I think the suggestion was more of the "STOP DROPPING FUCKING NETHERWIND WHEN THERE ISN'T A SINGLE MAGE IN THE GODDAMNED RAID YOU STUPID DRAGON!" variety, and less of the "give everyone all they gear they could want on the first run" variety.
Posting my thoughts on this and the post above it here:
For the Obama song thing, that was probably across the line, unless it was an entirely optional student pushed thing, with no faculty or staff involvement aside from offering resources like the camera. Given the age of the kids (which makes that seem unlikely), I'm hoping there are some lawsuits over it.
As for "flagpole days", so long as it's clear that any faculty or staff involved are not acting on behalf of the school (as in teachers involved in the event do not wield authority derived from the school during the event, as they are not acting as an agent of the school), and the resources used (in this case the space and time-of-day, pretty much) are not something that is inaccessible to student use outside of having a "christian prayer day", I don't see a problem. Now, when some students from another faith or another student organization of some kind ask to use the space during the same time-of-day for the following day (as in placing the same overall concerns for the school -- students gathering in location X outside of class at time Y performing an activity that is not in and of itself illegal) for some other activity (including any other type of religious service) are prevented from doing so for any reason that can't be justified as a safety or legality concern, then we have a problem. (So when the Muslims want the spot next week, Hindu the week after that, Wiccans the week after that, Satanists the week after that, Vodoun the week after that, and so on and so on...)
Frankly, any time any kind of government institution gives way to permitting any kind of religious "thing", it should have to give likewise to any other religious "thing" of the same general class resource-wise. Either that or refuse every group as a matter of policy.
Note that one of my big conditionals there is that noone wielding power as an agent of the school (which is itself an agent of the state) is taking part. If a teacher is present and retains his/her authority for the event (as opposed to being simply a participant wielding no school/state granted authority over the students), then it's become a prayer led by an agent of the school (and thus state), which crosses the line.
As for the Pledge, remove the reference to God. To be honest, I favor a complete reversion to the original Pledge to it's original text, before it was officially changed 4(going from memory, is that count right?) times. "I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.", as it was originally penned by Francis Bellamy.
Recently I've been reading the Dexter series (got into it from the show the first book is roughly analogous to season 1 [with certain important plot changes], after that they mostly diverge [though I have trouble deciding which I prefer]) and the Witcher books (got into those as a result of the game -- the first book "The Last Wish" has a somewhat unusual structure where there's one story going on throughout the book (with chapters named and numbered to reflect that) that is periodically interrupted by completely separate stories that happened in the past, in sort of "flashbacks" (with the chapters named and numbered separately to indicate what's what). The side stories are very much related to either the previous or following chapter of the main plot in some way, as either an explanation of some reference or to establish characterization, or something. There are also a *lot* of references to things that are semi-recognizable as having come out of common fairy tales (hence the quote on the back about every fairy tale having a grain of truth).
If you want to be really technical, most current day sports started out as a kind of stylized practice for either war or hunting. It's not something specifically attached to video games, although the testosterone spike is probably easier to measure with video games, because an awful lot of things cause testosterone to go up to varying degrees, and they're easier to control for in that environment.
I was an early reader too, but that was mostly due to my mothers voice being one of the few things that would soothe me when I got fussy as a baby -- she'd read to me to get me to sleep, and it more or less became habit for the first few years of my life. She started holding the books in front of me when I got slightly bigger, then getting me to read simple stories ("Little Golden Books") along with her, then harder and harder stuff pretty quickly. More or less I learned "reading" at the same time and in the same way most learn to talk. To this day I still think in strings of words, arranged into sentences, lists, and paragraphs -- always had trouble visualizing though, too much time with books and not enough with blocks, I suppose.
Family always favored scifi, fantasy, and mythology content-wise. I remember the first time I read "The Raven". I was in the 3rd grade, and I had only one question about the poem, one name I didn't recognize that sounded in context like I should know who it was. I asked and got a single word answer that explained everything. I asked "Who is Pallas?" and my Mom answered "Athena", which was sufficient.
