true, but they can also prevent popular legislation being passed as well. Despite overwhelming support for the ban on fox hunting, the lords delayed it by many years, mainly due to the fact that a big chunk of them are landed gentry who are pro-hunting, and not a single one of them is elected. Democracy. ha! The house of Lord is *not* a good idea, regardless of the occasional bit of sense that is accidentally spoken by the people who can afford to buy a peerage and a seat in government.*
* or in the case of 'Lord' Sainsbury or Haskins, you can even purchase a ministerial position, given a big enough check for the ruling party.
Why do you need 20 people? More is not always better. Only one person wrote Harry Potter. Only 1 person wrote Shakespeare's plays, just one person wrote pride and prejudice, the selfish gene, snowcrash... take your pick. Great entertainment is not always the output of a large group.
Too many of the 'business guys' at big retail developers and publishers are too old, too ill-informed and too darned crap at their jobs to make the change. I worked for a nameless big retail dev for 3 years. We had a business Q& A once, and 3 years ago I asked the biz dev guy what our companies plans were for digital distribution, like steam. His answer (to a packed room) was
"I don't really see us moving in that direction, theres so real future in [stuff like steam]".
I think he left in the end, but I know people still working there, they still have zero online distribution or even any plans for it. I was selling my indie games online 5 years before I even got a job there, and still am now. It's not rocket science. I wouldn't work for, or invest-in *any* game developer or publisher whose primary focus was making plastic boxes with DVDs in. Companies that are younger, and never made any investment in all that nonsense are in the best position to really benefit from it.
The problem is that if you need 200 people to make a game, you need to persuade so many committees of finance experts to give you the money that the chances of finding someone who will panic at your idea are stupidly high. Finding the money for a game that needs 20 people to make is a lot easier and less risky, because even if it's a flop, you aren't taking the whole publisher down with you. Of course, ideally, you do the whole game yourself, on your own, sticking 100% to the creative vision you had, without needing to persuade *anyone* about the validity of the idea, and taking all of the risk yourself. I've gone many years reading big name industry celebs saying how that's not possible any more, despite the fact that I do it for a living, and I know a fair few others who do so as well.
Of course, if you would rather not make a game at all, than make one on a low budget, then that's a different matter. But personally, if I could make a 'triple a' WW2 FPS clone with 100 people, or an original, inventive 2D budget game on my own, I'd do the latter, even if it will never make me rich.
But generally, he's right, there is a lack of originality in mainstream games (spore is a good exception though).
"We need to make sure that people can vote in more convenient ways consistent with a modern lifestyle."
We are trying to make voting as convenient as buying a bag of crisps. why?
If someone can't be bothered to walk or drive half a mile to a polling station and put a cross in a box, do they really *care* who they are voting for? Far too many people treat voting flippantly (I don't like the look of him, I never vote for a woman, He has horrible hair etc) as it is. Would we be any worse of if voters had to take a simple test before voting? If you can't name the leaders of the main 3 parties, and pick their faces out of a lineup, are you really informed enough about the issues to vote sensibly?
Politicians in the UK panic about low turnout and think its because voting is hard. Its not, its just that a First-Past-The Post system means that most of us have wasted votes, even if the main 2 parties were different, which they aren't. Proportional representation FTW.
jesus, you seriously want to do away with copy protection on DVDs in favour of "state control over what entertainment will be produced" It's called communism BTW, just so you understand what it is you support here.
No content creator is assured of anything in the current system. All content is created in an environment of extensive risk. Thats why some big expensive bits of content (waterworld) lose money big time. Others (Blair Witch) make massively mroe than expected. That's the game us content creators pay. People seem to be confused about this because *the price* is not the price that *they* specifically would choose to pay. This is unfortunate, but inevitable, there are such things as indifference curves in economcis to explain all this stuff, but basically, the price that a movie ticket is set at is being set as the one that maximises profit. Now, maximising profit might mean that *you personally* lsoe out, because the price is too high for you. Meanwhile, some people are having a whale of a time, paying noticeably LESS than they would be prepared to. Those are the breaks. The only solution 9and the optimum one from the creators POV) is to charge everyone what they are prepared to pay. This *can* be done to an extent by having stratified products (collectors edition / 'tescos finest' food anyone?) or by partitioning the users (*this copy not for sale outside Russia* / discount for over 60s). The problem is, with a lot of entertainment content, especially online content, you can't always tell who you are selling to, so everyone pays the lowest price you set.
