There was an NPR story on this a month or so ago, it's standard practice. Half the review-bytes in a newspaper ad are fake like this one, the other half are taken wildly out of context.... the possibility of an actually-good movie notwithstanding;)
Yes, this sucks. I highly doubt there's any good technical reason to go to this other boot record system. Honestly it just seems mean.
But it is competitive, not "stifling to competition". A better choice of words would be "stifling to THE competition," similar words, but diametric meanings.
Despite what economics textbooks say, competition isn't a market state, it's a process. When one firm drives another out of business with lower prices (ala Wal Mart), that's competition. When one firm makes its product more attractive than the other guys' to buyers, that's competition.
What MS is doing here is basically an odd case of that second point. By making it more difficult to use their product alongside a competing product, they are (to some degree) making their product relatively more attractive, essentially by making the/other/ product/less/ attractive.
For another example, consider if a car maker had a policy that if you used aftermarket parts in significant repairs (eg: new brakes, cylinder heads, etc), it voided part of the warranty. This causes the buyer to lean toward using the dealer's repair services or at least official factory parts rather than (possibly cheaper and/or "better") aftermarket parts. It's not nice, it may actually be detrimental to consumer utility, but it's COMPETITIVE.
"If I were a current employee, it would certainly make me feel good to know that they weren't going to cut me just to get cheaper labor in the door."
This is silly. If you're going to be cut, it means that, at least in management's eyes, what you're producing for the company has become worth/less/ than what you're being paid. If your boss takes you in his office to explain "the hard choice", offer to take a pay cut, a massive one even. This is what any labor supplier with half a brain will do in a "recession" (which we're not having, BTW), because having a job with less pay is better than having no job at all, tenfold so when jobs are scarce.
The "downward stickiness" of wages is responsible for much of the unemployment that comes with periods of economic malaise. If more workers took this approach, recessions would be less severe, and recoveries more rapid. And it doesn't take an economist to figure it out;)
"Things like this are why I just don't understand the typical Libertarian babble that government data collection is bad, but corporations should be allowed to collect and sell whatever data they want. Hey, guess what: if a corporation can collect and sell your information, it's available to the government too."
Not if the government doesn't have explicit legal authority to purchase that information. Remeber that government collection of data is a symptom, the disease consists of the nefarious plans they have for using that information. If they don't have the undue authority over our lives that makes that information valuable to them, data collection becomes a moot point.
Remember that the entire reason interest groups and corporations lobby the government is because they believe they can gain by doing so. If the government didn't have the power in the first place to do those favors, there'd be no point in lobbying. Similarly, if the gov't didn't have the power to regulate the minutiae of our daily lives, there'd be no reason to collect personal data on the masses.
If we were to somehow ban corporations from collecting personal data, or ban them from selling it to The Man, then the jack-booted thugs would just get the lawmakers to make it legal to collect it directly. If you don't want them collecting information, YOU MUST REMOVE THE INCENTIVES TO DO SO.
For a couple of months now, I've been playing the MMORTS game "Mankind" (read: playing far too much). It's published and maintained by a European company (French?) called Vibes.net. Periodically, Vibes updates the client game, and when you log on these updates will automatically be downloaded and installed. Nevermind the potential for a disgruntled employee to hit every MK player with a virus...
So here's what happened. Vibes decided, for whatever reason, that ingame e-mails should be stored on the player's computer rather than on the servers. So everyone logs on, and their clients download this update. Except, in addition to reorganizing the mail system, this update, for no explicable reason, screws up the entire building system. Most costs show up as negative numbers, disallowing you to execute those builds. Your builders say they can build ground structures in space, and space structures on the ground. In short, Total Chaos ensues as no one can get anything done, assuming they can even log on and enter their [star] systems.
Now, the big issue here is really that Vibes obviously needs better QA. I get the feeling they didn't test this patch AT ALL before releasing it. However, if the upgrade system wasn't force-feed, the people brave enough to download an untested patch (this isn't the first crazy-ass patch Vibes released) would be able to warn off the more cautious players from getting it.
Hypothetical examples can be instructive too. Think of what would have happened if every NS3 user had automatically been "upgraded" to NS4, or from 4 to the ultra-bloat of 6. Or if MS had forcefully pushed out the catastrophic IE5.5. Or if (heaven help us) the Linux kernel automatically "upgraded" itself...
When I tell people I'm opposed to all intellectualy property, they tend to assume that to mean patents, and probably most copyright, but they tend to be rather astonished that I include trademark under that umbrella as well. The concept of trademark has become so ingrained in our culture that people have a hard time thinking about a world without it. But it is just another kind of IP, none of which are valid forms of property because they *require* arbitrary application of force by a government.
At any rate, I've always been at a loss for a good example of how the trademark concept tramples on our natural rights.
I swear, "upgradability" is a myth. Anytime a processor worthy of upgrading to comes out, it either has a different interface or voltage, requiring new motherboards for all. I've never been able to put two consecutive chips in the same board.
I'm getting a little tired of Slashdot being so obviously pro-citizen disarmament (ie: gun control). Many Slashdot readers are libertarians, not liberals, and know that the right to bear arms is every bit as important as the right to free speech.
AOL should just pull out of Germany. Send letters to their customers saying, "Sorry, but your government has rules our business model to be illegal. We have no choice but to discontinue our service in your nation." All other ISP's should follow suit. Then when the entire country is left without internet access, maybe the court will see how stupid its ruling was.
Of course, this is unrealistic. But I can't imagine what else will work. I mean, they might as well have ruled that Microsoft is responsible if users of Windows use xcopy32.exe to "pirate" music.
I love the idea of being able to disable particular ads. The "Punch The Monkey" ad is the perfect example. Not only is it the most annoying ad in the universe, but I can't even tell what those people are selling.
The idea of being able to opt in and out of certain categories is also appealing. Probably upwards of 75% of the ads I see are for products or services I couldn't care less about. I'd prefer the ads I do have to look at to be at least marginally interesting. And the key factor is that I trust OSDN a hell of a lot more than I trust Doubleclick, as far as tracking my ad-viewing and whatnot, knowwhatImsayin?
I, too, left the theater only about an hour ago. I can pretty much remember the flow of the movie, but I don't think that's really important. Even though Snatch's story, like that of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, is a wonder in and of itself, twisting and turning and finally coming all back together to smack you in the face and tickle you on the ass at the end, it's the CHARACTERS that make the movie.
But as per most of my comments, I wouldn't be here if it weren't to make a political statement;) Notice how many of the characters had handguns? Know how handguns are 100% illegal in the UK? I wonder how that is.... OH THAT'S RIGHT, CRIMINALS IGNORE THE LAW!!!!
Carr on regulating away "obscenity" on the 'net:
"So far so good: We are talking about material that is obviously dangerous and has been criminalized in other areas."
Obvious to whom? FALLING ROCK is dangerous, pornography is not. Porn, or other "obscene" material, actively DOES nothing at all. One views it, one interprets, one chooses how to allow it to affect one's thought processes, ideas, and beliefs, just like any source of information. If I look at some porn, and then go commit some heinous crime (or some wonderful act of philanthropy, for that matter), the pornographer cannot be held accountable by any process of logic and reason.
There is a distinction of thought processes that I've discovered that will be very helpful if I share here. A person sees two things: one that is controlled by the government, and a similar-in-some-way thing that is not. The authoritarian mind looks at the unregulated thing and asks "why not?". The libertarian mind looks at the regulated thing and asks "why?". The point is not that obscenity on the 'net/should/ be regulated, but that obscenity elsewhere/should NOT/.
"And if that means suspending full First Amendment protection from the Internet, so be it."
That pretty much speaks for itself. The internet is a mechanism through which I can express myself, usually in very classic means such as the written word. Any government action that prevents me from doing so is in obvious violation of both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. To put it simply, the day the Feds start nuking Slashdot posts, the spirit of America dies.
