That may be the philosophical definition of a crime; the legal one includes codification of the acts that comprise a crime.
And unless you allow an individual to embody the law - a king, a judge - you need this codification. Which means laws and regulations.
Furthermore, without such codification, there is no sociatal contract about what is right and wrong, what is moral and immoral, and what the consequences of crossing the line are. It becomes arbitrary, and decided by those with the greatest wealth and power.
Furthermore, unless you have that codification, you cannot prevent someone from doing something wrong - only punish. And there are many crimes that cannot be paid for. If you steal the years of someone's life (by, for example, dumping cancer causing agents into the river), there is no way you can repay that person for their pain and lost years. None. A court could strip the guilty of everything they own, make a slave of them - and it would not pay for the lost time.
The legal system, the courts - are where we go for justice under the law. That second part is critical. Under the law. Though many complain about "judicial activism", the fundamental role of the courts is to interpret the law, and make rulings in cases of disputes. Where there is no law, the courts have no power.
The regulation and law that we have are necessary protections. What would you remove? Maybe allow factories to poison air but not rivers? Maybe allow them to hire 9 year olds, but make them pay minimum wage? Why is the argument that "we need less regulation" always so generic; why is the regulation never named? Could it be, perhaps, because when specifics are given, people would look on those advocating the removal and call them evil, crazy or backwards?
Finally, my example of what happens in other countries without regulation was meant of an empirical example of what happens when there is inadequate regulation; an object lesson in how not to do it. Maybe I can't do anything about it here, but what I can do is prevent the river near my house from becoming an inflammable and toxic open sewer and keep my the expectations for my kids over working in a damaging sweat shot.
My primary point is that government is not the only place that power concentrates. Right now, there is more power in the corporations than is vested in the instrument of power of the people: the government.
Too many arguing for purely free market approaches in our technological and interconnected world seem to be very aware of the evils of government, but seem to think that by reducing government, they'll reduce the overall exercise of power. This is simply not the case.
Both corporations and government can do good and evil. However, if not balanced against each other, they both tend towards evil.
Except that is exactly the argument being made. And a response cannot by definition be a strawman when it is basically exactly the argument being made by the person with who you are arguing.
When industry says that they need "less regulation" they are arguing for the right to dump crap in the rivers and air and to force their workers into the company store with company script. That is the regulation and law that industry is always complaining about, and trying to undermine.
And by convincing people that government is the most fundamentally evil of human inventions, they get the people protected by government to undermine their own protections.
Furthermore, if you think that there is some sort of nobility or interest in the human condition that would prevent the proverbial factory owner from doing so, take a look at those parts of the world where there are not such protections for workers for against dumping crap in the river. A corporation will get away with every single thing that it can. It has no conscience, no humanity, no care. It is a machine that is built to make money. And that is not a bad thing, as long as there is a balance. And that balance is government.
Let's say I'm a factory owner. I make widgets. My factory dumps poison into the sky and into the water. After all, it's my air and water, too, right? And it's next to my factory. If you stop me from dumping the waste, you are imposing on my property rights; you are decreasing the value of my factory. If I change this, I will have to cut back payment of my workers, thus impacting their property rights.
Now, let us switch positions. Let's say that I'm the guy who lives downwind and downstream. The factory has destroyed my farm. My kids are sickly. You are imposing on my property rights (my farm), and also, upon other inalienable rights (I don't own my kids, but the factory has absolutely done them permanent harm).
In order to protect your property rights, the factory would need to be left to continue to operate as it is. In order to protect mine, it needs to clean up after itself.
This is why we need set laws and limits. This is why we need to be able to say, here is the law that determines how much person A's rights are allowed to impose on person B's.
Furthermore, having laws that determine where your rights end and mine start allow me to prevent you from doing harm before hand. If I have to wait until my children have birth defects and my land and health are ruined, it is really too late. You cannot make up for that with money or property.
Finally, yes, let us look at China. They've poisoned their air, their water and their land. Yes, they have a massive concentration of power in their government, which is one and the same with their private enterprise for the most part (though, this is changing to some extent). However, here's the bit you're still missing: power will be exercised no matter what.
