Nahdude is pointing out that most people here don't want any kind of restriction on the kinds of communications they can send on the internet, but yet they want to restrict one form of internet communication: spam.
Your argument rests upon a definitional switch, like the old fallacy: 1)No cat has two tails, 2)A cat has one more tail than no cat, ergo 3)A cat has three tails.
Your argument mutates the definition of "communication" in the same way the above example mutates the definition of "no cat". In the first usage ("most people here don't want any kind of restriction on the kinds of communications"), it refers to content -- people quite properly think that governments have no legitimate authority to interfere with access to politics, pr0n, crypto software, etc. In the second usage ("yet they want to restrict one form of internet communication: spam"), it refers to manner of transmission -- spam may be properly prohibited for the same reason we prohibit the tossing of note-bearing bricks through windows, so long as the prohibition is content-neutral. /.
True, civil recovery of compensatory and punitive damages are the simplest solution to the problem. If current law allowed a practical avenue for individual spam recipients, not just ISPs, to recover, then I would agree that there is no need for legislation. As it is, I favor an extension of existing junk-fax law, tweaked to remove the distinction between commercial and non-commercial messages. /.
Although I hate spam as much as anyone else, can we as conscience-wielding citizens actually state from the left side of our mouths that spam should be illegal while with the right side we state that there should be absolutely no restriction on internet communications?
Yes. Next combination of two unrelated issues?
Do you see what I'm getting at?
I'd say that you are "getting at" a state of total befuddlement, but that would not be correct. You already have gotten at that point.
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can spray-paint your message on my house. Freedom of speech does not mean you can scratch your message on the side of my car. Freedom of speech does not mean you can blast your message from a sound truck in front of my house at 3 AM. Freedom of speech does not mean you can steal my bandwidth.
Send a $5000 contribution to each of the Representatives on this list. Then, remove the top name from the list, move each of the names up one space, and add your name to the bottom of the list. Send the new list to five other Representatives. Within 90 days, enough money will come in to pay the national debt!
Remember, this plan depends on your honesty to work! /.
It is not censorship to demand that offensive material not be rammed down our throats every time we open an unsolicited piece of email. It's not censorship to demand that Usenet groups that have NOTHING to do with Porn not be spammed with pornographic images and come-ons to visit porn websites. Think about it, folks. You're siding with the spammers on this issue.
You're raising an irrelevant argument. Spam is a private property issue (the spammer is stealing other people's bandwidth), not a freedom of speech issue. Content is irrelevant -- it is no more and no less wrong to dump spam advertising a Teletubbies fan site as it is to dump spam advertising a pr0n site. /.
Quadruple XXXX!! Nein Nein Nein!! Anyone viewing this has been infected by dangerous crimethink and needs to be placed under guard for the good of society!!!!
Any two objects held apart from each other posses potential energy governed by the strength of the field and the distance. If the force was repulsive the effective distance the objects could travel would be infinite rather than finite (as it is with normal gravity) thus the potential energy in the bodies would be infinite. Since the force between two objects never reaches zero they would constantly repel each other, with increasing amounts of the infinite potential energy being converted to kinetic. The result, everything traveling at speeds infinitly close to light speed.
Er, has the person who came up with this argument heard the news that an infinite series can have a finite sum? It's not like this is a new mathematical discovery mentioned on/. last week, after all....
If there is such a thing as gravitational repulsion, and it follows the same inverse square law as gravitational attraction, then the potential energy of two gravitationally repulsive masses equals the escape energy of two corresponding gravitationally attractive masses. Let a block of upsidasium fly off into space, and it will (ignoring air resistance, etc) fly off into space at escape velocity, not "infinitely close to light speed". /.
I think you must enforce your patent or risk it being declared public domain. In the US if you others use your patent publicly and do nothing for a year then your patent basicly goes away.
So long as they say "collectable," they're okay. But with the Pokemon cards, they're for a game, which makes it gambling.
Nonsense. The Pokemon game is no more a gambling game than checkers or Monopoly. People might decide to bet on it, but that is extrinsic to the game itself -- if that counts, then all games (hell, all events) would constitute gambling.
Personally I think the courts will agree with you that it's ridiculous.
Great Ghu, I certainly hope so. Given some of the idiocy that has come out of the courts, it's not a foregone conclusion, though.
We're talking about a country that insists guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Yes, and it's also a country that insists that two plus two equals four and that the sun rises in the east.
