I don't play any game that has an endless money supply in it -- I don't think there are any games yet that have a fixed amount of commodities in the gaming world, but I'd appreciate seeing it. It would really make people strive to earn (or steal or barter) their "income" online.
Ultima Online did that at first. It was a complete disaster.
The problem is, you're not removing farmers and grinders, but you're making players compete with them for limited resources. So what happens is that the highest-level farmers utterly deplete the entire game world of every resource and commodity, making the game economy utterly inaccessible to everyone else. (Imagine trying to hit level 60 without ever having any money, equipment, or access to crafting materials because they're all monopolized by existing level 60s...)
If you have a persistant economy and a limited money supply, lower level players will lose all access to money. The merchants will have no money to give to players and a level 10 has nothing a level 60 will want to buy. And if there are no infinite (i.e. farmable) money sources, it will stay that way permanently.
Balancing a game of this nature requires that you set the supply according to the characters, not the world. Ideally you want to make sure that a level X player has reasonably easy access to at least Y gold, but has to make an effort to get more. But since the player base is always increasing, so too must the money supply. If you're indefinately generating more gold, eventually the economy will explode, so you need to drain gold out of the system too. This is where money sinks come in.
The people who made that decision are considered irrelevant because they don't play the game. They're not even allowed to post on the forums. (I think the primary reason for that is to keep the forums under control; otherwise spam and such would crush them. Though if it were me, I would at least allow people with previously active accounts to continue to post...)
They're in an awkward position as far as time-sinking is concerned. They have a massively successful game, and it's difficult to predict how much of that success depends on time-sinks. The problem is that some people actually enjoy grinding. (Definately not me, but plenty of people I know.) Others don't really care either way.
The question is, how do you make a game that is constantly rewarding, yet remains in balance when you throw in people who will play it for 200 hours a month for months or years on end?
They've done their best to balance moderate and heavy playstyles but they've basically lost accessibility to casual players, especially when you consider that casual players usually have to solo. They've taken a lot of effort to fix this, but I know I find it almost impossible to find a party for anything without waiting for two hours--which was usually longer than I had to play.
This is an argument I've been in many times with people...they don't seem to grasp that pornography can't get people pregnant or give them STDs. They seem to take the "slippery slope" perspective, which to me is completely retarded. They seem to miss the core issue: KIDS ARE RELENTLESSLY HORNY.
I'll say that again.
RELENTLESSLY. HORNY.
So to say that pornography is bad because it leads teens into sexual behavior is like saying being wet is what causes it to rain. Pornography and masturbation are forms of sexual behavior. The reason that an IQ 70 with a survey can find correllations between teen pornography use and teen sex is because they're both manifestations of the horn demon. Now, normally the question of "is it causal or do they have a common cause?" is hard to tackle, but in this case it isn't even close. We know for certain that teens are horny naturally, and that hornyness is, by definition, the drive for sexual expression. So you'd have to be a moron NOT to figure that "common cause" is the more likely hypothesis.
Then they come out with the other argument. "Well, there's no evidence that pornography reduces sexual urges!" To which I say fblrking DUH. Sexual urges are primarily neurochemical, you dolt. NOTHING will reduce them except for hormone therapy or castration. We're not talking about urges, we're talking about behavior. Teen sex is the behavior you're trying to eliminate, and is directly caused by the urge. IF the urge can be directed to another, more harmless behavior--and remember, the urge is there either way, I just want to remind you because you seem to forget--then the odds of the destructive behavior taking place are vastly diminished because, at very least, there is competition among potential ways to satisfy the urge.
You want to take this outside of the realm of urges and animal behavior? Fine. Let's take it into the realm of cognition.
Suppose you've got a teen who is very, very horny. His only option is sex because pornography is EVAHL. He still has an urge for sex. He has no cognitive options except fighting the urge, which he may or may not succeed in doing depending on how strong the urge is. Urges interfere with cognition, so if you think it's as simple as deciding not to, you're a dolt.
Suppose you give this teen some porn and say "knock yourself out." Sure, the porn won't diminish his urge--not one whit. But unless the dopamine released when he comes somehow increases his testosterone production, it's not going to increase it either. The classical conditioning, on the other hand--the "effects on his mind"--will not cause him to seek out more sexual stimulation in general (that urge is constant as it is hormonal, not neurological), but to seek to repeat the specific pleasure-causing behavior (because that IS neurological). Meaning he will get in the habit of masturbating. There is no concievable circumstance that you could consider that a bad thing without being a hypocrite. The problem with teen sex isn't that Jesus Hates It [tm], it's that people get STDs and their peckers fall off or they have children before they have the resources to raise them without great difficulty. Masturbation will not get you pregnant, nor will it get you an STD. And if you discount the bible, which any reasonable society requires you to do when dealing with others, there is no reason to consider it bad in any way, shape, or form. It has no negative effects that aren't made up, socially produced, or present either way.
However, our teen now has a cognitive option. He will still have his urge for sexual expression, which would potentially include real sex. However, he now has the choice cognitively. The urge to masturbate and the urge to seek intercourse are now competing in his mind; both are potential outlets for his more basic hormonal urges. The difference is, one of them has the support of his cognitive mind. Any reasonable person will choose a safe behavior over a dangerous behavior whenever
Indeed; I apologize if my tone seemed to be antagonistic. I was more railing on parties in general than you.
Organizations--whether governmental, corporate, or "gentlemen's agreements," are a necessity simply due to the practical truth that a hundred people working together can accomplish more than merely a hundred times what one person can. If you send a hundred men one man at a time, they will lose to only ten men...
But we tend to misrepresent them in our minds nonetheless. Governments are hardly seen simply as practical necessities for practical functions. This is true, I imagine, mostly because the spectrum of governmental action is as broad as the spectrum of human action, and thus is too complex to grasp without abstracting or symbolizing it to at least some extent...
My point wasn't that I thought you were republican (it was quite clear you weren't). My point was that they--along with their brother democrats and anyone else who defines things by "party"--don't understand what free thought really is. Both of them think they're the free thinkers and that the other side is mindless drones. The truth is, both of them are composed of free thinkers AND mindless drones, and the free thinkers are the ones who realize that political parties are elaborate fictions. You could almost call them a religion of sorts.
I'd say household, not community. The problem with "community" standards is it's just another way of saying the local majority. In truth, it means "The community, except for all of those people." The only way you can even have accusations about someone violating community standards is by excluding them from your definition of "community."
That's why I side unconditionally with freedom of expression. If they're not painting it on the side of your house or otherwise violating the consent of those involved, you have no right to complain. (And they don't need your consent to do things that don't involve you.)
