The purpose of John Hodgman was not to "stereotype" PC users. The purpose was to provide a boring image of PCs themselves through the comedy of John Hodgman.
Right. John Hodgman does not represent a stereotypical PC user and Justin Long is not intended to represent a stereotypical Mac user. If you pay any attention to the ad, you'll realize that they represent personifications of a Mac and a PC. So that's why they say "I'm a Mac," and "I'm a PC."
So no, Apple isn't stereotyping PC users by saying that they're boring generic business geeks. They're making fun of other PC manufacturers for making boring generic business computers. Microsoft's ad people are either retarded or they're banking on the commercial-watching public to have paid little attention to the Mac/PC ads.
So I think you're right. Those people who paid any attention to those ads will probably see Microsoft's new ads and think, "Wow they're dumb. They missed the point." But for people who haven't paid a lot of attention to those Mac/PC ads, these ads will call more attention to the Mac/PC ads. If anything, by acknowledging those Mac/PC ads, Microsoft is raising Apple up (in terms of consumer psychology) to their equal and competitor, whereas part of what keeps people afraid of switching is the idea that Macs are a fad that shouldn't be taken seriously.
All in all, I don't think this is a great idea for an ad campaign.
Licensing version B to WP under the GFDL doesn't even put him as the author under any obligations; licenses like the GPL and GFDL only impose obligations on other people, if they want to redistribute the material.
Right. People misunderstand the "viral" nature of the GPL. If you're really still the sole author of a work, you can release it under the GPL, and still retain the rights to license it under a non-GPL license. The GPL does not revoke your copyright to the work, but on the contrary relies on you retaining the copyright of your work. As the copyright owner, you can license your work under any number of non-exclusive licenses. (IANAL, so if I'm at all wrong here, correct me. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.)
Further, this idea of "if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source". No. No one should be citing the Wikipedia as a primary source, unless people start posting original work there, in which case it could become a valid primary source. But even if an "expert" were doing fact-checking on the Wikipedia, you still shouldn't cite it any more than you should cite text books or encyclopedias.
If you actually watched the ads rather than following your anti-Mac bias, you're realize that what you're saying isn't true. So I just went to Apple's site, went to their ads section, and watched the first one that came up ("Off the Air"). The message is, we have employees in the store who will help you switch. Second ad over is pointing out how Macs have become popular on college campuses, they have a better OS, have a built-in camera, and run MS Office.
But even when the ad focusses more on particular Windows shortcomings (there are a lot of ads, and some of them do focus on how Windows, and Vista in particular kind of suck), they aren't just "poking fun at PCs without saying anything about a Mac". By giving those sorts of things as reasons why people are switching to Macs, there is, at bare minimum, a clear implication that Macs don't have those problems. To it'd be like selling a car that gets 100 MPG and saying, "Are you tired of of spending ridiculous amounts of money on gas filling up your inefficient vehicle? Buy our car." Now, you could say they didn't say anything about their car, but that's kind of a stupid complaint.
That's a good point, but I don't think Wingnut64 was trying to justify breaking into Palin's e-mail. Rather, I think he was suggesting that this "hacker" might not be very skilled, and so other people who are using properly secured government addresses might not be susceptible to the same attack.
Beyond all that (the idea that the election is decided on delegates and not the popular vote) there's the fact that they aren't counting any kind of "popular vote" in states which had caucuses, which are states that Obama did well in.
Supposedly if you take those states and divide the popular vote proportionally or based on polling, Obama suddenly wins the popular vote.
But as you say, the winner of the elections aren't determined by a popular vote, which is all the more reason why the popular vote isn't a good measure. People in states where one candidate is clearly going to win have less of an incentive to go out and vote, and often states basically stop counting the votes (at least paying much attention to accuracy) once a winner is determined. So really the accuracy of the popular vote is questionable unless you're looking in a state where the election was close
What if it's true, though? Like if someone were to market a car that got 100 MPG, wouldn't you expect them to make the ads about how their mileage didn't "suck as much as the other guy"?
I mean, "we don't suck as much as the other guy" is a certain way of saying it, but more often they go for wordings like "we're better than the competition." When people are unhappy with the status quo, and you're offering a product that will improve the situation, it's generally a good idea to advertise that your solution is better than the status quo.
Well, yeah, I know that's *why*. My post is somewhat rhetorical, and I say, "I'm tempted to question..." My point is that we do it out of tradition and convenience, but not because it's any kind of a well thought out system.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it makes sense to choose the mode as the sort of average you want to take for any given purpose, but only that it's considered (at least from what I've been taught) to be one sort of "average".