But just because they think it's ridiculous doesn't mean the parents don't have a point.
The only points these parents have are in their hair. They're trying to find someone else to blame for the fact that they gave a little kid "thousands of dollars" to blow on these cards. I have very large collections of a few CCGs, but I doubt that the total I've spent is even $1000 (and, as a self-respecting adult, I would never dream of trying to blame somebody else if I decided that the money had been wasted).
I mean, those Barbies, Tamagotchis, etc. are collectible too, but you don't see little kids trying to cheat eachother out of a rare one on the playground, do you?
I understand that some schools have banned Pokemon cards because of problems with theft and bad-faith trading. The underlying problem is with the ill-behaved brats causing the problems, not with the Pokemon cards. Unfortunately, the former cannot be banned. /.
A guy walks into a law office and said, "I need a lawyer -- I borrowed my neighbor's car, and now he says I damaged it and he's going to sue me if I don't pay him $2000."
The head of the firm replied, "Don't worry. First, we will prove that you never touched this car. Second, we will prove that the car was already damaged when you took possession. Third, we will prove that the car was in perfect condition when you returned it." /.
You're referring to Chronicles. In order to avoid completely screwing the card collectors, WotC printed the cards with a white border to distinguish the cards from the older versions. It still had the effect of reducing the secondary market value of the older versions because people who wanted the cards to put in play decks (as opposed to purely collecting them) no longer had to purchase the older versions, thus reducing demand. /.
The lawyers may be slimeballs, but buying Pokemon trading cards is little different from buying lottery tickets. You buy a card without knowing it's value, exactly like 'scratch and win' lottery tickets.
Yeah, and if you buy an oil painting at a yard sale, you don't know whether it is an undiscovered Grandma Moses worth a million dollars or an old paint-by-numbers worth forty-two cents. By this reasoning, it should be illegal for minors to buy junk at yard sales, which is preposterous on its face. /.
Why are there rare cards? Because they are more powerful within the context of the game.
Rarity was originally tied to game utility in Magic: The Gathering with the idea of preventing players from having too many overpowered cards in their deck. As we now know (and, frankly, should have been obvious at the time), this turned the game into a contest of wallets rather than a contest of brains. Since then, WotC has introduced other counterweights to excessively powerful cards (e.g. restrictions and bans on certain cards in tournament play, introduction of new cards to defend against power cards) to tilt the game back toward skill.
It is now generally recognized that tying card rarity to card utility is a Bad Thing, and game publishers that make a habit of it get a "Billgatus of Borg" reputation in the gaming community.
In a properly designed game, the reason for making some cards rarer than others is to make it more difficult to complete an entire set.
If all cards would be equally common, they would have to be equally powerful, and that would make a hell of a boring game.
Say, does anybody know where I can get an "Ace of Spades" to complete my NuPoker deck? (I tried asking my local collector, but he just bent my ear for an hour with a story about some boring old version of poker where you automatically had one of each card in the deck.) /.
I am reminded of the Doonesbury strip where Phil Slackmeyer is interviewing for a job with the Tobacco Institute. He fails their test of saying "Cigarettes do not cause cancer" with a straight face. /.
The constitution is suppsoed to be a living document that can be changed with the times.
Well, yes -- it's called the amendment process. If you don't think American citizens should have the right to keep and bear arms, your only honest recourse is to push for a Constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment, not to play it-depends-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is games with its plain language. /.
We recently [2-3 years ago] had a similar situation [Port Arthur], and this resulted in a very controversial change to our legistation, basically [and i'm generalising here] outlawing all semi-automatic rifles [pistols are already illegal without the licence].
Yes, and your crime rate went up afterwards. No thanks. /.
How does "a group of my friends, hold organized training sessions, develop a commands structure, etc." constitute a well regulated Militia?
Easily, if the training sessions produce a group that is competent in the proper handling of firearms -- that being what the term "well regulated" meant in late 18th-century English as someone on this thread already noted.
If the process could be made trustworthy, I would not be requiring gun purchasers and owners to show proof of basic competency in the safe and responsible handling of firearms. Unfortunately, our history shows that the government cannot be trusted in this regard:
Poll Official: What does this mean [holds up faintly-printed page written in Mandarin Chinese]. Would-be Black Voter: It means, "Ain't no n*gg*rs gonna vote here today. /.
I'm wondering if I'm the only one who was slightly disgusted by the way Katz went on about "geeks" being "repressed" in the wake of Columbine?
