There are quite a few games already well on their way to completion that are generally similar to the publicized ideas for 0x10c:
Blockade Runner will feature "fully destructible, operational, crewable 'living' starships in a procedurally generated galaxy".
https://blockaderunnergame.com/home.aspx
Shores of Hazeron is a first-person 4X-style game featuring fully-customizable spacecraft, city building and management, exploration, trade, combat, and more. It's playable right now, though it's under heavy development.
http://hazeron.com/
... and then there's Star Citizen, of course; a cross between Freelancer and Wing Commander - but you'll need to wait a while.
http://robertsspaceindustries.com/
1. The "criminal element" isn't stripping any rights away. (Rights can't be taken away, either, only infringed upon; if they can be taken away, they're called privileges.) If anyone, it's law enforcement that is infringing upon rights. Now, if you were referring to law enforcement agents as criminals, then I stand corrected.:)
2. The crime problem in America is not due to a flaw in law enforcement, but due to the ignorance and laxness of the population in general. Through court cases such as Warren vs DC and Gonzales vs Castle Rock, the government has explicitly disavowed any responsibility for any particular person's wellbeing. Whose responsibility is it then? The individual's. After decades of work, laws are finally starting to reflect reality, particularly in places like Alaska, Arizona, and Wyoming.
3. Yes, the parents have shirked responsibility. However, the enabler here is often government, in that through "free" housing, schooling, food, such irresponsible behavior is encouraged. All else being equal, whatever is taxed is discouraged, while whatever is subsidized becomes more commonplace. Aside from welfare in Section 8, another example of "bad parenting" that was only possible due to government subsidation was the Yearning for Zion Ranch, where many of the young mothers were receiving government money to make up for the shortfall the of the polygamous husbands. Take away the subsidation and the situation would largely go away all by itself.
Lastly, as pertains to the article, collective punishment is a slap in the face at best to any free person. If someone is found to have committed a crime, after due process is followed, PUNISH THAT PERSON.
The US sent men to the moon in 1969. Six decades later, and the best we got from NASA was a fancy sewer pipe in space along with a now-discarded orbiter system.
Worried about overpopulating the Earth? For this reason, and many others, get the hell out of the way of individuals who want to figure out how to leave this ball of rock you're so worried about.
While I don't recall if the location-providing services are enabled by default in Android 2.2, there is a clear warning given when enabling them.
If the services are disabled by unchecking boxes in the appropriate config area for the phone, location data IS NOT stored. (Previously-cached info from when the services were enabled might remain.) Neither does the above configuration change require jailbreaking or rooting the device.
That's a far cry from an "always on, can't disable" feature.
And the purchaser - NOT THE SELLER - is responsible for use taxes.
Of course, the utterly vast majority of folks don't pay use tax, even among those that know of it. Sort of illustrates our viewpoint on taxes if we're not being threatened over non-payment.
it's an order of magnitude easier to replace a single politician with someone who'll vote for laws with teeth than it is to expect [the voluntary market forces to work]
In theory, I could agree with the above. In practice, the politicians in the US are bought and paid for, largely with corporate money. (How else does one explain the DMCA?) Laws on the books, with teeth or otherwise, are no guarantee against wrongdoing by companies - see the ongoing ForclosureGate crap as an example of fraud and felonies of all stripes, with nary a cop in sight.
To the extent that US commerce remains free and voluntary, customers made aware of undesirable business practices divert their business away from the company in question to one extent or another. Absent government-granted and enforced monopolies, competitors will spring up to capture the alienated customers' business.
History is replete with examples of government's failure to replace free markets with government control/regulation.
Actually, regulation does not do anything to prevent a company from putting melanine or floor sweepings in their products - such activities have occurred while government regulations were in place to prevent such things.
