Let's see what else. Oh yeah he now has the power to declare a "national emergency" and shutdown the internet.
I'm always amazed at just how much people like to harp on the whole "OMG! Internet can be shut down in a national emergency!" thing. Yes, the President could abuse his power by arbitrarily declaring a national emergency and using that to derive the authority to shut down the internet.
But there's the slight side detail that the President has already had the power to declare a state of emergency and, say, revoke the right of habeas corpus (call me crazy, but I think holding people without charges or judicial oversight is a bit more serious than shutting down the internet) ever since Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution was accepted. The President has had far more injurious emergency powers available to him since long before you or I were born.
The power to shut down the internet in a national emergency does provide a possibility for abuse, there's no question about that, but, if you consider all the other things the President can order in a national emergency, shutting down the internet is just pissing in the ocean.
Hmm... When you put it that way... How about a game loaded with real-world advertising where the objective is to make the (game) world a better place by destroying the ads?
You underestimate the number of people who want bladder gauges... While I've never particularly understood the desire myself, the Oblivion modding community has produced a large number of (generally highly-rated) realism mods which require you to stop and eat/drink/rest every n game-hours. (They generally also tweak the ratio of game-time vs. real-time so that you don't have to eat every 30 seconds.) Some of them even require you to set up camp, build a fire, and cook your food before eating it or to remove your armor before sleeping.
I don't recall offhand whether I've seen any that require you to urinate/defecate "realistically" (i.e., not as a juvenile scatological joke), but I would be somewhat surprised if it hasn't been done.
All quite secure, unless the server is using crypt (or some other method which ignores everything after the 8th character) to hash its passwords. I'm sure you know enough to use MD5/SHA-n hashes on your system's passwords, but I don't trust the admins of some random server out on the net to be that responsible, so I tend to stick with random 8-alphanum passwords, courtesy of pwgen. (Osh9ahy6 kie9su9M fub2Ga5p Oegh6mie...)
I'd read a lot about OOP and made a few attempts at it, but had misunderstood the concept thoroughly enough that I was creating a separate class for every object, even if it the code was identical and the only difference was a couple of property values.
Then I started hanging out on LambdaMOO, requested a programmer bit, and started playing around with their tutorials. I "got it" and understood OOP (and how I'd been doing it wrong) almost instantly.
I think you missed the part in TFA (and TFS) where it says "Sixty-six percent of those surveyed don't want tailored, or targeted, online ads, according to the study" even before tracking was (explicitly) introduced. Although TFA doesn't give the exact questions, the results as presented seem to indicate that 66% don't want targeted ads at all and an additional 20% aren't opposed to them in general, but are opposed to having their behaviour tracked across multiple sites as part of the ad targeting process.
Although this doesn't apply to Google Docs, it's been pretty heavily publicized from day 1 that Wave is an open protocol, running on open software, so companies will be able to build and host their own private Wave servers.
Based on what I have read of Wave thus far, I am highly confident that it will support the sort of non-text collaboration you've described (there are already drop-in chessboards and the like for "collaboration" in the form of games). I would actually be mildly surprised if third-party devs haven't already started prototypes of Wave-based painting, spreadsheet, and musical composition apps.
Personally? I mostly listen to podcasts - short fiction, talking heads of the tech world, that kind of thing. Not music. When you're dealing with a single person talking (as in, say, most short fiction or audiobooks - or a phone call, for that matter), they either won't use stereo or both channels will carry identical audio. Panel discussions may use stereo, but they often don't. Even when they do, you don't really lose anything by mixing it down to mono, since it's just being done to virtually position the panel members, not to create any effects that enhance the experience (or at least it doesn't enhance my experience).
Just because stereo matters for music doesn't mean that it matters for audio recordings in general.
I didn't start using keyboards seriously until I was 8 (I had played with my mom's typewriter before that, but doubt I picked up any real speed there) and my experiences are much the same as yours. I spent a few years doing temp work after college and consistently tested in the upper-60s wpm on their tests, occasionally getting astonished comments from the temp agency's workers that I'd completed the test so quickly and with so few errors.
Also like you, I spend many hours a day on a keyboard and have never shown any signs of RSI or similar issues. I'm not sure I would entirely attribute that to the non-"standard" typing technique, though - I expect that my tendency to do everything by keyboard and rarely reaching for the mouse contributes as well.
