The environmental impact of farming is not farming itself -- it's transporting food halfway across the country (or sometimes halfway across the planet) from where it grows. The theory is that if you can grow more food closer to where people live, you save all that wasted fuel.
I'm of the philosophy that the home ownership race is just another rat race right now. The majority of the reason why two-income families in America today have less savings than single-income families of 50 years ago is that home prices have more than doubled since then (adjusted for inflation).
I'll have no part of that for a few reasons:
I live in the city. All the even close to affordable houses are well outside what I consider a reasonable commuting range.
It's just plain cheaper to rent. Sure, I'm not storing up equity, but really neither are a lot of people on subprime mortgages. At least the money I'm saving is being put into investments.
I predict that once the baby boomers get a decade into retirement (with no kids in the house and failing health) a lot of them are going to start moving out of houses; many of them will be moving into "assisted living" centers. Houses in areas near good schools are going to get a LOT cheaper in the next ten years. At that time, I'll reevaluate whether owning a home is a good thing or not, but unless you can solidly plan to put down roots for the next 30 years where you are right now, owning a home might be an unwise investment.
Leasing is silly if your end goal is to own.
So? What makes owning such a great goal to have in the first place? If your privacy or your paranoia is so important to you that you'd go through life without a bank account, then going without owning the house you live in isn't so bad in comparison.
Frankly, I'm paying about 1/2 to 2/3 what I'd pay for a mortgage on a home or condo in my area. My insurance is significantly cheaper, and I wouldn't have enough deductions to qualify for a tax break anyway.
Consider this wise or unwise as you wish, but I was able to live for half a year without a paycheck to go volunteer in the local election last year, and I had no fear of losing a place to live. I know that I'm fortunate to be in a very high income bracket due to my choice of careers, but I could get by comfortably with a third of my income because I live below my means.
The United States of America is a voluntary union comprising of many independent states. These states have the right to self-governance and popular sovereignty; the Constitution does not allow for any such federal restrictions.
Me: What about the interstate commerce clause and the Civil War? AC: LAH LAH LAH LAH LAH! I'M NOT LISTENING!
This is some serious disinformation here. Self-regulation by the tech industry worked just fine until the government began allowing business and corporate interests to affect its subsidies, grants, and funding.
I think you meant to put a colon after the word here. It makes more sense that way.
I mean, do you honestly believe that there has ever been some mythical time in US history in which businesses happily kept to themselves and acted like gentlemen in the best interests of their customers before some switch was flipped or some line was crossed and suddenly everyone started buying and trading power and favor? Must've been nice in that parallel universe.
Besides, you seem to be under the illusion that the privacy of their customers is in each business's best interest and that only the evil, evil government is causing them to datamine their customer base instead of the rich profits involved in knowing your customer's needs and desires and how to best inflame them. Privacy, frankly, is an impediment to profit.
The "grown up job that doesn't pay cash" is really the only big problem, but even then you can go to a check cashing place and pay an exorbitant rate to get your cash. I mean, you don't *have* to do direct deposit. Manage your expenses wisely, and you'll never need a loan or a mortgage.
If you need a credit card equivalent, try PrivaCash. I heard about it on a privacy website. It's basically a pre-paid debit card that isn't tied to your name. You can pick up preloaded cards in stores, but if you want to reload them, you have to deal with the bank that backs them. You can't do things like rent cars or do other things where access to a debt source is used in the place of a deposit, but you can make purchases online.
Really, though, unless you are planning on living completely off the record as much as possible once your stint in a university is done, go for a credit union. It's like a bank, only not evil (or at worst significantly less evil). Avoiding a bank is very, very hard in modern life. For more details about what you lose in terms of privacy and how to protect yourself to a limited extent, check out the book "How to be Invisible" by C.C. Luna.
I'm guessing that you didn't realize that almost the entirety of the US Code affected by the ECPA of 1986 is covered in US Code, Title 18, Chapter 119 -- the section of the US Code I linked to.
Once again, traffic shaping is not wiretapping. It does not constitute illegal "interception" under the code. Find me a definition of wiretapping or surveillance that includes traffic shaping or denial of transmission but does not also make illegal the standard delivery of such data by the same hardware that would otherwise be capable of performing the acts you don't like.
And do actually read the law before commenting further on it. After all, you might find the following paragraph interesting -- USC 2511 (2)(a)(i):
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for an operator of a switchboard, or an officer, employee, or agent of a provider of wire or electronic communication service, whose facilities are used in the transmission of a wire or electronic communication, to intercept, disclose, or use that communication in the normal course of his employment while engaged in any activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service, except that a provider of wire communication service to the public shall not utilize service observing or random monitoring except for mechanical or service quality control checks.
Setting simple routing rules does not constitution "service observing or random monitoring" since no data about the communications is being tracked. Monitoring the data for later analysis might unless it's meant for "service quality control checks" (i.e. improving the quality of filtering).
Also relevant -- USC 2511 (2)(d):
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for a person not acting under color of law to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication where such person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to such interception unless such communication is intercepted for the purpose of committing any criminal or tortious act in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States or of any State.
If the terms and conditions of your ISP demand that you give permission for them to shape traffic to discourage unlawful behavior and abuse of the service, then this section of the code might well protect your ISP from prosecution.
Next up is USC 2511 (2)(h)(ii)
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter-- [... section (i) trimmed...] (ii) for a provider of electronic communication service to record the fact that a wire or electronic communication was initiated or completed in order to protect such provider, another provider furnishing service toward the completion of the wire or electronic communication, or a user of that service, from fraudulent, unlawful or abusive use of such service.
This part might even be stretchable to allow the logging of piracy-related related data if the MPAA or RIAA are AT&T customers, but it would be a stretch. I could see a judge ruling either way depending on how well the lawyers on each side presented their case.
And that is the law. If you want to argue it further, take it to the judge, 'cause I don't care anymore.
No I didn't. You seem to think that looking at information that is unconcealed is the same as a strip search. It isn't, which was my point in highlighting the difference.
V> Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B. It only requires steam from a kettle for USPS to open and read your letter and seal it up again - but it is illegal.
Can you really consider yourself to have a single shred of intellectual integrity after making such an argument? The post office doesn't need to open your letter to deliver it. The address is on the outside. An IP packet has no "inside" or "outside." This will probably make the fifth or sixth time that I've had to say this, but everything that is needed to filter piracy is available in the portions of an IP packet that must be read by the ISP's hardware to deliver it.
If this is a violation of your privacy, then it's just as much a violation of your privacy when the postman reads the address on the outside of your letters to know where to deliver them. These are functionally the same kind of information.
I am aware of how IP transmissions and packets work thanks - I know for example that the router doesn't need people to watch over and help direct each of the individual packets.
Neither does it need people to filter out pirate traffic, then. It's all automated once the rules are set up, much like the routing tables are.
The data is your property - the ISP is merely the carrier.
Your concept of property doesn't match US law. Deal with it.
Fact is - nobody at my ISP can read my emails without physical intervention - by examining the data processed by the router etc. True or false?
Irrelevant. Intercepting and reading through your email has absolutely nothing to do with impeding piracy over P2P file sharing networks.
Wrong - nothing in there about it applying it only to recording - tapping does not mean just recording.
So let me get this straight: Even if you don't record the data anywhere... Even if you don't give a human access to read the data... Even if you don't track the state of the connection... Just by having hardware that reads any portion of any packet, you're guilty of wiretapping?
