Acting classes for Will Smith... for INDEPENDENCE DAY 2 OR 3? What kind of nonsense is that? Did GP not actually see ID1? It doesn't require acting, it requires big explosions and cheesy one liners.
Don't forget beating the ever-living shit out of aliens. And if you've seen I Am Legend (the remake), you know that Will Smith is ripped. If you make a short list of guys who can take on aliens and look awesome doing it, he's definitely on it.
But the health issues could be real and caused by the construction. They might not be able to prove it in court, but it could still be the truth.
Of course, this is by far a less likely explanation than 'they didn't like the new construction, so they lied and said it was causing health problems'. However, without a better reason than 'we don't know of a way for EMI to do that', I can't say that's the case for certain.
Exactly, if it happens in hardware all bets are off. Latch the throtle input hardware to VCC, and the chip that converts that analog message to CAN may find it reasonable and output equally coherent CAN messages.
How can a hypothetical God judge us for our choices, if our choices can be screwed up by a 'bad connection?' Maybe I was going to make the right choice, but a damn supernova sent a magnetic pulse through my head. I'm sorry, but it just seems laughable.
From a Christian viewpoint (sorry, not informed enough to give you any others), by setting the bar for morality high yet still being gracious. In other words, everyone is a sinner, but everyone can be forgiven through Jesus. So, it doesn't matter if you're 99.999% moral or just 85% moral, you're still not good enough by your own merits.
From the more Jewish standpoint, judgments were frequently reduced for those who were tricked or otherwise not aware of their sins. Check Genesis 20 for an example of someone (king Abimelech) who had been tricked into sinning and was forgiven because of that. And even here, Abraham (the one doing the tricking) was allowed to return to grace with repentance.
In any case, it does not matter how unlikely the stimulus, this research proves how ludicrous absolute concepts like 'good' and 'evil' really are. If the connection between soul and mind is anything less than 100% perfect, there are NO moral absolutes.
I disagree. There can be actions which are good or evil. There can be people which are good or evil. There does not need to be (nor is there) 100% correlation between the two (good men performing only good actions, and vice-vers-a).
So this research may show how unlikely it is for people to be absolutely good or evil, from both the Christian and Jewish viewpoints this is entirely consistent (and commonly referenced). I'm not sure about any other religions or dogmas.
Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job.
Think beyond the code, too. We're talking EMI, possible latch-ups of chips or ASICs, signal integrity issues, or any of a number of digital electronic issues. NASA builds stuff that just has to work, even when passing through the Van Allen radiation belts or outside the Earth's magnetosphere. If there's an intermittent hardware error, they will find it.
If our moral choices are influenced even in part by random environmental influences, the soul can not fairly accrue 'karma' or any kinds of merits or demerits for the actions taken by the individual. The random environmental influences must take part of both the blame and the credit for our actions, in which case, why do we even bother with the concept of free will and a soul? Why not admit there is no real 'self' at all?
Alternatively, the correct definition of "soul" doesn't take into account either the concept of 'karma', fairness, or both.
Specifically with respect to the 'fairness' of morality, there was only a 15% change under this very unlikely stimulus. One might argue that if a 15% change in your morality affects your decisions significantly adversely, you weren't that moral to begin with.
You have to consider the size of the "light source". She put up a 1 watt light. This ranks up with the person have an acute light sensitivity, and then complaining the neighbors nightlight burns him.
Let's not belabor the point, there's no good analogy here. Light is cheaply and easily blocked (with a curtain), while radio and wicrowave radiation is not (grounded metal). Assuming he is hypersensitive, in the (poor) analogy he would only need to see the 'nightlight' to be harmed, and all houses are made of glass.
He's suing because she's doing something perfectly legal in her house. She doesn't have a bank of 500W halogen lights lighting up the side of his house (which would be a legitimate complaint), nor does she have illegally amplified RF, like a 100W transmitter on her wifi (which would be a legitimate complaint and prosecuted by the FCC). Unless both of their walls are paper thin and almost adjoining, there probably isn't much signal getting to him at all.
