that's why the market crashed a couple of months ago and it wasn't a trader accidentally moving a decimal place.
You missed the part where liquidity allowed the market to correct itself within minutes that day. If you look at the hour-by-hour trending data there was no spike at all, just a gradual curve downward that had been occurring all day long. The DOW finished down 300 points, which is where it had been heading all day. A 3% dip is a lot, but not unusual.
This was only a problem for people who had too simple stop-loss rules, which actually created the problem in the first place. Had they been adjusting for changes over several minutes instead of instantaneous dips there would have been no spike at all.
It was a problem of strategy, nothing more. At the end of the day it was not a problem at all. That is 100% because the liquidity of the market allowed it to correct itself. Without it these kinds of massive spikes would be an every day occurrence, and all investing would be a form of gambling.
Seriously, I don't understand why people are so freaked out about a system that so obviously fixed its own problem. It's also not likely to happen again any time soon. Investors that don't want to go broke and/or lose all their customers will adjust the rules on their stops to prevent their own diving off the deep end should this sort of problem occur again. That's the way the stock market works. These guys in particular don't want to lose money, so they'll make the necessary adjustments to prevent it. Anybody who doesn't will be driven out of business in a hurry.
Historically bots work for a few weeks or months at best, then the market changes and they have to be scrapped (there is generally little that is worth salvaging). If this works better then it will be a gold mine for those who have it, though I have a sneaking suspicion meat-bag strategies will adjust to compensate for it.
No, but it means when you sell you could be stuck at a low point in the market, and economics would force you to sell your home for less than it is worth (exactly what happened to people who got caught with simple stop-loss measures in the 1000 point drop). On the flip side, your neighbor may get lucky and sell his for significantly more than it is worth to some poor schmuck who absolutely must have a house, yet cannot buy a house at its actual value because the market is at a high point.
In both cases the sale price does not reflect the value of the house - it is a pure gamble whether or not you will be in a position to sell your house for what it is worth or not when the market is right. Liquidity eliminates that problem, and while it's easier to get burned in the short term flipping houses, it's much harder to lose with longer term investments.
While the minute by minute fluctuations in stock look huge, from hour to hour they are much smaller, and much closer to the actual value of the stock. The hour by hour fluctuations too are much larger than the day by day fluctuations. Week to Week fluctuations are almost always a response a company's present actions - take a look at BP's stock right now, that is a direct reflection of their failure in the gulf, and it is accurate because of the liquidity of the market. Month to month fluctuations are a very good picture of how well a company's current market strategies are working, and year by year fluctuations tell you how well the company is doing in the long term.
That isn't to say more liquidity is always better, but a good deal of liquidity is a good thing. It was the liquidity of the market that allowed it to bounce back 700 points in 10 minutes or so after the 1000 point aberration. The DOW finished that day down 3%, which is a big drop but not uncommon or particularly special. In fact, if you look at the hour by hour figures for that day, there is a smooth continual drop - no spikes at all.
And if you noticed, the market corrected itself almost immediately, shooting back up 700+ points in a matter of minutes. It was a glitch, and some gamblers went bust while others got rich. By definition, long term investors were unaffected unless they happened to be extremely unlucky and actually sell when the market dipped.
The ones who got burned the most were the mid-term investors who had stops to prevent massive losses in a crashing stock. The correction is not new regulation, but for those individual portfolio managers to adjust the sensitivity of their stops to prevent a bad reaction to such aberrations. They undoubtedly lost customers for their failure, so in the future they will deal with this situation better.
The net effect was nothing more than a large but not unusual dip of about 300 points. It means the trading techniques being employed were too simplistic and need to be adjusted, nothing more.
What we have now is exactly what we were told dishing out the billions of dollars would fix.
Well, it hasn't fixed it. In fact, the vast majority of new jobs are government jobs, which actually subtract from the economy, not add to it. It isn't hard to argue that the problem is now worse than it would have been had we simply let things collapse. It's nearly impossible to prove, since we didn't do it that way, but it's clear the bail-outs didn't work as promised. Though the talking heads will keep saying it did - you know the old saying: repeat a lie often enough, and pretty soon everyone will believe it.
