In such a thoroughly middle-class society as our own, that position is tenable. Still, one must remember the reason that worker protections came to be to begin with. People who had no bread were given the choice: work a machine that might well take off your arm for twelve hours a day, or don't, and starve to death, because there are plenty of other peasants to take your place. This may have maximized efficiency, but it clashed strongly with the humanistic principles of a great deal of people. Society essentially decided that it was fundamentally unfair to ask a man trying to feed his family to make a choice like that so that the factory owner could take home the money that would otherwise be spent on safeguarding the machines or paying overtime. Granted, in this day and age, perhaps we are now wealthy enough that we can afford to be a bit more libertarian. Still, since many nations are yet in the throes of their own industrial revolution today, I would have to disagree with applying the libertarian principle across the board.
How can anyone not be happy with the ways that the franchise games have gone? It's not for nothing that Metroid and Zelda got perfect scores in all of their reviews. I just recently beat Metroid, and personally, it was the finest gaming experience I've had since Deus Ex.
Democrats give you no choices, it's true. Republicans give you choices, all of which suck. "Well, I can either put my kids in the defunded public schools, or I can take this here voucher that actually falls thousands short of covering tuition and put my kids in private school. Huh." Oh, glorious choice!
I wouldn't call myself a liberal or a conservative, just a cynic who finds sentiments like those expressed in the parent to be absurd beyond words.
I had a caustic reply all written -- obviously, we're not philisophically compatible -- but let's stick to the facts: when public awareness of the disease rose, new infections dropped, sometimes dramatically. Bringing up "personal responsibility" is a non sequiteur; I never said I wanted to hear somebody whine about their ignorance and how they wish there had been more PSAs on network TV after they tested positive for the disease. From where I stand, the ethical calculus is simple: had the government made an effort to bring up public awareness, countless lives could have been saved at minimal cost. (In fact, the costs that were incurred by people actually getting sick were almost undoubtedly higher than the cost of an effective public awareness campaign; this fact alone makes the Reagan policy seem idiotic.)
Well, that would be thoughtful of them. But the fact is that at some point, public awareness of the virus became high enough that its spread slowed rather dramatically. My point is that we might have reached this point several years earlier -- thus preventing hundreds of thousants of HIV infections -- had the Reagan administration seen fit to push the issue.
The spread of AIDS in the early years was an exponential function. Had the government made some effort to prevent its spread, the "epidemic" would have turned into nothing of the kind.
In any game, there has to be motivation for playing. In a MMORPG, where it's impossible to ever "beat" the game, something like combat has to either be thrilling in and of itself, or there has to be enough gained from combat in terms of character growth that the player feels that it's worth his or her time. So it's not that he's complaining that the lack of loot is a departure from EQ/UO tradition; he's saying that, when combined with the general boredom of combat, the fact that there are no financial incentives to kill wamprats and the like reduces the motivation to engage in combat past a certain critical point.
That seems like a crappy solution to a serious problem, to me. The problem is that it eliminates serious statesmen with career, insider politicians. We have term limits for the state legislature in California, and I don't think anyone can say that we've been better governed recently than in the past. What we need are things like open primaries (or the end of primaries altogether...why not have a general election and then a runoff, like in Freedonia, or wherever our delicious freedom fries come from?) and an end to gerrymandering.
Well, a perpetual and irrevocable license doesn't mean anything if you violate the terms of the license. In this case, if IBM did copy Unix code into Linux, that would almost undoubtedly be a violation of their eternal Unix license. In which case SCO would probably be well within their rights to revoke it, and certainly wouldn't owe IBM a refund.
It seems to me that if Microsoft releases the XBox2 at the same time as the PS3, it will be competing on less even footing than it currently is. Microsoft's big advantage is technology right now; how well will it fare when it's competing against an equally capable system? Sure, now MS has brand recognition, but as Sega will tell you, that and a quarter is enough to get you a gumball.
My point was that Nintendo is playing a different game from Microsoft; the only sense in which MS is "beating" Nintendo is market share. The XBox may be around for a while, but Nintendo will still exist when all that's left on this Earth are cockroaches.
