I think you have missed my point. I didn't claim the Americans live the good life or that they are not all going to die at the age of 50 from heart attacks brough on by a shitty diet, too much work, and crappy healthcare. My point was when it comes to corporations looking for a place to set up shop, Europe is causing companies to flee. While anticdotal, notice that IBM is cutting jobs in Europe, but not the US or developing nations.
The power houses of this centaury are multinational corporations. Multinational corporations by their very nature seek out the very best workers. The best workers are defined by their cost and their productivity. Americans survive off of ever expanding productivity. Developing nations survive off of expanding productivity and low cost. Europe's problem is that it certainly isn't getting any cheaper to employee Europeans in most European nations, and their productivity gains lag behind that of the US.
The advantage that Europe and the US have had is superior education and infrastructure that is 100 years ahead of the rest of the world. That advantage is rapidly diminishing. A technology degree from Indian or China is no longer laughable. The infrastructure of these nations is rapidly catching up. To make matters worse, they are much much cheaper labor. In short, the "we were here first" advantage is rapidly vanishing.
My point is that Europe is on the cusp. They are not growing their productivity fast enough. Corporations will leave if they can hire two Indians to do the job of one European for the same price. They will leave if they can hire American to do the job of two in Europeans for the same salary.
The US clearly has a plan to deal with the problem. Ramp up productivity and control as much of the financing of globalization as possible. Europe on the other hand is tittering between their more socialistic tendencies of old Europe, and the more globilized principles of the new EU. I am not saying that Europe is doomed, simply that it is sitting on the verge of a turning point. They need to jump one direction or the other before the rug is dragged out from under them. A dying population and stagnant productivity is going force change one way or the other.
Non-competiting contracts are paper thin. They hold close to no legal weight. What they really boil down to is that if you are working on a project, change companies, and suddenly that project gets finished there with your name smeared all over it, you might be in some trouble.
Really, if you have a clause like that in your contract and lose your job, talk to a laywer. They really are not as ironclad as they sound. Don't let a few words slapped into your contract keep you from a job you want. Talk to a lawyer before deciding what it means.
I imagine parent was a joke, but I would suggest recognizing the kernel of truth in it. Europe has a problem. The rest of the world is catching up in productivity or in price. The European economy is facing pressure from both ends of the stick. On one hand you have emerging third world economies like India where people will work long hours for cheap. On the other hand you have the Americans who are famously productive, but work for a high pay. Europe is losing on both ends. On one hand the richer or comparable priced American employees are working longer and are more productive, and on the other hand there is cheap labor in third world nations that are quickly catching up in terms of productivity. If you want to see this principle in action, look at Frances attempt to institute a 35 hour work week. It was a horrible disaster that at this point is dead in the private sector.
The rest of the world is moving towards an American work mentality. Wages go up, productivity and education go up, but hours are long and vacations are slim. In a globalized world I think Europe is going to continue to have a harder and harder time competing unless it starts to loosen up on its labor laws to stuff more work time in the year.
The other alternative of course is for Europe to move away from the globilized world (or at least hold the line). The French populace (from my outsider position) seems to be leaning this way with their leeriness towards the EU. If your nation is not dependent upon IBM or other multinational corporations that can book it once your labor starts to cost more then it is worth, then stuff like this is not a problem.
Whatever the case, I think Europe has some soul searching to do. I don't think rising globalism is going to be gentle to Europe. Europe needs to either adopt a more globalist attitude (especially in their labor laws), or makes preparations to deal the reality that there are more and more places in the world with educated and productive populaces willing to work either longer, harder, or for less. If corporations have the choice, they will pick these places over Europe. Europe certainly got to the top first, but having been first isn't going to be an advantage they can hold on to forever. The rest of the world is catching up.
People respond quickly because with a religious point of view this is cut and dry. If you look at the world through scientific eyes, a cluster of cells without sentience is a cluster of cells without sentience. Who cares what happens to a handful of cells? Sure, they could become humans, but so could the billions of reproductive cells most men spew everywhere. Hell, even a man who only does his business for the purpose of reproduction can't help but waste 99.99% of his reproductive cells. Unless a woman catches each egg with a handful of sperm, she too is constantly dropping off reproductive cells.
People without a social conservative agenda don't blink at such issues because there is no issue. Experimentation on a cluster of non-sentient human cells has long been standard practice. So a handful of eggs getting toyed with really doesn't bother them.
I am not saying that social conservatives should not argue their point, but they should not be horrible surprised when your average non-social conservative fails to even begin the controversy, much less think that such life saving technology should be abandoned upon ethical principles.
Ha, that is awesome, and vaguely disturbing. The only way I can see that getting sucked up as "news" original, is either someone read the joke and didn't realize it, or they were sitting there one day trying to write a story, remembered some arcane "fact" a friend told them, then reported it. Either way, it is shitty journalism. It is one thing for other news agencies to repeat it, as they can site a source, the original shitty article, but somewhere along the line some fuck up needs to originally report it as fact.
On the plus side though, the Internet makes disputing these made up facts much easier. This is a good example. Someone cited a 'fact' that had wormed its way in via crappy reporting and constant repetition, and someone else was able to show a fairly good evidence that this 'fact' was in fact (repetition used intentionally) not true. If this had been the old days, unless someone felt like going to the library, one guy would say well "I heard this from this...", and the other guy would respond with "Well I heard that wasn't true from this...". Makes you wonder though, has journalism always sucked but we are just getting better at picking out the fakers via the Internet, or are journalist just getting lazier?
First, this is not a trade issue and the US will do nothing in response because no treaties or rules have been broken. This is a piece of government policy. If you go to China, you can bring Microsoft, you just can't sell it to the government. This ONLY effects the Chinese government.
Second, I have a feeling this has a lot more to do with security then building up their industry. If they are building their own code, they are a lot less likely to get stuff with backdoors build in. This isn't just paranoia either. During the first gulf war the US wiped out the Iraqi air defense network with viruses they stuffed into printers bought in the US.
That said, I have this is going to be a mixed blessing for a while. Building your own code base from scratch is really not going to be easy. Mix in the absolutely terrible accountability and management issues of the Chinese government and you are talking about a disaster waiting to happen. It isn't that China doesn't have good coders. They have good and bad coders like the US, it is more that the government is unlikely to be able to tell the difference.
Finally, if the US is going to raise a stink about trading policies, it will be over currency. Hell, just glance at the days bussiness headlines if you want an Economics 101 from the bickering back and forth.
You are correct in that it is not bread, in that if you consume knowledge it doesn't vanish. Just like bread though, it costs money and takes resources to create knowledge in the first place. The fundamental problem is that it takes money to create knowledge, but there is no natural limit on supply to control the price. It is the age old supply and demand curve, only with the case of IP the supply is always infinite. Infinite supplies led to the commodities price reaching zero... which is all well and good, so long as the commodity is free to produce.
