Wouldn't it be an interesting world if this took off and you don't even own your own money anymore, and essentially have to use "disney dollars" for purchases.
Huh? Isn't that the same thing the Federal Government does to me every April?
Ever walk to your car in a dark parking lot? When you do, do you give thought to being attacked? I don't, but almost every woman I've asked says she does. I recently heard that 10% of high school senior girls report having been raped. These are girls under 18.
I'm not going to comment on this ladies issue, but I live in a city with over 300 murders last year. The vast majority of them were males 18-30.
There are drug dealers who like to hang out on my street, there was an axe murder two blocks over, and I've had a hard time driving home one night due to the fact police cordoned off a local park in hopes to catch someone who just shot a cop (about 1 block over). I've heard a drive by before...
My hood of my car has a big dent in it from someone getting slammed into it (not sure if was the cops) and my girl friend saw an actual swat team once while I was away from home doing a sweep.
And yes... I've often had thoughts about that person asking me for change is going to whip out a knife or a gun. Or if one day I'm going to be walking to my car on the street only to get shot by accident... But it doesn't consume me nor my girlfriend.
I suppose it would be better to move into the sub burbs and things have gotten better recently in the past years... But statically I'm more likely to die than majority of the people that you are referring too.
And yet I don't sit around in fear... Heck... Even my girl room mate doesn't live in fear... You get over it if you want to live your life and just be really cautious.
I don't want to paint it like where I live is a warzone (its not as bad as the city across the river *coughs*) but yes... As a guy who has had girlfriends physically strong than him... I've taken this into account. Of course when you face a person with a gun... Being a guy or girl or weak or strong doesn't make a difference.
unless I missed the chapter where Rome was sacked by anonymous graffiti artists.
Does the name "Vandals" ring any bells?
Re:Ultima Online during 2000 had most of this
on
Rethinking the MMOG
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· Score: 1
1. Level grinding sucks. We had to do it in Final Fantasy 1,2,3 and most of 4. Same with Dragon Warrior/Quest series. It sucks.
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
I would agree. I haven't played Ultima Online for about 7 years now (god has it been that long) but I really enjoyed playing it at the time due to the fact character advancement was based on skills and not levels.
Again, Ultima Online (in the past I can't vouch for it now because it became a different game) was fairly balanced in this aspect. You had what they called 7x Grand Masters who had maxed out their skills, but if he were jumped by a good deal of newbie players (say 5 to 10) he might face death if he is careless. Wheras a level 60 character in EQ (if he was theoretically allowed to pvp people at that gap) could basically lay waste to thousands of newbie players in less than 5 minutes duration.
But the real problem that UO was the greifing I suppose and the massive amounts of changes to the game in order to resolve these issues actually drove away many non-griefers (including myself).
I think the only way to police greifing and player content is to actually trust and empower the players and allow them power over the world itself.
I think that was Ralph Koster's original vision which he took from UO to SWG, but seeing how both have been changed into something neither they started out to be... well... it is a moot point.
This doesn't appeal to people who just want to play their mp3s.
True, but I've always found that I am lugging my cell phone and iPod nano around everywhere I go. If they were one device then it would save me the hassle of two devices in my pockets.
Even the innocent will settle. The only people who stand a chance are those who are so obviously innocent that the RIAA case against them is ridiculous
Actually, even if you are obviously innocent it might be still cheaper to settle than be acquitted in court. Unless you happen to be a lawyer or know one who would work for free for you...
Long Answer: It might reduct the affects on items not plugged in, but in general an EMP bomb goes off near your house, it will come in through the power or phone lines. I remember reading somewhere about bunkers that are EMP shielded have internal power sources and having communications with fiber optic lines to the outside world in order to prevent the EMP shock coming in that way.
Maybe if your house had tinfoil over the windows, underground power lines, Verizon FiOS, and this paint... Then maybe.
So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.
Like I said in a post above, if you find yourself having to persuade management constantly to make decisions in order to do your job, then it is usually a management problem. Usually they have given you responsibility without authority to act on those responsibilities (usually your management has the reverse in those instances... authority without responsibility) so you can't work independently without having to do a powerpoint presentation for every task.
