Average Americans used to be restricted to a very small subset of the information and culture that exists. The average person just couldn't afford any more than that.
Now, thanks to piracy, they have access to most of it.
In addition to having access to more, percentage-wise, it is a fact that despite current conditions, there are more creative works being made than ever before in recorded history. And they get access to most of that too.
Therefore, rampant piracy has improved the average persons quality of life.
If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.
Therefore, the average Americans quality of life would be significantly diminished should effective copyright enforcement become available and common.
In conclusion, the victims of the American War on Piracy are... the American people.
You think individuals don't have a character that is innate? Outside of that... you think little boys and little girls are the same?
Discipline needs to be tailored to the personality of the child. And there are lots of little boys and lots of grown men for that matter who won't respect any authority but that which is backed up by force. In those circumstances, judicious use of force to establish authority allows the softer methods of persuasion to penetrate. Lack of authority makes it impossible to raise a child. Wielding authority where it is necessary is a responsibility, failing to wield it when it is necessary is neglect. However, wielding authority where it is arbitrary and not necessary is domineering and abusive.
That's my opinion, and I'm not interested in putting together a thesis proposal to justify it to you. Take it or leave it.
When I was a kid, I got a warning: Stop that or you're getting a spanking.
If I didn't stop, I got a spanking. But never with the hand, always with a belt, which I had to fetch and deliver to my dad so he could spank me with it.
End result was, I recognized that my dad was the authority regardless of any decisions I made, but I was never afraid that I was going to get cuffed when I wasn't watching in a moment of anger. I would always get a warning, always make a conscious choice, and always have the opportunity to gather my courage and accept the consequences, which were delivered with sadness instead of anger. Which, now that I'm an adult, I recognize the wisdom of.
I've read of other cultures where it was the responsibility of the uncle to discipline the child, for the same general reasons. Always thought it was a sensible way to do things...
Never had use physical discipline myself, my daughter is a respectful and well behaved child. But I sure as hell wasn't. I was telling off nuns in a very articulate fashion at the age of 6, no general respect for authority at all.
Seems to me, the modern methods, time outs, grounding, etc... they don't allow issues to resolve quickly and have a new leaf turned over. They always drag things on far too long, and transform punishment into a sense of general oppression, leading to more willfulness, leading to more oppression, in a cycle that seems inescapable. Not what I would call effective or in the best interests of a child.
This is a ploy to sell the locks and keys to the public so the public will have support for locks and keys. After the public has the locks-and-keys-infrastructure in their homes, all bets are off. First they put the trusted computing support into our computer chips and set top boxes, then they try to get us to install the software support in Vista and purchase the Digital TV set top boxes, only people don't go for it en masse like they hoped. Now they're trying to sell the utility of draconian control over your children for their safety to get more penetration.
It's easy to keep an eye on your children. All you have to do is set appropriate life priorities. If your position is that don't have the time to supervise your children, it's because you made compromises you shouldn't have and turned them into latchkey kids, so don't pretend like you give a shit. The fact that this group includes the vast majority of the Western world doesn't make it any less true.
The ONLY real reason a company maintains ANY closed source is profitability. Everyone would run open source otherwise, because it costs way too damn much money to maintain close source, from physical protection to legal costs.
I sure as hell don't see people boycotting Coca Cola products because they haven't revealed their secret formula to EVERYONE.
That being said, one CANNOT overlook WHO is asking for the closed source, and determining the REAL reason WHY they need it. Somehow the words "safety" and "trust" do NOT come to mind.
Have you looked? I haven't tried it yet, but I've been looking into sourcing the stuff to make it, and if it's good, I intend to do just that. I don't imagine it would be hard to turn my friends and family on to the idea, either.
You've been doing work on this project and contributing the results of your labour back to the pool of common ideas. Why?
Did you ever feel pride in your efforts, pride in how they were contributing back to humanity, pride in the fact that you were sharing?
