It's a question of scale. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that it's the cardinal rule, but how many people benefit from something is a very important consideration in whether it should be funded. Federal highway systems, which I agree are an example of appropriate federal spending, benefit many millions of people.
This bridge, on the other hand, is a wildly inefficient use of taxpayer money. There are 8,000 or so people living on that island. At a cost of $315 million, that works out to $39,375 a person. You could probably take the ferry every day of your life for less than that. And even if the federal government did absolutely nothing else for these people for that fiscal year, they'd still be getting orders of magnitude more money out than they put in. How is that fair to the other 299,992,000 US citizens? And didn't they know when they moved there that the only way to the mainland was by plane or boat?
I'm sure the residents of Gravina Island would very much like to be able to drive to the mainland. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, you can't always get what you want. Especially when it would cost 315 million dollars.
I find 80 columns to be incredibly insufficient for writing readable code. I prefer to use about 100 columns for actual code, and then an additional 60 or so to house comments on the right-hand side. This is particularly true with most modern API's--function names are just too long to fit without adding a lot of intermediate steps. Hell, document.getElementById("foo") is almost half of your budget right there. God help you if you need to concatenate the values of two of them or add a comment to that line or something.
My screen is currently set to a very readable resolution (17"; 1280x1024), and I can fit 160 columns in a pretty large font even with two inches of the left side of the screen devoted to IDE controls. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to console screen modes from a quarter of a century ago--no one actually uses those for serious development work anymore.
I am sorry, but unless you can explain that statement and back it up with some facts, I would consider this as a troll.
Presuming you're also the author of the grandparent post (your styles are similar), I can't believe you're accusing someone else of trolling. Here are some excerpts from your (AC) post:
the biggest monopoly in human history has effectively brought the globe under the dictatorship of Bill Gates - through the computers.
Wait til we rely on biotech to live past 150 years and we're colonizing space. There Gates will be, deciding who lives and who dies and charging everybody 50 cents to breathe. Think the people will wake up then? If so, do we want to wait until it's that bad before we start to resist?
I can't even imagine anyone being able to read that last one aloud with a straight face. Given that you're posting as AC and he's not, and he's making sense and you're not, which one of you is the troll again?
Thank you for injecting enough reason into this discussion to almost restore my faith in humanity, which had been completely lost after reading the parent post.:p
The difference is that WoW and EQ are games. Most people play for enjoyment--or at least, they should be.
I don't think that buying gold is necessarily immoral, but I don't understand why anyone would do it. As with many things in life, the fun in MMO's is in the journey, not in the destination. (Which in this case is a row in a database somewhere. Grats!) Likewise, while I may not think you're a criminal for taking the lazy rich guy's way out, I certainly won't think more of you for it.
There's a bit more to it than that. I agree that a lot of most MMO's is grinding, and that they often reward time investment instead of skill. But at the high end, you need both. I raid with a decent WoW guild, and we turn away more than half of our applicants, because they just can't cut it. So skill plays some role. Sure, it's learning the game mechanics and then doing the same few things over and over again. It sounds easy, but there apparently are a lot of people who can't do it. And doing it optimally takes a good deal of research and forethought, and flawless execution.
WoW, in particular, not only uses tiered dungeons, but rotates the difficulty level of each one. When content is first released, it's overtuned and often impossible. A few guilds worldwide will put insane amounts of time into beating this content as soon as possible (Nihilum, the most prolific WoW guild at the moment, had 25 warlocks outside their raid putting soulstones on their raiding members when they killed Lady Vashj a month or two ago), and the rest of us will wait for the next patch. At patch time, they nerf everything a bit, and everyone moves up. This even occurs on the lower end: most 5-man dungeons will have about half of their mobs removed, their trash respawn times doubled, and their mobs' attacks nerfed. It lets little Timmy feel like he's progressing even if he's still tanking with a two-handed axe in Berserker Stance and allows lots of people to see content they couldn't before.
But yes, in larger raids, it's mostly about not fucking up. But how could it not be? Either the content is laughably easy and anyone can beat it in an hour, or it demands precision and coordination. You're still doing the same things you do in smaller dungeons; it's just that there's less margin for error, more demand for coordination, and greater consequences when you wipe your raid.