The current system works as well as it ever will. There will always be people saying that "I'm not prepared to pay X for Y", but you should just get used to not having Y, whilst meanwhile reminding yourself all the time you pay a mere Z for N, where it's worth so much more to you.
I know some freaks think they are born with an entitlement to Y without paying anything at all, but those guys are just out to lunch, and usually living in moms basement rent-free:D
I see. so did this Roman poet have to lay out 20 million dollars and employ 200 people for three years to knock up one of his poems? I doubt it.
You are making the 'content will still exist without copyright' argument, which is valid only for hobbyist content done on a very small scale. It's ironic that the same people who take this view of copyright, are then happy to download multi-million dollar sfx-laden movies that are completely impossible to create unless copyright can guarantee that those who watch them, pay for them.
Most people do not find copyright nonsensical. It's pretty fundamental that if you create something, you own it, whether that be a chair, a cake, or a song/movie. I don't have any inalienable right to see Lord of The Rings. That was a movie that Peter Jackson and hundreds of others worked hard on, based on a book that took someone else ages to write. I did bugger all towards it, so if I want to see it, I pay.
They are rules, not laws, and the next rule is (as you may know) "peace is good for business".
On a serious note, I'm unhappy with anything that allows for warfare to be any further removed from the human protagonist. If we could have stealth bombers flying by wire, is it really such a good thing? There is an argument that says, that if you are not willing to risk your own citizens to fight a war, is that war really justified? The first person to suggest that to me was a serving UK soldier. If the US could impose total control in Iraq using laser-equipped Mechs with not a single US citizen as risk, I'm sure a lot of US marines getting killed over there right now would be very happy about it, and I don't blame them, but if there is *zero* risk to your citizens from a war, then the 'barrier to entry' for new wars gets lower and lower. If The US had effective, mass produced killer mechwarrior doodads, does anyone doubt that they would already have invaded Syria and Iran? (Of course, you might think that would be good too, but where does it end?) Personally, I think that would be a bad thing. Wars should be a last resort, fought over issues so vital that men and women are genuinely prepared to risk life and limb to fight them. They should not be fought on a whim for economic reasons by wealthy nations, at no risk.
I agree. It's that much *sweeter* if I come top of a BF2 team with just the anti-tank guys shotgun (my fave weapon) because I know it's generally thought of as pretty poor. If all the weapons are equal in balsnce does it really matter so much which one I decide to outfit with? I love the idea of fighting against the odds, or turning and running like nuts when I see the guns some other guys have got. People concentrate too much on scores, winning, and balance, when they forget the FUN bit. To be honest, I don't care that much if a game has balance problems, or there's an exploit that lets me slaughter the AI. Esp in singleplayer, the only person losing out is me. I play games to have fun, end of story. if I'm playing a SP RTS an I KNOW that a tank rush with unit X always wins, I just won't use them. My goal is to have fun, not to rack up the most *points*.
games need more vision and passion in the design team. They certainly don't need to be more bland and clinical.
I own a number of domains, and get the usual 'joe-job' backlash mail bounces when emails claim to have come from non-existent addresses on my domains. stuff like 'dave AT positech.co.... Anyway, I know what addresses are used to *send* (as opposed to receive) email from my domains, as it's always me doing it. Is there a way to specify somewhere that "these are the only legit SENDING addresses at this domain? That way, any email that ever bounces around from the imaginary dave@ address will just get zapped before it leaves the fence. It's vital that I'm still able to receives ALL email for the domain, because people sometimes guess addresses, and I've given out so many over the years before I realised I should have kept closer track on them. I'm pretty sure you can do this but don't know how. I'm a simple windows end-user, who has his domains registered at freeparking.co.uk, and forwards email from there to various places. I'm not personally running the mail server or anything clever. Help a n00b do his bit. It's something to do with MX records and SPF isn't it?
oh please. I'm not trying to force anything on anyone. 99% of the world know that taking something that doesn't belong to you, thats priced, without paying, is wrong. If you are determined to stay in the 1%, then that's up to you, but don't expect the other 99% of us to consider you anything other than a freeloader.
Surely a more acceptable term than theft is 'freeloading'. That describes what people are doing, because they are taking (for free) something that would not exist if the majority had not paid for it. Or maybe Leeching.
