The pirate party is a political entity. The people who make up an entity like that are the ones who are passionate about the cause so of course their views are extreme. Also politics is about deals so its kind of like negotiating when buying an item from a pawn shop. You always say you want more than you want because the final result of the haggle is going to a price somewhere between your asking price and the sellers offer.
It isn't about what you are downloading. Some of us think that having a system like copyright and trying to artificially limit the spread of ideas, knowledge in books and videos, songs that lift the spirit, and the art that cultures our youth by locking it behind a pay wall is a far greater crime than denying someone a bit of POTENTIAL money.
In the case of media you will find that there are also a large number of people who see the media companies have purchased our governments and legislatively created an effective monopoly. Those people might be protesting the quality, the lack of fair pricing, convenience or all of the above because piracy is the only form of competition this monopoly industry has. 99 cents is extortion for a single song when reproduction of gigabytes of mp3's can be accomplished for nothing. It only seems otherwise because under the current system everyone who touched the thing has to be paid royalties and the copyright system has allowed a multi-billion dollar industry to grow around it. I see absolutely no reason that reform can't include bankrupting the existing industry.
"I think you'll likely find the only difference between the two is that you agree with Dr. King's agenda and do not agree with that of the pirate bay and the pirate party."
Since your comment suggests you missed it the first time.
The principals are non-violent civil disobedience as form of protest, free speech and expression. Either you have a right to do these things or you do not. If you do then nobody else has the right to deny them to you simply because they don't agree with your cause.
The civil rights movement isn't the only one to use non-violent civil disobedience as a form of protest.
The key underlying concept that people forget is that the right to non-violent protest, free speech, and free expression is a higher law than those that people break engaging in civil disobedience.
Agreed Troll. Not so much that we should fight over copyright itself but the corruption the media companies have clearly demonstrated is a very good reason for rebellion.
That's an odd notion. You know the GPL is only needed because of copyright right? Without copyright everyone would have the freedoms of the GPL and more for all software that was distributed...
Starting to spring up? Pretty much every city/county in the US has required permits to protest for a long time. Which you can protest the government... as long as you aren't encouraging civil disobedience like piracy or the civil rights movement... only if and when the government gives you permission to do so.
"Can you explain to me, very clearly, what common does freedom of speech and web service what only exist to allow people to share copyrighted material illegaly does have?"
Copyright only applies to creative works of speech and expression so actually the existence of copyright is a violation of freedom of speech and expression. A website is also a form of published speech and expression. Piracy is a peaceful protest of copyright either in whole or in part and the government corruption associated with it. The pirate bay participates by providing a meeting ground for this peaceful protest, nothing more.
Further the pirate bay facilitates publishing regardless of copyright. For instance, I wrote a book (and retain copyright on said book) which I distribute in part via a torrent listed on the pirate bay. My you censor the pirate bay, you are also censoring MY free speech in the form of that book.
Hiring a hitman isn't a form of speech and/or expression. The same is true of driving a get-away car. Publishing a website is both speech and expression. Civil disobedience as a form of protest is also protected by the first amendment. There is certainly an argument that piracy is nothing more than a protest, by those who feel that copyright laws are unjust and the result of government corruption, that takes the form of civil disobedience.
Someone who is facilitating that protest by vocalizing their support and refusing to actively block those engaging in said protest is engaging in protest, speech, and expression in its most fundamental and protected form. TPB doesn't go out and find copyrighted materials, they simply take no effort to censor links to the same being served on their common carrier. It really shouldn't matter that the founders have voiced their pro-piracy opinion they haven't taken any action that actually causes someone to engage in piracy who is not already inclined to do so.
"The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation"
Okay. Now name a single instance of the pirate bay doing so. TPB provides links to material that other people provide (independently of the TPB) and others use those links. TPB does so without regard to the copyright status of the material so linked. These links are posted by users and not TPB so the pirate bay is giving no preference to works shared without permission. The simple fact is that the pirate bay is no more or less than a search engine that is being targeted because those who run the site are openly in favor of civil disobedience in the form of piracy even though said owners take no ACTION to encourage the same beyond expressing that opinion.
