The hell with that I'd leave town! Jessica Fletcher was the name I was looking for fyi, thanks... my memory for the Geriatric Crime Fighters Club is a bit rusty...
The problem with virtual gold is there is no physical asset to back it (fiat money) but worse yet it is prone to inflation and unregulated in it's production. The gold comes from nowhere, literally.
From a stability standpoint it is prone to rapid inflation (on of the ways we detect laundring in virtual currency.) so they have to spread it across multiple platforms. Rapidly diminshing returns but cut supply and you can ward off inflation. You COULD look at this in a big evil conspiracy theory way that China is trying to stablize the virtual currency market to promote laundring money through it but that is a hell of a stretch....
If he was black and if we sentenced along the lines of crack possession ($300 worth will get you 5 years) he'd be serving 1.08 billion years for 65 billion. Only 120 years?! Yeah he won't live that long.. duh.. but way to chop off a few 0s there.
In contrast to any "non-white collar crime" he'd be looking at no less then a million years.
Yeah he should have gotten a few 000s on the end of that in the name of principle.
Shit the wife\accomplice is walking away with 2 million! I can't buy a fucking beer without my wife knowing it. That bitch knew just as plain as day. She actually gets to KEEP 2 million. The two should be rotting in jail then when they fucking die their bodies should be cremated and poured into a sewer drain. Burial is too good for that piece of shit and that hag of a wife.
Fuck it, white collar crime pays apparently. No hard labor. No punishment really. He had his fun, now off to a minimum security prison while his senator friends ensure he's in "The nice area". Now he can rot on tax payer's tab. Maybe do some tutoring, write a book, maybe take up painting.
Remember: if your white apparently you get to live a life of privlege then get caught and waste your last 10 or so years in jail. If you are a minority expect to live all BUT 10 years of your life in jail or the slums. This is bullshit.
Judicial hipocracy never ceases to stun me.
Here turn over everything you have. No wait your wife can keep 2 million and the millions you paid out to your friends and family is legitmate income to them so just give us back what is left.
So who got political contributions from him?
My opinion: He needs his fucking legs cheese gratered off and his face given a date with a belt sander. That wouldn't be cruel or unusual... rather fitting and the closest thing his victims will get to justice. For those with weak stomaches how about he pushes a rock uphill every day until the rock and gravity win.
As far as I read it they are talking money EARNED not neccesarily exchanged. So both could be accurate depending on which end they are on. Also who knows how much dissapears into pockets so to speak.
In full disclosure: I work in the financial industry currently.
This ban has nothing to do with gaming, gambling, or local economy.
This is likely a direct response to MASSIVE money laundering.
Joe has $100,000 worth of illicit cash. Joe strikes a deal to buy $100,000 worth of virtual currency in WoW. Joe smuggles the money. (Many times Joe can even hire the kid down the street and pay him cash...)
Joe turns around and over several months sells the gold BACK to the gold farmers and claims the sales as legitimate income. Selling it at a 50% loss he can convert $100,000 into $50,000 of legitimate funds. Even more so when he acts as a virtual broker (IGN anyone?).
While this is a simplified scenario but we are talking BILLIONS of dollars a year are now going through these kinds of channels.
I've seen locally here in the US $300,000 attempts and laundering money this way (through a combination of FF Online, LOTRO, and Maple).
While it is getting easier to deal with this now that the gaming companies are willing to share some data I can only imagine how hard is must be in Asian markets where channeling cash to chinese gold farmers is easier with the shorter phsyical distances. Oddly though, in my experience, I have seen more Korean and Indian gold farmers then Chinese.
Never had a problem with gold farmers, never will, but I have serious doubts that this ban has anything to do with gameplay.
I think this is in response to the forged bonds that were intercepted in Italy. They are worried about organized crime shifting large sums of money (which require laundering) through the virtual economy.
If I am an evil overlord and I have to get 4 billion to my agents around the world the easiest thing to do is buy a billion dollars worth of WoW gold, have all my agents log in with characters. Divvy up the gold then have them sell it off locally or back to the gold farmers at a loss.
No quicker way to distributed that much real world money then through a network of games.
