If you're pulled over and suspected of DUI, then don't take the damn test, beacuse the accuracy of the breathalyzers are questionable. Plain and simple. Keep your mouth shut and let 'em take you to the station, but don't take the blood or the piss test(they can't legally make you) later because your results may be worse and the the only thing that matters is your BAC at the time you were driving, not later at the station, so that can be fought. Also keep in mind that some cops make overtime and/or seek promotion and actively seek to bust as many as possible to achieve their goal.
The only better advice I could offer than the above is: never follow legal advice on Slashdot. Especially not on DUI issues from a bloke whose handle is "Ethanol-fueled."
Come on. I'm scratching my head as much as anyone as to how a judge could determine that "addiction to Halo 3" is a valid defense to a murder charge, but that was the defense's theory. It's not even clear from any of the articles I've read that his parents having taking the game away was a motive for the murder.
Even so, not one of the news stories I've read has suggested that the killing had anything to do with religion, or the boy's father being a minister. (Incidentally, TFA doesn't mention that the kid's dad was a minister--just how much research did you have to do in order to inject that totally irrelevant detail into the discussion?)
I'm not sure you quite understand the difference between reincarnation and ressurection, at least as they are understood in various religious traditions. Christians generally believe in resurrection (the latin term in the Credo you quoted which, incidentally, not all brands of Christianity accept), but not in reincarnation.
Even if 911 is allowed, other highly relevant calls cannot be made.
Such as? I'm trying to think of a non-emergency call that's worth making/texting from behind the wheel, but I'm drawing a blank. Even most emergency calls can be more safely made with no loss in time by pulling over and turning off the car.
How about facing the reality that bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things, and teach kids to not be stupid? Proactively blocking their every move because they might do something dumb does not turn them into responsible adults.
Ordinarily I agree with you 100%, but we're not talking about letting a kid smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to learn why smoking is bad. Bad things do indeed happen to stupid people doing stupid things, but when those stupid things also have tremendous potential to harm unrelated people who are behaving responsibly, then yes, it's a good idea to be "proactive." It's an obviously dangerous thing to be on the phone while you're driving. It's an insanely dangerous thing to be texting while behind the wheel. If it were only dangerous for the kid with the phone, I'd be on board with you, but I'm out on the road, too.
Microsoft said that the WordPad converter bug requires some help from the user, who must be tricked into actually opening a malicious file -- most likely delivered as an e-mail attachment.
Apparently it has to do with the conversion process, and-once again-requires a little bit of help. Following the basic precautions that keep you out of most malware-related problems will (hopefully) keep you out of trouble on this one, (don't open e-mails from senders you don't know, etc.)
Without open source, Apple will find itself in the same position as today's Microsoft in seven years.
I think it's clear enough by now that Steve Jobs salivates when he thinks about this. Does anyone still think that Apple is any less greedily proprietary than Microsoft? Or that, had their positions been reversed in the early years, Apple would have behaved differently from its competitor?
That means that school policies are government policies.
Not quite sure what you mean by this. Any policy of any branch of government must be followed by any state school? I don't think the equivalence you suggest really exists.
It is a violation of the Constitution for a government agency to have a policy that abridges freedom of speech.
Closer to the mark, and indeed quite true, but totally inapplicable to what the student above did. School resources (like e-mail addresses/computer networks) can certainly have reasonable limits placed on them. Freedom of speech does not mean that you have the right to use someone else's resources (including those of government agencies) in any way you see fit. This is all the more true when you have signed an agreement on which your usage of those resources is conditioned. Remember, the school is under no obligation to provide network access to anyone, for any purpose. Just because one very specific way of speaking has been curtailed (because you agreed that it would be if you violated certain terms), doesn't mean your freedom of speech has been meaningfully interfered with.
Only too true. I've never liked the civil disobedience letter--Thoreau's great sacrifice was spending a single evening in a comfortable jail, for refusing to pay a (modest, if not negligible) poll tax. The whole context of the essay sort of gives me the impression that Thoreau was jailed, not as a political dissident, but because some poor poll officer didn't know what else to do with him. Also, the whole essay would roll off the tongue a little easier if Thoreau hadn't been bailed out of jail by his aunt shortly after he went in (though admittedly he didn't want her to do this).
