Simple: People want to see something done to protect them even when it isn't possible.
Politicians are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, get themselves re-elected by catering to those that elected them.
The sad fact is most people didn't elect them though, just a small, focused, and motivated groups. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Don't complain when they do this when your idea of participating in politics is going to vote.
That is the smallest part of participation.
It would be no different to say you ran a marathon after driving it in an SUV, getting out 10 feet in front of the finish line and crossing it. You didn't run a marathon and voting is just crossing the finish line of the political system. We are lazy.
People are pissed at special interest groups because a group of people pooled their money, hired lobbiest, and worked hard to get their agenda through.
A few Special Interest Groups NRA Teacher's Union Pharmacutical Companies Trade Unions Your Local Church\Syna\Mosq\temp\etc.... The United Union of Gnome Collectors International Union of Bloggers Red Cross\Crescent GLBA-ETC (can keep up anymore with them...) PETA Green Peace Shriners Masons NAACP Free Press Ascc. WC3 EFF YOUR EMPLOYER
Which one are you a member of? Want your voice silenced or ignored? Every time you hear them say that special interest groups have to go, don't forget some of the ones above...
If all the people complaining about special interest groups made thier OWN special interest group you'd dwarf the resources of all the others at $5 dollars a month. Informal servey at my local mall reveals the only people that complain about special interest groups involved in government, well, don't belong to one.
We get the government we deserve and right now we deserve little if anything.
Obama talks about change, but he's from the same democrates that have been running around for over a 100 years. What change was there? Mc Cain is a republican? Why keep flip-flopping between two parties that have shown in the last 100 years their primary goal is to grab more power for... well their own party.
Seriously, we have no one to blame for this except ourselves. If we want change we need to stop listening to money, advertisements, and nicely laid out speeches and catch phrases and start listening to reason. The time for 15 minutes attention spans needs to come to a halt!
'08 Looks like this: Hillary: "Why the hell would I vote for a women that didn't have the balls to throw out her cheating husband after at least 12 years of infidelity. If you can tolerate a traitor in your marriage where else would you?"
Barack: "I've done little in congress, have no military campaign experience, and I am basically a closet socialist that lacks the balls to run as a socialist (not saying their bad). I'll bring change by following party lines and making sure that I keep my democrat backers happy..."
Mc Cain:............ I think we have a pulse.... "The tubes need to be regulated...".... can we get a canidate that isn't a fossil? Please...
We have no sense of personal responsibility left as a nation and can't perform the most basic forms of critical thinking. We beg for Big Brother in our actions and expectations but condemn Big Brother in our words.
We compain about the cops when they are there and bitch about them never being around when they're not.
We have come to expect simple answers, simple solutions, in a world that has never been, nor ever will, be simple.
We have become a planet (not just to pick on the US) of hypocrite.
The environmental types complain about global warming and want ethanol but then bitch about people starving due to high food costs
The capitalist demand free market but work hard and making sure patents and copyright are enforced by the government rather then market forces.
The difference is she didn't do it anonymously, she did it through a complete fabrication of a false identity.
There is a difference between posting as "Anonymous" verus "JackBauer". Especially when you spend months convincing that JackBauer is a real person living near by.
Well, in turn, one could say do people actually ever pay attention to what the reality of the issue is rather then make wild and vulger remarks about topics they know nothing about.
Here let me help you:
Lori is being pursued by prosecution because she is, in part, a contributing factor to Megan's death. Society has asked that this be addressed (public outcry, level of media attention etc..) in some manner.
It's that simple. How they address that is the next step. (see comments about Capone for an idea on that concept)
Now the question is, what tools does the prosecution have to punish Lori. It's simple adaptability. We have done it for centuries in law.
Here is an example: Guy goes to bar. Guy drinks and drinks and drinks. Bartender keeps giving him drinks. Guy dies from alch' poisioning.
The bartender is a factor in his death. While his intention (the bartender) was just to provide drinks it doesn't absolve him completely of his part in the death. The prosecutor has a set of legal tools at his disposal and a set of guidelines and what he can and can't do (state liability law, gross negligence resulting in death, etc..). In fact in most states the prosecution may not pursue criminal charges, as more then likely the civil case would serve as punishment enough. It's at the prosecution's discretion (as is a great deal of law, criminal or otherwise.) on what to do, if anything. If the bartender was intentionally trying to poison the customer by serving him too many drinks, manslaughter or murder may apply. Intent does factor into criminal law.
Back to Lori.
Now despite your reaction they do know how the Internet works, perhaps better then you. If someone on the street asks me my name I can say Bob, which it isn't, and I haven't violated any laws. Now if I go into a bank and pose as, say, you and withdrawn money I'm stealing money. I could also go into a church, hump a statue of Mary, and give them your name. Ironically, that is perfectly legal in most states to the best of my understanding. When it get's dicey is when they file charges against you rather then me based on the false information. Now the NATURE of my impersonation has changed. That is part of the prosecutor's tool bag, the nature of the crime applies to the tools used.
I'll give you a great example: Writing a check.
A simple contract if you would. Writing a check and bouncing it accidentally isn't illegal. Intentionally writing bad checks is.
Some crimes are modified by the tools used (assault, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with deadly force, assault with the intent to kill or maime, etc..) I bet you'd get a lesser sentence for punching someone in the face then putting their left hand in a woodchipper or disc sander...
So intention and tools used, has had a long standing in the determination of criminal proceedings.
Back to Lori.
Lori and company signed up for a Myspace page with fake information. First off, it against the Myspace EULA. Big deal not criminal yet. Civil sure, criminal nope.
Lori and company used the account to inflict emotional distress on a minor resulting in death. They did not intentionally set out to cause her death, so no manslaughter, murder, abuse, etc could apply. They did something wrong so the prosecution looks at the table of tools. This "feels" like someone sneaking into a bar using a fake ID or a golf course... what have we got... Public versus Private! DING!
Myspace is not a public system because, like a mall, just because you can walk in doesn't make it a public space. The mall owner can kick you out and if you refuse you are trespassing, it's a "private" space that is made generally avaialble to the public. The system is controlled by account login and thus makes most websites and forums a semi-private system. I do not have a Myspace page so when I go to Myspace my access is limited. This fact is what the prosecution chose at it's tool. Unlike a public street the ability to communicate on Myspace is limited (
I love kids these days, always thinking they are clever.
A long time ago a man wrote a book, he then made an index of all the words in the book and listed them in alphabetical order.
He then re-copied the book as a reference to the index.
Original: "I am the king of scotland"
Index: AM,I,KING,OF,SCOTLAND
Story: 2-1-3-4-5
Now this idea is nothing more then seeding a network with the index of data then to rebuild a particular file you pass is an index reference.
They would simply bust people for passing the index reference.
Ironical that old book became the foundation for modern day text compression schemes that used indexes and many of the key concepts that cryptography was born from.
Clever kids, if it was still the 1500's and you were trying to smuggle banned books under the nose of the inqusition. They just burned people with the indexes just as if they had the books themselves.
Honestly do they really thing that people are that stupid? If I use a pencil to stab someone I am going to jail just the same if I had used a knife. If someone is smuggling something across the border, but I don't know what, I am still an accomplice to some degree.
Plausable deniability is a great idea but the moment one of those indexes lands on you PC your gonna get dinged for whatever the index points too.
Okay, before everyone starts their throttling engines for war please remember the following:
A: ISP's are not throttling data because of bandwidth, they are throttling because of latency. If you do not understand the difference, here is a simple way to look at it
A router can handle a million packets a second let say. Wether the packet is a size of 10 or a size of 1000 it still can only handle a million packets. Bandwidth is how many seats on the bus (or if all the buses had the same number of seats, how many lanes on the road), latency is how fast the bus is going. A router it a toll gate. Too many buses, regardless of how many seats, will bog down the toll gate. P2P is very chatty in the number of packets and depending on how it sliced the data, lots of big chunks, or a whole hella lot of small chunks. Either way the guy working the toll gate is going to go postal at some point.
B: Encryption, your rights online, data type, freedom, and all of that supurious crap we like to toss around means nothing when: "You sign a contract." While I am not a lawyer I am an informed customer (I read the small print). When you sign up for Internet service, regardless of what you feel, or in fact what your rights are, you can and do sign most of those away when you sign up for a commerical service. If they say that you cannot encrypt your P2P traffic and you do; thus losing your service... that is more then acceptable under most nations idea of contract law. You have no right to privacy if you sign a contract that gives them the right to look.
Keeping A & B in mind please feel free to march forward with your discussions but, the most important thing to remember, is point A. Telling people there is plenty of bandwidth has LITTLE IF ANYTHING to do with throttling as far as I can tell. I watched 3 hearing on CSPAN and not one rep from the big three telecoms mentioned BANDWIDTH as a reason, but I did hear 18 engineers talk about routers, MTU initiated fragments, and total packets per second capacities on core routers, and I did keep count of bandwidth vs. latency.
Bandwidth Mentioned: 34 times Latency: 400+ times (I ran out of chicken scratch space on the page and gave up...)
Now I admit I did doze off after 30 minutes of an engineer trying to explain to a senate committee the difference between TCP and UDP but I am human after all.
