I'd much rather have a cold war with china than a hot one... or none at all, if possible. It's sad, really... their people are full of potential, but their gov't is pretty scary.
This article doesn't successfully demonstrate that goldfish are smarter than dolphins...
(i.e., goldfish which demonstratably have very poor long term memory (though not all as bad as cliche lets us believe... while dolphins can communicate with humans, have intensely complex langauges of their own, etc)... its proof that human beings don't fully (or even remotely) understand the brain yet!
not only the above, which are perfectly legitimate/scary, but the wifi versions are just not as reliable... I only just this weekend had to replace my mouse, and I thought, sure, I'll get a wireless mouse/keyboard set. Within hours I was already back out the door looking for a new wired mouse to replace them. They were hard to set up, hard to keep sync'd, and the mouse kept pausing and jumping and moving erratically... and designer/artist could not operate using it... at least that model. (sadly, the logitech mouse i bought to re-replace it... killed itself after 8 hours of use (somehow it went nuts, sent the 'puter up to 99% cpu, and then after reboot, it never activate/worked again (no laser, nothing)).
eh, i'd agree with 'idealistic'... but if they could build a pyramid back then, we could commandeer the net now... just a matter of willpower and effort =)
My difficulty with all this is that NEITHER side can produce incontroverible (able?) evidence... it's all claims and accusations...
Look, here's the deal... the point of this article is wise, and I hate the idea of the internet being subverted into a serious of highways and back alleys where protection money is the order of life.
BUT, we really only have the word of the two sides, here... who among us is in a position to KNOW, absolutely, for sure, what AT&T or Comcast would do under X and Y circumstances... on the one hand, they say that competition would lead to ingenuity and 'regulated' status would stifle it (Though haven't we had quite a lot of ingenuity even so?)... on the other side, they're saying this'll lead to internet thuggery and that we'll all lose freedoms and rights, etc. Since both complaints are rhetoric, and based upon 'we said','they said' barely-factoids, I honestly do not know how things will turn out.
BUT... everyone always approaches these battles as if, win or lose, this'll be the way things will remain forever and ever... When has that ever been the case? Laws are repealed or modified all the time, companies rise and fall.
So the question is... why don't we just TRY it their way for a year or two... why don't me draft some sort of compromise bill that allows them to attempt to fulfill their rhetorical promises, but allow us to repeal the whole stroke should they succumb to the temptations net-neutrality people worry about? Hell, if they tried to hold pipelines hostage, who is to say the public can't simply REPLACE the infrastructure entirely?!?!... my point is, there will never be a point where we are entirely without options to change things for the better... even if our gov't when totalitarian on us, we could still resist/fight back, tear it down, etc ad nauseum. If that's the cause... simply tearing the foundations out from under the telecomms is just as achievable if they really do betray us when given the opportunity.
Here is an idea... why not distribute tough-paper ballot-cards... heavy duty, not flimsy paper... it has the choices already on the thing, with large circles... maybe a write-in, too... the voter signs, SSN's, and thumb-prints the thing (or something equally verifiable)... this then goes to a really simple device that literally has a lever for each choice, ya put your card into a slot of appropriate size, pull the lever, it cuts a clean circle in your choice-box thing, and you get your card back... you can SEE which (obtusely large) circle was slotted, toss it in the garbage if it was wrong, go again, etc... then you file past some slanted bins which (for each separate party) you just drop the card, and like any kind of manufaturing device you see on 'How it's made' on the discovery channel, it lines them up, passes them through some sort of laser device (which passes over the cut slot just to make sure it was sent to the right bin) which autocounts, presorts, and stacks the things for easy counting... Hell, maybe the cards are even pre-printed and MAILED to each citizen ahead of time, and if they don't take their own vote seriously, it doesn't get counted... maybe that sort of in-your-face thing would get a couple more percent to the polls, and the voter themself can confirm the 'chad' or whatever is the one they went for...