The issue now is that we WANT people to pour money into creating new knowledge and building new technologies out it, but we would prefer everyone to have it for free. On one hand we want money to do the research, but in the end we want everyone to get the benefits of it. There is no clear solution around this (yet).
Even if the government was the sole provider of research money and the government mandated that all knowledge gained be made public, it wouldn't solve the problem. You would just end up forcing everyone to pay for knowledge with taxes, and (more disturbingly) rely on government bureaucracies to determine where to invest money. As someone who has been apart of requesting government money, this REALLY isn't the ideal way of doing it.
So, I suppose my point is we have a trade off. Either we get good plentiful knowledge that is only accessible at cost, or we get poor investments in knowledge that is accessible to everyone. Ideology aside, neither is preferable, and as far as I can see there are lots of poor utopian solutions and no good solution that acknowledge realty.
Sure, if my motorcycle taps someone else, they will probably be okay. Though, I think the best solution is just for everyone to own a car... kind of like the way it is now. I have been tapped going at 60 mpg (100 kph) in my car in heavy traffic. Thankfully, the other guy was also in a car. The result was that I got a jolt, swerved a little, realized I had been hit and we both pulled over. The net damage? I had a scratched paint job, the other guy had no damage at all. I wiped the damage off with a rag. If one or both of us had been in a motorcycle, one or both of us would be dead.
I am sorry, but motorcycles absolutely are not safe. If everyone who could use a motorcycle had one instead of a car, the death rates would shoot up. The simple fact of the matter is that you can lose control of a car and be a-okay. That is the nice thing about four wheels; it takes a lot of work to flip over. In a motor cycle, one ugly patch of ice or a piece of trash in the road and you are dead. Ride them if you like, as it certainly makes ME safer, but there is no way in hell I would ride one every single day 70 miles round trip to work on a high way. That is just stupid and asking to become an organ doner.
I am altruistic, but not altruistic enough to sign my organs away to an organ donation program before I am 30. So, ride your motorcycle all you want. I don't care what value (or lack there of) you place on your own life. Me personally though, I'll stick to four wheels, an air bag, a seatbelt, crumple zones, and the small perks like heating and a roof.
If every car on the road was a motorcycle it would suck to have a family or live where I live (Boston, USA) - especially when you need to drive an hour to work and it is well below 0 (F or C, take your pick). Further, nothing sounds more horrifying then trying to drive a motorcycle on ice.
Me personally? I like my Honda accord with its big fluffy air bag. I like a heater. I like knowing that I can take my friends and family places, even if it is raining near freezing rain. More then that, I like knowing that if someone taps me from behind while going 60 mph (100 kph) I am not going to die. Screw the enviroment, I want to live to be a crotchey old man.
Supply vs demand is kind of moot because the supply is nearly endless one someone has put in the initial cost to make the product (music). Any idiot given an MP3 file and distribute it at almost no cost to everyone else in the world. The result is that the point on the curve you are looking at is supply and infinity... which is always roughly zero. If people are acting in their own self interest and altruism isn't a factor, people simply won't pay for such content at all because the supply is so high.
What IP laws do is fix a supply. They give a monopoly on a certain product such that the supply can be limited. If only one company can produce and sell the music, then they can limit the supply and control the price. They can always keep it so that there is just enough supply such that everyone gets what they want, but they keep from flooding the market so that sellers don't drop their prices. Take out IP laws and suddenly the supply jumps to infinity and price drops to nothing.
Now, as to the American economy and traditional American capitalist ideals, IP laws have always been a problem. On one hand Americans want lassie-faire capitalism, on the other hand there is the inherent problem that pure hands off capitalism has a very hard time dealing with things with infinite supply. You could certainly get rid of IP laws, but the consequence to purely IP industries would be devastating. Hollywood and the RIAA would cease to function. Until some new model was found to make money off those IP products, the only things you would see coming out of America would be things created for altruistic purposes.
That in it of itself might not be horrible when you are talking music and movies, but the problem becomes much more sever when you are talking about things like technology development. Pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, and pretty much all advanced technologies thrive in IP protected markets. IP protection ensures that if pour a few million into coming up with an idea, someone can't copy your data and bring it to market without having to pay for the R&D costs.
The IP system in the US, Europe, Japan, and pretty much every place in the world that does or does not have IP protection is fucked up. The real problem is that mustering both a plan to fix it, the political will to do it, and minimizing disruptions to the economy is pretty much damn near impossible. I see the good and bad of IP laws, but I couldn't even begin to argue a solution. Personally, I think that technology will make the question moot long before we solve it through legislation.
I am sorry, but MMORPGs have absolutely nothing to do with RP. They don't even attempt to try and intergrate RP into these games. Further, even if they did attempt to make the games more RP friendly, starting everyone at level zero would not be one of the things to do to make the game more RP friendly. The idea of starting at level 1 and leveling up has nothing to do with RP. In fact, any decent RP game worth its salt won't even have levels.
If you want to see a real RP game, I suggest www.armageddon.org. It is an old text based MUD with perm death set in a desert wasteland. If I had the time I would still be playing that game.
Some day a small developer is going to develop a truly RP centric game. The current crop of MMORPGs are not that game though. Some auctioning going on isn't going to make the game less RP friendly.
You can make the argument that you don't need something to enjoy the game about any system. However, I think there is a reason why WoW blasted past a million subscribers and the runner up has less then half that. WoW is made for the casual gamer. Period. A casual gamer can log on, level up, and never see something that he can't eventually get. Log a casual gamer into EQ and the situation is very different. You get to see stuff all the time that takes an insane amount of free time to achieve.
The problem is two fold. First, they are destroying what made WoW such a blazing success. They are making a system that inherently a casual gamer will NEVER be able to win in. A casual gamer can never get the uber PvP armor. If only 0.1% or 1% or 5% can get it, then they will never ever get it. This is going to start pissing people off.
Second, on the PvP servers, you are handing out an advantage that that the casual player is not going to be able to get his hands on. A level 60 casual player can take on any other level 60. Start creating massive equipment imbalances that are dependent upon your 'hardcoreness' (also read as being jobless or in high school) to achieve, and casual players are going to start dropping out.
Wow should play to its strengths. That means playing to casual players. There is a difference between throwing a bone to the nuts who play 40+ hours a week and changing the focus of the game to suit them. As far as I can see for the future plans blizzard has, it seems like they have made a potentially fatal mistake of changing their focus to trying to retain that insane 5% who spend 40+ hours a week, and have stopped trying to serves the other 95% that think spending 40+ hours on a game is insane.
I personally think it is an insane move, but I suppose only time will tell. If I were to give advice to blizzard though, I would tell them to build the world outward horizontally, not up. Add more areas/quests/classes/races for all levels. Don't get caught up in the trap of chugging top end content and forgetting about the massive casual gamer player base that made the game so larger in the first place.
This is just paranoid. The only things that would make earth a worse place to live in the mars as it is now are the same things that make everything within a few light years to live in. Lets say DinoKiller 2 was to strike earth, where would you rather be? If you say Mars (or any other place in the solar system), you need to rethink things a little.
