I thought links to articles with titles like "Scientists make detailed image of first molecule!" without the article having the actual picture in it.
I'm used to CNN pulling that crap on their web site because they're too cheap to pay the outrageous price for the picture of the then-briefly hot story, but science?
That's where the philosophy chokes. It assumes making a decision, i.e. weighing pros and cons and your emotions and information, is somehow magically free of both determinism and random control. They may have influence, but ultimately there's some mysterious spiritual thing beyond determinism and randomness that's doing the deciding in a manner that doesn't involve either.
Which, I submit, makes no sense. Weighing options is the essence of determinism, for that matter.
More importantly, back to the physics, you can easily base quantum on determinism if you give up on Einstein's concept of reality. Which is to say, that there are "real things out there with real, measurable properties".
Quantum implies heavily that, for example, there is no particle out there with an actual, measurable position, and so on.
But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation, then the whole hidden-variables problem disappears as an issue. I.e. the "wavicles" of QM and their quantum properties don't even exist as real objects. The "probability cloud" and entanglement are not real features. Of course, that really violates Einstein's sacred belief about real objects out there.
> TiVo seeks a repeat DISH Network performance in going after AT&T (T) > and Verizon (VZ) for infringement. Basically, TiVo's current business > model appears to be ad sales and patent trolling.
A patent troll allows big businesses to get entrenched in using the patent, then slams them with a lawsuit, leveraging the phenomenal costs (and delays) of stopping using the patent against a settlement for a large, but lesser, sum.
Which is bad in many cases. But here?
Assuming TiVo has a legitimate patent for their primary concept, what I really question is AT&T's "business model" of "let's use TiVo's patent, which was upheld, and hope they don't sue or we will be able to defend ourselves".
Or just planning to pay TiVo through the nose should TiVo sue, [b]as a cost of doing business for AT&T".
So given the real possibility AT&T (and others) proceed deliberately down this dangerous path, I can't fault TiVo for "waiting around" for AT&T's DVR business to grow large before bringing it up as an issue.
It has nothing to do with the validity of the patent (much less the propriety of it, so dear to the hearts of Slashdotters) and everything to do with large companies playing a multibillion-dollar game of chicken.
This whole offshore call center crap may, as a practical matter, push Congress too far one day. Which is to say, push (us, lower-case note) Americans who vote for cretins too far one day.
Sooner or later a power-hungry politician will come along and note, loudly and rhetorically, that some businesses are turning into giant wads of foreign money using computers and hirelings to harass Americans by phone call, from outside the country.
What happens then is anybody's guess. If I could insert an "eating popcorn" emoticon here, I would.
> Canadian officials have been negotiating with Facebook since the Office > of the Privacy Commissioner released a report a month ago that argued > the social network breaches Canadian privacy law.
Canadian Official: Ok, then. Let the negotiations commence. Now, you're violating our law. What are you going to do or else we punish you with fines?
Facebook: Nothing but a token slap on the wrist, or we cut off Canadians from "illegal" but popular Facebook, Mr. Official Whose Boss Ultimately Is An Elected Official Up For Re-Election In No More Than Four Years, Max.
Also, there should be no comma after "pronunciation" in the second sentence.
He did, however, get the number of periods in his ellipsis correct: 3. Unless that's four periods and Slashdot put the space in there for reasons only known to it.
Different politicians? I'll grant you, though, that "leasing" away city things for cash to spend now is an interesting way to borrow from your children without looking like you're borrowing from your children.
R2-D2 Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."
In the first movie, he's climbing down stairs. He can go up and down any normal stairs -- I wouldn't presume shallow.
But I do agree the rockets are stupid. Even within the Star Wars universe, they're stupid. They have passes the rocket stage and have gravitational and levitational equipment.
R2 was cuter using his built-in maintenance droid utilities like the little round saw. Turning him into a James Bond car was just silly.
As for his "voice chip", he already has one! His language is just the beeps and boops language, a language that must be fairly common around the galaxy because most people can understand him. And he understands what people say. So it's a non-issue that he doesn't speak English-qua-Galactic Common.
C-3PO Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.
I don't know why everyone thinks The Brat invented the Goldenrod(tm) brand of droid. It seemed obvious to me that The Brat was just re-assembling one from a bunch of parts of several. After all, who the hell puts into production something assembled by a kid? Did the kid somehow whip up the whole "protocol" part of it as software, while he was at it? Didn't anyone think of a pretty, polished, gold robot for state functions before? Which is obviously not what was on the kid's mind.