If you did, and you do this, you will be a shamed man. Not to us. To yourself. You'll probably end up using cognitive dissonance to transform yourself into a more callous and selfish individual to escape the dichotomy.
How bad do you need the money? What are you prepared to do to yourself to get it?
The comment about this not having much consequence to MS is missing a very vital point: Vista was a back room deal to install locks and keys on everyones machines. They got a lot of money and a place in the new world order in exchange. Only, people are revolting, and they're not installing it like they're supposed to. Which is a big deal, because the economic systems are going to collapse, and their money isn't going to be worth shit. They're going to be irrelevant and hated. They shot big and lost.
The meeting at the docks is that way, friend.
Yeah, I get the reference. But you don't. He didn't say he was going to a meeting at the docks. He said he was going for a meeting at the Doc's. Then he died shortly after that show.
If you're in advertising, go hang yourself. Just planting seeds...
You guys are missing the point: Demanding that the source code be made available for your products is a reasonable thing to do. Just like demanding that the ingredients of your foodstuffs be made available is a reasonable thing to do. It has to do with safety and trust.
You guys are so caught up in fighting for your right to maintain the ignorance of third parties for your own competitive advantage, you're missing the point. This is a reasonable thing to do, and we should be doing it everywhere in the world.
If you don't like it, you can always stop sucking on the communist teat and die waving your flag and trumpeting how great Capitalism is. It's not like they aren't providing you everything as though you were little children who can't take care of yourself already.
The comment about this not having much consequence to MS is missing a very vital point: Vista was a back room deal to install locks and keys on everyones machines. They got a lot of money and a place in the new world order in exchange. Only, people are revolting, and they're not installing it like they're supposed to. Which is a big deal, because the economic systems are going to collapse, and their money isn't going to be worth shit. They're going to be irrelevant and hated. They shot big and lost.
It has more to do with the stock market opening on Sunday night in Asia. Everything revolves around Asia now, you just haven't digested the fact. The government printed all that money so they can give it to the Chinese, because it's easier than saying "Give us back half your money, we are selling half the country in exchange for another 10 years of comfort to die in." Printing money and devaluing what exists is less work and has the same effect.
You people keep wanting to make this an aberration. It's not. It's not a matter of "The system works, but someone didn't follow the system, we just need to sort them out and things will be ok." It's not like that at all. The fact of the matter is, the things that you hold most dear, your most treasured cultural values, they are what have done this to you. It's not the lawbreakers among you that did this to you. It's the laws and the people that follow them.
That's why people don't want your "Freedom" and "Democracy" in their own nations. It's because they see what you have done to yourselves, and they don't want any part of it.
I hope it happens quickly. The sooner you all fall to pieces, the sooner we can start clearing your poisonous influence out of our nations.
You are totally wrong. Consumers don't have any idea about NDA's or the lack of them. They are completely oblivious to such things. This is about developers. And developers have all the choice in the world. If you have a dozen different avenues you can dedicate your time and effort to, only one of them, you need to ask permission to try and put it into use, and the others, you're secure in your capacities to offer it to people. Add to this the fact that it's another platform you need to dedicate your time to learning and learning well if you're going to make good software. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a business perspective. Oh, and my purpose in building applications of any kind is neither fun nor money, but building good tools. Which incidentally is fun and makes me a lot of money.
It's also a good idea to have multiple smaller drives rather than one large drive. If you set up multiple swap partitions on independent disks and give them all the same priority level, the kernel will interleave it's swapping between them and function like a RAID-0. I've got 4 80G drives on my development box, with a 1.5G swap partition on each drive, 4 192MB boot partitions and a RAID-10 filling up the rest. I'm not a benchmark junkie, but it's pretty fast.
This doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with consumers and what they want. Everything you said about consumers and the market is irrelevant, be it true or false. This has to do with developers, who have the choice to support a platform or not. It's just like game consoles. If game developers don't support you, you're done, regardless of how much the consumers like or dislike your particular device. This is the same thing.
