If all of that stuff is so stagnant, why are you bothered about the copyright lease being so long? Look for cheap or free indie media.
You're missing the point of that adage. The mosquitoes don't stay in the stagnant pool of water once they've bred. They fly off and bite anyone they can find.
Likewise, absurd lease lengths on copyrights don't just effect the works the protect, but impact the entire media realm. Why bother funding new, creative media when you get the copyright on Mickey Mouse extended for another 90 years and keep milking that cow? Or, for that matter, why bother creating anything at all, when you can become a patent troll and makes tens of millions of dollars by suing other people for bothering to create something. (And so on.)
Not to mention a non-standard definition of "species." As I seem to recall, the biological definition of "species" simply involves whether or not a male and female can create a sexually viable offspring. Hence, donkeys and horses are different species, because mules (what you get when mating a horse and a donkey) are sterile, but different breeds of dogs (or cats or horses or whatever) aren't considered different species because they do create offspring which create offspring and so on (have your pets spayed or neutered!)
I'm really hoping the ESL author meant "race" instead of "species," because even after "large values of several," you'd probably still only end up with a race of Martian humans that are as different from us as our different racial groups are from each other - differences being mostly skin deep.
True, but most "sex offenders" (even "real" sex offenders) aren't attracted to children, so it seems to me like this might be a case of solving a non-existent problem. Great if you can keep the convicted pedophiles away from playgrounds, but what does that have to do with the majority of sex offenders who rape other adults?
The thing that really kills me about that kind of BS is that the incompetent managers taking three months and a dozen "change control meetings" to agree on replacing a failed drive make much more money than the people who know anything or actually do any work. I should have gone to PHB school... it's not like I use my soul for anything anyway.
The problem (that mainly gets over looked when bashing the G.O.P.) is that the Democrats want to control us too, just in different ways. And sure, they tell us it's all for our own good, and sometimes it even looks good on the surface.. but give it a few years and it tastes just as bad. Like all that internet legislation president Clinton got passed. God knows that hasn't been horribly abused and made even more of a farce out of our judicial system, right? Plus, it was for the kiddies, and there's no way that big business would be able to use some innocuous "updates" to copyright law to grab more power or anything.:/ (DMCA for anyone who's a little slow on the uptake here.)
And any "internet ID" legislation is even easier to abuse, to much more devastating effect. Frankly, the fact that Obama's even considering such a colossally horrible idea is quite unsettling. Like you said, little more than an ill-conceived power grab that will bite us very hard if anything comes of it.:(
And what would he say? It's not like the abysmal state of security on electronic gambling machines is new news, and evidently, no one cares enough to do anything about it. (And why would they when you can just have the feds arrest anyone who profits from flawed code and sieze their assets anyway?)
Being stupid isn't a crime, and horrible practices for writing code aren't against gaming commission rules. No, being smart is against the rules and profiting off of crappy code (as a "gambler"/player) is a crime.
Three cheers for the land of the free and our awesome justice system.:/
A bit off-topic, but what's homeschooling got to do with anything? It was the **public** school board in Kansas that decided creationism was as scientifically valid as... science, not the Kansas coalition of homeschoolers (or whatever it's called). Frankly, with the shape the public school system is in these days it's hard for me to imagine any alternative doing worse. Hell, we may as well save the country some money, disband the public school system and let the kiddies learn by sitting them in front of the TV.
But more fundamentally --- what is the implication of your post? That opposing Net Neutrality legislation is going to make it harder for governments to censor? Cause it seems to me that a small number of powerful telecoms dominating what people read is more or less a precondition for a modern totalitarian state.
Try looking at it from a different angle - which is to say: what real, existing problem is "Net Neutrality" legislation going to solve? (Or going to try to solve.)
I can't come up with anything. What I can come up with is my personal experience... back on the 'net before any "regulation" or even the web, for that matter. Before we had to worry about that DMCA legislation and all the bullshit that came with it, or all the Clinton-era attempts to "save the children" from pornography or (heaven forbid) the evils of unmonitored internet discussions with fellow human beings. (The whole 13 years of age or older EULAs you see on internet discussion boards are a direct result of one of those "save the children" laws Clinton championed.)
All I see is that every time the government has stepped in to "regulate" the internet to make it better/safer/whatever, they've ended up making it worse by handing more power over to large interest groups (like the RIAA/MPAA using DMCA take down notices to force practically any content they don't like off the net).
So call me an evil, ignorant member of the American Right if it makes you feel better, but I can't help but notice this pattern, and can't help but be convinced that the next bit of internet regulation will fit the same pattern, no matter what a bunch of Potomac River Rats say. Granted, having internet access controlled by a handful of corporate monopolies is far from ideal... but how in the hell can you expect to improve that situation by consolidating that power even more into one government monopoly? (Particularly given the FCC's existing track record on "regulating" other communication mediums.)