Man, you just summed up my greatest complaint with schools as a whole. They don't care about learning, comprehension, understanding or knowledge nearly as much as they care about symbolic academics. And it shows.
Should I read anything into the fact that you've got a Republican link in your sig, and you think that controlling the actions of others for stupid reasons constitutes "free thinking?"
Should I tell my "Think outside the box" story? It seems relevant, considering it happened at a school.
This prof gives us a paper with a grid of nine dots, saying it's a puzzle. We're supposed to hit all nine dots with three lines without our pen leaving the paper.
So I draw a big S and announce that I'm done, since he didn't say the lines had to be straight. So he gives me another paper and tells me to take it seriously.
I cut the paper into three strips and tape it together so the dots are all lined up. So with one line I can hit all nine. He huffs in indignation and gives me another paper, telling me to "Do it right."
So I fold the paper up so the dots are really close together, then take out a huge magic marker and hit all nine since they're so close together. He didn't like that either.
Then I rotate the paper as I draw so that, even though my arm is drawing straight, the line is curved, and hit all of them with a spiral.
Then I try a team effort--I do three lines that cross two papers and my neighbor does the same, so all nine dots on both papers are covered without either of us having drawn more than three.
Finally, I refuse to take any further part in the exercise on principle. Eventually he shows us the solution he had been looking for--a big triangle. He then announces triumphantly that "apparently there isn't a single student in this class that can think outside the box!"
This really happened.
Anyway, the moral of this story is, most people wouldn't know free thought if it drilled their sister.
You go to class for interactivity. These students are simply too young and too immature to understand that.
Aren't those two assertions mutually exclusive? "You go to class for interactivity" is a goal. It's a conscious reason. You can't do something for a conscious reason you don't even know about.
Also, my experience is that the interactivity in a typical class is completely worthless. It ends up being the teacher trying to engage the students by asking questions instead of imparting information; the problem is, if the students already knew enough to meaningfully participate, they don't need the frickin' class! Asking the class "And who knows why the Chinese got involved in Korea?" is useless. Completely useless. The students who know aren't going to learn it again by telling you, and those who don't know can't answer. The students who think about it--the exact activity you're supposedly trying to encourage--are all thinking "Aren't we paying you to tell us that? What the hell is wrong with you?"
Class participation has always been useless in my experience. It devolves into people telling anecdotes and explaining their personal opinions, which means I'm paying thirty thousand dollars for a piece of paper that certifies I participated in a four-year cultural circle-jerk which somehow means I'm more qualified as a worker.
Some of us would rather learn. I'm sick of talking about the idea; I want actual information. Details, techniques, even the prevailing theories and what support I have. I do not want to spend my class time learning what the rest of the class thinks about the subject. I do not care. I especially don't want to care to the tune of three grand a semester.
And every time I ask the professor a question and their answer is "Anybody know the answer to that?" I see red. The following "Come on, people! We don't have all day!" only makes it worse.
You talk about how it disrupts your learning to hear clicking, but it diminishes the value I get from the class when the professor has to stop every thirty seconds for everyone to finish writing their notes on paper.
Then again, I've always considered the concept of notes to be stupid. If both you and the teacher know it needs to be read or referenced later on, why isn't it in the incredibly expensive book you were required to buy for the class? Aren't notes and books redundant? If the important material isn't in the book, why not? (And if the book doesn't have what you need, why do you have the book to begin with?)
The worst is the teachers who go so far as to give you "note outlines" to fill in. I just want to slap them.
"You're telling me you have a specific set of written information you consider important, yet you're going out of your way to make me write it down instead of just giving it to me to read? Are you completely retarded?
"Yeah, yeah, 'retention is better when you write it.' You're still retarded. A 10% increase in my memory retention is not worth me completely missing half of what you say because I'm busy writing, and it's not worth you saying half as much in total because you're waiting for people to finish writing."
Not that I have any right to be bitter. After all, anything that interferes with learning is always completely the students' fault, right?
Circumstances mean a lot. All you mentioned was that he said he paid your salary, and that's true. If that was the only point of contention, he was right and you were wrong. And that was the only point of contention you mentioned. If he was blabbing and mouthing off and throwing things at the other students, you were right and he was wrong. However, that would be assuming things about the student's character, which is along the same line as what you're accusing the poster of doing to you.
You know why students use that line? Maybe it's because it's absolutely true? So you abused your power by throwing a student out for saying something you didn't like. Congratulations, you've earned a place among all the other people who cheerfully abused their undeserved power and never thought twice about it.
Don't try to take the moral high ground against the students. Half of them are only there because of a prejudice you created. A person's real skills don't matter as much as a paper degree. People assume that if you don't have a degree, you are lazy and incompetent, and that prejudice is the school's fault because they're the ones that enable and perpetuate that prejudice. For the school to require not only money but unconditional deference before they'll let you compete on your own merits in the job market is just sick. For you to take this "My castle, my realm" attitude is even worse.
You don't like what the students say, get another job.
So wait. In light of TFA, the implication here is that it is solely your responsibility to learn, yet you have no right to pick which strategy works for you?
That's retarded. (Yet typical of my school experience.)
You can't claim control while disclaiming responsibility. If you're going to stop a student from learning their way, you absolutely do have an ethical responsibility to pick up every ounce of slack it creates because that slack is directly your fault. You can't blame the students for not learning on their own when you're interfering with that learning.
I for one am tired of this attitude that professors are a form of nobility who's job is to take money from the students in exchange for permission to go home and learn everything by themselves, and that even showing up to teach the class is a gift to the masses. I'm tired of the mentality that the school is doing you a favor by taking your money. It's complete bullshit.
Next time you go to a restaurant, I'm going to point out to the staff that you don't expect to be catered to. They can just hand over the bill and tell you to go kill a deer.
No way, man. The Kaiser is behind it. His vampire cronies are manipulating the economy using the liberal-controlled media.
You want to talk about oxymorons? How about your use of the word neocon and the actions you attribute to them? Vague as Neocon is, you realize that a "Nationalist State" is incompatible with "Globalizing," even if you're talking about "Neocons," and that socialism is incompatible with corporatism?
Socialism is not fascism is not corporate abuse is not globalization is not abuse of government power. The fact that you can draw a relationship or a few specific similarities between them doesn't make them equivalent, even if you dislike all of them equally. And you sure as fblck aren't going to find a "neocon" who stands for all of them at once. In fact, just stop using the word neocon. You're using it as an epithet to refer to anyone you disagree with. Yes, some of the real neocons love to bandy about the word "Liberal" in the exact same way, but that just means they are retarded too.
