It's the voting system. The very nature of our plurality system ("one man, one vote," winner take all) will inevitably lead to a two-party system, because that's the only way to extract meaningful information out of the process. To quote the wikipedia entry on voting method, "[m]ost systems showed some potential advantage over Plurality, in many cases greater than the advantages of Plurality over monarchy."
I mean, you must care about _something_. Social issues, crime & punishment issues, the right to casemod, _something_. It doesn't take that much work to find out what your guy specifically supports; if not, then which of the two (sorry, but let's be realistic) parties pisses you off less?
True, but that's an argument saying that you should be informed, not an argument that you should vote if you're not.
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote, and I don't think anyone would encourage you to go to your polling place and flip a coin to determine each vote. In fact, I suspect that the very same people insisting you go vote would be appalled if you did that.
The people who argue that it's somehow your "duty" to go vote are also full of it. It may be possible - may - to make a case that it is the duty of each citizen to cast a reasoned vote. But it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the duty of every citizen to, again, go to the polling place and flip a coin.
Now, a caveat: I would argue that an uninformed vote is vastly superior to an misinformed vote. So I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low). After all, basically random votes should, ultimately, cancel each other out.
That being said, the comment that you should be happy to let your more-informed neighbors make the decisions really ought to be incentive to become informed, so you don't have to trust what Joe Bloggs thinks of who's in charge.
No, then you know that the machine printed out votes for all the people you voted for.
The only way for you to know that the votes going to the counting device are the ones you selected is for you to get a human-readable copy which you then insert into the counting device. Then, of course, you still don't know that the counting machine is on the up-and-up...
Basically, the vote of record needs to be something human readable and unambiguous, thereby opening the door for verifiable, auditable recounts.
What I'd like to see is an electronic voting machine that prints out two copies of my completed ballot, one for the counting device and one for me. These should each be marked with a hash comprising the timestamp of the vote, the contents of the vote, and the specific machine on which I voted. This hash should be recorded by the counting device and associated with the votes cast, such that I have the option to verify my vote against the vote tallied (which would compromise my voter anonymity, of course, but only at my discretion).
A system like that would be an advantage to electronic voting, since it would be essentially impossible to implement in a pure-paper scheme, and it would provide a level of verifiability that doesn't currently exist.
My FPS playing goes back to Wolf3d, and has made Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Half Life, Thief, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, Descent, Aliens vs. Predator, and who-knows-what other stops, at various version numbers, along the way. If you toss in console FPS, you can start counting Turok, Goldeneye, that Aliens game for the Jaguar, Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters, Metroid: Prime, and maybe a couple more I'm forgetting. Hopefully, this qualifies me to comment on FPS games.
I like Halo.
I had more fun with Halo than I'd had since my first time through HL, or the last time I'd played Quake co-op in dorm room with my roommate. I certainly had more fun with the Halo main story than I did with the Goldeneye main story, though I like Goldeneye's multiplayer more.
Halo 2, not as much, but still a game I enjoy.
I apologize, though, if I'm breaking your compartmentalization/judgement scheme.
Funny how you also don't see stuff about "freedom of expression" or "separation of church and state," either. If you read a bit further down, you might even see something about "shall not be infringed," and you won't see the words "privacy" or "abortion" anywhere. If you're feeling particularly intrepid, you can scan all the way down to the ones that have "IX" and "X" in front of them; those are especially exciting.
And none of that is particularly relevant to the way they've been interpreted over the course of US history. Freedom of expression has been read into the first for a long time, separation of church and state is a legal byword, we believe we have a legal right to privacy, it's illegal for a state to make abortion illegal, and the federal government has effectively imposed speed limits and blood alcohol thresholds for the entire country, despite not being granted that power anywhere in the document.
The point, of course, is that the reality of the modern legal landscape can't be denied just because you don't see a specific reference to a particular aspect (in this case, the intersection of juveniles and free speech rights) in the text.
Now, if you want to argue that you should be able to find a specific reference in the Constitution for everything the fed.gov does, I'll be completely on board with that. But that doesn't mean it's the way things actually are.
Then hide your details on Live. This isn't rocket surgery.
Have you ever heard someone boasting about how they go out and import or buy crappy 360 games just to increase their gamer score?
Then it's a winning business strategy then, isn't it? Makes it sort of self-evident that MS is providing something that people want, doesn't it? Makes it a little silly for a Sony flak to claim that it's something people don't actually want, don't you think?
