To me, the best part about Google's wave isn't that it's an omnibus tool that's being touted as the next revolution in communication, it's that it's an omnibus tool they've already released the specs and such for in a way that someone implementing it DOESN'T need to stick to Google's hosted service or even a web browser.
And as a result, if someone had the intent to, they could roll this into a dedicated RPG tool with a desktop client and the other bells and whistles.
What I see Google Wave to be is a demo for the product, just as I see Jabber.org as a demo for XMPP.
I think if you work for a boss that is going so far as to check his employee's list against a list of people who supported a petition, regardless of the issue being looked at, and acting negatively against those who matched, then you have deeper issues you should be worrying about. Such as why are you working for someone who is clearly unwilling to accept your viewpoint as valid.
Not to mention that if you were to have reversed the situation (public outing of those supporting gay rights) the majority of the people raising the cry right now would have absolutely no issue letting you go "because you don't represent the values of our company".
And lets do discuss this implied "OMG, the gays will get us" homophobia that this particular instance of our hypothetical discussion invokes. How many people do you actually think are going to get caught in your hypothetical situation? Hmm?
And Sean Hannity could publish your name as a member of Greenpeace simply because you were in the same room as a group of them once. Or because you happen to believe that produce needs better standards.
That doesn't make his claim valid or the argument that someone could do THAT with the list of names on a petition a good reason to keep them secret. If someone is committing violence or intimidation based on THAT level of investigation, regardless of the illegality of their acts themselves, then their methods are sufficiently crappy that you are exposing yourself to 'danger' just by not being one of them.
And what intrinsically makes marriage to a loved one not a right in the same sense that your tautological 'freedom or liberty' is a right? "Natural vs Legal" bullshit? If one is 'free' then how do you integrate that into the idea that you want to prevent them from joining in union with their loved ones?
You think it's silly to treat it as a right, and Southern slave owners thought it was silly to pretend the 'negros' should be treated as free men. You think you are being reasonable and level headed, and so did they. You and they were wrong.
And marriage "Solely a religious practice"? Screw the atheists and agnostics?
What I think is silly is that someone thinks religion ought to have any say over what someone who isn't practicing it does concerning 'marriage'.
What I think is silly is a bunch of people romanticizing 'marriage' to the point where they claim that their limited and ridiculous view of what marriage is not only valid today but is what it's always been.
It really HAS NOT been that long ago that 'christian' marriage was seen simply as a transfer of property from one man to another. Nor has 'christian' marriage been the predominate form of marriage in history.
You DO NOT own the word, you DO NOT own it's meaning. STOP attempting to force the rest of us to obey your idea of what marriage should be to the detriment of our own.
At which point, one asks oneself, how much of that is the fault of the signing of the petition and how much of it is the fact that you apparently live in a world that has gone so anti-KKK that they've run out of 'legitimate' targets and are now focusing on the people who just 'innocently' signed a KKK petition to support a non-hate mongering law. Keeping in mind that the people who signed this petition live in the same world and thus must have at least a passing knowledge of this more reviled KKK and somehow believe that signing THIS petition would have a greater impact than writing their own..
Really, I'm sure all those slaves down South would have loved to hear that regardless of their situation, they actually had 'freedom' because it was a 'natural' right.
Lets skip the bullshit shall we? The only difference between a legal right and a natural right is that 'natural' rights are ones that the group you are talking to are willing to pretend are universal to all people and legal rights are the ones they want to hold seperate 'just for them'.
Yes because an angry mob is going to form to lynch the people who supported a petition for a law supporting fairer taxes. For fucks sake, do you live in the land of Oz? The scarecrow isn't alive.
You know, I think I understand you now. In America, back in the pre-Civil War era South, blacks didn't have rights either. I see how you would say "It isn't about taking away their rights, it's about creating 'new' rights for them". Citizens ALWAYS had rights, after all, that was the definition of a citizen, someone with rights. Those blacks however, they were slaves. We shouldn't be trying to 'change' the definition of citizen to fit those filth, right?
So, how is the weather down in Hell today? I hear Satan's a bit bitchy this morning.
What a ridiculous straw man. If and I do mean IF the KKK passed around a petition for fairer taxes and somehow didn't include something racist or anti-non-protestants in it, and that was the only KKK petition you signed, then even in that Bizzaro world where such things happen AND people care enough to look up who supported the petition to shame them, you would simply need to turn to them and say "Yeah, I have no clue what the KKK was doing but the petition was for a valid law and I thought maybe they were making an attempt at being socially responsible instead of a being a gang of racist thugs. Mea Culpa."
