However, since you want to extend the right to every slinging dick that has $150 for a Sat Night Special, we prefer to ban everything.
Um, every dickhead with $150 for a Sat Night Special will continue to carry one, after the ban. In fact, there is an even greater incentive to carry one after a ban, as it gives the dickhead way more of a sense of power to be the only one carrying a gun.
Weed is illegal, the penalties for selling large amounts of weed are greater than murder. Not only that, it is a CONSUMABLE, meaning that people need a constant supply (unlike guns, which they only have to buy once). Weed also takes a lot more space to produce, where anyone with some basic metal working equipment and a basement can make fully auto weapony.
I am not worried about guns being banned, your gun bans will be as effective as the bans on weed. You gun ban will ensure that there will be an unstoppable black market of guns readily available to anyone who wants it. Your gun ban will make guns ubiquitous.
What I worry is the collateral damage you will do with your gun bans. Already, there are over a million people in jail because your your attempts to ban drugs (most are minorities and the disadvantaged), and the drug war has eroded civil liberties, resulted in para-military style raids of suspected "drug houses" being commonplace, and resulted in essentially a defacto war on young black urban males (we know the police certainly aren't sending the SWAT teams to kick down random doors in rich white suburbs). How many young black urban males will you be willing to sacrifice in order to carry out yet another shameful and doomed attempt at social engineering?
And sadly, you couldn't think of anything to say to counter his point. You are simply shocked that not all people believe in prohibitionism like you do.
The flaw in your logic is that you assume gun control laws make it harder for people to get guns. If you understand how black markets work, gun control makes it easier to get guns. The more difficult it is for someone to purchase a gun legally, the more financial incentive you offer to those who will provide the service illegally. And the black market won't have to worry about licencing costs, taxes, liability insurance, waiting periods, etc., meaning they can provide guns much cheaper.
Kind of like how alcohol consumption INCREASED during prohibition... or hard drug use INCREASED after the start of the War on Drugs.
How many mass shootings were there in 1900, when a kid could buy a gun via mail order from the back of a pulp magazine?
Your arguement is moot. Guns are easier to get on the black market than they are legally. Anyone who wants to carry a gun, can carry a gun, and most likely will never get caught by the police. Anything short of a police state will not stop guns (and, looking at the miserable state of the US war on drugs or the violence in places like Russia, not even a police state will stop it).
The only effect your gun control laws have (besides providing an opportunity for demogogy), is to:
A) Make guns more available and easier to get by pushing gun sales from regulated and taxed gun dealers into the black market. B) Making sure that if someone is carrying a gun, they aren't going to bother trying to stop the rampaging gunman unless it is a matter of their own personal survival (because if they do so they go to jail).
Well, the gun-nuts here quickly seized the issue and even before the bodies are warm, are screaming "GUNS R GOOD MMMKAY?" all over this thread. Disgraceful. Not quicker than the politicians you vote for to be on CNN calling for a complete gun ban. It is only disgraceful because they disagree with you.
Your plan would do more harm than good. Given how much college students drink, if even 10% of them regularly carried firearms, there would undoubtedly be > 30 additional accidental deaths every year due to alcohol-related stupidity. By the same logic we should ban automobiles as well, since they are hundreds of times more likely to kill a student (especially when alcohol is involved). Or why not ban alcohol, which in itself causes many deaths, and many life-destroying mistakes (unwanted pregnacy, sexual assault).
If you are going to go for reactionary prohibition, there are any number of things that you can ban that aren't a part of the bill of rights. All of them are going to fail miserably (as prohibition always does), but you will have less of a battle from civil libertarians.
Having everyone carrying guns around is just asking for them to be used during those moments we all have when we're not thinking clearly. But anyone can carry guns around the campus and shoot someone in a monent of rashness as it is. If they are rash enough to shoot someone, they are rash enough to carry a gun illegally. The law doesn't actually stop anyone from carrying a gun or shooting someone.
What we are talking about is making it legal for the non-rash and non-trigger happy person to carry guns, under the assumption than unless you want to turn the country into a Big Brother police state, anyone who wants to can get and carry a gun illegally.
What is wrong is that the guy is insane. You can't understand what he did because (presumably) you are not insane. The brain is a machine, and in some people the machine goes haywire.