If the perception among developers and those who fund development is that developing for the iPhone is risky and you might not be permitted to deploy your application after investing time and effort into learning the platform and developing for it and creating something useful that people want to use, then the iPhone will die, and quickly too.
Personally, I've already started investigating Android, but I'm not wasting my time with the iPhone, because Apple as a business entity is a control-freak of draconian proportions who simply can't be trusted.
Damn, you mean I've been hallucinating that Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia have been shipping smartphone software since the '90s?
Like comparing Apples and Oranges.
While you're rewriting history, why don't you take care of that annoying hohocaust thing as well?
I don't need to. It was done before I was born, and taught to me in history class. Here's a hint: it didn't happen because the secret police intimidated everyone into following a bunch of crazies. It happened because the state of the world was such that people were ready to follow anyone who was crazy enough to lead them against their oppressors, so they elevated the least crazy people around that were willing to do it.
It all has to do with the contrast between societies based on the association of free men and societies based on the rule of law. In societies based on the rule of law, you end up with conniving bastards who twist a societies laws against itself for personal gain, and eventually, inevitably, you need to shatter the fabric of society and massacre the perpetrators. It's a cyclical thing.
I suspect they were waiting for Android. Prior to its arrival, they were pretty much the only game in town, so there wasn't really anywhere for disgruntled developers to flee to.
Historically, Gimp was fine for images intended to be viewed only on a computer screen, but shit for print, due to it using 8 bit color and not supporting CMYK. The fact that they're making strides in moving to GEGL with support for 32 bit color is a large part of what makes this an important release for the project. But it's not there yet, so for those who work in print, Photoshop is still vital.
Wonder what this will do to the CinePaint project...
You're believing something the opposite of what the premise of the article is. The premise of the article is that we are in a bubble containing a void, not a highly dense space.
I think we really need to restructure our underlying philosophy of what existence is. I've been chewing on this concept for years:
This "universe" isn't infinite. It's a 4 dimensional object, with a large but quantifiable amount of mass/energy, and this mass/energy has permutations across x, y, z and t. You see a 3 dimensional object with dimensions x, y, z moving through t, but observed from outside the t dimension, it's a 4 dimensional object.
The big bang, the singularity, is significant because at the moment that the mass/energy of the universe is in the singular state, it is identical to all the other universes. It is at this point that it "connects" to all the other universes, like petals connecting together to make a flower.
Questions of religion, spirituality and what it means to be human start getting in your way once you start looking at things this way. Am I an aspect of this object that is my universe, or am I some sort of traveler within this object that is a universe?
I think there's a good possibility that the missing matter and forces we hypothesize to be acting upon our universe are actually other universes influencing our own, like petals on a flower bumping into each other. And, assuming that we are "souls traveling within the universe" as opposed to "4 dimensional objects that are aspects of the universe", it isn't outside the bounds of reason to imagine that we might one day be able to map the shape of these universes and achieve "time travel" by moving to other universes.
I expect that we will eventually find the concept of the "infinite universe" to be a false path, and that we will achieve great breakthroughs when we find a framework that doesn't rely upon its existence.
I might lose 25 dollars a month playing poker for 10 hours of entertainment, because I'm not that good, but still I only play 5 dollar games that aren't winner-takes all. My neighbour rents 5 movies a month for 10 hours of entertainment, spending 25 dollars. He's the good guy and I'm the bad guy why exactly?
You're not a bad guy. But people like you didn't lose anything to these scammers. You spend your money, you lose, you go watch tv, just like usual. You're like a retard burning his money and gleefully clapping while it burns pretty colors. Not bad exactly, just kind of sad to watch.
Which is how the people running the casinos are bad. They don't mug people or shoot people, they just take advantage of retarded people. Which might be legal, but is still kind of reprehensible, and the sort of thing you would expect a reasonable person to disapprove of.
