Your circular argument is a strawman. The only person I have ever heard utter that unbelievably innane rationale is you.
Even worse, you say that people who break immigration laws are not criminals because they only break immigration laws. That is like saying "I am not a criminal for importing drugs to the US because it is legal in the country I am from." Sovereignty means that when you make laws and they are binding. Contradicting this displays anarchistic tendencies that have no place in a republic like this. (In other words if you don't like the laws that our elected officials have made change them by electing new officials) Denying they exist is irrelevant and disingenuous.
Our government and society is based on respect for the law. An illegal immigrant's very first overture to our entire cultural basis is to violate our laws. Therefore, those individuals are by nature hostile to the basic structure of our country. You can easily see the fruits of this mentality by the number of illegal immigrants that are in prison for violent crimes, human and drug trafficking, sexually deviant crimes, and DUI/DWI. Of course it would be ludicrous to say that all illegal immigrants are bad people, however it is also naive to say that there are not huge social problems caused by the people that come into the US illegally.
Immigration laws are not designed to just "keep people out." They are created in an attempt to regulate the influences on our country that we internalize and to prevent the exploitation of those who enter. That reminds me of one of Hillary Clinton's speeches where she acknowledged illegal immigrants and their signifigance to the US economy by listing all the professions that you usually associate with illegal immigrants; House cleaners, restaurant workers, etc. For me, this was a horrible back handed compliment because it seemed to say that we allow illegal immigrants to occupy those positions because that is all they can be. I beg to differ. Consider: There is a gentelman I know that comes by about twice a week to sell pizzas to the businesses in my area. He is quite nice and we talk when I have the time. He is an illegal immigrant who has had alot of trouble trying to get documents. Even more interesting, he is a licensed pharmacist in his home country. Why is he, an educated man with vast quantities of untapped potential, forced to work in a prefession just because they will pay him in cash? Whose fault is this?
Rational people know that each individual is responsible for their own actions. However, there is much that the US can do to alleviate the problems that arise due to the uncontrolled nature of illegal immigration. Unfortunately, this would require our politicians to acknowledge the size of the problem and additionally that it needs to be solved.
I don't take issue with your stance about human rights. The human rights of immigrants are important. Letting them come here illegally opens them up to exploitation from a number of sources that will infringe on or destroy their human rights. Just because they are exploited "less" here than there were in their own country doesn't make it any better. Additionally, you forget that the people who live in the US have the basic human right to make and enforce laws within their sovereign country. The laws you scoff at are necessary for both reasons. Reconciling the two sides is a difficult problem that is not facilitated by your pie-in-the-sky dreams of open borders and unaccountable immigration.
How about the editors just give the dupes thier own thematic section. That way, insetad of hunting and searching for all your favorite dupes you could read them all on a single page.
Just think of it! You never have to read those boring new stories again! All of your favorite/. stuff from 1998 that you read in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004(someone definitely dropped the ball in 2003), 2004 (but they made up for it by posting it twice in 2004), 2004 (make that 3 times), 2005, 2006, and 2007!
Of course they would need a neat icon to go in the top right corner of the submission that would connote a dupe. I propose the yin/yang arrows more commonly recognized as the symbol for recycling.
"Our community rests on trust - trust that the people who say they are X are in fact X."
I beg to differ with you on this point, let me explain. Our community rests on the fact that it is a public community that anyone can contribute to, much like Wikipedia. Because of the constituents it is self balancing. For instance, if you say you are a professor of X and make a dumbassed/incorrect comment (whether in your area of expertise or not) there are a bunch of people here who will call you out with superior facts, figures, and examples. In addition, it doesn't matter if you or they are actual professors or not, it just matters who is right.
For me, the greatest strength in a community like this is the spirit of competetive geekiness and intellectual one-upmanship that led many of us to pursue careers in professions that most normal people will never begin to understand. That is the basis of a community like this one: a deep and abiding desire to know the whys and hows and to percieve how they interact correctly. Oh and to flame to cindery ashes anyone who dares to contradict the truth.