The key is that I am aware of my *OWN* limitations.
But for SOME people, using a phone is overly distracting under any circumstances.
Absolutely EVERYONE who uses a phone while driving will say exactly the same thing. "I can do it. I'm safe. Unfortunately there are a few people out there who can't. Why ban something useful based on a few easily-distracted individuals?"
Wake up.
I can no longer count on one hand the number of times I've nearly been killed or injured because of a driver whose conversation was more important than my safety. I'm still walking because I was paying attention for two people. In almost all of those instances, the other driver was totally oblivious to the fact that s/he had nearly caused an accident. The problem with being distracted is that you're not aware that you're distracted.
Enforce laws about the RESULTS of poor behaviours, not the supposed causes. It doesn't matter why someone is weaving, following too closely, drifting, not using turn signals, not checking blind spots, etc... they should be ticketed just the same.
Except that if behaviors are per se dangerous, we legislate them all the time. The drunk driving example is apposite, but it's only one example. If a certain behavior nearly always causes people to drive in a dangerous manner (and no, it's not just a few absent-minded no-goodnicks), and that behavior isn't overwhelmingly important in some way, why shouldn't it be banned? Sorry, but your convenience and self-reported confidence in your driving abilities don't outweigh my safety.
I don't get why are cellphones themselves a problem, and why the solution is jamming them.
An inmate's personal liberties are restricted in several ways. One of those restrictions is that, while you can talk on the phone in prison, you're not allowed to do so without the prison listening in. There are lots of good reasons for this. Prisoners who know they're being listened to are unlikely to place phone calls to do things like intimidate witnesses, arrange for perjured testimony, and so forth. This can be especially important where the prisoners are gangsters; an incarcerated gang member with a discreet line to the outside can conduct business as usual through contacts outside the prison.
Cell phones are generally confiscated when they're discovered. Listening in might be feasible, but it's done already through the prison phones to which the inmates are generally restricted. While it's possible to set up wireless listening stations, prison resources are limited. I suspect it's easier just to jam all wireless signals, period, than to set up a station keyed to listed only to signals originating from within the prison walls.
And the simple fact is that people like this woman do cause crime. Maybe you don't like it, but it's a fact.
And it's not a fact merely because you declare it to be so. Your own fallacy is in implying a causal relationship that doesn't exist. Turning it on its head makes just as much sense: if scammers like these didn't exist, no one would be able to fall victim to them. Your observation amounts to nothing more than saying, "Since there are victims, there must be crimes."
Some scams are obvious, some are very subtle. Some are devious enough that even smart, well-protected people fall victim to them. If a smart, well-protected person falls victim to a smart, well-equipped fraudster, do we then fault the victim for the existence of smart, well-equipped fraudsters? That's why criminal responsibility is relevant to your contention; if we fault the victim (rather than placing the fault squarely on the person who elects to commit a criminal act--not who is required to commit one merely because the opportunity presents itself), then we eventually require everyone to live in a perpetual state of expensive paranoia. Is there a point at which it's not my fault if I'm victimized? If so, where is it? If I'm a rape victim, is it the burka?
Wow. The society you propose, sir, is a disturbing one indeed. It's a short leap indeed from your premises to "if it isn't nailed down, it's mine."
Or how about:
Woman in revealing clothing=invitation to rape, ergo,
Woman in burka=better for everyone. (Isn't that the point of the burka, after all--men can't be held responsible for their impulses?)
The whole point to laws, particularly criminal laws, is attaching consequences to certain behaviors, regardless of any underlying negligence by the victim. If I leave a stack of money out in plain view, and my neighbor takes it, I may, as you say, be a complete idiot. My neighbor, however, is indeed 100% guilty of theft. It makes no difference if the money is on my front lawn, or in a safe in my basement. If he removes it without my consent, he has committed a crime for which the law will hold him responsible.