The behavior of participants within a free market will not prevent such happenings, either, but the resulting consequences can destroy such a company, through lawsuits to cover poisoned customers and loss of business from new and previous customers, and rightly so. As it currently stands, if a company is caught defrauding its customers, perhaps by poisoning its products, the government forces it to pay a small fine (relative to the costs of the gains made by the fraud) and recall existing poisoned product. That's no solution - that's viewed as a cost of business!
The biggest obstacle preventing such free market behavior is the government itself, at various levels, that grant and enforce monopolies that have no good reason to exist. This sort of meddling is becoming ever more prevalent, most recently with the passage of US Senate bill S-510 (and potentially its House counterpart) that raises the barrier for food production to such heights that only a small handful of mega companies can afford to meet them, thus in essence granting and enforcing yet another monopoly at the expense of a voluntary and free market.
With the advent of the open beta of Mechwarrior Living Legends, the "official" games may well be eclipsed by a fan-made total conversion mod for Crysis/Crysis Warhead. MWLL features, among other cool things, combined arms: air, mechs, infantry, and tanks are all playable and useful on the battlefield.
Listed there is the primary failure of McCain to understand the First Amendment, and a critical fact or two which pretty much blows the whole "we really don't know what the Second Amendment means, really, honest!" misdirection out of the water.
McCain broke the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;)
Obama advocates breaking (and has attempted to break) the Second.
These are the most obvious and blatant examples. Any attempt to reach beyond the list of enumerated powers laid out in the founding documentation (i.e., that "supreme law of the land" thing) is an automatic disqualification of suitability for public office.
I deviate from my initial point, which I laid out in fair detail in my mini-book post.
I'll vote for Obama (or anyone else, for that matter), if you can explain to me exactly how they are not pledging to break the supreme law of the land (or how they have not done so in the past).
You assume that state control is mandatory for roads, police, firemen, schools, and security (note: not military) to exist. In truth, the state has, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly on all except for fire departments (and California is working fast to correct that little oversight). All can exist apart from the state, and I say it's high time to give it a go.
Democrats being "more fiscally responsible" than Republicans is akin to saying that one snake's venom is slightly less toxic than another snake's. Both parties have spent like drunken sailors and promise to continue to do so in the future.
Voting for either party (and with Barr being the Libertarian candidate, either of the first three parties to come to mind) is a vote for more of the same.
As for raising taxes on the rich: do you consider your federal politicians to be middle class? Do you honestly believe that politicians will raise their own taxes, with laws free of loopholes?
I see assertions, but no evidence in your post. As for some of your statements: I'm solidly middle-class, and am paying 50% of my income in taxes of various sorts (federal, state, sales, property, gas, etc.). "Raise taxes", you say?? The Boston Tea Party came about over, what, a 4% tax? Oh, but they're "necessary." Somehow.
As for everything else, see my mini-book post in reply to one of your comments farther up the thread.
After witnessing first-hand the hijacking of the entire Republican party caucus in Nevada (by the party leadership, no less), I'm either going to be voting for someone along the lines of Chuck Baldwin, or, more likely, boycotting the federal elections entirely.
Just as small health issues can be symptomatic of a hideous medical problem, so can "micro-issues" be signs of a politician's hideous flaws.
The USA is ostensively a nation under the rule of law, with equality under the law. (While anyone with any time at all to spend on a brief review of the law/justice system in the US, along with a pair of brain cells to rub together can see that this is no longer the case and has not been for some time, that common mis-belief is still what holds this country together as a mostly-functioning society.)
Under the current government, the law still recognizes the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, with any contradictory lower law being "void", as if it had never existed (as explicitly stated in Marbury vs Madison in... 1803, IIRC), without even requiring such recognition by an official body.