There are a lot of people who believe that had we let the fools fail, other companies would have taken up the slack (this actually happened in the areas the Fed didn't deem important enough to save). For about the same cost in jobs we would have seen a rebound and a much more stable, if poorer in the short term, economy.
Instead we've propped up the failing system. We're rewarding companies for making shady deals and bad decisions. Yeah, that's definitely going to promote a healthy economy.
you don't have to look far to find very large and organized groups with their own ideas of what should and shouldn't be in the Constitution.
Which doesn't matter at all, because we actually have the Constitution and can read what is actually in it. If a group wants to change it, they aught to get the 2/3 congressional majority and 3/4 state ratification necessary to change it. It has been done 27 times in the past, for big issues like Slavery and Women's Suffrage and (unfortunately) Income Tax.
What has been going on over the last 100 years (it was going on before, but much less than today) is the Federal Government has been stretching the definitions of a single clause in the Constitution, and for the most part they have been getting away with it. It has gotten to the point where Congress doesn't even bother to consider if what they are doing is constitutional. That is left up to the SCOTUS, which only looks at cases brought before the court, so until someone fights an unjust law nothing at all happens.
But seriously, I think he needs to include a standard copyright notice to protect elements he did create (covers, etc.).
Copyright is automatic, a notice hasn't been required for decades. Furthermore, very little, if any, of what he did to the books would be copyrightable. Unless he is abridging them and releasing a "new" version of the old work, he hasn't got much of anything to copyright. I mean, the cover? Yeah, but really? All someone has to do is put a different cover on it and they aren't violating copyright. The only think copyrightable there would be any artwork. The composition of a compilation work in its entirety may be copyrightable, but that's pushing it. Even releasing another compilation with the works in the same order would not be copyrightable.
Putting a copyright notice on the work gives the impression he owns copyright on the work itself. That's also known as fraud. A copyright notice isn't necessary at all, but if he wants to put one on there it should clearly apply only to the elements he has an actual copyright for.
It wasn't the only issue, but it was a strong one.
It was the only issue for the South. It was illegal to own slaves in the North, and the Mason-Dixon line ensured that few, if any new states would be states where slavery was legal. The South had a fraction of the population of the North, and the North was growing far faster than the South, which means the southern states had less and less influence in Congress.
The prevailing opinion in the North was, and always had been, that slavery was wrong. The Constitution was written such that it was technically legal, but in my opinion that was only because at the time the passage of the Constitution was shaky enough, and making no allowances for slavery would have ended the United States of America right then and there.
They were willing to push laws to slowly fix the problem, but they were not willing to fight a war over it. They were, however, very much willing to fight to keep the Union intact. If not for that, there would have been no war, and the South would have been able to secede peacefully.
So it's important to recognize that for the South, it was 100% about slavery, and their weakening ability to protect their right to practice slavery. The North was anti-slavery, and it was not going to back down from that position. However, it was not so anti-slavery to fight a war. The North fought solely to preserve the Union, the eventual end of slavery was simply a bonus for them.
By the same token, why do MSNBC or CNN or any other news agency publish any story? I'll give you a hint: it's exactly the same reason Fox News does, though the target audience is different, so the content is different.
They are different sides of the same coin, and if you got the men behind the curtains in the same room they'd probably all be patting each other on the back.
I just want to point out that Bush was a republican, but he was by no means a conservative. The two are not the same.
A constitutional conservative by definition does not play fast and loose with the constitution. If he does, he's a liberal. Period. Party affiliation has nothing at all to do with it.
liberals on the left think the constitution says whatever they want it to.
liberals on the right think the constitution says whatever they want it to.
There, fixed that for you. Conservatives think the constitution means exactly what is written, and will go to great lengths to ensure they are applying it as the founders intended, not as they would prefer it. Anyone who says otherwise is not a conservative, by definition.
How is an income tax indirect? Because if it isn't, before the 16th amendment it was illegal unless in proportion to the census or as enumerated in the constitution.
It would be nice if lawyers could read once in a while.
...and only three taxes are known to be direct (in so far as the US constitutional law definition is concerned): Capitation, Property Tax, and Income Tax.
There, fixed that for you. Income tax is direct no matter where it comes from, why the fuck do you think a constitutional amendment was necessary to apply a non-proportionate income tax?
