"It is corrupt politicians who write legislation in favor of corrupt companies, maintaining their monopolies. The solution is not more government regulation of the economy, but less"
Wrong. The solution is to not have corrupt politicians write legislation, so voters should stop voting corrupt politicians in.
"they [store owners] would form agreements with road owners to make that happen"
Ridiculous. Why should the road owners even bother talking with store owners except to say "You pay the toll _too_. Muahahaha!".
The only entity road owners have to make agreements with is the _government_, since that's who can apply force.
If the government is corrupt, the road owners can sit pretty, collect exorbitant tolls, and use part of the profits to bribe that government to help enforce the monopoly.
And you keep implying that I'm talking nonsense, fine, I will stop trying to fill your poor little mind with my nonsense.
Been a long time since I last played it - don't recall a part with many spider monsters. The flying babies could get annoying though:). Anyway most of Doom 3 was a fewer but tougher monsters.
I think Serious Sam is closer to Doom 2 in gameplay than Doom 3 ever was.
Serious Sam did take the lots of monsters thing a bit further (some might say over the top even)- you could see lots of monsters rushing at you from the horizon, and go "hmm, I've got lots of ammo and life, which am I going to run out of first...";).
So once you have a government that is corrupt, the corrupt companies will be queueing up to "help" and "advise" the government. I've seen plenty of tenders where it's obvious who "helped" write them. Just google for the specs and you know who is going to win;).
The companies that aren't corrupt just won't be as good at winning government contracts and the various juicy monopolies.
Whereas if you have a clean and competent government, even the corrupt companies start putting up a good show of being squeaky clean.
If politicians are taking money from companies they _share_ the _greater_ part of the blame.
Now if they keep getting reelected for doing that, oh well that's the way it goes I guess.
As for the road thing:
"there is so much incentive for road owners to provide the cheapest possible access from a person's house to a store where that person can buy goods."
What incentive is there for companies to provide the cheapest possible access? There's still a fair bit of monopoly profit to be made, even avoiding the "get sued by individual/class action" levels. There are plenty of monopoly companies who are well aware of how much they can milk before they get kicked by the cow. Now if the Gov appointed a decent regulator, then you'd pay quite a bit less (the company far from goes bust as a result of those "low prices").
If you have a cooperative owned by the houseowners building the roads then there's a higher chance of things ending up differently. Cooperatives are cool, but there's not that much incentive for the person doing all the hard work and risk starting the cooperative. Usually such people will start companies instead. Perhaps cooperatives should start some sort of fund to help encourage more cooperatives to be formed, sounds tricky to get right though;).
Anyway, I've not been doing a good job of explaining stuff to you, so maybe it's better someone else does it.
OK so I'm crap at explaining stuff. I didn't intend that bit to be read as either the Government builds the roads or a single company would build the roads.
Let me try to explain the monopoly thing again: It's pretty hard for me to avoid using the road in front of my house. What can I do if the entity in charge of that road charges a high toll just to use that road? I hope you can see that it's not quite as easy as changing brands at the supermarket. Stuff like roads are monopolies.
BUT don't miss the most important point:
If you've got a corrupt government it's not going to make such a big difference whether that government appoints a single company to build the roads or twenty different companies to build the different roads.
A small corrupt government in league with big corporations or a big corrupt government will still have you screwed about as much. After all the gov defines what's legal, and many companies do whatever that gov lets them get away with to make as much money from you. Don't see a big difference whether it's a small corrupt gov being bribed by money those companies take from you, or a big corrupt gov throwing public money at those companies.
The US Gov is not the most corrupt or evil gov in the world, but it is quite a scary situation since it's the most powerful Gov in the world. A bad gov of some weak country is bad news for that country but not such a big problem for the rest of the world. The US Gov has pretty long reach and influence.
I'm really crap at explaining stuff, but believe me it's true what I'm _trying_ to explain;).
"it seems like docking with a spinning module on the end of a tether would be nearly impossible"
So have a docking module attached to the tether and movable along the tether.
Then you can move the people/cargo from the docking module to the ends when it is convenient.
The trouble is NASA spends tons of money on stupid "mission to mars/moon" bullshit.
Just fix this "zero G" problem already ok?
Once you fix that then you can figure out how to shield people from radiation. Water can help since you'll be needing it for lots of other reasons e.g. human consumption, hydrogen, oxygen.
