I find it outrageous that these countries not only violate federal law, but they also refuse to obey the causes in our constituition dealing with copyright!
This isn't the issue in question. They are wantonly violating their own laws, as well as internation laws that they have agreed to abide by. When America or the UK does this, the world is on our collective asses in the heartbeat. The detainment of terrorists in Gitmo has been cited non-stop by Americans, Europeans, and the UN as a violation of both American due process and international law. The Abu Graibh torture has been heavily scrutinized as a violation of international treaties to which the US is a party. When our government breaks its own rules, or violates treaties, or just declines to even SIGN a treaty that makes everybody feel good, we are blasted, attacked, flamed, maligned, insulted, and accused of being selfish, greedy, and whatever other invective you'd like.
But when we want to send legal experts to CONSULT WITH legal experts in other nations and engage in training on IP law in those nations and in the international arena, we're somehow being a bunch of pricks forcing American federalism on other nations. These programs are about nothing of the sort. I don't think it's a bunch of happy lawyers holding hands and cheering over how great it is to all cooperational internationally. Doubtless American businesses have been lobbying our reps to do something like this. But the level of hostility with which Slashdot is collectively reacting to this is vastly disproportionate to the severity of the issue.
Not to mention that not one of you guys has managed to figure out yet that the purpose of these people's "tours" is not to teach them about American law or why they should follow it but to engage in training on international and local law.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Bush fanbois defending this program. I have some criticisms of it and its purpose as well, but you guys just flap your gums about this shit without reading the article or understanding the issues or even considering, objectively, what is going on. Slashdot discussions about IP rights contain about as much intellectual merit as a dog slavering over a slice of bacon. Stimulus -> Response, you're as predictable as death and taxes.
Hmm, this sounds more like a world domination plan. So the US-government and US-businesses have agreed that all intellectual-property shall be theirs, and their agents ("... train foreign judges") will do the field administration to assure US interests secured. Why is the US so convinced of it's own legal system. Why should it work for the rest of the world?
We're not training them in how to use our legal system. The program is intended to foster proper intellectual property decisions according to international law, and the local law of each nation in question. Why on earth would you expect the United States to spend money on a plan like this that does NOT secure American interests? It's as if doing anything ANYTHING that benefits our own nation is somehow immoral.
As for our legal system... we at least have one that functions properly most of the time. You can decry its inadequacies and question our motivations all you want, but on balance the American legal and law enforcement systems are incredible compared to most of the rest of the world. If you don't care for it, go enjoy some tribal justice elsewhere for a while and then come back and let me know which system you prefer. Little communes full of happy natives sound great until you get your genitals chopped off in a public ritual for winking at another guy's wife.
Yeah, all those years of school and working as lawyers in the field couldn't prepare them enough.
It clearly doesn't. While American judges typically attend undergraduate school, law school, and practice as attorneys or are at least involved in the legal system for some kind of tenure before being appointed to courts, judges in many other nations often have far less legal expertise. The standards of American legal knowledge inherent in our court system are not shared worldwide. A handful of nations have judges who are far more knowledgable, but on balance, the nations in question tend to have a relatively large number of people in positions of legal authority whose primary qualification is being related to or owed favor by the right people in power. That does happen in the 'States too, but usually those people have some case for being qualified on their own merits.
For the record, law school trains you very, very little to actually be an attorney, and not at all to be a judge. Lawyering skills are almost entirely acquired on the job. When attorneys and judges "grow up" professional in a corrupt legal system, all the training in the world isn't going to convince them to enforce law consistantly. By international standards, American courts are a model of principle and fairness, as amazing as that may seem.
The problem is, other countries have other laws. You can't enforce US law in china. They'll tell us just where we can stick our initiative. I hope that ALL the countries do the same....
We're not going there to enforce our laws. We're sending people to advise businesses on local laws and stump for IP rights for businesses in those nations. Further, there are international IP rights, and the programs in question are intended to serve as training for judges and attorneys in international courts and advocate best practices. Nowhere in here is an attemp to force US IP law on other governments, only to encourage them to abide by the laws of their own countries and those laws that such nations have agreed to abide by in the international arena.
Or you could knee-jerk and flail your arms at the injustice of world, that any company doesn't want its software being sold on the streets of Jakarta for $2, in violation of local law, while police look the other way. I don't think this is unreasonable.
I do that, too. When there's too much technobabble jargon being bandied about in meetings, I said, "Do we have the 1.21 jigga watts for the flux capacitor?" At least one person always thinks I'm serious. I also frequently suggest that we solve any given problem by degaussing the main deflector dish or reversing the flow control to the plasma relay conduits.
We've already lost our right to assemble. Protesters are shipped off to designated fenced-in "free speech zones". US Citizens are held indefinately without charges or a trial.
In other words, we haven't lost our right to assemble. What we've lost is the right to assemble wherever the fuck we want, which is a Good Thing, because until some limits were in place, "peaceful" assemblies of pro-life nutjobs would canvas abortion clinics and harrass women going in and coming out. I'm in favor of fencing people like this off across the street so that private citizens can engage in private business without being hassled.
