They were laughed out of congress in the US and world-wide, so they took it to the international level, where they also met massive resistance.
There's a lesson here: if someone suggests something stupid and outrageously evil enough to make even you, an US congressman, want to laugh them out, don't; shoot them instead. Since you insist on keeping the death sentence and arming everyone, you can at least put these two habits to good use.
Let the copyright czar go the way of the Russian one.
Ah but the market will fix it because the market knows best, government involvement would cause it to be more inefficient and cost more...*
It has, actually: purely from the profit maximizing point of view, sick people are a burden, and letting them die is the most efficient solution. The exception are highly educated or trained workers, where the cost of replacement might be higher than the cost of treatment; as this is typically reflected in their pay, having the treatments available but expensive is exactly what the market should do.
*this is a joke, obviously.
It is completely accurate, actually. As far as the market is concerned, you are a human resource, not a human. And it is indeed inefficient to spend more resources protecting a resource than that resource's market value.
Why do you care how we look to the rest of the world?
Because you're near broke and can't fight any more wars. Also, outsourcing means that your economy is dependent on factories and people who are located in other countries.
I really don't give two shits about how some snoppy European views our country.
But you'd better care how the Chinese view your country, since they own it.
I sometimes think how fun it would be to define a section of the country and say "here, we will remove all government from this area" -- let those so-called adults go there and run it for themselves without the "benefit" of government -- I wonder how long they would last before the gangs and rough justice send them running back?
They would simply hire mercenaries and set themselves up as nobility. They fancy themselves as aristocrats, and historically, aristocrats were those who had the means of production - land, back then - to hire fighting men and kill anyone who opposed them. It was the rise of strong central government which put an end to feudalism, so of course the modern-day dukes want to abolish it to return to the good old days of serfdom.
This is no different than when my local Best Buy gave me a free MP3 player. If AT&T Internet wants to give stuff away for free, then that's a BENEFIT for the customer, not a detriment.
Giving stuff for free to kill the competition is classic form of anti-competitive behaviour. It is not to the customer's benefit, any more than putting cheese into a mousetrap is to the mouse's benefit.
IMHO net neutrality is violated is if AT&T blocks access to itunes.com. Then that's detrimental.
"Net neutrality" means that the network does not prioritize traffic based on its source or destination. And AT&T doesn't need to outright block itunes.com; it is quite simple to make it slightly slower or have traffic to and from it count against some limit traffic to AT&T's own competing site doesn't count against to give AT&T's site an unfair advantage.
And for those who download Bluray-sized HD movies or tv shows, then you *should* pay more for the increased electricity & wiring costs required. Whereas grandma who is probably only reading email, should only have to pay $7-10 a month. That's entirely fair.
It is also doable without anti-competitive behaviour: simply have multiple possible connection speeds available, so grandma can pick the slowest.
The issue here is not about charging per megabyte transferred; it's about charging per megabyte transferred from some IP addresses and not others.
This is not the reason why it's not done in Linux, but modern graphics cards accelerate some pretty high-level functionality, so your "thin graphics layer" would not stay very thin for long.
Use OpenGL and add some mode-switching stuff. That should do it.
The problem, of course, is that this would increase kernel size considerably - it would basically need to include the whole MesaGL to ensure that missing hardware features are emulated properly. However, that is the price of having a monolithic kernel.
On the other hand, you have a society based on the association of free men. You have co-operation and self-determination.
What happens if a band of thieves decides that, since there's no laws there, they can simply loot the group ? Either those free men don't resist, in which case they lose everything they own, they resist separately, in which case they also lose their lives, or they resist as a group, at which point they're effectively enforcing a rule against stealing - a law, but one dependent on the whims of who happens to be more charismatic.
You can't have any kind of society without rules of conduct, and having those rules be ambiguous and dependent on someone's whims is not an improvement over formalized ones.
There should never be a situation where one person connives themselves to the top, then dictates that all his fellows must act according to his direction even where it is contrary to their own wishes, because the numbers say that he is in charge.
Your precious anarchy actually promotes this kind of situation, since it removes the separation of powers, allowing some gang leader to take it all.
And when they finally do, it will be gloriously violent, as those who have been exploiting the rule of law to oppress their fellow man are hoisted by their own petard.