So far, it would appear so.
I mean, cripes, 15 people died violent brutal deaths here, and many more were maimed and/or paralyzed. And the only angle Katz seems concerned about (nay, obsessed about) is that some schools are banning trenchcoats, etc!?! I find that frankly revolting.
Nothing can be done to restore the dead to life. Something can, and must, be done when civil liberties are under attack.
Concentrating one's efforts where they can actually do some good isn't "revolting"; it's being a sapient life form.
Did anyone ever think that the admittedly knee-jerk reactions of school administrators might actually have saved lives?
Probably not, for the same reason nobody ever thought that sticking pins in a Billgatus of Borg voo-doo doll would make his computer run faster. The notion is so goofy on its face that to state it clearly is to dismiss it out of hand.
There was at least one other shooting afterwards, perhaps the crack down prevented more?
This is the sort of reasoning used by medieval witch-doctors ("Yes, the patient died, but perhaps he wouldn't have lasted this long if we hadn't bled him?)
I mean, it's too bad that some school kids lost some priviledges, but if lives were saved (even one,) isn't that *worth it*?
If a generation is raised to accept Big Brotherism as part of the normal background of life, they will vote for Big Brother as soon as they are old enough to do so. Big Brothers have a nasty habit of murdering their citizens.
Ergo, it behooves us to instill an attitude of skepticism toward authority among youth. If it saves even one life, it's worth it. /.
Um yes...well we cannot make any law which will radically take our society back to 1950's mores can we?
The fact that laws don't solve sociological problems is exactly my point. (Not that politics is completely irrelevant; sometimes bad institutions are propped up by laws that need repealing. Some of those "1950s mores" belong in the dead past, and the repeal of Jim Crow laws was an essential part of the process of putting them there.)
Nor did people in the 1950s have access to assault rifles (did they?).
According to the accurate definition of "assault rifle" (one that can be switched to full automatic fire), generally not. According to the modern media definition of "assault rifle" (a scary looking gun), generally yes.
What this analysis ignores is the fact that most violent street crime is committed by a core group of habitual criminals. Even if the chance of being shot or captured by an armed citizen is relatively low for each crime attempt, perhaps one in ten, that still represents a large reduction in total crime, because each time it happens several dozen future crimes are prevented on average. /.
At no point did anyone ask whether the avaliablility of guns was a factor.
Why bother to post an article explaining how the media gets it wrong when the respondents are going to parrot illogical media-driven cliches?
Forty years ago, guns were sold by mail order with no questions asked, schools routinely taught marksmanship as a sport -- and incidents such as Columbine were unheard of. So much for that theory. /.
Steve Jackson did a discussion of upcoming projects and Q&A session at Shorecon last week -- in response to a question about Hacker, he said that those odd-shaped cardboard parts would push up the price. I gather that it's not categorically ruled out, but not particularly likely. /.
When the story first broke about negotiations with "Iranian Moderates" as part of the whole Iran-Contra business, Mark Russell asked, "What the heck is an Iranian Moderate anyway? Is that somebody who takes hostages but doesn't eat them?" /.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument rests upon a definitional switch, like the old fallacy: 1)No cat has two tails, 2)A cat has one more tail than no cat, ergo 3)A cat has three tails.
Your argument mutates the definition of "communication" in the same way the above example mutates the definition of "no cat". In the first usage ("most people here don't want any kind of restriction on the kinds of communications"), it refers to content -- people quite properly think that governments have no legitimate authority to interfere with access to politics, pr0n, crypto software, etc. In the second usage ("yet they want to restrict one form of internet communication: spam"), it refers to manner of transmission -- spam may be properly prohibited for the same reason we prohibit the tossing of note-bearing bricks through windows, so long as the prohibition is content-neutral.
/.
True, civil recovery of compensatory and punitive damages are the simplest solution to the problem. If current law allowed a practical avenue for individual spam recipients, not just ISPs, to recover, then I would agree that there is no need for legislation. As it is, I favor an extension of existing junk-fax law, tweaked to remove the distinction between commercial and non-commercial messages.
/.
Yes. Next combination of two unrelated issues?
Do you see what I'm getting at?
I'd say that you are "getting at" a state of total befuddlement, but that would not be correct. You already have gotten at that point.
