"Your honor, we present this genetic analysis of the defendant's grain crop. If I may direct the court's attention to this particular DNA sequence? This is an intron -- a non-functional section of DNA -- specifically inserted by Monsanto. Using the following encoding system, the base sequence of the intron codes for the string "Patent 12,343,253 Monsanto Corp. 2015". As the defendant has not bought seed from Monsanto for five years, he would not have been able to harvest our patented strain of grain unless he had retained grain from previous harvests to replant, which is a direct violation of the contract he signed when he last purchased Monsanto seed grain."
The data collection will allow them to 'high-grade' parking meters by demand -- set lower maximum times for areas where they either want more turnover or a greater likelihood that the meter will expire before the driver gets back, allowing more ticketing.
And I would not put it past the design to incorporate the capability to alter the cost 'on the fly', raising the parking rates during peak times or when there is an event that's going to draw lots of people.
I'm all for the 24-hour clock, although I doubt we'll be saying "X at sixteen hundred hours" like the military any time soon.
Better 'sixteen hundred' than, say, 'six bells of the forenoon watch'.
What bothers me, though, is event calendaring.
If a movie theater runs a sneak preview of a movie at 00.30 on Friday, what does that mean? Are they saying it's in the night of Thursday on Friday at half past midnight? Or is it the night of Friday on Saturday at half past midnight?
At 0000 (or 2400, depending on how you want to define your endpoints) the day changes. 0030 on Friday is the morning of Friday, 30 minutes after midnight, which is the start of the day. There is no ambiguity. "O-dark-thirty Friday morning" is still Friday.
You call meetings using a position on a clock face, not where exactly where the sun is.
Actually, you do. Take an old-style clock -- one that has hands, not a digital clock. Point the hour hand at the sun. If you're north of the equator, halfway between the hour hand and 12 is due south (if you're south of the equator, it's due north). So by specifying the time of a meeting, you're also specifying where the sun will be.
Go back and read the PDF. It says nothing about the quality or accuracy of his research; the investigation concluded that Mann did not do anything improper with NSF funding, and that because there was no direct evidence that he had done anything improper, the investigation was closed. It says nothing about the accuracy of his data or provide any corroboration of his conclusions, and anyone who takes the results of the investigation as providing any kind of endorsement of the conclusions Mann presents is deluding themselves.
"The police face dangerous people every day, and need to be able to respond to percieved threats accordingly. Enforcing more strict controls over police escallation of violence places our public servants (The people who protect us from violent offenders) at risk. You dont want to be responsible for letting criminals run loose because you prevented the police from reacting, do you?"
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance." If the police aren't doing anything wrong, then they should have no objection to their actions being recorded. It's the same argument that law enforcement agencies keep trying to shove down our throats, and objecting when it gets turned around so that they're the ones with the cameras pointed at them just reveals the depth of their hypocrisy.
Based on conversations I've had with the developers from NCSoft, it has nothing to do with the game as DRM, and everything to do with the market, and the way that Blizzard has chosen to implement the protection is straight out of the MMO developer's bible -- "don't trust the client". Anything stored in the client can and will be hacked by end users, so in any game where a character's stats advance or there can be an exchange of in-game items for in-game or real currency, any changes to a character or their inventory have to be stored on the central server, where the end user's can't open up the data files on their local computer and dupe a dozen copies of the epic weapon that they were lucky enough to get in a drop, or grovel through the game data for item indexes and give themselves one of every top-tier item in the game.
In a stand-alone game, the user can hack the game to their heart's content, and it doesn't affect anyone else; having your friend next door hack his copy of "ForeverQuest" so that he's got the best armor and weapons doesn't change the game for you. Having someone be able to hack the copy of Diablo 3 on their PC, then sell a million copies of the best armor and weapons on the market screws with everyone's game. So stat and inventory data have to reside on a central server. And because a player's stats and inventory can be hacked while the game is running, you can't just get a download from the server when you open the game, then play the game offline and send any changes back up to the server at the end of your session; there has to be an ongoing dialog between the server and the client to make sure that you're not fabbing gear out of nowhere. Now, Blizzard could have set up offline play as a sandbox -- you get the download of your character's stats and gear when you start up, then you play without needing an active connection, but nothing that happens to your character persists past that session; when you start up the game again, your character gets downloaded from the server again, and your entire offline session was just a dream. But I don't think that's going to be acceptable to players.
