How much of a market is there for Linux games?
on
Is id Abandoning Linux?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The question is not how many Linux users can play games on Linux, but how many Linux users will actually insist that it must be on Linux. I bet that most would-be Linux gamers are dual-booting, and until there reaches a critical mass of people who insist on not having to dual-boot, companies will have a business case for not supporting Linux.
IT work outside of the well-paid areas is a breeding ground for discontent. It's thankless, low-paid work where you have to deal with a lot of stupid people. Add on to that that people who go into IT who are ambitious, ethical and hard-working are probably going to be more attracted to the engineering side (software, hardware and network) than the grunt technician work and you have a big problem on your hands.
I have never met a person who works in IT support that I would trust with my personal PC. That's just my experience, but I have known guys who would abuse their access to people's PC to get all sorts of files they shouldn't, which is why I didn't hesitate to believe the Consumerist story about Geek Squad employees abusing their customers in that way.
You know what needs to be done? They ought to be treated like a repairman who is caught going off into a totally unrelated part of the house and rifling through personal belongings. It may not be stealing since they're just copying, but that's the closest thing that we can compare it to.
Where I work there is little place for programmers or computer scientists. You have to be able to program, but you also have to be able to write software that shows that you have an ability to construct and follow requirements, use good design practices, and well, approach it like an engineer. They aren't as concerned with whether or not we are the best Java programmer,.NET programmer, etc., but rather how well we can come up with sophisticated architectures for reliably handling a problem.
What we are seeing is a split where programming itself is like being a construction worker, and software engineering is like going into architecture when it comes to construction work.
I would be surprised to find that this is an acceptable policy in most governments. The US government, for example, is pretty restrictive with its systems, and Tor would not be tolerated if you got caught. Sounds to me like the biggest move that needs to be made is reprimanding or firing employees, not policy.
20Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, 21nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within[b] you."
That's from the Gospel of Luke, one of the canonical Gospels. What you cite is from the Gospel of Thomas, which is considered to be a gnostic gospel. Seeing as how the CoE uses the canonical gospels only, Luke is more appropriate than Thomas here.
Why should he be hit with a $4,800 bill when he thought that the device was off? If anything, why shouldn't AT&T and Apple be legally liable for deceiving him into thinking that the device was turned off when in fact it wasn't.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who just want to do research, but the free market is not supposed to provide a safety net that ensures that people only get to do what they want to do. That's why I like the new patent bill. It's a step forward, even if it's not perfect, because it puts more safeguards into place and allows judges to use more objective standards to award damages. So what if Amazon ends up getting badly hurt by losing this patent? They're a retailer. Their role in the market is to sell, not to research. If they suck at their core business now, well, that's their problem now isn't it?
There is a LOT of bureaucracy to comply with, and a lot of countries are now offering simplified corporate taxes and regulations to boost interest in their economies. Eastern Europe is a very good example. Not only have many of those countries adopted flat corporate taxes, which cut down on the cost of compliance, and the rates are pretty low and getting lower. The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.
It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?
Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.
It seems like everytime my wife and I turn on the radio and hear rock or metal from the last few years, it's all either whiny, pussy emo shit or non-melodic, screaming heavy metal. We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.
I know there is more than those types of music, but it's like the music industry ain't even trying to promote anything decent anymore.
A $15 CD is 3 hours of minimum wage work. Most of the people who do that work are high school and college students, an audience that spends nearly $200B of disposable cash according to marketing estimates thrown out in some of the magazines I've seen. Why is it too much to ask that if you like the CD, you pay the money? It's not like we're hurting for options on how to get it cheaper than a typical overpriced local store.
When it comes down to other IP rights, why should those be sacred? It doesn't bother me at all when the latest GPL violation is posted on Slashdot. In fact, I say that the rights of developers working under the GPL should be totally ignored as long as we're going to cheer on people who are getting sued for downloading music they didn't buy. Both are copyright violations, and neither is more sacred than the other.
It's illegal to buy any good that is obtained through illegal means. I can't believe that at a minimum, the MPAA executives didn't violate a state law. Maybe TorrentSpy needs to contact a local attorney and see what options they have under state law. I find it very hard to believe that agreeing to pay for data gained through hacking is legal in any state in the United States.
