Well I would prefer that too, but we have to think about reality and stop believing in fairy tales. Life is hard, too bad, tough luck. So, to answer your implicit questions: no, you don't have a right to privacy, freedom, to anything at all unless you're able to defend it/enforce it by yourself. You see, you have a right to life but only as long as you're able to stop that guy from killing you.
No, you still have that right; it's just being violated. That is the meaning of "inalienable rights". You have them regardless of whether someone else recognizes those rights or not, including the Constitution itself.
This is the philosophical difference between the US Constitution and many other free countries. We start with this presumption, then grant the government powers (over our rights) to get things done. We do not start out with the assumption we are to be downtrodden by nature, and that there will exist naturally some group of people who will call themselves "government", and who will lord over us and grant us "rights".
I don't see how that deserves a "wait for it". I really don't see how a person owns the eletrons on a line once it leaves his or her property.
"Wait for it...", as in the "it'd be a funny joke if it wasn't true sort of way", i.e. the desire of the government to violate the spirit of private conversations for its own purposes.
It's like communication on the internet. If you don't encrypt it, don't expect it to be private. Because once it leaves your network everyone pretty much owns it and can read it.
However, we also assume that anyone doing this is up to sinister activities. Sure, some may not be, but most are. This applies doubly to the government itself
So the question you've gotta ask yourself is, "Do we want the government to do this willy-nilly?" In other words, just because someone can tap into passing traffic, does that mean we want to allow the government to do so legally?
A few years back, the court decided government couldn't tap into infrared emissions from a house (without some wiretappy sort of permission) even though these "left the property". Reason? Modern technology allowed the government to violate the assumption of privacy in ways the Founding Fathers could not have envisioned, so this ruling maintained that in the spirit of the intention of the Constitution.
To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.
Isn't it stunning how liars, sorry, lawyers for the government make it sound like they're doing you a favor even as they slike a yule-log sized cock up your ass?
If the government enforced absolutely nothing about content on the Internet, legal or otherwise, broadband development would continue to happen at the extremely rapid pace it has been going. Any government mucking about would slow this down.
This reminds me of the scene in the beginning of "Beaches", where the bitchy main character, as a little girl, just walks up to a kid building a magnificent sand castle all by himself and says, "I'll be back to check on your work later."
More than that, a free people have the right to freedom of speech, and that includes talking in encrypted ways, with the purpose of the encryption being to guarantee the government cannot spy on you.
I speak this way so you, the government, cannot understand me. I reserve this right, and do not grant the government any power over it.
"Ask them [members of the younger generation] HOW the things work, and they have no idea. They are really riding on the backs of the 'old folks' like us that built the goodies they enjoy."
Is this really a new phenomenon? How many of you can spout out how a color TV works? I recall a 30 year old sci-fi story where they time-teleport someone from the future back to the present. They talk about all kinds of wonders, but can't say how they work anymore than we can say how a TV or radio works. (And yes, many of us do know how it all works, past and present, but we are the statistical minority -- the point is this minority is nothing new.)
I see a market for an enterprising genius in the free world to write more intelligent software to try to track these people in China to the Chinese government! It's just money laying on the ground!
I'm writing my Congressman today. We need a law to make it illegal for copyright holders to offer fake movies when I wanna download the real one without paying! God almighty, can't Congress work for the people?!?!?
Well, at least #1 was the original Trek, and not some crap like Andromeda or Firefly or Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica (new), which I don't watch.
Ok, I can see them wanting to punish "Enterprise", but was it really worse than Logan's Run: The TV Show"? I actually watched that show every week until it went off the air. And even if so, was DS9 as well? Once the Quark-n-Kira circus act got going it wasn't too bad.
> At the time of his departure, Romero and Hall > were working on the still-unreleased action > role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows."
From an earlier interview with him from six months ago: Romero shouted "Content is king!" and pulled aside a hastily-erected curtain, exposing the latest alpha build of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows on a giant high definition plasma screen. Immediately, an elf with a bow and arrow began shooting at some incoming frogs. "That's what action, adventure, and mystery is all about. Who doesn't want to carefully design their character and equip them, and then be under assault by tiny woodland creatures. Nothing rams the "WOW!" factor home quite like this!"
Yes...but that sounds like pulling over a black guy in an SUV, then claiming it was because he went over the line a little bit.
The real reason is he had caught their attention by embarassing them by exposing virtual child prostitution, etc., stuff that they didn't want to have to deal with should the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather get ahold of it.