A requirement for an always-on connection may be annoying to most, and deal-breaking for some, but it's the only way that having an online market for items is going to be able to work unless you're willing to surrender a lot of control over your computer to 'big brother' processes that ensure that you don't modify local data files -- and how many separate rootkits are you willing to put up with just to not have an internet connection live when you play your market-enabled games?
You will notice that, in their demo videos, we're being shown views of thousands or millions of the same objects, and even in the parts where they're showing objects rendered with a texture, the textures look to be very small or simple, so that the data behind the scene can compress very efficiently.
I would be more impressed if they were to do a technology demonstration by, say, taking the source to Doom and applying their 'Unlimited Detail' technology to the level rendering and re-doing the textures, then releasing a level or two as a walkthrough to show it off live. Certainly making Doom look better is a sufficiently low bar to hurdle.
"Internet connection required" doesn't tell you whether the game requires an Internet connection to a) register the product before it will complete the install (i.e., verifying that the product key you're putting in hasn't been used before), b) register the product after install, which unlocks the product (a and b being both one-time requirements), or c) dial home each time you start the program to see whether the software company wants to let you use the product this time, or d) periodically pings the software company while you're using the product to make sure that they haven't decided to take it away from you, and assumes that they've revoked your license if it can't connect. The first two are reasonable; I have no problem with the product calling the company once to make sure that I'm installing a legal copy of the product. The other two aren't; having the company assume that I'm pirating their product unless and until I prove otherwise each time I use their product, or having to repeatedly offer the same proof as I use the product is insulting.
It may be considered a split hair in Massachusetts, but it's a fact of life on family farms -- you don't need a driver's license to operate farm machinery like tractors on private property, which is why you'll still see children too young to get a driver's license out on the family tractor harrowing a field.
Consider what a 'split hair' it is that motor vehicles operated on private property also are not required to comply with licensing, emissions, or safety laws, which is how the entire automobile racing industry avoids being saddled with equipment that would cripple the industry (Formula 1 cars required to have collision-rated bumpers, air bags, and meet fuel-economy standards, for example).
However, I would be willing to bet that a clever enough lawyer would be able to make a case that, as the state has declared that driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right, and that it can arbitrarily deny that privilege without cause, once the state has denied you that privilege, you are no longer obligated to pay for their upkeep. It would die in the courts, but it would be fun to watch.
There are still those here who will say that it's hyperbole, but the same tipping point is approaching here. Our real rulers (hint: neither political party, but those behind both) are getting nervous and moving to keep their grip on our society. They have perpetrated the most massive theft in the history of mankind, absconding with trillions of dollars of our money, selling our children into a lifetime of debt servitude while theirs party on; they know it, and we know it, and they're starting to realize that we know it too.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." -- Thomas Jefferson
The emphasis is mine. It is interesting that this quote is most often seen cut off after 'patriots'. Who might have a vested interest in seeing that the public stops thinking of rulers being made to pay for growing oppressive?
Sadly, I don't think there are enough tinkerers around anymore to make such a store profitable. We are relatively few and far between, much too scattered to make such a place viable... people would have to travel too far to get there.
Integrated circuits were the death of the electronics tinkerer, and smart projects using Arduinos and other low-powered processors haven't brought them back in anywhere the same numbers, likely because of the perceived learning cliff of becoming a 'computer programmer'.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line", 1939
While the intended console port was a limiting factor, I think by far the biggest problem was their being made by Cryptic. In fact by the original guys who couldn't even do the maths to see that a "situational" power could be made to stack with itself twice over at level 22, in COH, or produced balance swings so extreme as to go from City Of Blasters (a devices blaster could floor any enemy's accuracy) to City Of Tankers (tanks became basically invulnerable even to hundreds of enemies at a time.) COH has in the meantime been mostly fixed by Positron (in as much as possible without pulling a Sony-style NGE and ripping out the existing game's core), but Statesman and a good chunk of the gang of innumerates responsible for the COH fuckups went on to make CO.
