Lying is not a crime. It may be immoral in most circumstances, but if we're going to talk about morality, then I think it's more appropriate to talk about the morality of a public school system which treats students like inmates and citizens like subjects. So she had a cellphone... What exactly is the big deal? Why were the police even involved to begin with? And, speaking of the police, what the hell were they doing wasting the time of two officers on this--by all accounts--minor incident? Don't they have more important things they could be doing?
It's interesting they chose to charge her with disorderly conduct, of all things. She was not drunk. She was not loitering. According to the police report, she was not disturbing the peace in any sort of conventional sense of the phrase. She was, however, refusing to obey. Lesson learned, I guess...
"Does that mean their isn't corruption on the Republican side? Of course not, but what the Republicans consider necessary in the budget is much smaller than what the Democrats want, and most of it goes to scientists for military research, or producing tangible assets like military hardware and roads by Americans.
The Republican Party can just give up its self-proclaimed title as the party of fiscal conservatism and "small government" after the past eight years. With massive expansion of the federal government, executive powers, and the national debt, it's clear that such rhetoric was never the real agenda anyway.
Furthermore, those military assets are, in themselves, a massive liability. They give our leaders the false impression that the easiest solution to almost any foreign problem is to use our invincible, "full-spectrum dominant" military. So, instead of negotiating, we invade. Instead of evaluating our unsustainable lifestyle, domestic dysfunction, or dependence on foreign oil, we decide it's just easier to do fool's errands like attempting remake the middle east in our own image.
Large standing armies also represent a major threat to any republic. It's THE major reason why the founding fathers insisted on the use of militias rather than a professional army for national defense. Professional armies inevitably lead to costly military adventurism and (more often than not) military coups. In terms of the latter, the United States has been very fortunate, but then again, we've never had really tough times since the conception of the modern military industrial complex... How worthy of an investment is an M1A2 Abrams tank if eventually ends up rolling down an American street?
It's even worse than that. The two "new" versus campaigns they're selling are not new at all. They're two of the co-op only campaigns that they very slightly changed to run versus. There are seriously modified servers running right now that allow almost the exact same thing--for free. And let's not forget that the SDK they're mentioning as an upgrade was supposed to be released months ago...
Can you imagine the tone of this article and subsequent discussion if EA had done this?
One aspect of this that many seem to forget is the potential for stock-market fraud that these illegal surveillance techniques could easily present. You joke like these things don't affect you, and maybe you have good reasons to think that. Maybe you don't buy into the psychology of a chilling effect of government surveillance. Maybe you're an upright citizen with nothing to hide and no enemies. Maybe you don't have any "secrets." But if you have any investments or savings at all, you should be concerned.
Imagine the kind of profit one could have made by short-selling on financial stocks in the past 12 months. One or two illegally tapped phonecalls is all it likely would have taken to make billions while average investors lost their shirts. Do you really trust those in-charge (or even low-level personnel) to resist that kind of financial temptation?
If the public doesn't aggressively push their representatives to investigate these very serious allegations then they deserve everything they get. Don't shake your fists at the heavens when your 401(k) or IRA is wiped out years from now (maybe already?) from such fraud as if it were some kind of act of God or natural disaster.
The problem with this issue is that a great number of people fundamentally misunderstand the methodology of Science. The fact that so many have referenced "The Scientific Method" as if it is some sort of hard-and-fast rule that applies to the daily lives and work of research scientists in any field is quite telling. That notion is naive and absurd. The Scientific Method is merely a grade school-level thinking exercise meant to exemplify a systematic approach to understanding the world. Saying you can't trust the work of a scientist who doesn't follow the Scientific Method would be like saying "You can't run a football without an I formation." Neither of those statements makes any sense. The only difference is that most Americans know a thing or two about football and would laugh off the latter as sheer ignorance but, when it comes to the former, because they themselves are ignorant, they silently nod their heads in agreement.
"Are you really claiming that only someone with specialised experience in physics is qualified to point out errors in the arithmetic in a physics paper?... If the body of 'knowledge' you call science is characterised by testing propositions for truth by polling workers in a certain field on their opinion, rather than by rigorously testing the logical consequences of those propositions against empirical data, it is neither scientific nor is it knowledge."
This is the essence of the problem, the modern form of anti-intellectualism at its most narcissistic. To the poster, the "Scientific Body of Knowledge" is just an informal opinion poll of eggheads, so where should his opinion come in? And what do eggheads know anyway? Why, the problem is probably in their arithmetic somewhere... If only someone with commonsense, such as himself, were to look at it, they would spot error immediately, but he has better things to do. Climatologists should just go back to chasing butterflies in fields or whatever is they do and leave him and his way of life the hell alone.
I should probably add that I have had a power-supply fail in the past. It wasn't a computer I built myself but rather a cheapo HP Pavilion. You're right, it didn't explode or fry any of my components, but the experience left me with one distinct impression: As a hobbyist without access to testing equipment, intermittent PSU failures can be a very frustrating diagnosis of exclusion.
So, yeah, the chances of a catastrophic failure may be remote. And sure, maybe I do end up paying more for that one component, but overall, I'm paying at lot less than I would for a similar computer in a store, no?
I've only built a few computers, so I may not be as experienced as you, but here's how I approached the quality issue on a parts by part basis:
"What is the worst that can happen?"