The video game industry crashed back when video gaming was a rather less developed market... also, video games where so simple that it was easy to make a knockoff. (A knockoff of space invaders was almost exactly like space invaders... A knockoff of half-life, or halo, or splinter cell, will not be remotely enough like those games to steal their market). Now that the video game industry is larger than the movie industry, and there are several generations of people who grew up with video games, home video games aren't going anywhere.
What we might see is a slow down in hardware advances, and video game production budgets going down. Maybe the current gen of hardware is used for the next 8 years instead of the next 4 years. We might see the life cycle for a video game platform be more like a movie platform (how long has DVD been around). But there is no video game crash coming.
I am a huge fallout fan! I own all the games, and played them all through a couple times (including the Xbox game... which I would give a solid C-, it was mildly entertaining! It is definitly worth a $9.99 bargain bin purchase!), and I am definitly looking forward to Bethesda doing a new Fallout game.
Seriously, who else would you rather see do a Fallout game? (OK, who else would you rather see do a Fallout game besides Bioware?:) ) Aside from Bioware, Bethesda are an excellent choice. I would rather see a Bethesda game than to let the IP become worthless and totally die out. What do you think are the chances of seeing another Starflight game? Or another Populus? Or another Elite? Or another Wing Commander? Or another Space Quest? Game IPs die out, you know!
No it wouldn't... How would I use a keyboard and mouse on my sofa?
I play video games as a leisure activity... Keyboard and mouse may offer more precise control, but they are way less fun as you can only play sitting at a desk.
I understand that in this case it was a University... but the decision applies to all employers, public or private. What the courts have created is a situation where a company can't possibly avoid being the bad guy.
The courts have ruled that companies are responsible for the actions that their employees take with company resources... That if an employee uses the company email to send out harrassing messages, for example, even if the company did not authorize it and even if the company punished the behavior, the company would still be liable because they have an obligation to police their own resources to prevent such things.
On the other hand, if the company actually tries to police their own resources, that is a "violation of human rights", and they can be held liable for that too.
Don't worry folks, there is a solution... Move the office to a country where the legal system isn't structured into a catch-22 designed to destroy everyone. I am sure you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff if you open an office in India and China. China might be a police state, but unlike England they aren't a self-destructive police state... they aren't going to police away their own economic base.
I know I haven't been able to sleep since I heard this story! S.T.A.L.K.E.R., might have (may have, even), used some highly generic normal-mapping textures that the user doesn't really see, from other games!!! God damn that is worrying!
Think of enourmous damage that has been done to the Half Life and Doom franchise by such a thing! I was looking forward to the next Doom game, but it is all ruined for me now.
The next thing you know, people will be sampling a half second loop from other people's songs, adding other musical elements over it, and turning it into a new piece of music! And children will be encouraged to cut pictures out from magazines, and glue them on another piece of paper to create a new piece of artwork... IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS EVEN!!
Won't someone think of the childre... er, the big multinational corporations!!!
Right wing and Left wing are esthetic and rhetorical positions, that have nothing to do with real policy. The extreme left or extreme right are virtually identitcal in how they intend to run government (they are both authoritarian), they just differ in the political justification for their power. Should we ban explicit rap music because it is an affront to God, or because it exploits women? Should be eliminate free speech, to make sure things don't offend our religion, or should we eliminate it to protect minority groups from being offended? Should we nationalize the economy to protect us from foriegn powers and terrorists, or to promote "equality".
The real battle is between Authoritarians (left and right), versus Minarchists (Libertarians, Anarchists, etc.). Chirac's ideology is consistant with the totalitarian ideology of the "Leftist" European political elite, even if he is "Right Wing".
True, evil governments will always collapse... But sometimes it can take 70+ years (think of something like the Soviet Union - even longer if you are talking something like the Roman Empire). That is pretty much well over the adult lifespan of your average person. Even then (thinking of the Soviet Union), things didn't blossom into a totally healthy society (although it is vastly superior to the 'ol Stalinist days I guess). A person like you or I could end up living our lives under a dictatorship, no question. That would seriously suck.
Please forgive me if I don't have the Buddah like patience and personal detachment for what you are saying to be comforting.
Seriously, until they come up with a good way to STORE power generated by solar it's only half a solution. There was a story, not too long ago, about a guy off-the-grid who built his own hydrogen fuel cells for his solar array - The technology is not only here, it can be built from scratch by a non-expert in their spare time. His was of course, for his house... but if a hobbiest can build it for his house, I sure hope Toyota or Ford can build it for cars.