Most of the unrelenting bullheadedness in the early enhancement of CoH revolved around the fact that Statesman had absolute control over the direction the game took, and many of the core structures of the game were predicated on what he liked when playing video games. For example, it was supposed to be 'fun' to come up against the end boss in a mission and fail. Over and over again. Until you found a tactic that worked if you did everything just right. And he got bent out of shape at the idea that players would post tactics that worked on the Net for others to read about; apparently everyone was supposed to fail over and over again until each of them -- separately, without any help from anyone else -- found something that worked. And while CO is a lot 'prettier' than CoH was at the same point after release, I don't see that the "it's my ball, so you're going to play the way I want, because that's the right way to have fun" attitude has changed much.
With some allowance for the media involved, Kenneth Cole's "twitvert" can probably be traced back in concept to the "blipverts" used by Zik Zak in 'Max Headroom'.
It's time for big business to realize that capitalism does not require anyone to give you money for your offerings.
And it brings to mind a quote from Robert Heinlein's story "Life-Line":
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
They are enforcing the original rules, which is that if you make an app that has a notion of in-app purchasing--you have to offer the content via Apple's in-app purchasing model, although you are free to offer the user the choice of two models and there's nothing that says they have to be the same price as far as I know.
Pardon? Go back and read the article; Apple is requiring that, if an app developer sells e-books outside the app, they must also sell the e-books inside the app, and all such in-app sales must go through Apple, which will graciously only charge 30% of the sale price for the privilege of being forced to sell through them.
Have you ever watched video of a bola being used to take down game? The weights at the ends of the cords whip around at increasing speed as they wind around the legs of the target. The average orbital velocity of Apophis is 30 kilometers a second, so that's the relative speed between the probes and Apophis when it hits the cables. If you ever played tetherball as a kid, you'll remember that the ball speeds up as it winds in to the pole, so the probes might well double the initial relative velocity by the time of impact; rather than "providing observations for a long time", what you'd be doing is performing the experiment "What happens when we hit Apophis with three probes at a relative velocity of 100,000 miles per hour?" That is, of course, assuming that you managed to produce a cable strong enough that it doesn't break on contact, and the acceleration as the probes wind in doesn't exceed their design limits.
It's interesting to note, though, that Obama talked about how high-speed rail would allow you to travel "without the pat-downs". I would have expected that he would be in the loop about the TSA's desire to extend airport-style screening to both rail and bus terminals, or that they've alreadycarriedout pilot tests doing just that. It makes the President look as if he's losing control when he doesn't appear to be aware what his own administration is doing.
The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
And because the 'market' for live sporting events isn't interested in watching them via time-delayed recording or DVD. The attraction is seeing it happen in front of you, not watching a game or match that happened a week ago whose results have been analyzed to death on the news and elsewhere.
For religious functionaries, sure, the options would be something like that. Just 'decide' what dogma is correct, throw out whatever doesnt fit, and go with it - that's what priests do.
With the way the issue has turned into a religious war, I'm reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon of a man brought before an inquisition, parodying the original caption as "You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about global climate change." (the original was 'weight loss')
So instead of lifting the mouse that you are holding in your hand -- while still being able to hold the mouse buttons down -- you have to pick the baton up out of the trough it's in, move it to the right, and drop it back into the trough. Having released any of the four buttons you had been pressing to do so, unless you were to use your other hand, defeating the purpose of having a pointing device you can use with one hand while your other hand was pressing keys on the keyboard.
Not to mention that, as it's displayed in the picture, the buttons are closer to you than the side-to-side slider, which makes using both it and the buttons at the same time problematic. With a mouse, I can hold both the left and right buttons down with my first two fingers and move the mouse in whatever direction, picking it up to shift it back if I reach the edge of my mousepad; with the ErgoSlider, I've got two fingers pressing buttons on either side of the vertical slider, a third finger on the vertical slider, and a fourth finger on the side-to-side slider, and I'll have to either use my left hand or twist my right up into a pretzel to lift the baton out of the trough with my thumb and whatever finger I was using on the baton in order to move it back to the middle or other side when I reach the end. Good luck on being able to coordinate all that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Your honor, we present this genetic analysis of the defendant's grain crop. If I may direct the court's attention to this particular DNA sequence? This is an intron -- a non-functional section of DNA -- specifically inserted by Monsanto. Using the following encoding system, the base sequence of the intron codes for the string "Patent 12,343,253 Monsanto Corp. 2015". As the defendant has not bought seed from Monsanto for five years, he would not have been able to harvest our patented strain of grain unless he had retained grain from previous harvests to replant, which is a direct violation of the contract he signed when he last purchased Monsanto seed grain."