Meanwhile 80% of Americans are oblivious to the massive increase in Federal power.
I think 80% of Americans just don't care whether it's Republicans or Democrats bloating federal government and trampling upon their rights. Most of them don't run blogs, don't protest anything, don't watch public TV. Most citizens of most countries are not engaged in the political process beyond inheriting opinions from their family and friends and reciting them when called upon. Lots of people don't even do that much. It's human nature to not care when things that don't impact your lifestyle directly are changed. This is why it's so easy to tax the shit out of corporations and rich people. None of us are corporate board members or rich people, so why the hell would we care what the government does to them? Gotta pay for something? Tax rich people! Because 99.92% of us are NOT rich and we don't care, and it satisfies, frankly, a jealous instinct to see those snotty bastards with their Grey Poupon and luxury cars having to hand over more of their income.
They care more about the newest episode of The Lost than they do about their Lost Civil Rights. The 20% who do care are increasingly powerless.
Why would they care about civil rights they never execute? I'm not defending civic apathy, don't misunderstand, but you sound very frustrated and perplexed about this, and I don't think it's a difficult issue. People don't care because it has a negligable direct impact on their lifestyle. When Desperate Housewives is interrupted for a late-breaking news bulliten about weather, people get irate. Federal and state congresses, meanwhile, pass increasingly stupid and odious laws that amount to more government, more wasted money, and more people who work or the state, and nobody cares. We have a massive infrastructure of vehicle emissions testing here in St. Louis, that involves dozens of testing facilities, hundreds of employees, an accounting department to handle receipts, and all kinds of garbage to make sure that our cars aren't polluting too much. After running the program it was determined that it has had no effect on the quality of the air here. So what are they doing? Leaving it to run, because it generates income, and in a few more years, it'll bring in more to the government than it has cost so far.
That's government. And people don't care because they only have to go through this Mickey Mouse charade of emissions testing once every two years. But you don't dare interrupt House to tell me about a goddam tornado.
What am I missing here. How is campaign finance related to freedom of speech?
Because they passed a law that bans/restricts certain people from making political speech. Congress passed a law abridging the freedom of speech, which is specifically forbidden in the First Amendment of the Constitution. I don't know if it's been challenged yet, and even if it was I suspect that the current Supreme Court would uphold it.
The irony is that campaign finance reform is intended to dull the influence of heavy political donors on the behavior of public officials. However, in general the influence has been shifted to a new set of people, not eliminated, and the new set of people, on both sides, tends to be even more extreme.
I actually don't completely agree with this synopsis. Although I oppose McCain-Feingold, I also don't think it's fair to classify it as an attack on First Amendmend rights. There is a great confusion in this nation about the right to speak your mind vs the right to be heard. When that Kayne West rapper or whatever his name is started criticizing Bush on TV, and the network cut him off, my roommate leaped up and said, "That's freedom of speech! They can't do that!" Well, yes they can. West still got to say whatever it is he wanted to say. Nobody came by and hauled him off to jail for it. Nobody threatened or coerced him. The man had an opinion, and he voiced it. There's no Constitutional right to have your opinions broadcast to the entire nation just because you're famous and wealthy.
Howard Stern, Tim Robbins, and Rush Limbaugh have all made this mistake as well. Clear Channel dropped Stern's program from some of its major stations and Stern whined that it was an attack on his 1st Amendment rights. No, Howard. Such an attack would be if you were stopped from speaking at all. Howard can still say whatever he wants, but nobody has to publish or broadcast it. Tim Robbins was un-invited to speak at some kind of event because the organizers feared he'd start in on politics. He bitched about his freedom of speech. Wrong, Tim. You can still think and say whatever you want. But nobody has to give you a public forum and a captive audience for it. Limbaugh's show was going to be pulled from the Armed Forces radio network and he whined about the same thing. Now, Limbaugh's case has slightly more merit because the Armed Forces radio is pure government broadcasting. But the government wasn't silencing Limbaugh, it was only declining to rebroadcast what he had to say. That's not a violation of 1st Amendment rights.
So, campaign finance... nobody is stopping these political activists from saying what they want to whomever they want; being declined the right to broadcast something is not the same as being declined the right to say it at all.
I make the issue out here to be far more black-and-white than it is. Access to information via public airwaves is a critical to the survival of an informed society in the modern era, and divorcing "freedom of speech" from wide-scale public dissemination of information in the manner I have done is really over-simplifying the situation for argumentative convenience. But on a very basic and fundamental level, we have and continue to confuse the right to think and say what we wish with the right to have a national audience for it. If Tim Robbins' first amendment rights are being trodden upon because he's been disallowed to speak at a private function, then I'm going to ask for permission to give my opinions in some high-profile public forum, and when denied that opportunity, claim it was a 1st Amendment violation. Would anybody think my case has merit? Of course not. So why do Limbaugh, Robbins, Stern, and West have any legitimate claim to such discrimination? Because of their wealth and fame? Hogwash. There's no special exemptions for the rich in our founding documents; our social favoritism towards our cultural elites is a fabrication with no legal basis.