With cheap RAM, I get less performance, maybe a bad stick or two which I can weed out during stress testing.
With a cheap GPU, I get less performance, the thing craps out in a year--no problem it was going to get replaced in two to three years anyway.
With a cheap PSU, on the other hand, a catastrophic failure could literally have me buying all new parts and starting from scratch.
The computers I've built have been for myself and family and I personally found that risk unacceptable. As an aside, for the past couple of computers I've built, I've used PC Power and Cooling PSUs and have never had a problem with it. As always, YMMV.
My point was not that the climate should or will stay the same. I'm refuting his claim that we have no control or influence whatsoever over the climate at all.
Humanity has the ability to affect the global climate. It's a very basic point that everyone needs to agree upon in order for any sort of discussion on environmental policy or analysis of anthropogenic climate change can begin.
Trying to terraform the Earth to keep the climate the same way it was before is a pointless and futile exercise. Beliving that humans can control the climate is an arrogant statement that is provably false.
Is it? Do you think if we exploded every nuclear weapon in the world all at once that such a human action would not have any effect upon the global climate?
Assumptions such as yours are antiquated and, quite frankly, foolhardy. Human technology and industry has progressed to the point where our activities can affect the world as a whole--including the atmosphere.
My question for those who advocate gun control is this:
Do you not see the futility of measures such as Alcohol Prohibition or the War on Drugs? And, if you do, why do you think prohibitions against guns will be different and more successful?
In video game development, I see latent racism. In many games all of the central characters are white. The game developers probably never even though about racial issues. They just made a game. Being rendered invisible is almost as hurtful as being actively discriminated against.
Videogames are made by companies which are acutely aware of how sensitive some people are to issues related to race. So they take the simple solution and attempt to avoid it altogether by making most--if not all--of the characters white. Take, for example, Farcry 2, a game which takes place in Africa and thematically similar to the movie Blood Diamond. The game hardly has any Africans in it! Do you think this is a coincidence or a shrewd business decision to avoid the controversy and maximize sales?
Finding all the various ways to be offended is practically a cottage industry. People who sit around thinking about all the various types and sub-types of conscious and unconscious racism can (and will) find it anywhere. The best a company can hope for in these situations is being branded a "latent racist," so that's what they do.
In the first several GTA games the central character is white. In San Andreas, the central characters are almost all black and THAT'S when people notice. I salute Rockstar for making an effort.
San Andreas may have been the first GTA game with a black central character, and it will probably also be the last. At the time, Rockstar took a lot of flak for San Andreas because of it's "racism". People said it was a stereotypical depiction of "black youths reveling in street crime" with storylines which advocated a subtle, insidious brand of racism. I'm unsure if that would be classified as active or passive racism, but I do know that most companies would rather not try and walk that impossible tightrope. I don't blame them.
Of course the best way to tackle the 'issue' of 2nd hand gaming is to bring the price down of new games. If there are more customers (there are), then there is more room to bring the price down. I'm not holding my breath.
Exactly. The gaming industry's greed created this monster. By insisting on agranular pricing, so that nearly all games are MSRP priced at $50-60, regardless of production costs and actual value, they virtually ensured the gamestop niche. As a consumer, if you only had $30 to spend and wanted a new game, until very recently (via XBLA and steam), you were basically out of luck.
The secondhand market filled that gap. Plus, it also allowed a way for consumers to recoup some of the cost of bad games which publishers insist on pricing the same as triple-A titles.
The largest banks that failed (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) were almost arms of the government, they were tied so tightly in. And to call the financial industry of the U.S. "unregulated" is, frankly, breathtakingly idiotic or at the very least utterly ignorant of the market and the regulations imposed thereon. The WHOLE PROBLEM was that the government was TOO involved with the financial industry, not that they were too hands off. You don't get quite they level of giant sums of money and poor decisions without the government involved somehow.
There's a lot of disinformation out there regarding the nature of the financial crisis, and I can see how one might have such an opinion. However, I have made a genuine effort to research this issue and I can assure you that, as difficult as it may be to believe, our government did allow a 60 trillion dollar market, in the form of, modern OTC derivatives to exist completely and utterly unregulated.
In fact, this market was so "free" that that figure--60 trillion--is actually just an estimate (some go as high as 600 trillion). Nobody knows just how much money has been tied up in what was essentially bets between the mega-rich about the rise and fall of company values. Even crazier, not even the companies themselves know the others' positions because the information is secret. As a result, they've stopped lending to each other, the so-called "credit freeze" or more pleasant euphemism "lack of confidence."
Before you label others ignorant or a revisionist, please educate yourself on this issue. If you think Fannie Mae (an institution which has been around since the Great Depression) was the cause of all this, you have been misled. You need to ask yourself why you have been deceived and whose purpose does this lie serve.
Trust me. You wouldn't be terribly comfortable if AIG imploded. No one would be.
And that is the essence of the problem, is it not? How can a a political establishment so obsessed with "national security" let a market of an estimated $60 trillion dollars (almost 5 times our national GDP) go completely unregulated? It's absurd...
No terrorist in Guantanamo (or Afghanistan, for that matter) could ever do this much damage to the country, and yet none of those responsible will ever be executed, waterboarded, or undergo "extraordinary rendition." Funny how that works, huh? While we were all arguing over Dick Cheney's ticking time bomb hypothetical scenarios, the nation's economy was being set up for the largest act of sabotage and fraud in human history, and not a single person has yet to be arrested for it.