Now certainly there is some complexity in latency and bandwidth in how they are related and from what I have heard fiber does take care of a lot of the latency issues (signal to noise ratio seemed to be a big talking point from some AT&T engiee who looked like Dracula) so feel free to toss that into the discussions.
But seriously, this whole filtering stuff has nothing to do with bandwith, so please, please, please, stop with the bad 3rd party reporting. We have already seen on/. that the ISPs aren't hurting for bandwidth.
Getting accurate information from the mainstream press on Internet filtering is like asking a caveman to fix your car... all he's gonna do is smash it with a rock.
I would concur with the protagonist wakes up with amnesia and saves the world as well as add the following:
1) No angst-ridden junior high kid setting off on an adventure to save the world while the adult population offers no assistance and is oblivious to the dangers until it's too late turning to the angst-ridden teen who in turn transforms any sense of plot into a 60 hour long "Told You So" session.
2) No more wandering heroes that seemingly habitually refuse to help but ultimatley come around once a love interest arrives.
3) Apply the EVIL OVERLORD LIST to the villian, thus removing idiotic mistakes that no person would make.
4) NO MORE TIME TRAVEL. EVER. Why go back in time and kill the hero as a child. GO back and kill his great grandparents.
5) NO MORE ADVENTURE GUILDS. EVER. When in history do we see "Heroes for Hire?" shops? *coughyoustupidbastardsthatwroteforFable*
6) No more mysterious orphans, parentless adventurers, or heroes adopted by mysterious geriactric wizards.
7) No spandex. EVER.
8) At least obey the most basic highschool taught laws of physics unless magic is involved and even if your going to break them, use some common sense! Don't make me bring up that retarded Knight Rider remake where the car gets hit and doesn't get damaged. Ok lets say the car doesn't get damaged, at 30 miles and hour it should as least skid a little upon impact, did it fire pylons into the ground to anchor itself? Weight a few tons? WTF. If the Hulk is strong enough to life a mountain, fine. I can accept that in a comic. But wouldn't it crumble around him where he's holding it as the stone can't take the pressure? Hell wouldn't it go molten where he's holding it due to the pressure involved? Come on...
9) I'm sorry but if someone is going to magically transform into a giant monster of some sort, then change back, they're gonna be naked unless the cloths were a part of them.
10) NO PLOTS INVOLVING EVIL TWINS. EVER.
11) No plots involving death rays. EVER. Death Rays are retarded in a world where a baseball bat can easily kill someone with a good hit to the head. Just about anything can cause death, a death ray is just stupid (It's a ray weapons fine. The fact it's a weapon kinda implies death to a degree). We don't call an 80 amp circuit a Death Circuit do we? How about a quest to find the scared Death Pencil that can kill anyone when you stab them in the neck with it... Any writer that pens "death ray" in a novel, game, or comic should be beaten with lead pipe, I mean a Death Pipe!
12) NO MORE ELF, DWARF, HUMAN combos please. WTF how about a Kobold, A used car salesman, and a Minataur set out on a quest to steal back a 1979 El Camino for an accountant from Skokie?
13) Just because we are humans doesn't mean the characters need to be in the story. Hell I'll take a Fraggle Rock game where you play a Doozer trying to build the most delicious buildings out of radish beams
14) Dark and gritty is a cheap cop-out from the Film Noir era to avoid having to do better character development. A crime ridden city can have a nice clear blue-sky, 80 degrees with a 15 mile an hour breeze from the NE.
15) WRITE WITH A PURPOSE IN INTERACTIVE FICTION. An adventure without a moral or purpose is plain hack-and-slash stupidity. Pick: man vs. man, man vs. himself, man vs. nature. Comedy or Tragedy?
16) NO MORE DEUS EX MACHINA CRAP! Don't start a murder mystery with 8 suspects then in the last 3 pages throw in someone out of nowhere to be the killer without explaination, backstory, foreshadowing, etc. No more wizards at the last minute, gods showing up, etc.
17) Don't answer EVER SINGLE PLOT POINT. It's ok to leave people wondering, it gives them something to talk about with their friends.
18) DO NOT OVEREXPLAIN THINGS! If John is eating a Folxichoi on planet Rebu-5 I don't care what it is or where he is if he's getting on a ship back to earth in two paragraphs. A simple, "While John looked out for the last time at the blue h
Once a long time ago a man wrote a comic concerning toast, below is my best paraphrase of that comic:
Geek: I DID IT I DID IT! Pragmatist: Did What? G: I had my computer make toast! P: You mean like a toaster?Really? Wow! That is awesome. G: Here try it! P: Eww! It tastes like burnt silicon and ash! G: So what!? The computer made toast! Everywhere computer will start making toast! Just needs some tuning. P: So did it make it faster? G: Nope. P: Is it healthier? G: Nope. P: Then why have the computer make toast? G: Because man! It's computer generated toast! P: Why not just use a toaster? G: Because computers are better! P: Has it ever occured to you that a computer may not be the best tool for everything? G: My next project I am going to have a computer make a smoothie! P: Why not just use a blender? G: Computers are awesome!!!!!
Seriously why does everything have to have a computer in it? Why does everything need to be electric, internet enabled, digitally controlled?
I am waiting for the CPU driven hammer or screwdriver next...
In the mean time I give you a new term to use: Joybread.
Joybread: (noun) A product of a needlessly complex device that could be made from a substantially simpler device.
Joybreading: (verb) To make something in an overly complicated fashion for no reason
Examples:
"I am joybreading toast in a nuclear reactor!" "It's total joybread, what a waste of resources!" "I am drinking joybreaded coffee!" "Really how was it made? In a what?! Wouldn't a coffee pot work better?"
Warhamma' has one major, GLARING, OUTSTANDING, AND IDIOTIC failing that Mythic has time and time again told us the players is not an issue, yet we complained over and over (and still do to this day).
In Warhammer, there are only two factions (sides.) And I played BETA for 3 months I NEVER SAW A SINGLE, NON-CHAOS player. EVER. With only two sides the oldest problem MMO's face crops up, un-balanced populations.
Every 10 year old kid is going to "roll" Chaos. All the hard-core PvP'ers will roll Chaos. So for every 10 Chaos we'll get 1 person playing a dwarf for about a week; subsequently the dwarf cancels because they're outnumbered 30 to 1. DAOC had 3 factions so even if Midgard outnumbered Hibbies (Hibernian) the combined populations of bucket heads (Albion) and Hibbies outnumbered the fatties (midgard). A three-way battle provided an excellent mechanism for preventing population imbalances. (And isn't a three-way better then a two-way anyway?)
Faction stacking is going to be a serious issue with Warhamma, enough to kill the game at launch if not addressed and as usual, egotist know-it-alls claim they are smarter then the players, and in this case, smarter then basic statistic and math. They denyed population imbalances for years prior to and post Atlantais in DAOC. Time and time again we would show them the population problems (on one server there was an 4 to 1 ratio of Mid's to any of the other two. The other two combined only equaled 1/2 the number of mids.) Their arrogance keeps their head in the sand and with Warhamma, unless they fire some of those twits are gonna bury their own product at launch (reminds me of Star Wars....)
We see it already in WoW with battlegroups (clusters of servers) starting to stack as people transfer to "the horde or alliance dominated" battlegroups.
At least WoW instanced the majority of PvP\RvR to control population imbalances but as far as Warhamma is sizing up, failure is written all over it before it even launches... Hell the gearing imbalances still linger from the AV debacle. On Stormstike I have both alliance and horde (Archimonde and Scilla) and When I queue up for WSG I am standing next to 70's with an average resilience (a key PvP gear statistic) of 70. When I log into my horde on Scilla and head into WSG the average is 200. Most in full s3 gear and very few without at least 4 pieces of s2. Full BG rewards because they had such an advantage during the AV transition (now fixed but the damage is done.)
Basic math doesn't lie and without major re-work I see no future for Warhamma.
When you paint a situation with only two clear cut sides, even the foot steps of a moth will break any hope of balance.
Old Man: IT'S A CULT AND I DON'T CARE WHAT OR WHO THEY THINK THEY ARE! Kid: WHO? Old Man: I CAN'T SAY OR THEY'LL SUE ME FOR DEFAMATION! Kid: AREN'T YOU ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINION? Old Man: ONLY WHEN PEOPLE WITH MONEY AGREE WITH IT! Kid: WHAT ABOUT FREE SPEECH? Old Man: FREEDOM ISN'T FREE. THOSE WITH MONEY HAVE MORE FREEDOM THEN THOSE WITHOUT IT Kid: WHAT ABOUT INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY? Old Man: ONLY IN CRIMINAL CASES KID. IN CIVIL CASES YOUR ARE POOCHED UNTIL YOU ARE BROKE THEN YOU LOSE. Kid: SO WHAT IS FREE? Old Man: A PRISON SENTENCE, DON'T COST THE DEFENDANT A DIME Kid: HOW DO I GET ONE? Old Man:
First: Black Holes are not giant black bowling balls with near infinite gravity, they may not even be "solid" in the sense that most of us would think
Second: Black Holes aren't holes in the sense of a pot hole or even that cool portable hole the loony toons were fond of
Third: It is quite possible, as gravity warps space time in our conventional thinking that you could come up to a black hole and not even notice the change or even the black hole itself due to the distortion.
