I think Dentara Rask's take in the game could be classified like gambling winnings.
Except that he doesn't own it. The game company owns it. He didn't gain anything. However, if he were to ever figure out a way (like some people have suggested) to convert it to real money, then sure, like anything else you sell, you're technically liable in the US for taxes on the money you get for it.
Are you going to regulate my chess and backgammon play next?
Ha ha... "I'm sorry, sir, here in California en passant captures are punishable by a week in jail and sensitivity training. Please come with me....oh and that pawn you promoted to a Queen, I'm going to need to see some proof of the capital gain taxes you paid on that."...
(although of course your California tax liability is reduced due to having two Queens on the board at the same time.)
Of course, the game manufacturer still owns everything, but an argument could be made based on the value of the labor to you and the fact that they've effectively stolen YOUR time and YOUR labor.
How is this substantially different to salaried labour?
And then the boy suddenly realized that playing a game is NOT labor, that pretending to do something tangible was NOT itself doing something tangible, and that he was NOT being paid by the game company in gold coins to kill ogres -- but rather that it was all entertainment, and he was in fact paying the game company to do it. He then got off his butt and actually did something tangible.
If I could somehow do a scam and then transfer these winnings into tangible good / money. i.e. say via ebay then I would consider it to be a "real crime".
Except that scams are part of the game, so he would just be someone who did well in the game, not guilty of any crime. Besides, as the article points out (then apparently disregards), all in-game assets remain property of the game company, so you couldn't legally sell game money for real money.
I'm all for perspective in addressing tragedy and agree that the ridiculous coverage 9/11 gets cf the millions that die annually in the third word is farcical.
There's nothing disproportionate or farcical about the coverage 9/11 gets. There is nothing necessarily terrible about dying. There is something very terrible about murder. On 9/11, group of people, out of nothing but idealized hatred for the people of another country, intentionally created a living hell amongst those people, in which thousands of innocents were burned alive, suffocated, or crushed to death, and thousands more survived to live with the memory. Having accomplished this, they rejoiced and celebrated. The nature of this act sets it apart as one of the vivid examples that history provides us of the nature of evil.
Of course, the highly confused will say stupid things like "America is the real terrorist." Do they understand the destructive power of America's nuclear arsenal? If an American president had the mentality of any one of these Islamic death cultists, Mecca and Medina would be smouldering grease smudges in the desert, and Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria would be one big glowing wasteland. But those following or attempting to follow a path of good have such "burdens" as nuanced thought, compassion, and restraint.
a blatant lie in the form of a commercial claiming that the net neutrality act will cost the consumer more and that it is 'bad' for the consumer. This, of course, ignores how much the cable companies will profit from the act's defeat.
Wow, I just saw the same lie in a Pepsi ad. They said it was refreshing!!! Totally ignoring the profit they will make from its sales!!! LIARS!!!!
Fortunately, today we have four slam-dunk votes against this law on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito). Why? Because the Constitution contains the words "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and the mandade incorporated in our law from English commonlaw for the presumption of innocence. And this is exactly what those two concepts speak to (and have always spoken to). And then there are five votes from Dianne Feinstein's kind of judges -- those who take the approach that the meaning of the words of the Constitution only take form based upon whom the judge happens to feel greater compassion for at the moment. In this case it could be close, being between a person being punished without conviction and the potentiality of some child getting molested. Fortunately, only one of their votes is required.
This is why it's so important to have a strict constructionist Court. The government is not a legitimate government if its laws are not its laws.
It is not a hoax: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/interac tive-tv-conference-and-best.html
A google researcher and some other guy developed a prototype. However,
1) There's no indication that Google is actually going to use it.
2) While I understand people being nervous of trusting someone else with their microphone, this particular technology is not a privacy threat (unless you want what TV show you're watching to remain private). What it does is create one-way hashes of audio on the client side, and send those to the server, to be matched against a database of TV shows. If it doesn't match, any, there's no way to get any other information out of the hashes.
