals for a few years, passing malaria on to each new mosquito generation, and when you stop stopping them, they're back.
DDT was used to wipe out entire populations at once, massively, and it worked very well. Unfortunately, it's incredibly bad to use in this way.
You can argue that we should use DDT instead of, say, mosquito netting, and considering it kills the mosquito, that seems like a reasonable solution, but the problem with both of those is that it's not any sort of actual solution, just a way to stop a single person from being infected. (Or, do what the article you linked to say, and put insecticide on the nets.)
To actually stop malaria, entire breeding grounds of mosquitoes have to be wiped out. Not permanently, the mosquitoes can come back...it's just all the infected ones have to be killed. And you have to be quick about catching the disease in humans, as biting an infected human is the major way mosquitoes get it. (They get it from an infected mother, also, but without humans, it wouldn't really spread any.)
Hauling in 200 of these boxes to a breeding ground, leaving them up for a week, and then hauling them over to the next breeding ground might actually work.
Those aren't the same thing at all. Murder is not a form of death. Murder is an intent. People do not die of 'murder'.
And, yes, we should treat people who have died by violence (committed by someone else, aka murder) or have died by poisoning (committed by someone else, aka murder) the same as someone who dies by natural causes.
Namely, we should bury their body, and execute their will, notify various government agencies, etc, etc.
I don't know what point you're trying to make, but, yes, we do, in fact, treat the dead the same way, no matter if they were killed on purpose.
Likewise, if you can't install a game because you have no installation source, be that a lack of CD or a lack of a server, you can't install the game, period. If you already have it installed but can't run the game because you can't put in the CD it wants, or connect to the server it wants, you can't run the game, period.
They are exactly the same results. Lack of installing and/or running the game.
Well, I can sorta see their point in saying 'You have to give us the permissions of the least restrictive IP you have'.
But it's actually still dumb. The only IPs in my firewalls (Besides the mail server which has temp blocks for spammers) are the IPs of my other servers, so I can restrict specific things to them.
The only two that I can think of are access to the mysql port (So other servers can use a database), and access to a special mail submission port without any other security on it. (So my web servers can easily send email. I used to this via postfix checking IPs, and then I figured, why even let the wrong IP connect?)
Granted, there is a possible security issue there, but these protected services are either still password protected, like the mysql one, or not actually huge risks, like the mail server. (I wouldn't want to be spewing spam, but it's hardly going to result in someone stealing customer CC numbers.)
I firewall those simply because I don't think it's good to expose unneeded services to the internet, but they're hardly insecure.
But if I were in charge of security, and I had, for some reason or another, needed to run an vulnerable service and protect it behind a firewall except for a few IPs, I don't think that's a particularly large problem. Need to make sure everyone who can mess with the firewall knows that port must always be firewalled, but that's about it.
I wonder how they deal with Windows machines, which essentially always have insecure ports, and just have a firewall in front of them.
Criminal trials are about crimes against the state. All of them, even ones with 'victims', are crimes against the state. That's why the state is the one in court, and it's 'Defendant vs. The State of Virginia' or whatever.
Bribing a witness to not testify as to what they saw related to a crime of assault is witness tampering, even if said witness is the person who was assaulted.
I honestly don't understand how that often is allowed.
I don't understand why that isn't 'conspiracy after the fact'.
If I walk up to someone and say 'I saw you jaywalk, pay me $5 or I'll turn you in', that's just flat out illegal.
If someone steals from me, and I do the same, somehow it's legal?
See, what people have apparently forgotten is that criminal acts are not crimes against the victim. If the victim wants recomps, they can sue. Criminal acts are crimes against the state.
Yes, the state doesn't like forcing victims to testify, and thus often people a chance to 'drop the charges' if they don't, but they don't have to do that, they can just go ahead and prosecute. (In fact, they often prosecute against the will of the victim in cases of spousal abuse, although the victim usually can't be made to testify there anyway.)
If I were a witness to a crime, and I asked for money from the suspect in return for not testifying, I would, quite rightly, be charged with conspiracy after the fact, and I'd be jailed for contempt of court until I did testify. If I was charged with a crime, and attempted to pay a witness to keep them from testifying, I would be committing conspiracy after the fact and witness tampering.
Yet, somehow, change 'witness' to 'victim' and that's all legal, despite the fact that, in a court, 'victims' really are just unique witnesses. Crimes are not against victims, they are against the state. We realize it's hard to prove cases without the testimony of the victim-witness, and the victim-witness is often fairly fragile, so we often drop a case if they don't want to 'file charges', aka, to testify...but I'll be damned to see how it's legal to bribe them. There are fucking 'witness bribery' contracts out there filed in lawyer's offices.
Now, of course, there's no way to fully stop this, but that doesn't mean it should be legal.
Right. It's only criminal charges that can get decided in your absence. Civil suits, no so much.
If someone bringing a suit can't locate someone to serve them, they can hardly locate them to collect any money they have to pay. The courts frown on you just wasting the court's time with a meaningless suit.
This obviously applies to cases where the defendant is known at the start. If they are not, the court might let a 'vs. Doe' lawsuit proceed until they are identified. But if identified people cannot be located to be served, the court is essentially going to say 'You have to find them first, because this entire thing is pointless otherwise'.
