I never thought of it like that. How dare they make business decisions to ensure their fiscal viability for investors when they could be doing shit for free and giving it to me!
They're just greedy that's all. Right, jav1231? Not like us, who are demanding free shit! We're not greedy!
What you mean is, "Privacy should cost me nothing." Who cares if other people have to pay for it. Because allowing ANYBODY to just walk into a library and take a book out without having to identify themselves is going to fairly quickly result in libraries depleted of books and tons of library books on eBay and in used book stores. That's not "free".
I know the idiotic/. solution is that the poor people who can't afford to plop down cash can just get an old card - one that isn't anonymous. Toss equal rights right out the window. The rich get to be anonymous. The poor get tracked.
If people who can afford $50-$100 collateral for books are "rich" then I'm a goddam billionaire. Do you really think that only the rich can afford to do this? That only people in the top 2% or top 5% of taxpayers can afford this?
The reason why socialism has such a strong tendency to turn into a dictatorship is because socialism is intrinsically elitist. The idea that the government should control the economy implies automatically that people in the government are superior to the general population in their mental capacity. This goes contrary to the notion of democracy.
And this is evident all over American sociey today. There's this belief that everybody is too stupid to make their own decisions so we need to tax them and use the money to fund government agencies to make their decisions for them. And I find this highly contradictory to liberalism.
Unregulated capitalism is more democratic, because people vote with their wallets, but it's a "one dollar one vote" kind of democracy. It's also elitist, but, differently from socialist planning, it's efficient. In an unregulated capitalist system, rich people must have more aptitude to control the economy than the general population, otherwise they lose their money and become poor.
Exactly. Which is why a well-regulated capitalist economy tends to be the most productive. Like I said, a regulated economy is different from a planned economy.
I don't believe the economy itself should have any government regulation at all.
It depends. Do you consider setting the federal funds rate to be regulating the economy? What about establishing rules for when and how stocks may be traded and by whom? What about licensing for brokers? Taxes might be viewed as a form of economic regulation.
Regulation should be restricted to things like the exploration of natural resources, which are a common heritage of everyone.
And which businesses tend not to be interested in protecting if it means more expenses/less profit.
I envision the interior of Google as this huge warehouse full of oversized transistors, data streams with paddleboats, waterfalls of caffeinated beer, chairs contoured like a keyboard key, where diminutive men in green hair sing songs about electrons and logic gates and if you wander into the room where Duke Nukem 3D is being tested you'll be thrown out.
I think that a lot of Europe thinks capitalism and free markets are a fad.
They do, and Europe was migrating en masse to socialism during the late 19th and early 20th century, right up until we saw what happened to the pioneering socialist state - Germany. Around then a German (or maybe Austrian) economist published a still-controversial book linking socialism to Fascism, and the general trend of government-managed economies to produce governments that must manage societies and lives.
America and Britain were the only two industrialized nations that were slow to adopt socialism, and we're still slow to adopt it, but most of the "1st world" has been taking halting steps towards socialism anyway. Some more halting than others. Socialismn was viewed as the next logical step after capitalism, and its very good ends were believed by many to be worth any cost. And when the implementation of socialism produced the opposite of what was expected (e.g. Fascism), the pundits and thinkers blamed the people for screwing it up. And when the Soviet Union turned into a murderous machine, the people were blamed.
In my opinion, the biological instincts of most living things are antithetical to forced collectivism. Communism works on small, voluntary scales (ever heard of a kibbutz?). But I don't think that you can force collectivism on people and expect it to work out, it's counter to our nature. Capitalism (and the idea of a free market) provides the most natural and responsive set of checks and balances and micromanagement of the economic through competition. You still need a government to regulate it, of course, but there's a difference between regulation and management/planning. Planned economics are, in my opinion, a fallacy of socialism, and they produce societies in which the Enlightenment principles of liberalism fail, which is odd since those principles are meant to be protected by socialism.