We're so good at making machines to make each separate candy bar just right, how can't we get voting down to a science, too? Unless, of course, the politicians and corps who are involved in this stuff odn't want an accurate count, eh?
I probably am a little paranoid about all this, but I try to counter that with reason. What I feel is important to say here is that, most of this really is rather inert when you remove the human element... the concept of Big Brother CAN be both a positive and a negative force, depending at how it is run and by whom. RFID chips have the power to help commerce, post-criminal enforcement, finding your keys... beautiful things... and it has the power to allow a government and/or agency to watch your every move. Nanomachines can clean your artiries, kill cancer when it is just a cell big, and allow you to perceive the internet with all five of your senses, without implants, etc... and they can also be used to invade and spy on you, cause severe harm, kill... and (most unlikely of all) go grey-goo as people like to be idioticly paranoid about.
There was a time when people were worried about how reading would dull the brain, that radio would destroy society, and that rock and roll was the work of the devil. But all have been positive forces in our history. Some kid's life was recently saved because of a alligator-deterring technique he saw on the discovery channel! And for all this talk of lack of freedom, here we all are, using the internet, to talk about it!
The point I'm trying to make is... surveillances, RFID, call tapping, new technologies, government itself (big or small) are all completely neutral when unused... what we really don't know is... who is at he helm? Can we trust them? How realistic is it that they want to go so completely totalitarian on us? Until they take away our right to bear arms, I still have to withhold my inner paranoia. I've heard from at least 3 different sources (most of which are via fark or/. of course, but SEEM unrelated) about secret internment camps being built in the country... That's scary, but all I have is someone elses word for it.
All I know is that, almost routinely, I go to bed each night having read some frightening new news... global warming, fascist america, complete lack of accountability with repub-voted biotech firms, all the lies bush has been caught in, the fact that MY country has turned into the bad guy... we're supposed to be the good guys, dammit. Where's all our military spending going, exactly, when we can't even send our guys into harms way (bs'd as that whole situatio is) without humvee armor, huh? Von Braun once said, near the end of his life, that there there would be four great lies told to the public to secure vast quantities of money for military production and research... first would be russians (the impending issue in his time), next would be a 'faceless' and borderless threat (can anyone say 'terrorism'? (frankly, the real terrorism is done in the name of fighting terrorism, as far as I am concerned))... so we've got two prophecies left to fulfill... asteroids (legitimate as the concept is) and then aliens.
All I want is to lead a complete life, relatively free of fear, write some books, make some games, live in a relatively natural setting, etc... there's really no excuse for many of the great ills in the world today, but are some of these fears imagined, or are they real? Is it in the least bit possible that some of these 'edgy' services or technologies are being used more for their good rather than their evil (nuclear power is mostly a success after all, and we haven't destroyed civilization YET!). I dunno... I want to know... and that our government is no longer transparent, that our own 'leader's (for lack of a better word) have no credibility left... it doesn't help.
Every single link relating to HOPE, being hope.net (with various prefixes, etc) and those mp3 files coming off hope sites... all just ~gone~... is anyone seeing them?
I'm STILL Getting uncouth behavior from netflix (i know they had a class aciton lawsuit they lost over the same once before)... namely, I watch a lot of SERIES... anime, scifi, etc... and they have, a good 9 times out of 10, send the following volue 2 or more days before the preceeding one... i.e., the first to arrive is volume 2... then acouple days later, volume 1... then 4 and 3... etc. Even though the processing station for returns is just an hour down the road, sometimes they register recv'd the next day, sometimes it takes then 2-3 days, which is rediculous. I like the service, but I don't think they learned their lesson from the last time they got caught screwing with deliveries in an attempt to make you keep discs longer and expand their profit margin.
the problem with this idea is that if they abuse it, they will either destroy the patent as a concept or be dismantled by the/a government as it was with other overly abusive megacorps.