I for one welcome our Linux running Qubit overlords and in full disclousure IANAL but ITFA they had me ROTFL'ing when I pondered Linxu being greated then Micro$oft running in an N-Dimensional space until NYCL told me that my ImaginaryProperty was sold by kdawson to CmdTaco because Truth != Facts != Love != Reality after SCO and the RIAA\MPAA sued Open Source and WON!
I've tinkering with MMO design for years going all the way back to DIKU.
I will offer this theory for you:
SIZE in a game is actually a measurement of content density.
Imagine a grid and you put numbers in each box where there are X number of activities.
Given a 100x100 square box areas of high numbers are inheritly LARGER because a player spends more time in those areas. Areas with small numbers are SMALLER.
Players 'sense' the size of a game by this density not real world dimensions.
You want slower movement in areas of high density and quicker movement in areas of lower density. By tracking the measurement you give the world a consistent feel of size.
Early in an MMO where you have large phsyical distances between A and B with low density you place fast movement. This "shrinks" that distance so it feels like an area of higher density.
Outside of technical limitations this gives players a linear feel to the size of the world.
An analogy is running through a field versus a forest at a fixed speed. You'll do a lot more dodge, dip, dive, duck and dodging more in the forest then the plains and even though you are moving at the same speed you won't go as far in the forest then in the plains.
An ingame example is starting in WoW at Stormwind. The developers try to maintain a consistent sense of density by using quests (content) but once the quest is complete and the mobs are useless the density drops and Westfall all of a sudden is really big and boring. You want a mount at that point to regain that linear sense of density (size).
As the quests get more spread out and the content less dense the mounts come into play to control the percieved size of the game world.
Because I blame the Dutch for everything. (Kennedy, AIDS, Michael Moore, Nike, Teletubbies, TANG, all that evil crap!)
I used to blame Belgians but they have no sense of humor (seriously they sent me a letter once...)
Only the Dutch have vile and evil overlords. Those pesky Finns are evil... but lack overlords. They are more like a Committee of Marginal Evil. I'd pick on the Polish folks but they are about as evil as Ewoks...
Now Iceland... there is a land of pure Evil and Bad Taste... and weird sweaters....
I'd love to see an Evil-Off competition between the Dutch and Icelanders.... ohhh... sooo damn evil!
Thinking about it is a crime. Writing about it is a crime. Drawing about it is a crime.
Last I check wasn't DOING a crime... well.. a crime?
Next thing you know Jessica Lansbury and company will be held and charged for all those terroristic threats and murder plans called "Murder She Wrote". They were so detailed! Lets not forget the Matlock, Columbo, Perry Mason, CSI, etc... All those murder plans!!! GET EM!!
"When is a man damned? When he is oblivious to it."
Freedom of Speech doesn't not imply Freedom from Consequence.
A: Her Myspace page was publically browsable. B: She disclosed the statement Publically. C: He public statement ended up being reproduced in an equally publically accessable newspaper, even if under false circumstances. D: Her father suffered the consequences of her actions.
This would be no different then if she was at the mall telling her friends "This Town Sucks" and youtubing herself. Then CNN gets ahold of the youtube video (regardless of the source) and posts it.
While you could suggest copyright, voicing an opinion doesn't imply it is a literary work that falls under copyright. No more then this very post. It isn't a literary work, it is my opinion that I happened to type out, no different then typing to copyright it if I had spoken it in a mall.
The only issue that I can see (in a practical sense) is why is a grown adult principal lurking on a former student's myspace page?! If I was the father I'd be breaking the pervert's legs right now.
So the EU tries to sue the piss outta M$, fines them, forces them to help their competitors, levys some weird tarrifs, and a loads of other crap and now they bitch that M$ is charging them more?
Wow in the EU I guess between Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Slavic, Finnish, whatever the evil and vile Dutch overlords speak (we lubs you anyways), and Arabic, don't have a word for RETRIBUTION.:)
An old quote comes to mind from a comedian:
"Hey when I hire a dominatrix, I don't complain about getting beat up, I PAY to get beat up!"
I guess I am old enouh to remember Global Ice Age. I remember the debates (hysteria) and noting has changed. Same scientists, same students, same nonsense.
People, we are devolving so damn fast you can't even have a discussion anymore. No one even knows what that word means it seems.
You have torn yourselves apart ideologically, socially, and spiritually.