In China, there are no controls on power. Our government is in many ways designed to be a control on power - on it's own, on private power. If you remove those controls, then you have no justice. But you won't make the exercise of power go away. Corporations will continue to exercise power, and there will be no way to mitigate the results. And so, to return back to our original example of a factory and a river, the factory will continue to dump its poisons; the factory owner would be the sole exerciser of power, and the folks downstream could do nothing enforceable about it. It would be just like China, but it would be a corporation instead of a government exercising power.
In closing, you will never stop the exercise of power. All you can do is ensure that you chose the lesser of evils, that there is no single, overbearing concentration of power, and that power is structured so that it cannot act in its own interests without at least some benefit to the people. It is naive and dangerous to think that removing government will stop the wielding of power in harmful ways; quite the opposite.
If you saw the episode, then you'd remember that such a "war room" approach was shown to be more evil than "real" war, because it killed, but hid the killing, but didn't stop it. And death is death. Sanitizing and hiding it is a far cry from ending it.
And if you think about it, from the American point of view, we have in large hidden it away. When Bush took us to war against Iraq, the press was embedded - a control mechanism to ensure that there wasn't a repeat of the media footage of Vietnam. There was no showing of the dead returning, let alone the dead and mutilated over there. We were told to shop, not to share in the pain of war. It was sanitized... right up to the point where you looked into what was actually happening, or listened to the returning Vets.
I'd also note that war, hate, fear - it's all cyclical. Your father's father's father stole my great grandpappy's land; your ancestors took my ancestor's holy city; your ancestors brought this plague upon mine. It goes on and on. Hiding it doesn't end it; it just propagates it further and in an interest bearing manner that someday will absolutely come due.
If your city was sued, it means that there was a law that the courts ruled on a law.
Which means that a government made a law that said, no, dumping sewage into the river is a no-no because there was a law that said it was a no-no.
Unless you are proponing that the courts legislate from the bench with declarations of Solomon-esque wisdom. In which case, the courts become the government, and you've gone full circle.
Not to mention that in your fantasy system that you can ever stop someone from doing something harmful before they do it. If you can only sue someone after they dump the sewage and cause your children to be born with three arms, two heads and no intestine (see the linked wikipedia article in TFA), then you've already suffered non-recoverable harm.
Finally, why do free market purists think that if you get rid of government that it will get rid of people exercising power? Governments may be evil, but at least they are answerable in the end to the people, unlike the private fiefdoms known as corporations. (See also Jefferson on inalienable rights and men forming governments to protect them.) Governments are supposed to fill that niche, and be less evil than that which will fill them if they don't exist. The whole Ayn Rand free markets lead to paradise idea is naive and dangerous.
Courts are by definition a part of the government. And courts are supposed base their decision on law, not Solomon-esque declarations of wisdom off the cuff.
You argue that the courts are a required part of the free market.
You then say that free markets don't currently function properly because there's too much government involved in the process.
Your argument is absolutely contradictory to itself.
Aside from this, it also ignores the fact that the folks with the money can always influence decision makers, including the justices or judges of a court. So, no, in your case, the little guys suing the big guy would be even more screwed.
Finally, arguments like this always ignore the fact that power abhors a vacuum. Government may be in some ways fundamentally evil, but it is the bulwark that our societies build against even more evil (private and unaccountable) entities filling that niche. Taking government away will not stop power from being exercised; all it will do is ensure that the people of the land have no protections against that power.
Oh, I don't mean from a gamer's point of view - I mean from a success point of view.
They've got psychologists and artists who know cute better than the lolcats folks; they understand exactly how to get the little rats to pull the Skinner Box levers.
Which is why to them the actual "content" of the game doesn't matter; it's all about eye candy, about turning stripping absolutely everything except the achievements of other games, throwing in uber cute eye candy, then adding a time factor, then allowing you to buy your time back for real world money.
When viewed that way, there is nothing to improve - they have the absolute pure, distilled version of the crack that they sell already.
There are more libertarians here than there are at a Tea Party rally. And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression. And it's about draconian, unworkable solutions that will only stifle freedom of expression, innovation and open communication without censorship.
Techniques like dns blocking, holding a repository site responsible for every single client's actions, enforcing search engine censorship simply won't stop piracy. But it will build a framework to further stifle freedom of expression on the web, and to enhance mega corporation and government control.
You are attempting to paint those who are for an open internet in simplistic black and white terms, to impose a simpleton's view on others.