In reading the writings of the people involved in establishing the new government, it is completely clear that government, even the newly-created one, was to be viewed with suspicion and kept on a short leash. To that very specific end, as written in the Declaration of Independence, the right of revolution (and by extension, secession) is reserved to the individual people from which any governmental power is derived in the first place. The means to exercise such rights is explicitly protected from government meddling at any level by the Second Amendment, which does indeed forbid government at any level from denying any free individual from purchasing and/or keeping their own handgun, rifle, shotgun, body armor, sound suppressor, grenade launcher/RPG, armored vehicle, tank (complete with functional main gun), fighter jet, battleship, submarine, carrier group, and/or atomic bomb. (If anyone disagrees, please explain away the Letters of Marquee issued to private civilians.)
During my time "growing up", I have had many core beliefs shattered, among those being the still-common fallacy that government (including local police, etc.) exists to serve the people, and does so. All levels of government exist to serve only itself - nothing else. This is why taking responsibility for one's own self is important (because no one else is obligated to: see the court case Warren vs DC), as well as having the means to be able to act on that responsibility.
Keeping that reality in mind, all the paper in the world, covered in language describing freedoms, liberties, and promises will do absolutely nothing to prevent armed, masked men from breaking down your door in the middle of the night and having their way with your and your family, should they so wish, regardless of which group those men belong to. What will prevent such is having ready access to equal force to counter force, should reason fail to prevail. In the end, those are the only two options available to anyone wishing to impose their will upon others: reason and force.
That is why "gun control" is not a "micro-issue". "Gun control" is about consolidating a monopoly of force in the hands of a government who is explicitly, by their own highest law, forbidden from doing so, and when anyone seeking office in such a government fails to recognize and acknowledge this, they demonstrate their lack of suitability for such office in clear and concise terms.
(This isn't merely directed at Obama: the same general reasoning applies to McCain, as demonstrated by his TOTAL disregard for the supreme law of the land by working for and completing the passing of his treasonous "McCain-Feingold Act", showing defiance in the face of "Congress shall make no law". In fact, very few, if any, federal politicians are worthy of office.)
Yes, elections are important. This is apparently why they have been subverted by, among others, the Republican party leadership (I assume the same of the Democrats, but do not have first-hand knowledge) who ram-rods their desires through regardless of the wishes of the voters, and in direct violation of their own party laws. The solution is painful
The only question is, what happens now to all the assets?
Easy: civil forfeiture! That way, even if the government can't convince an impartial jury that the accused is guilty, the government still gets to keep all the dosh they sto... seized.
We're the US government, and by our figures, we have more guns than you. We just hope that you and three percent of your like-minded fellows don't all get mad at us at the same time, because if that were to happen, we're screwed.
Good thing, then, that by our figures, that three percent will never get around to getting off their asses.
The only thing that frightens me is that they describe the game as "highly cooperative."
That's what killed Diablo II for most of the legit players. If you were lucky, maybe as many as 2 people you knew in real life were also players, so you were left to play with strangers and 9 year-olds on Battle.Net. The 1.10 patch made the game no longer possible to finish by yourself.
No, this is wrong. It IS possible to finish Diablo II while solo - I've done so with at least a necromancer (which were given enough of a boost in 1.10 to make this possible) and a shape-shifting wolf druid.
Diablo II was - and still is - a fantastic single-player game which can be beaten solo. You do need to think a bit while building the character, though, and some characters are more difficult to play this way than others.
Freedom and security are diametrically opposing goals. I'll give you three guesses as to which goal the US government was established to help safeguard.
Safety isn't my primary motivation for driving myself around on my travels.
Real issues: money, i.e. taxes; wars on oil-rich countries; contracts for haliburton and similar companies; the economy; private lobbies such as the gun manufacturing industry, tobacco industry, etc; subsidies and regulation of high-value industries and corporations such as airlines and, recently, banks (only in relation to how the Fed is encouraging rampant fraud with cash rewards); health care, insurance industries; McDonald's; Wal*Mart; Exxon; Ford
How, exactly, is the business of private companies NOT engaging in fraudulent or directly harmful-to-a-human activities in any way, shape, or form the business of the government??
All those are your "real issues"!?
Please, stay in Europe (or wherever you are), and if you ever find yourself in the remains of what once was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, please leave at once before you hurt yourself!