Agreed that there isn't any activity beyond what is reasonably expected for the average American. I disagree that her signal would completely attenuate before it reached his house, it's quite possible to connect to Wi-Fi from a neighbor in the suburbs.
The reason I say it's an interesting case is twofold. One, it could depend on local interpretation of any verbal contract between the two. Secondly, there are other cases where otherwise legal activities (talking on the phone) can become illegal (while driving). Again, assuming he has a genuine medical condition, where does the state draw the line on his and the neighbor's rights? Likely case law will guide this, such as smokers living next to children with severe asthma or disruptive Christmas light displays.
To clarify, I'm not saying this guy is definitely physically or psychologically ill (he could be faking) or that he has an iron-clad case. I'm just saying I don't think it can be dismissed off-hand without clear precedent on the matter. Maybe the judge will quickly decide that he has no legal recourse unless she does something with intent to harm (buying a directional antenna to aim at him), in which case the precedent will be set and future cases should be quickly dismissed.
It was indicated that they were friends before she moved in. It sounds like something else went bad, and he's trying to get revenge somehow.
Agreed, I expect one likely bothered the other, and this is the result of the back-and-forth.
Consider that many people think they are a 'safe' drunk driver, so they do it anyway. One guy I know said he practiced the 'thumb' method: holding up his thumbs while holding the wheel and keeping them inside the white lines. Also keep in mind that the dead are frequently not the drunk driver, who has crumple zones, a seatbelt, and airbags to protect themself. Harsher criminal penalties sidestep this issue: the determining factor is now no longer just hitting someone.
Not that a punative measure would prevent all drunk driving, but it would be a stronger disincentive for those who are 'still alright to drive'.
A more apt analogy would be somebody who develops extreme sun sensitivity late in life, and then attempts to sue the sun.
Not really, since he claims he lived just fine with the condition before she moved next door. So your analogy would need to be that he developed sun sensitivity and moved to a cave, where the problem abated. Then his neighbor moved in and put up UV light sources (assuming such light sources were as commonplace as Wi-Fi and cell phones) which caused the condition to return.
It does bring up some interesting questions about propertyand rights, such as whose rights trump whose: the person who is performing reasonably common activities within their own home, or the person for whom this activity causes harm. This is, of course, assuming the guy actually does have an uncurable condition that causes him physical pain.
Of course, this could possibly be a case of the actual construction causing health issues (kicking up arsenic-laden dust, for example). Not that it's necessarily likely the tower caused any issues (other construction would have likely caused the same issues), but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand just because regular people misattributed the vector that caused the illness.
I wouldn't categorically say all of them are morons. Assuming they aren't intentionally claiming to be sick to get their way, they might actually be sick. Sure, it might be a psychosomatic illness rather than physiological one, but either way the person is ill and needs treatment.
Also, by better separating the morons from the real cases, we can hopefully eventually perform actual research to separate any physiological cases from psychosomatic ones. Then we can hopefully cure both and put an end to cases like this.
Considering we only get interesting collisions every 10^(some number) collisions. So they picked the first ones (because they are historic, not because of scientific interest) to publish since they haven't had time to pore over the billions (trillions?) of collisions to find one of interest to particle physicists.
And really, to the average lay person, a muon makes just as interesting and pretty of a picture as a Higgs Boson.
I agree that as far as the law should be concerned, yes they are equivalent. Cyber-bullying should be treated the same as bullying that happens anywhere else, particularly when it crosses the line into (criminal) harassment, as it certainly seems to have done in this case. So, in a concerted campaign of harassment it shouldn't matter whether you are called an 'irish whore' verbally, written of a school bathroom wall, or online: it would fall under the same harassment laws. The big difference is it's generally easier to track down and prove online (as you said).
