Parents lose big when a company downsizes or restructures their benefits. This is an indirect form of age discrimination because older folks are more likely to have families.
Then by that logic it is a form of discrimination to have those benefits, like child care, that are unusable by employees who choose to not have children. But really it isn't discrimination at all in either case. For it to be discrimination the motivation would have to be centered around age, but really age is just a correlation. I realize that's it's popular to cry "it's discrimination" whenever you want the world to conform to your needs, but really the change is just about money. Sure it might cost a parent more money for daycare, but every dollar my employer spends on daycare is a loss to my stock value or equipment quality or potential for a raise. If anything the subsidizing of child care, family insurance, and other family-centric benefits is discrimination in favor of parents. So please, don't cry about discrimination when the favors done to you are scaled back. Add the difference in market value of the insurance package a family gets to your annual income and see if you still have a net loss vs the "no dependents" employees. You should come out even. The same job deserves the same annual salary + benefits total, anything else would be favoritism.
. If 5 level 20's can take down a level 70, then those same 5 level 20's can do solo level 70 content.
I see how that could be a problem, but again going back to real life, could half a dozen fresh recruits do the same job that one veteran special forces op would do? Of course not. But I was also thinking of goals being more faction oriented and less personal glory oriented. Content is based around the advancement of the faction as whole, not just the advancement of one player, that seems to be almost a necessity if you are going to have quests with persistent effects. Now it would still be cool to have a level 70, you might be half the power in a team made of 3 lvl-20s and your lvl-70. It's still worth while for you to go on the mission, because it benefits the entire faction, you included. In City of Heroes the ability have a team with some mixed levels adds greatly to the ease of putting together a pick-up group. If the motivation is going to be the same as WoW, uber-gear and maxxed out guilds, then you should just play WoW, it's a great game for that. But if you want quest results to be effecting the whole gameworld, you have to sacrifice the glorification of single characters in favor benefiting your entire faction within the gameworld. There could be glory or fame or titles to acknowledge the characters that contribute greatly, but uber-gear or godlike power makes a persistent world too unstable, those things belong in a resetting type game, like WoW.
Corporations exist to shield people from liability, not to allow people to indirectly commit crimes.
When you have an amoral guiding principle such as "maximize profit" as the primary goal of your corporation, then there is little to no difference between a "shield from liability" and a carte blanc for white collar crime. I think that is the line that divides good corporations from evil corporations; the primacy of profit. A good corp might have profit as second in it's list of priorities after something like "make the best product we can" or "provide a low cost service" but a soon as profit overrules all other aspects of the company they crossover to the Dark Side. While a protection from liablity is a societially good thing when a good corporation has it, it is a societally bad thing when a evil corp has it. MediaDefender/Sentry/Thug is a tool of the RIAA which is purely based on profit maximization.
EVE has PvE but they have almost zero relation to the actual gameworld storyline. Yes you can get some decent gear an money out of the PvE but all of the storyline is PvP. But it really wouldn't be difficult at all to blend PvP and PvE in EVE. You already have four factions, each with their own faction space. You already have an NPC faction (Concord) that will hunt and kill certain players based on their security ratings. It would seem a simple thing to make a players security rating vary depending on which faction space they were in. A Gallente in Amarr 0.9 space would be chased down by Concord, even if they had high Concord security ratings when they were in Gallente space. Make it possible for Alliances or large zergs to overthrow the sovereignty of a system and you have a workable blend of PvE and PvP (a system being overthrown would bring in a lot of attention from players in nearby systems) Right now EVE storyline is PvP because instead of NPC factions all the story is between the big alliances. But it's better story than anything that content creators would ever dare put in a game. Read about: The Guiding Hand Social Club.
not exactly what i'd call holy. or "warrior", isn't that word usually reserved for those with a sense of honour? police forces, and military folks even more so, gang up on a single person, outnumbering and outgunning him/her. no honour there, really.
Because after someone shoots or stabs you in Real Life you don't magically appear at a resurrection stone a few miles away. Shouting "Rez!" doesn't stop you from bleeding to death. Waving your hands over your buddy's crumpled body doesn't make for very good "healz". Police and Soldiers use overwhelming force to help ensure that they don't orphan their kids. There is no honour in getting yourself killed by being a delusional romantic.
you'd need to create a lot of "unique"-ish rewards, so people have something to work for, and you're all set for the background gameplay.