"Proper" typing technique is highly, highly overrated.
I trust they won't send any of my "personal" information (name, telephone number, personal e-mails)...
You've just hit on exactly what I don't get about this blurb's claims of these games "collecting personal information":
When was the last time you entered your (real) name, a phone number, an email address, or any other piece of personal information into a game during play? In my case, that would be approximately... never, IIRC.
Any information I've ever entered has been during registration, not gameplay, and that's already getting sent to the publisher whether they use in-game ads or not. Unless they're including local exploits to collect information from other applications without the user's knowledge/consent, then I don't see any evidence of an actual privacy threat tied to the ads.
Gal Civ 1, I presume? Because I've installed my copy of Gal Civ 2 multiple times (on a total of three separate machines, IIRC) and, although it has always asked for my CD key during installation, it has also made it clear that this was only required for online play or to download updates. Since my only interest was in playing solo, I declined to enter the key. The game worked just fine without it and never asked for the key again until/unless I attempted to update to the latest version.
I do not recall ever encountering a key generator, whether named "Impulse" or anything else, although this may simply be because I chose not to bother with registering my copy.
I want my time to be worth the absolute maximum amount of money possible. I value my time, and I love my life, and I don't want to waste my time and my life making somebody else rich.
I'm with you so far...
I want to make myself rich....but we diverge here.
I want my time to be worth as much as possible not so I can be rich, but so I can live comfortably while selling as little of my time as possible because "I value my time... and I don't want to waste my time and my life".
Given the opportunity to work as much as I like at $2500/day (and, yes, I have worked at that rate, though not consistently), I would prefer to work 40 days/year and make $100k rather than 5 days/week every week to get the $650k or so that works out to. I can live more than comfortably on $100k, including plenty of room for saving for leaner times, so why waste my time and my life to build up a pile of cash that I have no actual use for?
Maybe it's time to vote for the candidate that we actually want. Only then will the third party candidates have a chance at winning.
You're forgetting one significant detail:
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. - US Constitution, Amendment 12 (as based on Article 2, Section 1 of the original document)
Unless someone gets an actual majority of the electoral vote, the President is chosen by the House. Having more than two viable parties (i.e., parties with an actual chance of winning) nearly guarantees that none of them will get a majority. Therefore, having more than two viable parties at one time is extremely unlikely (and arguably undesirable) unless another amendment is introduced and passed to change this. Given that such an amendment would require broad approval from within the two parties running things at the time it is introduced, it seems reasonable to conclude that its chances of coming into effect are a very, very close approximation of zero.
(Which is sad, really. My understanding is that the Constitution's authors were, in general, opposed to political parties on principle and did not intend for them to exist in the US at all. Apparently they weren't familiar enough with (proto-)game theory to see that they were creating a system which practically requires the existence of exactly two dominant parties.)
I doubt that anyone will disagree with your comment as stated. Many will, however, disagree on what constitutes a "prudent rational argument" or, even in the presence of an argument agreed to meet that standard, on the appropriate limits to the ways in which and time for which privacy is given up.
The road to fascist authoritarianism begins when government just says, "We're doing something, but we're not going to tell you what or for how long and will only give vague references to why. Just trust us. We know what's best, so don't you worry your pretty little heads about it."
And you're being amazingly naive here. Look at slashdot trolls or schoolyard bullies and you'll see that there are a hell of a lot of people out there who will gladly be jackasses just because they can. How about spiteful ex-lovers or former friends? "Oh, you know that precious letter that you've valued at $1 for tax purposes? Here's $5. It's mine now. Oops... how did that match happen to get lit underneath it? Too bad..."
Even in the space that you're saying this is intended for, how about this example: I've recently launched a web-based game. It's not anything hidden or private like that letter. On the contrary, I want people to know about it (which is why it's linked from my sig and I'm plugging it in these parentheses). I've put a few hundred dollars of my actual money into it and, if I had written it for a client, the time spent on it would've translated into a modest 5-figure invoice at my standard rates. I'm not offering subscriptions yet and, to date, the banner ads on the site have brought in a grand total of 19 cents. Do I assign this a low enough value for the paltry trickle of revenue to cover the taxes on it and just hope that nobody decides they want a cheap site or do I assign a high enough value to ensure that I'd be fairly paid if someone did buy it out from under me, but also ensuring that it would be a continuing money sink for as long as I run it?
