Perhaps, perhaps not. With the Abramoff scandal, the price of buying friendly legislation went up a few notches, so we may finally have reached the point where paying to produce good movies costs less than bribing Congress.
That the Second Amendment did not apply to the state governments, at least not before substantive due process was applied to the states.
The case you cite is one concerning not state but federal law (hence the "US" in the title), and the opinion was written over 70 years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment at that.
That my opinion was that the original intent of the Second Amendment was to prevent the federal government from placing restrictions on militia service to prevent the federal government from using it as an avenue of creating "select corps (...) composed of the young and the ardent, who may be rendered subservient to the views of arbitrary power" in the words of Hamilton in Federalist 29 ("Concerning the Militia").
The court opinion you reference was written over a century after all state and federal legislators involved in the ratification of the amendment had died.
Please forgive me if I fail to see your point in referencing it.
"I'd expect that some of the iron was converted to energy,"
IIRC, Fe is that magical break-even point where the energy it takes to fuse it is about even with the energy produced by the fusion (which is why blue supergiant stars go BOOM when they reach this stage). Beyond Fe, you're better off with fission I believe.
"That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies in time of peace should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."
Aside from saying nothing about personal ownership of firearms, I find it ironic that you're reaching to a quote that refers to a "free state" to support a federal imposition on a state's right to regulate the sale and distribution of anything.
However, there is Virginia's proposal for federal constitutional amendments, which includes (emphasis mine)
That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated Militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free State. That standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the Community will admit; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the Civil power.
So it would seem the Virginia delegation (which included George Mason) felt that the state should ensure that those who would serve in the militia and bear those arms be properly trained in their use (ostensibly by the state).
And why would the Virginia delegation propose a federal amendment to restrict the state legislature when a similar article already existed in their state constitution? Were they in favor of meaningless repitition? It seems to serve no purpose other than to render the state constitution they themselves helped to create meaningless.
"Of course it does, since in it are restrictions on the governments in states (a republican form of government), no regulation of commerce with other states, and such."
All of which specifically mention the states (hence my referring to the phrase "No State shall"). On the other hand, when Madison proposed the Bill of Rights to Congress, he specifically said he wanted the new text placed in Article I, Section 9, which is a list of prohibitions against Congress, as opposed to Section 10 which contains prohibitions against the states.
(And there is no text in the constitution that denies a state's right to regulate interstate commerce, only that they cannot lay duties or imposts. There's a reason why what you're referring to is called the Dormant Commerce Clause.)
"considered academically to be an expert commentator on the Constitution."
However, not a Supreme Court Justice (and certainly not writing that as part of a court opinion). And without reaching for "substantive due process" under the aegis of the Fourteenth Amendment, a Supreme Court that would apply the Second Amendment to the states that still did not apply the Sixth Amendment's requirement for jury trials, would be acting arbitrarily at best.
"Even so, you can't both blame inflation and deflation on the same group of people. That seriously makes no sense."
Yes you can, so long as you're talking about locallized inflation and deflation.
For example, I play Final Fantasy XI, on the Fairy server, and I've taken an interest in skilling up clothcraft. To limit the scope of this discussion, let's say there are three matierals you can make thread out of: saruta cotton (for cotton thread), red moko grass (for red grass thread) and flax flowers (for linen thread). The skill caps for cotton thread, red grass thread and linen thread are (for the sake of argument) 10, 15 and 20 respectively.
As it stands now, however, the thread that is most in demand is the intermediate one, red grass thread; high level crafters can make some nifty gear for rich level 20 red mages (or themselves if their RDM is only level 20), but they have to consume mass quantities of the stuff. As such, the price of red grass thread is orders of magnitude higher than even the more difficult to make (and more widely usable) linen thread.
In short, red grass thread is a prime target for gilsellers; all you would need to do is get your clothcraft up to 15 or so and you're able to churn out as much red grass thread as you can supply the raw materials (the red moko grass which, coincidentally, is also expensive).
What affect does this have on the game's economy?
