Make two games. The first game is simple and/or mindless and is designed expecting a casual/ newbie gamer to play it. Have that game fund another game which is more complex and intended for a more discerning crowd. That way you can make money and satisfy the hungry hardcore gamers out there at little extra cost (the creation of a simpler game that a broader group of people can enjoy).
Besides 9/11, how many terrorist attacks were there before the Act was passed? It is a logical fallacy to assume that attacks have been prevented due to the PATRIOT Act.
Here's an example of the same logic: You are a healthy person, but one day you contract a disease. I give you a pill that you have never seen before and tell you that taking it will prevent future illness. You can only claim that the pill was sucsessful at preventing illness if and only if you would have gotten sick without it and you didn't get sick when you would have. First, you must be able to tell if you would have gotten sick in the first place, which you can't know. If you don't ever get sick again, there is no way to tell whether or not it was due to my pill or due to the fact that you are a healthy person. It is a logical fallacy to claim either one, but if you had never been sick before now, it is certainly more reasonable to attribute your health to the strength of your body since that has been proven over and over again.
As I understand, the counter-terrorist intelligence in this country was very good before the PATRIOT Act. Just because we haven't had an attack since 9/11 does not mean it was due to the PATRIOT Act. It may easily be due to the good work those people are doing and have done in the past.
if you are living in an area where the vote is more or less decided (such as a very strong Bush locale, or a very strong Kerry locale)
I get the impression that this election will hold a lot of surprises. Here in Texas I am seeing a good number of Kerry supporters even though my state (and city!) have been overwhelmingly conservative in the past. My city is big on business, and I know many businessmen who are traditional Republicans yet think electing Bush is a foolish idea at best. It is possible that my state may still go for Bush, but if there's ever a time when you can vote Democrat in Texas and maybe actually be in the majority, it is now in this election.
In the history of the US, there have been instances where states which have traditionally voted one way have flipped overnight to vote heavily for the opposing party. Even though Texas has voted Republican in the past, I personally know many conservatives who will absoultely not vote for Bush in this election. The people here know business, and even they have their limits. You should not expect a state to go for one candidate just because it has gone for their party in the past. Things can change, and stranger things have happened.
I'm really sorry that you feel liberty is more important than safety. You do realize that if it were up to the terrorists you wouldn't have either, right?
It's a good thing it's not up to them, then.
Um... Kerry bashes it, yet he voted for it. You don't find that even a tiny bit hypocritical?
Normally I would think it's hypocritical... Maybe... Things are never that black and white to me. And in this case, I don't think he's being hypocritical. The reason I don't think he's being hypocritical is that he never went against any of his principals by voting for the Act, because he did not know what was in it when he voted for it.
The stories I've heard about the passage of the PATRIOT Act mostly go like this:
Congressman (I don't remember whether or not Senators, House members or both said this): "We were given this bill and told to vote on it. We we not given time to read it. We were told that it was an emergency counter-terrorism measure and that the fate of the country rested on its passage."
I wasn't there. I don't know what happened. But in nearly every story I've heard told about the PATRIOT Act's passage, the phrases "were not given time to read it" and "were not given time to discuss it" keep coming up. I can't make the claim that any Congressman, be they Republican, Democrat, or Third Party, knew what the Act really said when they voted on it if (like all the stories say) they were not able to read it before voting. I can't reasonably expect a Congressman to know what the provisions in a law are without being able to read it. Laws are long. Laws are convoluted. Laws have tons of crap (riders) that you have to wade through before you can find the important parts. Reading and understanding a law takes time. If time is not given for that purpose, I do not hold a Congressman accountable for understanding a law.
If the members of Congress had been given adequate time to read and absorb the law and John Kerry chose to ignore that opportunity, I might feel differently. But that's not what the stories suggest.
So did John Kerry go against his principals by signing the PATRIOT Act? If he did not know what the act entailed, I don't see how he could have made a concious decision to go against his principals, and therefore I can not call him a hypocrite. I might have done the exact same thing in his place, and I hold principals which are so strongly against denial of due process and secret laws that I can't even begin to describe them.
But there's more to the story. The PATRIOT Act exists. A huge pile of paper with a law written on it does not just appear out of mid-air. That means that someone had to have written it. There was at least one person who knew what was in the PATRIOT Act at the time Congress was voting on it. There were probably many more than one. I want to know who those people are. If those people claim to love the freedoms of the US, then they are the hypocrites for even considering to propose a law which so easily shrugs them off.
If you've heard a different story as to what happened in Congress on the day the PATRIOT Act was passed, I would love to hear it (I don't mean that sarcastically at all. I really would like to know what other people think happened). Given what I think happened during the passage of the PATRIOT Act, there is certainly at least one person (probably more) out there who deserves to have his/her feet held to the fire regarding that law. I don't think John Kerry is in that group.
A few inconveniences are a bery small price to pay for safety and security of the state and its people.
No amount of protection from terrorism - not even if it protected us all ad infinitum - is worth one iota of my precious liberty. There is a bigger number of human lives than I can even conceptualize that were given so that I could live in a place where I have the chance to live freely. Nothing is worth voiding the fruits of their sacrifices. Nothing.
Now on to my point. The only rebuttal I have seen to complaints about the PATRIOT Act have been of the "Don't worry. Nobody will use it to do that sort of stuff."
I humbly submit this:
Even if you think Bush and the executive branch of the government under him are from the highest chorus of angels and would never do anything to hurt the citizens of the USA, it should not affect your judgement of the PATRIOT Act at all. For that matter, it should not affect your judgement of any law passed while he is in office, regardless of who passes it, who proposes it, and who votes on it. A bad law passed by a group of angels is still a bad law.
Say the president is an angel and asks the Congress (who are also a group of angels) to pass a law that provides ways of foregoing due process. Say also that the president, the leadership of Homeland Security and every law enforcement agent in the country are angels and the law is never abused even once. It is still a bad law.