What about the slavery stuff? That slaves were worth only 3/5ths of a person? That's apparently according to you a "great guiding point"?
First off, slavery was never endorsed by the Constitution. It was simply not prohibited. As slaves were never considered citizens, the constitution and its protections did not apply to them.
Second, are all your copies of the Constitution over 150+ years old? Or did you miss the part where that got changed? Where the Republican party was formed which had as a primary tenant that no man should be enslaved by another. Lincoln won, you know, and fought a war directly related to slavery (it was not, however, fought specifically to free the slaves, though that was an ultimate goal). Slaves were never counted at all, the Southern states wanted slaves to count for 3/5 for the purposes of representation - the fact that they did not get it ultimately led them to attempt to seceed from the Union, and the Civil War began.
Not long after the Civil War, we got the 13th amendment, which - oh my god - changed the Constitution! That's right! If it's truly out of date, we can change it! It has happened almost 30 times before, I'm sure we could manage again when an issue is truly important enough.
Seriously, where the fuck did you learn history, a public school?
Exactly, the most that should be permitted is regulation of how dangerous chemicals/compounds/devices can be stored when not in use, and where they can be used recreationally (in some cases, like Nukes, the answer would be "nowhere").
That's it.
If my use of my property infringes your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then my right to use my property in that way ends. I.E. if I shoot you, and you die, I lose the right to use my gun(s). If I did it on purpose, I lose all of my rights, up to and including my right to life.
We already have a framework to deal with it, and if something in the Constitution truly is out of date, then get the frickin super-majority and 38-state ratification to change it.
Saying "Oh that doesn't apply any more" is utter bullshit.
Back in the day, at the writing of the Constitution "Arms" included cannons, rockets, and warships in addition to guns and knives. Basically, the Constitution originally protected the private ownership of the 18th century's versions of Weapons of Mass Destruction, yet today it is illegal to own a tank or jet with live ammunition, and owning a nuke is out of the question. Such things are expressly permitted in the constitution, yet they are made illegal.
So there is some debate there, though most people today would agree that owning a fully functional tank is overkill, I don't think the founders would agree with that sentiment.
what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
Any definition for arms other than "any weapon" would be infringing the right. That's what "Arms" are - weapons. Shall not be infringed means exactly that - don't touch this shit.
As for where, the same applies within the same limits that all the rights have - they can be kept anywhere they do not infringe another citizen's rights. Any adjustment to that is infringing on the right to bear Arms.
Obviously, the government has infringed on that right pretty heavily over the years, and so far we tolerate it. It's not much different than the infringements upon free speech, or the right to freely assemble that we tolerate.
It's up to the people to decide how big a deal this kind of thing is, but you should be aware that government by its very nature always seeks more control, not less, and will therefore always infringe your rights more, not less, until the people push back.
My bad, the $48 million payday was in the first 3 months alone, since they've now sold well over 2 million copies, the payday is about $118 million or more.
Proof that piracy is killing the gaming market, right?
Bullshit, independent estimates put the piracy rate at 5 legal to 1 illegal copy in the US, and 7 legal to 3 illegal in the UK. All of the insane 1:15 or 1:20 estimates were directly from company reps. They were talking out their ass.
Add to that, I fail to see how a $48 million ($70 mil sales minus $22 mil development) payday is crippling a game company. It's complete nonsense. 20 million people do not play a game that is considered by most to be mediocre at best. I doubt 20 million people even had the hardware to play it, the hardcore PC market has been shrinking for a while now.
Copyright is NOT intended to protect media creators. It is intended to create public domain works by temporarily incentivising creators.
The deal is they get short term profits, humanity gets the product forever after. In addition there are fair use rights in the interim.
DRM breaks fair use, but not only that it breaks copyright itself.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Copyright exists because we like culture, and artists/authors need to be compensated or they won't be able to. The options were a patronage system, or copyright. We chose the more organic copyright system.
Copyright's express purpose is to protect media creators from free-for-all copying of their work for a limited time to allow them time to be compensated. The purpose was not to push as much content as possible into the public domain, it was to produce as much art and literature as possible. Since the government was founded on the idea of restricting the individual as little as possible, it was set to be a temporary monopoly that lasts no longer than necessary for the artist/author to be compensated sufficiently to produce the work.