If you were to do that in the real world, some of your portfolios would make money, and others would lose. The aforementioned law of averages suggests that you'd just about break even, minus the overhead costs and (massive) brokerage fees. Would having one extremely successful portfolio among those 1,600 make you a good investor? I don't think anyone would argue that it would.
On the other hand, the CNBC game is designed to reward the person who makes the best picks. There's no real money involved, and therefore no cost associated with "losing money." The system encourages this sort of brute force behavior, and while it's not against the letter of the law, as far as the competition goes, it certainly subverts the contest's goal of rewarding the person who makes the best picks.
In order to upgrade you now or in the future, iTunes needs to be able to identify "iTunes Store purchases" from "other" in your music collection, which thanks to Apple's progressive and practical user-centric policies may include audio from dozens or hundreds of different sources.
Umm, no?
Apple undoubtedly has records of every song ever purchased in their database, and I'm pretty sure they'll base upgrades off that information. It's a lot easier, less failure-prone, less exploitable and less complex than scanning a user's hard drive for files that you may or may not have sold them sometime in the past. There are reasons to leave the metadata in there, I guess, but this isn't one of them.
I was skeptical, too, but then I read this article on Billy Mitchell. The guy is incredibly arrogant. Here are some quotes:
"If I get recognized six times in a seven-day week," Mitchell says, "I call that a slow week."
"Video games were something new and different and I don't like new and different," he says. "But they started getting more popular. Everyone was standing around the Donkey Kong machine and I wanted that attention."
Wanting to clarify a point about hiding spots, I try to ask him, "So someone can use these hiding spots--" Mitchell immediately interrupts me, "You don't use the hiding spots. Someone doesn't use them. I use them. I could show you how, but you wouldn't be able to do it."
"Well, it's actually a shame that you only have one life to live," Mitchell replies, and without hesitation, adds, "If I was a fighter pilot, I would be the best. I'm sure of it."
His claims may be mostly true, but he's still an asshole.
A lot of us have the pleasure of maintaining code written by people who were clearly not even trained to operate a calculator correctly, let alone a computer. If my predecessors had read this article, my job would be so much easier.
I don't understand it, but a lot of people seem to have trouble with "comment your fucking code."
It's a cute idea, but insanely cost-ineffective. There are hundreds of channels on each server, and so many nooblets that you couldn't possibly monitor them all. Why don't you hire someone to go through your email by hand and delete the spam? It would work well, but it's just not practical.
For instance, I'm a member of a decent raiding guild on my server. We've had a few server firsts, but are generally neck-and-neck with a few other guilds. While the prestige of being the first to beat content and the phat lewtz we receive are nice, simply winning subjects you to grief from other players.
Take our guild leader, for example. He's a good enough guy. He enforces humility to the greatest extent possible--our players don't go around linking their drops in trade chat, or talking trash, or stirring up drama. But if you were to survey all the players on our server, his name would be in the top 5 most disliked, guaranteed. Not because it's deserved, but because that's just how it is--if you turn down someone's application, they hate you. If you don't reply to their seventh PM asking if they can join your SSC raid (this happens all the time, believe it or not), they hate you. If you beat a rival guild to a world boss, they all hate you. Anyway, if that moderation system were implemented, he'd be at the lowest possible score within 24 hours, and most of his ratings would come from people who had never actually talked to him.
Remember the "Warn" feature on AOL Instant Messenger? The idea was that anyone could punish anyone else for anything, and restrict their target's ability to send messages temporarily. I never saw it used for anything other than griefing, and the feature was eventually removed. Moderation works on Slashdot, but I'd argue that that's only because most of/.'s users are reasonably intelligent, and care about the site. Such a system wouldn't work in most places.
1% of parents might use that, and that's an optimistic figure. Besides, there are loads of obnoxious jackasses who are (physically) older than 18. And how many parents do you know that would be savvy enough to see through their children's attempts to circumvent the system?
My WoW guild also contains a "Linux commie," as my guildmates have termed him. He uses Ventrilo, and has the same problem. He can hear, but not speak. I think it's codec-related in his case, though.
Having learned this myself through trial and error, the trick to avoiding asshats lies in the game's social structure. Yes, there are a lot of 13-year olds who play, and most of them are annoying and stupid. But if you find a good guild to join, you can pretty much ignore everyone in general and just group and trade in-guild.
If anyone calls you a fag, feel free to report them; they will get their account suspended. Which has to be worth something, right?