No, The Brat just put a Goldenrod together from the junked parts of several others.
As for the design defects, this is the future and exposed wiring is hardened against water and whatnot.
Lightsabers Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.
True, but then you'd have to avoid your own handguard as well as the blade itself. I can technobabble it away, though. Light saber blades don't slide well against each other. Hence no need for a handguard.
Sarlaac A monstrous yet immobile creature who lives in an exposed pit in the middle of a lifeless desert, waiting for large animals to apparently feel suicidal and trek out to throw themselves in? Yeah, not so much. Not every Sarlaac can count on an intergalactic mob boss to feed it tidbits.
I wondered at the time where 3PO relates the description of victims, "...where you will be slowly digested over a thousand years." I was like, "Cool! It extends your life by way over ten times!"
> Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern.
No repeating pattern. There already is a pattern -- the formula for pi.
There won't be a repeating pattern because, if there were, it could be represented as a proper fraction, which has been disproven long ago by the Greeks. That pi could not be represented with a fraction, i.e. a ratio, gave rise to the term "irrational", ir-rational.
Now if they're looking for other, non-repeating patterns ala the ending of the original Contact novel, then that's a different story.:)
Yeah, coming from a family where I distinctly remember the oddness of mom deliberately "coming to play with me", who sat there on a bar stool looking down at me for half an hour as I built a sofa cushion fort, talking, then went back to reading by herself in the other room, and a dad on 2nd shift I only saw on weekends, well, ya, ya need to interact more with your kid.
Otherwise they'll end up like the damaged monkeys who cling futilely to the wire cage "mommas". Because of experiments like that, experiments like that on animals are no longer considered ethical. i.e. it sure as hell proved what it was trying to do, which humanity needed to learn about.
> Except, people's opposition to patents is not restricted > to just the case of patent trolls
Also keep in mind that large corporations deal heavily in the patent troll's big brother: the defensive patent.
Big corporations try to patent everything they can think of, not just for the good patents, but also on things they have no intention of using directly, but rather to block other companies that do want to do that.
In this way, companies block each other, thus forcing each other to agree to a patent exchange agreement.
One company sues another over a legitimate, if zwingy, patent. The other patents a ton of stuff surrounding that or another patent important to that company, thus almost landlocking from further development, so to speak.
Until you start starving and panicking because the stores run out of food within 24 hours.
Although we're now overstretching the analogy, in this case, with P2P, for every packet for a legal transfer, there are what, 100? A billion? packets tied to the complete set of House Season 5 DVDs and whatnot.
So it would be more akin to finding out that one out of 20 stors is suddenly empty after 24 hours, but so is the trunk of the guy's '78 Eldorado he's selling burned DVDs of Twilight from.
I now humbly await my troll mod for comparing not paying for House out of a guy's trunk to not paying for House because you DL'd it from BitTorrent.
Balance between classes w.r.t. PvP is heavily weighted to the massive differences between PvP and PvE.
The solution? Stop making PvE so stupidly unrealistic! Then the "fix" falls out naturally.
No, I'm not saying magically come up with human-level intelligence for monsters. I'm saying just throw out the root of all evil. Not money, no.
Taunt.
Yes, you read that right. Taunt is the root of all evil in these games, and is at ground zero in the PvP vs. PvE balancing act, which is at the root of class vs. class balancing in PvP.
"But I love taunt!" Good for you. Doesn't mean it doesn't stomp around like a bull in a china shop, wreaking havoc on balancing. Read on, dear fellow.
Way back when, people looked at movies and books and saw guys withs words attack and kill monsters. The guys were tough, loaded with armor, and very skilled and deadly with a sword.
But along comes a game, and they don't want people standing there killing things easily and gaining levels.
So they disallow opponents too "easy". They become green...then gray, and you get no xp at all.
So you have to fight tougher stuff. Stuff that may very will actually kill you.
Well, at that point, a tough guy (let's call them generic melee), a melee guy will still be able to stand up to the monster better than a caster. They may not do as much damage, especially to many monsters (a sword isn't a fireball after all) but one at a time, they're awesome.
So you have to wimp out their damage. Or leave their damage high, but wimp them out making them partially squishy.
This is where melee forks. On one side are the traditional tankers, high defense but mediocre (at best) offense, and single target at that.
On the other side are squishier melee who do much more single-target damage. The thief/rogue, monk, and scrapper fall into this class. They turn into essentially single-target melee specialists, who go down fairly well one-on-one, and very fast if they're ganged up on.