Unlikely. Those who are good at exploiting law are usually pretty intelligent, so they can make it seem that Joe Scapegoat is to blame. Thus Joe Scapegoat hangs and Jack the Exploiter gets hailed as a hero and showered in gifts and praise for saving us all from Joe.
Lynch mobs aren't known for their accuracy, after all.
A six year old does not have the mental capacity to even understand politics. Meanwhile, an adult who does not own property, is poor, or is a women generally has the cognitive abilities to form a decently educated opinion in regards to how they should vote, assuming they put the effort into it.
More importantly, a six year old is incapable of staging a revolution, while an 18-year old is capable of it.
The point of representative democracy isn't to make the best possible decisions, but to end the cycle of bloody tyrants and equally bloody revolutions that is the only known alternative. The various limits to voting eligibility - demonstrating intelligence or political knowledge, for example - that elitists suggest from time to time utterly miss it.
always want the punishment for just owning up to a fault to be less than trying to lie and get out of trouble. In my mind, this reinforces the concept of personal accountability.
It also increases the chances that they are amongst those who'll get killed when the society completes its current slide towards fascism. Accountability is not a good thing when those doing the accounting are hostile, and honesty is a liability in a hypocritical society. Teaching them to lie to authority automatically, consistently and without any nervousness would probably serve them better and lead to longer, happier, freer and more productive life.
I'm amazed that somehow it's OK to react with physical violence when someone says something you don't like. Free speech and all that. How that shit has become to universally tolerated is beyond me.
First Amendment. Some people simply talk with their fists;(.
I don't think DRM is successful, when it comes to MY goals. But many of those who are employing it? Yes, I believe their goals are being met.
Seeing how my first reaction to hearing about, for example, Spore's DRM was "just get it off BitTorrent", I find that very unlikely. In fact it seems that nowadays there's less risk of getting something nasty from BitTorrent than from the official game disks...
When attempts at copy prevention make the potential customer eye the game box in a store with suspicion - "Do I dare to buy this ? Has it been thoroughly investigated and found harmless to install ? Or should I get the torrent with all the nasties stripped instead ?" - they have not only failed, but are an epic failure.
Honestly. Do the people who come up with these things actually think of what they're doing ? Or are they too busy counting beans ?
The game must have had next to no QA for many it it crashes as soon as you select new game!
By any chance, is it doing the DVD check then ? Because that caused Morrowind to crash nearly always. It's a longshot, but it might be forth getting a no-cd patch.
Your argument is simply retarded. No matter what stupid thing people do, everyone should be FORCED to help them? Should I be able to act like an idiot, get myself fired, and then expect my neighbors to pay for my basic necessities? Why don't I do just that... then I can jsut sit around all goddamn day while YOU work to feed me.
Most western countries have unemployment benefits conditional to actively searching for a new job.
Cooperating for the common defense is one thing, but fucking stuffing your fat face so full of donuts that it kills you is quite another.
Yes; you figure you can benefit from one but not another. That is why you want common defense - which, let's be honest here, means that people might be required to actually die for you - but aren't willing to pay a single penny to help others. That is indeed a huge difference between these forms of cooperation, at least as far as you are concerned.
I'm not going to "coopearate" in any way shape or from; stop eating so much.
And I won't help defend you or your rights or property. Have fun in the jungle.
Your argument is a strawman by the way; come back when you have a valid one.
How is it a strawman to suggest that we let libertarians and their ilk to get what they want; namely, a place with no oversight whatsoever by the government or any other such entity ?
Unless, of course, what you really want is a society based entirely on what you think you need and screw everyone else ? Which, I suppose, pretty much is the libertarian ideology...
I fail to see what's wrong with that. If you can't take basic care of your own health, I fail to see why I should have to pay for your laziness. I'd love for fatter people to have to pay more or be dropped entirely from health insurance.
If you can't protect your own back yard from the Soviet Union, Communist China or local gangs, I fail to see why I should care. Let's dissolve the Union and let every man fend for himself.