Yes, GWB is foolish, reckless and potentially dangerous to America's freedoms. That doesn't mean everything he does is wrong. The fact that, for example, the Patriot Act is an odious piece of McCarthy-era garbage does not automatically prove that his health care policies are the same way. I seriously doubt he even wrote them. He probably supports any given bill mainly because it was put up by the Republican party. That's a serious problem, but it's the kind of problem you're promoting by thinking in terms of labels such as "the neocons."
Lastly, the Iraq war was perfectly legal. It may or may not have been moral, but it was legal. GW got official permission from Congress, which is technically all he needed. The problem is that he lied and distorted the facts to get that permission. But that fact doesn't retroactively delete Congress' vote on the matter.
This "Us vs. Them" mentality is exactly what makes George W. an idiot. To him, there's only three kinds of people--Patriotic Americans, Liberals, and Terrorists. Thus, every bad thing in the world is the fault of either Liberals or Terrorists. That's why he's an idiot. If you blame everything on the "Neocons," you're being just as big of an idiot.
Yeah. Or, better yet, when super bowl time comes around, just drop a hundred million on all-star players.
Oh wait. Crap.
On a more tangible note, the analogies don't work because they have differing fundamental dynamics and requirements.
In competetive games--chess, football etc.--the point of the game is the competition. There can be only one winner, and the idea is that the players win through skill, and that's what makes it fun and interesting. By buying an advantage, you're bringing an element besides skill into the outcome of the game, and that diminishes the competition that made it interesting in the first place.
WoW is fundamentally non-competetive and a far cry from a skill-based game. Sure, you can duel people and compete to see who can get the most gold, but it doesn't matter. There are no winners nor losers, nor is there anything that even vaguely resembles a level playing field for competition. No matter what you pick to compete on, there is some skill-irrelevant factor that will throw it out of whack. PvP has some level of skill involved, but try claiming it's "fair" to a level 10 who's fighting a BWL-geared L60. The second you say "Well, you could get to level 60 too," you're removing skill and replacing it with time--which is also not in equal supply among players and isn't a viable platform of competition anyway.
The point is, it's stupid to talk about cheating in a game that is a billion miles from fair in every other way already. You can't say it's fair for people to exploit some possible avenues of rapid advancement in the game (joining a huge guild, playing for 300 hours straight, or even using Thottbot to blitz a quest line) but not others (buying gold or characters).
You might say "But joining a guild is fair because anybody can join a guild," but someone else might also say "Ergo, buying gold is fair because anybody can buy gold."
It's quite simple. The House of Representatives in my home state of Utah is composed of people who are authoritarian, fundamentalist, and extremely gullible.
One day, a mother saw violent images in a video game and was Deeply Distressed [tm]. Interpreting her personal distress at the fictional imagery as being a Sign from The Holy Ghost [tm], she decided that violent video games were Wrong [tm]. She announced to her children that they would Not Have Video Games In Their Home. They, being thinking human beings, asked why. This angered her, but her children didn't accept the logic of "because I'm your mother, that's why!" and subsequently ignored her, playing violent video games anyway--the only difference was that now it was a source of conflict and division, and they had to play them outside the comfort and safety of their own home.
Now even more distressed at the dangers her children were exposing themselves to (after all, video games are obviously dangerous--why else would the Holy Ghost warn her against them?), she went to her peers and the media to find a justification her children would accept.
"I bet it makes kids more violent," a retarded person told her.
Deciding this was why video games were Wrong [tm], she announced to her children that they could not play the games because it would make them violent.
Her kids, having played video games since they were 5 and never having thrown a punch in their lives, even in self-defense (unlike their football-playing peers), decide she's got the brain capacity of a dung beetle and, instead of abandoning video games, start to wonder if she's as full of crap about other things that are "wrong," such as cocaine and teen sex. Thankfully, they're smarter than she is and realize that while video games are harmless, that doesn't mean that coke and sex are. So they decide against drugs and orgies but keep playing video games.
Strongly distressed at her children's refusal to obey her unconditionally and now feeling that the destruction of all she holds dear must be imminent, she talks to her peers and writes letters talking about how dangerous video games are and asking "Why nobody is doing anything about this."
Meanwhile, halfway across the country, there are a number of sweet, innocent children just beginning to awaken into manhood. Not coincidentally, they're being beaten and emotionally abused by their peers every day, being dismissed when they complain about it, and being told they're too stupid and immature to think for themselves when they try to escape or rectify the situation. Deciding it's time to make a point, these sweet, innocent, immature minors decide--having never heard of such a thing before--to take dad's guns to school and blow away every last thing that ever hurt them. All they have to lose is their lives, which they have decided is a fair trade.
Now the whole world--which, until this point, had been denying there was anything wrong with the schools, the restrictive rules, their children's actual day to day lives or, God Forbid, their own treatment of them--are utterly unable to ignore them anymore. They are presented with the choice--accept that something is actually wrong, or deny that their only daughter has just been shot. The latter is very difficult to accomplish in practical terms.
So they finally realize something is wrong.
The problem is, they still need their previous morals, values and beliefs are correct, even in the face of their dead daughter. They must believe that they have been doing the right thing as parents, and as such, the explaination must be something that has nothing to do with how they've been treating their children up to this point.
The explainations the kids point to are things like massive pressure, constant insult and condescending antagonism by adults, virtually no liberties, and being forced into a culture which emotionally and physically brutalizes them every single day of their lives. They point to the fact that their lives are painful, and
It's dangerous to treat potential as the actual event.
For example, say you hand me a nuclear weapon with a big red button on it, then drop me in the center of Manhattan.
Does that make you guilty of aiding a terrorist attack?
If you thought yes, then no offense, but you're being a dumbass.
Why?
Because if you handed me a nuke and dropped me off in Manhattan, I'd hitch a ride on the bus, go home, throw the nuke in a closet and spend the rest of the day playing Castlevania, that's why.
Now, in the case of an indexing service, you can point to the fact that people did proceed to download copyrighted material. But it's totally inappropriate to assume that providing the information alone is enough to presume guilt.
If the guy walks in and gasses the clerks at the bank, you might have a point. On the other hand, if he looks at your plans and uses them to decide on the strategic placement of gas masks and changing guard schedules in order to reinforce the bank's security, am I still justified in throwing you in jail for giving out that information?
Everything we do publicly aids both good and bad things. When we stop Dr. Evil from destroying the Earth, we're also saving the lives of every child molester on Earth. When we publish phone books, we're providing great convenience and utility to some people while providing ready-made lists of potential scam targets to others.
It's bad policy to say that making information publicly available constitutes aiding the people who misuse it.
You're lucky. I can't take an "ethics and censorship" organisation seriously no matter what it's called. (There's sort of this problem with censorship itself being unethical.)
Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable. Even if we put our entire collective effort into killing every last creature alive, we would fail. Nature is far too resilient and our powers are far too minuscule to do anything more then weed out the least adaptable species in the most fragile environments. Yes, we might have it in our power to kill off all the cute Koalas. We don't have the power to kill off all the cockroaches, rats, rabbits, or begin to even make a dent in most insect populations. We would kill off ourselves long before killing them.
It sounds like you're deifying nature here. Nature is not a conscious agent who has the power to veto or counter the effects we have on the world. Nature is not a discrete force at all--it is just a word we use to describe a broad spectrum of natural phenomena. The foundations of those phenomena can be rendered inoperable just as anything else can, and if done collectively, "nature" as we know it would likewise fail.
The fact that you don't even think we could render the planet uninhabitable if we tried sounds downright irrational. There are plenty of ways I can think of that are well within our means. Life as a whole is resilient, but there are specific reasons why it's resilient. It's not magical. If you exceed it's capacities or hit it with something the environment does not have an answer for, everything dies. Things will evolve, but there are limits. Bacteria can evolve to survive our sledgehammer antibiotics, but they can't spontaneously evolve to survive temperatures a thousand degrees higher than what they're used to, or gamma ray bombardment, or exposure to vacuum. Such adaptations can take thousands or millions of years, assuming they are plausible at all--remember that all it takes to permanently preclude evolution is for 100% of the gene pool to die. If 0% of the existing bacteria survive a change in the ecosystem, the mere existance of evolution isn't going to spontaneously generate new ones--the existance of bacterial life will have permanently ended.
Yes, we need to be rational. Yes, we need to supress our emotional reactions. but assuming the world is somehow invincible to anything we could ever do is dangerously wrong. It's easily as irrational as assuming global warming is going to kill us all.
There are arguments that can be made about keeping their customer base happy by baleeting bad language and there are arguments that can be made about them maintaining a professional atmosphere (i.e. deleting things they don't like) but my personal experience is that people who vet for "offensive content" usually don't. They vet for just plain-old content.
I've written many articles (mostly game review sites) that were deleted simply on the basis of them being negative. No swearwords or ASCII depictions of body parts, just well-reasoned thoughts that the moderator didn't think were valid points.
I'm tempted to submit a game review that gives a big-name game 10 out of 10 but has a detailed ASCII wang in the middle of it, just to see what happens...
But I digress.
I don't think it's ethical to provide a forum for public feedback and discussion and then censor it, flame-fests or not. If they don't want the flak that free speech brings them, they shouldn't have it in the first place.
Therein lies the very crux of quantum mechanics and why it is so mystifying. Traditional phenomena follow those same rules--a thing and it's opposite may exist, but only as discrete entities. Up cannot simultaneously be down. But experiments in quantum mechanics have shown that, in the subatomic world, that is no longer true.
To my knowledge, we have seen the crazy stuff. That very article stated that they had managed to get a particle to spin in opposite directions at the same time. They would not have made that statement had they not determined a way to measure and verify that effect. (Otherwise it would have been dismissed as BS by the rest of the scientific community.)
And it's hard to play the conflict of interest card when it comes to experimental physics. There is no market for products that don't exist, and if the science is faulty, it won't produce results. And if there's no product--no revenue stream--then it's hard to argue that people's vested financial interests are causing them to make up theories. (And if they did, that tactic would flat-out fail--peer review and independant reproduction of experiments are still alive and well. You may be able to sell books about it at UFO conventions, but you wouldn't get the legitimate scientific community to give you a second glance.)
That's a pretty big assumption to make. You seem to think that the scientific community is pulling these ideas out of their collective bum-holes, and that's simply not the case. There are observable examples of many quantum phenomena--in fact, they have gone beyond experimental proofs and are working on practical applications in a few of the better-understood areas. I didn't see anything in TFA about coming to these conclusions based purely on theoretical mathematics, as you seem to imply.
You might be committing the sin you accuse them of--coming to a conclusion without looking for evidence. I only follow what's in the nerd papers, but everything I've read (including TFA) has revolved around a successful experiment (in meatspace) that supported some aspect of quantum mechanical theory. There's nothing I've seen that suggests they didn't do their homework on this.
And I think you missed the point. They CAN measure it. One of the points of quantum physics is, put simply, that measuring it is what causes it to be there, not the other way around as common sense would have you believe.
Privacy is important because it serves as a check. There's a hidden concept in the operation of any society and that is difficulty of enforcement. Many laws that would cause the destruction of a society (through revolt, crippling of a necessary process, etc) don't simply because those laws are too difficult to effectively enforce.
Privacy is an obstacle to total law enforcement, and that, ironically, is why it is crucial to keep. Privacy standards make up for imperfections in the law by placing a higher barrier to enforcement of laws in general.
Specifically, it prevents unjust and unnecessary laws from being practical to enforce. This, in turn, requires law enforcement to pick their battles and go for what's really important. If an issue is truly important, da gubment will go through the rigamarole of enforcing it. If it's not, they won't bother. Thus, privacy acts as a sort of "Buffer zone," preventing law enforcement from becoming petty tyrants. Privacy is the solution to stupid things like the fact that gay sex or drinking alcohol on a sunday are still overtly illegal in some states and counties.
On a more well-known level, privacy is important because it reduces harassment. If a policeman is not allowed to look at your private stuff, they can't threaten to look at your private stuff to get their way or for a petty thrill.
Freedom cannot exist in a society with no barriers to law enforcement unless the laws are perfect. Which is roughly as likely as Superman joining forces with Jesus to fight the Chinese. Somebody is going to get in a position of power and write a laundry list of utterly retarded laws based on their own personal preferences, and at that point, the only thing that will prevent the destruction of the liberties of that person's constituents is the sheer impracticality of enforcing said laws.
Of course, it's also important not to place the barriers to enforcement too high, or you end up with a world run by criminals. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" has been a good middle ground, and that's why we defend it.
The problem with internet junk in particular is there's no middle ground between total privacy and no privacy. Thus, "Reasonable Privacy" is impossible. If telcos have to record everything you ever do and that is accessible at the drop of a hat by any law enforcement agency, the protections afforded by privacy are severely eroded. Specifically, they are eroded according to how hard it is to compel a telco/ISP to reveal the data (whether it requires a warrant, probable cause, or a "National Security Letter," i.e. nothing).
The difficulty in ordering releases of information has been eroded simultaneously. A loss of liberty is inevitable under these circumstances, which is why people equate these acts with a stripping of their liberties.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't play any game that has an endless money supply in it -- I don't think there are any games yet that have a fixed amount of commodities in the gaming world, but I'd appreciate seeing it. It would really make people strive to earn (or steal or barter) their "income" online.