1) the evolving american: One very interesting and MEASURABLE transition in human genome has occurred right here in america, and in a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye... Our tallness (no, not fatness)... the average height and brawn of the american has demonstratably increased steadily since colonization (freaks like lincoln aside)... This is something known as contextual adaptation, and as been seen in the fossil record many a time (mini versions of various well known dinosaurs caught on new islands for milliions of years, etc and so on).
Some above have said that, 'well sure evolution exists, but it is purely accidental and could never adjust for overpopulation, etc'... but the enlargement of the american colonist over 200-400 years due to the bounty of the land shows that, well, in fact, our genome is more than simply an accident... it is code and capable of reactions to bounty, stresses, and environment. When we live in a place that can support larger bodies (again, no reference to fat), it will because a larger animal is less likely to be a target for predators... however, if yer stuck in no-man's-land or on tiny islands, well, you'll shrink because you want to remain viable even without enormous bounties of food to be had. That's a form of genetic adaptation that has been shown to occur very fast (in the greater scheme of things)
2) the swimming primate: Has anyone noticed, that of all the primates in existance, humans are the best adapted to swimming? How many other primates concentrate their populations on shorelines? How many can swim at all? From what I hear, very few... As one who has faith in our internal programmings, I am very curious where we are headed and why...
oh yes... it would have to be that dynamic... barter would be allowed, and minting of coins could literally be a form of tradeskill... but then again, that could be risky as you might not want to have to waste data tracking individual coins... but that depth isn't really necessary... if you had a dynamic 'culture' or 'faction', among its stats could be 'monetary units' that remain blank until that faciton/culture/town whatever had reached a critical mass enough to be able to give manpower to minting (assuming npcs since a player would be bored still doing that), the currency could then just be stored as numbers as with all other games, except they have exchange rate ratios that can change over time, etc with neighbors... and perhaps the faction/town/culture data keeps track of the 'maximum' value of its currency (i.e., the max amount that can be found in the world) which of course can also change over time... this way, it can keep track of the amount of currency that is held by players and the diff of that to the max, given random and odds, chance of being found on a REASONABLE npc in the area... etc... and of course, coinage on players can be lost, stolen, used (etc) thus distributing/changing the 'held vs. max' ratio, etc...
all ideas, and no doubt i'm selling myself out here =P
i should learn to keep quiet
I would like to see a somewhat harsher game... I mean, I play ArcticMUD off and on and that is one harsh game... you die, you lost immense amount of exp, all your gear, suffer stat damage for a week or more, etc etc etc... so harsh i usually let the character die for good (good roleplay) and take a few months off before playing again... sounds unfun? problem is, I keep coming back...
the point becomes, in a persistant world, when you log off, your character should still be int he game as an NPC... lets say we have an unnamed game in which the ENTIRE economy relies on player/npc crafted goods... the only items that can be looted from battles are those that at one point HAD been made by players... this would make such items as swords and armor and arcanery intrinsically precious... not like in WoW where you discard your sword every couple of days or so; So anyways, lets say your character has blacksmithy skill... you spend your online time experimenting, coming up with new formulas, new designs, trying to achieve a new plane of skills or such... and offline, except for sleep time, the npc version of yourself is hard at work filling orders and quotas for more basic but needed swords, armor for the town guards, etc etc etc... making money, building up crafting experience, etc...
sure, there'd be the danger that your town could get sacked and you'd die... but then again, all the more incentive to keep the town guards well armed, giving a real NEED for crafters (over the hobbyist level that you find in current games), and guards and... gasp... ROLES to play...
anyways...
really; the funny part about all this is that anyone cares... if people get sick and tired of this kind of crap being pulled all the time, they'll simply come up with their own devices, standards, and entertainment community... its not as if instituting a law that won't be accepted by the general public will actually work. If people are happy with this supposed new law it'll work... if they're not, it won't... pure and simple. Same as with gov't and all other services. People can be convinced they have to abide for a while, but never permanently.
