My PC still drives way more pixels and looks way more pretty than any console currently on the market. What's more, I use a mouse and keyboard for most games, (I can't stand shooters, strategy games, and games with heavy inventory management on consoles or menu navigation on controller, not when the mouse with clickwheel exists), and if I want to play a flight sim or something, I can hook up a joystick and throttle, or wheel and pedals, or whatever. What's more, it plays DVDs, and HD video, and even all of the videos that I have ripped and put on my fileserver. And I can save things, and install mods, and I don't have to walk into the other room and boot up a different device, which means I can do all of this more casually and easily, from the comfort of my desk. What does a console offer me?
Not that I object to consoles, I like the Wii a lot, and I'm thinking of grabbing a used PS3 so I can put Ubuntu on it, and use it as a media center. I just don't get how console gaming is any more superior to PC gaming than boardgames are. Console gaming is similar to PC gaming, because they both involve videogames, but the closer a console is to a PC, the *less* superior it is in my mind. Consoles should take advantage of their differences (standard hardware, lower system requirements, potential for faster boot times, simpler controls, and so on. The PS3 is so much like a PC that it's attractive to me *as a PC*, but not as a gaming platform.
Steam has its good and bad points...I enjoy the features it offers
For most people, it is a matter of trust.
And so we go directly to the heart of the DRM problem. When consumers complain about DRM, they are complaining about three things:
Lack of trust in purchase - (A lack of trust that they will own what they have purchased, and that they will not lose access to it through negligence, malice, or a critical existence failure on the part of the seller)
Lack of trust in software - (The belief that the DRM software itself will behave in a manner that is annoying, impact game or system performance, block legitimate access for dubious reasons, or worse, install something like a rootkit, causing more permanent damage to the OS or even the hardware, whether or not such a thing is *actually* possible)
Lack of comparable advantage - (The failure of the legitimately purchased software to be comparable to the pirated software. This is a *huge* problem for some software. If it has annoying intro videos, or the DRM adds several seconds of load time, or the pirated versions offer better performance, or the legitimate version has annoying crap bundled into it all over the place, or the pirated version is necessary to run mods, or you just plain need to break the DRM to back it up, or play without the CD)
Steam addresses enough of these problems for many people. Some other developers are working in similar areas, Stardock's Impulse for example, some developers are simply abandoning the whole DRM idea. Positech, GOG, and more.
Valve's Steam is also trying to capitalize on the 3rd point in particular, by offering an easy way to integrate updating, and even mods. Some people don't like it, which I certainly understand, since forced updates can and often do break third party content, but I can't deny that it's also way easier than trying to find a patch that's often not even hosted by the company that made the game, and is instead only available from some annoying third party hosting company that requires registration, or having to worry about applying three different patches in the right order to get from the retail version to the current version.
12. If a gamer owns a copy of a game for 1 platform they shall be able to legally undertake whatever measures they feel are appropriate to format shift their existing copy.
If I own Indiana Jones 4 on HD DVD, and I want to own it on DVD, I can either buy another copy (the argument movie studios love) or I can convert my existing copy. They aren't required to provide me with another copy. Same should go for games. If they want to provide alternate platform options for free, good for them. If they don't, fair use allows you to do whatever you want to the copy you already have.
I hate the word copy here. Let's call it an instance.
When I go to LANs, all the players typically have gig connections between them. Contrast that with even the most expensive and fastest of consumer internet connections, such as 50/20 FIOS.
I've always liked LANing with a couple people in a cabin in upstate NY. Of course, said cabin is over twenty miles from the nearest cell tower, so it would be satellite or dial up over a long distance call. But hey, my copy of Starcraft will work fine, as will Red Alert II, and even Command and Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander. So really, if you like LAN gaming, I guess any RTS that isn't Starcraft II would work for you.
