At my home in Bloomington, the recycling goes into a larger bin, and is picked up every other week.
I favor this move as a cost-cutting measure, even though it's sometimes easy to forget which week they pick it up, because most of the recycle stuff doesn't stink up the neighborhood if it sits out in the bin for an extra week. It's not like it's full of rotting kitchen trash.
I think you will find that our recylcling program in the Twin Cities is subsidized. You are paying more than you think you are.
See, they take a bunch of your money to encourage you to use the recycling service by 1. investing public funds into the recycling program, and 2. jacking up landfill fees.
Now, that all doesn't seem so bad if you are of the opinion that landfills are bad for Mother Earth and will be the death of us all unless we send all our unused paper to chemical processing plants, where they will sit around composting in warehouses for months, and then what remains is turned into slightly lower-quality paper for re-use.
When I saw the headline about the "Free WiFi trend", I foolishly assumed they were talking about actual free WiFi, like when a [...] coffee shop opens up their 802.11g
In that case you're paying for the wifi in increased coffee prices.
Cute that you put "..." in place of "private homes", and cut off the part about encryption removal.
Park in front of a Dunn Bros. Coffee shop, or for that matter, in my driveway, and you are on the Internet for free. Free as in beer.
Forced is a bit strong; the residents of the city voted for the mayor.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. If the 51% residents of your town decided that you, personally, should pay half your income in taxes in order to fund a small property-tax cut for everybody else, would "forced" still be too strong of a word?
If majority-rules was a fair way to decide everything, we could reduce the entire Constitution and all of the amendments to a single line: "Whatever the people vote for, that's what we do."
If you (via your elected representatives... not to mention "voting with your feet") feel that tax-funded Wi-Fi is worth it, then good luck with that. Just don't lie by calling it free, is all. That's all I was saying.
This isn't insightful. Please, someone take the mod points away from the right-wing nutjob.
So now you are a right-wing nutjob if you point out that "tax funded" and "free" are not exactly the same thing? I know a lot of democrats who will be shocked to learn that they are right-wing nutjobs. I can hardly wait to tell them the news.
You are one of those people who complains to the letters page of the Villiage Voice that Howard Dean isn't being combative enough, aren't you?
You, my friend, obviously don't live here. Walking a couple blocks without being spare changed is a luxury. There are far more crackheads and poor in the Tenderloin than people that make six figures on the entire peninsula. I see kids in the TL every day who need to see more of the world than the people smoking and selling themselves on the street.
So, in San Fran you have three groups of people:
1. The super-rich, living in the larger of those pretty houses that overlook the bay.
2. The upper-middle class, doing well enough to live in a $600,000 matchbox of a house, and happy enough with it that they won't move to a place where the cost of living is lower.
3. Homeless crack-heads, who are lucky if they can afford a change of clothes.
Of those three groups, which one needs state-funded WiFi? Because I don't see it.
By that logic, the whole record industry is participating in something other than capitalism, because they are not selling you a physical object, but the right to listen to a recording of music, which can be replicated effortlessly.
I think you are in a minority of "one" in your narrow definition of property.
When I saw the headline about the "Free WiFi trend", I foolishly assumed they were talking about actual free WiFi, like when a private resident or coffee shop opens up their 802.11g encryption so anybody in range is free to use it.
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
Now it seems we need three different definitions for "Free":
1. Free as in "speech" 2. Free as in "beer" 3. Free as in "pay for it or go to jail"
The Skill component is not sufficent to move it from the game of chance column to the game of skill column.
LOL!
That's like saying baseball is not a game of skill because good hitters only get on base about one time in three.
Craps, roulette, slot machines and blackjack are all games of chance, where (unless you count cards in blackjack) you are placing bets against random uncertainty.
Poker is not a game of chance, not by a long shot. The only uncertainty is whether your opponent is a better player than you are.
Even if you are one of those pedantic hair-splitters who gets bent out of shape when the word "theft" is applied to copyright infringement, there's no such nit to be picked here.
Con artists and cheating gamblers are thieves. So is this guy.
If I liked a girl and someone I did not know came along and took her out from under me before I got a chance to date her / ask her out. Does that mean he is a thief? Is her love tangible / something to be valued by me that I could take someone to court for stealing it away from me.
Can her love be bought and sold as an asset?
If so, then yes, that would mean he's a theif.
Since it can't, then its not analogous to what we are talking about here.
