Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody [...]
This part of my post is incorrect. I think what I meant to say was that pretending to independently reproduce the same work doesn't matter, but the first part of this sentence is nonsense as written.
I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that sentence about independent reproduction. It doesn't really matter here, since that's not what's happening here (you really are sending around derivative blocks), but that was a very, very poor way of phrasing my point.
I made a longer winded post about this here, but I'll summarize for you.
That's not the point. The point is that if someone downloads blocks from me to be used for copyrighted material, I cannot know what it is used for.
That's the problem. You have absolutely no way of knowing that you're not sharing infringing blocks, you have no way to prevent it, and yet you've still willingly installed and ran the software on your system.
How are the courts going to preserve copyright law in the face of this technical challenge? Make no mistake, courts aren't going to just throw up their hands in the air and say, "Wow! Centuries of legal tradition and entire sectors of the US economy have now been made obsolete by a very clever way of copying data. Let's call the whole thing off!" Somebody has to be held to account.
What can they do? 1) Make the person who uploaded the file liable? 2) Make the person who downloaded the file liable? 3) Make the people holding chunks of the file liable? 4) Treat the URL itself as a derivative work?
The first option is technically unfeasible. So is the second, unless you run your own data-store containing pieces of your own files as a sting operation, and you know what each chunk downloaded from you is. The third is feasible, because all it requires is that an authorized agent (like MediaSentry) download the file and track the IPs of all people who give them chunks -- every one of those people had an infringing piece, after all. The fourth has some real problems with not overreach and would create massive hassles for search engines, so I doubt the courts would go with that.
I think the most likely solution is to treat the software like that in Grokster as software that aids in infringement and doesn't have substantial noninfringing uses and to extend the decision to hold users liable for contributing to infringement. It's the most practical solution (from the court's perspective) to the situation.
All this accomplishes is getting them to turn another screw. So, thanks to all the people who invented this idea. Thanks a lot. (With friends like these, who needs enemies?)
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
In other words, it's distributing liability for infringement to all the people holding the bits you use to assemble the file. Wow. That's great.
No court is going to rule that centuries of legal tradition are meaningless before mathematical sophistry. The way you store the file is just as irrelevant to infringement as whether you've got music in MP3 format or AAC format.
You may think it's mathematically clever, but the court's aren't going to be interested in the logic of the math as much as the social and economic costs of allowing the creator's interpretation of copyright law to have any meaning. Courts will also look to the difficulty of enforcement if they limit liability to only those who uploaded the original file (which would be untraceable pretty quickly) and to those who downloaded the file via the URL (which is also nigh impossible to trace). The only easily identifiable contributors to the act left are those people holding the pieces.
The most likely result of a case like this is an extension of Grokster to create liability for just running the software since it doesn't have (per Grokster) "substantial noninfringing uses," and the software actively takes steps to make it impossible for the users not to have derivative portions of copyrighted works on their system. Efforts to make the transaction untraceable (via this randomized block encryption) and open advocacy of this as a means to defeat copyright would also count as "clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement."
I can't see this software as accomplishing anything more than distributing liability for copyright infringement. The only saving grace for it is that you have no idea whose rights you're violating or how many violations you've committed, so you can't be on the hook (civilly) for every file you share pieces of since there's no way of identifying all the victims.
However, all it takes is for the RIAA or MPAA to hire MediaSentry or some other firm to download a single file and copy down the IP addresses of every person they get a chunk from, and it's lawsuit city!
At least you're safe from criminal copyright violation since that requires willful infringement which I don't think can be proven, though again the fact that you ran a service that you can't not infringe with might be damaging, but given that the only practical means of enforcing the laws would be to make the people running data stores liable, that's exactly what the courts will do, all your protests of holding "random" data be damned.
There is a reason that legal "solutions" to technical problems deserve the derision we heap upon them. Legal "solutions" merely attempt to artificially constrain the problem without doing anything to resolve the technical nature of the problem itself.