My biggest fear about having these monopolies is that the SCOTUS will rule that you have little to no expectation of privacy from government surveillance if you are using the local muni wifi. If the muni wifi drives out competition in most areas, that would mean that you would end up with a system where the government could run rough shod on civil liberties.
The SCOTUS and other courts frequently pull legal arguments out their ass. The best one that comes to mind was Scalia's lowering of requirements on police to read rights because of the "new professionalism among police." He based a ruling on how he feels about the current state of police professionalism. This sort of weak-minded bullshit is common in the legal profession at large. Support this at your own risk, I say.
I used to live in rural Virginia. If you actually lived in town, rather than out in the county, you could get DSL or cable. In fact, the cable Internet access rocked compared to what a lot of people in Northern Virginia have told me about their service! I would frequently get 400-500kb/sec on Adelphia there, with interruptions being rare.
Obviously, if you want to live 20 miles from the nearest cable or telecom office, you'll have to put up with this. It's the price you pay for having so much space.
Why should the banks be liable for phishing? That is the failure of the user to remember proper security and/or make a good decision. However, the banks should be 100% responsible for all fraudulent credit issues and such.
One thing we need is a new court order from each state government that allows a citizen or legal immigrant to simply walk up to a credit institution, post identity theft, and say "purge those records, NOW!" at the penalty of fines and being liable for libel and slander if not acted upon in a reasonable time period.
After years of holding the industry back, video gamers are now old enough to be working professionals. Most of us who were in our late preteen and early teen years when Mortal Kombat was making so much controversy can now vote, pull down a serious income and are in short, starting to come to power. We make up the largest demographic of video gamers and it's a little hard to say that video games are primarily for children when most of the people who play them are at least 17 or 18 now.
I look at this, the victories on beating gun control and the increasing legal protection of self-defense as a bit of a reprieve for sanity and to some extent, masculinity in America. The fact is that a lot of women, especially (essentially primarily) middle and upper class women are scared shitless today of anything that reeks of traditional male ideas or interests. You see it everywhere from mostly female schools going batshit loco over a 6 year old **drawing a picture of a gun** to the attacks on violent video games (which are mostly enjoyed by men).
Now I'm not saying that women in general are like this. Most of the working class ones I've known are not like this, and I do know a a fair number of middle class women who aren't. However, a lot of the middle and upper class ones do find a serious problem with anything remotely dangerous or genuinely masculine. Anyone who has worked in a typical corporate environment should have met quite a few of those by now.
In some areas, I think we're seeing a return of sanity. There used to be a time where blaming violent games on every crime involving some punk was reasonable. Today it isn't. There used to be a time when saying stuff like "I wouldn't trust myself with a gun, so I wouldn't trust a stranger with one" sounded reasonable. With some of the stranger, more violent crimes and general shift in attitudes, now you need to explain why you aren't dangerous if you are so unbalanced that holding a gun would make you scared.
I'll remain a little positive until proven wrong about where things are going.
Community support is not acceptable to the vast majority of serious businesses. They also want to have their bases covered when it comes to liability. The community doesn't give them that either. If distributions that work with large IP holders like Microsoft end up winning, that is good for Linux as a platform. It means that Linux is getting a legal barrier removed that will allow it to mature more safely in the future. It will also throw in more money behind Linux development which means that more parties will have a vested interest in not seeing the Linux boat rocked.
Of course you can play scrappy rebel. Problem is that big business doesn't want to trust anything important to that sort of team or product. If you want Linux to be able to play with the big boys, it has to be able to play on their terms.
Prosecutors generally have a lot more freedom to act independently than cops do, especially cops on the street. Prosecutors can, at their discression, dismiss charges where they think that justice won't be served or there is a good reason to let the defendant go (ex. the cops arrested a guy purely on technicality). Some of the examples of prosecutor misconduct can be quite tragic, and show far less ethics than their police counterparts (which can be very bad in their own right!)
Web browsers have largely become a commodity. There is nothing preventing people from easily switching between IE, Opera and Firefox as their tastes shift. A user may hate IE 6's lack of tabs, do Mozilla for a while then stick with IE again when they use IE 7. Who knows why they leave, what do know is that shifting back and forth is very easy. That's one thing that Firefox has helped foster, and having that be the case could do a lot to weaken the importance of IE having a large marketshare since IE would not have compelling reasons to stay beyond aesthetics or familiarity.
