I completely agree with you on these points, but they have nothing to do with the formats it supports. Both text files and pdf will allow you to do annotation and highlighting (well, okay, it's kinda primitive in a text file to be sure). What you mention is a hardware limitation, and I agree that at the price tag sony's asking, they should provide these features.
much agreement from me. I've never heard of the document formats listed above. In my world PDF and.txt are the most common. Any decent format should be convertable to one, or both of the two.
Re:The bookstore has more than just "regular" book
on
Sony Reader Now Available
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It supports BBeB, PDF,.txt, RTF, Word files, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP. This covers _all_ document formats I would be interested in reading on the thing. What do you feel is missing and sufficiently important to make it "nearly useless"?
Ogg support would be nice, but I wouldn't say that its abscence makes the product "nearly useless". If it provided a stylus or input method for adding comments and markup to PDF documents I would probably buy one. As it is, the functionality wouldn't be worth the price and clunkyness of carrying a fragile piece of equipment around.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up man. Good english is worth striving for. I actually had to look this one up. Rest assured, I won`t be misusing moot again!
The same thing has happened with the slur "noob" which used to be an abreviation of newbie, or new person. Once upon someone doing something noobish or beeing a noob meant they were unskilled, unexperienced, and/or unaware of the social norms of the game being played.
Now it gets used as a gamers substitute for 'asshole'.
The same stupid people are going to believe this (why would your bank email you asking you to call them?), so now the phishers will be losing money by paying actors, and not really getting enough extra to cover the cost.
I don't think it's so absurd that the bank might email me to ask me to call them. I routinely email my work colleagues to do precisely that, when I cannot get them on the telephone. I often prefer this option to leaving a voice mail message, for varying reasons. In fact I'm pretty sure I've done the same thing with my insurance agent. Email is much less intrusive than a phone call, so it could be considered considerate to let the contacted party call when it is convenient for them....
Granted getting an automated system asking for a pin should be a tip off, but I can see my mom getting fooled at that point. I don't really think of my mother as stupid. Just roughly as naive and intellectualy lazy as 70 or 80 percent of humanity.
Sure, I wouldn't fall for it because I'm skeptical of emails. But isn't it a drag that we have to be? I've often thought "why the hell are they calling/snail mailing me? email would be so much more practical in this situation". But of course we all know the answer to this: email is considered unreliable and untrustworthy, thanks to phishers and spam.
I think this is actually pretty spooky. This is significantly more sophisticated than a normal email scam. Phishing is still a pretty young art, and the rate at which they are getting smarter seems to be climbing. I think this is certainly something to be wary of.
Aren't there pretty severe penalties for mail fraud, precisely becuase it's considered important that the post be regarded as reliable? Imagine if you got a letter from your bank asking to call that number, indistinguishable from the mail your bank sends you. Wouldn't that make dealing with your mail a significantly greater pain in the ass? I wish 'our' government was as aggressive about legislating out these bastards as they are about legislating out file-sharers.
Who are you to declare what is a fundamental human right? The question of what 'are' or what should be considered fundamental human rights is a pretty thorny one. As I recall from my history classes, the founders of the constitution had a hard time coming to a concensus on what should be considered fundamental human rights. Certainly they didn't get it right, or would you agree that blacks are only 3/5's of a human? Certainly they also weren't certain they had it all down correctly, as witnessed by the consitution stipulating a method whereby the constitution could be modified.
There are countries even now that don't consider freedom of speech or the right to bear arms fundamental human rights. So don't assert this as a truism. At best you can only state that you don't regard health care as a right, rather as a service.
Boy this kind of thinking always gets to me. It just strikes me as knee jerk reactionism. What's wrong with expecting large corporations to pay fair salaries? You aren't opposed to governments illegalizing indentured servitude or restricting the use of child workers are you? Illegalizing slavery is also a form of restricting the free market you know.
Read a little bit of recent history. Particularly enlightening would be to read something about the industrial revolution, as a lot of the regulations we have now are a product of that age. A market based economy has distinct and clear advantages, primarily that it does a good job of getting goods and resources to where they are needed.
But it's the hight of foolishness to assume that the optimal system is one in which the market is as free as possible. One only has to consider the implications: If you decide to allow the free market to determine everything, with no kind of social controls (laws, government), then if the demand is there (and history teaches us it is), you will have slave trading, child workers, private police forces, etc etc. Further, certain controls need to be put into place to prevent monopolies, which destroy all of the benefits of a free market economy, discarding all of the benefits of a free market economy for the sake of a wealthy individual or few.