That is part of the problem but the real basis of the problem is we've settled in to an entrenched two party system. Those two parties have established a complete strangehold on the electoral process and as long as they are both equally bad they get away with it, they can just ping pong power between each other while the country heads in to the dumper.
I agree that the two-party situation we're in is a deep, systemic flaw in our political landscape. It's not, however, fundamental. The fundamental problem is the plurality voting system we've got ("one man, one vote" combined with winner-take-all). This methodology virtually guarantees a two-party system, since that's the only way the votes turn out to be particularly meaningful. As an example, a voting system such that a vote for your favorite candidate is also, effectively, a vote for your least favorite candidate is completely broken. Plurality voting allows for that as soon as more than two parties are involved (consider the '92 and '00 presidential elections).
In fact, the case can be made that plurality voting is just about the worst possible method of determining representatives in accordance with the will of the electorate. Specifically, to quote the wikipedia article, "[m]ost systems showed some potential advantage over Plurality, in many cases greater than the advantages of Plurality over monarchy."
So yes, the two-party system is the problem. But the cause of the two-party system is the very voting scheme we have in place in the US.
If that's what the GP AC meant, then perhaps he shouldn't have said "due to the very existence of power itself," which sure sounds to me like the central tenet of anarchism.
Regardless, your point I agree with, to a certain extent. Specifically, to the extent that our (the US') particular system has flaws that far outweigh the differences between or the flaws among our elected officials (this is based, primarily, on the fundamentally broken "one man, one vote" winner-take-all system. Incidentally, from the "those founding father guys were really pretty smart" dept., the existence of the Electoral College was designed to mitigate this, along with indirect election of Senators. Only one of those is still around, and the other is under attack. One could wish that the math of voting methodologies had been well developed before they drafted the Constitution; we'd be in better shape today).
I do not agree that this is necessarily the case; I am optimistic enough to believe that perhaps a representation/voting system could be designed such that its flaws were trivial in comparison to the flaws of the representatives
News flash: some people are stronger than other people. This is the basis of the existence of power. All efforts at just government are attempts to abstract this power away from simply "I/we can beat you up, so you have to do what we say" into something that provides a higher order than that.
Complaining that it's the very existence of power that's the problem is, quite simply, either tectonically naive or a boring troll. When you can provide a system that eliminates power, then you can make your silly accusations.
Not that I even know why I'm bothering to respond to an anarchist AC.
First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.
If we paid attention to that logic, we'd have 50% fewer laws than we do.
Not that you're wrong, of course, just that passing laws is how the government proves it's Doing Something, irrespective of wheter the law does anything other than screw the innocent.
And I don't think this varies appreciably from government to government.
I'm all for it, except for the name-writing requirement. I've written too much code to trust arbitrary input compared to menu choices. This would result in too many valid, considered ballots being discarded for reasons irrelevant to the election (spelling errors, for example).
Now, providing a menu of all the offices to be filled on one side, and a menu of all the candidates on the other side (with no reference to the office for which each is running, of course)...then we'd be on to something.
It's already been outdated by centralized tools. By pretty much any metric, news is better on the internet than on TV/radio (wider variety of sources to help counteract bias, more details for each item of interest, greater availability of primary sources, greater availability of raw data, greater variety of topics available, etc). But that doesn't mean that it has taken over for traditional media in the general population, because it require more work to go get the information than it does to be told the information.
That's a fight against laziness, and that's a fight that, if it even can be won, won't be won for quite some time.
Really, this is no different than initial utopian claims about how the internet will change everything, bring people together, cause world peace, eliminate hunger, and usher in a new era of universal well being.
More tools are great, and making information easily accessible is a Good Thing. Calling politicians on their sources of funding is always positive, and holding politicians accountable for the things they say and the promises they make is fantastic.
But no matter how available you make the information, it only matters if people care enough to find out. That's the advantage the traditional media have: given US culture, it's a push medium. It brings information to people, rather than wating for people retrieve the information. The implication of an article like this is that the threat to democracy is unavailability of information, which isn't true - or at least, is far from the whole story.
The real threat to democracy is people who don't really care about what's going on in government. People who have voted straight ticket in every election since they were 18 (and are proud of the fact!) are the problem. People who consider themselves members of a Team Republican or Team Democrat are the problem. People who don't know who's on the ballot until they show up to vote are the problem. It's a combination of apathy, cynicism, and misguided loyalty that is the problem.
