I was really interested in the One-with-all edition, but then half of the cards would be useless and it still was too expensive
After INWO SubGenius came out, a few people developed one-deck versions using 120-150 selected cards (about 60-75 each groups and plots) to solve the "half the cards would be useless" problem. If you've still got a batch of INWO cards around that you haven't used lately, it might be worth a try. /.
Actually Eliza is no longer a card, some things have been removed to make way for new cards like the Chineses campaign doners
You're confusing INWO (the CCG version) with Illuminati (the 80s-vintage one-deck card game). Eliza was (and still is) an INWO card; Chinese Campaign Donors is a card in the new release of Deluxe Illuminati. It's an easy mistake to make, especially since some people play one-deck games using INWO cards.
You're right on the basic point, though -- there were some cards in the older edition of Deluxe Illuminati that were cut because they were too dated or just not that funny (e.g. "Iranian Moderates") in order to make room for contemporary jokes.
As I understand it, the success of M:tG gave Steve Jackson the idea of adapting the classic Illuminati game to that format -- this made it possible to create a lot of cards (over 400, or about three times the number of different cards in Illuminati) and of course bring some of the jokes up to date with jabs at contemporary figures.
However, it wasn't long before everybody and his brother started publishing collectible card games, and Sturgeon's Law kicked in. While INWO is, in my possibly biased opinion, one of the better ones (for one thing, it had the advantage of building on a decade-old successful design), it got caught up in the CCG glut (especially the Assassins expansion, which came out just as the industry was licking its wounds from all the CCGs that crashed and burned).
The whole concept has come full circle, with "One Big Deck" rules for playing INWO without individual player decks and the INWO SubGenius expansion designed for one-deck play.
The whole point of the regulations is to inhibit installation of strong crypto into mass-market software. They know they can't stop the distribution of standalone programs, but they also know that relatively few people will use them. /.
As I understand it, they're simply trying to re-gain wiretapping abilities that they've started to lose as as the result of us moving away from analog communications services.
How is it that whenever technology prodcues something that makes it harder for the police to monitor citizens (e.g. digital networks, strong crypto), this is a "problem" that must be "addressed" by new regulations, but when technology produces something that makes police surveillance easier (e.g. the look-through-walls capabilities described here a few weeks ago), the government quietly adopts it as part of the new natural order of things?
If the status quo of police capability is so important, it must work both ways. Otherwise, the relationship between the State and the individual becomes a one-way ratchet which can only tighten and never loosen. /.
If it's anything like the Sony portable CD player I used to have, you should have been embarassed even before this -- the damn thing skipped more than a playground full of kids playing hop-scotch. /.
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
Denying them the ability to stop victimless crimes which are nonetheless crimes hurts their ability to stop 'real' crime.
Your claim to the contrary notwithstanding, this statement shows that you've missed my point again. For the reasons I described in the earlier post, the police need considerably greater snooping powers to suppress criminalized vices than they need to suppress genuine crimes. Give them only what they need to do the latter, and they will be able to do the latter -- inability to do the former is irrelevant.
If they do in fact fail at the latter because too much effort is going to the former, this should be recognized as a form of "Washington Monument Scam" (the old trick where politicians forced to cut spending deliberately create PITAs for the citizens, such as closing the Washington Monument to tourists, in order to get the spending they want). /.
Re:Not correctly phrased
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
Ever hear the phrase, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"?
Yep. I've also heard Robert Ringer's Newspeak-to-English translation of that phrase: "Ask not what the people in power can do for you; ask what you can do for the people in power."
After all, this issue is not one of what I do for my country (everyone who earns an honest living fulfils that desideratum), but of what the people running the government are attempting to obtain from my country. /.
Re:About "tapping" the Internet...
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 2
The point you're missing is that criminalizing personal vices inherently requires the government to engage in widespread snooping even to discover that the "crime" has taken place, much less investigate it. In cases of criminalized vice, everyone involved wants to keep the matter hidden from the police. In cases of genuine crime, on the other hand, the victim (or his survivors) will be strongly motivated to provide the police with all available and relevant information. Thus, the former requires the police to have far more extensive surveillance power than the latter.
Thus, denying the government the sort of Big Brother powers it would need to make a dent in the drug trade would not "cripple" legitimate police action against real criminals. /.
Re:What are you so damn afraid of?
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
sounds like what you are looking for is accountability.
Damn straight. If, for example, Lon Horiuchi were spending the rest of his days making big boulders into little pebbles, there would be a bit less concern about government abuse of power.