4. Allow any candidate that can get on a ballot to join in any government-funded debate.
Therein lay the problem. Ballots used to not require a "getting onto." You just wrote down the name of the guy you were voting for. The problem, of course, is mis-spellings, illegible handwriting, smudged ink, etc. So we adopted a new type of ballot and a large set of rules about what it takes to be on it for each state. Both Republicans and Democrats warmly embrace this system and prop it up, because without it they'd have been resigned the dustbin of history decades ago. Notice that the Republicans were the large major party to come into any prominence in America? There were some notable other third parties, like the Bull Moose and Granger business, but right around the turn of the century (i.e, 100 years ago-ish), third parties really dried up and became impotent. It's not a coincidence that the United States adopted the pre-printed balloting system for the 1892 election.
Q. How much do you monitor the economics?
A. We monitor it.
Q. What would you have done differently?
A. We learned a lot!
Q. What challenges were involved with simultaneous development of the game for both Mac and Windows?
A. We released the game on Mac and Windows at the same time!
Q. What is the process for achieving class balance?
A. It's hard.
Q. Are there going to be events like in Asheron's Call that really impact the game?
A. You can go fishing! Every week!
Q. The game is boring at 60 if you don't know 15-40 people to play with, how are you doing to deal with it?
A. By adding new content that requires 15-40 people to enjoy.
Q. I don't play your game, but I'm curious about what made you decide to make it?
A. PLAY OUR GAME! PLAY IT YOU WILL LIKE IT! PLAY IT! IT HAS TONS OF FEATURES FOR YOU! YOU WILL LOVE IT! YOU WILL MARRY IT! YOU WILL SLEEP WITH THE BOX UNDER YOUR PILLOW! YOU WILL FORNICATE WITH THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL! YOU WILL FRAME THE CDs AND HANG THEM ON THE WALL! THE UI IS AWESOME! THE QUESTS ARE EASY, IT'S TOTALLY FOR THE CASUAL GAMER JUST LIKE YOU, IGNORE ALL THESE OTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW YOU NEED A SOCIAL CIRCLE LARGER THAN THE POPULATION OF WYOMING TO FINISH BLACKWING LAIR! THEY'RE JUST BITTER! PLAY IT! PLAY IT! PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT.
Oh, and we made it cuz we wanted to.
Q. What are you doing to deal with farming and boting?
A. Making it against the rules and saying loudly and frequently in public that it's against the rules. Nobody breaks the rules when you repeat them loudly and frequently. Don't farm or bot. Vote Quimby.
Q. I don't want to PvP or Raid, and the game is dull at 60 for me. Now what?
A. Tough shit, most people love it. Roll an alt and keep paying your monthly fee until some unpaid intern slops together some bullshit you might like.
Q. Why don't you let the developers blog, it helps a lot?
A. We think it's far more useful to set up forums for you to read, in which you can be insulted and accused of being a stupid, immature 12 year old by people who are stupid, immature 13 years old.
What's the latest Lynx exploit? Even that's too risky. I telnet straight to the web server and hand-request all the documents and parse the html via the ol' eye ball. No root exploits for my optic nerve, bitches.
I just grabbed it with no problems.
Mods, I beg you, don't mod garbage like this as "funny." Or insightful, or anything else. The guy has a good point but it's not really applicable to a product like FireFox.
The right to own a gun is a constitutionally protected
The right to BUY a gun at a particular store is NOT protected. I don't have to sell you jack shit if I don't want to. The 2nd amendment stops the GOVERNMENT (the public sector) from taking my guns away. It doesnt stop the private sector from refusing a sale.
If only you'd paid attention in government class and knew that the President doesn't ratify treaties, the Senate does.
Yes, yes, I know that, but it hasn't stopped the cadre of howlers from bitching that George Bush is responsible for Katrina because HE made the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico go up by NOT SIGNING KYOTO. (This is not a defense of the president, this is a comment about the one-sided blindness of some of his detractors).
The President makes the treaty, and 2/3 of the Senate concurs ('ratifies').
Right, and President Clinton knew the Senate would never ratify since they voted, in a rare 95-0 display of bipartisan solidarity, to never sign such a piece of crap treaty. Bush hasn't submitted it either, although perhaps for ideologically different reasons.
P.S.: Yes I get your satire, and you probably belted your post out rather quickly, but lots of people have never read the Constitution and don't have a clue about what it actually says.
Global warming is predicted to continue, agreed. Just because it may or may not be caused by mankind or prevented by Kyoto doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about.
I didn't say it was nothing to worry about. I said that the severity of the increase is measured enough that we'll be able to survive. Earthquakes and hurricanes and tornados and terrorists and anal warts are all things to worry about, too, but we survive them.
