The only one that has mattered in the last 200+ years is that they said the government can now take your property and sell it to other private individuals if they want to.
You can't even legally have property any more under that ruling. They could take your car, your business, your house, anything they want under that ruling.
If you do not vote, you deserve the government you get.
However Gerrymandering has negated the vote of many americans. In my case- my vote has made a difference *ONE* time in the last 8 years. Every other position it didn't matter if I voted for or against anything. They have my district at the 70/30 level (70% conservative). If I'm conservative, it doesn't matter. If I'm liberal, it doesn't matter.
Apolitical. lol. Everything is political. Even being apolitical is political.
The religious conservatives have made a deal with the corporate devils to get abortion rulings.
I hope all the other areas where freedom of speech, workers rights, corporate political advertising (basically outshouting any normal persons ability to participate in politics), and now crap like this.
And it is going to continue for the next 8 to 10 years.
And if another 'conservative' president gets in then it will be this way the rest of our lives.
One problem is that people who would have won and should quit the game stay and sell no-drop items (and flags) to people.
It directly affects me because as a result- people who pay money (like township rebellion-- the best guild money can buy) set how difficult the encounters are for me- trailing in their uber dust. The developers sit and watch them (with literally the best gear money can buy- including no drop loot) and set the encounter difficulty so it can only be beat if you have gear that might take 100 hours a week to collect (which you can do if you are buying part of the loot).
I'm playing legitimately- and because cheaters are setting the bar so high (including using programs like macroquest but hey once you cheat one way, you can justify any amount of cheating) I face content that is almost broken in difficulty. The fact that they look at the datastream and run straight to the rare mob prevents me from keying up for certain zones (and that includes cock-blocking back in the 2004 period which prevented a lot of other customers from getting to certain content).
So yes- cheating impacts me constantly and every day. And it impacts the customers. More and more of our members refuse to buy the new expansions because all the content is over a year away from being usable.
I've been ripped off one time on ebay in over 50 transactions (and it was small) and it was by someone who had under fifty sales (and I got email from other ebay users indicating they probably got a few hundred dollars from all of us at $20 to $30 a piece).
I would never make a major purchase from someone who had that little rep. The trust system really does work well. So you could decide to buy a magical sword for 999 gold from a guy with 13 sales or to buy a magical sword for 500 gold from someone that had 0 sales.
Trust systems built up over time by the users seem very effective for small transactions. For anything which involved a few months of effort (millions of gold?) I would have to have a secure third party or someone with phenomenal rep (like 2,000+ sales to 1000 different people over six+ months).
The main difficulty with mmorgs is that to do as he asks would require developing a hundred to a thousand times more content. Developing content takes people time and so it costs money. All that content has to run on content servers (not such a big issue now that they have instances but a big deal in shared zones).
The type of mmorg he is picturing (with a huge amount of content) would be very expensive. The grind allows them to develop one dungeon and require that you use it for a hundred hours before you can move on to the next dungeon where as many console games you can finish completely in under 100 hours (at a cost of about $50).
Players who can afford to play 50 hours a week exacerbate the problem and for some weird reason they seem to have a "rock star" appeal to the game designers (who even hang out with such players). So while more and more customers become completely unable to ever see content- the designers keep releasing content for that increasingly tiny leading edge.
If I were running a company, I would focus on the 20 hour a week players and let the 50 hour a week players "win" and sit and spin for a few months between each expansion since they cost a lot of bandwidth and they cost a lot of money to keep developing content for that only they consume.
Summary: We let them steal pumps and other oil field parts and designs that had subtle flaws resulted resulted in a huge-oil explosion. --- It was on purpose and we were really sneaky about it. And the people who did it couldn't even say anything about it for a couple decades or more.
Despite the increase in productivity (1000%?) since the 1930's- for some reason it always requires that we work at least 40 hours a week to make enough to live. We have less free time than they did in the 30's.
Because of the way health care is structured, you are free to not work-- and die or go bankrupt. You can no longer own property-- taxes are set so high that you have to work in order to pay rent to the government for "your" property. If they were set on sales tax or income tax- you could pass on working but not property taxes.
Make no mistake- we are in one of the most devious forms of slavery ever devised.
Corporations and the wealthy have done a wonderful job of turning up the heat so slowly that we frogs never had the sense to jump out.