"People assume that what they read on the Net is true."
That is THEIR problem. I tell you a lie, and you believe it. I may have done a morally reprehensible thing, but that does not relieve you of responsibility for any actions you take as a result of believing my lie. Much as I despise misleading advertising and media spin, the solution is to get people to question all information, to adopt healthy skepticism. The solution is NOT information pre-approval. If the author is truly worried about information consumers becoming complacent in unable to properly transform information into knowledge, he should fear this kind of sanitizing more than anything. After all, if we have the assurance of our (ultimately benevolent, of course) government that anything we read on the 'net is true, then there's no reason to ever question anything again!
"if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact)"
I turn your attention again to the liberty/authority thought dichotomy. The buyer of stolen goods not only did not intend wrongdoing, but did not even PERCEIVE wrongdoing. Similarly, webmasters cannot by process of logic and reason be held accountable for re-publishing information which they do not realize is false.
Mr. Carr dwells on the ostensible distinction between a motive of public welfare and that of private profit. He contends that the interests of average people and of corporations will not often coincide (a ridiculous notion in and of itself, anyone ever heard of the Invisible Hand?), and so government must make the choices instead. But he forgets that governments have interests too. If the government controls the media (which is essentially what Mr. Carr is proposing), how could anyone report on government corruption?
I get the sinking feeling that Caleb Carr's clocks and calendars are all wrong. You and I know it's 2001, but he seems to wish it were 1984.
I'm going to make a completely prejudicial post here and now, and then reply to it after I've read the article with more specific thoughts.
Government regulation cannot POSSIBLY be the answer. The simple reason is that government doesn't work. In fact, it often works in reverse. Most areas in which the government tries its (inherently violent) hand at "fixing" something, it ends up broken even worse. You can't throw a rock into the history of government without hitting a policy that worsened what was ostensibly the problem.
A corporation cannot "control" an aspect of my life that I do not/choose/ to allow it to "control". A/government/, on the other hand, will control (with force, naturally) any part of my life it damn well pleases, and if I don't like it, I get to go to jail.
Normally I never post unless there's only about 300 comments, but I'm breaking my rule due to this question striking SOOOOO close to home.
I share your fears. I've been pondering the question of fleeing the tyranny of the United Socialist States of America for quite some time now. It's amazing any of us today know what real freedom IS considering we've barely had any since the New Deal gutted the soul of America. If the Founding Fathers rose from their graves, they might recognize the geography, but the nation would be alien.
At any rate.
Remember to lay blame where blame is due. A corporation cannot strip any of our freedoms without at least the implicit cooperation of government. Only governments have the legal power to use violence against peaceful people, and so any time you lose a right, you lose it to a gov't. And a little historical reflection will demonstrate this to be the rule, not the exception. The prime concern of Machiavelli's Prince was not the welfare of the people but the maintenance of his own power. Modern subjects are far less revolutionarily inclined that 16th century Italians, so our politicians can shift their goal from/keeping/ their power to/expanding/ their power (well, except at election time). PJ O'Rourke phrased it that a politician's income isn't money but power, and he will seek to increase his power income just as you or I would seek to increase our money income. And that any politician who claims he wants to reduce the size and scope of government is saying he's going to sneak up on himself and steal his own wallet. If the framework of a nation had no mechanism for corporations to lobby for favors, protection, etc, "corporate power" would be a non-issue. Why are patents causing problems? They are a government grant of priviledge, not based on a natural right (I oppose intellectual property in all forms, based on economic analysis). Remember when RAM prices shot through the roof for a while? Micron implored the FTC to impose a tariff on RAM imports because foreign vendors were supposedly "dumping" their wares in our market (which was of course bullshit). If the feds didn't have the power to levy tariffs, that couldn't have happened. "Tax breaks" for corporations and "the rich" (BTW, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I believe the top 5% income-wise pay over 75% of total income taxes in the US. The poor and middle class pay so relatively little taxes, that ANY significant tax cut will, *cough*, "benefit the rich") wouldn't seem so evil if we put in perspective how many times more we pay in taxes than the founding fathers ever reasonably expected.
But that's not really the point.
South American countries strike me as being good options. On the face of it, they try to be as socialist as every where else. But pragmatically, their governments are so weak and thinly spread, that if you find yourself a quiet corner of nowhere to live (Banos, Ecuador, a wonderful little hot springs town, comes to mind...) you can pretty much live how you like. However, it's hard to get good 'net access in these countries;) Russia is somewhat similar this way. If you look at their laws, you could barely tell their not still communist. But everyone ignores the government. The majority of the Russian economy is conducted on the black market. The small nation of Monaco, if I'm informed correctly, has no taxes. But it's a tourist country, so everything is expensive, and you'd have to learn French:(. And in fact, that's my biggest trouble, is learning a new language. Believe it or not, the US is actually pretty well in front when it comes to freedom among English-dominant countries. The UK has high taxes, gov't control of many industries, and Nazi gun laws (which its former colonies, Australia and New Zealand, have copied). Canada is similar, in that it's only a little bit worse (what with worse gun laws, higher taxes, and socialized medicine). I was sorta thinking Switzerland. Lots of English speakers, a long tradition of firearms, and the world's greatest banking system.
Of course, things in the US might get better before they get worse, if we say, elected a Libertarian president;) But I think we can all agree that leaving the country is more practical than waiting for/that/ to happen...
From what I understand of this technology, market acceptance is nearly impossible. But if all the big bad corporations get together and cram it down our throats, it'll take absolutely YEARS to make the transition. For example, the first article I read about this indicated that a protected disk and a real disk wouldn't be able to interoperate at all, ie: you couldn't copy a file from one to the other, in either direction.
And at any rate, I can't imagine anything at that low of a level actually working in a meaningful way. An HD processor hardly has the spare cycle to do the heuristics to see if I'm writing an MP3. And it wouldn't know how to read through the filesystem layer anyway.
Call me overly optimistic, but I don't think this will ever happen.
I'm going to elucidate here what I think is the fundamental advantage of PC gaming over console gaming as they each stand today.
The list of console games I've bought since I started seriously gaming on my PC (circa Quake) is very short.
I played Einhander (PSX) at a friend's (who rented it) house, loved it, and bought it.
I borrowed Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX) from that same friend, loved it, and bought it.
I bought Viewpoint (PSX) cuz it was $8 and I remembered playing it on a NeoGeo arcade machine. It sucks;)
I've also bought a number of NES and SNES games, like Super Metroid, Star Fox, Wizards & Warriors, and Power Blade, that I had played before and picked up because they were relatively cheap.
What do all these have in common? I'd played them before. I'm most likely to buy a console game if I have the opportunity to play it for a significant amount of time before purchase time. And while it's true that many used game stores like our local BuyBack Games chain will let you play used games for a minute on their in-store systems, that's not the same thing. I'm talking about the kind of sample experience you get from - here it comes - a PC game demo.
I haven't bought a single PC game in recent memory that I didn't download a demo or or borrow from a friend first (well there was Half-Life, but that was a gift. And come on, it's Half-Life!) There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like. Gaming journalism is largely a joke, the writers tend to have $5000 PC's and every console in history, have played more games than I've ever even seen or heard of, and have editors that won't let them come out and say a game sucks balls. And renting games based solely on the box-back propaganda (and maybe some of the aforementioned BS journalism) for $5 doesn't float my boat.
So I think that once broadband internet becomes really pervasive, the best thing the console industry could do for itself would be to create a system for downloadable game demos. Gamers could log on to a central repository of demos, and browse them by (BS journalistic) rating, genre, number of downloads, or whatever. This would give us a reasonable way to thresh the wheat from the chaff.
I plan to buy a Playstation2 (eventually) mainly because it plays DVD's, and because it's Squaresoft's main platform. If there ends up being a Final Fantasy Tactics 2, that'll be worth the whole $300+$50 right there;) But other than that, I don't expect to end up with many games unless I find some reliable journalists or a friend who rents the things like crazy.
