The hardware would *certainly* cost no more than $5/pc in bulk.
Another example of something useful that'll never happen because it's not comercially/politically wanted is truly secure, anonymous, digital cash. The needed protocols have been known for over 20 years, and the infrastructure is basically there. But it just won't happen.
Someone will wave the "It'll make it possible for criminals to anonymously transfer money", or "The terrorists will use it!", or "It'll be used to pay for child-porn" card, and instantly render the entire idea moot.
Sad really. There would be *large* benefits to a secure, desentralized standard that achieves over the net what normal cash does in person. (If I give you a dollar-bill you also don't need to know who I am, you only need to be reasonably confident that the bill itself is valid)
The random bit was just an implementation of the idea that in general you *never* want to sign something that someone else gives you, unaltered. This is so because of the birthday attack.
Finding two messages that has the same has has only the sqrt of the complexity of finding a message with a given hash.
Thus, because you don't (completely) trust the bank, you want to make sure you're not signing one out of a PAIR of messages they produced with the same hash. You can acomplish this by adding some nonsensical random bit before signing.
There are digital signature schemes where the signature can be small and still secure. (obviouslz if you want the likelyhood of guessing no higher than 2**80, you obviously need a 80 bit signature, but it doesn't need to be 512 bit. (yes RSA works like that, the world is bigger than RSA)
That being said, you may be rigth that it'd be more practical for the device to be connected to the computer somehow, for example USB. That does however bring a whole host of new security-problems. First of all you need to ENSURE that the device CANNOT sign-off on something without the user actively asking it to, and that it CANNOT sign-off on something other than what the user thinks he is signing.
Those are tricky in a world where you cannot, for example, assume that no malicious code is running on the users computer with superuser-rigths. But tricky doesn't mean impossible -- it just requires great care.
In any case, my main point wasn't how to do this -- it seems we both agree it's possible. My main point is that VISA, Verisign and the other major players does not WANT to do this. *THAT* is the reason it won't happen aslong as payments are handled by them, aslong as they're not forced to do it.
Yes. Sure. Both are workable. And there's lots of other variations that may or may not be worthwhile too. Having the Token be a device that does not communicate with anything in any way other than the lcd-readout and pin-entry-pad has obvious security-benefits though. You don't have to worry about a virus on your smartphone or wonder what info is *really* exchanged between your phone and the bank.
Anyway: designing the protocol is the easy bit (and I say this with a degree in crypto, I'm very much aware that there's a large number of potential pitfalls in this area), the hard bit is the politics of it all.
The biggest problem is that all the big comercial players who play this game want to own the game.
So, while for customers (both users of the tokens, AND institutions implementing them) a standardised token usable, anyone with the required market-presence and expertise to pull it off has ZERO interest in doing it.
It's worse than that even. Not only will Verisign, Visa, Mastercard and all the others do NOTHING to help a token that would be standardised and usable by anyone. No, indeed they'll all be willing to spend MILLIONS to hinder the development and adoption of such a token.
The actual design of a standardised token does *not* in any way shape or form require a globally shared secret. (which is a dumb idea for a gazillion reasons anyway.
Here is a simple outline of one of the many ways it could be achieved:
Token contains a secret key, a pin-entry-pad and a lcd-readout, it also has an internal clock.
The corresponding *public* key is known to the owner of the token.
When you wish to be able to authenthicate to someone, say your bank, you somehow convince them that public-key so-and-so corresponds to your token. (for example you can physically show the token on opening an account)
Come login-time you go to the banks site. The bank presents you with a PIN.
You enter this pin into your token, and get a result back that is actually something like: Sign(time+pin+random, your_key)
You enter this and your username in the bank form.
Bank checks that your signature is valid, that the PIN is the one they gave you, that the time is within +-10 minutes of now and lets you in.