This is no different than if Google operated under EXACTLY the same principles it does today, acting as a common carrier without regard to content, but the founders published a statement announcing their support of NAMBLA. Does being a common carrier negate your right to free speech and support of civil disobedience? Doing having an opinion in favor of civil disobedience suddenly require that disobedience if you are a common carrier?
A website is a form of speech/expression. Hitting the mute button today's speech is censoring speech and that is what you are doing when you take down a website. It doesn't make it okay simply because there are other expressions you haven't censored yet.
If lower statutes trump free speech then it would have been illegal for Dr. Martin Luther King to discuss the organized civil disobedience in the civil rights movement. His speech clearly helped facilitate and encourage this activity in the same way the pirate bay encourages and facilitates civil disobedience in the form of piracy.
I think you'll likely find the only difference between the two is that you agree with Dr. King's agenda and do not agree with that of the pirate bay and the pirate party. Free speech is guaranteed constitutionally in the highest law of the land because its most important uses will often encourage the violation of lesser laws thought to be unjust or the result of government corruption.
At least this is the case here in the US even if free speech and the constitution hasn't always been honored here in practice. I don't know about the Netherlands. And yes, it is not a coincidence that the dutch branch of the RIAA/MPAA is taking the same action as the finish and other EU branches. These groups are affiliated and the ringleader is the US branch.
"Secondly, 3.5's changes were primarily about balancing and clarifications. It didn't favor miniatures any more than 3.0 did."
With regard to this. You need to refer back to the beginning of your core rulebooks. 3.0 lists miniatures as optional and 3.5 lists a battle grid and miniatures as required. Pathfinder continues this with at least the box set saying miniatures and battle grid are required to play. I'd have to check the books. If in doubt refer to Monte Cook (architect of 3.x) and his post explaining that 3.x was designed to be mini agnostic and his annoyance at 3.5's change of language regarding this. He then goes on to make suggestions for mini-less play. http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly21.html
Miniatures were common before 3.x true, but they weren't required or even the default there really weren't abilities that primarily benefited mini players and didn't make sense without minis. Most groups didn't use them or if they did use them didn't use the full game mechanics for them only using them to indicate rough positioning.
"Yes, it was D&D. You can't have AD&D without D&D."
If you are willing to consider D&D Basic and AD&D the same game then you obviously would consider any RPG that used dice and has D&D in the name to be D&D as these two games had completely distinct mechanics that were completely incompatible. I consider the lineage of the game mechanics to be the key factor that delineates D&D vs other rpgs. The right to make a wholesale change of the mechanics and still have it considered to be D&D died with Gary Gygax imho.
The only saving grace for 3.x in my mind was that essentially it was basic D&D with some expansions and therefore wasn't actually the wholesale change of mechanics it appeared to be from the AD&D players perspective. Oddly they killed off the AD&D mechanics but gave the new game the edition number that would have corresponded with a new release of AD&D.
"Sorry, but that is objectively untrue. 3E, for example, streamlined and harmonized many rules in a way that was more consistent and made more sense. This benefits all players, but especially newbies who want to get into the game with minimal paperwork. Furthermore, it greatly expanded the potential for characters to have significant non-combat abilities, which flatly contradicts your claim. The fact is, D&D started as almost entirely combat-focused (again, because it grew from mini-based wargaming), and the focus on "fluffy" stuff has grown over the years, not shrunk."
Sorry but there was nothing objective in that entire statement about objective truth. Every worth is unsupported subjective opinion without even a subjective opinion of an objective example. So lets examine it.
Consistent with your example is the skills system which does streamline skills many non-combat situations where one just made something up in the past. That said, there are skill checks for things that preferably would be handled primarily by clever role-play (wordplay with the duke, haggling with a shopkeeper, convincing a drow queen not to kill you) and the skill checks would be a backup to save a game from a player who lacks creativity or a patch for canned adventure content al la pathfinder. +1 for simplification, but this didn't add any NEW capabilities you could do everything skills allow already. It just boxed them into a formal system.
Feats. The Feat system is new to 3.x and aside from a couple feats that enhance skills in the skill system it is entirely combat focused. Before the feat system one could know every skill of every core class and know the capabilities of any character by seeing a handful of stats on their character sheet, their spell list, and the only oddball was the magic items they might have. Thanks to feats every character has a half dozen or more oddballs and the DM is mostly left to trust the player regarding their stats and capabilities or be forced to spend a few hours checking vs the books.