OK, first the bad parts.
- piecemeal character development
Did the dwarf even have a name? D&D the game (not that I play it) is all about character development, and the movie lacked it sorely. Of course, the main few characters were explored decently, but at the expense of everyone else, apparently. (also made many individual scenes highly predictable)
- cheesy RPG style plot
The Empire is in danger. To save it, an unlikely assortment of characters band together. They need to find a magical artifact. To get that one they need ANOTHER one. Swashbuckling along the way. Yadda yadda, blah blah. Good guys win.
- a Wayans brother
'nuff said.
But now to the upsides...
- effects used tastefully
In recent years there's been a glut of eye-candy movies, that have no draw besides the special effects. This was not one of them. Effects were used sparingly and appropriately, and the integration of computer animation with live action was nearly seamless.
- decent acting
Snails was rather annoying, but I suppose in some sort of good way. Damadar was highly convincing. And the "not all mages are evil!" scene, though extremely cheesy, demonstrated that some actors can actually ACT like REAL PEOPLE in a movie.
- Tom Baker
Did anyone else catch that the healing elf was frickin Tom Baker? w00t!
- it was entertaining
In the end, does anything else really matter, so long as the movie was entertaining? The guy quoted in the official post must have really high movie standards if he thinks he could have spent 2 hours and $0 just sooooo much better in some other way. I paid not only for myself but for my girlfriend and I feel fairly satisfied.
"Before our American cousins to the south start on government intervention remember that it's because of the CRTC that no high-speed Internet company in Canada is able to charge residential customer more than CAD$50 per month."
Yeah, and it's also because of gov't intervention that Canadians can't get health care. It's an established fact of economic science that price ceilings cause shortages. What about all the people that are/willing/ to pay more than $50/m, whether for better service or for service that's difficult to provide (due to geography, etc), but can't because it's illegal to provide it over that price? It's simply the inverse minimum wage paradox. By setting either a maximum (or minimum)price, so long as it is over (or under) the price established by the market, you WILL be pricing some sellers (or buyers) out of the market!
Don't bother buying an AMD keychain from OCZ, I'll sell you the one they sold me!
I bought a Duron 600 pretested to do 950 from these guys. At first it seemed to work fine, but within a week it had developed serious stability problems, and eventually refused to boot at all (no POST, not even sync to the monitor). So I contacted customer service. They recommended e-mail, so I tried that first. After a week (I should have waited less time), I picked up the phone. Their only phone contact system is voice mail! You can't call up and talk to a real person, you MUST leave a message and wait to be called back. So it was 3 to 4 weeks after my initial purhcase that I was first meaningfully contacted and offered a small tech tidbit (that should have been on their site in the first place) that helped me out a bit, but in the end was a wash. Even after I had solved my first problem, tracked down another show-stopper and thought I had everything licked, my chip eventually did die.
The end result was a chip they promised to do 950 lasted less than 2 months, most of that time running at its stock 600. And unfortunately for me, as I was re-applying thermal compound and re-mounting the heatsink in a (vain) effort to revive my dead chip (I was grasping at straws at this point), I cracked a corner of the die, thus making the damned thing completely un-returnable.
So I have a $110 AMD-brand keychain-to-be of my own sitting right here on the desk.
Moral of the story? %$#@ those &*@#$es at OCZ! I bought a replacement Duron 600 for $50 and did the unlock job myself with a pencil and am running fine at 900 right now. You're better off doing it yourself than spending extra money and writing off any chance of getting service should they sell you crap akin to what I got.
I forgot to disclaim that I do not nominally believe in the legitimacy of intellectual property. And not just software patents and stuff, I mean ALL IP, ALL copyright, ALL patents, ALL trademarks. Ideas can't be owned, simple as that.
Do grad students agree as part of their contract with the school that their code becomes the school's property? Then yes, it is the school's property.
If you want to retain ownership of your code, make that a condition of your study there. Just say, "I'll do my grad work here, and pay out the nose for it, but *I* get to keep my code etc".
...
Which brings up another point: graduate students are *customers* of the school, not *employees*. Policies that apply to faculty etc should not have anything to do with students (who are not also employees).
And so it comes to this, as it always does. Most of the people feel helpless, and respond with apathy, not even bothering to vote on anything, even critical local ballot initiaves. The rest, and the national media, have locked into their brains a two-man race:
Gore - rampant gov't growth, a tendency for lying that puts Clinton to shame, off the wall environmental policy, and a running mate you'd swear was a Republican
Bush - a bit less gov't growth, kinda stupid, did some drugs (like *I* care), and his running mate's ideas on energy policy would make any socialist proud
Not much of a choice, if you ask me. My own electoral choice for chief executive, Mr. Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party, likes to quip that you shouldn't vote for the candidate you feel will take you to hell the slowest. And yet, that's how most of the American voters view their choice. They see the other candidates:
Buchanan - a fervent nationalist, wants to close our borders to immigrants AND trade, and impose his religion on us
Nader - getting most of his support from his semi-celebrity status, I fear many of his erstwhile supporters have failed to read the Green Party platform, which reads like the agenda of a turn-of-the-century socialist party, plus a bunch of enviro-fascism
Browne - the only candidate really committed to the ideals on which this country was founded: individual liberty and responsibility. But considering how far we have strayed from liberty in the 20th century, the century of socialism, hardly anyone is ready for a return to a properly Constitutionally limted gov't
And so, at the ballot box, libertarians like me are left with a bitter choice: vote for Browne, express our ideals,/maybe/ get some media coverage, but fail when the day is done; or vote for Bush, maybe slow gov't growth a bit, treat the nation to a bit of SS privatization, and not cripple our booming economy with over-regulation.
Or, simply not vote (the argument here is that by not voting you remove your sanction from the outcome, we'll get to that in a bit).
And whom you choose comes down to a simple dichotomy of principle. What is the purpose of the vote you cast? If you believe, as I do, that your vote is an expression of your principles, whether you believe they can win or not, you MUST vote your conscience. However if you believe that the point of the vote is to adjust your priorities until you can be on the winning side, or that you should influence the outcome in the most powerful way you can, or indeed any pragmatism-based argument, then by all means, vote the lesser of two evils (as I can't imagine what type of mind would actually/support/ either one of these idiots as they stand). But the one thing you must do if you wish to retain your moral sanction to complain (complaining being one of the few originally American ideals we still cherish), you MUST vote. Proponents of and apologists for not-voting often say that by abstaining from the electoral process, you remove your sanction from the outcome, in a sort of don't-blame-me kind of way. That by having voted for someone, ANYONE, you have implicitly approved of the electoral process and are willing to accept whomever is chosen by it. Nothing could be further from the truth! By not voting, by refusing to participate in the process in any way, you are saying to those who/do/ vote, "whatever you decide is OK by me". It is/abstaining/, not voting, by which you wax complicit with the majority. But worst of all, I think, is that by not voting, by not expressing what you believe and want, you give up your moral right to complain about the results. A bumper sticker reads, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian!". Your vote landing in one of the losers' piles gives you the sanction to later say I Told You So, when whoever did get elected does something stupid. But he who does not vote...
Allow an analogy. You are the catcher in a baseball game. A runner is headed for home. The 3rd baseman throws you the ball. You stick out your glove, to the spot where you'd/like/ to catch the ball, but it isn't there. It wizzes past and the runner scores. Can we all agree that you have no right to complain that the 3rd baseman "missed your glove"? That in order to legimitately complain about anything, you would have had to have tried to alter the course of events, by attempting to catch the ball actively rather than passively? When you do not vote, you are that catcher.
But back to my despair.