I would much rather rather be deep underground or undersea then on some wasteland like Mars. The simple fact of the matter is that there is NOTHING short of the all out destruction of this planet that could possibly remove the massive quanties of water, carbon, and all those wonderful organics that we love. Even if the entire surface of earth was turned into ash by a massive strike, earth would still have more water and carbon then we know what to do with. Mars on the other hand will always be a cold dead wasteland without an atmosphere.
If preservation of the species really is your concern, I would suggest a deep sea colony. All the water you could possibly want, and if anything goes wrong, you are just never far from help. Further, if the world is wiped out, a deepl see colony is roughly the safest place you could be.
If you hack something that causes someone's death, you SHOULD be charged with murder, regardless of your intentions. If some ass hole got into a radar control computer and accidently caused two airplanes to collide, 500 counts of manslaughter would be a very much appropiate sentence.
"we will run out oil eventually... this running out will happen relatively abruptly, leading to something of a crisis in our society on account of our dependance on private transportation."
This is very much NOT true. We will not suddenly wake up one day and find all the oil gone. What will happen is that price of oil will slowly continue to rise for decades. This will facilitate a smooth transition from oil to alternative energy sources.
What most people don't understand about oil is that we dig up very little of the blackstuff. When we drop a well down and start sucking up reservoirs of this oil, we are really only dragging up the easiest to reach oil that is just sitting there. Most oil is left untouched due to the fact that it would be very expensive to remove it.
Three things are going to happen to make the cost of oil slowly rise as it is depleted.
1) Speculators will make sure that it rises slowly. Speculators watch the supply of oil and basically bet on how much it is going to cost in the future. While they do drive the price of the oil up by buying out supply, they also ensure a more even distribution over time of its distribution. For instance, if suddenly the oil companies were to announce that HOLY SHIT we are out of oil in a year, speculators would quickly buy up the supply and start parceling it away. The price absolutely would go up, but we wouldn't go from oil gushing out of our ears to being bone dry.
2) As the cost of oil is driven up, oil companies will naturally start digging up more expensive to extract oil. At $30 a barrel it makes no sense to go to an old oil well and start extracting all that stuff that takes $50 a barrel to extract. However, once the price of oil hits $100 per barrel, that $50 per barrel oil will make a tidy profit. So, as the cost for oil goes up, more and more expensive oil will be introduced to the market. The oil will not suddenly run out. Instead, more expensive oil will be introduced to the market that will slowly drive the price up.
3) As the cost of oil goes up, the demand for oil will go down. This is economics 101 supply and demand. Oil is the energy source of choice simply because it is relatively clean (compared to some thing), a very dense energy source, and extremely cheap. Today oil is cheap for the amount of energy you can make from it. The stuff is plentiful enough to fuel the world, and cheap enough for almost everyone to be able to buy it. This will not always be true. As the price goes up, more people will start to spend a few extra dollars to avoid having to shell out so much at the pump. Alternative energy sources will be comparatively cheaper then oil. People will move naturally away from oil. You can see a perfect of this by looking at Europe and the US. The US, where this is almost no taxation on oil, people own big ugly fuel hungry cars. In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil. Up the price of oil by 500% and even Americans will find it in their hearts (or more likely wallets) to be more fuel efficient.
The net result is that as the price of oil goes up, the consumption of the stuff goes down. As consumption goes down, the price slows its upward slope. The result is that you have a gradual increase in oil prices and a gradual move away from using it.
The step you are missing in the system you propose is move from academic research to industrial scale production. This is not a trivial step. In fact, it is without a doubt the hardest step. The current system produces a very streamlined system for moving things out of academia to industry. First you have academia which, for the most part, publishes their brains out. They generally hold a few patents for royalty purposes, but they tend to make their information very widely available. For instance, some time use SciFinder at a university library to search the word 'nanotube'. Watch as the program nearly explodes with the wealth of information it brings back.
The next step in the process is to pull things out of academia, which on the whole is VERY impracticable when it comes to scale up considerations. Academia might very well have made a nanotube transistor, but academia made it using a method where it would literally take a billion years to put together a decent sized circuit board. Large industry is leery of throwing money at the problem because it requires burning money outside of their core competency with a very high chance failure.
The compromise is to have a small start up with an idea take on the project. The start up gathers up some investors, throws some smart people at the problem, and more often then not fails miserably. The bright side is that the only people that lose are the investors that made the poor investment. Some times though, the start up has a stellar idea, gathers up the money it needs, and brings the product right up to the point of production. They work out that cool new technology that takes a process from taking a billion years to complete, to making it take 5 minutes by combining an interdisciplinary group that a university would find extremely hard to field. They also do it under financial pressure to keep their ideas applicable to industry in a manner that academia finds distasteful. If the startup plays their cards right, they can take their technology to a larger company, and with the protection of IP laws, share it with them and sell it off. The large company works out the final kinks and you get a new nanotube computer on your desktop.
This system lets each step in the process focus on what they are good at. Academia is awesome at pure research. The problem is that academia is very resentful and unskilled at doing research with an eye for scale up. In fact, one of the complaints academia has been having is that they are being pushed by industry to do less pure science and do more things with industrial potential. The IP laws let academia do what it does best. It lets large corporations get ready-to-go technology without taking on risk. It lets small start ups take big risk and receive big payoffs when they do good. It lets investors keep startups with an eye on reality by insisting that they work on industrial applications.
The system is solid, and it is the reason why the US, Europe, and Japan are by far the world leaders in getting technology from an idea to the market. It isn't coincidence that the leaders are all people with the best IP protection. That is not to say that the rest of the world doesn't contribute as well. The rest of the world is certainly catching up, though it should be pointed out that they are catching up at the same rate that they are improving their IP laws.
IP laws have a lot that could use fixing. The concept is sound though. If you put in the blood and sweat to build an idea from the ground up, you get to profit from it first, before people start to copy you. That protection is what makes people willing to pour so much blood and money into their work. Utopian systems aside, this system works, and it works damn good even for all of its problems. Pull the rug out from under this system, and you basically hand over all technical innovation responsibilities to large corporations that can take an idea from start to stop inside the same company, and to universities. No offense to anyone in either of those places, but I couldn't think of two entities I would least want to see in charge of innovation. One is paranoid of risk, and the other oblivious to reality. The startup is what keeps the system sane.
Again, you are really missing the point. You are assuming that this has something to do with post 9/11 attitudes. If you were to ask this question -anywhere- in the world, you would get the same answer. If anything, I would bet that Americans answer no, despite the flagrant bias of the question, more then most nations in the world.
The point is that this was a stupid question to begin with, made stupider by the complete lack of context. Ask this question to a few different nations populace and show me results that are different then American answers, and you might be on to something. Ask a biased polling question to just Americans and then go ahead and make a conclusion about what Americans think, and have committed some pretty grievous biasing.