Any mandatory sale provision would be abused just to mess with people or to take petty personal revenge far more often than it would be used legitimately. (Presuming there even is such thing as a legitimate use for it. If you're required to sell something at a certain price to anyone who offers that price, then a strong argument could be made that you don't actually own it in the first place.)
If property values in the area go up, and your house is re-appraised, the taxes will be increased greatly to account for how much more money you will make when you sell the house. Indeed. But how does "the potential to make more money if and when I decide to sell the house" translate into "additional revenue if I don't sell the house"? If property taxes are revenue-based and the house provides no revenue except at the time of sale, then property taxes should be zero until the time of sale, reflecting that there is zero revenue until that point, should they not? (And, yes, I'm fully aware they don't work that way. Which is my point. Property taxes are not revenue based. Therefore, a revenue-based IP tax would not be "like property taxes".)
The fact that the GPL happens to work reasonably well with current copyright laws doesn't mean you have an inherent right to prevent changes to the copyright laws that will happen to make it cease to work so well. I agree completely.
If you re-examine that portion of my previous post, you will hopefully see that it was predicated upon the "you must sell your IP at its valued price" extension of the "IP tax" idea. The problem I meant to illustrate was not "IP taxes will break GPL/FOSS", but, rather, that mandatory sale of IP at its tax-assessed value will lead to Microsoft or other rich corporations buying all competing products at their mandatory sale prices and then burying them, thus eliminating the competition. Even if the original authors are given the option to put their work into the public domain rather than allowing the mandatory sale to take place, they would still lose all rights to their creation. Neither of these is a desirable outcome.
It may be possible to make an IP tax scheme work at least as well as the current system, provided it does not include the mandatory sale provision. (Note that I do not mean to imply that you support such a provision, as I haven't noticed you saying anything about it one way or the other. Your post just happened to be the one I was responding to when I brought it up.) If a mandatory sale provision is included, however, then copyright will become inaccessible to anyone but large corporations - the very ones who are currently abusing it. Anyone else would be left with three options, none of which give them any real protection by copyright:
1) Work solely in the public domain. 2) Value their work at a low enough price that large corporations can trivially execute the mandatory purchase provisions. 3) Value their work at a high enough price to prevent mandatory purchases and risk being ruined by the IP taxes on it.
Yeah, sure, it would still (probably) have the desired beneficial effect of getting the large corporations to give up some of their existing IP into the public domain, but at the cost of denying meaningful copyright protections to anyone else. I do not believe that to be an acceptable cost. Copyright reform should result in the little guy having at least as much protection as the large corporations. "IP tax with mandatory sale" does just the opposite.
Well then, the assessor should find it worth almost nothing, and tax you an appropriate amount. Thus, once again, breaking the "IP is like real property" from which this tax idea springs. If I own a house and it generates no revenue for me, the property tax is not affected by that.
if it's worthless, you should simply give up your copyright on it, rather than keeping it from the public. I believe there's a certain Mr. Stallman you might want to chat with about this notion that owning copyright to something necessarily means you're "keeping it from the public". Don't forget that the GPL relies on copyright to keep things Free and open to the public.
And who's going to be paying the property taxes on GPLed or other FOSS code, anyhow? Don't try telling me that apache, Perl, or the Linux kernel are "worth almost nothing" simply because the software isn't a revenue stream for their copyright holders. Especially if you subscribe to the "mandatory sale" extension of the IP tax theory.
Tax assessor: Linus makes no money on sales of the Linux kernel, therefore it's only worth $100. Microsoft: Gee, we've got $100 to spare. *buy* *bury*
Or, alternately,
Tax assessor: The Linux kernel has revolutionized the world and is worth $1 billion. Linus: Uh, how the hell can I pay the taxes on that?!? Microsoft: Don't worry about it. We've got $1 billion to spare. *buy* *bury*
...and you've just completely demolished the "IP is like real property" analogy from which the suggestion of assessing property taxes on IP originated. Unless you mean to say that it either is or should be possible for anyone with enough cash to spare to just walk up and say, "Your house is valued at $200,000? OK, here's half a million. It's my house now. Be moved out by tomorrow."
