@renatojj

Church has high interested in religious candidates being elected. Most of the debates going on in politics are based on religious philosophy. Few off the top of my head are abortion, creationism, and women's rights. They've been going against the grain of the Constitution trying to get creationism which is a arguably religion based subject taught in schools. Which in turn possibly gets them more followers, which in turn gets them more tithing and more people in their "group" giving them more power. In fact I would argue they are specifically trying to erode the line between church and state with these arguments, injecting religion based reasons into many of the arguments.

Big media networks push for things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 where the reason for the bill is not actually what ends up happening. It was supposed to deregulate and open up the market for competition and instead it allowed them to reconsolidate by buying up competitors. And they largely don't fight with censorship on curse words because generally it drives off their audience, and those networks that don't have to censor curse words charge for the privilege of hearing them and seeing some nudity to boot. And they also support SOPA-like bills which are essential a blanket tool to censor the web....they also support monitoring and traffic shaping on the networks they control...which is another potential avenue for censorship.

You'll have to be more specific on what you're getting at......all these groups are eroding divisions we built through regulation and have been doing so steadily since the 80s at every opportunity across industries.

I've already shown that given the chance, they buy up competition to remain a monopoly. Look at ISPs, look at all the oil companies we USED to have. Look at the media conglomerates that own the majority of your radio stations ( I think there's two major radio networks, but they have like a million different stations under the same banners so it LOOKS like choice). How the record labels and movie industries are all tied together and often even tied into the same parent company that owns your ISP. Cell phone industry, ATT trying to buy T Mobile which would have brought it down to 3 major providers and they did it in the name of "better service" but still haven't announced plans to build out their infrastructure since the deal went through...why? Because it wasn't about better service, it was about buying up a competitor that offered plans at prices people preferred.

When people are unhappy with their ISPs they've tried to form local government run coop non-profit ISPs, and they get sued by the huge companies who refuse to service their area. It's happened multiple times. With regulation, they would have to provide internet to those places in a timely manner instead of preventing people from doing their own thing.

Did GoDaddy pay dearly for supporting SOPA? I heard they lost 30k subscribers at some point, but did they really? You'll have to show me on that. GoDaddy did lots of terrible things before it, yet they were still a huge provider and still are. They cybersquat on domain names people search for and allow you to buy them at "auction" from them when you try to look up if it's taken or not..they snatch it up to sell to you. They also give away people's domain names with no repercussions and a myriad of other things. Sounds like it needs a regulatory body with some teeth on it to make them act right or shut them down.

Unions are actually a really good way to fight monopolies and under the table deals, but they've been systematically villified. And unions aren't monopolies if they aren't mandatory, and most places are not fully unionized anymore. Often times they will have sections with union employees to do government work and non-union to do non-government work. Non-union guys make half the rate of union guys usually, and have less protections in place to keep themselves from getting shafted. But I don't really see how a union is a monopoly when there are lots of unions and lots of individuals in a union who make decisions for themselves and not as a collective like a company would. IE a company has a "head" that directs it and unions are a collective of individuals. Companies are people after all, unions are not (they are made up of people).

There are laws governing behavior usually based roughly on societal standards. Like pot being illegal is kind of against most of the societies beliefs, yet it remains illegal is an example of where it doesn't quite track. But overall we have laws that say you can't write a check that you know won't cash. Drunk driving, trespassing, vandalism, theft.....yelling fire in a crowded building.......setting off the fire alarm for fun.....etc. Giving people the finger isn't against the law....well probably not in most places so that might fall under social pressure. But we see that social pressure fails miserably at stopping bad behavior, so we have laws to enforce behavior...like not stealing and not murdering. This is society and people holding other people to standards, without the law to judge and convict them by the only thing you have left is personal interpretation and meeting out punishment by each individual or vigilante justice.

If you don't regulate business there is nothing stopping them, because nothing about our market is free. You can't have a free market without perfect information. You can't know every possible thing going on, so you will never have perfect information even if it was possible. So you will have swindlers and knock offs, pyramid schemes, etc. And without laws and regulations on these things, you will never be able to punish the company for what they did in a court of law.

Even if they were 100% above the board honest, they'd still be sourcing their materials from overseas and getting inferior materials to what you are paying for. It happens to the military all the time right now. They buy a bunch of nuts and bolts and some of them are chinese knockoffs that fail well after the installation is done and the machine is in operation. They can't catch them because china is basically lawless when it comes to producing goods for knock off purposes. It could just as easily be a US source doing it if we de-regulated everything and made no way for people to sue them into oblivion...because the damage would be done as soon as you buy a knock off and it fries the rest of your stuff.