This "web 2.0" phenomenon that the article discusses is, in a sense, the same as the "get out the vote" initiatives that come out every election cycle. When you come right down to it, if someone's only going to vote because MTV told them to, it's probably someone that shouldn't be voting*. If someone doesn't care enough about the process to know who stands for what and to take the time to go vote without being harangued by some celebrity, then that person should have just stayed home; we might as well roll dice to determine who gets elected.
All the tools that are now available for information disclosure are great tools, and they make the job of a responsible voter easier. But they won't make someone who doesn't care in the first place suddenly care unless the information is forced in front of him - which is exactly the information model that the web doesn't match up to. Helping informed voters become better informed is a great thing, but it's not going to save democracy.
*No, this doesn't mean I would ever advocate any kind of system to "validate" voters. Every citizen gets to vote if he wants to, and anything that begins to change that is abhorrent to the very idea of democracy. Nor would I restrict the right of any person or group to encourage people to vote. But that doesn't change the fact that the people who only vote because the TV told them to are very likely to cast unconsidered votes, which is not an ideal situation. Then, of course, there's the problem that any group pushing people to go vote is, almost certainly, pushing people to go vote the way that group wants them to - and the people being convinced don't even know that they're being pushed to a specific political position, rather than just being encouraged to exercise their franchise.
An overall score doesn't really tell me much, it tells me you've spent a lot of time online, it tells me you spend a lot of time playing games, but it doesn't tell me how good you are at a particular game
But the gamerscore isn't supposed to fill the role of "how good an opponent is someone," it's to fill the role of providing an official metric for the eternal "my dick's bigger than yours" competition that goes on amongst "hardcore" gamers. And that's a competition that's been going on since arcade denizens started sending Polaroids of their high scores in to gaming magazines.
That's all the gamerscore means, and it's not meant to mean anything else. It's bragging rights by the numbers, and I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it doesn't matter because it's not a record of how good someone is at a given game.
So it's not that the deal with Novell, in itself, represents a threat - it's that it indicates MS' intention to follow through on a threat that's always existed. That certainly answers my questions, though in a wholly disheartening fashion.
I think the phrase "a tremendous miscarriage of justice" is, if anything, an understatement of the situation you describe.
I suppose the only question left is whether there's anything an individual can do to help. Would more donations to the EFF be a (small) way to contribute? Is there any point to writing my so-called representatives?
(Thank you, incidentally, for taking the time to educate me on this)
...but the level in HL where you go up the stairs, through a door, and into a warehouse with catwalks, boxes, and, oh yeah, a squad of grenade-throwing marines. IIRC, that was the first pitched battle with marines you had in the game, and the first time I played through it, I could have sworn the marines were really people.
The scripting was great, and you tie that into the final confirmation that, yep, the marines are Not Your Friends...it was fantastic.
Unfortunately, of course, it really doesn't hold up as well in replay value, since the scripting becomes very predictable very quickly. But it's gotta be worth at least an honorable mention.
Then there's E1M1 in good old Doom, which is on the same level as SMB 1-1 for me in terms of knowing where everything is, and being able to run through it with my eyes closed.
Then there's Pokemon City in Super Smash Bros, which was the perfect peak of mayhem for that game.
I'm sure I'll think of more as the evening progresses, too.
But - and maybe I'm just being thick - I still don't see the real threat. I understand, of course, the implicit threat MS is making; I just don't see how they can make it stick if it comes right down to it.
Or is the concern that, if there's even a perceived threat, it will hamper use of OSS in business?
I guess my biggest question is, if MS has the patent portfolio to really threaten OSS in general, and Linux in particular, couldn't they wield that stick already, irrespective of the deal with Novell?
A logical next move for Microsoft could be to crack down on "unlicensed Linux", and "unlicensed Free Software", now that it can tell the courts that there is a Microsoft-licensed path.
But I don't see how they can actually make that work. That is, if MS were to buy a company that makes wheels, I don't think they could go to court subsequently and successfully sue people who are buying non-MS-licensed wheels. Or am I just being naive - does MS have the legal clout to effectively say that as long as they provide a product, no one else can legally provide that product? And if they can do that, what's stopping them from just providing a "Microsoft licensed" version of all the IP that's currently public domain? Is providing an alternative path, even one also owned by Microsoft, enough of a legal fig leaf for them to just, by fiat, decide that everything must be licensed through them to be legal?