To make this abundantly clear: Legal solution to a technical problem - outlawing buffer overflow exploits Technical solution to a legal problem - showing that the arresting officer made a procedural error which taints the evidence gathered against you.
You just mixed your namespaces.
1st: [Law solution (statutory)] tries to fix [Computer problem] 2nd: [Law solution (procedural)] tries to fix [Law problem]
These aren't equivalent. A technical computer solution to a computer problem is fine, as is a technical legal solution to a legal problem. What's worthy of derision is using a law solution to a computer problem or using a computer solution to a law problem, and that's what this is.
Claiming that you didn't violate someone's copyright because you copied their works without permission in a really nifty way is nonsense. Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody; it's a strict liability tort -- "innocent" infringement is still infringement.
And, if nothing else, a place to stop and "catch our breath". If you're planning to climb a mountain, it makes it easier if you have a place to stop a third of the way up to refuel, do repairs, etc.
AKA "A second gravity well to escape."
If we're going to keep to your analogy, you don't climb a mountain by jumping down a huge shaft to rest a third of the way to the top. The moon is only useful as a place to refuel, do repairs, etc. after we've spent FAR more money on a lunar industrial base than we would save on a trip to Mars. You would have to have regular traffic between Earth and Mars for it to make financial sense.
I support a Moon base for its own sake as a resource for Earth related science and industry or to help us get our legs under us on base design, but trying to talk it up as a refuel and manufacturing resource for an exploratory mission to Mars is fiscal and logistical madness.
Dumbo is a solid-core design. It has "a hydrogen moderated metallic core" and passes the propellant gas through insulated tubes designed to keep allow the plastic moderator regions to remain cool. The reaction material is solid uranium -- thus, not a gas-core reactor.
What are the main engineering problems with the closed-cycle GCNR? As far as I know, the continuous reaction will be outputting EM in a range to which the quartz is transparent.
Two main problems with quartz:
1) I have never been able to find what happens to quartz (or fused silica's) absorption spectrum under heavy irradiation. Many materials undergo changes in absorption spectra, atomic structure, etc. under neutron bombardment. No one proposing this idea has been able to show research on whether these materials do not become useless under operating conditions. AFAIK, we just haven't tested the materials under the proper conditions. (Also, what happens to the chemical byproducts of fusing uranium hexafluoride? Considering that hydrofluoric acid is best known for being able to etch glass, this might be a major concern.)
2) The temperatures of the reacting gas are much hotter than the melting point of the material (25,000 C vs. 1650 C). The way this is compensated for is by pouring the super-cooled propellant over the containment to be heated and sent out. What does this do to the stability of material? Just how fragile is the unit likely to be (under heavy vibration, eddy currents in the propellant, etc.)?
The nuclear lightbulb design is a really neat idea, but it needs some hard testing before we can declare it practical.
Bah. If it had been a gas-core nuclear rocket, we could put bases on the moon in a single shot.
Which kind? The open-core, spewing radioactive gas into the atmosphere kind? Or, the closed-core, made of unobtainium that is transparent and physically stable at all temperatures even under the influence of heavy radiation.
I was excited by the prospects of closed-cycle gas core rockets myself for a while, but I'm just not sold on the engineering anymore.
I would have said Orion, but there's even less chance of getting that to the moon, even if you could get rid of the outer space WMD ban -- just imagine the environmentalists' reaction to something that uses nuclear bombs as propulsion.
All those "wacky" environmentalists not wanting to set off continuous chain of nukes in the atmosphere on a semi-regular basis. Never mind what the EMI would do to satellites and electronics as the craft started to get into the upper atmosphere.
Second, he never exactly lied, they merely "selectively observed" some facts, and "selectively neglected" others. Obviously completely different from lying, and completely out of the realm of lying under oath. Funny. I thought that's what Clinton did. Shouldn't we be howling a Bush for having defaced the dignity of the office for the same kind of behavior?