So what does the other fork do? The high defense guy? He's the "tank", who can take it but not dish it out.
And as a result, he's fairly useless as all the monsters ignore him and go for people who, hehe, are an actual threat.
So to compensate, you give this guy a special, magical power that is a fake, high-damage attack that gains the attention of the monster.
This power is called taunt.
Now the gameplay falls out fairly directly. Super-tough guy runs in, starts spamming fake damage attacks that exceed the real damage of his colleagues, and everyone goes home happy and wealthier, loaded with busted antennae and spoiled gizzard linings.
Then along comes PvP. Well, humans aren't stupid. Well, they are, but not as stupid as the monsters. They know to ignore the guy with the fake high-damage attack and go for the squishy, high-damage people first, and the squishy healers, and the squishy controllers/mesmerizers.
And there you have it.
So take a deep breath, and envision a world without taunt. What happens?
Suddenly there is no super-tough guy, in the sense of taking a beating. There are just high-damage, single-target melee and high-damage, multi-target ranged casters, and every variation inbetween.
"Ok, then. Isn't the fireballist now an endangered species? Even if the melee can out-damage a single target, one burst of a fireball will send all the other monsters to insta-kill the caster!"
Yes. And that's where the controller/mesmerist comes in. They specialize in locking down whole groups of monsters, in one way or another. And they're plentiful. People love to play them.
So technically speaking, the tank really isn't needed. (The single super-boss we can deal with in a moment.) The controller can handle 99% of the situations.
And what does this buy you? Now switch to PvP. Controller powers still work, everyone's attacks still work. And the taunting tank isn't "broke" because he doesn't exist. (Oh
> Now, admittedly, in my little example, you willingly obligated yourself.
Ding, ftw!
> he benefits you have accrued from society are a little bit grayer, b/c you didn't > initially choose to benefit from society - your parents did when they chose to > raise you in a society.
Those "little societal benefits" are the result of freedom and free people interacting.
I'm tired of government interventionists (for lack of a better term) glomming onto this and claiming it as their own. They aren't talking regulation here. They're talking that the $5 is really a little bit better than $5 because of the quality of the society.
> Potentially, it could limit access to content it owns to subscribers > to its own services, thus shutting out competing services (where they > still exist at all).
Dear worrywarts,
So?
Signed,
A Devil's Advocate
Seriously, what is the problem? If "ComcastDisney" wants to limit Disney to Comcast customers, go for it.
It's called supply and demand, and art is a unique, natural monopoly. If they want to cut off a big chunk of the US (or the world) just to get a few more percent in areas that they have service, so what?
> Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its 'serious privacy gaps.' > And if the Canadian Privacy Commissioner isn't happy with the Web Company's > response, then she has two weeks to push it to the Canadian Federal Court in Ottawa.
"Disable all Canadian accounts, and redirect any from there to a web page saying 'The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is worried about your facebook page. You can contact here at phone number xxx-xxx-xxxx. Your local MP is soandso. You can contact him at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Have a nice day.' "
In City of Heroes, we can now stack up (i.e. overlap) base decorations to create new objects.
People use desks and chests to create entire multifloor buildings, using them as "bricks", complete with hallways and multiple interior rooms and stairways.
In other words, supergroup bases are no longer just a "The Sims" variant, with you putting down pre-designed decorations (functional or otherwise). You can now create whole worlds, buildings, mountains even.
One giant supergroup has a whole, full-sized wrestling arena, complete with what looks to be at least a few thousand seats. Utterly astounding.
This kind of thing is going to be huge and the next step in the MMORPG "standard feature" evolution.
Not a fan of "toon", either, but avatar is just as bad if you think about it. Worse, even. An avatar is a physical manifestation of a god. Most "avatars" running around in WoW are, how shall we put this, children of a very lesser god.
Commander Data: Captain, it appears the gods of these avatars have IQs of approximately 90. See as this one runs up to a green pig and kills it, and the other avatar says, "Good job".
Slashdot Mirror
I thought links to articles with titles like "Scientists make detailed image of first molecule!" without the article having the actual picture in it.
I'm used to CNN pulling that crap on their web site because they're too cheap to pay the outrageous price for the picture of the then-briefly hot story, but science?
You guys are killing me!
That's where the philosophy chokes. It assumes making a decision, i.e. weighing pros and cons and your emotions and information, is somehow magically free of both determinism and random control. They may have influence, but ultimately there's some mysterious spiritual thing beyond determinism and randomness that's doing the deciding in a manner that doesn't involve either.