However, you can't magically avoid this simply be refusing to confirm who you are to the messenger and rejecting certified mail. Having an impartial witness confirm he gave it to you is nice, but there are a lot of other ways in which you can be presumed to have been notified.
Now, a judge might let a case happen without one party if some property, which is in a known location, is being argued over. The big example, foreclosures, have specific laws about that (And notification happens via notices posted on front doors, not having to track people down.), but there are other cases.
For example, if I paid for someone else to purchase something for me, but I vanished and they were left holding it for a month, and that was costing them money, they can file suit to have it decided that they should sell my property to cover the costs they already expended in holding it, because they are unable to locate me. As the grounds of the case are 'They can't locate me', it's entirely reasonable that, for the case, they aren't able to notify me...but they don't need me to do what they're asking the court to do, unlike cases where the person filing suit is asking for money.
Not that I mind that much, but who came up with making copies being "not theft" and "not criminal"? I'd like to ask them what the hell is the difference in me stealing a CD from a music store and me "making unauthorised copies" of a friends CD?
Because theft means, and has always meant through history, 'unlawfully removing ownership of property from someone who already owns it'. (Ownership being the right and ability to use property for your own purposes. It is the ultimate 'control' of property, as opposed to possession, which is just who controls it at any one time.)
Theft is not just 'taking', in fact. That's just one form of theft, 'theft by taking'.
You also have 'theft by conversion', where you turn the property of someone else into a different form, such as building a desk out of someone else's lumber, and not attempting to take the desk. Still theft.
And some places have 'theft by destruction' or 'theft by vandalism', which is when you just entirely or mostly destroy something of someone else.
And there's 'theft by fraud', where you mislead someone who is in legal possession of property, or the owner of property, into 'transferring ownership' to you under certain false pretenses. For example, using counterfeit money to buy things. (Which is illegal by itself, but it's also theft by fraud.)
And there's 'theft by misappropriation', where you are in legal possession of property you don't own, but attempt to do something that only the owner can do, such as sell it. Just because you have been been granted the right and ability to use property, aka 'loaned property', by the owner doesn't mean you can do anything with it.
Please note I said 'the owner'. Theft by misappropriation is taking the ability of the owner to control his property. The owner of a CD is not able to copy it, nor have you removed those rights if you copy it, and, as you're doing it with the owner of a CD's permission anyway, it would hardly matter.
Not all places distinguish in exactly these ways, and not all of them call all the offenses 'theft', but the common thread holding together the various forms of theft is: At some point, someone owned something, and the thief changed things by removing it from their control.
As making copies doesn't remove control of anything from the owner of the CD without their consent, it cannot be theft. (Even making copies without their consent isn't actually theft, and probably legal if you can do it without breaking some other law. It's like sitting on lawn furniture in someone's front yard without damaging it, but without permission. You are not intending to deprive anyone of anything. You are using someone else's property without permission, but that is not ipso facto illegal if it doesn't deprive them. Whether or not you're trespassing is another matter.)
Now you could steal in a copyright itself, if you filed various legal papers falsely transferring it to you. That would probably be 'theft by fraud', which is often just covered under fraud statues.
Theft is, technically, speaking, referred to as 'permanently depriving' someone of a thing, although I hate to use that word because people get into a stupid mode when they insist companies have been deprived of 'profits'. Unless you're stating that profits have been stolen, profits haven't been deprived by theft. Stealing my car is theft because it deprived me of my car, not because it deprived me of a way to work. I have never owned 'a way to work', and, likewise, I have never owned hypothetical future profits, and can be deprived by theft of neither.
Of course, if a civil suits happens, those might be unlawful damages to me that I can get compensation for, but damages != theft, especially since damages aren't automatically illegal. (For example, you can spread true, but damaging, facts about me.)
And, if they do go up in smoke, how likely do you think it is that they will figure out some way to allow people to continue playing their games?
If they don't figure out some way, how likely is it that the game publishers might step in and help with the problem?
I mean, that's pretty bad PR for them, too. I could see publishers who used Steam asking Steam, as it collapsed, for a list of their customers, and offering them free, or at least cheap, CDs to order online. (Actually, they probably already have that list, as most games on Steam also get you to register the product key with the publisher, and I suspect the publisher knows what product keys Steam is distributing.)
Of course, all this is moot. Steam is too successful. There's no way in hell it's going anywhere. This is idiotic talk from 2005. Valve might fail, but Steam is going to continue.
And, on the other side: How much is the added convenience worth? Never deal with swapping DVDs, never deal with install programs, never deal with updates. Buy stuff and it's just there and working. (I mean, I live an hour from the nearest Frys, and until they opened, the only place to buy games was tiny GameStops, which have almost no PC games.)
Even if it is slightly 'more likely' to lose a game, however the hell you can figure the math on that, isn't it worth it for the convenience? I mean, last month I wanted to play NWN2. But the DVD was all the way in my 'original CD' case, which I carefully keep on a shelf, and would have to go and get. I've very careful and I don't break or scratch or damage in any way original DVDs...and hence, um, none of them are actually out where I can get to them easy.
Someone who was murdered, and someone who are dead from natural causes, do in fact have the same functionality. If you are depending on that person being alive, you're screwed no matter how he died. Um, duh.
And saying 'in your control' is the deciding factor is idiotic.
Car accidents are 'within your control' (Well, not really, someone could just randomly hit you, but, then again, your house could randomly catch on fire and burn your DVDs.), whereas airplane accidents are not within your control, but that doesn't magically make driving in a car safer. It is not.