Fourth: Space (as in what matter and energy exist in) isn't uniform as best as we can tell. Space, if we were to try and divide it up into little 1 inch cubes, we may find, depending on where we are in relation to one of these little 1 inch cubes, could find them billion of miles in size and that same cube, from a different location, could be a cubic millimeter. But if you were in that 1 inch cube you would think it was, well 1 cubic inch. While this is a bit of an over-simplification it helps people understand some of the oddities of black holes. A black hole may compress space around it soo much that billions of those 1 inch cubes could exist around it so from a distance it would look like objects speed up really fast because those 1 inch cubes are 'squished' down to say 1/2 an inch. Because the cubes are smaller from our perspective it looks like things speed up. It is also likely that if there are MORE cubes and they appear smaller things could be moving the same speed from our view but are in fact travelling twice as fast (yet if you were there everything is moving normally.)
This is the problem in science that we are always struggling with. The smaller things get the harder it is to be accurate (how can you look at things smaller then a photon when we use photons to look at things for instance) and the farther away things are the harder it is to accurately see them (as there are such massive objects warping space it's hard to get a clear picture.)
We turn to math to try and clear up the picture but our math as we apply it to the world around us is built on assumptions that we try and prove as best as possible, but any system built on a series of tested assumptions is bound to need correction from time to time.
A buddy of mine once said, "A black hole I'd wager if you got up and close to one is a mobius ring. A perfect black hole would be a smooth sphere at first but the moment a single particle landed to offset the mass it would first pinch in and collapse into a ring as the gravity would try to collapse back down. Then due to the inbalance the ring would osscillate into a mobius-like ring constantly flexing at extreme speeds. It would be so fast it would look like a sphere but in fact with weird twisted ring whipping around. Given just the right route you might just pass through it and back out or be trapped in the "eye of the storm" in the middle of the mobius ring's rotation\flexing"
Fun stuff happening every day but until chick's dig guys in lab coats we are screwed when it comes to the advancement of humanity. Face it the movie "Idiocracy" is more truth then fiction.
Chess Softball Kickball Baseball Soccer Checkers Go Hockey Football Water-Skiing Camping Sex Having coffee with someone face-to-face Remote control car races Whittling Gardening Lacross Golf Paintball Play a musical instrument
ALL the above are DRM-free sources of entertainment. Seriously people I swear some of you don't realized there are other forms of entertainment besides sitting in front of a computer... Let them add as much DRM as they want, once they are all out-of-business from a lack of customers then DRM goes with them. Life is not digital, there is ebb and flow in the security vs. freedom. We had that useless "4th word on page 8" protection nonsense since the old gold-box D&D games. DRM has always been around in one form or another. I swear kids these days think they invented everything... It will get worse, then better, then worse again.
Anyways, the very fact that the term Freetard is growing shows a backlash building to a degree, not so much towards pro-drm people, but the useless crap nerds complain about.
The veneer of trendy is starting to wear off the geeks as people once again realize that life is not a scene out of Tron, we do not live in our computers. Pay cash, write a letter with cursive, and remember that not every source of entertainment must come from a computer.
The pirates today are losing their edge, no longer rebels against over-priced software, but viewed increasingly as parasites that are damaging small game developers and empowering large EA type shops pumping out the same crap year after year.
This is why gaming is moving to a service-like structure rather then a product. WoW, EQ, etc are all services really rather then a game-in-a-box. Soon all single-player games will requirer a monthly subscription to play (small as that fee may be) with central hosted servers to provide content. It's the old razor sales angle used for consoles, printers, etc... Give the game away and charge a use fee instead for content.
I would like to thank all the warez teams in the 80 for bringing about "Software as a Service", as suggested by Bill Gates back in the 90s, a reality.
After our experience bribing various key people across the globe to get the Office XML specification accepted as an ISO standard we have found that the WC3 presents a much more difficult target for bribery, extortion, and other common tactics we have used in the past. Given this it is in our best interests to make sure, in order to gain firm control over HTML 5 and shut out those pesky open-source 'Freetards' to pursue the divide and counquer approach. Please provide the neccessary FUD needed to accomplish this.
FYI: I would also like to point out that whom ever is stealing my yogurt out of the fridge to please stop feeding the demon in conference room 4B using my yogurt. He has 'messed' in there several times and the cleaning crew, after having their 4th new hire devoured by the demon, are planning on refusing to clean that conference room in the future. Demons do not eat yogurt, they feed on human suffering not dairy products. In fact it would appear that demons are lactose intolerant.
And in China they say "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.
If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.
Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:
Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Q: Who pays for those subsidies? Given the tax base in the U.S. this is a classic "Borrow from Pete, to Pay Paul." The only people who can afford to purchase an electric car, even with a 25% subsidy already can afford to purchase the car without the subsidy. It is akin to subsidizing platinum rings starting at $4000 dollars giving a $1000 credit. If you can afford a $4000 dollar ring, you don't need a $1000 subsidy. The majority of people in need of hybrid cars are driving apx. 65 miles to work. Thats 130 miles round trip. Before you start subsidizing purchases you may want to subsidize research to get mileage up.
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.
Solar energy, when you map out the capacity across the U.S. is a loss in energy. You have to take the cloud coverage, sun angle, etc. into account. Not everyone lives in California, Arizona, or Florida for example. Even with 50% efficent solar panels you have to offset the energy costs of manufacturing and get a return on the cost of the panel within the life of the panel. Wind power to date is a loss econonmically unless you are a commerical wind-farm due to maintence costs, insurance, etc.
Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.
Again your method taxes the hell outta people that don't have the money in the first place. A failure of socialist mentality in general. Solar farms are great when you can find a place to build them and can get technology costs down to profitable levels (and if they were you wouldn't need government to do anything as free market mechanics would take care of that.) The largest problem with wind and solar is getting the energy from the plant to areas that can use it. A solar plant in Minnesota is useless but in Arizona it's great. You need to think like a president in your scenario, the country is a big place with very different energy requirements. Electric cars in the northern midwest are useless in the winter due to the cold. Hybrids? Sure, but pure electric is borderline madness. You have to look at a much larger picture in developing your energy policy. You're off to a good start but you are already in Neverland. I don't have 2 hours to sit at a solar charge station 1/2 through my work day because my pure electric is only going 60 miles before needing a charge. Need better batteries first.
You lack of history education is what makes this an issue.
Those that do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.
It was slave labor that was imported in.
Then it was indentured servants that were imported in.
Then is was sharecropping that was imported in.
The it was child labor that was imported in.
Then people formed unions and it stopped.
Then the unions rotted from within and rather then working with the employer became advasaries.
Then the unions grew weak and self-interested and lost power in the private sector.
Then the unions latched on to their last safe haven, government jobs.
Then the unions fought tooth an nail to bloat government to increase as many union jobs as possible to keep the money via union dues coming in. A frantic grasp as a glory long lost.
Then the businesses started importing H1B via staffers.
Then the unions complained and the government mandated that H1B's get market rate pay.
Then the H1Bs started working 80 hours a week but only reporting 40.
Then the unions complained and investigations were launched.
Then the companies sent the servers, the jobs, and the work over seas where the H1Bs aren't needed.
There has never been a golden age for US workers except when unions were strong and HONEST. Now the unions are in general a bunch of whiners that you can't even fire when they screw up. They don't, unless some is dead or in jail, accept responsibility for their own and have failed in their mission. The unions should never have stopped once they gain power in the US. They should have been fighting tooth an nail for a global minimum wage and global standards for living wages. Then there would have been no incentive to "go get cheap labor."
Outsource isn't a problem. Exporting jobs isn't a problem. Taking advantage of people, anywhere on Earth or beyond (future proofing this post) is the problem.
Solution: Global minimum wage as Earth struggles to approach parity in the job market. So long as there is a third world so to speak. The market will adjust and we will feel the pain as much of the 3rd world rises to take their "share". We had a good run but were blind to our own inflated sense of value. IT will go the way of TV repair men as technology advances.
We in IT are dealing with what autoworkers have struggled with for decades. Why did they last decades where modern IT only lasted 20 years till we hit this point? They have a union, we didn't.
We devalued our own industry and sabatoged our own success. Remember the excess during the bubble? Yeah businesses do. Remember the job hopping? Yep businesses do. Remember the network admins with the 3 flat screen monitors do track 1 exchange server and had a TCPDUMP on another "because it looked cool and made them look busy?", businesses do.
The hard fact is labor is cheaper then we would like and we are drifting ever lower and the rest of the world is rising and perhaps not in the lifetime of anyone reading this but perhaps a generation or two down the road we'll hit parity and business will have no where else to turn to for cheap labor... then again.. that might be the time the cycle starts again...
... Organizations that employ such dolts as bosses are doomed for failure....
IBM, Microsoft, CISCO, AT&T, Meridian, P&G, Gargill, Hailburton, UDLP, etc... are hardly failures and are far from "Doomed for Failure". (I assume you meant "Doomed to Fail" bte.)
Being well dressed has little to do with detail but rather motivation. As a customer I want those that I do business with to impress me, and impress upon me a sense of professionalism. I certainly wouldn't want my doctor to walk in wearing a pair of sandals and a Tee-Shirt that reads, "Licensed Boob Inspector."
Sadly I think your age group lacks and understanding of what "Professionalism" entails. YOu are confusing expertise with professionalism.