No, but you could in World War II Online. They'd load up players for an invasion to a base into a truck, then drive the truck at high speed into a bush. The bush was a static part of the landscape, and hence indestructible. The truck would flip over and fling the players (well done physics, by the way, neglecting that a bush caused a truck to flip, of course!) and the players would fly over the enemy base's fence, thus bypassing the "designed assault path" through the front gates.
They've already said why they don't want to make events like this. Every major change they make affects all the new players just joining, and balancing content for all levels equally is pretty much impossible.
They don't make events like this because they're worried about newbies (or established players) getting frustrated. Getting angry that their plans to go camp such-and-such are now interrupted because some invasion wave is in their cross-continental wave, or running the streets and they can't get to the damned bank.
And yet...and yet...
And yet, if some new MMORPG came out, and announced they'd be heavy on such events, and if you don't like it, tough, don't join...wouldn't you make a beeline for that MMORPG?
We have yet to see a game tie together the two most seductive aspects of online games: The "little constant rewards" of MMORPG's, and the live event hectic, now now now! nature of games like Quake.
Imagine a well-done AI group of NPC orcs coming down the street. "There, kill the healer first!" and they all run at him. Now that's some action.
As long as both have decent nutrition, they'd be the same.
However, some things weigh in the CPA's favor:
1. Extra body fat means you can survive infections better 2. Lack of extreme physical exercise means his immune system isn't weakened
Possibly extreme constant exercise keeps your blood glucose and nutrients low (repairing damage done via exercies, i.e. muscle building, as well as just generally sucking it up in the exercise itself) which causes the immune system (along with all bodily systems) to run on near empty, thus reducing its effectiveness.
In any event, it's a real phenomenon. Doctors recommended Earvin "Magic" Johnson stop playing professional basketball when he became diagnosed with HIV for just this reason. After awhile, he started playing again anyway.
> I can tell you firsthand that none of the major > MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's > the players being inventive with other commands > (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to > sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out)
Ahhh, who can forget good old Ultima Online...where you could combine these relatively innocent things into one fun evening:
1. Getting "drunk" 2. Wearing only underpants (whitey-tighties) 3. The pimp hat
To use: Get your character into underpants the pimp hat, and get krunk. Find someone standing idle next to a bank, as there are plenty around. Line yourself up properly such that you are right in front of them, back towards them. At some point, you will do a "hic", and stumble over, bending over at the waist. Immediately say "ow" to coincide with the nadir of your bend. Lower case, without an exclamation point, to make it mild and rather matter-of-fact, as something expected.
Real plagues also affect everyone more or less the same. The world's greatest warrior isn't going to succumb 70,000x slower than some CPA or McDonald's cashier. Only natural variation in your immune system would offer a difference, and because extreme physical exercise actually weakens your immune system, the level 12 billion warrior would likely die more quickly than the CPA.
Of course, expecting a plague to affect everyone equally in a MMORPG is like expecting a fireball to burn everybody without armor equally.
> Not in England it doesn't. If a newspaper there > publishes pictures proving that a rich man is a > closet transvestite, he can still sue them for > libel and win.
An interesting observation. In the US there is the presumption, thanks to free speech, that anything true is fair game. In Europe and elsewhere, this is not necessarily the case.
I recall a case some years ago in France, where two guys were running for some local office against each other. One guy was sleeping with the other guy's wife! So the other guy brought it out that this was happening, and the cheater sued him in court, claiming liable or slander or some such [b]since it was illegal in France to reveal embarassing details not relevant to the election.[/b]
IIRC, the suer lost because the judge ruled that since he (the cheater) was running for office claiming France's equivalent of "family values", that his cheating was evidence that he was lying about being a family values type of guy! And hence it was fair game for revelation.
> "You can't describe pornographic acts while in a school playground."
Actually, legally females are like children. Actually, they're wimpier than children, legally, in the office.
You can't get sued for telling a dirty joke to a child, while you can, and can be fired, for doing so if a female overhears you accidentally.
That's right, ladies. The male-to-female relationship in the workplace is redefined as male-to-child by the government. And a number of feminists are outraged over it, but c'est la guerre, or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you still have that right; it's just being violated. That is the meaning of "inalienable rights". You have them regardless of whether someone else recognizes those rights or not, including the Constitution itself.
This is the philosophical difference between the US Constitution and many other free countries. We start with this presumption, then grant the government powers (over our rights) to get things done. We do not start out with the assumption we are to be downtrodden by nature, and that there will exist naturally some group of people who will call themselves "government", and who will lord over us and grant us "rights".
"Wait for it...", as in the "it'd be a funny joke if it wasn't true sort of way", i.e. the desire of the government to violate the spirit of private conversations for its own purposes.