First, there is the lower-level cotton thread and its constituent part, saruta cotton. Every clothcrafter, gilseller or no, has to go through cotton skill-ups in order to get to the point where they can make red grass thread. But organized groups of gilsellers have access to each others' gil resources to buy saruta cotton en masse in order for new characters to skill up as quickly as possible. This leaves the rest of the cotton market with drastically inflated prices on saruta cotton. If you attempt to buy it from the clothcraft guild store with their (somewhat) more reasonable prices, who only has a limited supply each game day, if you camp the store at opening and jump on them as soon as they open shop, you might be lucky enough to buy a ball of saruta cotton (and two are required to make a thread).
On the other end of the spectrum, past the red grass thread hump at skill 15, is flax flowers and linen thread. Flax flowers are about as easy to find as saruta cotton if you go and harvest it yourself from the grass fields; in fact, it can be argued that cotton is easier to find than flax flowers as, unlike the cotton, no monsters drop it. However, the gilsellers aren't particularly interested in linen thread at skill 20, they're more interested in the red grass thread back at skill 15. So when they go out and harvest in the grass fields and end up with far more flax flowers than red moko grass, they're not interested in it and dump it in the auction house for a song. The cotton, of course, sells well (especially to each other) because of the manufactured short supply they helped to create, but the flax flowers aren't worth the similar amount of time put into finding them (because gilsellers aren't interested in it). As such, the prices of flax flowers are drastically deflated, even lower than the prices the guild store sells it for (which always has a ready supply of flax flowers to sell, no matter the time of day). In other fields, it is not unusual for raw materials to sell for more in the auction house than in the NPC stores (e. g. NPCs sell iron ore for about 800 gil, but it generally can't be had in the auction house for less than 1000), and yet, with flax flowers, they can be bought at the auction house for 1/10 of what the NPCs sell them for.
The results of gilselling in this example are
Inflated prices for saruta cotton
Deflated prices for flax flowers
A hideous barrier to entry in the clothcraft skill in general (at least if you don't buy gil).
And as a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER GAME, it's supposed to be interactive and (in the example of RPGs) cooperative.
"Sure, there's the whole issue of more money entering the economy, but if someone bought the money from someone else, the money was already in the economy, it's just changed hands."
Except you're forgetting about the people who would not be playing and making that money if it were not for that changing of hands (i. e. goldsellers). There is no Alan Greenspan in the background regulating how much gold monsters drop or what the auction rates are, the only variable in the amount of gold in ciruclation is the number of man-hours put into harvesting it; there is literally an infinite supply of gold to be had, limited only by the amount of labor put into finding it. If everybody spends a similar amount of time making that gold (i. e. casual play, more or less), then everybody will have similar access (more or less) to that gold. But as soon as some Chinese guy starts working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week solely on earning gold, the amount of gold made during casual play deflates in value dramatically.
You complain of the "treadmill" but don't stop to consider that if everybody spent 7 hours a week tops on said treadmill, prices would be far more reasonable and you'd hardly notice that treadmill at all. Your agrument of wanting to "get off the treadmill" is at best ciruclar logic; your "getting off the treadmill" makes said treadmill disproportionally more difficult for those who choose to stay on. All you're saying is "Everybody else is, so why shouldn't I?"
"it's not cheating unless it somehow operates completely outside of the game's mechanics,"
Find me a way to exchange United States Dollars (or Euros or what have you) in game in WoW, and then I'll consent that it operates wholly within the game mechanics. Until then, Visa/MasterCard/ACH/etc. are not constructs of Blizzard.
Yeah, except none of the Bill of Rights applied to the states in any way until the SCOTUS read the Fourteenth Amendment in a certain way. In light of the language of the rest of the Constitution, especially the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, it has to say "No State shall..." before it can unequivocally be said to be targeted at the states, otherwise it's a list of restrictions on the feds.