If you make the reward and the players effect on the game world one in the same, you don't need to create anything particularly unique. If the corrupt merchant is run out of town, then prices for that good are slightly lower, if they fail the mission the prices are slightly higher. I think the need for need for fancy personal items will drop if the "for the good of the faction" reward is a small tangible gameworld improvement. You could end up with players that become "town sheriff" because they do nothing but missions that optimize the prices and conditions in one small town.
If you take your idea of resource consumption and expanding faction territory, and keep the number of resource sources static within any given faction, then you have a self balancing mechanism for faction strength. A faction with twice the territory would have half the resource density. You could add a static number of wandering defense NPCs to each territory to also have this effect. A faction that lost half it's territory would have twice the density of NPC defenders. Ever time a defender is killed a new one quickly spanes somewhere in the faction territory, as that territory shrinks the likelihood of the spawn being close by increases, eventually a Faction territory that was reduced all the way down to just the Keep in the capital city would have an effectively infinite number of NPC defenders. So even a heavy faction imbalance in a server could be contained.
Part of why Puzzle Pirates is able to do that is the way very ordinary pirating tasks are made interesting. In Puzzle Pirates you have to engage in the driving activity of the game (completing puzzles) to make your ship more or to reload you cannons or repair your hull or to make rum or to make a sword, etc, etc, etc. By contrast, in Sid Miere's Pirates! you click to make you ship sail or fire or repair. So for a more standard MMO than Puzzle Pirates how do you make mundane things like building a city wall or forging a sword or converting an enemy town into a friendly town, into an interesting gameplay task? Do it right and many players might happily become non-heroes like masons or farmers or blacksmiths, never bothering to attack an enemy town. Now the next challenge in that game would be to keep the percentage of non-hero players high enough and to make them a very valued part of each faction. I think one key to that is minimizing the power difference between low and high levels. A half a dozen level three players, acting together should be able to take down a single player at the level cap. A group of non-heros should be able to chase off any griefer. Combine that ability with skills that make non-heros valuable to the heros and a game should have no shortage of "player NPCs"
The MMO "Pirates of the Burning Sea" works under this concept, but it has suffered under some exploits. Namely everyone other than the maxed out players are obsolete in the attacking or defending of a town, and guilds purposefully orchestrating attacks at low server hours (like a huge attack at 3am on a Tuesday).
Take the kids to a court if you want them educated about how courts work.
As it was pointed out, several Judges support this scare campaign. Why? Because if kids are educated to believe that Judges can rightly enact these "gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more)." Then slowly, as more and more people believe that lie the more power the Judges will have and the lie will become the truth. Look at every other power grab in recent American politics, it starts with a gross overstatement of authority, follows with stalling if pressed with the real limits of authority, wait until a different issue gains the spot light, act on your overstated authority as "an already established power". I'm sure the RIAA has a few pet judges (even if many Judges are starting to come around to common sense) and I'm sure the RIAA would love to have the authority to imprison copyright infringers or at least make them lose their scholarships (that aught to teach these schools to stand up to the RIAA) But none of that can happen if children are well educated on the proper processes and limits of different government functionaries.
do we get to have a discussion about the formation of the Constitution and how this totally violates the Bill of Rights
I wonder at what point the act of precisely pointing out how certain government actions are illegal, will become an illegal act? Everyone knows that the Founding Fathers employed terrorist tactics (for warfare at the time shooting from behind a tree instead of from a straight line in a field was the equivalent of using civilians for cover in today's warfare) So endorsing a return to their ideas of Rights is an implicit endorsement of fighting your government with terrorist tactics. It's not that far a stretch considering that asymetric warfare will be the only way to unseat the power elite in America should we as a society ever feel the need to do so. Voting between two brands of big government and centralized wealth, is a poor substitute for the kind of freedom this country was originally designed for. So at some point in the tightening of the DHS fist of security, accurately citing history will be a form of inciting terrorist acts.
Paranoia is my new litmus test for predictive accuracy.
I'm sorry I thought we were talking about MMOs. The first link in the article was discussing MMOs but the second and third were discussing adventure games. I find that an odd grouping because, as you point out, the kinds of story telling in the two genres is very different. Even in Slashdot blurb the genres are mixed.
