What these "forecasters" don't seem to understand is that the PC market moves much more slowly. For all practical intents, I can use an upgraded desktop that I purchased in 2005 and have a decent computer that can run most needed applications. Sure, I might not be able to run Super Fancy Game 2011 on it, but for typical computer tasks like e-mail, word processing, browsing the internet, YouTube, etc. it works just fine. But lets consider the smartphone market in 2005. There were no widely used captive touch screens, the iPhone wouldn't be released for another 2 years, and the first Android phone wouldn't be released for another 3 years. A person using a HTC Dream wouldn't be able to run the same basic programs that someone with, say, a Droid 2 could. Yet that is only a 2 year gap in hardware! People are buying more smartphones, tablets, etc. because they don't have a practical life longer than a year or two. You can't get software to run on them, annoying bugs in the OS won't be fixed, etc. On the other hand, if you spend a bit of money and upgrade a mid-range system from 2005, you can run just about any normal program on it.
Except for the fact that netbooks are cheap and not limited. While undoubtedly you are going to be able to do more with the Honeycomb tablet than an iPad and it will be cheaper, netbooks still are the way to go for laptop replacements. I can buy a netbook for a bit less than $300 that can do most of the things a tablet can do for a lot cheaper.
Section I. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act."
Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution. to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
Which the entire bill is irrelevant when you would consider that the idea of a marriage shouldn't be something that the government should deal with, let alone define. Any 2 people should be able to claim a "marriage" who are living together just like any two people can claim to be partners in a business.
So what if a minority (or even a majority) wishes to dictate how everyone (including themselves) should live, in certain areas? Then surely this incredibly limited government is simply a mechanism for ensuring your wishes trump their wishes, partially depriving them of their ability to affect the politics that are supposed to represent them, even if your wishes happened to be in minority?
Except for the fact that you don't have that right. No one has the right to tell anyone else how to live unless the thing that they are doing interferes with the right of someone else (as in murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc.). If people are not harming others in the way that they live, why should they be stopped? Allowing someone to do something is different than agreeing with them. Otherwise we give up all of our freedoms. Should a Jew's right to worship be infringed just because he lives in a Muslim neighbourhood? Should a Protestant not be allowed to worship because he lives next to a Catholic cathedral? Few people would suggest these things but yet they all run off of the same principle as allowing all games and letting people pick the ones they wish to purchase. No one is forcing you to be a Catholic just like no one is forcing you to buy Left 4 Dead 2. The idea of suppressing other people simply because you don't like it is born out of the same irrationality as preventing people from other religions from worshiping.
I don't know; it seems vaguely hypocritical to demand that an incredibly small government be permanently and inflexibly instated in a democracy, when incredibly small governments could well not be wanted. It just sounds, ironically enough, like yet another mechanism for majority consensus to oppress minority politics.
How? Here is the thing, with a large government, you can be forced to do something you don't want to or want to do something that isn't allowed (and that something isn't harming others). With a small government that never happens. If you don't want to buy a single "violent" video game in your lifetime, no one is forcing you to. If you want to indulge in as much zombie-slaying action as your Xbox can take, you can do that too. It is an irrationality to think that you should have the power over other people, you have the right to disagree, you have the right to protest, but you do not have the right to infringe on the life, liberty or property of someone else. It is as fundamental as the fact that murder is bad.
Or the proposition 8 thing - voting minorities' rights away sure was the fault of big government.
Yes it was. Why the hell do we have the government in marriages? It shouldn't be a function of government to have the power to associate or not associate people together. If we limited the function of government to simply a government which would protect against force (as in the lynching you described) and against fraud (so the economic system can work properly). Limited government is not powerless government, limited government is the government having a set list of things it can do and it can't break them. Limited government is making sure the government can't legislate itself more powers. Limited government isn't deciding not to enforce basic rules against murder, but rather limited government is limiting the government's scope so it can't, for instance invade people's privacy (TSA, border checkpoints, PATRIOT act), develop a baseless, fiat currency with 'legal tender' laws (Federal Reserve), invade sovereign nations for no real reason (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, etc.), keep people's retirement money in a glorified pyramid scheme (Social Security), detain people without them knowing what they were charged with (Guantanamo Bay), etc.
