And then there's that whole idea that the Constitution is just a basis guideline, and not meant to encompass every law that would ever be created. The idea of Amendments, even, was not meant to fully encompass every law. That's why they created a legislature(bicameral, even!), so that laws, not just amendments, could be drafted, voted upon, and put into effect. It seems that every time something about the government comes up, there is someone who says that the government can only do explicitly what the Constitution says. Never is the mention that the Constitution is considered a living Constitution, meaning that it is apt to change. How about we make a Constitutional Amendment, saying that everthing in the parent's post was now guaranteed by the government. I'm betting that there would be alot of people yelling and screaming that 'That's not what the founding fathers had in mind' blah blah blah.
Let's take, for instance, the idea of the 2nd Amendment. If you look at history, every man was a member of the militia. So therefore, every man was entitled to the right to bear arms. This is true. However, let's follow that idea into the present. Saying that every man now deserves to bear arms means that every man should be in the National Guard, since they should have to protect others with it. Nowhere does it say that you can use your rifle or shotgun to hunt with. Therefore, you don't have the right. You can only use it to be part of a well regulated militia. You can sign up here.
The whole 'being able to decide where tax dollars go' argument is ludicrous. If people were able to decide where tax money went, our governmental services would go into shambles. People who hated cops would say that they weren't going to pay for police protection while the anti-war activists would not want to pay the salaries of the soldiers and the people whose kids weren't in school wouldn't want to pay for education. People who don't use roads would not want to pay for roadways, and concentrate their moneys in sidewalks and bike paths. Part of living in a society means that you accept from your government how they use your money. If you do not like how they use it, then you elect someone else.
Funny little story about the mortgage and financial crisis. Where were the regulators? They were let go by Phil Gramm due to a law he wrote and got passed in 1999. It pretty much deregulated the entire financial industry.
Less government regulation + greed of big corporations = our present situation
On a political side note, guess where Mr. Gramm is now...
Yep, he's the economics advisor to John McCain, who doesn't like regulation. Guess what will happen if McCain is elected...
Yes, they stole your money and used it to build roads, build hospitals, maintain and strengthen a military, provide protection from criminals, educate the young, stop threats against the country, and help out those who have run into misfortune. Yes, they stole your money and you will never get it back in any form.
As of Tuesday, it has a mic jack and a speaker. Apple has already said there will be Wi-Fi VoIP applications.
If you're always in a Wi-Fi environment and have a 2G touch, you may rarely need a phone anymore.
So basically, as long as you live in a major metropolitan area, and only go places that offer free wi-fi without a password like...like...like...well, you'll never need a phone again.
Perhaps because screens do not have the tactile response of a true keyboard. While a keyboard has the ability to provide an actual response via fingertouch, a touchscreen feels the same wherever you touch it. People prefer an actual keyboard because they(if they have any typing experience at all) can quickly find where a key is simply by where their fingers are in relation to home row(the little bumps on the f and j keys are there for a reason).
One thing about console DRM. Say you want to play a homebrew game, but you must mod your console to play it. Today's consoles break alot of the time when they detect a modification of the console itself. No indie development on consoles without sacrificing also the big name games.
So say there was an awesome game, and you bought it, and it had the one time token. But then the company that made the game was bought out, and as the years went on, sales from that section were flat. The section was then scrapped. Support for past games was ended. Including DRM support. One day, you decide to play the game again, and try to install it. There is no server to respond to. Uh oh, you can never play that game again. Too bad if it was your favorite game of all time. It's okay, nobody played that game anymore because it was so old.
I know that it sounds like it could never happen, but what happens if EA(or even the Maxis brand) goes under? I know that it would be more likely for the Maxis brand to go under, but still. It's happened before. An example off the top of my head is Dynamix, which was a private company, was absorbed into Sierra, and had a number of successful titles(Starsiege:Tribes, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, Return to Krondor, The Incredible Machine, just to name a few). In 2001, the studio was closed down. What would have happened if their games had had to phone home with each install? I still occasionally play some of their games, but would not be able to if the DRM had been in. I highly doubt that the company would have sent out patches to the games, considering there were so many, and many were over ten years old. I would probably have been told there was nothing that could be done. And then I would have had to go online, hoping that someone else cared enough about the game to make a patch. However, if I managed to find a patch, and install it, I would have been a criminal, since I would have been getting around the DRM. I don't mind CD-Keys, but phone-home DRM is a bad thing.