It's not even that hard or involved. Assuming the "hacker" uses wifi himself, it's pretty trivial to monitor packets in the neighborhood, find the offending device and use simple triangulation to locate the house the device is in.
My thinking would be that a threat against the president would be more likely to be overlooked - typically there are hundreds of threats against the president's life every year. The vice-president, on the other hand probably doesn't receive many death threats, since that particular position is largely useless (at least in the American system).
Let's see: www.govtrack.us is not accessible. markey.house.gov is Joomla, ugh, definitely not accessible. How about showing the rest of us how it should be done before heaping yet another economy-destroying law on the productive class?
Oh, come on. If we expected the government to actually follow the laws it passed, there wouldn't be a single law on the books... or, at least, all the politicians would be in jail.
Hey, when I put it that way... your idea is, without hyperbole, the best idea in the history of humanity.
I'm far more inclined to observe how much money is made off of DUI convictions - "you did a horrible, dangerous, unacceptable thing! To protect society from your intolerable recklessness... I'm sentencing you to pay $2,500 in fines and attend a weekend 'rehab' program you'll also have to pay for.":/
I can't be the only one who sees that disconnect. If it really is a tenth as dangerous as they say, we'd be locking up DUI offenders for years and/or revoking driver's licenses on offense one. Of course, we're not, because its true purpose is just a massive money-grab.
It (drunk driving legislation) has already devoled to the point that it's just unabashed, unashamed, and undisguised profiteering by the government. Pay x thousand dollars, or go to jail for 6 months, period.
The fact that so many people (majority, probably) still, somehow manage to delude themselves into thinking this is about public safety, or anything other than the bottom line... is just further proof that human civilization is no smarter or better than a bacterial cultural.
I have hear this plenty, but not since the early 1970s. Then there was outrage in the 1980s when they passed an open container law for the front seat.
I must admit the reasoning behind open container laws utterly mystify me. What's the point ?
To get around that bothersome "probable cause" thing that only ever protects criminals. You see, before open container laws, the "smell of alcohol" argument that cops use as an excuse to force a sobriety test on a driver wasn't always sufficient. "Yeah, you smell booze because my passenger there is drinking/left an open 40 in the backseat/etc." Thus people who weren't actually impaired could *gasp* avoid a DUI by not having probable cause to be tested for an arbitrary chemical concentration in their bloodstream.
teh h0rr0rz!!1
Now that our benevolent and ever-loving political overlords have placed open container laws practically everywhere, the faintest whiff of booze is enough to force a sobriety test on anyone, whether they seem impaired or not, because it's evidence of a crime - if not DUI/OMVI/DWI/WTFE, then it's evidence of an open container.
Yet another reminder that the Constitution actually means fuck-all in reality, given that any parts of it found bothersome by the government are legislated around anyway.
Not bullshit... though wildly overstated. There are, after all, over a million members of the American "military," and only a very small fraction face the potential for unexpected death with no notice - even most soldiers in combat have months of warning that they're being deployed to a hot zone.
But among those who do face the potential to be killed with little to no notice... it's called a "burn bag" or "burn box." In official usage, they're for sensitive or classified documents that are to be destroyed after a certain period of time, or a given trigger ("burn after reading," etc), in unofficial usage, people use them to store personal effects they don't want their families to see in the event of their death.
Ask anyone who's done time with a tip-of-the-spear combat unit - your airborne, your rangers, your special forces, even your "normal" Marines, and so on. Chances are good they've had, seen, or even disposed of a burn bag (for a comrade).
Can't see why you wouldn't pick up ME1 but be interested in ME2 though, care to elaborate on that one?
Well, I didn't pick up ME1 because of its ridiculous DRM... but picked up ME2 because it didn't have over-the-top DRM, and assumed it would be the same role-playing goodness that everyone told me ME1 was. Honestly, I'm kinda regretting it, having finished the game already, with no desire to replay it. Seems like such a waste to have such a rich, well developed world you can't really interact with meaningfully. Maybe if I'd played the first one I'd care about doing a second play-through, but as it is, I just don't see enough variety to make it worthwhile - essentially no inventory, no loot, a painfully simple good/evil (err, paragon/renegade) system, and a very limited number of extremely linear quests and side quests. As far as I can tell, "exploration" beyond the tightly scripted missions on "hub" locations involves moving your ship to a planet/moon, hitting the scan button and hoping that *this* planet has more than just fscking minerals to harvest.
I honestly had almost completed the game by the time I realized I was past the beginning stages - I guess I just expect a radically different type of game from something billing itself as an "RPG."
Slashdot Mirror
If all of that stuff is so stagnant, why are you bothered about the copyright lease being so long? Look for cheap or free indie media.
