The whole idea is to prevent the accidents in the first place. Because they are preventable. No one can legislate against acts of God, brake failure or people mis-judging things, but this is 100% in the hands of the people doing it. They can't claim an accident if they weren't paying full attention to the road.
But you can't prevent auto accidents in the first place, at least not with legislation. Auto safety standards have been increasing, policing is now bordering on a police state, and we have laws against everything in the book. It doesn't work. It is not clear that it is any safer being behind the wheel now, than 10 or 20 years ago, despite all the laws, rules, and regulations. It is now easier for police to selectivly enforce the laws to harrase minorities, poor people, and teenagers (which is the main reason for the popularity of these laws), but the roads aren't any safer.
As for idiots and bears, well they're the ones that get eaten, not some innocent bystander, so there is no real similarity there.
No... they bring the kids along, and the kids get harmed too. And, then park rangers have to go out and shoot the "mankiller" bear after it kills some kid and people cry "They need to do something!". And then the park doesn't allow backpackers and campers aren't allowed to go into those parts of the woods any more, because they are worried that stupid people are gonna get themselves killed by bears.
It's funny that people who would advocate a technical/legal solution to cell phone use in cinemas, seem to be completely laissez-faire about something that will ruin your life, not just a stupid movie !
No one who is Laissez-Faire supports a legal solution to cell phone use in cinemas. Laissez Faire people support the right of theater operators to block cell phone calls strickly on their own property (so long as the blocking is strickly limited to the theater)... and there would be no fines or criminal penalties for anyone trying to use a phone in the theater.
If private insurance companies wanted to require that you install a hands-free phone before they insure people... or automakers wanted to install a cell phone blocker while the car is moving... or cell phone manufacturers wanted to stop making cell-switching possible (meaning you couldn't drive on a highway or moving at great speeds, because you couldn't switch to the next cell and continue your conversation)... that would be great. All of these are real solutions, that don't require an army of people to supervise a law that is very difficult to enforce (how do the police PROVE someone was talking on the cell phone... if they accused me of talking on the cell phone, I would just deny it. It is not like they are going to be able to video tape everyone on the road and present that in court).
The problem is we live in a society where people are so protected, people have no fear of danger. I mean you can jump off a bridge, and if there isn't a warming message that says that you can get killed from jumping, you can sue the city. If a bottle of medicine doesn't have a big warning "KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN", it is the companies fault if you give it to your kid to play with it and he dies from an overdose. People go out to national parks and get attacked by bears, because they think they can walk up to a bear and pet it, and bears don't understand shit about safety laws or lawsuits.
So people do incredably things (often involving cellphones), that causes auto accidents. Sorry, but if it wasn't cell phones, it would be some other idiotic thing (they would be watching the built in DVD player or something). If you have to explicitly make laws mandating against every specific idiotic thing a person could possibly be doing, it isn't going to do anything. The problem is that your population itself are a bunch of idiots. And why are they idiots? It isn't any genetic change... or any change in public education... it is the fact that we have pretty much destroyed any concept of people being responsible for their own actions. If I am not required by the law and society to look out for myself, then it is easy for me to coast through life without ever asking "is this dangerous", or "is this safe", because obviously if it was dangerous I wouldn't be allowed to do it.
A much better way to deal with these kinds of things would be to hold people criminally responsible for injuries they cause in accidents. If someone is a hunter, and they are acting like an idiot, and they accidentally shoot someone, they are going to go to jail for manslaughter. Why would automobiles be any different? (and no, no-one goes to jail for manslaughter with an automobile unless they are intoxicated).
All these "safety" laws sound great, but are completly idiotic if you apply a little thought to it.
It should be ILLEGAL to put a child under 3 in the back seat? What happens when a single mom, who needs to work to earn a living for her family, needs to take the kid to preschool every day? She can't put the kid in the front seat, because of course that is illegal nearly everywhere (car seat doesn't work well with air bag). The law makes life nearly impossible for millions of people.
Damn, it is frightening the extent of Housewife Facism that infects people, even on Slashdot. All these retarded, self-rightious, "Think of the Children" laws are strangling society.
The trouble is that anti-nuke enviornmentalists are much louder than pro-nuke enviornmentalists. Pro-nuke enviornmentalists are clearly in the minority, and play second string to the anti-nuke people.
You are discussing this as if it is a bad thing. People tend to ingore the terrible things governments do, because government teaches all sorts of nationalistic brainwashing in public schools, and gets people to believe the government has some sort of special goodness.
Big corporations, while more evil than small corporations, are far less evil than governments, who are at the top of the evil scale. Compare the "evil" that Microsoft has done, with the destruction and horror of even one small war, or throwing a innocent people in prison, and there is no comparison.
No, but it is a REAL WORLD GROUP, not a fictional group. If I attack the "Evil Orc Alliance" or whatever, it is a purely fictional group, with no real world affiliation. If the Elves attack the Orcs, it is not going to hurt anyone's feelings.