I am not saying that Americans might not be stupid or jumpy. I am not saying that they are not stupider or jumpier then normal due to 9/11. I am saying that this question means absolutely nothing unless it is either better worded, or asked to other populations. A horrible and biased question means nothing without some sort of context, and this poll was done without any context.
Are you joking? Should we analyze the results of my poll where I asked 100 people from each nation if they think that government should try and weed out corruption and conclude from the answers that everyone in the world desperately wants a police state? Ask the question, "Do you believe that the right to free speech should be in the constitution?" or "Do you believe that the media should be censored by the government?" and find a majority of Americans who say no, and you have a point.
The poll was stupid and asked a question with such a biased stance that you could ask that to any nation anywhere in the world, and you would get 80% of the populace answering the same way.
The best you can conclude is that when asked a casual question people do not always think through the entire line of logic on the spot. Thankfully though, we live in a democracy. Any such question needs to go to debate, and even after the debate, any decision needs to also go through the judiciary which is ruled by the constitution. When the move to amend the constitution to remove the first amendment starts, give me a call and I will tell you that you are right.
I can't speak for software patents, but I can speak for other patents. I work in a nanotechnology startup firm with a very hot product. We have grand total of 30 or so guys working in this company, all of which are very smart people. We only really do one thing, develop technology. We develop the basic idea of a new technology, work out the initial kinks, then sell it to another company for scale up operations. Patents are all we have. Take away our patents, and we would close up shop tomorrow and let the technology sit there stagnant.
What people don't realize is that often times the people that make the technology and the people that build the technology are two very different people. 30 guys can't run a semiconductor plant building enough memory to feed the global market. We can do all the R&D though. That means that we need to show our R&D to outsiders. We need to take our awesome idea, bring it to a company, and show them enough to convince them that we are not another crackpot startup. The only way to do this is to show them a lot... enough where they get a couple years leg up on reproducing what we have. The only thing that allows us to walk into companies and show them what we have is the protection of IP laws. Without those laws, we wouldn't be able to show off the technology, much less sell it.
It is this very reason why our company won't even contemplate doing business in Korea or Taiwan. IP is the only thing we have, and those nations are not exactly know for their respect of ownership of IP. IP laws are what keep our business in existence and in the US.
I am not a programmer, so I don't know how it works with software, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens in that industry too. A small company develops an impressive bit of code, and the only way they can sell it is with the protection of IP to shield them while they show it off and sell it.
IP laws are not the bane of creativity. The patent system has more then a few flukes and shitty patents handed out, but it is without a doubt needed. Kill patents and you better get cozy with universities and massive corporations, because without IP laws entrepreneurs and risk taking startups are SOL.
Gas prices are at a all time high... if you blatantly ignore inflation. Prices need to almost double to reach the peak. Further, I would be annoyed if while I was driving into work someone on a bike stopped by my car window at a red light and started bitching that gas costs too much.
Finally, this isn't about gas prices. This is about a VIDEO GAME. A luxury. This is something that could disappear tomorrow and no one would care beyond a few annoyed addicts. It is something that no one cares if you don't get enough of it, nor do they care if you think it costs too much. It is like bitching about the inflated price of yachts. You can bitch, but no one really cares. Just do what everyone else who can't afford a yacht does... live a happy and normal life without a yacht.
It is one thing to bitch and moan about stuff that matters, like gas, food, water, and things of that nature. You just sound like a spoiled prick though when you bitch about trivial shit that in truth costs less the three hours worth of work at minimum wage. There are people in the world that don't even get the necessities while some spoiled prick is crying about the trivial cost of his luxury goods.
And for the record, realize that they are selling WoW in China. Yeah. China. If they can scrape up enough to buy WoW despite having wages that can't even sit on the same scale as American and European wages, so can you.
"these trends are in all the other aspects of life right now. There's alot of messed up stuff going on around the world, and no one seems to care. That's my problem."
What trend is that? Trivial shit you don't need costing less then 3 hours of work a month at minimum wage? Most people make enough to pay off their WoW subscription in the time it takes for them take a shit and go on a coffee break at work.
This isn't the world rolling over while you fight on. This is a million plus people deciding that $15 is an okay price for a months worth of entertainment. Shit, if you are gowing to throw a hissy fit over the price of trivial crap you don't need, I would suggest walking over to your local movie theater.
More to the point, WoW is not exploiting the masses. They are selling a luxury at a price that well over a million don't mind paying. I personally hope they are making hand over fist. To me, that just means that they will be putting some of it away in the bank to make another great game that I will be happy to pay a monthly fee for.
The PvP servers actually have a minimal amount of ganking. I personally found that once I hit about 30 the gankings by people 10+ levels higher then me almost stopped. Generally, the only time I get ganked by a level ?? alliance is when I kill people my level too much at one location and they call in for guild support.
Sure, ganking is going to go up, but I have a feeling most the increased ganking will come from people that are roughly the same level. It doesn't bother me much if I get to a dungeon and find alliance waiting if they are my level. In fact, that sounds like a merry old time with hours of PvP goodness as we struggle to control the area.
I joined the PvP server for a reason. Sure, I don't level up as fast because I spent time fighting over hunting areas, but who in the hell wants to hunt mindless NPCs 24/7?
The problem is not that Anheuser-Busch is worried about pissing off Europe. The problem is that a drug company wants to produce rice designed to create a drug in open fields. Anheuser-Busch doesn't want that rice to contaminate their rice.
I am all for genetic engineering of pretty much everything, including things I stuff in my mouth. I don't think that genetic engineering is the boogie man. I don't even care if genetic strains blow to the wind and cross pollinate... so long as there is nothing in them that could potentially be harmful. Genetic cross pollination happens today all the time. Throwing in some human cracks at genetic code really doesn't worry me. That said, such genetic cross pollination needs to be treated like pollution.
It is a necessary evil, but it certainly needs some minimal level of oversight. If your genetic material is going to drift in the wind, you need to take responsibility for where it ends up, especially if it is harmful to other products. In the case of using genetic engineering to make crops produce drugs, Anheuser-Busch is right to put their foot down and demand steps be taken to prevent contamination of their own crops. It is one thing to catch a gene that makes your rice whiter down the wind from the farm a mile away, it is very much another thing to get a gene that puts a drug into rice meant for consumption.
IMO, this is just a straight up case of pollution. One guy wants to put something potentially harmful in the area. Either society needs to agree to accept the potential risks associated with the pollution, or steps need to be taken to limit the pollution (green houses come to mind). Whatever the case, the risks need to be understood or precautions taken. The fact that Anheuser-Busch, a company with absolutely zero interest in the debate otherwise is speaking up is a pretty clear indication that either the risks are not properly known, or that the risks are known and have been deemed too high.
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I think you have missed my point. I didn't claim the Americans live the good life or that they are not all going to die at the age of 50 from heart attacks brough on by a shitty diet, too much work, and crappy healthcare. My point was when it comes to corporations looking for a place to set up shop, Europe is causing companies to flee. While anticdotal, notice that IBM is cutting jobs in Europe, but not the US or developing nations.