I've played on both RP and normal PvE servers. There's no difference whatsoever, except that people whine about each others' innocuous names and force them to change them. No one actually role-plays. The general levels of player skill, intelligence, English fluency, helpfulness and friendliness aren't any higher than they are on other servers. If anything, the players are slightly more noobish (and insist that they not be held accountable for sucking, as they play for fun) in PvE, and downright awful in PvP.
But I hear you can get some hot night elf ass on the Deeprun Tram.
It's not like these laws are for you. I doubt you could even see any benefit from them. It's all going to benefit the big cartels. Unfortunately, no one gives a rat's ass about the little guy.
I agree that it sucks when someone uses your work without permission. You have to make a living, after all. But legalizing civil asset forfeiture for "attempted piracy" is not the answer.
I understand your point, but it was very clear from the context of most of those posts what the numbers were, and what they were supposed to be used for. Posting 32 hex digits, particularly on a site where they'd previously been posted with titles like "HD-DVD Decryption Key" and then claiming ignorance is a bit like punching someone in the face and then saying, "I didn't punch him. His nose just got in the way of my fist."
Like I said, I'm on your side on this one. I'd love to see leaks like this every week. I just wouldn't expect much sympathy from the courts when the inevitable lawsuits come around.
I agree with you that this whole DRM affair is reprehensible, but they're right. It's not a free speech issue.
Free speech generally deals with ideas and opinions, not data. Would you expect legal immunity if you posted a list of social security or credit card numbers online? What if someone cracked your online banking password and made that public? Would that be OK with you? How about the source code to a commercial application you wrote?
Don't get me wrong; these public revolts are great for those of us that want to see DRM disappear. TFA said there are 700,000 pages online containing the key. They can't sue 700,000 people individually. (If it were possible, the RIAA certainly would have found a way by now.) And the publicity never hurts--maybe some less technical people heard about the issue for the first time and jumped on the bandwagon. More importantly, maybe some of the major studios took notice, and perhaps realized that a significant number of their customers view this intrusive copy-protection scheme as a very large problem.
Don't expect help from the government on this one. If they get involved, it won't be on the side of consumers.
I think it's cool that they recanted and decided to side with their users instead of some faceless conglomerate. That said, I don't think they chose a very smart way to go about it.
If they'd just neglected to delete future posts about it, they might have been able to achieve the same effect, but with some sort of plausible deniability. But given that the founder actually posted the key, I give them about 12 hours before the lawsuit hits.
It was enjoyable, but only as a tech demo, frankly. And it basically killed the company--they put a fortune into opening a studio to produce it, and then failed to recoup most of that money. From what I understand, it's what directly led to the Enix buyout.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a question of scale. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that it's the cardinal rule, but how many people benefit from something is a very important consideration in whether it should be funded. Federal highway systems, which I agree are an example of appropriate federal spending, benefit many millions of people.
This bridge, on the other hand, is a wildly inefficient use of taxpayer money. There are 8,000 or so people living on that island. At a cost of $315 million, that works out to $39,375 a person. You could probably take the ferry every day of your life for less than that. And even if the federal government did absolutely nothing else for these people for that fiscal year, they'd still be getting orders of magnitude more money out than they put in. How is that fair to the other 299,992,000 US citizens? And didn't they know when they moved there that the only way to the mainland was by plane or boat?
I'm sure the residents of Gravina Island would very much like to be able to drive to the mainland. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, you can't always get what you want. Especially when it would cost 315 million dollars.
I find 80 columns to be incredibly insufficient for writing readable code. I prefer to use about 100 columns for actual code, and then an additional 60 or so to house comments on the right-hand side. This is particularly true with most modern API's--function names are just too long to fit without adding a lot of intermediate steps. Hell, document.getElementById("foo") is almost half of your budget right there. God help you if you need to concatenate the values of two of them or add a comment to that line or something.
My screen is currently set to a very readable resolution (17"; 1280x1024), and I can fit 160 columns in a pretty large font even with two inches of the left side of the screen devoted to IDE controls. There's no reason to restrict ourselves to console screen modes from a quarter of a century ago--no one actually uses those for serious development work anymore.
Presuming you're also the author of the grandparent post (your styles are similar), I can't believe you're accusing someone else of trolling. Here are some excerpts from your (AC) post:
I can't even imagine anyone being able to read that last one aloud with a straight face. Given that you're posting as AC and he's not, and he's making sense and you're not, which one of you is the troll again?