Hogwash. If your ridiculous assertion were true, then your ISP would be legally prohibited from delivering your IP traffic. Congratulations! You have proven that America is a police state where I am having my rights violated every time I successfully view Slashdot!
Traffic shaping is not wiretapping.
Here's a link for you to refuse to read in turn. US Code, Title 18, Section 119. Try framing your arguments on wiretapping in such a way that doesn't try to make every single thing that an ISP does in the course of its business a felony crime.
How many people on either side of the main political line in the US simply argue points to favour their bias like they're barracking for sports teams? That's one of the perceptions I get, and something that can definitely be true here in Australia as well.
It's a universal human trait and it waxes and wanes with the times. Basically, it's an instinctual result of us having evolved as pack animals. We identify with groups and overlook the faults of our own group as an instinctual mechanism meant to keep the pack together. We then seek to compete with other groups, and our minds are geared to find bellicose reasons to despise them. We have no problem empathizing with people "like us" but have a really hard time seeing things from the point of view of rivals.
Because of this, it's easier to push related views onto people who already identify with you on other issues. When a person doesn't understand or hasn't previously encountered a particular issue, they're far more likely to trust someone who has already been identified as a "like-minded" person than someone who they already disagree with on other issues. This is the reason why most American who consider themselves religious Christians supported the war in Iraq and support harsher sentencing guidelines despite Jesus's message praising peacemakers and forgiveness. The issues aren't considered separately; they're part of a package deal called conservatism.
And yes, as you've pointed out, this sort of behavior is mimicked in less life-shaping things like favorite sports teams, favorite brands of car, etc. It's truly a universal instinct. Sometimes the dominant mood of the times reaches away from such limiting and simple patterns of thought, but more recently it's been in fashion for leaders to play to such base instincts to swing the electorate around by its most scared and emotional members.
American democracy has really gotten dysfunctional. We've gotten to the point (thanks to the rise of negative campaigning) where politicians have found it easier to drive thinking, independent Americans away from the polls and play to hardened partisans than to attempt to sway the moderates in the middle with logic. After all, rallying people who judge you based on your aping of a broad platform is easier than letting them weigh you on a complex and nuanced platform of independent thought.
How does winning a district vs winning actual votes matter? Isn't the person elected the one who won the most votes?
Yes. In that district.
Imagine that you have two parties, Red and Blue, running for control of a ten-seat legislature. Now imagine that 61% of the general population votes for Red and 39% votes for Blue. Here's how you divide up the districts to let Blue control the legislature in spite of Red having the popular vote:
The end result is that just over 3/5 of the population votes for Red, but 3/5 of the seats go to Blue. Blue has a solid majority to press their agenda despite the fact that the majority of people in the state sympathize with Red.
In the real world, this is the reason why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required southern states that had a history of racial discrimination to have their districting plans reviewed to prevent attempts to marginalize the black vote. What you could do is make districts with a 90%+ black population and then spread out the remaining black vote within safe, white-dominated districts. This ensures that the white majority could never be threatened by the election of more than a handful of black politicians. Gerrymandering is a very real issue, and it's why Congress has only a handful of incumbents defeated each election cycle outside of major times of political unrest like 1994 and 2006. Gerrymandering makes sure that the voters are matched to the incumbent.
Gerrymandering also allows for victories at the state level to be translated into victories at the national level. Read about the 2003 Texas redistricting effort for more detail.
Keep in mind that while it's not the result of gerrymandering, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in 2000 despite losing the popular vote because most of the states he won were low population states which are given disproportionate voting strength in the electoral college. The composition of a district and its resulting voting power and voting biases is *extremely* important to the actual outcome of an election.
Somewhat, but in the end X still gets 100 votes to Y's 50. Who really cares who won what district since it's nothing but a fictional space to make up false statistics? At least to me the actual votes is all that matters.
Well, if you don't care who actually wins and gets the power, why do you care about the votes at all? Might as well draw straws or let the Inner Party decide if that's all you care about.
Getting a warrant for your ancestry DNA file or for a swab of your mouth is the same thing.
Really? I wasn't aware that the FBI could send a National Security Letter to my mouth to check my DNA records and compel my cheek to never inform me of the fact.
Looking at a clown in your shop is not a search - stripping him down and examining everything about him with a fine-toothed comb is.
It's *almost* like that was my point. Good of you to repeat it in such a way as to suggest that you completely missed it.
It is a load of b*ll*cks to say it is "like sending postcards around" - you cannot read or see my emails by looking at the phone line - you need equipment to 'open' it up and sort it in order and so be able to 'read' it.
Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B. Seriously, do you fundamentally not understand how the IP transmissions work? Data is divided up into packets with each packet containing "envelope data" telling the router where to send the packet. Without reading this info, your data can't get anywhere. What, did you think that they had to close their eyes and fling packets around until they magically arrived at their destination?
That data is more than sufficient to make a very simple piracy filter. Block or degrade all traffic to The Pirate Bay and to well known BitTorrent trackers, and you've made some progress. Inside the IP envelope is the always unencrypted TCP envelope. With that information, you can begin to determine what protocol a person is speaking which can let you filter certain protocols intended for P2P file sharing.
You don't have to even actually read packets to degrade a P2P connection, which is why Bram Cohen thought that adding encryption to the BitTorrent protocol was pointless. If you notice that a user has opened hundreds of low bandwidth connections to hundreds of different IPs, then you can almost guarantee that the user is using a P2P file sharing system. It's a simple matter then to cap their bandwidth at that point without even reading their data.
You think that ISPs are going to waste the resources trying to perfectly identify who's sharing legit data and pirated data? Oh, heck no. They're just going to impede anyone suspicious, and they'll alter the terms of their agreement with you to allow it. Blacklists against known pirate sites, whitelists for business partners, and simple, false-positive prone, dragnet rules for everything else will be the rule of the day. Your privacy isn't being violated by them doing so -- you've handed them all the info they need for it.
Is it perfectly legal for phone companies to listen in to the intangible data (i.e. electronic signal) of your private phone conversations over your LEASED line?
No. But that's because there are explicit laws preventing them from listening to and recording your conversations. However, there's nothing to prevent an ISP from using the information needed to deliver your data to deprioritize it or block it so long as they aren't recording it. As long as they aren't recording it, wiretapping provisions don't apply and your analogy once again breaks down because the law is not about analogies but about specific and tightly defined acts.
You keep trying to extend laws meant for very specific situations into situations where they don't apply. Try to understand this. You're just being mulish about this. If such laws existed, we wouldn't have to be fighting for them in the net neutrality debates right now.
BTW: How do private carriers know what is in parcel to refuse sending?
Well, first they tell you up front and make you sign a contract to not send certain things. It's in the fine print of the receipt you sign that you have to abide by certain rules. Almost always, the things they bar are things that require special handling and which cause troubles if not specially handled. Live animals are pretty easy to detect at the counter as long as you're sending them in a way that intends to keep them alive at the destination. Plus, when they inevitably ignore all your "this side up" and "fragile" warnings, the squeals of pain from the animals being tossed about inside have a way of
I always thought the difficulty of separating voices from background noise was the result of poor sound editing (especially when movies are transferred to DVD).
Some of us interact with people face to face as opposed to just watching them on the TV, you know.
And, yes, I too have some minor trouble discriminating speech over background noise (not as bad as the poster of the article, though). While I rarely need to result to closed captioning to get by watching a movie, I do frequently have to ask people to repeat themselves despite having been tested as having slightly above average hearing. I can easily hear a pin drop in a quiet room, but I can't understand people talking in the front of a car from the back seat over common road noise.