But what happens if a player is part of the "Conservative Christian Alliance", and they attack the "Gay Lesbian Clan"? There is no way, when REAL WORLD affiliations are attacking each other, that there is not going to be feelings hurt. And in our modern day society, hurting someone's feelings can be a criminal offense.
It is definitly true that the DMCA has a whole bunch of really terrible unintended consequences. What is sad is that people don't understand that the same applies to any law. Every single law that the government makes, has similiar unintended consequences - because human behavior and society is so complex we can never truly predict how these things are going to work out.
Geeks tend to understand the terrible effects the DMCA, because that is what Geeks are knowledgable in. If you are an expert in this kind of thing (or at least knowledgable, as most Slashdot people are), you are going to be able to look at it with a more critical eye than the average American. This is our shit, so we know exactly what the deal is.
But remember, the same thing happens when the government makes a law about terrorism, or illegal drugs, or health care, or the enviornment, or anything else. You might not hear about the same effects the way you hear about the DMCA, but it happens. You support the anti-Terrorism bill, and you don't understand the effect it has on imigrants and their families, or the potential racial-profiling and discrimination it causes. You don't hear about the small family buisnesses that get shut down because they simply don't have the money to comply with some new enviornmental regulation you support. You don't hear about the guy who picks up a hitchhiker, and when they get pulled over by the police, the driver goes to jail for 20 years because the hitchhiker happens to be carrying drugs... you think that tough drug laws are only harming criminals. Or you don't hear about the people who dieing of cancer who can't get a potentially life saving treatment, because the government determines it is "too risky".
Laws are about a subtle as a sledgehammer. With maybe the exception of small local government, society is just too diverse and too complex to make a law that doesn't have serious side effects. A law is a like a prescription drug, we know it is going to have some negative side effect, but we think the problem is worse than the potential side effect. The DMCA isn't a bad law - it is a typical law. It has the same type of negative effects than any law has.
The next time you support some new law, remember the DMCA, and remember the same thing is going to happen with that law. That doesn't mean you won't support the law anyway, but it means that like a drug, you need to know what negative effects it might have in order to evaluate the risks.
But if you think you can make a law that doesn't have significant negative effects on society, you are totally fooling yourself.
If female characters were really female, then you could probably get accused of being a sexist for attacking female characters. However, you don't have to be a female in real life to be a female in the game - therefore gender is entirely fictional. The "female" character could just as likely be a male as female in real life. There isn't a real world gender significance.
However, the GLBT clan, is REALLY Gay, Lesbian, Bi, or Transexual people, for real in real life. The gayness isn't a fictional character's attribute, it is them in real life! So when I am attacking a GLBT clan, they might percieve it as a personal attack on the real life selves, and not as an attack on their fictional character.
Even if they won't be offended, I am offended. I don't want to attack gays, or Christians, or Muslims, or Democrats, or Americans, or any real world group of people. I want to attack evil magic cults, or goblins, or purely fictional groups of people. If I am going to be attacking other players in a game, I want the line to be clearly drawn so there can be no mistake that it is purely fictional.
But lets say that they form a "Gay" guild... and I attack them (I don't play MMOs, but if I did, I would like to attack people because I think player vs. player competition is a lot of fun).
Now I have to worry about being called a homophobe or something like that, because I am having fun doing what I like (attacking other players). Could they even charge me with a hate crime, because after all, I am "simulating violence" against a "Gay" group, and could that be interpreted as an endorcement of violence against gays (Here in Canada, people have been arested for simply quoting biblical verses about Homosexuality, so it isn't outlandish that I could be charged with a hate crime)?
Perhaps they won't complain when I attack them... perhaps they will understand it is a game, and I just like player vs. player combat. But the fact that I have to even worry if people are going to interpret my attack in the game as an attack of their group in real life, makes the game not fun.
If gay people want to play the game, that is great! If gay people want to form guilds, that is great! If WoW wants to ban homophobic speech in the game, that is fantastic! Even if players wanted to roleplay homosexual acts in a fantasy context, that is fine by me! I support it 100%! But when they want to blur the line between the real world political groups (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Transexual), and the fantasy world (Orcs, Goblins, Elves), it ruins the game.
So what happens when the "Jesus Freaks" guild attacks the "Rainbow Guild"? If it was the "Black Dragons" attacking the "Iron Tigers" or something like that, the Iron Tigers would understand it is a game and all in fun. But are the "Rainbow Guild" going to complain that they are being discriminated against by the "Jesus Freaks" guild? What happens if the "Bowman of Allah" attack and kill the "Jesus Freaks"? Are the "Jesus Freaks" gonna get in a big huff and cry about it? What happens when the "Republican Ogre League" attacks the "Democrat Swordsmen"? Doesn't anyone see how the whole thing could become a mess really quick?