I'd be surprised if even a single CEO or government official ever gets convicted over this. And even if they do, we won't see a cent of their ill-gotten gains. Take a look at Kenneth Lay, mastermind of the Enron fraud. The man just so happened to conveniently die after his conviction but before his sentencing. The result? His conviction was wiped from the records and none of his or his wife's assets were seized.
Justice. Does the word even have a place in our society any more?
Price controls inevitably lead to either rationing or shortages, period.
Prices are already controlled. Most private insurance companies only compensate at the rates set by Medicare.
So what you propose may bring "universal" healthcare to the masses, but it will be both lowest-common-denominator healthcare, you'll have to wait on a list to get to it, and the government will decide who you get to see despite any preferences you may have to the contrary.
Unless you have a medical emergency, you will be waiting under the current system as well. This whole canard about waiting lists is completely disconnected from reality. As to your point about provider choices, most patients do not have much of a choice under the current system either. Most HMOs limit coverage to particular lists of providers and do not allow patients to see specialists without a referral. Many insurance companies will not even pay for a second opinion. Furthermore, at some point, people need to understand that it is unrealistic to expect to have unrestricted healthcare choices. You don't choose your police, fire, water, electrical, or other public services, and yet those generally are accepted by the public at large. I don't understand why people think that medicine should be so different. Do you really think if you have a heart attack right now that you or your family will be able to make an informed economic decision as to which doctor should treat you?
It's absurd to pretend that the healthcare system we have now is in any way a free-market, with prices set according to supply and demand and consumers free to make rational economic decisions. In fact, I assert that we already have socialized medicine. It's called the emergency department. But because people refuse to acknowledge this, the current socialized healthcare neglects true medical emergencies and is dramatically cost inefficient.
You conclude that we have chosen self-interest over altruism. That's because, quite simply, people tend to act in their own self-interest, while altruism doesn't exist in the real world. At times, some misunderstood instinct or action taken out of enlightened self-interest may appear to be altruistic, but altruism not only can't be relied upon - it has been shown to be entirely non-existent in the human animal.
I personally believe that people are products of their respective environments and what is expected of them. Your suggestion that altruism is non-existent is a very bold statement, indeed. You may prove yourself correct if you set the bar for human decency so low.
Your other error is assuming that there are free-market forces at work in the US Medical industry.
This is not what I said. In fact, it is the opposite of what I believe. It is my belief that free market capitalism is incompatible with the good practice of medicine. I have yet to hear a good explanation as to how a capitalistic system can function in such a coercive service such as medicine. Fundamentally, there is simply no way for patients or families to make valuation as to price of a loved one's health or life and often no time or ability to seek competitive providers. Plus, Western Medicine and its institutions constitute an effective monopoly on the industry, which is a good thing but antithetical to the preconditions of a healthy market.
Those who resist health care reform often do so by claiming that such an act will be socialism and will destroy the beneficial capitalistic forces at work. This is totally disconnected from reality for the very reasons you state. It is this dogmatic approach to this issue which I resent. People have associated self-interest and greed with free market capitalism to the point where they falsely believe that if every man acts in accordance with his own best interest that a free-market paradise of capitalistic efficiency and abundance will be the result. This is just not the case.
I don't have any answers to these issues. Disregarding the inefficiency and cost issues, I think the availability of health care in the US is outstanding, if not the best in the world.
I couldn't disagree more. The high cost of health care and health care insurance effectively makes it unavailable to a large (and growing) swath of the public. Metrics of availability such as infant mortality ratio put the United States health care system far behind other developed countries. We can and must do better.
Ok, if you are going to go there, please name 1 case of life-saving surgery that some US citizen required but they were denied because they couldn't afford it. Just 1, please.
This is a loaded question. To someone outside of the medical community, it might seem fair but it is not. First-hand, objective accounts of such stories are difficult to come by because patient records are confidential and healthcare providers have an ethical obligation (and legal obligation, a la HIPAA regulations) not to speak of such matters without approval from their patients. Plus, the chilling effect of rampant medical malpractice lawsuits has made many doctors silent out of fear of losing their livelihood for speaking the truth.
Another part of the problem with this question is the disparity between how a clinician might define "life-saving" and how the lay-public defines it. When most people think of "life-saving surgery" they often think only of surgical emergencies. It is true, in this respect, surgical emergencies are treated regardless of the ability to pay. But this is only a small aspect of medicine. Something as simple as bariatric surgery could literally be life-saving. A more mature definition of "life-saving surgery" might be: surgery for a medical condition which falls under the accepted standard of medical care and causally prevents death from that medical condition or associated complications. In that sense, the United States medical system frequently fails patients. And this failure is not limited to surgery.
An interesting aspect to all this is that by washing our hands of all non-emergency patients, the health care system may paradoxically end up being more expensive. Consider the hypothetical case of an uninsured heart attack patient who shows up in the emergency room and subsequently receives triple-bypass surgery. The associated costs with such a patient could be enormous. But what if this condition had been prevented by proper screening and preventative treatments like cholesterol or blood pressure reducing medications? In comparison, such expenses are negligible. And yet, hospitals are more likely to eat the cost of the former and not the latter because that is what the law and government incentivizes them to do.