"if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention. 'An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people.' Sure, that statement makes some sense, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the design and usability factor that makes the operating system much easier to use. And while both Mac OS X and Windows have their issues, for the average person, it makes more sense to use those than Linux."
A: Linux is, has always been, and as long as LT has a say, a kernel. Not a gui, not a file system, not a productivity suite.
WTF does Ubuntu or OpenSUSE have to do with the kernel?
Does the author mean the Windowing systems? The uninformed should NEVER be allowed to propogate nonsense to a broad audience.
There is no beauty and intuition in a kernel. It's about operational modes, interupts, rings, and hard core technical implementations.
Once again Slashdot gives a forum to the exercise of raw stupidity disguised as news....
I think that could fall under entrapment-like (entrapment applies to law enforcement only last I checked) laws. Boobytrapping someone intentionally with illegal content then turning them in I think would get you in a bit of trouble. Any lawyers care to comment?
They have that already, it's called a Taser\Tazer. The idea was that cops could use a Taser instead of a gun. Of course, like any authority group with non-lethal tools they immediately used it for torture\compliance. Every time you hear of a cop using a taser the question that should be asked is: "If they didn't have a taser, would they have used lethal force?"
That's what a taser was supposed to be used for, a substitute for lethal force. Now they use it if you are unwilling to get out of a car for instance, because, of course they would have shot you dead given a lack of a taser.... right... just what we need, more forms of torture and compliance tools...
The whole idea of a cop is that they are authorized by the government and granted arrest powers. Part of that responsibility is the ability to respond with deadly force against a civilian threat. If you reduce the cops to a non-lethal arsenal then you have eliminated 1/2 of what cops are. You eliminate the SWAT team, you eliminate the idea of immediate threat elimination and eliminate a large portion of what deters crime, permanent consequences.
Love the "idea" of a non-lethal police force but the "reality" is not too cheery.
you are grossly underestimating the level of stupidity coming out of American schools these days. Yes, you probably need to document steps like "Invite Participants" and "Attend your own meeting." Jebus Rice Federal and State guidelines require a maximum of 8th grade reading level in writing. A max of 8th grade... WTF!?
I am at the point I have to document for some of these kids processes like, "In the event that you cannot log in, contact the help desk immediately at xxxxxxxx. You computer not working isn't an excuse to surf the web on the other functioning computer 4 feet away all day. And no problems don't just fix themselves overnight much like your laundry magically gets done by mom..."
Kids seriously don't undesrtand that they could actually WORK on the other computer. The concept is nearly alien to them. If THEIR computer doesn't work they have no comprehension that they could possible use a different computer.
Sadly either in a doc, wiki, or presentation you'd be suprised what you have to document now. Tons of kids that can tell you the year the Civil War started, but have no clue why it happened. Plenty of kids that can deploy Exchange but have no idea how to configure it to meet the business needs. They know how to do various steps in configuration but have no concept on how to stich all that together to provide a solution. Their like robots now, complete deterministic people in a digital universe. No analog throught anymore...
No Linux distribution to date passes the 3 most important tests of an OS:
1: Once installed my wireless network card can connect to my AES encrypted network 2: I can install my favorite game X on it and start playing with equal performance when game X runs under windows. (Currently Team Fortress 2) 3: I can sit my mother down in front of the machine and she can import a scanned picture, resize it, and send it via email to my sister.
These 3 have been accomplished under Windows XP and sadly, Vista. To date OpenSuse, Redhat, Ubuntu, or Gentoo has passed ANY of those 3.
Technology is meaningless in of itself. Technology is used to accomplish a goal. Linux's superior technology is irrelivant to a typical end user. They want to get something done on Linux. It's the same debate that has been going on since Quick and Dirt Operating System was born and regardless of the next round of the OS wars it's really just another Cola war.
Too late, there was a case of a group of people passing bootleg images of Traci Lords around that way, which by the way is classified as Kiddie Pr0n. I've sat in a few cases and lo-and-behold the images were of Traci Lords. I never through about that really... I wonder what % of cases were of her stuff... Either way that tactic went way back to the BBS era. We even had a Door module for Renegage BBSs that you put take and two files and get a steno back. The only requirement was one was larger then the other. You can steno even in audio files now. The key is, with most, having an unlock code. Most steno's now are encrypted as old bit shifts in the color (for images) were far to easy to detect automatically. The nice safety of that is without the key you would have plasuable deniability if you accidentally downloaded a steno. Can you imagine how many facebook or myspace pages have steno'ed data?
...More people writing means more people learning to communicate...
Sadly you are assuming that people are writing content that is of value and people comprehend what they read. Reading Mad Magazine, Maxim, and Playboy really are not providing the world with any intellectual growth. The Internet is about 99.9% nonsense in what is written. It is the world's largest editorial newspaper with an overdeveloped "Letters to the Editor" section that is attempting to pass itself off as truth, fact, and lacking any signficant bias. One AOL brought every yahoo (yes that pun was intentional) to the Internet they brought with them most of the BS that the original folks that help built the Internet were trying to get away from. We tried to flee into cyberspace to get away from the commericials, away from the Jerry Springer culture, away from the uneducated masses, and try to colaborate and communicate. MySpace, Facebook, and the "Social Networking Revolution" is nothing more the millions of attention starved people dragging their insecurities and frustrations with their adult-children problems. They'er writing on the Internet is uninspired, intellectually vacant, and largely self-absorbed with no formal understanding of how to even present a discussion in written form. 99% of the time they degenerate into name calling. It's as if an entire generation have lost any shred of Critical Thinking Skills and have lost the ability to communicate.
The most damning of all evidence are letters written by soldiers home. Look as letters from the American Revolution to modern day. You can write far faster now then back in the days of a quill and ink well yet look at the complete loss of quality, thoughtfulness, and sadly intelligence. It makes me ill.
The Internet has done nothing but lower the bar of what good quality of writing consists of by simply skewing the average.
Out of 10,000 blogs perhaps 100 are of significant worth to society. That means that blogs in general are worthless. That 9,900 blogs drown out the 100 by sheer volume. Humans are not stupid but they are gullable. Ideally the 100 good blogs should thrive and eclipse the 9,900 other blogs as those crappy blogs die off. But they don't.
Case in point, Jerry Spinger, Baywatch, Knight Rider, Wonderwoman, The Dukes of Hazard, Heart to Heart, Buck Rogers, Melrose Place, 90210, and so forth were some of the crappiest programs ever launched on TV. The writing was terrible, the shows were empty of anything remotely intelligent and yet thrived in their time and still do to this day. Somwehere the idea of Smart Entertainment died. Something couldn't be both intelligent AND entertaining. That mentality slit the written craft's throat. I see glimmers of hope out there, usually from the Sci-Fi crowds where the writers have chosen to look at thought-provoking writing that is entertaining rather then cheap thrills and transparent titilations.
There never will be the great writer or poets of old. They have been replaced by sub-standard nonsense and the Internet has given the a grand stage to dumb down the next generation just a little bit more.
I still cannot for the life of me understand why people have an issue with the RIAA, MPAA, YMCA, whatever. I haven't bought a CD in 15 years. Why? There hasn't been anything good put out in 15 years. Most of the music I listen to was written what... ummm. 110 years ago. I have Mike Oldfields' Songs from a Distant Earth. I think that was the last CD\Music item I purchased. I ripped all my CDs back about what 2 years ago, boxed up my CDs and store them at a rented storage facility (Paranoid about fires, lived through one once). They sit on a removable hard disk which is attached to my computer sitting next to my stero. I listen to them on the Stereo and I sync a playlist or 3 to my MP3 player. All of this is legal, why? I own the CDs and have made my backups. The key is I don't share my collection. I don't burn CDs for friends, I don't make a custom mixed CD and send it to 20 friends, etc. I'm too busy for that crap anyways. The key is DISTRIBUTION.
The problem that RIAA has is people distributing files across the Internet. This lady was guilty as hell (and stupid). Ordinary people, stitting on a jury, decided that she was in the wrong. She was busted distributing music.
They have never gone after someone who has just ripped their CDs, they are after people sharing them. Every case they have brought, every John Doe they have issued, has all been in relation to content being shared across the Internet. In fact, I don't recall any cases yet about people even downloading music, just sharing (or in many cases with P2P you end up automatically resharing what you download, Bittorrent's nature implies redistribution as you download as a result of the packet trades). If that were the case they'd be all over the IRC channels using old school direct transfers.
Why is this an issue? All the arguements, all the complaining, and all the irrelevant comparisons. The issue is trafficing of bootleg music. Not ripping your music to MP3, AACS, FLAC, OGG, APE, etc. The RIAA has never shook someone down for ripping "Blade Runner" (which the person owns) to their laptop for a flight or their HTPC. They go after people for Ripping "Blade Runner" then posting it to a P2P network. If you aren't distributing it on the Internet then they don't really have an issue.
I just don't get what the problem here is. As far as I've seen this is no different in nature then the last 30 years or from that matter last 130 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple:
People want to see something done to protect them even when it isn't possible.
Politicians are doing exactly what they are supposed to do, get themselves re-elected by catering to those that elected them.
The sad fact is most people didn't elect them though, just a small, focused, and motivated groups. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Don't complain when they do this when your idea of participating in politics is going to vote.