It is a bad law because in the hands of a devil the law could be abused and used to hurt the people of the USA. Your rebuttal - the claim that the law is okay since it will never be abused - is entirely based on the assumption that we will have angels in public office for as long as the law is a law. If you think the terrorist threat is going to be around for a while, then you should expect the PATRIOT Act and things like it to be around for just as long. It shows no signs of going away, and a PATRIOT Act II was even proposed, I believe.
The assumption that this country will elect angel after angel is a tenuous one at best. The President is not the only one you should be worried about. What about the leadership of law enforcement and the DHS? Do you think every one of them is an angel? Have you met all of them? The "goodness" of a law should never have to be judged based on who uses it. This is something that a citizen of this country should agree on regardless of their political affiliation.
A law is a good law if 1.) it does what it sets out to do efficiently, 2.) what is sets out to do is in the public's best interest, and 3.) it can not be abused by those who would abuse it. For the PATRIOT Act, point 1 can be argued on both sides, most people will agree on point 2, but it fails miserably on point 3. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to give law enforcement a way to forego due process, but it's in the Act.
As a citizen, I will not bet the well-being of my country ride on whether or not the people in office have good intentions. I know a lot of people who don't like to see the PATRIOT Act being attacked feel that it is a personal attack on their Candidate of Choice. I mean to suggest that even if John Kerry or Clinton had pushed the PATRIOT Act through Congress, the very same people would be complaining. I definitely would. They would be complaining not because they are Republicans or Democrats, but because they are good citizens. One prerequisite to having good laws is being critial of them.
All that being said, I think it's really funny that a lot of conservatives rag on John Kerry and the liberals in Congress for voting to pass such a heinous law. Who proposed the law in the first place?
They should take a page from Serious Sam. You can handle AI calculations with a client-server architecture. The server only need to pipe back what the AI entities do to the clients (this is a separate problem in itself, but it's not like no one has ever come up with a good solution before). As far as cutscenes are concerned, in Serious Sam, the first player to active the scene would have it played on their screen while the others would not. The realtime aspect of the game was maintained, and usually no one gave a damn about not being able to see the cutscenes. I don't think that is really the appeal of co-op play, after all. If a cutscene revealed some sort of secret, it was up to the person who saw it to communicate with their teammates - just what should happen in co-op.
This aligns those people who make money via their creative output (as opposed to, say, tilling a field or screwing plastic things together on an assembly line) to be in a better position to support their family once they've shrugged this mortal coil.
You seem to be missing a very important aspect of what the copyright situation is now compared to how it used to be. Why haven't we had problems with piracy in the past? I'm sure we have, but I don't think anyone would claim that things are no worse than they were 10 years ago. The same things (music, books, et al) were copyrighted back then, but people never really had a problem with rampant piracy before now. What has changed since then? The answer is easy, but it illustrates the fundamental difference between something a musician does and something a farmer does.
The difference is this: It is trivial to enforce the scarcity of farms and farmers, while no one can enfore the scarcity of digital recordings any more. Said another way, a farmer is able to leave a legacy to his children simply because the legacy itself is something that only one or a few people can own. At the time the USA was founded, the term property was largely understood to mean "land," and many property laws made at that time involved disputes over land. A farm is land, and that is the sole reason it is valuable. Emphasis: its value is derived directly from its scarcity. The very same plot of land a farm is built on could be used to build a shopping mall, housing, a landfill, an office building, whatever. The reason we care about what is built on what land is that there is only so much of it to go around.
If you remember your history, you might remember that when the USA was founded, land was sold very cheaply - a person with only a little money could (within their lifetime) buy a plot and establish a household of their own. When there was a lot to go around, it was cheap. But as more and more land got bought up and developed, the price of a plot inevitably rose. We're now at the point where you have to pay some hundreds of dollars a month to live in a tiny appartment in New York.
Why did this happen? Because there is only so much land to go around (and the amount can be measured). Land's scarcity is automatically enforced.
What is slowly becoming apparent is that a digital recording of music does not have the same property as land does. Due to the technology we have now which makes it easy to replicate and propagate data, the scarcity of a single ditial recording can simply not be enforced. There's no good way to tell how many exist, and there's no good way to be a "gatekeeper" and control who gets what media. Someone might have been able to pull that off in the past, but not now. No matter what the laws say, a digital recording is nothing more than information, and by now, a majority of Americans have devices capable of flawlessly reproducing and propogating data. So as a result, the value of a single recording will tend towards 0 as the number tends towards infinity. This is perfectly natural and follows from economic theories.
My point follows:
Such a philosophy doesn't sit well with a portion of the Slashdot crowd who think that society would be better off if artists and writers knew their place
You sure do seem angry, but may I suggest that the "portion of the Slashdot crowd" you are refering to have actually thought their position out and come to a conclusion that is well-reasoned and logical regardless of how much it flies in the face of conventional wisdom? Some of us have more than philosophies with regards to these issues. The conclusion I came to above comes from an application of economic theories. And frankly, I'm irked that people think it's a good idea to apply what are essentially land laws to something which simply does not have the same characteristics. In my mind, it is foolhardy. Not only that, I have provided an argument
Some banks that have security guards in them never get robbed. So, using your "logic" those security guards are an unnecessary expense that increases my bank fees.
Just to be safe, maybe we should perform cavity searches on everyone who enters the bank to make sure they aren't carrying any concealed weapons.
Do you know the fundamental difference between things like the Patriot Act and having guards at a bank? The guards at the bank don't bother anyone who doesn't pose an immediate threat to the safety of the people who work there/ the money or the members of the bank. In effect the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality is still strong and in effect. That is why most people feel just fine with having guards.
Anything that adopts the stance of "guilty until proven innocent" is not worth one iota of my precious liberty, even if it were to stop all terrorist activity from here to perpetuity.
Brave men fought for the liberties we have today. They were courageous and daring. They could have submitted at any time, and they probably felt afraid often enough to seriously consider it. If our ancestors had stopped fighting for liberty everytime they felt afraid, we would have none today. I don't care how terrified I am. My right to wear the clothes I want and say the things I want in a public forum are my own.