DRM has always been a completely legal option for content producers. A book seller can choose not to sell the book to prevent people from copying it - that's a form of Rights Management (a pretty stupid form, but RM none the less). He can sell his book in a script nobody can read, and then designate certain individuals who will be trained to read it, who then read it aloud to others. All this is legal.
What is also legal, is one of the trained readers of the book can develop a key for the author's cryptic script, which would then allow anyone who purchases that book to read it. That's still legal today, as long as it involves paper books and not software. The circumvention of these types of barriers that copyright holders are free to put up on their work has always been legal. What has also always been legal, until the DMCA, was the circumvention of the digital equivalent of such measures - which have always been necessary because of the extreme ease with which a digital work can be copied. It was the copying that was protected, and there were fair use exceptions. Nothing outside that was protected by copyright.
The DMCA effectively makes fair use of any digital work illegal. That's not a knock against DRM, it's a knock against the DMCA. DRM is fine, the DMCA should be repealed. It is arguably unconstitutional, in that it goes far beyond what is necessary to promote the arts as laid down in the Constitution.
How is a single online account signup, your key is then bound to this account, any real form of DRM?
I paid for the game, I bind it to my battle.net account which has 4-5 other games on. I can log in and play whenever I want with no restrictions. No install limits, nothing. I can sell my account with all the games bound to it. Or create multiple battle.net accounts one per game and sell them seperately. There's no DRM/DLC or crap like that being pushed by other companies.
If you count a simple restriction of a login to prove the account you logged in with at some point legally bought the game (note the person using the account didn't have to buy it, you could lend it to a friend, or whatever). Then you've missed the point. I download stuff as much as the next guy, but when a company lets me use my purchase of the game the way I want. Then thats a good thing and should be applauded.
I believe you completely fail to understand the concept of Digital Rights Management.
CD keys and Play-with-CD-Only were the original forms of PC game DRM. It has since evolved, the pinnacle of which is EA's system - which to their credit protected the game for about a month.
Blizzard's DRM is still DRM. Any technical measure designed to prevent copying is DRM, that's what Digital Rights Management means.
Some people are anti-DRM, I'm personally not. What I'm against is copyright laws that heavily skew the legal rights in favor of the copyright holder at the expense of the public.
In other words, it's fine that they implement restrictive DRM, but we should be allowed to remove such DRM to facilitate our own legal usage of the software. If they believe a person is using the software illegally, they need to prove it in court. That's the way DRM and copyright used to work, but the DMCA has basically made any fair-use of any copyrighted material that has DRM of any sort illegal. That's just wrong.
Which, rather surprisingly, has never been cracked (at least as of the last time I heard anything about it, which admittedly was a couple years ago).
That's because there is a version of Windows XP that doesn't require activation, and it happens to be much better than the version that ships with non-business PCs.
What version is it, you ask? Why, Windows XP Pro - Enterprise. What's great about this version is it doesn't even need a crack a lot of times. These versions generally come with several hundred to several thousand CD keys, so depending on who's enterprise keys were stolen, thousands of people could install XP with no problem.
Why do it the hard way (cracking activation), when there is an easy way that gives you a better product? That's the only real reason Windows Activation wasn't cracked. Who was going to download Home when they could download Pro and not have to deal with it?
This is similar to what happened to Windows 2000: The code for 2000 and 2000 Server were identical, the only difference between them was a registry key and a few thousand dollars. No need to hack the system, just change the key and voila! Server version at Desktop price. Obviously they fixed it eventually, but a lot of people took advantage of that little mistake.
If they withdrew it under a DMCA complaint, they are actually required to put it back into service if a counter-claim is issued in order to maintain their safe harbor status. If they don't, counter-claimant can sue Google for not putting their material back up.
Slashdot Mirror
that's why the market crashed a couple of months ago and it wasn't a trader accidentally moving a decimal place.
You missed the part where liquidity allowed the market to correct itself within minutes that day. If you look at the hour-by-hour trending data there was no spike at all, just a gradual curve downward that had been occurring all day long. The DOW finished down 300 points, which is where it had been heading all day. A 3% dip is a lot, but not unusual.
This was only a problem for people who had too simple stop-loss rules, which actually created the problem in the first place. Had they been adjusting for changes over several minutes instead of instantaneous dips there would have been no spike at all.