Ragnar Tornquist is respected as one of the best storytellers in today's game industry. He's done work on Anarchy: Online, Dreamfall, and upcoming MMO The Secret World.
so I can mow the lawn,walk the dog,read a book,go jogging,build lego creations with my nephews,take a walk in the park,make a sandwich,etc while I wait for other people to do their job so I can get my done. I'd rather it that way then waiting for someone else, while pretending to be busy in a cubicle. Either way I'll likely have to work after business hours if I am kept waiting too long, but if I am waiting in my home, then those delayed hours aren't detracting so much from my home life.
That all ignores the fact that the interactivity of a game leads to a greater immersion
Well it should lead to greater immersion, but in my years of playing MMOs it is rarely true. I've felt immersed in the action of a good battle, but almost never the storyline. The one exception is in EVE Online, and the story wasn't something written by the dev team, it was the fact that my character there has an actual story and that story actually effected the world of the game. Being involved in a war between two alliances in 0.0 space, even though I was mostly hauling supplies to our player owned station, was far more immersing a game experience than anything I've found in WoW, LotRO, GW, CoH, DDO, or EQ. What I did in EVE actually mattered in the world of the game. By contrast, when absolutely nothing in the larger game world changes when I do or do not complete an epic quest, then I don't feel immersed, I feel dismissed.
Frankly, without someone to poke me with a sharp stick now and then, I wouldn't get much done.
I sometimes wonder how much gets done even when people are physically present, there is a lot of solitaire and web surfing going on in many offices. Perhaps with a rise in telecommuting we can switch to getting paid for generating x amount of work done instead of x hours in the workplace. It would lead to huge efficiency improvements, and it seems the only practical way to quantify "a days work" telecommuting.
Is the patent your boss wants for your company's only product or primary breadwinner?
If the company you work for is dependent on new software patents and you are of an anti-software patent ideology, maybe you should look for a job with a company that makes a product that you want to produce. It's kinda like going to an anti-war protest on the weekend, and working in a munitions factory during the week. Who do you really support? Actions speak louder than words, get your money and your ideology in line.
I just finished a 10 day free trial, and I have to agree. By level 3 it was too hard/slow to solo, but too sparse to find a decent group. You might say "10 days isn't enough to judge by" but why would I pay to play in the slight hopes that I would find a lively player community on day 11?
For years there were limits to how much of the media could be owned by any one company, but in the interests of promoting profits, that safeguard to our freedoms was lost and the limitations on media control were dropped. Where is the invisible hand of Capitalism pushing you now? The great flaw of unchecked capitalism occurs with wealth concentration. Capitalism votes with dollars. When an elite few have a majority of the wealth, then the elite few rule the country. The top 5% owns 60% of the national wealth in America, welcome your capitalist overlords.
Because it's rather strongly believed that unbridled capitalism creates a superior societal wealth in individual & national economic terms, and in military terms.
Thank you, your comment has helped me see a new side to this problem. When wealth and military might grow to such extremes and concentrations, they begin to work against the freedom of everyman, but everyman has gained some wealth and feeling of protection and power from the military as well and so it is easy to convince he to subjugate his freedoms to the pursuits of more national wealth and power. This has gone on for some time (much longer than the Bush presidency) and now we are seeing the fruits of that choice, a decline in wealth and power, because common freedom is a root source of those things.
I am just as shocked as you, but I have to wonder "Why do Corporations have the same free speech protections as real people?" It has long been understood that disinformation is a powerful weapon. That's why the US Army has Pysop. Yes, propaganda that is disguised as a grassroots movement or the work of independent experts is disinformation, not advertising. Part of taking in information (like a product review or political statement) is accounting for the source of that information, ie you will consider the words of someone you respect more than words of someone you regard as a fool. So misrepresenting the source of information is a form of disinformation, and disinformation is weapon, weapons are used to control and destroy. Why are corporations allowed to control and destroy things like legislative process and public political awareness? Sure it's subtle damage, but over time it has done much harm to our society.
How exactly do you think Russia and China got the size they are today ?
They got the size they are by oppressing individual choice with the moral justification of "for the good of the people" which is exactly what you are advocating.
I do also wonder what you will do if you don't consent to a real world fact, an "act of God" if you will. In essence what happens if you don't consent to the rain ?