It is violation of YOUR privacy to examine YOUR data.
Ethically, perhaps; I like to think so, anyway. As a matter of US law, no. How many times do I have to explain to you that philosophy/ethics and the laws on the books are two different things?
Under US law, "search" has a very specific meaning. It means to search your property and personal effects. It does not mean simply to look at anything another person is doing. If you decide to go running through the middle of my store dressed in a clown suit, it isn't "search" for me to know that. If I dig through your purse because you checked it with me, that is "search."
Now, when it comes to AT&T, it's well within their right (under current law) for them to decide that they don't like BitTorrent traffic. They can decide that all BitTorrent traffic should be restricted to 1 KB/sec for each IP. Guess what? It's their bandwidth; they get to decide how to use it.
It is nothing to do with a megaphone - you are leasing bandwidth.
Yes, LEASING -- as in, you don't own it. It isn't yours. It's theirs. This is what you need to get through your head. Your data is just ephemeral, electrical states in real, physical property that belongs to them and is under their control. Your data (as a property concept) has less rights than their hardware. Which bring me to my next point...
Just as your letter is not the property of USPS and your parcel is not the property of DHL - true or false?
You act like checking your IP traffic is equivalent to opening a package. You've made this ridiculous analogy repeatedly but IP traffic has absolutely no resemblance to a sealed package. Instead, it's more like sending postcards around. All the data that's needed for AT&T to decide whether to block or restrict traffic they don't like is out there in the open for them to read -- in fact, they HAVE to read that information to get the packet to the right place.
Your data is not a sealed package. With a real package, there is some expectation of privacy because it's real, physical piece of property that belongs to you and is only temporarily being remanded into their custody, and there's an expectation that the carrier will not know what's inside because it's closed.
Your data isn't like that. Your data is wide open for anyone to see. Who it's from and where it's going is right there in the header. Heck, your data doesn't even exist except as an expression of the state of their hardware. AT&T is not breaking into your private property to steer your data around anymore than a post office employee looking at a postcard is.
But, hey, let's pretend that your data is like a package. Guess what? DHL & UPS can refuse to deliver your package or send it along as less than optimal route if they feel like it. They can tell you right up front, "No thanks; we don't deliver live animals or explosives, and we don't deliver to U.S. post office boxes or shacks in the middle of the woods. Sorry." They make the refusal of such packages part of their policy. If AT&T feels like it doesn't want to deliver pirated content, then that's their right too.
AT&T is under no more legal obligation to accept all data transmissions or to grant them all equal and fair bandwidth than UPS is under and obligation to take every package and give it equal treatment. The US post office can't really do much to refuse packages beyond what Congress has decreed is unsafe, but private carriers can.
You write "Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part" - however you still cannot be strip searched and have your cavities examined by a jewellers shop assistant JUST IN CASE you stole some goods.
*sigh* You're not listening. That's a violation of your body, which is your ultimate property. Furthermore, that's explicitly banned by the 4th Amendment as an unreasonable search. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not someone can tell you to shut up on their property or publicizing a recording of you trying to rob the place that they took with their equipment on their property (at least so long as they've posted a sign that you're being recorded in some states).
Filtering your internet traffic is not the same as violating your rectum. It's the same as saying that you can use my megaphone if you're going to say rude things about my favorite sports team over it. It's my megaphone, after all. Actually, to heck with analogies -- filtering internet traffic is filtering internet traffic. It has nothing to do with your body or your personhood any more than speech, which the Supreme Court has long held can be censored by the owners of property you're standing on or using.
They are actually filtering your DATA which is carried on their bandwidth that they lease you.
So what? It's on their property, and it's using bandwidth that could be provisioned to customers doing thing that they like. Under current law, that's their right. There's no explicit protection -- unlike physical packages where there's a whole body of law preventing tampering with mail. Barring a lack of explicit legislative action, there is nothing in US law to stop them.
GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD. Your analogies mean jack; all that matters is what the law IS, not what you think it should be.
That's why there's the current flap about net neutrality in the US. Many of us WANT a law that would protect us from this sort of abuse. The only reason we NEED such a law is because one currently doesn't exist. Congress has the power to regulate this under the interstate commerce clause, but without such regulation over 200 years of federal cout case law comes down in favor of AT&T. End of story.
I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse.
Quite frankly, it only incenses people that understand that the free market isn't going to solve this for everything.
After all, by the tenets of the free market, the lack of presence of these services shows that they do not meet the test of reward vs. cost. If the market for people that needed closed captioning was large enough to defray the costs of providing closed captioning, it would be more common. To ask businesses to provide closed captioning at a loss is antithetical to the core tenets of free market capitalism.
However, if you think that helping the hearing impaired be fully included in society is a worthwhile goal, then you should be able to accept government intervention in the matter. Otherwise, you're left "voting with your dollars" for a position that will never gain the critical mass to succeed. You reap what you sow.
In the US legal tradition, privacy is a concept that arises from the right to be left alone on your own property -- this is what the 4th Amendment supports. Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part. There are a handful of exceptions to this carved out by law, such as the privacy of your medical records, but these rights are not Constitutionally protected and can be taken away.
It's not that contracts can contravene statutory law -- it's that statutory law itself considers privacy to be mostly a matter of the sanctity of your home and your body. Whatever actions you take on someone else's property (e.g. your ISP's servers) are Constitutionally protected as a matter of their privacy and not yours. Additional statutes may apply, but current privacy law offers no protections in the case of filtering their bandwidth that they lease to you. The rights of AT&T to do whatever they want with their property and to restrict how others use it is supreme unless contravened by an act of Congress passing laws under the interstate commerce clause. There is nothing that compels them to let you do whatever you want with their bandwidth. That's a large part of why there's the whole net neutrality flap right now.
Personally, I vastly prefer the European approach to privacy over ours.
Depending on the sword, there might be very little risk. Thrusting swords and heavy swords meant for armored opponents have either dull or no edge most of the time. Thrusting swords don't need an edge, and sharp edges are more likely to chip and break against armor than duller edges. Someone pointing a rapier or a claymore would offer a weapon that offers great places to grab without threat of injury.
Even a single edged but sharp blade offers the ability to bat the thing aside and lunge for the body in a confined space like a convenience store.
In the end, though, better a slashed up palm than a few new holes in the torso or head. Plus, I invite you to maintain a grip on the barrel of a pistol that's just been fired by someone trying to wrest it back away from you. See how *your* hand fares in comparison.
Privacy is mainly protected by extension of the 4th Amendement (proscribing certain law enforcement procedures) and by the 9th Amendment which is sort of the catch-all rights amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, privacy is not *explicitly* preserved as a right. However, there is a good bit of Supreme Court case law that preserves it. Olmstead v. United States, Griswold v. Conneticut, and most controversially Roe v. Wade. Most of the conservative hostility to the concept of the right to privacy stems from Roe v. Wade which held the right to have an abortion to be a natural extension of the right to privacy.
I thought that even the police have to get a judge to authorize a warrant to search - and only if there is reasonable grounds against an individual (not the populace of whole country).
That's actually explicitly banned under the 4th amendment, but that amendment has nothing to do with the right not to be watched like a hawk.