At the end of the day, when pragmatism does indeed rule, it IS a two-man race. Nader will get his media coverage from the liberal media monopoly, and probably end up with federal matching funds next time around, Browne's numbers will get reported on Fox News but will be otherwise ignored, and hopefully we can all forget about Buchanan and the "Reform" Party. Either Bush or Gore is going to take (and subsequently break) the Presidential Oath in January, like it or not. And when I think of that, my enthusiasm ebbs. Yes, I wore my Browne In '96 t-shirt today. Yes, I got quite excited yesterday when I saw an Elect Dr. Glazer (a libertarian candidate for state legislature) van drive by near my neighborhood (but sadly outside my district). Yes, I'm writing this post. But tonight after work and school I'll sit down on the bed and watch on television as Jefferson's tyrranny of the majority votes to steal my liberty and yours. Can you imagine that? In the Revolutionary War, thousands of colonists fought and died for the cause of liberty, so that they could be free from the arbitrary power of the British crown. The men of that era might be shocked that Americans today are so willing to surrender their liberty, but they would be absolutely appalled that the vast majority of those who/do/ vote, vote away not only their own liberties, but those of their fellow men.
Oh, how we have forgotten our triumph! Did they tell you in school, as they did me, that the great treasure of America was DEMOCRACY? Democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. What if 51% of Americans decided it would be good for the economy to summarily execute the other 49%? If the measure passed, it would be uncontestable! It's the will of the people! To reject it is to reject democracy! "But surely such a measure is unconstitutional," you say. Of course it would be! But so is every gun control law. So are the bans on various drugs such as marijuana, heroin, LSD, and Mescaline. So are no-knock warrants and civil asset forfeiture. And so are all the other laws - I would wager at least 90% of federal laws - in violation of the forgotten 9th and 10th Amendments. Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court piss on the Constitution every day, so what's to stop our hypothetical Summary Execution Act? Nothing. And that's democracy.
And although it may seem like a long jump from the gas tax hike that Al Gore will surely advocate, or the erosion of abortion and religious rights George Bush will push for, to the murder of a hundred million Americans, the principle is identical: they are all acts of violence by the government against its citizens. And at the end of the day, that's what I'm left with. That my gov't attacks me every day of my life, and that my fellow men, rather than come to my aid, assist my attackers with their compliance, their inaction, and their VOTES.
This a cut&paste of a post I made on the Shugashack when Sony announced day 1 supply would be cut from 1 to 1/2 million:
As anyone who's taken any intro to economics class (much less an econ major like myself) could tell you, there's something wrong with this picture. On the very first DAY of PS2 availability, we see there's at least 1,000,000 people willing to pay whatever Sony's charging to get one (let's call it $250, cuz I don't know the real figure). Yet, Sony only has 500,000 of the things to sell at that price. Now from the consumer's standpoint (particularly for the ppl who won't get one), the ideal situation would be to just make more of the damned things, and I think that's what Sony would be doing if they could, so let's assume they can't. You're Sony, you've got this HUUUUUUUUGE demand for your product, and can barely meet half of it. What do you do? You raise the price! If Sony jacks the PS2's price up to $350, will a lot of ppl not buy it, at least not on preorder? Of course, that's the Law of Demand at work. The practical question in this particular situation is, will enough people choose to do without so that any of those 500,000 units don't get sold? If not, then do it!
If I was a Sony shareholder, I'd be pissed too, cuz these guys are too stupid to raise the price on the goddamn thing! If the price was increased $100, and every unit still sold, that'd be $50,000,000 (yes, FIFTY MILLION) more in revenue!!!
On the other hand, it sure is nice for consumers that Sony's never thought to hire an economist...
...
These people who are now reselling PS2 units for like $1000, I applaud most heartily. Even though they ripped off my idea (hehe), they're moving goods from lower valued uses to higher valued uses, which is what capitalism is all about;)
Voting against gun locks makes sense, for a number of reasons.
1. A lock on my gun will at the very least make it difficult to ready my weapon to defend my life, family, and home. At the worst, it will outright *prevent* me from doing so, say because I lost the key or forgot the combination. And if on top of that I don't have kids, then there's no chance of an accident being prevented, and thus no possible positive value whatsoever.
2. It is my absolute right to use my property (here, my gun) in any way that is not an INITIATION of force. Simply storing it in a certain way is not a willful act of violence, and thus cannot be legitimately prohibited. (note that use of my firearm in self-defense is RETALIATORY force, another absolute right).
3. Kids are smart. Could you have gotten the lock off of a gun when you were a kid if you didn't know any better? I could have, no doubt. All a kid would have to do is sit around guessing combinations, or just find the key, and the lock's as good as non-existant. The kid's also smart enough to pick a time when daddy's away, so he has a bunch of time to guess numbers or hunt for the key, whereas when your house is being broken into you have mere seconds to ready your firearm.
4. An irresponsible gun owner, who has children, and puts a lock on his gun creates for himself a false sense of safety. What a responsible gun owner does is take his kid to the range and teaches him how to properly handle and shoot a gun, and to respect it for the dangerous tool that it is, like my Uncle Marc did with me when I was 7. And because I knew proper gun safety that young, I got my first gun for xmas when I was 12, a beautiful Ruger 10/22 that I still have and love (I'm 19). Because I've known proper firearms ethics, I've never shown my friends where the guns are, or played with a loaded gun, or anything of that foolish nature. For the irresponsible gun owner who doesn't teach his kids about guns, that lock is indeed ALL that insures against an accident, and it is flimsy insurance indeed.
5. Laws mandating "safe storage" are unenforceable, unless we really do repeal the 4th Amendment (remember when we had protection from unreasonable searches and siezures? I don't, we lost it before I was born). The police would have to knock on your door, ask you if you own any firearms (this is already a hideous violation of your rights), and then if you say yes, you'll have to show them where and how your guns are stored, and the police will have to decide if it's "safe" or not. Of course, to even show up, they'd either need no 4th Amendment restrictions, or a proper warrant (and how would they get a warrant if the only evidence are the guns themselves?).
So, to summarize why no intelligent person should vote FOR gun lock laws:
1. They're counterproductive.
2. They violate our rights.
3. They don't work.
4. They're counterproductive.
5. They're unenforceable.
That there is a correlation between my access to my firearm and my child's was exactly my point, but you took it in the opposite way as it was intended. I see it as "a gun lock may keep my child from having an accident, but it also prevents my from defending myself", you took it as "an unlocked firearm may allow you to defend yourself, but your kid might kill himself with it". Which brings me back to what I said about firearms education for your children. I was how to shoot and properly handle rifles and pistols when I was seven years old, and got my first gun for xmas when I was 12. Needless to say, I've never killed anyone or accidentally discharged a firearm in any way. I was smart enough to never say to my friends, "I know where daddy keeps his guns!", because I knew that guns were tools and not toys.
You also *presume* that gun locks actually do reduce accidents, which is far from proven. I was a smart kid, and you probably were too. If knowing it was wrong didn't stop you or I, we could have gotten the locks off those guns no question about it, and we would have had the same chance of accidentally discharging the supposedly "safely stored" weapon. No accident prevented.
I'm not saying that exactly 0 accidents will be prevented, or even that more people will die because they couldn't defend themselves than children will be saved (though I believe the latter would be true). Regardless of that, my firearm is my property, and I have an absolute right to use it in any way that is not an INITIATION of force. Simply storing it a certain way is not a willful act of force, and thus cannot be legitimately prohibited. (also note that using it in self-defense is RETALIATORY force, which is not only a right, but considered by many to be a duty)
Slashdot Mirror
There was an NPR story on this a month or so ago, it's standard practice. Half the review-bytes in a newspaper ad are fake like this one, the other half are taken wildly out of context.... the possibility of an actually-good movie notwithstanding ;)
Yes, this sucks. I highly doubt there's any good technical reason to go to this other boot record system. Honestly it just seems mean.
/other/ product /less/ attractive.
But it is competitive, not "stifling to competition". A better choice of words would be "stifling to THE competition," similar words, but diametric meanings.