I adore the way you equate the "right" of the ruling elite to govern me with an act of God. It really highlights how much you think like a serf refusing to question the Divine Right of the King. Physical realities can be accepted without being consented to as just and good. When it rains, I build my family shelter; when it floods, I take my family to higher ground. I accept the physical reality of bloated power hungry governments, but that doesn't mean that I then accept them as right and good. Clear logical public discourse is a fundamental beginning towards action to either transform or replace an unacceptable government. you seem like the idea of "America, Fuck Yeah!" but you don't really understand what the founding fathers intended America to be. If the slightly antiquated language doesn't bother you, I would suggest that you read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense" or for something more modern try Ron Paul's "Revolution". Learn a few thing about the real meaning of Freedom. * hint: it has nothing to do with cheap gas, football, or America being number one.
You are assuming people individually have the right to be governed as they please. Which is obviously beyond impractical.
Sorry but the only one who can give my consent is me, and the only person I can give consent for is myself. That is the very base line of freedom. I don't need a standing army to protect me, I need my right to bear arms to be respected and I will be plenty protected. (If you don't think a countryside of moderately armed natives can't hold off a foreign invasion, take a closer look at Vietnam or Iraq.)
Democracy is the best possible government system we know, and we all know why it works : because it delays the point where idiots (and truly sorry : like you) force their idiotic will on the people,
You start by telling me that I don't have the right to be governed as I please and then you turn around and accuse me of being the idiot that will force my will on the people. Sorry but to find that idiot you need to look in the mirror.
If a cop comes under investigation for a crime, it is a lot more likely to make it to Court than if it is a private citizen
Yeah that might hold true for murder or extortion but how about stuff like speeding tickets, running red lights, parking tickets, small amounts of pot, having fireworks? Cops don't ticket other off duty cops. If they don't have to obey the small laws why should they feel the need to obey the big laws?
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Parents lose big when a company downsizes or restructures their benefits. This is an indirect form of age discrimination because older folks are more likely to have families.
Then by that logic it is a form of discrimination to have those benefits, like child care, that are unusable by employees who choose to not have children. But really it isn't discrimination at all in either case. For it to be discrimination the motivation would have to be centered around age, but really age is just a correlation. I realize that's it's popular to cry "it's discrimination" whenever you want the world to conform to your needs, but really the change is just about money. Sure it might cost a parent more money for daycare, but every dollar my employer spends on daycare is a loss to my stock value or equipment quality or potential for a raise. If anything the subsidizing of child care, family insurance, and other family-centric benefits is discrimination in favor of parents. So please, don't cry about discrimination when the favors done to you are scaled back. Add the difference in market value of the insurance package a family gets to your annual income and see if you still have a net loss vs the "no dependents" employees. You should come out even. The same job deserves the same annual salary + benefits total, anything else would be favoritism.
. If 5 level 20's can take down a level 70, then those same 5 level 20's can do solo level 70 content.
I see how that could be a problem, but again going back to real life, could half a dozen fresh recruits do the same job that one veteran special forces op would do? Of course not. But I was also thinking of goals being more faction oriented and less personal glory oriented. Content is based around the advancement of the faction as whole, not just the advancement of one player, that seems to be almost a necessity if you are going to have quests with persistent effects. Now it would still be cool to have a level 70, you might be half the power in a team made of 3 lvl-20s and your lvl-70. It's still worth while for you to go on the mission, because it benefits the entire faction, you included. In City of Heroes the ability have a team with some mixed levels adds greatly to the ease of putting together a pick-up group.
If the motivation is going to be the same as WoW, uber-gear and maxxed out guilds, then you should just play WoW, it's a great game for that. But if you want quest results to be effecting the whole gameworld, you have to sacrifice the glorification of single characters in favor benefiting your entire faction within the gameworld. There could be glory or fame or titles to acknowledge the characters that contribute greatly, but uber-gear or godlike power makes a persistent world too unstable, those things belong in a resetting type game, like WoW.
Corporations exist to shield people from liability, not to allow people to indirectly commit crimes.
When you have an amoral guiding principle such as "maximize profit" as the primary goal of your corporation, then there is little to no difference between a "shield from liability" and a carte blanc for white collar crime. I think that is the line that divides good corporations from evil corporations; the primacy of profit. A good corp might have profit as second in it's list of priorities after something like "make the best product we can" or "provide a low cost service" but a soon as profit overrules all other aspects of the company they crossover to the Dark Side. While a protection from liablity is a societially good thing when a good corporation has it, it is a societally bad thing when a evil corp has it. MediaDefender/Sentry/Thug is a tool of the RIAA which is purely based on profit maximization.