It is not discriminating against anyone to not allow real world affiliations in a game. Because a game involves violence, you want the victims and perpetrators of violence to be completly fictional groups. If you have real life affiliations like Sex, Race, Religion, Sexual Preference, and it is going to cause all kinds of problems.
I realize that nowadays, politically correct posturing trumps common sense, and so people are going to cry that they are being discriminated against because they can't create a Gay, Bi, Lesbian, Transexual clan... and the threats of lawsuits will probably give them their way. But demanding to be allowed to make a GLBT guild, when all other real world affiliations are banned, is just stupid. GLBT are not discriminated from playing the game, or from starting clans, but they are (or where) banned from bringing real world issues into a totally fantasy escapist game.
Can someone, anyone, please give me some legit reasons why I would want to upgrade to Vista for my home PC? I don't mean this as a joke, some please knee-jerk Microsoft haters don't flood me with jokes. It seems to me that Vista offers me nothing.
The state would have an excuse to destroy the free-market and nationalize resources.
If industrial production is causing global warming, the government will have to take strong measures to reduce industrial production - and because there will be so much fewer goods and services, those will have to be rationed by the state. The state siezes total control of the economy.
The rhetoric of the enviornmental movement is that "Capitalist Greed is Destroying the Earth", hence we need to get rid of "Capitalism".
I don't think that has as much to do with unions, as the people who run the movie companies.
But that being said, Hollywood produces more good movies than ever before. It is just that the ratio of good movies to bad movies has gotten worse, since movies have become a form of disposable pop-entertainment.
No, because really we should be avoiding those kinds of wars in the first place.
It is one thing to shoot down missles if someone is firing at our country (legit self-defence). Or to launch an accurate pin-point strike on an Al-Queda leader without harming nearby civilians (in the case of Al-Queda, legit self-defense).
It is another thing to have large numbers of troops occupy a foriegn country (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq). Nothing will ever make that safe and trouble free, because it is a stupid thing to do.
It isn't a straw man, it is SATIRE. A parody of Marxism, intended to show the simularities between the extremes of Socialism and Capitalism, and ridicule both. It is supposed to make fun of the fact that a state run monopoly is often indistinguishable from a private monopoly in the real world.
It might be a legit critism to say the joke isn't funny, but not legit critism to say that my satire changes details about the thing I am making fun of. Of course it does, because it is satire.
The regular people don't have a say in government. Government regulation is the last thing that is going to address the concerns of "working stiffs" or "small buisness". Government "regulation" just means that the government is selling "protection", like the mafia, to the big corporations. The corporations will have to work with the people in power to make the deal suitable to the political elite, but the little guy will never have any real say in the deal.
Once the people who are in power decide who is elegible for election, once they decide how funds for campaigning are going to be distributed, once they decide how groups are going to be gerimandered together to give certain parties advantage, and once the laws become so complicated they have almost endless regulatory power to punish non-supporters, and vast resources to give to reward their supporters, then there is no real Democracy. Democracy works on the small scale, but once you get to the size and power of the modern state, it becomes a meaningless abstraction.
More often then not, the regulation is designed to help the big corporations (in fact, the modern day mega-corporation couldn't exist without the government)... the regulation is used to make the cost of doing buisness too high for the little guy to afford the initial investment, or the liability too high that the little guy can't afford the insurance, or the fixed regulatory cost that doesn't scale for company size. The government takes land with eminent domain in order to give to the chain store.
If you look at markets that aren't regulated by the government (such as the drug trade), or under regulated by the government (computer software), you will see that the small guy has a huge advantage over the big guy. In the software industry, Microsofts biggest competitor is a product that doesn't cost anything and began as a hobby. Microsoft has such institutional entrophy that it is hard for them to compete on the merits of their product (and so now they compete using the government to enforce "intellectual property"). In the drug trade, no-one ever dominates for long before someone smaller comes along and starts shaking things up. It is not natural for large monopoly style corporations to exist, unless the government creates the regulatory infrastructure for it.
My alternative? Don't shop at Walmart. I have never walked into a Walmart, EVER, in my life... let alone purchased anything at a Walmart. I wouldn't be able to find the closest Walmart without looking it up online. And that is entirely accidental, without me trying to not shop at a Walmart. The vast majority of Walmart shoppers are suburbanites or urbanites who have plenty of other choices to shop besides Walmart. The overwelming vast majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas and have access to plenty of other places to shop. Even if the people living in rural areas who are "forced" to shop at Walmart really mean that they would have to drive an extra 20 miles to a larger town - or would have to spend a little more money somewhere else - they are not forced, so much as can't be bothered.
