Rather than trying to comprehensively define subjective and inherently nebulous terms, I prefer to keep it simple. The parent poster, Causality, is a child rapist.
Blah blah blah, baseless statements about his beliefs, blah blah, eloquent but unsupported assertions about his goals, yadda yadda, claim that anyone who really knows what's what would realize this, blah blah, end with with a Monty Python quote for bonus karma.
Why don't you just repost that article from a while back that asserted, with the same lack of supporting evidence, that Obama is following the mentality of a Kenyan tribesman?
Or, if you'd prefer to actually add to the discussion, come up with something, anything to support the assertion that Obama is knowingly causing harm with the end goal of a state-run utopia. His opposition to single payer health care, among many, many other things, seems to fly in the face of this.
Drones may not object on humanitarian grounds, but they're basically just tricked out RC planes, and the people operating them are just as capable of refusing an order as a jet pilot or a member of the national guard or a cop. Why do drones scare you more than them, especially considering that we've seen (around the world and at home) examples of the later groups using deadly force against protestors?
You're fantasizing about the end of civilization when you talk about the government dropping napalm on protestors. They could also set up Nazi style death camps and start killing anyone with brown hair. Both scenarios have probabilities that would need to be expressed on a logarithmic scale.
During the height of the Iraq War, Blackhawks seemed to go down so often one wondered if they were just flinging the things out of catapults, and yet I don't recall any made up heroics explaining the crashes.
Now, picking up a soldier from a friendly hospital... there's a real story of heroics.
In fairness to WoW (which I haven't played since 2007), they had the "Kung Fu Pandas" in WC3, back in 2002, long before the movie even started development. It's not like the idea of taking an iconic Chinese animal and having them fight in an iconic Chinese style is particularly innovative.
The single player campaign was great. I spent more time on it than multiplayer, playing through three times (hard, insane, and speed run) and it was a blast.
No, it ensures valuable copyrights will last longer. A rich person isn't going to pay $10 million to extend his copyright if he doesn't expect to make a profit off the extension, and a poor person who's in a position where they own a copyright worth the $10M cost of extension has likely already earned more than that during the first twenty years.
The only people who get screwed over are those whose works don't become appreciated until decades after release, but they'll end up being screwed under any system except the current "lifetime of the author + as long as kids still like Mickey Mouse".
And if they pay you to take it, no one will undercut that either. But tell me again why they are bothering to even release these DVDs if their only option is to sell it at a 1 cent markup?
You're demanding that they provide you with a service and get absolutely nothing in return.
Because politicians don't understand math and would get confused as soon as you write anything resembling 0.01*2^x.
Maybe a simplified version? Copyright is automatic for the first ten years, the next ten cost $10k, then the next ten cost $10M, then $10B, etc.
All works get covered for ten years, successful works for 20, hugely successful and/or corporate backed for 30, realistically nothing for 40 (which is fine by me, since I think most people alive to see the release should live to see it reach public domain). In fact, maybe just automatically end it after 30 years, since otherwise the RIAA will find a way to sue someone for the full $10B for every song they download.
I agree with pretty much everything in your first paragraph. The industries war against the first sale doctrine needs to end, creators need to get to hold on to their copyrights instead of being pushed into selling their souls to publishers (particularly true in the music industry), and the fact that copyright terms have been indefinitely extended is appalling.
But after that, you get into some serious magical thinking.
For movies -- as you say, in a world without copyright, DVDs may die out. If releasing a DVD means that anyone can now buy it for $5 and distribute it as their own, no serious company is going to release DVDs (or streaming video, for that matter). If they do, someone will just copy the DVD and resell it at a lower price. An abolition of copyright would send the video industry back to the pre-VHS era. A better option is to shorten copyright duration to, say, 20 years. Long enough that they can make all their money with merchandising and sequels and DVD sales, but short enough that it will enter the public domain in the audience's lifetime.