If the sub-prime mortgage crisis is any sign, I think we are reaching a breaking point in our society. Greed and self-interest do not, in most cases, result in maximizing efficiency. It's the prisoner's dilemma and we have chosen self-interest over altruism--paradoxically at our own peril. In my opinion, the quintessential mistake of the past couple decades seems, to be a dogmatic belief that free market capitalism will always prevail in an unregulated environment, regardless of whether the underlying fundamentals to a free-market system are present and irrespective of the context. Medicine is not a widget. Greed is not good. The sooner we come to realize this, the better off we will be.
These guys are leeches. Artificial middlemen not just creaming off the profit from others' labour, but removing every last penny and walking off with it.
You realize the irony of this statement, right? Taken out if its anti-TPB rant, it quite easily applies to the Recording industry distributors. In fact, it almost better applies to them because TPB's so-called profits and effect on music sales are pretty questionable. Whereas the coercive and immoral contracts of the music distributors are widely accepted facts.
What do these guys contribute other than crap about being regular guys indulging a hobby?
The Pirate Bay provides a very valuable service. It excels at displaying what an immoral farce copyright laws and globalization have become. It is a modern day speakeasy. The fact that they STILL (after years of press) get threatening DMCA requests, which do not and should not apply to them (being that they aren't subjects of the United States government) is very telling.
Blowback. If you clampdown too hard, people will resist. Hard enough, and they will revolt and maybe even seek revenge--justified or not. U.S. Copyright law has progressed far beyond its constitutional mandate. Article 1 section 8, clause 8 states the following: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." And yet, "limited time" has come to mean 75 years AFTER the death of the author. There have been serious arguments made in on the congressional floor to construe "limited times" as infinity minus one day. In what reasonable way is that "limited"? Furthermore, there are countless examples where modern copyright and patent laws serve only to obstruct progress. Rarely do stated arguments even involve the actual mandate of patents and copyrights anymore. We speak in terms of losses to artists and inventors despite the fact that this is rarely ever the actual case (most copyrights and patents are held by multinational corporations) and not the intended focus of these protections.
"Intellectual Property" laws have become tools of oppression and exploitation. It should not be surprising that people are resisting them, even if such resistance has ulterior self-serving motive.
How is that "very clear"? the article doesn't mention any request from officials whatsoever.
According to the BBC,"MPs criticised video-sharing websites, including YouTube, in July, saying they should be doing more to vet content."
But back to the point - how does the Second Amendment stop Google from doing something similar in the USA?
Since your reading comprehension seems to be deficient, allow me to make it more clear for you. Google, the company which owns YouTube, a video site on the internet, is doing this at the (possibly informal) request of the United Kingdom, an overbearing government which does not value the right of an armed, empowered populace. Currently, in the United States of America, the Second Amendment to the Constitution upholds the right of the people to bear arms. This right is under increasing political attack, leaving many who recognize the utility of the Second Amendment to the Constitution left to wonder if the situation in the United Kingdom is a picture of things to come should said political attacks be successful.
What makes you think that criminals would not still be able to get handguns despite any and every governmental ban possible? And do you concede that such prohibitions will also have a negative impact on law-abiding gun owners and unintended consequences such as U.K.'s current knifing epidemic?
There's been a war on drugs for over 20 years now, and not only are drugs still available to those willing to break the law. Even worse, the streetprice of these drugs has not even increased despite all the laws, despite all the convictions, and despite all the money spent trying to prohibit them. I'll never understand how my liberal-minded friends can be so quick to recognize the folly of the "War on Drugs" whilst simultaneously calling for similar prohibitions on guns.
Uhh, what would this have to do with the British government or laws, or the second amendment?
It has everything to do with it. How many knifing epidemics have you ever heard of in the United States?
Google decided to do this of their own free will.
Google very clearly did this in response to a request by U.K. officials. True, though they probably legally could have said no, but they chose to comply. Makes you wonder about the "Do No Evil" mantra, eh? If you consider political censorship of this nature to be something evil (or, at least, immoral), like I do, then Google's policy is probably better stated as: "Do No Evil, unless China, the U.K., or some other government asks us."
Isn't it obvious what the real problem is? These videos implicitly question the effectiveness of the UK police state and are, thus, are doubleplusbad. After all, it makes no sense to have the telescreen speaking ill of big brother now does it?
I implore those who question the usefulness of the second amendment here in the U.S. to take a hard look at what's happening in the U.K. today. The slippery slope is very real.
I can understand how piracy helps companies like microsoft, as all you're doing by pirating windows is increasing their market penetration, but how about small/medium sized developers who don't have the market power of say EA? How do they remain competitive if their already meagre sales (Troika or Majesco anyone?) are hammered by piracy?
May I direct your attention to Tribes? Tribes 1 was created by Dynamix (now known as Sierra) a medium/small development house which found themselves in exactly the situation you describe. Tribes 1 was pirated left and right and the end result was that a relatively unknown game eventually had a very large dynamic, thriving community of players and player-created content. So, what did they do? They followed Tribes 1 up with with a Triple-A title, Tribes 2 and made a chunk of change.
I'm all for passing a Digital Consumer Rights Act to protect fair use and end user licensees, but some of the amoral "logic" here boggles the mind. If it is bad for Microsoft or Sony to rip off consumers, it's bad for you to rip off them.
I think what we're seeing here is a disconnect between the law and the beliefs of the people. In short, we are in a period of a very large political struggle (or perhaps transition is a better word) where old paradigms, descriptors, and values may not apply.