That is the smallest part of participation.
It would be no different to say you ran a marathon after driving it in an SUV, getting out 10 feet in front of the finish line and crossing it. You didn't run a marathon and voting is just crossing the finish line of the political system. We are lazy.
People are pissed at special interest groups because a group of people pooled their money, hired lobbiest, and worked hard to get their agenda through.
A few Special Interest Groups
NRA
Teacher's Union
Pharmacutical Companies
Trade Unions
Your Local Church\Syna\Mosq\temp\etc....
The United Union of Gnome Collectors
International Union of Bloggers
Red Cross\Crescent
GLBA-ETC (can keep up anymore with them...)
PETA
Green Peace
Shriners
Masons
NAACP
Free Press Ascc.
WC3
EFF
YOUR EMPLOYER
Which one are you a member of? Want your voice silenced or ignored? Every time you hear them say that special interest groups have to go, don't forget some of the ones above...
If all the people complaining about special interest groups made thier OWN special interest group you'd dwarf the resources of all the others at $5 dollars a month. Informal servey at my local mall reveals the only people that complain about special interest groups involved in government, well, don't belong to one.
We get the government we deserve and right now we deserve little if anything.
Obama talks about change, but he's from the same democrates that have been running around for over a 100 years. What change was there? Mc Cain is a republican? Why keep flip-flopping between two parties that have shown in the last 100 years their primary goal is to grab more power for... well their own party.
Seriously, we have no one to blame for this except ourselves. If we want change we need to stop listening to money, advertisements, and nicely laid out speeches and catch phrases and start listening to reason. The time for 15 minutes attention spans needs to come to a halt!
'08 Looks like this:
Hillary: "Why the hell would I vote for a women that didn't have the balls to throw out her cheating husband after at least 12 years of infidelity. If you can tolerate a traitor in your marriage where else would you?"
Barack: "I've done little in congress, have no military campaign experience, and I am basically a closet socialist that lacks the balls to run as a socialist (not saying their bad). I'll bring change by following party lines and making sure that I keep my democrat backers happy..."
Mc Cain: .... .... .... I think we have a pulse.... "The tubes need to be regulated..." .... can we get a canidate that isn't a fossil? Please...
We have no sense of personal responsibility left as a nation and can't perform the most basic forms of critical thinking. We beg for Big Brother in our actions and expectations but condemn Big Brother in our words.
We compain about the cops when they are there and bitch about them never being around when they're not.
We have come to expect simple answers, simple solutions, in a world that has never been, nor ever will, be simple.
We have become a planet (not just to pick on the US) of hypocrite.
The environmental types complain about global warming and want ethanol but then bitch about people starving due to high food costs
The capitalist demand free market but work hard and making sure patents and copyright are enforced by the government rather then market forces.
The difference is she didn't do it anonymously, she did it through a complete fabrication of a false identity.
There is a difference between posting as "Anonymous" verus "JackBauer". Especially when you spend months convincing that JackBauer is a real person living near by.
Well, in turn, one could say do people actually ever pay attention to what the reality of the issue is rather then make wild and vulger remarks about topics they know nothing about.
Here let me help you:
Lori is being pursued by prosecution because she is, in part, a contributing factor to Megan's death. Society has asked that this be addressed (public outcry, level of media attention etc..) in some manner.
It's that simple. How they address that is the next step. (see comments about Capone for an idea on that concept)
Now the question is, what tools does the prosecution have to punish Lori. It's simple adaptability. We have done it for centuries in law.
Here is an example:
Guy goes to bar.
Guy drinks and drinks and drinks.
Bartender keeps giving him drinks.
Guy dies from alch' poisioning.
The bartender is a factor in his death. While his intention (the bartender) was just to provide drinks it doesn't absolve him completely of his part in the death. The prosecutor has a set of legal tools at his disposal and a set of guidelines and what he can and can't do (state liability law, gross negligence resulting in death, etc..). In fact in most states the prosecution may not pursue criminal charges, as more then likely the civil case would serve as punishment enough. It's at the prosecution's discretion (as is a great deal of law, criminal or otherwise.) on what to do, if anything. If the bartender was intentionally trying to poison the customer by serving him too many drinks, manslaughter or murder may apply. Intent does factor into criminal law.
Back to Lori.
Now despite your reaction they do know how the Internet works, perhaps better then you. If someone on the street asks me my name I can say Bob, which it isn't, and I haven't violated any laws. Now if I go into a bank and pose as, say, you and withdrawn money I'm stealing money. I could also go into a church, hump a statue of Mary, and give them your name. Ironically, that is perfectly legal in most states to the best of my understanding. When it get's dicey is when they file charges against you rather then me based on the false information. Now the NATURE of my impersonation has changed. That is part of the prosecutor's tool bag, the nature of the crime applies to the tools used.
I'll give you a great example:
Writing a check.
A simple contract if you would. Writing a check and bouncing it accidentally isn't illegal. Intentionally writing bad checks is.
Some crimes are modified by the tools used (assault, assault with a deadly weapon, assault with deadly force, assault with the intent to kill or maime, etc..) I bet you'd get a lesser sentence for punching someone in the face then putting their left hand in a woodchipper or disc sander...
So intention and tools used, has had a long standing in the determination of criminal proceedings.
Back to Lori.
Lori and company signed up for a Myspace page with fake information. First off, it against the Myspace EULA. Big deal not criminal yet. Civil sure, criminal nope.
Lori and company used the account to inflict emotional distress on a minor resulting in death. They did not intentionally set out to cause her death, so no manslaughter, murder, abuse, etc could apply. They did something wrong so the prosecution looks at the table of tools. This "feels" like someone sneaking into a bar using a fake ID or a golf course... what have we got... Public versus Private! DING!
Myspace is not a public system because, like a mall, just because you can walk in doesn't make it a public space. The mall owner can kick you out and if you refuse you are trespassing, it's a "private" space that is made generally avaialble to the public. The system is controlled by account login and thus makes most websites and forums a semi-private system. I do not have a Myspace page so when I go to Myspace my access is limited. This fact is what the prosecution chose at it's tool. Unlike a public street the ability to communicate on Myspace is limited (
I love kids these days, always thinking they are clever.
A long time ago a man wrote a book, he then made an index of all the words in the book and listed them in alphabetical order.
He then re-copied the book as a reference to the index.
Original: "I am the king of scotland"
Index: AM,I,KING,OF,SCOTLAND
Story: 2-1-3-4-5
Now this idea is nothing more then seeding a network with the index of data then to rebuild a particular file you pass is an index reference.
They would simply bust people for passing the index reference.
Ironical that old book became the foundation for modern day text compression schemes that used indexes and many of the key concepts that cryptography was born from.
Clever kids, if it was still the 1500's and you were trying to smuggle banned books under the nose of the inqusition. They just burned people with the indexes just as if they had the books themselves.
Honestly do they really thing that people are that stupid? If I use a pencil to stab someone I am going to jail just the same if I had used a knife. If someone is smuggling something across the border, but I don't know what, I am still an accomplice to some degree.
Plausable deniability is a great idea but the moment one of those indexes lands on you PC your gonna get dinged for whatever the index points too.
Okay, before everyone starts their throttling engines for war please remember the following:
A: ISP's are not throttling data because of bandwidth, they are throttling because of latency. If you do not understand the difference, here is a simple way to look at it
A router can handle a million packets a second let say. Wether the packet is a size of 10 or a size of 1000 it still can only handle a million packets. Bandwidth is how many seats on the bus (or if all the buses had the same number of seats, how many lanes on the road), latency is how fast the bus is going. A router it a toll gate. Too many buses, regardless of how many seats, will bog down the toll gate. P2P is very chatty in the number of packets and depending on how it sliced the data, lots of big chunks, or a whole hella lot of small chunks. Either way the guy working the toll gate is going to go postal at some point.
B: Encryption, your rights online, data type, freedom, and all of that supurious crap we like to toss around means nothing when: "You sign a contract." While I am not a lawyer I am an informed customer (I read the small print). When you sign up for Internet service, regardless of what you feel, or in fact what your rights are, you can and do sign most of those away when you sign up for a commerical service. If they say that you cannot encrypt your P2P traffic and you do; thus losing your service... that is more then acceptable under most nations idea of contract law. You have no right to privacy if you sign a contract that gives them the right to look.
Keeping A & B in mind please feel free to march forward with your discussions but, the most important thing to remember, is point A. Telling people there is plenty of bandwidth has LITTLE IF ANYTHING to do with throttling as far as I can tell. I watched 3 hearing on CSPAN and not one rep from the big three telecoms mentioned BANDWIDTH as a reason, but I did hear 18 engineers talk about routers, MTU initiated fragments, and total packets per second capacities on core routers, and I did keep count of bandwidth vs. latency.
Bandwidth Mentioned: 34 times
Latency: 400+ times (I ran out of chicken scratch space on the page and gave up...)
Now I admit I did doze off after 30 minutes of an engineer trying to explain to a senate committee the difference between TCP and UDP but I am human after all.
Now certainly there is some complexity in latency and bandwidth in how they are related and from what I have heard fiber does take care of a lot of the latency issues (signal to noise ratio seemed to be a big talking point from some AT&T engiee who looked like Dracula) so feel free to toss that into the discussions.