And we all need to hold him responsible. If we indulge in the really repellent notion that "people like this woman cause crime," we're admitting that the criminal actors do not have responsibility. Victims of criminal acts already bear the consequences of criminal acts (does it fit into your moral calculus, for example, that the rape victim may already have suffered terribly as a result of "her" actions?)--assigning blame to them for the conduct of another person is a mathematics of responsibility that has no place in any world I care to live in.
This guy has been indicted. No trial, no sentence. He's been formally charged with a federal crime whose maximum potential penalty if he's convicted is a jail term with a hefty fine.
This "celebrity justice" screed is nonsense, at least at this point in the process. There's no indication that Palin "thinks she deserves special treatment." And if you've never reported a federal offense to the FBI (which I suspect you haven't, but correct me if I'm wrong) what's your basis for supposing the offender wouldn't be penalized?
The Moby Dick example is really just a tired rehash of Roger Ebert's contention that games cannot fundamentally qualify as art, since the author doesn't fundamentally control the outcome. My answer to this has always been: nonsense! Maybe a group of people getting together to blow each other up in Halo has no aesthetic merit, but that's irrelevant to the broader question of whether game designers can and do exert control over the outcome of the systems they create.
The average JRPG, for example, involves a limited amount of player control over the technical aspects of character development, but that won't usually affect the outcome of the overarching story in any meaningful way. Similar to the Moby Dick example, there's no way in, say, Final Fantasy X for Tidus to survive at the end. The Half-Life series has a pretty constrained, cinematic style of gameplay, as do, frankly, the majority of story-driven titles on the market. System-type games with truly limitless potential outcomes are probably in the minority, and are usually experimental titles where the system/ruleset is really the main event (Spore, et al).
Whatever else you may think of intellectual property legislation, it has little if anything to do with common sense. They are highly technical and hotly-contested areas of law. You may not like it, but people on all sides of each of these issues have valid and reasoned points of view.
I don't know much about Danish copyright law, but whining "innocent until proven guilty" is sort of incongruous in a forum whose mantra is often "copyright infringement isn't criminal!" If it isn't criminal (and it isn't), why apply criminal standards of proof? In U.S. tort law, if a claimant can demonstrate that a wrong has been inflicted on him, and there are several possible defendants, the burden of proof shifts to each defendant to prove that he wasn't the one that committed the wrong. Danish courts have apparently determined this isn't the standard to be applied in terms of copyright violations. This isn't common sense--I suspect it's actually a very complex legal question.
Ditto on the three strikes law. Cutting off copyright violators at the source may seem draconian, but it's not as if the lights would go out the first time you download a song. The article is a little spare, but I suspect the volume of infringing content would have to be pretty significant to warrant an investigation leading to a warning, followed by a temporary supension, with complete access being cut off if after these first two measures you elect to continue infringing on someone else's right. Yes, you have a property and contractual right to your internet service. How far does the law need to go in allowing you to use that right to abuse someone else's?
Honestly, "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" seems to be/. code for "finally, someone in power has adopted my point of view."
Isn't the US still number one polluter or did China overtake recently? Either way the per capita pollution is still worse in the states by a hefty margin. Talk about being hypocritical.
Wow...uh...so?
I'd mod you offtopic if I had the points. To all those crying "hypocrite"--what about this study is hypocritical? (Sidenote: I think "hypocrite" is an increasingly meaningless word--just a slur to throw at someone whose views disagree with yours.)
I RTFA, but couldn't find anything to suggest that China is a huge polluter, but the United States are not. All I read was an article about a study that suggests that pollutants travel greater distances than previously believed. Sure, this study focused on China--I'm sure a similar study about the U.S. would confirm that our pollutants also travel great distances and do damage to other countries. I believe the article itself concludes on this note:
"There are a lot of questions and few answers," Ramanathan said. "We shouldn't be pointing fingers. Everyone else is some one else's backyard. This is a global problem."
Name one video game that has the intellectual depth of a fine art painting or literature.
OK, at the risk of feeding a troll...Silent Hill 2.