But as others have mentioned, to a teenager it certainly can be different. Teenagers aren't rational people, in general. Sure, the same number of people might see something written on the girls bathroom and twitter, but to a teenager it feels more significant on Twitter. Add the fact that the kids doing the harassing may not take it as seriously because it is online (they likely think it is less serious to call someone a 'whore' on Facebook than to throw a Red Bull can at them), and you can see why cyber-bullying has a stronger focus on it than other forms of bullying. It simply can cause greater harm with less action by the aggressor.
As far as this story being 'Your Rights Online', I attribute that to standard/. posting methods (misread the article and write an attention-grabbing headline) and preemptively expecting that the 'cyber' part of the bullying will get the most attention in the MSM.
Piracy loses on both counts. If you really want companies to stop using DRM, get some camera time on the evening news, and the front page of the newspaper.
I think we're on the same page, here. My point was that if there's no sacrifice on the part of the protestors, there is no way you will get positive PR because there is no perceived injustice. No pirate will get sympathy from the public (it appears petty and juvenile), so there will be no pressure for the companies to change.
In other words, the message needs to be "I didn't buy this game because of -X-, which is unfair", instead of "I didn't like -X- enough to buy it, but I downloaded and played it anyway". Guess which person seems more reasonable and worthy of sympathy?
I dislike it when people degrade protest for human rights by comparing it to a protest for fair value on entertainment.
How did I degrade them? I'd say the degrading thing is those who use the same word 'protest' to describe their anger over a luxury item not being suitable to them, while simultaneously selfishly consuming the very thing they disagree with.
My comparison? Civil rights activists were brave and willing to stand up to injustice. Pirates are children who justify getting what they want without paying as 'sticking it to the man'.
Piracy itself is a "problem" created in order to take stock holders focuses off the real problem, which is people are getting screwed and are saying, "I'm not going to pay for that because {you're nickle and dimeing me || you want my arms AND legs || you don't want me to use something I paid you for || you want complete control over everything I do if I use your product}". Causing a loss in profits. Piracy is a way out so the company can say, "It's not our fault, look how many hundreds of millions of billions of people would have bought our product if it wasn't being stolen"
I don't disagree with you. However, because of the quantity of real piracy, these companies have a very strong case that there are lost revenues due to piracy. It's not the 'problem' that's invented (piracy is real and doesn't provide tangible benefits to the company), just the interpretation of the solution. Because they have a quite reasonable scapegoat for lost sales, they focus their attention toward fighting piracy instead of fixing their games and using fair pricing.
In other words, pirating a game to protest the pricing/implementation/DRM actually encourages increased DRM, harsher pricing schemes, and more creative methods to get money from you. Piracy is counter-productive to gamers, in general. Not that the corporations are innocent here, but piracy (which is a real cost to companies) puts them in a bind with their executives and shareholders that encourages this type of behavior. Pirates share some of the blame here, too. Don't pretend you're all innocent or harmless.
It's close minded people like you who think there is only ever one way to go about something that devalue the actions of anyone that disagree with your point of view that is enabling the corporations and government to get away with murder.
Calling it 'murder' to overcharge for a video game seems a bit excessive. Nobody died because they couldn't play a brand-new AAA video game, and anyone who spent too much or regretted a purchase on a luxury item has only themselves to blame. I'm also not sure what the government has to do with any of this, let alone how they benefit from aggressive DRM on video games.
Personally, I think it's the people who buy and play these luxury items regardless of the cost, DRM, and ramifications that allow the companies to take advantage of us. They're the ones that reward the game producers for the status quo, so they're the ones to blame for the lack of innovation and fairness to the consumer.
Well, the case in point is that if/when people do protest by stopping purchasing (and even stop pirating), it doesn't matter because the publisher/distributors simply BLAME PIRATES for the loss of sales and put MORE INVASIVE DRM on the product, which is the very thing you are PROTESTING AGAINST!
But the very point is that they don't need to. They see higher piracy numbers, and the CEOs make the only conclusion that makes economic sense, particularly for a publicly traded company.