Or is lying... sorry, "selective observation" about cheating on your wife more serious than misdirecting the country into a war that's cost us $600 billion and the lives of thousands of our most patriotic youths?
Without exceptions like those, things like the code that prevents (or at least discourages) the use of bots in games like WoW would be rendered illegal. Examining your system memory is *exactly* what the law is designed to prevent, and anti-bot code has to do just that. Why are your bloody games more important than my right to enjoy the use of my property without extrajudicial interference? I actually do work with my machine and might not let want it tampered with by a vendor who has another "Genuine Advantage" bug.
It's not like WoW is more important than due process rights.
(Not that that's what the bill actually does, but I'm kind of horrified to see someone supporting what the article purports that it to.)
Re:Self-Help & Much To-Do About Nothing.
on
UCITA By the Back Door
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The sentence makes a lot more sense if "...software for fraudulent..." was their intended language. Not that I can really criticize, given that the sentence before that one was missing a subject and verb, and the sentence before it had an "or" when an "of" was meant.
*sigh.
Self-Help & Much To-Do About Nothing.
on
UCITA By the Back Door
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Self-help" is kind of a legal term of the art for any extra-legal means that people use to resolve a dispute without the aid or sanction of the courts, usually with the implication of violent means of depriving people of property in dispute.
For quite enlightened reasons (and the more cynical would say selfish ones too), courts tend not to favor resolutions that encourage self-help. Courts are not going to interpret the phrase "detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of software fraudulent or other illegal activities" to allow for deprivations of or interference with the enjoyment of personal property without due process. This law can't be interpreted in any manner to set up a due process satisfying procedure, so it's pretty much unconstitutional if interpreted to allow remote disabling or (suspected) pirated property.
Assuming that the above language even means to imply the "software fraudulent" is a meaningful term, given that it appears nowhere else in the US Code, and there's no definitions section for the bill. The sentence makes a lot more sense if "...software for fraudulent..." was their intended language.
In that context, it seems less like a backdoor attempt to insert remote disabling into law and more like a phrase in line with preventing malware. UCITA was dangerous because it allowed people to contract away their protection against this sort of thing, which is less constitutionally suspect than just writing into law at large.
There is this class of people who seem to think you can just pass any law you like, it is the supreme courts job exclusively to decide what is constitutional. This statement is ironic considering that the topic of discussion was Ron Paul's proposed Amendment to overturn a Supreme Court decision overruling exactly the kind of Constitution-ignoring legislation you decry.
Okay, I'm an idiot for doing this, as now everyone'll say "He's a racist arsehole". I'm not racist, I have many black friends, I have many white friends, I don't give a holy f*k about race. I'm a facts man. Alright, let's pretend that's true. I doubt it, but let's pretend. How about some facts...
The facts are that the blacks were trading the folks that got brought over on boats as slaves long before Whitey from the South showed up with empty boats headed to the sugar/cotton farms. Fact 1: Slavery as practiced in Africa was very different from the kind of slavery practiced in the South. African slavery, like most world slavery throughout history, was a practice of taking war captives. Slavery was almost never for life, it did not extend to one's children, and a slave was not the chattel of another person. Read more here.
Observation: Two wrongs do not make a right. Even if Africans had practiced the kind of slavery that plantation owners did, that does not absolve the United States of any wrongdoing in its benefit from the trade, nor does it mean that there was no duty to put an end to rampant discrimination that followed the freeing of the slaves, from the "black laws" of the Reconstruction South that barred freed slaves from voting, owning property, being on juries, etc. to the "softer" Jim Crow laws and segregation of the 20th century.
The facts are that there were white slaves too, and black landowners/slaveowners/slavedrivers. Fact 2: White slavery was largely unknown by the time of the Revolutionary War. Even the indentured servant system recognized indentured servants as having significantly more rights than black slaves. Indentured servitude was not for life, and masters were expected to give their servants a starting package (by law) to help them found their own homes and families. Colonial Virginia, for example, required that white servants be given a rifle, some money, and some minimal provisions.