Futhermore, in the US legal tradition, the private property rights essentially supercede all other rights. The 1st Amendment protecting free speech does nothing to prevent censorship of speech by owners of the property the speech is taking place on. Similarly, protection against search means nothing when the owner of the property is doing the search. The post office can't search your mail because they're a government agency and they don't own your mail, but there's nothing preventing an ISP from archiving every email you send over their property.
Property rights mean more than any other form of right in the US legal tradition.
Really? So what happens when the cable company (who has even more ties to the TV and movie industry) decides to join in when they look at the now risk-free benefits?
Who is your choice going to be then? Dial-up? Cell phone internet? Satellite? Don't make me laugh -- all of those are completely useless for sharing large files. Satellite is too slow on the upstream, dial-up is too slow in both directions, and cell phone service is metered by the MB and heavily capped.
Your free market "vote with your dollars" fundamentalism breaks down when natural monopolies and oligopolies like utility companies come into play. It also doesn't matter at all if AT&T decides to filter the backbone too. Welcome to the real world where customers can't just magically change to all the competitors that just spring up *pop* whenever a company does something naughty.
Yes, but how many armed robberies were commited with other weapons? Knives? Swords? Bats? Hand? etc?
Armed robbery is a really bad example for arguing that guns don't matter. It's far easier to defend yourself against someone with a melee weapon than someone with a gun -- just stay out of range. Honestly, if someone threatened bank teller with a knife, it would just be a matter of running away while the person tries to climb over the counter instead of having to freeze and instantly obey the person who could take your life with little more than the pull of a trigger.
Furthermore, how do you hold a whole bank hostage? With guns, you wander in and threaten to shoot anyone who moves. With clubs and knives, everyone just runs. Worse, it's easier for you to be taken down by skilled individuals or an angry crowd throwing things. With a gun, everyone has to listen to you or risk death without you having to take a single step.
Convenience store robbery is even more funny. There's all kind of impediments to physical assault in the form of counters and racks of goods that don't matter much when you hold a gun up to eye level that make robbing a store with a sword much harder. I mean, we've all seen amusing videos of robbers letting their guard down with a gun and getting wrestled down by tough clerks, and there's a lot less to hold back someone from defending theirselves when grabbing a weapon no longer means that it might be wrestled into a position to pull a trigger and kill you. I know *I'd* grab a sword being pointed at me long before I'd grab a gun.
Really, your argument is so silly that if I accused a gun advocate of believing it, I'd be guilty of making a straw man. Guns make certain kinds of robbery possible.
Not having to own, carry or read 75 Wizard's books alone makes up for what I lose in the roleplaying aspect.
I would like to point out that there is a vast variety of perfectly fun games out there that have only one book or at the very least aren't part of a supplement factory product line like those that come out of WotC and White Wolf.
I recommend checking out indie-rpgs.com for good discussion on what makes gaming fun. The forums there are heavily biased towards the semi-academic theory of how to design games, but the articles section there will make you think about what games are.
Start with System Does Matter in which Ron Edwards muses a bit over the three major different play goals of gamers and some very broad differences between systems. If some of this makes sense, move on to the much larger and more academic GNS and Other Matters of Role-playing Theory.
A brief excerpt from the second:
My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated. My goal in this writing is to provide vocabulary and perspective that enable people to articulate what they want and like out of the activity, and to understand what to look for both in other people and in game design to achieve their goals. The person who is entirely satisfied with his or her role-playing experiences is not my target audience.
If this sounds like you, then maybe the problem isn't that you're tired of gaming and that gaming sucks -- it's that you're not playing kind of games that reward what you want out of gaming. It sounds to me like you're getting burned out because you're not getting what you want out of a game, and you're just still doing it to hang out with friends who might not have much to talk about otherwise. I've been there. Read these essays, think about what it is that you like, and then poke around the Forge for info on good games that fit your style of play. You'll probably be surprised by the sheer variety that's out there beyond the stuff churned out by WotC. Far too many people check-out of gaming because they aren't aware that there's other stuff out there or because they're unwilling to try it.
Try some new games. Maybe your friends will enjoy a one-shot or two as variety.
Worst case scenario, find a new play group. Gaming is a lot like a relationship in that many people will claim that it's better to have bad gaming than none at all, but that's not true in the slightest. Like any social activity, if you're not getting what you really want out of it, it becomes an energy-draining obligation. Even so, there's no reason to give up on it entirely if better gaming is out there. Plus, just because you aren't spending every weekend with your friends doesn't mean that you won't see them ever again.
It is a game, not a movie. Games require balance. Movies require drama.
Ah, but where should the balance lie? And should setting and style always come second to balance? (...And who says games shouldn't require drama too, dangit!)
X uses per day or fatigue checks are a staple of RPGs. It makes the player be selective about when to use a power instead of a mundane ability.
I actually covered that pretty well in another post in this thread. Fatigue mechanics are good for gritty games focused on realism and consequences for showing out too much. Games set in genres that do not focus on realism and reward over-the-top action should NOT have a fatigue mechanic. Games should be designed to facilitate a certain style of play and should not hamper the kinds of action that players come to the table expecting.
Let's look at the original Legend of the Five Rings game. L5R was based on a CCG of the same name about a high-magic, feudal Japan-like setting with samurai clans descended from dragons, elemental spellcasters, firebreathing tattooed monks, and other wild elements. It's a pretty fantastic setting.
Coming from having played the CCG and not being familiar with the system, I immediately made a Togashi monk when my group decided to play the game. I mean, who doesn't want to be a fire-breathing, kung fu badass? In the CCG, the cards for these characters are just as strong as samurai, and that's what I was expecting -- a character that was a match for a samurai.
However, L5R's damage system is highly biased towards realism. It has strong biases towards armed combat over unarmed combat; a person wielding a sword got to roll and keep more dice for damage than an unarmed martial artists. PCs can be killed in one or two hits from a good weapon. It also has a very strong "death spiral" where wounds give very powerful penalties to your ability to counterattack. In essence, the game strongly favors whoever hits first with a strong weapon.
As a result, the game's focus on realism and traditional resource management mechanics (i.e. fire-breathing was limited in uses per day) led to tattooed monks being utterly worthless characters. Playing a shugenja (an elemental spellcaster) wasn't much better. I can understand that you don't want characters capable of leveling provinces like in the CCG, but the contribution a shugenja added to combat was pathetic. It wasn't until the d20 release that Rokugan become a place where anyone other than a samurai could stand out and be useful in a party. The original L5R system, thus, was an extremely poor system for simulating the world of Rokugan as portrayed in the CCG.
Now, why would anyone want to play in a Star Wars game where Jedi had very limited uses of their powers? Superhero games don't generally have a fatigue mechanic. Kung fu games don't generally have a fatigue mechanic. Why should Star Wars? It's opposed to the feel of a space opera setting.
Rules should reflect the world that a game is meant to be run in; game worlds and whole genres should not be slaves to rules. Any game system that fails to understand the way its rules deform and shape the style of play is a bad ruleset. And so, I say that a fatigue system for Force powers is a bad system because it make people play Jedi *very* differently from the movies.
Besides, who cares if fatigue checks are a staple of RPGs. Ever since the 90s, we've had more than enough systems come out that didn't use such a mechanic that have remained balanced. Furthermore, there's no reason to appeal to tradition if tradition gets in the way of doing things right.
I'd say that's a problem between you and your DM. Every class is good at something, and if it's not in your campaign, blame the DM, not the system.