I'd be more concerned about eh power wastage / efficiency concerns. Electricity ain't getting any cheaper (quite the reverse), and I can't say its *that* onerous a task to plug in a device only when it needs charging. Is this an always-on solution? because if so, that seems horribly wasteful to me.
people have copied content from their friends for decades, being able to copy content from someone three thousand miles away while both of you are anonymous is a totally different ballgame. You really think there are two separate 'classes' of people - The honest purchasers and the freeloaders? Most free-loaders would be purchasers if it became too difficult to freeload. Many purchasers will become freeloaders if freeloading is too easy. Rapidshare and services like it make the freeloading too easy.
You might consider my views wrong, but ask yourself if you thinkt hat way because you are used to getting content for free, whilst still getting a salary. Now imagine your situation is a content provider who basically can't pay the rent if the products don't sell. People will go to great lengths to self-justify getting what they want for free.
I see, you would rather that people who make content spend half their time going around looking at file trading forums hunting down links to their content and asking for it to be taken down, hoping they might have found 1% of the links? Personally, I'd rather than time was spent developing newer content.
By the time the IP holder spots it, requests takedown, and has it removed, hundreds of people already got it. The system just does not work.
I'm all for free online storgae services, just why the emphasis on making them anonymous? That's just asking for trouble.
Man, I feel your pain. I *HATE* it when companies don't release demos. It's just like waving a banner saying "we have no faith in the quality of our product". Star Trek : legacy was a fine recent example of a game who decided it was better off without a demo, in case people saw how bad the game was. To be honest, I can't say I can get worked up about people trying out a game from p2p in those cases. Of course, when there is a demo available, that's another story. Sadly, most people aren't using rapidshare to get games because there is no demo, they are doing it because they expect to get full games for free. That's bad for everyone in the long term;( Cheers for buying my game btw!
money lost to piracy isn't just lost by 'a few execs'. Its a loss to the whole indsutry and everyone that works within it. Don't spin the old "everyone in entertainment is a millionaire" nonsense.
is anyone suprised? I can see how having some temporary storage for files that is totally anonymous *may* have some legit uses occasionally, but if you allow people to anonymously upload any content to a site for free, and other people pay a monthly subscription to download multiple files up to 100MB a time, is *anyone* even remotely suprised when 99% of the content is illegally shared content? Rapidshare can remove content on a whim, it's no use for anything thats really vital. Webspace is now trivially cheap, and so is bandwidth. If you need to share big binary files, setting up an ftp server or a website is trivial. The only real market for rapidshare that I can think of is illegal content, and it's no suprise to find so much of it there. Every software, movie and game site that is trading illegal software has dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of rapidshare links. This was inevitable.
I like the way they equate 'indie' with 'casual'. In what way is my political simulation game 'casual'? but it's still a popular indie game. No suprise to see that misconception, but it still bugs me.
If for planes, why not trains? If I was a terrorist, I'd skip airports entirely, far too many cameras and police. I'd target a high speed intercity train. If I time it right, I should be able to blast a 125mph train into pieces on a high speed track, in time to cause major derailments from other trains. Given that during commuter times, there could easily be 200-300 people on each train, I'd easily rack up the same body count as I would by hitting an airliner (assuming the airliner didn't crash into a tower block). And I can hit the train from pretty much anywhere along it's route.
Trying to make us all immune to terrorist attacks is just impractical. We are treating the symptom, not the disease.
Fine. here's a question. Seeing as though energy efficient (compact flourescent) light bulbs actually have lower total cost of ownership, why aren't they being used everywhere? They will save money, reduce carbon emissions AND save you money. What's to argue on measures like this?
Oh, nice to see someone modded me flamebait for daring to suggest that an armoured personell carrier might be overkill to go buy some cereal.
you keep thinking about what to do. have a commitee meeting. maybe senate hearings. Lets discuss it after the next election, or maybe the one after. meanwhile this is happening: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/2 5/0458231 (Inhabited Island Vanishes Forever Underwater)
You sound like the judean peoples front in life of Brian "This calls for immediate discussion!" We've been doing that all my adult life. So far, nothing noticeable has been achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
true, but they can also prevent popular legislation being passed as well. Despite overwhelming support for the ban on fox hunting, the lords delayed it by many years, mainly due to the fact that a big chunk of them are landed gentry who are pro-hunting, and not a single one of them is elected.