"Someone has to control it - the Internet can't be this free-for-all tech orgy or it will collapse. "
why do you think this exactly? It would need a protocol, sure... otherwise devices couldnt' even talk to each other... but I am not convinced about the need for centralized control...
of course it is... you should turn yourself on to kurzweilai.net; this guy is quite neat to listen to... anyhow, the internet is changing the planet; it is a threat to centralized power and the centralized powers know it... there is a hurdle to cross in terms of a decentralized internet, and that is devices and networks knowing who is who and where to get signals from or send them too... but hell, even cellphones these days can take on packet distribution roles... we're talking a new protocol here... i know people think, 'oh dang that's too hard' and maybe it IS hard... but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. And then what happens? Well, you get an internet that is for all intents and purposes immune to censorship, immune to destruction, etc... But make no mistake... such a thing coming about would be the last nail in the coffin of the world as you know it (think borders, language barriers, politics, war, news, etc etc etc).
"Collin Powel could have been another Eisenhower, unfortunately, many on the left would find a black moderate Republican president intollerable. "
Hee! I'm on the left... hmm... middle? I dunno... i agree with each party (and a few others as well) pretty much exactly as often as they say half decent things... and disagree with them when they dont. So i dunno what that makes me... but as someone who sees himself as a democrat, a free thinker, etc etc etc, I would love to see Powell run! Though I'd also like to see Angus King or George Mitchell run too, not that they would.
I also hear (my sister spent a short amount of time married to a canadian) that the wait time for medical care in Canada can be quite long, depending, of course, on where in canada you are and what you are waiting for. Here, south of the border, you can get it a little faster... the tradeoff is that you put your family in debt for the next 3 generations doing so. =P
Hee... I'm elligible to run for pres in 2012... Since I'm not uber rich, I wouldn't have any dream of winning, but I WOULD like to make it to a couple televised debates. Why? Well, to answer the questions with actual answers... and see how badly that messes up the likely candidates. Seriously...
My only concern with running is... well, the Mayan calander ends in 2012, doesn't it? No doubt, my running would cause the end of the world!
Its a tough thing; I can find something to agree with on both sides of the table.
America has absolutely fabulous potential... and used to live up to it... hell, back in the 50s, a high school JANITOR could pull in a decent enough living for his whole family... now both parents would have to double shift just to make due.
Everything feels so deliberate now... how can so many bad choices be bad so consistantly and so frequently? Hewlett Packard fires thousands of americans, hires thousands of indians (not that indians don't deserve jobs too, but...) and buys several 30 million dollar private jets... then puts them under a small corp to hide the fact when the press gets wind. Microsoft backs bill after bill to increase cheap foreign IT and technical labor importation TO the U.S. (H-1B madness).
Money has become the primary determing factor in elections. One of the SEVERAL national debt cap increases bush got just his first term was for more than the entire depth of debt we had under Reagan, and we/he burned through it in 18 months, asking for (and getting) more, of course. We don't know what they're lying to us about and what they aren't (if anything anymore).
Partisan propoganda has gone macarthyist (spelling?), and a recent poll on MSNBC had a majority of the polled suggesting it was time for a THIRD party. I don't think these people even remember who they work for anymore. The president, congress, judges, police, etc... they're not the boss. They must make hard choices in order to balance the wants and needs of one of the single most varied culture on the face of the planet, and you can never please everyone... but at the same time, its nearly dynastic now... if you are in a certain family, or just plain have enough money, you're in. Ultimately, we're the collective head honcho... and they serve us! But, really... how many of you here (americans that is) really feel like you have any power at all anymore?
Education is declining sharply (india and china are absolutely humiliating us in tech/engineering graduates, and even europe has reversed its own educational decline). It's also rediculously expensive. And from first hand experience, I can tell you how horribly you are treated (fiscally) at the college level if you aren't from a well-to-do family (that's a windbag story in itself). And no sooner do you have that quarter-million-dollar peice of paper, you find your jobs are being given to VISA workers from indonesia or going overseas altogether... because the bills you gotta pay in order to make up for the abuse you called an education make your cost of living too high and your rate of pay unattractive to those who can just lobby congress to get more H-1B foreign labor or tax breaks for hiring child labor in china for a pittance. Blah blah blah...