Seriously, knowing what you should know about anonymous communications, why would you ever take anyone's self professed knowledge and experience at face value? If anything, when I hear someone spout off their credentials in this forum it carnks up the sensitivity on my BS detector. In anonymous communications, never, ever consider the source. Consider the merits of the dialogue.
That aside, I do not agree with lying to people to give yourself a leg up. Far from it. I just disagree with your position that the community of an anonymous online forum is based on trust.
Then again I am scared to wear tinfoil hats because I think it is a government conspiracy. I am a cynical and suspicious bastard so it could just be me.
A short studty of cannonicity and the sources for all the texts of the Bible will reveal your statement to be erroneous. I am assuming you meant the council fo Treant (less than 1K yrs ago, but the closest thing I could think of that you were referring to) where the cannon of scripture was assembled. Fortunately assembling something does not erradicate the pieces of it or the antecedents of those pieces. Therefore, textural criticism and in depth study of the original works is still possible. Putting a bunch of books together into one does not equal creation and/or control.
In addition, there have been numerous discoveries of texts more antiquated than those the Catholics had available to them 1000 years ago. These are also available for study. Do the Catholics control these as well? Did they create these too, even though they predate the existance of this 1000 year old assemblage you refer to?
It is silly to say that they created something and can do whaterver they want with sit when it existed independently before and after the incident in question.
There are sociopaths, freaks, and evil men everywhere, religious or no. Impugning the character of those people is definitely not a bad thing. Their misdeeds need to be widely known so that things like those that you mention don't happen again. It would, however, also be remiss of you not to acknowledge the insanity of Cathoilics as well, as they had many hundereds of years to fuck up completely before the protestants were even on the scene. Holding back science, repressing freedom, torturing and killing innocnets, strangling governments, the list is virtually endless.
In addition, these goofballs that are calling the Wii a porn portal are due as much criticism as we can throw at them. Christianity has ideas concerning raising your children with certin principles that should preclude unsupervised hours in front of a video game, but I guess that is beside the point when you are trying to run everyone else's lives.
However, as a Christian what the Catholics do that does anger me is to deny the words of Christ. Christ said His work was sufficient for salvation. And yet the Catholics saw fit to introduce the extra-biblical idea of purgatory. The essence of purgatory is that what Christ did wasn't good enough to accomplish what He said it would. They call Christ a liar and a weakling. Not in those exact words, but by developing a doctrine that contradicts His words it is exactly what they are saying. If purgatory is real then Christ lied when he said that His work was sufficient for salvation and He was too weak to accomplish his goal. This is sickening blasphemy to someone like myself who studies the Bible and places his faith in the words of Christ therein.
For you non-Christians this probably seems silly. However, my contention has always been that if you decide to believe in a religion it is your responsibility to study it, understand it, and try to form your epistemological basis around it. Otherwise you are wagering your eternal salvation on something you don't even know or understand. To allow your church leader/leaders to insert something in to the cannon of the Bible or the doctrinal practice of your religion that is contradictory to the established and clearly stated tenents of the faith is the highest form of irresponsibility. At that point you become a group of people whith a set of beliefs that you choose arbitrarily and then give weight by claiming they are the words of God. You might as well go L. Ron Hubbard at that point. At least he had the dignity to start fresh rather than ursurp the station of the Bible to preach his wacky religion.
Catholicism contains doctrines that are by their very nature inimical to the stated words of the Bible and Christ Himself. And yet they hold up other parts of the Bible as inerrant and continue to place thir faith in a God (Christ) that they call a liar and a failure. Above all things that you can point fingers at, this I find the most abhorrent and vile.
For me, Star Trek was always about the future. I was cool with Star Trek as long as they stayed with that premise. Funny thing about it, now that they have charted the future history of that universe through Voyager and Deep Space 9 anything previous to that is about the *past* and not the *future*. I refer specifically to First Contact and to the Enterprise show. Can't stand either one of them. Sorry, I just can't.
Bring back the exploration, the mystery, the OMGWFT is that thing eating a planet and how do we stop it. Lets see the andromedans attack the federation along side some other extra galactic race. Wow me, be imaginitive, do something different, just stop making all the reruns that never were. And yes, I agree, filling in all those historical blanks just means that we will see the same old jokes and all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge references to stuff they already did the wink-wink to in a movie, and frankly, thats just tired.