Democracy. ha!
The house of Lord is *not* a good idea, regardless of the occasional bit of sense that is accidentally spoken by the people who can afford to buy a peerage and a seat in government.*
* or in the case of 'Lord' Sainsbury or Haskins, you can even purchase a ministerial position, given a big enough check for the ruling party.
Why do you need 20 people? More is not always better. Only one person wrote Harry Potter. Only 1 person wrote Shakespeare's plays, just one person wrote pride and prejudice, the selfish gene, snowcrash... take your pick. Great entertainment is not always the output of a large group.
Too many of the 'business guys' at big retail developers and publishers are too old, too ill-informed and too darned crap at their jobs to make the change. I worked for a nameless big retail dev for 3 years. We had a business Q& A once, and 3 years ago I asked the biz dev guy what our companies plans were for digital distribution, like steam. His answer (to a packed room) was
"I don't really see us moving in that direction, theres so real future in [stuff like steam]".
I think he left in the end, but I know people still working there, they still have zero online distribution or even any plans for it. I was selling my indie games online 5 years before I even got a job there, and still am now. It's not rocket science.
I wouldn't work for, or invest-in *any* game developer or publisher whose primary focus was making plastic boxes with DVDs in. Companies that are younger, and never made any investment in all that nonsense are in the best position to really benefit from it.
The problem is that if you need 200 people to make a game, you need to persuade so many committees of finance experts to give you the money that the chances of finding someone who will panic at your idea are stupidly high.
Finding the money for a game that needs 20 people to make is a lot easier and less risky, because even if it's a flop, you aren't taking the whole publisher down with you.
Of course, ideally, you do the whole game yourself, on your own, sticking 100% to the creative vision you had, without needing to persuade *anyone* about the validity of the idea, and taking all of the risk yourself. I've gone many years reading big name industry celebs saying how that's not possible any more, despite the fact that I do it for a living, and I know a fair few others who do so as well.
Of course, if you would rather not make a game at all, than make one on a low budget, then that's a different matter. But personally, if I could make a 'triple a' WW2 FPS clone with 100 people, or an original, inventive 2D budget game on my own, I'd do the latter, even if it will never make me rich.
But generally, he's right, there is a lack of originality in mainstream games (spore is a good exception though).
you must be American :D. there are never queues in the UK that I'm aware of. I've never queued more than 4 seconds to cast a vote my entire life.
"We need to make sure that people can vote in more convenient ways consistent with a modern lifestyle."
We are trying to make voting as convenient as buying a bag of crisps. why?
If someone can't be bothered to walk or drive half a mile to a polling station and put a cross in a box, do they really *care* who they are voting for? Far too many people treat voting flippantly (I don't like the look of him, I never vote for a woman, He has horrible hair etc) as it is. Would we be any worse of if voters had to take a simple test before voting? If you can't name the leaders of the main 3 parties, and pick their faces out of a lineup, are you really informed enough about the issues to vote sensibly?
Politicians in the UK panic about low turnout and think its because voting is hard. Its not, its just that a
First-Past-The Post system means that most of us have wasted votes, even if the main 2 parties were different, which they aren't.
Proportional representation FTW.
Just a thought.
jesus, you seriously want to do away with copy protection on DVDs in favour of "state control over what entertainment will be produced"
It's called communism BTW, just so you understand what it is you support here.
No content creator is assured of anything in the current system. All content is created in an environment of extensive risk. Thats why some big expensive bits of content (waterworld) lose money big time. Others (Blair Witch) make massively mroe than expected. That's the game us content creators pay.
:D
People seem to be confused about this because *the price* is not the price that *they* specifically would choose to pay. This is unfortunate, but inevitable, there are such things as indifference curves in economcis to explain all this stuff, but basically, the price that a movie ticket is set at is being set as the one that maximises profit. Now, maximising profit might mean that *you personally* lsoe out, because the price is too high for you. Meanwhile, some people are having a whale of a time, paying noticeably LESS than they would be prepared to. Those are the breaks.
The only solution 9and the optimum one from the creators POV) is to charge everyone what they are prepared to pay. This *can* be done to an extent by having stratified products (collectors edition / 'tescos finest' food anyone?) or by partitioning the users (*this copy not for sale outside Russia* / discount for over 60s). The problem is, with a lot of entertainment content, especially online content, you can't always tell who you are selling to, so everyone pays the lowest price you set.
