You can read more on this in The Fall of Berlin 1945. Good history book.
You should give it a read, since that book goes completely against what you just claimed- indeed, it attributes the bulk of terrorism in postwar Berlin to rampaging occupation troops!
As I recall, everyone including the U.S. military was predicting invasion casualties in the thousands or tens of thousands, yet actual losses were well under a thousand.
False. There were more than 10,000 during just the first 3 weeks, including more than 80 by a single Bradley gunner. (Furthermore, it is dishonest to compare a "casualty" statistic with one of "losses", because casaulties can easily be 5-15x greater than losses)
Or if you didn't intend to include OPFOR and collateral figures in those casualties, then your recollection is quite wrong, and most military planners thought that 500 Coalition deaths would be a high guess.
I am just pointing out that there's a difference between the two.
Yes, but not in the way you think. You can't simply divide all insurgent actions into either "terrorism" or "resistance". Depending on the situation, terrorism may be a valid form of resistance, or it can be for other purposes. ("valid" doesn't mean "good")
Terrorists target civilians whereas resistance fighters target the soldiers who occupy their land.
No. Even the USA government disagrees with you, as they classify many attacks directed solely at combat soliders as "terrorism".
Jack already explained it fine, and then I explained it fine. If you don't understand the simple 2-part statement yet, then there's little chance I can actually help you.
Jack specifically said: "If players lose nothing by being defeated". You quoted that clause, but did you read it?
Try to imagine if I could get another house identical to my current one, for free, at any instant, as many times as I want. Would it still bother me very much to suffer a tornado or fire?
So my original point still stands, if people already value their avatars, then there is no need for a "death penalty" to somehow make them value them more.
Prehaps your problem is with vocabulary; maybe you don't know what "avatar" means. You use it like a synonym for "character sheet".
Since The Incredibles just ripped that idea from the same seminal 20-year-old comic that it took 50% of the plot-points from, it's spoilagability is a little expired.
In fact, anyone who read that post and thought it told something about the movie would be misled. It's almost an anti-spoiler. (ie: "What if Haley Joel Osment was dead too?")
Pedantically, that is exactly backwards. To be technical about it, what we often call "games" like Doom and Half-Life are not games at all, but puzzles. By definition, a "game" requires competitiveness, so nothing single-player need apply.
Oh, so you got to level 100 in 419 hours online. And it took me 552, so you must be better at this than I am.
That's not nonsense. That's the truth. If I earned $100 in 80% of the time it took you, I'd be a better worker (according to the principles of capitalism).
Except...how much of your time was spent chatting, crafting, exploring, questing, fighting other players?
Many hobbies, from bicycling to basketweaving to RPGs, derive a great portion (majority?) of their enjoyability by peripheral activities like the pleasure of chatting with friends.
But, outside of the Special Olympics, there are other measures of ability beyond how much fun you had trying. We can conduct simple contests to tell who is the best player at a game. For PVP games (including reallife things such as football) a simple head-to-head contest is all that's needed. For a PVE game (including real quasi-sports like track&field) you set some metric of achievement and see who scores the highest. As Jack already explained, the best availble metric to quantify MMORPG ability is XP/hour.
you would be good enough to explain how levelling provides any useful and demonstrable distinction between one player and another.
When people play the game, what are they trying to do? (Aside from the worthlessly abstract "Have fun"). They want to either defeat computer challenges, view content, or collect power... all of which comes down to levelling. If the game weren't a level-grind like all other popular MMORPGs, then it would be valid to use another standard. But as long as the gameplay is about leveling, the fastest levellers will be the best players, by definition.
Consider if you were asked to objectively pick which of a set of players of a solo game (like Doom 3) was the best. You'd have to count how long it takes them to complete the game, or how many times they loaded a save, or something else quantifiable with a hard linkage to skill. The amount of time they spend admiring the scenary or toying with physics doesn't make them better players, even though they may be having more fun, which is the ostensible objective of games.
That fallacy is very rare amoung MMOG critics, because few people are stupid enough to misinterpret straightforward statements that way, while still retaining enough intellect for minimal literacy.
Avatars are disposable only if the player considers the cumulative time that they have put into developing their character as worthless.
No. Just like Jack said, avatars are disposable if you don't lose anything by disposing of them. Your suggestion that time would be lost is completely contradicted by his hypothesis that nothing would be lost.
UT2004 was patched to not even do a CD check, and only checks the key in multiplayer mode (when you have to be on the net anyhow) and it sold plenty.
That example works against your argument.