Walmart has to be the easiest company in the world to boycott! They have a razor thin profit margin, so that it only takes a boycott of a small group of people in order to cut into their bottom line. (that is why religious groups, who actually take the time to boycott once in a while, are always getting Walmart to do whatever they want). Walmarts are only profitable if built where land values are low, and where there is lots of wide open space, which means for most American consumers, it is actually a bit of a drive to get to Walmart. And they have a reputation for being "low-class", which means that any affluent Americans, or middle-class Americans pretending to be affluent, are not going to be caught dead in anything as declasse as a Walmart.
In the Revolutionary War, a bunch of poorly armed and untrained American farmers managed to defeat the elite armies of the most powerful empire in history. And now American
When has the government had a positive effect on competition? And I am not talking about the government breaking up the monopoly it helped create in the first place ("Bell"), or doing something like deregulate the airline industry (which is government getting rid of its intervention into the market).
Perhaps you can argue the whole Standard Oil thing, but by the time the government got to breaking up Standard Oil, Standard Oil was already losing market share. There is speculation that the breakup of Standard Oil was masterminded by J.D. Rockefeller.
In the Marxism definition of Socialism, Socialism is the state where the means of production are controlled by the state, under a dictatorship of the proletariate. That is then followed by Communism, in which the state withers away an people live in a utopian communal anarchist society. Karl Marx makes it clear how people who don't have the "very specific mindset" should be dealt with... they are counter-revolutionaries, and need to be destroyed.
Modern economists define Socialism as when the means of production are controlled by the state, and leave out all the other normative and subjective parts of the definition.
While you could have non-government voluntary collectivism, Socialism, by the accepted definitions implies the existance of a state. When people call themselves "Socialist", they usually mean that they want a dictatorship of the proletariate, or if they are not a Marxist they want a centrally-planned welfare state. Virtually no-one is advocating anarchism, and even the very few marginal groups that do advocate anarchism usually REALLY support state-socialism, and just say they support anarchism because it is "cooler" than saying you are a Socialist.
Yeah, but "abusing monopoly position", what the hell does that mean? That is so vauge as to be meaningless. A law like that isn't a law, it is a catch-all disclaimer to allow the government to go after any company it feels like.
One of the things that seperates a Democracy, with a Dictatorship, is that laws are precise and followable. "Don't drive faster than 100km/hour". That is a good law. It is absolutely clear what that law means. "Don't release more than x tons of carbon per y kw energy produced". That is a good law, because it is clearly measurable and understandable what it means. It is possible to prove guilty or innocent with no ambiguity. And I immediatly know what I need to do not to get in trouble.
How about, if the government created a law for you that said "Be a good neighbor!"? And an unelected board of officials had the power to arbitrarily declare you a "Bad Neighbor" and send you to jail? That would be a nightmare! If you are alergic to cats, do you have to watch your neighbors cat when they go on vacation? You could be accused of being a bad neighbor, but you can never tell. If your kid plays baseball in the street, and break a window, are you a criminal? What the hell does it mean to be a "good neighbor"? Could one of the members of the Good Neighbor Commission accuse you of being a bad neighbor, because your bookstore competes with his son-in-laws bookstore? Does this board have the power to order you to marry the girl you get pregnant, because that is "what a good neighbor does".
You don't support terrorism, do you? Well, what if someone is "convicted" of "terrorism" by a secret panel of un-elected officials, based on secret evidence, and thrown in prison? (and the charges against the "convicted terrorist" were put forward by the "terrorists" buisness competitors). Would you have a problem with that, after all, the guy IS a CONVICTED TERRORIST!!! The government might not have any real definition of what a "terrorist" is, or be willing to hold a trial in a way that is transparent or accountable to the people, but the person would be a "criminal" by every definition of the word.
In a democracy, we understand that guilty parties may be able to get away with a crime. And if we don't use fair, objective, transparent, and accountable officials to judge a clearly understandable and objective law, it doesn't matter if you "know the person is guilty", because your criminal system is not legit.
Microsoft is not a "criminal" in reasonable sense of the word. An un-elected body, of debatable authority (the E.U. constitution that gives it power to go after vauge kinda-crimes did not pass), and with a clear bias (they want to promote European software industry over the American software industry) decided to call Microsoft a "criminal", for a law so vauge that no one knows if they are guilty or not guilty until they are convicted. Even if you feel that Microsoft are a bunch of no-good evil bastards, any reasonable person has to see some series flaws with the process.
You don't have to like someone, or feel they are not-guilty, in order to question the system and want everyone to get a fair trial, and to realize that it won't just be Microsoft to get burned if the term "criminal" is to be thrown around to lightly, and un-democraticly.
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The whole idea is to prevent the accidents in the first place. Because they are preventable. No one can legislate against acts of God, brake failure or people mis-judging things, but this is 100% in the hands of the people doing it. They can't claim an accident if they weren't paying full attention to the road.