Facebook has one of the biggest distributed computing problems in the history of... well, computing.
Between development, server farms, etc - I doubt that they'd be the company that they are without that level of reinvestment.
And if they cut those costs (as I'm sure that many of the new shareholders will want to see), they'll shoot themselves in the foot.
Bezos was wise not to allow the shareholders to demand a lower burn rate with Amazon. If they hadn't and didn't keep reinvesting into the platform, they'd not have the niche they have today. Same applies to FB.
Certainly patent law always favors the plaintiff, which is Microsoft in this scenario. And we knew that this was an uphill fight for Barnes & Noble anyway, given the tilt against what you and I would consider fairness in both patent and antitrust law. Patent misuse defenses are hard to win. But I seriously doubt this is the end of the story. Barnes & Noble has some of the finest law firms defending it, and law firms of that calibre don't just lay down and die when there is an adverse ruling.
Which translates to:
Barnes & Noble are basically screwed because that's what the law says. But they pay a lot of money to high priced lawyers, who will keep this thing going in the legal system for at least a few more years. Yeah, the law sucks - but hey! At least the lawyers will profit. After that, Microsoft will probably win.
Rather, Microsoft is a medieval style guild, and they collect dues from any who would practice their trade. If you don't pay, they come and burn down our house.
And it goes way, way deeper than any "shortcuts". To put it another way, if we were talking about mechanical and structural engineering, not only would MS hold the rights to be the sole bridge builders in the land, but the very concept of a device or structure to facilitate the crossing of a body of water would be theirs. They'd own the rights to cables, supports, bolts; not only to steel but to alloys in general.
With our technology, there is nothing that doesn't stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before at this point. We should still be in a rapid development cycle, spinning upward. Instead, we squabble over who gets to build anything at all.
And eventually, we're going to absolutely destroy American technological innovation. First, by making it impossible for most everyone but the established players to build anything at all. And by doing so, we will lay the groundwork for the first other nation to surpass us to absolutely ensure that we are subject to the very idiotic laws that we are using to choke our own innovation.
The OUII basically concluded that even if all of what Barnes & Noble said about Microsoft's use of patents against Android was accurate, it would fall far short of the legal requirements for a patent misuse defense. For example, Barnes & Noble claimed that Microsoft asked for excessively high patent license fees, but the OUII quoted passages from U.S. law (statutory as well as case law) that clearly said that patent law doesn't require a patent holder to grant a license on any terms.
So, basically, it was game over before it got started.
It's not about creation anymore.
It's all about owning segments of possible creation.
And those have been mostly divvied up, given the ridiculously broad areas of thought and ideas that we allow to be patented.
I pride myself on being an engineer. And I absolutely love my work.
I coded professionally for years before I got my degree. But it took time, and a certain amount of formal training, to truly mature into an engineer.
These days, I play with some pretty big toys. And there most certainly is a part of me that's still a hacker. But that part is very much directed and disciplined by the engineer part of me.
As a result, I still get the joy of building things - at the code level, and at the architect level. The discipline allows me to build great things, not just toy projects, which is all that the undirected, undisciplined hacker will ever build.
Because I'm willing to learn (to read those manuals, and pay my dues), I've worked on everything from embedded to massive distributed systems.
Being an engineer and a hacker don't have to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps not all engineers have the drive and passion to be a hacker; perhaps not all hackers have what it takes to acquire the discipline of being an engineer. But those who can be both get to play with the biggest toys, get to work on the neatest problems, and, honestly, make the most money at the end of the day.
Just for the record, Megadeath really doesn't write satanic music; though they're speed/death metal, Dave Mustang tends (mostly) to sing about the grim, self imposed fate of Mankind, and how stupid and evil we are to each other.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be the philosophical definition of a crime; the legal one includes codification of the acts that comprise a crime.
And unless you allow an individual to embody the law - a king, a judge - you need this codification. Which means laws and regulations.
Furthermore, without such codification, there is no sociatal contract about what is right and wrong, what is moral and immoral, and what the consequences of crossing the line are. It becomes arbitrary, and decided by those with the greatest wealth and power.
Furthermore, unless you have that codification, you cannot prevent someone from doing something wrong - only punish. And there are many crimes that cannot be paid for. If you steal the years of someone's life (by, for example, dumping cancer causing agents into the river), there is no way you can repay that person for their pain and lost years. None. A court could strip the guilty of everything they own, make a slave of them - and it would not pay for the lost time.