Right, but the problem is more or less that it gets used improperly far more often than a firearm, and that it's relatively safe for the officer involved to do so. Supposedly the taser is intended to reduce the need to apply lethal force by being used in place of such, so why aren't uses of them investigated as though they are firearm discharges?
As a point, the cop who tasered the guy 28 times would likely not have been punished in any way so long as the guy lived and didn't start a publicly embarrassing lawsuit.
Yes, in a thousand years or so current texts are likely to be more difficult to read for contemporary speakers than text of the day, that is no surprise. Spelling changes and other language changes over time happen though, and don't have the degree of effect you seem to imply. You're quote (from if I had to guess The Canterbury Tales? As an aside, isn't that one of the older pieces of English literature still in existence (as in you reached as far back as you could manage for as extreme an example as you could manage?)). Still yet, I can read most of it just fine, though I had to do doubletakes on a couple of words. Not nearly as incomprehensible as you make it sound, but not as readable as modern text to modern readers.
Minimum wage laws are bad because they cut into profits, so less jobs will be available.
A minimum insurance requirement is bad because it would cut into profits, so less jobs will be available.
All I did was go back another couple of steps in the history of the law forcing companies to compensate their employees a certain way, to a particular one that is well known where I'm from:
Requiring employers to pay in money (whether cash, check, or electronic transfer) rather than allowing them to give compensation in company store credit (good old fashioned coal company scrip is a great example of this) is bad because it cuts into profits (you can't sell basic needs at tremendous profit margins to your employees because the people buying from you literally can't buy from anywhere else), so making companies pay with actual money instead of company scrip will cause less jobs to be available. Clearly we need to abolish that one, as it is bad for precisely the same reason as minimum wage is -- it reduces your profit margins by forcing you to give more compensation to your employees.
The argument though is that police are more apt to discharge a taser than a firearm to begin with. That in situations where it would be deemed bad judgment and possibly a career-killing move to discharge a firearm on someone, the police are much more likely to discharge a taser. If tasers were a replacement for a pistol and treated as such when an incident was reviewed it would be one thing, but they get used in situations where before their advent an officer would not have fired at all.
Clearly you are absolutely and we should remove all restrictions on how corporations treat and compensate their employees. I mean, why should they even be required to pay you in actual money, for example? The old coal towns worked just fine on company scrip, and moving from that system was bad for coal company profits, so it shouldn't have been forced on them, right?
I more or less catalog things in my head by who is allowed to know them. There's public knowledge, friends only stuff, family only stuff (those two may or may not overlap in some situations), only-if-you-were-involved stuff, not-even-if-you-were-involved stuff, and stuff that I blank out of my mind and shove in the "someone else's secret that I shouldn't think about unless I'm talking to them and they reference it" drawer. That last one is kept shut, locked, and blanked from my mind most of the time -- I find it easier to keep secrets if I don't actually remember them most of the time.
If I feel the need to write something secret down, I do so in code. Nothing terribly secure in and of itself, but enough to stop the equivalent of the "sibling reading the diary" problem. Someone who wanted to spend time analyzing the text could crack it pretty easily -- it's mostly a substitution cipher in a nonstandard script with common words having substitutions that are unique (so for example if the letters y, o, and u are rendered as q, w , and e respectively the word "you" may or may not be rendered "qwe" but something else, usually of a different length than the proper word. I also use titles/callsigns/nicknames/euphemisms in place of people's real names. Most of the time the result resembles Nostradamus' quatrains if written in the language of the Voynich manuscript. This is intentional.
I hadn't either -- in fact even when people were making a big deal about Bush and his "free speech zones", I could only find one example of his opponent using them even mentioned (I actually wondered if it was "business as usual" being turned around to vilify Bush). So is this where you claim that the entirety of the press really exists solely to promote the Democrats and only Fox News is unbiased?
What makes you think entities that exist to turn a profit (and thus have an explicit stated motive [corporate charters generally stating that profits = reason to exist, more or less] to deny care whenever possible[the only way to increase profits is to either charge more or pay out less]) are any better?