Try saying "I think we'll survive" in the context of rising water levels to the residents of New Orleans
At the current time, approximately 99.92% of New Orlean's population survived the hurricane and flood. I'm not concerned. Even if the number of dead quadruples over current estimates, it means 99.3% of the population survived the hurricane. Again, not worried.
YOU might survive, WE might not be so privelaged.
Irrelevent red herring. I said we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon. You're shifting the scope of the discussion and changing the definition of "we" to make a case. You're right i "we" may not survive if "we" is the cheery-picked 1000-odd people who may end up dead after New Orleans is drained. Or the ungodly number of people killed by the December 26 tsunami. The tsunmi took out about 0.003% of the world's human population. Again, I'm not worried. Yeah, it sucks to be them, and it'll suck to be me when Missouri gets annihilated by another rash of insane tornados. What am I going to do about it? Nothing. I'm going to drive my car to work, play Warcraft, read Slashdot, download porn, play poker, drink beer, and enjoy my life.
The useful idiots who repeat the spin and F.U.D. from the Global Climate Coalition, Club for Growth, Cato Institute and other tools of the fossil fuel industry have a huge variety of talking points at their disposal.
What really sucks is when people who are sensible skeptical about controversial research also have data. Because then you have to actually put up some of your own instead of firing off snide comments about people whose views are inconvenient.
It doesn't take much effort to look at historical temperature readings and notice that there is a cycle of warming and cooling that the planet undergoes, and the modern industrial age happens to coincidence with one rather closely. In fact, the current warming trend started about 10,000 years ago. While I can't say with complete authority that auto emissions and industrial pollutants weren't present at the time, I feel comfortable in hazarding a guess that the small population of humans were contributing negligably to the planet's greenhouse gases.
What IS interesting is that this warming cycle, ramps up over about 10,000 years and then gradually cools. Repeated melting and refreezing of the ice caps appears to be normal and we do not currently know whether climate change causes greenhouse gases to increase or the other way around. Or if they both occur in synchrony and are caused by something else entirely.
The danger here is that the cooling mechanism has failed to kick in, and it normally would have begun LONG before American capitalism and human greed stepped in to fuck up the planet.
Doubtless that our own contributions to global GTG content is not helping any, but I do not believe that there is conclusive evidence that our planet's temparture is primarily or even partially influenced to any significant degree by the behavior of its inhabitants at the current time. Something is different right now, that's for sure. We may or may not be the cause of it. There's at least a few components at work here, however, that we are not responsible for and cannot do anything about.
Sadly, there's a vacuum of intellectual integrity in the global warming debate precisely because of smug shitheads like you.
If the temperature rises by 6 degrees by 2050, as is expected under the Kyoto Treaty,
That is not what is expected. The temperature is expected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees by 2100, not 2050. I note that you round up the top end of the range and then reduce the timeline by 50 years. Further, the Kyoto protocol is expected to REDUCE this increase by 0.02C to 0.28C by 2050.
Not reduce _TO_, but reduce _BY_. So we're going to shave a quarter of a degree off, and at what expense? That's assuming that our theories on what is causing global warming pan out in the first place.
Talk about your schadenfreude experiences, eh? Either these scientists are wrong, or they get to gloat about how nobody listented to them.
What's interesting is that on the balance of scientific history the overwhelming majority of what science has "discovered" has turned out to be wrong. That's just how science works. There's been "overwhelming" evidence and "worldwide scientific consensus" on a lot of things that have turned out to be wrong, even though the evidence was based on the best modeling and mathematics available and blah blah blah. The global warming situation is too politicized right now and probably will continue to be until Bush is out of office.
Actually they've been warning us for a longer time than that, that there's global climate change coming and mankind is to blame for it, so we'd better change our ways. Except it was global cooling that was all the rage. Now that we have better data, it's easier to find correlations, although we haven't proved causation yet. Regardless, I am confident that as we move forward, the anti-intellectualism present in the global warming debate will decline and we'll be able to have a more open and honest scientific discussion on the topic. I mean "we" as in "we humans," not "we slashdot readers." There will never be an open, honest, intellectual debate about anything on Slashdot.:)
Even WITHOUT the Kyoto Protocol, the planet's mean temperature is expected to increase by 6-8 degrees over the 300 years. I think we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon.
I see... just as the Fire Department is a fire risk, hospitals increase reckless activity, having a police force causes crime, etc.
There's a flaw in your analogy. The fire department is there to save my ass when my own property is threatened. The police are there to deal with threats to my stuff or my person.
When I'm at work on the company's equipment, and the company is paying an entire IT department to maintain that equipment, do I give a shit about it? No, that's their JOB, and it's easily repaired like magic in a few short hours. So to hell with it.
The axiom at work here is that people are careless and irresponsible with other people's property, especially when that property comes with an entire team of people to keep it running no matter what stupid shit I do it.
There's a world of difference between getting a virus on my computer and throwing it down the stairs.
There's a world of difference also between cleaning toilet paper out of my yard and letting my house burn down.