As a secondary effect, if even the serious protestors are seen as hypocrites ('I don't like their measures to stop piracy, so I'll pirate it'), no neutral 3rd party will take their side. Rather than evoking sympathy at injustice, they are seen as a bunch of stuck-up middle-class white teenage thieves, and Ubisoft and Activision win the PR battle.
And if you're still playing the game, you might even get other people interested in the game who weren't otherwise. Again, the piracy argument tries to play both sides of the field: some say piracy is good because it increases publicity for the game, others say it is effective protest. Really, it's neither, because the protest is failed because it doesn't truly harm the company, yet the company further cripples their future products in response.
tl;dr
If the game companies are going to blame pirates, take the high-road and force them to manufacture that excuse, rather than handing them the data to justify the very things we hate to their shareholders.
I just said I didn't understand why they are so insistent on being called a sport.
Probably for the same reason other people are so insistent on racing not being considered a sport. If there wasn't some smartass chiming in with a 'but racing isn't a sport, lol' every time racing were mentioned, nobody would need to defend it.
To put it another way, it's the same thing that would happen if you tried to claim tennis weren't a sport because of the technology in the rackets, or skiing weren't a sport because of the technology of the skis. You'd end up with a lot of angry tennis players and skiers, not because they're militant by design, but because you made a silly claim with the intent of belittling their abilities.
I know some f1 drivers have (or are currently) in nascar such as Juan Pablo Montoya
who is currently ranked 22nd on the season. When I've watched he seems like a good driver, manages to stay up at the front of the pack for most of the race. He hasn't exactly dominated though. We'll see how Danica does if she makes it to the sprint cup next year or later.
Don't forget that Juan Pablo has won the 24 Hours at Daytona and the Indy 500, yet in over 2 seasons has yet to win an oval race in NASCAR. He's a fantastic driver, but has a different skillset. He's also proof that NASCAR racers are quality racers, since if they weren't, Montoya would be dominant like he was in F1. I can't wait until he really starts succeeding in the series.
With Danika, I hope they give her enough time to grow into the series, rather than rushing her. Like Juan Pablo, she really needs to build up the 'stock' car skillset that she doesn't have yet. And, because she's a woman and good for publicity, her being on the track has generally been more important than her being a good racer. The other drivers have had a lot of praise for her learning ability, given time I think she will do well also.
I used to bash nascar quite a bit, but its actually pretty fun.. You can usually skip the first few hundred laps and just watch the end, when everyone goes all out to win.
If you only watch 30 minutes, the last 30 are usually the ones to watch. And those who say it's not interesting or exciting obviously didn't watch this year's Daytona 500 when Jr. went from 10th to 2nd place on the last 2 laps of the race. I'm not aware of many other racing series where that happens without a wreck.
Well, that's why time trials and racing are different sports. Both have their place, but time trials will never completely replace head-to-head racing, because racing involves other techniques, such as the ability to run multiple lines, either to run adjacent to another car, or to apex late/early while passing. The issue with F1 is specific to the cars and the way they interact with the air (making drafting difficult), not with all auto racing.
Replacing racing with hot-lap time-trials would be like replacing basketball games with a slam-dunk, free-throw, and 3-point shot contest; highest combined score wins.
Short-sightedness can also be viewed as unique perspective on reality. After all, you can see at close distances where other people can't. Yet AFAIK no one has ever had any moral problems with correcting it.
Quite an 'ironic' error, as the potential moral problems (fixing something like near-sightedness that might have benefits later) is a result of short-sightedness.
Slashdot Mirror
At least it was a collaboration with Stevie Wonder...
Acting classes for Will Smith... for INDEPENDENCE DAY 2 OR 3? What kind of nonsense is that? Did GP not actually see ID1? It doesn't require acting, it requires big explosions and cheesy one liners.
Don't forget beating the ever-living shit out of aliens. And if you've seen I Am Legend (the remake), you know that Will Smith is ripped. If you make a short list of guys who can take on aliens and look awesome doing it, he's definitely on it.