By the way, where do your get the idea that the XBox is doing better than MS expected? Were MS's expectations really that low? It seems that it's doing just about as badly as everyone else expected (perhaps a little bit better) but still getting drubbed by Sony, which still sells (last I heard) three times as many PS2s as MS sells XBoxes. I think MS had higher expectations than that. It wasn't too long ago that Sony itself broke into the market when it had two well-established players and cornered the sucker.
Market share only counts for so much. I'm sure Nintendo is perfectly happy to be beaten, given that they're actually making money, whereas Microsoft has been bleeding money and still, despite superior hardware, can't seem to get an upper hand on Sony.
So we agree in disagreeing with the original poster, fine. And I agree with you, that if everything works out as well as you hope, that it will be a great bonus for society. I don't quite share your optimism, but hey, we'll all find out in the next ten years or so.
The Beatles would profit handsomely no matter the circumstances; artists of their talent would find a way. But I'm not convinced that they'd have the same capability to create their art in a system alternative to the one we have now. If you take the profit out of studio work, then just as a practical matter a musician's focus would have to be turned towards touring. There are several problems with this that I can see. First of all, there'a a goodly amount of beautiful music that can't be performed live ("Eleanor Rigby" is getting tired, but how about "A Day in the Life"?). Second, performing live puts a tremendous strain on many artists, which incidentally is why the Beatles gave it up. It seems probable that the group might not even have existed at the times when they put out the White Album and Abbey Road had they been forced to put up with each other on the highway after 1965(?). Third, and this is related to the first two, is that there are some artists who make beautiful music, but cannot perform in front of an audience particularly well, e.g., Van Morrison. The original poster had said, "musicians will have to make a living from live performances," and the point is, I sure hope not, because that may well turn out to be a net loss for society.
How was John Lennon supposed to put down his vision on tape without copyright? The technology used on "I Am the Walrus" wasn't cheap (at the time, seems sort of primitive now). Orchestral arrangements for songs like "Eleanor Rigby" aren't cheap. It's not that artists won't create art without copyright; it's that their ability to do so will be severely compromised.
Also, I wish people would stop citing Bach or Mozart. Unless you really advocate returning to a time where a wealthy aristocracy serves as the only support (and, consequently, the only audience) for music, you ought to accept that the situations are not comparable.
I don't get it. The game is undeniably good looking, and I tend to like shooters...but it doesn't appeal to me at all. I still fire up the far more traditional Star Monkey on my PC now and then and really enjoy it, and my friends always have to hold me back from wasting $20 in quarters whenever I see a Raiden machine, but Ikaruga does nothing for me. Am I broken or something?
Well, the event itself would seem to be newsworthy. I mean, that's the problem: if you cut out all of the news where Richard Stallman acts strangely or in an egomaniacal way, you'd end up cutting out a fair amount of stuff that should be covered in the free software community. Them's the breaks. Would you rather the news not be covered, or that the coverage just be tilted a bit more in Stallman's favor? At any rate, I don't really think it's fair to fault the Slashdot editors when there wasn't even the standard editor commentary along with this submission.
It would take so little effort for the editors to show a little discretion. Geez, they could just mark these things with "*SPOILER*" in the article title and no one would complain. That's all. I may not be able to have everything, but since I already don't have the contents of Fort Knox, I figure I ought to be able to get this at least.
It's not a minor spoiler, either. I mean, I hardly obsess over this sort of thing, but given that Chewey is one of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars, I really think this would have gone over better as a surprise.
That wasn't necessarily due to the tax cuts, though. It cannot be disputed that the federal deficit rose dramatically during the Reagan/Bush years. However, it rose during a time of dramatically increased defense spending towards the end of the Cold War. The difficult question is, would the debt have ended up larger or smaller in 1992 had it not been for the Reagan tax cuts? Hard to say -- but we do know that in the years following the cuts, government revenue fell.