As for black slaveowners in America: Citation please. (i.e. I call B.S.) Even if true, two wrongs don't make a right, and only the most deluded or ignorant student of history would believe that there was anything resembling equality between whites & blacks in their status in society.
The facts are that anybody currently alive in the US who feels that [the history is still a good reason for active debate and hatred against a group of people who have no way to change their forefathers actions] should get up and leave the country.
Do you need help buying a plane ticket to move to Africa? (See, it's that last comment that's going to burn me, but I'm still asking, and I'm still serious. I advocate changing the system, not blaming the great...great grandkids.) First of all, why do you assume that I'm of African descent myself just because I (like most Americans) feel some disgust for the horrible and degrading institutions of slavery & segregation?
Frankly, I think the fact that you feel you have to state that you're "not a racist" shows that you damned well know that supporting the right of states to engage in discrimination is something that most sane and patriotic Americans react to with disgust.
What honestly motivated you to write this whole "go back to Africa" diatribe in response to someone stating that the problem with letting states do as they wish is the historical tendency of states to oppress unpopular groups like black people? Can it really be anything other than knee-jerk racist resentment?
Next time, if you're going to go off the reservation and rant about how racial equality is such a put-upon for the current generation, at least try to get some of your historical facts straight. Not that I think reality has a firm grip on you as is.
You obviously missed the parallel between you supporting a Constitutional amendment allowing states to discriminate against gay people and previous state behavior towards black people. Not that I should have had to spell that out for you.
The 14th Amendment ensures that Constitutional rights belong to state citizens as well. Read up more on substantive due process if you don't know why Lawrence v. Texas turned out the way it did.
If you've been doing something for 19 years, you're a veteran at it by any sane standard. Gaming doesn't work on the seniority system. This is a hobby, not a union payscale.
And frankly, if you've been doing the same thing for 30 years, and all you can do is flaunt close-mindedness on any new ideas and pooh-pooh the experience of anyone who came a few years after you that officially makes you an old fart, not a veteran.
Anyone who is a fan of any kind of creative work who bothers to read examples from before "their time" will see that derivative genres influence the future development of the genres they sprung from.
There's no other explanation for a review this positive to: a) exist You lost me right at the point where you insinuated that your tastes are the only valid ones and that any and all fans of a product you don't like are all shills.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody [...]
This part of my post is incorrect. I think what I meant to say was that pretending to independently reproduce the same work doesn't matter, but the first part of this sentence is nonsense as written.
I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that sentence about independent reproduction. It doesn't really matter here, since that's not what's happening here (you really are sending around derivative blocks), but that was a very, very poor way of phrasing my point.
I made a longer winded post about this here, but I'll summarize for you.
That's not the point. The point is that if someone downloads blocks from me to be used for copyrighted material, I cannot know what it is used for.
That's the problem. You have absolutely no way of knowing that you're not sharing infringing blocks, you have no way to prevent it, and yet you've still willingly installed and ran the software on your system.
How are the courts going to preserve copyright law in the face of this technical challenge? Make no mistake, courts aren't going to just throw up their hands in the air and say, "Wow! Centuries of legal tradition and entire sectors of the US economy have now been made obsolete by a very clever way of copying data. Let's call the whole thing off!" Somebody has to be held to account.
What can they do?
1) Make the person who uploaded the file liable?
2) Make the person who downloaded the file liable?
3) Make the people holding chunks of the file liable?
4) Treat the URL itself as a derivative work?
The first option is technically unfeasible. So is the second, unless you run your own data-store containing pieces of your own files as a sting operation, and you know what each chunk downloaded from you is. The third is feasible, because all it requires is that an authorized agent (like MediaSentry) download the file and track the IPs of all people who give them chunks -- every one of those people had an infringing piece, after all. The fourth has some real problems with not overreach and would create massive hassles for search engines, so I doubt the courts would go with that.