The fact is that people who have been paying attention expect that a Fed who decides to abuse a citizen will probably get away with it. For obvious reasons, the idea of giving the Feds more power is extremely unappealing under those conditions. /.
I don't think I have *ever* read a Slashdot article with this number of posts and NOT A SINGLE FACT OR STATISTIC backing ANY of your objections up.
If so, that record remains intact. People have posted plenty of facts, though in some cases it requires the onerous effort of clicking on a link to access them, such as this one from my earlier posting on the thread, citing specific language of the amendment permitting the Feds to wiretap people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing, based on a "reasonably proximate" standard (i.e. if the Feds are investigating one of your acquaintances, they can tap your phone).
Like most of you, I have no statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if wiretaps aided in a significant number of prosecutions that would have been impossible without them.
Your "distress" at unsubstantiated assertions seems to be just a tad selective.
I am also extremely displeased by the high degree of bias in these "Your Rights Online" pieces.
I expect privacy-rights organizations to be biased in favor of privacy, for the same reason I expect my attorney to be biased in favor of my interests. If they weren't biased, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
Certainly, the government is biased in favor of expanding its own power, and some countervailing bias (feeble as it is in comparison) is needed.
Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY that these abilities will be misused.
The whole point of the objections is to insist that law enforcement does in fact behave in a lawful manner. If you agree with this objective, I don't understand your complaint.
Also, I note that the philosophy behind the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (that being the relevant standard for an American legal issue) is that, yes, certain powers should be outright denied to the government, and others firmly restricted in their scope, because the potential for abuse is simply too great.
Do you folks think that people in charges of these law enforcement organizations and the people appointed to act as judge are all complete IDIOTS?
No -- as I said above, I think they're biased in favor of expanding their own power, and therefore not entirely trustworthy. /.
One example of the necessity for such which is still trotted out by the FBI is solving kidnappings - "What if your child was kidnapped?". However, try as I might, I can't think of any situation in which a wiretap (which has to be placed on a known entity) would help locate a missing child. If you know who's got the kid...go get him.
That's not really an issue for the FBI, which does not wish to be bothered with quaint notions of only surveilling a small number of specific individuals after legitimate cause has been established for each (as evidenced by their lobbying for "roving wiretap" powers). /.
I'm not sure how frying each of the individual dust grains orbiting the Sun at that stage is supposed to affect planetary formation. You'd just have molten dust grains in the same orbits (with perhaps some random perturbations from volatiles venting off, but then there were going to be random perturbations anyway, from mutual gravitation and the occasional other star passing within a few thousand AU). They'd cool off again in an eyeblink compared to the average time between collisions (so it's not a matter of sticking together while molten).
Until SETI produces results, or an alien shows up on Prime Time TV during the President's State of the Union address
I thought it was routine for Al Gore to be present for those events (IIRC, they send one Cabinet secretary out of town in case the Hill gets nuked or something). /.
We are talking here about individuals being able to filter out what they consider to be trash.
That would be true only if the government had no hand in the matter. In reality, or course, the government drove the whole process, subsidizing it by making it mandatory (to drive down the unit cost at the expense of people who have no use for it) and determining which categories of content would be rated.
(Don't bother to dispute the latter point unless you are prepared to state with a straight face that Congress would have voted for a mandatory chip that could be set to add a LIAR LIAR LIAR crawl every time a politician appeared on the screen.) /.
Germany's constitution already forbids the viewing of "hate speech". They don't have a right to see it in the first place.
The latter statement does not follow from the former.
"What is your definition of justice?" "Justice, Elijah, is that which exists when all the laws are enforced." Fastolfe nodded. "A good definition, Mr. Baley, for a robot.... A human being can recognize the fact that, on the basis of an abstract moral code, some laws may be bad ones and their enforcement unjust. What do you say, R. Daneel?" "An unjust law," said R. Daneel evenly, "is a contradiction in terms." -- Isaac Asimov (The Caves Of Steel) /.
When was it definitively established that violence in the media causes violence in real life?
It was the same scientific study that showed that sticking pins in a PHB doll will cause pain to your boss in real life. The technical term is "symbolic magic".
We are governed by people who believe in voo-doo, Ghu help us. /.
There is no need for any bill to "let" the media regulate itself. Any media producer is perfectly free as it is to label his product: WARNING! Exposure to the violence, sexuality, language, and mopery with intent to creep depicted herein will instantly convert a saint into a RAVING PSYCHOPATH!!!. (Hell, they'd probably double their sales.)