You will never solve Roe v. Wade, Climate Change, or any other problem because you have lost your ability to function as a whole.
The comments, no, hysteria, that occurs any time someone challenges Islam, Climate Change, politics, Scientology, etc shows that we have failed as a society.
Facts speak for themselves. They don't need spin, they don't need long winded teardowns of the oppositions. Data is data and people will draw conclusions from it. This climate Jihad nonsense has to end.
The Global Warming Loons tell us we have to stop killing mother earth out of the left side of their mouth but tell us we are already doomed out of the right.
The anti-global warming goons tell us it is just sun spots, normal, bad data etc. But enter into the same name calling nonsense as the other side.
You have torn yourselves apart and learned nothing in the process. You've been blinded by your own sense of self rightiousness and intellectual superiority. You worship mankind. You worship youselves.
You have constructed your own self absorb religion around your own idealogical beliefs, compartmentalized your own existence, and reduced humanity to Me vs. Them.
The green crowd wants you to be 'green' but you are never green enough. Your never conservative, liberal, green, muslim, christian, pro-military, anti-military, what ever cause you lay claim to.
I have watched in my own lifetime humanity fall to lows I could never imagine. And while you tear one another part, mentally, physically, and spiritiually, everything around us suffers. Earth itself suffers our misdeeds.
Regardless of what you think, how can anyone expect to solve the problems around us when we cannot solve the problem in the mirror?
To hate we have become enslaved, rationalizing our personal war against the "they", "them", and "those" that stand against us.
You have fallen from being humans to machines. On and Off, Yes and No. The world is not digital but here you are, us v. them.
I heard in a coffee shop and old man utter the most painful thing I have heard:
"Humanity in the 21th century has become an embarrasment to the past."
I'm sure the EPA needs economists to evaluate the impact of its policies on the economy. Having said that, that doesn't mean that the opinion of said economists should have any weight whatsoever when it comes to evaluating the science of climate change. The fact remains that the author of the "quashed" report has never published a single paper relating to climatology and climate science, and has only worked as an economist for his entire career.
I'm a Ph.D. student in engineering at MIT with a substantial background in physics. Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
Yeah we wouldn't want career politicians with 0 experience in climate studies being given nobel prizes or anything like that when it comes to climate. We only want qualified people with a background in climatology involved in the discussion.
Zenimax with Bethesda makes great games with crappy software.
ID makes crappy games with great software.
Either this is going to be GREAT GAMES WITH GREAT SOFTWARE or CRAPPY GAMES WITH CRAPPY SOFTWARE.
I honestly can't think of a good ID game in the sense of a contemporary game. BRILLIANT technology. Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
Fallout 3 shows you can have an excellent game structured around bug ridden crap code.
Imagine ID's team doing the coding with the BETTER half doing the rest. Pure magic.
OR A COMPLETE DISASTER AS THEY BRING OUT THE WORST IN ONE ANOTHER.
It never ceases to amaze me the resistance to going to metric here in the states for measurements but no one bats an eyelash at the fact our money is basically metric (base 10).
It is in fact soo damn easy that we can instinctively give somone a $5 and a penny for something that costs $4.01 so we can get back a dollar rather then 3 quarters 2 dimes and 4 pennies....
Boo metric it's too damn easy to use! Forget cutting a board 1.46 meters in half. it's too damn hard to cut it.73 meters! Better yet that 3 5/8th inch board needs to be cut in half so we need umm... err... need some scratch paper here....
Without turning this into a 50 post thread on the concept of criminal justice I'l summarize thusly:
"Take everything away from a criminal and leave him nothing but the title of criminal; then all you will every have is a criminal."
We learned this in WW1\WW2 as we decimated Germany's ability to function as a nation after WW1 which was the root cause for the Nazi rise to power. We learned that when you put a man in jail then release him into the public with no future, no second chances, no resources, all you did was help train him to be a better criminal.
One must be careful not to make life "too hard" for a criminal so they have a chance to make something of their life once they do their time.
Take the ill-gotten gains and deposit them in a bank. 50% of the interest earned goes towards restitution and the other 50% to cover the costs of parole and house arrest.
"... overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes.."