Freedom to choose not to sell your property at any price (reasonable or not) seems to be a fundamental aspect of ownership.
No, youngdev, you haven't, assuming that the "D2" you're referring to is Diablo 2. Computer RPGs reflect the experience of in-person RPGs about as well as cybersex reflects the experience of in-person sex, if even that well.
Take your CRPG, but replace the computer's role as a mediator of what you can do and what the results are and replace it with an actual, living, breathing human who is able to assess any action you can imagine and (with the aid of the game's rules) determine what results. At the broad physical level, there's no asinine "there's a completely immovable knee-high table here that you must walk around" simply because the game engine doesn't have support for it - if you can't jump over, stand on, flip over, carry away, take a bite out of, etc. the table, there's a specific reason for it and you have a decent chance of determining that reason.
Much more importantly, though, it means that you can take on the persona of your character and interact with the other characters in the world - both PCs and NPCs - through that persona. You can set your own goals instead of or in addition to those presented to you. You can even negotiate the terms of the goals presented to you or their rewards instead of just walking up to the guy with punctuation floating above his head, click to talk, click a few canned responses, click "accept quest", kill 20 monsters, collect gold, repeat. (Admittedly, that's WoW. I haven't played D2, so I don't know whether it uses the floating punctuation or not.)
You can also change the (game) world in tabletop RPGs. Things don't respawn as soon as you turn your back (unless, as in the table example, there's an actual in-game reason). If there's a dragon threatening the city and you slay it, it stays dead instead of just waiting for the next person to accept that quest so you can go farm it. If you ignore it, then that city is going to be toast and your characters will be held at least partially accountable for their decision not to even try to save it unless they make sure that nobody knows it was their fault.
These last two combine to open up possibilities for actual stories to develop in the course of the game rather than just a series of "deliver item", "kill X monsters", and "clean out dungeon" contracts. With a good gaming group, you can get stories comparable to, and even more intricate than, the plot of a good novel or movie.
I have read your posts on "optimum velocity" and I think you're overcomplicating this with all the flow sensors and GPS trickery and so forth. Key the lights on either acceleration/deceleration or on whether distance to the vehicle ahead of you is increasing/decreasing. Much simpler that way and achieves basically the same effect.
That was my immediate thought as well. I'm surprised it took so long for someone to suggest it.
This could be validated by comparing reactions to deaths to seemingly random one- or two-shot attacks that the player had no chance to see coming or attempt to defend against (which I find frustrating) vs. reactions when taken down in a hard fight, especially one where the loser appeared to have a chance of winning and/or was trying to hold off an impossible foe for as long as possible for the benefit of teammates (which I find exhilarating and highly engaging - but not as much as when I somehow manage to win against those tough odds).
You're forgetting that there's a substantial body of evidence, including testimony from involved FBI agents, that we did know what the 9/11 guys were planning, based on information collected through old-fashioned police work, without the need for warrantless wiretaps or any of the other powers granted or assumed by the President since then.
There is a vast difference between "we must operate within the boundaries of the Constitution and the law" and "we should do nothing".
Ah, but it was the executive branch (and, specifically, the President) who decided that retroactive immunity for the telcos was more important than the powers granted by PAA. ("I will veto any bill which grants those powers but does not include immunity.") All the legislative branch did was to (finally) acknowledge that accountability is important and call Bush's bluff.
I realized that we are talking about conversations where one or both parties are NOT in America.
No, Bush claims that we're talking about conversations where one or both parties are outside of the US. And this surveillance is being done entirely by people who, directly or indirectly, work for Bush himself without even attempting to maintain the trappings of due process or third-party oversight, so we have no meaningful assurance that it really is being limited to conversations where one or both parties are outside of the US.
Even if we assume for the moment that everything the executive branch has said about it in public is absolutely, 100% true and the program is being impeccably run in perfect compliance with all actors' best judgement solely to support the national good, there are still two issues with it:
1) If they're monitoring conversations where one party is a US citizen on US soil, that effectively means that you give up (some) Constitutional protections solely for the act of speaking to someone outside of the US. That should not be.