The current system works as well as it ever will. There will always be people saying that "I'm not prepared to pay X for Y", but you should just get used to not having Y, whilst meanwhile reminding yourself all the time you pay a mere Z for N, where it's worth so much more to you.
I know some freaks think they are born with an entitlement to Y without paying anything at all, but those guys are just out to lunch, and usually living in moms basement rent-free
I see. so did this Roman poet have to lay out 20 million dollars and employ 200 people for three years to knock up one of his poems?
I doubt it.
You are making the 'content will still exist without copyright' argument, which is valid only for hobbyist content done on a very small scale. It's ironic that the same people who take this view of copyright, are then happy to download multi-million dollar sfx-laden movies that are completely impossible to create unless copyright can guarantee that those who watch them, pay for them.
Most people do not find copyright nonsensical. It's pretty fundamental that if you create something, you own it, whether that be a chair, a cake, or a song/movie. I don't have any inalienable right to see Lord of The Rings. That was a movie that Peter Jackson and hundreds of others worked hard on, based on a book that took someone else ages to write. I did bugger all towards it, so if I want to see it, I pay.
They are rules, not laws, and the next rule is (as you may know) "peace is good for business".
On a serious note, I'm unhappy with anything that allows for warfare to be any further removed from the human protagonist. If we could have stealth bombers flying by wire, is it really such a good thing? There is an argument that says, that if you are not willing to risk your own citizens to fight a war, is that war really justified? The first person to suggest that to me was a serving UK soldier.
If the US could impose total control in Iraq using laser-equipped Mechs with not a single US citizen as risk, I'm sure a lot of US marines getting killed over there right now would be very happy about it, and I don't blame them, but if there is *zero* risk to your citizens from a war, then the 'barrier to entry' for new wars gets lower and lower.
If The US had effective, mass produced killer mechwarrior doodads, does anyone doubt that they would already have invaded Syria and Iran? (Of course, you might think that would be good too, but where does it end?)
Personally, I think that would be a bad thing. Wars should be a last resort, fought over issues so vital that men and women are genuinely prepared to risk life and limb to fight them. They should not be fought on a whim for economic reasons by wealthy nations, at no risk.
I agree. It's that much *sweeter* if I come top of a BF2 team with just the anti-tank guys shotgun (my fave weapon) because I know it's generally thought of as pretty poor. If all the weapons are equal in balsnce does it really matter so much which one I decide to outfit with? I love the idea of fighting against the odds, or turning and running like nuts when I see the guns some other guys have got. People concentrate too much on scores, winning, and balance, when they forget the FUN bit.
To be honest, I don't care that much if a game has balance problems, or there's an exploit that lets me slaughter the AI. Esp in singleplayer, the only person losing out is me. I play games to have fun, end of story. if I'm playing a SP RTS an I KNOW that a tank rush with unit X always wins, I just won't use them. My goal is to have fun, not to rack up the most *points*.
games need more vision and passion in the design team. They certainly don't need to be more bland and clinical.
That's very interesting, cheers.
I own a number of domains, and get the usual 'joe-job' backlash mail bounces when emails claim to have come from non-existent addresses on my domains. stuff like 'dave AT positech.co....
Anyway, I know what addresses are used to *send* (as opposed to receive) email from my domains, as it's always me doing it. Is there a way to specify somewhere that "these are the only legit SENDING addresses at this domain? That way, any email that ever bounces around from the imaginary dave@ address will just get zapped before it leaves the fence. It's vital that I'm still able to receives ALL email for the domain, because people sometimes guess addresses, and I've given out so many over the years before I realised I should have kept closer track on them.
I'm pretty sure you can do this but don't know how. I'm a simple windows end-user, who has his domains registered at freeparking.co.uk, and forwards email from there to various places. I'm not personally running the mail server or anything clever.
Help a n00b do his bit. It's something to do with MX records and SPF isn't it?
oh please. I'm not trying to force anything on anyone. 99% of the world know that taking something that doesn't belong to you, thats priced, without paying, is wrong. If you are determined to stay in the 1%, then that's up to you, but don't expect the other 99% of us to consider you anything other than a freeloader.