Somebody once said of collectivism: "Great idea. Wrong species." Right on.
How about letting the market take care of something for once? As long as they aren't creating legal hurdles for OSS, business will come around.
Amen. Open source has managed to claw, fight, scratch, and bite it's way into the mainstream of business without any economic planning or meddling, despite heavy-handed anti-competitive practices by der Konig. Every time a government comes along and decides it needs to stick its hands into an otherwise free market, we introduce a foreign object to the cogs that drive economics and rarely does that object do anything but jam up the gears. Open source is kicking ass entirely on its own merits. Let it continue to do so. People in business and government worldwide are recognizing the benefit of switching to it, and are doing so. And for those who do not? Well, isn't that the purpose of a free market? Choices?
The really depressing thing is: this is the way politics works. Seldom with valid arguments, the people who whine the most get heard the most.
Politicians are a perverted type of managers, and if you've ever been a manager, your jobs it to make problems go away as quickly and quietly as possible. This is done by enacting legislation that promises millions of dollars of funds to be directed towards whoever is complaining.
And on those rare occasions when we get politicians who won't cater to whichever group of people perceived themselves as being victimized by some unreasonable decision of government, those people are accused of not listening, not caring, and being an apotheosis of partisan hackery.
Only half joking....lots of organizations I know of are pulling their support for Solaris and are buying cheaper machines from other vendors to run Linux on. I'm sure Sun has a substantial customer base left, but I wonder how long it will last as Linux continues to rise.
Every place I've worked has either abandoned or is in the process of abandoning Solaris. Java is probably Sun's future.
If you were forced to have an abortion, enter a gay marriage or undergo stem cell-based therapy when Democrats were in power, by all means come forward and complain about tyranny. Otherwise, the word you are looking for is freedom.
I have no defense for the Republican stance on gay marriage. They're wrong, by any reasonable interpretation of their own ideology.
Your analogy fails however on the other two topics. Stem cell research and therapy has not been banned. Federal funding hasn't even been cut off. No new federal funding is being issued. Privatized work on stem cell research is permitted to go forward. The justification of this is that millions upon millions of people in this country find the practically morally reprehensible (I do not, for the record), and thus forcing them to finance the practice is not being permitted. Liberals have plenty of items on their platform that they find morally objectionable, and they've worked hard to ban federal sponsorship of those things, while permitting the private sector to go forward with them as they wish (for the most part).
I fail to see the distinction between the two approaches other than to apply subjective "social betterment" evaluations on the various items in question and determine that the ones you want federal funding for are more important than the moral code of a fraction of the nation, no matter how large that fraction may be, even if it's a majority.
There's a breed of intolerance and intellectual elitism that characterizes the American Left today. It's along the lines of, "What we think and want is right, and you all are a bunch of morons who haven't figured that out yet, which is why you keep electing Republicans, who have bamboozled democracy with dirty tricks and lies." As if the Democrats never do that to attain power.
The Republicans have adopted an form of moral arrogance that I find equally intolerable and unacceptable, but they were, at least, voted into power by a majority of Americans, even after Iraq, after 9/11, and with people knowing full well what their platforms and policies are.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of the voters in this country are essentially middle-class old-fashioned conservative Christians in rural and suburban areas. Whichever party most successfully courts those people will win. Democrats used to enjoy widespread support from these people, especially in the South. They no longer do, and haven't for some time.
Until the Democrats can embrace an attitude and platform that appeals to NASCAR dads and soccer moms, they're going to keep losing elections. Being right about an issue isn't what gets you into power. It's convincing people that you represent what they want in their lives, and most people just want to raise their kids, go to football games, and watch American Idol.
In other words, you're for lower taxes? Sounds like what the Republicans usually say and the Democrats usually hate.
I favor lower taxes, yes. I don't care if Republicans favor this or Democrats oppose it, or vice versa. I also favor decriminalization of most drugs, and I could give two shits which political parties happen to agree with me.