No, seriously, let's do it. I want to see how all of these whining "Why should I have to care for my neighbour" libertarians do in the Darwinian jungle they apparently want to live in. I wonder how many of them would actually stick to their principles to the bitter end, and what proportion would band together and start rebuilding a Big Brother to keep them safe. Not that could, since it would be outcompeted by the governments built by people who cooperated from the start, but that's besides the point.
Nature is red in tooth and claw and yours are pathetic. A lone wolf can get a meal, but a lone human is the meal. That's why you should care about other people's health.
As disgusting as I find that (and saying that as someone who is regularly disturbed at night be drunk teenagers), it still doesn't equal a nationwide curfew for everyone.
First, it's for teenagers. Then it's for sex offenders. Then it's for convicted felons. Then you need to carry your identification papers with you at night to prove you're not one of them. Then being seen far from your house at night is grounds for arrest due to reasonable suspicion that you're up to no good. Then far means anywhere outside your front door.
However were he possessed of even the slightest hint of ethics he would have quit on the spot, called a press conference, told the public that the president was a traitor who intended to be a monarch, and that we needed to pull a Louis XVI to save the Republic.
Therefore betraying both his client and his professional duty. It wouldn't have been a very ethical thing to do at all, and certainly wouldn't have given him any grounds to call anyone else a traitor.
But the fame and potential wealth he could get by defending a traitor outweighed any integrity that scumbag might once have had.
The legal system is built on the premises that no one is guilty until proven so in a court of law, and that even traitors deserve to have defence counsel, especially when they haven't yet been proven to be traitors by said court. What you are suggesting is a lynch mob killing people they have deemed enemies of state without giving them a chance to defend themselves.
The lawyer did his duty, which was also the right thing to do. Hate Nixon and his deeds as much as you want, but that is no excuse to suppress his right to a fair trial. The second you do so, for any reason, your precious Republic is already gone and replaced with rule by arbitrary whims of whoever happens to be the most powerful at the moment; no different than Louis's France, really.
Any non-dictatorial form of government requires rule of law, because the only alternative is rule by someone's whims. Rule of law requires fair trials even to the worst scumbags, because otherwise it can be circumvented by declaring someone a scumbag. Fair trial requires that your defense attorney and everyone else acting on your behalf keep on doing that work to the best of their ability, no matter how many vomit bags they might need to use in the process, because otherwise declaring you scumbag tilts the odds against you, thus circumventing the rule of law.
Besides, what's an action/adventure game without someone to rescue? Even in Beyond Good and Evil (yes, I love that game), you end up rescuing a friend. What creative twist are you going to put on the formula that's so unique, yet at the same time compelling?
You get to play as Ganondorf, and your objectives are to learn to use your l33t magic powers (which of course requires finding ancient manuscripts from various dungeons and realizing their true meaning when almost dead in a previously hopeless fight against the boss monster), rise an army, conquer Hyrule, kidnap Princess Zelda and marry her in a lavish spectacle during which the final phase of your operation is carried out, and crush Link in an epic battle when he crashes said wedding party. Then you'll have an option to break and brainwash them both in your torture chamber to become your faithful servants; or you can go the softer route of using your l33t b3d sk1llz to enslave Zelda, then possess her body and do the same to Link, in scenes which fully utilize the motion sensors and shape of the Wii remote for maximum authenticity. As a secret, the latter could result in a child who has inherited aspects of all three triforces; potentially your most powerful general, or your deadliest foe if brought up wrongly (heroically). And of course you get to design your own fortresses and dungeons as you prepare to conquer the lands around Hyrule.
I'll call it "Grand Theft Triforce", or perhaps "Dark World Keeper". A K-18 Zelda for Wii with cutesy graphics and hardcore threesome sex scenes between Ganon, Link and Zelda - that different enough for you, Miyamoto ?-)
Or, to illustrate it with videogames; Asteroids is shallow as hell, but playing it is a much purer state of videogame zen than gears of war will ever be.
And there's no way in Hell that anyone's ever going to pay 70 euros for it.
Asteroids is an arcade hall game, designed to suck a few coins out of you every now and then. Gears of War is a console game, designed to suck a huge one-time sum out of you. It needs to justify that expenditure by having long play-time, and that means it needs to give rewards along the way. Or look at Zelda, which is constantly pushing new power-ups your way; each dungeon not only makes you more powerful with greater maximum health, but also gives you some new ability, and trains you at its use. That is why it's so successful.