Personally, I think they should do the following: Set an legal minimum standard for health insurance that all employers are required to provide to all of their employees, without exception (think similar to minimum wage laws). Introduce what is essentially a government run health insurer that meets the requirements and that any employer unwilling or unable to meet the requirement otherwise may use. Also open this insurer up to individual purchase, if possible. Increase payroll/income taxes (one, the other, or both) by an amount sufficient to pay for it. Offer a tax credit that completely covers the increase (as in said persons/groups are paying no extra taxes due to this legislation as said credit covers the full amount exactly) to any employer (and that employers respective employees) that receives private insurance meeting the guidelines instead of the government ran option.
As for ads reducing quality... City of Heroes I think had the right idea for application of in-game advertising, if they'd had more advertisers overall. Basically it's an option that defaults on but can be turned off at will by the users, change takes effect at next zone transition. When it's on, a percentage of the ads/billboards already in the game (it mostly takes place in an urban environment, so these aren't out of place, and were already there before they first enabled the advertising -- areas that wouldn't logically have that kind of thing [the forests in Croatoa (as opposed to the town) or the alternate-dimension shadow shard simply don't]) get their art replaced with an advertisers' image in place of an ad for an in-setting corporation. As in, for example 1 in 3 ads for Portal Corporation (an in-setting company that does inter-dimensional research and is a source of missions for players) might get replaced with an ad for Coke or what have you. They try to make the art blend in to the setting as well, so nothing that really glaringly doesn't fit in. The biggest downside is that they don't have *enough* advertisers, so in many areas it feels like the same 3 people are trying to push sales really, really hard.
My parents did the same thing, and I took to it like a fish to water. By the time I was in kindergarten I was reading the same books my sister was, and she is 6 years older than I am. Always been able to spell pretty well, phonetics filling in gaps where I didn't know the words offhand, but grammar was one of those things that confounded me frequently.
I've also noticed that I seem to think in "words" more than most people I know...I have trouble with visual thinking (like distances and directions all seem to kind of run together) but if the same is in a written description I can do better with it. Still have trouble telling the difference between 14 feet and 20 feet at a glance, unless I have them side by side or something where a comparison is clear. At the same time, I can read 30 pages of specs for something, understand it all and process it well enough to verify if the spec is being followed with minimal referencing to the text, ditto for things like contracts or rulebooks.
That's why it's legal in WV that if you hit it, you can keep it. The so-called roadkill law.
I'm being serious about that though. People think a law stating it is explicitly legal to keep the carcass of an animal you hit with a vehicle sounds strange, but there are so many of the damned critters running around, and enough of them are things that can be considered medium to large game animals that's it's not as crazy as it sounds...it saves the state from having to clean quite as many up when you can strap the deer you just hit to the top of your vehicle, and butcher it when you get home...I personally haven't, but I know some who have. Mostly hunters who have the assorted things necessary to properly butcher one at home anyways.
So, does the "state of your machine" not include being able to validate the software stack on it, and refuse if you dislike any part of what you see?
Let's say Office 2010 requires TPM, as an example. It encrypts the documents using your TPM, requiring remote attestation to get a decryption key, and responding with the key to only your TPM and specific other machines you name running Office 2010 only. It fails to let you open the document if you use any software other than Office 2010 or if you try to open it on any machine other than the creator or those specifically whitelisted. Sounds great for security, right? Next week, MS changes the key server to only divulge the correct key if you are running Office 2011. If you don't upgrade it's not a problem -- you can simply never open an encrypted document made or edited with TPM-enabled Office ever again (because you cannot prove that the state of your machine is "running the most recent version of Office, legally purchased" without MS having you locked in), not until you upgrade to the version that MS has dubbed correct ATM.
If it were something that could not be used for a lot of malicious things along the same lines, there wouldn't be a problem.