Were the French people vicious to the nobility and lawless during the French Revolution? You bet. Were speakeasies not hedonisticly breaking the law during Prohibition? Of course. But were either immoral? I don't think that the answer is very clear-cut. Would democracy in Frace have taken root were it not for the French taking up arms? Would Prohibition have ended were it not for speakeasies demonstrating how ineffective, unenforceable, and out-of-touch the law was? Similarly, I think you need to ask yourself whether real copyright and patent reform will ever take place simply from the goodwill of the legislature and industry.
Which provides, in which way, for legal cover when millions of kids grab ripped-off copies of a newly released recording the day after the musician in question publishes it for sale?... You're doing your level best to excuse people from ripping off the entertainment they want because they can.
File sharing, for most, is probably a civilly (sometimes criminally) liable act. Maybe even those who fileshare are committing a morally offensive act. That's really not the point. The privatization of human culture and the gutting of the public domain is similarly unlawful (via its unconstitutional lack of realistic limitations and hindrance of scientific and artistic progress) and arguably immoral. Furthermore, the means by which these industries foist their will upon the less-organized public (by bribing the legislature and, in some cases, actually writing the laws which regulate themselves) is also shameful and morally tenuous.
The situation is analogous to speakeasies during the prohibition era which were ostensibly illegal but, in actuality, a reflection of the failure--not of the people--but of prohibition itself. There were probably people back then who also tried to blame the entire situation on the hedonistic , law-breaking drinkers. They, like you, were misguided relics of a failed way of thinking.
Regardless, the writing is on the wall. One way or the other, "intellectual property" reform is coming. The only question is whether it will be from those in power waking up to the changing of the tides and acknowledging the failure of trying to pretend that ones and zeros are limited in supply or simply the result of demographics, when all those dirty file-sharers start taking political power.
Slashdot Mirror
Lying is not a crime. It may be immoral in most circumstances, but if we're going to talk about morality, then I think it's more appropriate to talk about the morality of a public school system which treats students like inmates and citizens like subjects. So she had a cellphone... What exactly is the big deal? Why were the police even involved to begin with? And, speaking of the police, what the hell were they doing wasting the time of two officers on this--by all accounts--minor incident? Don't they have more important things they could be doing?
It's interesting they chose to charge her with disorderly conduct, of all things. She was not drunk. She was not loitering. According to the police report, she was not disturbing the peace in any sort of conventional sense of the phrase. She was, however, refusing to obey. Lesson learned, I guess...
-Grym
The Republican Party can just give up its self-proclaimed title as the party of fiscal conservatism and "small government" after the past eight years. With massive expansion of the federal government, executive powers, and the national debt, it's clear that such rhetoric was never the real agenda anyway.
Furthermore, those military assets are, in themselves, a massive liability. They give our leaders the false impression that the easiest solution to almost any foreign problem is to use our invincible, "full-spectrum dominant" military. So, instead of negotiating, we invade. Instead of evaluating our unsustainable lifestyle, domestic dysfunction, or dependence on foreign oil, we decide it's just easier to do fool's errands like attempting remake the middle east in our own image.
Large standing armies also represent a major threat to any republic. It's THE major reason why the founding fathers insisted on the use of militias rather than a professional army for national defense. Professional armies inevitably lead to costly military adventurism and (more often than not) military coups. In terms of the latter, the United States has been very fortunate, but then again, we've never had really tough times since the conception of the modern military industrial complex... How worthy of an investment is an M1A2 Abrams tank if eventually ends up rolling down an American street?
-Grym
It's even worse than that. The two "new" versus campaigns they're selling are not new at all. They're two of the co-op only campaigns that they very slightly changed to run versus. There are seriously modified servers running right now that allow almost the exact same thing--for free. And let's not forget that the SDK they're mentioning as an upgrade was supposed to be released months ago...
Can you imagine the tone of this article and subsequent discussion if EA had done this?
-Grym
One aspect of this that many seem to forget is the potential for stock-market fraud that these illegal surveillance techniques could easily present. You joke like these things don't affect you, and maybe you have good reasons to think that. Maybe you don't buy into the psychology of a chilling effect of government surveillance. Maybe you're an upright citizen with nothing to hide and no enemies. Maybe you don't have any "secrets." But if you have any investments or savings at all, you should be concerned.
Imagine the kind of profit one could have made by short-selling on financial stocks in the past 12 months. One or two illegally tapped phonecalls is all it likely would have taken to make billions while average investors lost their shirts. Do you really trust those in-charge (or even low-level personnel) to resist that kind of financial temptation?
If the public doesn't aggressively push their representatives to investigate these very serious allegations then they deserve everything they get. Don't shake your fists at the heavens when your 401(k) or IRA is wiped out years from now (maybe already?) from such fraud as if it were some kind of act of God or natural disaster.
-Grym
The problem with this issue is that a great number of people fundamentally misunderstand the methodology of Science. The fact that so many have referenced "The Scientific Method" as if it is some sort of hard-and-fast rule that applies to the daily lives and work of research scientists in any field is quite telling. That notion is naive and absurd. The Scientific Method is merely a grade school-level thinking exercise meant to exemplify a systematic approach to understanding the world. Saying you can't trust the work of a scientist who doesn't follow the Scientific Method would be like saying "You can't run a football without an I formation." Neither of those statements makes any sense. The only difference is that most Americans know a thing or two about football and would laugh off the latter as sheer ignorance but, when it comes to the former, because they themselves are ignorant, they silently nod their heads in agreement.