Then you can take your sweet time to get to mars or wherever without dying.
If people want a mission to mars maybe they should send the NASA bosses and a few choice politicians on that mission to mars, one way. That would be a good use of taxpayer money.
Actually for Doom and Doom 2 often it's YOU that jumps out of hiding and mows down monsters. And that was fun.
And sometimes you find out a bit late that you just bit off more than you can chew - room with lots of monsters. That was fun too since if you keep at it you often find you can chew more;).
Whereas for Doom 3, while the graphics were nice and atmosphere was ok, it got a tad boring. You could almost play some parts of doom 3 with your eyes closed (and with the dark lighting it didn't make that much difference;) ). Putter along, hear some noise, point gun _behind_ you, and move backwards and a measured pace and shoot till you hear the monster die. Like doh.
What would be nice is a properly done Aliens vs Predator game with modern tech. Already Crysis in some parts has you playing something that's similar to a Predator;).
AVP2 the game wasn't that bad, but could have been a lot better with better tech and more resources. I also found it silly that a Predator couldn't climb up tree trunks in AVP2. Predators shouldn't be able to climb up smooth walls (concrete/metal) - but the Aliens should (which they could in AVP2).
AVP2 also did the multiplayer balance the wrong way. Instead of trying to make all the creatures the same. Just modify the scores players get for kills e.g. if Alien kills marine = X points, Alien kills predator = Y points, so on and so forth, and maybe do some shared kill points (share in points if you caused significant damage in the past 2 seconds). Basically paper should get a lot more points for somehow managing to beat scissors;).
OK on second thought I apologize, I'm very sorry. Nobody deserves that sort of government.
Anyway it's quite clear: 1) If you don't have a government, some dictator will come into power, and voila you now have a government. 2) It's so obvious you will have monopolies. Just think about roads and other infrastructure.
Either the government builds the roads or lets some corp or organisation do it instead.
If you have a corrupt gov it does not matter whether the government builds the stuff itself or appoints a crony to do it. You'll either lose money via tax money being siphoned off. Or by the crony being allowed to charge exorbitant prices.
Not all governments are that corrupt - just look at the diffferent countries around the world.
Allegedly you have a democracy and thus some choice but I suppose you should check with Diebold first;).
They just grumble and vote the same people over and over again, or don't bother voting at all.
If people really didn't like the mass media choices, they can go look and see who the other candidates are and go work something out. I mean they are listed down somewhere...
Doesn't take USD300 million for people to vote someone else.
The USD300 million is what it takes to figure out which politicians can be bought.
Most voters shouldn't be that interested in candidates like that. No surprise many corporations are though.
Right, and "just let private corporations handle it" will be better?
You think corporate employees don't get their jobs through friends and family or cronyism? There are efficient government run systems.
The problem is not "because it is done by government". It all depends on the people you have, it doesn't matter if it's "private or gov". Some stuff governments just do better than private corps. The idea is governments try not to do too much stuff that they're not good at, and regulate the private corps (especially the monopolies). And the government is accountable to the people.
The problem is you have a corrupt government and most voters don't really care that much. Whereas the private corporations care, and so they finance the politicians they want in both parties.
I've heard cases where people end up regulating/approving stuff made by a company they were/are linked to.
Anyway, it does look like the US voters are happy enough with the situation, otherwise they could get together and vote for someone really different for a change. Yes the 1st past the post thing tends to make things degenerate to a two horse race, but if you all are really pissed off enough with those two parties then you should start getting organized to vote some other candidate instead.
In the recent elections in my country, in one constituency when an opposition party member was disqualified and had to drop out, the voters voted in an independent instead of the incumbent.
When you're done with them incinerate them for energy - it's carbon neutral.
Landfill instead of incinerate if you wish to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The only problem is the fanatics who think chopping down trees is a mortal sin.
Definitely we should leave some forests reasonably untouched, but if nobody wants nuclear then humans are going to have to chop a fair number of forests down. Whether it is to make space for wind farms, or solar, or to grow stuff for fuel.
"The only people who would care in the slightest what happens to MS or Yahoo in the long term are people looking at long term investments"
Well I care a bit. I get a lot less spam on yahoo mail than on my hotmail account (which I don't bother checking regularly anymore).