Funny story. I did part of my undergraduate work in French literature. One of the last papers I had to write dealt with the interplay between love and death in the western tradition. The assignment was to apply the analyses learned during the course to a work of modern fiction. I've always regretted that I didn't start playing Silent Hill 2 until just after I'd turned in the paper. It would have made for a fascinating analysis. (As it was, I wrote on *shudder* Meet Joe Black, a markedly inferior piece of art that happened to correspond to the theme of the course.)
There has never been nor will there ever be a video game that can compare with great art and literature like Rafael, Picasso, van Gogh, James Joyce, Yeats, or Shakespeare.
I think it's pretty telling that all the blokes you hold up as the "standard of greatness" are dead. People are still writing and painting, you know. You might want to look into that.
Under blanket licensing, how do I reward artists with good music preferentially to those who suck? Frankly, any business model that has talented artists like Radiohead, NIN, etc earning the same amount or less than crappy acts like Britney Spears is fundamentally broken. I will not give one penny to those talentless pop stars.
As opposed to the currently preferred mode of digital distribution, where Britney and Radiohead make the same amount (i.e. nothing)?
I'm not trying to troll here. The stated concern is the monetization of a mode of digital distibution that currently affords no direct income to the artists whose work is being subjected to it--digital downloads. (I'm excluding from consideration those distribution models that have already been successfully monetized, like iTunes. And I am aware that "direct income to the artist" is mostly a fiction of RIAA contract arrangements, but such arrangements usually make provision for royalties.)
Yes, you can legitimately complain that this is a "tax" that penalizes the real buyers and the pirates alike, but don't pricing arrangements as they stand already do that? If you're downloading music without paying for it, your acticity is being partly subsidized by the paying customers.
My apologies to you if you are subsidizing the good artists by voting your dollar. My hat is off to you, but assuming a blanket license arrangement is a bad idea (which I agree it is), how do you propose to vote your dollar for Radiohead without some part of that dollar going into efforts to squeeze some kind of revenue out of the thousands of people who download their work for nothing every day?
But NetFlix is not handling this very well at all. They are taking something away without offering a thing. A while back, Netflix did something that, in my experience, no other service provider has ever done--they sent me an e-mail indicating they were cutting the monthly rate on my current plan. For no reason.
Maybe this was why?
We may never know. I do think it's weird to jump all over NetFlix for cutting out elements of their service--companies do this all the time. It bothers me more when my phone company does it (and then raises its rates), since where I live there aren't really other telecommunications options. But NetFlix is a luxury service, not a utility provider, and they also aren't a monopoly. So yes, in that sense, "NetFlix is a business, so they can do whatever they want." If people purchased the service based on a particular feature, and that feature is eliminated, those people can cancel the service. They're not entitled to profiles, any more than NetFlix is entitled to customers.
If you want to be upset, be upset about throttling--they did that without telling anyone. (That, I though, was pretty sleazy.) But here you get an e-mail several months in advance of a change being made above board, so that you as a consumer can decide whether their service will still be worth what you're paying, and can drop them if you think it isn't. Seems like they're making progress.
This really shows you that Nintendo has executed their strategy - ignore the ritalin kids in favor of focusing on everybody else - brilliantly. They realized what Sony, and to an extent Microsoft, didn't - that games aren't fun because they run on the latest hardware and look photorealistic, rather, they're fun for the same reason anything else is - you can play with your friends and family. Yes, I know Microsoft has Xbox Live. Running around killing people isn't really a game you'd play with grandma though - but Wii Tennis is (I have and she loved it). So your criterion for fun is something you can enjoy with grandma? I like Rummikub as much as the next young adult male (read: not very much, though I do love and respect my grandmother), but I think your reasoning is a bit limited.