Usually, this may stem from management not trusting you or their apathy towards what you do outweighs the effort to put in a system in place to have some sort of oversight. And if they aren't responding to your emails then chances are they are just are too apathetic towards what you do which is not the fault of email, but rather management....
Which ironically the only way to resolve is to persuade them to be less so.
I could be horribly wrong about your situation in particular, but I wouldn't blame email as the core problem.
Email has failed only if you use it for marketing or as a persuasion tool. As for communicating information it works fairly well.
However, perhaps we should be looking at these other problem... Persuasion.
Personally, I'll have none of it and I don't understand businesses that get talked into deals with cold call sales vendors. (Cold call in the industry means they call you first rather than the customer calling the sales department)
First of all, if you are running a business you should not have to persuade your employees, coworkers, or higher ups. Persuading your employees to comply shouldn't be that hard of a task and if they don't then it isn't because you aren't a good persuader but rather perhaps they are the wrong employee for the job (or perhaps you are asking them to do something they simply can't do or isn't actually their job in the first place).
However, persuading higher ups and coworkers isn't your job either. If you have to do a song and dance with a power point presentation every time to the CEO every time you need to get something approved to do your basic job functions then perhaps your employers don't trust you or they just don't care well enough to put into place a system into which you can perform your job independently but with oversight. Of course thats more of a management issue...
As far as getting customers, emailing as a form of communication is of course spam unless they contact you first via email for information. Cold calling is of course the same thing as telemarketing...
Doing both may actually loose customers and make a good deal of people angry at you.
As far as people traveling for that "big sales" meeting... I just never understood.
If you are a company in need of a product... Why do you need someone persuading you to buy theirs over someone else. Their art of persuasion doesn't make their actual product or services any better and in fact if your company buys products based on these sales meetings perhaps someone should look at if the vendors are giving out benefits of persuasion to the managers who are authorized to spend said money.
In fact, people with authorization to buy products or services should be hired on the sole fact they are not easily persuaded and do not take bribes from vendors. They should be the ones cold calling the vendors and then asking for plain cold information in emails and then not respond to the vendors relentless voice mails and not wasting company money going to meetings with countless vendors when they already know what product/service the company should buy.
Anything else is just hurting the buying company's bottom line, but I suppose that is why I don't work in marketing.
The only problem there is that real physical property always has some level of intrinsic value simply because it physically exists.
I would disagree.
Sometimes having a physical property is liability.
Lets say its 1969 Detroit. You buy a house...
During 1970 Detroit the US car manufacturing plummets, crime increases, and your neighborhood becomes a warzone.
You still are paying the mortgage... Now you can't sell the house and even if you didn't have a mortgage you still have to pay taxes and eventually you either stay put for the next 50 years and hope you don't get killed with the slim hope of an urban revival.
If not, you either foreclose or let the government seize the property for back taxes and all of this will cost you money.
I use Detroit for an example, but there are plenty of other things that could cause this in other cities. Not just crime, but natural disasters and man made (like toxic spills)
To be fair... In Philadelphia, housing prices are skyrocketing because of urban revival.
Of course this didn't happen because of wise investors who held on to their property over the years... But rather the City passed a law that seizes property that has been abandoned and sells it off to the highest bidder.
When people are too addictive to games such that the line between reality and virtuality is blurred, it starts to get into a dangerous point. Life suddenly becomes all about speculation, nothing is real and no productivity is gained for human societies as a whole.
The same could be said about the stock market or any other hyper reality system.
Actually, the stock market itself is nothing but computers, lots of paper, and a bunch of guys screaming at each other on a floor. Isolated from the rest of the world it has no productivity unto itself. It creates no art, makes no product, and provides no service to consumers.
If the stock market was not tied to any real world money you wouldn't notice much if you formatted their hard drives, burnt the back up tapes, shredded the shares, and sent the yelling traders home.
However, since the stock markets of the world as tied into basically the entire world's money and create a meta-reality that affects me and you on a daily basis.
By itself second life does nothing for productivity of the world other than art and entertainment, but if people value this and put a price on it then it becomes like the stock market in that sense.