So, is this a matter of the "poor players" who deserve better, even though they don't really deserve anything better than to lose all their money, which they did?
Is it a matter of the "poor businesspeople" who are fleecing suckers, getting rich and producing precisely zero value in return?
No, I think it's more a matter of these cheaters doing a public service. The players chose to throw their money away, while the business shouldn't exist in the first place.
Doesn't look like there is much hope that they will retain their freedom or their winnings, but maybe we'll all get lucky and the bastards running the casino won't get any of it back.
My post was intended as a cynical joke. Seriously though, when it comes to government, I've always been more concerned about the prospect of pouring months and years of my time and effort into creating something only to have it discarded because someone else got elected than about security and high pay. I've spoken to a few people who had that happen to them repeatedly and it sucked the soul right out of them, left a real impression on me. Building sandcastles that get wiped out every time the tide comes in doesn't sound like a very fulfilling life, no matter how well it pays...
Sounds like a good place to work. Clearly, they're full of incompetents, leaving lots of room to slack off and still shine brighter than everyone else. Course, after a few years of doing so, you train yourself to be as useless as the rest of em, but then you can just suck up a government cheque and pass the buck until it's time to retire.
The joke was lame. The show was lame. It was an exercise in reusing old Western plots while leveraging the fact that computer generated special effects are cheaper than hiring staff and building and maintaining a set. The sort of crap people from Texas would enjoy. It's also the sort of wistful daydreaming that allows people to tolerate that which should not be tolerated.
Oh, and I'm not a geek. Geeks bite the heads off chickens at the circus.
Slashdot Mirror
Average Americans used to be restricted to a very small subset of the information and culture that exists. The average person just couldn't afford any more than that.
Now, thanks to piracy, they have access to most of it.
In addition to having access to more, percentage-wise, it is a fact that despite current conditions, there are more creative works being made than ever before in recorded history. And they get access to most of that too.
Therefore, rampant piracy has improved the average persons quality of life.
If it came to pass that there was an end to piracy, and an extra 250 billion a year was divided amongst all Americans, that amount of money wouldn't be anywhere close to enough to pay for what the average person currently has access to because of piracy.
Therefore, the average Americans quality of life would be significantly diminished should effective copyright enforcement become available and common.
In conclusion, the victims of the American War on Piracy are... the American people.
You think individuals don't have a character that is innate? Outside of that... you think little boys and little girls are the same?
Discipline needs to be tailored to the personality of the child. And there are lots of little boys and lots of grown men for that matter who won't respect any authority but that which is backed up by force. In those circumstances, judicious use of force to establish authority allows the softer methods of persuasion to penetrate. Lack of authority makes it impossible to raise a child. Wielding authority where it is necessary is a responsibility, failing to wield it when it is necessary is neglect. However, wielding authority where it is arbitrary and not necessary is domineering and abusive.
That's my opinion, and I'm not interested in putting together a thesis proposal to justify it to you. Take it or leave it.
When I was a kid, I got a warning: Stop that or you're getting a spanking.
If I didn't stop, I got a spanking. But never with the hand, always with a belt, which I had to fetch and deliver to my dad so he could spank me with it.
End result was, I recognized that my dad was the authority regardless of any decisions I made, but I was never afraid that I was going to get cuffed when I wasn't watching in a moment of anger. I would always get a warning, always make a conscious choice, and always have the opportunity to gather my courage and accept the consequences, which were delivered with sadness instead of anger. Which, now that I'm an adult, I recognize the wisdom of.
I've read of other cultures where it was the responsibility of the uncle to discipline the child, for the same general reasons. Always thought it was a sensible way to do things...
Never had use physical discipline myself, my daughter is a respectful and well behaved child. But I sure as hell wasn't. I was telling off nuns in a very articulate fashion at the age of 6, no general respect for authority at all.