Yes, but what gains you experience, levels, and character growth in d20? What element of play is the system set up to guide the players towards? What is the focus of the rules? In d20, it's generally combat, unless d20 Star Wars had some sort of XP mechanic that I'm not aware of. (I've only played the d6 and older WEG versions.)
You shouldn't absolve the system and blame the DM for not twisting the rules and the reward system to accommodate styles of play that the system is not set up to reward.
Sure, if that's how you play it. I've also run campaigns with a lot more talking than fighting. Even out in the field, there's plenty more to the game than combat.
In that case, you probably should've run the game with a system other than d20. If that's the style of play you want, then use a system that supports it. Gaming is better when you're not working at cross-purposes with the system you're using.
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The environmental impact of farming is not farming itself -- it's transporting food halfway across the country (or sometimes halfway across the planet) from where it grows. The theory is that if you can grow more food closer to where people live, you save all that wasted fuel.
Just so you know.
I'll have no part of that for a few reasons:
- I live in the city. All the even close to affordable houses are well outside what I consider a reasonable commuting range.
- It's just plain cheaper to rent. Sure, I'm not storing up equity, but really neither are a lot of people on subprime mortgages. At least the money I'm saving is being put into investments.
- I predict that once the baby boomers get a decade into retirement (with no kids in the house and failing health) a lot of them are going to start moving out of houses; many of them will be moving into "assisted living" centers. Houses in areas near good schools are going to get a LOT cheaper in the next ten years. At that time, I'll reevaluate whether owning a home is a good thing or not, but unless you can solidly plan to put down roots for the next 30 years where you are right now, owning a home might be an unwise investment.
Leasing is silly if your end goal is to own.So? What makes owning such a great goal to have in the first place? If your privacy or your paranoia is so important to you that you'd go through life without a bank account, then going without owning the house you live in isn't so bad in comparison.
Frankly, I'm paying about 1/2 to 2/3 what I'd pay for a mortgage on a home or condo in my area. My insurance is significantly cheaper, and I wouldn't have enough deductions to qualify for a tax break anyway.
Consider this wise or unwise as you wish, but I was able to live for half a year without a paycheck to go volunteer in the local election last year, and I had no fear of losing a place to live. I know that I'm fortunate to be in a very high income bracket due to my choice of careers, but I could get by comfortably with a third of my income because I live below my means.
Home ownership is overrated, if you ask me.
The United States of America is a voluntary union comprising of many independent states. These states have the right to self-governance and popular sovereignty; the Constitution does not allow for any such federal restrictions.
Me: What about the interstate commerce clause and the Civil War?
AC: LAH LAH LAH LAH LAH! I'M NOT LISTENING!
I mean, unless it's a "War on Privacy" Czar, isn't that a bad thing?
This is some serious disinformation here. Self-regulation by the tech industry worked just fine until the government began allowing business and corporate interests to affect its subsidies, grants, and funding.
I think you meant to put a colon after the word here. It makes more sense that way.
I mean, do you honestly believe that there has ever been some mythical time in US history in which businesses happily kept to themselves and acted like gentlemen in the best interests of their customers before some switch was flipped or some line was crossed and suddenly everyone started buying and trading power and favor? Must've been nice in that parallel universe.
Besides, you seem to be under the illusion that the privacy of their customers is in each business's best interest and that only the evil, evil government is causing them to datamine their customer base instead of the rich profits involved in knowing your customer's needs and desires and how to best inflame them. Privacy, frankly, is an impediment to profit.
The "grown up job that doesn't pay cash" is really the only big problem, but even then you can go to a check cashing place and pay an exorbitant rate to get your cash. I mean, you don't *have* to do direct deposit. Manage your expenses wisely, and you'll never need a loan or a mortgage.
If you need a credit card equivalent, try PrivaCash. I heard about it on a privacy website. It's basically a pre-paid debit card that isn't tied to your name. You can pick up preloaded cards in stores, but if you want to reload them, you have to deal with the bank that backs them. You can't do things like rent cars or do other things where access to a debt source is used in the place of a deposit, but you can make purchases online.
Really, though, unless you are planning on living completely off the record as much as possible once your stint in a university is done, go for a credit union. It's like a bank, only not evil (or at worst significantly less evil). Avoiding a bank is very, very hard in modern life. For more details about what you lose in terms of privacy and how to protect yourself to a limited extent, check out the book "How to be Invisible" by C.C. Luna.
Once again, traffic shaping is not wiretapping. It does not constitute illegal "interception" under the code. Find me a definition of wiretapping or surveillance that includes traffic shaping or denial of transmission but does not also make illegal the standard delivery of such data by the same hardware that would otherwise be capable of performing the acts you don't like.
And do actually read the law before commenting further on it. After all, you might find the following paragraph interesting -- USC 2511 (2)(a)(i):
Setting simple routing rules does not constitution "service observing or random monitoring" since no data about the communications is being tracked. Monitoring the data for later analysis might unless it's meant for "service quality control checks" (i.e. improving the quality of filtering).
Also relevant -- USC 2511 (2)(d):
If the terms and conditions of your ISP demand that you give permission for them to shape traffic to discourage unlawful behavior and abuse of the service, then this section of the code might well protect your ISP from prosecution.
Next up is USC 2511 (2)(h)(ii)
This part might even be stretchable to allow the logging of piracy-related related data if the MPAA or RIAA are AT&T customers, but it would be a stretch. I could see a judge ruling either way depending on how well the lawyers on each side presented their case.
And that is the law. If you want to argue it further, take it to the judge, 'cause I don't care anymore.
I understood - it was you who missed my point.
No I didn't. You seem to think that looking at information that is unconcealed is the same as a strip search. It isn't, which was my point in highlighting the difference.
V> Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B.
It only requires steam from a kettle for USPS to open and read your letter and seal it up again - but it is illegal.
Can you really consider yourself to have a single shred of intellectual integrity after making such an argument? The post office doesn't need to open your letter to deliver it. The address is on the outside. An IP packet has no "inside" or "outside." This will probably make the fifth or sixth time that I've had to say this, but everything that is needed to filter piracy is available in the portions of an IP packet that must be read by the ISP's hardware to deliver it.
If this is a violation of your privacy, then it's just as much a violation of your privacy when the postman reads the address on the outside of your letters to know where to deliver them. These are functionally the same kind of information.
I am aware of how IP transmissions and packets work thanks - I know for example that the router doesn't need people to watch over and help direct each of the individual packets.
Neither does it need people to filter out pirate traffic, then. It's all automated once the rules are set up, much like the routing tables are.
The data is your property - the ISP is merely the carrier.
Your concept of property doesn't match US law. Deal with it.
Fact is - nobody at my ISP can read my emails without physical intervention - by examining the data processed by the router etc.
True or false?
Irrelevant. Intercepting and reading through your email has absolutely nothing to do with impeding piracy over P2P file sharing networks.
Wrong - nothing in there about it applying it only to recording - tapping does not mean just recording.
So let me get this straight: Even if you don't record the data anywhere... Even if you don't give a human access to read the data... Even if you don't track the state of the connection... Just by having hardware that reads any portion of any packet, you're guilty of wiretapping?
Hogwash. If your ridiculous assertion were true, then your ISP would be legally prohibited from delivering your IP traffic. Congratulations! You have proven that America is a police state where I am having my rights violated every time I successfully view Slashdot!
Traffic shaping is not wiretapping.