Most often, when people say "average" they mean the "arithmetic mean", and so a dictionary might list them as synonymous. That doesn't mean it's a good technical definition.
First, depending on how you want to define "citizen", it's not clear to me that states would have to be sovereign. Second, states are constitutionally semi-sovereign. The federal government can compel states in some ways, but the authority of the federal government over state matters is limited.
Of course, it's become much less limited as time has gone on, but technically they still have more sovereignty than they tend to exercise.
I don't know... I'm tempted to question why a driver's license is used as ID in the first place. It's a license to drive a car, but people treat it like it's a universal ID and everyone is supposed to have one.
Why not your license to own a pet? Or... I don't know, your license to be a lifeguard? Your license to carry a gun?
Like why should having a license to drive be taken as proof of identity and authorization to leave/enter the country?
We're getting off on a tangent of a tangent here, but I was always taught that mean, median, and mode were all a kind of "average". If that's true, then using "average" isn't wrong, but rather just lacking specificity.
Not exactly a FPS, but I was talking with someone about Thief recently, so it comes to mind. IIRC the difficulty levels added extra objectives to your missions. The enemy AI wasn't really much smarter (they may have made them a little stronger or something), but the real challenge is they might change the patrol, put someone right near the door you have to get through, and then add the requirement that you couldn't be detected or kill anyone. So it didn't really matter whether the guard was harder to kill, because the point was that you had to get past him. It successfully made it both more difficult and more rewarding.
This isn't really completely related to your post. You're talking about more run-and-gun type of games, and I think those sorts of games simply don't have a lot of options in adjusting difficulty. You can make enemies stronger, smarter, faster, and you can let them cheat. Making real changes in the AI to change difficulty would be quite a challenge.
Why would it be fun if easy > medium was just more of the same, going up in difficulty should make you have to think different and figure out different techniques. How would being very good at easy at all prepare you for something too difficult for you?
Because that's good game design. Playing the game on an easy level should train you to be better at the game, so that playing through the whole game gets you better as time goes on, and then you're better able to play on higher difficulties. This is just common sense in terms of game design, and pretty much all games do this.
And Guitar Hero 3 acknowledges that this is what a game should be in that the games get progressively more difficult as you move through the set list. If you're starting on Easy, the early songs help you practice the general skills, the later ones get more complicated and force you to learn new techniques. By the time you complete the Easy mode, the idea is that you should be ready to play the easier songs on Medium. It really should work like that, moving you along from Easy to Expert so that Everyone can always find songs that are challenging but within their skill range to attempt.
And I think Rock Band is much better in that regard.
I would say that GH3 spans a large interval of difficulty level. Thus it should be relatively simple to reach a challenge level that matches your skill.
No. That's exactly what I was saying is that I can't "match my skill". For me "Medium" is way too easy and not much fun to play, yet "Hard" is way too hard and not much fun to attempt. It's not an issue of whether it spans a large enough interval of difficulty, but that the difficulty curve isn't well developed (which is what I was saying).
Further, I think it's clear that there wasn't a lot of focus on making the easier settings *fun*. The harder settings seem to be fun for people who are really good and the the challenge is fun, but the easier settings bear practically no relation to the song in some places. There are things that I don't like about Rock Band, but it handles the whole difficulty curve better and clearly put more thought into the easier settings and the whole game being *fun*.
My biggest gripe with game difficulty that comes to mind is when I feel like it's making the whole thing hard for the sake of being hard. Guitar Hero 3 comes to mind. It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge. Some of the Tony Hawk games have the same problem, so it's probably those developers.
I can understand wanting a challenge, so I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But the problem manifests itself by having the difficulty curve all wonky. You can be very good at Easy, and still not be able to complete relatively simple songs on Medium. Same with Medium->Hard, and Hard->Expert. Rock Band, on the other hand, can also be pretty challenging, but the curve is more gradual, so IMO it works better. It's clear the developers were focused more on having the game be fun for all levels of expertise, rather than making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I think this applies for pretty much all games, across genres. Guitar Hero was just what came to mind. Ideally anyone should be able to play, but it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
Honestly, I've had various problems with warranties from Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA. At first for me buying my own stuff, but then for helping other people try to get things covered under warranty.
If you're lucky, they'll just stall and delay and you'll eventually get something repaired. But pretty often, they'll lie to you about the coverage, and then, somehow or another, it ends with them flatly refusing to repair the item. I've once seen it end with the store refusing to repair the item, and then subsequently informing the customer that they would not be returning the broken item (apparently they lost it).