People's attitudes have shifted dramatically in the last few years. At one point, they at least knew they were doing something wrong.
Now we are comparing enforcing the law and legal rights as if it were nazism or fascism.
Sure-- copyrights have been extended unreasonably. But students are violating copyrights under a year old in many cases.
Given that UW's income depends on intellectual property and that I would expect at least the philosophy professors to have some views on right and wrong, I'm surprised that everyone is basically encouraging students to break the law so shamelessly.
I've broken the law and know that I'm doing so. It's a choice. But I don't revel in doing so and pretend I'm not even doing anything wrong.
Perhaps the problem is so many laws so arbitrarily enforced and so many bad laws that we are losing respect for the rule of law.
It's okay Tcc3, I didn't take it as a knock on me- just you expressing your opinion and that difference is important to you. I was a fairly early DVD adopter and had friends come over and go "wow!" and then buy DVD players. The entire 'taste' of the HD/Blu thing feels nasty to me. It feels a bit like DIVX did.
I'll be interested in HD/BLU content when I can down-sample it to a 700mb video file easily.
You know something that does irritate me these days? I have a nice 58" screen and warner cable (Showtime) then takes away 3" around all the edges and replaces it with black. Sure-- I can upsample the image but it looks like crap. Only 2 years ago, I had the entire screen filled with image that was better than I can get today. I can't imagine how irritating it is for people with 31" crt televisions.
Some people are audiophiles. Music that sounds identical to me torments them. Some people are videophiles. Two video streams that look basically the same to me drive them up the wall with artifacts or other things.
I believe that not only can you see the difference but that it matters to you.
To me- they both look extremely crisp on a 55" screen from 15'. The movie isn't any more enjoyable. I can easily make backup copies of DVD's to take on my vacation and play on my 8" screen where HD is certainly going to be pointless. And I had two of 12 disks shattered last ski trip. Ooo. I'm out 80 cents. Not 50 dollars.
rf to s-video is a nice upgrade to me- not badly blurry. S-video to component is okay. But probably 5% difference max from S-Video for me. When I went to the store and looked at HD vs DVD with a perfect signal, my reaction was "eh".
And none of those things match the emotional truths of love- joy- healing by breathing.
You can't logic your way into love.
I don't believe in gods- ufo's (sure they are probably out there- but unlikely to get here)-real literal existing faeries.
But I do believe in magical reality and that it can be wondrous beyond the things you are talking about.
It took me over 40 years to "get" it. I was so busy fighting religion - that I almost missed magic and the sheer bliss of being irrational at times.
It started when I learned massage- and consciously turned off my logical filters and realized that some real true things can only be taught in mystical magical fashions. I've seen people doctors couldn't heal permanently healed by someone who just looked at them through magically trained eyes and saw what was wrong with them and permanently fixed them after years of distress that the scientific method couldn't address.
There isn't any point in going around another time- if you don't get it, you won't. If you are so wed to measurable, provable physical reality (which is awesome- I agree with all the points you make- I'm just saying that it is still a subset of the things you can see if you take off the blinders) then you are not going to get it.
But ponder- think- remember that someone who is a strong believer in the scientific method and finds religion goofy found some profound truths in freeing himself to think irrationally.
once life of some kind existed (by some unknown method) then evolution applies.
I love broken car analogies so here is one.
Steering requires a moving car like evolution requires moving life. Steering a non-moving car does nothing like evolution applied to non-living stuff does nothing.
And for others- magic is real if you believe in it.
Would you rather live in a magical world full of fairies or dry reality?
In the end, you are dead either way.
I'm a fairly dry logical type but I discovered that magical thinking adds to my zest for living enough that I'm willing to put aside logical thought for some things. Especially my relationship with my SO.
However, this stops when I start trying to have laws passed to educated pre-teens to think this way before they have a logical mind to deal with.
However- given that our logical conscious minds are riding on an invisible beast we only vaguely comprehend filled with warps and weaves from a childhood and pre-childhood we only vaguely remember- magical thinking contains truths which evade logical thinking.
You might try the original with the voice over (available via torrents).
I prefer it to the other version which is just too slow for me. The voice overs give me something to think about while they spend 2 minutes flying around or walking somewhere.
I remember folks instantly recognizing DVD was better- but they were not sure about the cost.