It was a problem of strategy, nothing more. At the end of the day it was not a problem at all. That is 100% because the liquidity of the market allowed it to correct itself. Without it these kinds of massive spikes would be an every day occurrence, and all investing would be a form of gambling.
Seriously, I don't understand why people are so freaked out about a system that so obviously fixed its own problem. It's also not likely to happen again any time soon. Investors that don't want to go broke and/or lose all their customers will adjust the rules on their stops to prevent their own diving off the deep end should this sort of problem occur again. That's the way the stock market works. These guys in particular don't want to lose money, so they'll make the necessary adjustments to prevent it. Anybody who doesn't will be driven out of business in a hurry.
Yup.
But I'd be interested to see how well it works.
Historically bots work for a few weeks or months at best, then the market changes and they have to be scrapped (there is generally little that is worth salvaging). If this works better then it will be a gold mine for those who have it, though I have a sneaking suspicion meat-bag strategies will adjust to compensate for it.
No, but it means when you sell you could be stuck at a low point in the market, and economics would force you to sell your home for less than it is worth (exactly what happened to people who got caught with simple stop-loss measures in the 1000 point drop). On the flip side, your neighbor may get lucky and sell his for significantly more than it is worth to some poor schmuck who absolutely must have a house, yet cannot buy a house at its actual value because the market is at a high point.
In both cases the sale price does not reflect the value of the house - it is a pure gamble whether or not you will be in a position to sell your house for what it is worth or not when the market is right. Liquidity eliminates that problem, and while it's easier to get burned in the short term flipping houses, it's much harder to lose with longer term investments.
While the minute by minute fluctuations in stock look huge, from hour to hour they are much smaller, and much closer to the actual value of the stock. The hour by hour fluctuations too are much larger than the day by day fluctuations. Week to Week fluctuations are almost always a response a company's present actions - take a look at BP's stock right now, that is a direct reflection of their failure in the gulf, and it is accurate because of the liquidity of the market. Month to month fluctuations are a very good picture of how well a company's current market strategies are working, and year by year fluctuations tell you how well the company is doing in the long term.
That isn't to say more liquidity is always better, but a good deal of liquidity is a good thing. It was the liquidity of the market that allowed it to bounce back 700 points in 10 minutes or so after the 1000 point aberration. The DOW finished that day down 3%, which is a big drop but not uncommon or particularly special. In fact, if you look at the hour by hour figures for that day, there is a smooth continual drop - no spikes at all.
And if you noticed, the market corrected itself almost immediately, shooting back up 700+ points in a matter of minutes. It was a glitch, and some gamblers went bust while others got rich. By definition, long term investors were unaffected unless they happened to be extremely unlucky and actually sell when the market dipped.
The ones who got burned the most were the mid-term investors who had stops to prevent massive losses in a crashing stock. The correction is not new regulation, but for those individual portfolio managers to adjust the sensitivity of their stops to prevent a bad reaction to such aberrations. They undoubtedly lost customers for their failure, so in the future they will deal with this situation better.
The net effect was nothing more than a large but not unusual dip of about 300 points. It means the trading techniques being employed were too simplistic and need to be adjusted, nothing more.
I call bullshit.
What we have now is exactly what we were told dishing out the billions of dollars would fix.
Well, it hasn't fixed it. In fact, the vast majority of new jobs are government jobs, which actually subtract from the economy, not add to it. It isn't hard to argue that the problem is now worse than it would have been had we simply let things collapse. It's nearly impossible to prove, since we didn't do it that way, but it's clear the bail-outs didn't work as promised. Though the talking heads will keep saying it did - you know the old saying: repeat a lie often enough, and pretty soon everyone will believe it.
There are a lot of people who believe that had we let the fools fail, other companies would have taken up the slack (this actually happened in the areas the Fed didn't deem important enough to save). For about the same cost in jobs we would have seen a rebound and a much more stable, if poorer in the short term, economy.
Instead we've propped up the failing system. We're rewarding companies for making shady deals and bad decisions. Yeah, that's definitely going to promote a healthy economy.
you don't have to look far to find very large and organized groups with their own ideas of what should and shouldn't be in the Constitution.