Slashdot Mirror
There are quite a few games already well on their way to completion that are generally similar to the publicized ideas for 0x10c:
... and then there's Star Citizen, of course; a cross between Freelancer and Wing Commander - but you'll need to wait a while.
Blockade Runner will feature "fully destructible, operational, crewable 'living' starships in a procedurally generated galaxy".
https://blockaderunnergame.com/home.aspx
Shores of Hazeron is a first-person 4X-style game featuring fully-customizable spacecraft, city building and management, exploration, trade, combat, and more. It's playable right now, though it's under heavy development.
http://hazeron.com/
http://robertsspaceindustries.com/
I've some problems with details in your post:
1. The "criminal element" isn't stripping any rights away. (Rights can't be taken away, either, only infringed upon; if they can be taken away, they're called privileges.) If anyone, it's law enforcement that is infringing upon rights. Now, if you were referring to law enforcement agents as criminals, then I stand corrected. :)
2. The crime problem in America is not due to a flaw in law enforcement, but due to the ignorance and laxness of the population in general. Through court cases such as Warren vs DC and Gonzales vs Castle Rock, the government has explicitly disavowed any responsibility for any particular person's wellbeing. Whose responsibility is it then? The individual's. After decades of work, laws are finally starting to reflect reality, particularly in places like Alaska, Arizona, and Wyoming.
3. Yes, the parents have shirked responsibility. However, the enabler here is often government, in that through "free" housing, schooling, food, such irresponsible behavior is encouraged. All else being equal, whatever is taxed is discouraged, while whatever is subsidized becomes more commonplace. Aside from welfare in Section 8, another example of "bad parenting" that was only possible due to government subsidation was the Yearning for Zion Ranch, where many of the young mothers were receiving government money to make up for the shortfall the of the polygamous husbands. Take away the subsidation and the situation would largely go away all by itself.
Lastly, as pertains to the article, collective punishment is a slap in the face at best to any free person. If someone is found to have committed a crime, after due process is followed, PUNISH THAT PERSON.
The US sent men to the moon in 1969. Six decades later, and the best we got from NASA was a fancy sewer pipe in space along with a now-discarded orbiter system.
Worried about overpopulating the Earth? For this reason, and many others, get the hell out of the way of individuals who want to figure out how to leave this ball of rock you're so worried about.
While I don't recall if the location-providing services are enabled by default in Android 2.2, there is a clear warning given when enabling them.
If the services are disabled by unchecking boxes in the appropriate config area for the phone, location data IS NOT stored. (Previously-cached info from when the services were enabled might remain.) Neither does the above configuration change require jailbreaking or rooting the device.
That's a far cry from an "always on, can't disable" feature.
And the purchaser - NOT THE SELLER - is responsible for use taxes.
Of course, the utterly vast majority of folks don't pay use tax, even among those that know of it. Sort of illustrates our viewpoint on taxes if we're not being threatened over non-payment.
In theory, I could agree with the above. In practice, the politicians in the US are bought and paid for, largely with corporate money. (How else does one explain the DMCA?) Laws on the books, with teeth or otherwise, are no guarantee against wrongdoing by companies - see the ongoing ForclosureGate crap as an example of fraud and felonies of all stripes, with nary a cop in sight.
To the extent that US commerce remains free and voluntary, customers made aware of undesirable business practices divert their business away from the company in question to one extent or another. Absent government-granted and enforced monopolies, competitors will spring up to capture the alienated customers' business.
History is replete with examples of government's failure to replace free markets with government control/regulation.
Actually, regulation does not do anything to prevent a company from putting melanine or floor sweepings in their products - such activities have occurred while government regulations were in place to prevent such things.
The behavior of participants within a free market will not prevent such happenings, either, but the resulting consequences can destroy such a company, through lawsuits to cover poisoned customers and loss of business from new and previous customers, and rightly so. As it currently stands, if a company is caught defrauding its customers, perhaps by poisoning its products, the government forces it to pay a small fine (relative to the costs of the gains made by the fraud) and recall existing poisoned product. That's no solution - that's viewed as a cost of business!