The data collection will allow them to 'high-grade' parking meters by demand -- set lower maximum times for areas where they either want more turnover or a greater likelihood that the meter will expire before the driver gets back, allowing more ticketing.
And I would not put it past the design to incorporate the capability to alter the cost 'on the fly', raising the parking rates during peak times or when there is an event that's going to draw lots of people.
I'm all for the 24-hour clock, although I doubt we'll be saying "X at sixteen hundred hours" like the military any time soon.
Better 'sixteen hundred' than, say, 'six bells of the forenoon watch'.
What bothers me, though, is event calendaring.
If a movie theater runs a sneak preview of a movie at 00.30 on Friday, what does that mean? Are they saying it's in the night of Thursday on Friday at half past midnight? Or is it the night of Friday on Saturday at half past midnight?
At 0000 (or 2400, depending on how you want to define your endpoints) the day changes. 0030 on Friday is the morning of Friday, 30 minutes after midnight, which is the start of the day. There is no ambiguity. "O-dark-thirty Friday morning" is still Friday.
Actually, you do. Take an old-style clock -- one that has hands, not a digital clock. Point the hour hand at the sun. If you're north of the equator, halfway between the hour hand and 12 is due south (if you're south of the equator, it's due north). So by specifying the time of a meeting, you're also specifying where the sun will be.
Go back and read the PDF. It says nothing about the quality or accuracy of his research; the investigation concluded that Mann did not do anything improper with NSF funding, and that because there was no direct evidence that he had done anything improper, the investigation was closed. It says nothing about the accuracy of his data or provide any corroboration of his conclusions, and anyone who takes the results of the investigation as providing any kind of endorsement of the conclusions Mann presents is deluding themselves.
"The police face dangerous people every day, and need to be able to respond to percieved threats accordingly. Enforcing more strict controls over police escallation of violence places our public servants (The people who protect us from violent offenders) at risk. You dont want to be responsible for letting criminals run loose because you prevented the police from reacting, do you?"
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from surveillance." If the police aren't doing anything wrong, then they should have no objection to their actions being recorded. It's the same argument that law enforcement agencies keep trying to shove down our throats, and objecting when it gets turned around so that they're the ones with the cameras pointed at them just reveals the depth of their hypocrisy.
Take the minimal-code approach and build it as a FINO stack -- First In, Never Out.
Based on conversations I've had with the developers from NCSoft, it has nothing to do with the game as DRM, and everything to do with the market, and the way that Blizzard has chosen to implement the protection is straight out of the MMO developer's bible -- "don't trust the client". Anything stored in the client can and will be hacked by end users, so in any game where a character's stats advance or there can be an exchange of in-game items for in-game or real currency, any changes to a character or their inventory have to be stored on the central server, where the end user's can't open up the data files on their local computer and dupe a dozen copies of the epic weapon that they were lucky enough to get in a drop, or grovel through the game data for item indexes and give themselves one of every top-tier item in the game.
In a stand-alone game, the user can hack the game to their heart's content, and it doesn't affect anyone else; having your friend next door hack his copy of "ForeverQuest" so that he's got the best armor and weapons doesn't change the game for you. Having someone be able to hack the copy of Diablo 3 on their PC, then sell a million copies of the best armor and weapons on the market screws with everyone's game. So stat and inventory data have to reside on a central server. And because a player's stats and inventory can be hacked while the game is running, you can't just get a download from the server when you open the game, then play the game offline and send any changes back up to the server at the end of your session; there has to be an ongoing dialog between the server and the client to make sure that you're not fabbing gear out of nowhere. Now, Blizzard could have set up offline play as a sandbox -- you get the download of your character's stats and gear when you start up, then you play without needing an active connection, but nothing that happens to your character persists past that session; when you start up the game again, your character gets downloaded from the server again, and your entire offline session was just a dream. But I don't think that's going to be acceptable to players.