From what I have heard from certain people, they already have been doing this since Regan. The largest use for this was domestically was tracking the drug trade including but not limited to:
Large distribution rings by tracking differential images for trafficing patterns (e.g. large number of cars at 2 am at a pier that only stick around for a hour or two)
Using the IR module for finding growers in remote areas with camoed green houses.
Using the information to track abnormal warehouse activity.
Spying seems a slanted term since the cops don't SPY on people, they investigate. Same with the FBI and ATF.
So what we really have is DHS decides for what appear to be largely buget issues, not taking the information, THAT IS ALREADY BEING COLLECTED, and using it for DHS purposes. Since the DHS is a new agency they probably didn't have access to that data. This sounds largely like a formality to get them access to the data. Now the DHS will have to step through the FBI and local law enforcement channels which was the whole reason we created the DHS in the first place.
Seriously, this amounts to "The cops can use it, the FBI can use it, but the 'new' intelligence community can't." Here contract a plane to get your imagining instead.
If there was a privacy issue why not raise it when ATF raids a pot grower? Why now and not under Regan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2? And why no outcry over the fact it has been used for years already? Surely the use of images from those darn helicopters and airplanes must be a privacy conern also? Right? You know those images you can get from the county and local city... Hello? Sensible Dissent where are you? (in my best Shaggy impersonation).
So is he's going to a nice minimum security prision for 6 years on the tax payer dime and getting fined a million eh? How much do you want to bet he'll earn more then a million in 6 years in interest on the money he's taken in.
Sentence should have been 6 years and all assets seized.
Slashdot Mirror
See EULA.
The hell with that I'd leave town! Jessica Fletcher was the name I was looking for fyi, thanks... my memory for the Geriatric Crime Fighters Club is a bit rusty...
The problem with virtual gold is there is no physical asset to back it (fiat money) but worse yet it is prone to inflation and unregulated in it's production. The gold comes from nowhere, literally.
From a stability standpoint it is prone to rapid inflation (on of the ways we detect laundring in virtual currency.) so they have to spread it across multiple platforms. Rapidly diminshing returns but cut supply and you can ward off inflation. You COULD look at this in a big evil conspiracy theory way that China is trying to stablize the virtual currency market to promote laundring money through it but that is a hell of a stretch....
If he was black and if we sentenced along the lines of crack possession ($300 worth will get you 5 years) he'd be serving 1.08 billion years for 65 billion. Only 120 years?! Yeah he won't live that long.. duh.. but way to chop off a few 0s there.
In contrast to any "non-white collar crime" he'd be looking at no less then a million years.
Yeah he should have gotten a few 000s on the end of that in the name of principle.
Shit the wife\accomplice is walking away with 2 million! I can't buy a fucking beer without my wife knowing it. That bitch knew just as plain as day. She actually gets to KEEP 2 million. The two should be rotting in jail then when they fucking die their bodies should be cremated and poured into a sewer drain. Burial is too good for that piece of shit and that hag of a wife.
Fuck it, white collar crime pays apparently. No hard labor. No punishment really. He had his fun, now off to a minimum security prison while his senator friends ensure he's in "The nice area". Now he can rot on tax payer's tab. Maybe do some tutoring, write a book, maybe take up painting.
Remember: if your white apparently you get to live a life of privlege then get caught and waste your last 10 or so years in jail. If you are a minority expect to live all BUT 10 years of your life in jail or the slums. This is bullshit.
Judicial hipocracy never ceases to stun me.
Here turn over everything you have. No wait your wife can keep 2 million and the millions you paid out to your friends and family is legitmate income to them so just give us back what is left.
So who got political contributions from him?
My opinion: He needs his fucking legs cheese gratered off and his face given a date with a belt sander. That wouldn't be cruel or unusual... rather fitting and the closest thing his victims will get to justice. For those with weak stomaches how about he pushes a rock uphill every day until the rock and gravity win.
As far as I read it they are talking money EARNED not neccesarily exchanged. So both could be accurate depending on which end they are on. Also who knows how much dissapears into pockets so to speak.
In full disclosure: I work in the financial industry currently.
This ban has nothing to do with gaming, gambling, or local economy.
This is likely a direct response to MASSIVE money laundering.
Joe has $100,000 worth of illicit cash.