Maxis has been suffering ever since the company became a 'The Sims' only enterprise. I am sure that I am not the only one who finds 'The Sims' dreadfully boring. I hate how http://www.maxis.com/ became only an advertisement for their latest game(either The Sims:Who the Hell Cares, or Spore). I realize that websites are used for advertising, but try finding out anything about, say, Simcity 4, or even(cringe) Simcity Societies. It's not there. Maxis has gone downhill ever since being bought out by EA. I swear to (insert Supreme Deity of Choice) that if they come out with any more The Sims expansions, I will cease to be a customer of any future games, whether they be fun or not.
Hey, everyone knows you always have parts left over when you do it yourself. You must be one of those 'safety' people who want to take power from the people. Enjoy your time in hell, communist!
Why don't we just build a few new ones? Brand new, with the latest gizmos and whirlygoos and all that. We shouldn't stop research into space simply because of complaints about safety and the budget. Imagine if the early explorers of our world had worried about safety. We would still be living in Africa, because everyone would be too scared to leave the home that they lived in for their entire life.
This world will not last forever. We should explore now for habitable new worlds, so as not to not keep all our eggs in one basket. And by eggs, I mean us, and the plants and animals around us. And by basket, I mean this planet/solar system.
I just want to know when I will be able to download into my mind knowledge. I'll take an order of all the languages in the world, with a side of advanced mathematics and physics, and maybe some animal science for dessert.
Apparently your idea of a 'fair fight' involves the other guy getting to use an assault rifle while you can only use your fists. It is sad that the 'greatest country in the world' can't compete with 3rd world piss-pot no-mans-land because companies have realized that they can pretty much get away with no regulation in those 3rd world piss-pot no-mans-land while in the U.S. they have to actually treat their workers like human beings. And attitudes like yours only reinforce big corporations view that what they do is right.
As for your view of someone being 'reckless enough to not have insurance', try having a minimum wage job, with a car payment(with insurance), rent payment, phone bill, grocery bill, paying for gasoline to fuel vehicle, and trying to afford health insurance. Are you kidding me? Do you realize how much health insurance is? Give me a break. Those items I just named are pretty much considered base requirements for living in society today. Now, when I wrote this, it was based upon a single person household. Now add in a kid or two. Do you honestly believe someone can afford health insurance with all those expenditures? Quit fooling yourself.
I hope you were kidding when you spoke of the Ferrari, but judging by your other comments...
Anyway, it is getting harder and harder for people to find jobs. I believe whole-heartily that if something doesn't drastically change in the next two or three years, we will be in the Great Depression, round 2. As for your statement about being in a stock-holder driven economy, I agree that we are in such an economy, and it is proving to be a major downfall. Even among businesses that actually have a sense of decency, and a "It's not all about the money" sense of self(I'm looking at you, Anheuser-Busch), the stock-holders do not have such a sense, and think only of their wallets, as we have seen very recently in the A-B case. Goodbye American owned companies. It seems that most of these investors either don't realize or don't care that they are pretty much selling off the country, one share at a time. And it is pretty disgusting that more people aren't pissed off about this.
The original Star Wars vs. the Special Edition Star Wars? A bit of a retelling. Those who saw the original have their whole thing about Han vs. Greedo shooting first. However, those of the younger viewers who have only seen the Special Edition will probably not care that a little bit was changed. And say, perhaps, in 30 years, someone remakes the films again. But they change a little more. Sure, those who saw the Special Edition will object, but those who have only seen the new version, with the latest in special effects, as well as having the latest popular actors and actresses, will probably like the new version, assuming they even watch the originals. Don't believe me? How many have seen the original Ocean's 11? And have many have seen the new Ocean's 11? And so, the story changes. Small changes throughout history can make much more change than a big change at one point in history. Kinda like the boiling frogs argument.
Actually, the people who are inflicting the damage on us are the publishers. I don't really hear anyone ever saying they love EA. Saying that to make a difference means to boycott is like saying that if you are pissed at Bush then you should leave America. Boycotts won't really work that well. What will happen is that the publishers will see that PC games don't sell, so they market entirely to console gamers. So PC gamers will get screwed over in the end, as well. The only thing gamers can really do write now is try to sail on through the storm, and hope that when it passes, clearer waters come.