Surely a more acceptable term than theft is 'freeloading'. That describes what people are doing, because they are taking (for free) something that would not exist if the majority had not paid for it.
Or maybe Leeching.
I'd be more concerned about eh power wastage / efficiency concerns. Electricity ain't getting any cheaper (quite the reverse), and I can't say its *that* onerous a task to plug in a device only when it needs charging. Is this an always-on solution? because if so, that seems horribly wasteful to me.
people have copied content from their friends for decades, being able to copy content from someone three thousand miles away while both of you are anonymous is a totally different ballgame.
You really think there are two separate 'classes' of people - The honest purchasers and the freeloaders? Most free-loaders would be purchasers if it became too difficult to freeload. Many purchasers will become freeloaders if freeloading is too easy. Rapidshare and services like it make the freeloading too easy.
You might consider my views wrong, but ask yourself if you thinkt hat way because you are used to getting content for free, whilst still getting a salary. Now imagine your situation is a content provider who basically can't pay the rent if the products don't sell.
People will go to great lengths to self-justify getting what they want for free.
I see, you would rather that people who make content spend half their time going around looking at file trading forums hunting down links to their content and asking for it to be taken down, hoping they might have found 1% of the links?
Personally, I'd rather than time was spent developing newer content.
By the time the IP holder spots it, requests takedown, and has it removed, hundreds of people already got it. The system just does not work.
I'm all for free online storgae services, just why the emphasis on making them anonymous? That's just asking for trouble.
Man, I feel your pain. I *HATE* it when companies don't release demos. It's just like waving a banner saying "we have no faith in the quality of our product". Star Trek : legacy was a fine recent example of a game who decided it was better off without a demo, in case people saw how bad the game was. To be honest, I can't say I can get worked up about people trying out a game from p2p in those cases. Of course, when there is a demo available, that's another story. ;(
Sadly, most people aren't using rapidshare to get games because there is no demo, they are doing it because they expect to get full games for free. That's bad for everyone in the long term
Cheers for buying my game btw!
money lost to piracy isn't just lost by 'a few execs'. Its a loss to the whole indsutry and everyone that works within it. Don't spin the old "everyone in entertainment is a millionaire" nonsense.
is anyone suprised? I can see how having some temporary storage for files that is totally anonymous *may* have some legit uses occasionally, but if you allow people to anonymously upload any content to a site for free, and other people pay a monthly subscription to download multiple files up to 100MB a time, is *anyone* even remotely suprised when 99% of the content is illegally shared content?
Rapidshare can remove content on a whim, it's no use for anything thats really vital. Webspace is now trivially cheap, and so is bandwidth. If you need to share big binary files, setting up an ftp server or a website is trivial. The only real market for rapidshare that I can think of is illegal content, and it's no suprise to find so much of it there. Every software, movie and game site that is trading illegal software has dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of rapidshare links.
This was inevitable.
I like the way they equate 'indie' with 'casual'. In what way is my political simulation game 'casual'? but it's still a popular indie game. No suprise to see that misconception, but it still bugs me.
If for planes, why not trains? If I was a terrorist, I'd skip airports entirely, far too many cameras and police. I'd target a high speed intercity train. If I time it right, I should be able to blast a 125mph train into pieces on a high speed track, in time to cause major derailments from other trains. Given that during commuter times, there could easily be 200-300 people on each train, I'd easily rack up the same body count as I would by hitting an airliner (assuming the airliner didn't crash into a tower block).
And I can hit the train from pretty much anywhere along it's route.
Trying to make us all immune to terrorist attacks is just impractical. We are treating the symptom, not the disease.
Fine. here's a question. Seeing as though energy efficient (compact flourescent) light bulbs actually have lower total cost of ownership, why aren't they being used everywhere? They will save money, reduce carbon emissions AND save you money. What's to argue on measures like this?
Oh, nice to see someone modded me flamebait for daring to suggest that an armoured personell carrier might be overkill to go buy some cereal.
you keep thinking about what to do. have a commitee meeting. maybe senate hearings. Lets discuss it after the next election, or maybe the one after. meanwhile this is happening:2 5/0458231
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/
(Inhabited Island Vanishes Forever Underwater)
You sound like the judean peoples front in life of Brian "This calls for immediate discussion!"
We've been doing that all my adult life. So far, nothing noticeable has been achieved.