But you can't prevent auto accidents in the first place, at least not with legislation. Auto safety standards have been increasing, policing is now bordering on a police state, and we have laws against everything in the book. It doesn't work. It is not clear that it is any safer being behind the wheel now, than 10 or 20 years ago, despite all the laws, rules, and regulations. It is now easier for police to selectivly enforce the laws to harrase minorities, poor people, and teenagers (which is the main reason for the popularity of these laws), but the roads aren't any safer.
As for idiots and bears, well they're the ones that get eaten, not some innocent bystander, so there is no real similarity there.
No... they bring the kids along, and the kids get harmed too. And, then park rangers have to go out and shoot the "mankiller" bear after it kills some kid and people cry "They need to do something!". And then the park doesn't allow backpackers and campers aren't allowed to go into those parts of the woods any more, because they are worried that stupid people are gonna get themselves killed by bears.
It's funny that people who would advocate a technical/legal solution to cell phone use in cinemas, seem to be completely laissez-faire about something that will ruin your life, not just a stupid movie !
No one who is Laissez-Faire supports a legal solution to cell phone use in cinemas. Laissez Faire people support the right of theater operators to block cell phone calls strickly on their own property (so long as the blocking is strickly limited to the theater)... and there would be no fines or criminal penalties for anyone trying to use a phone in the theater.
If private insurance companies wanted to require that you install a hands-free phone before they insure people... or automakers wanted to install a cell phone blocker while the car is moving... or cell phone manufacturers wanted to stop making cell-switching possible (meaning you couldn't drive on a highway or moving at great speeds, because you couldn't switch to the next cell and continue your conversation)... that would be great. All of these are real solutions, that don't require an army of people to supervise a law that is very difficult to enforce (how do the police PROVE someone was talking on the cell phone... if they accused me of talking on the cell phone, I would just deny it. It is not like they are going to be able to video tape everyone on the road and present that in court).
The problem is we live in a society where people are so protected, people have no fear of danger. I mean you can jump off a bridge, and if there isn't a warming message that says that you can get killed from jumping, you can sue the city. If a bottle of medicine doesn't have a big warning "KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN", it is the companies fault if you give it to your kid to play with it and he dies from an overdose. People go out to national parks and get attacked by bears, because they think they can walk up to a bear and pet it, and bears don't understand shit about safety laws or lawsuits.
So people do incredably things (often involving cellphones), that causes auto accidents. Sorry, but if it wasn't cell phones, it would be some other idiotic thing (they would be watching the built in DVD player or something). If you have to explicitly make laws mandating against every specific idiotic thing a person could possibly be doing, it isn't going to do anything. The problem is that your population itself are a bunch of idiots. And why are they idiots? It isn't any genetic change... or any change in public education... it is the fact that we have pretty much destroyed any concept of people being responsible for their own actions. If I am not required by the law and society to look out for myself, then it is easy for me to coast through life without ever asking "is this dangerous", or "is this safe", because obviously if it was dangerous I wouldn't be allowed to do it.
A much better way to deal with these kinds of things would be to hold people criminally responsible for injuries they cause in accidents. If someone is a hunter, and they are acting like an idiot, and they accidentally shoot someone, they are going to go to jail for manslaughter. Why would automobiles be any different? (and no, no-one goes to jail for manslaughter with an automobile unless they are intoxicated).
All these "safety" laws sound great, but are completly idiotic if you apply a little thought to it.
It should be ILLEGAL to put a child under 3 in the back seat? What happens when a single mom, who needs to work to earn a living for her family, needs to take the kid to preschool every day? She can't put the kid in the front seat, because of course that is illegal nearly everywhere (car seat doesn't work well with air bag). The law makes life nearly impossible for millions of people.
Damn, it is frightening the extent of Housewife Facism that infects people, even on Slashdot. All these retarded, self-rightious, "Think of the Children" laws are strangling society.
The trouble is that anti-nuke enviornmentalists are much louder than pro-nuke enviornmentalists. Pro-nuke enviornmentalists are clearly in the minority, and play second string to the anti-nuke people.
You are discussing this as if it is a bad thing. People tend to ingore the terrible things governments do, because government teaches all sorts of nationalistic brainwashing in public schools, and gets people to believe the government has some sort of special goodness.
Big corporations, while more evil than small corporations, are far less evil than governments, who are at the top of the evil scale. Compare the "evil" that Microsoft has done, with the destruction and horror of even one small war, or throwing a innocent people in prison, and there is no comparison.
At what point do we admit that we live in a police state?
No, but it is a REAL WORLD GROUP, not a fictional group. If I attack the "Evil Orc Alliance" or whatever, it is a purely fictional group, with no real world affiliation. If the Elves attack the Orcs, it is not going to hurt anyone's feelings.
But what happens if a player is part of the "Conservative Christian Alliance", and they attack the "Gay Lesbian Clan"? There is no way, when REAL WORLD affiliations are attacking each other, that there is not going to be feelings hurt. And in our modern day society, hurting someone's feelings can be a criminal offense.