The fact is that free market thinking must share credit with democratic processes for the economic and technological advances we currently enjoy. One could also call thes socialist processes , but this has become a kind of anathemic word in the modern world.
It makes total to sense to allow the masses of people to determine what appropriate and safe working conditions are, as well as to group together to exert some influence on their wages. Private interests, corporations, seek to maximize their profit margins. If you don't place some constraints on this, it will lead to instability, not to mention to horrible pay and working conditions for the people who are actually responsible for producing the goods or services the corporation is manufacturing. In a well functioning democracy, the government is the method by which the non wealthy masses can exersize some power. The rich and powerful already have plenty of power and influence, so it's important to have a mechanism to balance that out.
What I'm trying to say here, is this kind knee jerk government bashing is poorly thought out, and not helpful.
In physics, in order to understand a system, we usually look to the extreme conditions first, since these offer a certain amount of insight into a system, and are often easier to solve, being subject to certain simplifications. One can apply this to this outsourcing issue. Consider the following case: We have a system of production where the methods of production are controlled by a single entity, or a very small collection of entities who often cooperate when they have interests in common (they can compete with each other in other arenas, this is irrelevant to the scenario in question). In that case, these companies could force people into accepting an unfair wage, little better than slavery. By cooperating together they can agree to wage fixing, similar to price fixing, which is illegal. This is in fact what happened in the early industrial age. You have people living in misery, while a very few had it great.
I would propose that outsourcing is a tendency in this direction. It's a tool that takes power away from the individual workers to barter for a fair wage from their employers, and gives additional power to the corporations. Just as price fixing is a perversion of the free market system which harms the system, one can consider this kind of activity as also breaking the system. It's my opinion that currently the corporations hold too much power over their employees as it is. Of course, if you believe it's the other way around, this is what we should be discussing, and it perhaps it could lead to some kind of progress.
But just saying "govt is bad", and "we should tell corporations what to do" ac complishes nothing.
I'm not a typical Gates basher, but I do have a problem with praising the guy for all his charitable work, and I'm going to try to explain why.
Gates is convicted abuser of monopilist power. This means he obtained a large amount of his tremendous wealth through illegal means. The only reason he/his corporation hasn't been chastized for this is his enourmous contributions to the rebuplican party during the Bush vs. Gore elections. So not only is he guilty of abusing monopolistic power, but in my mind he is also guilty of subverting democracy. Granted this type of subversion is pretty common in modern America, but I still find it reprehensible behavior.
Now, for whatever motivations he has, he is taking some small portion of his ill gotten gains and using it for charity. But he gained that wealth by putting lots of smaller and often better companies and products out of business. God only knows what the final cost of the Microsoft monopoly is on the world.
I hope that it's clear to almost everyone that such monopolies are always bad for the consumer (there may be an argument to be made for publicly controlled monopolies like rail systems and postal systems, but this is a complex debate, and I don't think it's germane here). The lack of competition means less incentive to do strong quality checking, less responsiveness to the consumer, and higher cost. Not to mention the god awful EULA's and customer service.
And this hasn't even mentioned the nightmarish influence of Microsoft on the public domain and the patent service.
Now I don't want to focus on the typical fodder of microsoft bashing. My point is this wealth was accumulated using illegal business practices, and those illegal business practices were protected by using the wealth so gained to influence the political engine. Great. What a man! A real role-model.
Had he not accumulated such a vast amount of wealth through these illegal manoeverings, who knows how that wealth would have been spent otherwise? In essence, I see this as robbing money from the masses, and using it to purchase prestige and influence via charitable organizations. Granted his tactics aren't as bad as the Mafia's, but one can see a bit of an anology to the local mafia boss being a 'pillar of the community' because he does so much to maintain the local schools, libraries, and parks...
"ALONtm is a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength and durability"
Now, a ceramic compound (whether or not it contains aluminum) is a pretty far cry from aluminum. This isn't just a semantic difference. For example, ceramics tend to have vastly different properties than metals. Conductivity for example. Geez.
Jeez, read the summary why don't you? and that goes for the bozo who modded this insightful... Hell, read your own posting with comprehension in mind:
The IR is used to detect the presence of a digital camera. It doesn't wash out the picture. That's why you need the visible light beam. You could just flood it with more visible light, but then the camera could adjust for that.
On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets. Just look at Enron, Worldcom, etc if you want proof of that.