3) For some people this would be a cool product. It would let them chat in real time with other people watching the same TV show as them. It's also cool in that it would provide real-time ratings for TV shows.
How, again, does UK law apply in the US? I'm still waiting.
Well, for one thing, as a multi-national corporation with offices in London, UK law does apply to many things they do, but presuming that it doesn't apply in this case, still...
Therefore, no US newspaper has any business refusing to publish this story "on the advice of legal counsel" because no law exists that forces the censorship.
First of all, the fact that there is no US law mean precisely that it is the newspaper's business to publish or not publish as they see fit, on whatever kind of advice they see fit to listen to. Secondly, even if the letter of the law doesn't apply, the only decent way to conduct business in another country is to respect the spirit of their laws as well, when interacting with them -- especially considering that this is a law to protect the presumption of innocence of the accused, and not some chinaesque law of negative moral value. And thirdly, by way of example, I believe that diplomats are generally immune from prosecution in their host country, but I bet if a diplomat were to ask his lawyer, he would still be advised against randomly offing natives.
It's totally unbecoming of them to all of a sudden censor themselves in violation of the First Amendment of the United States, which is the law governing a U.S. newspaper.
A) The First Amendment of the United States [Constitution] is a law governing the U.S. Congress, not U.S. newspapers. Therefore, B) It is not possible for the New York Times to be in violation of the First Amendment. And furthermore, C) It is not self-censorship that is unbecoming, but the lack of it. The founders didn't advocate a system of limited government because they favored chaos, but because they believed that people should govern themselves.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
Hey, that's pretty cool! (And probably a lot less futile than SETI@home.) Okay, now I have two potential solutions for the common cold, and bupkus for stuck legos.
This overloads the waters with nutrients and spawns large algae blooms.
The "mystery" is where the polution is coming from.
It's really annoying how "nutrients" and "polution" can now apparently be used synonymously, and it doesn't seem to bother anyone. If a nutrient favors a worse-tasting species over a better-tasting species, then it's pollution? The same goes for calling CO2 pollution. You might as well call oxygen pollution. Let's just go ahead and say that every single molecule on the earth is a molecule of pollution. That will really simplify the job of passing laws to limit it and funding research to figure out how to elliminate it.
While such activity definitely causes dead-zones on sea and land, that's from CO2 gas emmision, whereas this is from lack of oxygen. If anything extra CO2 would boost oxygen by increasing plant life -- unless the water was saturated with in, in which case they would have presumably mentioned that in the article.
It's pretty spooky when that happens on land though -- CO2 will gather in a depression, then some animal will wander through it and die, and then one preditor after another will be attracted into the depression by the growing pile of free food.
But we will never know for absolutely certain the cause of the hypoxia until Al Gore or Michael Moore make a movie about it. That being said, anyone not completely stupid, that is, anyone who watches CNN instead of FoxNews, knows that the CONSTITUTION SAYS that the Republicans killed all those poor fish. And they didn't even use all their parts, like the Indians would have done. They only killed them for their fur, the fascists.
OK, now, with that out of the way, the point is, nobody yet knows why everything is dead out there. Not you, Not Google, Not me, Not anybody - yet.
Nuh-uh, man, it's global warming. Anyone who says it's not is a right-wing fascist who can just shut up! I bet Al Gore could tell us -- we need to get him to look at it. Come on, we can draft Al to lead the world to victory against the capitalists and SUV drivers. Then we'll execute them all, and in time life will return to the oceans!
Fucking terrorists. They're the same as abortion clinic bombers, using violence to induce fear to achieve their political goals.
There's a big difference between them and abortion clinic bombers (other than one is trying to protect animals, and the other is trying to protect people): The whole point of the republican form of government is that you can make change through your representitives and by rallying the majority of the people to your cause. And if you can't rally the people to your cause, then you need to respect the will of the people. I admit this philosophy has weaknesses, as the majority can't always be right, but what is the better philosophy? Certainly not the rule of violence. If you think that, then maybe we should pull out of Iraq, as we've obviously succeeded in created a utopia there.