It is definitly true that the DMCA has a whole bunch of really terrible unintended consequences. What is sad is that people don't understand that the same applies to any law. Every single law that the government makes, has similiar unintended consequences - because human behavior and society is so complex we can never truly predict how these things are going to work out.
Geeks tend to understand the terrible effects the DMCA, because that is what Geeks are knowledgable in. If you are an expert in this kind of thing (or at least knowledgable, as most Slashdot people are), you are going to be able to look at it with a more critical eye than the average American. This is our shit, so we know exactly what the deal is.
But remember, the same thing happens when the government makes a law about terrorism, or illegal drugs, or health care, or the enviornment, or anything else. You might not hear about the same effects the way you hear about the DMCA, but it happens. You support the anti-Terrorism bill, and you don't understand the effect it has on imigrants and their families, or the potential racial-profiling and discrimination it causes. You don't hear about the small family buisnesses that get shut down because they simply don't have the money to comply with some new enviornmental regulation you support. You don't hear about the guy who picks up a hitchhiker, and when they get pulled over by the police, the driver goes to jail for 20 years because the hitchhiker happens to be carrying drugs... you think that tough drug laws are only harming criminals. Or you don't hear about the people who dieing of cancer who can't get a potentially life saving treatment, because the government determines it is "too risky".
Laws are about a subtle as a sledgehammer. With maybe the exception of small local government, society is just too diverse and too complex to make a law that doesn't have serious side effects. A law is a like a prescription drug, we know it is going to have some negative side effect, but we think the problem is worse than the potential side effect. The DMCA isn't a bad law - it is a typical law. It has the same type of negative effects than any law has.
The next time you support some new law, remember the DMCA, and remember the same thing is going to happen with that law. That doesn't mean you won't support the law anyway, but it means that like a drug, you need to know what negative effects it might have in order to evaluate the risks.
But if you think you can make a law that doesn't have significant negative effects on society, you are totally fooling yourself.
The 360 hard drive is only 20 gigs, with only a 13 gig user partition (the other partition is swap space, cache, console settings, etc.).
13 gigs is not big enough to keep a bunch of games stored. Space Invaders, Gauntlet, yes... Full on first person shooters, no!
If female characters were really female, then you could probably get accused of being a sexist for attacking female characters. However, you don't have to be a female in real life to be a female in the game - therefore gender is entirely fictional. The "female" character could just as likely be a male as female in real life. There isn't a real world gender significance.
However, the GLBT clan, is REALLY Gay, Lesbian, Bi, or Transexual people, for real in real life. The gayness isn't a fictional character's attribute, it is them in real life! So when I am attacking a GLBT clan, they might percieve it as a personal attack on the real life selves, and not as an attack on their fictional character.
Even if they won't be offended, I am offended. I don't want to attack gays, or Christians, or Muslims, or Democrats, or Americans, or any real world group of people. I want to attack evil magic cults, or goblins, or purely fictional groups of people. If I am going to be attacking other players in a game, I want the line to be clearly drawn so there can be no mistake that it is purely fictional.
But lets say that they form a "Gay" guild... and I attack them (I don't play MMOs, but if I did, I would like to attack people because I think player vs. player competition is a lot of fun).
Now I have to worry about being called a homophobe or something like that, because I am having fun doing what I like (attacking other players). Could they even charge me with a hate crime, because after all, I am "simulating violence" against a "Gay" group, and could that be interpreted as an endorcement of violence against gays (Here in Canada, people have been arested for simply quoting biblical verses about Homosexuality, so it isn't outlandish that I could be charged with a hate crime)?
Perhaps they won't complain when I attack them... perhaps they will understand it is a game, and I just like player vs. player combat. But the fact that I have to even worry if people are going to interpret my attack in the game as an attack of their group in real life, makes the game not fun.
If gay people want to play the game, that is great! If gay people want to form guilds, that is great! If WoW wants to ban homophobic speech in the game, that is fantastic! Even if players wanted to roleplay homosexual acts in a fantasy context, that is fine by me! I support it 100%! But when they want to blur the line between the real world political groups (Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual and Transexual), and the fantasy world (Orcs, Goblins, Elves), it ruins the game.
So what happens when the "Jesus Freaks" guild attacks the "Rainbow Guild"? If it was the "Black Dragons" attacking the "Iron Tigers" or something like that, the Iron Tigers would understand it is a game and all in fun. But are the "Rainbow Guild" going to complain that they are being discriminated against by the "Jesus Freaks" guild? What happens if the "Bowman of Allah" attack and kill the "Jesus Freaks"? Are the "Jesus Freaks" gonna get in a big huff and cry about it? What happens when the "Republican Ogre League" attacks the "Democrat Swordsmen"? Doesn't anyone see how the whole thing could become a mess really quick?