For example, the intent that I see in the Second Amendment was to ensure that members of the state militias, the only military defense left solely to the states (at least without the Congressional consent required for a state army) would be representative of the people of the state as a whole, and not subject to a federal loyalty or political test (especially important if the federal government might be hostile to the state). It doesn't even prevent the states from instituting a loyalty test, unless you want to wave your hands around and shout "substantive due process!"
If you want something guaranteed to apply to laws in New Jersey, I invite you to read Article I, Section 6 of the New Jersey Constitution:
Every person may freely speak, write and publish his sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right. No law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.
"This is the problem with any structure of checks and balances -- there is no penalty for violating the oath to uphold a given constitution."
And who, if not the voters on election day, is to decide whether a politician is or is not upholding the constitution? The king?
"How about an amendment to all the Constitutions with a 3 strikes and you're out law? If a law-maker votes for 3 bills that are later found to be unconstitutional, they're booted."
He who stacks the court in their favor wins! You already spend a great deal of time bemoaning changes made to the federal government by Franklin Roosevelt, would you really be happier if he could also have used that supermajority he appointed to the Supreme Court to kick out Members of Congress he didn't like?
"Oh noes, there aren't any GameCubes for sale in a market that rejected even the NES! Netcraft confirms!"
Aside from the UK being the boondocks of the console game market, Brits haven't been very keen on buying Nintendo (ever). Why should they follow Microsoft's example in Japan when there are plenty of people in other markets more than happy to buy Nintendo hardware and software?
Titles such as Black, TOCA Race Driver 3 and FIFA Street 2 should ensure the Xbox and PlayStation 2 remain comfortable under consumers' TV sets for the rest of the year.
No, TOCA Race Driver 3 and FIFA Street 2 will only last you 6-8 months. In order to keep those PS2s and Xboxes humming, you need to release TOCA Race Driver 4 and FIFA Street 3 before next Christmas.
Nah, as I recall the arm on the station is one arm but has two hands: one on either end. One hand holds on to the station while the other does the catching/throwing, and it can move around the station like a slinky.
(Just going by faulty memory here, too lazy to look it up.)
"The only thing Judge Green would have needed to do all those years ago was repeal (and prevent the states from reestablishing) monopoly protection of AT&T."
Yeeaaaahhh... Have you read your constitution lately? Do you fully grasp the meaning of the word "federal?"
I'd like to see a state (any state) revoke a Bell's priveleges as much as the next Slashdotter, but just because we'd like it doesn't mean a federal judge automatically has the power to mandate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the Xbox 360 is essentially "more of the same" while the DS was designed to be anything but.
Perhaps, perhaps not. With the Abramoff scandal, the price of buying friendly legislation went up a few notches, so we may finally have reached the point where paying to produce good movies costs less than bribing Congress.
I believe my original post made two points:
Please forgive me if I fail to see your point in referencing it.
"I'd expect that some of the iron was converted to energy,"
IIRC, Fe is that magical break-even point where the energy it takes to fuse it is about even with the energy produced by the fusion (which is why blue supergiant stars go BOOM when they reach this stage). Beyond Fe, you're better off with fission I believe.
Where's CleverNickName when you need him?
Not sure there's much of a difference between "wet" and "dry" when you're talking plasma. The ol' critical line ends way down yonder.
"Well, the military is also against food"
They've been that way for decades. Haven't you heard of MREs?
"No one has mentioned citizens giving up their rights, only deployed Marines/Soldiers."
They ain't citizens?
However, there is Virginia's proposal for federal constitutional amendments, which includes (emphasis mine)So it would seem the Virginia delegation (which included George Mason) felt that the state should ensure that those who would serve in the militia and bear those arms be properly trained in their use (ostensibly by the state).
And why would the Virginia delegation propose a federal amendment to restrict the state legislature when a similar article already existed in their state constitution? Were they in favor of meaningless repitition? It seems to serve no purpose other than to render the state constitution they themselves helped to create meaningless.
"Of course it does, since in it are restrictions on the governments in states (a republican form of government), no regulation of commerce with other states, and such."