I admit to being a bit tired of the sanctimoniously fannish "it's-the-gameplay-not-the-graphics" mantras that invariably get tossed around whenever the Wii comes up in discussion. It's a marvelously innovative little machine, but certainly doesn't hold any secret key to human enjoyment entirely overlooked by its competitors. I hate golf--playing Wii golf did nothing to change my opinion; the virtual activity was every bit as tedious as the real thing. I have people (including family) that I very much enjoy spending time with, but who prefer "running around killing people" to the upgraded version of Pong that is Wii tennis. And really, would people enjoy Wii tennis/bowling/[insert simulated other activity of choice] as much if they did use Pong-era graphics? The visuals aren't an entirely negligible component of the experience.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're pulled over and suspected of DUI, then don't take the damn test, beacuse the accuracy of the breathalyzers are questionable. Plain and simple. Keep your mouth shut and let 'em take you to the station, but don't take the blood or the piss test(they can't legally make you) later because your results may be worse and the the only thing that matters is your BAC at the time you were driving, not later at the station, so that can be fought. Also keep in mind that some cops make overtime and/or seek promotion and actively seek to bust as many as possible to achieve their goal.
The only better advice I could offer than the above is: never follow legal advice on Slashdot. Especially not on DUI issues from a bloke whose handle is "Ethanol-fueled."
...pushing an unmanned airforce leaves something to be desired.
Whoops, my bad. The judge rejected the defense and the kid was convicted. Why all the hoopla, then?
And that's notable because...?
Come on. I'm scratching my head as much as anyone as to how a judge could determine that "addiction to Halo 3" is a valid defense to a murder charge, but that was the defense's theory. It's not even clear from any of the articles I've read that his parents having taking the game away was a motive for the murder.
Even so, not one of the news stories I've read has suggested that the killing had anything to do with religion, or the boy's father being a minister. (Incidentally, TFA doesn't mention that the kid's dad was a minister--just how much research did you have to do in order to inject that totally irrelevant detail into the discussion?)
I'm not sure you quite understand the difference between reincarnation and ressurection, at least as they are understood in various religious traditions. Christians generally believe in resurrection (the latin term in the Credo you quoted which, incidentally, not all brands of Christianity accept), but not in reincarnation.
Even if 911 is allowed, other highly relevant calls cannot be made.
Such as? I'm trying to think of a non-emergency call that's worth making/texting from behind the wheel, but I'm drawing a blank. Even most emergency calls can be more safely made with no loss in time by pulling over and turning off the car.
How about facing the reality that bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things, and teach kids to not be stupid? Proactively blocking their every move because they might do something dumb does not turn them into responsible adults.
Ordinarily I agree with you 100%, but we're not talking about letting a kid smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to learn why smoking is bad. Bad things do indeed happen to stupid people doing stupid things, but when those stupid things also have tremendous potential to harm unrelated people who are behaving responsibly, then yes, it's a good idea to be "proactive." It's an obviously dangerous thing to be on the phone while you're driving. It's an insanely dangerous thing to be texting while behind the wheel. If it were only dangerous for the kid with the phone, I'd be on board with you, but I'm out on the road, too.
I'm told the survival statistics for hospices are even more grim...
Microsoft said that the WordPad converter bug requires some help from the user, who must be tricked into actually opening a malicious file -- most likely delivered as an e-mail attachment.
Apparently it has to do with the conversion process, and-once again-requires a little bit of help. Following the basic precautions that keep you out of most malware-related problems will (hopefully) keep you out of trouble on this one, (don't open e-mails from senders you don't know, etc.)
Without open source, Apple will find itself in the same position as today's Microsoft in seven years.
I think it's clear enough by now that Steve Jobs salivates when he thinks about this. Does anyone still think that Apple is any less greedily proprietary than Microsoft? Or that, had their positions been reversed in the early years, Apple would have behaved differently from its competitor?
That means that school policies are government policies.
Not quite sure what you mean by this. Any policy of any branch of government must be followed by any state school? I don't think the equivalence you suggest really exists.
It is a violation of the Constitution for a government agency to have a policy that abridges freedom of speech.
Closer to the mark, and indeed quite true, but totally inapplicable to what the student above did. School resources (like e-mail addresses/computer networks) can certainly have reasonable limits placed on them. Freedom of speech does not mean that you have the right to use someone else's resources (including those of government agencies) in any way you see fit. This is all the more true when you have signed an agreement on which your usage of those resources is conditioned. Remember, the school is under no obligation to provide network access to anyone, for any purpose. Just because one very specific way of speaking has been curtailed (because you agreed that it would be if you violated certain terms), doesn't mean your freedom of speech has been meaningfully interfered with.