For books -- paper books might stay as is, but ebooks would die. No point in selling an ebook if anyone can just copy it and resell it as their own at a lower price. This would be a significant blow to innovation, as ebooks have allowed a lot more people to self-publish.
For videogames -- as you say, this would be the death of all big budget games. I happen to like gaming, as do hundreds of millions of other people, and don't want to see it die out. The indie gaming scene is thriving right now, so I don't understand your suggestion that copyright abolition would make it better. Given your statement, "You can code whatever you want without worrying that someone else has locked up some feature you thought up," I think you're conflating copyrights with software patents. I agree that the latter needs to be severely curtailed, or outright eliminated, but copyrights are different. You don't get sued for making a similar game to someone else.
For music -- you didn't mention it, which is strange, because it would actually do the best in a world with no copyrights, as artists already make most of their money from touring. Even so, I like music copyrights if only for the fact that they allow artists to prevent companies from using their music in ways they go against their original intent.
You're suggesting that eliminating copyrights would lead to thriving innovation, but I see no reason to believe that. Copyrights aren't patents -- no one is held back from writing a new song or book due to copyrights. The terms need to be shortened tremendously, and the draconian measures used to enforce copyrights need to be curtailed, but I've never heard a compelling argument for why the core idea of copyright is a bad one.
There's no evidence (aside from a forced confession) that this man even worked for Kuma.
Here's a sequence of events for you: 1) Kuma starts making games that might have a political message (maybe at the CIA's behest, maybe because they think it's a good niche to make money in) 2) Iran doesn't like this, and wants to find a way to shut down the company 3) Iran picks up an American within their borders, a tortures him into confessing that he works for Kuma and that they're on the CIA payroll 4) Iran now has "evidence" that Kuma is an enemy of the state, and can use this pretense to ban their games, shut them down, etc.
This same sort of thing has been happening for millenia. Torture has always been used to get someone to implicate your enemies in a conspiracy.
The alternate theory is that a man with a background clearly tying him to the US military went to Iran to work on games subverting the Iranian government, and announced on arrival his ties to the US military, even though he easily could have done the same work from literally anywhere else in the world.
Torture is evil, full stop. I've spoken against it when used by the US, and I'll condemn it here too. The fact that the nation this man was born in did something bad does not justify doing that same thing to him.
He sounds like a typical politician, making big bold lies that are more descriptive of how he sees the world than how it is.
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software. Those that don't often give reasons like "I wanted to try it before buying it" or "It's not available for sale [where I live]/[in a format I want]" or "I can't afford it anyway", suggesting that they would follow the laws given the right circumstances.
It's good that people generally follow these laws, because the core idea of copyright (that creators have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work) is a good one.
Now, the statement that "Copyright laws are ridiculous" is unambiguously true. Any law that suggests the unauthorized download of MP3s causes trillions of dollars worth of damage to the economy is clearly insane. But suggesting that we should have no protection for creators at all is equally insane. It's just a nice fiery soundbite intended to get his supporters all worked up, so that they'll donate more or participate in get out the vote efforts, etc.
We need copyright reform, and hopefully the pirate parties draw attention to that fact. But copyright abolition is a cure worse than the disease.
You're assuming consumers never do real work, which is not a good assumption. Lots of people need to work from home now and then. And not just the people in techie professions, but teachers and reporters and managers and so on. None of those people will choose a tablet in place of a PC. And then there are the tens of millions of people who play video games like WoW or CoD. And there's the ever growing blogging world, whose members would likely prefer to write up their posts with a real keyboard.
Tablets represent a real threat to the laptop market, and may outright kill the netbook. But the PC has some major advantages that will allow it to remain the top choice for most people (who may also buy a tablet to go along with it!), at least until we get a sufficiently good docking system that can allow a tablet double as a PC.
Why is /. repeating Iran's propaganda for them?
on
Video Games As Propaganda
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriously, all of the "evidence" in this case comes from the man's forced confession. Given Iran's record on human rights, he was most likely tortured into confessing. Why on Earth is this being reported as fact?