However, we also assume that anyone doing this is up to sinister activities. Sure, some may not be, but most are. This applies doubly to the government itself
So the question you've gotta ask yourself is, "Do we want the government to do this willy-nilly?" In other words, just because someone can tap into passing traffic, does that mean we want to allow the government to do so legally?
A few years back, the court decided government couldn't tap into infrared emissions from a house (without some wiretappy sort of permission) even though these "left the property". Reason? Modern technology allowed the government to violate the assumption of privacy in ways the Founding Fathers could not have envisioned, so this ruling maintained that in the spirit of the intention of the Constitution.
Isn't it stunning how liars, sorry, lawyers for the government make it sound like they're doing you a favor even as they slike a yule-log sized cock up your ass?
If the government enforced absolutely nothing about content on the Internet, legal or otherwise, broadband development would continue to happen at the extremely rapid pace it has been going. Any government mucking about would slow this down.
This reminds me of the scene in the beginning of "Beaches", where the bitchy main character, as a little girl, just walks up to a kid building a magnificent sand castle all by himself and says, "I'll be back to check on your work later."
Forkers, all of 'em.
More than that, a free people have the right to freedom of speech, and that includes talking in encrypted ways, with the purpose of the encryption being to guarantee the government cannot spy on you.
I speak this way so you, the government, cannot understand me. I reserve this right, and do not grant the government any power over it.
Is this really a new phenomenon? How many of you can spout out how a color TV works? I recall a 30 year old sci-fi story where they time-teleport someone from the future back to the present. They talk about all kinds of wonders, but can't say how they work anymore than we can say how a TV or radio works. (And yes, many of us do know how it all works, past and present, but we are the statistical minority -- the point is this minority is nothing new.)
I see a market for an enterprising genius in the free world to write more intelligent software to try to track these people in China to the Chinese government! It's just money laying on the ground!
Who's up to the challenge?
Maybe they were sea-related puns, instead of species-related ones.
And before criticizing someone having a whale of a time, first take the plankton out of thy own eye.
What if the enemy starts training dolphins, too?
I mean, our boys have enough psychological problems having to shoot approaching children. Imagine if they had to shoot dolphins, too?
I'm writing my Congressman today. We need a law to make it illegal for copyright holders to offer fake movies when I wanna download the real one without paying! God almighty, can't Congress work for the people?!?!?
> It is morally repugnant to an honorable person (a 'warrior') to have machines fighting wars for you.
We will shed tears of oil for you on your grave, and kneel to your lost honor.
Well, at least #1 was the original Trek, and not some crap like Andromeda or Firefly or Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica (new), which I don't watch.
Ok, I can see them wanting to punish "Enterprise", but was it really worse than Logan's Run: The TV Show"? I actually watched that show every week until it went off the air. And even if so, was DS9 as well? Once the Quark-n-Kira circus act got going it wasn't too bad.
> At the time of his departure, Romero and Hall
> were working on the still-unreleased action
> role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows."
From an earlier interview with him from six months ago: Romero shouted "Content is king!" and pulled aside a hastily-erected curtain, exposing the latest alpha build of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows on a giant high definition plasma screen. Immediately, an elf with a bow and arrow began shooting at some incoming frogs. "That's what action, adventure, and mystery is all about. Who doesn't want to carefully design their character and equip them, and then be under assault by tiny woodland creatures. Nothing rams the "WOW!" factor home quite like this!"
Yes...but that sounds like pulling over a black guy in an SUV, then claiming it was because he went over the line a little bit.
The real reason is he had caught their attention by embarassing them by exposing virtual child prostitution, etc., stuff that they didn't want to have to deal with should the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather get ahold of it.
There's an old saying: "Follow the money"
> can you fling a player into a town in WoW?
No, but you could in World War II Online. They'd load up players for an invasion to a base into a truck, then drive the truck at high speed into a bush. The bush was a static part of the landscape, and hence indestructible. The truck would flip over and fling the players (well done physics, by the way, neglecting that a bush caused a truck to flip, of course!) and the players would fly over the enemy base's fence, thus bypassing the "designed assault path" through the front gates.
They don't make events like this because they're worried about newbies (or established players) getting frustrated. Getting angry that their plans to go camp such-and-such are now interrupted because some invasion wave is in their cross-continental wave, or running the streets and they can't get to the damned bank.
And yet...and yet...
And yet, if some new MMORPG came out, and announced they'd be heavy on such events, and if you don't like it, tough, don't join...wouldn't you make a beeline for that MMORPG?
We have yet to see a game tie together the two most seductive aspects of online games: The "little constant rewards" of MMORPG's, and the live event hectic, now now now! nature of games like Quake.