Did President Bush call the local authorities and say, "As part of my War on Terror, please unreasonably search all those Goddamned stupid hippies who have been annually gathering to stink up the Georgia countryside lo, this past quarter century?" Of course not.
Whether he did or not, he can say it legally now. Nobody in the past could say it legally. Are these the sorts of laws you want on the books? Some people still believe that the government shouldn't have any power at all that allows them to jail and interrogate people without going through the proper public channels and without a written reason why that person poses an immediate and direct threat to the health of our nation. Some people still believe that citizens of this country should be given fair and public trials no matter what.
Considering that the leading challenger against Bush voted for the Patriot Act, I don't see much change if we continue to stick with the homogeneity of the two major parties.
I agree that the two major parties have not presented compelling candidates for this race, but I feel it is unfair to point out that Kerry voted for the Patriot Act without also pointing out that the act was pushed through Congress without the legislators getting to read it.
It's clear that the patriot act could have prevented 911.
For those of you who have missed a few episodes, the Clinton administration has reported that they were aware that terrorists were planning to attack our country before before 9/11 (and hence before the Partiot Act), and that they told Bush's administration about the impending attack. It is not clear that the Patriot Act would have prevented the events of 9/11, and furthermore, it is not clear that had the act been in place prior to 9/11 that the intelligence agencies would have taken appropriate steps to stop the events if they did not act on the information the Clinton administration gave to them.
There are two major candidates in the next presidential race. The names have been ommitted to protect the innocent, but one has been president before. That person has made mistake after mistake after mistake in both the foreign policy and economic spheres. That person outright lied to the citizens of this country on national television and on more than one occasion. The other has not.
I know who I'm voting for. I don't like the person I'm voting for very much, which is why in the 2008 election I will seriously consider casting a Libertarian vote. But I feel it is my duty as a citizen to dispense with an obvious failure in favor of someone who has no track record in the executive branch of the government. It is not because of my politics, and it is not because of some amount of pride. It is because of my pride as a citizen.
Would you really have to port office to Linux to be able to convince people to switch?
I use OpenOffice for my text-editing needs, and the only pain it causes me is that it can't perfectly write and read.doc files. If that standard were opened and implimented in the numerous Linux text editors, I would never have to explain to people that the.docs I send them may look strange because I don't use MS Office.
I like OpenOffice a lot, but I am reluctant to suggest that friends and family of mine switch because of the fact that their old files would not be read/ rendered correctly.
From my perspective, the closed MS standards that only MS Office can read and write are the only thing keeping it alive.
This is what good software is all about, after all. Not who can read what files, but who can streamline the user experience and perform their task the most efficiently. It is that criterion that software should compete on, and none other.
A lousy review seems to be the best chance at that; maybe none have actually "Gone too far" yet.
Good post. One assumption you seem to be making is that stuff like this happens instantly. Someone who buys this round of games with annoying ads will be less likely to buy into the next round that comes around if they are annoyed by the ads. I know quite a few gamers who would feel incredibly patronized and insulted by this sort of thing. Those people aren't the sort of people who play sports games, but that does not mean that people who play Madden 2004 don't have limits on what they will tolerate.
Unfortunately, this seems to me like another example of where video game makers have the potential to irk the shit out of buyers and get away with it.
Keep in mind that having annoying ads in a game essentially raises the price of the game to potential buyers. You have to pay the price of the game AND put up with ads every five minutes. The fact that ads raise the price of a game for an end-user explains why people keep saying "if they lowered the price of such games, i would be willing to consider buying them". You can balance things out by lowering the monetary cost and increasing the annoyance factor. Since the "annoyance factor" is different for each individual gamer, the amount you would have to lower the price for each gamer will be different. The companies are banking on the fact that people won't be that annoyed at having ads in their games. That's probably why they are being put in sports games primarily. Can you imagine Doom3 with a commercial in the middle?
The real point I'm trying to make is that competitive products (i.e. Not-Madden 2005) can use the abscence of ads in their game as a marketing point. Competitive products without intrusive ads can leverage that fact against the products that do. If they are sucsessful, I suspect we will see the prices for ad-filled games drop or the ads themselves will be removed. So while people might continue to buy ad-filled games in the short run, companies might figure out that they can gain a market advantage by exploiting the desire for ad-free games.
Re:But, how do you really feel?
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Linus Interviewed
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Econ101 only teaches you about the old world. It doesnt take into account goods that can be reproduced with no cost.
Actually, the theories taught in economics are fairly timeless. If an assumption is made about a certain good or set of goods (i.e. scarcity is automatically enforced by the sheer physical number of said product), that does not mean the entire theory falls apart if you take away that assumption. All it means is that you have to figure out the rammifications of said assumption and change your model accordingly.
I might also add that what is happening with software and music piracy right now does not contradict long-standing economic models. Any economist worth their salt would be able to think critically about such markets without being tied to certain assumptions about the scarcity of goods that the "old world" may still cling to.
That sort of thinking is one of the goals of a scientist's education.
If the only way to be "unbiased" is to refuse to take a position on anything that is contested, even when there's a mountain of evidence for the position, well, I'd rather be biased!
Well said. Almost invariably someone who claims that an opponent's view in an argument is invalid because it is "biased" does not have any evidence of their own to stand on. It would be refreshing every once in a while to hear someone complain about their opponent being biased and then present facts along with their reasoned interpretation on their meaning.
I can't remember the last time I saw something like that happen.
Unfortunately most people want scandal, lurid crimes, partisan bickering, controversy and watching people fight. The problem here is mostly the American people and not so much the cable networks. Americans are so dumbed down most of them don't want to watch insightful debate or intelligent journalism.
What makes you think that just because people do something over and over again that they would prefer it to something else? What if those people never learned that they could have something better? What if they have been doing one thing for so long that they have forgotten what it was like to do something else?
If what you're saying is true, then Jon Stewart's show wouldn't have a viewing audience at all. Do you think maybe the fact that his show is the *only* news show for many Americans is evidence enough to the contrary? His show is labeled as fake news, but just as he says in the transcript of his interview, most of his material comes from the absurdity in the political system and its accompanying news-pundit right-hand-men. Now I simply can't watch *real* news. It's like the Allegory of the Cave applied to my own life.