Limited government is simply stating the powers that governments have and not letting them cross over those boundaries.
And this, is why democracy isn't the 'end all' solution the West seems to think it is. If governments realized that in most to all cases legalizing things would have little benefit except supporting the people who want it legalized.
Give me one good reason on why R-18 games should be banned. There isn't any, you might personally disagree with them, but here is the thing, you don't have to buy them. No one is making you sit down in front of a 360 and shoot zombie after zombie. On the other hand, banning them is effectively forcing people not to even if they want to do so.
Politicians and their voters. This is why democracy without incredibly limited government is always a bad thing because the majority can fuck with the minority in any way they wish without the minority being able to do anything about it, despite there being no harm for the majority if the minority is allowed to do what they wish.
This is why you specifically numerate the powers of your government to prevent things like this from happening and the government overstepping its bounds to protect against fraud and force (the only two legitimate reasons for government) and screwing the people who want to play these games.
Safety regulations save lives -- they are necessary in any civilized society unless life is meaningless to you.
Safety regulations do nothing that an informed person wouldn't already have done. It is up to individuals to weigh risks to benefits. It is up to individuals to exercise caution and take responsibility for their actions. It is up to the individual to decide how much risk is tolerable. A corporation's goal is to make a product that is free of defects and doesn't use fraud to persuade an individual. You can't eliminate all risk, everyone has to decide for themselves how much risk is acceptable and live their life in that manner. That is simply part of life, if you want to save a few bucks and go for a car with less safety features, go for it, but realize that you are putting your life in more danger. If you enjoy fattening foods in excess, you are putting a few years of your life at risk, but for a person who loves eating fattening foods, they might prefer that.
It is an individual's right to live their life in whatever manner they see fit so long as it doesn't interfere with another's right to do the same thing. The government's role is to protect people against force and fraud, to ensure that people aren't going around killing each other and that people aren't disrupting the free market by misrepresenting products. The government's job isn't to force choice in products.
Lets see here, for one the computer market. Computers keep getting faster, cheaper, have more features, etc. based solely on consumer demand. A basic desktop no longer costs $1,000+, laptops can be found for $300 commonly, etc. Look at robotics, what was seen as a distant, science-fiction dream, having a robot sweep your floors, can now be purchased for only a few hundred dollars in the form of a Roomba and other-type devices. Then just look at the rest of the stuff we have that we never would have dreamed we would have had as children, mini-TVs in the backs of cars, the ability for your phone to play just about any game you played as a child or teenager, the ability to store an entire library on a card the size of a fingernail, the fact that your entire CD collection can be compressed into a tiny box with speakers, the ability to watch movies in -real- 3D that doesn't look messed up like with the old red/blue glasses, the fact that you can use video chat to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world and see them in pretty close to real time, what about the fact that you don't even need a paper map anymore you type in any address anywhere in the country and your GPS can give you pretty accurate directions of how to get there (they still need an "avoid the ghetto" option though), what about the fact that we no longer have to wait for film to develop, or even lug around a bulky camera, we can instead capture those moments and send them around the world with a cell phone, what about the fact that we've gone from blurry-barely-recognizable black and white TV to crystal-clear HDTV? Etc.
And to think that all of that is pretty much attainable for anyone living in the west. Yes, I know, not all of it was fully developed by corporations and some of the underlying technologies were developed by universities, but the fact still remains that they are only attainable at a low cost because of the (somewhat) free-market that we have. And yes, I know, some people would like everything to be free. Ever. And they'd just love it for everything to be sold for exactly what it costs, but the fact remains, we've gotten so much in the last few years from the free market, had those economic benefits not been there, our lives would be profoundly worse off.
They weren't common because they were seen as unnecessary, if you wanted airbags and you wanted seatbelts you could get cars that had them. This idea that things only change with regulation is silly, there is no regulation saying that all new computers have to have more than 128 MB of RAM, but yet most do because of consumer demands. It is no different in the auto industry, if people want something and are willing to pay for it, they will make a car or provide options to allow you to do it. It all comes down to personal responsibility and personal preference.