Seems to me, the modern methods, time outs, grounding, etc... they don't allow issues to resolve quickly and have a new leaf turned over. They always drag things on far too long, and transform punishment into a sense of general oppression, leading to more willfulness, leading to more oppression, in a cycle that seems inescapable. Not what I would call effective or in the best interests of a child.
This is a ploy to sell the locks and keys to the public so the public will have support for locks and keys. After the public has the locks-and-keys-infrastructure in their homes, all bets are off. First they put the trusted computing support into our computer chips and set top boxes, then they try to get us to install the software support in Vista and purchase the Digital TV set top boxes, only people don't go for it en masse like they hoped. Now they're trying to sell the utility of draconian control over your children for their safety to get more penetration.
It's easy to keep an eye on your children. All you have to do is set appropriate life priorities. If your position is that don't have the time to supervise your children, it's because you made compromises you shouldn't have and turned them into latchkey kids, so don't pretend like you give a shit. The fact that this group includes the vast majority of the Western world doesn't make it any less true.
The ONLY real reason a company maintains ANY closed source is profitability. Everyone would run open source otherwise, because it costs way too damn much money to maintain close source, from physical protection to legal costs.
I sure as hell don't see people boycotting Coca Cola products because they haven't revealed their secret formula to EVERYONE.
That being said, one CANNOT overlook WHO is asking for the closed source, and determining the REAL reason WHY they need it. Somehow the words "safety" and "trust" do NOT come to mind.
Have you looked? I haven't tried it yet, but I've been looking into sourcing the stuff to make it, and if it's good, I intend to do just that. I don't imagine it would be hard to turn my friends and family on to the idea, either.
You've been doing work on this project and contributing the results of your labour back to the pool of common ideas. Why?
Did you ever feel pride in your efforts, pride in how they were contributing back to humanity, pride in the fact that you were sharing?
If you did, and you do this, you will be a shamed man. Not to us. To yourself. You'll probably end up using cognitive dissonance to transform yourself into a more callous and selfish individual to escape the dichotomy.
How bad do you need the money? What are you prepared to do to yourself to get it?
The comment about this not having much consequence to MS is missing a very vital point: Vista was a back room deal to install locks and keys on everyones machines. They got a lot of money and a place in the new world order in exchange. Only, people are revolting, and they're not installing it like they're supposed to. Which is a big deal, because the economic systems are going to collapse, and their money isn't going to be worth shit. They're going to be irrelevant and hated. They shot big and lost.
The meeting at the docks is that way, friend.
Yeah, I get the reference. But you don't. He didn't say he was going to a meeting at the docks. He said he was going for a meeting at the Doc's. Then he died shortly after that show.
If you're in advertising, go hang yourself. Just planting seeds...
You guys are missing the point: Demanding that the source code be made available for your products is a reasonable thing to do. Just like demanding that the ingredients of your foodstuffs be made available is a reasonable thing to do. It has to do with safety and trust.
You guys are so caught up in fighting for your right to maintain the ignorance of third parties for your own competitive advantage, you're missing the point. This is a reasonable thing to do, and we should be doing it everywhere in the world.
If you don't like it, you can always stop sucking on the communist teat and die waving your flag and trumpeting how great Capitalism is. It's not like they aren't providing you everything as though you were little children who can't take care of yourself already.
The comment about this not having much consequence to MS is missing a very vital point: Vista was a back room deal to install locks and keys on everyones machines. They got a lot of money and a place in the new world order in exchange. Only, people are revolting, and they're not installing it like they're supposed to. Which is a big deal, because the economic systems are going to collapse, and their money isn't going to be worth shit. They're going to be irrelevant and hated. They shot big and lost.
It has more to do with the stock market opening on Sunday night in Asia. Everything revolves around Asia now, you just haven't digested the fact. The government printed all that money so they can give it to the Chinese, because it's easier than saying "Give us back half your money, we are selling half the country in exchange for another 10 years of comfort to die in." Printing money and devaluing what exists is less work and has the same effect.