Ultima Online did that at first. It was a complete disaster.
The problem is, you're not removing farmers and grinders, but you're making players compete with them for limited resources. So what happens is that the highest-level farmers utterly deplete the entire game world of every resource and commodity, making the game economy utterly inaccessible to everyone else. (Imagine trying to hit level 60 without ever having any money, equipment, or access to crafting materials because they're all monopolized by existing level 60s...)
If you have a persistant economy and a limited money supply, lower level players will lose all access to money. The merchants will have no money to give to players and a level 10 has nothing a level 60 will want to buy. And if there are no infinite (i.e. farmable) money sources, it will stay that way permanently.
Balancing a game of this nature requires that you set the supply according to the characters, not the world. Ideally you want to make sure that a level X player has reasonably easy access to at least Y gold, but has to make an effort to get more. But since the player base is always increasing, so too must the money supply. If you're indefinately generating more gold, eventually the economy will explode, so you need to drain gold out of the system too. This is where money sinks come in.
The people who made that decision are considered irrelevant because they don't play the game. They're not even allowed to post on the forums. (I think the primary reason for that is to keep the forums under control; otherwise spam and such would crush them. Though if it were me, I would at least allow people with previously active accounts to continue to post...)
They're in an awkward position as far as time-sinking is concerned. They have a massively successful game, and it's difficult to predict how much of that success depends on time-sinks. The problem is that some people actually enjoy grinding. (Definately not me, but plenty of people I know.) Others don't really care either way.
The question is, how do you make a game that is constantly rewarding, yet remains in balance when you throw in people who will play it for 200 hours a month for months or years on end?
They've done their best to balance moderate and heavy playstyles but they've basically lost accessibility to casual players, especially when you consider that casual players usually have to solo. They've taken a lot of effort to fix this, but I know I find it almost impossible to find a party for anything without waiting for two hours--which was usually longer than I had to play.
Ah-fricking-men.
This is an argument I've been in many times with people...they don't seem to grasp that pornography can't get people pregnant or give them STDs. They seem to take the "slippery slope" perspective, which to me is completely retarded. They seem to miss the core issue: KIDS ARE RELENTLESSLY HORNY.
I'll say that again.
RELENTLESSLY. HORNY.
So to say that pornography is bad because it leads teens into sexual behavior is like saying being wet is what causes it to rain. Pornography and masturbation are forms of sexual behavior. The reason that an IQ 70 with a survey can find correllations between teen pornography use and teen sex is because they're both manifestations of the horn demon. Now, normally the question of "is it causal or do they have a common cause?" is hard to tackle, but in this case it isn't even close. We know for certain that teens are horny naturally, and that hornyness is, by definition, the drive for sexual expression. So you'd have to be a moron NOT to figure that "common cause" is the more likely hypothesis.
Then they come out with the other argument. "Well, there's no evidence that pornography reduces sexual urges!" To which I say fblrking DUH. Sexual urges are primarily neurochemical, you dolt. NOTHING will reduce them except for hormone therapy or castration. We're not talking about urges, we're talking about behavior. Teen sex is the behavior you're trying to eliminate, and is directly caused by the urge. IF the urge can be directed to another, more harmless behavior--and remember, the urge is there either way, I just want to remind you because you seem to forget--then the odds of the destructive behavior taking place are vastly diminished because, at very least, there is competition among potential ways to satisfy the urge.
You want to take this outside of the realm of urges and animal behavior? Fine. Let's take it into the realm of cognition.
Suppose you've got a teen who is very, very horny. His only option is sex because pornography is EVAHL. He still has an urge for sex. He has no cognitive options except fighting the urge, which he may or may not succeed in doing depending on how strong the urge is. Urges interfere with cognition, so if you think it's as simple as deciding not to, you're a dolt.
Suppose you give this teen some porn and say "knock yourself out." Sure, the porn won't diminish his urge--not one whit. But unless the dopamine released when he comes somehow increases his testosterone production, it's not going to increase it either. The classical conditioning, on the other hand--the "effects on his mind"--will not cause him to seek out more sexual stimulation in general (that urge is constant as it is hormonal, not neurological), but to seek to repeat the specific pleasure-causing behavior (because that IS neurological). Meaning he will get in the habit of masturbating. There is no concievable circumstance that you could consider that a bad thing without being a hypocrite. The problem with teen sex isn't that Jesus Hates It [tm], it's that people get STDs and their peckers fall off or they have children before they have the resources to raise them without great difficulty. Masturbation will not get you pregnant, nor will it get you an STD. And if you discount the bible, which any reasonable society requires you to do when dealing with others, there is no reason to consider it bad in any way, shape, or form. It has no negative effects that aren't made up, socially produced, or present either way.
However, our teen now has a cognitive option. He will still have his urge for sexual expression, which would potentially include real sex. However, he now has the choice cognitively. The urge to masturbate and the urge to seek intercourse are now competing in his mind; both are potential outlets for his more basic hormonal urges. The difference is, one of them has the support of his cognitive mind. Any reasonable person will choose a safe behavior over a dangerous behavior whenever
Indeed; I apologize if my tone seemed to be antagonistic. I was more railing on parties in general than you.
Organizations--whether governmental, corporate, or "gentlemen's agreements," are a necessity simply due to the practical truth that a hundred people working together can accomplish more than merely a hundred times what one person can. If you send a hundred men one man at a time, they will lose to only ten men...
But we tend to misrepresent them in our minds nonetheless. Governments are hardly seen simply as practical necessities for practical functions. This is true, I imagine, mostly because the spectrum of governmental action is as broad as the spectrum of human action, and thus is too complex to grasp without abstracting or symbolizing it to at least some extent...
My point wasn't that I thought you were republican (it was quite clear you weren't). My point was that they--along with their brother democrats and anyone else who defines things by "party"--don't understand what free thought really is. Both of them think they're the free thinkers and that the other side is mindless drones. The truth is, both of them are composed of free thinkers AND mindless drones, and the free thinkers are the ones who realize that political parties are elaborate fictions. You could almost call them a religion of sorts.
I'd say household, not community. The problem with "community" standards is it's just another way of saying the local majority. In truth, it means "The community, except for all of those people." The only way you can even have accusations about someone violating community standards is by excluding them from your definition of "community."
That's why I side unconditionally with freedom of expression. If they're not painting it on the side of your house or otherwise violating the consent of those involved, you have no right to complain. (And they don't need your consent to do things that don't involve you.)
Man, you just summed up my greatest complaint with schools as a whole. They don't care about learning, comprehension, understanding or knowledge nearly as much as they care about symbolic academics. And it shows.