Because voting has safeguards that were meant to prevent dead people from voting, live people from voting twice, and imaginary people from even showing up at the polling place. Notwithstanding the matter of the effectiveness of those safeguards or the manner in which our less than upright politicians have attempted to circumvent them, petitions have none of these.
Additionally, even if these were 'codified' into the manner in which petitions were made, the entire point of a petition is "We proudly support this idea and are the ones that put you in office, do it!" That implies you are willing to take a stand on it.
PS. You don't have to go through the 'petition' stage to get to the 'voting' stage. It's just as possible for you to walk into your congressman's office and have a nice private chat with him.
Yes, because historically we've had mobs of gay rights activists who have rioted, killed, and otherwise physically assaulted and intimidated straight folk. That's what "gay rage" means, right?...
The quality of a bullshit argument that "you never had that right" or "you can marry, just not the one you love cause you are gay" is defined by the word: bullshit. The moderation of such as bullshit is accurate, valid, and not in any way an attempt to silence a person based on their opinion.
You know, that would mean alota shit if it weren't for the fact that the 'moral right' has used the method of "shame him! he supported something we are against!" far longer than the 'liberal left'.
There are groups who still sit in parking lots to take photos of the folk who visit porn shops as they leave and post them online with whatever personal details they can find for the individual in questions.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. And honestly, I think at this time and age, it's good for a little "think about who will see your name attached to this" to be involved when people are passing around petitions.
Lets see how many people want to get behind the hate mongering when they don't have the illusion of anonymity lending them boldness.
Though it wasn't a Mormon church, when I was a kid there was a huge stink in the town I lived in because a young woman that had been abused by her husband for years committed suicide and the church refused to allow her to be buried with the rest of her family on church grounds, with the excuse that it was the one unforgivable sin.
Even if that weren't the case, a suicide in the family is never something people brag about. Many of those left after such an act feel both betrayed and blindsided by it, wondering if it was their fault that the intentions were caught in time and prevented. Shame is a strong motivator.
It's SOP for greedy companies. Before the days of the internet, many companies that allowed you to submit 'fan' work had similar disclaimers when they provided the address to send to.
A good spin doctor will tell you it's to protect the interests of the company, since you are likely creating a derivative work based not just on their copyrights but using their trademarks. But it's mostly so that if you send them something they decide to use, they don't ever have to get into an issue with you asking for money.
On one side of the coin, I understand and agree how you could come to your opinion RE: the direction Hasbro is taking.
On the other side of the coin, knowing the history of all the companies that have been behind D&D since it started, I have to think this is simply a rinse and repeat cycle that's been happening since the first edition and spats between Gygax, Arneson, and the Blumes.
This is a franchise run by people that have always been willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever someone in charge wakes up and gets greedy. It just seems to be in genes.
The problem you'll run into with that setup is it seems the publishers set the price tag (per this and most of the other articles I've read about Google Editions so far). So your virtual web front will have the same prices as the rest of Googles partners, preventing you from driving traffic to your store simply by undercutting everyone.
This is good and bad. It's good because it means that someone in theory can setup a 'niche' web site and promote books that fit that niche for a low cost (due to presumably low traffic) without worrying that if their subject matterial becomes mainstream, the big dogs will come in and be able to eat their lunch by undercuting the prices.
It's bad because publishers aren't always the best judges of what price point a book would sell best at, and this whole project could tumble if the publishers get too greedy too soon.
People are reactionary, and despite our best intentions, most of us are still luddites outside of our 'natural' habitat.
One might as well ask why people still believe cellphones will cause a second head to grow out of your neck, food irradiated for sterilization will give you super powers, and high voltage lines cause autism.
Google isn't creating a bookstore, they are creating a backend for bookstores to use.
In otherwords they hope to have you walk into a Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, or whatever brick and motar stores are still out there in the era of Amazon.com, and/or visit these company's websites, and purchase a "Google Editions" version of the book as opposed to having their own dedicated webfront like Amazon does.
Man the above sentence is tourtured grammer, but I can't make it come out any better.
Slashdot Mirror
PBS had a fairly (to my laymen eyes) informative and accessible NOVA episode concerning the megaflood.
To me, the best part about Google's wave isn't that it's an omnibus tool that's being touted as the next revolution in communication, it's that it's an omnibus tool they've already released the specs and such for in a way that someone implementing it DOESN'T need to stick to Google's hosted service or even a web browser.