Imagine a well-done AI group of NPC orcs coming down the street. "There, kill the healer first!" and they all run at him. Now that's some action.
As long as both have decent nutrition, they'd be the same.
However, some things weigh in the CPA's favor:
1. Extra body fat means you can survive infections better
2. Lack of extreme physical exercise means his immune system isn't weakened
Possibly extreme constant exercise keeps your blood glucose and nutrients low (repairing damage done via exercies, i.e. muscle building, as well as just generally sucking it up in the exercise itself) which causes the immune system (along with all bodily systems) to run on near empty, thus reducing its effectiveness.
In any event, it's a real phenomenon. Doctors recommended Earvin "Magic" Johnson stop playing professional basketball when he became diagnosed with HIV for just this reason. After awhile, he started playing again anyway.
It turns out WoW has turned into a major business; hence the non-techies have seized control, and this is what you get.
Do the terms of service include:
- You are NOT allowed to warn people about scams?
- You are NOT allowed to talk about in-game events and activities?
I see this as one of the three items of major history in MMORPGs:
1. Character banned for embarassing (to the company) virtual newspaper
2. The killing of the unkillable Lord British
3. The almost-killing of the "unkillable" Sleeper monster dragon, with cheezy, tawdry, last-second reset by an employee to prevent this "travesty"
I'm sure little goodies like this will keep coming around every year or two.
> I can tell you firsthand that none of the major
> MMOs have a "/blowjob" command or such. It's
> the players being inventive with other commands
> (e.g., a prayer kinda command was used on AO to
> sorta look like a blowjob, until the devs took it out)
Ahhh, who can forget good old Ultima Online...where you could combine these relatively innocent things into one fun evening:
1. Getting "drunk"
2. Wearing only underpants (whitey-tighties)
3. The pimp hat
To use: Get your character into underpants the pimp hat, and get krunk. Find someone standing idle next to a bank, as there are plenty around. Line yourself up properly such that you are right in front of them, back towards them. At some point, you will do a "hic", and stumble over, bending over at the waist. Immediately say "ow" to coincide with the nadir of your bend. Lower case, without an exclamation point, to make it mild and rather matter-of-fact, as something expected.
> Imagine you're destroying the hordes of Nazarath
Like when Jesus cast out Legion into the herd of swine that then ran over a cliff?
People roleplay child pr0n for in-game money
Virtual newspaper talks about it
Real-world press gets wind of it, perhaps with a nice little video for 20-20 or 60 Minutes Wednesday
Congressional hearings are called
Now you have to police to stop this, and how on earth will you do that, to say nothing of taking the financial hit.
Conclude it's better to try to shut the virtual newspaper down
Real plagues also affect everyone more or less the same. The world's greatest warrior isn't going to succumb 70,000x slower than some CPA or McDonald's cashier. Only natural variation in your immune system would offer a difference, and because extreme physical exercise actually weakens your immune system, the level 12 billion warrior would likely die more quickly than the CPA.
Of course, expecting a plague to affect everyone equally in a MMORPG is like expecting a fireball to burn everybody without armor equally.
> The SWIFT team have announced the furthest-ever
> observed super-massive gamma-ray burst (from 13
> billion light years away).
Hmmmm. That means when God created the universe 6000 years ago, he placed the gamma rays already 99.999953% of the way to earth.
Better make sure the schools teach this!
> Not in England it doesn't. If a newspaper there
> publishes pictures proving that a rich man is a
> closet transvestite, he can still sue them for
> libel and win.
An interesting observation. In the US there is the presumption, thanks to free speech, that anything true is fair game. In Europe and elsewhere, this is not necessarily the case.
I recall a case some years ago in France, where two guys were running for some local office against each other. One guy was sleeping with the other guy's wife! So the other guy brought it out that this was happening, and the cheater sued him in court, claiming liable or slander or some such [b]since it was illegal in France to reveal embarassing details not relevant to the election.[/b]
IIRC, the suer lost because the judge ruled that since he (the cheater) was running for office claiming France's equivalent of "family values", that his cheating was evidence that he was lying about being a family values type of guy! And hence it was fair game for revelation.
> "You can't describe pornographic acts while in a school playground."
Actually, legally females are like children. Actually, they're wimpier than children, legally, in the office.
You can't get sued for telling a dirty joke to a child, while you can, and can be fired, for doing so if a female overhears you accidentally.
That's right, ladies. The male-to-female relationship in the workplace is redefined as male-to-child by the government. And a number of feminists are outraged over it, but c'est la guerre, or whatever.