And while MS instant messaging thing has more features than Yahoo's, it fails a lot more often. Skype might be a bit more secure but it's pretty flaky too and a bigger resource hog.
The Yahoo finance stuff isn't that bad too.
That said, yes the Yahoo shareholders should be pissed off since they could have cashed out and then wait for the "Grand USA Stock Sale" when the recession starts to hurt, and then buy good/better stuff at discounts.
He didn't say there's no sex. He just said no virgins.
In the world outside Slashdot, it's not just virgins who have sex you know;).
And if it's a virgin slashdotter's office maybe the locked door is for the sake and sanity of the poor unfortunate souls who might stumble in at the "wrong time" and be scarred for life.
Something is seriously wrong if the package management tool takes up more memory than many database/web/app servers.
And the time it takes to get to the package management screen itself is terrible. So much so that a colleague has preferred to take the mem hit and just leaves the yast package manager open all the time;).
That's fine for a desktop machine and for people with more mem than time.
But when Mozilla/Firefox often sucks up 1GB and yast sucks up >=200MB, you start to run out of mem on a typical desktop with < 4GB ram.
Slashdot Mirror
"they also use special subsonic ammunition"
Or supersonic ammunition that don't make very audible sonic booms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busemann's_Biplane
And now he's a state court judge, where I suppose he'll do the right thing when presented with moral dilemmas.
Why not complain beforehand so that they change their minds? Then you can buy it instead of not buying it because of some stupid DRM?
After all it actually seems to have worked in this case.
Your suggested approach has the following disadvantages:
1) Buyer and Seller lose out
2) Higher latency/lag in the feedback loop.
"It is corrupt politicians who write legislation in favor of corrupt companies, maintaining their monopolies. The solution is not more government regulation of the economy, but less"
Wrong. The solution is to not have corrupt politicians write legislation, so voters should stop voting corrupt politicians in.
"they [store owners] would form agreements with road owners to make that happen"
Ridiculous. Why should the road owners even bother talking with store owners except to say "You pay the toll _too_. Muahahaha!".
The only entity road owners have to make agreements with is the _government_, since that's who can apply force.
If the government is corrupt, the road owners can sit pretty, collect exorbitant tolls, and use part of the profits to bribe that government to help enforce the monopoly.
And you keep implying that I'm talking nonsense, fine, I will stop trying to fill your poor little mind with my nonsense.
Been a long time since I last played it - don't recall a part with many spider monsters. The flying babies could get annoying though :). Anyway most of Doom 3 was a fewer but tougher monsters.
;).
I think Serious Sam is closer to Doom 2 in gameplay than Doom 3 ever was.
Serious Sam did take the lots of monsters thing a bit further (some might say over the top even)- you could see lots of monsters rushing at you from the horizon, and go "hmm, I've got lots of ammo and life, which am I going to run out of first..."
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5HSVmXIexc
Compare with Doom 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7oG9im9LvM
You are incorrectly assuming that I am assuming that companies by default are corrupt.
;) ).
;).
;).
Most companies aren't corrupt ( well not that corrupt anyway
But, corrupt governments attract corrupt companies.
So once you have a government that is corrupt, the corrupt companies will be queueing up to "help" and "advise" the government. I've seen plenty of tenders where it's obvious who "helped" write them. Just google for the specs and you know who is going to win
The companies that aren't corrupt just won't be as good at winning government contracts and the various juicy monopolies.
Whereas if you have a clean and competent government, even the corrupt companies start putting up a good show of being squeaky clean.
If politicians are taking money from companies they _share_ the _greater_ part of the blame.
Now if they keep getting reelected for doing that, oh well that's the way it goes I guess.
As for the road thing:
"there is so much incentive for road owners to provide the cheapest possible access from a person's house to a store where that person can buy goods."
What incentive is there for companies to provide the cheapest possible access? There's still a fair bit of monopoly profit to be made, even avoiding the "get sued by individual/class action" levels. There are plenty of monopoly companies who are well aware of how much they can milk before they get kicked by the cow. Now if the Gov appointed a decent regulator, then you'd pay quite a bit less (the company far from goes bust as a result of those "low prices").
If you have a cooperative owned by the houseowners building the roads then there's a higher chance of things ending up differently. Cooperatives are cool, but there's not that much incentive for the person doing all the hard work and risk starting the cooperative. Usually such people will start companies instead. Perhaps cooperatives should start some sort of fund to help encourage more cooperatives to be formed, sounds tricky to get right though
Anyway, I've not been doing a good job of explaining stuff to you, so maybe it's better someone else does it.