(I admit through all of this, of course, that my mind is nowhere near Byzantine enough to comprehend legal maneuverings on this level; it's entirely possible that the only answer to my questions is "you can't understand this without a law degree")
they can stop organizations (for-profit or not) from distributing that software you are using by bringing "patent infringement" suits against them
This may be true (or not, I don't really know), but I don't see how this deal has any impact on the issue. If they've got patents on stuff such that they can claim some GPL'd software infringes their IP, then couldn't they already say that now? What does partnering with Novell get them that they didn't have before?
In essence they own GPL software now and can extract license fees from us at their will and pleasure
If true, you're right, it's cataclysmic. I just don't see how this can be true. If they sell GPL'd software, they're required to distribute the source, and they're not able to prevent you from doing whatever you want with it (provided, of course, that you also provide the source if you distribute derivative software). This, obviously, includes distributing the source to anyone else you want to.
I just don't see how they can lock up GPL'd software without violating the GPL - and if they can do that, then I don't see how they need a deal with Novell to make it happen; they could lock up all the software that's currently GPL'd by distributing it with a license.
Sure, there may be market pressure insofar as some comapnies may elect to pay the MS tax rather than take any chance of future litigation, but some comapnies paid SCO, too, and that hasn't led to the demise of Linux.
You may be right about what the article's saying, so don't take this as me arguing with you - but assuming you are right, I don't see how their case would hold water. Once something's GPL'd, it can't be un-GPL'd. I don't think the Linux community at large would be foolish enough to incorporate Suse tech that wasn't under the GPL, so I don't think MS could make that stick.
And, really, if the Linux community at large did make that mistake, the only people they'd have to blame would be themselves, just like they would if they started incorporating other non-GPL code.
I suppose it's not beyond reason that MS might want to try something like this and hope for the best in the courts, but it seems like really shaky ground, even for them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the voting system. The very nature of our plurality system ("one man, one vote," winner take all) will inevitably lead to a two-party system, because that's the only way to extract meaningful information out of the process. To quote the wikipedia entry on voting method, "[m]ost systems showed some potential advantage over Plurality, in many cases greater than the advantages of Plurality over monarchy."
I mean, you must care about _something_. Social issues, crime & punishment issues, the right to casemod, _something_. It doesn't take that much work to find out what your guy specifically supports; if not, then which of the two (sorry, but let's be realistic) parties pisses you off less?
True, but that's an argument saying that you should be informed, not an argument that you should vote if you're not.
Of course not. An uninformed vote will be insignificantly different from a random vote, and I don't think anyone would encourage you to go to your polling place and flip a coin to determine each vote. In fact, I suspect that the very same people insisting you go vote would be appalled if you did that.
The people who argue that it's somehow your "duty" to go vote are also full of it. It may be possible - may - to make a case that it is the duty of each citizen to cast a reasoned vote. But it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the duty of every citizen to, again, go to the polling place and flip a coin.
Now, a caveat: I would argue that an uninformed vote is vastly superior to an misinformed vote. So I, personally, am happier hearing that people went and just voted according to whim than hearing that people went and voted straight ticket (I find the odds of each candidate at all levels of government for a given party just happening to line up with your opinions on each issue at each level of government to be quite low). After all, basically random votes should, ultimately, cancel each other out.
That being said, the comment that you should be happy to let your more-informed neighbors make the decisions really ought to be incentive to become informed, so you don't have to trust what Joe Bloggs thinks of who's in charge.
No, then you know that the machine printed out votes for all the people you voted for.
The only way for you to know that the votes going to the counting device are the ones you selected is for you to get a human-readable copy which you then insert into the counting device. Then, of course, you still don't know that the counting machine is on the up-and-up...
Basically, the vote of record needs to be something human readable and unambiguous, thereby opening the door for verifiable, auditable recounts.
What I'd like to see is an electronic voting machine that prints out two copies of my completed ballot, one for the counting device and one for me. These should each be marked with a hash comprising the timestamp of the vote, the contents of the vote, and the specific machine on which I voted. This hash should be recorded by the counting device and associated with the votes cast, such that I have the option to verify my vote against the vote tallied (which would compromise my voter anonymity, of course, but only at my discretion).
A system like that would be an advantage to electronic voting, since it would be essentially impossible to implement in a pure-paper scheme, and it would provide a level of verifiability that doesn't currently exist.