The legal system, the courts - are where we go for justice under the law. That second part is critical. Under the law. Though many complain about "judicial activism", the fundamental role of the courts is to interpret the law, and make rulings in cases of disputes. Where there is no law, the courts have no power.
The regulation and law that we have are necessary protections. What would you remove? Maybe allow factories to poison air but not rivers? Maybe allow them to hire 9 year olds, but make them pay minimum wage? Why is the argument that "we need less regulation" always so generic; why is the regulation never named? Could it be, perhaps, because when specifics are given, people would look on those advocating the removal and call them evil, crazy or backwards?
Finally, my example of what happens in other countries without regulation was meant of an empirical example of what happens when there is inadequate regulation; an object lesson in how not to do it. Maybe I can't do anything about it here, but what I can do is prevent the river near my house from becoming an inflammable and toxic open sewer and keep my the expectations for my kids over working in a damaging sweat shot.
I don't disagree that power corrupts.
My primary point is that government is not the only place that power concentrates. Right now, there is more power in the corporations than is vested in the instrument of power of the people: the government.
Too many arguing for purely free market approaches in our technological and interconnected world seem to be very aware of the evils of government, but seem to think that by reducing government, they'll reduce the overall exercise of power. This is simply not the case.
Both corporations and government can do good and evil. However, if not balanced against each other, they both tend towards evil.
Except that is exactly the argument being made. And a response cannot by definition be a strawman when it is basically exactly the argument being made by the person with who you are arguing.
When industry says that they need "less regulation" they are arguing for the right to dump crap in the rivers and air and to force their workers into the company store with company script. That is the regulation and law that industry is always complaining about, and trying to undermine.
And by convincing people that government is the most fundamentally evil of human inventions, they get the people protected by government to undermine their own protections.
Furthermore, if you think that there is some sort of nobility or interest in the human condition that would prevent the proverbial factory owner from doing so, take a look at those parts of the world where there are not such protections for workers for against dumping crap in the river. A corporation will get away with every single thing that it can. It has no conscience, no humanity, no care. It is a machine that is built to make money. And that is not a bad thing, as long as there is a balance. And that balance is government.
Let's say I'm a factory owner. I make widgets. My factory dumps poison into the sky and into the water. After all, it's my air and water, too, right? And it's next to my factory. If you stop me from dumping the waste, you are imposing on my property rights; you are decreasing the value of my factory. If I change this, I will have to cut back payment of my workers, thus impacting their property rights.
Now, let us switch positions. Let's say that I'm the guy who lives downwind and downstream. The factory has destroyed my farm. My kids are sickly. You are imposing on my property rights (my farm), and also, upon other inalienable rights (I don't own my kids, but the factory has absolutely done them permanent harm).
In order to protect your property rights, the factory would need to be left to continue to operate as it is. In order to protect mine, it needs to clean up after itself.
This is why we need set laws and limits. This is why we need to be able to say, here is the law that determines how much person A's rights are allowed to impose on person B's.
Furthermore, having laws that determine where your rights end and mine start allow me to prevent you from doing harm before hand. If I have to wait until my children have birth defects and my land and health are ruined, it is really too late. You cannot make up for that with money or property.
Finally, yes, let us look at China. They've poisoned their air, their water and their land. Yes, they have a massive concentration of power in their government, which is one and the same with their private enterprise for the most part (though, this is changing to some extent). However, here's the bit you're still missing: power will be exercised no matter what.
In China, there are no controls on power. Our government is in many ways designed to be a control on power - on it's own, on private power. If you remove those controls, then you have no justice. But you won't make the exercise of power go away. Corporations will continue to exercise power, and there will be no way to mitigate the results. And so, to return back to our original example of a factory and a river, the factory will continue to dump its poisons; the factory owner would be the sole exerciser of power, and the folks downstream could do nothing enforceable about it. It would be just like China, but it would be a corporation instead of a government exercising power.
In closing, you will never stop the exercise of power. All you can do is ensure that you chose the lesser of evils, that there is no single, overbearing concentration of power, and that power is structured so that it cannot act in its own interests without at least some benefit to the people. It is naive and dangerous to think that removing government will stop the wielding of power in harmful ways; quite the opposite.