The protocol has problems. It's not supposed to be a finished proposal. Rather it's intended to show that designing such a system so that anyone (anyone you wish to be able to that is) can authenthicate you, without any globally shared secret, indeed without any shared secret at all. The only secret is your secret key, and that stays in your token and is shared and known by noone (not even you, unless you somehow do hardware-disassembly and figure it out)
This ain't new or rocket-science. ssh has done something similar to this for literally decades. (well atleast 2 of those)
What's stopping this ain't technology or cryptography. It's politics and greed. Verisign *WANTS* a system where verisign is a needed component between *every* online entity and *every* customer. They *don't* want an open, decentralized system like the one I propose here.
Umm, sorry. The moment Mac OS X 10.0 started shipping, it immediately became the most common desktop UNIX-like operating system.
I highly doubt it. The moment Mac OS X started shipping, there was *1* copy of it sold, and that one wasn't even installed.
Somewhat later there are now millions of desktops running Mac Os X, but that has been true for Linux for years, assuming you accept Linux as a unix. (yeah, I know, it's a reimplementation without shared code)
It's quite possible that Mac OS X is now more common than Linux on the desktop, but I'm not at all sure about that, and it *certainly* wasn't true from the "moment" Mac os X *started* shipping.
Depends solely on the choosen definition of "person". It's sorta like when non-astronomers are debating if pluto is a planet. They think they're debating something significant about pluto, while in reality they are simply debating: "What definition of 'planet' would we like to use?"
An embryo is not a self-aware thinking being. True. I agree with you mostly, what I find a bit tricky is where to draw the line. A 3 month old baby is *also* not self-aware. (a 2 year old generally is though) again depending a bit on your definitions.
heh. Just goes to show how different various climates are. Where I grew up there was like literally a meter of topsoil. (i.e. soil consisting of 90%+ biological matter.
Just by being employed, depending on how you want to look at it, you are being fucked. An employee's pay is x per annum, but to be finacially viable to the employer the employee has to be worth more than x per annum to the employer. If this wasn't the case, then the employer would run out of money quickly.
You're aware that you're semi-quoting Marx ?
He says, if a company buys stuff for X, and sells the products made for Y, then the *entire* difference in value between X and Y is caused by *work* being done by various people working in the company. (including the bosses) If the sum of money these people are paid is smaller than the difference between X and Y (which it *will* be if the company runs at a profit) then the workers are collectively being screwed. They are not paid the real value of their work.
Now, his solution to this was that the workers must own the production-apparatus, in practice the state. That didn't work out terribly well, because it removed much of the motivation for being productive.
A different solution is used at my employer: All employees are offered stock in the company, up to a max of a part of the company equivalent to their part of the work-force. (i.e. if there where only 20 employees, you'd be offered to buy up to 5%) for a very good price.
Now, this keeps the motivation for doing good work, not only for the management, but also for normal employees, afterall with a 5% stake in the company, any $1000 profit extra you can make somehow is $50 extra for you.
At the same time, those who accept the offer are *not* being screwed over -- they *do* get atleast the average value of their work. (allthough offcourse if one employer works very hard, everyone benefits, not only the one who works hard)
Now, some of the employees didn't want to take part. Too risky, you could *loose* your money if the company went bust. Fine enough. But I'd argue not even those are screwed: they where given the offer on equal terms. If they don't want part of the RISK of running a company, then they also won't have part of the REWARD (other than their normal salary ofcourse) I don't think that amounts to screwing over.
True. Even if you didn't quit for reasons such as you refuse to accept being treated like a criminal, and you insist on a minimum amount of trust.
Even then you should still quit, because like you say it's a pretty sure sign that the company is going nowhere fast if the culture is *that* confrontational.
Re:Just because you have a mobile doesn't mean
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Cell Tracking on the Rise
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· Score: 4, Insightful
But even that ain't ok. I expect a certain level of trust in me from my employer -- there's really no alternative to this anyway because *any* employee can screw the employer over (atleast somewhat) if he wants to anyway.
An employer who is not willing to take my word for, for example, that it took 20 minutes longer from the airport back to work today than it does on the average is an employer I have no wish to work for. End of discussion.
A private contract between X and Y cannot affect Ys rigths relating to country Z.
For example, if two people could make a purely private contract, with the effect that one of them had (among other things) the rigths to immigrate to the other country, this is in effect opening all borders for free immigration.