Here's a link for you to refuse to read in turn. US Code, Title 18, Section 119. Try framing your arguments on wiretapping in such a way that doesn't try to make every single thing that an ISP does in the course of its business a felony crime.
How many people on either side of the main political line in the US simply argue points to favour their bias like they're barracking for sports teams? That's one of the perceptions I get, and something that can definitely be true here in Australia as well.
It's a universal human trait and it waxes and wanes with the times. Basically, it's an instinctual result of us having evolved as pack animals. We identify with groups and overlook the faults of our own group as an instinctual mechanism meant to keep the pack together. We then seek to compete with other groups, and our minds are geared to find bellicose reasons to despise them. We have no problem empathizing with people "like us" but have a really hard time seeing things from the point of view of rivals.
Because of this, it's easier to push related views onto people who already identify with you on other issues. When a person doesn't understand or hasn't previously encountered a particular issue, they're far more likely to trust someone who has already been identified as a "like-minded" person than someone who they already disagree with on other issues. This is the reason why most American who consider themselves religious Christians supported the war in Iraq and support harsher sentencing guidelines despite Jesus's message praising peacemakers and forgiveness. The issues aren't considered separately; they're part of a package deal called conservatism.
And yes, as you've pointed out, this sort of behavior is mimicked in less life-shaping things like favorite sports teams, favorite brands of car, etc. It's truly a universal instinct. Sometimes the dominant mood of the times reaches away from such limiting and simple patterns of thought, but more recently it's been in fashion for leaders to play to such base instincts to swing the electorate around by its most scared and emotional members.
American democracy has really gotten dysfunctional. We've gotten to the point (thanks to the rise of negative campaigning) where politicians have found it easier to drive thinking, independent Americans away from the polls and play to hardened partisans than to attempt to sway the moderates in the middle with logic. After all, rallying people who judge you based on your aping of a broad platform is easier than letting them weigh you on a complex and nuanced platform of independent thought.
How does winning a district vs winning actual votes matter? Isn't the person elected the one who won the most votes?
Yes. In that district.
Imagine that you have two parties, Red and Blue, running for control of a ten-seat legislature. Now imagine that 61% of the general population votes for Red and 39% votes for Blue. Here's how you divide up the districts to let Blue control the legislature in spite of Red having the popular vote:
Totals State-Wide -- 39,000 Blues; 61,000 Reds
Districts 1-4 -- No Blues; 10,000 Reds each.
Districts 6-10 -- 6,500 Blues; 3,500 Reds each.
The end result is that just over 3/5 of the population votes for Red, but 3/5 of the seats go to Blue. Blue has a solid majority to press their agenda despite the fact that the majority of people in the state sympathize with Red.
In the real world, this is the reason why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required southern states that had a history of racial discrimination to have their districting plans reviewed to prevent attempts to marginalize the black vote. What you could do is make districts with a 90%+ black population and then spread out the remaining black vote within safe, white-dominated districts. This ensures that the white majority could never be threatened by the election of more than a handful of black politicians. Gerrymandering is a very real issue, and it's why Congress has only a handful of incumbents defeated each election cycle outside of major times of political unrest like 1994 and 2006. Gerrymandering makes sure that the voters are matched to the incumbent.
Gerrymandering also allows for victories at the state level to be translated into victories at the national level. Read about the 2003 Texas redistricting effort for more detail.
Keep in mind that while it's not the result of gerrymandering, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in 2000 despite losing the popular vote because most of the states he won were low population states which are given disproportionate voting strength in the electoral college. The composition of a district and its resulting voting power and voting biases is *extremely* important to the actual outcome of an election.
Somewhat, but in the end X still gets 100 votes to Y's 50. Who really cares who won what district since it's nothing but a fictional space to make up false statistics? At least to me the actual votes is all that matters.
Well, if you don't care who actually wins and gets the power, why do you care about the votes at all? Might as well draw straws or let the Inner Party decide if that's all you care about.
Getting a warrant for your ancestry DNA file or for a swab of your mouth is the same thing.
Really? I wasn't aware that the FBI could send a National Security Letter to my mouth to check my DNA records and compel my cheek to never inform me of the fact.
Looking at a clown in your shop is not a search - stripping him down and examining everything about him with a fine-toothed comb is.
It's *almost* like that was my point. Good of you to repeat it in such a way as to suggest that you completely missed it.
It is a load of b*ll*cks to say it is "like sending postcards around" - you cannot read or see my emails by looking at the phone line - you need equipment to 'open' it up and sort it in order and so be able to 'read' it.
Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B. Seriously, do you fundamentally not understand how the IP transmissions work? Data is divided up into packets with each packet containing "envelope data" telling the router where to send the packet. Without reading this info, your data can't get anywhere. What, did you think that they had to close their eyes and fling packets around until they magically arrived at their destination?
That data is more than sufficient to make a very simple piracy filter. Block or degrade all traffic to The Pirate Bay and to well known BitTorrent trackers, and you've made some progress. Inside the IP envelope is the always unencrypted TCP envelope. With that information, you can begin to determine what protocol a person is speaking which can let you filter certain protocols intended for P2P file sharing.
You don't have to even actually read packets to degrade a P2P connection, which is why Bram Cohen thought that adding encryption to the BitTorrent protocol was pointless. If you notice that a user has opened hundreds of low bandwidth connections to hundreds of different IPs, then you can almost guarantee that the user is using a P2P file sharing system. It's a simple matter then to cap their bandwidth at that point without even reading their data.
You think that ISPs are going to waste the resources trying to perfectly identify who's sharing legit data and pirated data? Oh, heck no. They're just going to impede anyone suspicious, and they'll alter the terms of their agreement with you to allow it. Blacklists against known pirate sites, whitelists for business partners, and simple, false-positive prone, dragnet rules for everything else will be the rule of the day. Your privacy isn't being violated by them doing so -- you've handed them all the info they need for it.
Is it perfectly legal for phone companies to listen in to the intangible data (i.e. electronic signal) of your private phone conversations over your LEASED line?
No. But that's because there are explicit laws preventing them from listening to and recording your conversations. However, there's nothing to prevent an ISP from using the information needed to deliver your data to deprioritize it or block it so long as they aren't recording it. As long as they aren't recording it, wiretapping provisions don't apply and your analogy once again breaks down because the law is not about analogies but about specific and tightly defined acts.
You keep trying to extend laws meant for very specific situations into situations where they don't apply. Try to understand this. You're just being mulish about this. If such laws existed, we wouldn't have to be fighting for them in the net neutrality debates right now.
BTW: How do private carriers know what is in parcel to refuse sending?
Well, first they tell you up front and make you sign a contract to not send certain things. It's in the fine print of the receipt you sign that you have to abide by certain rules. Almost always, the things they bar are things that require special handling and which cause troubles if not specially handled. Live animals are pretty easy to detect at the counter as long as you're sending them in a way that intends to keep them alive at the destination. Plus, when they inevitably ignore all your "this side up" and "fragile" warnings, the squeals of pain from the animals being tossed about inside have a way of
I always thought the difficulty of separating voices from background noise was the result of poor sound editing (especially when movies are transferred to DVD).
Some of us interact with people face to face as opposed to just watching them on the TV, you know.
And, yes, I too have some minor trouble discriminating speech over background noise (not as bad as the poster of the article, though). While I rarely need to result to closed captioning to get by watching a movie, I do frequently have to ask people to repeat themselves despite having been tested as having slightly above average hearing. I can easily hear a pin drop in a quiet room, but I can't understand people talking in the front of a car from the back seat over common road noise.