Actually, tournament-style poker has become vastly more common over the last ten years or so, and the chip are just pegs on the wall. Prizes are awarded either winner-take-all, or sometimes even set ammounts for second and third-place finishers, regardless of the exact number of chips which remain in each players' pile.
Squaresoft does not have the legal authority to take his ill-gotten gains away, because it's not theirs to take.
However, the government, seeing that the guy cheated at a game in which assets with real-world value change hands, most certainly has the authority to arrest the man for fraud.
Also, if somebody cheats in a private wager of any kind, they can also be arrested for fraud. People go to jail for grifting with crooked "bar bets" all the time.
Running a 3-Card Monty game that's not rigged would be a silly thing to do, and yes, it would be illegal in most states, but if you bilk a person out of a few thousand bucks with a rigged game, you are guilty of running a con act, and face much stiffer penalties than somebody who is merely playing an outlawed game of chance.
How many chips they give you for your money at a poker tournament is a matter of agreement, not obligation.
For example, if somebody wanted to run a "handicapped" tournament, in which everybody bought in for $100, but players who did well in previous tournaments started with fewer chips, they could do so. Anybody who played in such a tournament would be doing so of their own free will. So, in that situation you are buying your way into the tournament, not buying currency. It's still gambling.
In most online games, this is not the case - the real-monetary value in the objects comes from third parties
Where the real-world value comes from is irrelevant. The fact remains that they are playing for assets which have real value.
Allowing obsessed third parties paying for virtual objects to turn something into gambling is a dangerous precedent. Is online checkers gambling? What if some nutter pays me for captured pieces?
If there were an on-line checkers game which let you introduce your "captured pieces" from previous games as extra pieces, I'm sure IGN or somebody most certainly would set up a cash-for-checkers exchange, and yes. I would say under those circumstances that it should be considered gambling.
The same goes for any "Magic: The Gathering" tournament which allows you to keep the cards you capture from your opponent. Anyone who says that it's not a form of gambling is lying to themselves.
If I play poker of Friday nights with my friends (technically illeagal where I live) and I cheat them am I breaking any laws other than the gambling statutes?
In most of the world? Yes. Yes you are. They are sitting down at what they believe to be a fair game of chance with you, and in fact you are cheating them out of their money. It's the exact same thing as running a rigged 3-Card Monty game on a street-corner. It's a con, and you can be arrested for stealing their money.
YMMV, depending on which country or state you live in.
We already are, and will continue to laugh at the State Board of Education in Kansas...
Which echoed the general tone of several other replies to my post. I was addressing the issue of the entire thread being flooded with responses from people who seemed to think what I was saying was "dangerous" because it propped up the arguments of anti-science nuts.
Never having played Lineage II I don't know if the game requires you to pay for the game items that you use. So I don't think that you can call it a form of gambling. I think the problem is the auction sites the let you trade the Ever War Sims sword of falic enlargement for real money...
You have to pay to play the game, and you can exchange some of the rewards of playing the game well (and/or being lucky) for real-world money.
Is there a definition of gambling which that does not fit? Does it differ from a poker tournament which has a limited "buy in" that you play with in any way that matters?
Beating up an on-line character and taking away its on-line money in a game is not at al analogous to robbing somebody.
It's more like beating somebody at poker.
Lineage II is a game in which characters are allowed to compete with each other for assets that have real-world value, just as with an on-line poker match. Taking somebody's money in Lineage II is no worse (or better) than slow-playing a hand of Texas Hold 'Em until some poor sap goes "all in" against you, and then cleaning them out.
That said, there are two obvious conclusions you can draw from my analogy:
1. If you cheat at poker, even on-line poker, you are a theif and should be arrested. Likewise, they were right to arrest this guy.
2. Lineage II is not just a recreational game. It's a means of gambling, and therefore should be regulated as such by any country which chooses to regulate gambling.
Slashdot Mirror
At my home in Bloomington, the recycling goes into a larger bin, and is picked up every other week.
I favor this move as a cost-cutting measure, even though it's sometimes easy to forget which week they pick it up, because most of the recycle stuff doesn't stink up the neighborhood if it sits out in the bin for an extra week. It's not like it's full of rotting kitchen trash.
I think you will find that our recylcling program in the Twin Cities is subsidized. You are paying more than you think you are.
See, they take a bunch of your money to encourage you to use the recycling service by 1. investing public funds into the recycling program, and 2. jacking up landfill fees.