But though I'm not advocating what they do, abortion clinic bombers are not guilty of trying to undermining democracy. All abortion clinic bombers were only active after the Supreme Court decree that no people's representatives in either state or federal legislators could pass any law based on the idea that a living fetus is alive. So, at least in terms of the issue that mattered to these people, they were not living in a representitive government, but were trying to fight for the ideals of the people. To the best of my recollection, such bombings have only taken place in states where the people or their representatives would severely restrict abortion, if they had the power to do so legally.
Long term social survival requires accurate mapping of reality and the scientific method is the only consistent iron clad way we have to map reality.
I'm by no means against the scientific theory, but if one overestimates what it is, one will be led into all sorts of delusional beliefs. An "iron clad way to map reality" it is certainly not. Closer to the truth is that it's a methodical way of discarding half the nonsense that it gave us in the past. A very close model of the scientific method is natural selection itself. A new hypothesis is like a new form of life. The methodical testing is like nature's tests of survivability. The unfit ultimately don't survive. But the question lies in where the new forms of life come from. Hypotheses that break new ground are never merely deduced from observation. If they could be, science would be a lot easier than it is. New significant hypothises are a works of insight or intuition, or as Einstein said, imagination. It's that moment of intuition that is the life of science. What people see when they look at nature is a reflection of who they are. People who advocate Intelligent Design have insights that typically come from a theistic world-view, and so imagine that new forms of life must come about by some directed process, or at least according to some preordained plan. People who advocate Neo-Darwinism have insights that typically are based on an atheistic world-view, and so imagine that new forms of life must come about in a strictly non-directed or random way. Both of these are pre-suppositions that have not been explored by the scientific process. An atheistic presupposition is in no way more scientific than a theistic one. The fact that in the U.S. there is at least an arguement to be heard in favor of exploring this question scientifically, is a credit to the intellectualism of the country. Back in the good old days of Europe, they used to have similar arguements, with the pope getting worked up at Galileo's ideas of heliocentrism, and Galileo ridiculing Kepler's childish and superstitious (we would say "unscientific" I guess) ideas about the moon causing the tides. Today it seems that Europe has regressed to their pre-Galilean form of monolithic thought, when everything that Aristotle was true and scientific, and anyone who disagreed was uneducated.
HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims. As of now, 49 people out of 49, were infected with HIV and didn't catch it. It may just be preliminary results, but this is very very good.
I'll probably be accused (again) of being pendantic, but I'm sorry, HIV does not kill 100% (or %100) of its victims. Some die in car accidents and others die of heart attacks, etc. And since most people worldwide with HIV are druggies, (not that there's anything wrong with druggies... I have to remember where I'm posting) I bet a lot die from drug overdoses. And holy crap, I know it's China, but they didn't expose the test subjects to HIV to see if they became infected!! (Typically, researchers would take a blood sample, and expose the sample to the virus, and measure the immune response in the vial of blood.)
I always thought that the CIA and NSA could do just about anything they wanted...as long as a USA citizen was not involved. In that case, the FBI would have jurisdiction and would require (a possibly secret warrant) to do any surveillence. To me this is a good and clear distinction.
But it doesn't work... The FBI and the police conduct criminal investigations against non-U.S. citizens all the time, but those suspects are still, as they should be, protected by the Bill of Rights. In other words, the right of individuals to be free from unreasonable searches is considered a basic right in our legal system regardless of the citizenship of the individual. Things that would make a search reasonable would include A) probable cause of a crime (usually formalized in a warrant) or B) that it is a requirement of military due diligence.
The only thing that makes sense both practically and legally is to draw the distinction based on the purpose and intent of the intelligence gathering. Now, you could also make a distinction by organization, and say that the CIA has different rules than the FBI, but in that case we need to get the FBI out of the anti-terrorism business, and expand the CIA, since terrorism is now THE mode by which war is being waged against the U.S.