I didn't watch news before the Daily Show. Now, whenever I see anything on FOX, CNN, et al I feel sick. That might mean that I am not *most* Americans. But I imagine that's it's harder to make the change to interesting journalism from CNN, FOX et al if you grew up watching them. This has no bearing on what people would actually want - just what they are used to and do habitually.
Remember, folks. One of the requirements of a (real) free market is good information.
It doesn't matter if what you're saying is true or not. Whether they are illegal or legal, people are going to use the hard drugs you are talking about. The parent is arguing that we will actually be in a much better position to help those people who actually do become addicts not only in the treatment phase but also in the preventative phase if they are made legal. You seem to be assuming that making something illegal will stop people from doing it. Whether you are right or not, making something illegal makes it ILLEGAL, and people must do illegal things to get the stuff they want. The product gets sold through illegal channels, the sellers of the product do illegal things to get rid of their competition, and the users get used to hiding from authorities and breaking the law to do the things they want to do anyway.
Have you ever heard of anyone talking about drug safety in school? About the proper dosages of certain drugs to take and survive? Of how to tell if a batch of drugs you have might cause you serious health problems? Beyond saying "drugs are bad and you shouldn't do them," school drug awareness programs don't tell kids anything about how to do drugs and be safe. Ask yourself why young children don't get taught these things in school. If you answered "because those things are illegal" then you're probably right. But it also means that children are not getting properly educated on what drug use may do to their lives, how to prevent harming themselves using drugs and safe amounts to take but they are still taking drugs anyway. What if schools could actually give reccomendations on which drugs to take or in what doses? What if there were "bars" that you could go to to do a little ice and would flag a taxi to drive you home afterwards?
You seemed happy that someone noted that prohibition does not work but you failed to rebute their statement. Like I have pointed out, you seemed to think that because crack, cocaine, et al are hard drugs that prohibitive laws should work better than they did for alcohol. This is not true. Prohibitive laws do not work on anything if many people want what is being prohibited. It does not matter if that thing is coca cola or LSD. The demand is still there whether there are prohibitive laws in place, but since the market for those things can no longer be a legitimate market, the market becomes a "black market" and drops out from under the watchful eyes of the medical authorities and FDA.
For a moment, I'll assume that you're claiming that since the market becomes a black market the supply of illicit drugs will drop and therefore less people will be able to get them. Measuring actual supply in a black market is hard to do, so I'll pose this question to you: have you ever met anyone who was not able to find an illicit drug they wanted to buy? How many people do you know who could sell you any illicit drugs you wanted? How many people do you know who *know someone* who could sell an illicit drug to you? From my standpoint, I know at least two people who fill each of those categories, even though I don't do any illicit drugs. This is an example of what happens in a free market - if there is profit to be made at all, people (read: drug dealers) will find a way to make it. The high demand for those substances in effect creates the market for them. As long as there is a dollar profit to be made, someone will be there to sell you the pot. Ask an economist to explain to you why seller surplus tends toward 0 in a free market. (seller surplus tends towards 0 means that the market approaches its equilibrium - anyone who wants drugs at the market price can get them.)
What about demand? Maybe you could argue that since users are worried about getting caught by authorities they are less likely to buy illicit drugs. Fair enough, but ask yourself which drugs are more likely to lose business because of prohibition. From an economic standpoint, the demand for those dru
I can't clearly remember what all the criterion were. Maybe it was money spent to treat people in the hospital due to drug abuse. It really doesn't matter. The point is that some economists are actually concerned with the problem of measuring overall standard-of-living accurately.
That's very true. In my post I was talking about classical liberalism and conservatism, and I should have said so. Politics has traditionally been looked at in three different realms: the economic, the regulatory (which is supposed to cover stuff like law enforcement and other laws to keep people orderly, health care, etc), and social.
The "old" notions of conservative and liberal dealt primarily with the first two realms of lawmaking (mostly because people felt that no one would even think of violating social taboos). The current Republican leadership seems to be less concerned about their role in regulating the economy, education or health care and more about regulating what happens in peoples' bedrooms. That's not to say there aren't people who care about the economy or health care in the Republican leadership, but as a whole they seem to not have a unifying policy or plan regarding those two issues (which is probably why nobody in the Replublican party really talks about it). This contrasts with the older Republican party, which believed that the role of the government was to stay as far out of the economic and regulatory realms as they could and let people sort things out for themselves.
The Democrats are also not as unified as they have been in the past, but there seems to be some semblance of a direction they believe the country should take regarding the economic and regulatory realms. Ironically, it looks to me like Democrats are more "conservative" than the new Republican party is. This is evidenced in the fact that Clinton managed to have a defecit surplus for the past few years of his presidency (which is evidence of less government spending and hence less involvement in the economic and regulatory realms). This is not exactly true, though, since much of the "cut budgets" were military. So they might have actually had bigger social programs while spending less overall.
I digress. I have tried to talk about the way politics have changed since the Reagan years. The most important thing to see is the way people have changed the way they think about laws since then. The old "conservative" and "liberals" were concerned with making laws telling the government what they could and could not do. The new "conservatives" and "liberals" look at laws as dictating what citizens can and can not do. Laws and policies that place restrictions on the government are called liberties. These are things like your "right to privacy". Laws and policies that obligate the government to provide servies to citizens are called rights. An example is the "right to a fair and speedy trial". Since both categories of law are referred to as "rights" things get confusing. But looking at it this way, it is clear to see that the current political parties are much more concerned with our rights than they are with our liberties even though this wasn't always the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Make two games. The first game is simple and/or mindless and is designed expecting a casual/ newbie gamer to play it. Have that game fund another game which is more complex and intended for a more discerning crowd. That way you can make money and satisfy the hungry hardcore gamers out there at little extra cost (the creation of a simpler game that a broader group of people can enjoy).
Besides 9/11, how many terrorist attacks were there before the Act was passed? It is a logical fallacy to assume that attacks have been prevented due to the PATRIOT Act.