This is the essence of the problem, the modern form of anti-intellectualism at its most narcissistic. To the poster, the "Scientific Body of Knowledge" is just an informal opinion poll of eggheads, so where should his opinion come in? And what do eggheads know anyway? Why, the problem is probably in their arithmetic somewhere... If only someone with commonsense, such as himself, were to look at it, they would spot error immediately, but he has better things to do. Climatologists should just go back to chasing butterflies in fields or whatever is they do and leave him and his way of life the hell alone.
-Grym
I should probably add that I have had a power-supply fail in the past. It wasn't a computer I built myself but rather a cheapo HP Pavilion. You're right, it didn't explode or fry any of my components, but the experience left me with one distinct impression: As a hobbyist without access to testing equipment, intermittent PSU failures can be a very frustrating diagnosis of exclusion.
So, yeah, the chances of a catastrophic failure may be remote. And sure, maybe I do end up paying more for that one component, but overall, I'm paying at lot less than I would for a similar computer in a store, no?
-Grym
I've only built a few computers, so I may not be as experienced as you, but here's how I approached the quality issue on a parts by part basis:
"What is the worst that can happen?"
The computers I've built have been for myself and family and I personally found that risk unacceptable. As an aside, for the past couple of computers I've built, I've used PC Power and Cooling PSUs and have never had a problem with it. As always, YMMV.
-Grym
My point was not that the climate should or will stay the same. I'm refuting his claim that we have no control or influence whatsoever over the climate at all.
Humanity has the ability to affect the global climate. It's a very basic point that everyone needs to agree upon in order for any sort of discussion on environmental policy or analysis of anthropogenic climate change can begin.
-Grym
Is it? Do you think if we exploded every nuclear weapon in the world all at once that such a human action would not have any effect upon the global climate?
Assumptions such as yours are antiquated and, quite frankly, foolhardy. Human technology and industry has progressed to the point where our activities can affect the world as a whole--including the atmosphere.
-Grym
My question for those who advocate gun control is this:
Do you not see the futility of measures such as Alcohol Prohibition or the War on Drugs? And, if you do, why do you think prohibitions against guns will be different and more successful?
-Grym
Videogames are made by companies which are acutely aware of how sensitive some people are to issues related to race. So they take the simple solution and attempt to avoid it altogether by making most--if not all--of the characters white. Take, for example, Farcry 2, a game which takes place in Africa and thematically similar to the movie Blood Diamond. The game hardly has any Africans in it! Do you think this is a coincidence or a shrewd business decision to avoid the controversy and maximize sales?
Finding all the various ways to be offended is practically a cottage industry. People who sit around thinking about all the various types and sub-types of conscious and unconscious racism can (and will) find it anywhere. The best a company can hope for in these situations is being branded a "latent racist," so that's what they do.
San Andreas may have been the first GTA game with a black central character, and it will probably also be the last. At the time, Rockstar took a lot of flak for San Andreas because of it's "racism". People said it was a stereotypical depiction of "black youths reveling in street crime" with storylines which advocated a subtle, insidious brand of racism. I'm unsure if that would be classified as active or passive racism, but I do know that most companies would rather not try and walk that impossible tightrope. I don't blame them.
-Grym
Exactly. The gaming industry's greed created this monster. By insisting on agranular pricing, so that nearly all games are MSRP priced at $50-60, regardless of production costs and actual value, they virtually ensured the gamestop niche. As a consumer, if you only had $30 to spend and wanted a new game, until very recently (via XBLA and steam), you were basically out of luck.
The secondhand market filled that gap. Plus, it also allowed a way for consumers to recoup some of the cost of bad games which publishers insist on pricing the same as triple-A titles.
-Grym
There's a lot of disinformation out there regarding the nature of the financial crisis, and I can see how one might have such an opinion. However, I have made a genuine effort to research this issue and I can assure you that, as difficult as it may be to believe, our government did allow a 60 trillion dollar market, in the form of, modern OTC derivatives to exist completely and utterly unregulated.
In fact, this market was so "free" that that figure--60 trillion--is actually just an estimate (some go as high as 600 trillion). Nobody knows just how much money has been tied up in what was essentially bets between the mega-rich about the rise and fall of company values. Even crazier, not even the companies themselves know the others' positions because the information is secret. As a result, they've stopped lending to each other, the so-called "credit freeze" or more pleasant euphemism "lack of confidence."
Before you label others ignorant or a revisionist, please educate yourself on this issue. If you think Fannie Mae (an institution which has been around since the Great Depression) was the cause of all this, you have been misled. You need to ask yourself why you have been deceived and whose purpose does this lie serve.
-Grym
And that is the essence of the problem, is it not? How can a a political establishment so obsessed with "national security" let a market of an estimated $60 trillion dollars (almost 5 times our national GDP) go completely unregulated? It's absurd...
No terrorist in Guantanamo (or Afghanistan, for that matter) could ever do this much damage to the country, and yet none of those responsible will ever be executed, waterboarded, or undergo "extraordinary rendition." Funny how that works, huh? While we were all arguing over Dick Cheney's ticking time bomb hypothetical scenarios, the nation's economy was being set up for the largest act of sabotage and fraud in human history, and not a single person has yet to be arrested for it.