(I can't really believe I'm comparing the two but productivity is in the eye of the beholder)
I'd like to point out that most of the insurgents are either getting new munitions from Iran or have plenty of military grade munitions laying around from the previous administration.
I mean a 150MM artillery shell isn't something you keep about your house either is it?
I find it morbidly amusing how some people find the lack of desire to have net access must mean there's something inherently wrong with the person.
To be fair, it isn't really that needed to have internet access and personally I wish I could do without sometimes. (I often tell people when I am not at work if they need to get a hold of me to use the phone because of having to sit in front of the computer 8 hours a day makes me hate the internet... but I digress)
However, let me use an anology....
Using the internet was akin to knowing Latin.
In 1995 Rome was a small village and if you traveled abroad you would have to speak whatever language was dictated such as paper book and magazines to radio to TV.
However, in 1997 Rome got uppity and conquered the rest of the world and by 2007 every one who was in the "know" now spoke Latin. Latin wasn't just for geeks anymore but for fashion designers, CEOs, and soccer moms.
Heck... Now Latin was boring and everyday.
However, if you were a Germanic visigoth barbarian (well to be fair the visigoth's were violent or uneducated but they didn't know latin that well) you could live happy lives doing whatever you want without learning how to use Latin.
However, if you a Visigoth wanted to get a job or go to school they would have to learn some Latin and in fact if they were to compete against other people who had Latin in their homes then it would make it harder for them to compete on that level if they didn't have Latin at home either.
Of course modern technology has provided people with Blackberries and other devices so you are always tied in to your Roman Slave masters... err... I mean jobs so it isn't always important that you can't work from home.
But seriously... If you want to compete on the job market these days you basically have to have a home connection if your field is highly competitive especially when it comes finding a job and then working from home.
Again... I'm not the competitive type and I would never work a job where I would be on call 24/7 or work from home, but that is why I make less much like other Visigoth's. Sometimes its just not worth it.
I seem to recall there is also another jet in the works that will take either 900 or 1,200 passenegers. Just wait until one of those crashes on take off and you've got over a thousand dead in one swoop.
To be fair, we'd have to crash 40 to 50 of them a year to equal the amount of Americans who die in car accidents. Freak accidents aside, you are still more likely to die driving to work (or perhaps your bathtub) than you are flying.
It is just that when planes do crash (and it has been a while since I remember the last one on the news) a lot of people end up dead all at once. It just looks bad on the news, but in reality we'd never had enough time in the day to show all the other people who died from other transportation methods.
To be fair, the Indians didn't travel to Washington DC and lay it to siege and then kill off several of our largest armies.
The Carthaginian massacre was mostly due to fear and retaliation for the Hannibal victories. I'm not saying the Carthaginians were asking for it, but rather they put a great deal of fear into the hearts of the Romans more than the Indians did with the Settlers.
All the talk about rich corporations out to squeeze the last dime from the consumer is just a smoke screen. What it comes down to is can people rely on patents, trademarks and copyrights for a livelihood.
Then why aren't these individuals pushing for change rather than the corporations? It is pretty clear that corporations want to use the law by any means needed to increase their profit margin. That is what they pay their legal experts and lobbyists to do.
To think otherwise is absurd.
Personally, I think you would be hard pressed to find a person who makes their livelihood based solely on intellectual property (in fact of the three you mention I would be shocked if an individual made a living on nothing but trademarks *coughs*).
In order to make a living, the artist or scientist often bring their materials to market often requiring them to give up their rights and hand them over to larger entities which makes the argument a moot point.
Often times these persons have to do secondary work (as in provide services) such as either live performances or perhaps technical troubleshooting service in the case of the patent in order to really make their end's meat.
The only people who really make a complete living off of intellectual property are of course corporations (and of course say... IP lawyers who didn't come up with the material themselves) and have a desire to appease shareholders so they maximize profits by paying their employees to do their best to change no only their company but consumers and of course law.
Like it or not... That is how things are really done. We could ban lobbying but that wouldn't really solve the core of the problem with the debate.