My FPS playing goes back to Wolf3d, and has made Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Half Life, Thief, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, CounterStrike, Descent, Aliens vs. Predator, and who-knows-what other stops, at various version numbers, along the way. If you toss in console FPS, you can start counting Turok, Goldeneye, that Aliens game for the Jaguar, Perfect Dark, TimeSplitters, Metroid: Prime, and maybe a couple more I'm forgetting. Hopefully, this qualifies me to comment on FPS games.
I like Halo.
I had more fun with Halo than I'd had since my first time through HL, or the last time I'd played Quake co-op in dorm room with my roommate. I certainly had more fun with the Halo main story than I did with the Goldeneye main story, though I like Goldeneye's multiplayer more.
Halo 2, not as much, but still a game I enjoy.
I apologize, though, if I'm breaking your compartmentalization/judgement scheme.
Funny how you also don't see stuff about "freedom of expression" or "separation of church and state," either. If you read a bit further down, you might even see something about "shall not be infringed," and you won't see the words "privacy" or "abortion" anywhere. If you're feeling particularly intrepid, you can scan all the way down to the ones that have "IX" and "X" in front of them; those are especially exciting.
And none of that is particularly relevant to the way they've been interpreted over the course of US history. Freedom of expression has been read into the first for a long time, separation of church and state is a legal byword, we believe we have a legal right to privacy, it's illegal for a state to make abortion illegal, and the federal government has effectively imposed speed limits and blood alcohol thresholds for the entire country, despite not being granted that power anywhere in the document.
The point, of course, is that the reality of the modern legal landscape can't be denied just because you don't see a specific reference to a particular aspect (in this case, the intersection of juveniles and free speech rights) in the text.
Now, if you want to argue that you should be able to find a specific reference in the Constitution for everything the fed.gov does, I'll be completely on board with that. But that doesn't mean it's the way things actually are.
Same here.
I've been attributing it to living in the leftist echo chamber of Madison, though.
Then hide your details on Live. This isn't rocket surgery.
Have you ever heard someone boasting about how they go out and import or buy crappy 360 games just to increase their gamer score?
Then it's a winning business strategy then, isn't it? Makes it sort of self-evident that MS is providing something that people want, doesn't it? Makes it a little silly for a Sony flak to claim that it's something people don't actually want, don't you think?
That is part of the problem but the real basis of the problem is we've settled in to an entrenched two party system. Those two parties have established a complete strangehold on the electoral process and as long as they are both equally bad they get away with it, they can just ping pong power between each other while the country heads in to the dumper.
I agree that the two-party situation we're in is a deep, systemic flaw in our political landscape. It's not, however, fundamental. The fundamental problem is the plurality voting system we've got ("one man, one vote" combined with winner-take-all). This methodology virtually guarantees a two-party system, since that's the only way the votes turn out to be particularly meaningful. As an example, a voting system such that a vote for your favorite candidate is also, effectively, a vote for your least favorite candidate is completely broken. Plurality voting allows for that as soon as more than two parties are involved (consider the '92 and '00 presidential elections).
In fact, the case can be made that plurality voting is just about the worst possible method of determining representatives in accordance with the will of the electorate. Specifically, to quote the wikipedia article, "[m]ost systems showed some potential advantage over Plurality, in many cases greater than the advantages of Plurality over monarchy."
So yes, the two-party system is the problem. But the cause of the two-party system is the very voting scheme we have in place in the US.
If that's what the GP AC meant, then perhaps he shouldn't have said "due to the very existence of power itself," which sure sounds to me like the central tenet of anarchism.
Regardless, your point I agree with, to a certain extent. Specifically, to the extent that our (the US') particular system has flaws that far outweigh the differences between or the flaws among our elected officials (this is based, primarily, on the fundamentally broken "one man, one vote" winner-take-all system. Incidentally, from the "those founding father guys were really pretty smart" dept., the existence of the Electoral College was designed to mitigate this, along with indirect election of Senators. Only one of those is still around, and the other is under attack. One could wish that the math of voting methodologies had been well developed before they drafted the Constitution; we'd be in better shape today).
I do not agree that this is necessarily the case; I am optimistic enough to believe that perhaps a representation/voting system could be designed such that its flaws were trivial in comparison to the flaws of the representatives
News flash: some people are stronger than other people. This is the basis of the existence of power. All efforts at just government are attempts to abstract this power away from simply "I/we can beat you up, so you have to do what we say" into something that provides a higher order than that.
Complaining that it's the very existence of power that's the problem is, quite simply, either tectonically naive or a boring troll. When you can provide a system that eliminates power, then you can make your silly accusations.