Despite what economics textbooks say, competition isn't a market state, it's a process. When one firm drives another out of business with lower prices (ala Wal Mart), that's competition. When one firm makes its product more attractive than the other guys' to buyers, that's competition.
What MS is doing here is basically an odd case of that second point. By making it more difficult to use their product alongside a competing product, they are (to some degree) making their product relatively more attractive, essentially by making the
For another example, consider if a car maker had a policy that if you used aftermarket parts in significant repairs (eg: new brakes, cylinder heads, etc), it voided part of the warranty. This causes the buyer to lean toward using the dealer's repair services or at least official factory parts rather than (possibly cheaper and/or "better") aftermarket parts. It's not nice, it may actually be detrimental to consumer utility, but it's COMPETITIVE.
MoNsTeR
"If I were a current employee, it would certainly make me feel good to know that they weren't going to cut me just to get cheaper labor in the door."
/less/ than what you're being paid. If your boss takes you in his office to explain "the hard choice", offer to take a pay cut, a massive one even. This is what any labor supplier with half a brain will do in a "recession" (which we're not having, BTW), because having a job with less pay is better than having no job at all, tenfold so when jobs are scarce.
;)
This is silly. If you're going to be cut, it means that, at least in management's eyes, what you're producing for the company has become worth
The "downward stickiness" of wages is responsible for much of the unemployment that comes with periods of economic malaise. If more workers took this approach, recessions would be less severe, and recoveries more rapid. And it doesn't take an economist to figure it out
MoNsTeR
"Things like this are why I just don't understand the typical Libertarian babble that government data collection is bad, but corporations should be allowed to collect and sell whatever data they want. Hey, guess what: if a corporation can collect and sell your information, it's available to the government too."
Not if the government doesn't have explicit legal authority to purchase that information. Remeber that government collection of data is a symptom, the disease consists of the nefarious plans they have for using that information. If they don't have the undue authority over our lives that makes that information valuable to them, data collection becomes a moot point.
Remember that the entire reason interest groups and corporations lobby the government is because they believe they can gain by doing so. If the government didn't have the power in the first place to do those favors, there'd be no point in lobbying. Similarly, if the gov't didn't have the power to regulate the minutiae of our daily lives, there'd be no reason to collect personal data on the masses.
If we were to somehow ban corporations from collecting personal data, or ban them from selling it to The Man, then the jack-booted thugs would just get the lawmakers to make it legal to collect it directly. If you don't want them collecting information, YOU MUST REMOVE THE INCENTIVES TO DO SO.
MoNsTeR
For a couple of months now, I've been playing the MMORTS game "Mankind" (read: playing far too much). It's published and maintained by a European company (French?) called Vibes.net. Periodically, Vibes updates the client game, and when you log on these updates will automatically be downloaded and installed. Nevermind the potential for a disgruntled employee to hit every MK player with a virus...
So here's what happened. Vibes decided, for whatever reason, that ingame e-mails should be stored on the player's computer rather than on the servers. So everyone logs on, and their clients download this update. Except, in addition to reorganizing the mail system, this update, for no explicable reason, screws up the entire building system. Most costs show up as negative numbers, disallowing you to execute those builds. Your builders say they can build ground structures in space, and space structures on the ground. In short, Total Chaos ensues as no one can get anything done, assuming they can even log on and enter their [star] systems.
Now, the big issue here is really that Vibes obviously needs better QA. I get the feeling they didn't test this patch AT ALL before releasing it. However, if the upgrade system wasn't force-feed, the people brave enough to download an untested patch (this isn't the first crazy-ass patch Vibes released) would be able to warn off the more cautious players from getting it.
Hypothetical examples can be instructive too. Think of what would have happened if every NS3 user had automatically been "upgraded" to NS4, or from 4 to the ultra-bloat of 6. Or if MS had forcefully pushed out the catastrophic IE5.5. Or if (heaven help us) the Linux kernel automatically "upgraded" itself...
When I tell people I'm opposed to all intellectualy property, they tend to assume that to mean patents, and probably most copyright, but they tend to be rather astonished that I include trademark under that umbrella as well. The concept of trademark has become so ingrained in our culture that people have a hard time thinking about a world without it. But it is just another kind of IP, none of which are valid forms of property because they *require* arbitrary application of force by a government.
At any rate, I've always been at a loss for a good example of how the trademark concept tramples on our natural rights.
This is it.
I'll need a new motherboard for this, won't I? :(
I swear, "upgradability" is a myth. Anytime a processor worthy of upgrading to comes out, it either has a different interface or voltage, requiring new motherboards for all. I've never been able to put two consecutive chips in the same board.
sigh....
I'm getting a little tired of Slashdot being so obviously pro-citizen disarmament (ie: gun control). Many Slashdot readers are libertarians, not liberals, and know that the right to bear arms is every bit as important as the right to free speech.
AOL should just pull out of Germany. Send letters to their customers saying, "Sorry, but your government has rules our business model to be illegal. We have no choice but to discontinue our service in your nation." All other ISP's should follow suit. Then when the entire country is left without internet access, maybe the court will see how stupid its ruling was.
Of course, this is unrealistic. But I can't imagine what else will work. I mean, they might as well have ruled that Microsoft is responsible if users of Windows use xcopy32.exe to "pirate" music.
MoNsTeR
I love the idea of being able to disable particular ads. The "Punch The Monkey" ad is the perfect example. Not only is it the most annoying ad in the universe, but I can't even tell what those people are selling.
The idea of being able to opt in and out of certain categories is also appealing. Probably upwards of 75% of the ads I see are for products or services I couldn't care less about. I'd prefer the ads I do have to look at to be at least marginally interesting. And the key factor is that I trust OSDN a hell of a lot more than I trust Doubleclick, as far as tracking my ad-viewing and whatnot, knowwhatImsayin?
The karma system...? Kinda seems silly.
MoNsTeR
I, too, left the theater only about an hour ago. I can pretty much remember the flow of the movie, but I don't think that's really important. Even though Snatch's story, like that of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, is a wonder in and of itself, twisting and turning and finally coming all back together to smack you in the face and tickle you on the ass at the end, it's the CHARACTERS that make the movie.
;) Notice how many of the characters had handguns? Know how handguns are 100% illegal in the UK? I wonder how that is.... OH THAT'S RIGHT, CRIMINALS IGNORE THE LAW!!!!
But as per most of my comments, I wouldn't be here if it weren't to make a political statement
MoNsTeR
Oh god, it's 10 times worse than I expected.
/should/ be regulated, but that obscenity elsewhere /should NOT/.
Carr on regulating away "obscenity" on the 'net:
"So far so good: We are talking about material that is obviously dangerous and has been criminalized in other areas."
Obvious to whom? FALLING ROCK is dangerous, pornography is not. Porn, or other "obscene" material, actively DOES nothing at all. One views it, one interprets, one chooses how to allow it to affect one's thought processes, ideas, and beliefs, just like any source of information. If I look at some porn, and then go commit some heinous crime (or some wonderful act of philanthropy, for that matter), the pornographer cannot be held accountable by any process of logic and reason.
There is a distinction of thought processes that I've discovered that will be very helpful if I share here. A person sees two things: one that is controlled by the government, and a similar-in-some-way thing that is not. The authoritarian mind looks at the unregulated thing and asks "why not?". The libertarian mind looks at the regulated thing and asks "why?". The point is not that obscenity on the 'net
"And if that means suspending full First Amendment protection from the Internet, so be it."
That pretty much speaks for itself. The internet is a mechanism through which I can express myself, usually in very classic means such as the written word. Any government action that prevents me from doing so is in obvious violation of both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. To put it simply, the day the Feds start nuking Slashdot posts, the spirit of America dies.
"People assume that what they read on the Net is true."