I'd be surprised if even a single CEO or government official ever gets convicted over this. And even if they do, we won't see a cent of their ill-gotten gains. Take a look at Kenneth Lay, mastermind of the Enron fraud. The man just so happened to conveniently die after his conviction but before his sentencing. The result? His conviction was wiped from the records and none of his or his wife's assets were seized.
Justice. Does the word even have a place in our society any more?
-Grym
Prices are already controlled. Most private insurance companies only compensate at the rates set by Medicare.
Unless you have a medical emergency, you will be waiting under the current system as well. This whole canard about waiting lists is completely disconnected from reality. As to your point about provider choices, most patients do not have much of a choice under the current system either. Most HMOs limit coverage to particular lists of providers and do not allow patients to see specialists without a referral. Many insurance companies will not even pay for a second opinion. Furthermore, at some point, people need to understand that it is unrealistic to expect to have unrestricted healthcare choices. You don't choose your police, fire, water, electrical, or other public services, and yet those generally are accepted by the public at large. I don't understand why people think that medicine should be so different. Do you really think if you have a heart attack right now that you or your family will be able to make an informed economic decision as to which doctor should treat you?
It's absurd to pretend that the healthcare system we have now is in any way a free-market, with prices set according to supply and demand and consumers free to make rational economic decisions. In fact, I assert that we already have socialized medicine. It's called the emergency department. But because people refuse to acknowledge this, the current socialized healthcare neglects true medical emergencies and is dramatically cost inefficient.
-Grym
I personally believe that people are products of their respective environments and what is expected of them. Your suggestion that altruism is non-existent is a very bold statement, indeed. You may prove yourself correct if you set the bar for human decency so low.
This is not what I said. In fact, it is the opposite of what I believe. It is my belief that free market capitalism is incompatible with the good practice of medicine. I have yet to hear a good explanation as to how a capitalistic system can function in such a coercive service such as medicine. Fundamentally, there is simply no way for patients or families to make valuation as to price of a loved one's health or life and often no time or ability to seek competitive providers. Plus, Western Medicine and its institutions constitute an effective monopoly on the industry, which is a good thing but antithetical to the preconditions of a healthy market.
Those who resist health care reform often do so by claiming that such an act will be socialism and will destroy the beneficial capitalistic forces at work. This is totally disconnected from reality for the very reasons you state. It is this dogmatic approach to this issue which I resent. People have associated self-interest and greed with free market capitalism to the point where they falsely believe that if every man acts in accordance with his own best interest that a free-market paradise of capitalistic efficiency and abundance will be the result. This is just not the case.
I couldn't disagree more. The high cost of health care and health care insurance effectively makes it unavailable to a large (and growing) swath of the public. Metrics of availability such as infant mortality ratio put the United States health care system far behind other developed countries. We can and must do better.
-Grym
This is a loaded question. To someone outside of the medical community, it might seem fair but it is not. First-hand, objective accounts of such stories are difficult to come by because patient records are confidential and healthcare providers have an ethical obligation (and legal obligation, a la HIPAA regulations) not to speak of such matters without approval from their patients. Plus, the chilling effect of rampant medical malpractice lawsuits has made many doctors silent out of fear of losing their livelihood for speaking the truth.
Another part of the problem with this question is the disparity between how a clinician might define "life-saving" and how the lay-public defines it. When most people think of "life-saving surgery" they often think only of surgical emergencies. It is true, in this respect, surgical emergencies are treated regardless of the ability to pay. But this is only a small aspect of medicine. Something as simple as bariatric surgery could literally be life-saving. A more mature definition of "life-saving surgery" might be: surgery for a medical condition which falls under the accepted standard of medical care and causally prevents death from that medical condition or associated complications. In that sense, the United States medical system frequently fails patients. And this failure is not limited to surgery.
An interesting aspect to all this is that by washing our hands of all non-emergency patients, the health care system may paradoxically end up being more expensive. Consider the hypothetical case of an uninsured heart attack patient who shows up in the emergency room and subsequently receives triple-bypass surgery. The associated costs with such a patient could be enormous. But what if this condition had been prevented by proper screening and preventative treatments like cholesterol or blood pressure reducing medications? In comparison, such expenses are negligible. And yet, hospitals are more likely to eat the cost of the former and not the latter because that is what the law and government incentivizes them to do.
If the sub-prime mortgage crisis is any sign, I think we are reaching a breaking point in our society. Greed and self-interest do not, in most cases, result in maximizing efficiency. It's the prisoner's dilemma and we have chosen self-interest over altruism--paradoxically at our own peril. In my opinion, the quintessential mistake of the past couple decades seems, to be a dogmatic belief that free market capitalism will always prevail in an unregulated environment, regardless of whether the underlying fundamentals to a free-market system are present and irrespective of the context. Medicine is not a widget. Greed is not good. The sooner we come to realize this, the better off we will be.
-Grym
You realize the irony of this statement, right? Taken out if its anti-TPB rant, it quite easily applies to the Recording industry distributors. In fact, it almost better applies to them because TPB's so-called profits and effect on music sales are pretty questionable. Whereas the coercive and immoral contracts of the music distributors are widely accepted facts.
