Get real. Both of those situations involve force or its threat. When your employer screws you, it's hardly the same thing. I'm not saying there shouldn't be labor laws and legal protections, but don't equate long work hours with rape or the oppression of innocents by dictators. Not all power imbalances are equal or anything even close to it.
This is complete PR fluff for EA. Nothing in this article suggests EA is actually doing anything differently. Yeah, they're hoping an interesting game like Spore will make them money -- but that's nothing new. They've been milking Will Wright's Sims franchise for years.
If you look at the other new game they mention, it's yet another Medal of Honor game. Wow, a company like EA is really innovating by changing the way its employees work to churn out the fiftieth iteration of a proven franchise! How wonderful.
In reality, EA has Will Wright so they're guaranteed at least some innovation. Aside from that, I see nothing to suggest they're actually interested in innovating too much.
I'm not sure if this is cyclical, but today's audiences don't really want mildly disguised social commentary. If you look at the top shows right now, they tend to be about human drama. BSG is a great example. Farscape was (often) a good example. Deadwood, the Wire... The list goes on and on.
The Wire? Are you kidding me? The Wire has to have more social commentary than any other fictional show on TV... save maybe South Park.
Your plan already exists in part. I have HBO on Demand where I live (San Diego, Cox Cable) as part of the HBO package. In addition to being able to watch a variety of movies HBO is showing on demand, you get a list of HBO shows and can watch episodes of them on demand.
You don't get the entire series at your fingertips, sadly, but generally there is a whole season's worth of each show that cycles through. So if HBO is rerunning Sopranos Season 3, you'll get that season's episodes avaiable to order.
If a series is currently doing new episodes, you get access to the newest episode a bit after it airs. It's incredibly convienent. Ordering episodes is free (since you already have to pay extra for HBO) and you pause, fast forward, etc. The only real downside is that the On Demand service isn't high def., which is a shame because HBO has some of the nicest looking HD shows around.
Maybe we're just a step on the path to something higher, bound to be forgotten.
...or maybe we're just going to end here, when some unexpected disaster completely wipes out the human genetic line. You're all over this thread, Ars-Fartsica, insisting that evolution will run its own course, evolving us into something that's not recognizably human.
That's possible. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't want to preserve our culture and our species -- after all, self-preservation is the trait which evolution is most likely to select for! Humans are unique among known life forms in our ability to actively and collectively plan for the future, anticipating possible threats to ourselves and trying to mitigate them. It's a big part of what's made us so sucessful in the evolutionary game, and it's perfectly natural for us to want to extend this planning to include remote possibilities such as asteroid impact that could completely annhiliate our species on Earth.
I agree with your other comments in this thread that it may be impossible to ever set up sustaining colonies in space or on other planets. But in the attempt to do this -- which is partially fueled by our desire to preserve ourselves and our culture -- we'll learn a lot of interesting things about how to help us live in harsh environments.
It may well be that manned space exploration, and our attempt to survive for long periods of time in the harshest of environments, is what will lead us toward adapting ourselves through technology to that "something higher" you're talking about. Whether or not this future hypothetical higher creature is considered a human or not is fairly irrelevant to those of us humans alive today. We're still gripped by that same human desire to preserve and extend our species, and I don't see what's wrong with that.
Please! As an American Internet user, I would be ecstatic if the rest of the world blacklisted us for spam. It might actually get the government to take the problem seriously.
Of course, given the overwhelmingly huge amount of legit traffic originating from within the United States, you may find yourself sacrificing a lot of signal to cut down on the noise. But I'm for just about anything that will get rid of the spam problem.
Of course, the sort of "strict constructionists" who believe that the government should never, ever, even think of overstepping the authority granted to it in the Constitution are, ironically, the exact same people who think it's a "technicality" when an alleged criminal is set free because the Constitution includes specific provisions to protect the People from abuse by the government.
Actually, I think you're more likely to find that strict constructivists hate the fact that the majority of said technicalities exist only due to activist intreprations of the Constitution. Consider the Miranda ruling or the various rulings creating the Exclusionary Rule (which says that evidence obtained without probable cause or a warrant is inadmissable in court). These are pretty broad interpretations of the Bill of Rights, and are even more broadly applied to the states when you consider that the restrictions in the Bill of Rights seem to apply primarily to the federal government.
The people who would prefer that the Exclusionary Rule, which is one of those "technicalities" that "get tough on crime!" people tend to bemoan, be left up to individual states are off their rockers, but their claims are not without constitutional merit. At least not from a literal interpretation of the Constitution.
