They probably think that if they kill the rental market, people will have to buy games. And with no used games market, they don't even have to lower the prices of old games that much. Seems like the perfect strategy to milk the market, so long as you don't stop to think about how much this would piss off potential customers, who would go elsewhere with their dollars. (but wait, call everyone pirates and win anyway?)
A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law.
A fundamental premise of good laws is that they are not arbitrary. Laws that do not relate to reality or universal ethics should be viewed with great suspicion and disobeyed if it is unreasonable or antithetical to a "good" society (which may not necessarily be an "ordered" one). Speed limits are a reasonable idea for safety, but in many places, they have no relation to safety (in terms of what the traffic engineers actually determine what is "safe" for the road), but have much more to do with social and economic engineering (see the time period of a 55 mph limit on federal highways to "improve gasoline mileage").
If drug laws didn't currently exist, would they be worth supporting? Sure, we can argue that mislabeling drugs would be very bad, but if the average person could walk into Starbucks right now and buy a dime bag to go with your latte, would society really be less ordered? Or would we be better off realizing that having unjust laws leads to contempt of the fraction of laws that do make us better off? Saying "the law is the law, and that's just the way it is" means acquiescing to stupid, dangerous, and possibly tyrannical laws.
I've got this rock, and it prevents penguin attacks. You know it's working, because I'm not getting attacked by a penguin right now. In fact, so long as I have this rock, I don't think I'll even see a penguin unless I actively search for one. I'll let you have this rock if you promise to do the macarena before going to bed every night. You might be saying "What? No one gets attacked by penguins anyway!" and I'll say "That might be true, or maybe they're just planning in the long term. Do you really want to have to hide from the penguin armada when it possibly comes? Isn't doing a little dance worth it to prevent terror penguins from causing an incident?"
Logically, the only way to compete with China would be to reduce costs down to being just under China costs + shipping.
Or, in a sane world, we could impose tariffs on countries in proportion to how shitty their workplace conditions and environmental protections are.
Of course, America can't really brag about workplace conditions right now compared to Western European countries, and it'd eat into corporate profits (aww, poor babies can't make 100000+% markup on their shitty toys made from 2 cents of stamped plastic, they might have to settle for only 10000% markup), so good luck getting it passed.
Also big-O notation can hide arbitrarily large constants. This is why, despite the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm being the "fastest" matrix multiplication algorithm (in terms of having the lowest exponent), it still isn't used. The constant is so large that the only matrices that it would actually be faster for are way beyond the size that modern hardware can handle.
And that will stop people from paying cash under the table how exactly? And if we somehow manage to stop that, have fun paying twice as much for fruits and veggies (at least).
4. No sweeping amnesty, ever. No rewards for breaking our law.
5. As I understand it, in Mexico, you spend, at least, two years in prison for entering the country illegally. That is for the first offense. The US should adopt, and enforce, similar laws.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. Even if we wanted to enforce this kind of law, we couldn't. We already hold about 3 million people in prisons in this country and we're way over capacity. Short of sending a bunch of prisoners to an island in the middle of nowhere, there's no way we could deal with that kind of prison population.
6. No more anchor-baby loophole.
The 14th amendment? The one created specifically so that no one born in the US would be relegated to an underclass for the rest of their life? (Sure, it's promise wasn't delivered on for 100 years, but it was better than nothing)
This is the system working as intended.
7. Prison time for anybody who knowing hires an illegal.
Be prepared to arrest a large number of farmers, hotel owners, and anyone who wants a clean house or leaf free lawn in the Southwest. Seriously, unless we're willing to really get our hands dirty and go after corporate executives (rather than just fine them), then sure, it could be fun (Wal-mart executives would be spending the next couple hundred years in jail), but until then, it's an empty threat to anyone who really matters.
We could try therapy. You know, instead of tossing people into a cell for a couple years (where they'll get raped, beaten, and otherwise abused) then releasing them out into the world, where on release they'll probably have trouble finding housing (both from not being able to live within X yards of Y places and having to disclose that they're a sex offender to everyone around) or finding a job (disclosue).
But America sees things like therapy as "soft on crime", because we apparently love the idea of "the bad guys" getting assraped in prison by other prisoners. Are there people who can't be treated? Undoubtedly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Really? What if I strictly limit my posts to a few friends (or maybe I just have one friend and only post so they can see)? Should my whole profile be released to the world if I specifically mark sections of it as not public? Sure, people on Slashdot might not expect that the information won't be released to anyone willing to give Zuck a couple bucks, but the average person might take privacy settings at face value, and by the plain reading of the settings, they would be somewhat justified in that belief.