The critical period for game sales is the first 3 weeks. Ut2k4 did have CD-checking for the begining of its marketing period, when the risk of copyright infringment was greatest.
how would you like to buy a $60,000 Rolex to find a quartz movement inside?
I'd be happy. Quartz watches far more accurate and reliable than mechanical ones, and the watch itself is just male jewelery. In conspicuous consumption, the fact that it looks expensive is what really matters.
Why is it you get to decide that video games have an arbitrary shelf life (and... a shelf life 1/5 the current copyright length?).
In the USA, the Constitution requires this.
It states that Congress may establish copyright protection to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". 20-30 years of copyright protection does promote progress, by giving authors a better chance to earn money from their work.
However, copyright extending much longer than that becomes counter-productive: it allows authors to sit back and collect royalties from old works, instead of creating anything new. And it also makes it harder for other authors to build off old works, further retarding progress.
The USA's Supreme Court has already noted that the length of copyright terms is contrary to the Constitutional intent, although they haven't yet had a case asking them to rule on it.
And you know what? They made one hell of a profit.
A perfect example of how copyright lasts too long. A game company made a lot of money without making any new games. If copyright was shorter, the public would still be playing those games, but Nintendo would be spending more time writing new stuff, instead of marketing oldies.
because that would probably be copyright infringement
No. Google is not the author of the search results. It merely quoted them from other sources, and holds no copyright on them.
would almost certainly run afoul of "database rights" (shudder).
Both Google and Microsoft are in the USA, where there is no legal concept of "database rights". They both have European subsidiaries, but it's unlikely MS is using them for a search project such as this.
I believe it is clearly in our best interest to restore the balance of power between DC and the several States.
So that's your opinion about how things should be, and you're entitled to it.
But when someone makes a factual statement about how things actually are, and you contradict it, then you are straightforwardly wrong. (Which can occasionally be acceptable as rhetorical hyperbole, as in "Abortion is murder!" when legally it isn't. In that case the clause "should be" is inferred)
Now, as to trying to convince other people as to how elections should be conducted, you have a pro-EC viewpoint that's based on the idea of states being fairly autonomous. But I strongly suspect that the average USA voter believes in her heart "One Nation, Indivisible" and harbors patriotic feelings not towards Georgia or Kansas, but "America".
On a different topic, if you want a weaker, less-meddlesome federal government, then you should support a popular vote. If the President was elected nationwide, then rather than pandering towards Yucca Mountain here and farm subdidies there, he'd run on a platform based more in truely federal-level issues, and not promise to bring spoils back to every swing state he touches.
Yes (which does not exclude democracy). But, what did the American public back then fear most about non-republican governments? Monarchy. They had just been through a painful war against an enemy personified in King George, and they were anxious for reassurance that no royalty could again enthrall them. The ONLY firm thing "republic" means is that there is no monarchy.
Republic: A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
True. That is the definition of republic.
A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
False. That is not the definition of republic, primarily because it contradicts the correct definition you already printed. For example, the citizens of the hold supreme power and elect representatives, so it matches this definition, even though it's it is a constitutional monarchy, and not a republic.
Democracy: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
True. But if you know that, how can you continue to claim that the USA is not a democracy? I mean, the final two sentences of your post directly contradict each other. Or don't you think the people there govern through elected representatives?
You completely ignored the last half of my sentence:
No, I saw that. YOU, on the other hand, ignored all of my post. A "common defense" is irrelevant to what I wrote, so it seems you just don't understand. Shall I type it all again?
Nation-states have citizens.
Canada, USA, and Spain are all nation-states, because people can hold Canadian, USA ("American") or Spanish citizenship.
There is no process to acquire Ottowanian, New Yorkian, or Andalucian citizenship independent of the nation containing that district.
The "states" of the USA are not separate nation-states because, amoung many other reasons, the residents don't consider them to be separate. There are no legal, language, or cultural barriers to moving between Virginia and California, as there would for going from Denmark to Italy.
They collect their own income and/or sales taxes, have their own legislatures (the structure of which are determined by their own constitutions), determine their own funding levels for education, transportation, etc., write their own criminal justice codes, and so on and so on.
The city of San Francisco collects its own taxes, has a legislature, funds education and transportation, etc. Those attributes are meaningless towards classifying something as a nation, unless you want to claim the USA is made of 400+ different states...
America is fifty states, united into a federation.
No it isn't. The word "state" is misused throughout the USA. Traditionally, "state" is a synonym for "nation", but in the USA it is a synonym for "district" or "province".
Even back in 1780 it was really one nation-state, and by 1860 the total unification was undeniably demonstrated.