But seriously, this whole filtering stuff has nothing to do with bandwith, so please, please, please, stop with the bad 3rd party reporting. We have already seen on /. that the ISPs aren't hurting for bandwidth.
Getting accurate information from the mainstream press on Internet filtering is like asking a caveman to fix your car... all he's gonna do is smash it with a rock.
I would concur with the protagonist wakes up with amnesia and saves the world as well as add the following:
1) No angst-ridden junior high kid setting off on an adventure to save the world while the adult population offers no assistance and is oblivious to the dangers until it's too late turning to the angst-ridden teen who in turn transforms any sense of plot into a 60 hour long "Told You So" session.
2) No more wandering heroes that seemingly habitually refuse to help but ultimatley come around once a love interest arrives.
3) Apply the EVIL OVERLORD LIST to the villian, thus removing idiotic mistakes that no person would make.
4) NO MORE TIME TRAVEL. EVER. Why go back in time and kill the hero as a child. GO back and kill his great grandparents.
5) NO MORE ADVENTURE GUILDS. EVER. When in history do we see "Heroes for Hire?" shops? *coughyoustupidbastardsthatwroteforFable*
6) No more mysterious orphans, parentless adventurers, or heroes adopted by mysterious geriactric wizards.
7) No spandex. EVER.
8) At least obey the most basic highschool taught laws of physics unless magic is involved and even if your going to break them, use some common sense! Don't make me bring up that retarded Knight Rider remake where the car gets hit and doesn't get damaged. Ok lets say the car doesn't get damaged, at 30 miles and hour it should as least skid a little upon impact, did it fire pylons into the ground to anchor itself? Weight a few tons? WTF. If the Hulk is strong enough to life a mountain, fine. I can accept that in a comic. But wouldn't it crumble around him where he's holding it as the stone can't take the pressure? Hell wouldn't it go molten where he's holding it due to the pressure involved? Come on...
9) I'm sorry but if someone is going to magically transform into a giant monster of some sort, then change back, they're gonna be naked unless the cloths were a part of them.
10) NO PLOTS INVOLVING EVIL TWINS. EVER.
11) No plots involving death rays. EVER. Death Rays are retarded in a world where a baseball bat can easily kill someone with a good hit to the head. Just about anything can cause death, a death ray is just stupid (It's a ray weapons fine. The fact it's a weapon kinda implies death to a degree). We don't call an 80 amp circuit a Death Circuit do we? How about a quest to find the scared Death Pencil that can kill anyone when you stab them in the neck with it... Any writer that pens "death ray" in a novel, game, or comic should be beaten with lead pipe, I mean a Death Pipe!
12) NO MORE ELF, DWARF, HUMAN combos please. WTF how about a Kobold, A used car salesman, and a Minataur set out on a quest to steal back a 1979 El Camino for an accountant from Skokie?
13) Just because we are humans doesn't mean the characters need to be in the story. Hell I'll take a Fraggle Rock game where you play a Doozer trying to build the most delicious buildings out of radish beams
14) Dark and gritty is a cheap cop-out from the Film Noir era to avoid having to do better character development. A crime ridden city can have a nice clear blue-sky, 80 degrees with a 15 mile an hour breeze from the NE.
15) WRITE WITH A PURPOSE IN INTERACTIVE FICTION. An adventure without a moral or purpose is plain hack-and-slash stupidity. Pick: man vs. man, man vs. himself, man vs. nature. Comedy or Tragedy?
16) NO MORE DEUS EX MACHINA CRAP! Don't start a murder mystery with 8 suspects then in the last 3 pages throw in someone out of nowhere to be the killer without explaination, backstory, foreshadowing, etc. No more wizards at the last minute, gods showing up, etc.
17) Don't answer EVER SINGLE PLOT POINT. It's ok to leave people wondering, it gives them something to talk about with their friends.
18) DO NOT OVEREXPLAIN THINGS! If John is eating a Folxichoi on planet Rebu-5 I don't care what it is or where he is if he's getting on a ship back to earth in two paragraphs. A simple, "While John looked out for the last time at the blue h
Once a long time ago a man wrote a comic concerning toast, below is my best paraphrase of that comic:
Geek: I DID IT I DID IT!
Pragmatist: Did What?
G: I had my computer make toast!
P: You mean like a toaster?Really? Wow! That is awesome.
G: Here try it!
P: Eww! It tastes like burnt silicon and ash!
G: So what!? The computer made toast! Everywhere computer will start making toast! Just needs some tuning.
P: So did it make it faster?
G: Nope.
P: Is it healthier?
G: Nope.
P: Then why have the computer make toast?
G: Because man! It's computer generated toast!
P: Why not just use a toaster?
G: Because computers are better!
P: Has it ever occured to you that a computer may not be the best tool for everything?
G: My next project I am going to have a computer make a smoothie!
P: Why not just use a blender?
G: Computers are awesome!!!!!
Seriously why does everything have to have a computer in it? Why does everything need to be electric, internet enabled, digitally controlled?
I am waiting for the CPU driven hammer or screwdriver next...
In the mean time I give you a new term to use: Joybread.
Joybread: (noun) A product of a needlessly complex device that could be made from a substantially simpler device.
Joybreading: (verb) To make something in an overly complicated fashion for no reason
Examples:
"I am joybreading toast in a nuclear reactor!"
"It's total joybread, what a waste of resources!"
"I am drinking joybreaded coffee!"
"Really how was it made? In a what?! Wouldn't a coffee pot work better?"
In full disclousure I am a former DAOC player:
Warhamma' has one major, GLARING, OUTSTANDING, AND IDIOTIC failing that Mythic has time and time again told us the players is not an issue, yet we complained over and over (and still do to this day).
In Warhammer, there are only two factions (sides.) And I played BETA for 3 months I NEVER SAW A SINGLE, NON-CHAOS player. EVER. With only two sides the oldest problem MMO's face crops up, un-balanced populations.
Every 10 year old kid is going to "roll" Chaos. All the hard-core PvP'ers will roll Chaos. So for every 10 Chaos we'll get 1 person playing a dwarf for about a week; subsequently the dwarf cancels because they're outnumbered 30 to 1. DAOC had 3 factions so even if Midgard outnumbered Hibbies (Hibernian) the combined populations of bucket heads (Albion) and Hibbies outnumbered the fatties (midgard). A three-way battle provided an excellent mechanism for preventing population imbalances. (And isn't a three-way better then a two-way anyway?)
Faction stacking is going to be a serious issue with Warhamma, enough to kill the game at launch if not addressed and as usual, egotist know-it-alls claim they are smarter then the players, and in this case, smarter then basic statistic and math. They denyed population imbalances for years prior to and post Atlantais in DAOC. Time and time again we would show them the population problems (on one server there was an 4 to 1 ratio of Mid's to any of the other two. The other two combined only equaled 1/2 the number of mids.) Their arrogance keeps their head in the sand and with Warhamma, unless they fire some of those twits are gonna bury their own product at launch (reminds me of Star Wars....)
We see it already in WoW with battlegroups (clusters of servers) starting to stack as people transfer to "the horde or alliance dominated" battlegroups.
At least WoW instanced the majority of PvP\RvR to control population imbalances but as far as Warhamma is sizing up, failure is written all over it before it even launches... Hell the gearing imbalances still linger from the AV debacle. On Stormstike I have both alliance and horde (Archimonde and Scilla) and When I queue up for WSG I am standing next to 70's with an average resilience (a key PvP gear statistic) of 70. When I log into my horde on Scilla and head into WSG the average is 200. Most in full s3 gear and very few without at least 4 pieces of s2. Full BG rewards because they had such an advantage during the AV transition (now fixed but the damage is done.)
Basic math doesn't lie and without major re-work I see no future for Warhamma.
When you paint a situation with only two clear cut sides, even the foot steps of a moth will break any hope of balance.
Plain and simple, this guy's career is toast. His greed is incomprehensible to me.
Old Man: IT'S A CULT AND I DON'T CARE WHAT OR WHO THEY THINK THEY ARE!
Kid: WHO?
Old Man: I CAN'T SAY OR THEY'LL SUE ME FOR DEFAMATION!
Kid: AREN'T YOU ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINION?
Old Man: ONLY WHEN PEOPLE WITH MONEY AGREE WITH IT!
Kid: WHAT ABOUT FREE SPEECH?
Old Man: FREEDOM ISN'T FREE. THOSE WITH MONEY HAVE MORE FREEDOM THEN THOSE WITHOUT IT
Kid: WHAT ABOUT INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY?
Old Man: ONLY IN CRIMINAL CASES KID. IN CIVIL CASES YOUR ARE POOCHED UNTIL YOU ARE BROKE THEN YOU LOSE.
Kid: SO WHAT IS FREE?
Old Man: A PRISON SENTENCE, DON'T COST THE DEFENDANT A DIME
Kid: HOW DO I GET ONE?
Old Man:
First: Black Holes are not giant black bowling balls with near infinite gravity, they may not even be "solid" in the sense that most of us would think
Second: Black Holes aren't holes in the sense of a pot hole or even that cool portable hole the loony toons were fond of
Third: It is quite possible, as gravity warps space time in our conventional thinking that you could come up to a black hole and not even notice the change or even the black hole itself due to the distortion.