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can spray-paint your message on my house. Freedom of speech does not mean you can scratch your message on the side of my car. Freedom of speech does not mean you can blast your message from a sound truck in front of my house at 3 AM. Freedom of speech does not mean you can steal my bandwidth.
What part of this progression eludes you?
/.
Remember, this plan depends on your honesty to work!
/.
Think about it, folks. You're siding with the spammers on this issue.
You're raising an irrelevant argument. Spam is a private property issue (the spammer is stealing other people's bandwidth), not a freedom of speech issue. Content is irrelevant -- it is no more and no less wrong to dump spam advertising a Teletubbies fan site as it is to dump spam advertising a pr0n site.
/.
Because we can't read your mind. We can only read what you wrote.
I said it provides a starting point for parents.
You said it should be made mandatory. This is stupid and evil for reasons which have repeatedly been explained here.
/.
No.
It's that simple.
As one small part of the reason the answer is "NO", consider the ratings the US Government would put on the following, assuming equal violence, etc:
Our Heroic Merikin Troops Kick The Ass Of The Target Of Today's Five-Minute Hate
The Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum/.
Er, has the person who came up with this argument heard the news that an infinite series can have a finite sum? It's not like this is a new mathematical discovery mentioned on /. last week, after all....
If there is such a thing as gravitational repulsion, and it follows the same inverse square law as gravitational attraction, then the potential energy of two gravitationally repulsive masses equals the escape energy of two corresponding gravitationally attractive masses. Let a block of upsidasium fly off into space, and it will (ignoring air resistance, etc) fly off into space at escape velocity, not "infinitely close to light speed".
/.
No -- trademarks work that way, not patents.
/.
Nonsense. The Pokemon game is no more a gambling game than checkers or Monopoly. People might decide to bet on it, but that is extrinsic to the game itself -- if that counts, then all games (hell, all events) would constitute gambling.
Personally I think the courts will agree with you that it's ridiculous.
Great Ghu, I certainly hope so. Given some of the idiocy that has come out of the courts, it's not a foregone conclusion, though.
We're talking about a country that insists guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Yes, and it's also a country that insists that two plus two equals four and that the sun rises in the east.
But just because they think it's ridiculous doesn't mean the parents don't have a point.
The only points these parents have are in their hair. They're trying to find someone else to blame for the fact that they gave a little kid "thousands of dollars" to blow on these cards. I have very large collections of a few CCGs, but I doubt that the total I've spent is even $1000 (and, as a self-respecting adult, I would never dream of trying to blame somebody else if I decided that the money had been wasted).
I mean, those Barbies, Tamagotchis, etc. are collectible too, but you don't see little kids trying to cheat eachother out of a rare one on the playground, do you?
I understand that some schools have banned Pokemon cards because of problems with theft and bad-faith trading. The underlying problem is with the ill-behaved brats causing the problems, not with the Pokemon cards. Unfortunately, the former cannot be banned.
/.
The head of the firm replied, "Don't worry. First, we will prove that you never touched this car. Second, we will prove that the car was already damaged when you took possession. Third, we will prove that the car was in perfect condition when you returned it."
/.
You're referring to Chronicles. In order to avoid completely screwing the card collectors, WotC printed the cards with a white border to distinguish the cards from the older versions. It still had the effect of reducing the secondary market value of the older versions because people who wanted the cards to put in play decks (as opposed to purely collecting them) no longer had to purchase the older versions, thus reducing demand.
/.
You buy a card without knowing it's value, exactly like 'scratch and win' lottery tickets.
Yeah, and if you buy an oil painting at a yard sale, you don't know whether it is an undiscovered Grandma Moses worth a million dollars or an old paint-by-numbers worth forty-two cents. By this reasoning, it should be illegal for minors to buy junk at yard sales, which is preposterous on its face.
/.
Rarity was originally tied to game utility in Magic: The Gathering with the idea of preventing players from having too many overpowered cards in their deck. As we now know (and, frankly, should have been obvious at the time), this turned the game into a contest of wallets rather than a contest of brains. Since then, WotC has introduced other counterweights to excessively powerful cards (e.g. restrictions and bans on certain cards in tournament play, introduction of new cards to defend against power cards) to tilt the game back toward skill.
It is now generally recognized that tying card rarity to card utility is a Bad Thing, and game publishers that make a habit of it get a "Billgatus of Borg" reputation in the gaming community.
In a properly designed game, the reason for making some cards rarer than others is to make it more difficult to complete an entire set.