Being unable to install something because you can't download it or don't have a physical copy of it is the strangest definition of 'DRM' I've ever heard. By that logic, everything has DRM on it. 'I can't play my White Album vinyl because I snapped it in half. Damn DRM!'
Being unable to download and install a game from Steam because Steam is dead is exactly the same as being unable to install a game because your DVD copy is broken. In both cases, you either have to buy a new copy on DVD, or you will have to find a pirate version, download it, and use your old product key.
Granted, 'DVD is broken' is something you have more control over than 'Steam is dead', but the result is the same, and it's not 'removed functionality'.
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales
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Game Industry Vets On DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Indeed.
Hey, asshats, we gave you copyright protection for a reason, and it wasn't to help you. It was to help society.
You've stopped helping society? But you bought all the lawmakers so we can't change the copyright laws?
Bite me.
Copyright laws have long since stopped reflecting the will of the people. Laws are supposed to be a social contract we all agree to, but no one in his right mind would, for example, agree to retroactive copyright extension to encourage long-dead people to produce more stuff. Copyright laws have managed to work themselves outside said social contact, and hence, morally, you can do whatever the fuck you want WRT them.
You want society to abide by the laws, they have to, at least vaguely, match what society actually thinks should be legal. Period. That's how laws work. It's not 'society has to do whatever laws corporations can buy'. Copyright law has long falling out of matching what society wants, long enough to actually have people grow up with mismatched laws, resulting in no respect whatsoever of them.
Sucks for the numerous content creators who didn't have anything to do with this brokenness, but they should, by this point, know what world they live in.
That said, game manufacturers aren't Disney, and aren't trying to rip off the entire system. They really do need to get paid for their games.
But that doesn't mean it's moral for them to sell people games that will crap all over user's systems and/or not function and not give a refund. Even if the law says they can, because copyright law is not a reflection of what laws society actually wants.
Really? You think Steam is worse than those DRM schemes that totally fuck up your CD and often block access to games you own?
Steam is the best DRM setup out there. Now, you can rightly argue we shouldn't have any DRM, but 'Check online for permission to run' is a hell of a lot better than 'Fuck around with hardware drivers and require users to have physical CDs'.
I just bought my first Steam game, ME2, and I'm rather pleased with it. I might be annoyed if I needed to run it when I wasn't online, although I did see some mention of an 'offline' option...I assume I can run offline for a bit if my net connection is down, but it has to check in eventually?
Steam is really the sane way to do DRM: Simply check every once in a while that the product key is correct over the internet.
I seriously doubt that the majority of people pirating games go out and buy it as an act of good will.
What are you, a moron? No one even suggested that.
However, there is a large group of people who buy the game and then download a no-cd crack because they aren't putting up with that crap.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
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Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
Have you ever seen a bridge in ME2?
Uh...yes?
The citadel is very simplified, OTOH, that's because it's not really your 'base' anymore. You don't have to keep reporting back there, and you don't get stranded there for the first quarter of the game. In fact, I'm not entirely certain you have to visit it at all, although you really should to get your 'dead' status straightened out and back in contact with the council.
The problem I had with the first game is you had this huge citadel, with all sorts of things on it, which was nice...and then you had nowhere else. Seriously, no planet seemed to actually have, you know, a mall in their spaceport. Or even a duty-free shop.
For some, like dirt-poor colonies, this was justified, but there was a damn free trade human planet...without any shops on it. (Well, one smuggler-ish street vender.)
ME2, while making the citadel 'smaller', or at least, less accessible, makes up for it by having other places that actually seemed to be communities of people, not just mission entrance points. Like Omega and Illium.
Strangely enough, it does this as it also requires you to buy a lot less, hence most vendors end up having almost no inventory.
Did Garrus or Tali actually ever do anything? I can't remember any scenes that involved them as important characters.
Garrus hated Saren, and Tali's people just hate the Geth in general.
My complaint is that if you're going to give the player the ability to make choices, they should both be hard to make and have significant impacts on the story. Choices that are obviously good or evil are bad because you're really just choosing whether you want to be nice or to be an ass; also, knowing that the game will give you rewards either way lessens the impact of picking one over the other.
Yes, in Mass Effect 1, the choices didn't really do anything...however, in 2, I've run across a lot of things that would be different if I'd done ME1 differently.
And as someone who's played ME1 both ways, there's actually a lot of places where you can skip areas by choosing the 'renegade' option, which, as I pointed out, isn't really bad, it is more 'chaotic'. The two choices are 'good plus slightly lawful', vs 'chaotic plus slightly evil', it is not a 'good vs evil' axis. You can't actually play as outright evil. All you can do is play as a person who's willing to let innocents die, cold-bloodedly kill people, and ignore rules in an attempt to save the galaxy, a 'Dirty Harry'-type character.
Which, frankly, works a lot better than most RPGs, where you nonsensically 'evilly' risk your life to save everyone. Yeah, it's justified that if the world goes, so go you, but that's a rather thin justification...you still should be last in line to help. In ME, you can throw your weight around, intimidate people, shoot them if they don't help, or you can pause and help everyone you come across, and turn people over to the authorities, and generally be nice, but you're a good guy either way. (Although juries probably wouldn't see it that way.)