Not that I even know why I'm bothering to respond to an anarchist AC.
Agreed.
I just picked MTV because their "Rock the Vote" campaign is the first thing that leapt to mind.
First off, passing a law that the criminals will disregard is just about useless. They're already criminals. Breaking another law is not going to deter them.
If we paid attention to that logic, we'd have 50% fewer laws than we do.
Not that you're wrong, of course, just that passing laws is how the government proves it's Doing Something, irrespective of wheter the law does anything other than screw the innocent.
And I don't think this varies appreciably from government to government.
I'm all for it, except for the name-writing requirement. I've written too much code to trust arbitrary input compared to menu choices. This would result in too many valid, considered ballots being discarded for reasons irrelevant to the election (spelling errors, for example).
Now, providing a menu of all the offices to be filled on one side, and a menu of all the candidates on the other side (with no reference to the office for which each is running, of course)...then we'd be on to something.
All I got was to keep my kneecaps.
I feel so ripped off.
Gah
"outdated by centralized tools" should be "outdated by decentralized tools."
Nothing like typos that completely invert the intent of what you wrote. Sorry, and all that.
It's already been outdated by centralized tools. By pretty much any metric, news is better on the internet than on TV/radio (wider variety of sources to help counteract bias, more details for each item of interest, greater availability of primary sources, greater availability of raw data, greater variety of topics available, etc). But that doesn't mean that it has taken over for traditional media in the general population, because it require more work to go get the information than it does to be told the information.
That's a fight against laziness, and that's a fight that, if it even can be won, won't be won for quite some time.
Really, this is no different than initial utopian claims about how the internet will change everything, bring people together, cause world peace, eliminate hunger, and usher in a new era of universal well being.
More tools are great, and making information easily accessible is a Good Thing. Calling politicians on their sources of funding is always positive, and holding politicians accountable for the things they say and the promises they make is fantastic.
But no matter how available you make the information, it only matters if people care enough to find out. That's the advantage the traditional media have: given US culture, it's a push medium. It brings information to people, rather than wating for people retrieve the information. The implication of an article like this is that the threat to democracy is unavailability of information, which isn't true - or at least, is far from the whole story.
The real threat to democracy is people who don't really care about what's going on in government. People who have voted straight ticket in every election since they were 18 (and are proud of the fact!) are the problem. People who consider themselves members of a Team Republican or Team Democrat are the problem. People who don't know who's on the ballot until they show up to vote are the problem. It's a combination of apathy, cynicism, and misguided loyalty that is the problem.
This "web 2.0" phenomenon that the article discusses is, in a sense, the same as the "get out the vote" initiatives that come out every election cycle. When you come right down to it, if someone's only going to vote because MTV told them to, it's probably someone that shouldn't be voting*. If someone doesn't care enough about the process to know who stands for what and to take the time to go vote without being harangued by some celebrity, then that person should have just stayed home; we might as well roll dice to determine who gets elected.
All the tools that are now available for information disclosure are great tools, and they make the job of a responsible voter easier. But they won't make someone who doesn't care in the first place suddenly care unless the information is forced in front of him - which is exactly the information model that the web doesn't match up to. Helping informed voters become better informed is a great thing, but it's not going to save democracy.
*No, this doesn't mean I would ever advocate any kind of system to "validate" voters. Every citizen gets to vote if he wants to, and anything that begins to change that is abhorrent to the very idea of democracy. Nor would I restrict the right of any person or group to encourage people to vote. But that doesn't change the fact that the people who only vote because the TV told them to are very likely to cast unconsidered votes, which is not an ideal situation. Then, of course, there's the problem that any group pushing people to go vote is, almost certainly, pushing people to go vote the way that group wants them to - and the people being convinced don't even know that they're being pushed to a specific political position, rather than just being encouraged to exercise their franchise.
An overall score doesn't really tell me much, it tells me you've spent a lot of time online, it tells me you spend a lot of time playing games, but it doesn't tell me how good you are at a particular game
But the gamerscore isn't supposed to fill the role of "how good an opponent is someone," it's to fill the role of providing an official metric for the eternal "my dick's bigger than yours" competition that goes on amongst "hardcore" gamers. And that's a competition that's been going on since arcade denizens started sending Polaroids of their high scores in to gaming magazines.