2) Even if Bush is running this surveillance program perfectly and in a manner which respects the rights of all innocent people in general and US citizens in particular, what about the next President? Or the one after that? Or the guy 20 years from now? Somewhere down the line, we will have a President who is not beneath using these powers for personal gain. If Congress makes the powers permanent, they'll fall right into that bastard's lap. If they're allowed to expire, but ultimately viewed favorably, he'll be able to cite the present day as precedent in his bid to have those powers "restored". This is why we must not allow the President (or any branch of government, really) to have powers which can be easily abused without accountability, regardless of who gets those powers today - it's just a matter of time before the powers will fall into the hands of someone who will abuse them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see what else. Oh yeah he now has the power to declare a "national emergency" and shutdown the internet.
I'm always amazed at just how much people like to harp on the whole "OMG! Internet can be shut down in a national emergency!" thing. Yes, the President could abuse his power by arbitrarily declaring a national emergency and using that to derive the authority to shut down the internet.
But there's the slight side detail that the President has already had the power to declare a state of emergency and, say, revoke the right of habeas corpus (call me crazy, but I think holding people without charges or judicial oversight is a bit more serious than shutting down the internet) ever since Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution was accepted. The President has had far more injurious emergency powers available to him since long before you or I were born.
The power to shut down the internet in a national emergency does provide a possibility for abuse, there's no question about that, but, if you consider all the other things the President can order in a national emergency, shutting down the internet is just pissing in the ocean.
Hmm... When you put it that way... How about a game loaded with real-world advertising where the objective is to make the (game) world a better place by destroying the ads?
You underestimate the number of people who want bladder gauges... While I've never particularly understood the desire myself, the Oblivion modding community has produced a large number of (generally highly-rated) realism mods which require you to stop and eat/drink/rest every n game-hours. (They generally also tweak the ratio of game-time vs. real-time so that you don't have to eat every 30 seconds.) Some of them even require you to set up camp, build a fire, and cook your food before eating it or to remove your armor before sleeping.
I don't recall offhand whether I've seen any that require you to urinate/defecate "realistically" (i.e., not as a juvenile scatological joke), but I would be somewhat surprised if it hasn't been done.
All quite secure, unless the server is using crypt (or some other method which ignores everything after the 8th character) to hash its passwords. I'm sure you know enough to use MD5/SHA-n hashes on your system's passwords, but I don't trust the admins of some random server out on the net to be that responsible, so I tend to stick with random 8-alphanum passwords, courtesy of pwgen. (Osh9ahy6 kie9su9M fub2Ga5p Oegh6mie...)
You too, eh?
I'd read a lot about OOP and made a few attempts at it, but had misunderstood the concept thoroughly enough that I was creating a separate class for every object, even if it the code was identical and the only difference was a couple of property values.
Then I started hanging out on LambdaMOO, requested a programmer bit, and started playing around with their tutorials. I "got it" and understood OOP (and how I'd been doing it wrong) almost instantly.
Good times...
I think you missed the part in TFA (and TFS) where it says "Sixty-six percent of those surveyed don't want tailored, or targeted, online ads, according to the study" even before tracking was (explicitly) introduced. Although TFA doesn't give the exact questions, the results as presented seem to indicate that 66% don't want targeted ads at all and an additional 20% aren't opposed to them in general, but are opposed to having their behaviour tracked across multiple sites as part of the ad targeting process.
Although this doesn't apply to Google Docs, it's been pretty heavily publicized from day 1 that Wave is an open protocol, running on open software, so companies will be able to build and host their own private Wave servers.
Based on what I have read of Wave thus far, I am highly confident that it will support the sort of non-text collaboration you've described (there are already drop-in chessboards and the like for "collaboration" in the form of games). I would actually be mildly surprised if third-party devs haven't already started prototypes of Wave-based painting, spreadsheet, and musical composition apps.
Personally? I mostly listen to podcasts - short fiction, talking heads of the tech world, that kind of thing. Not music. When you're dealing with a single person talking (as in, say, most short fiction or audiobooks - or a phone call, for that matter), they either won't use stereo or both channels will carry identical audio. Panel discussions may use stereo, but they often don't. Even when they do, you don't really lose anything by mixing it down to mono, since it's just being done to virtually position the panel members, not to create any effects that enhance the experience (or at least it doesn't enhance my experience).