I think the most likely solution is to treat the software like that in Grokster as software that aids in infringement and doesn't have substantial noninfringing uses and to extend the decision to hold users liable for contributing to infringement. It's the most practical solution (from the court's perspective) to the situation.
All this accomplishes is getting them to turn another screw. So, thanks to all the people who invented this idea. Thanks a lot. (With friends like these, who needs enemies?)
Brightnets don't distribute material. They distribute random blocks. The URL distributes the material, by combining the random blocks in the Brightnet to something none-random. That none-random part can be anything, it could be something that is copyright-infringing or it could be something innocent like holiday photo's. If I'm storing random blocks for a Brightnet, I'm doing just that. Storing Random blocks of data. Nothing more nothing less. I have not clue, and can't know, how people are going to use those random blocks. It all depends on the URL, not on the Random Data.
In other words, it's distributing liability for infringement to all the people holding the bits you use to assemble the file. Wow. That's great.
No court is going to rule that centuries of legal tradition are meaningless before mathematical sophistry. The way you store the file is just as irrelevant to infringement as whether you've got music in MP3 format or AAC format.
You may think it's mathematically clever, but the court's aren't going to be interested in the logic of the math as much as the social and economic costs of allowing the creator's interpretation of copyright law to have any meaning. Courts will also look to the difficulty of enforcement if they limit liability to only those who uploaded the original file (which would be untraceable pretty quickly) and to those who downloaded the file via the URL (which is also nigh impossible to trace). The only easily identifiable contributors to the act left are those people holding the pieces.
The most likely result of a case like this is an extension of Grokster to create liability for just running the software since it doesn't have (per Grokster) "substantial noninfringing uses," and the software actively takes steps to make it impossible for the users not to have derivative portions of copyrighted works on their system. Efforts to make the transaction untraceable (via this randomized block encryption) and open advocacy of this as a means to defeat copyright would also count as "clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement."
I can't see this software as accomplishing anything more than distributing liability for copyright infringement. The only saving grace for it is that you have no idea whose rights you're violating or how many violations you've committed, so you can't be on the hook (civilly) for every file you share pieces of since there's no way of identifying all the victims.
However, all it takes is for the RIAA or MPAA to hire MediaSentry or some other firm to download a single file and copy down the IP addresses of every person they get a chunk from, and it's lawsuit city!
At least you're safe from criminal copyright violation since that requires willful infringement which I don't think can be proven, though again the fact that you ran a service that you can't not infringe with might be damaging, but given that the only practical means of enforcing the laws would be to make the people running data stores liable, that's exactly what the courts will do, all your protests of holding "random" data be damned.
There is a reason that legal "solutions" to technical problems deserve the derision we heap upon them. Legal "solutions" merely attempt to artificially constrain the problem without doing anything to resolve the technical nature of the problem itself.
To make this abundantly clear:
Legal solution to a technical problem - outlawing buffer overflow exploits
Technical solution to a legal problem - showing that the arresting officer made a procedural error which taints the evidence gathered against you.
You just mixed your namespaces.
1st: [Law solution (statutory)] tries to fix [Computer problem]
2nd: [Law solution (procedural)] tries to fix [Law problem]
These aren't equivalent. A technical computer solution to a computer problem is fine, as is a technical legal solution to a legal problem. What's worthy of derision is using a law solution to a computer problem or using a computer solution to a law problem, and that's what this is.
Claiming that you didn't violate someone's copyright because you copied their works without permission in a really nifty way is nonsense. Copyright law doesn't care if you independently produce exactly the same work as somebody; it's a strict liability tort -- "innocent" infringement is still infringement.
Only a Windows version, is more accurate.
How would you create a game about fighting off viruses without an environment that's hospitable to them?