Likewise, even though this post is probably in some government database somewhere, I don't necessarily find it reasonable to think that the IP address I'm posting from would get put into an NSA database to cross reference against my gmail address, steam account, and most looked up recipes. Is that a reasonable belief? Well, given the stories about the NSA splitting off the traffic of fiber optic trunks, I do have to wonder...
So you think the US government, if they got their hands on Assange, would just ask him a few questions then let him go? What if he refuses to answer (Fifth amendment rights)? He's not even an "enemy combatant", so they can't even flimsily justify shipping him off to Gitmo or some other hole for the rest of his days. If he disappears to some foreign country with a spotty human rights record, it's not like people won't start asking where he went to (if just he disappears we'll all know what happened, then the real shit storm starts). If he winds up dead in "an act of senseless violence", same thing, people will dig, and they'll find something.
The only option the US government has is to grind his reputation to dust, and while an echo room of "rape" may tarnish him, it kinda pales in comparison to him posting about the US government doing far worse things.
We don't have anything comparable to abandoning *for sure* everything you know and settling somewhere new in our race's living memory. We have a handful of people alive who were born in the very late 1890's - when crossing from Europe to the Americas was not unreasonable to contemplate doing twice, or being able to send for one's family, or otherwise not cut oneself off from everything you knew. Even Columbus made it here and back - there really would be nothing comparable in even the most charitable definition of modern times.
What about the mutiny on the Bounty and the eventual settlement of some of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island (where they burned the boat)? They sailed there specifically to avoid detection and had no reason to believe they'd ever see Britain or any civilization at all again (and only one who went to Pitcairn did, 25 years later).
Unless you're currently having as much sex as is humanly possible and using no birth control, you're not giving as many children life as you can. You could have a dozen kids easily if you really wanted to. But for various reasons, you probably stopped or plan to stop at some number X. Why X instead of X-1, or X-2? Why X instead of X-X?
Unless you plan on having your wife pregnant till menopause, in which case, you're at least logically consistent. Until then, if you've got time for Slashdot, you've got time to put your slash in her dot, if you know what I mean.
They'll keep cutting, and cutting, and sooner or later we'll end up with a second market. I told you the SEC shouldn't have allowed the axiom of choice!
The most telling quote from George Lucas since the last time he said anything: "Releasing the originals is kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good."
Apparently quality only means blue screen special effects and a jumble of completely pointless CGI aliens onscreen. Here I thought quality involved plot, strong characters, and not weighing us down with scenes of Galactic Senate CSPAN.
As time goes on, we have to seriously doubt if George Lucas had anything to do with the original Star Wars at all.
Even if that weren't the case, this patent could easily be described as "Poker Tournements... on the internet!", and online cash poker has been around since '98 (Planet Poker being the first example).
Not everyone is a sociopath. Some people have enough ethics that they don't think it's right to personally enrich themselves by screwing someone else (shareholders, customers, fellow employees, whoever).
The real problem is access speeds. Even if you had an arbitrarily powerful CPU, you'd still have to load in everything from memory, hard disk, or network sources (i.e. all very slow). Until these can keep up the same pace as CPUs (SSDs are still expensive), it's pretty much just AMD and Intel having a pissing match. How often do you really max out your CPU cycles these days anyway?
If it's not self built hardware (in a cave, with a box of scraps), with every line of code personally checked, compiled from a bootstrap , how do you know a "wipe" is really a wipe?
You can be compelled to hand over a password, but it requires a court order.
Well, that's complicated. Boucher made the cardinal mistake of cooperating with the police. If he hadn't, he couldn't have been compelled to hand over anything (though he might not have been let into the country). Basically, if you've done anything illegal, don't give the government any more than you legally have to. Also, if you've done anything at all, you've probably done something illegal.
What about Noah, the man who was saved from flooding because only he and his family were worthy, then not long after he gets off the boat he ends up getting drunk, passes out, then curses one of his sons for seeing him naked.
Or Elisha who called down some bears to kill kids who made fun of him for being bald?
Biblical Israel committed mass genocide and forced conquered women to be wives (today we'd call that rape).
Hell, can we even really call Abraham good for being willing to kill his son? If someone tells me to kill someone else in cold blood, I wouldn't do it. Period. I don't care if they can squash me like a bug. I damn sure hope that most other people wouldn't kill in cold blood either. If someone today said that god wanted them to kill, we'd lock them up. Someone in a couple thousand year old book does it and it becomes the foundation point for a group of religions followed by half the planet.