Joe strikes a deal to buy $100,000 worth of virtual currency in WoW. Joe smuggles the money. (Many times Joe can even hire the kid down the street and pay him cash...)
Joe turns around and over several months sells the gold BACK to the gold farmers and claims the sales as legitimate income. Selling it at a 50% loss he can convert $100,000 into $50,000 of legitimate funds. Even more so when he acts as a virtual broker (IGN anyone?).
While this is a simplified scenario but we are talking BILLIONS of dollars a year are now going through these kinds of channels.
I've seen locally here in the US $300,000 attempts and laundering money this way (through a combination of FF Online, LOTRO, and Maple).
While it is getting easier to deal with this now that the gaming companies are willing to share some data I can only imagine how hard is must be in Asian markets where channeling cash to chinese gold farmers is easier with the shorter phsyical distances. Oddly though, in my experience, I have seen more Korean and Indian gold farmers then Chinese.
Never had a problem with gold farmers, never will, but I have serious doubts that this ban has anything to do with gameplay.
I think this is in response to the forged bonds that were intercepted in Italy. They are worried about organized crime shifting large sums of money (which require laundering) through the virtual economy.
If I am an evil overlord and I have to get 4 billion to my agents around the world the easiest thing to do is buy a billion dollars worth of WoW gold, have all my agents log in with characters. Divvy up the gold then have them sell it off locally or back to the gold farmers at a loss.
No quicker way to distributed that much real world money then through a network of games.
I for one welcome our Linux running Qubit overlords and in full disclousure IANAL but ITFA they had me ROTFL'ing when I pondered Linxu being greated then Micro$oft running in an N-Dimensional space until NYCL told me that my ImaginaryProperty was sold by kdawson to CmdTaco because Truth != Facts != Love != Reality after SCO and the RIAA\MPAA sued Open Source and WON!
Therefore your post sucks and should be deleted.
I've tinkering with MMO design for years going all the way back to DIKU.
I will offer this theory for you:
SIZE in a game is actually a measurement of content density.
Imagine a grid and you put numbers in each box where there are X number of activities.
Given a 100x100 square box areas of high numbers are inheritly LARGER because a player spends more time in those areas. Areas with small numbers are SMALLER.
Players 'sense' the size of a game by this density not real world dimensions.
You want slower movement in areas of high density and quicker movement in areas of lower density. By tracking the measurement you give the world a consistent feel of size.
Early in an MMO where you have large phsyical distances between A and B with low density you place fast movement. This "shrinks" that distance so it feels like an area of higher density.
Outside of technical limitations this gives players a linear feel to the size of the world.
An analogy is running through a field versus a forest at a fixed speed. You'll do a lot more dodge, dip, dive, duck and dodging more in the forest then the plains and even though you are moving at the same speed you won't go as far in the forest then in the plains.
An ingame example is starting in WoW at Stormwind. The developers try to maintain a consistent sense of density by using quests (content) but once the quest is complete and the mobs are useless the density drops and Westfall all of a sudden is really big and boring. You want a mount at that point to regain that linear sense of density (size).
As the quests get more spread out and the content less dense the mounts come into play to control the percieved size of the game world.
Because I blame the Dutch for everything. (Kennedy, AIDS, Michael Moore, Nike, Teletubbies, TANG, all that evil crap!)
I used to blame Belgians but they have no sense of humor (seriously they sent me a letter once...)
Only the Dutch have vile and evil overlords. Those pesky Finns are evil... but lack overlords. They are more like a Committee of Marginal Evil. I'd pick on the Polish folks but they are about as evil as Ewoks...
Now Iceland... there is a land of pure Evil and Bad Taste... and weird sweaters....
I'd love to see an Evil-Off competition between the Dutch and Icelanders.... ohhh... sooo damn evil!
Welcome to the era of Thought Crime.
Thinking about it is a crime.
Writing about it is a crime.
Drawing about it is a crime.
Last I check wasn't DOING a crime... well.. a crime?
Next thing you know Jessica Lansbury and company will be held and charged for all those terroristic threats and murder plans called "Murder She Wrote". They were so detailed! Lets not forget the Matlock, Columbo, Perry Mason, CSI, etc... All those murder plans!!! GET EM!!
"When is a man damned? When he is oblivious to it."
Freedom of Speech doesn't not imply Freedom from Consequence.