It is violation of YOUR privacy to examine YOUR data.
Ethically, perhaps; I like to think so, anyway. As a matter of US law, no. How many times do I have to explain to you that philosophy/ethics and the laws on the books are two different things?
Under US law, "search" has a very specific meaning. It means to search your property and personal effects. It does not mean simply to look at anything another person is doing. If you decide to go running through the middle of my store dressed in a clown suit, it isn't "search" for me to know that. If I dig through your purse because you checked it with me, that is "search."
Now, when it comes to AT&T, it's well within their right (under current law) for them to decide that they don't like BitTorrent traffic. They can decide that all BitTorrent traffic should be restricted to 1 KB/sec for each IP. Guess what? It's their bandwidth; they get to decide how to use it.
It is nothing to do with a megaphone - you are leasing bandwidth.
Yes, LEASING -- as in, you don't own it. It isn't yours. It's theirs. This is what you need to get through your head. Your data is just ephemeral, electrical states in real, physical property that belongs to them and is under their control. Your data (as a property concept) has less rights than their hardware. Which bring me to my next point...
Just as your letter is not the property of USPS and your parcel is not the property of DHL - true or false?
You act like checking your IP traffic is equivalent to opening a package. You've made this ridiculous analogy repeatedly but IP traffic has absolutely no resemblance to a sealed package. Instead, it's more like sending postcards around. All the data that's needed for AT&T to decide whether to block or restrict traffic they don't like is out there in the open for them to read -- in fact, they HAVE to read that information to get the packet to the right place.
Your data is not a sealed package. With a real package, there is some expectation of privacy because it's real, physical piece of property that belongs to you and is only temporarily being remanded into their custody, and there's an expectation that the carrier will not know what's inside because it's closed.
Your data isn't like that. Your data is wide open for anyone to see. Who it's from and where it's going is right there in the header. Heck, your data doesn't even exist except as an expression of the state of their hardware. AT&T is not breaking into your private property to steer your data around anymore than a post office employee looking at a postcard is.
But, hey, let's pretend that your data is like a package. Guess what? DHL & UPS can refuse to deliver your package or send it along as less than optimal route if they feel like it. They can tell you right up front, "No thanks; we don't deliver live animals or explosives, and we don't deliver to U.S. post office boxes or shacks in the middle of the woods. Sorry." They make the refusal of such packages part of their policy. If AT&T feels like it doesn't want to deliver pirated content, then that's their right too.
AT&T is under no more legal obligation to accept all data transmissions or to grant them all equal and fair bandwidth than UPS is under and obligation to take every package and give it equal treatment. The US post office can't really do much to refuse packages beyond what Congress has decreed is unsafe, but private carriers can.
You write "Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part" - however you still cannot be strip searched and have your cavities examined by a jewellers shop assistant JUST IN CASE you stole some goods.
*sigh* You're not listening. That's a violation of your body, which is your ultimate property. Furthermore, that's explicitly banned by the 4th Amendment as an unreasonable search. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not someone can tell you to shut up on their property or publicizing a recording of you trying to rob the place that they took with their equipment on their property (at least so long as they've posted a sign that you're being recorded in some states).
Filtering your internet traffic is not the same as violating your rectum. It's the same as saying that you can use my megaphone if you're going to say rude things about my favorite sports team over it. It's my megaphone, after all. Actually, to heck with analogies -- filtering internet traffic is filtering internet traffic. It has nothing to do with your body or your personhood any more than speech, which the Supreme Court has long held can be censored by the owners of property you're standing on or using.
They are actually filtering your DATA which is carried on their bandwidth that they lease you.
So what? It's on their property, and it's using bandwidth that could be provisioned to customers doing thing that they like. Under current law, that's their right. There's no explicit protection -- unlike physical packages where there's a whole body of law preventing tampering with mail. Barring a lack of explicit legislative action, there is nothing in US law to stop them.
GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD. Your analogies mean jack; all that matters is what the law IS, not what you think it should be.
That's why there's the current flap about net neutrality in the US. Many of us WANT a law that would protect us from this sort of abuse. The only reason we NEED such a law is because one currently doesn't exist. Congress has the power to regulate this under the interstate commerce clause, but without such regulation over 200 years of federal cout case law comes down in favor of AT&T. End of story.
I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse.
Quite frankly, it only incenses people that understand that the free market isn't going to solve this for everything.
After all, by the tenets of the free market, the lack of presence of these services shows that they do not meet the test of reward vs. cost. If the market for people that needed closed captioning was large enough to defray the costs of providing closed captioning, it would be more common. To ask businesses to provide closed captioning at a loss is antithetical to the core tenets of free market capitalism.
However, if you think that helping the hearing impaired be fully included in society is a worthwhile goal, then you should be able to accept government intervention in the matter. Otherwise, you're left "voting with your dollars" for a position that will never gain the critical mass to succeed. You reap what you sow.
In the US legal tradition, privacy is a concept that arises from the right to be left alone on your own property -- this is what the 4th Amendment supports. Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part. There are a handful of exceptions to this carved out by law, such as the privacy of your medical records, but these rights are not Constitutionally protected and can be taken away.
It's not that contracts can contravene statutory law -- it's that statutory law itself considers privacy to be mostly a matter of the sanctity of your home and your body. Whatever actions you take on someone else's property (e.g. your ISP's servers) are Constitutionally protected as a matter of their privacy and not yours. Additional statutes may apply, but current privacy law offers no protections in the case of filtering their bandwidth that they lease to you. The rights of AT&T to do whatever they want with their property and to restrict how others use it is supreme unless contravened by an act of Congress passing laws under the interstate commerce clause. There is nothing that compels them to let you do whatever you want with their bandwidth. That's a large part of why there's the whole net neutrality flap right now.
Personally, I vastly prefer the European approach to privacy over ours.
Depending on the sword, there might be very little risk. Thrusting swords and heavy swords meant for armored opponents have either dull or no edge most of the time. Thrusting swords don't need an edge, and sharp edges are more likely to chip and break against armor than duller edges. Someone pointing a rapier or a claymore would offer a weapon that offers great places to grab without threat of injury.
Even a single edged but sharp blade offers the ability to bat the thing aside and lunge for the body in a confined space like a convenience store.
In the end, though, better a slashed up palm than a few new holes in the torso or head. Plus, I invite you to maintain a grip on the barrel of a pistol that's just been fired by someone trying to wrest it back away from you. See how *your* hand fares in comparison.
In other words, privacy is not *explicitly* preserved as a right. However, there is a good bit of Supreme Court case law that preserves it. Olmstead v. United States, Griswold v. Conneticut, and most controversially Roe v. Wade. Most of the conservative hostility to the concept of the right to privacy stems from Roe v. Wade which held the right to have an abortion to be a natural extension of the right to privacy.
I thought that even the police have to get a judge to authorize a warrant to search - and only if there is reasonable grounds against an individual (not the populace of whole country).
That's actually explicitly banned under the 4th amendment, but that amendment has nothing to do with the right not to be watched like a hawk.
Futhermore, in the US legal tradition, the private property rights essentially supercede all other rights. The 1st Amendment protecting free speech does nothing to prevent censorship of speech by owners of the property the speech is taking place on. Similarly, protection against search means nothing when the owner of the property is doing the search. The post office can't search your mail because they're a government agency and they don't own your mail, but there's nothing preventing an ISP from archiving every email you send over their property.