Combat maneuvers, combat defense, attacks of opportunity, thief back stabs, sorcerer class, etc. This is all about combat and it complicates it severely. Everything slows while everyone figures this crap out, its doubtful that ANYONE is doing all this correctly ESPECIALLY if they aren't using minis.
Mini's. In the days of Basic and Advanced 1st Ed not using mini's was the default. Minis were an optional add-on for the imagination impaired. They detract from role-playing in combat as the game then becomes about manipulating a grid rather than visualizing an interaction between you and some bad things you see in your mind. Many of those who did used minis used them as a basic idea of the scale of combat with the DM and not movement rates and spell ranges ultimately deciding if you could hit and or where exactly your spell landed. With 3.x mini's are essential if you want to use the full rules and combat with them is all about dancing around a grid. Movement rate is one of the most essential things in combat now as it determines how fast you can dance on the stupid grid.
The CR system. This made things much easier for calculating monster difficulty and rewards. Definitely plus to game play. That said, it is by definition a combat enhancement.
Advanced wasn't D&D it was a different game with a different rule set that was available in parallel to Basic D&D the two weren't compatible. 2nd was an extension of the Advanced rule set so obviously it was the same game. 3rd could be debated as it replaced Advanced and Basic with a combined rule set but the rules were based on both of those previous rule sets. 3.5 was 3 with some rephrased language that implied you needed to spend money on miniatures so that the RPG could be about hack and slash rather than role-playing. 4 is a completely new game with a new rule set that can't trace it's rule set origin back to the rules created by Gary Gygax. 5 is no doubt an evolution of the 4.x rule set.
Pathfinder is adapted from the rule set of 3.5. It isn't 3.5 but it is an evolution of the original rule sets devised by the games creator Gary Gygax. It's not a matter of what one likes or is comfortable with. I'm of the opinion that AD&D 1st Ed was the best rule set of the bunch. The subsequent editions added clarifications and useful tables but they added extra complexity that mostly just benefits people who are trying to 'strategically' gear their characters for combat encounters. If you pick skills and abilities based on what gives you the best combat modifiers rather what makes sense from an in character perspective I will toss your ass our of my game quick. If you want hack and slash you are better off playing something like WoW. Tabletop D&D can never compete with the strategic complexity and realism of a computer game for hack and slash. Of course a video game could never recreate the experience of even something as simple a role-play burglery in D&D. They lack the flexibility.
Exactly. There is one part of the experience of playing the old original D&D and AD&D gave you that the new games are missing. I don't even see a reference to the fact that the 'rules' are merely guidelines for the dungeon master anymore. A DM should make a point of learning the rules as best he can so that players can learn but in the meantime he is perfectly free to make shit up or even to completely override and ignore rules that over complicate the game.
3.5 was the last incarnation of the traditional game that wizards released. They created a new game to attempt larger market share and kept the name. If you want the newest incarnation of the traditional game see PATHFINDER. They can't call it D&D but that's what it is.
Nice qualifier there. Your statement is true if the only right you consider 'consistent' is the right to property and the advantages accumulating means without oversight brings.
What needs added isn't a right to press equipment but rather a right to access to communications mediums. Once upon a time that was the pony express and for awhile the mail, then the telegraph (and the mail), today it is the internet. Like all constitutional rights this applies to government not private industry. The government can't disconnect my internet but private industry doesn't have to provide me with free access either.
You could say government should provide the communications medium but then they wouldn't even need to scare telecoms into submission they could hook up NSA taps all day long and nobody would be the wiser.
If you mean the US govt they absolutely can prevent YOU access along with preventing access to press machines, telephones, radio, etc. They just can't* stop you from publishing on those mediums if you get access. The government can outlaw all mass communication mediums tomorrow and they haven't infringed upon your freedom of speech and expression.
* Unless they decide to ignore the restriction and do it anyway, as the often do. Commonly seen anytime it makes someone who is rich even richer.
That's because the government has decided it is in their interest to neuter the party that is supposed to keep them in check. The people.