The "heroes" of the Bible are almost never sane, decent human beings looking for civility. They're certainly not who you'd expect to represent some omniscient and omnibenevolent deity.
You don't need 3D vision to drive (or for much of anything besides maybe very fine motor work (i.e. surgery), catching a baseball, or seeing Avatar). I've had a lazy eye for as long as I can remember and outside of maybe being a bit more cautious of traffic at intersections, you'd never know. Admittedly, I can't be sure of what I'm missing out on, but I'm pretty sure you (and those in the military anecdotes) are overreacting.
Trying to copy Israel's security wouldn't be possible. They've got roadblocks a mile outside the airport (not something we can do with airports already built near anything), they don't have many airports, their airports aren't nearly as high traffic as major US ones, we'd have to massively renovate all of our terminals, we'd need to devote a large number of trained people to the job (Israel's draft ensures a high percentage of people have basic training for the job), and Israeli security means anyone vaguely brown better show up to airports 6-8 hours in advance. Israel has serious threats, and can reasonably justify this. America is under attack from the bumbling henchmen crew. When the terrorists attacking you can't get their bombs to detonate, you really shouldn't worry so much.
If you own a copy of the software, there's an exception in the law that permits you to load it into memory, modify it as necessary in order to get it to work, and make backups. It doesn't apply if you merely license software, however; then you're stuck with whatever the license allows or disallows, which is why EULAs are a pretty important thing.
Whether or not software you buy actually counts as being "licensed" depends on which federal district you live in, and even within those districts, the extent to which the license can be enforced varies depending on the actual clauses within the license (Softman v. Adobe upheld a sold, not licensed, view, at least if you don't agree to the terms). It's an awfully confusing mess, and given that EULAs are almost always trying to get around consumer protection laws, I would like to see courts be much more vigilance in protecting against the abuses contained within them.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably think that if they kill the rental market, people will have to buy games. And with no used games market, they don't even have to lower the prices of old games that much. Seems like the perfect strategy to milk the market, so long as you don't stop to think about how much this would piss off potential customers, who would go elsewhere with their dollars. (but wait, call everyone pirates and win anyway?)
A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law.
A fundamental premise of good laws is that they are not arbitrary. Laws that do not relate to reality or universal ethics should be viewed with great suspicion and disobeyed if it is unreasonable or antithetical to a "good" society (which may not necessarily be an "ordered" one). Speed limits are a reasonable idea for safety, but in many places, they have no relation to safety (in terms of what the traffic engineers actually determine what is "safe" for the road), but have much more to do with social and economic engineering (see the time period of a 55 mph limit on federal highways to "improve gasoline mileage").
If drug laws didn't currently exist, would they be worth supporting? Sure, we can argue that mislabeling drugs would be very bad, but if the average person could walk into Starbucks right now and buy a dime bag to go with your latte, would society really be less ordered? Or would we be better off realizing that having unjust laws leads to contempt of the fraction of laws that do make us better off? Saying "the law is the law, and that's just the way it is" means acquiescing to stupid, dangerous, and possibly tyrannical laws.
I've got this rock, and it prevents penguin attacks. You know it's working, because I'm not getting attacked by a penguin right now. In fact, so long as I have this rock, I don't think I'll even see a penguin unless I actively search for one. I'll let you have this rock if you promise to do the macarena before going to bed every night. You might be saying "What? No one gets attacked by penguins anyway!" and I'll say "That might be true, or maybe they're just planning in the long term. Do you really want to have to hide from the penguin armada when it possibly comes? Isn't doing a little dance worth it to prevent terror penguins from causing an incident?"
Logically, the only way to compete with China would be to reduce costs down to being just under China costs + shipping.
Or, in a sane world, we could impose tariffs on countries in proportion to how shitty their workplace conditions and environmental protections are.
Of course, America can't really brag about workplace conditions right now compared to Western European countries, and it'd eat into corporate profits (aww, poor babies can't make 100000+% markup on their shitty toys made from 2 cents of stamped plastic, they might have to settle for only 10000% markup), so good luck getting it passed.
Also big-O notation can hide arbitrarily large constants. This is why, despite the Coppersmith-Winograd algorithm being the "fastest" matrix multiplication algorithm (in terms of having the lowest exponent), it still isn't used. The constant is so large that the only matrices that it would actually be faster for are way beyond the size that modern hardware can handle.