And, if nothing else, a place to stop and "catch our breath". If you're planning to climb a mountain, it makes it easier if you have a place to stop a third of the way up to refuel, do repairs, etc.
AKA "A second gravity well to escape."
If we're going to keep to your analogy, you don't climb a mountain by jumping down a huge shaft to rest a third of the way to the top. The moon is only useful as a place to refuel, do repairs, etc. after we've spent FAR more money on a lunar industrial base than we would save on a trip to Mars. You would have to have regular traffic between Earth and Mars for it to make financial sense.
I support a Moon base for its own sake as a resource for Earth related science and industry or to help us get our legs under us on base design, but trying to talk it up as a refuel and manufacturing resource for an exploratory mission to Mars is fiscal and logistical madness.
Dumbo is a solid-core design. It has "a hydrogen moderated metallic core" and passes the propellant gas through insulated tubes designed to keep allow the plastic moderator regions to remain cool. The reaction material is solid uranium -- thus, not a gas-core reactor.
What are the main engineering problems with the closed-cycle GCNR? As far as I know, the continuous reaction will be outputting EM in a range to which the quartz is transparent.
Two main problems with quartz:
1) I have never been able to find what happens to quartz (or fused silica's) absorption spectrum under heavy irradiation. Many materials undergo changes in absorption spectra, atomic structure, etc. under neutron bombardment. No one proposing this idea has been able to show research on whether these materials do not become useless under operating conditions. AFAIK, we just haven't tested the materials under the proper conditions. (Also, what happens to the chemical byproducts of fusing uranium hexafluoride? Considering that hydrofluoric acid is best known for being able to etch glass, this might be a major concern.)
2) The temperatures of the reacting gas are much hotter than the melting point of the material (25,000 C vs. 1650 C). The way this is compensated for is by pouring the super-cooled propellant over the containment to be heated and sent out. What does this do to the stability of material? Just how fragile is the unit likely to be (under heavy vibration, eddy currents in the propellant, etc.)?
The nuclear lightbulb design is a really neat idea, but it needs some hard testing before we can declare it practical.
Bah. If it had been a gas-core nuclear rocket, we could put bases on the moon in a single shot.
Which kind? The open-core, spewing radioactive gas into the atmosphere kind? Or, the closed-core, made of unobtainium that is transparent and physically stable at all temperatures even under the influence of heavy radiation.
I was excited by the prospects of closed-cycle gas core rockets myself for a while, but I'm just not sold on the engineering anymore.
I would have said Orion, but there's even less chance of getting that to the moon, even if you could get rid of the outer space WMD ban -- just imagine the environmentalists' reaction to something that uses nuclear bombs as propulsion.
All those "wacky" environmentalists not wanting to set off continuous chain of nukes in the atmosphere on a semi-regular basis. Never mind what the EMI would do to satellites and electronics as the craft started to get into the upper atmosphere.
Yeah, but knowing this administration, that capacity's only good for sending up white elephants.
Or is lying... sorry, "selective observation" about cheating on your wife more serious than misdirecting the country into a war that's cost us $600 billion and the lives of thousands of our most patriotic youths?
It's not like WoW is more important than due process rights.
(Not that that's what the bill actually does, but I'm kind of horrified to see someone supporting what the article purports that it to.)
*sigh.
"Self-help" is kind of a legal term of the art for any extra-legal means that people use to resolve a dispute without the aid or sanction of the courts, usually with the implication of violent means of depriving people of property in dispute.
For quite enlightened reasons (and the more cynical would say selfish ones too), courts tend not to favor resolutions that encourage self-help. Courts are not going to interpret the phrase "detection or prevention of the unauthorized use of software fraudulent or other illegal activities" to allow for deprivations of or interference with the enjoyment of personal property without due process. This law can't be interpreted in any manner to set up a due process satisfying procedure, so it's pretty much unconstitutional if interpreted to allow remote disabling or (suspected) pirated property.