So you are more happy with a company which advertises one thing then remotely changes it down the line? Would you be happy with owning a box set of DVDs only to find out that 2 years later they removed some of the episodes? Would you be happy with buying a computer then suddenly 2 years after you've had it the disk capacity goes down by 50 GB? With removing "OtherOS" Sony committed fraud, I much more strongly despise Sony for using fraudulent tactics than I do Microsoft or Nintendo which haven't resorted to such tactics. Also, the Wii is much, much, much more open than the PS3 or 360. Nintendo doesn't try to ban third-party controllers like Sony does, and doesn't kick you offline if it detects a "modified" console like Microsoft does. Yes, there is always that yearly update that it takes the homebrew guys a week to get around, but other than that it is the most open of the 3 consoles.
The problem is the government. Left in a free market, consumers and corporations will balance each other out to the benefit of the consumer. In a truly free market Sony can do whatever DRM scheme it wants and anyone can break it without any legal hurdles. The government is what is preventing this, thanks to tyrannical legislation such as the DMCA.
Yes, they are useful so you should be able to get it on a car if you so choose. Just like everything else, if you want it, go ahead and have it installed and have it on your car. However, don't make everyone else have to have it. There isn't anything wrong with having rear-view cameras, there is a problem with the government mandating rear-view cameras. I'm sure that once more information gets out about this bill I can almost guarantee you that the sponsors of the bill have some ties to rear-view camera technology and the bill will be written to include them while exclude their competitors because of technicalities.
When the market works, innovations are made and things work. When government tries to control it, corners get cut, customers get screwed, companies get screwed and only the government ever wins.
It is silly to compare the two. For one is the scope, how much does adding a few lights cost? Not much at all. What does adding in cameras, adding in LCD screens, adding in extra hardware to process it, etc. cost? A shitload more money. Secondly, you seem to have made the incorrect assumption that somehow car manufacturers don't add safety features when pressured by consumers. They do. All extra government regulation does it add in big bucks for a handful of "approved" suppliers while eliminating the competition in most cases.
And as for the "bang for your buck" this is a pretty insignificant issue. Yes, 292 people lost per year to these things is tragic but it doesn't require massive costs. As for pedestrians, simply get away from cars that are backing up. It isn't that hard to see that a car is moving backwards and then move outside of its path. And what all does it add? We can't say that 292 people weren't seen by the driver had the driver been fully aware and the pedestrians using some basic common sense so we can't even eliminate that statistic. It is more government regulation with little to no true upside, will result in people relying on cameras or alarms rather than actually paying attention all the while we lose freedoms and money out of our pockets in both initial and maintenance costs, not to mention the potential for abuse.
Your analogies don't work with this situation. Wikileaks isn't posting war plans, they aren't posting technical details of bombs and jet planes. They are simply posting details about past things that the mainstream press conveniently "forgot" to tell us. This isn't about disclosing D-Day information, this is about the government lying to us. It is about putting the information in the hands of citizens about the war so we can make informed votes over if it is worth it to continue.
I applaud the government for not going after Assange. Any remotely free government should have first off released all the info that Assange has released first off, and secondly should admit to being wrong when it does break out. The only person that should be punished should be the US government.
Assange -wants- people to look at these leaked documents, if being in the media all the time is what it takes to do it, I'm sure hes willing.
While I'd really like him to be less of a drama queen and just post all the damn documents already, it does draw more attention to them and highlight just how corrupt governments are.
And the risk to reward ratio for copper is still rather low. Copper isn't gold people, it would be better to just get a bunch of pre-1982 pennies and melt them down if you wanted cheap, illegal copper.
The vast majority of a game's level of fun has little to do with hardware. About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need or with loading times which completely screw up immersion. I'd rather Fable II look worse and have no loading screens than it to have the terrible amount of loading it has.
I know that some people obsess over pixel count and want their games to look better, but the fact is, it doesn't make the game any more fun. A game that isn't fun to play in NTSC resolutions isn't going to become fun to play in 1080p. A game that is a poorly executed concept with broken play mechanics isn't going to be any more fun if there are 3,000 polygons rendered per second or 300,000,000 polygons rendered per second. Etc.
There isn't really anything limiting the Wii other than developers are reluctant to spent more time developing quality games for it. Other than graphics, the Wii can certainly handle most of the stuff that a PS3 or Xbox can do, it just might take a bit more time developing. There is no technical reason why Final Fantasy XIII couldn't have been ported to the Wii simply running at 480p rather than 1080p.