That's all the gamerscore means, and it's not meant to mean anything else. It's bragging rights by the numbers, and I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that it doesn't matter because it's not a record of how good someone is at a given game.
So it's not that the deal with Novell, in itself, represents a threat - it's that it indicates MS' intention to follow through on a threat that's always existed. That certainly answers my questions, though in a wholly disheartening fashion.
I think the phrase "a tremendous miscarriage of justice" is, if anything, an understatement of the situation you describe.
I suppose the only question left is whether there's anything an individual can do to help. Would more donations to the EFF be a (small) way to contribute? Is there any point to writing my so-called representatives?
(Thank you, incidentally, for taking the time to educate me on this)
...but the level in HL where you go up the stairs, through a door, and into a warehouse with catwalks, boxes, and, oh yeah, a squad of grenade-throwing marines. IIRC, that was the first pitched battle with marines you had in the game, and the first time I played through it, I could have sworn the marines were really people.
The scripting was great, and you tie that into the final confirmation that, yep, the marines are Not Your Friends...it was fantastic.
Unfortunately, of course, it really doesn't hold up as well in replay value, since the scripting becomes very predictable very quickly. But it's gotta be worth at least an honorable mention.
Then there's E1M1 in good old Doom, which is on the same level as SMB 1-1 for me in terms of knowing where everything is, and being able to run through it with my eyes closed.
Then there's Pokemon City in Super Smash Bros, which was the perfect peak of mayhem for that game.
I'm sure I'll think of more as the evening progresses, too.
You're right, your version is far more coherent.
But - and maybe I'm just being thick - I still don't see the real threat. I understand, of course, the implicit threat MS is making; I just don't see how they can make it stick if it comes right down to it.
Or is the concern that, if there's even a perceived threat, it will hamper use of OSS in business?
I guess my biggest question is, if MS has the patent portfolio to really threaten OSS in general, and Linux in particular, couldn't they wield that stick already, irrespective of the deal with Novell?
A logical next move for Microsoft could be to crack down on "unlicensed Linux", and "unlicensed Free Software", now that it can tell the courts that there is a Microsoft-licensed path.
But I don't see how they can actually make that work. That is, if MS were to buy a company that makes wheels, I don't think they could go to court subsequently and successfully sue people who are buying non-MS-licensed wheels. Or am I just being naive - does MS have the legal clout to effectively say that as long as they provide a product, no one else can legally provide that product? And if they can do that, what's stopping them from just providing a "Microsoft licensed" version of all the IP that's currently public domain? Is providing an alternative path, even one also owned by Microsoft, enough of a legal fig leaf for them to just, by fiat, decide that everything must be licensed through them to be legal?
(I admit through all of this, of course, that my mind is nowhere near Byzantine enough to comprehend legal maneuverings on this level; it's entirely possible that the only answer to my questions is "you can't understand this without a law degree")
they can stop organizations (for-profit or not) from distributing that software you are using by bringing "patent infringement" suits against them
This may be true (or not, I don't really know), but I don't see how this deal has any impact on the issue. If they've got patents on stuff such that they can claim some GPL'd software infringes their IP, then couldn't they already say that now? What does partnering with Novell get them that they didn't have before?
In essence they own GPL software now and can extract license fees from us at their will and pleasure
If true, you're right, it's cataclysmic. I just don't see how this can be true. If they sell GPL'd software, they're required to distribute the source, and they're not able to prevent you from doing whatever you want with it (provided, of course, that you also provide the source if you distribute derivative software). This, obviously, includes distributing the source to anyone else you want to.
I just don't see how they can lock up GPL'd software without violating the GPL - and if they can do that, then I don't see how they need a deal with Novell to make it happen; they could lock up all the software that's currently GPL'd by distributing it with a license.
Sure, there may be market pressure insofar as some comapnies may elect to pay the MS tax rather than take any chance of future litigation, but some comapnies paid SCO, too, and that hasn't led to the demise of Linux.
You may be right about what the article's saying, so don't take this as me arguing with you - but assuming you are right, I don't see how their case would hold water. Once something's GPL'd, it can't be un-GPL'd. I don't think the Linux community at large would be foolish enough to incorporate Suse tech that wasn't under the GPL, so I don't think MS could make that stick.
And, really, if the Linux community at large did make that mistake, the only people they'd have to blame would be themselves, just like they would if they started incorporating other non-GPL code.
I suppose it's not beyond reason that MS might want to try something like this and hope for the best in the courts, but it seems like really shaky ground, even for them.