You're missing the point of that adage. The mosquitoes don't stay in the stagnant pool of water once they've bred. They fly off and bite anyone they can find.
Likewise, absurd lease lengths on copyrights don't just effect the works the protect, but impact the entire media realm. Why bother funding new, creative media when you get the copyright on Mickey Mouse extended for another 90 years and keep milking that cow? Or, for that matter, why bother creating anything at all, when you can become a patent troll and makes tens of millions of dollars by suing other people for bothering to create something. (And so on.)
For large values of several.
Not to mention a non-standard definition of "species." As I seem to recall, the biological definition of "species" simply involves whether or not a male and female can create a sexually viable offspring. Hence, donkeys and horses are different species, because mules (what you get when mating a horse and a donkey) are sterile, but different breeds of dogs (or cats or horses or whatever) aren't considered different species because they do create offspring which create offspring and so on (have your pets spayed or neutered!)
I'm really hoping the ESL author meant "race" instead of "species," because even after "large values of several," you'd probably still only end up with a race of Martian humans that are as different from us as our different racial groups are from each other - differences being mostly skin deep.
True, but most "sex offenders" (even "real" sex offenders) aren't attracted to children, so it seems to me like this might be a case of solving a non-existent problem. Great if you can keep the convicted pedophiles away from playgrounds, but what does that have to do with the majority of sex offenders who rape other adults?
We used to work together, didn't we?
The thing that really kills me about that kind of BS is that the incompetent managers taking three months and a dozen "change control meetings" to agree on replacing a failed drive make much more money than the people who know anything or actually do any work. I should have gone to PHB school... it's not like I use my soul for anything anyway.
Right, thank you.
:/ (DMCA for anyone who's a little slow on the uptake here.)
:(
The problem (that mainly gets over looked when bashing the G.O.P.) is that the Democrats want to control us too, just in different ways. And sure, they tell us it's all for our own good, and sometimes it even looks good on the surface.. but give it a few years and it tastes just as bad. Like all that internet legislation president Clinton got passed. God knows that hasn't been horribly abused and made even more of a farce out of our judicial system, right? Plus, it was for the kiddies, and there's no way that big business would be able to use some innocuous "updates" to copyright law to grab more power or anything.
And any "internet ID" legislation is even easier to abuse, to much more devastating effect. Frankly, the fact that Obama's even considering such a colossally horrible idea is quite unsettling. Like you said, little more than an ill-conceived power grab that will bite us very hard if anything comes of it.
And what would he say? It's not like the abysmal state of security on electronic gambling machines is new news, and evidently, no one cares enough to do anything about it. (And why would they when you can just have the feds arrest anyone who profits from flawed code and sieze their assets anyway?) Being stupid isn't a crime, and horrible practices for writing code aren't against gaming commission rules. No, being smart is against the rules and profiting off of crappy code (as a "gambler"/player) is a crime. Three cheers for the land of the free and our awesome justice system. :/
A bit off-topic, but what's homeschooling got to do with anything? It was the **public** school board in Kansas that decided creationism was as scientifically valid as... science, not the Kansas coalition of homeschoolers (or whatever it's called). Frankly, with the shape the public school system is in these days it's hard for me to imagine any alternative doing worse. Hell, we may as well save the country some money, disband the public school system and let the kiddies learn by sitting them in front of the TV.
...
But more fundamentally --- what is the implication of your post? That opposing Net Neutrality legislation is going to make it harder for governments to censor? Cause it seems to me that a small number of powerful telecoms dominating what people read is more or less a precondition for a modern totalitarian state.
Try looking at it from a different angle - which is to say: what real, existing problem is "Net Neutrality" legislation going to solve? (Or going to try to solve.)
I can't come up with anything. What I can come up with is my personal experience... back on the 'net before any "regulation" or even the web, for that matter. Before we had to worry about that DMCA legislation and all the bullshit that came with it, or all the Clinton-era attempts to "save the children" from pornography or (heaven forbid) the evils of unmonitored internet discussions with fellow human beings. (The whole 13 years of age or older EULAs you see on internet discussion boards are a direct result of one of those "save the children" laws Clinton championed.)
All I see is that every time the government has stepped in to "regulate" the internet to make it better/safer/whatever, they've ended up making it worse by handing more power over to large interest groups (like the RIAA/MPAA using DMCA take down notices to force practically any content they don't like off the net).
So call me an evil, ignorant member of the American Right if it makes you feel better, but I can't help but notice this pattern, and can't help but be convinced that the next bit of internet regulation will fit the same pattern, no matter what a bunch of Potomac River Rats say. Granted, having internet access controlled by a handful of corporate monopolies is far from ideal... but how in the hell can you expect to improve that situation by consolidating that power even more into one government monopoly? (Particularly given the FCC's existing track record on "regulating" other communication mediums.)