All of which specifically mention the states (hence my referring to the phrase "No State shall"). On the other hand, when Madison proposed the Bill of Rights to Congress, he specifically said he wanted the new text placed in Article I, Section 9, which is a list of prohibitions against Congress, as opposed to Section 10 which contains prohibitions against the states.
(And there is no text in the constitution that denies a state's right to regulate interstate commerce, only that they cannot lay duties or imposts. There's a reason why what you're referring to is called the Dormant Commerce Clause.)
"considered academically to be an expert commentator on the Constitution."
However, not a Supreme Court Justice (and certainly not writing that as part of a court opinion). And without reaching for "substantive due process" under the aegis of the Fourteenth Amendment, a Supreme Court that would apply the Second Amendment to the states that still did not apply the Sixth Amendment's requirement for jury trials, would be acting arbitrarily at best.
"CO2 waste compared to RadioActive waste isnt even in the same league"
So, how's the lung cancer rate over there?
Are there hot grits involved?
Yes you can, so long as you're talking about locallized inflation and deflation.
For example, I play Final Fantasy XI, on the Fairy server, and I've taken an interest in skilling up clothcraft. To limit the scope of this discussion, let's say there are three matierals you can make thread out of: saruta cotton (for cotton thread), red moko grass (for red grass thread) and flax flowers (for linen thread). The skill caps for cotton thread, red grass thread and linen thread are (for the sake of argument) 10, 15 and 20 respectively.
As it stands now, however, the thread that is most in demand is the intermediate one, red grass thread; high level crafters can make some nifty gear for rich level 20 red mages (or themselves if their RDM is only level 20), but they have to consume mass quantities of the stuff. As such, the price of red grass thread is orders of magnitude higher than even the more difficult to make (and more widely usable) linen thread.
In short, red grass thread is a prime target for gilsellers; all you would need to do is get your clothcraft up to 15 or so and you're able to churn out as much red grass thread as you can supply the raw materials (the red moko grass which, coincidentally, is also expensive).
What affect does this have on the game's economy?
First, there is the lower-level cotton thread and its constituent part, saruta cotton. Every clothcrafter, gilseller or no, has to go through cotton skill-ups in order to get to the point where they can make red grass thread. But organized groups of gilsellers have access to each others' gil resources to buy saruta cotton en masse in order for new characters to skill up as quickly as possible. This leaves the rest of the cotton market with drastically inflated prices on saruta cotton. If you attempt to buy it from the clothcraft guild store with their (somewhat) more reasonable prices, who only has a limited supply each game day, if you camp the store at opening and jump on them as soon as they open shop, you might be lucky enough to buy a ball of saruta cotton (and two are required to make a thread).
On the other end of the spectrum, past the red grass thread hump at skill 15, is flax flowers and linen thread. Flax flowers are about as easy to find as saruta cotton if you go and harvest it yourself from the grass fields; in fact, it can be argued that cotton is easier to find than flax flowers as, unlike the cotton, no monsters drop it. However, the gilsellers aren't particularly interested in linen thread at skill 20, they're more interested in the red grass thread back at skill 15. So when they go out and harvest in the grass fields and end up with far more flax flowers than red moko grass, they're not interested in it and dump it in the auction house for a song. The cotton, of course, sells well (especially to each other) because of the manufactured short supply they helped to create, but the flax flowers aren't worth the similar amount of time put into finding them (because gilsellers aren't interested in it). As such, the prices of flax flowers are drastically deflated, even lower than the prices the guild store sells it for (which always has a ready supply of flax flowers to sell, no matter the time of day). In other fields, it is not unusual for raw materials to sell for more in the auction house than in the NPC stores (e. g. NPCs sell iron ore for about 800 gil, but it generally can't be had in the auction house for less than 1000), and yet, with flax flowers, they can be bought at the auction house for 1/10 of what the NPCs sell them for.
The results of gilselling in this example are
I'm noticing a similar effect in leatherc
Pascal's Flaw: you assume WoW players could get a date to begin with.
"As a GAME, the point is to be fun."
And as a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER GAME, it's supposed to be interactive and (in the example of RPGs) cooperative.