HD & BLU ray are instantly recognizable as worse in terms of DRM and Cost and only marginally better in terms of playback.
You really need a 20' living room and a 60" screen for the difference to matter and even then the difference is more a matter of degree (it's mildly crisper-- but in some cases that exposes flaws and cheesy costuming in the movie that you couldn't see at lower resolutions).
And are american 6 year olds being trained to say they want to blow themselves up and kill non-islamics?
I'm sorry dude- I'm not religious but I know most churches in america teach a message of peace and tolerance to their children.
Even (and especially) those in very poor areas.
Being evil is independent of being poor or rich.
American media is extremely objective. You get everything from hard left washington post and new york times to hard right rush limbaugh and laura ingrams. You have fox news on the middle right to right and MSNBC and CNN (and CBS, ABC) on the middle left to hard left.
American media is corporate controlled and so it will not give a lot of anti-corporate messages but it is not state controlled so it does ride government hard (except where it would cross a corporate agenda).
Again-- we are not teaching our children that it is good to kill complete strangers because they believe differently than us. We are not teaching our children that it is okay to kill hispanics, indians, and chinese because they are underbidding us for jobs.
However, you look at palestian and saudi children's television programming and you can see they do not need us to grow up terrorists.
You have 6 year olds brainwashed into thinking it is good to die killing non-islamic people.
Unless we stop them raising their children to be murderers, this is not going to end. The middle east tends to do things for 500 to 1000 years at a pop.
The us's primary benefit was a set of founding fathers who were uniquely incorruptable.
George Washington had complete dictatorial power and gave it back up. Further-- after two terms he retired and said all presidents should retire setting a precedent that wasn't even questioned for over 150 years.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin-- even quasi royalists like Alexander Hamilton (and many others too numerous to list) were all real human beings with real human failings who were at the same time extremely principled and resisted temptations to corruption which people all over the rest of the world (and in the US today) can't seem to resist.
Many countries around the world have abundant natural resources and yet they can't seem to get rulers who are principled and can't get governments that are resistant to abuse.
We are losing in the US lately (Allowing private developers to take property was another huge loss of our founding rights in the last couple years) but for a very long time, the work done by the founding fathers stood the test of time for a long time.
There is a strong benefit to society in preventing the growth of a new nobility class which humans historically do.
It is happening right now in the united states and the easiest way to prevent it is to prevent overconcentration of wealth in too small a part of the population.
There is a great benefit to allowing accumulation of reasonable wealth.
In today's society, 10mil or even 100mil perhaps.
There is no benefit to society in 1% of the population controlling 95% of the assets.
If my cornfield has plentiful heads of corn because I practiced wise field practices, watered and weeded regularly, should I have more rights to the corn than random people driving down the highway who decide they want some of my corn now that it is ripe?
If my city engages in good policy so that we have a good economy should I not have more rights to employment in my city than strangers who had no part in building but merely snuck in at night after we had done the hard work?
If my country engages in an economic and political system which over the course of 40 years causes my country to have surplus and the country next door (say a religious quasi dictator plutocracy with rampant corruption) reduces itself to ruin over 40 years, should non-citizens be able to come in, break the law (w/regard to housing, driving, paying taxes, forged documents, etc. etc.), and have more right to a job than citizens?
---
However as far as capitalism goes- with real capitalism, we would be able to buy our drugs for.10 like indians instead of for $5.35. We would be able to reimport those $2.49 movies and pay maybe $3.00 instead of $19.99. We wouldn't be competing against chinese child and prison slave labor. If you want real capitalism- I'm for it. Outsourcing bothers me- on the basis above. It is an end run around our labor laws that corporations get to make while they continue to charge full retail for their products allowing me to gloriously subsidize large parts of the rest of the world.
But what gets me is how many of these RIAA targets do not have p2p software. Or they are dead. Or they don't own a computer. Or it turns out their IP address was used by many other people.
Slashdot Mirror
Which eminent domain decision?
OMG.
The only one that has mattered in the last 200+ years is that they said the government can now take your property and sell it to other private individuals if they want to.
You can't even legally have property any more under that ruling. They could take your car, your business, your house, anything they want under that ruling.
If you do not vote, you deserve the government you get.