If I murder my neighbor, it is the State of Minnesota, not the US, which throws me in prison.
So when you move from Minneapolis to Chicago, you first apply with the Illinois department of immigration. They check your employment history and give you a green card, which lets you apply for Illinois citizenship in 3 years?
Sorry, I don't think so. Citizenship is on a per-nation basis. Just because your "state" (district) has its own laws doesn't make it a separte country, any more than a town's dog-leash regulation make it a country. "Governor" is not the title of a head of state; "President" is.
The European Union really works the way you claim the USA does. Notice that in the recent Iraq invasion, it wasn't the EU that declared support for the operation, but individual countries within it. But from the American front, Massachusetts soldiers went in alongside Texas ones, under a single authority.
Make politicians work to earn those EVs, flying all over the country.
That makes almost as much sense as cutting the deficeit by cutting taxes.
If more states allocated EVs discretely, then candidates would spend even more time near the big cities. George Bush would have an incentive to campaign in NY and CA again (because otherwise urban=solid Democrat), which would draw Kerry in too, to protect his turf.
Slashdot Mirror
You can read more on this in The Fall of Berlin 1945. Good history book.
You should give it a read, since that book goes completely against what you just claimed- indeed, it attributes the bulk of terrorism in postwar Berlin to rampaging occupation troops!
As I recall, everyone including the U.S. military was predicting invasion casualties in the thousands or tens of thousands, yet actual losses were well under a thousand.
False. There were more than 10,000 during just the first 3 weeks, including more than 80 by a single Bradley gunner. (Furthermore, it is dishonest to compare a "casualty" statistic with one of "losses", because casaulties can easily be 5-15x greater than losses)
Or if you didn't intend to include OPFOR and collateral figures in those casualties, then your recollection is quite wrong, and most military planners thought that 500 Coalition deaths would be a high guess.
I am just pointing out that there's a difference between the two.
Yes, but not in the way you think. You can't simply divide all insurgent actions into either "terrorism" or "resistance". Depending on the situation, terrorism may be a valid form of resistance, or it can be for other purposes. ("valid" doesn't mean "good")
Terrorists target civilians whereas resistance fighters target the soldiers who occupy their land.
No. Even the USA government disagrees with you, as they classify many attacks directed solely at combat soliders as "terrorism".
Well, I certainly hop you back up that insult with some substance.
I don't really see the need. Your complete miscomprehension is obvious to everyone else.
Jack already explained it fine, and then I explained it fine. If you don't understand the simple 2-part statement yet, then there's little chance I can actually help you.
Jack specifically said: "If players lose nothing by being defeated". You quoted that clause, but did you read it?
Try to imagine if I could get another house identical to my current one, for free, at any instant, as many times as I want. Would it still bother me very much to suffer a tornado or fire?
So my original point still stands, if people already value their avatars, then there is no need for a "death penalty" to somehow make them value them more.
Prehaps your problem is with vocabulary; maybe you don't know what "avatar" means. You use it like a synonym for "character sheet".
Mind using the word spoiler?
Since The Incredibles just ripped that idea from the same seminal 20-year-old comic that it took 50% of the plot-points from, it's spoilagability is a little expired.
In fact, anyone who read that post and thought it told something about the movie would be misled. It's almost an anti-spoiler. (ie: "What if Haley Joel Osment was dead too?")
All games are a puzzle of some sort,
Pedantically, that is exactly backwards. To be technical about it, what we often call "games" like Doom and Half-Life are not games at all, but puzzles. By definition, a "game" requires competitiveness, so nothing single-player need apply.
Oh, so you got to level 100 in 419 hours online. And it took me 552, so you must be better at this than I am.
That's not nonsense. That's the truth. If I earned $100 in 80% of the time it took you, I'd be a better worker (according to the principles of capitalism).
Except...how much of your time was spent chatting, crafting, exploring, questing, fighting other players?
Many hobbies, from bicycling to basketweaving to RPGs, derive a great portion (majority?) of their enjoyability by peripheral activities like the pleasure of chatting with friends.
But, outside of the Special Olympics, there are other measures of ability beyond how much fun you had trying. We can conduct simple contests to tell who is the best player at a game. For PVP games (including reallife things such as football) a simple head-to-head contest is all that's needed. For a PVE game (including real quasi-sports like track&field) you set some metric of achievement and see who scores the highest. As Jack already explained, the best availble metric to quantify MMORPG ability is XP/hour.
you would be good enough to explain how levelling provides any useful and demonstrable distinction between one player and another.