How about, giving up before this gets to the Supreme Court which might re-affirm fair use rights before Congress can figure out how to take them away.
The Fair Use doctrine has been decided by the legal system to be unenforcable in policy, which means that we cannot create a set of clear rules or laws to determine whether or not a given use of intellectual property falls under Fair Use or not. As new situations come up, which side of Fair Use they fall on will be determined, case-by-case, by the court. Some are mentioned specifically in US legal code but the opinion of the court has been that Fair Use is impossible to legally define, except by the results of individual cases. It'd be dangerous to everybody to have a Fair Use case put before the court. It's a major gamble.
North Korea won't be bankrupted the way Russia was. Russia wanted to make a shield to maintain parity. There is no parity with North Korea, the USA is clearly a superior military force. That doesn't mean that Korea isn't dangerous. The political situation with Choson isn't analogous.
A broadcast flag may stop a Tivo-like device from recording, but as long as there is a video and sound output, there will be some device to record on. I personally think a broadcast flag is useless. Maybe for Direct DVD recorders. But anyone with determination will easily pass a broadcast flag.
You're right, but don't forget that our esteemed elected officials have passed legislation to criminalize this behavior. It's called the DMCA.
Could that be because by and large the entertainment industry disparages Republicans? Or at least gives more money to Democrats. Either way it's a nice example of how negativity can come back to haunt you.
I recall reading somewhere that the RIAA and MPAA-type organizations contribute lopsidedly to Democratic congresspeople, by about 140% (for every dollar they contribute to Republicans, they contribute $1.40 to Democrats).
The difference between the parties any more is over whose special interest group is most likely to damages your freedom the least, not whether one party or the other is more free from corporate sponsorship.
The Enlightenment principles of social and economic personal freedom are embraced by almost nobody. They materialize in a spotty faction in each party but both are basically consumed with being in power and embracing whatever platform they must to stay in power. I wonder if any of them really ever stop to think about what's best for America, or if what they believe in is really best for America, or if they're so blinded by the desire to screw over the opposition and solidify their control of the nation that they never stop to wonder what exactly their purpose is.
I can explain away almost all perplexing political behavior as a desire to secure bloc voters, but why do they want to be in power so badly? All of their legislation is intended to either fulfill campaign promises to secure more voters or to please financial backers without whose money they'll struggle to win re-election. It's like the purpose of politics is to stay in politics. It's more of a video game than anything else. And at the end of the day, who really has to live with the decisions being made on our behalf by 650 unethical millionaires?
You and I do.
And this is why I always claim that the less they rape my paycheck to fund this lunacy, the happier I am.-
I suspect he knows much less about the gaming world than he thinks he does, given that he allegedly owned "an extremely old SuperNintendo system with Mario 2..."
My 8-bit NES still sits in my living room, almost 20 years after I mowed lawns all summer in 1985 to scrape together the $100 to buy it. To me, Final Fantasy is characters with 4-letter names and Bikke the pirate. I was grown up and in college by the time the rest of the FF games came out, and I didn't have the surplus income for a gaming system that could run any of them, nor the time to play them (nor a TV set in my dorm room, for that matter).
I was a little shocked to read a guy trashing the SuperNintendo, a system that evokes a Pavlovian connection in my mind of being only owned by the "rich kids", and talking about the "way back when" days of Final Fantasy VII, a game I still have not played and seems light years ahead of the RPGs I grew up with. There was a Dragon Warrior IV? No shit? I remember that they made a Dragon Warrior 2, but I never got to play it. I was (supposedly) all grown up and done with such childhood affectations.
Then a few years ago I sold about 50 CDs for in-store credit and got a PS/2 for that plus $25. I was utterly horrified by the quality of the games. They looked stunning visually but the gameplay was utterly uninspiring, unimpressive, uncompelling. I picked up 4 or 5 of the games that were popular and universally praised by critics, and I hated them all. The gameplay was utterly monotonous and dull. And yet, I could derive hours of bliss from the levelling grind in Final Fantasy and slaughtering the same monsters for money in The Legend of Zelda. That was fun, why do these games suck?