Set your preferences to filter it.
If enough people do that, maybe it will go away.
Only too true. I've never liked the civil disobedience letter--Thoreau's great sacrifice was spending a single evening in a comfortable jail, for refusing to pay a (modest, if not negligible) poll tax. The whole context of the essay sort of gives me the impression that Thoreau was jailed, not as a political dissident, but because some poor poll officer didn't know what else to do with him. Also, the whole essay would roll off the tongue a little easier if Thoreau hadn't been bailed out of jail by his aunt shortly after he went in (though admittedly he didn't want her to do this).
The key is that I am aware of my *OWN* limitations.
But for SOME people, using a phone is overly distracting under any circumstances.
Absolutely EVERYONE who uses a phone while driving will say exactly the same thing. "I can do it. I'm safe. Unfortunately there are a few people out there who can't. Why ban something useful based on a few easily-distracted individuals?"
Wake up.
I can no longer count on one hand the number of times I've nearly been killed or injured because of a driver whose conversation was more important than my safety. I'm still walking because I was paying attention for two people. In almost all of those instances, the other driver was totally oblivious to the fact that s/he had nearly caused an accident. The problem with being distracted is that you're not aware that you're distracted.
Enforce laws about the RESULTS of poor behaviours, not the supposed causes. It doesn't matter why someone is weaving, following too closely, drifting, not using turn signals, not checking blind spots, etc... they should be ticketed just the same.
Except that if behaviors are per se dangerous, we legislate them all the time. The drunk driving example is apposite, but it's only one example. If a certain behavior nearly always causes people to drive in a dangerous manner (and no, it's not just a few absent-minded no-goodnicks), and that behavior isn't overwhelmingly important in some way, why shouldn't it be banned? Sorry, but your convenience and self-reported confidence in your driving abilities don't outweigh my safety.
I don't get why are cellphones themselves a problem, and why the solution is jamming them.
An inmate's personal liberties are restricted in several ways. One of those restrictions is that, while you can talk on the phone in prison, you're not allowed to do so without the prison listening in. There are lots of good reasons for this. Prisoners who know they're being listened to are unlikely to place phone calls to do things like intimidate witnesses, arrange for perjured testimony, and so forth. This can be especially important where the prisoners are gangsters; an incarcerated gang member with a discreet line to the outside can conduct business as usual through contacts outside the prison.
Cell phones are generally confiscated when they're discovered. Listening in might be feasible, but it's done already through the prison phones to which the inmates are generally restricted. While it's possible to set up wireless listening stations, prison resources are limited. I suspect it's easier just to jam all wireless signals, period, than to set up a station keyed to listed only to signals originating from within the prison walls.
And the simple fact is that people like this woman do cause crime. Maybe you don't like it, but it's a fact.
And it's not a fact merely because you declare it to be so. Your own fallacy is in implying a causal relationship that doesn't exist. Turning it on its head makes just as much sense: if scammers like these didn't exist, no one would be able to fall victim to them. Your observation amounts to nothing more than saying, "Since there are victims, there must be crimes."
Some scams are obvious, some are very subtle. Some are devious enough that even smart, well-protected people fall victim to them. If a smart, well-protected person falls victim to a smart, well-equipped fraudster, do we then fault the victim for the existence of smart, well-equipped fraudsters? That's why criminal responsibility is relevant to your contention; if we fault the victim (rather than placing the fault squarely on the person who elects to commit a criminal act--not who is required to commit one merely because the opportunity presents itself), then we eventually require everyone to live in a perpetual state of expensive paranoia. Is there a point at which it's not my fault if I'm victimized? If so, where is it? If I'm a rape victim, is it the burka?
Wow. The society you propose, sir, is a disturbing one indeed. It's a short leap indeed from your premises to "if it isn't nailed down, it's mine."
Or how about:
Woman in revealing clothing=invitation to rape, ergo,
Woman in burka=better for everyone. (Isn't that the point of the burka, after all--men can't be held responsible for their impulses?)