The standard paragon choice is often slightly more annoying, as you often end up agreeing to help more. I can't count the times, paragon-wise, I agreed not to do something that would make the entire mission much simpler. I mentioned one above, with the 'plant possessed' people. Getting back into the camp is a bitch if you're playing as a paragon, you have to carefully traq each person...and if you're a renegade, you can just blow them the hell away, they're really defenseless and bad fighters. Likewise, you end up in at least two hostage standoffs...with hostages you don't actually know. You can spend time and effort trying to save them...or, you know, not.
Of course, once you've gained points in paragon, you can use the additional choices to skip things, too, but that's no different than points in 'charm' or whatever. (And renegade is points in intimidate.) That's standard RPG game mechanics. But the baseline paragon option is often harder than the 'neutral' option, which itself is often harder than renegade.
That's what I didn't like about Mass Effect -- all of the choices are very obvious about which one is "nice" and which one is "mean," and the outcome is almost always exactly what you'd expect.
That's actually changed a bit in ME2. I already let one cowering person, who claim they hadn't really understood what was going on when they joined a gang and hadn't killed anyone, go during my attack on a group who'd murdered someone...only five minutes later, to find logs indicating that she was, in fact, specifically the killer.
Likewise, at least one 'good decision' I made in ME1 has backfired. Although it's hard to tell what the outcome of the other would have been.
Given that BioWare always structures the plots of their games in the same way, that made it pretty obvious that you were going to accomplish the next four objectives in any order and then have a showdown with Saren.
Well, yes. That's about the only way to do 'wide open' RPGs. You make everything funnel. Give people multiple choices, and when they finish they all, give them a new objective, or a new set of them.
Slashdot Mirror
When you have rulers, or any sort of power hierarchy, you don't have anarchy.
Wrong.
You have anarchy when you don't have a government.
A government is a monopoly on the use of force. It requires one 'force user', or group of force users, that if other people start using force, it will step in and stop them.
If there is no monopoly, it's anarchy. If there are multiple groups asserting the right to use force, and all of them appear to be able to use force as they wish, it is anarchy.
You can perhaps argue that some long-lasting duopoly on force that have existed in a quasi-permanent state should graduate to 'government' status (Like Hezbollah and the Lebanon government), and I won't argue much with that, and of course a war with two specific monopolies arguing over who has the right to use force in a certain area isn't really an 'anarchy'.
But 'strongmen' certainly are, no matter how you want to pretend that they magically become a government, and thus aren't anarchy. If it's not a monopoly on the use of force, it's not a government.
But if we humour your definition and assume that tomorrow America became a land of magic cooperative anarchy, it wouldn't take 5 minutes for the power vacuum to devolve into Somalia.
No, don't argue his stupid definitions. Anarchy is the lack of government. Government is a monopoly on the use of force. If there is no monopoly on the use of force, there is no government, and, hence, it's an anarchy. It's simple logic, the only vague area is what we mean by 'monopoly'. But strongmen certainly aren't it.
Only idiots use 'anarchy' to mean 'no use of force, ever, or it's magically not anarchy.'.
Government has only one purpose, one motivation for its existence, and one moral justification for its operation: Defending the rights of individuals against those who would violate them, whether foreign or domestic.
The US government, strangely enough, was founded on philosophical grounds...but, sadly for glibertarians, not those philosophical grounds. It was founded on the idea that, when a government does not meet certain requirements, when certain rights are not upheld, said government can, and should, be removed and replaced by a government that does...
You can argue that a government should not provide the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a paper hat every Tuesday, that providing the last is unwise or even immoral, and you can even make that argument on philosophical grounds based on what you think a government should be.
But you have to actually make that argument, you can't just tritely say it and imagine that it's magically correct.
Forget us going other places...roboticly mining this solar system would kept us from fucking up the earth, and not have to go anywhere at all.
Any form of society that does not have a functioning government is anarchy, by definition. (Or a functioning 'leadership' of some sort, even if not backed by force.)
Anarchy does not 'deteriorate' into rule by strongmen, rule by (competing) strongman is form of anarchy. (Rule by just one strongman who has a monopoly on force is, of course, 'a government'.)
You can't just define anarchy to be 'near-magical cooperative anarchy'.
The reason that Amtrak has such low ridership is a few things, all things where it should have the advantages over air, but we've managed to break it:
Amtrak has to inexplicably wait for freight to get out of the way, resulting in random delays. Freight often has priority thanks to idiotic railway agreements. With planes, passenger planes have priority, and there actually isn't that much air freight.
They've managed to turn it into airport style security and hassle, resulting in you having to get there early. The entire point of train travel is that you didn't have to do that, and hence you could actually get places faster than a plane. Can't anymore. As you cannot hijack a train, and if you wanted to blow one up, blowing up a packed subway car in the middle of the city would make a hell of a lot more sense than blowing up a half empty train in the middle of nowhere.
As these two problems are so stupid, I am forced to conclude that they are almost certainly deliberate attempts to break passenger rail. Laws could trivially fix them and cause no problems whatsoever.
And there are a few infrastructure problems that would be more work to fix:
They refuse to build the system in any sane way, requiring people to get into a town to get on the train. For example, if I want to get on Amtrak, I have to go to downtown Atlanta. Trains need to end in large cities, but you need to be able to enter the system on the outsides of said cities, so you don't have to deal with the fucking traffic of the town you're trying to leave.Yet again, another thing that should be an advantage of rail, totally ignored.