Too true. There are two problems to consider. Rampant poverty will increase crime. Especially in the event where labor is being done, but the laborers are not reaping the rewards of their labor. So that's one contributing factor, in the U.S. as well as abroad.
A second contributing factor is the culture of greed that dominates in the modern world. Wealth without labor is the new goal. One of the most elequent discussions of this I have seen was by harvey pekar, in an issue of American Splendor (sorry, don't remember what issue). But we have a culture (which we are aggresively exporting) which places more importance on the possession of wealth than on honesty, integrity, or a strong work ethic.
I'm hoping that this is actually changing, that the Bernard Ebbers, the Dick Cheneys, the Kenneth Lays and Darrel McBride's become outcasts and pariahs, shunned and hated enough by society at large that people feel a strong enough social pressure to mitigate their greediest instincts.
Just because someone is functional doesn't mean they're normal and not sick.
Boy am i disturbed by the choice of words in this sesntence. Am i the only person here that thinks normal==sick?
I like what G.B. Shaw said (paraphrasing) "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. The unreasonable man seeks to change the world to suit him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man".
Anyway, read Knuth's "things a computer scientist rarely talks about". Brilliant guy, and as far as I'm concerned pretty well adjusted. A positive influence on society beyond just his remarkable mathematical and scientific contributions.
The scariest people I know aspire to being "normal", or describe themselves as "normal". They fill me with dread and I avoid their company.
Most of us here on Slashdot have been warning about the consequences of software and business process patents for a long time. 2 years ago I recall there being a couple of ridiculous and obviously harmful such patent lawsuits. Last year it seems the number increased significantly. This year we seem to be seeing one nearly every week.
It seems the flood has started. Hopefully in time to scare the EU away from software patents. One hopes American legislators will respond responsibly, but I doubt it.
It's clear that most of the people posting here are not very aware of trademark, copyright, and patent law. They confuse the three under the umbrella of "intelectual property", which is of course the goal of the trademeark, copyright and patent profiteers.
Trademark law has a significant aspect which I have observed in several cases in recent history (one that springs to mind was a parody of Reese's peanut butter cups, which had to be taken down from goats.com because of a lawsuit threat). Apparently a company has to defend its trademark or it loses it. As I understand it, if a company tries to sue another company for infringing on its trademark, and the other company can prove that the trademark in question has a use beyond the trademark (this happened when MS tried to sue Lindows, claming that it had the trademark on the word windows), the sued company can succesfully defend the lawsuit, and the trademark is essentially lost.
What this means is, having trademarked MAME, Foley may find it necessary to sue MAME's creators at some later date. He won't try to shut them down, but get them to stop using the word MAME, since this would threaten his trademark.
I have to agree with modding the guy down. Cunt really shouldn't be used as a pejorative. I like vaginas.
another user suggested the word "asswipe". Well, although I wouldn't mind smearing the guy with fecal matter, I'm not sure I would want to wipe my ass on him... More to the point, the world would be a terrible place without things with which to wipe my ass but a better place without him.
Looking for good pejorative labels, I guess I would choose from "Leech", "parasite", "bottom feeder", "venture capitalist", "film or music executive", or some such synonym.
and to wait in line in months for something, which no matter how great it might be (cough), he coud always watch the next bloody day by showing up a few minutes before the show starts. And then can watch hundreds of time a few months later when the dvd version comes out...
It's just a bloody waste. Can't this guy get arrested for vagrancy?
I mean, this is essentially a story of a terrorist freeing england from a fascist dictatorship...
It will be pretty brave, under the current political climate, if they keep the political and social messages intact. Considering how badly the league of extraordinary gentlemen was raped, i hope mr moore retains more creative control over this film.
I though From Hell was done well... but it didn't have any controversial content.
Some other people have responded to this with statistics, but I want to point out your logical flaws. Quoth you:
And are you going to tell me a Porsche Boxster, 911 or BMW 7 (or hell, an X5) is going to destroy the road faster than a Ford Explorer or Expedition? Whatever you're smoking, spread it around. My dealer is out of town, and I need someone to hook me up.
You clearly didn't read a very interesting post above, where we are informed that unused roads degrade faster than used roads. Moderate use (eg, by light vehicles) smooths out the road and acts against natural wear and tear caused by, for example, uneven thermal expansion (this is a big problem in Alaska, esp. in Fairbanks, where they get huge temperature differentials over a year).