And as a result, if someone had the intent to, they could roll this into a dedicated RPG tool with a desktop client and the other bells and whistles.
What I see Google Wave to be is a demo for the product, just as I see Jabber.org as a demo for XMPP.
I think if you work for a boss that is going so far as to check his employee's list against a list of people who supported a petition, regardless of the issue being looked at, and acting negatively against those who matched, then you have deeper issues you should be worrying about. Such as why are you working for someone who is clearly unwilling to accept your viewpoint as valid.
Not to mention that if you were to have reversed the situation (public outing of those supporting gay rights) the majority of the people raising the cry right now would have absolutely no issue letting you go "because you don't represent the values of our company".
And lets do discuss this implied "OMG, the gays will get us" homophobia that this particular instance of our hypothetical discussion invokes. How many people do you actually think are going to get caught in your hypothetical situation? Hmm?
No unicorn. Less controversy than a Kindle. Lame.
And Sean Hannity could publish your name as a member of Greenpeace simply because you were in the same room as a group of them once. Or because you happen to believe that produce needs better standards.
That doesn't make his claim valid or the argument that someone could do THAT with the list of names on a petition a good reason to keep them secret. If someone is committing violence or intimidation based on THAT level of investigation, regardless of the illegality of their acts themselves, then their methods are sufficiently crappy that you are exposing yourself to 'danger' just by not being one of them.
And what intrinsically makes marriage to a loved one not a right in the same sense that your tautological 'freedom or liberty' is a right? "Natural vs Legal" bullshit? If one is 'free' then how do you integrate that into the idea that you want to prevent them from joining in union with their loved ones?
You think it's silly to treat it as a right, and Southern slave owners thought it was silly to pretend the 'negros' should be treated as free men. You think you are being reasonable and level headed, and so did they. You and they were wrong.
And marriage "Solely a religious practice"? Screw the atheists and agnostics?
What I think is silly is that someone thinks religion ought to have any say over what someone who isn't practicing it does concerning 'marriage'.
What I think is silly is a bunch of people romanticizing 'marriage' to the point where they claim that their limited and ridiculous view of what marriage is not only valid today but is what it's always been.
It really HAS NOT been that long ago that 'christian' marriage was seen simply as a transfer of property from one man to another. Nor has 'christian' marriage been the predominate form of marriage in history.
You DO NOT own the word, you DO NOT own it's meaning. STOP attempting to force the rest of us to obey your idea of what marriage should be to the detriment of our own.
At which point, one asks oneself, how much of that is the fault of the signing of the petition and how much of it is the fact that you apparently live in a world that has gone so anti-KKK that they've run out of 'legitimate' targets and are now focusing on the people who just 'innocently' signed a KKK petition to support a non-hate mongering law. Keeping in mind that the people who signed this petition live in the same world and thus must have at least a passing knowledge of this more reviled KKK and somehow believe that signing THIS petition would have a greater impact than writing their own..
Not if you show up with a sufficiently large group of constitutes who all agree.
Really, I'm sure all those slaves down South would have loved to hear that regardless of their situation, they actually had 'freedom' because it was a 'natural' right.
Lets skip the bullshit shall we? The only difference between a legal right and a natural right is that 'natural' rights are ones that the group you are talking to are willing to pretend are universal to all people and legal rights are the ones they want to hold seperate 'just for them'.
Yes because an angry mob is going to form to lynch the people who supported a petition for a law supporting fairer taxes. For fucks sake, do you live in the land of Oz? The scarecrow isn't alive.
You know, I think I understand you now. In America, back in the pre-Civil War era South, blacks didn't have rights either. I see how you would say "It isn't about taking away their rights, it's about creating 'new' rights for them". Citizens ALWAYS had rights, after all, that was the definition of a citizen, someone with rights. Those blacks however, they were slaves. We shouldn't be trying to 'change' the definition of citizen to fit those filth, right?
So, how is the weather down in Hell today? I hear Satan's a bit bitchy this morning.
What a ridiculous straw man. If and I do mean IF the KKK passed around a petition for fairer taxes and somehow didn't include something racist or anti-non-protestants in it, and that was the only KKK petition you signed, then even in that Bizzaro world where such things happen AND people care enough to look up who supported the petition to shame them, you would simply need to turn to them and say "Yeah, I have no clue what the KKK was doing but the petition was for a valid law and I thought maybe they were making an attempt at being socially responsible instead of a being a gang of racist thugs. Mea Culpa."