And if those parts are designed to experience some cracking, as part of some carefully tuned tradeoff? There was some high altitude spy plane (maybe the Blackbird?) that leaked fuel on the ground, because when operating the temperatures would cause things to expand, so it was better to have it leak on the ground than break in the air. If a layman, or even an engineer unfamiliar with the project, saw that, they would naturally assume something was wrong.
So let's see, in the past three years we've gotten:
*Health care extended to millions of people who wouldn't otherwise have it *Honesty about how much the War on Terror is costing by putting it in the budget, rather than hiding it as Bush did *Laws stopping credit card companies from abusing their customers through short notice due date changes and excessive default rates *Limitations on outrageous fees charged to retailers by the card companies *A Network Neutrality law (albeit not on mobile networks, but there are good technical reasons why wireless networks can't be as unfettered as wired ones) *An end to the stop loss program wherein soldiers were forced to stay beyond what they signed up for *Fixes to the abortion that was No Child Left Behind (e.g. funding it, helping low scoring school instead of punishing them, etc.) *The Ledbetter Law, pushing back against a conservative SCOTUS ruling that made it virtually impossible for women and minorities to sue over pay discrimination *An end to torture and extraordinary rendition *An end to DADT, and no support for DOMA (he can't end it unilaterally, but he's refusing to defend it in court) *A new START treaty to reduce the number of nukes in the world
Had it not been for Republican filibusters, we also would have gotten: *EFCA, helping to fight back against the corporate driven destruction of unions *Cap & Trade, a free market solution to global warming *Public option health care, allowing people to buy health insurance direct from the government rather than a for-profit company *The DREAM act, allowing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship through college or military service
That's just what's coming to mind right now. I'm sure there's a bunch of small stuff I've forgotten. Now, how many of those things would be supported by the GOP? Maybe the New START treaty, but I doubt it, and certainly none of the others.
Claiming that Obama is "Dubya 2.0" makes for a nice sound bite, but it is blatantly false. This whole myopic claim that Republicans and Democrats are the same is just an excuse for the lazy who don't want to be bothered trying to make a difference in the world, and prefer to just shrug off the whole system while hoping for a magic solution that will never come.
The bill was supported by a veto proof majority. Had he vetoed it, it would have done nothing but allow the Republicans to run ads against him about how he vetoed a law to provide health care to wounded veterans and armor to troops on the front lines.
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading this lie. We can't run a country based on false information.
The NDAA is a military spending bill. It gets passed every year. For several years it has allowed the military to detain members of Al Qaeda, and no one had a problem with this. In the latest version, this was expanded to cover members of other terrorists organizations, but it still states that it cannot be applied to United States citizens or immigrants.
I know that doom and gloom is fun. It gets the blood pumping, and being outraged squirts some feel good chemicals into your brain. But stop spreading lies, and go read the damn thing. Claiming that the US is now a police state is the sort of lie I'd expect from Glen Beck; no different from claiming that the government subsidizing people meeting with their doctor to learn about Do Not Resuscitate orders is equivalent to the Holocaust.
Reducing corporate influence on the government so that it becomes accountable to actual citizens is a good thing, and would work.
You're just so devout in your worship of the Almighty Free Market, that you can't see that the problem isn't the government itself, but the corruption of the government by the rich and powerful.
"Yes, but if they're just reporting an average salary half of the people will be getting below average salaries."
Nope. Given the usual pay scales, far more than half the people will be getting below average salaries. Exactly half the people will be getting below the median salary. Different things.
No, far more than half the people will be getting below the mean salary. The word "average" can refer to mean, median, mode, or other things.
If you're going to be pedantic, check a dictionary first.
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Rather than trying to comprehensively define subjective and inherently nebulous terms, I prefer to keep it simple. The parent poster, Causality, is a child rapist.
Blah blah blah, baseless statements about his beliefs, blah blah, eloquent but unsupported assertions about his goals, yadda yadda, claim that anyone who really knows what's what would realize this, blah blah, end with with a Monty Python quote for bonus karma.