The computer is not typically damaged beyond repair when Joe Q. Employee fucks it up through willful ignorance. If it was, he'd be asked to pay for it, especially if he broke it while in violation of company policy. This is nothing like me lightning candles and placing them next to my Classic Collection of Petroleum Samples from AcCross the Globe and then going to bed, thinking, "If anything goes wrong, the fire department will fix it!" They won't fix it, they'll put out the fire, but they won't rebuild my fucking house. The IT guy puts out fires and then fixes everything back to how it was before you broke it.
There is no accountability to the end user, and when people have neither ownership nor responsibility for something, they don't take care of it. They just don't, no matter how well-meaning they are.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the issue in question. They are wantonly violating their own laws, as well as internation laws that they have agreed to abide by. When America or the UK does this, the world is on our collective asses in the heartbeat. The detainment of terrorists in Gitmo has been cited non-stop by Americans, Europeans, and the UN as a violation of both American due process and international law. The Abu Graibh torture has been heavily scrutinized as a violation of international treaties to which the US is a party. When our government breaks its own rules, or violates treaties, or just declines to even SIGN a treaty that makes everybody feel good, we are blasted, attacked, flamed, maligned, insulted, and accused of being selfish, greedy, and whatever other invective you'd like.
But when we want to send legal experts to CONSULT WITH legal experts in other nations and engage in training on IP law in those nations and in the international arena, we're somehow being a bunch of pricks forcing American federalism on other nations. These programs are about nothing of the sort. I don't think it's a bunch of happy lawyers holding hands and cheering over how great it is to all cooperational internationally. Doubtless American businesses have been lobbying our reps to do something like this. But the level of hostility with which Slashdot is collectively reacting to this is vastly disproportionate to the severity of the issue.
Not to mention that not one of you guys has managed to figure out yet that the purpose of these people's "tours" is not to teach them about American law or why they should follow it but to engage in training on international and local law.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Bush fanbois defending this program. I have some criticisms of it and its purpose as well, but you guys just flap your gums about this shit without reading the article or understanding the issues or even considering, objectively, what is going on. Slashdot discussions about IP rights contain about as much intellectual merit as a dog slavering over a slice of bacon. Stimulus -> Response, you're as predictable as death and taxes.
We're not training them in how to use our legal system. The program is intended to foster proper intellectual property decisions according to international law, and the local law of each nation in question. Why on earth would you expect the United States to spend money on a plan like this that does NOT secure American interests? It's as if doing anything ANYTHING that benefits our own nation is somehow immoral.
As for our legal system ... we at least have one that functions properly most of the time. You can decry its inadequacies and question our motivations all you want, but on balance the American legal and law enforcement systems are incredible compared to most of the rest of the world. If you don't care for it, go enjoy some tribal justice elsewhere for a while and then come back and let me know which system you prefer. Little communes full of happy natives sound great until you get your genitals chopped off in a public ritual for winking at another guy's wife.
It clearly doesn't. While American judges typically attend undergraduate school, law school, and practice as attorneys or are at least involved in the legal system for some kind of tenure before being appointed to courts, judges in many other nations often have far less legal expertise. The standards of American legal knowledge inherent in our court system are not shared worldwide. A handful of nations have judges who are far more knowledgable, but on balance, the nations in question tend to have a relatively large number of people in positions of legal authority whose primary qualification is being related to or owed favor by the right people in power. That does happen in the 'States too, but usually those people have some case for being qualified on their own merits.
For the record, law school trains you very, very little to actually be an attorney, and not at all to be a judge. Lawyering skills are almost entirely acquired on the job. When attorneys and judges "grow up" professional in a corrupt legal system, all the training in the world isn't going to convince them to enforce law consistantly. By international standards, American courts are a model of principle and fairness, as amazing as that may seem.
We're not going there to enforce our laws. We're sending people to advise businesses on local laws and stump for IP rights for businesses in those nations. Further, there are international IP rights, and the programs in question are intended to serve as training for judges and attorneys in international courts and advocate best practices. Nowhere in here is an attemp to force US IP law on other governments, only to encourage them to abide by the laws of their own countries and those laws that such nations have agreed to abide by in the international arena.
Or you could knee-jerk and flail your arms at the injustice of world, that any company doesn't want its software being sold on the streets of Jakarta for $2, in violation of local law, while police look the other way. I don't think this is unreasonable.
I do that, too. When there's too much technobabble jargon being bandied about in meetings, I said, "Do we have the 1.21 jigga watts for the flux capacitor?" At least one person always thinks I'm serious. I also frequently suggest that we solve any given problem by degaussing the main deflector dish or reversing the flow control to the plasma relay conduits.
Most of Slashdot's front-page articles aren't justifiable as "news for nerds." This one comes closer than many.
In other words, we haven't lost our right to assemble. What we've lost is the right to assemble wherever the fuck we want, which is a Good Thing, because until some limits were in place, "peaceful" assemblies of pro-life nutjobs would canvas abortion clinics and harrass women going in and coming out. I'm in favor of fencing people like this off across the street so that private citizens can engage in private business without being hassled.