Now, we migth argue that this is desireable, but just allowing it, starting tomorrow, would pretty much blow up the western world.
Secondly, a private contract between two parts cannot affect the rigths of third parts. For example children. We probably agree that parents have *some* obligation to care for their children. (if they didn't want that, they shouldn't *have* children) Which cannot be affected by private contract between the parents.
The child cannot legally enter into a contract by itself. (and it'd be nonsensical atleast for small children anyway, a 6 month old is not capable of evaluating a contract for itself.)
I do agree, btw that many of these rigths should be free. For example, I think it's complete nonsense that a person cannot freely testament all his stuff to whomever he wishes. Afterall he *can* spend the same money however he wishes aslong as he's alive.
But I think it's perfectly fair that when a third party grants rigths based on a contract (say the state), that it is also allowed to set demands. in essence "IF you wish for this agreement you have with this person to give this person the rigth to immigrate THEN we demand that the agreement has certain properties...."
That's pretty close to what marriage is actually. Atleast if you cut away the religiously motivated bullshit.
It's a step, but it's not enough. There are some positive discriminations in favour of marrieds that we probably *want* couples to be able to get, assuming they both agree to it. (I see no reason these shouldn't be available without marriage, but today they aren't, atleast not all and not easily.)
The rigth to have your country recognize you are important to eachothers, want to live together etc. This includes stuff like being allowed to immigrate to the country of your partner.
The rigth to inherit from eachothers, even when children exist. (this would be fixed if we did away with all compulsory inheritance)
The rigth to be considered "next of kin" and f.ex. be informed when something serious happens to one partner, or even in the extreme case where one partner dies, decide over stuff like organ-donation or not. (you can do some of this by contract, but the fact that the contract even exists won't be discovered until too late, atleast that's a high risk.)
Who died and made you king ? Put differently, since when does your *word* have defining power over what is the purpose of anything ?
People marry for lots of different reasons, and always (well, atleast several tens of millenia) have. Who are you to say which reasons are "THE purpose", and which are not ? How about letting other people decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives, and what purposes they want to assign to what ?
Besides, if your views where consistent (which they won't be since you're 99% likely to be a religious bigot) then you'd consider marriages where the couple can't get children invalid, and advocate that if a married couple fails to get a child in say 5 years after marriage, then the marriage should be considered legally void. But you won't. Because you're not actually bringing arguments to the table to support a logical conclusion: you're hand-picking half-arguments to support a position you decided on beforehand.
Works, for that particular problem, and some MMORPGs do exactly this. Has serious drawbacks though, even apart from the unrealism, and the fair question: If that's what you want, why not just make a single-player game with online-chat:-) (Ok, I realise that's extreme)
Require NPC interaction to get a 'quest' to open an instance or spawn das uber beast.
Doesn't work. Anything a normal player can do, a chinese gold-collector can also do. (I realize they don't have to be chinese, that's only the clichee)
Use collision detection. Farm scripter will have a much harder time automating the process if someone blocks their route.
Blocks *pure* stupid scripts, but also doesn't work: Even with the additional interrupt, one human who is running 20 farmscripts can easily keep them all active by manualy helping them out when they get stuck. If you make that common enough to significantly affect effectivity, it'll also be common enough to be really freaking annoying for normal players.
Control the economy similar to a real economy.
Works, sort of. But it means turning playing the game into a job. Which means nobody wants to play it -- there's no reason to *pay* for working.
Sure. Even out the world and the problem likely goes away. The current situation is much because the world is so uneven that there are US kids that are willing to pay a weeks salary to some chinese for an accessory to a game. This is only possible because a chinese week-salary is peanuts to many US-kids.
That migth appear a fair question, but actually, the reasons are pretty well-known;
If there's *no* predictable (or semi-predictable) way of finding a given monster, then this also means there's no way to find a monster for a non-gil-farmer.
A world where *all* monsters spawn randomly is a world where a high-level gamer spends most of his time swatting butterflies -- he has no way to find the more challenging mobs.