Maybe because games aren't made for a guy in his 30's anymore, and it's only my childhood nostalgia that endears me to the classics. And yet, my 60 Shaman in Warcraft at least partially demonstrates that I can adapt.
Anyway, I'm on board with all of you who found the author of this essay to be a bit "young". A few of us were there, wisely or not, at the beginning of the video game revolution. I gamed on my neighbor's Intellivision, my cousin's Coleco Vision, the Atari 2600, and hours spend in dark, smokey arcades dodging guys with mullets. I had to sneak in, my mom thought the arcade was a place for drug deals and knife fights. In truth, it was a place for teenage boys with bad hygeine and six bucks worth of quarters.
We remember the (continued) folly of missile defense,
Bear in mind that the purpose of missile defense was to bankrupt the Soviet economy. Whether or not we ever actually finished the shield didn't matter, as long as the Soviets believed that they had to build one too in order to maintain global parity. They couldn't do it, they knew they couldn't do it, and our government knew they couldn't do it. Soviet economists knew that the Soviet Union's days were numbered by the 1970's. Some within the USSR had predicted the collapse of the Union within 10-20 years. The Soviet Union was basically a third-world country with techology and an enormous military. They were barely able to keep pace as it was. They never did manage to get a shuttle program up and running, and facing the prospect of having to build a missile shield was the final nail in the Soviet Union's coffin.
So was it folly? I don't think so, it accomplished its end. That our current president is trying to resurrect the program, however, is dubious at best. The threat of the missile shield has served its purpose, and the idea needs to be retired.
Using that logic, we should just dump everyone in the Senate and House. It's not like one side or the other has a perfect record.....You know, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea.
The problem with politics is that you have to be at least as unethical as your opponent to defeat him. And once you are in office you have to stay unethical to get re-elected.
I don't doubt that DeLay has a sketchville past and has done some shady things. But if any of you people blasting him and calling for his resignation think that he is uniquely unethical... wow. Talk about naivete. I wonder sometimes at the "gee whiz..." attitude people have about Washington, and the very earnest belief held by an alarming number of voters that the people in their party aren't unethical, it's only the people on the other side who pull stunts like this.
One small nit-pick. Piracy doesn't *cost* them anything other than what they spend to combat it.
Those terms annoy me almost as much as saying copyright infringment is theft.
I agree and disagree. Copyright infringement is most definitely not the same as theft. Theft has a distinct legal definition, as does copyright infringement, and they are not the same thing. Theft is when I take a CD that you purchased without your consent. Copyright infringement is when I make a copy of it without the copyright holder's consent. Your consent in the latter case is irrelevent.
Piracy most certainly does cost them money, however. For every person who would have purchased a CD or DVD and does not because they can get it for free, illegally, on-line, they have lost money. By every definition of cost in the world of financial accounting, this is an expense.
If they really believe this will force more CD's to be bought, they are idiots. If it is impossible to rip the CD to some other form, the desire to buy the CD goes *down*, not up. The "casual pirate", knowing that the CD is worthless for them, will spend their time searching the internet, to find the "professional pirate" who has the necessary sound-proof room and microphones to do a high-quality rip right off the digitally-encrypted speakers. They will not buy the CD any more!
It is a strange peculiarity that they're spending millions of dollars to make their product less valuable. They're betting, of course, that the lost revenue from the handful of (what they think of as) fringe "rights nuts" like the people who post here is negligable because we're all pirates now anyway. But the amount of gained revenue by stopping technically ignorant pirates should more than make up for it. Dunno if they're right or not. It's always about money. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think it was highly likely to pay for itself and then some. And they're probably right, but the copies will still get out there and they won't stop. That's the real danger of this, is the escalating arms race.