I've never understood this attitude. When Call Of Duty 2 came out, LAN play didn't even require a unique CD key, or disc in the drive. We had ten people installed and playing off of two copies the day it came out. Seven of the eight who were borrowing had purchased the game for the next LAN party a month later. A whole bunch of new people tried it, and most of them went on to buy their own copies. It was almost as if some executive somewhere had thought "If the people who buy it the day it comes out are able to get their friends playing at LAN parties, those friends are more likely to buy copies when they go home." Best. Viral. Marketing. Ever.
Now if, say, 700 thousand sex offenders registers all the personal addresses of all the family members of all the congresscritters who supported said law... that might be far more hilarious.
Nailing people who stray over the line has been the MO for years now. Zero tolerance for violence, zero tolerance for drugs, zero tolerance for weapons, no fly lists, the list goes on. Why? Fear. The more screwed you are if you cross the line, the more afraid you are supposed to be of getting near the line. Fear of government -> power in the hands of government. Fear has been the only source of governmental power, in one form or another, for decades. Fear of Russia, Fear of AIDS, Fear of Drugs, Fear of Strangers, Fear of Foreigners, Fear of Terrorists, Fear of Sex Offenders, it's all the same. The government feeds of your fear, drawing power from it. You want it to stop? Stop being afraid.
I know how you feel. I'm still using a T42 for my main laptop, the one area it falls down on is gaming. That said, I recently went from a similar era laptop to a new core2 duo at work, and it's saved me more than an hour a day of waiting for stuff to load, because I can leave more apps open without stuff swapping to disk. But basically, you are correct. Hardware is slowly getting a longer life cycle, as the average end user sees less and less need for more computing power.
I could believe that, but I also wonder about the other side: the people for whom the game didn't work, so they just gave up. Never knew it was DRM, (and after all, product support won't tell you), so they just gave up and didn't buy next time around. I have no difficulty believing that those people could account for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of lost sales *per game* for some games. At the end of the day, there's no way of really knowing whether there's a 'silent majority' or not, because they're silent. The vocal ones have an axe to grind, they know what it is. I have an axe to grind, hell, I've been complaining about DRM, returning games, and otherwise trying to make myself heard since I realized I had to take the manual from my mother's house to my father's house if I wanted to play my new copy of X-Wing at both. That puts me squarely within the 0.2%. But the only reason EA cares about DRM is lost sales. That means that they only see the people who boycott because of DRM. Let's imagine that the breakdown is as follows:
10% of people have heard of DRM
10% of those know what it is, and why it's bad.
20% of those refuse to buy games with it. (EA's number)
The the other 90% from the first line, and the additional 9% from the second, may *also* not have bought games because of DRM. They just won't know it. All those people who switched to consoles looking for the *just works* experience. EA doesn't care because they also sell console games. Often, they sell the *same* games, and just port them to PC. At the end of the day, EA would make more money for less effort if there were no PC gamers, because piracy is less common on consoles and development effort is lower. The only reason for EA to sell to PC gamers at all is fear that they'll switch to other labels rather than switch platforms.
I've had to reinstall every game I was playing 4 times in the last month, as I've gone from XP32(1) to XP64(2), had stability issues, tried Vista64(3), had stability issues, identified my mobo as the problem, had to replace it, as a result had to reinstall Vista64(4), had stability issues, and am now about to buy a different mainboard which will likely make me install a clean OS again (5), which I may then reinstall in the process of tweaking (6). Most of the people I know who buy games reinstall windows at least once a year *when nothing is wrong*, just to get rid of old versions of drivers, registry cruft, and similar issues. So they must think their games don't have enough replay value to be worth 50$.
As a 25yo, I can tell you that when I was 12, the DRM was much less intrusive, and we still got annoyed, especially about the damn manual lookup things. I returned the first game that required me to keep the CD in the drive as broken.
At the end of the day, though, I do care about DRM. I'm not a huge fan of consoles, and the number of games I buy goes down every year. It's not quality, there have been a whole bunch of really awesome games that I didn't buy because when I did some research, it turned out they had DRM. It's not even just a moral exception, I've been burned by DRM one too many times. These days, if I'm worried about the DRM in a title, I just go buy an older pc game that I liked at LAN parties, or enjoyed the demo of, instead. I waited on Half Life 2 for three years, for them to get the kinks out of Steam.