The people in the form of juries are granted the power of jury nullification so that at the end of the day the government can elect itself, pass illegal and unconstitutional laws, but nobody can be successfully prosecuted under those laws because of their right to a jury trial. The courts decided they trumped the juries because of unjust actions in trials involving blacks in the South (nevermind that judges were responsible as often if not more often than juries).
Of course the Constitution gave us the right to bear arms so we could do something about it when the government does something like take the people out of the balance of powers but they were slick enough to slowly neuter that one first.
No the first Amendment doesn't cover that. The first amendment guarantees the right to free speech (since we are pretending the Constitution is respected in the US) but not free and open access to communications mediums that most effectively let you leverage that speech. It is correct to say that constitution shouldn't refer to the net specifically but there has always been a communication medium that should be protected in this manner. At different times that would be the mail, telegraph, radio, telephone, and internet.
Nah, they just won't measure the performance of a computer in terms of chip anymore. There are plenty of specs they can use to convince the average idiot that the new pc is the bigger better one and the old one sux0rs.
"I think everyone understands Moore's law is not a law in the scientific sense, but rather a Coloquialism like "Murphy's law"."
First of all. I'd caution you to show more respect to Mr. Murphy. Second Moore's law became a self fulfilling prophecy the minute the major chip development companies heard it. It's a way of colluding without breaking the law. Got a technology that can give a 10 fold increase, another that could give 2 fold, and another that could give 4 fold... all in the research lab of course so which do you work on making ready for production? If you went straight for the 10 fold you wouldn't be guaranteed to have anything ready to rock in the next 18 months. Thanks to Moores law, your competition feels the same way so while you might compete on your answer to the next 18 month milestone, neither of you are going to skip by much.
Exactly, the reason we hear about it is that chip companies decided it was a decent way to space out their releases. Develop tech that gives an 8 fold increase in transistors? Don't need to work that to release immediately, focus on tech giving only a two fold increase or watered down step along the path of the 8 fold increase and get that ready for production. That way you already know where to go from there.
Slashdot Mirror
The pirate party is a political entity. The people who make up an entity like that are the ones who are passionate about the cause so of course their views are extreme. Also politics is about deals so its kind of like negotiating when buying an item from a pawn shop. You always say you want more than you want because the final result of the haggle is going to a price somewhere between your asking price and the sellers offer.
It isn't about what you are downloading. Some of us think that having a system like copyright and trying to artificially limit the spread of ideas, knowledge in books and videos, songs that lift the spirit, and the art that cultures our youth by locking it behind a pay wall is a far greater crime than denying someone a bit of POTENTIAL money.
In the case of media you will find that there are also a large number of people who see the media companies have purchased our governments and legislatively created an effective monopoly. Those people might be protesting the quality, the lack of fair pricing, convenience or all of the above because piracy is the only form of competition this monopoly industry has. 99 cents is extortion for a single song when reproduction of gigabytes of mp3's can be accomplished for nothing. It only seems otherwise because under the current system everyone who touched the thing has to be paid royalties and the copyright system has allowed a multi-billion dollar industry to grow around it. I see absolutely no reason that reform can't include bankrupting the existing industry.
"I think you'll likely find the only difference between the two is that you agree with Dr. King's agenda and do not agree with that of the pirate bay and the pirate party."
Since your comment suggests you missed it the first time.
The principals are non-violent civil disobedience as form of protest, free speech and expression. Either you have a right to do these things or you do not. If you do then nobody else has the right to deny them to you simply because they don't agree with your cause.
The civil rights movement isn't the only one to use non-violent civil disobedience as a form of protest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
The key underlying concept that people forget is that the right to non-violent protest, free speech, and free expression is a higher law than those that people break engaging in civil disobedience.
Agreed Troll. Not so much that we should fight over copyright itself but the corruption the media companies have clearly demonstrated is a very good reason for rebellion.
That's an odd notion. You know the GPL is only needed because of copyright right? Without copyright everyone would have the freedoms of the GPL and more for all software that was distributed...
Starting to spring up? Pretty much every city/county in the US has required permits to protest for a long time. Which you can protest the government... as long as you aren't encouraging civil disobedience like piracy or the civil rights movement... only if and when the government gives you permission to do so.
you mean like the gazillion other torrent search sites which all index the pirate bay?