It's not even that hard or involved. Assuming the "hacker" uses wifi himself, it's pretty trivial to monitor packets in the neighborhood, find the offending device and use simple triangulation to locate the house the device is in.
My thinking would be that a threat against the president would be more likely to be overlooked - typically there are hundreds of threats against the president's life every year. The vice-president, on the other hand probably doesn't receive many death threats, since that particular position is largely useless (at least in the American system).
Let's see: www.govtrack.us is not accessible. markey.house.gov is Joomla, ugh, definitely not accessible. How about showing the rest of us how it should be done before heaping yet another economy-destroying law on the productive class?
Oh, come on. If we expected the government to actually follow the laws it passed, there wouldn't be a single law on the books... or, at least, all the politicians would be in jail.
Hey, when I put it that way... your idea is, without hyperbole, the best idea in the history of humanity.
You really think it's about MADD anymore?
:/
I'm far more inclined to observe how much money is made off of DUI convictions - "you did a horrible, dangerous, unacceptable thing! To protect society from your intolerable recklessness... I'm sentencing you to pay $2,500 in fines and attend a weekend 'rehab' program you'll also have to pay for."
I can't be the only one who sees that disconnect. If it really is a tenth as dangerous as they say, we'd be locking up DUI offenders for years and/or revoking driver's licenses on offense one. Of course, we're not, because its true purpose is just a massive money-grab.
It (drunk driving legislation) has already devoled to the point that it's just unabashed, unashamed, and undisguised profiteering by the government. Pay x thousand dollars, or go to jail for 6 months, period.
The fact that so many people (majority, probably) still, somehow manage to delude themselves into thinking this is about public safety, or anything other than the bottom line... is just further proof that human civilization is no smarter or better than a bacterial cultural.
I have hear this plenty, but not since the early 1970s. Then there was outrage in the 1980s when they passed an open container law for the front seat.
I must admit the reasoning behind open container laws utterly mystify me. What's the point ?
To get around that bothersome "probable cause" thing that only ever protects criminals. You see, before open container laws, the "smell of alcohol" argument that cops use as an excuse to force a sobriety test on a driver wasn't always sufficient. "Yeah, you smell booze because my passenger there is drinking/left an open 40 in the backseat/etc." Thus people who weren't actually impaired could *gasp* avoid a DUI by not having probable cause to be tested for an arbitrary chemical concentration in their bloodstream.
teh h0rr0rz!!1
Now that our benevolent and ever-loving political overlords have placed open container laws practically everywhere, the faintest whiff of booze is enough to force a sobriety test on anyone, whether they seem impaired or not, because it's evidence of a crime - if not DUI/OMVI/DWI/WTFE, then it's evidence of an open container.
Yet another reminder that the Constitution actually means fuck-all in reality, given that any parts of it found bothersome by the government are legislated around anyway.
Not bullshit... though wildly overstated. There are, after all, over a million members of the American "military," and only a very small fraction face the potential for unexpected death with no notice - even most soldiers in combat have months of warning that they're being deployed to a hot zone.
But among those who do face the potential to be killed with little to no notice... it's called a "burn bag" or "burn box." In official usage, they're for sensitive or classified documents that are to be destroyed after a certain period of time, or a given trigger ("burn after reading," etc), in unofficial usage, people use them to store personal effects they don't want their families to see in the event of their death.
Ask anyone who's done time with a tip-of-the-spear combat unit - your airborne, your rangers, your special forces, even your "normal" Marines, and so on. Chances are good they've had, seen, or even disposed of a burn bag (for a comrade).
it clearly needs government regulation to fix it. :/
Can't see why you wouldn't pick up ME1 but be interested in ME2 though, care to elaborate on that one?
Well, I didn't pick up ME1 because of its ridiculous DRM... but picked up ME2 because it didn't have over-the-top DRM, and assumed it would be the same role-playing goodness that everyone told me ME1 was. Honestly, I'm kinda regretting it, having finished the game already, with no desire to replay it. Seems like such a waste to have such a rich, well developed world you can't really interact with meaningfully. Maybe if I'd played the first one I'd care about doing a second play-through, but as it is, I just don't see enough variety to make it worthwhile - essentially no inventory, no loot, a painfully simple good/evil (err, paragon/renegade) system, and a very limited number of extremely linear quests and side quests. As far as I can tell, "exploration" beyond the tightly scripted missions on "hub" locations involves moving your ship to a planet/moon, hitting the scan button and hoping that *this* planet has more than just fscking minerals to harvest. I honestly had almost completed the game by the time I realized I was past the beginning stages - I guess I just expect a radically different type of game from something billing itself as an "RPG."