It's pathetic that people are so anxious to waste their time writing and publishing things, such as the original article and the responses here that I've read, with seemingly no desire to research the facts which would be a necessary basis for any intelligent expression of an opinion on the matter.
The terrorists had planned to prepare a gel of TATP, and conceal it inside a bottle of gatorade, which, besides concealing it would help protect it from both heat and shock, and ignite it with a disposible camera flash. Leaving further details aside, there's nothing even remotely infeasible about that plan.
it's called a warrant. In fact, for the past several decades, we've had a program in place that makes getting a warrant for wiretapping quite easy. You can get a FISA warrant quickly, confidentially, and even retroactively. Yes, retroactively. You can spot a suspect, set up an emergency wiretap, then a day later you can walk into the secret court and tell the judge why it was necessary to set up the wiretap. And you'll get the warrant. It's no hardship, unless you have reason to believe a judge wouldn't grant you the warrant.
These arguements are all based on the fallacy that there's some legal equivalency between criminal investigation and spying on war-time enemies. Do you argue that a submarine captain should get a FISA warrent everytime he activates his listening equiptment? Or every time a satellite picture of an enemy camp is taken? Not if you're sane! A warrent is a document of probable cause of a crime. It has nothing to do with gathering military intelligence. The FBI has traditionally investigated criminal activity, but if they are involved in military intelligence, like they were when they were investigation Moussaoui, then they need procedures appropriate for that task. If they had, then they would have been able to listen to Moussaoui's conversations with the 9-11 hijackers, like they desparately wanted to do (even though there was no probable cause relating to a crime he had committed, so no warrant, FISA or otherwise, was possible), and 9-11-01 would have been just another uneventful day.
P.S. to people who do trust the current administration: just consider that someone you don't like will eventually be in charge. Maybe another Republican, maybe a Democrat, maybe the balance of power will realign and we'll be looking at Republicans vs. Greens or something for the next few decades. However it works out, someone you disagree with will be in the Oval Office at some point. Would you want them to have the powers that this administration has been insisting on?
I know that some people, I don't know who, maybe the Greens, think that the president personally sneaks into people's basements and messes with their phone lines, but that's not how it works. This is a question of whether or not the agents of the FBI and CIA are given the flexibility to do their job. Those agents don't change depending on what president or what party is in power.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing disproportionate or farcical about the coverage 9/11 gets. There is nothing necessarily terrible about dying. There is something very terrible about murder. On 9/11, group of people, out of nothing but idealized hatred for the people of another country, intentionally created a living hell amongst those people, in which thousands of innocents were burned alive, suffocated, or crushed to death, and thousands more survived to live with the memory. Having accomplished this, they rejoiced and celebrated. The nature of this act sets it apart as one of the vivid examples that history provides us of the nature of evil.
Of course, the highly confused will say stupid things like "America is the real terrorist." Do they understand the destructive power of America's nuclear arsenal? If an American president had the mentality of any one of these Islamic death cultists, Mecca and Medina would be smouldering grease smudges in the desert, and Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria would be one big glowing wasteland. But those following or attempting to follow a path of good have such "burdens" as nuanced thought, compassion, and restraint.
Fortunately, today we have four slam-dunk votes against this law on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito). Why? Because the Constitution contains the words "No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and the mandade incorporated in our law from English commonlaw for the presumption of innocence. And this is exactly what those two concepts speak to (and have always spoken to). And then there are five votes from Dianne Feinstein's kind of judges -- those who take the approach that the meaning of the words of the Constitution only take form based upon whom the judge happens to feel greater compassion for at the moment. In this case it could be close, being between a person being punished without conviction and the potentiality of some child getting molested. Fortunately, only one of their votes is required.
This is why it's so important to have a strict constructionist Court. The government is not a legitimate government if its laws are not its laws.