Give me back the future. That's why people started watching Trek in the first place.
"In many hospitals there are strains of bacteria that have evolved antibiotics-resistance."
It may make perfect sense, however it is also obtuse. Additionally, I find it curious that one could make that statement as a scientist and use a word so broadly inclusive that there would be no way of knowing the mechanism of the presence of reisistance. It's like saying the surface of the sun is hot. It lacks a frame of reference and any semblance of precision. Was it a mutation? Was it the result of horisontal gene transfer? Was it the result of increased reproductive success? Maybe it was a combination of those factors. Unfortunately, the word evolution alone, in this context, does not suffice.
At the peril of ruining any small amount of humor in my post I will now explain my (sarcastic) joke.
Sexism is an intentional prejudicial or discriminatory practice or M.O. That a pronoun could posess this intention is ludicrous and yet one way to parse your sentence is that the pronoun itself is the sexist entity.
Therefore the pronoun "he" would be the subject of the charges. What charges? For sexism naturally. This in itsef is an exaggeration of the punishment for sexism (unless it is in the workplace) and exaggeration, as we all know, is a form of humor.
Also, interestingly enough, there are people who have already "prosecuted" the pronoun "he" by expurgating it from classical texts and re-releasing them in "gender-neutral" fashion.
In addition, the idea that the pronoun "he" is sexist in proper English usage is also similarly ludicrous as I am sure that people who use correct English are not filled with nasty misogynistic thoughts every time they refer to something as "he".
So, for me, that part of your comment was like an ironic double-entendre pun all in itself.
I will quietly sink back into my own psychotic thougths now.
I think you and I are alike in our appreciation of MMO's in that I really enjoy the immersion and enjoyment of developing my character, not just power-gaming. I have played EQ I&II, and now play WoW.
However I don't think that all people will enjoy the same things or even the same things in the same way.
As for not making sense, I was referring to (without mentioning the context) the fact that most MMO's do not allow players into high end content without many days of playing time, not to mention a having to have a group of high end players that will go with them. Not everyone is going to stay interested in a game for that long without ruining the game for themselves.
Those people paid the same for the game as you and I. They pay the same for the monthly fees that you and I do. Maybe because of that they feel entitled to see the layout of Black Wing Lair, or to see how much ass Naxx kicks during that boss fight.
Again, I know better than to think that everyone looks for the same thing in a game. And while I am probably really close to the same as you when it comes to the aspects of the game I enjoy I can also see that other people look for other things in a game. The game manufacturer should try to find a way to accomodate those players that want to see high end content w/o putting in the time.
It would be cool to see a server that you could either transfer to or start a character on that you could buy the things you wanted with either game cash as usual or with real world cash. Of course this would be a one way destination for transfers and there would be no way to get out once in, just to keep it fair. In addition it would level the playing field for the people on the normal servers, eliminating farming by undercutting the prices and by also allowing people to buy their way to super-badassness, just not on the servers where hard working players reside.
You seem to be saying that if you made an online world tourism would be illegal.
That being said I can see the desire on someone's part to see all the fruits of the developers labors without having to dedicate 48 days of real time to leveling/gaining equipment, etc.
"Basically if someone looses money by an honest mistake "
Computers and software do not posess the ability to be honest or to dissemble.
The orders were processed and shipped by computers and software. We know this because no human would let 2 box sets of immense value leave the warehouse for $0.
Therefore there was no honest (or even dishonest) mistake.
Question: Has anyone speculated what would happen to a black hole that ran out of infalling material?
Could it eventually decay to the point of no longer being a black hole? If so, would the decaying black hole transition smoothly into another state or would Bad Things happen?
Actually, Creationism and even God, is disprovable.
The experiment runs the entirety of your lifetime. All of your experiences and thoughts contribute to your particular hypothesis. The only problem is the results come in just after you die.
"I'll tell you which one of those commercials bugged me. Actually, they all bug me, they insult my intelligence, and I want to punch the metrosexual anthropomorphic Mac right in his smug faggy little trendy mczippershirt ironically-listens-to-duran-duran face, but I digress.."