Assuming that the above language even means to imply the "software fraudulent" is a meaningful term, given that it appears nowhere else in the US Code, and there's no definitions section for the bill. The sentence makes a lot more sense if "...software for fraudulent..." was their intended language.
In that context, it seems less like a backdoor attempt to insert remote disabling into law and more like a phrase in line with preventing malware. UCITA was dangerous because it allowed people to contract away their protection against this sort of thing, which is less constitutionally suspect than just writing into law at large.
Observation: Two wrongs do not make a right. Even if Africans had practiced the kind of slavery that plantation owners did, that does not absolve the United States of any wrongdoing in its benefit from the trade, nor does it mean that there was no duty to put an end to rampant discrimination that followed the freeing of the slaves, from the "black laws" of the Reconstruction South that barred freed slaves from voting, owning property, being on juries, etc. to the "softer" Jim Crow laws and segregation of the 20th century. The facts are that there were white slaves too, and black landowners/slaveowners/slavedrivers. Fact 2: White slavery was largely unknown by the time of the Revolutionary War. Even the indentured servant system recognized indentured servants as having significantly more rights than black slaves. Indentured servitude was not for life, and masters were expected to give their servants a starting package (by law) to help them found their own homes and families. Colonial Virginia, for example, required that white servants be given a rifle, some money, and some minimal provisions.
As for black slaveowners in America: Citation please. (i.e. I call B.S.) Even if true, two wrongs don't make a right, and only the most deluded or ignorant student of history would believe that there was anything resembling equality between whites & blacks in their status in society. The facts are that anybody currently alive in the US who feels that [the history is still a good reason for active debate and hatred against a group of people who have no way to change their forefathers actions] should get up and leave the country.
Do you need help buying a plane ticket to move to Africa? (See, it's that last comment that's going to burn me, but I'm still asking, and I'm still serious. I advocate changing the system, not blaming the great...great grandkids.) First of all, why do you assume that I'm of African descent myself just because I (like most Americans) feel some disgust for the horrible and degrading institutions of slavery & segregation?
Frankly, I think the fact that you feel you have to state that you're "not a racist" shows that you damned well know that supporting the right of states to engage in discrimination is something that most sane and patriotic Americans react to with disgust.
What honestly motivated you to write this whole "go back to Africa" diatribe in response to someone stating that the problem with letting states do as they wish is the historical tendency of states to oppress unpopular groups like black people? Can it really be anything other than knee-jerk racist resentment?
Next time, if you're going to go off the reservation and rant about how racial equality is such a put-upon for the current generation, at least try to get some of your historical facts straight. Not that I think reality has a firm grip on you as is.
You obviously missed the parallel between you supporting a Constitutional amendment allowing states to discriminate against gay people and previous state behavior towards black people. Not that I should have had to spell that out for you.
The 14th Amendment ensures that Constitutional rights belong to state citizens as well. Read up more on substantive due process if you don't know why Lawrence v. Texas turned out the way it did.
On what you learn in science class. (See question 4.)
More detail on that.
Age of Conan? More like Age of Gor. Amirite?
If you've been doing something for 19 years, you're a veteran at it by any sane standard. Gaming doesn't work on the seniority system. This is a hobby, not a union payscale.
And frankly, if you've been doing the same thing for 30 years, and all you can do is flaunt close-mindedness on any new ideas and pooh-pooh the experience of anyone who came a few years after you that officially makes you an old fart, not a veteran.
Anyone who is a fan of any kind of creative work who bothers to read examples from before "their time" will see that derivative genres influence the future development of the genres they sprung from.
Example: Jazz & Rock or Film & Theater.
a) exist You lost me right at the point where you insinuated that your tastes are the only valid ones and that any and all fans of a product you don't like are all shills.
Get over yourself.
Call me when our new, self-replicating robot overlords are made of something more durable than cheap plastic.