"Can you explain to me, very clearly, what common does freedom of speech and web service what only exist to allow people to share copyrighted material illegaly does have?"
Copyright only applies to creative works of speech and expression so actually the existence of copyright is a violation of freedom of speech and expression. A website is also a form of published speech and expression. Piracy is a peaceful protest of copyright either in whole or in part and the government corruption associated with it. The pirate bay participates by providing a meeting ground for this peaceful protest, nothing more.
Further the pirate bay facilitates publishing regardless of copyright. For instance, I wrote a book (and retain copyright on said book) which I distribute in part via a torrent listed on the pirate bay. My you censor the pirate bay, you are also censoring MY free speech in the form of that book.
"GPL wouldn't exist without strong copyright."
The GPL is only NEEDED because of copyright.
Hiring a hitman isn't a form of speech and/or expression. The same is true of driving a get-away car. Publishing a website is both speech and expression. Civil disobedience as a form of protest is also protected by the first amendment. There is certainly an argument that piracy is nothing more than a protest, by those who feel that copyright laws are unjust and the result of government corruption, that takes the form of civil disobedience.
Someone who is facilitating that protest by vocalizing their support and refusing to actively block those engaging in said protest is engaging in protest, speech, and expression in its most fundamental and protected form. TPB doesn't go out and find copyrighted materials, they simply take no effort to censor links to the same being served on their common carrier. It really shouldn't matter that the founders have voiced their pro-piracy opinion they haven't taken any action that actually causes someone to engage in piracy who is not already inclined to do so.
"The very act of providing copyrighted material for download without permission from the copyright holders is prima facie copyright violation"
Okay. Now name a single instance of the pirate bay doing so. TPB provides links to material that other people provide (independently of the TPB) and others use those links. TPB does so without regard to the copyright status of the material so linked. These links are posted by users and not TPB so the pirate bay is giving no preference to works shared without permission. The simple fact is that the pirate bay is no more or less than a search engine that is being targeted because those who run the site are openly in favor of civil disobedience in the form of piracy even though said owners take no ACTION to encourage the same beyond expressing that opinion.
This is no different than if Google operated under EXACTLY the same principles it does today, acting as a common carrier without regard to content, but the founders published a statement announcing their support of NAMBLA. Does being a common carrier negate your right to free speech and support of civil disobedience? Doing having an opinion in favor of civil disobedience suddenly require that disobedience if you are a common carrier?
Not in a free society.
A website is a form of speech/expression. Hitting the mute button today's speech is censoring speech and that is what you are doing when you take down a website. It doesn't make it okay simply because there are other expressions you haven't censored yet.
If lower statutes trump free speech then it would have been illegal for Dr. Martin Luther King to discuss the organized civil disobedience in the civil rights movement. His speech clearly helped facilitate and encourage this activity in the same way the pirate bay encourages and facilitates civil disobedience in the form of piracy.
I think you'll likely find the only difference between the two is that you agree with Dr. King's agenda and do not agree with that of the pirate bay and the pirate party. Free speech is guaranteed constitutionally in the highest law of the land because its most important uses will often encourage the violation of lesser laws thought to be unjust or the result of government corruption.
At least this is the case here in the US even if free speech and the constitution hasn't always been honored here in practice. I don't know about the Netherlands. And yes, it is not a coincidence that the dutch branch of the RIAA/MPAA is taking the same action as the finish and other EU branches. These groups are affiliated and the ringleader is the US branch.
"Secondly, 3.5's changes were primarily about balancing and clarifications. It didn't favor miniatures any more than 3.0 did."
With regard to this. You need to refer back to the beginning of your core rulebooks. 3.0 lists miniatures as optional and 3.5 lists a battle grid and miniatures as required. Pathfinder continues this with at least the box set saying miniatures and battle grid are required to play. I'd have to check the books. If in doubt refer to Monte Cook (architect of 3.x) and his post explaining that 3.x was designed to be mini agnostic and his annoyance at 3.5's change of language regarding this. He then goes on to make suggestions for mini-less play. http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly21.html
Miniatures were common before 3.x true, but they weren't required or even the default there really weren't abilities that primarily benefited mini players and didn't make sense without minis. Most groups didn't use them or if they did use them didn't use the full game mechanics for them only using them to indicate rough positioning.