However Gerrymandering has negated the vote of many americans. In my case- my vote has made a difference *ONE* time in the last 8 years. Every other position it didn't matter if I voted for or against anything. They have my district at the 70/30 level (70% conservative). If I'm conservative, it doesn't matter. If I'm liberal, it doesn't matter.
Apolitical. lol. Everything is political. Even being apolitical is political.
The religious conservatives have made a deal with the corporate devils to get abortion rulings.
I hope all the other areas where freedom of speech, workers rights, corporate political advertising (basically outshouting any normal persons ability to participate in politics), and now crap like this.
And it is going to continue for the next 8 to 10 years.
And if another 'conservative' president gets in then it will be this way the rest of our lives.
One problem is that people who would have won and should quit the game stay and sell no-drop items (and flags) to people.
It directly affects me because as a result- people who pay money (like township rebellion-- the best guild money can buy) set how difficult the encounters are for me- trailing in their uber dust. The developers sit and watch them (with literally the best gear money can buy- including no drop loot) and set the encounter difficulty so it can only be beat if you have gear that might take 100 hours a week to collect (which you can do if you are buying part of the loot).
I'm playing legitimately- and because cheaters are setting the bar so high (including using programs like macroquest but hey once you cheat one way, you can justify any amount of cheating) I face content that is almost broken in difficulty. The fact that they look at the datastream and run straight to the rare mob prevents me from keying up for certain zones (and that includes cock-blocking back in the 2004 period which prevented a lot of other customers from getting to certain content).
So yes- cheating impacts me constantly and every day. And it impacts the customers. More and more of our members refuse to buy the new expansions because all the content is over a year away from being usable.
That is an excellent idea.
I've been ripped off one time on ebay in over 50 transactions (and it was small) and it was by someone who had under fifty sales (and I got email from other ebay users indicating they probably got a few hundred dollars from all of us at $20 to $30 a piece).
I would never make a major purchase from someone who had that little rep. The trust system really does work well.
So you could decide to buy a magical sword for 999 gold from a guy with 13 sales or to buy a magical sword for 500 gold from someone that had 0 sales.
Trust systems built up over time by the users seem very effective for small transactions.
For anything which involved a few months of effort (millions of gold?) I would have to have a secure third party or someone with phenomenal rep (like 2,000+ sales to 1000 different people over six+ months).
The main difficulty with mmorgs is that to do as he asks would require developing a hundred to a thousand times more content. Developing content takes people time and so it costs money. All that content has to run on content servers (not such a big issue now that they have instances but a big deal in shared zones).
The type of mmorg he is picturing (with a huge amount of content) would be very expensive. The grind allows them to develop one dungeon and require that you use it for a hundred hours before you can move on to the next dungeon where as many console games you can finish completely in under 100 hours (at a cost of about $50).
Players who can afford to play 50 hours a week exacerbate the problem and for some weird reason they seem to have a "rock star" appeal to the game designers (who even hang out with such players). So while more and more customers become completely unable to ever see content- the designers keep releasing content for that increasingly tiny leading edge.
If I were running a company, I would focus on the 20 hour a week players and let the 50 hour a week players "win" and sit and spin for a few months between each expansion since they cost a lot of bandwidth and they cost a lot of money to keep developing content for that only they consume.
Summary:
We let them steal pumps and other oil field parts and designs that had subtle flaws resulted resulted in a huge-oil explosion.
---
It was on purpose and we were really sneaky about it.
And the people who did it couldn't even say anything about it for a couple decades or more.
Despite the increase in productivity (1000%?) since the 1930's- for some reason it always requires that we work at least 40 hours a week to make enough to live. We have less free time than they did in the 30's.
Because of the way health care is structured, you are free to not work-- and die or go bankrupt. You can no longer own property-- taxes are set so high that you have to work in order to pay rent to the government for "your" property. If they were set on sales tax or income tax- you could pass on working but not property taxes.
Make no mistake- we are in one of the most devious forms of slavery ever devised.
Corporations and the wealthy have done a wonderful job of turning up the heat so slowly that we frogs never had the sense to jump out.
People's attitudes have shifted dramatically in the last few years.
At one point, they at least knew they were doing something wrong.
Now we are comparing enforcing the law and legal rights as if it were nazism or fascism.
Sure-- copyrights have been extended unreasonably. But students are violating copyrights under a year old in many cases.