You propose that harm to a road is linearly proportional, or at least monotononely increasing as a function of vehicle weight. Obviously the fact I just stated belies this. In fact there is probably some critical weight at which the vehicle becomes damaging to road rather than beneficial. Or it may be the case that the difference between a porsche and Ford explorer is insignificant, and it isn't until you get to the weight of a loaded semi before changes in weight are significant. Not being an expert on the subject I don't know. My point is simply that your conclusion, while it may be intuitive is not necessarily correct.
People often think things are obvious simply because they haven't thought them through sufficiently.
When are these old days of the repuplic you're talking about? At what point in American history was there 0 taxation by the government, or only voluntary taxation? Your economic views are another example of jumping to a quick, emotionally satisfying conclusion, and stating that it's obvious. There are plenty of good reasons for having progressive taxes, but of course there's no way of getting through what I assume are years of dogma and horse-blinders in a slashdot post.
In terms of modern technological and software development it's a lifetime. I can't believe you got modded up for this compeletly ignorant comment.
The entire problem here is the patenting of absurdly obvious ideas and algorithms. It's already a problem, and wasteful, harmful, progress and development slowing lawsuits are already flying right and left. Just do a search for software patents on slashdot to find plenty of examples. One guy's kid patented swinging sideways on a swingset for christ's sake (also shown on slashdot).
The parasites are the companies sitting on these patents, not the software developers who independantly come up with similar, often transparent ideas.
So, this is more of a suggestion than a question. At the beginning and end of missions you give a little text blurb saying what we have to do or have accomplished. I'd dig it heavily if you guys could put these text blurbs into comic form-- it could even be done with miniaturezed screenshots with text bubbles sort of thing.
Maybe not for every mission, but for story arcs and task forces... If you let us save them that would be a lot bigger incentive for me than badges. If you do the screenshots idea, or use images generated from our characters, this would also provide us with a a cool memento of who we were with when we did said task...
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree with you on these points, but they have nothing to do with the formats it supports. Both text files and pdf will allow you to do annotation and highlighting (well, okay, it's kinda primitive in a text file to be sure). What you mention is a hardware limitation, and I agree that at the price tag sony's asking, they should provide these features.
much agreement from me. I've never heard of the document formats listed above. In my world PDF and .txt are the most common. Any decent format should be convertable to one, or both of the two.
Ogg support would be nice, but I wouldn't say that its abscence makes the product "nearly useless". If it provided a stylus or input method for adding comments and markup to PDF documents I would probably buy one. As it is, the functionality wouldn't be worth the price and clunkyness of carrying a fragile piece of equipment around.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up man. Good english is worth striving for. I actually had to look this one up. Rest assured, I won`t be misusing moot again!
actually, it's living with debt that sucks
The same thing has happened with the slur "noob" which used to be an abreviation of newbie, or new person. Once upon someone doing something noobish or beeing a noob meant they were unskilled, unexperienced, and/or unaware of the social norms of the game being played. Now it gets used as a gamers substitute for 'asshole'.
Granted getting an automated system asking for a pin should be a tip off, but I can see my mom getting fooled at that point. I don't really think of my mother as stupid. Just roughly as naive and intellectualy lazy as 70 or 80 percent of humanity.
Sure, I wouldn't fall for it because I'm skeptical of emails. But isn't it a drag that we have to be? I've often thought "why the hell are they calling/snail mailing me? email would be so much more practical in this situation". But of course we all know the answer to this: email is considered unreliable and untrustworthy, thanks to phishers and spam.
I think this is actually pretty spooky. This is significantly more sophisticated than a normal email scam. Phishing is still a pretty young art, and the rate at which they are getting smarter seems to be climbing. I think this is certainly something to be wary of.
Aren't there pretty severe penalties for mail fraud, precisely becuase it's considered important that the post be regarded as reliable? Imagine if you got a letter from your bank asking to call that number, indistinguishable from the mail your bank sends you. Wouldn't that make dealing with your mail a significantly greater pain in the ass? I wish 'our' government was as aggressive about legislating out these bastards as they are about legislating out file-sharers.
There are countries even now that don't consider freedom of speech or the right to bear arms fundamental human rights. So don't assert this as a truism. At best you can only state that you don't regard health care as a right, rather as a service.
Read a little bit of recent history. Particularly enlightening would be to read something about the industrial revolution, as a lot of the regulations we have now are a product of that age. A market based economy has distinct and clear advantages, primarily that it does a good job of getting goods and resources to where they are needed.