OK so I'm crap at explaining stuff. I didn't intend that bit to be read as either the Government builds the roads or a single company would build the roads.
;).
Let me try to explain the monopoly thing again: It's pretty hard for me to avoid using the road in front of my house. What can I do if the entity in charge of that road charges a high toll just to use that road? I hope you can see that it's not quite as easy as changing brands at the supermarket. Stuff like roads are monopolies.
BUT don't miss the most important point:
If you've got a corrupt government it's not going to make such a big difference whether that government appoints a single company to build the roads or twenty different companies to build the different roads.
A small corrupt government in league with big corporations or a big corrupt government will still have you screwed about as much. After all the gov defines what's legal, and many companies do whatever that gov lets them get away with to make as much money from you. Don't see a big difference whether it's a small corrupt gov being bribed by money those companies take from you, or a big corrupt gov throwing public money at those companies.
The US Gov is not the most corrupt or evil gov in the world, but it is quite a scary situation since it's the most powerful Gov in the world. A bad gov of some weak country is bad news for that country but not such a big problem for the rest of the world. The US Gov has pretty long reach and influence.
I'm really crap at explaining stuff, but believe me it's true what I'm _trying_ to explain
"it seems like docking with a spinning module on the end of a tether would be nearly impossible"
So have a docking module attached to the tether and movable along the tether.
Then you can move the people/cargo from the docking module to the ends when it is convenient.
The trouble is NASA spends tons of money on stupid "mission to mars/moon" bullshit.
Just fix this "zero G" problem already ok?
Once you fix that then you can figure out how to shield people from radiation. Water can help since you'll be needing it for lots of other reasons e.g. human consumption, hydrogen, oxygen.
Then you can take your sweet time to get to mars or wherever without dying.
If people want a mission to mars maybe they should send the NASA bosses and a few choice politicians on that mission to mars, one way. That would be a good use of taxpayer money.
He could also try gentoo. Then he would often genuinely be waiting for a compile to finish.
Actually for Doom and Doom 2 often it's YOU that jumps out of hiding and mows down monsters. And that was fun.
;).
;) ). Putter along, hear some noise, point gun _behind_ you, and move backwards and a measured pace and shoot till you hear the monster die. Like doh.
;).
;).
And sometimes you find out a bit late that you just bit off more than you can chew - room with lots of monsters. That was fun too since if you keep at it you often find you can chew more
Whereas for Doom 3, while the graphics were nice and atmosphere was ok, it got a tad boring. You could almost play some parts of doom 3 with your eyes closed (and with the dark lighting it didn't make that much difference
What would be nice is a properly done Aliens vs Predator game with modern tech. Already Crysis in some parts has you playing something that's similar to a Predator
AVP2 the game wasn't that bad, but could have been a lot better with better tech and more resources. I also found it silly that a Predator couldn't climb up tree trunks in AVP2. Predators shouldn't be able to climb up smooth walls (concrete/metal) - but the Aliens should (which they could in AVP2).
AVP2 also did the multiplayer balance the wrong way. Instead of trying to make all the creatures the same. Just modify the scores players get for kills e.g. if Alien kills marine = X points, Alien kills predator = Y points, so on and so forth, and maybe do some shared kill points (share in points if you caused significant damage in the past 2 seconds). Basically paper should get a lot more points for somehow managing to beat scissors
OK on second thought I apologize, I'm very sorry. Nobody deserves that sort of government.
;).
Anyway it's quite clear:
1) If you don't have a government, some dictator will come into power, and voila you now have a government.
2) It's so obvious you will have monopolies. Just think about roads and other infrastructure.
Either the government builds the roads or lets some corp or organisation do it instead.
If you have a corrupt gov it does not matter whether the government builds the stuff itself or appoints a crony to do it. You'll either lose money via tax money being siphoned off. Or by the crony being allowed to charge exorbitant prices.
Not all governments are that corrupt - just look at the diffferent countries around the world.
Allegedly you have a democracy and thus some choice but I suppose you should check with Diebold first
People don't really care that much.
They just grumble and vote the same people over and over again, or don't bother voting at all.
If people really didn't like the mass media choices, they can go look and see who the other candidates are and go work something out. I mean they are listed down somewhere...