Since I think we can all agree that 99% of all songs by the RIAA are crap, this SHOULD work out well for consumers. Virtually all the music published in the U.S. falls under the auspices the RIAA. If you buy music from iTunes, if you buy music from any sort of chain record store, and 90% of the music they sell at indie record stores, all the music from amazon.com, or cdnow.com, or online retailer, is RIAA music.
Basicly, any album that sells more than say 20,000 records, and the label is most likely RIAA, or the label has a label deal with a bigger label that is connected to the RIAA. (a lot of indie labels release their material through larger record labels, or through distributers who work with the RIAA).
So if you are saying 99% of RIAA music is crap, you are saying 99% of published music is crap. The RIAA pretty much has a monopoly on published music, a much larger monopoly than Microsoft, that is for sure.
But what happens if the people in charge decide not to have democratic elections? Or to blatently fake the results to whatever they want? (Don't say "that won't happen", it happens all the time all over the world). You can vote the people in power out, only as much as they are willing to voluntarily relinquish power.
What did George Orwell consider to be the ultimate protection for democracy?
The thing is, record companies LOSE money on most artists. They pay most artists more money than the artist will ever make. They sign 100 artists, and 99 of them are total and complete flops.
That 1 artist who is highly successful, subsidizes all those artists who failed. Profits from NIN recording subsidizes someone who recorded an album, got a big advance, filmed a video, etc., and then only sold a few albums.
The end result of a record company only taking a small cut of the profits on an album would be that record companies would be extremly risk adverse. They would only sign artists that they would be sure would sell millions of records.
It is one thing to claim that there is a moral right for the free exchange of information, and we should be able to trade our mp3s without restriction... YOU or I have not signed a contract and given our word to respect any intellectual property agreement. We should be free to do whatever the hell we want.
But the artists on a record label DID sign an agreement, along with their lawyers, buisness managers, etc. They knew exactly what they were doing, and accepted a big-ass check to do just that. All the people who claim they didn't understand the contract are full of shit - their lawyers will not sign the agreement themselves unless they have fully explained the contract so they can cover their ass. The artist is most likely working a shit job and they are desperate to be a star, sees that $100,000 or $200,000 advance check and record contract, and just doesn't care at the time - then after they go multi-platinum they get pissed off about the deal they signed.
Without a popular artist like NIN making only a fraction of the profits on his work, you wouldn't have the band who gets signed, gets a $200,000 advance, a $200,000 video, $50,000 for recording the album, and then doesn't sell any records and is ahead by $200,000 and the record company is out half a million.
Unless of course, as we have seen more and more these days, its the 15 yr. old who is carrying the gun... Exactly... Gun control has totally failed - A 15 year old kid can get a modified fully-auto tec-9 on the black market for less that a law abiding adult will pay for a decent hunting rifle (and no paperwork or wait time or licencing fees, either). All the more reason to stop wasting resources on gun control.
Slashdot Mirror
However, since you want to extend the right to every slinging dick that has $150 for a Sat Night Special, we prefer to ban everything.
Um, every dickhead with $150 for a Sat Night Special will continue to carry one, after the ban. In fact, there is an even greater incentive to carry one after a ban, as it gives the dickhead way more of a sense of power to be the only one carrying a gun.
Weed is illegal, the penalties for selling large amounts of weed are greater than murder. Not only that, it is a CONSUMABLE, meaning that people need a constant supply (unlike guns, which they only have to buy once). Weed also takes a lot more space to produce, where anyone with some basic metal working equipment and a basement can make fully auto weapony.
I am not worried about guns being banned, your gun bans will be as effective as the bans on weed. You gun ban will ensure that there will be an unstoppable black market of guns readily available to anyone who wants it. Your gun ban will make guns ubiquitous.
What I worry is the collateral damage you will do with your gun bans. Already, there are over a million people in jail because your your attempts to ban drugs (most are minorities and the disadvantaged), and the drug war has eroded civil liberties, resulted in para-military style raids of suspected "drug houses" being commonplace, and resulted in essentially a defacto war on young black urban males (we know the police certainly aren't sending the SWAT teams to kick down random doors in rich white suburbs). How many young black urban males will you be willing to sacrifice in order to carry out yet another shameful and doomed attempt at social engineering?