Here's an example of the same logic: You are a healthy person, but one day you contract a disease. I give you a pill that you have never seen before and tell you that taking it will prevent future illness. You can only claim that the pill was sucsessful at preventing illness if and only if you would have gotten sick without it and you didn't get sick when you would have. First, you must be able to tell if you would have gotten sick in the first place, which you can't know. If you don't ever get sick again, there is no way to tell whether or not it was due to my pill or due to the fact that you are a healthy person. It is a logical fallacy to claim either one, but if you had never been sick before now, it is certainly more reasonable to attribute your health to the strength of your body since that has been proven over and over again.
As I understand, the counter-terrorist intelligence in this country was very good before the PATRIOT Act. Just because we haven't had an attack since 9/11 does not mean it was due to the PATRIOT Act. It may easily be due to the good work those people are doing and have done in the past.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
Right on. Right on.
if you are living in an area where the vote is more or less decided (such as a very strong Bush locale, or a very strong Kerry locale)
I get the impression that this election will hold a lot of surprises. Here in Texas I am seeing a good number of Kerry supporters even though my state (and city!) have been overwhelmingly conservative in the past. My city is big on business, and I know many businessmen who are traditional Republicans yet think electing Bush is a foolish idea at best. It is possible that my state may still go for Bush, but if there's ever a time when you can vote Democrat in Texas and maybe actually be in the majority, it is now in this election.
In the history of the US, there have been instances where states which have traditionally voted one way have flipped overnight to vote heavily for the opposing party. Even though Texas has voted Republican in the past, I personally know many conservatives who will absoultely not vote for Bush in this election. The people here know business, and even they have their limits. You should not expect a state to go for one candidate just because it has gone for their party in the past. Things can change, and stranger things have happened.
Ahem. Two words. "Finding Nemo".
Oh, why does it have to happen to all the A-list titles?
I'm really sorry that you feel liberty is more important than safety. You do realize that if it were up to the terrorists you wouldn't have either, right?
It's a good thing it's not up to them, then.
Um... Kerry bashes it, yet he voted for it. You don't find that even a tiny bit hypocritical?
Normally I would think it's hypocritical... Maybe... Things are never that black and white to me. And in this case, I don't think he's being hypocritical. The reason I don't think he's being hypocritical is that he never went against any of his principals by voting for the Act, because he did not know what was in it when he voted for it.
The stories I've heard about the passage of the PATRIOT Act mostly go like this:
Congressman (I don't remember whether or not Senators, House members or both said this): "We were given this bill and told to vote on it. We we not given time to read it. We were told that it was an emergency counter-terrorism measure and that the fate of the country rested on its passage."
I wasn't there. I don't know what happened. But in nearly every story I've heard told about the PATRIOT Act's passage, the phrases "were not given time to read it" and "were not given time to discuss it" keep coming up. I can't make the claim that any Congressman, be they Republican, Democrat, or Third Party, knew what the Act really said when they voted on it if (like all the stories say) they were not able to read it before voting. I can't reasonably expect a Congressman to know what the provisions in a law are without being able to read it. Laws are long. Laws are convoluted. Laws have tons of crap (riders) that you have to wade through before you can find the important parts. Reading and understanding a law takes time. If time is not given for that purpose, I do not hold a Congressman accountable for understanding a law.
If the members of Congress had been given adequate time to read and absorb the law and John Kerry chose to ignore that opportunity, I might feel differently. But that's not what the stories suggest.
So did John Kerry go against his principals by signing the PATRIOT Act? If he did not know what the act entailed, I don't see how he could have made a concious decision to go against his principals, and therefore I can not call him a hypocrite. I might have done the exact same thing in his place, and I hold principals which are so strongly against denial of due process and secret laws that I can't even begin to describe them.
But there's more to the story. The PATRIOT Act exists. A huge pile of paper with a law written on it does not just appear out of mid-air. That means that someone had to have written it. There was at least one person who knew what was in the PATRIOT Act at the time Congress was voting on it. There were probably many more than one. I want to know who those people are. If those people claim to love the freedoms of the US, then they are the hypocrites for even considering to propose a law which so easily shrugs them off.
If you've heard a different story as to what happened in Congress on the day the PATRIOT Act was passed, I would love to hear it (I don't mean that sarcastically at all. I really would like to know what other people think happened). Given what I think happened during the passage of the PATRIOT Act, there is certainly at least one person (probably more) out there who deserves to have his/her feet held to the fire regarding that law. I don't think John Kerry is in that group.
A few inconveniences are a bery small price to pay for safety and security of the state and its people.
No amount of protection from terrorism - not even if it protected us all ad infinitum - is worth one iota of my precious liberty. There is a bigger number of human lives than I can even conceptualize that were given so that I could live in a place where I have the chance to live freely. Nothing is worth voiding the fruits of their sacrifices. Nothing.
Now on to my point. The only rebuttal I have seen to complaints about the PATRIOT Act have been of the "Don't worry. Nobody will use it to do that sort of stuff."
I humbly submit this:
Even if you think Bush and the executive branch of the government under him are from the highest chorus of angels and would never do anything to hurt the citizens of the USA, it should not affect your judgement of the PATRIOT Act at all. For that matter, it should not affect your judgement of any law passed while he is in office, regardless of who passes it, who proposes it, and who votes on it. A bad law passed by a group of angels is still a bad law.
Say the president is an angel and asks the Congress (who are also a group of angels) to pass a law that provides ways of foregoing due process. Say also that the president, the leadership of Homeland Security and every law enforcement agent in the country are angels and the law is never abused even once. It is still a bad law.
It is a bad law because in the hands of a devil the law could be abused and used to hurt the people of the USA. Your rebuttal - the claim that the law is okay since it will never be abused - is entirely based on the assumption that we will have angels in public office for as long as the law is a law. If you think the terrorist threat is going to be around for a while, then you should expect the PATRIOT Act and things like it to be around for just as long. It shows no signs of going away, and a PATRIOT Act II was even proposed, I believe.