The moment the government becomes involved, the system becomes politicized. Maybe in your world, there would be no pressure to rate Waco: The Rules Of Engagement more unfavorably than Our Heroic Troops Kick [insert hobgolin du jour]'s Ass (a hypothetical film containing an equivalent level of violence). That ain't so here in reality. /.
I fail to see how congess placing limits on the amount of violence or the amount of pornography in the media - I fail to see how this will in any way place restrictions on anyone political freedoms.
Your inability to see is not my problem (though, for obvious reasons, I hope that it causes you to spend Election Day blundering through restrooms, fitting booths, etc in an unsuccessful attempt to find a voting machine).
Slashdot Mirror
Do they make one for boom boxes? If so, I've got Der Fuerher's Face on CD.
/.
After INWO SubGenius came out, a few people developed one-deck versions using 120-150 selected cards (about 60-75 each groups and plots) to solve the "half the cards would be useless" problem. If you've still got a batch of INWO cards around that you haven't used lately, it might be worth a try.
/.
You're confusing INWO (the CCG version) with Illuminati (the 80s-vintage one-deck card game). Eliza was (and still is) an INWO card; Chinese Campaign Donors is a card in the new release of Deluxe Illuminati. It's an easy mistake to make, especially since some people play one-deck games using INWO cards.
You're right on the basic point, though -- there were some cards in the older edition of Deluxe Illuminati that were cut because they were too dated or just not that funny (e.g. "Iranian Moderates") in order to make room for contemporary jokes.
MIB 0137 Fnord
/.
However, it wasn't long before everybody and his brother started publishing collectible card games, and Sturgeon's Law kicked in. While INWO is, in my possibly biased opinion, one of the better ones (for one thing, it had the advantage of building on a decade-old successful design), it got caught up in the CCG glut (especially the Assassins expansion, which came out just as the industry was licking its wounds from all the CCGs that crashed and burned).
The whole concept has come full circle, with "One Big Deck" rules for playing INWO without individual player decks and the INWO SubGenius expansion designed for one-deck play.
MIB 0137 Fnord
/.
Did anybody actually need the added emphasis to spot one of the standard mistakes of gee-wiz writing?
/.
Not quite. ALL of the elements of ANY ONE claim must be present.
/.
The whole point of the regulations is to inhibit installation of strong crypto into mass-market software. They know they can't stop the distribution of standalone programs, but they also know that relatively few people will use them.
/.
How is it that whenever technology prodcues something that makes it harder for the police to monitor citizens (e.g. digital networks, strong crypto), this is a "problem" that must be "addressed" by new regulations, but when technology produces something that makes police surveillance easier (e.g. the look-through-walls capabilities described here a few weeks ago), the government quietly adopts it as part of the new natural order of things?
If the status quo of police capability is so important, it must work both ways. Otherwise, the relationship between the State and the individual becomes a one-way ratchet which can only tighten and never loosen.
/.
If it's anything like the Sony portable CD player I used to have, you should have been embarassed even before this -- the damn thing skipped more than a playground full of kids playing hop-scotch.
/.
Your claim to the contrary notwithstanding, this statement shows that you've missed my point again. For the reasons I described in the earlier post, the police need considerably greater snooping powers to suppress criminalized vices than they need to suppress genuine crimes. Give them only what they need to do the latter, and they will be able to do the latter -- inability to do the former is irrelevant.
If they do in fact fail at the latter because too much effort is going to the former, this should be recognized as a form of "Washington Monument Scam" (the old trick where politicians forced to cut spending deliberately create PITAs for the citizens, such as closing the Washington Monument to tourists, in order to get the spending they want).
/.
Yep. I've also heard Robert Ringer's Newspeak-to-English translation of that phrase: "Ask not what the people in power can do for you; ask what you can do for the people in power."
After all, this issue is not one of what I do for my country (everyone who earns an honest living fulfils that desideratum), but of what the people running the government are attempting to obtain from my country.
/.
Thus, denying the government the sort of Big Brother powers it would need to make a dent in the drug trade would not "cripple" legitimate police action against real criminals.
/.
Damn straight. If, for example, Lon Horiuchi were spending the rest of his days making big boulders into little pebbles, there would be a bit less concern about government abuse of power.
The fact is that people who have been paying attention expect that a Fed who decides to abuse a citizen will probably get away with it. For obvious reasons, the idea of giving the Feds more power is extremely unappealing under those conditions.
/.