It's large-scale immigration from countries that don't share British or American values. Both countries are taking in a lot of immigrants who don't want to integrate. That poses future problems for the culture in our respective countries. Even more so in Britain where it is primarily people from Islamic countries who are convinced that British culture can go to hell as far as they're concerned.
With immigration, we have too much of a good thing. Immigration is good, but only when it is limited to people who actually want to **abandon** their old culture in favor of the new one. Multiculturalism is bullshit. If you like the way it was done back home, then stay there.
There usually is a parent who is, for whatever reason, not involved. I bet if you did a study on the parents whose kids meet strangers in public after contacting them online, you'd find a few of the following things:
1) Parents are working extra hours to buy fancy things. 2) Parents are afraid of their kids being bitter toward them for *gasp* being AUTHORITY FIGURES! 3) Parents are more concerned about being their kid's friend than a mother or father. 4) Parents are too lazy to learn how to control their own home. 5) The kids have internet access in their rooms, where their parents have far less control.
#5 is something that my wife and I have already agreed to with our kids. They can be on the Internet all they want/need, but they will not be doing it in their room where no one can watch them. It's possible that they could sneak downstairs while we're asleep, but if they can just get out of bed and go to their desk, that makes it virtually impossible for us to police them.
My wife is a software engineer, and a very good one. She hates working with most women, and this is why she's told me as such:
1) They're catty. 2) They often use the power of the pussy to get out of doing real work. 3) Many of them are there just because someone pushed them into working in IT. 4) Did I mention that many of them are extremely insecure and often viciously attack other women far worse than the men would ever even conceive of doing?
All of the women around me are the "intelligent, strong, independent women" that feminists talk about. Growing up around them, and then being exposed to almost nothing but "normal women" at a liberal arts college made me realize that the personality difference is hard-wired. They're not what women generally are, and that's ok. However, that realization made me have to face the fact that most women should be nowhere near anything technical, anymore than most men should be around a daycare job.
Call me a misogynist if you want, but clearly I am not afraid to simultaneously hold "retrograde views" on women, while being happily married to a woman who has several years on me professionally and makes more than I do at this point. The truth is, if you need to cope with your job, you have no business being there. Either it's the wrong environment or the wrong profession, and for most women, it's the latter.
The whole point of common carrier protection should be that if they do any tampering to the content, it is assumed that they knew what was passing through their network. It should be a protection that only exists when the company is in 100% compliance. The moment they insert ads into web pages they didn't buy, rewrite an email, censor someone, etc. even if it is one group in a 100,000+ employee company, the entire company should lose common carrier status and be open to litigation from everyone who has any copyright or other type of valid complaint otherwise shielded by common carrier status.
Everytime you hear crap about "saving our democracy" you ought to cringe. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing. You can have a monarchy and have a free society. You can have a democracy or representative democracy and have a society that is all but a police state. The abuse most commonly occurs when leftists criticize actions by regimes like the Bush Administration.
Truth is, America was a lot freer when we weren't even a democracy in name. When our founders created our country, only 1/3 of the federal body politic was directly elected. We had the lowest taxes, fewest regulations, our federal civil service was actually serving, rather than ruling, the people and federal police powers were few and far between. Today, well, speaks for itself.
I'm glad they changed the name. Their project has a lot more to do with freedom than democracy.
They won't need high calibre pilots to fly these things. They can get anyone who is good at video games to pilot the bloody things. It would not be impossible for them to substitute the actual video from the plane with something else, making a civilian target look like a military one. Pretty soon, you have an Air Force that thinks it's bombing the hell out of purely military targets, when in fact it is bombing a myriad number of things ranging from schools and hospitals to political targets.
Plus, where do you think that the non-roboticized military controlled
One of the dumbest counter-arguments I've seen in a long time! The military has a chain of command that goes up to the Pentagon, but it is not **controlled** by the Pentagon. Individual units retain basic human freedom to act, which means that in a bad situation, they can choose to disregard their orders. Robots cannot do that, and the more mechanical you make the basic structure of the military, the less you have that safeguard.