The assumption that this country will elect angel after angel is a tenuous one at best. The President is not the only one you should be worried about. What about the leadership of law enforcement and the DHS? Do you think every one of them is an angel? Have you met all of them? The "goodness" of a law should never have to be judged based on who uses it. This is something that a citizen of this country should agree on regardless of their political affiliation.
A law is a good law if 1.) it does what it sets out to do efficiently, 2.) what is sets out to do is in the public's best interest, and 3.) it can not be abused by those who would abuse it. For the PATRIOT Act, point 1 can be argued on both sides, most people will agree on point 2, but it fails miserably on point 3. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to give law enforcement a way to forego due process, but it's in the Act.
As a citizen, I will not bet the well-being of my country ride on whether or not the people in office have good intentions. I know a lot of people who don't like to see the PATRIOT Act being attacked feel that it is a personal attack on their Candidate of Choice. I mean to suggest that even if John Kerry or Clinton had pushed the PATRIOT Act through Congress, the very same people would be complaining. I definitely would. They would be complaining not because they are Republicans or Democrats, but because they are good citizens. One prerequisite to having good laws is being critial of them.
All that being said, I think it's really funny that a lot of conservatives rag on John Kerry and the liberals in Congress for voting to pass such a heinous law. Who proposed the law in the first place?
No, I did not RTFA. I guess it was just wishful thinking that there's a lady out there who even knows the names of half those games.
I don't see any reason Crisis Core could be a killer app.
Given what happened with X and X-2, I wouldn't be surprised if this game falls very far short of the standard set by FF7.
FAVORITE BOOKS: Screw books! Video games: Ninja Gaiden, Halo, Zelda, Final Fantasy I-VI, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Castlevania, Silent Hill, Earthworm Jim, Mega Man, Unreal, Metroid, Doom, Soul Caliber, Guilty Gear, F-Zero GX, Eternal Darkness, KOTOR, WarCraft
I think I'm in love.
They should take a page from Serious Sam. You can handle AI calculations with a client-server architecture. The server only need to pipe back what the AI entities do to the clients (this is a separate problem in itself, but it's not like no one has ever come up with a good solution before). As far as cutscenes are concerned, in Serious Sam, the first player to active the scene would have it played on their screen while the others would not. The realtime aspect of the game was maintained, and usually no one gave a damn about not being able to see the cutscenes. I don't think that is really the appeal of co-op play, after all. If a cutscene revealed some sort of secret, it was up to the person who saw it to communicate with their teammates - just what should happen in co-op.
This aligns those people who make money via their creative output (as opposed to, say, tilling a field or screwing plastic things together on an assembly line) to be in a better position to support their family once they've shrugged this mortal coil.
You seem to be missing a very important aspect of what the copyright situation is now compared to how it used to be. Why haven't we had problems with piracy in the past? I'm sure we have, but I don't think anyone would claim that things are no worse than they were 10 years ago. The same things (music, books, et al) were copyrighted back then, but people never really had a problem with rampant piracy before now. What has changed since then? The answer is easy, but it illustrates the fundamental difference between something a musician does and something a farmer does.
The difference is this: It is trivial to enforce the scarcity of farms and farmers, while no one can enfore the scarcity of digital recordings any more. Said another way, a farmer is able to leave a legacy to his children simply because the legacy itself is something that only one or a few people can own. At the time the USA was founded, the term property was largely understood to mean "land," and many property laws made at that time involved disputes over land. A farm is land, and that is the sole reason it is valuable. Emphasis: its value is derived directly from its scarcity. The very same plot of land a farm is built on could be used to build a shopping mall, housing, a landfill, an office building, whatever. The reason we care about what is built on what land is that there is only so much of it to go around.
If you remember your history, you might remember that when the USA was founded, land was sold very cheaply - a person with only a little money could (within their lifetime) buy a plot and establish a household of their own. When there was a lot to go around, it was cheap. But as more and more land got bought up and developed, the price of a plot inevitably rose. We're now at the point where you have to pay some hundreds of dollars a month to live in a tiny appartment in New York.
Why did this happen? Because there is only so much land to go around (and the amount can be measured). Land's scarcity is automatically enforced.
What is slowly becoming apparent is that a digital recording of music does not have the same property as land does. Due to the technology we have now which makes it easy to replicate and propagate data, the scarcity of a single ditial recording can simply not be enforced. There's no good way to tell how many exist, and there's no good way to be a "gatekeeper" and control who gets what media. Someone might have been able to pull that off in the past, but not now. No matter what the laws say, a digital recording is nothing more than information, and by now, a majority of Americans have devices capable of flawlessly reproducing and propogating data. So as a result, the value of a single recording will tend towards 0 as the number tends towards infinity. This is perfectly natural and follows from economic theories.
My point follows:
Such a philosophy doesn't sit well with a portion of the Slashdot crowd who think that society would be better off if artists and writers knew their place
You sure do seem angry, but may I suggest that the "portion of the Slashdot crowd" you are refering to have actually thought their position out and come to a conclusion that is well-reasoned and logical regardless of how much it flies in the face of conventional wisdom? Some of us have more than philosophies with regards to these issues. The conclusion I came to above comes from an application of economic theories. And frankly, I'm irked that people think it's a good idea to apply what are essentially land laws to something which simply does not have the same characteristics. In my mind, it is foolhardy. Not only that, I have provided an argument
Some banks that have security guards in them never get robbed. So, using your "logic" those security guards are an unnecessary expense that increases my bank fees.
Just to be safe, maybe we should perform cavity searches on everyone who enters the bank to make sure they aren't carrying any concealed weapons.
Do you know the fundamental difference between things like the Patriot Act and having guards at a bank? The guards at the bank don't bother anyone who doesn't pose an immediate threat to the safety of the people who work there/ the money or the members of the bank. In effect the "innocent until proven guilty" mentality is still strong and in effect. That is why most people feel just fine with having guards.
Anything that adopts the stance of "guilty until proven innocent" is not worth one iota of my precious liberty, even if it were to stop all terrorist activity from here to perpetuity.