I've never seen or even heard of an actual case where anybody was happy with the coverage, but like I said, I've been lied to by these stores' employees first-hand.
Oh, right, so I guess we shouldn't have any law permitting free speech, because if the government is good then they won't restrict speech in bad ways, but if it turns evil they'll just take it away anyway? Hey, maybe we shouldn't have laws, since it's safe to assume that either the police will be good, in which case we don't need laws, or the police will be bad, in which case laws won't help us! That will make everything better.
if you have a government that does not respect and protect the people's right to discuss that government freely and without fear of reprisal, then the government in that country is broken, and it is already time to move on to the next of the four boxes and remove that government from power.
How do you go about removing it from power if you aren't permitted to talk to your fellow citizens about wanting to remove it from power? That's exactly why the freedom to speech is so important.
Yeah, I'm guessing that ccguy might not live in America. First because of his complaint about "this country", but also because my understanding is that not all countries have the same sense of precedence that the US legal system does.
At least in the US, what other courts have ruled in the past can be determinant of how future judges will rule. Also, it's my understanding that judges are allowed to look at the intent of the laws, which could possibly connect to the history of the law.
I talked to an Austrian lawyer once who claimed that European courts often don't stress precedence quite as much as US courts, and are a little more free to rule on the wording of the current law and their own judgment. I have no knowledge about it myself, but don't have any reason (so far) to disbelief that lawyer. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
In any case, if you're writing about a set of laws, it seems worthwhile to me to talk about the past laws to give an idea of "how we got here". Of course, if someone were writing a book on storage media and could find 50 pages of interesting information about punch cards, I wouldn't object to that either.
I agree, and would more or less say the same thing about copyright law. There are valid reasons for both patents and copyrights, and ideally we can come up with a system to protect/reward inventors and creators (and investors who back inventors and creators) in order to encourage science and the arts for the sake of the common good.
But we should keep in mind that the purpose of those laws are for that reason: to encourage development of science and art for the sake of the common good. That's why those laws were created (at least in the US), and they aren't currently serving those purposes very well. Therefore, they should be reevaluated and rewritten with that purpose in mind, and also keeping in mind our current state of development.
The concept of "intellectual property" has to take a different role in the digital/internet age, where progress is quick and millions of copies can be made for free. Sharing of information and collaboration are much more powerful tools now that you can share information with the entire planet instantly. We need to seriously look at whether we can develop new systems to encourage people to invest time, money, and effort-- to encourage them to share-- while not restricting that shared information to the point where those restrictions are inhibiting the development of art and science.
These laws were not intended to "reward creative people" in a benevolent way. My government (who ideally is an extension of our collective will) is under no obligation to protect your thoughts from being thought by other people. I don't pay taxes to the government for them to protect (with law enforcement) your investment in art/science for your own sake because I think you're a super-duper great guy who deserves more money. I'm being repetitive, but people really need to understand it. The reason our collective will and our collective money is being used to protect copyrights and patents is specifically so that we, as a society, get to use your work. Maybe someone has to pay you something in the short term, but after a time, your work becomes ours, and we get to use it however we like, because that's the deal.
And if people/businesses, don't respect that deal and don't like that deal, and we can't make the deal work in favor of the common good, then I say revoke it.
Is there really a question whether online anonymity should be possible? I would assume that you would have a firmer stance, Anonymous Brave Guy.
I suppose I'm among those who would say that you can't have free speech without the option of anonymity, and without free speech the Internet becomes another controlled broadcast system for the powerful to use. That's the last thing we need.
At the same time, I'm not against some sort of identity verification scheme. Real-world analog: I carry a driver's license most of the time, and don't mind whatever fancy technology they want to use to make sure I can't make a fake drivers license. However, I would be completely opposed to any law which required me to have and carry an ID at all times. I shouldn't need an ID to walk around on the streets, but only to do things where my identity specifically needs to be authenticated (e.g. opening a bank account).
Same thing online. If I want to verify my identity on the web, I do think I should have a better way of doing that than currently exists. However, I rarely want to verify my identity on the web, and why should I?
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of John Hodgman was not to "stereotype" PC users. The purpose was to provide a boring image of PCs themselves through the comedy of John Hodgman.
Right. John Hodgman does not represent a stereotypical PC user and Justin Long is not intended to represent a stereotypical Mac user. If you pay any attention to the ad, you'll realize that they represent personifications of a Mac and a PC. So that's why they say "I'm a Mac," and "I'm a PC."