Sane setups would pick up additional car as they leave a town or assemble trains out of cars from suburbs, but heaven forbid Amtrak be designed with any sort of sanity.
Likewise, at least here, getting from the subway to the train is not as easy as you'd think. A sane system would have the two trains pull up parallel to each other, and you just walk across. Perhaps you could even purchase train tickets on the subway, or at least once you get across.
Here, you lug your bags up to a whole nother floor, stand in line to buy tickets, go through a security screening (Which I already mentioned is nonsensical.), file into the train as they check said ticket, and then take a seat. Instead of a 60 second process, it's at least ten minutes. (Granted, it'd be a while anyway, as you'd have to wait for the train schedule, but ten minutes gets added to each trip, on average. And running around trying to buy tickets is much more annoying than just sitting on the train.)
Buying tickets probably deserves a special mention. For some reason, we've gotten rid of the tried and true method of handing tickets, which was that you could buy your ticket on the train, usually before it got underway, but occasionally people would make it on without tickets and couldn't or wouldn't pay, and hence got ejected at the next stop. It was actually less work than getting on the subway. You just walk on, sit down, and a guy would come around and ask to see your ticket. You didn't have it, you paid cash then and there, or got off the train. It was a perfectly workable and reasonable system, and even better now that everyone has credit cards and can actually pay $70 randomly.
But suddenly, gasp, terrorism was all over the place, and now we have to fucking ID check and security screen everyone because they might decided to blow up a train by riding on it. (As opposed to, you know, driving a car into a passing train at a crossing. That would just make too much sense.)
It's honestly amazing how libertarians will somehow make the shortsightedness of businesses into a government problem, like there's some magical special tax on R&D or something, and that companies would happily have less profit if it wasn't for big bad government taxes.
This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever, and in fact a lot of R&D is because of the tax structure which rewards companies 'wasting' money on stuff like that, (Because only profits are taxed, so if they can turn some profit into 'research' spending, it is taxed less.) but in a libertarian's head, everything is the government's fault.
The reason companies are shortsighted is that the stock market has become a roulette where the entire point of companies is to raise the stock prices. The point is no longer to make a profit, or invest long term, it is to simply for the CEO to cause the stock to go up, cash in his bonus, and run for the door.
The reason only start-ups can develop new tech is they do it before they go public, before a board of directors that only cares about their stock price goes out and hires a CEO that only cares about the stock price.
All this could be fixed with a trivial government regulation, namely, requiring everyone to hold on to purchased stock for six months or so. Make it where stockholders make 95% of their money by dividends, and you'll suddenly see companies thinking about profits, and companies that think about profits think long-term.
Oh, and incidentally, all this 'making money reselling stock' is because of tax laws deliberately structured to tax it less, aka, capital gains tax. The system is deliberately set up to turn our corporations into a fucking price-jumping gambling short-term nonsense, with the price of stock entirely disconnected from reality, instead of simply rewarding people who own pieces of money-making corporations with a percentage of that money, which would be the sane way to operate an economy, and the entire damn original point of stocks.
You mean the private airlines that can't keep themselves afloat without government handouts?
Yeah, no dumb decisions in the airline industry.
The way to stop malaria is to remove malaria from humans and mosquitoes, period.
Spreading a house with DDT doesn't solve the problem.
The only way to stop malaria is to kill all infected mosquitoes (Which is essentially all mosquitoes in certain areas.) and treat infected people. (You could kill them too, but we frown on that.)
If all you do is stop mosquitoes from biting people, they will happily go off and attack other animals for a few years, passing malaria on to each new mosquito generation, and when you stop stopping them, they're back.
DDT was used to wipe out entire populations at once, massively, and it worked very well. Unfortunately, it's incredibly bad to use in this way.
You can argue that we should use DDT instead of, say, mosquito netting, and considering it kills the mosquito, that seems like a reasonable solution, but the problem with both of those is that it's not any sort of actual solution, just a way to stop a single person from being infected. (Or, do what the article you linked to say, and put insecticide on the nets.)
To actually stop malaria, entire breeding grounds of mosquitoes have to be wiped out. Not permanently, the mosquitoes can come back...it's just all the infected ones have to be killed. And you have to be quick about catching the disease in humans, as biting an infected human is the major way mosquitoes get it. (They get it from an infected mother, also, but without humans, it wouldn't really spread any.)
Hauling in 200 of these boxes to a breeding ground, leaving them up for a week, and then hauling them over to the next breeding ground might actually work.
Those aren't the same thing at all. Murder is not a form of death. Murder is an intent. People do not die of 'murder'.
And, yes, we should treat people who have died by violence (committed by someone else, aka murder) or have died by poisoning (committed by someone else, aka murder) the same as someone who dies by natural causes.
Namely, we should bury their body, and execute their will, notify various government agencies, etc, etc.
I don't know what point you're trying to make, but, yes, we do, in fact, treat the dead the same way, no matter if they were killed on purpose.
Likewise, if you can't install a game because you have no installation source, be that a lack of CD or a lack of a server, you can't install the game, period. If you already have it installed but can't run the game because you can't put in the CD it wants, or connect to the server it wants, you can't run the game, period.
They are exactly the same results. Lack of installing and/or running the game.
Well, I can sorta see their point in saying 'You have to give us the permissions of the least restrictive IP you have'.