Meanwhile 80% of Americans are oblivious to the massive increase in Federal power.
I think 80% of Americans just don't care whether it's Republicans or Democrats bloating federal government and trampling upon their rights. Most of them don't run blogs, don't protest anything, don't watch public TV. Most citizens of most countries are not engaged in the political process beyond inheriting opinions from their family and friends and reciting them when called upon. Lots of people don't even do that much. It's human nature to not care when things that don't impact your lifestyle directly are changed. This is why it's so easy to tax the shit out of corporations and rich people. None of us are corporate board members or rich people, so why the hell would we care what the government does to them? Gotta pay for something? Tax rich people! Because 99.92% of us are NOT rich and we don't care, and it satisfies, frankly, a jealous instinct to see those snotty bastards with their Grey Poupon and luxury cars having to hand over more of their income.
They care more about the newest episode of The Lost than they do about their Lost Civil Rights. The 20% who do care are increasingly powerless.
Why would they care about civil rights they never execute? I'm not defending civic apathy, don't misunderstand, but you sound very frustrated and perplexed about this, and I don't think it's a difficult issue. People don't care because it has a negligable direct impact on their lifestyle. When Desperate Housewives is interrupted for a late-breaking news bulliten about weather, people get irate. Federal and state congresses, meanwhile, pass increasingly stupid and odious laws that amount to more government, more wasted money, and more people who work or the state, and nobody cares. We have a massive infrastructure of vehicle emissions testing here in St. Louis, that involves dozens of testing facilities, hundreds of employees, an accounting department to handle receipts, and all kinds of garbage to make sure that our cars aren't polluting too much. After running the program it was determined that it has had no effect on the quality of the air here. So what are they doing? Leaving it to run, because it generates income, and in a few more years, it'll bring in more to the government than it has cost so far.
That's government. And people don't care because they only have to go through this Mickey Mouse charade of emissions testing once every two years. But you don't dare interrupt House to tell me about a goddam tornado.
Because they passed a law that bans/restricts certain people from making political speech. Congress passed a law abridging the freedom of speech, which is specifically forbidden in the First Amendment of the Constitution. I don't know if it's been challenged yet, and even if it was I suspect that the current Supreme Court would uphold it.
The irony is that campaign finance reform is intended to dull the influence of heavy political donors on the behavior of public officials. However, in general the influence has been shifted to a new set of people, not eliminated, and the new set of people, on both sides, tends to be even more extreme.
I actually don't completely agree with this synopsis. Although I oppose McCain-Feingold, I also don't think it's fair to classify it as an attack on First Amendmend rights. There is a great confusion in this nation about the right to speak your mind vs the right to be heard. When that Kayne West rapper or whatever his name is started criticizing Bush on TV, and the network cut him off, my roommate leaped up and said, "That's freedom of speech! They can't do that!" Well, yes they can. West still got to say whatever it is he wanted to say. Nobody came by and hauled him off to jail for it. Nobody threatened or coerced him. The man had an opinion, and he voiced it. There's no Constitutional right to have your opinions broadcast to the entire nation just because you're famous and wealthy.
Howard Stern, Tim Robbins, and Rush Limbaugh have all made this mistake as well. Clear Channel dropped Stern's program from some of its major stations and Stern whined that it was an attack on his 1st Amendment rights. No, Howard. Such an attack would be if you were stopped from speaking at all. Howard can still say whatever he wants, but nobody has to publish or broadcast it. Tim Robbins was un-invited to speak at some kind of event because the organizers feared he'd start in on politics. He bitched about his freedom of speech. Wrong, Tim. You can still think and say whatever you want. But nobody has to give you a public forum and a captive audience for it. Limbaugh's show was going to be pulled from the Armed Forces radio network and he whined about the same thing. Now, Limbaugh's case has slightly more merit because the Armed Forces radio is pure government broadcasting. But the government wasn't silencing Limbaugh, it was only declining to rebroadcast what he had to say. That's not a violation of 1st Amendment rights.
So, campaign finance ... nobody is stopping these political activists from saying what they want to whomever they want; being declined the right to broadcast something is not the same as being declined the right to say it at all.
I make the issue out here to be far more black-and-white than it is. Access to information via public airwaves is a critical to the survival of an informed society in the modern era, and divorcing "freedom of speech" from wide-scale public dissemination of information in the manner I have done is really over-simplifying the situation for argumentative convenience. But on a very basic and fundamental level, we have and continue to confuse the right to think and say what we wish with the right to have a national audience for it. If Tim Robbins' first amendment rights are being trodden upon because he's been disallowed to speak at a private function, then I'm going to ask for permission to give my opinions in some high-profile public forum, and when denied that opportunity, claim it was a 1st Amendment violation. Would anybody think my case has merit? Of course not. So why do Limbaugh, Robbins, Stern, and West have any legitimate claim to such discrimination? Because of their wealth and fame? Hogwash. There's no special exemptions for the rich in our founding documents; our social favoritism towards our cultural elites is a fabrication with no legal basis.