When people play the game, what are they trying to do? (Aside from the worthlessly abstract "Have fun"). They want to either defeat computer challenges, view content, or collect power... all of which comes down to levelling. If the game weren't a level-grind like all other popular MMORPGs, then it would be valid to use another standard. But as long as the gameplay is about leveling, the fastest levellers will be the best players, by definition.
Consider if you were asked to objectively pick which of a set of players of a solo game (like Doom 3) was the best. You'd have to count how long it takes them to complete the game, or how many times they loaded a save, or something else quantifiable with a hard linkage to skill. The amount of time they spend admiring the scenary or toying with physics doesn't make them better players, even though they may be having more fun, which is the ostensible objective of games.
Levelling pace in an MMORPG has little to do with how much "better" a player is but more with how much time said player has to invest.
Obtuse much? If I told you my Ferrari was faster than your Honda, how would you reply?
Movement rate on roads has little to do with how much "faster" a car is but more with how much time each car has been driving.
Both statments are true. Both are also irrelevant, miss the obvious point, and attack things that weren't even implied in the original.
Really now, this is frothing idiocy.
It's rare for a poster to give such an honest self-critique.
Or can't you pick up on obvious inferences? Must everything be spelled out for you using 5 times the word-count?
If I told you that faster vehicles travel further, would you get all confused because I elided "in equal time"?
This fallacy is very popular amongst MMOG devs.
That fallacy is very rare amoung MMOG critics, because few people are stupid enough to misinterpret straightforward statements that way, while still retaining enough intellect for minimal literacy.
Avatars are disposable only if the player considers the cumulative time that they have put into developing their character as worthless.
No. Just like Jack said, avatars are disposable if you don't lose anything by disposing of them. Your suggestion that time would be lost is completely contradicted by his hypothesis that nothing would be lost.
UT2004 was patched to not even do a CD check, and only checks the key in multiplayer mode (when you have to be on the net anyhow) and it sold plenty.
That example works against your argument.
The critical period for game sales is the first 3 weeks. Ut2k4 did have CD-checking for the begining of its marketing period, when the risk of copyright infringment was greatest.
amount to a specific prohibited form of discrimination such as race or disability.
And since those things ARE specifically prohibited, the statement "They can discriminate on *any* grounds they like" is 100% untrue.
how would you like to buy a $60,000 Rolex to find a quartz movement inside?
I'd be happy. Quartz watches far more accurate and reliable than mechanical ones, and the watch itself is just male jewelery. In conspicuous consumption, the fact that it looks expensive is what really matters.
Why is it you get to decide that video games have an arbitrary shelf life (and... a shelf life 1/5 the current copyright length?).
In the USA, the Constitution requires this.
It states that Congress may establish copyright protection to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". 20-30 years of copyright protection does promote progress, by giving authors a better chance to earn money from their work.
However, copyright extending much longer than that becomes counter-productive: it allows authors to sit back and collect royalties from old works, instead of creating anything new. And it also makes it harder for other authors to build off old works, further retarding progress.
The USA's Supreme Court has already noted that the length of copyright terms is contrary to the Constitutional intent, although they haven't yet had a case asking them to rule on it.
And you know what? They made one hell of a profit.
A perfect example of how copyright lasts too long. A game company made a lot of money without making any new games. If copyright was shorter, the public would still be playing those games, but Nintendo would be spending more time writing new stuff, instead of marketing oldies.
because that would probably be copyright infringement
No. Google is not the author of the search results. It merely quoted them from other sources, and holds no copyright on them.
would almost certainly run afoul of "database rights" (shudder).
Both Google and Microsoft are in the USA, where there is no legal concept of "database rights". They both have European subsidiaries, but it's unlikely MS is using them for a search project such as this.
If I copy your work and take credit or it,
Regardless of any terms of service, that's doubly illegal: it is both copyright infringement, and fraud.
Even if the author gave you permission, taking credit for it yourself is plagiarism, which in certain instances can make you liable for fraud.
They don't like the way you look, and won't sell you what you want? Tough luck.
And then you sue them for discrimination, and the feds seize their entire business assests.
Business owners in the USA do not have the right to refuse service for any reason they want!
If you don't follow my rules, I can go ahead and firewall off your IP,
Irrelevant. Even if someone does follow the rules, the webserver can ban him on a whim. The rules mean nothing (except to give a warning).
In fact, the rules don't even make sense: "If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services,"
So a company worker looking for a place to buy polyesther thread can't search for it on Google, because that'd be a commercial use!
you need a Lucifer match
"Lucifer match" is just as redundant as "torch flashlight" or "lorry truck". "Lucifer" is a noun, not an adjective that needs a noun to follow...