Company introduces mildly annoying and easily sidestepped copy protection or DRM technique.
Content is on-line within hours.
Company concludes that it wasn't enough and develops new, more obtrusive, more annoying DRM.
It's cracked and the content is on-line within hours.
Company begins to push for legislation to solve this!
That'll be circumvented and on-line in hours.
Company pushes for stiffer fines and more trampling on privacy rights so they can figure out who is doing this and stop them.
Eventually this has to stop and our government is going to have to be the ones that stop them. Yes, piracy happens and probably costs them a significant amount of money but no amount of wrongdoing by a group of people justifies legislation or activity that infringes upon the rights of the innocent.
no, the DMCA makes you a criminal after step 4, not step 5. copyright laws make you a criminal after step 5.
Yes, true. I wouldn't be a Slashdot poster if I didn't nitpick, however. Copyright infringement is not always/necessarily criminal offense. However, I don't believe there's such a beast as a civil violation of the DMCA. As I understand it, the major contention that many people have with the DMCA is that it specifically criminalizes behavior that a person has a number of legitimate and (until recently) legal reasons to engage in, such as making copies of material with anti-piracy/copy-protection under the Fair Use doctrine.
Slashdot Mirror
They're just greedy that's all. Right, jav1231? Not like us, who are demanding free shit! We're not greedy!
What you mean is, "Privacy should cost me nothing." Who cares if other people have to pay for it. Because allowing ANYBODY to just walk into a library and take a book out without having to identify themselves is going to fairly quickly result in libraries depleted of books and tons of library books on eBay and in used book stores. That's not "free".
If people who can afford $50-$100 collateral for books are "rich" then I'm a goddam billionaire. Do you really think that only the rich can afford to do this? That only people in the top 2% or top 5% of taxpayers can afford this?
And this is evident all over American sociey today. There's this belief that everybody is too stupid to make their own decisions so we need to tax them and use the money to fund government agencies to make their decisions for them. And I find this highly contradictory to liberalism.
Unregulated capitalism is more democratic, because people vote with their wallets, but it's a "one dollar one vote" kind of democracy. It's also elitist, but, differently from socialist planning, it's efficient. In an unregulated capitalist system, rich people must have more aptitude to control the economy than the general population, otherwise they lose their money and become poor.
Exactly. Which is why a well-regulated capitalist economy tends to be the most productive. Like I said, a regulated economy is different from a planned economy.
I don't believe the economy itself should have any government regulation at all.
It depends. Do you consider setting the federal funds rate to be regulating the economy? What about establishing rules for when and how stocks may be traded and by whom? What about licensing for brokers? Taxes might be viewed as a form of economic regulation.
Regulation should be restricted to things like the exploration of natural resources, which are a common heritage of everyone.
And which businesses tend not to be interested in protecting if it means more expenses/less profit.
This is a dupe of a story that was published before the PS2 came out.
I envision the interior of Google as this huge warehouse full of oversized transistors, data streams with paddleboats, waterfalls of caffeinated beer, chairs contoured like a keyboard key, where diminutive men in green hair sing songs about electrons and logic gates and if you wander into the room where Duke Nukem 3D is being tested you'll be thrown out.
They do, and Europe was migrating en masse to socialism during the late 19th and early 20th century, right up until we saw what happened to the pioneering socialist state - Germany. Around then a German (or maybe Austrian) economist published a still-controversial book linking socialism to Fascism, and the general trend of government-managed economies to produce governments that must manage societies and lives.
America and Britain were the only two industrialized nations that were slow to adopt socialism, and we're still slow to adopt it, but most of the "1st world" has been taking halting steps towards socialism anyway. Some more halting than others. Socialismn was viewed as the next logical step after capitalism, and its very good ends were believed by many to be worth any cost. And when the implementation of socialism produced the opposite of what was expected (e.g. Fascism), the pundits and thinkers blamed the people for screwing it up. And when the Soviet Union turned into a murderous machine, the people were blamed.