"Yes, it was D&D. You can't have AD&D without D&D."
If you are willing to consider D&D Basic and AD&D the same game then you obviously would consider any RPG that used dice and has D&D in the name to be D&D as these two games had completely distinct mechanics that were completely incompatible. I consider the lineage of the game mechanics to be the key factor that delineates D&D vs other rpgs. The right to make a wholesale change of the mechanics and still have it considered to be D&D died with Gary Gygax imho.
The only saving grace for 3.x in my mind was that essentially it was basic D&D with some expansions and therefore wasn't actually the wholesale change of mechanics it appeared to be from the AD&D players perspective. Oddly they killed off the AD&D mechanics but gave the new game the edition number that would have corresponded with a new release of AD&D.
"Sorry, but that is objectively untrue. 3E, for example, streamlined and harmonized many rules in a way that was more consistent and made more sense. This benefits all players, but especially newbies who want to get into the game with minimal paperwork. Furthermore, it greatly expanded the potential for characters to have significant non-combat abilities, which flatly contradicts your claim. The fact is, D&D started as almost entirely combat-focused (again, because it grew from mini-based wargaming), and the focus on "fluffy" stuff has grown over the years, not shrunk."
Sorry but there was nothing objective in that entire statement about objective truth. Every worth is unsupported subjective opinion without even a subjective opinion of an objective example. So lets examine it.
Consistent with your example is the skills system which does streamline skills many non-combat situations where one just made something up in the past. That said, there are skill checks for things that preferably would be handled primarily by clever role-play (wordplay with the duke, haggling with a shopkeeper, convincing a drow queen not to kill you) and the skill checks would be a backup to save a game from a player who lacks creativity or a patch for canned adventure content al la pathfinder. +1 for simplification, but this didn't add any NEW capabilities you could do everything skills allow already. It just boxed them into a formal system.
Feats. The Feat system is new to 3.x and aside from a couple feats that enhance skills in the skill system it is entirely combat focused. Before the feat system one could know every skill of every core class and know the capabilities of any character by seeing a handful of stats on their character sheet, their spell list, and the only oddball was the magic items they might have. Thanks to feats every character has a half dozen or more oddballs and the DM is mostly left to trust the player regarding their stats and capabilities or be forced to spend a few hours checking vs the books.
Combat maneuvers, combat defense, attacks of opportunity, thief back stabs, sorcerer class, etc. This is all about combat and it complicates it severely. Everything slows while everyone figures this crap out, its doubtful that ANYONE is doing all this correctly ESPECIALLY if they aren't using minis.
Mini's. In the days of Basic and Advanced 1st Ed not using mini's was the default. Minis were an optional add-on for the imagination impaired. They detract from role-playing in combat as the game then becomes about manipulating a grid rather than visualizing an interaction between you and some bad things you see in your mind. Many of those who did used minis used them as a basic idea of the scale of combat with the DM and not movement rates and spell ranges ultimately deciding if you could hit and or where exactly your spell landed. With 3.x mini's are essential if you want to use the full rules and combat with them is all about dancing around a grid. Movement rate is one of the most essential things in combat now as it determines how fast you can dance on the stupid grid.
The CR system. This made things much easier for calculating monster difficulty and rewards. Definitely plus to game play. That said, it is by definition a combat enhancement.
Advanced wasn't D&D it was a different game with a different rule set that was available in parallel to Basic D&D the two weren't compatible. 2nd was an extension of the Advanced rule set so obviously it was the same game. 3rd could be debated as it replaced Advanced and Basic with a combined rule set but the rules were based on both of those previous rule sets. 3.5 was 3 with some rephrased language that implied you needed to spend money on miniatures so that the RPG could be about hack and slash rather than role-playing. 4 is a completely new game with a new rule set that can't trace it's rule set origin back to the rules created by Gary Gygax. 5 is no doubt an evolution of the 4.x rule set.