Which doesn't matter at all, because we actually have the Constitution and can read what is actually in it. If a group wants to change it, they aught to get the 2/3 congressional majority and 3/4 state ratification necessary to change it. It has been done 27 times in the past, for big issues like Slavery and Women's Suffrage and (unfortunately) Income Tax.
What has been going on over the last 100 years (it was going on before, but much less than today) is the Federal Government has been stretching the definitions of a single clause in the Constitution, and for the most part they have been getting away with it. It has gotten to the point where Congress doesn't even bother to consider if what they are doing is constitutional. That is left up to the SCOTUS, which only looks at cases brought before the court, so until someone fights an unjust law nothing at all happens.
But seriously, I think he needs to include a standard copyright notice to protect elements he did create (covers, etc.).
Copyright is automatic, a notice hasn't been required for decades. Furthermore, very little, if any, of what he did to the books would be copyrightable. Unless he is abridging them and releasing a "new" version of the old work, he hasn't got much of anything to copyright. I mean, the cover? Yeah, but really? All someone has to do is put a different cover on it and they aren't violating copyright. The only think copyrightable there would be any artwork. The composition of a compilation work in its entirety may be copyrightable, but that's pushing it. Even releasing another compilation with the works in the same order would not be copyrightable.
Putting a copyright notice on the work gives the impression he owns copyright on the work itself. That's also known as fraud. A copyright notice isn't necessary at all, but if he wants to put one on there it should clearly apply only to the elements he has an actual copyright for.
It wasn't the only issue, but it was a strong one.
It was the only issue for the South. It was illegal to own slaves in the North, and the Mason-Dixon line ensured that few, if any new states would be states where slavery was legal. The South had a fraction of the population of the North, and the North was growing far faster than the South, which means the southern states had less and less influence in Congress.
The prevailing opinion in the North was, and always had been, that slavery was wrong. The Constitution was written such that it was technically legal, but in my opinion that was only because at the time the passage of the Constitution was shaky enough, and making no allowances for slavery would have ended the United States of America right then and there.
They were willing to push laws to slowly fix the problem, but they were not willing to fight a war over it. They were, however, very much willing to fight to keep the Union intact. If not for that, there would have been no war, and the South would have been able to secede peacefully.
So it's important to recognize that for the South, it was 100% about slavery, and their weakening ability to protect their right to practice slavery. The North was anti-slavery, and it was not going to back down from that position. However, it was not so anti-slavery to fight a war. The North fought solely to preserve the Union, the eventual end of slavery was simply a bonus for them.
Because not only statistics prove that the amount of facts on Fox News is negligible
Uh, first off, statistics rarely prove anything, and second, citation please?
Or is this one of those "60% of the time it works every time" made up statistics of yours?
It’s like a boy who cries wolf 99.9999% of the time, and you want us to trust him on the one time he is right. Well, you know how the story ends...
Yeah, the townsfolk don't listen to the boy and the wolves get all the sheep. I'm thinking you only got half the lesson from that fable.
By the same token, why do MSNBC or CNN or any other news agency publish any story? I'll give you a hint: it's exactly the same reason Fox News does, though the target audience is different, so the content is different.
They are different sides of the same coin, and if you got the men behind the curtains in the same room they'd probably all be patting each other on the back.
See for reference the Bush administration
I just want to point out that Bush was a republican, but he was by no means a conservative. The two are not the same.
A constitutional conservative by definition does not play fast and loose with the constitution. If he does, he's a liberal. Period. Party affiliation has nothing at all to do with it.
liberals on the left think the constitution says whatever they want it to.
liberals on the right think the constitution says whatever they want it to.
There, fixed that for you. Conservatives think the constitution means exactly what is written, and will go to great lengths to ensure they are applying it as the founders intended, not as they would prefer it. Anyone who says otherwise is not a conservative, by definition.
That's the most sane tax plan I've heard in a long while, and it's so stupid simple the average person wouldn't have to worry about it.
I love it.
No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid
How is an income tax indirect? Because if it isn't, before the 16th amendment it was illegal unless in proportion to the census or as enumerated in the constitution.
It would be nice if lawyers could read once in a while.
...and only three taxes are known to be direct (in so far as the US constitutional law definition is concerned): Capitation, Property Tax, and Income Tax.