Yes, I know that spammers use Internet cafes to do their dirty deeds, but the spam-filters should somehow have the ability to detect a genuine e-mail sent using the webmail service.
Yes, and my car should also be able to run without using any fuel.
Book predates the movie, not saying that the book wasn't written with the movie in mind. But the order of creation is clear.
Except that movies start their lives as things called screenplays, and I guarantee the screenplay was written (or at least some draft of it) before Anthony started writing the adaptation. Six different people have writing credit for the movie, plus PKD, and none of them is Piers Anthony. Two have credit for the "screen story" which probably means they wrote early drafts of the screenplay, and three have credit for the screenplay itself (which probably means they threw out much of the early drafts -- IMDB says more than 40 drafts were written).
If the film were based on the work Anthony had done in the Total Recall novel, then I can all but promise he'd have a writing credit for the film. Given that Amazon has the publication date for the novel as September 1989, and IMDB lists the film as coming out on June 1, 1990, I'd guess that the movie had finished principal photography by the time the novel had been released. Since it clearly took a long time to make the movie (40 drafts of the damn screenplay, plus likely a ton of post-production special effects work), it's pretty safe to say that Anthony deserves no credit for the storyline of the film.
We all nod our heads in unison as they wipe away the rights of terrorists because afterall, we're not terrorists. ..
This is sort of a pedantic post, but it's important: what we should be upset about is the loss of rights for suspected terrorists, not of actual terrorists. With the exception that they shouldn't be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (not saying this doesn't occur), convicted terrorists (granted, not many exist at the moment) don't deserve many rights.
It's subtle but important: we need to argue for the rights of suspects, as the government should do all number of not-so-nice things to actual, convicted terrorists. If you confuse the two, you weaken your own argument.
They control the appointment of new Justices. So long as the current court remains intact (no one steps aside or dies), neither of the other two branchs has any control over its composition. Ask FDR about this one.;)
My post assumed that the legislative and executive branches were working together. In such a case, they can add as many new justices as they'd like, since the Const. does not specify the size of the court. FDR failed because the Congress was able to block his enlargement of the Court. Also note that the Senate can impeach justices basically for whatever it wants to, since the Constitution is admirably vague on the issue.
Article III, Section 2 would seem to disagree with your assertion that the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction could be removed. From that section:
"In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact"
To remove the Supreme Court's jurisdiction in all cases, you'd have to ensure that no one ever appealed any court decision to the Supreme Court.
Note the end of that sentence: "and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." That's the kicker. Congress has in the past changed the way that the Court gets its cases and could conceivably just get rid of the entire federal appeals process (III, 1 gives the Congress total power over the entire composition of the federal court system).
The ultimate battle would be in the hearts and minds of the soldiers and commanders themselves. Do you follow a lawful order from the Supreme Court? Or do you follow the (presumably unlawful) order of your commander in chief?
Were the Court to just overturn a Constitutional amendment, I would say that order was unlawful, as it completely goes against even the most activist principles I can think of.
For the Supreme Court to take such a drastic step, I believe we would have to have far larger problems at hand to create such a situation. When the time comes that Supreme Court finds it necessary to take the drastic step of killing an amendment, I think judicial tyranny will be the least of our worries.
This is about the only bit I agree with. This entire line of reasoning is interesting but so very unlikely I'm not worried. But, yes, if the SC just flat-out ignores a Constitutional amendment, we have huge problems.
I think income taxes are a good idea in principle, but I agree that the present system is out of hand. I am not a fan of socialist states, but even most libertarian states require some money to operate. We at least need to provide for protection, and that costs relatively more today than it did in the 18th Century.
A progressive income tax makes sense because it does not (in principle) burden the lower classes overly much. Any means of taxation that does not take income or wealth into account runs the risk of taking too much from the lower classes that they become overburdened.
I know that on some level it is unfair to take more from the rich (especially as a percentage of their income) just because they can afford it. But practically speaking it is the best way to do things: the point is to burden everyone the same, and taxing purchases (or income at a flate rate) doesn't do it. If you take 10 percent of the income of somebody making $30,000 per year, it is considerably more burdensome (given that there is a set cost of living) than taking 15 percent of the income of somebody making $1 million per year.
Because this system is in some ways unfair, I believe it should be limited, and that the best way to limit it is to limit the spending of governments. It doesn't entirely eliminate the unfairness, but it helps reduce the brunt of it. This thread, however, has been about whether or not we should have an income tax at all, not whether the present system is a good one. I would affirm the former principle and deny the latter.
Does that position make sense? I am happy to clarify it further. As for the rest of your post, Loki, there is a lot to dissect there but I would rather not do so. I agree and disagree in about equal measure, but it is very general in its nature and as such hard to comment on.