When a population begins engaging in lots of promiscuous sex with another population, such as during a rapacious, pillaging invasion, it tends to spread diseases between the two. Everyone on both sides gets herpes strains they're not immune to.
Actually, STDs haven't really been that fatal until recently. No one really dies from herpes and besides aids the only fatal STD had been syphilis which had not been introduction until Columbus returned from the new world after the 1500s.
So... Before then raping and pillaging was helpful in spreading your species genetics by monopolizing the resources and the breeding.
for explaining why the brain seeks out morality, but says nothing of why any given action is moral or not.
Actually, I saw the same article in Digg and would like to point out the same thing that I saw there... What they describe as morality is actually altruism which is not the same thing.
Again...
Morality != Altruism
And what the article describes is altruism and not morality. In fact, morality is often at odds with altruism. Altruism is quite apparent as a biological feature of homo sapiens (and other primates) and in fact if you don't have it then you are basically a sociopath which is about 1 out of a 100 persons.
The text book definition of altruism is of course "Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others." which is basically by no means related to morality when it comes to rules for society.
The chimp sees another chimp drowning and jumps in to save it. The same thing happens to humans and is most likely an evolutionary trait that helped our species survive.
Morality is that god or law or society says you must jump in the water to save the other chimp or we'll punish you. (Which there are bystander laws these days from my understanding)
Secondly, morality often comes into conflict with altruism... Where say you see another chimp starving but in order to feed him you have to steal food from another more wealthy chimp.
It is immoral, but at its instinct level it would be altruistic to see a chimp too that (which is why many view the Robin Hood fantasy as a good thing), but the other chimp may disagree and fight back leading to violence which other chimps may step in and enforce the rule of law which is morality.
I used to work for for a FoxPro developer back in 2001.
It was rather a fun and useful software and a whole lot nicer to work with than say MS Access at the time if you were developing your own database software.
I even got to attend a developers conference with them (I did training for them and support) and there were plenty of people that did Fox Pro.
However, they did have a contingency plan to switch all their products to MS SQL based solutions which I don't know how that went since I left the company.
It had its quirks, but I could see a lot of in house DB companies still using the product.
SCO Lawyer: "Your honor... I would like to point out that anyone who still owns shares of SCO at this point must have some sort form of mental retardation. Therefore if you rule against us, you will make 'special' people cry! And by special... I mean the 'special' people who have paid me and my team millions to drag this on for so long that they are going to be lucky to trade those shares in for toilet paper as it is."
The Romans Conquered the Greeks, the Normans conquered the Saxons, etc. The list goes on and on. The case has ALWAYS been that if some other nation wanted your land and you couldn't stand up to them in a military confrontation, then you were gonna loose that land.
As a person who loves to study European antiquity I would point out some flaws in this thinking...
1. When the Romans conquered the Greeks they actually adopted Greek culture and didn't kill off the Greeks. 2. When the Normans conquered the Saxons they didn't kill off the Saxons nor really conquered their land as much as just intermarried with them (Hence Anglo-Saxon Culture)
The only whole sale Genocides that history can come up with is the Crusaders massacre of Jerusalem (which wasn't really as much as hatred of Muslims as it was starving Europeans killing off everyone in the city regardless of religion out of rage of having to starve in the desert for several months) and then the Mongol sack of Baghdad which wasn't over so much as land, but out of spite of the execution of Mongol diplomats (considering they burned and salted the lands made the "take your lands" point of conquering sort of a non-issue).
The genocide and seizure of lands in this scale was never really seen before until the colonization of Americas. It wasn't as much as the Indians could not defend them as much as it was that the westerners thought they were subhuman.
Which sadly we saw again in the European theatre in WW2.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be an interesting world if this took off and you don't even own your own money anymore, and essentially have to use "disney dollars" for purchases.
Huh? Isn't that the same thing the Federal Government does to me every April?
That'd be the processor.
Doesn't Intel have a major plant in Israel now?
This is a government spaceport.
Isn't that the same for most FAA airports? Basically, the airports are run by the federal agency and leased by private corporations?
Certainly there should be some regulation of space travel like regular air travel.