For kicks, here's a few games I would buy this weekend if there was no DRM on them:
Bioshock
Crysis Warhead
Red Alert 3 (if it was out)
DRM convinced me not to buy Spore as well, though there are other issues with that one. I also haven't bought Kane's Wrath, because I'm not sure what it uses, and I no longer trust EA.
If my math is correct, that's about $250 that DRM has cost EA from *one* gamer. How many dollars has it made them through discouraged pirates?
A fifty pound hammer might be a bit much. I have a thirteen pound greatsword, which is somewhat awkward to wield, however, and your point makes sense, except that it is incredibly easy to simply put the sword up. Hanging it on the backstrap takes about 1 second. Drawing it and striking takes less than half a second. With the sword sheathed, I can do anything I could normally do barehanded, except contort myself into places it could not fit. And for those who fight with swords that are less than six feet long, this becomes even easier.
But I'm also not just talking about casting while in armor with a sword, although that might be the desired end state for some. I'm talking about characters leveling quickly to the peak of power in being a caster, and then expending further experience on becoming a fighter, and then maybe a rouge, and so on. I understand most people on WOW play multiple characters of different classes, why not let one character have a similar experience? If done correctly, (with the peak power level at any one tree is not too far from the start point, and the overlap is balanced, so that the caster has some advantages over a complete newbie as they work up the fighter tree, but not enough to make it excessively easier, skilled players could spend their time working not on trying to combine items correctly to eke out another percent of DPS, but on increasing the versatility of their characters, and gaining access to an ever expanding array of new combinations of abilities. What's more, it then becomes easier for new content to appeal to both experience players and newbies, because new classes provide new opportunities for both new and old characters, and because the power level of players doesn't increase too dramatically, new challenges can be approachable to new converts, and still interesting for seasoned characters.
What if I just work twice as hard? If it requires X work to be an awesome caster, and Y work to be an awesome deliverer of stabbity death, why cannot some enterprising sod who's lived longer have expended X+Y work? Oh, right, character balance.
Here's the thing: people don't want to stop advancing. As a result, the upper limit in all skills are roughly equal, and as a result of that, any work on skillset Y is work lost by skillset X. If games had a greater array of skill options, and a lower cap on individual skills, it would open up whole new kinds of customization options. With some clever game design, one could even design an MMO where characters increase in versatility, rather than power level, after hitting the level cap, thus making the game become more complex and interesting over time, but still balanced for relative noobs.
If someone does this, I *might* even ever try a MMORPG again.
Would you settle for the talent "trees" of Titan Quest? Pick any two trees. Compensates for the tendency of players to choose things that don't complement each other, but still about twice as freeform as 'classes'.
I don't for one minute think they're out to get me. They are at best out to get a chunk of my pocketbook. I don't think that even that is the case, however. They're out to maintain their own positions, or improve them. They do not care about us except insofar as we further or hinder those goals. But the NSA *is* listening to my phone calls, and they *are* confiscating whatever the hell they want, and imprisoning whoever the hell they want, and that's not supposed to happen in America. That was, in fact, the *point* of America.
I still think that the system can work, but the individuals with power in that system need to be held responsible, and that means more than just not re-electing them, it means charging them with crimes, bring out evidence, and punishing them if they are guilty. Up to and including capital punishment, for the crime of High Treason.
This makes me angry. Not just 'vote for a third party' angry, not even just 'rant on a blog' angry, but shoot a congressman angry. I honestly want to shoot the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). I believe that his negligence in the matter of oversight is not merely appalling, but actively treasonous. Line him up in front of a firing squad treasonous. What's more, he's not alone. Even Senator Barack 'Change' Obama voted against the rule of law and for the FISA bill that extended immunity to the big companies that participated in, and allowed this.