"Have you ever had sex with an animal?"
Humans are animals... so I'm betting the answer for most candidates is still no.
1. Make e-verify mandatory.
And that will stop people from paying cash under the table how exactly? And if we somehow manage to stop that, have fun paying twice as much for fruits and veggies (at least).
4. No sweeping amnesty, ever. No rewards for breaking our law.
5. As I understand it, in Mexico, you spend, at least, two years in prison for entering the country illegally. That is for the first offense. The US should adopt, and enforce, similar laws.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. Even if we wanted to enforce this kind of law, we couldn't. We already hold about 3 million people in prisons in this country and we're way over capacity. Short of sending a bunch of prisoners to an island in the middle of nowhere, there's no way we could deal with that kind of prison population.
6. No more anchor-baby loophole.
The 14th amendment? The one created specifically so that no one born in the US would be relegated to an underclass for the rest of their life? (Sure, it's promise wasn't delivered on for 100 years, but it was better than nothing)
This is the system working as intended.
7. Prison time for anybody who knowing hires an illegal.
Be prepared to arrest a large number of farmers, hotel owners, and anyone who wants a clean house or leaf free lawn in the Southwest. Seriously, unless we're willing to really get our hands dirty and go after corporate executives (rather than just fine them), then sure, it could be fun (Wal-mart executives would be spending the next couple hundred years in jail), but until then, it's an empty threat to anyone who really matters.
We could try therapy. You know, instead of tossing people into a cell for a couple years (where they'll get raped, beaten, and otherwise abused) then releasing them out into the world, where on release they'll probably have trouble finding housing (both from not being able to live within X yards of Y places and having to disclose that they're a sex offender to everyone around) or finding a job (disclosue).
But America sees things like therapy as "soft on crime", because we apparently love the idea of "the bad guys" getting assraped in prison by other prisoners. Are there people who can't be treated? Undoubtedly, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Really? What if I strictly limit my posts to a few friends (or maybe I just have one friend and only post so they can see)? Should my whole profile be released to the world if I specifically mark sections of it as not public? Sure, people on Slashdot might not expect that the information won't be released to anyone willing to give Zuck a couple bucks, but the average person might take privacy settings at face value, and by the plain reading of the settings, they would be somewhat justified in that belief.
Likewise, even though this post is probably in some government database somewhere, I don't necessarily find it reasonable to think that the IP address I'm posting from would get put into an NSA database to cross reference against my gmail address, steam account, and most looked up recipes. Is that a reasonable belief? Well, given the stories about the NSA splitting off the traffic of fiber optic trunks, I do have to wonder...
So you think the US government, if they got their hands on Assange, would just ask him a few questions then let him go? What if he refuses to answer (Fifth amendment rights)? He's not even an "enemy combatant", so they can't even flimsily justify shipping him off to Gitmo or some other hole for the rest of his days. If he disappears to some foreign country with a spotty human rights record, it's not like people won't start asking where he went to (if just he disappears we'll all know what happened, then the real shit storm starts). If he winds up dead in "an act of senseless violence", same thing, people will dig, and they'll find something.
The only option the US government has is to grind his reputation to dust, and while an echo room of "rape" may tarnish him, it kinda pales in comparison to him posting about the US government doing far worse things.
And more than enough free water to drink!
We don't have anything comparable to abandoning *for sure* everything you know and settling somewhere new in our race's living memory. We have a handful of people alive who were born in the very late 1890's - when crossing from Europe to the Americas was not unreasonable to contemplate doing twice, or being able to send for one's family, or otherwise not cut oneself off from everything you knew. Even Columbus made it here and back - there really would be nothing comparable in even the most charitable definition of modern times.
What about the mutiny on the Bounty and the eventual settlement of some of the mutineers on Pitcairn Island (where they burned the boat)? They sailed there specifically to avoid detection and had no reason to believe they'd ever see Britain or any civilization at all again (and only one who went to Pitcairn did, 25 years later).
Every sperm is sacred...
Unless you're currently having as much sex as is humanly possible and using no birth control, you're not giving as many children life as you can. You could have a dozen kids easily if you really wanted to. But for various reasons, you probably stopped or plan to stop at some number X. Why X instead of X-1, or X-2? Why X instead of X-X?
Unless you plan on having your wife pregnant till menopause, in which case, you're at least logically consistent. Until then, if you've got time for Slashdot, you've got time to put your slash in her dot, if you know what I mean.