I guess the question is... how long do you stick with it... and when do you divorce? I really don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point...
I'd much rather have a cold war with china than a hot one... or none at all, if possible. It's sad, really... their people are full of potential, but their gov't is pretty scary.
This article doesn't successfully demonstrate that goldfish are smarter than dolphins... (i.e., goldfish which demonstratably have very poor long term memory (though not all as bad as cliche lets us believe... while dolphins can communicate with humans, have intensely complex langauges of their own, etc) ... its proof that human beings don't fully (or even remotely) understand the brain yet!
not only the above, which are perfectly legitimate/scary, but the wifi versions are just not as reliable... I only just this weekend had to replace my mouse, and I thought, sure, I'll get a wireless mouse/keyboard set. Within hours I was already back out the door looking for a new wired mouse to replace them. They were hard to set up, hard to keep sync'd, and the mouse kept pausing and jumping and moving erratically... and designer/artist could not operate using it... at least that model. (sadly, the logitech mouse i bought to re-replace it... killed itself after 8 hours of use (somehow it went nuts, sent the 'puter up to 99% cpu, and then after reboot, it never activate/worked again (no laser, nothing)).
And then there's the matter of batteries...
eh, i'd agree with 'idealistic' ... but if they could build a pyramid back then, we could commandeer the net now... just a matter of willpower and effort =)
My difficulty with all this is that NEITHER side can produce incontroverible (able?) evidence... it's all claims and accusations...
Look, here's the deal... the point of this article is wise, and I hate the idea of the internet being subverted into a serious of highways and back alleys where protection money is the order of life.
BUT, we really only have the word of the two sides, here... who among us is in a position to KNOW, absolutely, for sure, what AT&T or Comcast would do under X and Y circumstances... on the one hand, they say that competition would lead to ingenuity and 'regulated' status would stifle it (Though haven't we had quite a lot of ingenuity even so?) ... on the other side, they're saying this'll lead to internet thuggery and that we'll all lose freedoms and rights, etc. Since both complaints are rhetoric, and based upon 'we said','they said' barely-factoids, I honestly do not know how things will turn out.
BUT... everyone always approaches these battles as if, win or lose, this'll be the way things will remain forever and ever... When has that ever been the case? Laws are repealed or modified all the time, companies rise and fall.
So the question is... why don't we just TRY it their way for a year or two... why don't me draft some sort of compromise bill that allows them to attempt to fulfill their rhetorical promises, but allow us to repeal the whole stroke should they succumb to the temptations net-neutrality people worry about? Hell, if they tried to hold pipelines hostage, who is to say the public can't simply REPLACE the infrastructure entirely?!?! ... my point is, there will never be a point where we are entirely without options to change things for the better... even if our gov't when totalitarian on us, we could still resist/fight back, tear it down, etc ad nauseum. If that's the cause... simply tearing the foundations out from under the telecomms is just as achievable if they really do betray us when given the opportunity.
We're so good at making machines to make each separate candy bar just right, how can't we get voting down to a science, too? Unless, of course, the politicians and corps who are involved in this stuff odn't want an accurate count, eh?
dang, sorry.. didn't realize it wouldn't automatically handle line breaks =(
I probably am a little paranoid about all this, but I try to counter that with reason. What I feel is important to say here is that, most of this really is rather inert when you remove the human element... the concept of Big Brother CAN be both a positive and a negative force, depending at how it is run and by whom. RFID chips have the power to help commerce, post-criminal enforcement, finding your keys ... beautiful things... and it has the power to allow a government and/or agency to watch your every move. Nanomachines can clean your artiries, kill cancer when it is just a cell big, and allow you to perceive the internet with all five of your senses, without implants, etc... and they can also be used to invade and spy on you, cause severe harm, kill... and (most unlikely of all) go grey-goo as people like to be idioticly paranoid about.