A: Her Myspace page was publically browsable.
B: She disclosed the statement Publically.
C: He public statement ended up being reproduced in an equally publically accessable newspaper, even if under false circumstances.
D: Her father suffered the consequences of her actions.
This would be no different then if she was at the mall telling her friends "This Town Sucks" and youtubing herself. Then CNN gets ahold of the youtube video (regardless of the source) and posts it.
While you could suggest copyright, voicing an opinion doesn't imply it is a literary work that falls under copyright. No more then this very post. It isn't a literary work, it is my opinion that I happened to type out, no different then typing to copyright it if I had spoken it in a mall.
The only issue that I can see (in a practical sense) is why is a grown adult principal lurking on a former student's myspace page?! If I was the father I'd be breaking the pervert's legs right now.
So the EU tries to sue the piss outta M$, fines them, forces them to help their competitors, levys some weird tarrifs, and a loads of other crap and now they bitch that M$ is charging them more?
Wow in the EU I guess between Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Slavic, Finnish, whatever the evil and vile Dutch overlords speak (we lubs you anyways), and Arabic, don't have a word for RETRIBUTION. :)
An old quote comes to mind from a comedian:
"Hey when I hire a dominatrix, I don't complain about getting beat up, I PAY to get beat up!"
I guess I am old enouh to remember Global Ice Age. I remember the debates (hysteria) and noting has changed. Same scientists, same students, same nonsense.
People, we are devolving so damn fast you can't even have a discussion anymore. No one even knows what that word means it seems.
You have torn yourselves apart ideologically, socially, and spiritually.
You will never solve Roe v. Wade, Climate Change, or any other problem because you have lost your ability to function as a whole.
The comments, no, hysteria, that occurs any time someone challenges Islam, Climate Change, politics, Scientology, etc shows that we have failed as a society.
Facts speak for themselves. They don't need spin, they don't need long winded teardowns of the oppositions. Data is data and people will draw conclusions from it. This climate Jihad nonsense has to end.
The Global Warming Loons tell us we have to stop killing mother earth out of the left side of their mouth but tell us we are already doomed out of the right.
The anti-global warming goons tell us it is just sun spots, normal, bad data etc. But enter into the same name calling nonsense as the other side.
You have torn yourselves apart and learned nothing in the process. You've been blinded by your own sense of self rightiousness and intellectual superiority. You worship mankind. You worship youselves.
You have constructed your own self absorb religion around your own idealogical beliefs, compartmentalized your own existence, and reduced humanity to Me vs. Them.
The green crowd wants you to be 'green' but you are never green enough. Your never conservative, liberal, green, muslim, christian, pro-military, anti-military, what ever cause you lay claim to.
I have watched in my own lifetime humanity fall to lows I could never imagine. And while you tear one another part, mentally, physically, and spiritiually, everything around us suffers. Earth itself suffers our misdeeds.
Regardless of what you think, how can anyone expect to solve the problems around us when we cannot solve the problem in the mirror?
To hate we have become enslaved, rationalizing our personal war against the "they", "them", and "those" that stand against us.
You have fallen from being humans to machines. On and Off, Yes and No. The world is not digital but here you are, us v. them.
I heard in a coffee shop and old man utter the most painful thing I have heard:
"Humanity in the 21th century has become an embarrasment to the past."
I'm sure the EPA needs economists to evaluate the impact of its policies on the economy. Having said that, that doesn't mean that the opinion of said economists should have any weight whatsoever when it comes to evaluating the science of climate change. The fact remains that the author of the "quashed" report has never published a single paper relating to climatology and climate science, and has only worked as an economist for his entire career.
I'm a Ph.D. student in engineering at MIT with a substantial background in physics. Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
Yeah we wouldn't want career politicians with 0 experience in climate studies being given nobel prizes or anything like that when it comes to climate. We only want qualified people with a background in climatology involved in the discussion.
I for one welcome our new found sand droplet forming overlords and I am more then willing to narc on all those sand castle building sons of bitches!
I wrote a 200+ word response to this then found that I can summarize it in one sentence:
"Once again the Imaginative Bullshit Makers have developed a self defeating product..."
whoa wait? Atari is still around? Sweet when is Pole Position 3 coming out?