The whole point to laws, particularly criminal laws, is attaching consequences to certain behaviors, regardless of any underlying negligence by the victim. If I leave a stack of money out in plain view, and my neighbor takes it, I may, as you say, be a complete idiot. My neighbor, however, is indeed 100% guilty of theft. It makes no difference if the money is on my front lawn, or in a safe in my basement. If he removes it without my consent, he has committed a crime for which the law will hold him responsible.
And we all need to hold him responsible. If we indulge in the really repellent notion that "people like this woman cause crime," we're admitting that the criminal actors do not have responsibility. Victims of criminal acts already bear the consequences of criminal acts (does it fit into your moral calculus, for example, that the rape victim may already have suffered terribly as a result of "her" actions?)--assigning blame to them for the conduct of another person is a mathematics of responsibility that has no place in any world I care to live in.
What penalty?
This guy has been indicted. No trial, no sentence. He's been formally charged with a federal crime whose maximum potential penalty if he's convicted is a jail term with a hefty fine.
This "celebrity justice" screed is nonsense, at least at this point in the process. There's no indication that Palin "thinks she deserves special treatment." And if you've never reported a federal offense to the FBI (which I suspect you haven't, but correct me if I'm wrong) what's your basis for supposing the offender wouldn't be penalized?
Who mods this stuff insightful?
The Moby Dick example is really just a tired rehash of Roger Ebert's contention that games cannot fundamentally qualify as art, since the author doesn't fundamentally control the outcome. My answer to this has always been: nonsense! Maybe a group of people getting together to blow each other up in Halo has no aesthetic merit, but that's irrelevant to the broader question of whether game designers can and do exert control over the outcome of the systems they create.
The average JRPG, for example, involves a limited amount of player control over the technical aspects of character development, but that won't usually affect the outcome of the overarching story in any meaningful way. Similar to the Moby Dick example, there's no way in, say, Final Fantasy X for Tidus to survive at the end. The Half-Life series has a pretty constrained, cinematic style of gameplay, as do, frankly, the majority of story-driven titles on the market. System-type games with truly limitless potential outcomes are probably in the minority, and are usually experimental titles where the system/ruleset is really the main event (Spore, et al).
Whatever else you may think of intellectual property legislation, it has little if anything to do with common sense. They are highly technical and hotly-contested areas of law. You may not like it, but people on all sides of each of these issues have valid and reasoned points of view.
/. code for "finally, someone in power has adopted my point of view."
I don't know much about Danish copyright law, but whining "innocent until proven guilty" is sort of incongruous in a forum whose mantra is often "copyright infringement isn't criminal!" If it isn't criminal (and it isn't), why apply criminal standards of proof? In U.S. tort law, if a claimant can demonstrate that a wrong has been inflicted on him, and there are several possible defendants, the burden of proof shifts to each defendant to prove that he wasn't the one that committed the wrong. Danish courts have apparently determined this isn't the standard to be applied in terms of copyright violations. This isn't common sense--I suspect it's actually a very complex legal question.
Ditto on the three strikes law. Cutting off copyright violators at the source may seem draconian, but it's not as if the lights would go out the first time you download a song. The article is a little spare, but I suspect the volume of infringing content would have to be pretty significant to warrant an investigation leading to a warning, followed by a temporary supension, with complete access being cut off if after these first two measures you elect to continue infringing on someone else's right. Yes, you have a property and contractual right to your internet service. How far does the law need to go in allowing you to use that right to abuse someone else's?
Honestly, "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" seems to be
Unsigned drivers making the OS crash may not be Vista's fault, but this definitely is.
Explain how. My understanding was that you write applications for the OS, not the other way around.
Isn't the US still number one polluter or did China overtake recently? Either way the per capita pollution is still worse in the states by a hefty margin. Talk about being hypocritical.
Wow...uh...so?
I'd mod you offtopic if I had the points. To all those crying "hypocrite"--what about this study is hypocritical? (Sidenote: I think "hypocrite" is an increasingly meaningless word--just a slur to throw at someone whose views disagree with yours.)