Lots of monsters have *stories* connected to them. The *stories* frequently involve *places*, it's part of making it seem like a *world*. That's *really* hard to combine with random spawns.
Some people *enjoy* practicing, trying to do something they already did. Say see if you're able to take down Foo with being singl,even though you already killed him in a party. I realize that's not "realistic", but "realism" is secondary to "fun" in games anyway. (or supposed to be)
So, in short: because noone has thougth of a better way.
Re:I'll tell you how to stop gilfarmers...
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Hunting Down Gilfarmers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The reason we care is because it forces everyone to buy Gil. The thing is, Gilfarmers greatly increase the amount of Gil in the game. More Gil means higher prices for the rare items.
These higher prices aren't payable for normal players playing normally, because it'd literally take like years of playing to get the money.
Yes, they could try to get the rare item themselves. A good idea ! Only, there's a problem: the area where the monster with the item spawns is camped by a dozens of chinese, your odds of ever actually getting to tackle with the monster, even assuming you're *also* willing to camp there for a week, are slim.
So what are you to do ? Accept that the game is now split in three: One, normal players, that play with the weakest gear, and are prevented from meeting the most powerful monsters. Two: players who buy Gil and thus gets the best gear for no in-game investment. They can *also* still not challenge the most powerful monsters, since these are camped. And three: Campers and Farmers that have no interest in playing the game or contributing to the society, but only camp the monster that gives them the most Gil, or does the same farming-thing over-and-over-and-over for literally years.
Can you see why this environment migth detract from the fun for someone ?
I know. It's just -- well, people need to start thinking. When I was in Univeristy, we had a course -- "Computers in society" or some such, with ethical and moral issues that come up with the use of computers. A fun course with *lots* of outside guest-lecturers.
Among them, Inger Marie Sunde, at the time head of the Norwegian Polices computer-crime department. It scared me at the time to discover that high-ranking people in the police would come to a university and deliberately lie, or atleast twist the truth to become unrecognizable, in order to get more police-powers. (she wishes for anonymous access to the internet to be outlawed, and records to be delivered to the police directly from ISPs without a court-ruling for example)
One example: She claimed that over 400 children a year are abducted in the USA alone after meeting with pedophiles they've learnt knowing on the internet. I thougth the claim sounded strange at the time, and asked here why we never hear of these *daily* occurances in the news if that's so.
She had no ready answer, and also no source for her number. She promised to provide a source by email after the lecture, but never did. Instead I investigated a bit on the Internet after the lecture and found the (likely) source of the number:
Turns out its reasonably common that girls (primarily) around the age of 16-17 run away from home by essentially fleeing to boyfriends they have that live on their own (which often means they're 18 or over). In this day and age, offcourse some of those boyfriends are people they met over the net. (I myself met both a former girlfriend, and my wife over the internet)
Now, it may be that various laws are broken if a 16 year old runs away from home and stays with her 18 year old boyfriend that she learnt knowing by IRC. It's just a *tiny* bit misleading to characterise this problem as "predatory pedophiles on the internet abducting children."
Besides, young people have run away from home with their partners for aslong as humanity has existed, the fact that these days they young people sometimes learn to know eachothers over the net is completely secondary.
Sounds strange. Where I live, it's two different questions if the police, as an institution, is liable, and if any individual officer can be indicted for something.
The latter will require that the officer breaking the law be identifiable, but the former will not. You'd still need to show that they where using force outside the bounds of what is "required" though, which in general is tough without multi-witnesses or video.
I wasn't recommending getting beat up over a photo anyway, it's usually not worth it.
I was recommending saying: "No, I will *not* let you search my backpack, I will however accept sitting quietly here and waiting until the police arrives." If they still *do* use force, I'd yield. But I'd do so in a way that makes it clear that I *am* yielding to use of force, and *not* that I'm voluntarily cooperating.
You seem to assume everyone lives in the USA. I never did.
Besides, simply knowing your rigths, and standing up for them is sufficient to *not* have them trampled over on like 95% of all occasions.