But it's the hight of foolishness to assume that the optimal system is one in which the market is as free as possible. One only has to consider the implications: If you decide to allow the free market to determine everything, with no kind of social controls (laws, government), then if the demand is there (and history teaches us it is), you will have slave trading, child workers, private police forces, etc etc. Further, certain controls need to be put into place to prevent monopolies, which destroy all of the benefits of a free market economy, discarding all of the benefits of a free market economy for the sake of a wealthy individual or few.
The fact is that free market thinking must share credit with democratic processes for the economic and technological advances we currently enjoy. One could also call thes socialist processes , but this has become a kind of anathemic word in the modern world.
It makes total to sense to allow the masses of people to determine what appropriate and safe working conditions are, as well as to group together to exert some influence on their wages. Private interests, corporations, seek to maximize their profit margins. If you don't place some constraints on this, it will lead to instability, not to mention to horrible pay and working conditions for the people who are actually responsible for producing the goods or services the corporation is manufacturing. In a well functioning democracy, the government is the method by which the non wealthy masses can exersize some power. The rich and powerful already have plenty of power and influence, so it's important to have a mechanism to balance that out.
What I'm trying to say here, is this kind knee jerk government bashing is poorly thought out, and not helpful.
In physics, in order to understand a system, we usually look to the extreme conditions first, since these offer a certain amount of insight into a system, and are often easier to solve, being subject to certain simplifications. One can apply this to this outsourcing issue. Consider the following case: We have a system of production where the methods of production are controlled by a single entity, or a very small collection of entities who often cooperate when they have interests in common (they can compete with each other in other arenas, this is irrelevant to the scenario in question). In that case, these companies could force people into accepting an unfair wage, little better than slavery. By cooperating together they can agree to wage fixing, similar to price fixing, which is illegal. This is in fact what happened in the early industrial age. You have people living in misery, while a very few had it great.
I would propose that outsourcing is a tendency in this direction. It's a tool that takes power away from the individual workers to barter for a fair wage from their employers, and gives additional power to the corporations. Just as price fixing is a perversion of the free market system which harms the system, one can consider this kind of activity as also breaking the system. It's my opinion that currently the corporations hold too much power over their employees as it is. Of course, if you believe it's the other way around, this is what we should be discussing, and it perhaps it could lead to some kind of progress.
But just saying "govt is bad", and "we should tell corporations what to do" ac complishes nothing.
Gates is convicted abuser of monopilist power. This means he obtained a large amount of his tremendous wealth through illegal means. The only reason he/his corporation hasn't been chastized for this is his enourmous contributions to the rebuplican party during the Bush vs. Gore elections. So not only is he guilty of abusing monopolistic power, but in my mind he is also guilty of subverting democracy. Granted this type of subversion is pretty common in modern America, but I still find it reprehensible behavior.
Now, for whatever motivations he has, he is taking some small portion of his ill gotten gains and using it for charity. But he gained that wealth by putting lots of smaller and often better companies and products out of business. God only knows what the final cost of the Microsoft monopoly is on the world.
I hope that it's clear to almost everyone that such monopolies are always bad for the consumer (there may be an argument to be made for publicly controlled monopolies like rail systems and postal systems, but this is a complex debate, and I don't think it's germane here). The lack of competition means less incentive to do strong quality checking, less responsiveness to the consumer, and higher cost. Not to mention the god awful EULA's and customer service. And this hasn't even mentioned the nightmarish influence of Microsoft on the public domain and the patent service.
Now I don't want to focus on the typical fodder of microsoft bashing. My point is this wealth was accumulated using illegal business practices, and those illegal business practices were protected by using the wealth so gained to influence the political engine. Great. What a man! A real role-model.
Had he not accumulated such a vast amount of wealth through these illegal manoeverings, who knows how that wealth would have been spent otherwise? In essence, I see this as robbing money from the masses, and using it to purchase prestige and influence via charitable organizations. Granted his tactics aren't as bad as the Mafia's, but one can see a bit of an anology to the local mafia boss being a 'pillar of the community' because he does so much to maintain the local schools, libraries, and parks...
"ALONtm is a ceramic compound with a high compressive strength and durability"
Now, a ceramic compound (whether or not it contains aluminum) is a pretty far cry from aluminum. This isn't just a semantic difference. For example, ceramics tend to have vastly different properties than metals. Conductivity for example. Geez.
The IR is used to detect the presence of a digital camera. It doesn't wash out the picture. That's why you need the visible light beam. You could just flood it with more visible light, but then the camera could adjust for that.