Property rights mean more than any other form of right in the US legal tradition.
Really? So what happens when the cable company (who has even more ties to the TV and movie industry) decides to join in when they look at the now risk-free benefits?
Who is your choice going to be then? Dial-up? Cell phone internet? Satellite? Don't make me laugh -- all of those are completely useless for sharing large files. Satellite is too slow on the upstream, dial-up is too slow in both directions, and cell phone service is metered by the MB and heavily capped.
Your free market "vote with your dollars" fundamentalism breaks down when natural monopolies and oligopolies like utility companies come into play. It also doesn't matter at all if AT&T decides to filter the backbone too. Welcome to the real world where customers can't just magically change to all the competitors that just spring up *pop* whenever a company does something naughty.
Yes, but how many armed robberies were commited with other weapons? Knives? Swords? Bats? Hand? etc?
Armed robbery is a really bad example for arguing that guns don't matter. It's far easier to defend yourself against someone with a melee weapon than someone with a gun -- just stay out of range. Honestly, if someone threatened bank teller with a knife, it would just be a matter of running away while the person tries to climb over the counter instead of having to freeze and instantly obey the person who could take your life with little more than the pull of a trigger.
Furthermore, how do you hold a whole bank hostage? With guns, you wander in and threaten to shoot anyone who moves. With clubs and knives, everyone just runs. Worse, it's easier for you to be taken down by skilled individuals or an angry crowd throwing things. With a gun, everyone has to listen to you or risk death without you having to take a single step.
Convenience store robbery is even more funny. There's all kind of impediments to physical assault in the form of counters and racks of goods that don't matter much when you hold a gun up to eye level that make robbing a store with a sword much harder. I mean, we've all seen amusing videos of robbers letting their guard down with a gun and getting wrestled down by tough clerks, and there's a lot less to hold back someone from defending theirselves when grabbing a weapon no longer means that it might be wrestled into a position to pull a trigger and kill you. I know *I'd* grab a sword being pointed at me long before I'd grab a gun.
Really, your argument is so silly that if I accused a gun advocate of believing it, I'd be guilty of making a straw man. Guns make certain kinds of robbery possible.
I would like to point out that there is a vast variety of perfectly fun games out there that have only one book or at the very least aren't part of a supplement factory product line like those that come out of WotC and White Wolf.
I recommend checking out indie-rpgs.com for good discussion on what makes gaming fun. The forums there are heavily biased towards the semi-academic theory of how to design games, but the articles section there will make you think about what games are.
Start with System Does Matter in which Ron Edwards muses a bit over the three major different play goals of gamers and some very broad differences between systems. If some of this makes sense, move on to the much larger and more academic GNS and Other Matters of Role-playing Theory.
A brief excerpt from the second:
If this sounds like you, then maybe the problem isn't that you're tired of gaming and that gaming sucks -- it's that you're not playing kind of games that reward what you want out of gaming. It sounds to me like you're getting burned out because you're not getting what you want out of a game, and you're just still doing it to hang out with friends who might not have much to talk about otherwise. I've been there. Read these essays, think about what it is that you like, and then poke around the Forge for info on good games that fit your style of play. You'll probably be surprised by the sheer variety that's out there beyond the stuff churned out by WotC. Far too many people check-out of gaming because they aren't aware that there's other stuff out there or because they're unwilling to try it.
Try some new games. Maybe your friends will enjoy a one-shot or two as variety.
Worst case scenario, find a new play group. Gaming is a lot like a relationship in that many people will claim that it's better to have bad gaming than none at all, but that's not true in the slightest. Like any social activity, if you're not getting what you really want out of it, it becomes an energy-draining obligation. Even so, there's no reason to give up on it entirely if better gaming is out there. Plus, just because you aren't spending every weekend with your friends doesn't mean that you won't see them ever again.
It is a game, not a movie. Games require balance. Movies require drama.
Ah, but where should the balance lie? And should setting and style always come second to balance? (...And who says games shouldn't require drama too, dangit!)
X uses per day or fatigue checks are a staple of RPGs. It makes the player be selective about when to use a power instead of a mundane ability.
I actually covered that pretty well in another post in this thread. Fatigue mechanics are good for gritty games focused on realism and consequences for showing out too much. Games set in genres that do not focus on realism and reward over-the-top action should NOT have a fatigue mechanic. Games should be designed to facilitate a certain style of play and should not hamper the kinds of action that players come to the table expecting.
Let's look at the original Legend of the Five Rings game. L5R was based on a CCG of the same name about a high-magic, feudal Japan-like setting with samurai clans descended from dragons, elemental spellcasters, firebreathing tattooed monks, and other wild elements. It's a pretty fantastic setting.
Coming from having played the CCG and not being familiar with the system, I immediately made a Togashi monk when my group decided to play the game. I mean, who doesn't want to be a fire-breathing, kung fu badass? In the CCG, the cards for these characters are just as strong as samurai, and that's what I was expecting -- a character that was a match for a samurai.
However, L5R's damage system is highly biased towards realism. It has strong biases towards armed combat over unarmed combat; a person wielding a sword got to roll and keep more dice for damage than an unarmed martial artists. PCs can be killed in one or two hits from a good weapon. It also has a very strong "death spiral" where wounds give very powerful penalties to your ability to counterattack. In essence, the game strongly favors whoever hits first with a strong weapon.
As a result, the game's focus on realism and traditional resource management mechanics (i.e. fire-breathing was limited in uses per day) led to tattooed monks being utterly worthless characters. Playing a shugenja (an elemental spellcaster) wasn't much better. I can understand that you don't want characters capable of leveling provinces like in the CCG, but the contribution a shugenja added to combat was pathetic. It wasn't until the d20 release that Rokugan become a place where anyone other than a samurai could stand out and be useful in a party. The original L5R system, thus, was an extremely poor system for simulating the world of Rokugan as portrayed in the CCG.
Now, why would anyone want to play in a Star Wars game where Jedi had very limited uses of their powers? Superhero games don't generally have a fatigue mechanic. Kung fu games don't generally have a fatigue mechanic. Why should Star Wars? It's opposed to the feel of a space opera setting.
Rules should reflect the world that a game is meant to be run in; game worlds and whole genres should not be slaves to rules. Any game system that fails to understand the way its rules deform and shape the style of play is a bad ruleset. And so, I say that a fatigue system for Force powers is a bad system because it make people play Jedi *very* differently from the movies.
Besides, who cares if fatigue checks are a staple of RPGs. Ever since the 90s, we've had more than enough systems come out that didn't use such a mechanic that have remained balanced. Furthermore, there's no reason to appeal to tradition if tradition gets in the way of doing things right.
I'd say that's a problem between you and your DM. Every class is good at something, and if it's not in your campaign, blame the DM, not the system.
Yes, but what gains you experience, levels, and character growth in d20? What element of play is the system set up to guide the players towards? What is the focus of the rules? In d20, it's generally combat, unless d20 Star Wars had some sort of XP mechanic that I'm not aware of. (I've only played the d6 and older WEG versions.)
You shouldn't absolve the system and blame the DM for not twisting the rules and the reward system to accommodate styles of play that the system is not set up to reward.
Sure, if that's how you play it. I've also run campaigns with a lot more talking than fighting. Even out in the field, there's plenty more to the game than combat.
In that case, you probably should've run the game with a system other than d20. If that's the style of play you want, then use a system that supports it. Gaming is better when you're not working at cross-purposes with the system you're using.