95% of all rentacops will back down if you make it clear that you know your rigths and aren't prepared to surrender them. I kinda doubt a rentacop would physically wrestle the camera from you and destroy the film. And even if he did, he'd be standing even weaker in any court.
Certainly. Anyone can say anything that doesn't break any law. It's called free speech. I can tell you to get naked and dance like a chicken too. Please do !:-)
They do this all the time: play on the fact that most people a) don't know their rigths and b) have respect for people in uniform.
I regularily get asked, by various rentacops to, for example, open my backpack. Invariably they drop the request when I simply say: "No thank you."
Now this is, of course, assuming your friend wasn't doing something illegal while taking the pictures like tresspassing, which is illegal and would get him in trouble. This would actually be what I would suspect, given my past experiences with such things. I've had a number of "rent-a-cops breaking the law" stories related to me in my life, most in person.
But the thing is -- even if you *did* break some law, this does not give the rent-a-cops carte-blanche. They *are* under such circumstances allowed to, under certain limitations, make a citizens arrest and detain you (by use of force if nessecary) until the police arrives.
They are *not* allowed to, for example search your backpack, destroy film from your camera, or indeed prevent you from taking pictures. (they can however indirectly prevent the latter by asking you to leave the premises)
It basically broke down tasks like this: A task is either important or not important. Then, a task is also either urgent or not urgent. Things like taking care of your health are not urgent (until it's too late) and are also important. But it is unlikely for anyone to do anything about it because health and your physical, mental, and social condition is determined usually over a span of decades. So people spend more time on things that are urgent, regardless of whether they are important (paying bills) or not important (catching the most recent episode of a TV series).
Yes. That is one of the main things that separate people -- how well are they able to do the rigth thing *now* when the consequences are long or very-long term. Everyone (more or less) manages to do the rigth thing when the reward is immediate, but it's not equally easy to skip Cinema today, on the grounds that you'd like to be able to buy a house in 10 years.
Or not smoke, because it destroys your health, in addition to costing $$$
Or bike to work today
Or any other of literally 1000s of situations where you know what's good for you, medium to long term, but are tempted to do something else, because it's the easiest short-term.
France is debating something similar, under heavy protest from the labels, they call it the "culture flatrate", essentially they want to make it legal for a private person to without limit swap music, assuming the person paid his "culture flatrate".
Makes a lot of sense to me. More sense than suing everyone in existence anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example of something useful that'll never happen because it's not comercially/politically wanted is truly secure, anonymous, digital cash. The needed protocols have been known for over 20 years, and the infrastructure is basically there. But it just won't happen.
Someone will wave the "It'll make it possible for criminals to anonymously transfer money", or "The terrorists will use it!", or "It'll be used to pay for child-porn" card, and instantly render the entire idea moot.
Sad really. There would be *large* benefits to a secure, desentralized standard that achieves over the net what normal cash does in person. (If I give you a dollar-bill you also don't need to know who I am, you only need to be reasonably confident that the bill itself is valid)
Finding two messages that has the same has has only the sqrt of the complexity of finding a message with a given hash.
Thus, because you don't (completely) trust the bank, you want to make sure you're not signing one out of a PAIR of messages they produced with the same hash. You can acomplish this by adding some nonsensical random bit before signing.
That being said, you may be rigth that it'd be more practical for the device to be connected to the computer somehow, for example USB. That does however bring a whole host of new security-problems. First of all you need to ENSURE that the device CANNOT sign-off on something without the user actively asking it to, and that it CANNOT sign-off on something other than what the user thinks he is signing.
Those are tricky in a world where you cannot, for example, assume that no malicious code is running on the users computer with superuser-rigths. But tricky doesn't mean impossible -- it just requires great care.
In any case, my main point wasn't how to do this -- it seems we both agree it's possible. My main point is that VISA, Verisign and the other major players does not WANT to do this. *THAT* is the reason it won't happen aslong as payments are handled by them, aslong as they're not forced to do it.
Anyway: designing the protocol is the easy bit (and I say this with a degree in crypto, I'm very much aware that there's a large number of potential pitfalls in this area), the hard bit is the politics of it all.