Brave men fought for the liberties we have today. They were courageous and daring. They could have submitted at any time, and they probably felt afraid often enough to seriously consider it. If our ancestors had stopped fighting for liberty everytime they felt afraid, we would have none today. I don't care how terrified I am. My right to wear the clothes I want and say the things I want in a public forum are my own.
Did President Bush call the local authorities and say, "As part of my War on Terror, please unreasonably search all those Goddamned stupid hippies who have been annually gathering to stink up the Georgia countryside lo, this past quarter century?" Of course not.
Whether he did or not, he can say it legally now. Nobody in the past could say it legally. Are these the sorts of laws you want on the books? Some people still believe that the government shouldn't have any power at all that allows them to jail and interrogate people without going through the proper public channels and without a written reason why that person poses an immediate and direct threat to the health of our nation. Some people still believe that citizens of this country should be given fair and public trials no matter what.
Considering that the leading challenger against Bush voted for the Patriot Act, I don't see much change if we continue to stick with the homogeneity of the two major parties.
I agree that the two major parties have not presented compelling candidates for this race, but I feel it is unfair to point out that Kerry voted for the Patriot Act without also pointing out that the act was pushed through Congress without the legislators getting to read it.
It's clear that the patriot act could have prevented 911.
For those of you who have missed a few episodes, the Clinton administration has reported that they were aware that terrorists were planning to attack our country before before 9/11 (and hence before the Partiot Act), and that they told Bush's administration about the impending attack. It is not clear that the Patriot Act would have prevented the events of 9/11, and furthermore, it is not clear that had the act been in place prior to 9/11 that the intelligence agencies would have taken appropriate steps to stop the events if they did not act on the information the Clinton administration gave to them.
Kerry is just as bad.
So?
There are two major candidates in the next presidential race. The names have been ommitted to protect the innocent, but one has been president before. That person has made mistake after mistake after mistake in both the foreign policy and economic spheres. That person outright lied to the citizens of this country on national television and on more than one occasion. The other has not.
I know who I'm voting for. I don't like the person I'm voting for very much, which is why in the 2008 election I will seriously consider casting a Libertarian vote. But I feel it is my duty as a citizen to dispense with an obvious failure in favor of someone who has no track record in the executive branch of the government. It is not because of my politics, and it is not because of some amount of pride. It is because of my pride as a citizen.
So... let's shut down the CIA, the DHS, and the terrorism wing of the FBI?
How about instead we don't give everything a knee-jerk reaction?
Would you really have to port office to Linux to be able to convince people to switch?
.doc files. If that standard were opened and implimented in the numerous Linux text editors, I would never have to explain to people that the .docs I send them may look strange because I don't use MS Office.
I use OpenOffice for my text-editing needs, and the only pain it causes me is that it can't perfectly write and read
I like OpenOffice a lot, but I am reluctant to suggest that friends and family of mine switch because of the fact that their old files would not be read/ rendered correctly.
From my perspective, the closed MS standards that only MS Office can read and write are the only thing keeping it alive.
This is what good software is all about, after all. Not who can read what files, but who can streamline the user experience and perform their task the most efficiently. It is that criterion that software should compete on, and none other.
A lousy review seems to be the best chance at that; maybe none have actually "Gone too far" yet.
Good post. One assumption you seem to be making is that stuff like this happens instantly. Someone who buys this round of games with annoying ads will be less likely to buy into the next round that comes around if they are annoyed by the ads. I know quite a few gamers who would feel incredibly patronized and insulted by this sort of thing. Those people aren't the sort of people who play sports games, but that does not mean that people who play Madden 2004 don't have limits on what they will tolerate.
Unfortunately, this seems to me like another example of where video game makers have the potential to irk the shit out of buyers and get away with it.
Keep in mind that having annoying ads in a game essentially raises the price of the game to potential buyers. You have to pay the price of the game AND put up with ads every five minutes. The fact that ads raise the price of a game for an end-user explains why people keep saying "if they lowered the price of such games, i would be willing to consider buying them". You can balance things out by lowering the monetary cost and increasing the annoyance factor. Since the "annoyance factor" is different for each individual gamer, the amount you would have to lower the price for each gamer will be different. The companies are banking on the fact that people won't be that annoyed at having ads in their games. That's probably why they are being put in sports games primarily. Can you imagine Doom3 with a commercial in the middle?
The real point I'm trying to make is that competitive products (i.e. Not-Madden 2005) can use the abscence of ads in their game as a marketing point. Competitive products without intrusive ads can leverage that fact against the products that do. If they are sucsessful, I suspect we will see the prices for ad-filled games drop or the ads themselves will be removed. So while people might continue to buy ad-filled games in the short run, companies might figure out that they can gain a market advantage by exploiting the desire for ad-free games.
Econ101 only teaches you about the old world. It doesnt take into account goods that can be reproduced with no cost.
Actually, the theories taught in economics are fairly timeless. If an assumption is made about a certain good or set of goods (i.e. scarcity is automatically enforced by the sheer physical number of said product), that does not mean the entire theory falls apart if you take away that assumption. All it means is that you have to figure out the rammifications of said assumption and change your model accordingly.
I might also add that what is happening with software and music piracy right now does not contradict long-standing economic models. Any economist worth their salt would be able to think critically about such markets without being tied to certain assumptions about the scarcity of goods that the "old world" may still cling to.
That sort of thinking is one of the goals of a scientist's education.
If the only way to be "unbiased" is to refuse to take a position on anything that is contested, even when there's a mountain of evidence for the position, well, I'd rather be biased!
Well said. Almost invariably someone who claims that an opponent's view in an argument is invalid because it is "biased" does not have any evidence of their own to stand on. It would be refreshing every once in a while to hear someone complain about their opponent being biased and then present facts along with their reasoned interpretation on their meaning.
I can't remember the last time I saw something like that happen.
Unfortunately most people want scandal, lurid crimes, partisan bickering, controversy and watching people fight. The problem here is mostly the American people and not so much the cable networks. Americans are so dumbed down most of them don't want to watch insightful debate or intelligent journalism.