"Voluntary" does seem to exist, at the same time though setting a hard line to tell one from the other is probably too difficult. Heck, when I was 17 a friend of one of my nieces (she was 9) apparently had a thing for me. I was Captain Oblivious until one day they (niece and friend) were at my home on my computer while I was sitting on the corner of my bed playing a video game. My niece had to go home, and as they were walking out, her friend said something to the effect of "go on ahead, I forgot something", came back in my room, hopped on my lap straddling me, and started grinding and begging me to do various sexual things to her. I turned her down, which seemed to piss her off, but she wasn't my type, and wouldn't have been likely to be my type if she were older. After that frankly bizarre encounter, I started thinking about the times I'd been around her before that (usually when hanging out with my niece) and realized she'd been trying to drop hints and give signals for a while, and I just completely missed all of it as standard preteen girl banter.
Yes, yes, some people though 4chan was too restrictive and begat 7chan, which some people felt was too restrictive and begat 12chan. Think about what that says about 12chan...if you can't, let be straightforward. There is a line that if you cross, your servers get raided by assorted police forces and you get arrested. Anything that doesn't blatantly cross that line is permissible on 12chan.
The real question is this: Can you name worse than 12chan?
Let's presume that you didn't have a specific dislike for eBooks of all types and forms to begin with ("making reading more complicated"); how would you have phrased his notes, without having each note include a significant portion of the book's text? After all, you can't just reference "Page 100, paragraph 2, sentence 3", as the pagination will be different between different editions, limiting your notes to only applying to one printing of the book (and accordingly making his notes worthless). Unless you intend to suggest he either quote several sentences as part of each note, or else start counting from beginning of chapter (flipping back 5-10 pages to see exactly how many paragraphs in you are in the current chapter every time you need to make a note about something).
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I think the suggestion was more of the "STOP DROPPING FUCKING NETHERWIND WHEN THERE ISN'T A SINGLE MAGE IN THE GODDAMNED RAID YOU STUPID DRAGON!" variety, and less of the "give everyone all they gear they could want on the first run" variety.
Posting my thoughts on this and the post above it here:
For the Obama song thing, that was probably across the line, unless it was an entirely optional student pushed thing, with no faculty or staff involvement aside from offering resources like the camera. Given the age of the kids (which makes that seem unlikely), I'm hoping there are some lawsuits over it.
As for "flagpole days", so long as it's clear that any faculty or staff involved are not acting on behalf of the school (as in teachers involved in the event do not wield authority derived from the school during the event, as they are not acting as an agent of the school), and the resources used (in this case the space and time-of-day, pretty much) are not something that is inaccessible to student use outside of having a "christian prayer day", I don't see a problem. Now, when some students from another faith or another student organization of some kind ask to use the space during the same time-of-day for the following day (as in placing the same overall concerns for the school -- students gathering in location X outside of class at time Y performing an activity that is not in and of itself illegal) for some other activity (including any other type of religious service) are prevented from doing so for any reason that can't be justified as a safety or legality concern, then we have a problem. (So when the Muslims want the spot next week, Hindu the week after that, Wiccans the week after that, Satanists the week after that, Vodoun the week after that, and so on and so on...)
Frankly, any time any kind of government institution gives way to permitting any kind of religious "thing", it should have to give likewise to any other religious "thing" of the same general class resource-wise. Either that or refuse every group as a matter of policy.
Note that one of my big conditionals there is that noone wielding power as an agent of the school (which is itself an agent of the state) is taking part. If a teacher is present and retains his/her authority for the event (as opposed to being simply a participant wielding no school/state granted authority over the students), then it's become a prayer led by an agent of the school (and thus state), which crosses the line.
As for the Pledge, remove the reference to God. To be honest, I favor a complete reversion to the original Pledge to it's original text, before it was officially changed 4(going from memory, is that count right?) times. "I Pledge Allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.", as it was originally penned by Francis Bellamy.