Slashdot Mirror
In such a thoroughly middle-class society as our own, that position is tenable. Still, one must remember the reason that worker protections came to be to begin with. People who had no bread were given the choice: work a machine that might well take off your arm for twelve hours a day, or don't, and starve to death, because there are plenty of other peasants to take your place. This may have maximized efficiency, but it clashed strongly with the humanistic principles of a great deal of people. Society essentially decided that it was fundamentally unfair to ask a man trying to feed his family to make a choice like that so that the factory owner could take home the money that would otherwise be spent on safeguarding the machines or paying overtime. Granted, in this day and age, perhaps we are now wealthy enough that we can afford to be a bit more libertarian. Still, since many nations are yet in the throes of their own industrial revolution today, I would have to disagree with applying the libertarian principle across the board.
How can anyone not be happy with the ways that the franchise games have gone? It's not for nothing that Metroid and Zelda got perfect scores in all of their reviews. I just recently beat Metroid, and personally, it was the finest gaming experience I've had since Deus Ex.
Democrats give you no choices, it's true. Republicans give you choices, all of which suck. "Well, I can either put my kids in the defunded public schools, or I can take this here voucher that actually falls thousands short of covering tuition and put my kids in private school. Huh." Oh, glorious choice!
I wouldn't call myself a liberal or a conservative, just a cynic who finds sentiments like those expressed in the parent to be absurd beyond words.
Fellas, fellas, don't fight...you're both assholes.
I had a caustic reply all written -- obviously, we're not philisophically compatible -- but let's stick to the facts: when public awareness of the disease rose, new infections dropped, sometimes dramatically. Bringing up "personal responsibility" is a non sequiteur; I never said I wanted to hear somebody whine about their ignorance and how they wish there had been more PSAs on network TV after they tested positive for the disease. From where I stand, the ethical calculus is simple: had the government made an effort to bring up public awareness, countless lives could have been saved at minimal cost. (In fact, the costs that were incurred by people actually getting sick were almost undoubtedly higher than the cost of an effective public awareness campaign; this fact alone makes the Reagan policy seem idiotic.)
Well, that would be thoughtful of them. But the fact is that at some point, public awareness of the virus became high enough that its spread slowed rather dramatically. My point is that we might have reached this point several years earlier -- thus preventing hundreds of thousants of HIV infections -- had the Reagan administration seen fit to push the issue.
The spread of AIDS in the early years was an exponential function. Had the government made some effort to prevent its spread, the "epidemic" would have turned into nothing of the kind.
He didn't actually take his shoe off. He happened to have a spare shoe. Which is just as odd, really.
You're so thrilled to have a girlfriend that you wanted to let the whole world know, huh?
In any game, there has to be motivation for playing. In a MMORPG, where it's impossible to ever "beat" the game, something like combat has to either be thrilling in and of itself, or there has to be enough gained from combat in terms of character growth that the player feels that it's worth his or her time. So it's not that he's complaining that the lack of loot is a departure from EQ/UO tradition; he's saying that, when combined with the general boredom of combat, the fact that there are no financial incentives to kill wamprats and the like reduces the motivation to engage in combat past a certain critical point.
That seems like a crappy solution to a serious problem, to me. The problem is that it eliminates serious statesmen with career, insider politicians. We have term limits for the state legislature in California, and I don't think anyone can say that we've been better governed recently than in the past. What we need are things like open primaries (or the end of primaries altogether...why not have a general election and then a runoff, like in Freedonia, or wherever our delicious freedom fries come from?) and an end to gerrymandering.
Well, a perpetual and irrevocable license doesn't mean anything if you violate the terms of the license. In this case, if IBM did copy Unix code into Linux, that would almost undoubtedly be a violation of their eternal Unix license. In which case SCO would probably be well within their rights to revoke it, and certainly wouldn't owe IBM a refund.
God, I can't believe I'm saying this.
How could you have possibly forgotten the last step?
7. Profit!!!
It seems to me that if Microsoft releases the XBox2 at the same time as the PS3, it will be competing on less even footing than it currently is. Microsoft's big advantage is technology right now; how well will it fare when it's competing against an equally capable system? Sure, now MS has brand recognition, but as Sega will tell you, that and a quarter is enough to get you a gumball.
My point was that Nintendo is playing a different game from Microsoft; the only sense in which MS is "beating" Nintendo is market share. The XBox may be around for a while, but Nintendo will still exist when all that's left on this Earth are cockroaches.