But it's actually still dumb. The only IPs in my firewalls (Besides the mail server which has temp blocks for spammers) are the IPs of my other servers, so I can restrict specific things to them.
The only two that I can think of are access to the mysql port (So other servers can use a database), and access to a special mail submission port without any other security on it. (So my web servers can easily send email. I used to this via postfix checking IPs, and then I figured, why even let the wrong IP connect?)
Granted, there is a possible security issue there, but these protected services are either still password protected, like the mysql one, or not actually huge risks, like the mail server. (I wouldn't want to be spewing spam, but it's hardly going to result in someone stealing customer CC numbers.)
I firewall those simply because I don't think it's good to expose unneeded services to the internet, but they're hardly insecure.
But if I were in charge of security, and I had, for some reason or another, needed to run an vulnerable service and protect it behind a firewall except for a few IPs, I don't think that's a particularly large problem. Need to make sure everyone who can mess with the firewall knows that port must always be firewalled, but that's about it.
I wonder how they deal with Windows machines, which essentially always have insecure ports, and just have a firewall in front of them.
Civil suits are to collect damages doe to you.
Criminal trials are about crimes against the state. All of them, even ones with 'victims', are crimes against the state. That's why the state is the one in court, and it's 'Defendant vs. The State of Virginia' or whatever.
Bribing a witness to not testify as to what they saw related to a crime of assault is witness tampering, even if said witness is the person who was assaulted.
I honestly don't understand how that often is allowed.
I don't understand why that isn't 'conspiracy after the fact'.
If I walk up to someone and say 'I saw you jaywalk, pay me $5 or I'll turn you in', that's just flat out illegal.
If someone steals from me, and I do the same, somehow it's legal?
See, what people have apparently forgotten is that criminal acts are not crimes against the victim. If the victim wants recomps, they can sue. Criminal acts are crimes against the state.
Yes, the state doesn't like forcing victims to testify, and thus often people a chance to 'drop the charges' if they don't, but they don't have to do that, they can just go ahead and prosecute. (In fact, they often prosecute against the will of the victim in cases of spousal abuse, although the victim usually can't be made to testify there anyway.)
If I were a witness to a crime, and I asked for money from the suspect in return for not testifying, I would, quite rightly, be charged with conspiracy after the fact, and I'd be jailed for contempt of court until I did testify. If I was charged with a crime, and attempted to pay a witness to keep them from testifying, I would be committing conspiracy after the fact and witness tampering.
Yet, somehow, change 'witness' to 'victim' and that's all legal, despite the fact that, in a court, 'victims' really are just unique witnesses. Crimes are not against victims, they are against the state. We realize it's hard to prove cases without the testimony of the victim-witness, and the victim-witness is often fairly fragile, so we often drop a case if they don't want to 'file charges', aka, to testify...but I'll be damned to see how it's legal to bribe them. There are fucking 'witness bribery' contracts out there filed in lawyer's offices.
Now, of course, there's no way to fully stop this, but that doesn't mean it should be legal.
Right. It's only criminal charges that can get decided in your absence. Civil suits, no so much.
If someone bringing a suit can't locate someone to serve them, they can hardly locate them to collect any money they have to pay. The courts frown on you just wasting the court's time with a meaningless suit.
This obviously applies to cases where the defendant is known at the start. If they are not, the court might let a 'vs. Doe' lawsuit proceed until they are identified. But if identified people cannot be located to be served, the court is essentially going to say 'You have to find them first, because this entire thing is pointless otherwise'.
However, you can't magically avoid this simply be refusing to confirm who you are to the messenger and rejecting certified mail. Having an impartial witness confirm he gave it to you is nice, but there are a lot of other ways in which you can be presumed to have been notified.
Now, a judge might let a case happen without one party if some property, which is in a known location, is being argued over. The big example, foreclosures, have specific laws about that (And notification happens via notices posted on front doors, not having to track people down.), but there are other cases.
For example, if I paid for someone else to purchase something for me, but I vanished and they were left holding it for a month, and that was costing them money, they can file suit to have it decided that they should sell my property to cover the costs they already expended in holding it, because they are unable to locate me. As the grounds of the case are 'They can't locate me', it's entirely reasonable that, for the case, they aren't able to notify me...but they don't need me to do what they're asking the court to do, unlike cases where the person filing suit is asking for money.
Not that I mind that much, but who came up with making copies being "not theft" and "not criminal"? I'd like to ask them what the hell is the difference in me stealing a CD from a music store and me "making unauthorised copies" of a friends CD?
Because theft means, and has always meant through history, 'unlawfully removing ownership of property from someone who already owns it'. (Ownership being the right and ability to use property for your own purposes. It is the ultimate 'control' of property, as opposed to possession, which is just who controls it at any one time.)
Theft is not just 'taking', in fact. That's just one form of theft, 'theft by taking'.
You also have 'theft by conversion', where you turn the property of someone else into a different form, such as building a desk out of someone else's lumber, and not attempting to take the desk. Still theft.
And some places have 'theft by destruction' or 'theft by vandalism', which is when you just entirely or mostly destroy something of someone else.
And there's 'theft by fraud', where you mislead someone who is in legal possession of property, or the owner of property, into 'transferring ownership' to you under certain false pretenses. For example, using counterfeit money to buy things. (Which is illegal by itself, but it's also theft by fraud.)