Doesn't take USD300 million for people to vote someone else.
The USD300 million is what it takes to figure out which politicians can be bought.
Most voters shouldn't be that interested in candidates like that. No surprise many corporations are though.
From your response, it is clearly obvious you got the government you deserve.
Right, and "just let private corporations handle it" will be better?
You think corporate employees don't get their jobs through friends and family or cronyism? There are efficient government run systems.
The problem is not "because it is done by government". It all depends on the people you have, it doesn't matter if it's "private or gov". Some stuff governments just do better than private corps. The idea is governments try not to do too much stuff that they're not good at, and regulate the private corps (especially the monopolies). And the government is accountable to the people.
The problem is you have a corrupt government and most voters don't really care that much. Whereas the private corporations care, and so they finance the politicians they want in both parties.
I've heard cases where people end up regulating/approving stuff made by a company they were/are linked to.
Anyway, it does look like the US voters are happy enough with the situation, otherwise they could get together and vote for someone really different for a change. Yes the 1st past the post thing tends to make things degenerate to a two horse race, but if you all are really pissed off enough with those two parties then you should start getting organized to vote some other candidate instead.
In the recent elections in my country, in one constituency when an opposition party member was disqualified and had to drop out, the voters voted in an independent instead of the incumbent.
"She was useless"
"just that she was nothing more than a figurehead for the company so we could get more contracts"
If that meant you actually got more contracts then she was not useless at all.
"What if I don't agree with either candidate, because I think that both of them are crooks?"
You stand for election instead? Or get someone else to stand and vote for that someone?
Unless of course you're living in some kind of monarchy where candidates need to be royalty or something.
"Pinatubo put out more CO2 in '91 than the entire output of all mankinds exisistence"
Citation please. How much CO2 did it put out?
Easy. Convert the trees to paper and lumber.
When you're done with them incinerate them for energy - it's carbon neutral.
Landfill instead of incinerate if you wish to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The only problem is the fanatics who think chopping down trees is a mortal sin.
Definitely we should leave some forests reasonably untouched, but if nobody wants nuclear then humans are going to have to chop a fair number of forests down. Whether it is to make space for wind farms, or solar, or to grow stuff for fuel.
"The only people who would care in the slightest what happens to MS or Yahoo in the long term are people looking at long term investments"
Well I care a bit. I get a lot less spam on yahoo mail than on my hotmail account (which I don't bother checking regularly anymore).
And while MS instant messaging thing has more features than Yahoo's, it fails a lot more often. Skype might be a bit more secure but it's pretty flaky too and a bigger resource hog.
The Yahoo finance stuff isn't that bad too.
That said, yes the Yahoo shareholders should be pissed off since they could have cashed out and then wait for the "Grand USA Stock Sale" when the recession starts to hurt, and then buy good/better stuff at discounts.
If you're desperate you can probably get someone to pass you the relevant cracked exe in a CD/DVD or thumbdrive.
;) ).
But you can't activate the DRM stuff that way.
I doubt it really reduces piracy much - the people selling or passing around "pirate copies" are going to be distributing the cracked version.
If the game is good enough, someone will probably find the "phone home" bit annoying enough to crack (and probably within 2 weeks
If the game is good enough, enough people will pay even without the DRM crap.
He didn't say there's no sex. He just said no virgins.
;).
In the world outside Slashdot, it's not just virgins who have sex you know
And if it's a virgin slashdotter's office maybe the locked door is for the sake and sanity of the poor unfortunate souls who might stumble in at the "wrong time" and be scarred for life.
Believe me it doesn't perform well at all.
;).
Something is seriously wrong if the package management tool takes up more memory than many database/web/app servers.
And the time it takes to get to the package management screen itself is terrible. So much so that a colleague has preferred to take the mem hit and just leaves the yast package manager open all the time
That's fine for a desktop machine and for people with more mem than time.
But when Mozilla/Firefox often sucks up 1GB and yast sucks up >=200MB, you start to run out of mem on a typical desktop with < 4GB ram.
Yes you're right that the Slashdot summary is wrong in that way.
;).
I was just pointing out the Slashdot summary was wrong in another way too
On the bright side, you didn't go "down" either right?
Despite the Slashdot "summary" saying he is on the list, Robert Morris isn't even mentioned in the article.