Now, that all doesn't seem so bad if you are of the opinion that landfills are bad for Mother Earth and will be the death of us all unless we send all our unused paper to chemical processing plants, where they will sit around composting in warehouses for months, and then what remains is turned into slightly lower-quality paper for re-use.
By that standard, there is no such thing as free.
I gave my neice a swingset for free last Christmas.
If you are at my house, you may use my WiFi for free.
In a couple weeks, I'll be helping a charity called "Sharing and Caring Hands" serve free meals.
Free (as in beer) exists. All that it requires is somebody willing to offer it while asking nothing in return.
However, if you take some of my money and then use it to offer me something "for free", that is not the same thing.
When I saw the headline about the "Free WiFi trend", I foolishly assumed they were talking about actual free WiFi, like when a [...] coffee shop opens up their 802.11g
In that case you're paying for the wifi in increased coffee prices.
Cute that you put "..." in place of "private homes", and cut off the part about encryption removal.
Park in front of a Dunn Bros. Coffee shop, or for that matter, in my driveway, and you are on the Internet for free. Free as in beer.
Forced is a bit strong; the residents of the city voted for the mayor.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner. If the 51% residents of your town decided that you, personally, should pay half your income in taxes in order to fund a small property-tax cut for everybody else, would "forced" still be too strong of a word?
If majority-rules was a fair way to decide everything, we could reduce the entire Constitution and all of the amendments to a single line: "Whatever the people vote for, that's what we do."
Easy, cowboy.
If you (via your elected representatives... not to mention "voting with your feet") feel that tax-funded Wi-Fi is worth it, then good luck with that. Just don't lie by calling it free, is all. That's all I was saying.
This isn't insightful. Please, someone take the mod points away from the right-wing nutjob.
So now you are a right-wing nutjob if you point out that "tax funded" and "free" are not exactly the same thing? I know a lot of democrats who will be shocked to learn that they are right-wing nutjobs. I can hardly wait to tell them the news.
You are one of those people who complains to the letters page of the Villiage Voice that Howard Dean isn't being combative enough, aren't you?
You, my friend, obviously don't live here. Walking a couple blocks without being spare changed is a luxury. There are far more crackheads and poor in the Tenderloin than people that make six figures on the entire peninsula. I see kids in the TL every day who need to see more of the world than the people smoking and selling themselves on the street.
So, in San Fran you have three groups of people:
1. The super-rich, living in the larger of those pretty houses that overlook the bay.
2. The upper-middle class, doing well enough to live in a $600,000 matchbox of a house, and happy enough with it that they won't move to a place where the cost of living is lower.
3. Homeless crack-heads, who are lucky if they can afford a change of clothes.
Of those three groups, which one needs state-funded WiFi? Because I don't see it.
Plus, TFA never mentioned anything like $5 fee.
Neither did I. Try to keep up.
By that logic, the whole record industry is participating in something other than capitalism, because they are not selling you a physical object, but the right to listen to a recording of music, which can be replicated effortlessly.
I think you are in a minority of "one" in your narrow definition of property.
When I saw the headline about the "Free WiFi trend", I foolishly assumed they were talking about actual free WiFi, like when a private resident or coffee shop opens up their 802.11g encryption so anybody in range is free to use it.
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
Now it seems we need three different definitions for "Free":
1. Free as in "speech"
2. Free as in "beer"
3. Free as in "pay for it or go to jail"
There are two classes of things subject to trade under capitalism: physical goods and labour.
Says who?
I've heard "goods and labor" said before, but I've never heard anybody before you stipulate that the goods must be "physical."
The Skill component is not sufficent to move it from the game of chance column to the game of skill column.
LOL!
That's like saying baseball is not a game of skill because good hitters only get on base about one time in three.
Craps, roulette, slot machines and blackjack are all games of chance, where (unless you count cards in blackjack) you are placing bets against random uncertainty.
Poker is not a game of chance, not by a long shot. The only uncertainty is whether your opponent is a better player than you are.
Getting money via fraud is a type of theft.
Even if you are one of those pedantic hair-splitters who gets bent out of shape when the word "theft" is applied to copyright infringement, there's no such nit to be picked here.
Con artists and cheating gamblers are thieves. So is this guy.
If you think poker is not a game of skill, I really would like to have you join me next time I play.
If I liked a girl and someone I did not know came along and took her out from under me before I got a chance to date her / ask her out. Does that mean he is a thief? Is her love tangible / something to be valued by me that I could take someone to court for stealing it away from me.