EVE has PvE but they have almost zero relation to the actual gameworld storyline. Yes you can get some decent gear an money out of the PvE but all of the storyline is PvP. But it really wouldn't be difficult at all to blend PvP and PvE in EVE. You already have four factions, each with their own faction space. You already have an NPC faction (Concord) that will hunt and kill certain players based on their security ratings. It would seem a simple thing to make a players security rating vary depending on which faction space they were in. A Gallente in Amarr 0.9 space would be chased down by Concord, even if they had high Concord security ratings when they were in Gallente space. Make it possible for Alliances or large zergs to overthrow the sovereignty of a system and you have a workable blend of PvE and PvP (a system being overthrown would bring in a lot of attention from players in nearby systems) Right now EVE storyline is PvP because instead of NPC factions all the story is between the big alliances. But it's better story than anything that content creators would ever dare put in a game. Read about: The Guiding Hand Social Club.
not exactly what i'd call holy. or "warrior", isn't that word usually reserved for those with a sense of honour? police forces, and military folks even more so, gang up on a single person, outnumbering and outgunning him/her. no honour there, really.
Because after someone shoots or stabs you in Real Life you don't magically appear at a resurrection stone a few miles away. Shouting "Rez!" doesn't stop you from bleeding to death. Waving your hands over your buddy's crumpled body doesn't make for very good "healz". Police and Soldiers use overwhelming force to help ensure that they don't orphan their kids. There is no honour in getting yourself killed by being a delusional romantic.
you'd need to create a lot of "unique"-ish rewards, so people have something to work for, and you're all set for the background gameplay.
If you make the reward and the players effect on the game world one in the same, you don't need to create anything particularly unique. If the corrupt merchant is run out of town, then prices for that good are slightly lower, if they fail the mission the prices are slightly higher. I think the need for need for fancy personal items will drop if the "for the good of the faction" reward is a small tangible gameworld improvement. You could end up with players that become "town sheriff" because they do nothing but missions that optimize the prices and conditions in one small town.
If you take your idea of resource consumption and expanding faction territory, and keep the number of resource sources static within any given faction, then you have a self balancing mechanism for faction strength. A faction with twice the territory would have half the resource density. You could add a static number of wandering defense NPCs to each territory to also have this effect. A faction that lost half it's territory would have twice the density of NPC defenders. Ever time a defender is killed a new one quickly spanes somewhere in the faction territory, as that territory shrinks the likelihood of the spawn being close by increases, eventually a Faction territory that was reduced all the way down to just the Keep in the capital city would have an effectively infinite number of NPC defenders. So even a heavy faction imbalance in a server could be contained.
Part of why Puzzle Pirates is able to do that is the way very ordinary pirating tasks are made interesting. In Puzzle Pirates you have to engage in the driving activity of the game (completing puzzles) to make your ship more or to reload you cannons or repair your hull or to make rum or to make a sword, etc, etc, etc. By contrast, in Sid Miere's Pirates! you click to make you ship sail or fire or repair. So for a more standard MMO than Puzzle Pirates how do you make mundane things like building a city wall or forging a sword or converting an enemy town into a friendly town, into an interesting gameplay task? Do it right and many players might happily become non-heroes like masons or farmers or blacksmiths, never bothering to attack an enemy town. Now the next challenge in that game would be to keep the percentage of non-hero players high enough and to make them a very valued part of each faction. I think one key to that is minimizing the power difference between low and high levels. A half a dozen level three players, acting together should be able to take down a single player at the level cap. A group of non-heros should be able to chase off any griefer. Combine that ability with skills that make non-heros valuable to the heros and a game should have no shortage of "player NPCs"
The MMO "Pirates of the Burning Sea" works under this concept, but it has suffered under some exploits. Namely everyone other than the maxed out players are obsolete in the attacking or defending of a town, and guilds purposefully orchestrating attacks at low server hours (like a huge attack at 3am on a Tuesday).
Might photographs/videos of police officers breaking the law be the first example of this.