Which, I submit, makes no sense. Weighing options is the essence of determinism, for that matter.
More importantly, back to the physics, you can easily base quantum on determinism if you give up on Einstein's concept of reality. Which is to say, that there are "real things out there with real, measurable properties".
Quantum implies heavily that, for example, there is no particle out there with an actual, measurable position, and so on.
But if Quantum Mechanics itself was, say, a computer simulation, then the whole hidden-variables problem disappears as an issue. I.e. the "wavicles" of QM and their quantum properties don't even exist as real objects. The "probability cloud" and entanglement are not real features. Of course, that really violates Einstein's sacred belief about real objects out there.
> TiVo seeks a repeat DISH Network performance in going after AT&T (T)
> and Verizon (VZ) for infringement. Basically, TiVo's current business
> model appears to be ad sales and patent trolling.
A patent troll allows big businesses to get entrenched in using the patent, then slams them with a lawsuit, leveraging the phenomenal costs (and delays) of stopping using the patent against a settlement for a large, but lesser, sum.
Which is bad in many cases. But here?
Assuming TiVo has a legitimate patent for their primary concept, what I really question is AT&T's "business model" of "let's use TiVo's patent, which was upheld, and hope they don't sue or we will be able to defend ourselves".
Or just planning to pay TiVo through the nose should TiVo sue, [b]as a cost of doing business for AT&T".
So given the real possibility AT&T (and others) proceed deliberately down this dangerous path, I can't fault TiVo for "waiting around" for AT&T's DVR business to grow large before bringing it up as an issue.
It has nothing to do with the validity of the patent (much less the propriety of it, so dear to the hearts of Slashdotters) and everything to do with large companies playing a multibillion-dollar game of chicken.
This whole offshore call center crap may, as a practical matter, push Congress too far one day. Which is to say, push (us, lower-case note) Americans who vote for cretins too far one day.
Sooner or later a power-hungry politician will come along and note, loudly and rhetorically, that some businesses are turning into giant wads of foreign money using computers and hirelings to harass Americans by phone call, from outside the country.
What happens then is anybody's guess. If I could insert an "eating popcorn" emoticon here, I would.
> Canadian officials have been negotiating with Facebook since the Office
> of the Privacy Commissioner released a report a month ago that argued
> the social network breaches Canadian privacy law.
Canadian Official: Ok, then. Let the negotiations commence. Now, you're violating our law. What are you going to do or else we punish you with fines?
Facebook: Nothing but a token slap on the wrist, or we cut off Canadians from "illegal" but popular Facebook, Mr. Official Whose Boss Ultimately Is An Elected Official Up For Re-Election In No More Than Four Years, Max.
Homer: "...so on and and so forth."
Which, by the way, is the correct way of things.
For both spammers and lawyers who set up lawsuit manufacturing plants, the dials go all the way down to 11.
Also, there should be no comma after "pronunciation" in the second sentence.
He did, however, get the number of periods in his ellipsis correct: 3. Unless that's four periods and Slashdot put the space in there for reasons only known to it.
> Any other ideas?
Different politicians? I'll grant you, though, that "leasing" away city things for cash to spend now is an interesting way to borrow from your children without looking like you're borrowing from your children.
Teeth ain't the only things that need more than a retread.
> The researchers suggested that using similar techniques in humans
> could restore function to patients with organ failure.
if ya know what I mean...
Fast track, peese!
From TFA:
In the first movie, he's climbing down stairs. He can go up and down any normal stairs -- I wouldn't presume shallow.
But I do agree the rockets are stupid. Even within the Star Wars universe, they're stupid. They have passes the rocket stage and have gravitational and levitational equipment.
R2 was cuter using his built-in maintenance droid utilities like the little round saw. Turning him into a James Bond car was just silly.
As for his "voice chip", he already has one! His language is just the beeps and boops language, a language that must be fairly common around the galaxy because most people can understand him. And he understands what people say. So it's a non-issue that he doesn't speak English-qua-Galactic Common.
I don't know why everyone thinks The Brat invented the Goldenrod(tm) brand of droid. It seemed obvious to me that The Brat was just re-assembling one from a bunch of parts of several. After all, who the hell puts into production something assembled by a kid? Did the kid somehow whip up the whole "protocol" part of it as software, while he was at it? Didn't anyone think of a pretty, polished, gold robot for state functions before? Which is obviously not what was on the kid's mind.
No, The Brat just put a Goldenrod together from the junked parts of several others.
As for the design defects, this is the future and exposed wiring is hardened against water and whatnot.