The Pirate Bay provides a very valuable service. It excels at displaying what an immoral farce copyright laws and globalization have become. It is a modern day speakeasy. The fact that they STILL (after years of press) get threatening DMCA requests, which do not and should not apply to them (being that they aren't subjects of the United States government) is very telling.
Blowback. If you clampdown too hard, people will resist. Hard enough, and they will revolt and maybe even seek revenge--justified or not. U.S. Copyright law has progressed far beyond its constitutional mandate. Article 1 section 8, clause 8 states the following: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." And yet, "limited time" has come to mean 75 years AFTER the death of the author. There have been serious arguments made in on the congressional floor to construe "limited times" as infinity minus one day. In what reasonable way is that "limited"? Furthermore, there are countless examples where modern copyright and patent laws serve only to obstruct progress. Rarely do stated arguments even involve the actual mandate of patents and copyrights anymore. We speak in terms of losses to artists and inventors despite the fact that this is rarely ever the actual case (most copyrights and patents are held by multinational corporations) and not the intended focus of these protections.
"Intellectual Property" laws have become tools of oppression and exploitation. It should not be surprising that people are resisting them, even if such resistance has ulterior self-serving motive.
-Grym
According to the BBC,"MPs criticised video-sharing websites, including YouTube, in July, saying they should be doing more to vet content."
Since your reading comprehension seems to be deficient, allow me to make it more clear for you. Google, the company which owns YouTube, a video site on the internet, is doing this at the (possibly informal) request of the United Kingdom, an overbearing government which does not value the right of an armed, empowered populace. Currently, in the United States of America, the Second Amendment to the Constitution upholds the right of the people to bear arms. This right is under increasing political attack, leaving many who recognize the utility of the Second Amendment to the Constitution left to wonder if the situation in the United Kingdom is a picture of things to come should said political attacks be successful.
-Grym
What makes you think that criminals would not still be able to get handguns despite any and every governmental ban possible? And do you concede that such prohibitions will also have a negative impact on law-abiding gun owners and unintended consequences such as U.K.'s current knifing epidemic?
There's been a war on drugs for over 20 years now, and not only are drugs still available to those willing to break the law. Even worse, the streetprice of these drugs has not even increased despite all the laws, despite all the convictions, and despite all the money spent trying to prohibit them. I'll never understand how my liberal-minded friends can be so quick to recognize the folly of the "War on Drugs" whilst simultaneously calling for similar prohibitions on guns.
-Grym
It has everything to do with it. How many knifing epidemics have you ever heard of in the United States?
Google very clearly did this in response to a request by U.K. officials. True, though they probably legally could have said no, but they chose to comply. Makes you wonder about the "Do No Evil" mantra, eh? If you consider political censorship of this nature to be something evil (or, at least, immoral), like I do, then Google's policy is probably better stated as: "Do No Evil, unless China, the U.K., or some other government asks us."
-Grym
Isn't it obvious what the real problem is? These videos implicitly question the effectiveness of the UK police state and are, thus, are doubleplusbad. After all, it makes no sense to have the telescreen speaking ill of big brother now does it?
I implore those who question the usefulness of the second amendment here in the U.S. to take a hard look at what's happening in the U.K. today. The slippery slope is very real.
-Grym
May I direct your attention to Tribes? Tribes 1 was created by Dynamix (now known as Sierra) a medium/small development house which found themselves in exactly the situation you describe. Tribes 1 was pirated left and right and the end result was that a relatively unknown game eventually had a very large dynamic, thriving community of players and player-created content. So, what did they do? They followed Tribes 1 up with with a Triple-A title, Tribes 2 and made a chunk of change.
-Grym
I think what we're seeing here is a disconnect between the law and the beliefs of the people. In short, we are in a period of a very large political struggle (or perhaps transition is a better word) where old paradigms, descriptors, and values may not apply.
Were the French people vicious to the nobility and lawless during the French Revolution? You bet. Were speakeasies not hedonisticly breaking the law during Prohibition? Of course. But were either immoral? I don't think that the answer is very clear-cut. Would democracy in Frace have taken root were it not for the French taking up arms? Would Prohibition have ended were it not for speakeasies demonstrating how ineffective, unenforceable, and out-of-touch the law was? Similarly, I think you need to ask yourself whether real copyright and patent reform will ever take place simply from the goodwill of the legislature and industry.
-Grym
File sharing, for most, is probably a civilly (sometimes criminally) liable act. Maybe even those who fileshare are committing a morally offensive act. That's really not the point. The privatization of human culture and the gutting of the public domain is similarly unlawful (via its unconstitutional lack of realistic limitations and hindrance of scientific and artistic progress) and arguably immoral. Furthermore, the means by which these industries foist their will upon the less-organized public (by bribing the legislature and, in some cases, actually writing the laws which regulate themselves) is also shameful and morally tenuous.
The situation is analogous to speakeasies during the prohibition era which were ostensibly illegal but, in actuality, a reflection of the failure--not of the people--but of prohibition itself. There were probably people back then who also tried to blame the entire situation on the hedonistic , law-breaking drinkers. They, like you, were misguided relics of a failed way of thinking.
Regardless, the writing is on the wall. One way or the other, "intellectual property" reform is coming. The only question is whether it will be from those in power waking up to the changing of the tides and acknowledging the failure of trying to pretend that ones and zeros are limited in supply or simply the result of demographics, when all those dirty file-sharers start taking political power.
-Grym