That is THEIR problem. I tell you a lie, and you believe it. I may have done a morally reprehensible thing, but that does not relieve you of responsibility for any actions you take as a result of believing my lie. Much as I despise misleading advertising and media spin, the solution is to get people to question all information, to adopt healthy skepticism. The solution is NOT information pre-approval. If the author is truly worried about information consumers becoming complacent in unable to properly transform information into knowledge, he should fear this kind of sanitizing more than anything. After all, if we have the assurance of our (ultimately benevolent, of course) government that anything we read on the 'net is true, then there's no reason to ever question anything again!
"if site owners can be held legally responsible for disinformation they may unwittingly disseminate (much in the way that if you unknowingly buy stolen goods you can still become an accessory after the fact)"
I turn your attention again to the liberty/authority thought dichotomy. The buyer of stolen goods not only did not intend wrongdoing, but did not even PERCEIVE wrongdoing. Similarly, webmasters cannot by process of logic and reason be held accountable for re-publishing information which they do not realize is false.
Mr. Carr dwells on the ostensible distinction between a motive of public welfare and that of private profit. He contends that the interests of average people and of corporations will not often coincide (a ridiculous notion in and of itself, anyone ever heard of the Invisible Hand?), and so government must make the choices instead. But he forgets that governments have interests too. If the government controls the media (which is essentially what Mr. Carr is proposing), how could anyone report on government corruption?
I get the sinking feeling that Caleb Carr's clocks and calendars are all wrong. You and I know it's 2001, but he seems to wish it were 1984.
MoNsTeR
I'm going to make a completely prejudicial post here and now, and then reply to it after I've read the article with more specific thoughts.
/choose/ to allow it to "control". A /government/, on the other hand, will control (with force, naturally) any part of my life it damn well pleases, and if I don't like it, I get to go to jail.
Government regulation cannot POSSIBLY be the answer. The simple reason is that government doesn't work. In fact, it often works in reverse. Most areas in which the government tries its (inherently violent) hand at "fixing" something, it ends up broken even worse. You can't throw a rock into the history of government without hitting a policy that worsened what was ostensibly the problem.
A corporation cannot "control" an aspect of my life that I do not
more in a minute...
MoNsTeR
Normally I never post unless there's only about 300 comments, but I'm breaking my rule due to this question striking SOOOOO close to home.
/keeping/ their power to /expanding/ their power (well, except at election time). PJ O'Rourke phrased it that a politician's income isn't money but power, and he will seek to increase his power income just as you or I would seek to increase our money income. And that any politician who claims he wants to reduce the size and scope of government is saying he's going to sneak up on himself and steal his own wallet. If the framework of a nation had no mechanism for corporations to lobby for favors, protection, etc, "corporate power" would be a non-issue. Why are patents causing problems? They are a government grant of priviledge, not based on a natural right (I oppose intellectual property in all forms, based on economic analysis). Remember when RAM prices shot through the roof for a while? Micron implored the FTC to impose a tariff on RAM imports because foreign vendors were supposedly "dumping" their wares in our market (which was of course bullshit). If the feds didn't have the power to levy tariffs, that couldn't have happened. "Tax breaks" for corporations and "the rich" (BTW, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I believe the top 5% income-wise pay over 75% of total income taxes in the US. The poor and middle class pay so relatively little taxes, that ANY significant tax cut will, *cough*, "benefit the rich") wouldn't seem so evil if we put in perspective how many times more we pay in taxes than the founding fathers ever reasonably expected.
;) Russia is somewhat similar this way. If you look at their laws, you could barely tell their not still communist. But everyone ignores the government. The majority of the Russian economy is conducted on the black market. The small nation of Monaco, if I'm informed correctly, has no taxes. But it's a tourist country, so everything is expensive, and you'd have to learn French :(. And in fact, that's my biggest trouble, is learning a new language. Believe it or not, the US is actually pretty well in front when it comes to freedom among English-dominant countries. The UK has high taxes, gov't control of many industries, and Nazi gun laws (which its former colonies, Australia and New Zealand, have copied). Canada is similar, in that it's only a little bit worse (what with worse gun laws, higher taxes, and socialized medicine). I was sorta thinking Switzerland. Lots of English speakers, a long tradition of firearms, and the world's greatest banking system.
;) But I think we can all agree that leaving the country is more practical than waiting for /that/ to happen...
I share your fears. I've been pondering the question of fleeing the tyranny of the United Socialist States of America for quite some time now. It's amazing any of us today know what real freedom IS considering we've barely had any since the New Deal gutted the soul of America. If the Founding Fathers rose from their graves, they might recognize the geography, but the nation would be alien.
At any rate.
Remember to lay blame where blame is due. A corporation cannot strip any of our freedoms without at least the implicit cooperation of government. Only governments have the legal power to use violence against peaceful people, and so any time you lose a right, you lose it to a gov't. And a little historical reflection will demonstrate this to be the rule, not the exception. The prime concern of Machiavelli's Prince was not the welfare of the people but the maintenance of his own power. Modern subjects are far less revolutionarily inclined that 16th century Italians, so our politicians can shift their goal from
But that's not really the point.
South American countries strike me as being good options. On the face of it, they try to be as socialist as every where else. But pragmatically, their governments are so weak and thinly spread, that if you find yourself a quiet corner of nowhere to live (Banos, Ecuador, a wonderful little hot springs town, comes to mind...) you can pretty much live how you like. However, it's hard to get good 'net access in these countries
Of course, things in the US might get better before they get worse, if we say, elected a Libertarian president
MoNsTeR
By next year? HAHAHAHAHAH!!!
From what I understand of this technology, market acceptance is nearly impossible. But if all the big bad corporations get together and cram it down our throats, it'll take absolutely YEARS to make the transition. For example, the first article I read about this indicated that a protected disk and a real disk wouldn't be able to interoperate at all, ie: you couldn't copy a file from one to the other, in either direction.
And at any rate, I can't imagine anything at that low of a level actually working in a meaningful way. An HD processor hardly has the spare cycle to do the heuristics to see if I'm writing an MP3. And it wouldn't know how to read through the filesystem layer anyway.
Call me overly optimistic, but I don't think this will ever happen.
MoNsTeR
I'm going to elucidate here what I think is the fundamental advantage of PC gaming over console gaming as they each stand today.
;)
;) But other than that, I don't expect to end up with many games unless I find some reliable journalists or a friend who rents the things like crazy.
The list of console games I've bought since I started seriously gaming on my PC (circa Quake) is very short.
I played Einhander (PSX) at a friend's (who rented it) house, loved it, and bought it.
I borrowed Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX) from that same friend, loved it, and bought it.
I bought Viewpoint (PSX) cuz it was $8 and I remembered playing it on a NeoGeo arcade machine. It sucks
I've also bought a number of NES and SNES games, like Super Metroid, Star Fox, Wizards & Warriors, and Power Blade, that I had played before and picked up because they were relatively cheap.
What do all these have in common? I'd played them before. I'm most likely to buy a console game if I have the opportunity to play it for a significant amount of time before purchase time. And while it's true that many used game stores like our local BuyBack Games chain will let you play used games for a minute on their in-store systems, that's not the same thing. I'm talking about the kind of sample experience you get from - here it comes - a PC game demo.
I haven't bought a single PC game in recent memory that I didn't download a demo or or borrow from a friend first (well there was Half-Life, but that was a gift. And come on, it's Half-Life!) There are hundreds of PSX titles out there, but I only own 7 of them, because I have no reasonable way of finding out which ones I'd like. Gaming journalism is largely a joke, the writers tend to have $5000 PC's and every console in history, have played more games than I've ever even seen or heard of, and have editors that won't let them come out and say a game sucks balls. And renting games based solely on the box-back propaganda (and maybe some of the aforementioned BS journalism) for $5 doesn't float my boat.
So I think that once broadband internet becomes really pervasive, the best thing the console industry could do for itself would be to create a system for downloadable game demos. Gamers could log on to a central repository of demos, and browse them by (BS journalistic) rating, genre, number of downloads, or whatever. This would give us a reasonable way to thresh the wheat from the chaff.