I think it's high time we did something. But by something, I don't mean voting for somebody else, that doesn't amount to much. I mean bringing officials, elected and appointed, up in front of tribunals, and making them explain why they have consistently voted to turn this country into a surveillance state to a degree comparable to Communist Russia, or the very same current China that these very same elected officials reprimanded Google and Yahoo for complying with. This is ridiculous. We don't have elected representation any more, we have elected oppression, and it's time we fought back. Really fought back, not just with votes but with riots, and criminal charges. We still, in theory, hang traitors in this country, so why the hell can't we hang the worst enemies our constitution has ever had? Our President, George W. Bush, has been making war on this country, on our constitution, and on our way of life for eight years. His appointed lackeys have been even worse. It's time it stopped.
But when you tag that picture with my name, without my consent, you have taken direct action which could be considered infringing on my privacy if you don't have permission.
There's also the question of whether putting something in a publicly accessible place imposes an obligation that merely taking a picture does not.
Consider: I take a picture. I don't realized it at the time, but you happen to be in the background of that picture. Do I have any obligation to redact you from the picture? Conventional wisdom has always said no.
I blow the picture up, and put in on a billboard. Do I now have any obligation to obscure your face, or obtain your consent? Conventional wisdom is at least divided (though if I'm profiting by it, I often do owe you a share.
When I post the picture online, (especially if there is no password required to view it) it is at least plausible that I have done something similar to making a billboard, in that my copy has gone from personal and private to public.
And when I tag it with your name, I'm now responsible for increasing the ease with which that can be associated with you.
That said, this may be a case where culture change should prevail, and our own attitudes toward privacy should become relaxed. Ultimately, maybe the tendency of things like compromising photos online will force employers to become more accepting of a little wildness in staff, and drive home a division between on the job and off. Maybe contracting will become more common, where people do business under an assumed name so that the company they work for can't hunt down their personal information as easily. Maybe it's a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
My PC still drives way more pixels and looks way more pretty than any console currently on the market. What's more, I use a mouse and keyboard for most games, (I can't stand shooters, strategy games, and games with heavy inventory management on consoles or menu navigation on controller, not when the mouse with clickwheel exists), and if I want to play a flight sim or something, I can hook up a joystick and throttle, or wheel and pedals, or whatever. What's more, it plays DVDs, and HD video, and even all of the videos that I have ripped and put on my fileserver. And I can save things, and install mods, and I don't have to walk into the other room and boot up a different device, which means I can do all of this more casually and easily, from the comfort of my desk. What does a console offer me?
Not that I object to consoles, I like the Wii a lot, and I'm thinking of grabbing a used PS3 so I can put Ubuntu on it, and use it as a media center. I just don't get how console gaming is any more superior to PC gaming than boardgames are. Console gaming is similar to PC gaming, because they both involve videogames, but the closer a console is to a PC, the *less* superior it is in my mind. Consoles should take advantage of their differences (standard hardware, lower system requirements, potential for faster boot times, simpler controls, and so on. The PS3 is so much like a PC that it's attractive to me *as a PC*, but not as a gaming platform.
Steam has its good and bad points...I enjoy the features it offers
For most people, it is a matter of trust.
And so we go directly to the heart of the DRM problem. When consumers complain about DRM, they are complaining about three things:
Lack of trust in purchase - (A lack of trust that they will own what they have purchased, and that they will not lose access to it through negligence, malice, or a critical existence failure on the part of the seller)
Lack of trust in software - (The belief that the DRM software itself will behave in a manner that is annoying, impact game or system performance, block legitimate access for dubious reasons, or worse, install something like a rootkit, causing more permanent damage to the OS or even the hardware, whether or not such a thing is *actually* possible)
Lack of comparable advantage - (The failure of the legitimately purchased software to be comparable to the pirated software. This is a *huge* problem for some software. If it has annoying intro videos, or the DRM adds several seconds of load time, or the pirated versions offer better performance, or the legitimate version has annoying crap bundled into it all over the place, or the pirated version is necessary to run mods, or you just plain need to break the DRM to back it up, or play without the CD)
Steam addresses enough of these problems for many people. Some other developers are working in similar areas, Stardock's Impulse for example, some developers are simply abandoning the whole DRM idea. Positech, GOG, and more.