Recently I've been reading the Dexter series (got into it from the show the first book is roughly analogous to season 1 [with certain important plot changes], after that they mostly diverge [though I have trouble deciding which I prefer]) and the Witcher books (got into those as a result of the game -- the first book "The Last Wish" has a somewhat unusual structure where there's one story going on throughout the book (with chapters named and numbered to reflect that) that is periodically interrupted by completely separate stories that happened in the past, in sort of "flashbacks" (with the chapters named and numbered separately to indicate what's what). The side stories are very much related to either the previous or following chapter of the main plot in some way, as either an explanation of some reference or to establish characterization, or something. There are also a *lot* of references to things that are semi-recognizable as having come out of common fairy tales (hence the quote on the back about every fairy tale having a grain of truth).
If you want to be really technical, most current day sports started out as a kind of stylized practice for either war or hunting. It's not something specifically attached to video games, although the testosterone spike is probably easier to measure with video games, because an awful lot of things cause testosterone to go up to varying degrees, and they're easier to control for in that environment.
I was an early reader too, but that was mostly due to my mothers voice being one of the few things that would soothe me when I got fussy as a baby -- she'd read to me to get me to sleep, and it more or less became habit for the first few years of my life. She started holding the books in front of me when I got slightly bigger, then getting me to read simple stories ("Little Golden Books") along with her, then harder and harder stuff pretty quickly. More or less I learned "reading" at the same time and in the same way most learn to talk. To this day I still think in strings of words, arranged into sentences, lists, and paragraphs -- always had trouble visualizing though, too much time with books and not enough with blocks, I suppose.
Family always favored scifi, fantasy, and mythology content-wise. I remember the first time I read "The Raven". I was in the 3rd grade, and I had only one question about the poem, one name I didn't recognize that sounded in context like I should know who it was. I asked and got a single word answer that explained everything. I asked "Who is Pallas?" and my Mom answered "Athena", which was sufficient.
Right, but the problem is more or less that it gets used improperly far more often than a firearm, and that it's relatively safe for the officer involved to do so. Supposedly the taser is intended to reduce the need to apply lethal force by being used in place of such, so why aren't uses of them investigated as though they are firearm discharges?
As a point, the cop who tasered the guy 28 times would likely not have been punished in any way so long as the guy lived and didn't start a publicly embarrassing lawsuit.
Yes, in a thousand years or so current texts are likely to be more difficult to read for contemporary speakers than text of the day, that is no surprise. Spelling changes and other language changes over time happen though, and don't have the degree of effect you seem to imply. You're quote (from if I had to guess The Canterbury Tales? As an aside, isn't that one of the older pieces of English literature still in existence (as in you reached as far back as you could manage for as extreme an example as you could manage?)). Still yet, I can read most of it just fine, though I had to do doubletakes on a couple of words. Not nearly as incomprehensible as you make it sound, but not as readable as modern text to modern readers.
Hey now, don't be hatin' on the blue people. It's not right to harass them for being from Kentucky and being blue...
In case you don't know who I'm referring to, links regarding the blue Fugates and their disorder follow: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyperry3/Blue_Fugates_Troublesome_Creek.html http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1272/is-there-really-a-race-of-blue-people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methemoglobinemia
Hmm, let's see what was actually said:
Minimum wage laws are bad because they cut into profits, so less jobs will be available.
A minimum insurance requirement is bad because it would cut into profits, so less jobs will be available.
All I did was go back another couple of steps in the history of the law forcing companies to compensate their employees a certain way, to a particular one that is well known where I'm from:
Requiring employers to pay in money (whether cash, check, or electronic transfer) rather than allowing them to give compensation in company store credit (good old fashioned coal company scrip is a great example of this) is bad because it cuts into profits (you can't sell basic needs at tremendous profit margins to your employees because the people buying from you literally can't buy from anywhere else), so making companies pay with actual money instead of company scrip will cause less jobs to be available. Clearly we need to abolish that one, as it is bad for precisely the same reason as minimum wage is -- it reduces your profit margins by forcing you to give more compensation to your employees.