There was a time when people were worried about how reading would dull the brain, that radio would destroy society, and that rock and roll was the work of the devil. But all have been positive forces in our history. Some kid's life was recently saved because of a alligator-deterring technique he saw on the discovery channel! And for all this talk of lack of freedom, here we all are, using the internet, to talk about it!
The point I'm trying to make is... surveillances, RFID, call tapping, new technologies, government itself (big or small) are all completely neutral when unused... what we really don't know is... who is at he helm? Can we trust them? How realistic is it that they want to go so completely totalitarian on us? Until they take away our right to bear arms, I still have to withhold my inner paranoia. I've heard from at least 3 different sources (most of which are via fark or /. of course, but SEEM unrelated) about secret internment camps being built in the country... That's scary, but all I have is someone elses word for it.
All I know is that, almost routinely, I go to bed each night having read some frightening new news... global warming, fascist america, complete lack of accountability with repub-voted biotech firms, all the lies bush has been caught in, the fact that MY country has turned into the bad guy... we're supposed to be the good guys, dammit. Where's all our military spending going, exactly, when we can't even send our guys into harms way (bs'd as that whole situatio is) without humvee armor, huh? Von Braun once said, near the end of his life, that there there would be four great lies told to the public to secure vast quantities of money for military production and research... first would be russians (the impending issue in his time), next would be a 'faceless' and borderless threat (can anyone say 'terrorism'? (frankly, the real terrorism is done in the name of fighting terrorism, as far as I am concerned))... so we've got two prophecies left to fulfill... asteroids (legitimate as the concept is) and then aliens.
All I want is to lead a complete life, relatively free of fear, write some books, make some games, live in a relatively natural setting, etc... there's really no excuse for many of the great ills in the world today, but are some of these fears imagined, or are they real? Is it in the least bit possible that some of these 'edgy' services or technologies are being used more for their good rather than their evil (nuclear power is mostly a success after all, and we haven't destroyed civilization YET!). I dunno... I want to know... and that our government is no longer transparent, that our own 'leader's (for lack of a better word) have no credibility left... it doesn't help.
Every single link relating to HOPE, being hope.net (with various prefixes, etc) and those mp3 files coming off hope sites... all just ~gone~... is anyone seeing them?
was he also not a character from the 1995 movie HACKERS?
I'm STILL Getting uncouth behavior from netflix (i know they had a class aciton lawsuit they lost over the same once before)... namely, I watch a lot of SERIES... anime, scifi, etc... and they have, a good 9 times out of 10, send the following volue 2 or more days before the preceeding one... i.e., the first to arrive is volume 2... then acouple days later, volume 1... then 4 and 3... etc. Even though the processing station for returns is just an hour down the road, sometimes they register recv'd the next day, sometimes it takes then 2-3 days, which is rediculous. I like the service, but I don't think they learned their lesson from the last time they got caught screwing with deliveries in an attempt to make you keep discs longer and expand their profit margin.
the problem with this idea is that if they abuse it, they will either destroy the patent as a concept or be dismantled by the/a government as it was with other overly abusive megacorps.
Two things...
... the average height and brawn of the american has demonstratably increased steadily since colonization (freaks like lincoln aside)... This is something known as contextual adaptation, and as been seen in the fossil record many a time (mini versions of various well known dinosaurs caught on new islands for milliions of years, etc and so on).