Wow. Just...wow.
Should I read anything into the fact that you've got a Republican link in your sig, and you think that controlling the actions of others for stupid reasons constitutes "free thinking?"
Should I tell my "Think outside the box" story? It seems relevant, considering it happened at a school.
This prof gives us a paper with a grid of nine dots, saying it's a puzzle. We're supposed to hit all nine dots with three lines without our pen leaving the paper.
So I draw a big S and announce that I'm done, since he didn't say the lines had to be straight. So he gives me another paper and tells me to take it seriously.
I cut the paper into three strips and tape it together so the dots are all lined up. So with one line I can hit all nine. He huffs in indignation and gives me another paper, telling me to "Do it right."
So I fold the paper up so the dots are really close together, then take out a huge magic marker and hit all nine since they're so close together. He didn't like that either.
Then I rotate the paper as I draw so that, even though my arm is drawing straight, the line is curved, and hit all of them with a spiral.
Then I try a team effort--I do three lines that cross two papers and my neighbor does the same, so all nine dots on both papers are covered without either of us having drawn more than three.
Finally, I refuse to take any further part in the exercise on principle. Eventually he shows us the solution he had been looking for--a big triangle. He then announces triumphantly that "apparently there isn't a single student in this class that can think outside the box!"
This really happened.
Anyway, the moral of this story is, most people wouldn't know free thought if it drilled their sister.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's look at this:
You go to class for interactivity. These students are simply too young and too immature to understand that.
Aren't those two assertions mutually exclusive? "You go to class for interactivity" is a goal. It's a conscious reason. You can't do something for a conscious reason you don't even know about.
Also, my experience is that the interactivity in a typical class is completely worthless. It ends up being the teacher trying to engage the students by asking questions instead of imparting information; the problem is, if the students already knew enough to meaningfully participate, they don't need the frickin' class! Asking the class "And who knows why the Chinese got involved in Korea?" is useless. Completely useless. The students who know aren't going to learn it again by telling you, and those who don't know can't answer. The students who think about it--the exact activity you're supposedly trying to encourage--are all thinking "Aren't we paying you to tell us that? What the hell is wrong with you?"
Class participation has always been useless in my experience. It devolves into people telling anecdotes and explaining their personal opinions, which means I'm paying thirty thousand dollars for a piece of paper that certifies I participated in a four-year cultural circle-jerk which somehow means I'm more qualified as a worker.
Some of us would rather learn. I'm sick of talking about the idea; I want actual information. Details, techniques, even the prevailing theories and what support I have. I do not want to spend my class time learning what the rest of the class thinks about the subject. I do not care. I especially don't want to care to the tune of three grand a semester.
And every time I ask the professor a question and their answer is "Anybody know the answer to that?" I see red. The following "Come on, people! We don't have all day!" only makes it worse.
You talk about how it disrupts your learning to hear clicking, but it diminishes the value I get from the class when the professor has to stop every thirty seconds for everyone to finish writing their notes on paper.
Then again, I've always considered the concept of notes to be stupid. If both you and the teacher know it needs to be read or referenced later on, why isn't it in the incredibly expensive book you were required to buy for the class? Aren't notes and books redundant? If the important material isn't in the book, why not? (And if the book doesn't have what you need, why do you have the book to begin with?)
The worst is the teachers who go so far as to give you "note outlines" to fill in. I just want to slap them.
"You're telling me you have a specific set of written information you consider important, yet you're going out of your way to make me write it down instead of just giving it to me to read? Are you completely retarded?
"Yeah, yeah, 'retention is better when you write it.' You're still retarded. A 10% increase in my memory retention is not worth me completely missing half of what you say because I'm busy writing, and it's not worth you saying half as much in total because you're waiting for people to finish writing."
Not that I have any right to be bitter. After all, anything that interferes with learning is always completely the students' fault, right?
Guh.
(End of Rant)
Circumstances mean a lot. All you mentioned was that he said he paid your salary, and that's true. If that was the only point of contention, he was right and you were wrong. And that was the only point of contention you mentioned. If he was blabbing and mouthing off and throwing things at the other students, you were right and he was wrong. However, that would be assuming things about the student's character, which is along the same line as what you're accusing the poster of doing to you.
You know why students use that line? Maybe it's because it's absolutely true? So you abused your power by throwing a student out for saying something you didn't like. Congratulations, you've earned a place among all the other people who cheerfully abused their undeserved power and never thought twice about it.
Don't try to take the moral high ground against the students. Half of them are only there because of a prejudice you created. A person's real skills don't matter as much as a paper degree. People assume that if you don't have a degree, you are lazy and incompetent, and that prejudice is the school's fault because they're the ones that enable and perpetuate that prejudice. For the school to require not only money but unconditional deference before they'll let you compete on your own merits in the job market is just sick. For you to take this "My castle, my realm" attitude is even worse.
You don't like what the students say, get another job.
So wait. In light of TFA, the implication here is that it is solely your responsibility to learn, yet you have no right to pick which strategy works for you?
That's retarded. (Yet typical of my school experience.)
You can't claim control while disclaiming responsibility. If you're going to stop a student from learning their way, you absolutely do have an ethical responsibility to pick up every ounce of slack it creates because that slack is directly your fault. You can't blame the students for not learning on their own when you're interfering with that learning.
I for one am tired of this attitude that professors are a form of nobility who's job is to take money from the students in exchange for permission to go home and learn everything by themselves, and that even showing up to teach the class is a gift to the masses. I'm tired of the mentality that the school is doing you a favor by taking your money. It's complete bullshit.
Next time you go to a restaurant, I'm going to point out to the staff that you don't expect to be catered to. They can just hand over the bill and tell you to go kill a deer.
No way, man. The Kaiser is behind it. His vampire cronies are manipulating the economy using the liberal-controlled media.
You want to talk about oxymorons? How about your use of the word neocon and the actions you attribute to them? Vague as Neocon is, you realize that a "Nationalist State" is incompatible with "Globalizing," even if you're talking about "Neocons," and that socialism is incompatible with corporatism?
Socialism is not fascism is not corporate abuse is not globalization is not abuse of government power. The fact that you can draw a relationship or a few specific similarities between them doesn't make them equivalent, even if you dislike all of them equally. And you sure as fblck aren't going to find a "neocon" who stands for all of them at once. In fact, just stop using the word neocon. You're using it as an epithet to refer to anyone you disagree with. Yes, some of the real neocons love to bandy about the word "Liberal" in the exact same way, but that just means they are retarded too.