Valve's Steam is also trying to capitalize on the 3rd point in particular, by offering an easy way to integrate updating, and even mods. Some people don't like it, which I certainly understand, since forced updates can and often do break third party content, but I can't deny that it's also way easier than trying to find a patch that's often not even hosted by the company that made the game, and is instead only available from some annoying third party hosting company that requires registration, or having to worry about applying three different patches in the right order to get from the retail version to the current version.
12. If a gamer owns a copy of a game for 1 platform they shall be able to legally undertake whatever measures they feel are appropriate to format shift their existing copy.
If I own Indiana Jones 4 on HD DVD, and I want to own it on DVD, I can either buy another copy (the argument movie studios love) or I can convert my existing copy. They aren't required to provide me with another copy. Same should go for games. If they want to provide alternate platform options for free, good for them. If they don't, fair use allows you to do whatever you want to the copy you already have.
I hate the word copy here. Let's call it an instance.
Every computer(thinkpad) I own (and two desktops) has a (and an HTPC custom case) Firewire port.
And those users, who "do not play into Apple's plans" are the ones who are annoyed, and I would say rightly so.
It sold me Warcraft, actually, now that I think about it. Starcraft too.
When I go to LANs, all the players typically have gig connections between them. Contrast that with even the most expensive and fastest of consumer internet connections, such as 50/20 FIOS.
I've always liked LANing with a couple people in a cabin in upstate NY. Of course, said cabin is over twenty miles from the nearest cell tower, so it would be satellite or dial up over a long distance call. But hey, my copy of Starcraft will work fine, as will Red Alert II, and even Command and Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander. So really, if you like LAN gaming, I guess any RTS that isn't Starcraft II would work for you.
I've never understood this attitude. When Call Of Duty 2 came out, LAN play didn't even require a unique CD key, or disc in the drive. We had ten people installed and playing off of two copies the day it came out. Seven of the eight who were borrowing had purchased the game for the next LAN party a month later. A whole bunch of new people tried it, and most of them went on to buy their own copies. It was almost as if some executive somewhere had thought "If the people who buy it the day it comes out are able to get their friends playing at LAN parties, those friends are more likely to buy copies when they go home." Best. Viral. Marketing. Ever.
That was actually my favorite part of Red Alert II: More or less every single unit was unstoppable if used in the right manner and combination.
Now if, say, 700 thousand sex offenders registers all the personal addresses of all the family members of all the congresscritters who supported said law... that might be far more hilarious.
Nailing people who stray over the line has been the MO for years now. Zero tolerance for violence, zero tolerance for drugs, zero tolerance for weapons, no fly lists, the list goes on. Why? Fear. The more screwed you are if you cross the line, the more afraid you are supposed to be of getting near the line. Fear of government -> power in the hands of government. Fear has been the only source of governmental power, in one form or another, for decades. Fear of Russia, Fear of AIDS, Fear of Drugs, Fear of Strangers, Fear of Foreigners, Fear of Terrorists, Fear of Sex Offenders, it's all the same. The government feeds of your fear, drawing power from it. You want it to stop? Stop being afraid.
But let me tell you, it would be far more hilarious to register Sarah Palin's yahoo account than to hack it.
I know how you feel. I'm still using a T42 for my main laptop, the one area it falls down on is gaming. That said, I recently went from a similar era laptop to a new core2 duo at work, and it's saved me more than an hour a day of waiting for stuff to load, because I can leave more apps open without stuff swapping to disk. But basically, you are correct. Hardware is slowly getting a longer life cycle, as the average end user sees less and less need for more computing power.