So no, Apple isn't stereotyping PC users by saying that they're boring generic business geeks. They're making fun of other PC manufacturers for making boring generic business computers. Microsoft's ad people are either retarded or they're banking on the commercial-watching public to have paid little attention to the Mac/PC ads.
So I think you're right. Those people who paid any attention to those ads will probably see Microsoft's new ads and think, "Wow they're dumb. They missed the point." But for people who haven't paid a lot of attention to those Mac/PC ads, these ads will call more attention to the Mac/PC ads. If anything, by acknowledging those Mac/PC ads, Microsoft is raising Apple up (in terms of consumer psychology) to their equal and competitor, whereas part of what keeps people afraid of switching is the idea that Macs are a fad that shouldn't be taken seriously.
All in all, I don't think this is a great idea for an ad campaign.
Licensing version B to WP under the GFDL doesn't even put him as the author under any obligations; licenses like the GPL and GFDL only impose obligations on other people, if they want to redistribute the material.
Right. People misunderstand the "viral" nature of the GPL. If you're really still the sole author of a work, you can release it under the GPL, and still retain the rights to license it under a non-GPL license. The GPL does not revoke your copyright to the work, but on the contrary relies on you retaining the copyright of your work. As the copyright owner, you can license your work under any number of non-exclusive licenses. (IANAL, so if I'm at all wrong here, correct me. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.)
Further, this idea of "if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source". No. No one should be citing the Wikipedia as a primary source, unless people start posting original work there, in which case it could become a valid primary source. But even if an "expert" were doing fact-checking on the Wikipedia, you still shouldn't cite it any more than you should cite text books or encyclopedias.
If you actually watched the ads rather than following your anti-Mac bias, you're realize that what you're saying isn't true. So I just went to Apple's site, went to their ads section, and watched the first one that came up ("Off the Air"). The message is, we have employees in the store who will help you switch. Second ad over is pointing out how Macs have become popular on college campuses, they have a better OS, have a built-in camera, and run MS Office.
But even when the ad focusses more on particular Windows shortcomings (there are a lot of ads, and some of them do focus on how Windows, and Vista in particular kind of suck), they aren't just "poking fun at PCs without saying anything about a Mac". By giving those sorts of things as reasons why people are switching to Macs, there is, at bare minimum, a clear implication that Macs don't have those problems. To it'd be like selling a car that gets 100 MPG and saying, "Are you tired of of spending ridiculous amounts of money on gas filling up your inefficient vehicle? Buy our car." Now, you could say they didn't say anything about their car, but that's kind of a stupid complaint.
What's socialism, then? Would it be like if the government took over the banking/finance system?
I didn't know we had a secret terrorist organization. Why was I not told? And how do I sign up?
That's a good point, but I don't think Wingnut64 was trying to justify breaking into Palin's e-mail. Rather, I think he was suggesting that this "hacker" might not be very skilled, and so other people who are using properly secured government addresses might not be susceptible to the same attack.
Beyond all that (the idea that the election is decided on delegates and not the popular vote) there's the fact that they aren't counting any kind of "popular vote" in states which had caucuses, which are states that Obama did well in.
Supposedly if you take those states and divide the popular vote proportionally or based on polling, Obama suddenly wins the popular vote.
But as you say, the winner of the elections aren't determined by a popular vote, which is all the more reason why the popular vote isn't a good measure. People in states where one candidate is clearly going to win have less of an incentive to go out and vote, and often states basically stop counting the votes (at least paying much attention to accuracy) once a winner is determined. So really the accuracy of the popular vote is questionable unless you're looking in a state where the election was close
What if it's true, though? Like if someone were to market a car that got 100 MPG, wouldn't you expect them to make the ads about how their mileage didn't "suck as much as the other guy"?
I mean, "we don't suck as much as the other guy" is a certain way of saying it, but more often they go for wordings like "we're better than the competition." When people are unhappy with the status quo, and you're offering a product that will improve the situation, it's generally a good idea to advertise that your solution is better than the status quo.
Well, yeah, I know that's *why*. My post is somewhat rhetorical, and I say, "I'm tempted to question..." My point is that we do it out of tradition and convenience, but not because it's any kind of a well thought out system.
FWIW, the Wikipedia seems to agree with me.
Anyway, I'm not saying that it makes sense to choose the mode as the sort of average you want to take for any given purpose, but only that it's considered (at least from what I've been taught) to be one sort of "average".