No one wants a Boeing 747 or Multi-Stage rocket crashing in their neighborhood.
Ever walk to your car in a dark parking lot? When you do, do you give thought to being attacked? I don't, but almost every woman I've asked says she does. I recently heard that 10% of high school senior girls report having been raped. These are girls under 18.
I'm not going to comment on this ladies issue, but I live in a city with over 300 murders last year. The vast majority of them were males 18-30.
There are drug dealers who like to hang out on my street, there was an axe murder two blocks over, and I've had a hard time driving home one night due to the fact police cordoned off a local park in hopes to catch someone who just shot a cop (about 1 block over). I've heard a drive by before...
My hood of my car has a big dent in it from someone getting slammed into it (not sure if was the cops) and my girl friend saw an actual swat team once while I was away from home doing a sweep.
And yes... I've often had thoughts about that person asking me for change is going to whip out a knife or a gun. Or if one day I'm going to be walking to my car on the street only to get shot by accident... But it doesn't consume me nor my girlfriend.
I suppose it would be better to move into the sub burbs and things have gotten better recently in the past years... But statically I'm more likely to die than majority of the people that you are referring too.
And yet I don't sit around in fear... Heck... Even my girl room mate doesn't live in fear... You get over it if you want to live your life and just be really cautious.
I don't want to paint it like where I live is a warzone (its not as bad as the city across the river *coughs*) but yes... As a guy who has had girlfriends physically strong than him... I've taken this into account. Of course when you face a person with a gun... Being a guy or girl or weak or strong doesn't make a difference.
unless I missed the chapter where Rome was sacked by anonymous graffiti artists.
Does the name "Vandals" ring any bells?
1. Level grinding sucks. We had to do it in Final Fantasy 1,2,3 and most of 4. Same with Dragon Warrior/Quest series. It sucks.
2. How do you deal with rapidly differing levels of experience? Many places have higher level only places and those aren't fun as they're only high levelers.
I would agree. I haven't played Ultima Online for about 7 years now (god has it been that long) but I really enjoyed playing it at the time due to the fact character advancement was based on skills and not levels.
Again, Ultima Online (in the past I can't vouch for it now because it became a different game) was fairly balanced in this aspect. You had what they called 7x Grand Masters who had maxed out their skills, but if he were jumped by a good deal of newbie players (say 5 to 10) he might face death if he is careless. Wheras a level 60 character in EQ (if he was theoretically allowed to pvp people at that gap) could basically lay waste to thousands of newbie players in less than 5 minutes duration.
But the real problem that UO was the greifing I suppose and the massive amounts of changes to the game in order to resolve these issues actually drove away many non-griefers (including myself).
I think the only way to police greifing and player content is to actually trust and empower the players and allow them power over the world itself.
I think that was Ralph Koster's original vision which he took from UO to SWG, but seeing how both have been changed into something neither they started out to be... well... it is a moot point.
This doesn't appeal to people who just want to play their mp3s.
True, but I've always found that I am lugging my cell phone and iPod nano around everywhere I go. If they were one device then it would save me the hassle of two devices in my pockets.
However, I'm not going to pay $500 for it.
Even the innocent will settle. The only people who stand a chance are those who are so obviously innocent that the RIAA case against them is ridiculous
Actually, even if you are obviously innocent it might be still cheaper to settle than be acquitted in court. Unless you happen to be a lawyer or know one who would work for free for you...
fats kick the crap out of carbohydrates with regard to energy density
Creating machines that could "potentially" run off fuel made from dead humans might be a "potentially" bad thing.
Of course to be fair, you never have to run faster than the flesh eating machines... Just faster than anyone else you happen to be with.
Short Answer: No
Long Answer: It might reduct the affects on items not plugged in, but in general an EMP bomb goes off near your house, it will come in through the power or phone lines. I remember reading somewhere about bunkers that are EMP shielded have internal power sources and having communications with fiber optic lines to the outside world in order to prevent the EMP shock coming in that way.
Maybe if your house had tinfoil over the windows, underground power lines, Verizon FiOS, and this paint... Then maybe.
So at least once a month, I have to commute to what has become my least favorite airport in the US, just to get a face-to-face decision or committment.