Fourth: Space (as in what matter and energy exist in) isn't uniform as best as we can tell. Space, if we were to try and divide it up into little 1 inch cubes, we may find, depending on where we are in relation to one of these little 1 inch cubes, could find them billion of miles in size and that same cube, from a different location, could be a cubic millimeter. But if you were in that 1 inch cube you would think it was, well 1 cubic inch. While this is a bit of an over-simplification it helps people understand some of the oddities of black holes. A black hole may compress space around it soo much that billions of those 1 inch cubes could exist around it so from a distance it would look like objects speed up really fast because those 1 inch cubes are 'squished' down to say 1/2 an inch. Because the cubes are smaller from our perspective it looks like things speed up. It is also likely that if there are MORE cubes and they appear smaller things could be moving the same speed from our view but are in fact travelling twice as fast (yet if you were there everything is moving normally.)
This is the problem in science that we are always struggling with. The smaller things get the harder it is to be accurate (how can you look at things smaller then a photon when we use photons to look at things for instance) and the farther away things are the harder it is to accurately see them (as there are such massive objects warping space it's hard to get a clear picture.)
We turn to math to try and clear up the picture but our math as we apply it to the world around us is built on assumptions that we try and prove as best as possible, but any system built on a series of tested assumptions is bound to need correction from time to time.
A buddy of mine once said, "A black hole I'd wager if you got up and close to one is a mobius ring. A perfect black hole would be a smooth sphere at first but the moment a single particle landed to offset the mass it would first pinch in and collapse into a ring as the gravity would try to collapse back down. Then due to the inbalance the ring would osscillate into a mobius-like ring constantly flexing at extreme speeds. It would be so fast it would look like a sphere but in fact with weird twisted ring whipping around. Given just the right route you might just pass through it and back out or be trapped in the "eye of the storm" in the middle of the mobius ring's rotation\flexing"
Fun stuff happening every day but until chick's dig guys in lab coats we are screwed when it comes to the advancement of humanity. Face it the movie "Idiocracy" is more truth then fiction.
Chess
Softball
Kickball
Baseball
Soccer
Checkers
Go
Hockey
Football
Water-Skiing
Camping
Sex
Having coffee with someone face-to-face
Remote control car races
Whittling
Gardening
Lacross
Golf
Paintball
Play a musical instrument
ALL the above are DRM-free sources of entertainment. Seriously people I swear some of you don't realized there are other forms of entertainment besides sitting in front of a computer... Let them add as much DRM as they want, once they are all out-of-business from a lack of customers then DRM goes with them. Life is not digital, there is ebb and flow in the security vs. freedom. We had that useless "4th word on page 8" protection nonsense since the old gold-box D&D games. DRM has always been around in one form or another. I swear kids these days think they invented everything... It will get worse, then better, then worse again.
Anyways, the very fact that the term Freetard is growing shows a backlash building to a degree, not so much towards pro-drm people, but the useless crap nerds complain about.
The veneer of trendy is starting to wear off the geeks as people once again realize that life is not a scene out of Tron, we do not live in our computers. Pay cash, write a letter with cursive, and remember that not every source of entertainment must come from a computer.
The pirates today are losing their edge, no longer rebels against over-priced software, but viewed increasingly as parasites that are damaging small game developers and empowering large EA type shops pumping out the same crap year after year.
This is why gaming is moving to a service-like structure rather then a product. WoW, EQ, etc are all services really rather then a game-in-a-box. Soon all single-player games will requirer a monthly subscription to play (small as that fee may be) with central hosted servers to provide content. It's the old razor sales angle used for consoles, printers, etc... Give the game away and charge a use fee instead for content.
I would like to thank all the warez teams in the 80 for bringing about "Software as a Service", as suggested by Bill Gates back in the 90s, a reality.
To Staff, From "Da Boss"
After our experience bribing various key people across the globe to get the Office XML specification accepted as an ISO standard we have found that the WC3 presents a much more difficult target for bribery, extortion, and other common tactics we have used in the past. Given this it is in our best interests to make sure, in order to gain firm control over HTML 5 and shut out those pesky open-source 'Freetards' to pursue the divide and counquer approach. Please provide the neccessary FUD needed to accomplish this.
FYI: I would also like to point out that whom ever is stealing my yogurt out of the fridge to please stop feeding the demon in conference room 4B using my yogurt. He has 'messed' in there several times and the cleaning crew, after having their 4th new hire devoured by the demon, are planning on refusing to clean that conference room in the future. Demons do not eat yogurt, they feed on human suffering not dairy products. In fact it would appear that demons are lactose intolerant.
Q: Who pays for those subsidies? Given the tax base in the U.S. this is a classic "Borrow from Pete, to Pay Paul." The only people who can afford to purchase an electric car, even with a 25% subsidy already can afford to purchase the car without the subsidy. It is akin to subsidizing platinum rings starting at $4000 dollars giving a $1000 credit. If you can afford a $4000 dollar ring, you don't need a $1000 subsidy. The majority of people in need of hybrid cars are driving apx. 65 miles to work. Thats 130 miles round trip. Before you start subsidizing purchases you may want to subsidize research to get mileage up.
Solar energy, when you map out the capacity across the U.S. is a loss in energy. You have to take the cloud coverage, sun angle, etc. into account. Not everyone lives in California, Arizona, or Florida for example. Even with 50% efficent solar panels you have to offset the energy costs of manufacturing and get a return on the cost of the panel within the life of the panel. Wind power to date is a loss econonmically unless you are a commerical wind-farm due to maintence costs, insurance, etc.
Again your method taxes the hell outta people that don't have the money in the first place. A failure of socialist mentality in general. Solar farms are great when you can find a place to build them and can get technology costs down to profitable levels (and if they were you wouldn't need government to do anything as free market mechanics would take care of that.) The largest problem with wind and solar is getting the energy from the plant to areas that can use it. A solar plant in Minnesota is useless but in Arizona it's great. You need to think like a president in your scenario, the country is a big place with very different energy requirements. Electric cars in the northern midwest are useless in the winter due to the cold. Hybrids? Sure, but pure electric is borderline madness. You have to look at a much larger picture in developing your energy policy. You're off to a good start but you are already in Neverland. I don't have 2 hours to sit at a solar charge station 1/2 through my work day because my pure electric is only going 60 miles before needing a charge. Need better batteries first.
You lack of history education is what makes this an issue.
Those that do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.
It was slave labor that was imported in.
Then it was indentured servants that were imported in.
Then is was sharecropping that was imported in.
The it was child labor that was imported in.
Then people formed unions and it stopped.
Then the unions rotted from within and rather then working with the employer became advasaries.
Then the unions grew weak and self-interested and lost power in the private sector.
Then the unions latched on to their last safe haven, government jobs.
Then the unions fought tooth an nail to bloat government to increase as many union jobs as possible to keep the money via union dues coming in. A frantic grasp as a glory long lost.
Then the businesses started importing H1B via staffers.
Then the unions complained and the government mandated that H1B's get market rate pay.
Then the H1Bs started working 80 hours a week but only reporting 40.
Then the unions complained and investigations were launched.
Then the companies sent the servers, the jobs, and the work over seas where the H1Bs aren't needed.
There has never been a golden age for US workers except when unions were strong and HONEST. Now the unions are in general a bunch of whiners that you can't even fire when they screw up. They don't, unless some is dead or in jail, accept responsibility for their own and have failed in their mission. The unions should never have stopped once they gain power in the US. They should have been fighting tooth an nail for a global minimum wage and global standards for living wages. Then there would have been no incentive to "go get cheap labor."
Outsource isn't a problem. Exporting jobs isn't a problem. Taking advantage of people, anywhere on Earth or beyond (future proofing this post) is the problem.
Solution: Global minimum wage as Earth struggles to approach parity in the job market. So long as there is a third world so to speak. The market will adjust and we will feel the pain as much of the 3rd world rises to take their "share". We had a good run but were blind to our own inflated sense of value. IT will go the way of TV repair men as technology advances.
We in IT are dealing with what autoworkers have struggled with for decades. Why did they last decades where modern IT only lasted 20 years till we hit this point? They have a union, we didn't.
We devalued our own industry and sabatoged our own success. Remember the excess during the bubble? Yeah businesses do. Remember the job hopping? Yep businesses do. Remember the network admins with the 3 flat screen monitors do track 1 exchange server and had a TCPDUMP on another "because it looked cool and made them look busy?", businesses do.
The hard fact is labor is cheaper then we would like and we are drifting ever lower and the rest of the world is rising and perhaps not in the lifetime of anyone reading this but perhaps a generation or two down the road we'll hit parity and business will have no where else to turn to for cheap labor... then again.. that might be the time the cycle starts again...
my 2 cents. enjoy, hate, flame etc...
... Organizations that employ such dolts as bosses are doomed for failure. ...
IBM, Microsoft, CISCO, AT&T, Meridian, P&G, Gargill, Hailburton, UDLP, etc... are hardly failures and are far from "Doomed for Failure". (I assume you meant "Doomed to Fail" bte.)
Being well dressed has little to do with detail but rather motivation. As a customer I want those that I do business with to impress me, and impress upon me a sense of professionalism. I certainly wouldn't want my doctor to walk in wearing a pair of sandals and a Tee-Shirt that reads, "Licensed Boob Inspector."