True, but then you'd have to avoid your own handguard as well as the blade itself. I can technobabble it away, though. Light saber blades don't slide well against each other. Hence no need for a handguard.
I wondered at the time where 3PO relates the description of victims, "...where you will be slowly digested over a thousand years." I was like, "Cool! It extends your life by way over ten times!"
> Unfortunately, there still seems to be no pattern.
No repeating pattern. There already is a pattern -- the formula for pi.
There won't be a repeating pattern because, if there were, it could be represented as a proper fraction, which has been disproven long ago by the Greeks. That pi could not be represented with a fraction, i.e. a ratio, gave rise to the term "irrational", ir-rational.
Now if they're looking for other, non-repeating patterns ala the ending of the original Contact novel, then that's a different story. :)
No, he has bicycles and gets the hell out of the house, leaving the kids and wife behind.
Weren't you listening?!?!?
Yeah, coming from a family where I distinctly remember the oddness of mom deliberately "coming to play with me", who sat there on a bar stool looking down at me for half an hour as I built a sofa cushion fort, talking, then went back to reading by herself in the other room, and a dad on 2nd shift I only saw on weekends, well, ya, ya need to interact more with your kid.
Otherwise they'll end up like the damaged monkeys who cling futilely to the wire cage "mommas". Because of experiments like that, experiments like that on animals are no longer considered ethical. i.e. it sure as hell proved what it was trying to do, which humanity needed to learn about.
> Except, people's opposition to patents is not restricted
> to just the case of patent trolls
Also keep in mind that large corporations deal heavily in the patent troll's big brother: the defensive patent.
Big corporations try to patent everything they can think of, not just for the good patents, but also on things they have no intention of using directly, but rather to block other companies that do want to do that.
In this way, companies block each other, thus forcing each other to agree to a patent exchange agreement.
One company sues another over a legitimate, if zwingy, patent. The other patents a ton of stuff surrounding that or another patent important to that company, thus almost landlocking from further development, so to speak.
Until you start starving and panicking because the stores run out of food within 24 hours.
Although we're now overstretching the analogy, in this case, with P2P, for every packet for a legal transfer, there are what, 100? A billion? packets tied to the complete set of House Season 5 DVDs and whatnot.
So it would be more akin to finding out that one out of 20 stors is suddenly empty after 24 hours, but so is the trunk of the guy's '78 Eldorado he's selling burned DVDs of Twilight from.
I now humbly await my troll mod for comparing not paying for House out of a guy's trunk to not paying for House because you DL'd it from BitTorrent.
Balance between classes w.r.t. PvP is heavily weighted to the massive differences between PvP and PvE.
The solution? Stop making PvE so stupidly unrealistic! Then the "fix" falls out naturally.
No, I'm not saying magically come up with human-level intelligence for monsters. I'm saying just throw out the root of all evil. Not money, no.
Taunt.
Yes, you read that right. Taunt is the root of all evil in these games, and is at ground zero in the PvP vs. PvE balancing act, which is at the root of class vs. class balancing in PvP.
"But I love taunt!" Good for you. Doesn't mean it doesn't stomp around like a bull in a china shop, wreaking havoc on balancing. Read on, dear fellow.
Way back when, people looked at movies and books and saw guys withs words attack and kill monsters. The guys were tough, loaded with armor, and very skilled and deadly with a sword.
But along comes a game, and they don't want people standing there killing things easily and gaining levels.
So they disallow opponents too "easy". They become green...then gray, and you get no xp at all.
So you have to fight tougher stuff. Stuff that may very will actually kill you.
Well, at that point, a tough guy (let's call them generic melee), a melee guy will still be able to stand up to the monster better than a caster. They may not do as much damage, especially to many monsters (a sword isn't a fireball after all) but one at a time, they're awesome.
So you have to wimp out their damage. Or leave their damage high, but wimp them out making them partially squishy.
This is where melee forks. On one side are the traditional tankers, high defense but mediocre (at best) offense, and single target at that.
On the other side are squishier melee who do much more single-target damage. The thief/rogue, monk, and scrapper fall into this class. They turn into essentially single-target melee specialists, who go down fairly well one-on-one, and very fast if they're ganged up on.
So what does the other fork do? The high defense guy? He's the "tank", who can take it but not dish it out.
And as a result, he's fairly useless as all the monsters ignore him and go for people who, hehe, are an actual threat.
So to compensate, you give this guy a special, magical power that is a fake, high-damage attack that gains the attention of the monster.
This power is called taunt.