Reading comprehension. It's not just for school.
oh good. thanks for writing that response. Saves me the efffort
A second contributing factor is the culture of greed that dominates in the modern world. Wealth without labor is the new goal. One of the most elequent discussions of this I have seen was by harvey pekar, in an issue of American Splendor (sorry, don't remember what issue). But we have a culture (which we are aggresively exporting) which places more importance on the possession of wealth than on honesty, integrity, or a strong work ethic.
I'm hoping that this is actually changing, that the Bernard Ebbers, the Dick Cheneys, the Kenneth Lays and Darrel McBride's become outcasts and pariahs, shunned and hated enough by society at large that people feel a strong enough social pressure to mitigate their greediest instincts.
Boy am i disturbed by the choice of words in this sesntence. Am i the only person here that thinks normal==sick?
I like what G.B. Shaw said (paraphrasing) "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. The unreasonable man seeks to change the world to suit him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man".
Anyway, read Knuth's "things a computer scientist rarely talks about". Brilliant guy, and as far as I'm concerned pretty well adjusted. A positive influence on society beyond just his remarkable mathematical and scientific contributions.
The scariest people I know aspire to being "normal", or describe themselves as "normal". They fill me with dread and I avoid their company.
It seems the flood has started. Hopefully in time to scare the EU away from software patents. One hopes American legislators will respond responsibly, but I doubt it.
Trademark law has a significant aspect which I have observed in several cases in recent history (one that springs to mind was a parody of Reese's peanut butter cups, which had to be taken down from goats.com because of a lawsuit threat). Apparently a company has to defend its trademark or it loses it. As I understand it, if a company tries to sue another company for infringing on its trademark, and the other company can prove that the trademark in question has a use beyond the trademark (this happened when MS tried to sue Lindows, claming that it had the trademark on the word windows), the sued company can succesfully defend the lawsuit, and the trademark is essentially lost.
What this means is, having trademarked MAME, Foley may find it necessary to sue MAME's creators at some later date. He won't try to shut them down, but get them to stop using the word MAME, since this would threaten his trademark.
but IANAL... can anyone edify on this?
another user suggested the word "asswipe". Well, although I wouldn't mind smearing the guy with fecal matter, I'm not sure I would want to wipe my ass on him... More to the point, the world would be a terrible place without things with which to wipe my ass but a better place without him.
Looking for good pejorative labels, I guess I would choose from "Leech", "parasite", "bottom feeder", "venture capitalist", "film or music executive", or some such synonym.
It's just a bloody waste. Can't this guy get arrested for vagrancy?
Mod this up!!! That's a brilliant comment. Obviously no one with mod points read V...
It will be pretty brave, under the current political climate, if they keep the political and social messages intact. Considering how badly the league of extraordinary gentlemen was raped, i hope mr moore retains more creative control over this film.
I though From Hell was done well... but it didn't have any controversial content.
You propose that harm to a road is linearly proportional, or at least monotononely increasing as a function of vehicle weight. Obviously the fact I just stated belies this. In fact there is probably some critical weight at which the vehicle becomes damaging to road rather than beneficial. Or it may be the case that the difference between a porsche and Ford explorer is insignificant, and it isn't until you get to the weight of a loaded semi before changes in weight are significant. Not being an expert on the subject I don't know. My point is simply that your conclusion, while it may be intuitive is not necessarily correct.
People often think things are obvious simply because they haven't thought them through sufficiently.
When are these old days of the repuplic you're talking about? At what point in American history was there 0 taxation by the government, or only voluntary taxation? Your economic views are another example of jumping to a quick, emotionally satisfying conclusion, and stating that it's obvious. There are plenty of good reasons for having progressive taxes, but of course there's no way of getting through what I assume are years of dogma and horse-blinders in a slashdot post.
The entire problem here is the patenting of absurdly obvious ideas and algorithms. It's already a problem, and wasteful, harmful, progress and development slowing lawsuits are already flying right and left. Just do a search for software patents on slashdot to find plenty of examples. One guy's kid patented swinging sideways on a swingset for christ's sake (also shown on slashdot).
The parasites are the companies sitting on these patents, not the software developers who independantly come up with similar, often transparent ideas.
Maybe not for every mission, but for story arcs and task forces... If you let us save them that would be a lot bigger incentive for me than badges. If you do the screenshots idea, or use images generated from our characters, this would also provide us with a a cool memento of who we were with when we did said task...
Too onerous, or a good idea?