Given that UW's income depends on intellectual property and that I would expect at least the philosophy professors to have some views on right and wrong, I'm surprised that everyone is basically encouraging students to break the law so shamelessly.
I've broken the law and know that I'm doing so. It's a choice. But I don't revel in doing so and pretend I'm not even doing anything wrong.
Perhaps the problem is so many laws so arbitrarily enforced and so many bad laws that we are losing respect for the rule of law.
Yea. my guild has been around in EQ alone since June of 1999. 8 years.
Never heard of syndicate. Cool they are published tho.
It's okay Tcc3,
I didn't take it as a knock on me- just you expressing your opinion and that difference is important to you.
I was a fairly early DVD adopter and had friends come over and go "wow!" and then buy DVD players. The entire 'taste' of the HD/Blu thing feels nasty to me. It feels a bit like DIVX did.
I'll be interested in HD/BLU content when I can down-sample it to a 700mb video file easily.
You know something that does irritate me these days? I have a nice 58" screen and warner cable (Showtime) then takes away 3" around all the edges and replaces it with black. Sure-- I can upsample the image but it looks like crap. Only 2 years ago, I had the entire screen filled with image that was better than I can get today. I can't imagine how irritating it is for people with 31" crt televisions.
I appreciate the friendliness of your response.
What I am saying unfortunately is at odds with some of your statement. I say to understand some things you have to think irrationally.
This knowledge is like gained by considering zen koans. Logically impossible or irrational statements that nonetheless provide insight.
Peace.
Some people are audiophiles. Music that sounds identical to me torments them.
Some people are videophiles. Two video streams that look basically the same to me drive them up the wall with artifacts or other things.
I believe that not only can you see the difference but that it matters to you.
To me- they both look extremely crisp on a 55" screen from 15'. The movie isn't any more enjoyable. I can easily make backup copies of DVD's to take on my vacation and play on my 8" screen where HD is certainly going to be pointless. And I had two of 12 disks shattered last ski trip. Ooo. I'm out 80 cents. Not 50 dollars.
rf to s-video is a nice upgrade to me- not badly blurry. S-video to component is okay. But probably 5% difference max from S-Video for me.
When I went to the store and looked at HD vs DVD with a perfect signal, my reaction was "eh".
And none of those things match the emotional truths of love- joy- healing by breathing.
You can't logic your way into love.
I don't believe in gods- ufo's (sure they are probably out there- but unlikely to get here)-real literal existing faeries.
But I do believe in magical reality and that it can be wondrous beyond the things you are talking about.
It took me over 40 years to "get" it. I was so busy fighting religion - that I almost missed magic and the sheer bliss of being irrational at times.
It started when I learned massage- and consciously turned off my logical filters and realized that some real true things can only be taught in mystical magical fashions. I've seen people doctors couldn't heal permanently healed by someone who just looked at them through magically trained eyes and saw what was wrong with them and permanently fixed them after years of distress that the scientific method couldn't address.
There isn't any point in going around another time- if you don't get it, you won't. If you are so wed to measurable, provable physical reality (which is awesome- I agree with all the points you make- I'm just saying that it is still a subset of the things you can see if you take off the blinders) then you are not going to get it.
But ponder- think- remember that someone who is a strong believer in the scientific method and finds religion goofy found some profound truths in freeing himself to think irrationally.
evolution is not about how life started.
once life of some kind existed (by some unknown method) then evolution applies.
I love broken car analogies so here is one.
Steering requires a moving car like evolution requires moving life.
Steering a non-moving car does nothing like evolution applied to non-living stuff does nothing.
And for others- magic is real if you believe in it.
Would you rather live in a magical world full of fairies or dry reality?
In the end, you are dead either way.
I'm a fairly dry logical type but I discovered that magical thinking adds to my zest for living enough that I'm willing to put aside logical thought for some things. Especially my relationship with my SO.
However, this stops when I start trying to have laws passed to educated pre-teens to think this way before they have a logical mind to deal with.
However- given that our logical conscious minds are riding on an invisible beast we only vaguely comprehend filled with warps and weaves from a childhood and pre-childhood we only vaguely remember- magical thinking contains truths which evade logical thinking.
You might try the original with the voice over (available via torrents).