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The question is not how many Linux users can play games on Linux, but how many Linux users will actually insist that it must be on Linux. I bet that most would-be Linux gamers are dual-booting, and until there reaches a critical mass of people who insist on not having to dual-boot, companies will have a business case for not supporting Linux.
IT work outside of the well-paid areas is a breeding ground for discontent. It's thankless, low-paid work where you have to deal with a lot of stupid people. Add on to that that people who go into IT who are ambitious, ethical and hard-working are probably going to be more attracted to the engineering side (software, hardware and network) than the grunt technician work and you have a big problem on your hands.
I have never met a person who works in IT support that I would trust with my personal PC. That's just my experience, but I have known guys who would abuse their access to people's PC to get all sorts of files they shouldn't, which is why I didn't hesitate to believe the Consumerist story about Geek Squad employees abusing their customers in that way.
You know what needs to be done? They ought to be treated like a repairman who is caught going off into a totally unrelated part of the house and rifling through personal belongings. It may not be stealing since they're just copying, but that's the closest thing that we can compare it to.
Where I work there is little place for programmers or computer scientists. You have to be able to program, but you also have to be able to write software that shows that you have an ability to construct and follow requirements, use good design practices, and well, approach it like an engineer. They aren't as concerned with whether or not we are the best Java programmer, .NET programmer, etc., but rather how well we can come up with sophisticated architectures for reliably handling a problem.
What we are seeing is a split where programming itself is like being a construction worker, and software engineering is like going into architecture when it comes to construction work.
I would be surprised to find that this is an acceptable policy in most governments. The US government, for example, is pretty restrictive with its systems, and Tor would not be tolerated if you got caught. Sounds to me like the biggest move that needs to be made is reprimanding or firing employees, not policy.
That's from the Gospel of Luke, one of the canonical Gospels. What you cite is from the Gospel of Thomas, which is considered to be a gnostic gospel. Seeing as how the CoE uses the canonical gospels only, Luke is more appropriate than Thomas here.
Why should he be hit with a $4,800 bill when he thought that the device was off? If anything, why shouldn't AT&T and Apple be legally liable for deceiving him into thinking that the device was turned off when in fact it wasn't.
I have a lot of sympathy for people who just want to do research, but the free market is not supposed to provide a safety net that ensures that people only get to do what they want to do. That's why I like the new patent bill. It's a step forward, even if it's not perfect, because it puts more safeguards into place and allows judges to use more objective standards to award damages. So what if Amazon ends up getting badly hurt by losing this patent? They're a retailer. Their role in the market is to sell, not to research. If they suck at their core business now, well, that's their problem now isn't it?
There is a LOT of bureaucracy to comply with, and a lot of countries are now offering simplified corporate taxes and regulations to boost interest in their economies. Eastern Europe is a very good example. Not only have many of those countries adopted flat corporate taxes, which cut down on the cost of compliance, and the rates are pretty low and getting lower. The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.
It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?
Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.
It seems like everytime my wife and I turn on the radio and hear rock or metal from the last few years, it's all either whiny, pussy emo shit or non-melodic, screaming heavy metal. We're only in our mid-20s and we already "feel like old people" when it comes to music sometimes. But then, we realize something. Most of us who were teenagers in the mid-to-late 90s remember when rock and metal were more than emo and frat boy headbanging crap.
I know there is more than those types of music, but it's like the music industry ain't even trying to promote anything decent anymore.
A $15 CD is 3 hours of minimum wage work. Most of the people who do that work are high school and college students, an audience that spends nearly $200B of disposable cash according to marketing estimates thrown out in some of the magazines I've seen. Why is it too much to ask that if you like the CD, you pay the money? It's not like we're hurting for options on how to get it cheaper than a typical overpriced local store.
When it comes down to other IP rights, why should those be sacred? It doesn't bother me at all when the latest GPL violation is posted on Slashdot. In fact, I say that the rights of developers working under the GPL should be totally ignored as long as we're going to cheer on people who are getting sued for downloading music they didn't buy. Both are copyright violations, and neither is more sacred than the other.
It's illegal to buy any good that is obtained through illegal means. I can't believe that at a minimum, the MPAA executives didn't violate a state law. Maybe TorrentSpy needs to contact a local attorney and see what options they have under state law. I find it very hard to believe that agreeing to pay for data gained through hacking is legal in any state in the United States.