In my opinion, the biological instincts of most living things are antithetical to forced collectivism. Communism works on small, voluntary scales (ever heard of a kibbutz?). But I don't think that you can force collectivism on people and expect it to work out, it's counter to our nature. Capitalism (and the idea of a free market) provides the most natural and responsive set of checks and balances and micromanagement of the economic through competition. You still need a government to regulate it, of course, but there's a difference between regulation and management/planning. Planned economics are, in my opinion, a fallacy of socialism, and they produce societies in which the Enlightenment principles of liberalism fail, which is odd since those principles are meant to be protected by socialism.
Somebody once said of collectivism: "Great idea. Wrong species." Right on.
Amen. Open source has managed to claw, fight, scratch, and bite it's way into the mainstream of business without any economic planning or meddling, despite heavy-handed anti-competitive practices by der Konig. Every time a government comes along and decides it needs to stick its hands into an otherwise free market, we introduce a foreign object to the cogs that drive economics and rarely does that object do anything but jam up the gears. Open source is kicking ass entirely on its own merits. Let it continue to do so. People in business and government worldwide are recognizing the benefit of switching to it, and are doing so. And for those who do not? Well, isn't that the purpose of a free market? Choices?
Politicians are a perverted type of managers, and if you've ever been a manager, your jobs it to make problems go away as quickly and quietly as possible. This is done by enacting legislation that promises millions of dollars of funds to be directed towards whoever is complaining.
And on those rare occasions when we get politicians who won't cater to whichever group of people perceived themselves as being victimized by some unreasonable decision of government, those people are accused of not listening, not caring, and being an apotheosis of partisan hackery.
If I slide this thing all the way to the right does it mean that there'll be no paid positioning search results?
Every place I've worked has either abandoned or is in the process of abandoning Solaris. Java is probably Sun's future.
I have no defense for the Republican stance on gay marriage. They're wrong, by any reasonable interpretation of their own ideology.
Your analogy fails however on the other two topics. Stem cell research and therapy has not been banned. Federal funding hasn't even been cut off. No new federal funding is being issued. Privatized work on stem cell research is permitted to go forward. The justification of this is that millions upon millions of people in this country find the practically morally reprehensible (I do not, for the record), and thus forcing them to finance the practice is not being permitted. Liberals have plenty of items on their platform that they find morally objectionable, and they've worked hard to ban federal sponsorship of those things, while permitting the private sector to go forward with them as they wish (for the most part).
I fail to see the distinction between the two approaches other than to apply subjective "social betterment" evaluations on the various items in question and determine that the ones you want federal funding for are more important than the moral code of a fraction of the nation, no matter how large that fraction may be, even if it's a majority.
There's a breed of intolerance and intellectual elitism that characterizes the American Left today. It's along the lines of, "What we think and want is right, and you all are a bunch of morons who haven't figured that out yet, which is why you keep electing Republicans, who have bamboozled democracy with dirty tricks and lies." As if the Democrats never do that to attain power.
The Republicans have adopted an form of moral arrogance that I find equally intolerable and unacceptable, but they were, at least, voted into power by a majority of Americans, even after Iraq, after 9/11, and with people knowing full well what their platforms and policies are.
The problem is that the overwhelming majority of the voters in this country are essentially middle-class old-fashioned conservative Christians in rural and suburban areas. Whichever party most successfully courts those people will win. Democrats used to enjoy widespread support from these people, especially in the South. They no longer do, and haven't for some time.
Until the Democrats can embrace an attitude and platform that appeals to NASCAR dads and soccer moms, they're going to keep losing elections. Being right about an issue isn't what gets you into power. It's convincing people that you represent what they want in their lives, and most people just want to raise their kids, go to football games, and watch American Idol.
I favor lower taxes, yes. I don't care if Republicans favor this or Democrats oppose it, or vice versa. I also favor decriminalization of most drugs, and I could give two shits which political parties happen to agree with me.