Just because stereo matters for music doesn't mean that it matters for audio recordings in general.
I didn't start using keyboards seriously until I was 8 (I had played with my mom's typewriter before that, but doubt I picked up any real speed there) and my experiences are much the same as yours. I spent a few years doing temp work after college and consistently tested in the upper-60s wpm on their tests, occasionally getting astonished comments from the temp agency's workers that I'd completed the test so quickly and with so few errors.
Also like you, I spend many hours a day on a keyboard and have never shown any signs of RSI or similar issues. I'm not sure I would entirely attribute that to the non-"standard" typing technique, though - I expect that my tendency to do everything by keyboard and rarely reaching for the mouse contributes as well.
"Proper" typing technique is highly, highly overrated.
I trust they won't send any of my "personal" information (name, telephone number, personal e-mails)...
You've just hit on exactly what I don't get about this blurb's claims of these games "collecting personal information":
When was the last time you entered your (real) name, a phone number, an email address, or any other piece of personal information into a game during play? In my case, that would be approximately... never, IIRC.
Any information I've ever entered has been during registration, not gameplay, and that's already getting sent to the publisher whether they use in-game ads or not. Unless they're including local exploits to collect information from other applications without the user's knowledge/consent, then I don't see any evidence of an actual privacy threat tied to the ads.
Gal Civ 1, I presume? Because I've installed my copy of Gal Civ 2 multiple times (on a total of three separate machines, IIRC) and, although it has always asked for my CD key during installation, it has also made it clear that this was only required for online play or to download updates. Since my only interest was in playing solo, I declined to enter the key. The game worked just fine without it and never asked for the key again until/unless I attempted to update to the latest version.
I do not recall ever encountering a key generator, whether named "Impulse" or anything else, although this may simply be because I chose not to bother with registering my copy.
I want my time to be worth the absolute maximum amount of money possible. I value my time, and I love my life, and I don't want to waste my time and my life making somebody else rich.
...but we diverge here.
I'm with you so far...
I want to make myself rich.
I want my time to be worth as much as possible not so I can be rich, but so I can live comfortably while selling as little of my time as possible because "I value my time... and I don't want to waste my time and my life".
Given the opportunity to work as much as I like at $2500/day (and, yes, I have worked at that rate, though not consistently), I would prefer to work 40 days/year and make $100k rather than 5 days/week every week to get the $650k or so that works out to. I can live more than comfortably on $100k, including plenty of room for saving for leaner times, so why waste my time and my life to build up a pile of cash that I have no actual use for?
You're forgetting one significant detail:
Unless someone gets an actual majority of the electoral vote, the President is chosen by the House. Having more than two viable parties (i.e., parties with an actual chance of winning) nearly guarantees that none of them will get a majority. Therefore, having more than two viable parties at one time is extremely unlikely (and arguably undesirable) unless another amendment is introduced and passed to change this. Given that such an amendment would require broad approval from within the two parties running things at the time it is introduced, it seems reasonable to conclude that its chances of coming into effect are a very, very close approximation of zero.
(Which is sad, really. My understanding is that the Constitution's authors were, in general, opposed to political parties on principle and did not intend for them to exist in the US at all. Apparently they weren't familiar enough with (proto-)game theory to see that they were creating a system which practically requires the existence of exactly two dominant parties.)
I doubt that anyone will disagree with your comment as stated. Many will, however, disagree on what constitutes a "prudent rational argument" or, even in the presence of an argument agreed to meet that standard, on the appropriate limits to the ways in which and time for which privacy is given up.
The road to fascist authoritarianism begins when government just says, "We're doing something, but we're not going to tell you what or for how long and will only give vague references to why. Just trust us. We know what's best, so don't you worry your pretty little heads about it."
And you're being amazingly naive here. Look at slashdot trolls or schoolyard bullies and you'll see that there are a hell of a lot of people out there who will gladly be jackasses just because they can. How about spiteful ex-lovers or former friends? "Oh, you know that precious letter that you've valued at $1 for tax purposes? Here's $5. It's mine now. Oops... how did that match happen to get lit underneath it? Too bad..."