... but the enlargement of the american colonist over 200-400 years due to the bounty of the land shows that, well, in fact, our genome is more than simply an accident... it is code and capable of reactions to bounty, stresses, and environment. When we live in a place that can support larger bodies (again, no reference to fat), it will because a larger animal is less likely to be a target for predators... however, if yer stuck in no-man's-land or on tiny islands, well, you'll shrink because you want to remain viable even without enormous bounties of food to be had. That's a form of genetic adaptation that has been shown to occur very fast (in the greater scheme of things)
1) the evolving american: One very interesting and MEASURABLE transition in human genome has occurred right here in america, and in a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye... Our tallness (no, not fatness)
Some above have said that, 'well sure evolution exists, but it is purely accidental and could never adjust for overpopulation, etc'
2) the swimming primate: Has anyone noticed, that of all the primates in existance, humans are the best adapted to swimming? How many other primates concentrate their populations on shorelines? How many can swim at all? From what I hear, very few... As one who has faith in our internal programmings, I am very curious where we are headed and why...
oh yes... it would have to be that dynamic... barter would be allowed, and minting of coins could literally be a form of tradeskill... but then again, that could be risky as you might not want to have to waste data tracking individual coins... but that depth isn't really necessary... if you had a dynamic 'culture' or 'faction', among its stats could be 'monetary units' that remain blank until that faciton/culture/town whatever had reached a critical mass enough to be able to give manpower to minting (assuming npcs since a player would be bored still doing that), the currency could then just be stored as numbers as with all other games, except they have exchange rate ratios that can change over time, etc with neighbors... and perhaps the faction/town/culture data keeps track of the 'maximum' value of its currency (i.e., the max amount that can be found in the world) which of course can also change over time... this way, it can keep track of the amount of currency that is held by players and the diff of that to the max, given random and odds, chance of being found on a REASONABLE npc in the area... etc... and of course, coinage on players can be lost, stolen, used (etc) thus distributing/changing the 'held vs. max' ratio, etc... all ideas, and no doubt i'm selling myself out here =P i should learn to keep quiet
I would like to see a somewhat harsher game... I mean, I play ArcticMUD off and on and that is one harsh game... you die, you lost immense amount of exp, all your gear, suffer stat damage for a week or more, etc etc etc... so harsh i usually let the character die for good (good roleplay) and take a few months off before playing again... sounds unfun? problem is, I keep coming back... the point becomes, in a persistant world, when you log off, your character should still be int he game as an NPC... lets say we have an unnamed game in which the ENTIRE economy relies on player/npc crafted goods... the only items that can be looted from battles are those that at one point HAD been made by players... this would make such items as swords and armor and arcanery intrinsically precious... not like in WoW where you discard your sword every couple of days or so; So anyways, lets say your character has blacksmithy skill... you spend your online time experimenting, coming up with new formulas, new designs, trying to achieve a new plane of skills or such... and offline, except for sleep time, the npc version of yourself is hard at work filling orders and quotas for more basic but needed swords, armor for the town guards, etc etc etc... making money, building up crafting experience, etc... sure, there'd be the danger that your town could get sacked and you'd die... but then again, all the more incentive to keep the town guards well armed, giving a real NEED for crafters (over the hobbyist level that you find in current games), and guards and ... gasp... ROLES to play...
anyways...
really; the funny part about all this is that anyone cares... if people get sick and tired of this kind of crap being pulled all the time, they'll simply come up with their own devices, standards, and entertainment community ... its not as if instituting a law that won't be accepted by the general public will actually work. If people are happy with this supposed new law it'll work... if they're not, it won't... pure and simple. Same as with gov't and all other services. People can be convinced they have to abide for a while, but never permanently.
"Someone has to control it - the Internet can't be this free-for-all tech orgy or it will collapse. "
why do you think this exactly? It would need a protocol, sure... otherwise devices couldnt' even talk to each other... but I am not convinced about the need for centralized control...