The biggest technical barrier in the past 3 generations of consoles have been load times. I don't care if it is only 15 seconds, it ruins any immersion in the game every time you have to hit a load screen. Even running from a HDD, Fable II lags like crazy on the 360 and sounds like a jet engine taking off if you play it with the disk.
There is no technical reason why games can't be just as fun on all 3 systems, it is only the developer's reluctance to do so that is holding them back.
Which does nothing. Which scenario do you think RandomMediaExec is going to think of first when the album doesn't sell well:
A) The album sucked
B) People are taking a principled stand against our actions
C) ZOMG!!!!111!11 RAMPANT PIRACY!!!111!! EVERYONE WHO DIDN"T BUY THE ALBUM MUST BE A PIRATE!!!111
Most media executives go with option C even though the main cause may be A or B. Every drop in sales to them is correspondent to an increase in "piracy" in their statistical games.
Yes a cop might be on the way. But there are times such as with Virginia Tech and other hostage situations where a cop isn't going to do the job. Look, if someone or a group of people has a large amount of hostages, you want a hostage negotiator or a SWAT team, you don't want the typical donut eating cop to show up. Texting through 911 would make it be easier, that way you can differentiate between "hes taking all the money from the register and just needs to be scared away" and "he's got a gun to the cashier's head, there are 15 of us here and he has no problems shooting us all".
At some point there's simply no way for the government to raise more revenue
Then they just start up the printing presses. We have a currency based on nothing, not only that but the US has a currency which many other currencies are pegged to it or use it as their primary currency or reserve. Hell, the Fed just injected, what? A few billion? A trillion? Extra 'dollars' into the economy. Yes, there -is- a point where people won't take Federal Reserve notes and start accepting coins for bullion value, but I don't think the masses have hit that point yet nor ever will unless we see a -dramatic- increase in prices.
Slashdot Mirror
What these "forecasters" don't seem to understand is that the PC market moves much more slowly. For all practical intents, I can use an upgraded desktop that I purchased in 2005 and have a decent computer that can run most needed applications. Sure, I might not be able to run Super Fancy Game 2011 on it, but for typical computer tasks like e-mail, word processing, browsing the internet, YouTube, etc. it works just fine. But lets consider the smartphone market in 2005. There were no widely used captive touch screens, the iPhone wouldn't be released for another 2 years, and the first Android phone wouldn't be released for another 3 years. A person using a HTC Dream wouldn't be able to run the same basic programs that someone with, say, a Droid 2 could. Yet that is only a 2 year gap in hardware! People are buying more smartphones, tablets, etc. because they don't have a practical life longer than a year or two. You can't get software to run on them, annoying bugs in the OS won't be fixed, etc. On the other hand, if you spend a bit of money and upgrade a mid-range system from 2005, you can run just about any normal program on it.
Except for the fact that netbooks are cheap and not limited. While undoubtedly you are going to be able to do more with the Honeycomb tablet than an iPad and it will be cheaper, netbooks still are the way to go for laptop replacements. I can buy a netbook for a bit less than $300 that can do most of the things a tablet can do for a lot cheaper.
Section I. Title This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act." Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution. to read: Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
Which the entire bill is irrelevant when you would consider that the idea of a marriage shouldn't be something that the government should deal with, let alone define. Any 2 people should be able to claim a "marriage" who are living together just like any two people can claim to be partners in a business.
So what if a minority (or even a majority) wishes to dictate how everyone (including themselves) should live, in certain areas? Then surely this incredibly limited government is simply a mechanism for ensuring your wishes trump their wishes, partially depriving them of their ability to affect the politics that are supposed to represent them, even if your wishes happened to be in minority?
Except for the fact that you don't have that right. No one has the right to tell anyone else how to live unless the thing that they are doing interferes with the right of someone else (as in murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc.). If people are not harming others in the way that they live, why should they be stopped? Allowing someone to do something is different than agreeing with them. Otherwise we give up all of our freedoms. Should a Jew's right to worship be infringed just because he lives in a Muslim neighbourhood? Should a Protestant not be allowed to worship because he lives next to a Catholic cathedral? Few people would suggest these things but yet they all run off of the same principle as allowing all games and letting people pick the ones they wish to purchase. No one is forcing you to be a Catholic just like no one is forcing you to buy Left 4 Dead 2. The idea of suppressing other people simply because you don't like it is born out of the same irrationality as preventing people from other religions from worshiping.