Because so many GPL based companies are releasing million dollar games right now. While I like the idea of GPL, I also like the idea of being able to eat, and I am sure that all those game company programmers and designers like it too. How many people do you know actually make a donation every time they see a GPL based program, being given out for free? Now take that number, and make it a proportion of the entire country. Do you really think there would be a lot of big games? I doubt it. But I am sure there would be alot of Tetris and Breakout clones, as well as the obligatory Bust-a-Move clone. Very similar to the GPL market now. The 'bigger' games are clones of yesterday's games, and most aren't done very well. But hey, they are GPL, right?
And here comes the troll modifier, in 3...2...1...
One of my big things is that I wish they would have the CD key written on the CD itself. I like to put all of my CDs into a big book, so I can carry them around with me wherever I happen to go. I generally keep all the documentation and whatnot in a central location. However, not only do I now have to type all the CD keys out, wasting paper, but I recently found an older game that I thought I had lost, which isn't made anymore, and I was super excited about finding it, until I realized that the booklet in the case with the CD key in it had found some sort of liquid or something, because the booklet is stuck together, and impossible to pull apart without ripping one side onto the other. So now I am forced to go online to try to locate a cd key.
I recently bought a laptop from Dell for my upcoming deployment. In order to remain totally open to anyone else in my unit, I decided to go with Windows XP(since there most likely won't be any resources to do any kind of messing around to get Linux to work with any Windows program). Unfortunately, Dell only has Windows XP for their top-end laptops, of which I didn't want to spend that much money on. The default for everything else is Windows Vista. While I did end up buying one, I have to now use an old copy of XP, call up Microsoft, make up an explanation, etc etc etc. And I was actually wanting to use a legitimate copy. I even offered to pay extra. No dice.
As much as I like Linux, it isn't for everyone. Until more software can be used out of the box, Linux isn't going to grow by the amounts that many here wish for it. Yeah, yeah, I know, there are programs like WINE that allow you to run Windows programs. But until my dad can turn on a computer running Linux, install a game, and play the game without having to put much thought into things such as 'Am I screwing anything important up?', Linux isn't user friendly enough for the average computer user.
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And then there's that whole idea that the Constitution is just a basis guideline, and not meant to encompass every law that would ever be created. The idea of Amendments, even, was not meant to fully encompass every law. That's why they created a legislature(bicameral, even!), so that laws, not just amendments, could be drafted, voted upon, and put into effect. It seems that every time something about the government comes up, there is someone who says that the government can only do explicitly what the Constitution says. Never is the mention that the Constitution is considered a living Constitution, meaning that it is apt to change. How about we make a Constitutional Amendment, saying that everthing in the parent's post was now guaranteed by the government. I'm betting that there would be alot of people yelling and screaming that 'That's not what the founding fathers had in mind' blah blah blah.
Let's take, for instance, the idea of the 2nd Amendment. If you look at history, every man was a member of the militia. So therefore, every man was entitled to the right to bear arms. This is true. However, let's follow that idea into the present. Saying that every man now deserves to bear arms means that every man should be in the National Guard, since they should have to protect others with it. Nowhere does it say that you can use your rifle or shotgun to hunt with. Therefore, you don't have the right. You can only use it to be part of a well regulated militia. You can sign up here.
The whole 'being able to decide where tax dollars go' argument is ludicrous. If people were able to decide where tax money went, our governmental services would go into shambles. People who hated cops would say that they weren't going to pay for police protection while the anti-war activists would not want to pay the salaries of the soldiers and the people whose kids weren't in school wouldn't want to pay for education. People who don't use roads would not want to pay for roadways, and concentrate their moneys in sidewalks and bike paths. Part of living in a society means that you accept from your government how they use your money. If you do not like how they use it, then you elect someone else.
Funny little story about the mortgage and financial crisis. Where were the regulators? They were let go by Phil Gramm due to a law he wrote and got passed in 1999. It pretty much deregulated the entire financial industry.
Less government regulation + greed of big corporations = our present situation
On a political side note, guess where Mr. Gramm is now...
Yep, he's the economics advisor to John McCain, who doesn't like regulation. Guess what will happen if McCain is elected...
Yes, they stole your money and used it to build roads, build hospitals, maintain and strengthen a military, provide protection from criminals, educate the young, stop threats against the country, and help out those who have run into misfortune. Yes, they stole your money and you will never get it back in any form.
As of Tuesday, it has a mic jack and a speaker. Apple has already said there will be Wi-Fi VoIP applications.
If you're always in a Wi-Fi environment and have a 2G touch, you may rarely need a phone anymore.