Why don't you just repost that article from a while back that asserted, with the same lack of supporting evidence, that Obama is following the mentality of a Kenyan tribesman?
Or, if you'd prefer to actually add to the discussion, come up with something, anything to support the assertion that Obama is knowingly causing harm with the end goal of a state-run utopia. His opposition to single payer health care, among many, many other things, seems to fly in the face of this.
You're being paranoid.
Drones may not object on humanitarian grounds, but they're basically just tricked out RC planes, and the people operating them are just as capable of refusing an order as a jet pilot or a member of the national guard or a cop. Why do drones scare you more than them, especially considering that we've seen (around the world and at home) examples of the later groups using deadly force against protestors?
You're fantasizing about the end of civilization when you talk about the government dropping napalm on protestors. They could also set up Nazi style death camps and start killing anyone with brown hair. Both scenarios have probabilities that would need to be expressed on a logarithmic scale.
During the height of the Iraq War, Blackhawks seemed to go down so often one wondered if they were just flinging the things out of catapults, and yet I don't recall any made up heroics explaining the crashes.
Now, picking up a soldier from a friendly hospital... there's a real story of heroics.
In fairness to WoW (which I haven't played since 2007), they had the "Kung Fu Pandas" in WC3, back in 2002, long before the movie even started development. It's not like the idea of taking an iconic Chinese animal and having them fight in an iconic Chinese style is particularly innovative.
The single player campaign was great. I spent more time on it than multiplayer, playing through three times (hard, insane, and speed run) and it was a blast.
Starcraft 2 was fantastic. I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than the original SC. Take off those rose colored glasses.
My mother needs a PC at home to make up her lesson plans.
My grandfather needs one because he enjoys creating digital art in photoshop.
My uncle needs one because he runs a sports blog.
My brother, my father, and many of my friends and cousins, and I "need" one because we enjoy playing FPSs together.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the people you know are a representative cross section of the world.
Your civil rights? Really, you have a civil right to enjoy someone else's works without paying them?
Methinks your diluting the term a bit...
No, it ensures valuable copyrights will last longer. A rich person isn't going to pay $10 million to extend his copyright if he doesn't expect to make a profit off the extension, and a poor person who's in a position where they own a copyright worth the $10M cost of extension has likely already earned more than that during the first twenty years.
The only people who get screwed over are those whose works don't become appreciated until decades after release, but they'll end up being screwed under any system except the current "lifetime of the author + as long as kids still like Mickey Mouse".
And if they pay you to take it, no one will undercut that either. But tell me again why they are bothering to even release these DVDs if their only option is to sell it at a 1 cent markup?
You're demanding that they provide you with a service and get absolutely nothing in return.
Why not?
Because politicians don't understand math and would get confused as soon as you write anything resembling 0.01*2^x.
Maybe a simplified version? Copyright is automatic for the first ten years, the next ten cost $10k, then the next ten cost $10M, then $10B, etc.
All works get covered for ten years, successful works for 20, hugely successful and/or corporate backed for 30, realistically nothing for 40 (which is fine by me, since I think most people alive to see the release should live to see it reach public domain). In fact, maybe just automatically end it after 30 years, since otherwise the RIAA will find a way to sue someone for the full $10B for every song they download.
I agree with pretty much everything in your first paragraph. The industries war against the first sale doctrine needs to end, creators need to get to hold on to their copyrights instead of being pushed into selling their souls to publishers (particularly true in the music industry), and the fact that copyright terms have been indefinitely extended is appalling.
But after that, you get into some serious magical thinking.
For movies -- as you say, in a world without copyright, DVDs may die out. If releasing a DVD means that anyone can now buy it for $5 and distribute it as their own, no serious company is going to release DVDs (or streaming video, for that matter). If they do, someone will just copy the DVD and resell it at a lower price. An abolition of copyright would send the video industry back to the pre-VHS era. A better option is to shorten copyright duration to, say, 20 years. Long enough that they can make all their money with merchandising and sequels and DVD sales, but short enough that it will enter the public domain in the audience's lifetime.