Even in the space that you're saying this is intended for, how about this example: I've recently launched a web-based game. It's not anything hidden or private like that letter. On the contrary, I want people to know about it (which is why it's linked from my sig and I'm plugging it in these parentheses). I've put a few hundred dollars of my actual money into it and, if I had written it for a client, the time spent on it would've translated into a modest 5-figure invoice at my standard rates. I'm not offering subscriptions yet and, to date, the banner ads on the site have brought in a grand total of 19 cents. Do I assign this a low enough value for the paltry trickle of revenue to cover the taxes on it and just hope that nobody decides they want a cheap site or do I assign a high enough value to ensure that I'd be fairly paid if someone did buy it out from under me, but also ensuring that it would be a continuing money sink for as long as I run it?
Any mandatory sale provision would be abused just to mess with people or to take petty personal revenge far more often than it would be used legitimately. (Presuming there even is such thing as a legitimate use for it. If you're required to sell something at a certain price to anyone who offers that price, then a strong argument could be made that you don't actually own it in the first place.)
If you re-examine that portion of my previous post, you will hopefully see that it was predicated upon the "you must sell your IP at its valued price" extension of the "IP tax" idea. The problem I meant to illustrate was not "IP taxes will break GPL/FOSS", but, rather, that mandatory sale of IP at its tax-assessed value will lead to Microsoft or other rich corporations buying all competing products at their mandatory sale prices and then burying them, thus eliminating the competition. Even if the original authors are given the option to put their work into the public domain rather than allowing the mandatory sale to take place, they would still lose all rights to their creation. Neither of these is a desirable outcome.
It may be possible to make an IP tax scheme work at least as well as the current system, provided it does not include the mandatory sale provision. (Note that I do not mean to imply that you support such a provision, as I haven't noticed you saying anything about it one way or the other. Your post just happened to be the one I was responding to when I brought it up.) If a mandatory sale provision is included, however, then copyright will become inaccessible to anyone but large corporations - the very ones who are currently abusing it. Anyone else would be left with three options, none of which give them any real protection by copyright:
1) Work solely in the public domain.
2) Value their work at a low enough price that large corporations can trivially execute the mandatory purchase provisions.
3) Value their work at a high enough price to prevent mandatory purchases and risk being ruined by the IP taxes on it.
Yeah, sure, it would still (probably) have the desired beneficial effect of getting the large corporations to give up some of their existing IP into the public domain, but at the cost of denying meaningful copyright protections to anyone else. I do not believe that to be an acceptable cost. Copyright reform should result in the little guy having at least as much protection as the large corporations. "IP tax with mandatory sale" does just the opposite.
And who's going to be paying the property taxes on GPLed or other FOSS code, anyhow? Don't try telling me that apache, Perl, or the Linux kernel are "worth almost nothing" simply because the software isn't a revenue stream for their copyright holders. Especially if you subscribe to the "mandatory sale" extension of the IP tax theory.
Tax assessor: Linus makes no money on sales of the Linux kernel, therefore it's only worth $100.
Microsoft: Gee, we've got $100 to spare. *buy* *bury*
Or, alternately,
Tax assessor: The Linux kernel has revolutionized the world and is worth $1 billion.
Linus: Uh, how the hell can I pay the taxes on that?!?
Microsoft: Don't worry about it. We've got $1 billion to spare. *buy* *bury*
...and you've just completely demolished the "IP is like real property" analogy from which the suggestion of assessing property taxes on IP originated. Unless you mean to say that it either is or should be possible for anyone with enough cash to spare to just walk up and say, "Your house is valued at $200,000? OK, here's half a million. It's my house now. Be moved out by tomorrow."
Freedom to choose not to sell your property at any price (reasonable or not) seems to be a fundamental aspect of ownership.
No, youngdev, you haven't, assuming that the "D2" you're referring to is Diablo 2. Computer RPGs reflect the experience of in-person RPGs about as well as cybersex reflects the experience of in-person sex, if even that well.