Yes, GWB is foolish, reckless and potentially dangerous to America's freedoms. That doesn't mean everything he does is wrong. The fact that, for example, the Patriot Act is an odious piece of McCarthy-era garbage does not automatically prove that his health care policies are the same way. I seriously doubt he even wrote them. He probably supports any given bill mainly because it was put up by the Republican party. That's a serious problem, but it's the kind of problem you're promoting by thinking in terms of labels such as "the neocons."
Lastly, the Iraq war was perfectly legal. It may or may not have been moral, but it was legal. GW got official permission from Congress, which is technically all he needed. The problem is that he lied and distorted the facts to get that permission. But that fact doesn't retroactively delete Congress' vote on the matter.
This "Us vs. Them" mentality is exactly what makes George W. an idiot. To him, there's only three kinds of people--Patriotic Americans, Liberals, and Terrorists. Thus, every bad thing in the world is the fault of either Liberals or Terrorists. That's why he's an idiot. If you blame everything on the "Neocons," you're being just as big of an idiot.
Yeah. Or, better yet, when super bowl time comes around, just drop a hundred million on all-star players.
Oh wait. Crap.
On a more tangible note, the analogies don't work because they have differing fundamental dynamics and requirements.
In competetive games--chess, football etc.--the point of the game is the competition. There can be only one winner, and the idea is that the players win through skill, and that's what makes it fun and interesting. By buying an advantage, you're bringing an element besides skill into the outcome of the game, and that diminishes the competition that made it interesting in the first place.
WoW is fundamentally non-competetive and a far cry from a skill-based game. Sure, you can duel people and compete to see who can get the most gold, but it doesn't matter. There are no winners nor losers, nor is there anything that even vaguely resembles a level playing field for competition. No matter what you pick to compete on, there is some skill-irrelevant factor that will throw it out of whack. PvP has some level of skill involved, but try claiming it's "fair" to a level 10 who's fighting a BWL-geared L60. The second you say "Well, you could get to level 60 too," you're removing skill and replacing it with time--which is also not in equal supply among players and isn't a viable platform of competition anyway.
The point is, it's stupid to talk about cheating in a game that is a billion miles from fair in every other way already. You can't say it's fair for people to exploit some possible avenues of rapid advancement in the game (joining a huge guild, playing for 300 hours straight, or even using Thottbot to blitz a quest line) but not others (buying gold or characters).
You might say "But joining a guild is fair because anybody can join a guild," but someone else might also say "Ergo, buying gold is fair because anybody can buy gold."
It's quite simple. The House of Representatives in my home state of Utah is composed of people who are authoritarian, fundamentalist, and extremely gullible.
One day, a mother saw violent images in a video game and was Deeply Distressed [tm]. Interpreting her personal distress at the fictional imagery as being a Sign from The Holy Ghost [tm], she decided that violent video games were Wrong [tm]. She announced to her children that they would Not Have Video Games In Their Home. They, being thinking human beings, asked why. This angered her, but her children didn't accept the logic of "because I'm your mother, that's why!" and subsequently ignored her, playing violent video games anyway--the only difference was that now it was a source of conflict and division, and they had to play them outside the comfort and safety of their own home.
Now even more distressed at the dangers her children were exposing themselves to (after all, video games are obviously dangerous--why else would the Holy Ghost warn her against them?), she went to her peers and the media to find a justification her children would accept.
"I bet it makes kids more violent," a retarded person told her.
Deciding this was why video games were Wrong [tm], she announced to her children that they could not play the games because it would make them violent.
Her kids, having played video games since they were 5 and never having thrown a punch in their lives, even in self-defense (unlike their football-playing peers), decide she's got the brain capacity of a dung beetle and, instead of abandoning video games, start to wonder if she's as full of crap about other things that are "wrong," such as cocaine and teen sex. Thankfully, they're smarter than she is and realize that while video games are harmless, that doesn't mean that coke and sex are. So they decide against drugs and orgies but keep playing video games.
Strongly distressed at her children's refusal to obey her unconditionally and now feeling that the destruction of all she holds dear must be imminent, she talks to her peers and writes letters talking about how dangerous video games are and asking "Why nobody is doing anything about this."
Meanwhile, halfway across the country, there are a number of sweet, innocent children just beginning to awaken into manhood. Not coincidentally, they're being beaten and emotionally abused by their peers every day, being dismissed when they complain about it, and being told they're too stupid and immature to think for themselves when they try to escape or rectify the situation. Deciding it's time to make a point, these sweet, innocent, immature minors decide--having never heard of such a thing before--to take dad's guns to school and blow away every last thing that ever hurt them. All they have to lose is their lives, which they have decided is a fair trade.
Now the whole world--which, until this point, had been denying there was anything wrong with the schools, the restrictive rules, their children's actual day to day lives or, God Forbid, their own treatment of them--are utterly unable to ignore them anymore. They are presented with the choice--accept that something is actually wrong, or deny that their only daughter has just been shot. The latter is very difficult to accomplish in practical terms.
So they finally realize something is wrong.
The problem is, they still need their previous morals, values and beliefs are correct, even in the face of their dead daughter. They must believe that they have been doing the right thing as parents, and as such, the explaination must be something that has nothing to do with how they've been treating their children up to this point.
The explainations the kids point to are things like massive pressure, constant insult and condescending antagonism by adults, virtually no liberties, and being forced into a culture which emotionally and physically brutalizes them every single day of their lives. They point to the fact that their lives are painful, and
It's dangerous to treat potential as the actual event.
For example, say you hand me a nuclear weapon with a big red button on it, then drop me in the center of Manhattan.
Does that make you guilty of aiding a terrorist attack?
If you thought yes, then no offense, but you're being a dumbass.
Why?
Because if you handed me a nuke and dropped me off in Manhattan, I'd hitch a ride on the bus, go home, throw the nuke in a closet and spend the rest of the day playing Castlevania, that's why.
Now, in the case of an indexing service, you can point to the fact that people did proceed to download copyrighted material. But it's totally inappropriate to assume that providing the information alone is enough to presume guilt.
If the guy walks in and gasses the clerks at the bank, you might have a point. On the other hand, if he looks at your plans and uses them to decide on the strategic placement of gas masks and changing guard schedules in order to reinforce the bank's security, am I still justified in throwing you in jail for giving out that information?
Everything we do publicly aids both good and bad things. When we stop Dr. Evil from destroying the Earth, we're also saving the lives of every child molester on Earth. When we publish phone books, we're providing great convenience and utility to some people while providing ready-made lists of potential scam targets to others.
It's bad policy to say that making information publicly available constitutes aiding the people who misuse it.
You're lucky. I can't take an "ethics and censorship" organisation seriously no matter what it's called. (There's sort of this problem with censorship itself being unethical.)