That's a very likely point you made. Officers don't really take kindly to being watched the way they watch us. That's when vague crimes like Obstructing Justice come into their own. "Modern obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, refers to the crime of offering interference of any sort to the work of police, investigators, regulatory agencies, prosecutors, or other (usually government) officials. Often, no actual investigation or substantiated suspicion of a specific incident need exist to support a charge of obstruction of justice." So even if they can't make the charge stick, a police officer can arrest anyone who pays them special attention because they are a police officer. You might beat the charge in court, but now you have a few days in court and an arrest record (it might be struck from your formal record, but your fingerprints, mug shot, and other biometrics are going to still be in the police database in the same way as any criminal)
Take the kids to a court if you want them educated about how courts work.
As it was pointed out, several Judges support this scare campaign. Why? Because if kids are educated to believe that Judges can rightly enact these "gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more)." Then slowly, as more and more people believe that lie the more power the Judges will have and the lie will become the truth. Look at every other power grab in recent American politics, it starts with a gross overstatement of authority, follows with stalling if pressed with the real limits of authority, wait until a different issue gains the spot light, act on your overstated authority as "an already established power". I'm sure the RIAA has a few pet judges (even if many Judges are starting to come around to common sense) and I'm sure the RIAA would love to have the authority to imprison copyright infringers or at least make them lose their scholarships (that aught to teach these schools to stand up to the RIAA) But none of that can happen if children are well educated on the proper processes and limits of different government functionaries.
do we get to have a discussion about the formation of the Constitution and how this totally violates the Bill of Rights
I wonder at what point the act of precisely pointing out how certain government actions are illegal, will become an illegal act? Everyone knows that the Founding Fathers employed terrorist tactics (for warfare at the time shooting from behind a tree instead of from a straight line in a field was the equivalent of using civilians for cover in today's warfare) So endorsing a return to their ideas of Rights is an implicit endorsement of fighting your government with terrorist tactics. It's not that far a stretch considering that asymetric warfare will be the only way to unseat the power elite in America should we as a society ever feel the need to do so. Voting between two brands of big government and centralized wealth, is a poor substitute for the kind of freedom this country was originally designed for. So at some point in the tightening of the DHS fist of security, accurately citing history will be a form of inciting terrorist acts.
Paranoia is my new litmus test for predictive accuracy.
I'm sorry I thought we were talking about MMOs. The first link in the article was discussing MMOs but the second and third were discussing adventure games. I find that an odd grouping because, as you point out, the kinds of story telling in the two genres is very different. Even in Slashdot blurb the genres are mixed.
so I can mow the lawn,walk the dog,read a book,go jogging,build lego creations with my nephews,take a walk in the park,make a sandwich,etc while I wait for other people to do their job so I can get my done. I'd rather it that way then waiting for someone else, while pretending to be busy in a cubicle. Either way I'll likely have to work after business hours if I am kept waiting too long, but if I am waiting in my home, then those delayed hours aren't detracting so much from my home life.
That all ignores the fact that the interactivity of a game leads to a greater immersion
Well it should lead to greater immersion, but in my years of playing MMOs it is rarely true. I've felt immersed in the action of a good battle, but almost never the storyline. The one exception is in EVE Online, and the story wasn't something written by the dev team, it was the fact that my character there has an actual story and that story actually effected the world of the game. Being involved in a war between two alliances in 0.0 space, even though I was mostly hauling supplies to our player owned station, was far more immersing a game experience than anything I've found in WoW, LotRO, GW, CoH, DDO, or EQ. What I did in EVE actually mattered in the world of the game. By contrast, when absolutely nothing in the larger game world changes when I do or do not complete an epic quest, then I don't feel immersed, I feel dismissed.
Frankly, without someone to poke me with a sharp stick now and then, I wouldn't get much done.
I sometimes wonder how much gets done even when people are physically present, there is a lot of solitaire and web surfing going on in many offices. Perhaps with a rise in telecommuting we can switch to getting paid for generating x amount of work done instead of x hours in the workplace. It would lead to huge efficiency improvements, and it seems the only practical way to quantify "a days work" telecommuting.
Is the patent your boss wants for your company's only product or primary breadwinner?