For books -- paper books might stay as is, but ebooks would die. No point in selling an ebook if anyone can just copy it and resell it as their own at a lower price. This would be a significant blow to innovation, as ebooks have allowed a lot more people to self-publish.
For videogames -- as you say, this would be the death of all big budget games. I happen to like gaming, as do hundreds of millions of other people, and don't want to see it die out. The indie gaming scene is thriving right now, so I don't understand your suggestion that copyright abolition would make it better. Given your statement, "You can code whatever you want without worrying that someone else has locked up some feature you thought up," I think you're conflating copyrights with software patents. I agree that the latter needs to be severely curtailed, or outright eliminated, but copyrights are different. You don't get sued for making a similar game to someone else.
For music -- you didn't mention it, which is strange, because it would actually do the best in a world with no copyrights, as artists already make most of their money from touring. Even so, I like music copyrights if only for the fact that they allow artists to prevent companies from using their music in ways they go against their original intent.
You're suggesting that eliminating copyrights would lead to thriving innovation, but I see no reason to believe that. Copyrights aren't patents -- no one is held back from writing a new song or book due to copyrights. The terms need to be shortened tremendously, and the draconian measures used to enforce copyrights need to be curtailed, but I've never heard a compelling argument for why the core idea of copyright is a bad one.
There's no evidence (aside from a forced confession) that this man even worked for Kuma.
Here's a sequence of events for you:
1) Kuma starts making games that might have a political message (maybe at the CIA's behest, maybe because they think it's a good niche to make money in)
2) Iran doesn't like this, and wants to find a way to shut down the company
3) Iran picks up an American within their borders, a tortures him into confessing that he works for Kuma and that they're on the CIA payroll
4) Iran now has "evidence" that Kuma is an enemy of the state, and can use this pretense to ban their games, shut them down, etc.
This same sort of thing has been happening for millenia. Torture has always been used to get someone to implicate your enemies in a conspiracy.
The alternate theory is that a man with a background clearly tying him to the US military went to Iran to work on games subverting the Iranian government, and announced on arrival his ties to the US military, even though he easily could have done the same work from literally anywhere else in the world.
You tell me which one seems more likely.
Torture is evil, full stop. I've spoken against it when used by the US, and I'll condemn it here too. The fact that the nation this man was born in did something bad does not justify doing that same thing to him.
He sounds like a typical politician, making big bold lies that are more descriptive of how he sees the world than how it is.
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software. Those that don't often give reasons like "I wanted to try it before buying it" or "It's not available for sale [where I live]/[in a format I want]" or "I can't afford it anyway", suggesting that they would follow the laws given the right circumstances.
It's good that people generally follow these laws, because the core idea of copyright (that creators have a right to be reimbursed for their hard work) is a good one.
Now, the statement that "Copyright laws are ridiculous" is unambiguously true. Any law that suggests the unauthorized download of MP3s causes trillions of dollars worth of damage to the economy is clearly insane. But suggesting that we should have no protection for creators at all is equally insane. It's just a nice fiery soundbite intended to get his supporters all worked up, so that they'll donate more or participate in get out the vote efforts, etc.
We need copyright reform, and hopefully the pirate parties draw attention to that fact. But copyright abolition is a cure worse than the disease.
You're assuming consumers never do real work, which is not a good assumption. Lots of people need to work from home now and then. And not just the people in techie professions, but teachers and reporters and managers and so on. None of those people will choose a tablet in place of a PC. And then there are the tens of millions of people who play video games like WoW or CoD. And there's the ever growing blogging world, whose members would likely prefer to write up their posts with a real keyboard.
Tablets represent a real threat to the laptop market, and may outright kill the netbook. But the PC has some major advantages that will allow it to remain the top choice for most people (who may also buy a tablet to go along with it!), at least until we get a sufficiently good docking system that can allow a tablet double as a PC.