Probably so. But even if you made it unconstitutional, there's no reason the Constitution couldn't be changed again. And since neither one is going to happen (because ultimately income taxes are good ideas, even if the current system is poor), it's moot.
If you're arguing that Article I, Section 10 is a prohibition on states levying use taxes on goods that come from other states (which I still assert is not the meaning of the relevant clause), note that it is not a blanket prohibition against the states from doing so: it simply says they need approval of the Congress in order to do so.
If the SC were to counter an amendment to the Constitution, I can all but guarantee you'd see the end of the SC as we know it. The other two branches of the government ultimately have more power, since:
They control the composition of the SC (appointment and number of justices and they have the all-but-unused power to impeach justices)
They control the entire makeup of the lower federal court system, and could thus effectively remove all of the SC's appellate jurisdiction (robbing it of the means to hear the vast majority of cases)
They control all the money
They have the military
I'm a fan of judicial activism where it makes sense, but it would be crazy -- and completely out of character -- for the SC to directly contradict a Constitutional amendment. If the SC ever just decided to nullify an amendment in such a way, we would basically have to abolish or drastically limit the court's power.
The head tax idea is interesting but extremely unlikely. People who want to get rid of the income tax are probably best reccomended to just convince the feds to stop using it. After all, Amendment XVI doesn't say the Congress *has* to tax income, just that it may do so. Obviously this is pretty unlikely, but far more realistic than getting the Court to do it at this point in time.
Except that when you buy something from another state, you're not importing it, since we're talking about buying stuff from other countries. That's just buying it domestically: we're talking about foreign imports. The whole point here is that Congress has the power to regulate international trade and inter-state commerce, and that states can't get in on the action except to cover their own customs costs.
A use tax -- which is what sales taxes on items purchased in other states are -- is not a tarrif on an import. There is nothing unconstitutional about this. Use taxes on imported items in lieu of sales tax is nothing new, and in fact has technically been on the books for a long time in most states.
Also, Article I, Section 9 (which the grandparent quoted) is really about the Congress, not the states, so it's entirely irrelevant.
Except that regardless of his reasons, Woo has not made a single good film since coming to Hollywood (and Face/Off is not good, despite what some people think). He hasn't just mellowed in terms of violence: his films have lost all the depth of character and intelligence that elevated the best of his Hong Kong movies. He makes dumb, mediocre action movies now that only have a hint of his former style.
Considering how wonderfully dull Paycheck was, I don't think we should be excited at all about another sci-fi thriller/action flick from Woo.
Your two aforementioned companies are both publicly owned. They are legally bound to do what is in the best financial interests of their shareholders. The actual owners of the company are not involved in the daily management and have only one, single-minded reason for owning stock: profit.
Uh. Privately-owned companies are bound to do the same thing. Minority shareholders in private corporations most certainly can sue the majority shareholders if the minority feels its interests are not being protected by the directors of the corporation.
Has this guy never heard of the concept of a social contract (if you don't like the laws, you're free to leave, otherwise you gotta obey them)?
Uh. Social Contract Theory is quite the opposite. The theory posits that the government exists to serve the will of the people, and as such, if the people don't like the government they are free to replace it with a better one. The theory mainly came out of England and France (Locke and Rosseau) and was in response to the previous position of royalty that monarchs were handpicked by God to run things (James I's "Divine Right of Kings," Luis XIV's "I am the state").
There's a very nice summary of social contract theory in the opening of the American Declaration of Independence. Locke's Second Treatise on Government goes into much greater depth.
I personally don't go in so much for that stuff, tho. Give me something intellectually challenging and original, as well as entertaining (and hopefully, characters with some emotional depth, and a writing style that is polished or at least not irritatingly bad).
You obviously haven't read the novel. That's okay; this is/. and it's longer than the usual articles that don't get read. But slamming the author for using ideas like the Three Laws and a singularity is completely uncalled for.
The fact is, "Metamorphasis" uses these ideas in a very interesting way. That is what the best sci-fi does. We shouldn't be concerned with every author having to come up with some brand new plot outline or technology. It's the specifics and what's done with the ideas that are most important.
Think of something like Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy. What's the new idea in there? Psychohistory? That's nothing more than a little plot-point. No, what makes that series so compelling (despite the use of hyperdrives and spaceships that were cliche even when Asimov was writing) is the characters and the intricate plotting. Likewise, "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect" fully considers the implications of a post-singularity artifical intelligence that is required to use the Three Laws.