A requirement for an always-on connection may be annoying to most, and deal-breaking for some, but it's the only way that having an online market for items is going to be able to work unless you're willing to surrender a lot of control over your computer to 'big brother' processes that ensure that you don't modify local data files -- and how many separate rootkits are you willing to put up with just to not have an internet connection live when you play your market-enabled games?
You will notice that, in their demo videos, we're being shown views of thousands or millions of the same objects, and even in the parts where they're showing objects rendered with a texture, the textures look to be very small or simple, so that the data behind the scene can compress very efficiently.
I would be more impressed if they were to do a technology demonstration by, say, taking the source to Doom and applying their 'Unlimited Detail' technology to the level rendering and re-doing the textures, then releasing a level or two as a walkthrough to show it off live. Certainly making Doom look better is a sufficiently low bar to hurdle.
"Internet connection required" doesn't tell you whether the game requires an Internet connection to a) register the product before it will complete the install (i.e., verifying that the product key you're putting in hasn't been used before), b) register the product after install, which unlocks the product (a and b being both one-time requirements), or c) dial home each time you start the program to see whether the software company wants to let you use the product this time, or d) periodically pings the software company while you're using the product to make sure that they haven't decided to take it away from you, and assumes that they've revoked your license if it can't connect. The first two are reasonable; I have no problem with the product calling the company once to make sure that I'm installing a legal copy of the product. The other two aren't; having the company assume that I'm pirating their product unless and until I prove otherwise each time I use their product, or having to repeatedly offer the same proof as I use the product is insulting.
It may be considered a split hair in Massachusetts, but it's a fact of life on family farms -- you don't need a driver's license to operate farm machinery like tractors on private property, which is why you'll still see children too young to get a driver's license out on the family tractor harrowing a field.
Consider what a 'split hair' it is that motor vehicles operated on private property also are not required to comply with licensing, emissions, or safety laws, which is how the entire automobile racing industry avoids being saddled with equipment that would cripple the industry (Formula 1 cars required to have collision-rated bumpers, air bags, and meet fuel-economy standards, for example).
However, I would be willing to bet that a clever enough lawyer would be able to make a case that, as the state has declared that driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right, and that it can arbitrarily deny that privilege without cause, once the state has denied you that privilege, you are no longer obligated to pay for their upkeep. It would die in the courts, but it would be fun to watch.
There are still those here who will say that it's hyperbole, but the same tipping point is approaching here. Our real rulers (hint: neither political party, but those behind both) are getting nervous and moving to keep their grip on our society. They have perpetrated the most massive theft in the history of mankind, absconding with trillions of dollars of our money, selling our children into a lifetime of debt servitude while theirs party on; they know it, and we know it, and they're starting to realize that we know it too.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." -- Thomas Jefferson
The emphasis is mine. It is interesting that this quote is most often seen cut off after 'patriots'. Who might have a vested interest in seeing that the public stops thinking of rulers being made to pay for growing oppressive?
Sadly, I don't think there are enough tinkerers around anymore to make such a store profitable. We are relatively few and far between, much too scattered to make such a place viable... people would have to travel too far to get there.
Integrated circuits were the death of the electronics tinkerer, and smart projects using Arduinos and other low-powered processors haven't brought them back in anywhere the same numbers, likely because of the perceived learning cliff of becoming a 'computer programmer'.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line", 1939
While the intended console port was a limiting factor, I think by far the biggest problem was their being made by Cryptic. In fact by the original guys who couldn't even do the maths to see that a "situational" power could be made to stack with itself twice over at level 22, in COH, or produced balance swings so extreme as to go from City Of Blasters (a devices blaster could floor any enemy's accuracy) to City Of Tankers (tanks became basically invulnerable even to hundreds of enemies at a time.) COH has in the meantime been mostly fixed by Positron (in as much as possible without pulling a Sony-style NGE and ripping out the existing game's core), but Statesman and a good chunk of the gang of innumerates responsible for the COH fuckups went on to make CO.