The power houses of this centaury are multinational corporations. Multinational corporations by their very nature seek out the very best workers. The best workers are defined by their cost and their productivity. Americans survive off of ever expanding productivity. Developing nations survive off of expanding productivity and low cost. Europe's problem is that it certainly isn't getting any cheaper to employee Europeans in most European nations, and their productivity gains lag behind that of the US.
The advantage that Europe and the US have had is superior education and infrastructure that is 100 years ahead of the rest of the world. That advantage is rapidly diminishing. A technology degree from Indian or China is no longer laughable. The infrastructure of these nations is rapidly catching up. To make matters worse, they are much much cheaper labor. In short, the "we were here first" advantage is rapidly vanishing.
My point is that Europe is on the cusp. They are not growing their productivity fast enough. Corporations will leave if they can hire two Indians to do the job of one European for the same price. They will leave if they can hire American to do the job of two in Europeans for the same salary.
The US clearly has a plan to deal with the problem. Ramp up productivity and control as much of the financing of globalization as possible. Europe on the other hand is tittering between their more socialistic tendencies of old Europe, and the more globilized principles of the new EU. I am not saying that Europe is doomed, simply that it is sitting on the verge of a turning point. They need to jump one direction or the other before the rug is dragged out from under them. A dying population and stagnant productivity is going force change one way or the other.
Non-competiting contracts are paper thin. They hold close to no legal weight. What they really boil down to is that if you are working on a project, change companies, and suddenly that project gets finished there with your name smeared all over it, you might be in some trouble.
Really, if you have a clause like that in your contract and lose your job, talk to a laywer. They really are not as ironclad as they sound. Don't let a few words slapped into your contract keep you from a job you want. Talk to a lawyer before deciding what it means.
I imagine parent was a joke, but I would suggest recognizing the kernel of truth in it. Europe has a problem. The rest of the world is catching up in productivity or in price. The European economy is facing pressure from both ends of the stick. On one hand you have emerging third world economies like India where people will work long hours for cheap. On the other hand you have the Americans who are famously productive, but work for a high pay. Europe is losing on both ends. On one hand the richer or comparable priced American employees are working longer and are more productive, and on the other hand there is cheap labor in third world nations that are quickly catching up in terms of productivity. If you want to see this principle in action, look at Frances attempt to institute a 35 hour work week. It was a horrible disaster that at this point is dead in the private sector.
The rest of the world is moving towards an American work mentality. Wages go up, productivity and education go up, but hours are long and vacations are slim. In a globalized world I think Europe is going to continue to have a harder and harder time competing unless it starts to loosen up on its labor laws to stuff more work time in the year.
The other alternative of course is for Europe to move away from the globilized world (or at least hold the line). The French populace (from my outsider position) seems to be leaning this way with their leeriness towards the EU. If your nation is not dependent upon IBM or other multinational corporations that can book it once your labor starts to cost more then it is worth, then stuff like this is not a problem.
Whatever the case, I think Europe has some soul searching to do. I don't think rising globalism is going to be gentle to Europe. Europe needs to either adopt a more globalist attitude (especially in their labor laws), or makes preparations to deal the reality that there are more and more places in the world with educated and productive populaces willing to work either longer, harder, or for less. If corporations have the choice, they will pick these places over Europe. Europe certainly got to the top first, but having been first isn't going to be an advantage they can hold on to forever. The rest of the world is catching up.
People respond quickly because with a religious point of view this is cut and dry. If you look at the world through scientific eyes, a cluster of cells without sentience is a cluster of cells without sentience. Who cares what happens to a handful of cells? Sure, they could become humans, but so could the billions of reproductive cells most men spew everywhere. Hell, even a man who only does his business for the purpose of reproduction can't help but waste 99.99% of his reproductive cells. Unless a woman catches each egg with a handful of sperm, she too is constantly dropping off reproductive cells.
People without a social conservative agenda don't blink at such issues because there is no issue. Experimentation on a cluster of non-sentient human cells has long been standard practice. So a handful of eggs getting toyed with really doesn't bother them.
I am not saying that social conservatives should not argue their point, but they should not be horrible surprised when your average non-social conservative fails to even begin the controversy, much less think that such life saving technology should be abandoned upon ethical principles.
Ha, that is awesome, and vaguely disturbing. The only way I can see that getting sucked up as "news" original, is either someone read the joke and didn't realize it, or they were sitting there one day trying to write a story, remembered some arcane "fact" a friend told them, then reported it. Either way, it is shitty journalism. It is one thing for other news agencies to repeat it, as they can site a source, the original shitty article, but somewhere along the line some fuck up needs to originally report it as fact.
On the plus side though, the Internet makes disputing these made up facts much easier. This is a good example. Someone cited a 'fact' that had wormed its way in via crappy reporting and constant repetition, and someone else was able to show a fairly good evidence that this 'fact' was in fact (repetition used intentionally) not true. If this had been the old days, unless someone felt like going to the library, one guy would say well "I heard this from this...", and the other guy would respond with "Well I heard that wasn't true from this...". Makes you wonder though, has journalism always sucked but we are just getting better at picking out the fakers via the Internet, or are journalist just getting lazier?
First, this is not a trade issue and the US will do nothing in response because no treaties or rules have been broken. This is a piece of government policy. If you go to China, you can bring Microsoft, you just can't sell it to the government. This ONLY effects the Chinese government.
Second, I have a feeling this has a lot more to do with security then building up their industry. If they are building their own code, they are a lot less likely to get stuff with backdoors build in. This isn't just paranoia either. During the first gulf war the US wiped out the Iraqi air defense network with viruses they stuffed into printers bought in the US.
That said, I have this is going to be a mixed blessing for a while. Building your own code base from scratch is really not going to be easy. Mix in the absolutely terrible accountability and management issues of the Chinese government and you are talking about a disaster waiting to happen. It isn't that China doesn't have good coders. They have good and bad coders like the US, it is more that the government is unlikely to be able to tell the difference.
Finally, if the US is going to raise a stink about trading policies, it will be over currency. Hell, just glance at the days bussiness headlines if you want an Economics 101 from the bickering back and forth.
You are correct in that it is not bread, in that if you consume knowledge it doesn't vanish. Just like bread though, it costs money and takes resources to create knowledge in the first place. The fundamental problem is that it takes money to create knowledge, but there is no natural limit on supply to control the price. It is the age old supply and demand curve, only with the case of IP the supply is always infinite. Infinite supplies led to the commodities price reaching zero... which is all well and good, so long as the commodity is free to produce.
The issue now is that we WANT people to pour money into creating new knowledge and building new technologies out it, but we would prefer everyone to have it for free. On one hand we want money to do the research, but in the end we want everyone to get the benefits of it. There is no clear solution around this (yet).