My biggest fear about having these monopolies is that the SCOTUS will rule that you have little to no expectation of privacy from government surveillance if you are using the local muni wifi. If the muni wifi drives out competition in most areas, that would mean that you would end up with a system where the government could run rough shod on civil liberties.
The SCOTUS and other courts frequently pull legal arguments out their ass. The best one that comes to mind was Scalia's lowering of requirements on police to read rights because of the "new professionalism among police." He based a ruling on how he feels about the current state of police professionalism. This sort of weak-minded bullshit is common in the legal profession at large. Support this at your own risk, I say.
I used to live in rural Virginia. If you actually lived in town, rather than out in the county, you could get DSL or cable. In fact, the cable Internet access rocked compared to what a lot of people in Northern Virginia have told me about their service! I would frequently get 400-500kb/sec on Adelphia there, with interruptions being rare.
Obviously, if you want to live 20 miles from the nearest cable or telecom office, you'll have to put up with this. It's the price you pay for having so much space.
Why should the banks be liable for phishing? That is the failure of the user to remember proper security and/or make a good decision. However, the banks should be 100% responsible for all fraudulent credit issues and such.
One thing we need is a new court order from each state government that allows a citizen or legal immigrant to simply walk up to a credit institution, post identity theft, and say "purge those records, NOW!" at the penalty of fines and being liable for libel and slander if not acted upon in a reasonable time period.
That was supposed to be "mostly female-administered schools" not "mostly female schools."
After years of holding the industry back, video gamers are now old enough to be working professionals. Most of us who were in our late preteen and early teen years when Mortal Kombat was making so much controversy can now vote, pull down a serious income and are in short, starting to come to power. We make up the largest demographic of video gamers and it's a little hard to say that video games are primarily for children when most of the people who play them are at least 17 or 18 now.
I look at this, the victories on beating gun control and the increasing legal protection of self-defense as a bit of a reprieve for sanity and to some extent, masculinity in America. The fact is that a lot of women, especially (essentially primarily) middle and upper class women are scared shitless today of anything that reeks of traditional male ideas or interests. You see it everywhere from mostly female schools going batshit loco over a 6 year old **drawing a picture of a gun** to the attacks on violent video games (which are mostly enjoyed by men).
Now I'm not saying that women in general are like this. Most of the working class ones I've known are not like this, and I do know a a fair number of middle class women who aren't. However, a lot of the middle and upper class ones do find a serious problem with anything remotely dangerous or genuinely masculine. Anyone who has worked in a typical corporate environment should have met quite a few of those by now.
In some areas, I think we're seeing a return of sanity. There used to be a time where blaming violent games on every crime involving some punk was reasonable. Today it isn't. There used to be a time when saying stuff like "I wouldn't trust myself with a gun, so I wouldn't trust a stranger with one" sounded reasonable. With some of the stranger, more violent crimes and general shift in attitudes, now you need to explain why you aren't dangerous if you are so unbalanced that holding a gun would make you scared.
I'll remain a little positive until proven wrong about where things are going.
Community support is not acceptable to the vast majority of serious businesses. They also want to have their bases covered when it comes to liability. The community doesn't give them that either. If distributions that work with large IP holders like Microsoft end up winning, that is good for Linux as a platform. It means that Linux is getting a legal barrier removed that will allow it to mature more safely in the future. It will also throw in more money behind Linux development which means that more parties will have a vested interest in not seeing the Linux boat rocked.
Of course you can play scrappy rebel. Problem is that big business doesn't want to trust anything important to that sort of team or product. If you want Linux to be able to play with the big boys, it has to be able to play on their terms.
Prosecutors generally have a lot more freedom to act independently than cops do, especially cops on the street. Prosecutors can, at their discression, dismiss charges where they think that justice won't be served or there is a good reason to let the defendant go (ex. the cops arrested a guy purely on technicality). Some of the examples of prosecutor misconduct can be quite tragic, and show far less ethics than their police counterparts (which can be very bad in their own right!)
Web browsers have largely become a commodity. There is nothing preventing people from easily switching between IE, Opera and Firefox as their tastes shift. A user may hate IE 6's lack of tabs, do Mozilla for a while then stick with IE again when they use IE 7. Who knows why they leave, what do know is that shifting back and forth is very easy. That's one thing that Firefox has helped foster, and having that be the case could do a lot to weaken the importance of IE having a large marketshare since IE would not have compelling reasons to stay beyond aesthetics or familiarity.