Most of the unrelenting bullheadedness in the early enhancement of CoH revolved around the fact that Statesman had absolute control over the direction the game took, and many of the core structures of the game were predicated on what he liked when playing video games. For example, it was supposed to be 'fun' to come up against the end boss in a mission and fail. Over and over again. Until you found a tactic that worked if you did everything just right. And he got bent out of shape at the idea that players would post tactics that worked on the Net for others to read about; apparently everyone was supposed to fail over and over again until each of them -- separately, without any help from anyone else -- found something that worked. And while CO is a lot 'prettier' than CoH was at the same point after release, I don't see that the "it's my ball, so you're going to play the way I want, because that's the right way to have fun" attitude has changed much.
With some allowance for the media involved, Kenneth Cole's "twitvert" can probably be traced back in concept to the "blipverts" used by Zik Zak in 'Max Headroom'.
It's time for big business to realize that capitalism does not require anyone to give you money for your offerings.
And it brings to mind a quote from Robert Heinlein's story "Life-Line":
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
They are enforcing the original rules, which is that if you make an app that has a notion of in-app purchasing--you have to offer the content via Apple's in-app purchasing model, although you are free to offer the user the choice of two models and there's nothing that says they have to be the same price as far as I know.
Pardon? Go back and read the article; Apple is requiring that, if an app developer sells e-books outside the app, they must also sell the e-books inside the app, and all such in-app sales must go through Apple, which will graciously only charge 30% of the sale price for the privilege of being forced to sell through them.
Have you ever watched video of a bola being used to take down game? The weights at the ends of the cords whip around at increasing speed as they wind around the legs of the target. The average orbital velocity of Apophis is 30 kilometers a second, so that's the relative speed between the probes and Apophis when it hits the cables. If you ever played tetherball as a kid, you'll remember that the ball speeds up as it winds in to the pole, so the probes might well double the initial relative velocity by the time of impact; rather than "providing observations for a long time", what you'd be doing is performing the experiment "What happens when we hit Apophis with three probes at a relative velocity of 100,000 miles per hour?" That is, of course, assuming that you managed to produce a cable strong enough that it doesn't break on contact, and the acceleration as the probes wind in doesn't exceed their design limits.
Jesus saves,
Gretzky steals... He shoots... He SCORES!!!
It's interesting to note, though, that Obama talked about how high-speed rail would allow you to travel "without the pat-downs". I would have expected that he would be in the loop about the TSA's desire to extend airport-style screening to both rail and bus terminals, or that they've already carried out pilot tests doing just that. It makes the President look as if he's losing control when he doesn't appear to be aware what his own administration is doing.
Reminds me of the old "/earth is 97% full. Please delete anyone you can" fortune...
The SyFy channel isn't moving towards showing wrestling because they think that wrestling is cooler than space ships and time machines, it is just that the audience for wrestling will watch wrestling on the TV rather than downloading it and watching it in an alternate manner.
And because the 'market' for live sporting events isn't interested in watching them via time-delayed recording or DVD. The attraction is seeing it happen in front of you, not watching a game or match that happened a week ago whose results have been analyzed to death on the news and elsewhere.
For religious functionaries, sure, the options would be something like that. Just 'decide' what dogma is correct, throw out whatever doesnt fit, and go with it - that's what priests do.
With the way the issue has turned into a religious war, I'm reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon of a man brought before an inquisition, parodying the original caption as "You are charged with preaching wrongful, pernicious, and misleading doctrine about global climate change." (the original was 'weight loss')
So instead of lifting the mouse that you are holding in your hand -- while still being able to hold the mouse buttons down -- you have to pick the baton up out of the trough it's in, move it to the right, and drop it back into the trough. Having released any of the four buttons you had been pressing to do so, unless you were to use your other hand, defeating the purpose of having a pointing device you can use with one hand while your other hand was pressing keys on the keyboard.
Not to mention that, as it's displayed in the picture, the buttons are closer to you than the side-to-side slider, which makes using both it and the buttons at the same time problematic. With a mouse, I can hold both the left and right buttons down with my first two fingers and move the mouse in whatever direction, picking it up to shift it back if I reach the edge of my mousepad; with the ErgoSlider, I've got two fingers pressing buttons on either side of the vertical slider, a third finger on the vertical slider, and a fourth finger on the side-to-side slider, and I'll have to either use my left hand or twist my right up into a pretzel to lift the baton out of the trough with my thumb and whatever finger I was using on the baton in order to move it back to the middle or other side when I reach the end. Good luck on being able to coordinate all that.