What it's ultimately about is how you define humanity. What's interesting is that the story doesn't take an easy out -- the problem, as presented in the book, is very tricky. I assure you that if you read it all the way through, you will find it intellectually challenging and original, even if in summary it does not seem that way.
Maybe it's just for the shock, but I think a skilled writer could invoke the same feelings of their loss of 'human-ess' without resorting to the use of these explicit passages.
I think you're missing the point of these scenes, as many seem to be. The very point is that they're explicit and horrible. Catherine's descent into something twisted and awful is the point of the story. I suppose this could be conveyed without being explicit, but would it have the same impact? It's supposed to be a little nauseating. This is not a happy story.
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I used to work at a community newspaper. The parent post is a big reason why I quit and went back into IT.
"Let us Cling Together" is a Queen song. All of the Tactics Ogre/Ogre Battle games are named after Queen songs.
Get real. Both of those situations involve force or its threat. When your employer screws you, it's hardly the same thing. I'm not saying there shouldn't be labor laws and legal protections, but don't equate long work hours with rape or the oppression of innocents by dictators. Not all power imbalances are equal or anything even close to it.
If you look at the other new game they mention, it's yet another Medal of Honor game. Wow, a company like EA is really innovating by changing the way its employees work to churn out the fiftieth iteration of a proven franchise! How wonderful.
In reality, EA has Will Wright so they're guaranteed at least some innovation. Aside from that, I see nothing to suggest they're actually interested in innovating too much.
You don't get the entire series at your fingertips, sadly, but generally there is a whole season's worth of each show that cycles through. So if HBO is rerunning Sopranos Season 3, you'll get that season's episodes avaiable to order.
If a series is currently doing new episodes, you get access to the newest episode a bit after it airs. It's incredibly convienent. Ordering episodes is free (since you already have to pay extra for HBO) and you pause, fast forward, etc. The only real downside is that the On Demand service isn't high def., which is a shame because HBO has some of the nicest looking HD shows around.
That's possible. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't want to preserve our culture and our species -- after all, self-preservation is the trait which evolution is most likely to select for! Humans are unique among known life forms in our ability to actively and collectively plan for the future, anticipating possible threats to ourselves and trying to mitigate them. It's a big part of what's made us so sucessful in the evolutionary game, and it's perfectly natural for us to want to extend this planning to include remote possibilities such as asteroid impact that could completely annhiliate our species on Earth.
I agree with your other comments in this thread that it may be impossible to ever set up sustaining colonies in space or on other planets. But in the attempt to do this -- which is partially fueled by our desire to preserve ourselves and our culture -- we'll learn a lot of interesting things about how to help us live in harsh environments.
It may well be that manned space exploration, and our attempt to survive for long periods of time in the harshest of environments, is what will lead us toward adapting ourselves through technology to that "something higher" you're talking about. Whether or not this future hypothetical higher creature is considered a human or not is fairly irrelevant to those of us humans alive today. We're still gripped by that same human desire to preserve and extend our species, and I don't see what's wrong with that.
Of course, given the overwhelmingly huge amount of legit traffic originating from within the United States, you may find yourself sacrificing a lot of signal to cut down on the noise. But I'm for just about anything that will get rid of the spam problem.
The people who would prefer that the Exclusionary Rule, which is one of those "technicalities" that "get tough on crime!" people tend to bemoan, be left up to individual states are off their rockers, but their claims are not without constitutional merit. At least not from a literal interpretation of the Constitution.
If the film were based on the work Anthony had done in the Total Recall novel, then I can all but promise he'd have a writing credit for the film. Given that Amazon has the publication date for the novel as September 1989, and IMDB lists the film as coming out on June 1, 1990, I'd guess that the movie had finished principal photography by the time the novel had been released. Since it clearly took a long time to make the movie (40 drafts of the damn screenplay, plus likely a ton of post-production special effects work), it's pretty safe to say that Anthony deserves no credit for the storyline of the film.
This is sort of a pedantic post, but it's important: what we should be upset about is the loss of rights for suspected terrorists, not of actual terrorists. With the exception that they shouldn't be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (not saying this doesn't occur), convicted terrorists (granted, not many exist at the moment) don't deserve many rights.
It's subtle but important: we need to argue for the rights of suspects, as the government should do all number of not-so-nice things to actual, convicted terrorists. If you confuse the two, you weaken your own argument.
Note the end of that sentence: "and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." That's the kicker. Congress has in the past changed the way that the Court gets its cases and could conceivably just get rid of the entire federal appeals process (III, 1 gives the Congress total power over the entire composition of the federal court system).
Were the Court to just overturn a Constitutional amendment, I would say that order was unlawful, as it completely goes against even the most activist principles I can think of.