The biggest obstacle preventing such free market behavior is the government itself, at various levels, that grant and enforce monopolies that have no good reason to exist. This sort of meddling is becoming ever more prevalent, most recently with the passage of US Senate bill S-510 (and potentially its House counterpart) that raises the barrier for food production to such heights that only a small handful of mega companies can afford to meet them, thus in essence granting and enforcing yet another monopoly at the expense of a voluntary and free market.
Government still is the problem.
Currency has nothing to do with "user experience".
With the advent of the open beta of Mechwarrior Living Legends, the "official" games may well be eclipsed by a fan-made total conversion mod for Crysis/Crysis Warhead. MWLL features, among other cool things, combined arms: air, mechs, infantry, and tanks are all playable and useful on the battlefield.
I'd rather not reiterate what I've already posted.
Listed there is the primary failure of McCain to understand the First Amendment, and a critical fact or two which pretty much blows the whole "we really don't know what the Second Amendment means, really, honest!" misdirection out of the water.
McCain broke the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;)
Obama advocates breaking (and has attempted to break) the Second.
These are the most obvious and blatant examples. Any attempt to reach beyond the list of enumerated powers laid out in the founding documentation (i.e., that "supreme law of the land" thing) is an automatic disqualification of suitability for public office.
I deviate from my initial point, which I laid out in fair detail in my mini-book post.
I'll vote for Obama (or anyone else, for that matter), if you can explain to me exactly how they are not pledging to break the supreme law of the land (or how they have not done so in the past).
No votes for law-breakers.
You assume that state control is mandatory for roads, police, firemen, schools, and security (note: not military) to exist. In truth, the state has, for all intents and purposes, a monopoly on all except for fire departments (and California is working fast to correct that little oversight). All can exist apart from the state, and I say it's high time to give it a go.
Democrats being "more fiscally responsible" than Republicans is akin to saying that one snake's venom is slightly less toxic than another snake's. Both parties have spent like drunken sailors and promise to continue to do so in the future.
Voting for either party (and with Barr being the Libertarian candidate, either of the first three parties to come to mind) is a vote for more of the same.
As for raising taxes on the rich: do you consider your federal politicians to be middle class? Do you honestly believe that politicians will raise their own taxes, with laws free of loopholes?
I see assertions, but no evidence in your post. As for some of your statements: I'm solidly middle-class, and am paying 50% of my income in taxes of various sorts (federal, state, sales, property, gas, etc.). "Raise taxes", you say?? The Boston Tea Party came about over, what, a 4% tax? Oh, but they're "necessary." Somehow.
As for everything else, see my mini-book post in reply to one of your comments farther up the thread.
Both parties want to tax people to death.
Both parties want to keep spending money they do not have.
Both parties want war (only differing in the specific locations).
Both parties steal freedom from we, the people, every chance they get.
Both parties are, in essence, the same.
Boycott the elections, force ALL the politicians out, and start over.
Barr probably isn't the liberty-minded person most of his supporters believe.
After witnessing first-hand the hijacking of the entire Republican party caucus in Nevada (by the party leadership, no less), I'm either going to be voting for someone along the lines of Chuck Baldwin, or, more likely, boycotting the federal elections entirely.
Just as small health issues can be symptomatic of a hideous medical problem, so can "micro-issues" be signs of a politician's hideous flaws.
The USA is ostensively a nation under the rule of law, with equality under the law. (While anyone with any time at all to spend on a brief review of the law/justice system in the US, along with a pair of brain cells to rub together can see that this is no longer the case and has not been for some time, that common mis-belief is still what holds this country together as a mostly-functioning society.)