But the health issues could be real and caused by the construction. They might not be able to prove it in court, but it could still be the truth.
Of course, this is by far a less likely explanation than 'they didn't like the new construction, so they lied and said it was causing health problems'. However, without a better reason than 'we don't know of a way for EMI to do that', I can't say that's the case for certain.
Exactly, if it happens in hardware all bets are off. Latch the throtle input hardware to VCC, and the chip that converts that analog message to CAN may find it reasonable and output equally coherent CAN messages.
How can a hypothetical God judge us for our choices, if our choices can be screwed up by a 'bad connection?' Maybe I was going to make the right choice, but a damn supernova sent a magnetic pulse through my head. I'm sorry, but it just seems laughable.
From a Christian viewpoint (sorry, not informed enough to give you any others), by setting the bar for morality high yet still being gracious. In other words, everyone is a sinner, but everyone can be forgiven through Jesus. So, it doesn't matter if you're 99.999% moral or just 85% moral, you're still not good enough by your own merits.
From the more Jewish standpoint, judgments were frequently reduced for those who were tricked or otherwise not aware of their sins. Check Genesis 20 for an example of someone (king Abimelech) who had been tricked into sinning and was forgiven because of that. And even here, Abraham (the one doing the tricking) was allowed to return to grace with repentance.
In any case, it does not matter how unlikely the stimulus, this research proves how ludicrous absolute concepts like 'good' and 'evil' really are. If the connection between soul and mind is anything less than 100% perfect, there are NO moral absolutes.
I disagree. There can be actions which are good or evil. There can be people which are good or evil. There does not need to be (nor is there) 100% correlation between the two (good men performing only good actions, and vice-vers-a).
So this research may show how unlikely it is for people to be absolutely good or evil, from both the Christian and Jewish viewpoints this is entirely consistent (and commonly referenced). I'm not sure about any other religions or dogmas.
Given NASA's experience with writing software that's just gotta work or else, I'd be very hard-pressed to think of no better team of programmers for the job.
Think beyond the code, too. We're talking EMI, possible latch-ups of chips or ASICs, signal integrity issues, or any of a number of digital electronic issues. NASA builds stuff that just has to work, even when passing through the Van Allen radiation belts or outside the Earth's magnetosphere. If there's an intermittent hardware error, they will find it.
And the people who write code for throttle-by-wire systems probably have an engineering background. At least, they damn well better!
Regardless, it would be the responsibility of Software/Computer Engineers to fix any problem in code.
If our moral choices are influenced even in part by random environmental influences, the soul can not fairly accrue 'karma' or any kinds of merits or demerits for the actions taken by the individual. The random environmental influences must take part of both the blame and the credit for our actions, in which case, why do we even bother with the concept of free will and a soul? Why not admit there is no real 'self' at all?
Alternatively, the correct definition of "soul" doesn't take into account either the concept of 'karma', fairness, or both.
Specifically with respect to the 'fairness' of morality, there was only a 15% change under this very unlikely stimulus. One might argue that if a 15% change in your morality affects your decisions significantly adversely, you weren't that moral to begin with.
You have to consider the size of the "light source". She put up a 1 watt light. This ranks up with the person have an acute light sensitivity, and then complaining the neighbors nightlight burns him.
Let's not belabor the point, there's no good analogy here. Light is cheaply and easily blocked (with a curtain), while radio and wicrowave radiation is not (grounded metal). Assuming he is hypersensitive, in the (poor) analogy he would only need to see the 'nightlight' to be harmed, and all houses are made of glass.
He's suing because she's doing something perfectly legal in her house. She doesn't have a bank of 500W halogen lights lighting up the side of his house (which would be a legitimate complaint), nor does she have illegally amplified RF, like a 100W transmitter on her wifi (which would be a legitimate complaint and prosecuted by the FCC). Unless both of their walls are paper thin and almost adjoining, there probably isn't much signal getting to him at all.