If you saw the episode, then you'd remember that such a "war room" approach was shown to be more evil than "real" war, because it killed, but hid the killing, but didn't stop it. And death is death. Sanitizing and hiding it is a far cry from ending it.
And if you think about it, from the American point of view, we have in large hidden it away. When Bush took us to war against Iraq, the press was embedded - a control mechanism to ensure that there wasn't a repeat of the media footage of Vietnam. There was no showing of the dead returning, let alone the dead and mutilated over there. We were told to shop, not to share in the pain of war. It was sanitized... right up to the point where you looked into what was actually happening, or listened to the returning Vets.
I'd also note that war, hate, fear - it's all cyclical. Your father's father's father stole my great grandpappy's land; your ancestors took my ancestor's holy city; your ancestors brought this plague upon mine. It goes on and on. Hiding it doesn't end it; it just propagates it further and in an interest bearing manner that someday will absolutely come due.
If your city was sued, it means that there was a law that the courts ruled on a law.
Which means that a government made a law that said, no, dumping sewage into the river is a no-no because there was a law that said it was a no-no.
Unless you are proponing that the courts legislate from the bench with declarations of Solomon-esque wisdom. In which case, the courts become the government, and you've gone full circle.
Not to mention that in your fantasy system that you can ever stop someone from doing something harmful before they do it. If you can only sue someone after they dump the sewage and cause your children to be born with three arms, two heads and no intestine (see the linked wikipedia article in TFA), then you've already suffered non-recoverable harm.
Finally, why do free market purists think that if you get rid of government that it will get rid of people exercising power? Governments may be evil, but at least they are answerable in the end to the people, unlike the private fiefdoms known as corporations. (See also Jefferson on inalienable rights and men forming governments to protect them.) Governments are supposed to fill that niche, and be less evil than that which will fill them if they don't exist. The whole Ayn Rand free markets lead to paradise idea is naive and dangerous.
You can't have it both ways.
Courts are by definition a part of the government. And courts are supposed base their decision on law, not Solomon-esque declarations of wisdom off the cuff.
You argue that the courts are a required part of the free market.
You then say that free markets don't currently function properly because there's too much government involved in the process.
Your argument is absolutely contradictory to itself.
Aside from this, it also ignores the fact that the folks with the money can always influence decision makers, including the justices or judges of a court. So, no, in your case, the little guys suing the big guy would be even more screwed.
Finally, arguments like this always ignore the fact that power abhors a vacuum. Government may be in some ways fundamentally evil, but it is the bulwark that our societies build against even more evil (private and unaccountable) entities filling that niche. Taking government away will not stop power from being exercised; all it will do is ensure that the people of the land have no protections against that power.
Not sure you can improve on their games.
Oh, I don't mean from a gamer's point of view - I mean from a success point of view.
They've got psychologists and artists who know cute better than the lolcats folks; they understand exactly how to get the little rats to pull the Skinner Box levers.
Which is why to them the actual "content" of the game doesn't matter; it's all about eye candy, about turning stripping absolutely everything except the achievements of other games, throwing in uber cute eye candy, then adding a time factor, then allowing you to buy your time back for real world money.
When viewed that way, there is nothing to improve - they have the absolute pure, distilled version of the crack that they sell already.
It's because our legal system allows multiple inheritance...
Simple black and white worldview horseshit.
There are more libertarians here than there are at a Tea Party rally. And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression. And it's about draconian, unworkable solutions that will only stifle freedom of expression, innovation and open communication without censorship.
Techniques like dns blocking, holding a repository site responsible for every single client's actions, enforcing search engine censorship simply won't stop piracy. But it will build a framework to further stifle freedom of expression on the web, and to enhance mega corporation and government control.
You are attempting to paint those who are for an open internet in simplistic black and white terms, to impose a simpleton's view on others.
A cookie that I'm sure security agencies will love to scan for.
In a way, yes.
Because that way, the evil would be dragged out into the light, and not allowed to hide behind Google.
Facebook has one of the biggest distributed computing problems in the history of... well, computing.
Between development, server farms, etc - I doubt that they'd be the company that they are without that level of reinvestment.
And if they cut those costs (as I'm sure that many of the new shareholders will want to see), they'll shoot themselves in the foot.