Under the current government, the law still recognizes the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, with any contradictory lower law being "void", as if it had never existed (as explicitly stated in Marbury vs Madison in ... 1803, IIRC), without even requiring such recognition by an official body.
In reading the writings of the people involved in establishing the new government, it is completely clear that government, even the newly-created one, was to be viewed with suspicion and kept on a short leash. To that very specific end, as written in the Declaration of Independence, the right of revolution (and by extension, secession) is reserved to the individual people from which any governmental power is derived in the first place. The means to exercise such rights is explicitly protected from government meddling at any level by the Second Amendment, which does indeed forbid government at any level from denying any free individual from purchasing and/or keeping their own handgun, rifle, shotgun, body armor, sound suppressor, grenade launcher/RPG, armored vehicle, tank (complete with functional main gun), fighter jet, battleship, submarine, carrier group, and/or atomic bomb. (If anyone disagrees, please explain away the Letters of Marquee issued to private civilians.)
During my time "growing up", I have had many core beliefs shattered, among those being the still-common fallacy that government (including local police, etc.) exists to serve the people, and does so. All levels of government exist to serve only itself - nothing else. This is why taking responsibility for one's own self is important (because no one else is obligated to: see the court case Warren vs DC), as well as having the means to be able to act on that responsibility.
Keeping that reality in mind, all the paper in the world, covered in language describing freedoms, liberties, and promises will do absolutely nothing to prevent armed, masked men from breaking down your door in the middle of the night and having their way with your and your family, should they so wish, regardless of which group those men belong to. What will prevent such is having ready access to equal force to counter force, should reason fail to prevail. In the end, those are the only two options available to anyone wishing to impose their will upon others: reason and force.
That is why "gun control" is not a "micro-issue". "Gun control" is about consolidating a monopoly of force in the hands of a government who is explicitly, by their own highest law, forbidden from doing so, and when anyone seeking office in such a government fails to recognize and acknowledge this, they demonstrate their lack of suitability for such office in clear and concise terms.
(This isn't merely directed at Obama: the same general reasoning applies to McCain, as demonstrated by his TOTAL disregard for the supreme law of the land by working for and completing the passing of his treasonous "McCain-Feingold Act", showing defiance in the face of "Congress shall make no law". In fact, very few, if any, federal politicians are worthy of office.)
Yes, elections are important. This is apparently why they have been subverted by, among others, the Republican party leadership (I assume the same of the Democrats, but do not have first-hand knowledge) who ram-rods their desires through regardless of the wishes of the voters, and in direct violation of their own party laws. The solution is painful
Easy: civil forfeiture! That way, even if the government can't convince an impartial jury that the accused is guilty, the government still gets to keep all the dosh they sto... seized.
We're the US government, and by our figures, we have more guns than you. We just hope that you and three percent of your like-minded fellows don't all get mad at us at the same time, because if that were to happen, we're screwed.
Good thing, then, that by our figures, that three percent will never get around to getting off their asses.
Using your definition, Zimbabwe's economy isn't "collapsing", either.
No, this is wrong. It IS possible to finish Diablo II while solo - I've done so with at least a necromancer (which were given enough of a boost in 1.10 to make this possible) and a shape-shifting wolf druid.
Diablo II was - and still is - a fantastic single-player game which can be beaten solo. You do need to think a bit while building the character, though, and some characters are more difficult to play this way than others.
Ahah, I see. I suppose then that your list isn't nearly long enough. ;)
Call me when the tea party starts, then.
Freedom and security are diametrically opposing goals. I'll give you three guesses as to which goal the US government was established to help safeguard.
Safety isn't my primary motivation for driving myself around on my travels.
How, exactly, is the business of private companies NOT engaging in fraudulent or directly harmful-to-a-human activities in any way, shape, or form the business of the government??
All those are your "real issues"!?
Please, stay in Europe (or wherever you are), and if you ever find yourself in the remains of what once was the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, please leave at once before you hurt yourself!
"Security Through Ineptitude"
I don't fly anywhere anymore.