That has got to be one of the best things I have ever read!
Thanks to the nifty Apple/PC personified commercials I now know that all Apples come with an integrated video camera right in the monitor.
Well thats just fucking nifty. Maybe I am just paranoid, but having a video camera trained on me whenever I use the computer is disquieting.
I definitely don't need some snazzy Appl-ey hacker writing some code that lets remote useres watch me get all pissed off when I PK'ed playing WoW. And in my more intimate moments I already have to contend with ceiling cat.
Thanks, but no thanks. I read 1984 and it was a little bleak for me.
The scary thing? 4 Billion per year is nothing for the government budget to handle. If the law passes and costs go up things could get really bad.
I can hear the oration now:
"This fight against Terrorism and Child Porn (Congressmen talk in caps sometimes) is creating a huge burden on the communications industry. Costs have skyrocketed. We must act now to relieve the economic pressures from our consumers.
Therefore we propose the Subsidised Communicationm Affordability Measure (SCAM) wherein we, Your Government, will supply not only the funding but also the hardware for handling the logging of all internet traffic, phone communications, and email for every person in the USA. We will even store this information indefinitely in secret locations where it is safe from Terrorists."
Sounds reasonable, right? Don't think that your parents and grandparents wouldn't vote for it. Internet addicted geriatrics on a fixed income are a powerful voting block.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with the effects of having your employees stay up for 3 days straight to finish a project.
Rinse and repeat 3-4 times a quarter for a few years and you burn your employees out by the time they are 30.
Your circular argument is a strawman. The only person I have ever heard utter that unbelievably innane rationale is you.
Even worse, you say that people who break immigration laws are not criminals because they only break immigration laws. That is like saying "I am not a criminal for importing drugs to the US because it is legal in the country I am from." Sovereignty means that when you make laws and they are binding. Contradicting this displays anarchistic tendencies that have no place in a republic like this. (In other words if you don't like the laws that our elected officials have made change them by electing new officials) Denying they exist is irrelevant and disingenuous.
Our government and society is based on respect for the law. An illegal immigrant's very first overture to our entire cultural basis is to violate our laws. Therefore, those individuals are by nature hostile to the basic structure of our country. You can easily see the fruits of this mentality by the number of illegal immigrants that are in prison for violent crimes, human and drug trafficking, sexually deviant crimes, and DUI/DWI. Of course it would be ludicrous to say that all illegal immigrants are bad people, however it is also naive to say that there are not huge social problems caused by the people that come into the US illegally.
Immigration laws are not designed to just "keep people out." They are created in an attempt to regulate the influences on our country that we internalize and to prevent the exploitation of those who enter. That reminds me of one of Hillary Clinton's speeches where she acknowledged illegal immigrants and their signifigance to the US economy by listing all the professions that you usually associate with illegal immigrants; House cleaners, restaurant workers, etc. For me, this was a horrible back handed compliment because it seemed to say that we allow illegal immigrants to occupy those positions because that is all they can be. I beg to differ. Consider: There is a gentelman I know that comes by about twice a week to sell pizzas to the businesses in my area. He is quite nice and we talk when I have the time. He is an illegal immigrant who has had alot of trouble trying to get documents. Even more interesting, he is a licensed pharmacist in his home country. Why is he, an educated man with vast quantities of untapped potential, forced to work in a prefession just because they will pay him in cash? Whose fault is this?
Rational people know that each individual is responsible for their own actions. However, there is much that the US can do to alleviate the problems that arise due to the uncontrolled nature of illegal immigration. Unfortunately, this would require our politicians to acknowledge the size of the problem and additionally that it needs to be solved.
I don't take issue with your stance about human rights. The human rights of immigrants are important. Letting them come here illegally opens them up to exploitation from a number of sources that will infringe on or destroy their human rights. Just because they are exploited "less" here than there were in their own country doesn't make it any better. Additionally, you forget that the people who live in the US have the basic human right to make and enforce laws within their sovereign country. The laws you scoff at are necessary for both reasons. Reconciling the two sides is a difficult problem that is not facilitated by your pie-in-the-sky dreams of open borders and unaccountable immigration.