Like I said in a post above, if you find yourself having to persuade management constantly to make decisions in order to do your job, then it is usually a management problem. Usually they have given you responsibility without authority to act on those responsibilities (usually your management has the reverse in those instances... authority without responsibility) so you can't work independently without having to do a powerpoint presentation for every task.
Usually, this may stem from management not trusting you or their apathy towards what you do outweighs the effort to put in a system in place to have some sort of oversight. And if they aren't responding to your emails then chances are they are just are too apathetic towards what you do which is not the fault of email, but rather management....
Which ironically the only way to resolve is to persuade them to be less so.
I could be horribly wrong about your situation in particular, but I wouldn't blame email as the core problem.
Email has failed only if you use it for marketing or as a persuasion tool. As for communicating information it works fairly well.
However, perhaps we should be looking at these other problem... Persuasion.
Personally, I'll have none of it and I don't understand businesses that get talked into deals with cold call sales vendors. (Cold call in the industry means they call you first rather than the customer calling the sales department)
First of all, if you are running a business you should not have to persuade your employees, coworkers, or higher ups. Persuading your employees to comply shouldn't be that hard of a task and if they don't then it isn't because you aren't a good persuader but rather perhaps they are the wrong employee for the job (or perhaps you are asking them to do something they simply can't do or isn't actually their job in the first place).
However, persuading higher ups and coworkers isn't your job either. If you have to do a song and dance with a power point presentation every time to the CEO every time you need to get something approved to do your basic job functions then perhaps your employers don't trust you or they just don't care well enough to put into place a system into which you can perform your job independently but with oversight. Of course thats more of a management issue...
As far as getting customers, emailing as a form of communication is of course spam unless they contact you first via email for information. Cold calling is of course the same thing as telemarketing...
Doing both may actually loose customers and make a good deal of people angry at you.
As far as people traveling for that "big sales" meeting... I just never understood.
If you are a company in need of a product... Why do you need someone persuading you to buy theirs over someone else. Their art of persuasion doesn't make their actual product or services any better and in fact if your company buys products based on these sales meetings perhaps someone should look at if the vendors are giving out benefits of persuasion to the managers who are authorized to spend said money.
In fact, people with authorization to buy products or services should be hired on the sole fact they are not easily persuaded and do not take bribes from vendors. They should be the ones cold calling the vendors and then asking for plain cold information in emails and then not respond to the vendors relentless voice mails and not wasting company money going to meetings with countless vendors when they already know what product/service the company should buy.
Anything else is just hurting the buying company's bottom line, but I suppose that is why I don't work in marketing.
The only problem there is that real physical property always has some level of intrinsic value simply because it physically exists.
I would disagree.
Sometimes having a physical property is liability.
Lets say its 1969 Detroit. You buy a house...
During 1970 Detroit the US car manufacturing plummets, crime increases, and your neighborhood becomes a warzone.
You still are paying the mortgage... Now you can't sell the house and even if you didn't have a mortgage you still have to pay taxes and eventually you either stay put for the next 50 years and hope you don't get killed with the slim hope of an urban revival.
If not, you either foreclose or let the government seize the property for back taxes and all of this will cost you money.
I use Detroit for an example, but there are plenty of other things that could cause this in other cities. Not just crime, but natural disasters and man made (like toxic spills)
To be fair... In Philadelphia, housing prices are skyrocketing because of urban revival.
Of course this didn't happen because of wise investors who held on to their property over the years... But rather the City passed a law that seizes property that has been abandoned and sells it off to the highest bidder.
When people are too addictive to games such that the line between reality and virtuality is blurred, it starts to get into a dangerous point. Life suddenly becomes all about speculation, nothing is real and no productivity is gained for human societies as a whole.
The same could be said about the stock market or any other hyper reality system.
Actually, the stock market itself is nothing but computers, lots of paper, and a bunch of guys screaming at each other on a floor. Isolated from the rest of the world it has no productivity unto itself. It creates no art, makes no product, and provides no service to consumers.