This democrat agrees with that republican... and btw, that sig IS perfect!
of course it is... you should turn yourself on to kurzweilai.net; this guy is quite neat to listen to... anyhow, the internet is changing the planet; it is a threat to centralized power and the centralized powers know it... there is a hurdle to cross in terms of a decentralized internet, and that is devices and networks knowing who is who and where to get signals from or send them too... but hell, even cellphones these days can take on packet distribution roles... we're talking a new protocol here... i know people think, 'oh dang that's too hard' and maybe it IS hard... but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. And then what happens? Well, you get an internet that is for all intents and purposes immune to censorship, immune to destruction, etc... But make no mistake... such a thing coming about would be the last nail in the coffin of the world as you know it (think borders, language barriers, politics, war, news, etc etc etc).
"Collin Powel could have been another Eisenhower, unfortunately, many on the left would find a black moderate Republican president intollerable. " Hee! I'm on the left... hmm... middle? I dunno... i agree with each party (and a few others as well) pretty much exactly as often as they say half decent things... and disagree with them when they dont. So i dunno what that makes me... but as someone who sees himself as a democrat, a free thinker, etc etc etc, I would love to see Powell run! Though I'd also like to see Angus King or George Mitchell run too, not that they would.
wow... that's completely different from what I've heard and read from others. But even so, given your description, I don't mind being wrong!
I also hear (my sister spent a short amount of time married to a canadian) that the wait time for medical care in Canada can be quite long, depending, of course, on where in canada you are and what you are waiting for. Here, south of the border, you can get it a little faster... the tradeoff is that you put your family in debt for the next 3 generations doing so. =P
Hee... I'm elligible to run for pres in 2012... Since I'm not uber rich, I wouldn't have any dream of winning, but I WOULD like to make it to a couple televised debates. Why? Well, to answer the questions with actual answers... and see how badly that messes up the likely candidates. Seriously...
My only concern with running is... well, the Mayan calander ends in 2012, doesn't it? No doubt, my running would cause the end of the world!
Its a tough thing; I can find something to agree with on both sides of the table.
America has absolutely fabulous potential... and used to live up to it... hell, back in the 50s, a high school JANITOR could pull in a decent enough living for his whole family... now both parents would have to double shift just to make due.
Everything feels so deliberate now... how can so many bad choices be bad so consistantly and so frequently? Hewlett Packard fires thousands of americans, hires thousands of indians (not that indians don't deserve jobs too, but...) and buys several 30 million dollar private jets... then puts them under a small corp to hide the fact when the press gets wind. Microsoft backs bill after bill to increase cheap foreign IT and technical labor importation TO the U.S. (H-1B madness).
Money has become the primary determing factor in elections. One of the SEVERAL national debt cap increases bush got just his first term was for more than the entire depth of debt we had under Reagan, and we/he burned through it in 18 months, asking for (and getting) more, of course. We don't know what they're lying to us about and what they aren't (if anything anymore).
Partisan propoganda has gone macarthyist (spelling?), and a recent poll on MSNBC had a majority of the polled suggesting it was time for a THIRD party. I don't think these people even remember who they work for anymore. The president, congress, judges, police, etc... they're not the boss. They must make hard choices in order to balance the wants and needs of one of the single most varied culture on the face of the planet, and you can never please everyone... but at the same time, its nearly dynastic now... if you are in a certain family, or just plain have enough money, you're in. Ultimately, we're the collective head honcho... and they serve us! But, really... how many of you here (americans that is) really feel like you have any power at all anymore?
Education is declining sharply (india and china are absolutely humiliating us in tech/engineering graduates, and even europe has reversed its own educational decline). It's also rediculously expensive. And from first hand experience, I can tell you how horribly you are treated (fiscally) at the college level if you aren't from a well-to-do family (that's a windbag story in itself). And no sooner do you have that quarter-million-dollar peice of paper, you find your jobs are being given to VISA workers from indonesia or going overseas altogether... because the bills you gotta pay in order to make up for the abuse you called an education make your cost of living too high and your rate of pay unattractive to those who can just lobby congress to get more H-1B foreign labor or tax breaks for hiring child labor in china for a pittance. Blah blah blah...
I guess the question is... how long do you stick with it... and when do you divorce? I really don't know.