Thank you for injecting enough reason into this discussion to almost restore my faith in humanity, which had been completely lost after reading the parent post. :p
The difference is that WoW and EQ are games. Most people play for enjoyment--or at least, they should be.
I don't think that buying gold is necessarily immoral, but I don't understand why anyone would do it. As with many things in life, the fun in MMO's is in the journey, not in the destination. (Which in this case is a row in a database somewhere. Grats!) Likewise, while I may not think you're a criminal for taking the lazy rich guy's way out, I certainly won't think more of you for it.
There's a bit more to it than that. I agree that a lot of most MMO's is grinding, and that they often reward time investment instead of skill. But at the high end, you need both. I raid with a decent WoW guild, and we turn away more than half of our applicants, because they just can't cut it. So skill plays some role. Sure, it's learning the game mechanics and then doing the same few things over and over again. It sounds easy, but there apparently are a lot of people who can't do it. And doing it optimally takes a good deal of research and forethought, and flawless execution.
WoW, in particular, not only uses tiered dungeons, but rotates the difficulty level of each one. When content is first released, it's overtuned and often impossible. A few guilds worldwide will put insane amounts of time into beating this content as soon as possible (Nihilum, the most prolific WoW guild at the moment, had 25 warlocks outside their raid putting soulstones on their raiding members when they killed Lady Vashj a month or two ago), and the rest of us will wait for the next patch. At patch time, they nerf everything a bit, and everyone moves up. This even occurs on the lower end: most 5-man dungeons will have about half of their mobs removed, their trash respawn times doubled, and their mobs' attacks nerfed. It lets little Timmy feel like he's progressing even if he's still tanking with a two-handed axe in Berserker Stance and allows lots of people to see content they couldn't before.
But yes, in larger raids, it's mostly about not fucking up. But how could it not be? Either the content is laughably easy and anyone can beat it in an hour, or it demands precision and coordination. You're still doing the same things you do in smaller dungeons; it's just that there's less margin for error, more demand for coordination, and greater consequences when you wipe your raid.
Or it was just an obvious idea that someone else thought was good as well.
It's a completely different game.
If you were to do that in the real world, some of your portfolios would make money, and others would lose. The aforementioned law of averages suggests that you'd just about break even, minus the overhead costs and (massive) brokerage fees. Would having one extremely successful portfolio among those 1,600 make you a good investor? I don't think anyone would argue that it would.
On the other hand, the CNBC game is designed to reward the person who makes the best picks. There's no real money involved, and therefore no cost associated with "losing money." The system encourages this sort of brute force behavior, and while it's not against the letter of the law, as far as the competition goes, it certainly subverts the contest's goal of rewarding the person who makes the best picks.
Umm, no?
Apple undoubtedly has records of every song ever purchased in their database, and I'm pretty sure they'll base upgrades off that information. It's a lot easier, less failure-prone, less exploitable and less complex than scanning a user's hard drive for files that you may or may not have sold them sometime in the past. There are reasons to leave the metadata in there, I guess, but this isn't one of them.
You've obviously never played World of Warcraft.
I was skeptical, too, but then I read this article on Billy Mitchell. The guy is incredibly arrogant. Here are some quotes:
His claims may be mostly true, but he's still an asshole.
The way I'd always heard it was that it's always easier to pick up girls when you already have a girlfriend. But I guess it works for jobs, too.
A lot of us have the pleasure of maintaining code written by people who were clearly not even trained to operate a calculator correctly, let alone a computer. If my predecessors had read this article, my job would be so much easier.
I don't understand it, but a lot of people seem to have trouble with "comment your fucking code."
It's like any other backwater town: it's only nice because no one is there.
It's a cute idea, but insanely cost-ineffective. There are hundreds of channels on each server, and so many nooblets that you couldn't possibly monitor them all. Why don't you hire someone to go through your email by hand and delete the spam? It would work well, but it's just not practical.
There are other considerations.
For instance, I'm a member of a decent raiding guild on my server. We've had a few server firsts, but are generally neck-and-neck with a few other guilds. While the prestige of being the first to beat content and the phat lewtz we receive are nice, simply winning subjects you to grief from other players.