Because voting has safeguards that were meant to prevent dead people from voting, live people from voting twice, and imaginary people from even showing up at the polling place. Notwithstanding the matter of the effectiveness of those safeguards or the manner in which our less than upright politicians have attempted to circumvent them, petitions have none of these.
Additionally, even if these were 'codified' into the manner in which petitions were made, the entire point of a petition is "We proudly support this idea and are the ones that put you in office, do it!" That implies you are willing to take a stand on it.
PS. You don't have to go through the 'petition' stage to get to the 'voting' stage. It's just as possible for you to walk into your congressman's office and have a nice private chat with him.
Yes, because historically we've had mobs of gay rights activists who have rioted, killed, and otherwise physically assaulted and intimidated straight folk. That's what "gay rage" means, right? ...
What? You mean it doesn't?
The quality of a bullshit argument that "you never had that right" or "you can marry, just not the one you love cause you are gay" is defined by the word: bullshit. The moderation of such as bullshit is accurate, valid, and not in any way an attempt to silence a person based on their opinion.
You know, that would mean alota shit if it weren't for the fact that the 'moral right' has used the method of "shame him! he supported something we are against!" far longer than the 'liberal left'.
There are groups who still sit in parking lots to take photos of the folk who visit porn shops as they leave and post them online with whatever personal details they can find for the individual in questions.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. And honestly, I think at this time and age, it's good for a little "think about who will see your name attached to this" to be involved when people are passing around petitions.
Lets see how many people want to get behind the hate mongering when they don't have the illusion of anonymity lending them boldness.
As others have pointed out, the petition in question was in support of a "Prop 8" bill, not against.
Though it wasn't a Mormon church, when I was a kid there was a huge stink in the town I lived in because a young woman that had been abused by her husband for years committed suicide and the church refused to allow her to be buried with the rest of her family on church grounds, with the excuse that it was the one unforgivable sin.
Even if that weren't the case, a suicide in the family is never something people brag about. Many of those left after such an act feel both betrayed and blindsided by it, wondering if it was their fault that the intentions were caught in time and prevented. Shame is a strong motivator.
To paraphrase a grumpy old author, "In the end, all causes of death can be listed as heart failure."
It's SOP for greedy companies. Before the days of the internet, many companies that allowed you to submit 'fan' work had similar disclaimers when they provided the address to send to.
A good spin doctor will tell you it's to protect the interests of the company, since you are likely creating a derivative work based not just on their copyrights but using their trademarks. But it's mostly so that if you send them something they decide to use, they don't ever have to get into an issue with you asking for money.
On one side of the coin, I understand and agree how you could come to your opinion RE: the direction Hasbro is taking.
On the other side of the coin, knowing the history of all the companies that have been behind D&D since it started, I have to think this is simply a rinse and repeat cycle that's been happening since the first edition and spats between Gygax, Arneson, and the Blumes.
This is a franchise run by people that have always been willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever someone in charge wakes up and gets greedy. It just seems to be in genes.
Then Google/the publisher misses out on the opportunity to sell me another service and I still have the electronic version to view and read?
<snark>Oh dear. Now I only have the best of one world, how shall I live?</snark>
The problem you'll run into with that setup is it seems the publishers set the price tag (per this and most of the other articles I've read about Google Editions so far). So your virtual web front will have the same prices as the rest of Googles partners, preventing you from driving traffic to your store simply by undercutting everyone.
This is good and bad. It's good because it means that someone in theory can setup a 'niche' web site and promote books that fit that niche for a low cost (due to presumably low traffic) without worrying that if their subject matterial becomes mainstream, the big dogs will come in and be able to eat their lunch by undercuting the prices.
It's bad because publishers aren't always the best judges of what price point a book would sell best at, and this whole project could tumble if the publishers get too greedy too soon.
People are reactionary, and despite our best intentions, most of us are still luddites outside of our 'natural' habitat.
One might as well ask why people still believe cellphones will cause a second head to grow out of your neck, food irradiated for sterilization will give you super powers, and high voltage lines cause autism.
Google isn't creating a bookstore, they are creating a backend for bookstores to use.
In otherwords they hope to have you walk into a Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, or whatever brick and motar stores are still out there in the era of Amazon.com, and/or visit these company's websites, and purchase a "Google Editions" version of the book as opposed to having their own dedicated webfront like Amazon does.
Man the above sentence is tourtured grammer, but I can't make it come out any better.