Agreed that there isn't any activity beyond what is reasonably expected for the average American. I disagree that her signal would completely attenuate before it reached his house, it's quite possible to connect to Wi-Fi from a neighbor in the suburbs.
The reason I say it's an interesting case is twofold. One, it could depend on local interpretation of any verbal contract between the two. Secondly, there are other cases where otherwise legal activities (talking on the phone) can become illegal (while driving). Again, assuming he has a genuine medical condition, where does the state draw the line on his and the neighbor's rights? Likely case law will guide this, such as smokers living next to children with severe asthma or disruptive Christmas light displays.
To clarify, I'm not saying this guy is definitely physically or psychologically ill (he could be faking) or that he has an iron-clad case. I'm just saying I don't think it can be dismissed off-hand without clear precedent on the matter. Maybe the judge will quickly decide that he has no legal recourse unless she does something with intent to harm (buying a directional antenna to aim at him), in which case the precedent will be set and future cases should be quickly dismissed.
It was indicated that they were friends before she moved in. It sounds like something else went bad, and he's trying to get revenge somehow.
Agreed, I expect one likely bothered the other, and this is the result of the back-and-forth.
Penalty != Consequence
Consider that many people think they are a 'safe' drunk driver, so they do it anyway. One guy I know said he practiced the 'thumb' method: holding up his thumbs while holding the wheel and keeping them inside the white lines. Also keep in mind that the dead are frequently not the drunk driver, who has crumple zones, a seatbelt, and airbags to protect themself. Harsher criminal penalties sidestep this issue: the determining factor is now no longer just hitting someone.
Not that a punative measure would prevent all drunk driving, but it would be a stronger disincentive for those who are 'still alright to drive'.
A more apt analogy would be somebody who develops extreme sun sensitivity late in life, and then attempts to sue the sun.
Not really, since he claims he lived just fine with the condition before she moved next door. So your analogy would need to be that he developed sun sensitivity and moved to a cave, where the problem abated. Then his neighbor moved in and put up UV light sources (assuming such light sources were as commonplace as Wi-Fi and cell phones) which caused the condition to return.
It does bring up some interesting questions about propertyand rights, such as whose rights trump whose: the person who is performing reasonably common activities within their own home, or the person for whom this activity causes harm. This is, of course, assuming the guy actually does have an uncurable condition that causes him physical pain.
Of course, this could possibly be a case of the actual construction causing health issues (kicking up arsenic-laden dust, for example). Not that it's necessarily likely the tower caused any issues (other construction would have likely caused the same issues), but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand just because regular people misattributed the vector that caused the illness.
I wouldn't categorically say all of them are morons. Assuming they aren't intentionally claiming to be sick to get their way, they might actually be sick. Sure, it might be a psychosomatic illness rather than physiological one, but either way the person is ill and needs treatment.
Also, by better separating the morons from the real cases, we can hopefully eventually perform actual research to separate any physiological cases from psychosomatic ones. Then we can hopefully cure both and put an end to cases like this.
It'd be especially stupid to 'cure' gayness en masse as our planet's population begins to peak.
To flip the coin, what if governments started to cause genetic gayness, as a way to reduce birth rates? How's that for a moral dilemma?
Considering we only get interesting collisions every 10^(some number) collisions. So they picked the first ones (because they are historic, not because of scientific interest) to publish since they haven't had time to pore over the billions (trillions?) of collisions to find one of interest to particle physicists.
And really, to the average lay person, a muon makes just as interesting and pretty of a picture as a Higgs Boson.
I once ran my SanDisk flash MP3 player through the wash and half a cycle in the drier. I let it sit long enough, and it worked just fine.
It's even better because you didn't try to force the joke. Like saying that your dad's prior art ended your mom's Red Period.