If the stock market was not tied to any real world money you wouldn't notice much if you formatted their hard drives, burnt the back up tapes, shredded the shares, and sent the yelling traders home.
However, since the stock markets of the world as tied into basically the entire world's money and create a meta-reality that affects me and you on a daily basis.
By itself second life does nothing for productivity of the world other than art and entertainment, but if people value this and put a price on it then it becomes like the stock market in that sense.
(I can't really believe I'm comparing the two but productivity is in the eye of the beholder)
I'd like to point out that most of the insurgents are either getting new munitions from Iran or have plenty of military grade munitions laying around from the previous administration.
I mean a 150MM artillery shell isn't something you keep about your house either is it?
I find it morbidly amusing how some people find the lack of desire to have net access must mean there's something inherently wrong with the person.
To be fair, it isn't really that needed to have internet access and personally I wish I could do without sometimes. (I often tell people when I am not at work if they need to get a hold of me to use the phone because of having to sit in front of the computer 8 hours a day makes me hate the internet... but I digress)
However, let me use an anology....
Using the internet was akin to knowing Latin.
In 1995 Rome was a small village and if you traveled abroad you would have to speak whatever language was dictated such as paper book and magazines to radio to TV.
However, in 1997 Rome got uppity and conquered the rest of the world and by 2007 every one who was in the "know" now spoke Latin. Latin wasn't just for geeks anymore but for fashion designers, CEOs, and soccer moms.
Heck... Now Latin was boring and everyday.
However, if you were a Germanic visigoth barbarian (well to be fair the visigoth's were violent or uneducated but they didn't know latin that well) you could live happy lives doing whatever you want without learning how to use Latin.
However, if you a Visigoth wanted to get a job or go to school they would have to learn some Latin and in fact if they were to compete against other people who had Latin in their homes then it would make it harder for them to compete on that level if they didn't have Latin at home either.
Of course modern technology has provided people with Blackberries and other devices so you are always tied in to your Roman Slave masters... err... I mean jobs so it isn't always important that you can't work from home.
But seriously... If you want to compete on the job market these days you basically have to have a home connection if your field is highly competitive especially when it comes finding a job and then working from home.
Again... I'm not the competitive type and I would never work a job where I would be on call 24/7 or work from home, but that is why I make less much like other Visigoth's. Sometimes its just not worth it.
I seem to recall there is also another jet in the works that will take either 900 or 1,200 passenegers. Just wait until one of those crashes on take off and you've got over a thousand dead in one swoop.
To be fair, we'd have to crash 40 to 50 of them a year to equal the amount of Americans who die in car accidents. Freak accidents aside, you are still more likely to die driving to work (or perhaps your bathtub) than you are flying.
It is just that when planes do crash (and it has been a while since I remember the last one on the news) a lot of people end up dead all at once. It just looks bad on the news, but in reality we'd never had enough time in the day to show all the other people who died from other transportation methods.
To be fair, the Indians didn't travel to Washington DC and lay it to siege and then kill off several of our largest armies.
The Carthaginian massacre was mostly due to fear and retaliation for the Hannibal victories. I'm not saying the Carthaginians were asking for it, but rather they put a great deal of fear into the hearts of the Romans more than the Indians did with the Settlers.
All the talk about rich corporations out to squeeze the last dime from the consumer is just a smoke screen. What it comes down to is can people rely on patents, trademarks and copyrights for a livelihood.
Then why aren't these individuals pushing for change rather than the corporations? It is pretty clear that corporations want to use the law by any means needed to increase their profit margin. That is what they pay their legal experts and lobbyists to do.
To think otherwise is absurd.
Personally, I think you would be hard pressed to find a person who makes their livelihood based solely on intellectual property (in fact of the three you mention I would be shocked if an individual made a living on nothing but trademarks *coughs*).
In order to make a living, the artist or scientist often bring their materials to market often requiring them to give up their rights and hand them over to larger entities which makes the argument a moot point.
Often times these persons have to do secondary work (as in provide services) such as either live performances or perhaps technical troubleshooting service in the case of the patent in order to really make their end's meat.