I plan to buy a Playstation2 (eventually) mainly because it plays DVD's, and because it's Squaresoft's main platform. If there ends up being a Final Fantasy Tactics 2, that'll be worth the whole $300+$50 right there
MoNsTeR
OK, first the bad parts.
- piecemeal character development
Did the dwarf even have a name? D&D the game (not that I play it) is all about character development, and the movie lacked it sorely. Of course, the main few characters were explored decently, but at the expense of everyone else, apparently. (also made many individual scenes highly predictable)
- cheesy RPG style plot
The Empire is in danger. To save it, an unlikely assortment of characters band together. They need to find a magical artifact. To get that one they need ANOTHER one. Swashbuckling along the way. Yadda yadda, blah blah. Good guys win.
- a Wayans brother
'nuff said.
But now to the upsides...
- effects used tastefully
In recent years there's been a glut of eye-candy movies, that have no draw besides the special effects. This was not one of them. Effects were used sparingly and appropriately, and the integration of computer animation with live action was nearly seamless.
- decent acting
Snails was rather annoying, but I suppose in some sort of good way. Damadar was highly convincing. And the "not all mages are evil!" scene, though extremely cheesy, demonstrated that some actors can actually ACT like REAL PEOPLE in a movie.
- Tom Baker
Did anyone else catch that the healing elf was frickin Tom Baker? w00t!
- it was entertaining
In the end, does anything else really matter, so long as the movie was entertaining? The guy quoted in the official post must have really high movie standards if he thinks he could have spent 2 hours and $0 just sooooo much better in some other way. I paid not only for myself but for my girlfriend and I feel fairly satisfied.
MoNsTeR
"Before our American cousins to the south start on government intervention remember that it's because of the CRTC that no high-speed Internet company in Canada is able to charge residential customer more than CAD$50 per month."
/willing/ to pay more than $50/m, whether for better service or for service that's difficult to provide (due to geography, etc), but can't because it's illegal to provide it over that price? It's simply the inverse minimum wage paradox. By setting either a maximum (or minimum)price, so long as it is over (or under) the price established by the market, you WILL be pricing some sellers (or buyers) out of the market!
Yeah, and it's also because of gov't intervention that Canadians can't get health care. It's an established fact of economic science that price ceilings cause shortages. What about all the people that are
MoNsTeR
Don't bother buying an AMD keychain from OCZ, I'll sell you the one they sold me!
I bought a Duron 600 pretested to do 950 from these guys. At first it seemed to work fine, but within a week it had developed serious stability problems, and eventually refused to boot at all (no POST, not even sync to the monitor). So I contacted customer service. They recommended e-mail, so I tried that first. After a week (I should have waited less time), I picked up the phone. Their only phone contact system is voice mail! You can't call up and talk to a real person, you MUST leave a message and wait to be called back. So it was 3 to 4 weeks after my initial purhcase that I was first meaningfully contacted and offered a small tech tidbit (that should have been on their site in the first place) that helped me out a bit, but in the end was a wash. Even after I had solved my first problem, tracked down another show-stopper and thought I had everything licked, my chip eventually did die.
The end result was a chip they promised to do 950 lasted less than 2 months, most of that time running at its stock 600. And unfortunately for me, as I was re-applying thermal compound and re-mounting the heatsink in a (vain) effort to revive my dead chip (I was grasping at straws at this point), I cracked a corner of the die, thus making the damned thing completely un-returnable.
So I have a $110 AMD-brand keychain-to-be of my own sitting right here on the desk.
Moral of the story? %$#@ those &*@#$es at OCZ! I bought a replacement Duron 600 for $50 and did the unlock job myself with a pencil and am running fine at 900 right now. You're better off doing it yourself than spending extra money and writing off any chance of getting service should they sell you crap akin to what I got.
MoNsTeR
I forgot to disclaim that I do not nominally believe in the legitimacy of intellectual property. And not just software patents and stuff, I mean ALL IP, ALL copyright, ALL patents, ALL trademarks. Ideas can't be owned, simple as that.
Do grad students agree as part of their contract with the school that their code becomes the school's property? Then yes, it is the school's property.
If you want to retain ownership of your code, make that a condition of your study there. Just say, "I'll do my grad work here, and pay out the nose for it, but *I* get to keep my code etc".
...
Which brings up another point: graduate students are *customers* of the school, not *employees*. Policies that apply to faculty etc should not have anything to do with students (who are not also employees).
MoNsTeR
And so it comes to this, as it always does. Most of the people feel helpless, and respond with apathy, not even bothering to vote on anything, even critical local ballot initiaves. The rest, and the national media, have locked into their brains a two-man race:
/maybe/ get some media coverage, but fail when the day is done; or vote for Bush, maybe slow gov't growth a bit, treat the nation to a bit of SS privatization, and not cripple our booming economy with over-regulation.
/support/ either one of these idiots as they stand). But the one thing you must do if you wish to retain your moral sanction to complain (complaining being one of the few originally American ideals we still cherish), you MUST vote. Proponents of and apologists for not-voting often say that by abstaining from the electoral process, you remove your sanction from the outcome, in a sort of don't-blame-me kind of way. That by having voted for someone, ANYONE, you have implicitly approved of the electoral process and are willing to accept whomever is chosen by it. Nothing could be further from the truth! By not voting, by refusing to participate in the process in any way, you are saying to those who /do/ vote, "whatever you decide is OK by me". It is /abstaining/, not voting, by which you wax complicit with the majority. But worst of all, I think, is that by not voting, by not expressing what you believe and want, you give up your moral right to complain about the results. A bumper sticker reads, "Don't Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian!". Your vote landing in one of the losers' piles gives you the sanction to later say I Told You So, when whoever did get elected does something stupid. But he who does not vote...
/like/ to catch the ball, but it isn't there. It wizzes past and the runner scores. Can we all agree that you have no right to complain that the 3rd baseman "missed your glove"? That in order to legimitately complain about anything, you would have had to have tried to alter the course of events, by attempting to catch the ball actively rather than passively? When you do not vote, you are that catcher.
/do/ vote, vote away not only their own liberties, but those of their fellow men.
Gore - rampant gov't growth, a tendency for lying that puts Clinton to shame, off the wall environmental policy, and a running mate you'd swear was a Republican
Bush - a bit less gov't growth, kinda stupid, did some drugs (like *I* care), and his running mate's ideas on energy policy would make any socialist proud
Not much of a choice, if you ask me. My own electoral choice for chief executive, Mr. Harry Browne of the Libertarian Party, likes to quip that you shouldn't vote for the candidate you feel will take you to hell the slowest. And yet, that's how most of the American voters view their choice. They see the other candidates:
Buchanan - a fervent nationalist, wants to close our borders to immigrants AND trade, and impose his religion on us
Nader - getting most of his support from his semi-celebrity status, I fear many of his erstwhile supporters have failed to read the Green Party platform, which reads like the agenda of a turn-of-the-century socialist party, plus a bunch of enviro-fascism
Browne - the only candidate really committed to the ideals on which this country was founded: individual liberty and responsibility. But considering how far we have strayed from liberty in the 20th century, the century of socialism, hardly anyone is ready for a return to a properly Constitutionally limted gov't
And so, at the ballot box, libertarians like me are left with a bitter choice: vote for Browne, express our ideals,
Or, simply not vote (the argument here is that by not voting you remove your sanction from the outcome, we'll get to that in a bit).
And whom you choose comes down to a simple dichotomy of principle. What is the purpose of the vote you cast? If you believe, as I do, that your vote is an expression of your principles, whether you believe they can win or not, you MUST vote your conscience. However if you believe that the point of the vote is to adjust your priorities until you can be on the winning side, or that you should influence the outcome in the most powerful way you can, or indeed any pragmatism-based argument, then by all means, vote the lesser of two evils (as I can't imagine what type of mind would actually
Allow an analogy. You are the catcher in a baseball game. A runner is headed for home. The 3rd baseman throws you the ball. You stick out your glove, to the spot where you'd
But back to my despair.