I don't know; it seems vaguely hypocritical to demand that an incredibly small government be permanently and inflexibly instated in a democracy, when incredibly small governments could well not be wanted. It just sounds, ironically enough, like yet another mechanism for majority consensus to oppress minority politics.
How? Here is the thing, with a large government, you can be forced to do something you don't want to or want to do something that isn't allowed (and that something isn't harming others). With a small government that never happens. If you don't want to buy a single "violent" video game in your lifetime, no one is forcing you to. If you want to indulge in as much zombie-slaying action as your Xbox can take, you can do that too. It is an irrationality to think that you should have the power over other people, you have the right to disagree, you have the right to protest, but you do not have the right to infringe on the life, liberty or property of someone else. It is as fundamental as the fact that murder is bad.
Or the proposition 8 thing - voting minorities' rights away sure was the fault of big government.
Yes it was. Why the hell do we have the government in marriages? It shouldn't be a function of government to have the power to associate or not associate people together. If we limited the function of government to simply a government which would protect against force (as in the lynching you described) and against fraud (so the economic system can work properly). Limited government is not powerless government, limited government is the government having a set list of things it can do and it can't break them. Limited government is making sure the government can't legislate itself more powers. Limited government isn't deciding not to enforce basic rules against murder, but rather limited government is limiting the government's scope so it can't, for instance invade people's privacy (TSA, border checkpoints, PATRIOT act), develop a baseless, fiat currency with 'legal tender' laws (Federal Reserve), invade sovereign nations for no real reason (Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, etc.), keep people's retirement money in a glorified pyramid scheme (Social Security), detain people without them knowing what they were charged with (Guantanamo Bay), etc.
Limited government is simply stating the powers that governments have and not letting them cross over those boundaries.
And this, is why democracy isn't the 'end all' solution the West seems to think it is. If governments realized that in most to all cases legalizing things would have little benefit except supporting the people who want it legalized.
Give me one good reason on why R-18 games should be banned. There isn't any, you might personally disagree with them, but here is the thing, you don't have to buy them. No one is making you sit down in front of a 360 and shoot zombie after zombie. On the other hand, banning them is effectively forcing people not to even if they want to do so.
Politicians and their voters. This is why democracy without incredibly limited government is always a bad thing because the majority can fuck with the minority in any way they wish without the minority being able to do anything about it, despite there being no harm for the majority if the minority is allowed to do what they wish.
This is why you specifically numerate the powers of your government to prevent things like this from happening and the government overstepping its bounds to protect against fraud and force (the only two legitimate reasons for government) and screwing the people who want to play these games.
Safety regulations save lives -- they are necessary in any civilized society unless life is meaningless to you.
Safety regulations do nothing that an informed person wouldn't already have done. It is up to individuals to weigh risks to benefits. It is up to individuals to exercise caution and take responsibility for their actions. It is up to the individual to decide how much risk is tolerable. A corporation's goal is to make a product that is free of defects and doesn't use fraud to persuade an individual. You can't eliminate all risk, everyone has to decide for themselves how much risk is acceptable and live their life in that manner. That is simply part of life, if you want to save a few bucks and go for a car with less safety features, go for it, but realize that you are putting your life in more danger. If you enjoy fattening foods in excess, you are putting a few years of your life at risk, but for a person who loves eating fattening foods, they might prefer that.
It is an individual's right to live their life in whatever manner they see fit so long as it doesn't interfere with another's right to do the same thing. The government's role is to protect people against force and fraud, to ensure that people aren't going around killing each other and that people aren't disrupting the free market by misrepresenting products. The government's job isn't to force choice in products.