It's not about the value of Iraqi lives. It's about looking after the interests of the US first and foremost.
Iran is located right next to Iraq. If US troops leave and Iraq collapses into chaos, what's to stop Iran from moving in ? I don't think that it would be in the interests of US to have a hostile theocracy get control of Iraq's oil, do you ?
Like a father or a mother, you don't put your family into ruin to save another family on the other side of the world. It's just outright irresponsible.
Except, of course, that it was your family who fucked the other family over in the first place. If you then leave them to die, when it's clearly your fault that they're in the mess, it sends a clear message to others that their only chance of avoiding ruin at your hand is to get WMDs as soon as possible. The US hasn't invaded North Korea...
"Look out for number one" only works when you have an ordered society to protect you from the consequences of your assholiness; in global politics, getting everyone to hate and fear you is not a good idea, since it results in a cold war with the rest of the world, and you can't win that. This is doubly true when the people who'll end up hating you most happen to control an increasingly rare resource your economy depends on.
And what happens when 1 of the users decides to take his computer offline & toss it into a landfill? Then you've lost a chunk of your data. That does not sound like a good system to me.
As I explained in the post you answered to, there is likely to be more than one copy of any given chunk floating around, more so if the data the chunk belongs to is popular. And nothing stops the original author from simply reinserting the data, should it become unavailable. In fact there is an automatic system that requests data if it can't download it and reinserts it when so requested built into the Freenet client Frost.
Freenet is an anonymizing and caching communication layer, rather than permanent storage. However, since popular content keeps on spawning new copies as old ones are discarded, it is essentially permanent, doesn't require a server, and doesn't suffer from Slashdot effect. And even unpopular content can stay available for over a year in some cases.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lesson here: if someone suggests something stupid and outrageously evil enough to make even you, an US congressman, want to laugh them out, don't; shoot them instead. Since you insist on keeping the death sentence and arming everyone, you can at least put these two habits to good use.
Let the copyright czar go the way of the Russian one.
It has, actually: purely from the profit maximizing point of view, sick people are a burden, and letting them die is the most efficient solution. The exception are highly educated or trained workers, where the cost of replacement might be higher than the cost of treatment; as this is typically reflected in their pay, having the treatments available but expensive is exactly what the market should do.
It is completely accurate, actually. As far as the market is concerned, you are a human resource, not a human. And it is indeed inefficient to spend more resources protecting a resource than that resource's market value.
Because you're near broke and can't fight any more wars. Also, outsourcing means that your economy is dependent on factories and people who are located in other countries.
But you'd better care how the Chinese view your country, since they own it.
They would simply hire mercenaries and set themselves up as nobility. They fancy themselves as aristocrats, and historically, aristocrats were those who had the means of production - land, back then - to hire fighting men and kill anyone who opposed them. It was the rise of strong central government which put an end to feudalism, so of course the modern-day dukes want to abolish it to return to the good old days of serfdom.
Giving stuff for free to kill the competition is classic form of anti-competitive behaviour. It is not to the customer's benefit, any more than putting cheese into a mousetrap is to the mouse's benefit.
"Net neutrality" means that the network does not prioritize traffic based on its source or destination. And AT&T doesn't need to outright block itunes.com; it is quite simple to make it slightly slower or have traffic to and from it count against some limit traffic to AT&T's own competing site doesn't count against to give AT&T's site an unfair advantage.
It is also doable without anti-competitive behaviour: simply have multiple possible connection speeds available, so grandma can pick the slowest.
The issue here is not about charging per megabyte transferred; it's about charging per megabyte transferred from some IP addresses and not others.
Use OpenGL and add some mode-switching stuff. That should do it.
The problem, of course, is that this would increase kernel size considerably - it would basically need to include the whole MesaGL to ensure that missing hardware features are emulated properly. However, that is the price of having a monolithic kernel.
What happens if a band of thieves decides that, since there's no laws there, they can simply loot the group ? Either those free men don't resist, in which case they lose everything they own, they resist separately, in which case they also lose their lives, or they resist as a group, at which point they're effectively enforcing a rule against stealing - a law, but one dependent on the whims of who happens to be more charismatic.