So, while for customers (both users of the tokens, AND institutions implementing them) a standardised token usable, anyone with the required market-presence and expertise to pull it off has ZERO interest in doing it.
It's worse than that even. Not only will Verisign, Visa, Mastercard and all the others do NOTHING to help a token that would be standardised and usable by anyone. No, indeed they'll all be willing to spend MILLIONS to hinder the development and adoption of such a token.
The actual design of a standardised token does *not* in any way shape or form require a globally shared secret. (which is a dumb idea for a gazillion reasons anyway.
Here is a simple outline of one of the many ways it could be achieved:
Token contains a secret key, a pin-entry-pad and a lcd-readout, it also has an internal clock.
The corresponding *public* key is known to the owner of the token.
When you wish to be able to authenthicate to someone, say your bank, you somehow convince them that public-key so-and-so corresponds to your token. (for example you can physically show the token on opening an account)
Come login-time you go to the banks site. The bank presents you with a PIN.
You enter this pin into your token, and get a result back that is actually something like: Sign(time+pin+random, your_key)
You enter this and your username in the bank form.
Bank checks that your signature is valid, that the PIN is the one they gave you, that the time is within +-10 minutes of now and lets you in.
The protocol has problems. It's not supposed to be a finished proposal. Rather it's intended to show that designing such a system so that anyone (anyone you wish to be able to that is) can authenthicate you, without any globally shared secret, indeed without any shared secret at all. The only secret is your secret key, and that stays in your token and is shared and known by noone (not even you, unless you somehow do hardware-disassembly and figure it out)
This ain't new or rocket-science. ssh has done something similar to this for literally decades. (well atleast 2 of those)
What's stopping this ain't technology or cryptography. It's politics and greed. Verisign *WANTS* a system where verisign is a needed component between *every* online entity and *every* customer. They *don't* want an open, decentralized system like the one I propose here.
I highly doubt it. The moment Mac OS X started shipping, there was *1* copy of it sold, and that one wasn't even installed.
Somewhat later there are now millions of desktops running Mac Os X, but that has been true for Linux for years, assuming you accept Linux as a unix. (yeah, I know, it's a reimplementation without shared code)
It's quite possible that Mac OS X is now more common than Linux on the desktop, but I'm not at all sure about that, and it *certainly* wasn't true from the "moment" Mac os X *started* shipping.
Depends solely on the choosen definition of "person". It's sorta like when non-astronomers are debating if pluto is a planet. They think they're debating something significant about pluto, while in reality they are simply debating: "What definition of 'planet' would we like to use?"
An embryo is not a self-aware thinking being. True. I agree with you mostly, what I find a bit tricky is where to draw the line. A 3 month old baby is *also* not self-aware. (a 2 year old generally is though) again depending a bit on your definitions.
heh. Just goes to show how different various climates are. Where I grew up there was like literally a meter of topsoil. (i.e. soil consisting of 90%+ biological matter.
You're aware that you're semi-quoting Marx ?
He says, if a company buys stuff for X, and sells the products made for Y, then the *entire* difference in value between X and Y is caused by *work* being done by various people working in the company. (including the bosses) If the sum of money these people are paid is smaller than the difference between X and Y (which it *will* be if the company runs at a profit) then the workers are collectively being screwed. They are not paid the real value of their work.
Now, his solution to this was that the workers must own the production-apparatus, in practice the state. That didn't work out terribly well, because it removed much of the motivation for being productive.
A different solution is used at my employer: All employees are offered stock in the company, up to a max of a part of the company equivalent to their part of the work-force. (i.e. if there where only 20 employees, you'd be offered to buy up to 5%) for a very good price.
Now, this keeps the motivation for doing good work, not only for the management, but also for normal employees, afterall with a 5% stake in the company, any $1000 profit extra you can make somehow is $50 extra for you.
At the same time, those who accept the offer are *not* being screwed over -- they *do* get atleast the average value of their work. (allthough offcourse if one employer works very hard, everyone benefits, not only the one who works hard)
Now, some of the employees didn't want to take part. Too risky, you could *loose* your money if the company went bust. Fine enough. But I'd argue not even those are screwed: they where given the offer on equal terms. If they don't want part of the RISK of running a company, then they also won't have part of the REWARD (other than their normal salary ofcourse) I don't think that amounts to screwing over.