"...but I guarentee you that your family isn't going to love the sacrifices they'd have to make if you changed careers."
What family? Stress from financial problems is listed as one of the leading causes of divorce in the US.
In a strange reversal, I sometimes notice the conspicuous absence of "danger music" when I am driving too fast or shoplifting.
How about the editors just give the dupes thier own thematic section. That way, insetad of hunting and searching for all your favorite dupes you could read them all on a single page.
/. stuff from 1998 that you read in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004(someone definitely dropped the ball in 2003), 2004 (but they made up for it by posting it twice in 2004), 2004 (make that 3 times), 2005, 2006, and 2007!
Just think of it! You never have to read those boring new stories again! All of your favorite
Of course they would need a neat icon to go in the top right corner of the submission that would connote a dupe. I propose the yin/yang arrows more commonly recognized as the symbol for recycling.
"Our community rests on trust - trust that the people who say they are X are in fact X."
I beg to differ with you on this point, let me explain. Our community rests on the fact that it is a public community that anyone can contribute to, much like Wikipedia. Because of the constituents it is self balancing. For instance, if you say you are a professor of X and make a dumbassed/incorrect comment (whether in your area of expertise or not) there are a bunch of people here who will call you out with superior facts, figures, and examples. In addition, it doesn't matter if you or they are actual professors or not, it just matters who is right.
For me, the greatest strength in a community like this is the spirit of competetive geekiness and intellectual one-upmanship that led many of us to pursue careers in professions that most normal people will never begin to understand. That is the basis of a community like this one: a deep and abiding desire to know the whys and hows and to percieve how they interact correctly. Oh and to flame to cindery ashes anyone who dares to contradict the truth.
Seriously, knowing what you should know about anonymous communications, why would you ever take anyone's self professed knowledge and experience at face value? If anything, when I hear someone spout off their credentials in this forum it carnks up the sensitivity on my BS detector. In anonymous communications, never, ever consider the source. Consider the merits of the dialogue.
That aside, I do not agree with lying to people to give yourself a leg up. Far from it. I just disagree with your position that the community of an anonymous online forum is based on trust.
Then again I am scared to wear tinfoil hats because I think it is a government conspiracy. I am a cynical and suspicious bastard so it could just be me.
A short studty of cannonicity and the sources for all the texts of the Bible will reveal your statement to be erroneous. I am assuming you meant the council fo Treant (less than 1K yrs ago, but the closest thing I could think of that you were referring to) where the cannon of scripture was assembled. Fortunately assembling something does not erradicate the pieces of it or the antecedents of those pieces. Therefore, textural criticism and in depth study of the original works is still possible. Putting a bunch of books together into one does not equal creation and/or control.
In addition, there have been numerous discoveries of texts more antiquated than those the Catholics had available to them 1000 years ago. These are also available for study. Do the Catholics control these as well? Did they create these too, even though they predate the existance of this 1000 year old assemblage you refer to?
It is silly to say that they created something and can do whaterver they want with sit when it existed independently before and after the incident in question.
"I mean... AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"
The really scary part is when you hear the echo...
There are sociopaths, freaks, and evil men everywhere, religious or no. Impugning the character of those people is definitely not a bad thing. Their misdeeds need to be widely known so that things like those that you mention don't happen again. It would, however, also be remiss of you not to acknowledge the insanity of Cathoilics as well, as they had many hundereds of years to fuck up completely before the protestants were even on the scene. Holding back science, repressing freedom, torturing and killing innocnets, strangling governments, the list is virtually endless.
In addition, these goofballs that are calling the Wii a porn portal are due as much criticism as we can throw at them. Christianity has ideas concerning raising your children with certin principles that should preclude unsupervised hours in front of a video game, but I guess that is beside the point when you are trying to run everyone else's lives.