I prefer it to the other version which is just too slow for me. The voice overs give me something to think about while they spend 2 minutes flying around or walking somewhere.
I think as of Battlestar: Galactica, the CGI is now as good as models.
I remember folks instantly recognizing DVD was better- but they were not sure about the cost.
HD & BLU ray are instantly recognizable as worse in terms of DRM and Cost and only marginally better in terms of playback.
You really need a 20' living room and a 60" screen for the difference to matter and even then the difference is more a matter of degree (it's mildly crisper-- but in some cases that exposes flaws and cheesy costuming in the movie that you couldn't see at lower resolutions).
And are american 6 year olds being trained to say they want to blow themselves up and kill non-islamics?
I'm sorry dude- I'm not religious but I know most churches in america teach a message of peace and tolerance to their children.
Even (and especially) those in very poor areas.
Being evil is independent of being poor or rich.
American media is extremely objective. You get everything from hard left washington post and new york times to hard right rush limbaugh and laura ingrams. You have fox news on the middle right to right and MSNBC and CNN (and CBS, ABC) on the middle left to hard left.
American media is corporate controlled and so it will not give a lot of anti-corporate messages but it is not state controlled so it does ride government hard (except where it would cross a corporate agenda).
Again-- we are not teaching our children that it is good to kill complete strangers because they believe differently than us. We are not teaching our children that it is okay to kill hispanics, indians, and chinese because they are underbidding us for jobs.
I agree with a lot of what you say.
However, you look at palestian and saudi children's television programming and you can see they do not need us to grow up terrorists.
You have 6 year olds brainwashed into thinking it is good to die killing non-islamic people.
Unless we stop them raising their children to be murderers, this is not going to end. The middle east tends to do things for 500 to 1000 years at a pop.
The us's primary benefit was a set of founding fathers who were uniquely incorruptable.
George Washington had complete dictatorial power and gave it back up. Further-- after two terms he retired and said all presidents should retire setting a precedent that wasn't even questioned for over 150 years.
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin-- even quasi royalists like Alexander Hamilton (and many others too numerous to list) were all real human beings with real human failings who were at the same time extremely principled and resisted temptations to corruption which people all over the rest of the world (and in the US today) can't seem to resist.
Many countries around the world have abundant natural resources and yet they can't seem to get rulers who are principled and can't get governments that are resistant to abuse.
We are losing in the US lately (Allowing private developers to take property was another huge loss of our founding rights in the last couple years) but for a very long time, the work done by the founding fathers stood the test of time for a long time.
There is a strong benefit to society in preventing the growth of a new nobility class which humans historically do.
It is happening right now in the united states and the easiest way to prevent it is to prevent overconcentration of wealth in too small a part of the population.
There is a great benefit to allowing accumulation of reasonable wealth.
In today's society, 10mil or even 100mil perhaps.
There is no benefit to society in 1% of the population controlling 95% of the assets.
I'll give it a stab.
.10 like indians instead of for $5.35. We would be able to reimport those $2.49 movies and pay maybe $3.00 instead of $19.99. We wouldn't be competing against chinese child and prison slave labor. If you want real capitalism- I'm for it. Outsourcing bothers me- on the basis above. It is an end run around our labor laws that corporations get to make while they continue to charge full retail for their products allowing me to gloriously subsidize large parts of the rest of the world.
If my cornfield has plentiful heads of corn because I practiced wise field practices, watered and weeded regularly, should I have more rights to the corn than random people driving down the highway who decide they want some of my corn now that it is ripe?
If my city engages in good policy so that we have a good economy should I not have more rights to employment in my city than strangers who had no part in building but merely snuck in at night after we had done the hard work?
If my country engages in an economic and political system which over the course of 40 years causes my country to have surplus and the country next door (say a religious quasi dictator plutocracy with rampant corruption) reduces itself to ruin over 40 years, should non-citizens be able to come in, break the law (w/regard to housing, driving, paying taxes, forged documents, etc. etc.), and have more right to a job than citizens?
---
However as far as capitalism goes- with real capitalism, we would be able to buy our drugs for
Peerblocker in part.
But what gets me is how many of these RIAA targets do not have p2p software.
Or they are dead.
Or they don't own a computer.
Or it turns out their IP address was used by many other people.
How can the RIAA be wrong so often?