The definition of "free market" right now means they want to be able to buy stuff cheap as shit from overseas and charge you US built prices for it. And when it comes to financial industry "free market" means they want to have speculation upon speculation to where the financial industry has 10-100x more money leveraged than what actually exists. It's a house of cards if they can just inflate it without any kind of acceptable risks being enforced.

@ChaosEngine @NetRunner I think you are abusing the first amendment here. The first amendment says nothing about how independent businesses should conduct themselves, but how the government should conduct itself. Unless you are saying that businesses also must provide for " the right to trial by jury", which is of course just silly

Self censorship is a right, unless you are going to say that people selling ad space on TV must accept some kind of objectionable material. So, if one of the largest FREE video upload sites knocks off your video, to bad, so sad...and you might have a case that they violated the agreed upon terms of serves and have some sort of appeal...but in the end...you don't have a RIGHT to store video information on a server that you don't own...period. Now, to relent to your point, I think it is a shitty to boost that you are a open forum and start editing content away...but lets not overlook that youtube ALREADY censors all adult (pornographic) material. Youtube might start to shift away to a public forum of video information to more of galactic TV service...and they should be allowed to do so.

So the REAL question is will you still use them if this is the business model they adapt. Not that we get to force them (by law) into what we want youtube to be, the choice will be much more indirect. Anyway, I truly think you are abusing the words "free market" and "free speech" to advance a demagogically end. Youtube has ALWAYS filtered content, is fully in its rights to do so. And to carry your logic to its end...they should be forced to store pornographic information in the name of the first amendment, (which was never its intent) to wit @gwiz665 just gave 2 thumbs up. Then again, the FCC should also then be shut down for censorship of free speech by the same token, as the actively participate in the largest censorship regime, perhaps, in the world. Which would also be the same body responsible for not censoring the internet...fail.

One time I got knocked off my bike by a van, and another bike messenger zoomed past and knocked of the drivers's side-view mirror with his radio. A perfect symphony of revenge.

Another time I got badly cut off by the same cabbie three times in a short stretch of road, and I got madder and madder each time. The first time I yelled at him. The second time I banged his hood. The third time I punched through the driver-side window. There were tiny little bits of safety glass on his lips. It was hilarious.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

There was really no call for that. He wasn't knocked off his bike, he was minorly inconvenienced for a few seconds in traffic. If the situations were reversed (i.e. if the cyclist cut off the car and the car smashed his bike), we'd be screaming murder.
On top of that, for the simple fact that he was cycling in traffic without a helmet, the cyclist is a fucking idiot.


Actually, and counter-intuitively, there's apparently some evidence for wearing helmets to be less safe than going without. See video here.

>> ^Reefie:

@A10anis @kevingrr @carneval Interesting to note that none of you had previously commented on this sift but the moment something is said that you can argue against you wade right in. I cycle daily, everywhere, and I can tell you that drivers are dickheads 99% of the time. I've done everything the highway code asks cyclists and yet I've still been run over at roundabouts, every couple of days I get some arsehole winding down their window and telling me to get the fuck off the roads and buy a proper vehicle, I've been knocked off my bike more times than I can count (often while I'm in the cyclist lane), drivers who rarely indicate when required, though often they do it as an afterthought after they've side-swiped me.
Basically if you cycle daily then you are all too aware of just how frustrating it is for cyclists to commute. If you deny the frustration that cyclists endure daily then you're full of it.


I, like Kevin, watched the video and then read your comment as it had already been posted. I think you are making some assumptions about the chronology of events here

You must live in a bad area for cyclists, and I'm sorry to hear that. I went to college in a town that had what you described; many dickheads.

I'm a driver too, I do not commute by bike, and I do understand how drivers can get easily irritated. Unfortunately - and I am not excluded from this - being behind a window/steering wheel tends to disconnect people from the world/results in a lack of empathy. It's sad, and very unfortunate.

I see that you are in the UK. I have never cycled there but my relatives across the pond tell me that the dynamics between cyclists and drivers are really bad- it seems your experience agrees.

However, I think my point still stands - I do not want to be run over because some other cyclist pissed off the operator of a 2-ton killing machine yesterday, last week, or last year.

@A10anis @kevingrr @carneval Interesting to note that none of you had previously commented on this sift but the moment something is said that you can argue against you wade right in. I cycle daily, everywhere, and I can tell you that drivers are dickheads 99% of the time. I've done everything the highway code asks cyclists and yet I've still been run over at roundabouts, every couple of days I get some arsehole winding down their window and telling me to get the fuck off the roads and buy a proper vehicle, I've been knocked off my bike more times than I can count (often while I'm in the cyclist lane), drivers who rarely indicate when required, though often they do it as an afterthought after they've side-swiped me.