Pathfinder is adapted from the rule set of 3.5. It isn't 3.5 but it is an evolution of the original rule sets devised by the games creator Gary Gygax. It's not a matter of what one likes or is comfortable with. I'm of the opinion that AD&D 1st Ed was the best rule set of the bunch. The subsequent editions added clarifications and useful tables but they added extra complexity that mostly just benefits people who are trying to 'strategically' gear their characters for combat encounters. If you pick skills and abilities based on what gives you the best combat modifiers rather what makes sense from an in character perspective I will toss your ass our of my game quick. If you want hack and slash you are better off playing something like WoW. Tabletop D&D can never compete with the strategic complexity and realism of a computer game for hack and slash. Of course a video game could never recreate the experience of even something as simple a role-play burglery in D&D. They lack the flexibility.
Exactly. There is one part of the experience of playing the old original D&D and AD&D gave you that the new games are missing. I don't even see a reference to the fact that the 'rules' are merely guidelines for the dungeon master anymore. A DM should make a point of learning the rules as best he can so that players can learn but in the meantime he is perfectly free to make shit up or even to completely override and ignore rules that over complicate the game.
3.5 was the last incarnation of the traditional game that wizards released. They created a new game to attempt larger market share and kept the name. If you want the newest incarnation of the traditional game see PATHFINDER. They can't call it D&D but that's what it is.
"consistent right"
Nice qualifier there. Your statement is true if the only right you consider 'consistent' is the right to property and the advantages accumulating means without oversight brings.
What needs added isn't a right to press equipment but rather a right to access to communications mediums. Once upon a time that was the pony express and for awhile the mail, then the telegraph (and the mail), today it is the internet. Like all constitutional rights this applies to government not private industry. The government can't disconnect my internet but private industry doesn't have to provide me with free access either.
You could say government should provide the communications medium but then they wouldn't even need to scare telecoms into submission they could hook up NSA taps all day long and nobody would be the wiser.
If you mean the US govt they absolutely can prevent YOU access along with preventing access to press machines, telephones, radio, etc. They just can't* stop you from publishing on those mediums if you get access. The government can outlaw all mass communication mediums tomorrow and they haven't infringed upon your freedom of speech and expression.
* Unless they decide to ignore the restriction and do it anyway, as the often do. Commonly seen anytime it makes someone who is rich even richer.
That's because the government has decided it is in their interest to neuter the party that is supposed to keep them in check. The people.
The people in the form of juries are granted the power of jury nullification so that at the end of the day the government can elect itself, pass illegal and unconstitutional laws, but nobody can be successfully prosecuted under those laws because of their right to a jury trial. The courts decided they trumped the juries because of unjust actions in trials involving blacks in the South (nevermind that judges were responsible as often if not more often than juries).
Of course the Constitution gave us the right to bear arms so we could do something about it when the government does something like take the people out of the balance of powers but they were slick enough to slowly neuter that one first.
No the first Amendment doesn't cover that. The first amendment guarantees the right to free speech (since we are pretending the Constitution is respected in the US) but not free and open access to communications mediums that most effectively let you leverage that speech. It is correct to say that constitution shouldn't refer to the net specifically but there has always been a communication medium that should be protected in this manner. At different times that would be the mail, telegraph, radio, telephone, and internet.
1.5 yr is not 1 yr or so. If anything it'd be 2 yrs or so since it rounds up.
Nah, they just won't measure the performance of a computer in terms of chip anymore. There are plenty of specs they can use to convince the average idiot that the new pc is the bigger better one and the old one sux0rs.
"I think everyone understands Moore's law is not a law in the scientific sense, but rather a Coloquialism like "Murphy's law"."
First of all. I'd caution you to show more respect to Mr. Murphy. Second Moore's law became a self fulfilling prophecy the minute the major chip development companies heard it. It's a way of colluding without breaking the law. Got a technology that can give a 10 fold increase, another that could give 2 fold, and another that could give 4 fold... all in the research lab of course so which do you work on making ready for production? If you went straight for the 10 fold you wouldn't be guaranteed to have anything ready to rock in the next 18 months. Thanks to Moores law, your competition feels the same way so while you might compete on your answer to the next 18 month milestone, neither of you are going to skip by much.
Exactly, the reason we hear about it is that chip companies decided it was a decent way to space out their releases. Develop tech that gives an 8 fold increase in transistors? Don't need to work that to release immediately, focus on tech giving only a two fold increase or watered down step along the path of the 8 fold increase and get that ready for production. That way you already know where to go from there.