There, fixed that for you. Income tax is direct no matter where it comes from, why the fuck do you think a constitutional amendment was necessary to apply a non-proportionate income tax?
What about the slavery stuff? That slaves were worth only 3/5ths of a person? That's apparently according to you a "great guiding point"?
First off, slavery was never endorsed by the Constitution. It was simply not prohibited. As slaves were never considered citizens, the constitution and its protections did not apply to them.
Second, are all your copies of the Constitution over 150+ years old? Or did you miss the part where that got changed? Where the Republican party was formed which had as a primary tenant that no man should be enslaved by another. Lincoln won, you know, and fought a war directly related to slavery (it was not, however, fought specifically to free the slaves, though that was an ultimate goal). Slaves were never counted at all, the Southern states wanted slaves to count for 3/5 for the purposes of representation - the fact that they did not get it ultimately led them to attempt to seceed from the Union, and the Civil War began.
Not long after the Civil War, we got the 13th amendment, which - oh my god - changed the Constitution! That's right! If it's truly out of date, we can change it! It has happened almost 30 times before, I'm sure we could manage again when an issue is truly important enough.
Seriously, where the fuck did you learn history, a public school?
Exactly, the most that should be permitted is regulation of how dangerous chemicals/compounds/devices can be stored when not in use, and where they can be used recreationally (in some cases, like Nukes, the answer would be "nowhere").
That's it.
If my use of my property infringes your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then my right to use my property in that way ends. I.E. if I shoot you, and you die, I lose the right to use my gun(s). If I did it on purpose, I lose all of my rights, up to and including my right to life.
We already have a framework to deal with it, and if something in the Constitution truly is out of date, then get the frickin super-majority and 38-state ratification to change it.
Saying "Oh that doesn't apply any more" is utter bullshit.
As for what constitutes arms, is that a debate?
Actually, yeah, it is.
Back in the day, at the writing of the Constitution "Arms" included cannons, rockets, and warships in addition to guns and knives. Basically, the Constitution originally protected the private ownership of the 18th century's versions of Weapons of Mass Destruction, yet today it is illegal to own a tank or jet with live ammunition, and owning a nuke is out of the question. Such things are expressly permitted in the constitution, yet they are made illegal.
So there is some debate there, though most people today would agree that owning a fully functional tank is overkill, I don't think the founders would agree with that sentiment.
what constitutes Arms or where they have the right to keep and bear them.
Any definition for arms other than "any weapon" would be infringing the right. That's what "Arms" are - weapons. Shall not be infringed means exactly that - don't touch this shit.
As for where, the same applies within the same limits that all the rights have - they can be kept anywhere they do not infringe another citizen's rights. Any adjustment to that is infringing on the right to bear Arms.
Obviously, the government has infringed on that right pretty heavily over the years, and so far we tolerate it. It's not much different than the infringements upon free speech, or the right to freely assemble that we tolerate.
It's up to the people to decide how big a deal this kind of thing is, but you should be aware that government by its very nature always seeks more control, not less, and will therefore always infringe your rights more, not less, until the people push back.
My bad, the $48 million payday was in the first 3 months alone, since they've now sold well over 2 million copies, the payday is about $118 million or more.
Proof that piracy is killing the gaming market, right?
Right?
No?
Most people who played Crysis didn't pay for it
Bullshit, independent estimates put the piracy rate at 5 legal to 1 illegal copy in the US, and 7 legal to 3 illegal in the UK. All of the insane 1:15 or 1:20 estimates were directly from company reps. They were talking out their ass.
Add to that, I fail to see how a $48 million ($70 mil sales minus $22 mil development) payday is crippling a game company. It's complete nonsense. 20 million people do not play a game that is considered by most to be mediocre at best. I doubt 20 million people even had the hardware to play it, the hardcore PC market has been shrinking for a while now.
Copyright is NOT intended to protect media creators. It is intended to create public domain works by temporarily incentivising creators.
The deal is they get short term profits, humanity gets the product forever after. In addition there are fair use rights in the interim.
DRM breaks fair use, but not only that it breaks copyright itself.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Copyright exists because we like culture, and artists/authors need to be compensated or they won't be able to. The options were a patronage system, or copyright. We chose the more organic copyright system.