What makes you think that just because people do something over and over again that they would prefer it to something else? What if those people never learned that they could have something better? What if they have been doing one thing for so long that they have forgotten what it was like to do something else?
If what you're saying is true, then Jon Stewart's show wouldn't have a viewing audience at all. Do you think maybe the fact that his show is the *only* news show for many Americans is evidence enough to the contrary? His show is labeled as fake news, but just as he says in the transcript of his interview, most of his material comes from the absurdity in the political system and its accompanying news-pundit right-hand-men. Now I simply can't watch *real* news. It's like the Allegory of the Cave applied to my own life.
I didn't watch news before the Daily Show. Now, whenever I see anything on FOX, CNN, et al I feel sick. That might mean that I am not *most* Americans. But I imagine that's it's harder to make the change to interesting journalism from CNN, FOX et al if you grew up watching them. This has no bearing on what people would actually want - just what they are used to and do habitually.
Remember, folks. One of the requirements of a (real) free market is good information.
It doesn't matter if what you're saying is true or not. Whether they are illegal or legal, people are going to use the hard drugs you are talking about. The parent is arguing that we will actually be in a much better position to help those people who actually do become addicts not only in the treatment phase but also in the preventative phase if they are made legal. You seem to be assuming that making something illegal will stop people from doing it. Whether you are right or not, making something illegal makes it ILLEGAL, and people must do illegal things to get the stuff they want. The product gets sold through illegal channels, the sellers of the product do illegal things to get rid of their competition, and the users get used to hiding from authorities and breaking the law to do the things they want to do anyway.
Have you ever heard of anyone talking about drug safety in school? About the proper dosages of certain drugs to take and survive? Of how to tell if a batch of drugs you have might cause you serious health problems? Beyond saying "drugs are bad and you shouldn't do them," school drug awareness programs don't tell kids anything about how to do drugs and be safe. Ask yourself why young children don't get taught these things in school. If you answered "because those things are illegal" then you're probably right. But it also means that children are not getting properly educated on what drug use may do to their lives, how to prevent harming themselves using drugs and safe amounts to take but they are still taking drugs anyway. What if schools could actually give reccomendations on which drugs to take or in what doses? What if there were "bars" that you could go to to do a little ice and would flag a taxi to drive you home afterwards?
You seemed happy that someone noted that prohibition does not work but you failed to rebute their statement. Like I have pointed out, you seemed to think that because crack, cocaine, et al are hard drugs that prohibitive laws should work better than they did for alcohol. This is not true. Prohibitive laws do not work on anything if many people want what is being prohibited. It does not matter if that thing is coca cola or LSD. The demand is still there whether there are prohibitive laws in place, but since the market for those things can no longer be a legitimate market, the market becomes a "black market" and drops out from under the watchful eyes of the medical authorities and FDA.
For a moment, I'll assume that you're claiming that since the market becomes a black market the supply of illicit drugs will drop and therefore less people will be able to get them. Measuring actual supply in a black market is hard to do, so I'll pose this question to you: have you ever met anyone who was not able to find an illicit drug they wanted to buy? How many people do you know who could sell you any illicit drugs you wanted? How many people do you know who *know someone* who could sell an illicit drug to you? From my standpoint, I know at least two people who fill each of those categories, even though I don't do any illicit drugs. This is an example of what happens in a free market - if there is profit to be made at all, people (read: drug dealers) will find a way to make it. The high demand for those substances in effect creates the market for them. As long as there is a dollar profit to be made, someone will be there to sell you the pot. Ask an economist to explain to you why seller surplus tends toward 0 in a free market. (seller surplus tends towards 0 means that the market approaches its equilibrium - anyone who wants drugs at the market price can get them.)
What about demand? Maybe you could argue that since users are worried about getting caught by authorities they are less likely to buy illicit drugs. Fair enough, but ask yourself which drugs are more likely to lose business because of prohibition. From an economic standpoint, the demand for those dru
I can't clearly remember what all the criterion were. Maybe it was money spent to treat people in the hospital due to drug abuse. It really doesn't matter. The point is that some economists are actually concerned with the problem of measuring overall standard-of-living accurately.
That's very true. In my post I was talking about classical liberalism and conservatism, and I should have said so. Politics has traditionally been looked at in three different realms: the economic, the regulatory (which is supposed to cover stuff like law enforcement and other laws to keep people orderly, health care, etc), and social.
The "old" notions of conservative and liberal dealt primarily with the first two realms of lawmaking (mostly because people felt that no one would even think of violating social taboos). The current Republican leadership seems to be less concerned about their role in regulating the economy, education or health care and more about regulating what happens in peoples' bedrooms. That's not to say there aren't people who care about the economy or health care in the Republican leadership, but as a whole they seem to not have a unifying policy or plan regarding those two issues (which is probably why nobody in the Replublican party really talks about it). This contrasts with the older Republican party, which believed that the role of the government was to stay as far out of the economic and regulatory realms as they could and let people sort things out for themselves.
The Democrats are also not as unified as they have been in the past, but there seems to be some semblance of a direction they believe the country should take regarding the economic and regulatory realms. Ironically, it looks to me like Democrats are more "conservative" than the new Republican party is. This is evidenced in the fact that Clinton managed to have a defecit surplus for the past few years of his presidency (which is evidence of less government spending and hence less involvement in the economic and regulatory realms). This is not exactly true, though, since much of the "cut budgets" were military. So they might have actually had bigger social programs while spending less overall.
I digress. I have tried to talk about the way politics have changed since the Reagan years. The most important thing to see is the way people have changed the way they think about laws since then. The old "conservative" and "liberals" were concerned with making laws telling the government what they could and could not do. The new "conservatives" and "liberals" look at laws as dictating what citizens can and can not do. Laws and policies that place restrictions on the government are called liberties. These are things like your "right to privacy". Laws and policies that obligate the government to provide servies to citizens are called rights. An example is the "right to a fair and speedy trial". Since both categories of law are referred to as "rights" things get confusing. But looking at it this way, it is clear to see that the current political parties are much more concerned with our rights than they are with our liberties even though this wasn't always the case.