I believe it is clearly in our best interest to restore the balance of power between DC and the several States.
So that's your opinion about how things should be, and you're entitled to it.
But when someone makes a factual statement about how things actually are, and you contradict it, then you are straightforwardly wrong. (Which can occasionally be acceptable as rhetorical hyperbole, as in "Abortion is murder!" when legally it isn't. In that case the clause "should be" is inferred)
Now, as to trying to convince other people as to how elections should be conducted, you have a pro-EC viewpoint that's based on the idea of states being fairly autonomous. But I strongly suspect that the average USA voter believes in her heart "One Nation, Indivisible" and harbors patriotic feelings not towards Georgia or Kansas, but "America".
On a different topic, if you want a weaker, less-meddlesome federal government, then you should support a popular vote. If the President was elected nationwide, then rather than pandering towards Yucca Mountain here and farm subdidies there, he'd run on a platform based more in truely federal-level issues, and not promise to bring spoils back to every swing state he touches.
"A republic, if you can keep it."
Yes (which does not exclude democracy). But, what did the American public back then fear most about non-republican governments? Monarchy. They had just been through a painful war against an enemy personified in King George, and they were anxious for reassurance that no royalty could again enthrall them. The ONLY firm thing "republic" means is that there is no monarchy.
Republic: A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
True. That is the definition of republic.
A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
False. That is not the definition of republic, primarily because it contradicts the correct definition you already printed. For example, the citizens of the hold supreme power and elect representatives, so it matches this definition, even though it's it is a constitutional monarchy, and not a republic.
Democracy: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
True. But if you know that, how can you continue to claim that the USA is not a democracy? I mean, the final two sentences of your post directly contradict each other. Or don't you think the people there govern through elected representatives?
You completely ignored the last half of my sentence:
No, I saw that. YOU, on the other hand, ignored all of my post. A "common defense" is irrelevant to what I wrote, so it seems you just don't understand. Shall I type it all again?
Nation-states have citizens.
Canada, USA, and Spain are all nation-states, because people can hold Canadian, USA ("American") or Spanish citizenship.
There is no process to acquire Ottowanian, New Yorkian, or Andalucian citizenship independent of the nation containing that district.
The "states" of the USA are not separate nation-states because, amoung many other reasons, the residents don't consider them to be separate. There are no legal, language, or cultural barriers to moving between Virginia and California, as there would for going from Denmark to Italy.
They collect their own income and/or sales taxes, have their own legislatures (the structure of which are determined by their own constitutions), determine their own funding levels for education, transportation, etc., write their own criminal justice codes, and so on and so on.
The city of San Francisco collects its own taxes, has a legislature, funds education and transportation, etc. Those attributes are meaningless towards classifying something as a nation, unless you want to claim the USA is made of 400+ different states...
I completely and fundamentally disagree with that notion. And I guess it shows in every discussion we have.
I've seen Holocaust Deniers before, but never War-Between-The-States Deniers...
America is fifty states, united into a federation.
No it isn't. The word "state" is misused throughout the USA. Traditionally, "state" is a synonym for "nation", but in the USA it is a synonym for "district" or "province".
Even back in 1780 it was really one nation-state, and by 1860 the total unification was undeniably demonstrated.
If I murder my neighbor, it is the State of Minnesota, not the US, which throws me in prison.
So when you move from Minneapolis to Chicago, you first apply with the Illinois department of immigration. They check your employment history and give you a green card, which lets you apply for Illinois citizenship in 3 years?
Sorry, I don't think so. Citizenship is on a per-nation basis. Just because your "state" (district) has its own laws doesn't make it a separte country, any more than a town's dog-leash regulation make it a country. "Governor" is not the title of a head of state; "President" is.
The European Union really works the way you claim the USA does. Notice that in the recent Iraq invasion, it wasn't the EU that declared support for the operation, but individual countries within it. But from the American front, Massachusetts soldiers went in alongside Texas ones, under a single authority.
PS. Also, Massachusetts isn't even called a state.
We start by pointing out were not a democracy...
Still allergic to dictionaries, eh? I hear you can get a prescription for that now...
Make politicians work to earn those EVs, flying all over the country.
That makes almost as much sense as cutting the deficeit by cutting taxes.
If more states allocated EVs discretely, then candidates would spend even more time near the big cities. George Bush would have an incentive to campaign in NY and CA again (because otherwise urban=solid Democrat), which would draw Kerry in too, to protect his turf.