If all cards would be equally common, they would have to be equally powerful, and that would make a hell of a boring game.
Say, does anybody know where I can get an "Ace of Spades" to complete my NuPoker deck? (I tried asking my local collector, but he just bent my ear for an hour with a story about some boring old version of poker where you automatically had one of each card in the deck.)
/.
I am reminded of the Doonesbury strip where Phil Slackmeyer is interviewing for a job with the Tobacco Institute. He fails their test of saying "Cigarettes do not cause cancer" with a straight face.
/.
Well, yes -- it's called the amendment process. If you don't think American citizens should have the right to keep and bear arms, your only honest recourse is to push for a Constitutional amendment to repeal the Second Amendment, not to play it-depends-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is games with its plain language.
/.
Yes, and your crime rate went up afterwards. No thanks.
/.
Easily, if the training sessions produce a group that is competent in the proper handling of firearms -- that being what the term "well regulated" meant in late 18th-century English as someone on this thread already noted.
If the process could be made trustworthy, I would not be requiring gun purchasers and owners to show proof of basic competency in the safe and responsible handling of firearms. Unfortunately, our history shows that the government cannot be trusted in this regard:
Poll Official: What does this mean [holds up faintly-printed page written in Mandarin Chinese].
Would-be Black Voter: It means, "Ain't no n*gg*rs gonna vote here today.
/.
Yes, and if pigs had wings I would never go outdoors without an umbrella.
We now return to The Real World, already in progress....
/.
So far, it would appear so.
I mean, cripes, 15 people died violent brutal deaths here, and many more were maimed and/or paralyzed. And the only angle Katz seems concerned about (nay, obsessed about) is that some schools are banning trenchcoats, etc!?! I find that frankly revolting.
Nothing can be done to restore the dead to life. Something can, and must, be done when civil liberties are under attack.
Concentrating one's efforts where they can actually do some good isn't "revolting"; it's being a sapient life form.
Did anyone ever think that the admittedly knee-jerk reactions of school administrators might actually have saved lives?
Probably not, for the same reason nobody ever thought that sticking pins in a Billgatus of Borg voo-doo doll would make his computer run faster. The notion is so goofy on its face that to state it clearly is to dismiss it out of hand.
There was at least one other shooting afterwards, perhaps the crack down prevented more?
This is the sort of reasoning used by medieval witch-doctors ("Yes, the patient died, but perhaps he wouldn't have lasted this long if we hadn't bled him?)
I mean, it's too bad that some school kids lost some priviledges, but if lives were saved (even one,) isn't that *worth it*?
If a generation is raised to accept Big Brotherism as part of the normal background of life, they will vote for Big Brother as soon as they are old enough to do so. Big Brothers have a nasty habit of murdering their citizens.
Ergo, it behooves us to instill an attitude of skepticism toward authority among youth. If it saves even one life, it's worth it.
/.
The fact that laws don't solve sociological problems is exactly my point. (Not that politics is completely irrelevant; sometimes bad institutions are propped up by laws that need repealing. Some of those "1950s mores" belong in the dead past, and the repeal of Jim Crow laws was an essential part of the process of putting them there.)
Nor did people in the 1950s have access to assault rifles (did they?).
According to the accurate definition of "assault rifle" (one that can be switched to full automatic fire), generally not. According to the modern media definition of "assault rifle" (a scary looking gun), generally yes.
/.
What this analysis ignores is the fact that most violent street crime is committed by a core group of habitual criminals. Even if the chance of being shot or captured by an armed citizen is relatively low for each crime attempt, perhaps one in ten, that still represents a large reduction in total crime, because each time it happens several dozen future crimes are prevented on average.
/.
Why bother to post an article explaining how the media gets it wrong when the respondents are going to parrot illogical media-driven cliches?
Forty years ago, guns were sold by mail order with no questions asked, schools routinely taught marksmanship as a sport -- and incidents such as Columbine were unheard of. So much for that theory.
/.
Steve Jackson did a discussion of upcoming projects and Q&A session at Shorecon last week -- in response to a question about Hacker, he said that those odd-shaped cardboard parts would push up the price. I gather that it's not categorically ruled out, but not particularly likely.
/.
When the story first broke about negotiations with "Iranian Moderates" as part of the whole Iran-Contra business, Mark Russell asked, "What the heck is an Iranian Moderate anyway? Is that somebody who takes hostages but doesn't eat them?"
/.