Take your CRPG, but replace the computer's role as a mediator of what you can do and what the results are and replace it with an actual, living, breathing human who is able to assess any action you can imagine and (with the aid of the game's rules) determine what results. At the broad physical level, there's no asinine "there's a completely immovable knee-high table here that you must walk around" simply because the game engine doesn't have support for it - if you can't jump over, stand on, flip over, carry away, take a bite out of, etc. the table, there's a specific reason for it and you have a decent chance of determining that reason.
Much more importantly, though, it means that you can take on the persona of your character and interact with the other characters in the world - both PCs and NPCs - through that persona. You can set your own goals instead of or in addition to those presented to you. You can even negotiate the terms of the goals presented to you or their rewards instead of just walking up to the guy with punctuation floating above his head, click to talk, click a few canned responses, click "accept quest", kill 20 monsters, collect gold, repeat. (Admittedly, that's WoW. I haven't played D2, so I don't know whether it uses the floating punctuation or not.)
You can also change the (game) world in tabletop RPGs. Things don't respawn as soon as you turn your back (unless, as in the table example, there's an actual in-game reason). If there's a dragon threatening the city and you slay it, it stays dead instead of just waiting for the next person to accept that quest so you can go farm it. If you ignore it, then that city is going to be toast and your characters will be held at least partially accountable for their decision not to even try to save it unless they make sure that nobody knows it was their fault.
These last two combine to open up possibilities for actual stories to develop in the course of the game rather than just a series of "deliver item", "kill X monsters", and "clean out dungeon" contracts. With a good gaming group, you can get stories comparable to, and even more intricate than, the plot of a good novel or movie.
It's a whole different world.
I have read your posts on "optimum velocity" and I think you're overcomplicating this with all the flow sensors and GPS trickery and so forth. Key the lights on either acceleration/deceleration or on whether distance to the vehicle ahead of you is increasing/decreasing. Much simpler that way and achieves basically the same effect.
That was my immediate thought as well. I'm surprised it took so long for someone to suggest it.
This could be validated by comparing reactions to deaths to seemingly random one- or two-shot attacks that the player had no chance to see coming or attempt to defend against (which I find frustrating) vs. reactions when taken down in a hard fight, especially one where the loser appeared to have a chance of winning and/or was trying to hold off an impossible foe for as long as possible for the benefit of teammates (which I find exhilarating and highly engaging - but not as much as when I somehow manage to win against those tough odds).
You're forgetting that there's a substantial body of evidence, including testimony from involved FBI agents, that we did know what the 9/11 guys were planning, based on information collected through old-fashioned police work, without the need for warrantless wiretaps or any of the other powers granted or assumed by the President since then.
There is a vast difference between "we must operate within the boundaries of the Constitution and the law" and "we should do nothing".
Ah, but it was the executive branch (and, specifically, the President) who decided that retroactive immunity for the telcos was more important than the powers granted by PAA. ("I will veto any bill which grants those powers but does not include immunity.") All the legislative branch did was to (finally) acknowledge that accountability is important and call Bush's bluff.
I realized that we are talking about conversations where one or both parties are NOT in America.
No, Bush claims that we're talking about conversations where one or both parties are outside of the US. And this surveillance is being done entirely by people who, directly or indirectly, work for Bush himself without even attempting to maintain the trappings of due process or third-party oversight, so we have no meaningful assurance that it really is being limited to conversations where one or both parties are outside of the US.
Even if we assume for the moment that everything the executive branch has said about it in public is absolutely, 100% true and the program is being impeccably run in perfect compliance with all actors' best judgement solely to support the national good, there are still two issues with it:
1) If they're monitoring conversations where one party is a US citizen on US soil, that effectively means that you give up (some) Constitutional protections solely for the act of speaking to someone outside of the US. That should not be.
2) Even if Bush is running this surveillance program perfectly and in a manner which respects the rights of all innocent people in general and US citizens in particular, what about the next President? Or the one after that? Or the guy 20 years from now? Somewhere down the line, we will have a President who is not beneath using these powers for personal gain. If Congress makes the powers permanent, they'll fall right into that bastard's lap. If they're allowed to expire, but ultimately viewed favorably, he'll be able to cite the present day as precedent in his bid to have those powers "restored". This is why we must not allow the President (or any branch of government, really) to have powers which can be easily abused without accountability, regardless of who gets those powers today - it's just a matter of time before the powers will fall into the hands of someone who will abuse them.