It's large-scale immigration from countries that don't share British or American values. Both countries are taking in a lot of immigrants who don't want to integrate. That poses future problems for the culture in our respective countries. Even more so in Britain where it is primarily people from Islamic countries who are convinced that British culture can go to hell as far as they're concerned.
With immigration, we have too much of a good thing. Immigration is good, but only when it is limited to people who actually want to **abandon** their old culture in favor of the new one. Multiculturalism is bullshit. If you like the way it was done back home, then stay there.
There usually is a parent who is, for whatever reason, not involved. I bet if you did a study on the parents whose kids meet strangers in public after contacting them online, you'd find a few of the following things:
1) Parents are working extra hours to buy fancy things.
2) Parents are afraid of their kids being bitter toward them for *gasp* being AUTHORITY FIGURES!
3) Parents are more concerned about being their kid's friend than a mother or father.
4) Parents are too lazy to learn how to control their own home.
5) The kids have internet access in their rooms, where their parents have far less control.
#5 is something that my wife and I have already agreed to with our kids. They can be on the Internet all they want/need, but they will not be doing it in their room where no one can watch them. It's possible that they could sneak downstairs while we're asleep, but if they can just get out of bed and go to their desk, that makes it virtually impossible for us to police them.
My wife is a software engineer, and a very good one. She hates working with most women, and this is why she's told me as such:
1) They're catty.
2) They often use the power of the pussy to get out of doing real work.
3) Many of them are there just because someone pushed them into working in IT.
4) Did I mention that many of them are extremely insecure and often viciously attack other women far worse than the men would ever even conceive of doing?
All of the women around me are the "intelligent, strong, independent women" that feminists talk about. Growing up around them, and then being exposed to almost nothing but "normal women" at a liberal arts college made me realize that the personality difference is hard-wired. They're not what women generally are, and that's ok. However, that realization made me have to face the fact that most women should be nowhere near anything technical, anymore than most men should be around a daycare job.
Call me a misogynist if you want, but clearly I am not afraid to simultaneously hold "retrograde views" on women, while being happily married to a woman who has several years on me professionally and makes more than I do at this point. The truth is, if you need to cope with your job, you have no business being there. Either it's the wrong environment or the wrong profession, and for most women, it's the latter.
The whole point of common carrier protection should be that if they do any tampering to the content, it is assumed that they knew what was passing through their network. It should be a protection that only exists when the company is in 100% compliance. The moment they insert ads into web pages they didn't buy, rewrite an email, censor someone, etc. even if it is one group in a 100,000+ employee company, the entire company should lose common carrier status and be open to litigation from everyone who has any copyright or other type of valid complaint otherwise shielded by common carrier status.
Everytime you hear crap about "saving our democracy" you ought to cringe. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing. You can have a monarchy and have a free society. You can have a democracy or representative democracy and have a society that is all but a police state. The abuse most commonly occurs when leftists criticize actions by regimes like the Bush Administration.
Truth is, America was a lot freer when we weren't even a democracy in name. When our founders created our country, only 1/3 of the federal body politic was directly elected. We had the lowest taxes, fewest regulations, our federal civil service was actually serving, rather than ruling, the people and federal police powers were few and far between. Today, well, speaks for itself.
I'm glad they changed the name. Their project has a lot more to do with freedom than democracy.
They won't need high calibre pilots to fly these things. They can get anyone who is good at video games to pilot the bloody things. It would not be impossible for them to substitute the actual video from the plane with something else, making a civilian target look like a military one. Pretty soon, you have an Air Force that thinks it's bombing the hell out of purely military targets, when in fact it is bombing a myriad number of things ranging from schools and hospitals to political targets.
Plus, where do you think that the non-roboticized military controlled
One of the dumbest counter-arguments I've seen in a long time! The military has a chain of command that goes up to the Pentagon, but it is not **controlled** by the Pentagon. Individual units retain basic human freedom to act, which means that in a bad situation, they can choose to disregard their orders. Robots cannot do that, and the more mechanical you make the basic structure of the military, the less you have that safeguard.