I agree that as far as the law should be concerned, yes they are equivalent. Cyber-bullying should be treated the same as bullying that happens anywhere else, particularly when it crosses the line into (criminal) harassment, as it certainly seems to have done in this case. So, in a concerted campaign of harassment it shouldn't matter whether you are called an 'irish whore' verbally, written of a school bathroom wall, or online: it would fall under the same harassment laws. The big difference is it's generally easier to track down and prove online (as you said).
But as others have mentioned, to a teenager it certainly can be different. Teenagers aren't rational people, in general. Sure, the same number of people might see something written on the girls bathroom and twitter, but to a teenager it feels more significant on Twitter. Add the fact that the kids doing the harassing may not take it as seriously because it is online (they likely think it is less serious to call someone a 'whore' on Facebook than to throw a Red Bull can at them), and you can see why cyber-bullying has a stronger focus on it than other forms of bullying. It simply can cause greater harm with less action by the aggressor.
As far as this story being 'Your Rights Online', I attribute that to standard /. posting methods (misread the article and write an attention-grabbing headline) and preemptively expecting that the 'cyber' part of the bullying will get the most attention in the MSM.
Piracy loses on both counts. If you really want companies to stop using DRM, get some camera time on the evening news, and the front page of the newspaper.
I think we're on the same page, here. My point was that if there's no sacrifice on the part of the protestors, there is no way you will get positive PR because there is no perceived injustice. No pirate will get sympathy from the public (it appears petty and juvenile), so there will be no pressure for the companies to change.
In other words, the message needs to be "I didn't buy this game because of -X-, which is unfair", instead of "I didn't like -X- enough to buy it, but I downloaded and played it anyway". Guess which person seems more reasonable and worthy of sympathy?
I dislike it when people degrade protest for human rights by comparing it to a protest for fair value on entertainment.
How did I degrade them? I'd say the degrading thing is those who use the same word 'protest' to describe their anger over a luxury item not being suitable to them, while simultaneously selfishly consuming the very thing they disagree with.
My comparison? Civil rights activists were brave and willing to stand up to injustice. Pirates are children who justify getting what they want without paying as 'sticking it to the man'.
Piracy itself is a "problem" created in order to take stock holders focuses off the real problem, which is people are getting screwed and are saying, "I'm not going to pay for that because {you're nickle and dimeing me || you want my arms AND legs || you don't want me to use something I paid you for || you want complete control over everything I do if I use your product}". Causing a loss in profits. Piracy is a way out so the company can say, "It's not our fault, look how many hundreds of millions of billions of people would have bought our product if it wasn't being stolen"
I don't disagree with you. However, because of the quantity of real piracy, these companies have a very strong case that there are lost revenues due to piracy. It's not the 'problem' that's invented (piracy is real and doesn't provide tangible benefits to the company), just the interpretation of the solution. Because they have a quite reasonable scapegoat for lost sales, they focus their attention toward fighting piracy instead of fixing their games and using fair pricing.
In other words, pirating a game to protest the pricing/implementation/DRM actually encourages increased DRM, harsher pricing schemes, and more creative methods to get money from you. Piracy is counter-productive to gamers, in general. Not that the corporations are innocent here, but piracy (which is a real cost to companies) puts them in a bind with their executives and shareholders that encourages this type of behavior. Pirates share some of the blame here, too. Don't pretend you're all innocent or harmless.
It's close minded people like you who think there is only ever one way to go about something that devalue the actions of anyone that disagree with your point of view that is enabling the corporations and government to get away with murder.
Calling it 'murder' to overcharge for a video game seems a bit excessive. Nobody died because they couldn't play a brand-new AAA video game, and anyone who spent too much or regretted a purchase on a luxury item has only themselves to blame. I'm also not sure what the government has to do with any of this, let alone how they benefit from aggressive DRM on video games.
Personally, I think it's the people who buy and play these luxury items regardless of the cost, DRM, and ramifications that allow the companies to take advantage of us. They're the ones that reward the game producers for the status quo, so they're the ones to blame for the lack of innovation and fairness to the consumer.