The only people who really make a complete living off of intellectual property are of course corporations (and of course say... IP lawyers who didn't come up with the material themselves) and have a desire to appease shareholders so they maximize profits by paying their employees to do their best to change no only their company but consumers and of course law.
Like it or not... That is how things are really done. We could ban lobbying but that wouldn't really solve the core of the problem with the debate.
When a population begins engaging in lots of promiscuous sex with another population, such as during a rapacious, pillaging invasion, it tends to spread diseases between the two. Everyone on both sides gets herpes strains they're not immune to.
Actually, STDs haven't really been that fatal until recently. No one really dies from herpes and besides aids the only fatal STD had been syphilis which had not been introduction until Columbus returned from the new world after the 1500s.
So... Before then raping and pillaging was helpful in spreading your species genetics by monopolizing the resources and the breeding.
for explaining why the brain seeks out morality, but says nothing of why any given action is moral or not.
Actually, I saw the same article in Digg and would like to point out the same thing that I saw there... What they describe as morality is actually altruism which is not the same thing.
Again...
Morality != Altruism
And what the article describes is altruism and not morality. In fact, morality is often at odds with altruism. Altruism is quite apparent as a biological feature of homo sapiens (and other primates) and in fact if you don't have it then you are basically a sociopath which is about 1 out of a 100 persons.
The text book definition of altruism is of course "Altruism is selfless concern for the welfare of others." which is basically by no means related to morality when it comes to rules for society.
The chimp sees another chimp drowning and jumps in to save it. The same thing happens to humans and is most likely an evolutionary trait that helped our species survive.
Morality is that god or law or society says you must jump in the water to save the other chimp or we'll punish you. (Which there are bystander laws these days from my understanding)
Secondly, morality often comes into conflict with altruism... Where say you see another chimp starving but in order to feed him you have to steal food from another more wealthy chimp.
It is immoral, but at its instinct level it would be altruistic to see a chimp too that (which is why many view the Robin Hood fantasy as a good thing), but the other chimp may disagree and fight back leading to violence which other chimps may step in and enforce the rule of law which is morality.
before the government starts taxing MMOs.
That's ok. I'll just pay them in MMO money. Otherwise known as 1,000,000 sewer rat pelts.
I used to work for for a FoxPro developer back in 2001.
It was rather a fun and useful software and a whole lot nicer to work with than say MS Access at the time if you were developing your own database software.
I even got to attend a developers conference with them (I did training for them and support) and there were plenty of people that did Fox Pro.
However, they did have a contingency plan to switch all their products to MS SQL based solutions which I don't know how that went since I left the company.
It had its quirks, but I could see a lot of in house DB companies still using the product.
SCO Lawyer: "Your honor... I would like to point out that anyone who still owns shares of SCO at this point must have some sort form of mental retardation. Therefore if you rule against us, you will make 'special' people cry! And by special... I mean the 'special' people who have paid me and my team millions to drag this on for so long that they are going to be lucky to trade those shares in for toilet paper as it is."
The Romans Conquered the Greeks, the Normans conquered the Saxons, etc. The list goes on and on. The case has ALWAYS been that if some other nation wanted your land and you couldn't stand up to them in a military confrontation, then you were gonna loose that land.
As a person who loves to study European antiquity I would point out some flaws in this thinking...
1. When the Romans conquered the Greeks they actually adopted Greek culture and didn't kill off the Greeks.
2. When the Normans conquered the Saxons they didn't kill off the Saxons nor really conquered their land as much as just intermarried with them (Hence Anglo-Saxon Culture)
The only whole sale Genocides that history can come up with is the Crusaders massacre of Jerusalem (which wasn't really as much as hatred of Muslims as it was starving Europeans killing off everyone in the city regardless of religion out of rage of having to starve in the desert for several months) and then the Mongol sack of Baghdad which wasn't over so much as land, but out of spite of the execution of Mongol diplomats (considering they burned and salted the lands made the "take your lands" point of conquering sort of a non-issue).
The genocide and seizure of lands in this scale was never really seen before until the colonization of Americas. It wasn't as much as the Indians could not defend them as much as it was that the westerners thought they were subhuman.
Which sadly we saw again in the European theatre in WW2.