However, as a Christian what the Catholics do that does anger me is to deny the words of Christ. Christ said His work was sufficient for salvation. And yet the Catholics saw fit to introduce the extra-biblical idea of purgatory. The essence of purgatory is that what Christ did wasn't good enough to accomplish what He said it would. They call Christ a liar and a weakling. Not in those exact words, but by developing a doctrine that contradicts His words it is exactly what they are saying. If purgatory is real then Christ lied when he said that His work was sufficient for salvation and He was too weak to accomplish his goal. This is sickening blasphemy to someone like myself who studies the Bible and places his faith in the words of Christ therein.
For you non-Christians this probably seems silly. However, my contention has always been that if you decide to believe in a religion it is your responsibility to study it, understand it, and try to form your epistemological basis around it. Otherwise you are wagering your eternal salvation on something you don't even know or understand. To allow your church leader/leaders to insert something in to the cannon of the Bible or the doctrinal practice of your religion that is contradictory to the established and clearly stated tenents of the faith is the highest form of irresponsibility. At that point you become a group of people whith a set of beliefs that you choose arbitrarily and then give weight by claiming they are the words of God. You might as well go L. Ron Hubbard at that point. At least he had the dignity to start fresh rather than ursurp the station of the Bible to preach his wacky religion.
Catholicism contains doctrines that are by their very nature inimical to the stated words of the Bible and Christ Himself. And yet they hold up other parts of the Bible as inerrant and continue to place thir faith in a God (Christ) that they call a liar and a failure. Above all things that you can point fingers at, this I find the most abhorrent and vile.
For me, Star Trek was always about the future. I was cool with Star Trek as long as they stayed with that premise. Funny thing about it, now that they have charted the future history of that universe through Voyager and Deep Space 9 anything previous to that is about the *past* and not the *future*. I refer specifically to First Contact and to the Enterprise show. Can't stand either one of them. Sorry, I just can't.
Bring back the exploration, the mystery, the OMGWFT is that thing eating a planet and how do we stop it. Lets see the andromedans attack the federation along side some other extra galactic race. Wow me, be imaginitive, do something different, just stop making all the reruns that never were. And yes, I agree, filling in all those historical blanks just means that we will see the same old jokes and all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge references to stuff they already did the wink-wink to in a movie, and frankly, thats just tired.
Give me back the future. That's why people started watching Trek in the first place.
"In many hospitals there are strains of bacteria that have evolved antibiotics-resistance."
It may make perfect sense, however it is also obtuse. Additionally, I find it curious that one could make that statement as a scientist and use a word so broadly inclusive that there would be no way of knowing the mechanism of the presence of reisistance. It's like saying the surface of the sun is hot. It lacks a frame of reference and any semblance of precision. Was it a mutation? Was it the result of horisontal gene transfer? Was it the result of increased reproductive success? Maybe it was a combination of those factors. Unfortunately, the word evolution alone, in this context, does not suffice.
Good news: The nuke that was incoming to the Super Bowl was successfully destroyed by our new laser missile defense system.
Bad news: Due to an errant piece of tinfoil attached to the incoming nuke, no one in the stadium got to watch the second half.
At the peril of ruining any small amount of humor in my post I will now explain my (sarcastic) joke.
Sexism is an intentional prejudicial or discriminatory practice or M.O. That a pronoun could posess this intention is ludicrous and yet one way to parse your sentence is that the pronoun itself is the sexist entity.
Therefore the pronoun "he" would be the subject of the charges. What charges? For sexism naturally. This in itsef is an exaggeration of the punishment for sexism (unless it is in the workplace) and exaggeration, as we all know, is a form of humor.
Also, interestingly enough, there are people who have already "prosecuted" the pronoun "he" by expurgating it from classical texts and re-releasing them in "gender-neutral" fashion.
In addition, the idea that the pronoun "he" is sexist in proper English usage is also similarly ludicrous as I am sure that people who use correct English are not filled with nasty misogynistic thoughts every time they refer to something as "he".
So, for me, that part of your comment was like an ironic double-entendre pun all in itself.
I will quietly sink back into my own psychotic thougths now.
"...the sexist "he"..."
Charges should be brought immediately.
I think you and I are alike in our appreciation of MMO's in that I really enjoy the immersion and enjoyment of developing my character, not just power-gaming. I have played EQ I&II, and now play WoW.