This is about the only bit I agree with. This entire line of reasoning is interesting but so very unlikely I'm not worried. But, yes, if the SC just flat-out ignores a Constitutional amendment, we have huge problems.
A progressive income tax makes sense because it does not (in principle) burden the lower classes overly much. Any means of taxation that does not take income or wealth into account runs the risk of taking too much from the lower classes that they become overburdened.
I know that on some level it is unfair to take more from the rich (especially as a percentage of their income) just because they can afford it. But practically speaking it is the best way to do things: the point is to burden everyone the same, and taxing purchases (or income at a flate rate) doesn't do it. If you take 10 percent of the income of somebody making $30,000 per year, it is considerably more burdensome (given that there is a set cost of living) than taking 15 percent of the income of somebody making $1 million per year.
Because this system is in some ways unfair, I believe it should be limited, and that the best way to limit it is to limit the spending of governments. It doesn't entirely eliminate the unfairness, but it helps reduce the brunt of it. This thread, however, has been about whether or not we should have an income tax at all, not whether the present system is a good one. I would affirm the former principle and deny the latter.
Does that position make sense? I am happy to clarify it further. As for the rest of your post, Loki, there is a lot to dissect there but I would rather not do so. I agree and disagree in about equal measure, but it is very general in its nature and as such hard to comment on.
Probably so. But even if you made it unconstitutional, there's no reason the Constitution couldn't be changed again. And since neither one is going to happen (because ultimately income taxes are good ideas, even if the current system is poor), it's moot.
If you're arguing that Article I, Section 10 is a prohibition on states levying use taxes on goods that come from other states (which I still assert is not the meaning of the relevant clause), note that it is not a blanket prohibition against the states from doing so: it simply says they need approval of the Congress in order to do so.
I'm a fan of judicial activism where it makes sense, but it would be crazy -- and completely out of character -- for the SC to directly contradict a Constitutional amendment. If the SC ever just decided to nullify an amendment in such a way, we would basically have to abolish or drastically limit the court's power.
The head tax idea is interesting but extremely unlikely. People who want to get rid of the income tax are probably best reccomended to just convince the feds to stop using it. After all, Amendment XVI doesn't say the Congress *has* to tax income, just that it may do so. Obviously this is pretty unlikely, but far more realistic than getting the Court to do it at this point in time.
A use tax -- which is what sales taxes on items purchased in other states are -- is not a tarrif on an import. There is nothing unconstitutional about this. Use taxes on imported items in lieu of sales tax is nothing new, and in fact has technically been on the books for a long time in most states.
Also, Article I, Section 9 (which the grandparent quoted) is really about the Congress, not the states, so it's entirely irrelevant.
Considering how wonderfully dull Paycheck was, I don't think we should be excited at all about another sci-fi thriller/action flick from Woo.
Except how does Neo do what he does in the real world? Specifically mess with the Sentinels and "see" even though he's been blinded?
Uh. Privately-owned companies are bound to do the same thing. Minority shareholders in private corporations most certainly can sue the majority shareholders if the minority feels its interests are not being protected by the directors of the corporation.
There's a very nice summary of social contract theory in the opening of the American Declaration of Independence. Locke's Second Treatise on Government goes into much greater depth.
Hey, that's not fair either. Comparing RIAA and MPAA folks to humans. Give our species a bit of dignity.
You obviously haven't read the novel. That's okay; this is /. and it's longer than the usual articles that don't get read. But slamming the author for using ideas like the Three Laws and a singularity is completely uncalled for.
The fact is, "Metamorphasis" uses these ideas in a very interesting way. That is what the best sci-fi does. We shouldn't be concerned with every author having to come up with some brand new plot outline or technology. It's the specifics and what's done with the ideas that are most important.
Think of something like Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy. What's the new idea in there? Psychohistory? That's nothing more than a little plot-point. No, what makes that series so compelling (despite the use of hyperdrives and spaceships that were cliche even when Asimov was writing) is the characters and the intricate plotting. Likewise, "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect" fully considers the implications of a post-singularity artifical intelligence that is required to use the Three Laws.
What it's ultimately about is how you define humanity. What's interesting is that the story doesn't take an easy out -- the problem, as presented in the book, is very tricky. I assure you that if you read it all the way through, you will find it intellectually challenging and original, even if in summary it does not seem that way.
I think you're missing the point of these scenes, as many seem to be. The very point is that they're explicit and horrible. Catherine's descent into something twisted and awful is the point of the story. I suppose this could be conveyed without being explicit, but would it have the same impact? It's supposed to be a little nauseating. This is not a happy story.