It is not a hoax: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/interac tive-tv-conference-and-best.html
A google researcher and some other guy developed a prototype. However,
1) There's no indication that Google is actually going to use it.
2) While I understand people being nervous of trusting someone else with their microphone, this particular technology is not a privacy threat (unless you want what TV show you're watching to remain private). What it does is create one-way hashes of audio on the client side, and send those to the server, to be matched against a database of TV shows. If it doesn't match, any, there's no way to get any other information out of the hashes.
3) For some people this would be a cool product. It would let them chat in real time with other people watching the same TV show as them. It's also cool in that it would provide real-time ratings for TV shows.
A) The First Amendment of the United States [Constitution] is a law governing the U.S. Congress, not U.S. newspapers.
Therefore,
B) It is not possible for the New York Times to be in violation of the First Amendment.
And furthermore,
C) It is not self-censorship that is unbecoming, but the lack of it. The founders didn't advocate a system of limited government because they favored chaos, but because they believed that people should govern themselves.
Hey, that's pretty cool! (And probably a lot less futile than SETI@home.) Okay, now I have two potential solutions for the common cold, and bupkus for stuck legos.
Shouldn't these people have been working on the cure for the common cold? Or legos that are don't get stuck together as badly, or something else?
While such activity definitely causes dead-zones on sea and land, that's from CO2 gas emmision, whereas this is from lack of oxygen. If anything extra CO2 would boost oxygen by increasing plant life -- unless the water was saturated with in, in which case they would have presumably mentioned that in the article.
It's pretty spooky when that happens on land though -- CO2 will gather in a depression, then some animal will wander through it and die, and then one preditor after another will be attracted into the depression by the growing pile of free food.
President Bush Lied! Thousands of Fish Died!
But we will never know for absolutely certain the cause of the hypoxia until Al Gore or Michael Moore make a movie about it. That being said, anyone not completely stupid, that is, anyone who watches CNN instead of FoxNews, knows that the CONSTITUTION SAYS that the Republicans killed all those poor fish. And they didn't even use all their parts, like the Indians would have done. They only killed them for their fur, the fascists.
[end left wing parody]
Ok, now give me my 5 Insightful.
But though I'm not advocating what they do, abortion clinic bombers are not guilty of trying to undermining democracy. All abortion clinic bombers were only active after the Supreme Court decree that no people's representatives in either state or federal legislators could pass any law based on the idea that a living fetus is alive. So, at least in terms of the issue that mattered to these people, they were not living in a representitive government, but were trying to fight for the ideals of the people. To the best of my recollection, such bombings have only taken place in states where the people or their representatives would severely restrict abortion, if they had the power to do so legally.
(of course this, new thing is from a completely different plant, so who knows.)
But it doesn't work... The FBI and the police conduct criminal investigations against non-U.S. citizens all the time, but those suspects are still, as they should be, protected by the Bill of Rights. In other words, the right of individuals to be free from unreasonable searches is considered a basic right in our legal system regardless of the citizenship of the individual. Things that would make a search reasonable would include A) probable cause of a crime (usually formalized in a warrant) or B) that it is a requirement of military due diligence.
The only thing that makes sense both practically and legally is to draw the distinction based on the purpose and intent of the intelligence gathering. Now, you could also make a distinction by organization, and say that the CIA has different rules than the FBI, but in that case we need to get the FBI out of the anti-terrorism business, and expand the CIA, since terrorism is now THE mode by which war is being waged against the U.S.
It's pathetic that people are so anxious to waste their time writing and publishing things, such as the original article and the responses here that I've read, with seemingly no desire to research the facts which would be a necessary basis for any intelligent expression of an opinion on the matter.
The terrorists had planned to prepare a gel of TATP, and conceal it inside a bottle of gatorade, which, besides concealing it would help protect it from both heat and shock, and ignite it with a disposible camera flash. Leaving further details aside, there's nothing even remotely infeasible about that plan.