Even if the government was the sole provider of research money and the government mandated that all knowledge gained be made public, it wouldn't solve the problem. You would just end up forcing everyone to pay for knowledge with taxes, and (more disturbingly) rely on government bureaucracies to determine where to invest money. As someone who has been apart of requesting government money, this REALLY isn't the ideal way of doing it.
So, I suppose my point is we have a trade off. Either we get good plentiful knowledge that is only accessible at cost, or we get poor investments in knowledge that is accessible to everyone. Ideology aside, neither is preferable, and as far as I can see there are lots of poor utopian solutions and no good solution that acknowledge realty.
Sure, if my motorcycle taps someone else, they will probably be okay. Though, I think the best solution is just for everyone to own a car... kind of like the way it is now. I have been tapped going at 60 mpg (100 kph) in my car in heavy traffic. Thankfully, the other guy was also in a car. The result was that I got a jolt, swerved a little, realized I had been hit and we both pulled over. The net damage? I had a scratched paint job, the other guy had no damage at all. I wiped the damage off with a rag. If one or both of us had been in a motorcycle, one or both of us would be dead.
I am sorry, but motorcycles absolutely are not safe. If everyone who could use a motorcycle had one instead of a car, the death rates would shoot up. The simple fact of the matter is that you can lose control of a car and be a-okay. That is the nice thing about four wheels; it takes a lot of work to flip over. In a motor cycle, one ugly patch of ice or a piece of trash in the road and you are dead. Ride them if you like, as it certainly makes ME safer, but there is no way in hell I would ride one every single day 70 miles round trip to work on a high way. That is just stupid and asking to become an organ doner.
I am altruistic, but not altruistic enough to sign my organs away to an organ donation program before I am 30. So, ride your motorcycle all you want. I don't care what value (or lack there of) you place on your own life. Me personally though, I'll stick to four wheels, an air bag, a seatbelt, crumple zones, and the small perks like heating and a roof.
If every car on the road was a motorcycle it would suck to have a family or live where I live (Boston, USA) - especially when you need to drive an hour to work and it is well below 0 (F or C, take your pick). Further, nothing sounds more horrifying then trying to drive a motorcycle on ice.
Me personally? I like my Honda accord with its big fluffy air bag. I like a heater. I like knowing that I can take my friends and family places, even if it is raining near freezing rain. More then that, I like knowing that if someone taps me from behind while going 60 mph (100 kph) I am not going to die. Screw the enviroment, I want to live to be a crotchey old man.
Supply vs demand is kind of moot because the supply is nearly endless one someone has put in the initial cost to make the product (music). Any idiot given an MP3 file and distribute it at almost no cost to everyone else in the world. The result is that the point on the curve you are looking at is supply and infinity... which is always roughly zero. If people are acting in their own self interest and altruism isn't a factor, people simply won't pay for such content at all because the supply is so high.
What IP laws do is fix a supply. They give a monopoly on a certain product such that the supply can be limited. If only one company can produce and sell the music, then they can limit the supply and control the price. They can always keep it so that there is just enough supply such that everyone gets what they want, but they keep from flooding the market so that sellers don't drop their prices. Take out IP laws and suddenly the supply jumps to infinity and price drops to nothing.
Now, as to the American economy and traditional American capitalist ideals, IP laws have always been a problem. On one hand Americans want lassie-faire capitalism, on the other hand there is the inherent problem that pure hands off capitalism has a very hard time dealing with things with infinite supply. You could certainly get rid of IP laws, but the consequence to purely IP industries would be devastating. Hollywood and the RIAA would cease to function. Until some new model was found to make money off those IP products, the only things you would see coming out of America would be things created for altruistic purposes.
That in it of itself might not be horrible when you are talking music and movies, but the problem becomes much more sever when you are talking about things like technology development. Pharmaceuticals, nanotechnology, and pretty much all advanced technologies thrive in IP protected markets. IP protection ensures that if pour a few million into coming up with an idea, someone can't copy your data and bring it to market without having to pay for the R&D costs.
The IP system in the US, Europe, Japan, and pretty much every place in the world that does or does not have IP protection is fucked up. The real problem is that mustering both a plan to fix it, the political will to do it, and minimizing disruptions to the economy is pretty much damn near impossible. I see the good and bad of IP laws, but I couldn't even begin to argue a solution. Personally, I think that technology will make the question moot long before we solve it through legislation.
I am sorry, but MMORPGs have absolutely nothing to do with RP. They don't even attempt to try and intergrate RP into these games. Further, even if they did attempt to make the games more RP friendly, starting everyone at level zero would not be one of the things to do to make the game more RP friendly. The idea of starting at level 1 and leveling up has nothing to do with RP. In fact, any decent RP game worth its salt won't even have levels.
If you want to see a real RP game, I suggest www.armageddon.org. It is an old text based MUD with perm death set in a desert wasteland. If I had the time I would still be playing that game.
Some day a small developer is going to develop a truly RP centric game. The current crop of MMORPGs are not that game though. Some auctioning going on isn't going to make the game less RP friendly.
You can make the argument that you don't need something to enjoy the game about any system. However, I think there is a reason why WoW blasted past a million subscribers and the runner up has less then half that. WoW is made for the casual gamer. Period. A casual gamer can log on, level up, and never see something that he can't eventually get. Log a casual gamer into EQ and the situation is very different. You get to see stuff all the time that takes an insane amount of free time to achieve.
The problem is two fold. First, they are destroying what made WoW such a blazing success. They are making a system that inherently a casual gamer will NEVER be able to win in. A casual gamer can never get the uber PvP armor. If only 0.1% or 1% or 5% can get it, then they will never ever get it. This is going to start pissing people off.
Second, on the PvP servers, you are handing out an advantage that that the casual player is not going to be able to get his hands on. A level 60 casual player can take on any other level 60. Start creating massive equipment imbalances that are dependent upon your 'hardcoreness' (also read as being jobless or in high school) to achieve, and casual players are going to start dropping out.
Wow should play to its strengths. That means playing to casual players. There is a difference between throwing a bone to the nuts who play 40+ hours a week and changing the focus of the game to suit them. As far as I can see for the future plans blizzard has, it seems like they have made a potentially fatal mistake of changing their focus to trying to retain that insane 5% who spend 40+ hours a week, and have stopped trying to serves the other 95% that think spending 40+ hours on a game is insane.
I personally think it is an insane move, but I suppose only time will tell. If I were to give advice to blizzard though, I would tell them to build the world outward horizontally, not up. Add more areas/quests/classes/races for all levels. Don't get caught up in the trap of chugging top end content and forgetting about the massive casual gamer player base that made the game so larger in the first place.
This is just paranoid. The only things that would make earth a worse place to live in the mars as it is now are the same things that make everything within a few light years to live in. Lets say DinoKiller 2 was to strike earth, where would you rather be? If you say Mars (or any other place in the solar system), you need to rethink things a little.