You can't have any kind of society without rules of conduct, and having those rules be ambiguous and dependent on someone's whims is not an improvement over formalized ones.
Your precious anarchy actually promotes this kind of situation, since it removes the separation of powers, allowing some gang leader to take it all.
Unlikely. Those who are good at exploiting law are usually pretty intelligent, so they can make it seem that Joe Scapegoat is to blame. Thus Joe Scapegoat hangs and Jack the Exploiter gets hailed as a hero and showered in gifts and praise for saving us all from Joe.
Lynch mobs aren't known for their accuracy, after all.
More importantly, a six year old is incapable of staging a revolution, while an 18-year old is capable of it.
The point of representative democracy isn't to make the best possible decisions, but to end the cycle of bloody tyrants and equally bloody revolutions that is the only known alternative. The various limits to voting eligibility - demonstrating intelligence or political knowledge, for example - that elitists suggest from time to time utterly miss it.
It also increases the chances that they are amongst those who'll get killed when the society completes its current slide towards fascism. Accountability is not a good thing when those doing the accounting are hostile, and honesty is a liability in a hypocritical society. Teaching them to lie to authority automatically, consistently and without any nervousness would probably serve them better and lead to longer, happier, freer and more productive life.
</cynicism>.
First Amendment. Some people simply talk with their fists ;(.
Since these seem to be powers of two, it's 4 orders of magnitude, actually.
Seeing how my first reaction to hearing about, for example, Spore's DRM was "just get it off BitTorrent", I find that very unlikely. In fact it seems that nowadays there's less risk of getting something nasty from BitTorrent than from the official game disks...
When attempts at copy prevention make the potential customer eye the game box in a store with suspicion - "Do I dare to buy this ? Has it been thoroughly investigated and found harmless to install ? Or should I get the torrent with all the nasties stripped instead ?" - they have not only failed, but are an epic failure.
Honestly. Do the people who come up with these things actually think of what they're doing ? Or are they too busy counting beans ?
"Doctor ! This man's been hit with a shotgun to the heart !" "Bring him to the toilet, nurse, I'll smash the urinal ! Quickly !"
By any chance, is it doing the DVD check then ? Because that caused Morrowind to crash nearly always. It's a longshot, but it might be forth getting a no-cd patch.
Putin is working on that.
Most western countries have unemployment benefits conditional to actively searching for a new job.
Yes; you figure you can benefit from one but not another. That is why you want common defense - which, let's be honest here, means that people might be required to actually die for you - but aren't willing to pay a single penny to help others. That is indeed a huge difference between these forms of cooperation, at least as far as you are concerned.
And I won't help defend you or your rights or property. Have fun in the jungle.
How is it a strawman to suggest that we let libertarians and their ilk to get what they want; namely, a place with no oversight whatsoever by the government or any other such entity ?
Unless, of course, what you really want is a society based entirely on what you think you need and screw everyone else ? Which, I suppose, pretty much is the libertarian ideology...
Actually, Feynman's path integration means that reality takes into account all sides of an issue when deciding the final outcome.
If you can't protect your own back yard from the Soviet Union, Communist China or local gangs, I fail to see why I should care. Let's dissolve the Union and let every man fend for himself.
No, seriously, let's do it. I want to see how all of these whining "Why should I have to care for my neighbour" libertarians do in the Darwinian jungle they apparently want to live in. I wonder how many of them would actually stick to their principles to the bitter end, and what proportion would band together and start rebuilding a Big Brother to keep them safe. Not that could, since it would be outcompeted by the governments built by people who cooperated from the start, but that's besides the point.
Nature is red in tooth and claw and yours are pathetic. A lone wolf can get a meal, but a lone human is the meal. That's why you should care about other people's health.
First, it's for teenagers. Then it's for sex offenders. Then it's for convicted felons. Then you need to carry your identification papers with you at night to prove you're not one of them. Then being seen far from your house at night is grounds for arrest due to reasonable suspicion that you're up to no good. Then far means anywhere outside your front door.
Sometimes, the slope really is slippery.
Therefore betraying both his client and his professional duty. It wouldn't have been a very ethical thing to do at all, and certainly wouldn't have given him any grounds to call anyone else a traitor.