The Fair Use doctrine has been decided by the legal system to be unenforcable in policy, which means that we cannot create a set of clear rules or laws to determine whether or not a given use of intellectual property falls under Fair Use or not. As new situations come up, which side of Fair Use they fall on will be determined, case-by-case, by the court. Some are mentioned specifically in US legal code but the opinion of the court has been that Fair Use is impossible to legally define, except by the results of individual cases. It'd be dangerous to everybody to have a Fair Use case put before the court. It's a major gamble.
North Korea won't be bankrupted the way Russia was. Russia wanted to make a shield to maintain parity. There is no parity with North Korea, the USA is clearly a superior military force. That doesn't mean that Korea isn't dangerous. The political situation with Choson isn't analogous.
Whether or not that's their "goal" is irrelevent, it's undistputably what the result will be.
You're right, but don't forget that our esteemed elected officials have passed legislation to criminalize this behavior. It's called the DMCA.
I recall reading somewhere that the RIAA and MPAA-type organizations contribute lopsidedly to Democratic congresspeople, by about 140% (for every dollar they contribute to Republicans, they contribute $1.40 to Democrats).
The difference between the parties any more is over whose special interest group is most likely to damages your freedom the least, not whether one party or the other is more free from corporate sponsorship.
The Enlightenment principles of social and economic personal freedom are embraced by almost nobody. They materialize in a spotty faction in each party but both are basically consumed with being in power and embracing whatever platform they must to stay in power. I wonder if any of them really ever stop to think about what's best for America, or if what they believe in is really best for America, or if they're so blinded by the desire to screw over the opposition and solidify their control of the nation that they never stop to wonder what exactly their purpose is.
I can explain away almost all perplexing political behavior as a desire to secure bloc voters, but why do they want to be in power so badly? All of their legislation is intended to either fulfill campaign promises to secure more voters or to please financial backers without whose money they'll struggle to win re-election. It's like the purpose of politics is to stay in politics. It's more of a video game than anything else. And at the end of the day, who really has to live with the decisions being made on our behalf by 650 unethical millionaires?
You and I do.
And this is why I always claim that the less they rape my paycheck to fund this lunacy, the happier I am.-
My 8-bit NES still sits in my living room, almost 20 years after I mowed lawns all summer in 1985 to scrape together the $100 to buy it. To me, Final Fantasy is characters with 4-letter names and Bikke the pirate. I was grown up and in college by the time the rest of the FF games came out, and I didn't have the surplus income for a gaming system that could run any of them, nor the time to play them (nor a TV set in my dorm room, for that matter).
I was a little shocked to read a guy trashing the SuperNintendo, a system that evokes a Pavlovian connection in my mind of being only owned by the "rich kids", and talking about the "way back when" days of Final Fantasy VII, a game I still have not played and seems light years ahead of the RPGs I grew up with. There was a Dragon Warrior IV? No shit? I remember that they made a Dragon Warrior 2, but I never got to play it. I was (supposedly) all grown up and done with such childhood affectations.
Then a few years ago I sold about 50 CDs for in-store credit and got a PS/2 for that plus $25. I was utterly horrified by the quality of the games. They looked stunning visually but the gameplay was utterly uninspiring, unimpressive, uncompelling. I picked up 4 or 5 of the games that were popular and universally praised by critics, and I hated them all. The gameplay was utterly monotonous and dull. And yet, I could derive hours of bliss from the levelling grind in Final Fantasy and slaughtering the same monsters for money in The Legend of Zelda. That was fun, why do these games suck?
Maybe because games aren't made for a guy in his 30's anymore, and it's only my childhood nostalgia that endears me to the classics. And yet, my 60 Shaman in Warcraft at least partially demonstrates that I can adapt.