And there's 'theft by misappropriation', where you are in legal possession of property you don't own, but attempt to do something that only the owner can do, such as sell it. Just because you have been been granted the right and ability to use property, aka 'loaned property', by the owner doesn't mean you can do anything with it.
Please note I said 'the owner'. Theft by misappropriation is taking the ability of the owner to control his property. The owner of a CD is not able to copy it, nor have you removed those rights if you copy it, and, as you're doing it with the owner of a CD's permission anyway, it would hardly matter.
Not all places distinguish in exactly these ways, and not all of them call all the offenses 'theft', but the common thread holding together the various forms of theft is: At some point, someone owned something, and the thief changed things by removing it from their control.
As making copies doesn't remove control of anything from the owner of the CD without their consent, it cannot be theft. (Even making copies without their consent isn't actually theft, and probably legal if you can do it without breaking some other law. It's like sitting on lawn furniture in someone's front yard without damaging it, but without permission. You are not intending to deprive anyone of anything. You are using someone else's property without permission, but that is not ipso facto illegal if it doesn't deprive them. Whether or not you're trespassing is another matter.)
Now you could steal in a copyright itself, if you filed various legal papers falsely transferring it to you. That would probably be 'theft by fraud', which is often just covered under fraud statues.
Theft is, technically, speaking, referred to as 'permanently depriving' someone of a thing, although I hate to use that word because people get into a stupid mode when they insist companies have been deprived of 'profits'. Unless you're stating that profits have been stolen, profits haven't been deprived by theft. Stealing my car is theft because it deprived me of my car, not because it deprived me of a way to work. I have never owned 'a way to work', and, likewise, I have never owned hypothetical future profits, and can be deprived by theft of neither.
Of course, if a civil suits happens, those might be unlawful damages to me that I can get compensation for, but damages != theft, especially since damages aren't automatically illegal. (For example, you can spread true, but damaging, facts about me.)
Also, murder isn't theft? Does that mean I can steal your life?
Hey, dumbass, not all crimes are 'theft'. Using someone's social security number is not 'theft', it is fraud.
Mostly correct, with a few added points:
And, if they do go up in smoke, how likely do you think it is that they will figure out some way to allow people to continue playing their games?
If they don't figure out some way, how likely is it that the game publishers might step in and help with the problem?
I mean, that's pretty bad PR for them, too. I could see publishers who used Steam asking Steam, as it collapsed, for a list of their customers, and offering them free, or at least cheap, CDs to order online. (Actually, they probably already have that list, as most games on Steam also get you to register the product key with the publisher, and I suspect the publisher knows what product keys Steam is distributing.)
Of course, all this is moot. Steam is too successful. There's no way in hell it's going anywhere. This is idiotic talk from 2005. Valve might fail, but Steam is going to continue.
And, on the other side: How much is the added convenience worth? Never deal with swapping DVDs, never deal with install programs, never deal with updates. Buy stuff and it's just there and working. (I mean, I live an hour from the nearest Frys, and until they opened, the only place to buy games was tiny GameStops, which have almost no PC games.)
Even if it is slightly 'more likely' to lose a game, however the hell you can figure the math on that, isn't it worth it for the convenience? I mean, last month I wanted to play NWN2. But the DVD was all the way in my 'original CD' case, which I carefully keep on a shelf, and would have to go and get. I've very careful and I don't break or scratch or damage in any way original DVDs...and hence, um, none of them are actually out where I can get to them easy.
Someone who was murdered, and someone who are dead from natural causes, do in fact have the same functionality. If you are depending on that person being alive, you're screwed no matter how he died. Um, duh.
And saying 'in your control' is the deciding factor is idiotic.
Car accidents are 'within your control' (Well, not really, someone could just randomly hit you, but, then again, your house could randomly catch on fire and burn your DVDs.), whereas airplane accidents are not within your control, but that doesn't magically make driving in a car safer. It is not.
Being unable to install something because you can't download it or don't have a physical copy of it is the strangest definition of 'DRM' I've ever heard. By that logic, everything has DRM on it. 'I can't play my White Album vinyl because I snapped it in half. Damn DRM!'
Being unable to download and install a game from Steam because Steam is dead is exactly the same as being unable to install a game because your DVD copy is broken. In both cases, you either have to buy a new copy on DVD, or you will have to find a pirate version, download it, and use your old product key.
Granted, 'DVD is broken' is something you have more control over than 'Steam is dead', but the result is the same, and it's not 'removed functionality'.
Indeed.
Hey, asshats, we gave you copyright protection for a reason, and it wasn't to help you. It was to help society.
You've stopped helping society? But you bought all the lawmakers so we can't change the copyright laws?
Bite me.
Copyright laws have long since stopped reflecting the will of the people. Laws are supposed to be a social contract we all agree to, but no one in his right mind would, for example, agree to retroactive copyright extension to encourage long-dead people to produce more stuff. Copyright laws have managed to work themselves outside said social contact, and hence, morally, you can do whatever the fuck you want WRT them.
You want society to abide by the laws, they have to, at least vaguely, match what society actually thinks should be legal. Period. That's how laws work. It's not 'society has to do whatever laws corporations can buy'. Copyright law has long falling out of matching what society wants, long enough to actually have people grow up with mismatched laws, resulting in no respect whatsoever of them.