I would much rather rather be deep underground or undersea then on some wasteland like Mars. The simple fact of the matter is that there is NOTHING short of the all out destruction of this planet that could possibly remove the massive quanties of water, carbon, and all those wonderful organics that we love. Even if the entire surface of earth was turned into ash by a massive strike, earth would still have more water and carbon then we know what to do with. Mars on the other hand will always be a cold dead wasteland without an atmosphere.
If preservation of the species really is your concern, I would suggest a deep sea colony. All the water you could possibly want, and if anything goes wrong, you are just never far from help. Further, if the world is wiped out, a deepl see colony is roughly the safest place you could be.
If you hack something that causes someone's death, you SHOULD be charged with murder, regardless of your intentions. If some ass hole got into a radar control computer and accidently caused two airplanes to collide, 500 counts of manslaughter would be a very much appropiate sentence.
"we will run out oil eventually... this running out will happen relatively abruptly, leading to something of a crisis in our society on account of our dependance on private transportation."
This is very much NOT true. We will not suddenly wake up one day and find all the oil gone. What will happen is that price of oil will slowly continue to rise for decades. This will facilitate a smooth transition from oil to alternative energy sources.
What most people don't understand about oil is that we dig up very little of the blackstuff. When we drop a well down and start sucking up reservoirs of this oil, we are really only dragging up the easiest to reach oil that is just sitting there. Most oil is left untouched due to the fact that it would be very expensive to remove it.
Three things are going to happen to make the cost of oil slowly rise as it is depleted.
1) Speculators will make sure that it rises slowly. Speculators watch the supply of oil and basically bet on how much it is going to cost in the future. While they do drive the price of the oil up by buying out supply, they also ensure a more even distribution over time of its distribution. For instance, if suddenly the oil companies were to announce that HOLY SHIT we are out of oil in a year, speculators would quickly buy up the supply and start parceling it away. The price absolutely would go up, but we wouldn't go from oil gushing out of our ears to being bone dry.
2) As the cost of oil is driven up, oil companies will naturally start digging up more expensive to extract oil. At $30 a barrel it makes no sense to go to an old oil well and start extracting all that stuff that takes $50 a barrel to extract. However, once the price of oil hits $100 per barrel, that $50 per barrel oil will make a tidy profit. So, as the cost for oil goes up, more and more expensive oil will be introduced to the market. The oil will not suddenly run out. Instead, more expensive oil will be introduced to the market that will slowly drive the price up.
3) As the cost of oil goes up, the demand for oil will go down. This is economics 101 supply and demand. Oil is the energy source of choice simply because it is relatively clean (compared to some thing), a very dense energy source, and extremely cheap. Today oil is cheap for the amount of energy you can make from it. The stuff is plentiful enough to fuel the world, and cheap enough for almost everyone to be able to buy it. This will not always be true. As the price goes up, more people will start to spend a few extra dollars to avoid having to shell out so much at the pump. Alternative energy sources will be comparatively cheaper then oil. People will move naturally away from oil. You can see a perfect of this by looking at Europe and the US. The US, where this is almost no taxation on oil, people own big ugly fuel hungry cars. In Europe, where the taxes on oil account for a full ¾ of the costs, people use significantly more fuel efficient cars and in general burn much less oil. Up the price of oil by 500% and even Americans will find it in their hearts (or more likely wallets) to be more fuel efficient.
The net result is that as the price of oil goes up, the consumption of the stuff goes down. As consumption goes down, the price slows its upward slope. The result is that you have a gradual increase in oil prices and a gradual move away from using it.
The step you are missing in the system you propose is move from academic research to industrial scale production. This is not a trivial step. In fact, it is without a doubt the hardest step. The current system produces a very streamlined system for moving things out of academia to industry. First you have academia which, for the most part, publishes their brains out. They generally hold a few patents for royalty purposes, but they tend to make their information very widely available. For instance, some time use SciFinder at a university library to search the word 'nanotube'. Watch as the program nearly explodes with the wealth of information it brings back.
The next step in the process is to pull things out of academia, which on the whole is VERY impracticable when it comes to scale up considerations. Academia might very well have made a nanotube transistor, but academia made it using a method where it would literally take a billion years to put together a decent sized circuit board. Large industry is leery of throwing money at the problem because it requires burning money outside of their core competency with a very high chance failure.
The compromise is to have a small start up with an idea take on the project. The start up gathers up some investors, throws some smart people at the problem, and more often then not fails miserably. The bright side is that the only people that lose are the investors that made the poor investment. Some times though, the start up has a stellar idea, gathers up the money it needs, and brings the product right up to the point of production. They work out that cool new technology that takes a process from taking a billion years to complete, to making it take 5 minutes by combining an interdisciplinary group that a university would find extremely hard to field. They also do it under financial pressure to keep their ideas applicable to industry in a manner that academia finds distasteful. If the startup plays their cards right, they can take their technology to a larger company, and with the protection of IP laws, share it with them and sell it off. The large company works out the final kinks and you get a new nanotube computer on your desktop.
This system lets each step in the process focus on what they are good at. Academia is awesome at pure research. The problem is that academia is very resentful and unskilled at doing research with an eye for scale up. In fact, one of the complaints academia has been having is that they are being pushed by industry to do less pure science and do more things with industrial potential. The IP laws let academia do what it does best. It lets large corporations get ready-to-go technology without taking on risk. It lets small start ups take big risk and receive big payoffs when they do good. It lets investors keep startups with an eye on reality by insisting that they work on industrial applications.
The system is solid, and it is the reason why the US, Europe, and Japan are by far the world leaders in getting technology from an idea to the market. It isn't coincidence that the leaders are all people with the best IP protection. That is not to say that the rest of the world doesn't contribute as well. The rest of the world is certainly catching up, though it should be pointed out that they are catching up at the same rate that they are improving their IP laws.
IP laws have a lot that could use fixing. The concept is sound though. If you put in the blood and sweat to build an idea from the ground up, you get to profit from it first, before people start to copy you. That protection is what makes people willing to pour so much blood and money into their work. Utopian systems aside, this system works, and it works damn good even for all of its problems. Pull the rug out from under this system, and you basically hand over all technical innovation responsibilities to large corporations that can take an idea from start to stop inside the same company, and to universities. No offense to anyone in either of those places, but I couldn't think of two entities I would least want to see in charge of innovation. One is paranoid of risk, and the other oblivious to reality. The startup is what keeps the system sane.
Again, you are really missing the point. You are assuming that this has something to do with post 9/11 attitudes. If you were to ask this question -anywhere- in the world, you would get the same answer. If anything, I would bet that Americans answer no, despite the flagrant bias of the question, more then most nations in the world.
The point is that this was a stupid question to begin with, made stupider by the complete lack of context. Ask this question to a few different nations populace and show me results that are different then American answers, and you might be on to something. Ask a biased polling question to just Americans and then go ahead and make a conclusion about what Americans think, and have committed some pretty grievous biasing.