However I don't think that all people will enjoy the same things or even the same things in the same way.
As for not making sense, I was referring to (without mentioning the context) the fact that most MMO's do not allow players into high end content without many days of playing time, not to mention a having to have a group of high end players that will go with them. Not everyone is going to stay interested in a game for that long without ruining the game for themselves.
Those people paid the same for the game as you and I. They pay the same for the monthly fees that you and I do. Maybe because of that they feel entitled to see the layout of Black Wing Lair, or to see how much ass Naxx kicks during that boss fight.
Again, I know better than to think that everyone looks for the same thing in a game. And while I am probably really close to the same as you when it comes to the aspects of the game I enjoy I can also see that other people look for other things in a game. The game manufacturer should try to find a way to accomodate those players that want to see high end content w/o putting in the time.
It would be cool to see a server that you could either transfer to or start a character on that you could buy the things you wanted with either game cash as usual or with real world cash. Of course this would be a one way destination for transfers and there would be no way to get out once in, just to keep it fair. In addition it would level the playing field for the people on the normal servers, eliminating farming by undercutting the prices and by also allowing people to buy their way to super-badassness, just not on the servers where hard working players reside.
You seem to be saying that if you made an online world tourism would be illegal.
That being said I can see the desire on someone's part to see all the fruits of the developers labors without having to dedicate 48 days of real time to leveling/gaining equipment, etc.
"Basically if someone looses money by an honest mistake "
Computers and software do not posess the ability to be honest or to dissemble.
The orders were processed and shipped by computers and software. We know this because no human would let 2 box sets of immense value leave the warehouse for $0.
Therefore there was no honest (or even dishonest) mistake.
Can I be a lawyer now?
Question: Has anyone speculated what would happen to a black hole that ran out of infalling material?
Could it eventually decay to the point of no longer being a black hole? If so, would the decaying black hole transition smoothly into another state or would Bad Things happen?
Actually, Creationism and even God, is disprovable.
The experiment runs the entirety of your lifetime. All of your experiences and thoughts contribute to your particular hypothesis. The only problem is the results come in just after you die.
OMG its an Apple! Do you have any idea WTF you are saying?!?!
Steve Jobs himself would come to your house and tickle fight you to death if you dared to put tape on his perfect machine.
And no, I wasn't serious. I would never buy an Apple in the first place.
"I'll tell you which one of those commercials bugged me. Actually, they all bug me, they insult my intelligence, and I want to punch the metrosexual anthropomorphic Mac right in his smug faggy little trendy mczippershirt ironically-listens-to-duran-duran face, but I digress.."
That has got to be one of the best things I have ever read!
I salute you sir.
Quoth myself: "And in my more intimate moments I already have to contend with ceiling cat."
To be explicitly blunt: http://ceilingcat.com/
Cheers!
Thanks to the nifty Apple/PC personified commercials I now know that all Apples come with an integrated video camera right in the monitor.
Well thats just fucking nifty. Maybe I am just paranoid, but having a video camera trained on me whenever I use the computer is disquieting.
I definitely don't need some snazzy Appl-ey hacker writing some code that lets remote useres watch me get all pissed off when I PK'ed playing WoW. And in my more intimate moments I already have to contend with ceiling cat.
Thanks, but no thanks. I read 1984 and it was a little bleak for me.
The scary thing? 4 Billion per year is nothing for the government budget to handle. If the law passes and costs go up things could get really bad.
I can hear the oration now:
"This fight against Terrorism and Child Porn (Congressmen talk in caps sometimes) is creating a huge burden on the communications industry. Costs have skyrocketed. We must act now to relieve the economic pressures from our consumers.
Therefore we propose the Subsidised Communicationm Affordability Measure (SCAM) wherein we, Your Government, will supply not only the funding but also the hardware for handling the logging of all internet traffic, phone communications, and email for every person in the USA. We will even store this information indefinitely in secret locations where it is safe from Terrorists."
Sounds reasonable, right? Don't think that your parents and grandparents wouldn't vote for it. Internet addicted geriatrics on a fixed income are a powerful voting block.