Sucks for the numerous content creators who didn't have anything to do with this brokenness, but they should, by this point, know what world they live in.
That said, game manufacturers aren't Disney, and aren't trying to rip off the entire system. They really do need to get paid for their games.
But that doesn't mean it's moral for them to sell people games that will crap all over user's systems and/or not function and not give a refund. Even if the law says they can, because copyright law is not a reflection of what laws society actually wants.
Really? You think Steam is worse than those DRM schemes that totally fuck up your CD and often block access to games you own?
Steam is the best DRM setup out there. Now, you can rightly argue we shouldn't have any DRM, but 'Check online for permission to run' is a hell of a lot better than 'Fuck around with hardware drivers and require users to have physical CDs'.
I just bought my first Steam game, ME2, and I'm rather pleased with it. I might be annoyed if I needed to run it when I wasn't online, although I did see some mention of an 'offline' option...I assume I can run offline for a bit if my net connection is down, but it has to check in eventually?
Steam is really the sane way to do DRM: Simply check every once in a while that the product key is correct over the internet.
I seriously doubt that the majority of people pirating games go out and buy it as an act of good will.
What are you, a moron? No one even suggested that.
However, there is a large group of people who buy the game and then download a no-cd crack because they aren't putting up with that crap.
Have you ever seen a bridge in ME2?
Uh...yes?
The citadel is very simplified, OTOH, that's because it's not really your 'base' anymore. You don't have to keep reporting back there, and you don't get stranded there for the first quarter of the game. In fact, I'm not entirely certain you have to visit it at all, although you really should to get your 'dead' status straightened out and back in contact with the council.
The problem I had with the first game is you had this huge citadel, with all sorts of things on it, which was nice...and then you had nowhere else. Seriously, no planet seemed to actually have, you know, a mall in their spaceport. Or even a duty-free shop.
For some, like dirt-poor colonies, this was justified, but there was a damn free trade human planet...without any shops on it. (Well, one smuggler-ish street vender.)
ME2, while making the citadel 'smaller', or at least, less accessible, makes up for it by having other places that actually seemed to be communities of people, not just mission entrance points. Like Omega and Illium.
Strangely enough, it does this as it also requires you to buy a lot less, hence most vendors end up having almost no inventory.
Did Garrus or Tali actually ever do anything? I can't remember any scenes that involved them as important characters.
Garrus hated Saren, and Tali's people just hate the Geth in general.
My complaint is that if you're going to give the player the ability to make choices, they should both be hard to make and have significant impacts on the story. Choices that are obviously good or evil are bad because you're really just choosing whether you want to be nice or to be an ass; also, knowing that the game will give you rewards either way lessens the impact of picking one over the other.
Yes, in Mass Effect 1, the choices didn't really do anything...however, in 2, I've run across a lot of things that would be different if I'd done ME1 differently.
And as someone who's played ME1 both ways, there's actually a lot of places where you can skip areas by choosing the 'renegade' option, which, as I pointed out, isn't really bad, it is more 'chaotic'. The two choices are 'good plus slightly lawful', vs 'chaotic plus slightly evil', it is not a 'good vs evil' axis. You can't actually play as outright evil. All you can do is play as a person who's willing to let innocents die, cold-bloodedly kill people, and ignore rules in an attempt to save the galaxy, a 'Dirty Harry'-type character.
Which, frankly, works a lot better than most RPGs, where you nonsensically 'evilly' risk your life to save everyone. Yeah, it's justified that if the world goes, so go you, but that's a rather thin justification...you still should be last in line to help. In ME, you can throw your weight around, intimidate people, shoot them if they don't help, or you can pause and help everyone you come across, and turn people over to the authorities, and generally be nice, but you're a good guy either way. (Although juries probably wouldn't see it that way.)
The standard paragon choice is often slightly more annoying, as you often end up agreeing to help more. I can't count the times, paragon-wise, I agreed not to do something that would make the entire mission much simpler. I mentioned one above, with the 'plant possessed' people. Getting back into the camp is a bitch if you're playing as a paragon, you have to carefully traq each person...and if you're a renegade, you can just blow them the hell away, they're really defenseless and bad fighters. Likewise, you end up in at least two hostage standoffs...with hostages you don't actually know. You can spend time and effort trying to save them...or, you know, not.
Of course, once you've gained points in paragon, you can use the additional choices to skip things, too, but that's no different than points in 'charm' or whatever. (And renegade is points in intimidate.) That's standard RPG game mechanics. But the baseline paragon option is often harder than the 'neutral' option, which itself is often harder than renegade.
That's what I didn't like about Mass Effect -- all of the choices are very obvious about which one is "nice" and which one is "mean," and the outcome is almost always exactly what you'd expect.
That's actually changed a bit in ME2. I already let one cowering person, who claim they hadn't really understood what was going on when they joined a gang and hadn't killed anyone, go during my attack on a group who'd murdered someone...only five minutes later, to find logs indicating that she was, in fact, specifically the killer.
Likewise, at least one 'good decision' I made in ME1 has backfired. Although it's hard to tell what the outcome of the other would have been.
Given that BioWare always structures the plots of their games in the same way, that made it pretty obvious that you were going to accomplish the next four objectives in any order and then have a showdown with Saren.
Well, yes. That's about the only way to do 'wide open' RPGs. You make everything funnel. Give people multiple choices, and when they finish they all, give them a new objective, or a new set of them.