Yes, if all Americans had access to automatic weapons, it would be a violent hellhole like Switzerland...
t m
Oh, wait:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1566715.s
And sadly, you couldn't think of anything to say to counter his point. You are simply shocked that not all people believe in prohibitionism like you do.
The flaw in your logic is that you assume gun control laws make it harder for people to get guns. If you understand how black markets work, gun control makes it easier to get guns. The more difficult it is for someone to purchase a gun legally, the more financial incentive you offer to those who will provide the service illegally. And the black market won't have to worry about licencing costs, taxes, liability insurance, waiting periods, etc., meaning they can provide guns much cheaper.
Kind of like how alcohol consumption INCREASED during prohibition... or hard drug use INCREASED after the start of the War on Drugs.
How many mass shootings were there in 1900, when a kid could buy a gun via mail order from the back of a pulp magazine?
Your arguement is moot. Guns are easier to get on the black market than they are legally. Anyone who wants to carry a gun, can carry a gun, and most likely will never get caught by the police. Anything short of a police state will not stop guns (and, looking at the miserable state of the US war on drugs or the violence in places like Russia, not even a police state will stop it).
The only effect your gun control laws have (besides providing an opportunity for demogogy), is to:
A) Make guns more available and easier to get by pushing gun sales from regulated and taxed gun dealers into the black market.
B) Making sure that if someone is carrying a gun, they aren't going to bother trying to stop the rampaging gunman unless it is a matter of their own personal survival (because if they do so they go to jail).
Sick society compared to what?
If you are going to go for reactionary prohibition, there are any number of things that you can ban that aren't a part of the bill of rights. All of them are going to fail miserably (as prohibition always does), but you will have less of a battle from civil libertarians.
What we are talking about is making it legal for the non-rash and non-trigger happy person to carry guns, under the assumption than unless you want to turn the country into a Big Brother police state, anyone who wants to can get and carry a gun illegally.
What is wrong is that the guy is insane. You can't understand what he did because (presumably) you are not insane. The brain is a machine, and in some people the machine goes haywire.
The video game industry crashed back when video gaming was a rather less developed market... also, video games where so simple that it was easy to make a knockoff. (A knockoff of space invaders was almost exactly like space invaders... A knockoff of half-life, or halo, or splinter cell, will not be remotely enough like those games to steal their market). Now that the video game industry is larger than the movie industry, and there are several generations of people who grew up with video games, home video games aren't going anywhere.
What we might see is a slow down in hardware advances, and video game production budgets going down. Maybe the current gen of hardware is used for the next 8 years instead of the next 4 years. We might see the life cycle for a video game platform be more like a movie platform (how long has DVD been around). But there is no video game crash coming.
I am a huge fallout fan! I own all the games, and played them all through a couple times (including the Xbox game... which I would give a solid C-, it was mildly entertaining! It is definitly worth a $9.99 bargain bin purchase!), and I am definitly looking forward to Bethesda doing a new Fallout game.
:) ) Aside from Bioware, Bethesda are an excellent choice. I would rather see a Bethesda game than to let the IP become worthless and totally die out. What do you think are the chances of seeing another Starflight game? Or another Populus? Or another Elite? Or another Wing Commander? Or another Space Quest? Game IPs die out, you know!
Seriously, who else would you rather see do a Fallout game? (OK, who else would you rather see do a Fallout game besides Bioware?
No it wouldn't... How would I use a keyboard and mouse on my sofa?
I play video games as a leisure activity... Keyboard and mouse may offer more precise control, but they are way less fun as you can only play sitting at a desk.
I understand that in this case it was a University... but the decision applies to all employers, public or private. What the courts have created is a situation where a company can't possibly avoid being the bad guy.
The courts have ruled that companies are responsible for the actions that their employees take with company resources... That if an employee uses the company email to send out harrassing messages, for example, even if the company did not authorize it and even if the company punished the behavior, the company would still be liable because they have an obligation to police their own resources to prevent such things.
On the other hand, if the company actually tries to police their own resources, that is a "violation of human rights", and they can be held liable for that too.
Don't worry folks, there is a solution... Move the office to a country where the legal system isn't structured into a catch-22 designed to destroy everyone. I am sure you don't have to worry about that kind of stuff if you open an office in India and China. China might be a police state, but unlike England they aren't a self-destructive police state... they aren't going to police away their own economic base.
The textures I saw were fairly generic normal maps, not textures.