The argument though is that police are more apt to discharge a taser than a firearm to begin with. That in situations where it would be deemed bad judgment and possibly a career-killing move to discharge a firearm on someone, the police are much more likely to discharge a taser. If tasers were a replacement for a pistol and treated as such when an incident was reviewed it would be one thing, but they get used in situations where before their advent an officer would not have fired at all.
Clearly you are absolutely and we should remove all restrictions on how corporations treat and compensate their employees. I mean, why should they even be required to pay you in actual money, for example? The old coal towns worked just fine on company scrip, and moving from that system was bad for coal company profits, so it shouldn't have been forced on them, right?
I more or less catalog things in my head by who is allowed to know them. There's public knowledge, friends only stuff, family only stuff (those two may or may not overlap in some situations), only-if-you-were-involved stuff, not-even-if-you-were-involved stuff, and stuff that I blank out of my mind and shove in the "someone else's secret that I shouldn't think about unless I'm talking to them and they reference it" drawer. That last one is kept shut, locked, and blanked from my mind most of the time -- I find it easier to keep secrets if I don't actually remember them most of the time.
If I feel the need to write something secret down, I do so in code. Nothing terribly secure in and of itself, but enough to stop the equivalent of the "sibling reading the diary" problem. Someone who wanted to spend time analyzing the text could crack it pretty easily -- it's mostly a substitution cipher in a nonstandard script with common words having substitutions that are unique (so for example if the letters y, o, and u are rendered as q, w , and e respectively the word "you" may or may not be rendered "qwe" but something else, usually of a different length than the proper word. I also use titles/callsigns/nicknames/euphemisms in place of people's real names. Most of the time the result resembles Nostradamus' quatrains if written in the language of the Voynich manuscript. This is intentional.
I hadn't either -- in fact even when people were making a big deal about Bush and his "free speech zones", I could only find one example of his opponent using them even mentioned (I actually wondered if it was "business as usual" being turned around to vilify Bush). So is this where you claim that the entirety of the press really exists solely to promote the Democrats and only Fox News is unbiased?
Since we're talking about free speech, you left out being caged in a "free speech zone" if you weren't on Bush's side during his campaign.
What makes you think entities that exist to turn a profit (and thus have an explicit stated motive [corporate charters generally stating that profits = reason to exist, more or less] to deny care whenever possible[the only way to increase profits is to either charge more or pay out less]) are any better?
Personally, I think they should do the following: Set an legal minimum standard for health insurance that all employers are required to provide to all of their employees, without exception (think similar to minimum wage laws). Introduce what is essentially a government run health insurer that meets the requirements and that any employer unwilling or unable to meet the requirement otherwise may use. Also open this insurer up to individual purchase, if possible. Increase payroll/income taxes (one, the other, or both) by an amount sufficient to pay for it. Offer a tax credit that completely covers the increase (as in said persons/groups are paying no extra taxes due to this legislation as said credit covers the full amount exactly) to any employer (and that employers respective employees) that receives private insurance meeting the guidelines instead of the government ran option.
As for ads reducing quality... City of Heroes I think had the right idea for application of in-game advertising, if they'd had more advertisers overall. Basically it's an option that defaults on but can be turned off at will by the users, change takes effect at next zone transition. When it's on, a percentage of the ads/billboards already in the game (it mostly takes place in an urban environment, so these aren't out of place, and were already there before they first enabled the advertising -- areas that wouldn't logically have that kind of thing [the forests in Croatoa (as opposed to the town) or the alternate-dimension shadow shard simply don't]) get their art replaced with an advertisers' image in place of an ad for an in-setting corporation. As in, for example 1 in 3 ads for Portal Corporation (an in-setting company that does inter-dimensional research and is a source of missions for players) might get replaced with an ad for Coke or what have you. They try to make the art blend in to the setting as well, so nothing that really glaringly doesn't fit in. The biggest downside is that they don't have *enough* advertisers, so in many areas it feels like the same 3 people are trying to push sales really, really hard.
That depends, is either cute? If both, are they averse to sharing? =p
My parents did the same thing, and I took to it like a fish to water. By the time I was in kindergarten I was reading the same books my sister was, and she is 6 years older than I am. Always been able to spell pretty well, phonetics filling in gaps where I didn't know the words offhand, but grammar was one of those things that confounded me frequently.