Seriously, all of the "evidence" in this case comes from the man's forced confession. Given Iran's record on human rights, he was most likely tortured into confessing. Why on Earth is this being reported as fact?
Someone ought to check the rags for little green patches.
Please tell me how you would design a trackpad that isn't a smooth, flat, rectangular surface.
And if those parts are designed to experience some cracking, as part of some carefully tuned tradeoff? There was some high altitude spy plane (maybe the Blackbird?) that leaked fuel on the ground, because when operating the temperatures would cause things to expand, so it was better to have it leak on the ground than break in the air. If a layman, or even an engineer unfamiliar with the project, saw that, they would naturally assume something was wrong.
So let's see, in the past three years we've gotten:
*Health care extended to millions of people who wouldn't otherwise have it
*Honesty about how much the War on Terror is costing by putting it in the budget, rather than hiding it as Bush did
*Laws stopping credit card companies from abusing their customers through short notice due date changes and excessive default rates
*Limitations on outrageous fees charged to retailers by the card companies
*A Network Neutrality law (albeit not on mobile networks, but there are good technical reasons why wireless networks can't be as unfettered as wired ones)
*An end to the stop loss program wherein soldiers were forced to stay beyond what they signed up for
*Fixes to the abortion that was No Child Left Behind (e.g. funding it, helping low scoring school instead of punishing them, etc.)
*The Ledbetter Law, pushing back against a conservative SCOTUS ruling that made it virtually impossible for women and minorities to sue over pay discrimination
*An end to torture and extraordinary rendition
*An end to DADT, and no support for DOMA (he can't end it unilaterally, but he's refusing to defend it in court)
*A new START treaty to reduce the number of nukes in the world
Had it not been for Republican filibusters, we also would have gotten:
*EFCA, helping to fight back against the corporate driven destruction of unions
*Cap & Trade, a free market solution to global warming
*Public option health care, allowing people to buy health insurance direct from the government rather than a for-profit company
*The DREAM act, allowing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship through college or military service
That's just what's coming to mind right now. I'm sure there's a bunch of small stuff I've forgotten. Now, how many of those things would be supported by the GOP? Maybe the New START treaty, but I doubt it, and certainly none of the others.
Claiming that Obama is "Dubya 2.0" makes for a nice sound bite, but it is blatantly false. This whole myopic claim that Republicans and Democrats are the same is just an excuse for the lazy who don't want to be bothered trying to make a difference in the world, and prefer to just shrug off the whole system while hoping for a magic solution that will never come.
The bill was supported by a veto proof majority. Had he vetoed it, it would have done nothing but allow the Republicans to run ads against him about how he vetoed a law to provide health care to wounded veterans and armor to troops on the front lines.
What would you have done in his shoes?
Please, please, PLEASE stop spreading this lie. We can't run a country based on false information.
The NDAA is a military spending bill. It gets passed every year. For several years it has allowed the military to detain members of Al Qaeda, and no one had a problem with this. In the latest version, this was expanded to cover members of other terrorists organizations, but it still states that it cannot be applied to United States citizens or immigrants.
I know that doom and gloom is fun. It gets the blood pumping, and being outraged squirts some feel good chemicals into your brain. But stop spreading lies, and go read the damn thing. Claiming that the US is now a police state is the sort of lie I'd expect from Glen Beck; no different from claiming that the government subsidizing people meeting with their doctor to learn about Do Not Resuscitate orders is equivalent to the Holocaust.
Reducing corporate influence on the government so that it becomes accountable to actual citizens is a good thing, and would work.
You're just so devout in your worship of the Almighty Free Market, that you can't see that the problem isn't the government itself, but the corruption of the government by the rich and powerful.
"Yes, but if they're just reporting an average salary half of the people will be getting below average salaries."
Nope. Given the usual pay scales, far more than half the people will be getting below average salaries. Exactly half the people will be getting below the median salary. Different things.
No, far more than half the people will be getting below the mean salary. The word "average" can refer to mean, median, mode, or other things.
If you're going to be pedantic, check a dictionary first.