Anyway, I'm on board with all of you who found the author of this essay to be a bit "young". A few of us were there, wisely or not, at the beginning of the video game revolution. I gamed on my neighbor's Intellivision, my cousin's Coleco Vision, the Atari 2600, and hours spend in dark, smokey arcades dodging guys with mullets. I had to sneak in, my mom thought the arcade was a place for drug deals and knife fights. In truth, it was a place for teenage boys with bad hygeine and six bucks worth of quarters.
I also eat breakfast, play with my dog, and read the newspaper every morning. Addiction is not the same as "routine".
Bear in mind that the purpose of missile defense was to bankrupt the Soviet economy. Whether or not we ever actually finished the shield didn't matter, as long as the Soviets believed that they had to build one too in order to maintain global parity. They couldn't do it, they knew they couldn't do it, and our government knew they couldn't do it. Soviet economists knew that the Soviet Union's days were numbered by the 1970's. Some within the USSR had predicted the collapse of the Union within 10-20 years. The Soviet Union was basically a third-world country with techology and an enormous military. They were barely able to keep pace as it was. They never did manage to get a shuttle program up and running, and facing the prospect of having to build a missile shield was the final nail in the Soviet Union's coffin.
So was it folly? I don't think so, it accomplished its end. That our current president is trying to resurrect the program, however, is dubious at best. The threat of the missile shield has served its purpose, and the idea needs to be retired.
The problem with politics is that you have to be at least as unethical as your opponent to defeat him. And once you are in office you have to stay unethical to get re-elected.
I don't doubt that DeLay has a sketchville past and has done some shady things. But if any of you people blasting him and calling for his resignation think that he is uniquely unethical ... wow. Talk about naivete. I wonder sometimes at the "gee whiz..." attitude people have about Washington, and the very earnest belief held by an alarming number of voters that the people in their party aren't unethical, it's only the people on the other side who pull stunts like this.
Those terms annoy me almost as much as saying copyright infringment is theft.
I agree and disagree. Copyright infringement is most definitely not the same as theft. Theft has a distinct legal definition, as does copyright infringement, and they are not the same thing. Theft is when I take a CD that you purchased without your consent. Copyright infringement is when I make a copy of it without the copyright holder's consent. Your consent in the latter case is irrelevent.
Piracy most certainly does cost them money, however. For every person who would have purchased a CD or DVD and does not because they can get it for free, illegally, on-line, they have lost money. By every definition of cost in the world of financial accounting, this is an expense.
It is a strange peculiarity that they're spending millions of dollars to make their product less valuable. They're betting, of course, that the lost revenue from the handful of (what they think of as) fringe "rights nuts" like the people who post here is negligable because we're all pirates now anyway. But the amount of gained revenue by stopping technically ignorant pirates should more than make up for it. Dunno if they're right or not. It's always about money. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think it was highly likely to pay for itself and then some. And they're probably right, but the copies will still get out there and they won't stop. That's the real danger of this, is the escalating arms race.
Company introduces mildly annoying and easily sidestepped copy protection or DRM technique.
Content is on-line within hours.
Company concludes that it wasn't enough and develops new, more obtrusive, more annoying DRM.
It's cracked and the content is on-line within hours.
Company begins to push for legislation to solve this!
That'll be circumvented and on-line in hours.
Company pushes for stiffer fines and more trampling on privacy rights so they can figure out who is doing this and stop them.
Eventually this has to stop and our government is going to have to be the ones that stop them. Yes, piracy happens and probably costs them a significant amount of money but no amount of wrongdoing by a group of people justifies legislation or activity that infringes upon the rights of the innocent.
Yes, true. I wouldn't be a Slashdot poster if I didn't nitpick, however. Copyright infringement is not always/necessarily criminal offense. However, I don't believe there's such a beast as a civil violation of the DMCA. As I understand it, the major contention that many people have with the DMCA is that it specifically criminalizes behavior that a person has a number of legitimate and (until recently) legal reasons to engage in, such as making copies of material with anti-piracy/copy-protection under the Fair Use doctrine.