Lets see here, for one the computer market. Computers keep getting faster, cheaper, have more features, etc. based solely on consumer demand. A basic desktop no longer costs $1,000+, laptops can be found for $300 commonly, etc. Look at robotics, what was seen as a distant, science-fiction dream, having a robot sweep your floors, can now be purchased for only a few hundred dollars in the form of a Roomba and other-type devices. Then just look at the rest of the stuff we have that we never would have dreamed we would have had as children, mini-TVs in the backs of cars, the ability for your phone to play just about any game you played as a child or teenager, the ability to store an entire library on a card the size of a fingernail, the fact that your entire CD collection can be compressed into a tiny box with speakers, the ability to watch movies in -real- 3D that doesn't look messed up like with the old red/blue glasses, the fact that you can use video chat to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world and see them in pretty close to real time, what about the fact that you don't even need a paper map anymore you type in any address anywhere in the country and your GPS can give you pretty accurate directions of how to get there (they still need an "avoid the ghetto" option though), what about the fact that we no longer have to wait for film to develop, or even lug around a bulky camera, we can instead capture those moments and send them around the world with a cell phone, what about the fact that we've gone from blurry-barely-recognizable black and white TV to crystal-clear HDTV? Etc.
And to think that all of that is pretty much attainable for anyone living in the west. Yes, I know, not all of it was fully developed by corporations and some of the underlying technologies were developed by universities, but the fact still remains that they are only attainable at a low cost because of the (somewhat) free-market that we have. And yes, I know, some people would like everything to be free. Ever. And they'd just love it for everything to be sold for exactly what it costs, but the fact remains, we've gotten so much in the last few years from the free market, had those economic benefits not been there, our lives would be profoundly worse off.
They weren't common because they were seen as unnecessary, if you wanted airbags and you wanted seatbelts you could get cars that had them. This idea that things only change with regulation is silly, there is no regulation saying that all new computers have to have more than 128 MB of RAM, but yet most do because of consumer demands. It is no different in the auto industry, if people want something and are willing to pay for it, they will make a car or provide options to allow you to do it. It all comes down to personal responsibility and personal preference.
So you are more happy with a company which advertises one thing then remotely changes it down the line? Would you be happy with owning a box set of DVDs only to find out that 2 years later they removed some of the episodes? Would you be happy with buying a computer then suddenly 2 years after you've had it the disk capacity goes down by 50 GB? With removing "OtherOS" Sony committed fraud, I much more strongly despise Sony for using fraudulent tactics than I do Microsoft or Nintendo which haven't resorted to such tactics. Also, the Wii is much, much, much more open than the PS3 or 360. Nintendo doesn't try to ban third-party controllers like Sony does, and doesn't kick you offline if it detects a "modified" console like Microsoft does. Yes, there is always that yearly update that it takes the homebrew guys a week to get around, but other than that it is the most open of the 3 consoles.
The problem is the government. Left in a free market, consumers and corporations will balance each other out to the benefit of the consumer. In a truly free market Sony can do whatever DRM scheme it wants and anyone can break it without any legal hurdles. The government is what is preventing this, thanks to tyrannical legislation such as the DMCA.
Yes, they are useful so you should be able to get it on a car if you so choose. Just like everything else, if you want it, go ahead and have it installed and have it on your car. However, don't make everyone else have to have it. There isn't anything wrong with having rear-view cameras, there is a problem with the government mandating rear-view cameras. I'm sure that once more information gets out about this bill I can almost guarantee you that the sponsors of the bill have some ties to rear-view camera technology and the bill will be written to include them while exclude their competitors because of technicalities.
When the market works, innovations are made and things work. When government tries to control it, corners get cut, customers get screwed, companies get screwed and only the government ever wins.
It is silly to compare the two. For one is the scope, how much does adding a few lights cost? Not much at all. What does adding in cameras, adding in LCD screens, adding in extra hardware to process it, etc. cost? A shitload more money. Secondly, you seem to have made the incorrect assumption that somehow car manufacturers don't add safety features when pressured by consumers. They do. All extra government regulation does it add in big bucks for a handful of "approved" suppliers while eliminating the competition in most cases.