I RTFA, but couldn't find anything to suggest that China is a huge polluter, but the United States are not. All I read was an article about a study that suggests that pollutants travel greater distances than previously believed. Sure, this study focused on China--I'm sure a similar study about the U.S. would confirm that our pollutants also travel great distances and do damage to other countries. I believe the article itself concludes on this note:
"There are a lot of questions and few answers," Ramanathan said. "We shouldn't be pointing fingers. Everyone else is some one else's backyard. This is a global problem."
Name one video game that has the intellectual depth of a fine art painting or literature.
OK, at the risk of feeding a troll...Silent Hill 2.
Funny story. I did part of my undergraduate work in French literature. One of the last papers I had to write dealt with the interplay between love and death in the western tradition. The assignment was to apply the analyses learned during the course to a work of modern fiction. I've always regretted that I didn't start playing Silent Hill 2 until just after I'd turned in the paper. It would have made for a fascinating analysis. (As it was, I wrote on *shudder* Meet Joe Black, a markedly inferior piece of art that happened to correspond to the theme of the course.)
There has never been nor will there ever be a video game that can compare with great art and literature like Rafael, Picasso, van Gogh, James Joyce, Yeats, or Shakespeare.
I think it's pretty telling that all the blokes you hold up as the "standard of greatness" are dead. People are still writing and painting, you know. You might want to look into that.
Under blanket licensing, how do I reward artists with good music preferentially to those who suck? Frankly, any business model that has talented artists like Radiohead, NIN, etc earning the same amount or less than crappy acts like Britney Spears is fundamentally broken. I will not give one penny to those talentless pop stars.
As opposed to the currently preferred mode of digital distribution, where Britney and Radiohead make the same amount (i.e. nothing)?
I'm not trying to troll here. The stated concern is the monetization of a mode of digital distibution that currently affords no direct income to the artists whose work is being subjected to it--digital downloads. (I'm excluding from consideration those distribution models that have already been successfully monetized, like iTunes. And I am aware that "direct income to the artist" is mostly a fiction of RIAA contract arrangements, but such arrangements usually make provision for royalties.)
Yes, you can legitimately complain that this is a "tax" that penalizes the real buyers and the pirates alike, but don't pricing arrangements as they stand already do that? If you're downloading music without paying for it, your acticity is being partly subsidized by the paying customers.
My apologies to you if you are subsidizing the good artists by voting your dollar. My hat is off to you, but assuming a blanket license arrangement is a bad idea (which I agree it is), how do you propose to vote your dollar for Radiohead without some part of that dollar going into efforts to squeeze some kind of revenue out of the thousands of people who download their work for nothing every day?
Maybe this was why?
We may never know. I do think it's weird to jump all over NetFlix for cutting out elements of their service--companies do this all the time. It bothers me more when my phone company does it (and then raises its rates), since where I live there aren't really other telecommunications options. But NetFlix is a luxury service, not a utility provider, and they also aren't a monopoly. So yes, in that sense, "NetFlix is a business, so they can do whatever they want." If people purchased the service based on a particular feature, and that feature is eliminated, those people can cancel the service. They're not entitled to profiles, any more than NetFlix is entitled to customers.
If you want to be upset, be upset about throttling--they did that without telling anyone. (That, I though, was pretty sleazy.) But here you get an e-mail several months in advance of a change being made above board, so that you as a consumer can decide whether their service will still be worth what you're paying, and can drop them if you think it isn't. Seems like they're making progress.
I admit to being a bit tired of the sanctimoniously fannish "it's-the-gameplay-not-the-graphics" mantras that invariably get tossed around whenever the Wii comes up in discussion. It's a marvelously innovative little machine, but certainly doesn't hold any secret key to human enjoyment entirely overlooked by its competitors. I hate golf--playing Wii golf did nothing to change my opinion; the virtual activity was every bit as tedious as the real thing. I have people (including family) that I very much enjoy spending time with, but who prefer "running around killing people" to the upgraded version of Pong that is Wii tennis. And really, would people enjoy Wii tennis/bowling/[insert simulated other activity of choice] as much if they did use Pong-era graphics? The visuals aren't an entirely negligible component of the experience.