At the end of the day, when pragmatism does indeed rule, it IS a two-man race. Nader will get his media coverage from the liberal media monopoly, and probably end up with federal matching funds next time around, Browne's numbers will get reported on Fox News but will be otherwise ignored, and hopefully we can all forget about Buchanan and the "Reform" Party. Either Bush or Gore is going to take (and subsequently break) the Presidential Oath in January, like it or not. And when I think of that, my enthusiasm ebbs. Yes, I wore my Browne In '96 t-shirt today. Yes, I got quite excited yesterday when I saw an Elect Dr. Glazer (a libertarian candidate for state legislature) van drive by near my neighborhood (but sadly outside my district). Yes, I'm writing this post. But tonight after work and school I'll sit down on the bed and watch on television as Jefferson's tyrranny of the majority votes to steal my liberty and yours. Can you imagine that? In the Revolutionary War, thousands of colonists fought and died for the cause of liberty, so that they could be free from the arbitrary power of the British crown. The men of that era might be shocked that Americans today are so willing to surrender their liberty, but they would be absolutely appalled that the vast majority of those who
Oh, how we have forgotten our triumph! Did they tell you in school, as they did me, that the great treasure of America was DEMOCRACY? Democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. What if 51% of Americans decided it would be good for the economy to summarily execute the other 49%? If the measure passed, it would be uncontestable! It's the will of the people! To reject it is to reject democracy! "But surely such a measure is unconstitutional," you say. Of course it would be! But so is every gun control law. So are the bans on various drugs such as marijuana, heroin, LSD, and Mescaline. So are no-knock warrants and civil asset forfeiture. And so are all the other laws - I would wager at least 90% of federal laws - in violation of the forgotten 9th and 10th Amendments. Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court piss on the Constitution every day, so what's to stop our hypothetical Summary Execution Act? Nothing. And that's democracy.
And although it may seem like a long jump from the gas tax hike that Al Gore will surely advocate, or the erosion of abortion and religious rights George Bush will push for, to the murder of a hundred million Americans, the principle is identical: they are all acts of violence by the government against its citizens. And at the end of the day, that's what I'm left with. That my gov't attacks me every day of my life, and that my fellow men, rather than come to my aid, assist my attackers with their compliance, their inaction, and their VOTES.
MoNsTeR
This a cut&paste of a post I made on the Shugashack when Sony announced day 1 supply would be cut from 1 to 1/2 million:
;)
As anyone who's taken any intro to economics class (much less an econ major like myself) could tell you, there's something wrong with this picture. On the very first DAY of PS2 availability, we see there's at least 1,000,000 people willing to pay whatever Sony's charging to get one (let's call it $250, cuz I don't know the real figure). Yet, Sony only has 500,000 of the things to sell at that price. Now from the consumer's standpoint (particularly for the ppl who won't get one), the ideal situation would be to just make more of the damned things, and I think that's what Sony would be doing if they could, so let's assume they can't. You're Sony, you've got this HUUUUUUUUGE demand for your product, and can barely meet half of it. What do you do? You raise the price! If Sony jacks the PS2's price up to $350, will a lot of ppl not buy it, at least not on preorder? Of course, that's the Law of Demand at work. The practical question in this particular situation is, will enough people choose to do without so that any of those 500,000 units don't get sold? If not, then do it!
If I was a Sony shareholder, I'd be pissed too, cuz these guys are too stupid to raise the price on the goddamn thing! If the price was increased $100, and every unit still sold, that'd be $50,000,000 (yes, FIFTY MILLION) more in revenue!!!
On the other hand, it sure is nice for consumers that Sony's never thought to hire an economist...
...
These people who are now reselling PS2 units for like $1000, I applaud most heartily. Even though they ripped off my idea (hehe), they're moving goods from lower valued uses to higher valued uses, which is what capitalism is all about
MoNsTeR
Voting against gun locks makes sense, for a number of reasons.
1. A lock on my gun will at the very least make it difficult to ready my weapon to defend my life, family, and home. At the worst, it will outright *prevent* me from doing so, say because I lost the key or forgot the combination. And if on top of that I don't have kids, then there's no chance of an accident being prevented, and thus no possible positive value whatsoever.
2. It is my absolute right to use my property (here, my gun) in any way that is not an INITIATION of force. Simply storing it in a certain way is not a willful act of violence, and thus cannot be legitimately prohibited. (note that use of my firearm in self-defense is RETALIATORY force, another absolute right).
3. Kids are smart. Could you have gotten the lock off of a gun when you were a kid if you didn't know any better? I could have, no doubt. All a kid would have to do is sit around guessing combinations, or just find the key, and the lock's as good as non-existant. The kid's also smart enough to pick a time when daddy's away, so he has a bunch of time to guess numbers or hunt for the key, whereas when your house is being broken into you have mere seconds to ready your firearm.
4. An irresponsible gun owner, who has children, and puts a lock on his gun creates for himself a false sense of safety. What a responsible gun owner does is take his kid to the range and teaches him how to properly handle and shoot a gun, and to respect it for the dangerous tool that it is, like my Uncle Marc did with me when I was 7. And because I knew proper gun safety that young, I got my first gun for xmas when I was 12, a beautiful Ruger 10/22 that I still have and love (I'm 19). Because I've known proper firearms ethics, I've never shown my friends where the guns are, or played with a loaded gun, or anything of that foolish nature. For the irresponsible gun owner who doesn't teach his kids about guns, that lock is indeed ALL that insures against an accident, and it is flimsy insurance indeed.
5. Laws mandating "safe storage" are unenforceable, unless we really do repeal the 4th Amendment (remember when we had protection from unreasonable searches and siezures? I don't, we lost it before I was born). The police would have to knock on your door, ask you if you own any firearms (this is already a hideous violation of your rights), and then if you say yes, you'll have to show them where and how your guns are stored, and the police will have to decide if it's "safe" or not. Of course, to even show up, they'd either need no 4th Amendment restrictions, or a proper warrant (and how would they get a warrant if the only evidence are the guns themselves?).
So, to summarize why no intelligent person should vote FOR gun lock laws:
1. They're counterproductive.
2. They violate our rights.
3. They don't work.
4. They're counterproductive.
5. They're unenforceable.
MoNsTeR
That there is a correlation between my access to my firearm and my child's was exactly my point, but you took it in the opposite way as it was intended. I see it as "a gun lock may keep my child from having an accident, but it also prevents my from defending myself", you took it as "an unlocked firearm may allow you to defend yourself, but your kid might kill himself with it". Which brings me back to what I said about firearms education for your children. I was how to shoot and properly handle rifles and pistols when I was seven years old, and got my first gun for xmas when I was 12. Needless to say, I've never killed anyone or accidentally discharged a firearm in any way. I was smart enough to never say to my friends, "I know where daddy keeps his guns!", because I knew that guns were tools and not toys.
You also *presume* that gun locks actually do reduce accidents, which is far from proven. I was a smart kid, and you probably were too. If knowing it was wrong didn't stop you or I, we could have gotten the locks off those guns no question about it, and we would have had the same chance of accidentally discharging the supposedly "safely stored" weapon. No accident prevented.
I'm not saying that exactly 0 accidents will be prevented, or even that more people will die because they couldn't defend themselves than children will be saved (though I believe the latter would be true). Regardless of that, my firearm is my property, and I have an absolute right to use it in any way that is not an INITIATION of force. Simply storing it a certain way is not a willful act of force, and thus cannot be legitimately prohibited. (also note that using it in self-defense is RETALIATORY force, which is not only a right, but considered by many to be a duty)
MoNsTeR