Take our guild leader, for example. He's a good enough guy. He enforces humility to the greatest extent possible--our players don't go around linking their drops in trade chat, or talking trash, or stirring up drama. But if you were to survey all the players on our server, his name would be in the top 5 most disliked, guaranteed. Not because it's deserved, but because that's just how it is--if you turn down someone's application, they hate you. If you don't reply to their seventh PM asking if they can join your SSC raid (this happens all the time, believe it or not), they hate you. If you beat a rival guild to a world boss, they all hate you. Anyway, if that moderation system were implemented, he'd be at the lowest possible score within 24 hours, and most of his ratings would come from people who had never actually talked to him.
Remember the "Warn" feature on AOL Instant Messenger? The idea was that anyone could punish anyone else for anything, and restrict their target's ability to send messages temporarily. I never saw it used for anything other than griefing, and the feature was eventually removed. Moderation works on Slashdot, but I'd argue that that's only because most of /.'s users are reasonably intelligent, and care about the site. Such a system wouldn't work in most places.
1% of parents might use that, and that's an optimistic figure. Besides, there are loads of obnoxious jackasses who are (physically) older than 18. And how many parents do you know that would be savvy enough to see through their children's attempts to circumvent the system?
My WoW guild also contains a "Linux commie," as my guildmates have termed him. He uses Ventrilo, and has the same problem. He can hear, but not speak. I think it's codec-related in his case, though.
Having learned this myself through trial and error, the trick to avoiding asshats lies in the game's social structure. Yes, there are a lot of 13-year olds who play, and most of them are annoying and stupid. But if you find a good guild to join, you can pretty much ignore everyone in general and just group and trade in-guild.
If anyone calls you a fag, feel free to report them; they will get their account suspended. Which has to be worth something, right?
I've played on both RP and normal PvE servers. There's no difference whatsoever, except that people whine about each others' innocuous names and force them to change them. No one actually role-plays. The general levels of player skill, intelligence, English fluency, helpfulness and friendliness aren't any higher than they are on other servers. If anything, the players are slightly more noobish (and insist that they not be held accountable for sucking, as they play for fun) in PvE, and downright awful in PvP.
But I hear you can get some hot night elf ass on the Deeprun Tram.
It's not like these laws are for you. I doubt you could even see any benefit from them. It's all going to benefit the big cartels. Unfortunately, no one gives a rat's ass about the little guy.
I agree that it sucks when someone uses your work without permission. You have to make a living, after all. But legalizing civil asset forfeiture for "attempted piracy" is not the answer.
I understand your point, but it was very clear from the context of most of those posts what the numbers were, and what they were supposed to be used for. Posting 32 hex digits, particularly on a site where they'd previously been posted with titles like "HD-DVD Decryption Key" and then claiming ignorance is a bit like punching someone in the face and then saying, "I didn't punch him. His nose just got in the way of my fist."
Like I said, I'm on your side on this one. I'd love to see leaks like this every week. I just wouldn't expect much sympathy from the courts when the inevitable lawsuits come around.
I agree with you that this whole DRM affair is reprehensible, but they're right. It's not a free speech issue.
Free speech generally deals with ideas and opinions, not data. Would you expect legal immunity if you posted a list of social security or credit card numbers online? What if someone cracked your online banking password and made that public? Would that be OK with you? How about the source code to a commercial application you wrote?
Don't get me wrong; these public revolts are great for those of us that want to see DRM disappear. TFA said there are 700,000 pages online containing the key. They can't sue 700,000 people individually. (If it were possible, the RIAA certainly would have found a way by now.) And the publicity never hurts--maybe some less technical people heard about the issue for the first time and jumped on the bandwagon. More importantly, maybe some of the major studios took notice, and perhaps realized that a significant number of their customers view this intrusive copy-protection scheme as a very large problem.
Don't expect help from the government on this one. If they get involved, it won't be on the side of consumers.
I think it's cool that they recanted and decided to side with their users instead of some faceless conglomerate. That said, I don't think they chose a very smart way to go about it.
If they'd just neglected to delete future posts about it, they might have been able to achieve the same effect, but with some sort of plausible deniability. But given that the founder actually posted the key, I give them about 12 hours before the lawsuit hits.
It was enjoyable, but only as a tech demo, frankly. And it basically killed the company--they put a fortune into opening a studio to produce it, and then failed to recoup most of that money. From what I understand, it's what directly led to the Enix buyout.