Anyway, so the rea
Therein lay the problem. Ballots used to not require a "getting onto." You just wrote down the name of the guy you were voting for. The problem, of course, is mis-spellings, illegible handwriting, smudged ink, etc. So we adopted a new type of ballot and a large set of rules about what it takes to be on it for each state. Both Republicans and Democrats warmly embrace this system and prop it up, because without it they'd have been resigned the dustbin of history decades ago. Notice that the Republicans were the large major party to come into any prominence in America? There were some notable other third parties, like the Bull Moose and Granger business, but right around the turn of the century (i.e, 100 years ago-ish), third parties really dried up and became impotent. It's not a coincidence that the United States adopted the pre-printed balloting system for the 1892 election.
Q. How much do you monitor the economics?
A. We monitor it.
Q. What would you have done differently?
A. We learned a lot!
Q. What challenges were involved with simultaneous development of the game for both Mac and Windows?
A. We released the game on Mac and Windows at the same time!
Q. What is the process for achieving class balance?
A. It's hard.
Q. Are there going to be events like in Asheron's Call that really impact the game?
A. You can go fishing! Every week!
Q. The game is boring at 60 if you don't know 15-40 people to play with, how are you doing to deal with it?
A. By adding new content that requires 15-40 people to enjoy.
Q. I don't play your game, but I'm curious about what made you decide to make it?
A. PLAY OUR GAME! PLAY IT YOU WILL LIKE IT! PLAY IT! IT HAS TONS OF FEATURES FOR YOU! YOU WILL LOVE IT! YOU WILL MARRY IT! YOU WILL SLEEP WITH THE BOX UNDER YOUR PILLOW! YOU WILL FORNICATE WITH THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL! YOU WILL FRAME THE CDs AND HANG THEM ON THE WALL! THE UI IS AWESOME! THE QUESTS ARE EASY, IT'S TOTALLY FOR THE CASUAL GAMER JUST LIKE YOU, IGNORE ALL THESE OTHER QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW YOU NEED A SOCIAL CIRCLE LARGER THAN THE POPULATION OF WYOMING TO FINISH BLACKWING LAIR! THEY'RE JUST BITTER! PLAY IT! PLAY IT! PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT PLAY IT.
Oh, and we made it cuz we wanted to.
Q. What are you doing to deal with farming and boting?
A. Making it against the rules and saying loudly and frequently in public that it's against the rules. Nobody breaks the rules when you repeat them loudly and frequently. Don't farm or bot. Vote Quimby.
Q. I don't want to PvP or Raid, and the game is dull at 60 for me. Now what?
A. Tough shit, most people love it. Roll an alt and keep paying your monthly fee until some unpaid intern slops together some bullshit you might like.
Q. Why don't you let the developers blog, it helps a lot?
A. We think it's far more useful to set up forums for you to read, in which you can be insulted and accused of being a stupid, immature 12 year old by people who are stupid, immature 13 years old.
What's the latest Lynx exploit? Even that's too risky. I telnet straight to the web server and hand-request all the documents and parse the html via the ol' eye ball. No root exploits for my optic nerve, bitches.
HA! I don't have your insecure Linux problems. I run Windows!
I just grabbed it with no problems. Mods, I beg you, don't mod garbage like this as "funny." Or insightful, or anything else. The guy has a good point but it's not really applicable to a product like FireFox.
Yeah but they're SOLAR cars. Proof that the technology isn't going to solve our problems.
"Well, we've got it for radio, why not for CD's? Or cable TV?"
The right to BUY a gun at a particular store is NOT protected. I don't have to sell you jack shit if I don't want to. The 2nd amendment stops the GOVERNMENT (the public sector) from taking my guns away. It doesnt stop the private sector from refusing a sale.
Yes, yes, I know that, but it hasn't stopped the cadre of howlers from bitching that George Bush is responsible for Katrina because HE made the temperature in the Gulf of Mexico go up by NOT SIGNING KYOTO. (This is not a defense of the president, this is a comment about the one-sided blindness of some of his detractors).
The President makes the treaty, and 2/3 of the Senate concurs ('ratifies').
Right, and President Clinton knew the Senate would never ratify since they voted, in a rare 95-0 display of bipartisan solidarity, to never sign such a piece of crap treaty. Bush hasn't submitted it either, although perhaps for ideologically different reasons.
P.S.: Yes I get your satire, and you probably belted your post out rather quickly, but lots of people have never read the Constitution and don't have a clue about what it actually says.
Quite true, quite true.
I didn't say it was nothing to worry about. I said that the severity of the increase is measured enough that we'll be able to survive. Earthquakes and hurricanes and tornados and terrorists and anal warts are all things to worry about, too, but we survive them.
Try saying "I think we'll survive" in the context of rising water levels to the residents of New Orleans
At the current time, approximately 99.92% of New Orlean's population survived the hurricane and flood. I'm not concerned. Even if the number of dead quadruples over current estimates, it means 99.3% of the population survived the hurricane. Again, not worried.