Even then you should still quit, because like you say it's a pretty sure sign that the company is going nowhere fast if the culture is *that* confrontational.
An employer who is not willing to take my word for, for example, that it took 20 minutes longer from the airport back to work today than it does on the average is an employer I have no wish to work for. End of discussion.
For example, if two people could make a purely private contract, with the effect that one of them had (among other things) the rigths to immigrate to the other country, this is in effect opening all borders for free immigration.
Now, we migth argue that this is desireable, but just allowing it, starting tomorrow, would pretty much blow up the western world.
Secondly, a private contract between two parts cannot affect the rigths of third parts. For example children. We probably agree that parents have *some* obligation to care for their children. (if they didn't want that, they shouldn't *have* children) Which cannot be affected by private contract between the parents. The child cannot legally enter into a contract by itself. (and it'd be nonsensical atleast for small children anyway, a 6 month old is not capable of evaluating a contract for itself.)
I do agree, btw that many of these rigths should be free. For example, I think it's complete nonsense that a person cannot freely testament all his stuff to whomever he wishes. Afterall he *can* spend the same money however he wishes aslong as he's alive.
But I think it's perfectly fair that when a third party grants rigths based on a contract (say the state), that it is also allowed to set demands. in essence "IF you wish for this agreement you have with this person to give this person the rigth to immigrate THEN we demand that the agreement has certain properties...."
That's pretty close to what marriage is actually. Atleast if you cut away the religiously motivated bullshit.
The rigth to have your country recognize you are important to eachothers, want to live together etc. This includes stuff like being allowed to immigrate to the country of your partner.
The rigth to inherit from eachothers, even when children exist. (this would be fixed if we did away with all compulsory inheritance)
The rigth to be considered "next of kin" and f.ex. be informed when something serious happens to one partner, or even in the extreme case where one partner dies, decide over stuff like organ-donation or not. (you can do some of this by contract, but the fact that the contract even exists won't be discovered until too late, atleast that's a high risk.)
People marry for lots of different reasons, and always (well, atleast several tens of millenia) have. Who are you to say which reasons are "THE purpose", and which are not ? How about letting other people decide for themselves what they want to do with their lives, and what purposes they want to assign to what ?
Besides, if your views where consistent (which they won't be since you're 99% likely to be a religious bigot) then you'd consider marriages where the couple can't get children invalid, and advocate that if a married couple fails to get a child in say 5 years after marriage, then the marriage should be considered legally void. But you won't. Because you're not actually bringing arguments to the table to support a logical conclusion: you're hand-picking half-arguments to support a position you decided on beforehand.
Works, for that particular problem, and some MMORPGs do exactly this. Has serious drawbacks though, even apart from the unrealism, and the fair question: If that's what you want, why not just make a single-player game with online-chat :-) (Ok, I realise that's extreme)
Require NPC interaction to get a 'quest' to open an instance or spawn das uber beast.
Doesn't work. Anything a normal player can do, a chinese gold-collector can also do. (I realize they don't have to be chinese, that's only the clichee)
Use collision detection. Farm scripter will have a much harder time automating the process if someone blocks their route.
Blocks *pure* stupid scripts, but also doesn't work: Even with the additional interrupt, one human who is running 20 farmscripts can easily keep them all active by manualy helping them out when they get stuck. If you make that common enough to significantly affect effectivity, it'll also be common enough to be really freaking annoying for normal players.
Control the economy similar to a real economy.
Works, sort of. But it means turning playing the game into a job. Which means nobody wants to play it -- there's no reason to *pay* for working.
So, in short: because noone has thougth of a better way.
These higher prices aren't payable for normal players playing normally, because it'd literally take like years of playing to get the money.
Yes, they could try to get the rare item themselves. A good idea ! Only, there's a problem: the area where the monster with the item spawns is camped by a dozens of chinese, your odds of ever actually getting to tackle with the monster, even assuming you're *also* willing to camp there for a week, are slim.