You people keep wanting to make this an aberration. It's not. It's not a matter of "The system works, but someone didn't follow the system, we just need to sort them out and things will be ok." It's not like that at all. The fact of the matter is, the things that you hold most dear, your most treasured cultural values, they are what have done this to you. It's not the lawbreakers among you that did this to you. It's the laws and the people that follow them.
That's why people don't want your "Freedom" and "Democracy" in their own nations. It's because they see what you have done to yourselves, and they don't want any part of it.
I hope it happens quickly. The sooner you all fall to pieces, the sooner we can start clearing your poisonous influence out of our nations.
That said, the AT&T exclusivity contact may well verge on antitrust violations; IANAL, so I cannot really speak with any authority on that.
It really wouldn't matter if you were a lawyer or not. A Federal Judge has stated that it is an anti-monopoly violation. Therefore, it is.
You are totally wrong. Consumers don't have any idea about NDA's or the lack of them. They are completely oblivious to such things. This is about developers. And developers have all the choice in the world. If you have a dozen different avenues you can dedicate your time and effort to, only one of them, you need to ask permission to try and put it into use, and the others, you're secure in your capacities to offer it to people. Add to this the fact that it's another platform you need to dedicate your time to learning and learning well if you're going to make good software. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a business perspective. Oh, and my purpose in building applications of any kind is neither fun nor money, but building good tools. Which incidentally is fun and makes me a lot of money.
It's also a good idea to have multiple smaller drives rather than one large drive. If you set up multiple swap partitions on independent disks and give them all the same priority level, the kernel will interleave it's swapping between them and function like a RAID-0. I've got 4 80G drives on my development box, with a 1.5G swap partition on each drive, 4 192MB boot partitions and a RAID-10 filling up the rest. I'm not a benchmark junkie, but it's pretty fast.
This doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with consumers and what they want. Everything you said about consumers and the market is irrelevant, be it true or false. This has to do with developers, who have the choice to support a platform or not. It's just like game consoles. If game developers don't support you, you're done, regardless of how much the consumers like or dislike your particular device. This is the same thing.
If the perception among developers and those who fund development is that developing for the iPhone is risky and you might not be permitted to deploy your application after investing time and effort into learning the platform and developing for it and creating something useful that people want to use, then the iPhone will die, and quickly too.
Personally, I've already started investigating Android, but I'm not wasting my time with the iPhone, because Apple as a business entity is a control-freak of draconian proportions who simply can't be trusted.
Damn, you mean I've been hallucinating that Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia have been shipping smartphone software since the '90s?
Like comparing Apples and Oranges.
While you're rewriting history, why don't you take care of that annoying hohocaust thing as well?
I don't need to. It was done before I was born, and taught to me in history class. Here's a hint: it didn't happen because the secret police intimidated everyone into following a bunch of crazies. It happened because the state of the world was such that people were ready to follow anyone who was crazy enough to lead them against their oppressors, so they elevated the least crazy people around that were willing to do it.
It all has to do with the contrast between societies based on the association of free men and societies based on the rule of law. In societies based on the rule of law, you end up with conniving bastards who twist a societies laws against itself for personal gain, and eventually, inevitably, you need to shatter the fabric of society and massacre the perpetrators. It's a cyclical thing.
I suspect they were waiting for Android. Prior to its arrival, they were pretty much the only game in town, so there wasn't really anywhere for disgruntled developers to flee to.
Historically, Gimp was fine for images intended to be viewed only on a computer screen, but shit for print, due to it using 8 bit color and not supporting CMYK. The fact that they're making strides in moving to GEGL with support for 32 bit color is a large part of what makes this an important release for the project. But it's not there yet, so for those who work in print, Photoshop is still vital.
Wonder what this will do to the CinePaint project...