Well, the case in point is that if/when people do protest by stopping purchasing (and even stop pirating), it doesn't matter because the publisher/distributors simply BLAME PIRATES for the loss of sales and put MORE INVASIVE DRM on the product, which is the very thing you are PROTESTING AGAINST!
But the very point is that they don't need to. They see higher piracy numbers, and the CEOs make the only conclusion that makes economic sense, particularly for a publicly traded company.
As a secondary effect, if even the serious protestors are seen as hypocrites ('I don't like their measures to stop piracy, so I'll pirate it'), no neutral 3rd party will take their side. Rather than evoking sympathy at injustice, they are seen as a bunch of stuck-up middle-class white teenage thieves, and Ubisoft and Activision win the PR battle.
And if you're still playing the game, you might even get other people interested in the game who weren't otherwise. Again, the piracy argument tries to play both sides of the field: some say piracy is good because it increases publicity for the game, others say it is effective protest. Really, it's neither, because the protest is failed because it doesn't truly harm the company, yet the company further cripples their future products in response.
tl;dr
If the game companies are going to blame pirates, take the high-road and force them to manufacture that excuse, rather than handing them the data to justify the very things we hate to their shareholders.
I just said I didn't understand why they are so insistent on being called a sport.
Probably for the same reason other people are so insistent on racing not being considered a sport. If there wasn't some smartass chiming in with a 'but racing isn't a sport, lol' every time racing were mentioned, nobody would need to defend it.
To put it another way, it's the same thing that would happen if you tried to claim tennis weren't a sport because of the technology in the rackets, or skiing weren't a sport because of the technology of the skis. You'd end up with a lot of angry tennis players and skiers, not because they're militant by design, but because you made a silly claim with the intent of belittling their abilities.
I know some f1 drivers have (or are currently) in nascar such as Juan Pablo Montoya who is currently ranked 22nd on the season. When I've watched he seems like a good driver, manages to stay up at the front of the pack for most of the race. He hasn't exactly dominated though. We'll see how Danica does if she makes it to the sprint cup next year or later.
Don't forget that Juan Pablo has won the 24 Hours at Daytona and the Indy 500, yet in over 2 seasons has yet to win an oval race in NASCAR. He's a fantastic driver, but has a different skillset. He's also proof that NASCAR racers are quality racers, since if they weren't, Montoya would be dominant like he was in F1. I can't wait until he really starts succeeding in the series.
With Danika, I hope they give her enough time to grow into the series, rather than rushing her. Like Juan Pablo, she really needs to build up the 'stock' car skillset that she doesn't have yet. And, because she's a woman and good for publicity, her being on the track has generally been more important than her being a good racer. The other drivers have had a lot of praise for her learning ability, given time I think she will do well also.
I used to bash nascar quite a bit, but its actually pretty fun.. You can usually skip the first few hundred laps and just watch the end, when everyone goes all out to win.
If you only watch 30 minutes, the last 30 are usually the ones to watch. And those who say it's not interesting or exciting obviously didn't watch this year's Daytona 500 when Jr. went from 10th to 2nd place on the last 2 laps of the race. I'm not aware of many other racing series where that happens without a wreck.
Well, that's why time trials and racing are different sports. Both have their place, but time trials will never completely replace head-to-head racing, because racing involves other techniques, such as the ability to run multiple lines, either to run adjacent to another car, or to apex late/early while passing. The issue with F1 is specific to the cars and the way they interact with the air (making drafting difficult), not with all auto racing.
Replacing racing with hot-lap time-trials would be like replacing basketball games with a slam-dunk, free-throw, and 3-point shot contest; highest combined score wins.
Short-sightedness can also be viewed as unique perspective on reality. After all, you can see at close distances where other people can't. Yet AFAIK no one has ever had any moral problems with correcting it.
Quite an 'ironic' error, as the potential moral problems (fixing something like near-sightedness that might have benefits later) is a result of short-sightedness.