So basically, as long as you live in a major metropolitan area, and only go places that offer free wi-fi without a password like...like...like...well, you'll never need a phone again.
why havent tablets caught on?
Perhaps because screens do not have the tactile response of a true keyboard. While a keyboard has the ability to provide an actual response via fingertouch, a touchscreen feels the same wherever you touch it. People prefer an actual keyboard because they(if they have any typing experience at all) can quickly find where a key is simply by where their fingers are in relation to home row(the little bumps on the f and j keys are there for a reason).
Sorry, it was meant as a joke.
One thing about console DRM. Say you want to play a homebrew game, but you must mod your console to play it. Today's consoles break alot of the time when they detect a modification of the console itself. No indie development on consoles without sacrificing also the big name games.
So say there was an awesome game, and you bought it, and it had the one time token. But then the company that made the game was bought out, and as the years went on, sales from that section were flat. The section was then scrapped. Support for past games was ended. Including DRM support. One day, you decide to play the game again, and try to install it. There is no server to respond to. Uh oh, you can never play that game again. Too bad if it was your favorite game of all time. It's okay, nobody played that game anymore because it was so old.
I know that it sounds like it could never happen, but what happens if EA(or even the Maxis brand) goes under? I know that it would be more likely for the Maxis brand to go under, but still. It's happened before. An example off the top of my head is Dynamix, which was a private company, was absorbed into Sierra, and had a number of successful titles(Starsiege:Tribes, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, Return to Krondor, The Incredible Machine, just to name a few). In 2001, the studio was closed down. What would have happened if their games had had to phone home with each install? I still occasionally play some of their games, but would not be able to if the DRM had been in. I highly doubt that the company would have sent out patches to the games, considering there were so many, and many were over ten years old. I would probably have been told there was nothing that could be done. And then I would have had to go online, hoping that someone else cared enough about the game to make a patch. However, if I managed to find a patch, and install it, I would have been a criminal, since I would have been getting around the DRM. I don't mind CD-Keys, but phone-home DRM is a bad thing.
iTunes killed my DVD burner. I had to reinstall Windows in order for the burner to work again.
Maxis has been suffering ever since the company became a 'The Sims' only enterprise. I am sure that I am not the only one who finds 'The Sims' dreadfully boring. I hate how http://www.maxis.com/ became only an advertisement for their latest game(either The Sims:Who the Hell Cares, or Spore). I realize that websites are used for advertising, but try finding out anything about, say, Simcity 4, or even(cringe) Simcity Societies. It's not there. Maxis has gone downhill ever since being bought out by EA. I swear to (insert Supreme Deity of Choice) that if they come out with any more The Sims expansions, I will cease to be a customer of any future games, whether they be fun or not.
Hey, everyone knows you always have parts left over when you do it yourself. You must be one of those 'safety' people who want to take power from the people. Enjoy your time in hell, communist!
Er, what I meant to say was,
I agree.
Um...you should know that acting like the 'too-cool-for-school jock' probably isn't the best thing to do on a site like slashdot...
Why don't we just build a few new ones? Brand new, with the latest gizmos and whirlygoos and all that. We shouldn't stop research into space simply because of complaints about safety and the budget. Imagine if the early explorers of our world had worried about safety. We would still be living in Africa, because everyone would be too scared to leave the home that they lived in for their entire life.
This world will not last forever. We should explore now for habitable new worlds, so as not to not keep all our eggs in one basket. And by eggs, I mean us, and the plants and animals around us. And by basket, I mean this planet/solar system.
I just want to know when I will be able to download into my mind knowledge. I'll take an order of all the languages in the world, with a side of advanced mathematics and physics, and maybe some animal science for dessert.
Apparently your idea of a 'fair fight' involves the other guy getting to use an assault rifle while you can only use your fists. It is sad that the 'greatest country in the world' can't compete with 3rd world piss-pot no-mans-land because companies have realized that they can pretty much get away with no regulation in those 3rd world piss-pot no-mans-land while in the U.S. they have to actually treat their workers like human beings. And attitudes like yours only reinforce big corporations view that what they do is right.
As for your view of someone being 'reckless enough to not have insurance', try having a minimum wage job, with a car payment(with insurance), rent payment, phone bill, grocery bill, paying for gasoline to fuel vehicle, and trying to afford health insurance. Are you kidding me? Do you realize how much health insurance is? Give me a break. Those items I just named are pretty much considered base requirements for living in society today. Now, when I wrote this, it was based upon a single person household. Now add in a kid or two. Do you honestly believe someone can afford health insurance with all those expenditures? Quit fooling yourself.