And as for the "bang for your buck" this is a pretty insignificant issue. Yes, 292 people lost per year to these things is tragic but it doesn't require massive costs. As for pedestrians, simply get away from cars that are backing up. It isn't that hard to see that a car is moving backwards and then move outside of its path. And what all does it add? We can't say that 292 people weren't seen by the driver had the driver been fully aware and the pedestrians using some basic common sense so we can't even eliminate that statistic. It is more government regulation with little to no true upside, will result in people relying on cameras or alarms rather than actually paying attention all the while we lose freedoms and money out of our pockets in both initial and maintenance costs, not to mention the potential for abuse.
Your analogies don't work with this situation. Wikileaks isn't posting war plans, they aren't posting technical details of bombs and jet planes. They are simply posting details about past things that the mainstream press conveniently "forgot" to tell us. This isn't about disclosing D-Day information, this is about the government lying to us. It is about putting the information in the hands of citizens about the war so we can make informed votes over if it is worth it to continue.
I applaud the government for not going after Assange. Any remotely free government should have first off released all the info that Assange has released first off, and secondly should admit to being wrong when it does break out. The only person that should be punished should be the US government.
Assange -wants- people to look at these leaked documents, if being in the media all the time is what it takes to do it, I'm sure hes willing.
While I'd really like him to be less of a drama queen and just post all the damn documents already, it does draw more attention to them and highlight just how corrupt governments are.
And the risk to reward ratio for copper is still rather low. Copper isn't gold people, it would be better to just get a bunch of pre-1982 pennies and melt them down if you wanted cheap, illegal copper.
The vast majority of a game's level of fun has little to do with hardware. About the only two times where hardware becomes an issue is when the hardware isn't adequate to show you all the information you need or with loading times which completely screw up immersion. I'd rather Fable II look worse and have no loading screens than it to have the terrible amount of loading it has.
I know that some people obsess over pixel count and want their games to look better, but the fact is, it doesn't make the game any more fun. A game that isn't fun to play in NTSC resolutions isn't going to become fun to play in 1080p. A game that is a poorly executed concept with broken play mechanics isn't going to be any more fun if there are 3,000 polygons rendered per second or 300,000,000 polygons rendered per second. Etc.
There isn't really anything limiting the Wii other than developers are reluctant to spent more time developing quality games for it. Other than graphics, the Wii can certainly handle most of the stuff that a PS3 or Xbox can do, it just might take a bit more time developing. There is no technical reason why Final Fantasy XIII couldn't have been ported to the Wii simply running at 480p rather than 1080p.
The biggest technical barrier in the past 3 generations of consoles have been load times. I don't care if it is only 15 seconds, it ruins any immersion in the game every time you have to hit a load screen. Even running from a HDD, Fable II lags like crazy on the 360 and sounds like a jet engine taking off if you play it with the disk.
There is no technical reason why games can't be just as fun on all 3 systems, it is only the developer's reluctance to do so that is holding them back.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. NTSC was used in all major consoles from PONG to the Wii.
Like, not buying their music?
Which does nothing. Which scenario do you think RandomMediaExec is going to think of first when the album doesn't sell well:
A) The album sucked
B) People are taking a principled stand against our actions
C) ZOMG!!!!111!11 RAMPANT PIRACY!!!111!! EVERYONE WHO DIDN"T BUY THE ALBUM MUST BE A PIRATE!!!111
Most media executives go with option C even though the main cause may be A or B. Every drop in sales to them is correspondent to an increase in "piracy" in their statistical games.
Yes a cop might be on the way. But there are times such as with Virginia Tech and other hostage situations where a cop isn't going to do the job. Look, if someone or a group of people has a large amount of hostages, you want a hostage negotiator or a SWAT team, you don't want the typical donut eating cop to show up. Texting through 911 would make it be easier, that way you can differentiate between "hes taking all the money from the register and just needs to be scared away" and "he's got a gun to the cashier's head, there are 15 of us here and he has no problems shooting us all".
Which is why this entire patent nonsense is exactly that: nonsense.
At some point there's simply no way for the government to raise more revenue
Then they just start up the printing presses. We have a currency based on nothing, not only that but the US has a currency which many other currencies are pegged to it or use it as their primary currency or reserve. Hell, the Fed just injected, what? A few billion? A trillion? Extra 'dollars' into the economy. Yes, there -is- a point where people won't take Federal Reserve notes and start accepting coins for bullion value, but I don't think the masses have hit that point yet nor ever will unless we see a -dramatic- increase in prices.