Nature doesn't give a shit what we do. We don't have it in our capacity to make this world uninhabitable. Even if we put our entire collective effort into killing every last creature alive, we would fail. Nature is far too resilient and our powers are far too minuscule to do anything more then weed out the least adaptable species in the most fragile environments. Yes, we might have it in our power to kill off all the cute Koalas. We don't have the power to kill off all the cockroaches, rats, rabbits, or begin to even make a dent in most insect populations. We would kill off ourselves long before killing them.
It sounds like you're deifying nature here. Nature is not a conscious agent who has the power to veto or counter the effects we have on the world. Nature is not a discrete force at all--it is just a word we use to describe a broad spectrum of natural phenomena. The foundations of those phenomena can be rendered inoperable just as anything else can, and if done collectively, "nature" as we know it would likewise fail.
The fact that you don't even think we could render the planet uninhabitable if we tried sounds downright irrational. There are plenty of ways I can think of that are well within our means. Life as a whole is resilient, but there are specific reasons why it's resilient. It's not magical. If you exceed it's capacities or hit it with something the environment does not have an answer for, everything dies. Things will evolve, but there are limits. Bacteria can evolve to survive our sledgehammer antibiotics, but they can't spontaneously evolve to survive temperatures a thousand degrees higher than what they're used to, or gamma ray bombardment, or exposure to vacuum. Such adaptations can take thousands or millions of years, assuming they are plausible at all--remember that all it takes to permanently preclude evolution is for 100% of the gene pool to die. If 0% of the existing bacteria survive a change in the ecosystem, the mere existance of evolution isn't going to spontaneously generate new ones--the existance of bacterial life will have permanently ended.
Yes, we need to be rational. Yes, we need to supress our emotional reactions. but assuming the world is somehow invincible to anything we could ever do is dangerously wrong. It's easily as irrational as assuming global warming is going to kill us all.
There are arguments that can be made about keeping their customer base happy by baleeting bad language and there are arguments that can be made about them maintaining a professional atmosphere (i.e. deleting things they don't like) but my personal experience is that people who vet for "offensive content" usually don't. They vet for just plain-old content.
I've written many articles (mostly game review sites) that were deleted simply on the basis of them being negative. No swearwords or ASCII depictions of body parts, just well-reasoned thoughts that the moderator didn't think were valid points.
I'm tempted to submit a game review that gives a big-name game 10 out of 10 but has a detailed ASCII wang in the middle of it, just to see what happens...
But I digress.
I don't think it's ethical to provide a forum for public feedback and discussion and then censor it, flame-fests or not. If they don't want the flak that free speech brings them, they shouldn't have it in the first place.
Therein lies the very crux of quantum mechanics and why it is so mystifying. Traditional phenomena follow those same rules--a thing and it's opposite may exist, but only as discrete entities. Up cannot simultaneously be down. But experiments in quantum mechanics have shown that, in the subatomic world, that is no longer true.
To my knowledge, we have seen the crazy stuff. That very article stated that they had managed to get a particle to spin in opposite directions at the same time. They would not have made that statement had they not determined a way to measure and verify that effect. (Otherwise it would have been dismissed as BS by the rest of the scientific community.)
And it's hard to play the conflict of interest card when it comes to experimental physics. There is no market for products that don't exist, and if the science is faulty, it won't produce results. And if there's no product--no revenue stream--then it's hard to argue that people's vested financial interests are causing them to make up theories. (And if they did, that tactic would flat-out fail--peer review and independant reproduction of experiments are still alive and well. You may be able to sell books about it at UFO conventions, but you wouldn't get the legitimate scientific community to give you a second glance.)
That's a pretty big assumption to make. You seem to think that the scientific community is pulling these ideas out of their collective bum-holes, and that's simply not the case. There are observable examples of many quantum phenomena--in fact, they have gone beyond experimental proofs and are working on practical applications in a few of the better-understood areas. I didn't see anything in TFA about coming to these conclusions based purely on theoretical mathematics, as you seem to imply.
You might be committing the sin you accuse them of--coming to a conclusion without looking for evidence. I only follow what's in the nerd papers, but everything I've read (including TFA) has revolved around a successful experiment (in meatspace) that supported some aspect of quantum mechanical theory. There's nothing I've seen that suggests they didn't do their homework on this.
(BTW, Accepting != Excepting)
I think you mean the cat is dead XOR alive.
And I think you missed the point. They CAN measure it. One of the points of quantum physics is, put simply, that measuring it is what causes it to be there, not the other way around as common sense would have you believe.
Privacy is important because it serves as a check. There's a hidden concept in the operation of any society and that is difficulty of enforcement. Many laws that would cause the destruction of a society (through revolt, crippling of a necessary process, etc) don't simply because those laws are too difficult to effectively enforce.
Privacy is an obstacle to total law enforcement, and that, ironically, is why it is crucial to keep. Privacy standards make up for imperfections in the law by placing a higher barrier to enforcement of laws in general.
Specifically, it prevents unjust and unnecessary laws from being practical to enforce. This, in turn, requires law enforcement to pick their battles and go for what's really important. If an issue is truly important, da gubment will go through the rigamarole of enforcing it. If it's not, they won't bother. Thus, privacy acts as a sort of "Buffer zone," preventing law enforcement from becoming petty tyrants. Privacy is the solution to stupid things like the fact that gay sex or drinking alcohol on a sunday are still overtly illegal in some states and counties.
On a more well-known level, privacy is important because it reduces harassment. If a policeman is not allowed to look at your private stuff, they can't threaten to look at your private stuff to get their way or for a petty thrill.
Freedom cannot exist in a society with no barriers to law enforcement unless the laws are perfect. Which is roughly as likely as Superman joining forces with Jesus to fight the Chinese. Somebody is going to get in a position of power and write a laundry list of utterly retarded laws based on their own personal preferences, and at that point, the only thing that will prevent the destruction of the liberties of that person's constituents is the sheer impracticality of enforcing said laws.
Of course, it's also important not to place the barriers to enforcement too high, or you end up with a world run by criminals. "Reasonable expectation of privacy" has been a good middle ground, and that's why we defend it.
The problem with internet junk in particular is there's no middle ground between total privacy and no privacy. Thus, "Reasonable Privacy" is impossible. If telcos have to record everything you ever do and that is accessible at the drop of a hat by any law enforcement agency, the protections afforded by privacy are severely eroded. Specifically, they are eroded according to how hard it is to compel a telco/ISP to reveal the data (whether it requires a warrant, probable cause, or a "National Security Letter," i.e. nothing).
The difficulty in ordering releases of information has been eroded simultaneously. A loss of liberty is inevitable under these circumstances, which is why people equate these acts with a stripping of their liberties.