Now the gameplay falls out fairly directly. Super-tough guy runs in, starts spamming fake damage attacks that exceed the real damage of his colleagues, and everyone goes home happy and wealthier, loaded with busted antennae and spoiled gizzard linings.
Then along comes PvP. Well, humans aren't stupid. Well, they are, but not as stupid as the monsters. They know to ignore the guy with the fake high-damage attack and go for the squishy, high-damage people first, and the squishy healers, and the squishy controllers/mesmerizers.
And there you have it.
So take a deep breath, and envision a world without taunt. What happens?
Suddenly there is no super-tough guy, in the sense of taking a beating. There are just high-damage, single-target melee and high-damage, multi-target ranged casters, and every variation inbetween.
"Ok, then. Isn't the fireballist now an endangered species? Even if the melee can out-damage a single target, one burst of a fireball will send all the other monsters to insta-kill the caster!"
Yes. And that's where the controller/mesmerist comes in. They specialize in locking down whole groups of monsters, in one way or another. And they're plentiful. People love to play them.
So technically speaking, the tank really isn't needed. (The single super-boss we can deal with in a moment.) The controller can handle 99% of the situations.
And what does this buy you? Now switch to PvP. Controller powers still work, everyone's attacks still work. And the taunting tank isn't "broke" because he doesn't exist. (Oh
Translated from the Danish:
(Old lady's voice) "Joe?"
"What?"
"There's someone at the door."
"Ohhhh. Oh kay."
(The rocking chair creeks as Joe leans forward and gets up. He grabs his cane and shuffles to the door.)
(Opening door) "Yes?"
"Here's your source code for your Linux-based HDTV decoder!"
"My what for my what?"
etc. ad nauseam.
Who watches the watchmen? Don't know. But apparently the watchmen watch whoever watches them.
> Now, admittedly, in my little example, you willingly obligated yourself.
Ding, ftw!
> he benefits you have accrued from society are a little bit grayer, b/c you didn't
> initially choose to benefit from society - your parents did when they chose to
> raise you in a society.
Those "little societal benefits" are the result of freedom and free people interacting.
I'm tired of government interventionists (for lack of a better term) glomming onto this and claiming it as their own. They aren't talking regulation here. They're talking that the $5 is really a little bit better than $5 because of the quality of the society.
Yes. Exactly my point.
> Potentially, it could limit access to content it owns to subscribers
> to its own services, thus shutting out competing services (where they
> still exist at all).
Dear worrywarts,
So?
Signed,
A Devil's Advocate
Seriously, what is the problem? If "ComcastDisney" wants to limit Disney to Comcast customers, go for it.
It's called supply and demand, and art is a unique, natural monopoly. If they want to cut off a big chunk of the US (or the world) just to get a few more percent in areas that they have service, so what?
> Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its 'serious privacy gaps.'
> And if the Canadian Privacy Commissioner isn't happy with the Web Company's
> response, then she has two weeks to push it to the Canadian Federal Court in Ottawa.
"Disable all Canadian accounts, and redirect any from there to a web page saying 'The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is worried about your facebook page. You can contact here at phone number xxx-xxx-xxxx. Your local MP is soandso. You can contact him at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Have a nice day.' "
What gives you any justification for "in all likelihood"?
How do you get from no evidence whatsoever and many massive studies to "20 years from now cancer, in all likelihood"?
I know people want there to be something wrong so their mental models can be justified, giving them a disasterbatory rush, but get real people.
This is the first time I've heard anyone mention Nomic since I played it as a freshman at U-Mich 25 years ago.
In City of Heroes, we can now stack up (i.e. overlap) base decorations to create new objects.
People use desks and chests to create entire multifloor buildings, using them as "bricks", complete with hallways and multiple interior rooms and stairways.
In other words, supergroup bases are no longer just a "The Sims" variant, with you putting down pre-designed decorations (functional or otherwise). You can now create whole worlds, buildings, mountains even.
One giant supergroup has a whole, full-sized wrestling arena, complete with what looks to be at least a few thousand seats. Utterly astounding.
This kind of thing is going to be huge and the next step in the MMORPG "standard feature" evolution.
Not a fan of "toon", either, but avatar is just as bad if you think about it. Worse, even. An avatar is a physical manifestation of a god. Most "avatars" running around in WoW are, how shall we put this, children of a very lesser god.
Commander Data: Captain, it appears the gods of these avatars have IQs of approximately 90. See as this one runs up to a green pig and kills it, and the other avatar says, "Good job".