I've also noticed that I seem to think in "words" more than most people I know...I have trouble with visual thinking (like distances and directions all seem to kind of run together) but if the same is in a written description I can do better with it. Still have trouble telling the difference between 14 feet and 20 feet at a glance, unless I have them side by side or something where a comparison is clear. At the same time, I can read 30 pages of specs for something, understand it all and process it well enough to verify if the spec is being followed with minimal referencing to the text, ditto for things like contracts or rulebooks.
That's why it's legal in WV that if you hit it, you can keep it. The so-called roadkill law.
I'm being serious about that though. People think a law stating it is explicitly legal to keep the carcass of an animal you hit with a vehicle sounds strange, but there are so many of the damned critters running around, and enough of them are things that can be considered medium to large game animals that's it's not as crazy as it sounds...it saves the state from having to clean quite as many up when you can strap the deer you just hit to the top of your vehicle, and butcher it when you get home...I personally haven't, but I know some who have. Mostly hunters who have the assorted things necessary to properly butcher one at home anyways.
So, does the "state of your machine" not include being able to validate the software stack on it, and refuse if you dislike any part of what you see?
Let's say Office 2010 requires TPM, as an example. It encrypts the documents using your TPM, requiring remote attestation to get a decryption key, and responding with the key to only your TPM and specific other machines you name running Office 2010 only. It fails to let you open the document if you use any software other than Office 2010 or if you try to open it on any machine other than the creator or those specifically whitelisted. Sounds great for security, right? Next week, MS changes the key server to only divulge the correct key if you are running Office 2011. If you don't upgrade it's not a problem -- you can simply never open an encrypted document made or edited with TPM-enabled Office ever again (because you cannot prove that the state of your machine is "running the most recent version of Office, legally purchased" without MS having you locked in), not until you upgrade to the version that MS has dubbed correct ATM.
If it were something that could not be used for a lot of malicious things along the same lines, there wouldn't be a problem.
"Voluntary" does seem to exist, at the same time though setting a hard line to tell one from the other is probably too difficult. Heck, when I was 17 a friend of one of my nieces (she was 9) apparently had a thing for me. I was Captain Oblivious until one day they (niece and friend) were at my home on my computer while I was sitting on the corner of my bed playing a video game. My niece had to go home, and as they were walking out, her friend said something to the effect of "go on ahead, I forgot something", came back in my room, hopped on my lap straddling me, and started grinding and begging me to do various sexual things to her. I turned her down, which seemed to piss her off, but she wasn't my type, and wouldn't have been likely to be my type if she were older. After that frankly bizarre encounter, I started thinking about the times I'd been around her before that (usually when hanging out with my niece) and realized she'd been trying to drop hints and give signals for a while, and I just completely missed all of it as standard preteen girl banter.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Rules_Of_The_Internet
Yes, yes, some people though 4chan was too restrictive and begat 7chan, which some people felt was too restrictive and begat 12chan. Think about what that says about 12chan...if you can't, let be straightforward. There is a line that if you cross, your servers get raided by assorted police forces and you get arrested. Anything that doesn't blatantly cross that line is permissible on 12chan.
The real question is this: Can you name worse than 12chan?
Let's presume that you didn't have a specific dislike for eBooks of all types and forms to begin with ("making reading more complicated"); how would you have phrased his notes, without having each note include a significant portion of the book's text? After all, you can't just reference "Page 100, paragraph 2, sentence 3", as the pagination will be different between different editions, limiting your notes to only applying to one printing of the book (and accordingly making his notes worthless). Unless you intend to suggest he either quote several sentences as part of each note, or else start counting from beginning of chapter (flipping back 5-10 pages to see exactly how many paragraphs in you are in the current chapter every time you need to make a note about something).
I've used that argument before wrt Nessy, but it works less for Bigfoot, mostly because you have much smaller creatures in a much larger area.