Copyright's express purpose is to protect media creators from free-for-all copying of their work for a limited time to allow them time to be compensated. The purpose was not to push as much content as possible into the public domain, it was to produce as much art and literature as possible. Since the government was founded on the idea of restricting the individual as little as possible, it was set to be a temporary monopoly that lasts no longer than necessary for the artist/author to be compensated sufficiently to produce the work.
DRM has always been a completely legal option for content producers. A book seller can choose not to sell the book to prevent people from copying it - that's a form of Rights Management (a pretty stupid form, but RM none the less). He can sell his book in a script nobody can read, and then designate certain individuals who will be trained to read it, who then read it aloud to others. All this is legal.
What is also legal, is one of the trained readers of the book can develop a key for the author's cryptic script, which would then allow anyone who purchases that book to read it. That's still legal today, as long as it involves paper books and not software. The circumvention of these types of barriers that copyright holders are free to put up on their work has always been legal. What has also always been legal, until the DMCA, was the circumvention of the digital equivalent of such measures - which have always been necessary because of the extreme ease with which a digital work can be copied. It was the copying that was protected, and there were fair use exceptions. Nothing outside that was protected by copyright.
The DMCA effectively makes fair use of any digital work illegal. That's not a knock against DRM, it's a knock against the DMCA. DRM is fine, the DMCA should be repealed. It is arguably unconstitutional, in that it goes far beyond what is necessary to promote the arts as laid down in the Constitution.
How is a single online account signup, your key is then bound to this account, any real form of DRM?
I paid for the game, I bind it to my battle.net account which has 4-5 other games on. I can log in and play whenever I want with no restrictions. No install limits, nothing. I can sell my account with all the games bound to it. Or create multiple battle.net accounts one per game and sell them seperately. There's no DRM/DLC or crap like that being pushed by other companies.
If you count a simple restriction of a login to prove the account you logged in with at some point legally bought the game (note the person using the account didn't have to buy it, you could lend it to a friend, or whatever). Then you've missed the point. I download stuff as much as the next guy, but when a company lets me use my purchase of the game the way I want. Then thats a good thing and should be applauded.
I believe you completely fail to understand the concept of Digital Rights Management.
CD keys and Play-with-CD-Only were the original forms of PC game DRM. It has since evolved, the pinnacle of which is EA's system - which to their credit protected the game for about a month.
Blizzard's DRM is still DRM. Any technical measure designed to prevent copying is DRM, that's what Digital Rights Management means.
Some people are anti-DRM, I'm personally not. What I'm against is copyright laws that heavily skew the legal rights in favor of the copyright holder at the expense of the public.
In other words, it's fine that they implement restrictive DRM, but we should be allowed to remove such DRM to facilitate our own legal usage of the software. If they believe a person is using the software illegally, they need to prove it in court. That's the way DRM and copyright used to work, but the DMCA has basically made any fair-use of any copyrighted material that has DRM of any sort illegal. That's just wrong.
Some even like it rough!
I absolutely loved StarCraft, but never once bothered to play online.
You're an idiot.
Which, rather surprisingly, has never been cracked (at least as of the last time I heard anything about it, which admittedly was a couple years ago).
That's because there is a version of Windows XP that doesn't require activation, and it happens to be much better than the version that ships with non-business PCs.
What version is it, you ask? Why, Windows XP Pro - Enterprise. What's great about this version is it doesn't even need a crack a lot of times. These versions generally come with several hundred to several thousand CD keys, so depending on who's enterprise keys were stolen, thousands of people could install XP with no problem.
Why do it the hard way (cracking activation), when there is an easy way that gives you a better product? That's the only real reason Windows Activation wasn't cracked. Who was going to download Home when they could download Pro and not have to deal with it?
This is similar to what happened to Windows 2000: The code for 2000 and 2000 Server were identical, the only difference between them was a registry key and a few thousand dollars. No need to hack the system, just change the key and voila! Server version at Desktop price. Obviously they fixed it eventually, but a lot of people took advantage of that little mistake.
If they withdrew it under a DMCA complaint, they are actually required to put it back into service if a counter-claim is issued in order to maintain their safe harbor status. If they don't, counter-claimant can sue Google for not putting their material back up.