The legal system is built on the premises that no one is guilty until proven so in a court of law, and that even traitors deserve to have defence counsel, especially when they haven't yet been proven to be traitors by said court. What you are suggesting is a lynch mob killing people they have deemed enemies of state without giving them a chance to defend themselves.
The lawyer did his duty, which was also the right thing to do. Hate Nixon and his deeds as much as you want, but that is no excuse to suppress his right to a fair trial. The second you do so, for any reason, your precious Republic is already gone and replaced with rule by arbitrary whims of whoever happens to be the most powerful at the moment; no different than Louis's France, really.
Any non-dictatorial form of government requires rule of law, because the only alternative is rule by someone's whims. Rule of law requires fair trials even to the worst scumbags, because otherwise it can be circumvented by declaring someone a scumbag. Fair trial requires that your defense attorney and everyone else acting on your behalf keep on doing that work to the best of their ability, no matter how many vomit bags they might need to use in the process, because otherwise declaring you scumbag tilts the odds against you, thus circumventing the rule of law.
You get to play as Ganondorf, and your objectives are to learn to use your l33t magic powers (which of course requires finding ancient manuscripts from various dungeons and realizing their true meaning when almost dead in a previously hopeless fight against the boss monster), rise an army, conquer Hyrule, kidnap Princess Zelda and marry her in a lavish spectacle during which the final phase of your operation is carried out, and crush Link in an epic battle when he crashes said wedding party. Then you'll have an option to break and brainwash them both in your torture chamber to become your faithful servants; or you can go the softer route of using your l33t b3d sk1llz to enslave Zelda, then possess her body and do the same to Link, in scenes which fully utilize the motion sensors and shape of the Wii remote for maximum authenticity. As a secret, the latter could result in a child who has inherited aspects of all three triforces; potentially your most powerful general, or your deadliest foe if brought up wrongly (heroically). And of course you get to design your own fortresses and dungeons as you prepare to conquer the lands around Hyrule.
I'll call it "Grand Theft Triforce", or perhaps "Dark World Keeper". A K-18 Zelda for Wii with cutesy graphics and hardcore threesome sex scenes between Ganon, Link and Zelda - that different enough for you, Miyamoto ?-)
And there's no way in Hell that anyone's ever going to pay 70 euros for it.
Asteroids is an arcade hall game, designed to suck a few coins out of you every now and then. Gears of War is a console game, designed to suck a huge one-time sum out of you. It needs to justify that expenditure by having long play-time, and that means it needs to give rewards along the way. Or look at Zelda, which is constantly pushing new power-ups your way; each dungeon not only makes you more powerful with greater maximum health, but also gives you some new ability, and trains you at its use. That is why it's so successful.
Iran is located right next to Iraq. If US troops leave and Iraq collapses into chaos, what's to stop Iran from moving in ? I don't think that it would be in the interests of US to have a hostile theocracy get control of Iraq's oil, do you ?
Except, of course, that it was your family who fucked the other family over in the first place. If you then leave them to die, when it's clearly your fault that they're in the mess, it sends a clear message to others that their only chance of avoiding ruin at your hand is to get WMDs as soon as possible. The US hasn't invaded North Korea...
"Look out for number one" only works when you have an ordered society to protect you from the consequences of your assholiness; in global politics, getting everyone to hate and fear you is not a good idea, since it results in a cold war with the rest of the world, and you can't win that. This is doubly true when the people who'll end up hating you most happen to control an increasingly rare resource your economy depends on.
Protip: next time, make the plan - and preferably Plans B, C and D - before driving in.
As I explained in the post you answered to, there is likely to be more than one copy of any given chunk floating around, more so if the data the chunk belongs to is popular. And nothing stops the original author from simply reinserting the data, should it become unavailable. In fact there is an automatic system that requests data if it can't download it and reinserts it when so requested built into the Freenet client Frost.
Freenet is an anonymizing and caching communication layer, rather than permanent storage. However, since popular content keeps on spawning new copies as old ones are discarded, it is essentially permanent, doesn't require a server, and doesn't suffer from Slashdot effect. And even unpopular content can stay available for over a year in some cases.