Most often, when people say "average" they mean the "arithmetic mean", and so a dictionary might list them as synonymous. That doesn't mean it's a good technical definition.
First, depending on how you want to define "citizen", it's not clear to me that states would have to be sovereign. Second, states are constitutionally semi-sovereign. The federal government can compel states in some ways, but the authority of the federal government over state matters is limited.
Of course, it's become much less limited as time has gone on, but technically they still have more sovereignty than they tend to exercise.
I don't know... I'm tempted to question why a driver's license is used as ID in the first place. It's a license to drive a car, but people treat it like it's a universal ID and everyone is supposed to have one.
Why not your license to own a pet? Or... I don't know, your license to be a lifeguard? Your license to carry a gun?
Like why should having a license to drive be taken as proof of identity and authorization to leave/enter the country?
We're getting off on a tangent of a tangent here, but I was always taught that mean, median, and mode were all a kind of "average". If that's true, then using "average" isn't wrong, but rather just lacking specificity.
Not exactly a FPS, but I was talking with someone about Thief recently, so it comes to mind. IIRC the difficulty levels added extra objectives to your missions. The enemy AI wasn't really much smarter (they may have made them a little stronger or something), but the real challenge is they might change the patrol, put someone right near the door you have to get through, and then add the requirement that you couldn't be detected or kill anyone. So it didn't really matter whether the guard was harder to kill, because the point was that you had to get past him. It successfully made it both more difficult and more rewarding.
This isn't really completely related to your post. You're talking about more run-and-gun type of games, and I think those sorts of games simply don't have a lot of options in adjusting difficulty. You can make enemies stronger, smarter, faster, and you can let them cheat. Making real changes in the AI to change difficulty would be quite a challenge.
Why would it be fun if easy > medium was just more of the same, going up in difficulty should make you have to think different and figure out different techniques. How would being very good at easy at all prepare you for something too difficult for you?
Because that's good game design. Playing the game on an easy level should train you to be better at the game, so that playing through the whole game gets you better as time goes on, and then you're better able to play on higher difficulties. This is just common sense in terms of game design, and pretty much all games do this.
And Guitar Hero 3 acknowledges that this is what a game should be in that the games get progressively more difficult as you move through the set list. If you're starting on Easy, the early songs help you practice the general skills, the later ones get more complicated and force you to learn new techniques. By the time you complete the Easy mode, the idea is that you should be ready to play the easier songs on Medium. It really should work like that, moving you along from Easy to Expert so that Everyone can always find songs that are challenging but within their skill range to attempt.
And I think Rock Band is much better in that regard.
I would say that GH3 spans a large interval of difficulty level. Thus it should be relatively simple to reach a challenge level that matches your skill.
No. That's exactly what I was saying is that I can't "match my skill". For me "Medium" is way too easy and not much fun to play, yet "Hard" is way too hard and not much fun to attempt. It's not an issue of whether it spans a large enough interval of difficulty, but that the difficulty curve isn't well developed (which is what I was saying).
Further, I think it's clear that there wasn't a lot of focus on making the easier settings *fun*. The harder settings seem to be fun for people who are really good and the the challenge is fun, but the easier settings bear practically no relation to the song in some places. There are things that I don't like about Rock Band, but it handles the whole difficulty curve better and clearly put more thought into the easier settings and the whole game being *fun*.
My biggest gripe with game difficulty that comes to mind is when I feel like it's making the whole thing hard for the sake of being hard. Guitar Hero 3 comes to mind. It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge. Some of the Tony Hawk games have the same problem, so it's probably those developers.
I can understand wanting a challenge, so I don't think there's anything wrong with it. But the problem manifests itself by having the difficulty curve all wonky. You can be very good at Easy, and still not be able to complete relatively simple songs on Medium. Same with Medium->Hard, and Hard->Expert. Rock Band, on the other hand, can also be pretty challenging, but the curve is more gradual, so IMO it works better. It's clear the developers were focused more on having the game be fun for all levels of expertise, rather than making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I think this applies for pretty much all games, across genres. Guitar Hero was just what came to mind. Ideally anyone should be able to play, but it should be more *fun* to play harder difficulties if your better at the game.
Just stumbled across this today: http://consumerist.com/5050054/ex+best-buy-employee-regrets-selling-warranties-now-that-hes-a-customer
Honestly, I've had various problems with warranties from Best Buy, Circuit City, and CompUSA. At first for me buying my own stuff, but then for helping other people try to get things covered under warranty.