I could believe that, but I also wonder about the other side: the people for whom the game didn't work, so they just gave up. Never knew it was DRM, (and after all, product support won't tell you), so they just gave up and didn't buy next time around. I have no difficulty believing that those people could account for hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of lost sales *per game* for some games. At the end of the day, there's no way of really knowing whether there's a 'silent majority' or not, because they're silent. The vocal ones have an axe to grind, they know what it is. I have an axe to grind, hell, I've been complaining about DRM, returning games, and otherwise trying to make myself heard since I realized I had to take the manual from my mother's house to my father's house if I wanted to play my new copy of X-Wing at both. That puts me squarely within the 0.2%. But the only reason EA cares about DRM is lost sales. That means that they only see the people who boycott because of DRM. Let's imagine that the breakdown is as follows:
10% of people have heard of DRM
10% of those know what it is, and why it's bad.
20% of those refuse to buy games with it. (EA's number)
The the other 90% from the first line, and the additional 9% from the second, may *also* not have bought games because of DRM. They just won't know it. All those people who switched to consoles looking for the *just works* experience. EA doesn't care because they also sell console games. Often, they sell the *same* games, and just port them to PC. At the end of the day, EA would make more money for less effort if there were no PC gamers, because piracy is less common on consoles and development effort is lower. The only reason for EA to sell to PC gamers at all is fear that they'll switch to other labels rather than switch platforms.
I've had to reinstall every game I was playing 4 times in the last month, as I've gone from XP32(1) to XP64(2), had stability issues, tried Vista64(3), had stability issues, identified my mobo as the problem, had to replace it, as a result had to reinstall Vista64(4), had stability issues, and am now about to buy a different mainboard which will likely make me install a clean OS again (5), which I may then reinstall in the process of tweaking (6). Most of the people I know who buy games reinstall windows at least once a year *when nothing is wrong*, just to get rid of old versions of drivers, registry cruft, and similar issues. So they must think their games don't have enough replay value to be worth 50$.
As a 25yo, I can tell you that when I was 12, the DRM was much less intrusive, and we still got annoyed, especially about the damn manual lookup things. I returned the first game that required me to keep the CD in the drive as broken.
At the end of the day, though, I do care about DRM. I'm not a huge fan of consoles, and the number of games I buy goes down every year. It's not quality, there have been a whole bunch of really awesome games that I didn't buy because when I did some research, it turned out they had DRM. It's not even just a moral exception, I've been burned by DRM one too many times. These days, if I'm worried about the DRM in a title, I just go buy an older pc game that I liked at LAN parties, or enjoyed the demo of, instead. I waited on Half Life 2 for three years, for them to get the kinks out of Steam.
For kicks, here's a few games I would buy this weekend if there was no DRM on them:
Bioshock
Crysis Warhead
Red Alert 3 (if it was out)
DRM convinced me not to buy Spore as well, though there are other issues with that one. I also haven't bought Kane's Wrath, because I'm not sure what it uses, and I no longer trust EA.
If my math is correct, that's about $250 that DRM has cost EA from *one* gamer. How many dollars has it made them through discouraged pirates?
A fifty pound hammer might be a bit much. I have a thirteen pound greatsword, which is somewhat awkward to wield, however, and your point makes sense, except that it is incredibly easy to simply put the sword up. Hanging it on the backstrap takes about 1 second. Drawing it and striking takes less than half a second. With the sword sheathed, I can do anything I could normally do barehanded, except contort myself into places it could not fit. And for those who fight with swords that are less than six feet long, this becomes even easier.
But I'm also not just talking about casting while in armor with a sword, although that might be the desired end state for some. I'm talking about characters leveling quickly to the peak of power in being a caster, and then expending further experience on becoming a fighter, and then maybe a rouge, and so on. I understand most people on WOW play multiple characters of different classes, why not let one character have a similar experience? If done correctly, (with the peak power level at any one tree is not too far from the start point, and the overlap is balanced, so that the caster has some advantages over a complete newbie as they work up the fighter tree, but not enough to make it excessively easier, skilled players could spend their time working not on trying to combine items correctly to eke out another percent of DPS, but on increasing the versatility of their characters, and gaining access to an ever expanding array of new combinations of abilities. What's more, it then becomes easier for new content to appeal to both experience players and newbies, because new classes provide new opportunities for both new and old characters, and because the power level of players doesn't increase too dramatically, new challenges can be approachable to new converts, and still interesting for seasoned characters.