Basically if you cycle daily then you are all too aware of just how frustrating it is for cyclists to commute. If you deny the frustration that cyclists endure daily then you're full of it.

There was really no call for that. He wasn't knocked off his bike, he was minorly inconvenienced for a few seconds in traffic. If the situations were reversed (i.e. if the cyclist cut off the car and the car smashed his bike), we'd be screaming murder.

On top of that, for the simple fact that he was cycling in traffic without a helmet, the cyclist is a fucking idiot.

>> ^gwiz665:

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible.

I think we're talking about different things. Here you're describing people making "knock offs" of WoW by actually trying to independently create a new game from scratch without directly copying any artwork or code from WoW, but still kinda looks and feels and plays like WoW.

I'm talking about firing up the DVD-burner, and making a 100% exact copy of WoW. If that were legal, people would do it. In other words, the "private server" thing. Right now they're mostly script kiddies diddling themselves with Legendary items, because if they tried to actually replicate the WoW-server service and charge money for it, they'd be forced to shut down, and probably get thrown in jail too.

If that constraint weren't there, I'm sure you'd see an explosion of "competitors" for WoW "service". And I'm sure the market would explode with all kinds of people trying to differentiate themselves on service and price, but I'm sure the competition would force the average price well below what Blizzard's charging.

And that's the rub -- without being able to hold a monopoly over the monthly service charge, or even be able to demand $40 for the expansions, would Blizzard even bother with a Mists of Pandaria expansion?

I do think we could make things a lot better if they'd stop extending the time limit on things going into the public domain. Any content older than 10 years should be public domain, period.

Ultimately, the service they would provide would be content before any of the knock offs. Plenty of companies have tried to make knockoffs of wow, some even with otherwise very compelling universes in the baggage (lord of the rings online, warhammer online), but no one has come close yet. Star Wars the Old Republic might, but I doubt it. A rose by any other name is still WoW. And right now they have a critical mass of users, which is all they need. They could shit in a shoebox and call it Mist of Pandaria and millions will buy it on the release day.

Sure, there exists private servers of Wow at this point too, and some people like to play on them, but for me? I wouldn't even want to. There's no challenge when everything is possible. I'm certain that even if a joint effort between developers of all sorts banded together to copy and create an MMO like wow, it would likely be crap, because they have no other incentive to make it than "because we can". Design decisions based on that are not good - look at linux. Even Mozilla is a company nowadays. A command structure is essential in creating a massive work of art in a reasonable time.

Making a copy of WoW isn't "just" making a copy of WoW, it's enormous. By the time someone has copied it to the finer details, the game will have moved on to something else; systems change all the time.

A good example of something happening like you say is Vampires: Bloodlines where the community made a huge amount of "community patches" to fix the game, after the developer went bankrupt. I like that, but they could do it because the things they were fixing were straight forward. If they wanted to make entirely new things, who decides which things are good and bad? Like wikipedia, they would need custodians. A private company like Blizzard does not have that problem.

I was certainly a little too broad when I said all intellectual property is bunk. First of all I have a problem with the umbrella term of IP. I don't think it's helpful. Different types of IP have different solutions and problems. Some are more bunk than others. (Wtf is with they way rights to music works? What is it now, 100 years after the artist dies? Crazy.)

Like you I am philosophically on the "you can't own ideas, man"-wagon, but practically I'm more loose with my morals - hell, morals are fluid baby.

I'll say this. I would rather have 50000 people playing my game and 50 people paying for it, than I would have 50 people playing my game and paying for it any day.

>> ^NetRunner:

I think this is the most plausible way I've seen anyone square this circle. I'm just not sure it really holds up to scrutiny.
Philosophically, I'm in the "information isn't property" camp, but I also put food on the table by creating intellectual property.
The confluence of my own philosophical tastes on this topic would be that not only should "making copies" be legalized, it should actually be criminal to withhold any sort of scientific or engineering advance from the broader public, especially for selfish gain.
But, I think that would essentially destroy software companies as we know them. I think Blizzard & WoW would have trouble making the case to people that their service is worth $140/yr. That's especially true in the kind of world in which any content they generate can just be copied by a knockoff service provider just as easily as the original copy of WoW was in the first place.
I have trouble even imagining what sort of service they'd be able to compete on in that world. Uptime? In-game customer service? Best policing of player misbehavior? It can't be bugfixes (copyable), and it can't be content (also copyable).
I think ultimately WoW would have to become something more like an open source project -- the community provides all bugfixes and content gratis. Blizzard ultimately would have to give up any kind of creative or engineering control at that point, and also give up on having a revenue stream of millions of dollars a month, too. They'd just be a glorified hosting company. Companies like Microsoft probably wouldn't even be that.
It'd probably be better for the whole world that way, but not so awesome for incumbents in the industry.
You know, people like you and me.
>> ^gwiz665:
Essentially you couldn't. You would not be able to provide a better service without spending a very very large amount of money and effort into doing it. An MMO is a service, and you have to provide more than just stable servers for it to work, you also have to create new content, bug fixes etc to maintain the integrity of the product.
You can design your way out of it easily. Free to play is one way of doing it, which we have a lot of success with on iOS and the big shots on PC are waking up to as well, finally. Apple in general have their app rejection policy which keeps the most things at bay, but of course there is jailbreaks, which I don't much care for.
I don't have a problem with people copying, although I would of course prefer they give me lots of money. If they corrupt our product however, with map hacks, cheats etc. then it's a much different issue.
I think it's a problem that many different types of media is lumped together under "intellectual property", because I do think things like Art, music etc should be protected from forgeries and that the original artist should be compensated for his time, otherwise we would have no art at all.
The industry is changing to provide a better service still though. Look at music - who buys CDs anymore? We have things like Spotify and Grooveshark who stream just about any music easily supported by commercials.
Any Blizzard game, and all their future games, will need a persistent internet connection, both for piracy issues but also for better service - instant patching, social networking etc. Same with steam.

I thought Ricky sounded like an idiot. I've never known snakes to fart either, there's lots of animals that don't fart because of differing bacteria within their stomachs. It bugs me how sometimes because Ricky doesn't understand something Karl must be a fucking idiot.

Also this series wasn't nearly as good as the first...knock off the stupid phone thing. I wanna see Ricky and Steve travel with Karl, I'm sick of them calling and demanding he do random shit.

>> ^spoco2:

A great opportunity lost... why did they not have a series of punches where she knocked off more and more of the beard, easy to do, he would have just had to shave out different shaped pieces from it.
Could have been hilarious.
As it stands, it's... ok.


The reason I had my beard fly off in one blow instead of chunks is that I had the idea for that one big VFX shot before I even conceptualized the rest of the piece. This was originally going to be a personal exercise in VFX to see if I could get my beard punched off my face and make it look seamless, but then I decided to make it into something more robust and entertaining by putting it into a short narrative context.

I agree that it would be cool to see the chunks, but that's not the video I set out to make. :-)

If anyone is interested in seeing a breakdown of how I accomplished some of the effects in this video, check out this post on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/npwm4/beard_gets_punched_off_a_guys_face_in_slow_motion/c3ba3ow

A great opportunity lost... why did they not have a series of punches where she knocked off more and more of the beard, easy to do, he would have just had to shave out different shaped pieces from it.

Could have been hilarious.

As it stands, it's... ok.

Big fan of the show. I am glad no one got hurt, but I can well imagine that the Build team got a severe chastising by one James Franklin Hyneman. He's usually in charge of safety, and someone could have easily been killed or hurt by this lapse. I don't know what happened, but I bet dimonds to dollars that the cannon was not anchored properly before it want off and the recoil probably kicked the barrel up just high enough to clear the hill the shot was supposed to go into. The Mythbusters themselves probably didn't set up the cannon - unless it was the home-made cannon that Tory did for the "Ball & Chain prison escape" episode. That was more like a mortar though, and not designed to fire laterally. I hope this incident makes a blooper show, or gets broadcast in some way. You KNOW they have footage on the accident right up to where the shot went bad.

Not the first time the build team has had a bad accident though. In "Hollywood Car Myths" they were testing the movie axiom of when a car goes full speed under a semi-trailer and gets the roof knocked off but is still drivable. The myth was confirmed - the car slid right under the trailer. But the car went off the safety track and kept on going at like 70 miles an hour... It went right off the track, off the course, up a hill, and over a fence. Kari Byron had a horrified look on her face and just said, "Uh oh..." Luckily in that case (also) no one got hurt, but there was a road not too far past the fence the car flew over and someone could have gotten really clobbered. In that case it was also not the Build Team's fault. The site's safety rigging must have failed somehow.

>> ^Barseps:

Rupert Murdoch got knocked off his perch today Boise
http:/
/www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/09/20/milly-dowler-family-s-3million-over-news-of-the-world-phone-hacking-115875-23432849/


Too bad it wasn't much more.

Rupert Murdoch got knocked off his perch today Boise

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/09/20/milly-dowler-family-s-3million-over-news-of-the-world-phone-hacking-115875-23432849/