"Sure, there's the whole issue of more money entering the economy, but if someone bought the money from someone else, the money was already in the economy, it's just changed hands."
Except you're forgetting about the people who would not be playing and making that money if it were not for that changing of hands (i. e. goldsellers). There is no Alan Greenspan in the background regulating how much gold monsters drop or what the auction rates are, the only variable in the amount of gold in ciruclation is the number of man-hours put into harvesting it; there is literally an infinite supply of gold to be had, limited only by the amount of labor put into finding it. If everybody spends a similar amount of time making that gold (i. e. casual play, more or less), then everybody will have similar access (more or less) to that gold. But as soon as some Chinese guy starts working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week solely on earning gold, the amount of gold made during casual play deflates in value dramatically.
You complain of the "treadmill" but don't stop to consider that if everybody spent 7 hours a week tops on said treadmill, prices would be far more reasonable and you'd hardly notice that treadmill at all. Your agrument of wanting to "get off the treadmill" is at best ciruclar logic; your "getting off the treadmill" makes said treadmill disproportionally more difficult for those who choose to stay on. All you're saying is "Everybody else is, so why shouldn't I?"
"it's not cheating unless it somehow operates completely outside of the game's mechanics,"
Find me a way to exchange United States Dollars (or Euros or what have you) in game in WoW, and then I'll consent that it operates wholly within the game mechanics. Until then, Visa/MasterCard/ACH/etc. are not constructs of Blizzard.
"better, faster, stronger"
Ah, but are they cheaper?
For example, the intent that I see in the Second Amendment was to ensure that members of the state militias, the only military defense left solely to the states (at least without the Congressional consent required for a state army) would be representative of the people of the state as a whole, and not subject to a federal loyalty or political test (especially important if the federal government might be hostile to the state). It doesn't even prevent the states from instituting a loyalty test, unless you want to wave your hands around and shout "substantive due process!"
If you want something guaranteed to apply to laws in New Jersey, I invite you to read Article I, Section 6 of the New Jersey Constitution:
"This is the problem with any structure of checks and balances -- there is no penalty for violating the oath to uphold a given constitution."
And who, if not the voters on election day, is to decide whether a politician is or is not upholding the constitution? The king?
"How about an amendment to all the Constitutions with a 3 strikes and you're out law? If a law-maker votes for 3 bills that are later found to be unconstitutional, they're booted."
He who stacks the court in their favor wins! You already spend a great deal of time bemoaning changes made to the federal government by Franklin Roosevelt, would you really be happier if he could also have used that supermajority he appointed to the Supreme Court to kick out Members of Congress he didn't like?
They're making you an offer you can't refuse.
"Oh noes, there aren't any GameCubes for sale in a market that rejected even the NES! Netcraft confirms!"
Aside from the UK being the boondocks of the console game market, Brits haven't been very keen on buying Nintendo (ever). Why should they follow Microsoft's example in Japan when there are plenty of people in other markets more than happy to buy Nintendo hardware and software?
I can go down the street to get kerosene. Hyrdogen, not so much.
It's similar to the reasons why cars are still primarily designed to burn gasoline instead of hydrogen.
Nah, as I recall the arm on the station is one arm but has two hands: one on either end. One hand holds on to the station while the other does the catching/throwing, and it can move around the station like a slinky.
(Just going by faulty memory here, too lazy to look it up.)
"The only thing Judge Green would have needed to do all those years ago was repeal (and prevent the states from reestablishing) monopoly protection of AT&T."
Yeeaaaahhh... Have you read your constitution lately? Do you fully grasp the meaning of the word "federal?"
I'd like to see a state (any state) revoke a Bell's priveleges as much as the next Slashdotter, but just because we'd like it doesn't mean a federal judge automatically has the power to mandate it.
Speak for yourself; when I was 4 my father would consistently cream me in Warlords.
If Slashdot were any sort of representative cross-section, he'd ignite a civil war for saying "gamepad" and not "keyboard and mouse."