They'll keep cutting, and cutting, and sooner or later we'll end up with a second market. I told you the SEC shouldn't have allowed the axiom of choice!
The most telling quote from George Lucas since the last time he said anything: "Releasing the originals is kind of an oxymoron because the quality of the original is not very good." Apparently quality only means blue screen special effects and a jumble of completely pointless CGI aliens onscreen. Here I thought quality involved plot, strong characters, and not weighing us down with scenes of Galactic Senate CSPAN. As time goes on, we have to seriously doubt if George Lucas had anything to do with the original Star Wars at all.
Laches and estoppel by acquiescence. Vigilantibus non dormientibus æquitas subvenit.
Even if that weren't the case, this patent could easily be described as "Poker Tournements... on the internet!", and online cash poker has been around since '98 (Planet Poker being the first example).
Not everyone is a sociopath. Some people have enough ethics that they don't think it's right to personally enrich themselves by screwing someone else (shareholders, customers, fellow employees, whoever).
I hear that if you watch The Wizard of Oz while reading this post, the universe pulls itself inside out.
The real problem is access speeds. Even if you had an arbitrarily powerful CPU, you'd still have to load in everything from memory, hard disk, or network sources (i.e. all very slow). Until these can keep up the same pace as CPUs (SSDs are still expensive), it's pretty much just AMD and Intel having a pissing match. How often do you really max out your CPU cycles these days anyway?
If it's not self built hardware (in a cave, with a box of scraps), with every line of code personally checked, compiled from a bootstrap , how do you know a "wipe" is really a wipe?
You can be compelled to hand over a password, but it requires a court order.
Well, that's complicated. Boucher made the cardinal mistake of cooperating with the police. If he hadn't, he couldn't have been compelled to hand over anything (though he might not have been let into the country). Basically, if you've done anything illegal, don't give the government any more than you legally have to. Also, if you've done anything at all, you've probably done something illegal.
What about Noah, the man who was saved from flooding because only he and his family were worthy, then not long after he gets off the boat he ends up getting drunk, passes out, then curses one of his sons for seeing him naked.
Or Elisha who called down some bears to kill kids who made fun of him for being bald?
Biblical Israel committed mass genocide and forced conquered women to be wives (today we'd call that rape).
Hell, can we even really call Abraham good for being willing to kill his son? If someone tells me to kill someone else in cold blood, I wouldn't do it. Period. I don't care if they can squash me like a bug. I damn sure hope that most other people wouldn't kill in cold blood either. If someone today said that god wanted them to kill, we'd lock them up. Someone in a couple thousand year old book does it and it becomes the foundation point for a group of religions followed by half the planet.
The "heroes" of the Bible are almost never sane, decent human beings looking for civility. They're certainly not who you'd expect to represent some omniscient and omnibenevolent deity.
You don't need 3D vision to drive (or for much of anything besides maybe very fine motor work (i.e. surgery), catching a baseball, or seeing Avatar). I've had a lazy eye for as long as I can remember and outside of maybe being a bit more cautious of traffic at intersections, you'd never know. Admittedly, I can't be sure of what I'm missing out on, but I'm pretty sure you (and those in the military anecdotes) are overreacting.
Trying to copy Israel's security wouldn't be possible. They've got roadblocks a mile outside the airport (not something we can do with airports already built near anything), they don't have many airports, their airports aren't nearly as high traffic as major US ones, we'd have to massively renovate all of our terminals, we'd need to devote a large number of trained people to the job (Israel's draft ensures a high percentage of people have basic training for the job), and Israeli security means anyone vaguely brown better show up to airports 6-8 hours in advance. Israel has serious threats, and can reasonably justify this. America is under attack from the bumbling henchmen crew. When the terrorists attacking you can't get their bombs to detonate, you really shouldn't worry so much.
If you own a copy of the software, there's an exception in the law that permits you to load it into memory, modify it as necessary in order to get it to work, and make backups. It doesn't apply if you merely license software, however; then you're stuck with whatever the license allows or disallows, which is why EULAs are a pretty important thing.
Whether or not software you buy actually counts as being "licensed" depends on which federal district you live in, and even within those districts, the extent to which the license can be enforced varies depending on the actual clauses within the license (Softman v. Adobe upheld a sold, not licensed, view, at least if you don't agree to the terms). It's an awfully confusing mess, and given that EULAs are almost always trying to get around consumer protection laws, I would like to see courts be much more vigilance in protecting against the abuses contained within them.