It is not discriminating against anyone to not allow real world affiliations in a game. Because a game involves violence, you want the victims and perpetrators of violence to be completly fictional groups. If you have real life affiliations like Sex, Race, Religion, Sexual Preference, and it is going to cause all kinds of problems.
I realize that nowadays, politically correct posturing trumps common sense, and so people are going to cry that they are being discriminated against because they can't create a Gay, Bi, Lesbian, Transexual clan... and the threats of lawsuits will probably give them their way. But demanding to be allowed to make a GLBT guild, when all other real world affiliations are banned, is just stupid. GLBT are not discriminated from playing the game, or from starting clans, but they are (or where) banned from bringing real world issues into a totally fantasy escapist game.
Can someone, anyone, please give me some legit reasons why I would want to upgrade to Vista for my home PC? I don't mean this as a joke, some please knee-jerk Microsoft haters don't flood me with jokes. It seems to me that Vista offers me nothing.
Buisness school grads flip burgers nowadays... What the heck are you talking about?
The state would have an excuse to destroy the free-market and nationalize resources.
If industrial production is causing global warming, the government will have to take strong measures to reduce industrial production - and because there will be so much fewer goods and services, those will have to be rationed by the state. The state siezes total control of the economy.
The rhetoric of the enviornmental movement is that "Capitalist Greed is Destroying the Earth", hence we need to get rid of "Capitalism".
I don't think that has as much to do with unions, as the people who run the movie companies.
But that being said, Hollywood produces more good movies than ever before. It is just that the ratio of good movies to bad movies has gotten worse, since movies have become a form of disposable pop-entertainment.
Probably not as likely as a soldier accidentally shooting non-combatants because he thinks they might be launching a rocket.
Why not unionize, like the movie professionals in Hollywood did?
No, because really we should be avoiding those kinds of wars in the first place.
It is one thing to shoot down missles if someone is firing at our country (legit self-defence). Or to launch an accurate pin-point strike on an Al-Queda leader without harming nearby civilians (in the case of Al-Queda, legit self-defense).
It is another thing to have large numbers of troops occupy a foriegn country (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq). Nothing will ever make that safe and trouble free, because it is a stupid thing to do.
It isn't a straw man, it is SATIRE. A parody of Marxism, intended to show the simularities between the extremes of Socialism and Capitalism, and ridicule both. It is supposed to make fun of the fact that a state run monopoly is often indistinguishable from a private monopoly in the real world.
It might be a legit critism to say the joke isn't funny, but not legit critism to say that my satire changes details about the thing I am making fun of. Of course it does, because it is satire.
The regular people don't have a say in government. Government regulation is the last thing that is going to address the concerns of "working stiffs" or "small buisness". Government "regulation" just means that the government is selling "protection", like the mafia, to the big corporations. The corporations will have to work with the people in power to make the deal suitable to the political elite, but the little guy will never have any real say in the deal.
Once the people who are in power decide who is elegible for election, once they decide how funds for campaigning are going to be distributed, once they decide how groups are going to be gerimandered together to give certain parties advantage, and once the laws become so complicated they have almost endless regulatory power to punish non-supporters, and vast resources to give to reward their supporters, then there is no real Democracy. Democracy works on the small scale, but once you get to the size and power of the modern state, it becomes a meaningless abstraction.
More often then not, the regulation is designed to help the big corporations (in fact, the modern day mega-corporation couldn't exist without the government)... the regulation is used to make the cost of doing buisness too high for the little guy to afford the initial investment, or the liability too high that the little guy can't afford the insurance, or the fixed regulatory cost that doesn't scale for company size. The government takes land with eminent domain in order to give to the chain store.
If you look at markets that aren't regulated by the government (such as the drug trade), or under regulated by the government (computer software), you will see that the small guy has a huge advantage over the big guy. In the software industry, Microsofts biggest competitor is a product that doesn't cost anything and began as a hobby. Microsoft has such institutional entrophy that it is hard for them to compete on the merits of their product (and so now they compete using the government to enforce "intellectual property"). In the drug trade, no-one ever dominates for long before someone smaller comes along and starts shaking things up. It is not natural for large monopoly style corporations to exist, unless the government creates the regulatory infrastructure for it.
My alternative? Don't shop at Walmart. I have never walked into a Walmart, EVER, in my life... let alone purchased anything at a Walmart. I wouldn't be able to find the closest Walmart without looking it up online. And that is entirely accidental, without me trying to not shop at a Walmart. The vast majority of Walmart shoppers are suburbanites or urbanites who have plenty of other choices to shop besides Walmart. The overwelming vast majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas and have access to plenty of other places to shop. Even if the people living in rural areas who are "forced" to shop at Walmart really mean that they would have to drive an extra 20 miles to a larger town - or would have to spend a little more money somewhere else - they are not forced, so much as can't be bothered.