Zenimax with Bethesda makes great games with crappy software.
ID makes crappy games with great software.
Either this is going to be GREAT GAMES WITH GREAT SOFTWARE or CRAPPY GAMES WITH CRAPPY SOFTWARE.
I honestly can't think of a good ID game in the sense of a contemporary game. BRILLIANT technology. Great game engines, but the games themselves were always lack luster. In short: If it moves, it dies. That was it.
Doom series was nearly devoid of any literary content. It was literally just shoot stuff. Fun mind you but nothing to write home about.
Fallout 3 shows you can have an excellent game structured around bug ridden crap code.
Imagine ID's team doing the coding with the BETTER half doing the rest. Pure magic.
OR A COMPLETE DISASTER AS THEY BRING OUT THE WORST IN ONE ANOTHER.
It never ceases to amaze me the resistance to going to metric here in the states for measurements but no one bats an eyelash at the fact our money is basically metric (base 10).
It is in fact soo damn easy that we can instinctively give somone a $5 and a penny for something that costs $4.01 so we can get back a dollar rather then 3 quarters 2 dimes and 4 pennies....
Boo metric it's too damn easy to use! Forget cutting a board 1.46 meters in half. it's too damn hard to cut it .73 meters! Better yet that 3 5/8th inch board needs to be cut in half so we need umm... err... need some scratch paper here....
I blame Bush for forcing NASA to use Imperial Units, Clinton for under funding NASA, Carter for drafting the requirement, and Cheney for inventing it!
If only Obama had invented metric earlier then Cheney could this all have been averted!
DAMN YOU REGAN FOR INVENTING SPACE FLIGHT!!!
Without turning this into a 50 post thread on the concept of criminal justice I'l summarize thusly:
"Take everything away from a criminal and leave him nothing but the title of criminal; then all you will every have is a criminal."
We learned this in WW1\WW2 as we decimated Germany's ability to function as a nation after WW1 which was the root cause for the Nazi rise to power. We learned that when you put a man in jail then release him into the public with no future, no second chances, no resources, all you did was help train him to be a better criminal.
One must be careful not to make life "too hard" for a criminal so they have a chance to make something of their life once they do their time.
Yes I would agree. Perhaps a solution would be:
Take the ill-gotten gains and deposit them in a bank. 50% of the interest earned goes towards restitution and the other 50% to cover the costs of parole and house arrest.
Life moves on.
"... overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites for homeland security and law enforcement purposes.."
From what I have heard from certain people, they already have been doing this since Regan. The largest use for this was domestically was tracking the drug trade including but not limited to:
Large distribution rings by tracking differential images for trafficing patterns (e.g. large number of cars at 2 am at a pier that only stick around for a hour or two)
Using the IR module for finding growers in remote areas with camoed green houses.
Using the information to track abnormal warehouse activity.
Spying seems a slanted term since the cops don't SPY on people, they investigate. Same with the FBI and ATF.
So what we really have is DHS decides for what appear to be largely buget issues, not taking the information, THAT IS ALREADY BEING COLLECTED, and using it for DHS purposes. Since the DHS is a new agency they probably didn't have access to that data. This sounds largely like a formality to get them access to the data. Now the DHS will have to step through the FBI and local law enforcement channels which was the whole reason we created the DHS in the first place.
Seriously, this amounts to "The cops can use it, the FBI can use it, but the 'new' intelligence community can't." Here contract a plane to get your imagining instead.
If there was a privacy issue why not raise it when ATF raids a pot grower? Why now and not under Regan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2? And why no outcry over the fact it has been used for years already? Surely the use of images from those darn helicopters and airplanes must be a privacy conern also? Right? You know those images you can get from the county and local city... Hello? Sensible Dissent where are you? (in my best Shaggy impersonation).
Couldn't it be just as simple as:
A: It's in conflict with the basic instinct of breeding
B: It's an additional expense
C: It's a physical barrier
D: We are lazy
$400k to study this? Hell I just saved us at least $800k since when has anything the government done in the last 40 years been on or under budget?
So is he's going to a nice minimum security prision for 6 years on the tax payer dime and getting fined a million eh? How much do you want to bet he'll earn more then a million in 6 years in interest on the money he's taken in.
Sentence should have been 6 years and all assets seized.