You're believing something the opposite of what the premise of the article is. The premise of the article is that we are in a bubble containing a void, not a highly dense space.
I think we really need to restructure our underlying philosophy of what existence is. I've been chewing on this concept for years:
This "universe" isn't infinite. It's a 4 dimensional object, with a large but quantifiable amount of mass/energy, and this mass/energy has permutations across x, y, z and t. You see a 3 dimensional object with dimensions x, y, z moving through t, but observed from outside the t dimension, it's a 4 dimensional object.
The big bang, the singularity, is significant because at the moment that the mass/energy of the universe is in the singular state, it is identical to all the other universes. It is at this point that it "connects" to all the other universes, like petals connecting together to make a flower.
Questions of religion, spirituality and what it means to be human start getting in your way once you start looking at things this way. Am I an aspect of this object that is my universe, or am I some sort of traveler within this object that is a universe?
I think there's a good possibility that the missing matter and forces we hypothesize to be acting upon our universe are actually other universes influencing our own, like petals on a flower bumping into each other. And, assuming that we are "souls traveling within the universe" as opposed to "4 dimensional objects that are aspects of the universe", it isn't outside the bounds of reason to imagine that we might one day be able to map the shape of these universes and achieve "time travel" by moving to other universes.
I expect that we will eventually find the concept of the "infinite universe" to be a false path, and that we will achieve great breakthroughs when we find a framework that doesn't rely upon its existence.
Whatever. Bite your shoulder and hit your chest with your wrist. Then give me your money, retard.
I might lose 25 dollars a month playing poker for 10 hours of entertainment, because I'm not that good, but still I only play 5 dollar games that aren't winner-takes all. My neighbour rents 5 movies a month for 10 hours of entertainment, spending 25 dollars. He's the good guy and I'm the bad guy why exactly?
You're not a bad guy. But people like you didn't lose anything to these scammers. You spend your money, you lose, you go watch tv, just like usual. You're like a retard burning his money and gleefully clapping while it burns pretty colors. Not bad exactly, just kind of sad to watch.
Which is how the people running the casinos are bad. They don't mug people or shoot people, they just take advantage of retarded people. Which might be legal, but is still kind of reprehensible, and the sort of thing you would expect a reasonable person to disapprove of.
So, is this a matter of the "poor players" who deserve better, even though they don't really deserve anything better than to lose all their money, which they did?
Is it a matter of the "poor businesspeople" who are fleecing suckers, getting rich and producing precisely zero value in return?
No, I think it's more a matter of these cheaters doing a public service. The players chose to throw their money away, while the business shouldn't exist in the first place.
Doesn't look like there is much hope that they will retain their freedom or their winnings, but maybe we'll all get lucky and the bastards running the casino won't get any of it back.
My post was intended as a cynical joke. Seriously though, when it comes to government, I've always been more concerned about the prospect of pouring months and years of my time and effort into creating something only to have it discarded because someone else got elected than about security and high pay. I've spoken to a few people who had that happen to them repeatedly and it sucked the soul right out of them, left a real impression on me. Building sandcastles that get wiped out every time the tide comes in doesn't sound like a very fulfilling life, no matter how well it pays...
Sounds like a good place to work. Clearly, they're full of incompetents, leaving lots of room to slack off and still shine brighter than everyone else. Course, after a few years of doing so, you train yourself to be as useless as the rest of em, but then you can just suck up a government cheque and pass the buck until it's time to retire.
The joke was lame. The show was lame. It was an exercise in reusing old Western plots while leveraging the fact that computer generated special effects are cheaper than hiring staff and building and maintaining a set. The sort of crap people from Texas would enjoy. It's also the sort of wistful daydreaming that allows people to tolerate that which should not be tolerated.
Oh, and I'm not a geek. Geeks bite the heads off chickens at the circus.
Funny. Try to launch a plane, or a satellite, or set up a radio transmitter. See how quickly you get caged or shot.