Walmart has to be the easiest company in the world to boycott! They have a razor thin profit margin, so that it only takes a boycott of a small group of people in order to cut into their bottom line. (that is why religious groups, who actually take the time to boycott once in a while, are always getting Walmart to do whatever they want). Walmarts are only profitable if built where land values are low, and where there is lots of wide open space, which means for most American consumers, it is actually a bit of a drive to get to Walmart. And they have a reputation for being "low-class", which means that any affluent Americans, or middle-class Americans pretending to be affluent, are not going to be caught dead in anything as declasse as a Walmart.
In the Revolutionary War, a bunch of poorly armed and untrained American farmers managed to defeat the elite armies of the most powerful empire in history. And now American
The government is elected by the people, for the people. Remember?
And a sucker is born every minute!
When has the government had a positive effect on competition? And I am not talking about the government breaking up the monopoly it helped create in the first place ("Bell"), or doing something like deregulate the airline industry (which is government getting rid of its intervention into the market).
Perhaps you can argue the whole Standard Oil thing, but by the time the government got to breaking up Standard Oil, Standard Oil was already losing market share. There is speculation that the breakup of Standard Oil was masterminded by J.D. Rockefeller.
In the Marxism definition of Socialism, Socialism is the state where the means of production are controlled by the state, under a dictatorship of the proletariate. That is then followed by Communism, in which the state withers away an people live in a utopian communal anarchist society. Karl Marx makes it clear how people who don't have the "very specific mindset" should be dealt with... they are counter-revolutionaries, and need to be destroyed.
Modern economists define Socialism as when the means of production are controlled by the state, and leave out all the other normative and subjective parts of the definition.
While you could have non-government voluntary collectivism, Socialism, by the accepted definitions implies the existance of a state. When people call themselves "Socialist", they usually mean that they want a dictatorship of the proletariate, or if they are not a Marxist they want a centrally-planned welfare state. Virtually no-one is advocating anarchism, and even the very few marginal groups that do advocate anarchism usually REALLY support state-socialism, and just say they support anarchism because it is "cooler" than saying you are a Socialist.
Yeah, but "abusing monopoly position", what the hell does that mean? That is so vauge as to be meaningless. A law like that isn't a law, it is a catch-all disclaimer to allow the government to go after any company it feels like.
One of the things that seperates a Democracy, with a Dictatorship, is that laws are precise and followable. "Don't drive faster than 100km/hour". That is a good law. It is absolutely clear what that law means. "Don't release more than x tons of carbon per y kw energy produced". That is a good law, because it is clearly measurable and understandable what it means. It is possible to prove guilty or innocent with no ambiguity. And I immediatly know what I need to do not to get in trouble.
How about, if the government created a law for you that said "Be a good neighbor!"? And an unelected board of officials had the power to arbitrarily declare you a "Bad Neighbor" and send you to jail? That would be a nightmare! If you are alergic to cats, do you have to watch your neighbors cat when they go on vacation? You could be accused of being a bad neighbor, but you can never tell. If your kid plays baseball in the street, and break a window, are you a criminal? What the hell does it mean to be a "good neighbor"? Could one of the members of the Good Neighbor Commission accuse you of being a bad neighbor, because your bookstore competes with his son-in-laws bookstore? Does this board have the power to order you to marry the girl you get pregnant, because that is "what a good neighbor does".
You don't support terrorism, do you? Well, what if someone is "convicted" of "terrorism" by a secret panel of un-elected officials, based on secret evidence, and thrown in prison? (and the charges against the "convicted terrorist" were put forward by the "terrorists" buisness competitors). Would you have a problem with that, after all, the guy IS a CONVICTED TERRORIST!!! The government might not have any real definition of what a "terrorist" is, or be willing to hold a trial in a way that is transparent or accountable to the people, but the person would be a "criminal" by every definition of the word.
In a democracy, we understand that guilty parties may be able to get away with a crime. And if we don't use fair, objective, transparent, and accountable officials to judge a clearly understandable and objective law, it doesn't matter if you "know the person is guilty", because your criminal system is not legit.
Microsoft is not a "criminal" in reasonable sense of the word. An un-elected body, of debatable authority (the E.U. constitution that gives it power to go after vauge kinda-crimes did not pass), and with a clear bias (they want to promote European software industry over the American software industry) decided to call Microsoft a "criminal", for a law so vauge that no one knows if they are guilty or not guilty until they are convicted. Even if you feel that Microsoft are a bunch of no-good evil bastards, any reasonable person has to see some series flaws with the process.
You don't have to like someone, or feel they are not-guilty, in order to question the system and want everyone to get a fair trial, and to realize that it won't just be Microsoft to get burned if the term "criminal" is to be thrown around to lightly, and un-democraticly.