By the way, where do your get the idea that the XBox is doing better than MS expected? Were MS's expectations really that low? It seems that it's doing just about as badly as everyone else expected (perhaps a little bit better) but still getting drubbed by Sony, which still sells (last I heard) three times as many PS2s as MS sells XBoxes. I think MS had higher expectations than that. It wasn't too long ago that Sony itself broke into the market when it had two well-established players and cornered the sucker.
Market share only counts for so much. I'm sure Nintendo is perfectly happy to be beaten, given that they're actually making money, whereas Microsoft has been bleeding money and still, despite superior hardware, can't seem to get an upper hand on Sony.
So we agree in disagreeing with the original poster, fine. And I agree with you, that if everything works out as well as you hope, that it will be a great bonus for society. I don't quite share your optimism, but hey, we'll all find out in the next ten years or so.
The Beatles would profit handsomely no matter the circumstances; artists of their talent would find a way. But I'm not convinced that they'd have the same capability to create their art in a system alternative to the one we have now. If you take the profit out of studio work, then just as a practical matter a musician's focus would have to be turned towards touring. There are several problems with this that I can see. First of all, there'a a goodly amount of beautiful music that can't be performed live ("Eleanor Rigby" is getting tired, but how about "A Day in the Life"?). Second, performing live puts a tremendous strain on many artists, which incidentally is why the Beatles gave it up. It seems probable that the group might not even have existed at the times when they put out the White Album and Abbey Road had they been forced to put up with each other on the highway after 1965(?). Third, and this is related to the first two, is that there are some artists who make beautiful music, but cannot perform in front of an audience particularly well, e.g., Van Morrison. The original poster had said, "musicians will have to make a living from live performances," and the point is, I sure hope not, because that may well turn out to be a net loss for society.
How was John Lennon supposed to put down his vision on tape without copyright? The technology used on "I Am the Walrus" wasn't cheap (at the time, seems sort of primitive now). Orchestral arrangements for songs like "Eleanor Rigby" aren't cheap. It's not that artists won't create art without copyright; it's that their ability to do so will be severely compromised.
Also, I wish people would stop citing Bach or Mozart. Unless you really advocate returning to a time where a wealthy aristocracy serves as the only support (and, consequently, the only audience) for music, you ought to accept that the situations are not comparable.
I don't get it. The game is undeniably good looking, and I tend to like shooters...but it doesn't appeal to me at all. I still fire up the far more traditional Star Monkey on my PC now and then and really enjoy it, and my friends always have to hold me back from wasting $20 in quarters whenever I see a Raiden machine, but Ikaruga does nothing for me. Am I broken or something?
Actually, the Supreme Court recently ruled that you can be arrested for a misdemeanor, in the case of a Texas woman who was, I believe, speeding.
Well, the event itself would seem to be newsworthy. I mean, that's the problem: if you cut out all of the news where Richard Stallman acts strangely or in an egomaniacal way, you'd end up cutting out a fair amount of stuff that should be covered in the free software community. Them's the breaks. Would you rather the news not be covered, or that the coverage just be tilted a bit more in Stallman's favor? At any rate, I don't really think it's fair to fault the Slashdot editors when there wasn't even the standard editor commentary along with this submission.
It would take so little effort for the editors to show a little discretion. Geez, they could just mark these things with "*SPOILER*" in the article title and no one would complain. That's all. I may not be able to have everything, but since I already don't have the contents of Fort Knox, I figure I ought to be able to get this at least.
It's not a minor spoiler, either. I mean, I hardly obsess over this sort of thing, but given that Chewey is one of the most beloved characters in all of Star Wars, I really think this would have gone over better as a surprise.
That wasn't necessarily due to the tax cuts, though. It cannot be disputed that the federal deficit rose dramatically during the Reagan/Bush years. However, it rose during a time of dramatically increased defense spending towards the end of the Cold War. The difficult question is, would the debt have ended up larger or smaller in 1992 had it not been for the Reagan tax cuts? Hard to say -- but we do know that in the years following the cuts, government revenue fell.