I am not saying that Americans might not be stupid or jumpy. I am not saying that they are not stupider or jumpier then normal due to 9/11. I am saying that this question means absolutely nothing unless it is either better worded, or asked to other populations. A horrible and biased question means nothing without some sort of context, and this poll was done without any context.
Now that is trolling with style. You people need to take a lesson. Anyone want to take bets on who responds to this like it is a real post?
Are you joking? Should we analyze the results of my poll where I asked 100 people from each nation if they think that government should try and weed out corruption and conclude from the answers that everyone in the world desperately wants a police state? Ask the question, "Do you believe that the right to free speech should be in the constitution?" or "Do you believe that the media should be censored by the government?" and find a majority of Americans who say no, and you have a point.
The poll was stupid and asked a question with such a biased stance that you could ask that to any nation anywhere in the world, and you would get 80% of the populace answering the same way.
The best you can conclude is that when asked a casual question people do not always think through the entire line of logic on the spot. Thankfully though, we live in a democracy. Any such question needs to go to debate, and even after the debate, any decision needs to also go through the judiciary which is ruled by the constitution. When the move to amend the constitution to remove the first amendment starts, give me a call and I will tell you that you are right.
I can't speak for software patents, but I can speak for other patents. I work in a nanotechnology startup firm with a very hot product. We have grand total of 30 or so guys working in this company, all of which are very smart people. We only really do one thing, develop technology. We develop the basic idea of a new technology, work out the initial kinks, then sell it to another company for scale up operations. Patents are all we have. Take away our patents, and we would close up shop tomorrow and let the technology sit there stagnant.
What people don't realize is that often times the people that make the technology and the people that build the technology are two very different people. 30 guys can't run a semiconductor plant building enough memory to feed the global market. We can do all the R&D though. That means that we need to show our R&D to outsiders. We need to take our awesome idea, bring it to a company, and show them enough to convince them that we are not another crackpot startup. The only way to do this is to show them a lot... enough where they get a couple years leg up on reproducing what we have. The only thing that allows us to walk into companies and show them what we have is the protection of IP laws. Without those laws, we wouldn't be able to show off the technology, much less sell it.
It is this very reason why our company won't even contemplate doing business in Korea or Taiwan. IP is the only thing we have, and those nations are not exactly know for their respect of ownership of IP. IP laws are what keep our business in existence and in the US.
I am not a programmer, so I don't know how it works with software, but I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens in that industry too. A small company develops an impressive bit of code, and the only way they can sell it is with the protection of IP to shield them while they show it off and sell it.
IP laws are not the bane of creativity. The patent system has more then a few flukes and shitty patents handed out, but it is without a doubt needed. Kill patents and you better get cozy with universities and massive corporations, because without IP laws entrepreneurs and risk taking startups are SOL.
Gas prices are at a all time high... if you blatantly ignore inflation. Prices need to almost double to reach the peak. Further, I would be annoyed if while I was driving into work someone on a bike stopped by my car window at a red light and started bitching that gas costs too much.
Finally, this isn't about gas prices. This is about a VIDEO GAME. A luxury. This is something that could disappear tomorrow and no one would care beyond a few annoyed addicts. It is something that no one cares if you don't get enough of it, nor do they care if you think it costs too much. It is like bitching about the inflated price of yachts. You can bitch, but no one really cares. Just do what everyone else who can't afford a yacht does... live a happy and normal life without a yacht.
It is one thing to bitch and moan about stuff that matters, like gas, food, water, and things of that nature. You just sound like a spoiled prick though when you bitch about trivial shit that in truth costs less the three hours worth of work at minimum wage. There are people in the world that don't even get the necessities while some spoiled prick is crying about the trivial cost of his luxury goods.
And for the record, realize that they are selling WoW in China. Yeah. China. If they can scrape up enough to buy WoW despite having wages that can't even sit on the same scale as American and European wages, so can you.
"The fipside of this coin for a game designed to take awhile is that it takes awhile to occomplish things."
Translation: You know all that shit that made you leave EverTreadmill and go to WoW for? We have.
"these trends are in all the other aspects of life right now. There's alot of messed up stuff going on around the world, and no one seems to care. That's my problem."
What trend is that? Trivial shit you don't need costing less then 3 hours of work a month at minimum wage? Most people make enough to pay off their WoW subscription in the time it takes for them take a shit and go on a coffee break at work.
This isn't the world rolling over while you fight on. This is a million plus people deciding that $15 is an okay price for a months worth of entertainment. Shit, if you are gowing to throw a hissy fit over the price of trivial crap you don't need, I would suggest walking over to your local movie theater.
More to the point, WoW is not exploiting the masses. They are selling a luxury at a price that well over a million don't mind paying. I personally hope they are making hand over fist. To me, that just means that they will be putting some of it away in the bank to make another great game that I will be happy to pay a monthly fee for.
The PvP servers actually have a minimal amount of ganking. I personally found that once I hit about 30 the gankings by people 10+ levels higher then me almost stopped. Generally, the only time I get ganked by a level ?? alliance is when I kill people my level too much at one location and they call in for guild support.
Sure, ganking is going to go up, but I have a feeling most the increased ganking will come from people that are roughly the same level. It doesn't bother me much if I get to a dungeon and find alliance waiting if they are my level. In fact, that sounds like a merry old time with hours of PvP goodness as we struggle to control the area.
I joined the PvP server for a reason. Sure, I don't level up as fast because I spent time fighting over hunting areas, but who in the hell wants to hunt mindless NPCs 24/7?
The problem is not that Anheuser-Busch is worried about pissing off Europe. The problem is that a drug company wants to produce rice designed to create a drug in open fields. Anheuser-Busch doesn't want that rice to contaminate their rice.
I am all for genetic engineering of pretty much everything, including things I stuff in my mouth. I don't think that genetic engineering is the boogie man. I don't even care if genetic strains blow to the wind and cross pollinate... so long as there is nothing in them that could potentially be harmful. Genetic cross pollination happens today all the time. Throwing in some human cracks at genetic code really doesn't worry me. That said, such genetic cross pollination needs to be treated like pollution.
It is a necessary evil, but it certainly needs some minimal level of oversight. If your genetic material is going to drift in the wind, you need to take responsibility for where it ends up, especially if it is harmful to other products. In the case of using genetic engineering to make crops produce drugs, Anheuser-Busch is right to put their foot down and demand steps be taken to prevent contamination of their own crops. It is one thing to catch a gene that makes your rice whiter down the wind from the farm a mile away, it is very much another thing to get a gene that puts a drug into rice meant for consumption.
IMO, this is just a straight up case of pollution. One guy wants to put something potentially harmful in the area. Either society needs to agree to accept the potential risks associated with the pollution, or steps need to be taken to limit the pollution (green houses come to mind). Whatever the case, the risks need to be understood or precautions taken. The fact that Anheuser-Busch, a company with absolutely zero interest in the debate otherwise is speaking up is a pretty clear indication that either the risks are not properly known, or that the risks are known and have been deemed too high.