So what are you to do ? Accept that the game is now split in three: One, normal players, that play with the weakest gear, and are prevented from meeting the most powerful monsters. Two: players who buy Gil and thus gets the best gear for no in-game investment. They can *also* still not challenge the most powerful monsters, since these are camped. And three: Campers and Farmers that have no interest in playing the game or contributing to the society, but only camp the monster that gives them the most Gil, or does the same farming-thing over-and-over-and-over for literally years.
Can you see why this environment migth detract from the fun for someone ?
Among them, Inger Marie Sunde, at the time head of the Norwegian Polices computer-crime department. It scared me at the time to discover that high-ranking people in the police would come to a university and deliberately lie, or atleast twist the truth to become unrecognizable, in order to get more police-powers. (she wishes for anonymous access to the internet to be outlawed, and records to be delivered to the police directly from ISPs without a court-ruling for example)
One example: She claimed that over 400 children a year are abducted in the USA alone after meeting with pedophiles they've learnt knowing on the internet. I thougth the claim sounded strange at the time, and asked here why we never hear of these *daily* occurances in the news if that's so.
She had no ready answer, and also no source for her number. She promised to provide a source by email after the lecture, but never did. Instead I investigated a bit on the Internet after the lecture and found the (likely) source of the number:
Turns out its reasonably common that girls (primarily) around the age of 16-17 run away from home by essentially fleeing to boyfriends they have that live on their own (which often means they're 18 or over). In this day and age, offcourse some of those boyfriends are people they met over the net. (I myself met both a former girlfriend, and my wife over the internet)
Now, it may be that various laws are broken if a 16 year old runs away from home and stays with her 18 year old boyfriend that she learnt knowing by IRC. It's just a *tiny* bit misleading to characterise this problem as "predatory pedophiles on the internet abducting children."
Besides, young people have run away from home with their partners for aslong as humanity has existed, the fact that these days they young people sometimes learn to know eachothers over the net is completely secondary.
The latter will require that the officer breaking the law be identifiable, but the former will not. You'd still need to show that they where using force outside the bounds of what is "required" though, which in general is tough without multi-witnesses or video.
I wasn't recommending getting beat up over a photo anyway, it's usually not worth it.
I was recommending saying: "No, I will *not* let you search my backpack, I will however accept sitting quietly here and waiting until the police arrives." If they still *do* use force, I'd yield. But I'd do so in a way that makes it clear that I *am* yielding to use of force, and *not* that I'm voluntarily cooperating.
Besides, simply knowing your rigths, and standing up for them is sufficient to *not* have them trampled over on like 95% of all occasions.
95% of all rentacops will back down if you make it clear that you know your rigths and aren't prepared to surrender them. I kinda doubt a rentacop would physically wrestle the camera from you and destroy the film. And even if he did, he'd be standing even weaker in any court.
They do this all the time: play on the fact that most people a) don't know their rigths and b) have respect for people in uniform.
I regularily get asked, by various rentacops to, for example, open my backpack. Invariably they drop the request when I simply say: "No thank you."
But the thing is -- even if you *did* break some law, this does not give the rent-a-cops carte-blanche. They *are* under such circumstances allowed to, under certain limitations, make a citizens arrest and detain you (by use of force if nessecary) until the police arrives.
They are *not* allowed to, for example search your backpack, destroy film from your camera, or indeed prevent you from taking pictures. (they can however indirectly prevent the latter by asking you to leave the premises)
Yes. That is one of the main things that separate people -- how well are they able to do the rigth thing *now* when the consequences are long or very-long term. Everyone (more or less) manages to do the rigth thing when the reward is immediate, but it's not equally easy to skip Cinema today, on the grounds that you'd like to be able to buy a house in 10 years.
Or not smoke, because it destroys your health, in addition to costing $$$
Or bike to work today
Or any other of literally 1000s of situations where you know what's good for you, medium to long term, but are tempted to do something else, because it's the easiest short-term.
Makes a lot of sense to me. More sense than suing everyone in existence anyway.