YOU might survive, WE might not be so privelaged.
Irrelevent red herring. I said we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon. You're shifting the scope of the discussion and changing the definition of "we" to make a case. You're right i "we" may not survive if "we" is the cheery-picked 1000-odd people who may end up dead after New Orleans is drained. Or the ungodly number of people killed by the December 26 tsunami. The tsunmi took out about 0.003% of the world's human population. Again, I'm not worried. Yeah, it sucks to be them, and it'll suck to be me when Missouri gets annihilated by another rash of insane tornados. What am I going to do about it? Nothing. I'm going to drive my car to work, play Warcraft, read Slashdot, download porn, play poker, drink beer, and enjoy my life.
What really sucks is when people who are sensible skeptical about controversial research also have data. Because then you have to actually put up some of your own instead of firing off snide comments about people whose views are inconvenient.
It doesn't take much effort to look at historical temperature readings and notice that there is a cycle of warming and cooling that the planet undergoes, and the modern industrial age happens to coincidence with one rather closely. In fact, the current warming trend started about 10,000 years ago. While I can't say with complete authority that auto emissions and industrial pollutants weren't present at the time, I feel comfortable in hazarding a guess that the small population of humans were contributing negligably to the planet's greenhouse gases.
What IS interesting is that this warming cycle, ramps up over about 10,000 years and then gradually cools. Repeated melting and refreezing of the ice caps appears to be normal and we do not currently know whether climate change causes greenhouse gases to increase or the other way around. Or if they both occur in synchrony and are caused by something else entirely.
The danger here is that the cooling mechanism has failed to kick in, and it normally would have begun LONG before American capitalism and human greed stepped in to fuck up the planet.
Doubtless that our own contributions to global GTG content is not helping any, but I do not believe that there is conclusive evidence that our planet's temparture is primarily or even partially influenced to any significant degree by the behavior of its inhabitants at the current time. Something is different right now, that's for sure. We may or may not be the cause of it. There's at least a few components at work here, however, that we are not responsible for and cannot do anything about.
Sadly, there's a vacuum of intellectual integrity in the global warming debate precisely because of smug shitheads like you.
That is not what is expected. The temperature is expected to increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees by 2100, not 2050. I note that you round up the top end of the range and then reduce the timeline by 50 years. Further, the Kyoto protocol is expected to REDUCE this increase by 0.02C to 0.28C by 2050. Not reduce _TO_, but reduce _BY_. So we're going to shave a quarter of a degree off, and at what expense? That's assuming that our theories on what is causing global warming pan out in the first place.
What's interesting is that on the balance of scientific history the overwhelming majority of what science has "discovered" has turned out to be wrong. That's just how science works. There's been "overwhelming" evidence and "worldwide scientific consensus" on a lot of things that have turned out to be wrong, even though the evidence was based on the best modeling and mathematics available and blah blah blah. The global warming situation is too politicized right now and probably will continue to be until Bush is out of office.
Actually they've been warning us for a longer time than that, that there's global climate change coming and mankind is to blame for it, so we'd better change our ways. Except it was global cooling that was all the rage. Now that we have better data, it's easier to find correlations, although we haven't proved causation yet. Regardless, I am confident that as we move forward, the anti-intellectualism present in the global warming debate will decline and we'll be able to have a more open and honest scientific discussion on the topic. I mean "we" as in "we humans," not "we slashdot readers." There will never be an open, honest, intellectual debate about anything on Slashdot. :)
Even WITHOUT the Kyoto Protocol, the planet's mean temperature is expected to increase by 6-8 degrees over the 300 years. I think we'll survive, as will the food we depend upon.
If only President Clinton had ratified the Kyoto Protocol, this would never have happened.
There's a flaw in your analogy. The fire department is there to save my ass when my own property is threatened. The police are there to deal with threats to my stuff or my person.
When I'm at work on the company's equipment, and the company is paying an entire IT department to maintain that equipment, do I give a shit about it? No, that's their JOB, and it's easily repaired like magic in a few short hours. So to hell with it.
The axiom at work here is that people are careless and irresponsible with other people's property, especially when that property comes with an entire team of people to keep it running no matter what stupid shit I do it.
There's a world of difference between getting a virus on my computer and throwing it down the stairs.
There's a world of difference also between cleaning toilet paper out of my yard and letting my house burn down.
The computer is not typically damaged beyond repair when Joe Q. Employee fucks it up through willful ignorance. If it was, he'd be asked to pay for it, especially if he broke it while in violation of company policy. This is nothing like me lightning candles and placing them next to my Classic Collection of Petroleum Samples from AcCross the Globe and then going to bed, thinking, "If anything goes wrong, the fire department will fix it!" They won't fix it, they'll put out the fire, but they won't rebuild my fucking house. The IT guy puts out fires and then fixes everything back to how it was before you broke it.
There is no accountability to the end user, and when people have neither ownership nor responsibility for something, they don't take care of it. They just don't, no matter how well-meaning they are.