If so, that record remains intact. People have posted plenty of facts, though in some cases it requires the onerous effort of clicking on a link to access them, such as this one from my earlier posting on the thread, citing specific language of the amendment permitting the Feds to wiretap people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing, based on a "reasonably proximate" standard (i.e. if the Feds are investigating one of your acquaintances, they can tap your phone).
Like most of you, I have no statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if wiretaps aided in a significant number of prosecutions that would have been impossible without them.
Your "distress" at unsubstantiated assertions seems to be just a tad selective.
I am also extremely displeased by the high degree of bias in these "Your Rights Online" pieces.
I expect privacy-rights organizations to be biased in favor of privacy, for the same reason I expect my attorney to be biased in favor of my interests. If they weren't biased, they wouldn't be doing their jobs.
Certainly, the government is biased in favor of expanding its own power, and some countervailing bias (feeble as it is in comparison) is needed.
Don't hinder law enforcement's abilities to conduct investigations in a LAWFUL and DISCRETE manner just because there exists the POSSIBILITY that these abilities will be misused.
The whole point of the objections is to insist that law enforcement does in fact behave in a lawful manner. If you agree with this objective, I don't understand your complaint.
Also, I note that the philosophy behind the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (that being the relevant standard for an American legal issue) is that, yes, certain powers should be outright denied to the government, and others firmly restricted in their scope, because the potential for abuse is simply too great.
Do you folks think that people in charges of these law enforcement organizations and the people appointed to act as judge are all complete IDIOTS?
No -- as I said above, I think they're biased in favor of expanding their own power, and therefore not entirely trustworthy.
/.
That's not really an issue for the FBI, which does not wish to be bothered with quaint notions of only surveilling a small number of specific individuals after legitimate cause has been established for each (as evidenced by their lobbying for "roving wiretap" powers).
/.
Hey, Lester has a /. account! Odd -- or perhaps not -- that he hasn't offerred a more substantive rebuttal to the many criticisms of his thesis.
/.
So what gives?
/.
I thought it was routine for Al Gore to be present for those events (IIRC, they send one Cabinet secretary out of town in case the Hill gets nuked or something).
/.
That would be true only if the government had no hand in the matter. In reality, or course, the government drove the whole process, subsidizing it by making it mandatory (to drive down the unit cost at the expense of people who have no use for it) and determining which categories of content would be rated.
(Don't bother to dispute the latter point unless you are prepared to state with a straight face that Congress would have voted for a mandatory chip that could be set to add a LIAR LIAR LIAR crawl every time a politician appeared on the screen.)
/.
"Hand over yer wallet an' nobody gets hurt...."
They chose not to
As well they should.
and now slashdot-heads are up in arms about how their "rights" (there is no natural right here) are being infringed by asking that people be WARNED
If you want warnings, go read reviews. Complaining because other people didn't do your homework for you is one of the key indicators of luserhood.
/.
The latter statement does not follow from the former.
"What is your definition of justice?"
"Justice, Elijah, is that which exists when all the laws are enforced."
Fastolfe nodded. "A good definition, Mr. Baley, for a robot.... A human being can recognize the fact that, on the basis of an abstract moral code, some laws may be bad ones and their enforcement unjust. What do you say, R. Daneel?"
"An unjust law," said R. Daneel evenly, "is a contradiction in terms."
-- Isaac Asimov (The Caves Of Steel)
/.
We have. It's called "Parental Supervision".
If you're too damn lazy to excersize there are two other solutions to choose from. They're called "Contraception" and "Abstinence".
/.
It was the same scientific study that showed that sticking pins in a PHB doll will cause pain to your boss in real life. The technical term is "symbolic magic".
We are governed by people who believe in voo-doo, Ghu help us.
/.
There is no need for any bill to "let" the media regulate itself. Any media producer is perfectly free as it is to label his product: WARNING! Exposure to the violence, sexuality, language, and mopery with intent to creep depicted herein will instantly convert a saint into a RAVING PSYCHOPATH!!!. (Hell, they'd probably double their sales.)
The moment the government becomes involved, the system becomes politicized. Maybe in your world, there would be no pressure to rate Waco: The Rules Of Engagement more unfavorably than Our Heroic Troops Kick [insert hobgolin du jour]'s Ass (a hypothetical film containing an equivalent level of violence). That ain't so here in reality.
/.
Your inability to see is not my problem (though, for obvious reasons, I hope that it causes you to spend Election Day blundering through restrooms, fitting booths, etc in an unsuccessful attempt to find a voting machine).
/.