What if I just work twice as hard? If it requires X work to be an awesome caster, and Y work to be an awesome deliverer of stabbity death, why cannot some enterprising sod who's lived longer have expended X+Y work? Oh, right, character balance.
Here's the thing: people don't want to stop advancing. As a result, the upper limit in all skills are roughly equal, and as a result of that, any work on skillset Y is work lost by skillset X. If games had a greater array of skill options, and a lower cap on individual skills, it would open up whole new kinds of customization options. With some clever game design, one could even design an MMO where characters increase in versatility, rather than power level, after hitting the level cap, thus making the game become more complex and interesting over time, but still balanced for relative noobs.
If someone does this, I *might* even ever try a MMORPG again.
Would you settle for the talent "trees" of Titan Quest? Pick any two trees. Compensates for the tendency of players to choose things that don't complement each other, but still about twice as freeform as 'classes'.
I don't for one minute think they're out to get me. They are at best out to get a chunk of my pocketbook. I don't think that even that is the case, however. They're out to maintain their own positions, or improve them. They do not care about us except insofar as we further or hinder those goals. But the NSA *is* listening to my phone calls, and they *are* confiscating whatever the hell they want, and imprisoning whoever the hell they want, and that's not supposed to happen in America. That was, in fact, the *point* of America.
I still think that the system can work, but the individuals with power in that system need to be held responsible, and that means more than just not re-electing them, it means charging them with crimes, bring out evidence, and punishing them if they are guilty. Up to and including capital punishment, for the crime of High Treason.
This makes me angry. Not just 'vote for a third party' angry, not even just 'rant on a blog' angry, but shoot a congressman angry. I honestly want to shoot the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). I believe that his negligence in the matter of oversight is not merely appalling, but actively treasonous. Line him up in front of a firing squad treasonous. What's more, he's not alone. Even Senator Barack 'Change' Obama voted against the rule of law and for the FISA bill that extended immunity to the big companies that participated in, and allowed this.
I think it's high time we did something. But by something, I don't mean voting for somebody else, that doesn't amount to much. I mean bringing officials, elected and appointed, up in front of tribunals, and making them explain why they have consistently voted to turn this country into a surveillance state to a degree comparable to Communist Russia, or the very same current China that these very same elected officials reprimanded Google and Yahoo for complying with. This is ridiculous. We don't have elected representation any more, we have elected oppression, and it's time we fought back. Really fought back, not just with votes but with riots, and criminal charges. We still, in theory, hang traitors in this country, so why the hell can't we hang the worst enemies our constitution has ever had? Our President, George W. Bush, has been making war on this country, on our constitution, and on our way of life for eight years. His appointed lackeys have been even worse. It's time it stopped.
But when you tag that picture with my name, without my consent, you have taken direct action which could be considered infringing on my privacy if you don't have permission.
There's also the question of whether putting something in a publicly accessible place imposes an obligation that merely taking a picture does not.
Consider: I take a picture. I don't realized it at the time, but you happen to be in the background of that picture. Do I have any obligation to redact you from the picture? Conventional wisdom has always said no.
I blow the picture up, and put in on a billboard. Do I now have any obligation to obscure your face, or obtain your consent? Conventional wisdom is at least divided (though if I'm profiting by it, I often do owe you a share.
When I post the picture online, (especially if there is no password required to view it) it is at least plausible that I have done something similar to making a billboard, in that my copy has gone from personal and private to public.
And when I tag it with your name, I'm now responsible for increasing the ease with which that can be associated with you.
That said, this may be a case where culture change should prevail, and our own attitudes toward privacy should become relaxed. Ultimately, maybe the tendency of things like compromising photos online will force employers to become more accepting of a little wildness in staff, and drive home a division between on the job and off. Maybe contracting will become more common, where people do business under an assumed name so that the company they work for can't hunt down their personal information as easily. Maybe it's a good thing.
But can you drink and integrate? After all, they say it's hard to derive backwards sober