Sadly I think your age group lacks and understanding of what "Professionalism" entails. YOu are confusing expertise with professionalism.
Per the original post:
"if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention. 'An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people.' Sure, that statement makes some sense, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the design and usability factor that makes the operating system much easier to use. And while both Mac OS X and Windows have their issues, for the average person, it makes more sense to use those than Linux."
A: Linux is, has always been, and as long as LT has a say, a kernel. Not a gui, not a file system, not a productivity suite.
WTF does Ubuntu or OpenSUSE have to do with the kernel?
Does the author mean the Windowing systems? The uninformed should NEVER be allowed to propogate nonsense to a broad audience.
There is no beauty and intuition in a kernel. It's about operational modes, interupts, rings, and hard core technical implementations.
Once again Slashdot gives a forum to the exercise of raw stupidity disguised as news....
IANAL:
I think that could fall under entrapment-like (entrapment applies to law enforcement only last I checked) laws. Boobytrapping someone intentionally with illegal content then turning them in I think would get you in a bit of trouble. Any lawyers care to comment?
* Non-Lethal Weaponry for Cops
They have that already, it's called a Taser\Tazer. The idea was that cops could use a Taser instead of a gun. Of course, like any authority group with non-lethal tools they immediately used it for torture\compliance. Every time you hear of a cop using a taser the question that should be asked is: "If they didn't have a taser, would they have used lethal force?"
That's what a taser was supposed to be used for, a substitute for lethal force. Now they use it if you are unwilling to get out of a car for instance, because, of course they would have shot you dead given a lack of a taser.... right... just what we need, more forms of torture and compliance tools...
The whole idea of a cop is that they are authorized by the government and granted arrest powers. Part of that responsibility is the ability to respond with deadly force against a civilian threat. If you reduce the cops to a non-lethal arsenal then you have eliminated 1/2 of what cops are. You eliminate the SWAT team, you eliminate the idea of immediate threat elimination and eliminate a large portion of what deters crime, permanent consequences.
Love the "idea" of a non-lethal police force but the "reality" is not too cheery.
you are grossly underestimating the level of stupidity coming out of American schools these days. Yes, you probably need to document steps like "Invite Participants" and "Attend your own meeting." Jebus Rice Federal and State guidelines require a maximum of 8th grade reading level in writing. A max of 8th grade... WTF!?
I am at the point I have to document for some of these kids processes like, "In the event that you cannot log in, contact the help desk immediately at xxxxxxxx. You computer not working isn't an excuse to surf the web on the other functioning computer 4 feet away all day. And no problems don't just fix themselves overnight much like your laundry magically gets done by mom..."
Kids seriously don't undesrtand that they could actually WORK on the other computer. The concept is nearly alien to them. If THEIR computer doesn't work they have no comprehension that they could possible use a different computer.
Sadly either in a doc, wiki, or presentation you'd be suprised what you have to document now. Tons of kids that can tell you the year the Civil War started, but have no clue why it happened. Plenty of kids that can deploy Exchange but have no idea how to configure it to meet the business needs. They know how to do various steps in configuration but have no concept on how to stich all that together to provide a solution. Their like robots now, complete deterministic people in a digital universe. No analog throught anymore...
No Linux distribution to date passes the 3 most important tests of an OS:
1: Once installed my wireless network card can connect to my AES encrypted network
2: I can install my favorite game X on it and start playing with equal performance when game X runs under windows. (Currently Team Fortress 2)
3: I can sit my mother down in front of the machine and she can import a scanned picture, resize it, and send it via email to my sister.
These 3 have been accomplished under Windows XP and sadly, Vista. To date OpenSuse, Redhat, Ubuntu, or Gentoo has passed ANY of those 3.
Technology is meaningless in of itself. Technology is used to accomplish a goal. Linux's superior technology is irrelivant to a typical end user. They want to get something done on Linux. It's the same debate that has been going on since Quick and Dirt Operating System was born and regardless of the next round of the OS wars it's really just another Cola war.
Too late, there was a case of a group of people passing bootleg images of Traci Lords around that way, which by the way is classified as Kiddie Pr0n. I've sat in a few cases and lo-and-behold the images were of Traci Lords. I never through about that really... I wonder what % of cases were of her stuff... Either way that tactic went way back to the BBS era. We even had a Door module for Renegage BBSs that you put take and two files and get a steno back. The only requirement was one was larger then the other. You can steno even in audio files now. The key is, with most, having an unlock code. Most steno's now are encrypted as old bit shifts in the color (for images) were far to easy to detect automatically. The nice safety of that is without the key you would have plasuable deniability if you accidentally downloaded a steno. Can you imagine how many facebook or myspace pages have steno'ed data?
I never have and never will purchase an EA game. Ever. Why? One Word:
Origin
...More people writing means more people learning to communicate...
Sadly you are assuming that people are writing content that is of value and people comprehend what they read. Reading Mad Magazine, Maxim, and Playboy really are not providing the world with any intellectual growth. The Internet is about 99.9% nonsense in what is written. It is the world's largest editorial newspaper with an overdeveloped "Letters to the Editor" section that is attempting to pass itself off as truth, fact, and lacking any signficant bias. One AOL brought every yahoo (yes that pun was intentional) to the Internet they brought with them most of the BS that the original folks that help built the Internet were trying to get away from. We tried to flee into cyberspace to get away from the commericials, away from the Jerry Springer culture, away from the uneducated masses, and try to colaborate and communicate. MySpace, Facebook, and the "Social Networking Revolution" is nothing more the millions of attention starved people dragging their insecurities and frustrations with their adult-children problems. They'er writing on the Internet is uninspired, intellectually vacant, and largely self-absorbed with no formal understanding of how to even present a discussion in written form. 99% of the time they degenerate into name calling. It's as if an entire generation have lost any shred of Critical Thinking Skills and have lost the ability to communicate.
The most damning of all evidence are letters written by soldiers home. Look as letters from the American Revolution to modern day. You can write far faster now then back in the days of a quill and ink well yet look at the complete loss of quality, thoughtfulness, and sadly intelligence. It makes me ill.
The Internet has done nothing but lower the bar of what good quality of writing consists of by simply skewing the average.
Out of 10,000 blogs perhaps 100 are of significant worth to society. That means that blogs in general are worthless. That 9,900 blogs drown out the 100 by sheer volume. Humans are not stupid but they are gullable. Ideally the 100 good blogs should thrive and eclipse the 9,900 other blogs as those crappy blogs die off. But they don't.
Case in point, Jerry Spinger, Baywatch, Knight Rider, Wonderwoman, The Dukes of Hazard, Heart to Heart, Buck Rogers, Melrose Place, 90210, and so forth were some of the crappiest programs ever launched on TV. The writing was terrible, the shows were empty of anything remotely intelligent and yet thrived in their time and still do to this day. Somwehere the idea of Smart Entertainment died. Something couldn't be both intelligent AND entertaining. That mentality slit the written craft's throat. I see glimmers of hope out there, usually from the Sci-Fi crowds where the writers have chosen to look at thought-provoking writing that is entertaining rather then cheap thrills and transparent titilations.
There never will be the great writer or poets of old. They have been replaced by sub-standard nonsense and the Internet has given the a grand stage to dumb down the next generation just a little bit more.
I still cannot for the life of me understand why people have an issue with the RIAA, MPAA, YMCA, whatever. I haven't bought a CD in 15 years. Why? There hasn't been anything good put out in 15 years. Most of the music I listen to was written what... ummm. 110 years ago. I have Mike Oldfields' Songs from a Distant Earth. I think that was the last CD\Music item I purchased. I ripped all my CDs back about what 2 years ago, boxed up my CDs and store them at a rented storage facility (Paranoid about fires, lived through one once). They sit on a removable hard disk which is attached to my computer sitting next to my stero. I listen to them on the Stereo and I sync a playlist or 3 to my MP3 player. All of this is legal, why? I own the CDs and have made my backups. The key is I don't share my collection. I don't burn CDs for friends, I don't make a custom mixed CD and send it to 20 friends, etc. I'm too busy for that crap anyways. The key is DISTRIBUTION.
The problem that RIAA has is people distributing files across the Internet. This lady was guilty as hell (and stupid). Ordinary people, stitting on a jury, decided that she was in the wrong. She was busted distributing music.
They have never gone after someone who has just ripped their CDs, they are after people sharing them. Every case they have brought, every John Doe they have issued, has all been in relation to content being shared across the Internet. In fact, I don't recall any cases yet about people even downloading music, just sharing (or in many cases with P2P you end up automatically resharing what you download, Bittorrent's nature implies redistribution as you download as a result of the packet trades). If that were the case they'd be all over the IRC channels using old school direct transfers.
Why is this an issue? All the arguements, all the complaining, and all the irrelevant comparisons. The issue is trafficing of bootleg music. Not ripping your music to MP3, AACS, FLAC, OGG, APE, etc. The RIAA has never shook someone down for ripping "Blade Runner" (which the person owns) to their laptop for a flight or their HTPC. They go after people for Ripping "Blade Runner" then posting it to a P2P network. If you aren't distributing it on the Internet then they don't really have an issue.
I just don't get what the problem here is. As far as I've seen this is no different in nature then the last 30 years or from that matter last 130 years.