If the company you work for is dependent on new software patents and you are of an anti-software patent ideology, maybe you should look for a job with a company that makes a product that you want to produce. It's kinda like going to an anti-war protest on the weekend, and working in a munitions factory during the week. Who do you really support? Actions speak louder than words, get your money and your ideology in line.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
Does that ten acres include the uranium mine and the waste disposal site? Because in-situ leaching isn't exactly eco-friendly.
I just finished a 10 day free trial, and I have to agree. By level 3 it was too hard/slow to solo, but too sparse to find a decent group. You might say "10 days isn't enough to judge by" but why would I pay to play in the slight hopes that I would find a lively player community on day 11?
For years there were limits to how much of the media could be owned by any one company, but in the interests of promoting profits, that safeguard to our freedoms was lost and the limitations on media control were dropped. Where is the invisible hand of Capitalism pushing you now? The great flaw of unchecked capitalism occurs with wealth concentration. Capitalism votes with dollars. When an elite few have a majority of the wealth, then the elite few rule the country. The top 5% owns 60% of the national wealth in America, welcome your capitalist overlords.
Because it's rather strongly believed that unbridled capitalism creates a superior societal wealth in individual & national economic terms, and in military terms.
Thank you, your comment has helped me see a new side to this problem. When wealth and military might grow to such extremes and concentrations, they begin to work against the freedom of everyman, but everyman has gained some wealth and feeling of protection and power from the military as well and so it is easy to convince he to subjugate his freedoms to the pursuits of more national wealth and power. This has gone on for some time (much longer than the Bush presidency) and now we are seeing the fruits of that choice, a decline in wealth and power, because common freedom is a root source of those things.
I am just as shocked as you, but I have to wonder "Why do Corporations have the same free speech protections as real people?" It has long been understood that disinformation is a powerful weapon. That's why the US Army has Pysop. Yes, propaganda that is disguised as a grassroots movement or the work of independent experts is disinformation, not advertising. Part of taking in information (like a product review or political statement) is accounting for the source of that information, ie you will consider the words of someone you respect more than words of someone you regard as a fool. So misrepresenting the source of information is a form of disinformation, and disinformation is weapon, weapons are used to control and destroy. Why are corporations allowed to control and destroy things like legislative process and public political awareness? Sure it's subtle damage, but over time it has done much harm to our society.
How exactly do you think Russia and China got the size they are today ?
They got the size they are by oppressing individual choice with the moral justification of "for the good of the people" which is exactly what you are advocating.
I do also wonder what you will do if you don't consent to a real world fact, an "act of God" if you will. In essence what happens if you don't consent to the rain ?
I adore the way you equate the "right" of the ruling elite to govern me with an act of God. It really highlights how much you think like a serf refusing to question the Divine Right of the King. Physical realities can be accepted without being consented to as just and good. When it rains, I build my family shelter; when it floods, I take my family to higher ground. I accept the physical reality of bloated power hungry governments, but that doesn't mean that I then accept them as right and good. Clear logical public discourse is a fundamental beginning towards action to either transform or replace an unacceptable government. you seem like the idea of "America, Fuck Yeah!" but you don't really understand what the founding fathers intended America to be. If the slightly antiquated language doesn't bother you, I would suggest that you read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense" or for something more modern try Ron Paul's "Revolution". Learn a few thing about the real meaning of Freedom.
* hint: it has nothing to do with cheap gas, football, or America being number one.
You are assuming people individually have the right to be governed as they please. Which is obviously beyond impractical.
Sorry but the only one who can give my consent is me, and the only person I can give consent for is myself. That is the very base line of freedom. I don't need a standing army to protect me, I need my right to bear arms to be respected and I will be plenty protected. (If you don't think a countryside of moderately armed natives can't hold off a foreign invasion, take a closer look at Vietnam or Iraq.)
Democracy is the best possible government system we know, and we all know why it works : because it delays the point where idiots (and truly sorry : like you) force their idiotic will on the people,
You start by telling me that I don't have the right to be governed as I please and then you turn around and accuse me of being the idiot that will force my will on the people. Sorry but to find that idiot you need to look in the mirror.
If a cop comes under investigation for a crime, it is a lot more likely to make it to Court than if it is a private citizen
Yeah that might hold true for murder or extortion but how about stuff like speeding tickets, running red lights, parking tickets, small amounts of pot, having fireworks? Cops don't ticket other off duty cops. If they don't have to obey the small laws why should they feel the need to obey the big laws?