Can her love be bought and sold as an asset?
If so, then yes, that would mean he's a theif.
Since it can't, then its not analogous to what we are talking about here.
Actually, tournament-style poker has become vastly more common over the last ten years or so, and the chip are just pegs on the wall. Prizes are awarded either winner-take-all, or sometimes even set ammounts for second and third-place finishers, regardless of the exact number of chips which remain in each players' pile.
Squaresoft does not have the legal authority to take his ill-gotten gains away, because it's not theirs to take.
However, the government, seeing that the guy cheated at a game in which assets with real-world value change hands, most certainly has the authority to arrest the man for fraud.
Also, if somebody cheats in a private wager of any kind, they can also be arrested for fraud. People go to jail for grifting with crooked "bar bets" all the time.
Running a 3-Card Monty game that's not rigged would be a silly thing to do, and yes, it would be illegal in most states, but if you bilk a person out of a few thousand bucks with a rigged game, you are guilty of running a con act, and face much stiffer penalties than somebody who is merely playing an outlawed game of chance.
In other words, yes. It's fraud.
Poker is also most definitely a game of skill.
Roulette is most definitely a game of chance.
Both are gambling.
How many chips they give you for your money at a poker tournament is a matter of agreement, not obligation.
For example, if somebody wanted to run a "handicapped" tournament, in which everybody bought in for $100, but players who did well in previous tournaments started with fewer chips, they could do so. Anybody who played in such a tournament would be doing so of their own free will. So, in that situation you are buying your way into the tournament, not buying currency. It's still gambling.
In most online games, this is not the case - the real-monetary value in the objects comes from third parties
Where the real-world value comes from is irrelevant. The fact remains that they are playing for assets which have real value.
Allowing obsessed third parties paying for virtual objects to turn something into gambling is a dangerous precedent. Is online checkers gambling? What if some nutter pays me for captured pieces?
If there were an on-line checkers game which let you introduce your "captured pieces" from previous games as extra pieces, I'm sure IGN or somebody most certainly would set up a cash-for-checkers exchange, and yes. I would say under those circumstances that it should be considered gambling.
The same goes for any "Magic: The Gathering" tournament which allows you to keep the cards you capture from your opponent. Anyone who says that it's not a form of gambling is lying to themselves.
If I play poker of Friday nights with my friends (technically illeagal where I live) and I cheat them am I breaking any laws other than the gambling statutes?
In most of the world? Yes. Yes you are. They are sitting down at what they believe to be a fair game of chance with you, and in fact you are cheating them out of their money. It's the exact same thing as running a rigged 3-Card Monty game on a street-corner. It's a con, and you can be arrested for stealing their money.
YMMV, depending on which country or state you live in.
(IANAL, yadda yadda yadda)
I was replying to your final comment:
We already are, and will continue to laugh at the State Board of Education in Kansas...
Which echoed the general tone of several other replies to my post. I was addressing the issue of the entire thread being flooded with responses from people who seemed to think what I was saying was "dangerous" because it propped up the arguments of anti-science nuts.
It wasn't directed at you specifically.
Never having played Lineage II I don't know if the game requires you to pay for the game items that you use. So I don't think that you can call it a form of gambling. I think the problem is the auction sites the let you trade the Ever War Sims sword of falic enlargement for real money...
You have to pay to play the game, and you can exchange some of the rewards of playing the game well (and/or being lucky) for real-world money.
Is there a definition of gambling which that does not fit? Does it differ from a poker tournament which has a limited "buy in" that you play with in any way that matters?
Beating up an on-line character and taking away its on-line money in a game is not at al analogous to robbing somebody.
It's more like beating somebody at poker.
Lineage II is a game in which characters are allowed to compete with each other for assets that have real-world value, just as with an on-line poker match. Taking somebody's money in Lineage II is no worse (or better) than slow-playing a hand of Texas Hold 'Em until some poor sap goes "all in" against you, and then cleaning them out.
That said, there are two obvious conclusions you can draw from my analogy:
1. If you cheat at poker, even on-line poker, you are a theif and should be arrested. Likewise, they were right to arrest this guy.
2. Lineage II is not just a recreational game. It's a means of gambling, and therefore should be regulated as such by any country which chooses to regulate gambling.
I heard that in North Korea, only old gamers have girlfriends.
And in Soviet Russia, girlfriends have gamers.