/ S.T.A.L.K.E.R.+Asset+Incident/1/thumbs/070408_stal kerassets_lights_stalker_01.jpg
For example:
http://www.shacknews.com/screens.x/stalker_assets
Yeah, I am sure those id guys were really slaving over those.
The next thing you know someone will tell us that Doom is just a ripoff of a certain James Cameron movie!
I know I haven't been able to sleep since I heard this story! S.T.A.L.K.E.R., might have (may have, even), used some highly generic normal-mapping textures that the user doesn't really see, from other games!!! God damn that is worrying!
Think of enourmous damage that has been done to the Half Life and Doom franchise by such a thing! I was looking forward to the next Doom game, but it is all ruined for me now.
The next thing you know, people will be sampling a half second loop from other people's songs, adding other musical elements over it, and turning it into a new piece of music! And children will be encouraged to cut pictures out from magazines, and glue them on another piece of paper to create a new piece of artwork... IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS EVEN!!
Won't someone think of the childre... er, the big multinational corporations!!!
Right wing and Left wing are esthetic and rhetorical positions, that have nothing to do with real policy. The extreme left or extreme right are virtually identitcal in how they intend to run government (they are both authoritarian), they just differ in the political justification for their power. Should we ban explicit rap music because it is an affront to God, or because it exploits women? Should be eliminate free speech, to make sure things don't offend our religion, or should we eliminate it to protect minority groups from being offended? Should we nationalize the economy to protect us from foriegn powers and terrorists, or to promote "equality".
The real battle is between Authoritarians (left and right), versus Minarchists (Libertarians, Anarchists, etc.). Chirac's ideology is consistant with the totalitarian ideology of the "Leftist" European political elite, even if he is "Right Wing".
True, evil governments will always collapse... But sometimes it can take 70+ years (think of something like the Soviet Union - even longer if you are talking something like the Roman Empire). That is pretty much well over the adult lifespan of your average person. Even then (thinking of the Soviet Union), things didn't blossom into a totally healthy society (although it is vastly superior to the 'ol Stalinist days I guess). A person like you or I could end up living our lives under a dictatorship, no question. That would seriously suck.
Please forgive me if I don't have the Buddah like patience and personal detachment for what you are saying to be comforting.
Basicly, any album that sells more than say 20,000 records, and the label is most likely RIAA, or the label has a label deal with a bigger label that is connected to the RIAA. (a lot of indie labels release their material through larger record labels, or through distributers who work with the RIAA).
So if you are saying 99% of RIAA music is crap, you are saying 99% of published music is crap. The RIAA pretty much has a monopoly on published music, a much larger monopoly than Microsoft, that is for sure.
But what happens if the people in charge decide not to have democratic elections? Or to blatently fake the results to whatever they want? (Don't say "that won't happen", it happens all the time all over the world). You can vote the people in power out, only as much as they are willing to voluntarily relinquish power.
What did George Orwell consider to be the ultimate protection for democracy?
The thing is, record companies LOSE money on most artists. They pay most artists more money than the artist will ever make. They sign 100 artists, and 99 of them are total and complete flops.
That 1 artist who is highly successful, subsidizes all those artists who failed. Profits from NIN recording subsidizes someone who recorded an album, got a big advance, filmed a video, etc., and then only sold a few albums.
The end result of a record company only taking a small cut of the profits on an album would be that record companies would be extremly risk adverse. They would only sign artists that they would be sure would sell millions of records.
It is one thing to claim that there is a moral right for the free exchange of information, and we should be able to trade our mp3s without restriction... YOU or I have not signed a contract and given our word to respect any intellectual property agreement. We should be free to do whatever the hell we want.
But the artists on a record label DID sign an agreement, along with their lawyers, buisness managers, etc. They knew exactly what they were doing, and accepted a big-ass check to do just that. All the people who claim they didn't understand the contract are full of shit - their lawyers will not sign the agreement themselves unless they have fully explained the contract so they can cover their ass. The artist is most likely working a shit job and they are desperate to be a star, sees that $100,000 or $200,000 advance check and record contract, and just doesn't care at the time - then after they go multi-platinum they get pissed off about the deal they signed.
Without a popular artist like NIN making only a fraction of the profits on his work, you wouldn't have the band who gets signed, gets a $200,000 advance, a $200,000 video, $50,000 for recording the album, and then doesn't sell any records and is ahead by $200,000 and the record company is out half a million.