I hope you were kidding when you spoke of the Ferrari, but judging by your other comments...
Anyway, it is getting harder and harder for people to find jobs. I believe whole-heartily that if something doesn't drastically change in the next two or three years, we will be in the Great Depression, round 2. As for your statement about being in a stock-holder driven economy, I agree that we are in such an economy, and it is proving to be a major downfall. Even among businesses that actually have a sense of decency, and a "It's not all about the money" sense of self(I'm looking at you, Anheuser-Busch), the stock-holders do not have such a sense, and think only of their wallets, as we have seen very recently in the A-B case. Goodbye American owned companies. It seems that most of these investors either don't realize or don't care that they are pretty much selling off the country, one share at a time. And it is pretty disgusting that more people aren't pissed off about this.
The original Star Wars vs. the Special Edition Star Wars? A bit of a retelling. Those who saw the original have their whole thing about Han vs. Greedo shooting first. However, those of the younger viewers who have only seen the Special Edition will probably not care that a little bit was changed. And say, perhaps, in 30 years, someone remakes the films again. But they change a little more. Sure, those who saw the Special Edition will object, but those who have only seen the new version, with the latest in special effects, as well as having the latest popular actors and actresses, will probably like the new version, assuming they even watch the originals. Don't believe me? How many have seen the original Ocean's 11? And have many have seen the new Ocean's 11? And so, the story changes. Small changes throughout history can make much more change than a big change at one point in history. Kinda like the boiling frogs argument.
Actually, the people who are inflicting the damage on us are the publishers. I don't really hear anyone ever saying they love EA. Saying that to make a difference means to boycott is like saying that if you are pissed at Bush then you should leave America. Boycotts won't really work that well. What will happen is that the publishers will see that PC games don't sell, so they market entirely to console gamers. So PC gamers will get screwed over in the end, as well. The only thing gamers can really do write now is try to sail on through the storm, and hope that when it passes, clearer waters come.
Because so many GPL based companies are releasing million dollar games right now. While I like the idea of GPL, I also like the idea of being able to eat, and I am sure that all those game company programmers and designers like it too. How many people do you know actually make a donation every time they see a GPL based program, being given out for free? Now take that number, and make it a proportion of the entire country. Do you really think there would be a lot of big games? I doubt it. But I am sure there would be alot of Tetris and Breakout clones, as well as the obligatory Bust-a-Move clone. Very similar to the GPL market now. The 'bigger' games are clones of yesterday's games, and most aren't done very well. But hey, they are GPL, right?
And here comes the troll modifier, in 3...2...1...
One of my big things is that I wish they would have the CD key written on the CD itself. I like to put all of my CDs into a big book, so I can carry them around with me wherever I happen to go. I generally keep all the documentation and whatnot in a central location. However, not only do I now have to type all the CD keys out, wasting paper, but I recently found an older game that I thought I had lost, which isn't made anymore, and I was super excited about finding it, until I realized that the booklet in the case with the CD key in it had found some sort of liquid or something, because the booklet is stuck together, and impossible to pull apart without ripping one side onto the other. So now I am forced to go online to try to locate a cd key.
I was trying to go more with the OMG PINK PONIES!!! in my failed attempt at humor.
I recently bought a laptop from Dell for my upcoming deployment. In order to remain totally open to anyone else in my unit, I decided to go with Windows XP(since there most likely won't be any resources to do any kind of messing around to get Linux to work with any Windows program). Unfortunately, Dell only has Windows XP for their top-end laptops, of which I didn't want to spend that much money on. The default for everything else is Windows Vista. While I did end up buying one, I have to now use an old copy of XP, call up Microsoft, make up an explanation, etc etc etc. And I was actually wanting to use a legitimate copy. I even offered to pay extra. No dice.
As much as I like Linux, it isn't for everyone. Until more software can be used out of the box, Linux isn't going to grow by the amounts that many here wish for it. Yeah, yeah, I know, there are programs like WINE that allow you to run Windows programs. But until my dad can turn on a computer running Linux, install a game, and play the game without having to put much thought into things such as 'Am I screwing anything important up?', Linux isn't user friendly enough for the average computer user.
I prefer the standard #FF1492