Bezos was wise not to allow the shareholders to demand a lower burn rate with Amazon. If they hadn't and didn't keep reinvesting into the platform, they'd not have the niche they have today. Same applies to FB.
There goes all of your oh-so-valued privacy at Facebook, now that they've got stockholders to answer to.
Except... for his closing remarks in the article:
Certainly patent law always favors the plaintiff, which is Microsoft in this scenario. And we knew that this was an uphill fight for Barnes & Noble anyway, given the tilt against what you and I would consider fairness in both patent and antitrust law. Patent misuse defenses are hard to win. But I seriously doubt this is the end of the story. Barnes & Noble has some of the finest law firms defending it, and law firms of that calibre don't just lay down and die when there is an adverse ruling.
Which translates to:
Barnes & Noble are basically screwed because that's what the law says. But they pay a lot of money to high priced lawyers, who will keep this thing going in the legal system for at least a few more years. Yeah, the law sucks - but hey! At least the lawyers will profit. After that, Microsoft will probably win.
What do facts matter when one can go with an ad hominem approach?
... and it's not a tax.
Rather, Microsoft is a medieval style guild, and they collect dues from any who would practice their trade. If you don't pay, they come and burn down our house.
And it goes way, way deeper than any "shortcuts". To put it another way, if we were talking about mechanical and structural engineering, not only would MS hold the rights to be the sole bridge builders in the land, but the very concept of a device or structure to facilitate the crossing of a body of water would be theirs. They'd own the rights to cables, supports, bolts; not only to steel but to alloys in general.
With our technology, there is nothing that doesn't stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before at this point. We should still be in a rapid development cycle, spinning upward. Instead, we squabble over who gets to build anything at all.
And eventually, we're going to absolutely destroy American technological innovation. First, by making it impossible for most everyone but the established players to build anything at all. And by doing so, we will lay the groundwork for the first other nation to surpass us to absolutely ensure that we are subject to the very idiotic laws that we are using to choke our own innovation.
The OUII basically concluded that even if all of what Barnes & Noble said about Microsoft's use of patents against Android was accurate, it would fall far short of the legal requirements for a patent misuse defense. For example, Barnes & Noble claimed that Microsoft asked for excessively high patent license fees, but the OUII quoted passages from U.S. law (statutory as well as case law) that clearly said that patent law doesn't require a patent holder to grant a license on any terms.
So, basically, it was game over before it got started.
It's not about creation anymore.
It's all about owning segments of possible creation.
And those have been mostly divvied up, given the ridiculously broad areas of thought and ideas that we allow to be patented.
Disagree.
In fact, I'd actually say that the terms engineer and hacker are somewhat orthogonal.
How much of a hacker someone is is a matter of passion.
How much of an engineer someone is is a matter of discipline.
I pride myself on being an engineer. And I absolutely love my work.
I coded professionally for years before I got my degree. But it took time, and a certain amount of formal training, to truly mature into an engineer.
These days, I play with some pretty big toys. And there most certainly is a part of me that's still a hacker. But that part is very much directed and disciplined by the engineer part of me.
As a result, I still get the joy of building things - at the code level, and at the architect level. The discipline allows me to build great things, not just toy projects, which is all that the undirected, undisciplined hacker will ever build.
Because I'm willing to learn (to read those manuals, and pay my dues), I've worked on everything from embedded to massive distributed systems.
Being an engineer and a hacker don't have to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps not all engineers have the drive and passion to be a hacker; perhaps not all hackers have what it takes to acquire the discipline of being an engineer. But those who can be both get to play with the biggest toys, get to work on the neatest problems, and, honestly, make the most money at the end of the day.
It's all about time and experience.
As long as you know that growth is possible, and worth striving for, and keep that as part of your outlook, the maturity will take care of itself.
You and I will be up against the wall long before then.
Joe Sixpack may be the lucky one. He'll still have his big game, Jersey Shore and his cheap beer. That's what Soma passes for these days.
Just for the record, Megadeath really doesn't write satanic music; though they're speed/death metal, Dave Mustang tends (mostly) to sing about the grim, self imposed fate of Mankind, and how stupid and evil we are to each other.
I think that you were thinking of Slayer...
You could always go back...
Just special chair cushions.