If you're lucky, they'll just stall and delay and you'll eventually get something repaired. But pretty often, they'll lie to you about the coverage, and then, somehow or another, it ends with them flatly refusing to repair the item. I've once seen it end with the store refusing to repair the item, and then subsequently informing the customer that they would not be returning the broken item (apparently they lost it).
I've never seen or even heard of an actual case where anybody was happy with the coverage, but like I said, I've been lied to by these stores' employees first-hand.
Oh, right, so I guess we shouldn't have any law permitting free speech, because if the government is good then they won't restrict speech in bad ways, but if it turns evil they'll just take it away anyway? Hey, maybe we shouldn't have laws, since it's safe to assume that either the police will be good, in which case we don't need laws, or the police will be bad, in which case laws won't help us! That will make everything better.
if you have a government that does not respect and protect the people's right to discuss that government freely and without fear of reprisal, then the government in that country is broken, and it is already time to move on to the next of the four boxes and remove that government from power.
How do you go about removing it from power if you aren't permitted to talk to your fellow citizens about wanting to remove it from power? That's exactly why the freedom to speech is so important.
Yeah, I'm guessing that ccguy might not live in America. First because of his complaint about "this country", but also because my understanding is that not all countries have the same sense of precedence that the US legal system does.
At least in the US, what other courts have ruled in the past can be determinant of how future judges will rule. Also, it's my understanding that judges are allowed to look at the intent of the laws, which could possibly connect to the history of the law.
I talked to an Austrian lawyer once who claimed that European courts often don't stress precedence quite as much as US courts, and are a little more free to rule on the wording of the current law and their own judgment. I have no knowledge about it myself, but don't have any reason (so far) to disbelief that lawyer. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
In any case, if you're writing about a set of laws, it seems worthwhile to me to talk about the past laws to give an idea of "how we got here". Of course, if someone were writing a book on storage media and could find 50 pages of interesting information about punch cards, I wouldn't object to that either.
I agree, and would more or less say the same thing about copyright law. There are valid reasons for both patents and copyrights, and ideally we can come up with a system to protect/reward inventors and creators (and investors who back inventors and creators) in order to encourage science and the arts for the sake of the common good.
But we should keep in mind that the purpose of those laws are for that reason: to encourage development of science and art for the sake of the common good. That's why those laws were created (at least in the US), and they aren't currently serving those purposes very well. Therefore, they should be reevaluated and rewritten with that purpose in mind, and also keeping in mind our current state of development.
The concept of "intellectual property" has to take a different role in the digital/internet age, where progress is quick and millions of copies can be made for free. Sharing of information and collaboration are much more powerful tools now that you can share information with the entire planet instantly. We need to seriously look at whether we can develop new systems to encourage people to invest time, money, and effort-- to encourage them to share-- while not restricting that shared information to the point where those restrictions are inhibiting the development of art and science.
These laws were not intended to "reward creative people" in a benevolent way. My government (who ideally is an extension of our collective will) is under no obligation to protect your thoughts from being thought by other people. I don't pay taxes to the government for them to protect (with law enforcement) your investment in art/science for your own sake because I think you're a super-duper great guy who deserves more money. I'm being repetitive, but people really need to understand it. The reason our collective will and our collective money is being used to protect copyrights and patents is specifically so that we, as a society, get to use your work. Maybe someone has to pay you something in the short term, but after a time, your work becomes ours, and we get to use it however we like, because that's the deal.
And if people/businesses, don't respect that deal and don't like that deal, and we can't make the deal work in favor of the common good, then I say revoke it.
Is there really a question whether online anonymity should be possible? I would assume that you would have a firmer stance, Anonymous Brave Guy.
I suppose I'm among those who would say that you can't have free speech without the option of anonymity, and without free speech the Internet becomes another controlled broadcast system for the powerful to use. That's the last thing we need.
At the same time, I'm not against some sort of identity verification scheme. Real-world analog: I carry a driver's license most of the time, and don't mind whatever fancy technology they want to use to make sure I can't make a fake drivers license. However, I would be completely opposed to any law which required me to have and carry an ID at all times. I shouldn't need an ID to walk around on the streets, but only to do things where my identity specifically needs to be authenticated (e.g. opening a bank account).
Same thing online. If I want to verify my identity on the web, I do think I should have a better way of doing that than currently exists. However, I rarely want to verify my identity on the web, and why should I?
Sounds like Gorlock screwed up again.
(Seemed like the obvious connection between the parent post and grandparent post.)