The luxury industry has been linked with reducing the size of the middle class, since it tends to greater a broader disparity between those providing goods and services and those consuming them. You are certainly correct, of course, that spending money will 'stimulate the economy' regardless if it comes from the rich or the poor. The question is the type of economy you want to stimulate. Luxury spending tends to stimulate the segment of industry that sees little return back at the lower end of the wage pools. They reap higher profits, and provide fewer goods and services, thus tending towards increasing the divide in wealth. Spending in the lower end 'consumer grade' market tends to stimulate an industry that will increase growth where more goods and services are produced.

Henry Ford famously paid his employees enough so they could buy the cars they were building. Imagine what might have happened to the auto industry if he had catered only to the rich? Compare also to Walmart, who also wants to pay their employees enough to buy their products.

Don't propagate this myth. Hell, my Atari 400 came with 4 joystick ports. We had a multi-tap for our SNES so you could play 4 player games. That isn't new, and yet once we had our own PCs, we still went to LAN parties.

You can't play all games crowded around the same monitor. For some you really want your own audio/visual source so you're NOT all tied to one another in the same location. Playing games of 8 player X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter or Starcraft or Age of Empires, or 16 player Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six were expressly fun because we could all run off on our assigned tasks without worrying about going off screen or trying to watch our tiny slice of the split-screen. Breaking a LAN party up into two teams, where each team was in a separate room, beat the hell out of any cooperative on-line play I've ever experienced.

Now, granted, lugging around a 30 or even 40 pound monitor was a bit of a pain, even with those handy monitor tote straps. But, in the end, it only took a few minutes for us to tear down a PC, toss the cables in a bag, and pack it all into the car. As we'd have LAN parties every few (extended) weekends, setup was not the major pain. Have LAN party locations with adequate seating, power, ventilation, and ethernet ports was the tricky part. But once we had adequately sized apartments (gamers living in the next unit works fantastic) or homes, we had our gaming mecca.

Once new game consoles came out that have ports for everyone to plug in their own audio/visual head set, then you'll have a case. Until then, for me at least, there is still something to be said for LAN parties.

I find it interesting you say that he 'played the game correctly' since that was the core part of the argument that I thought the professor completely missed in his paper.

Who gets to define the 'correct' way to play? And if we look at the social dynamic of the game world as being larger than merely a 'game', who gets to define the correct way to live life? Can you really do it wrong? Is there anything interesting about that fact that players were put in an environment were they were suppose to compete against one another, and yet collectively choose to cooperate instead?

Certainly, we could make a compelling argument that the game designers and developers are the ones who get to define the 'correct' way to play the game. But I should think an equally compelling argument could also be made that the players also get to make that decision. Or, even, that it is an entirely subjective and personal choice, and not subject to the tyranny of any majority.

Snake Pliskin? I heard he was dead.

I was using 'running to center' to describe how many politicians quickly and easily change their rhetoric to match the perceived political mood of their audience, without actually making any change in their own positions. The two party system makes 'the center' not a platform for compromise, but merely a battle ground for votes, as no party exists there to represent anyone. And the ways in which we try and confirm 'the center' as part of a two dimensional spectrum does a gross insult to the true complexity and nuance of political philosophy.

How the hell can you blame a guy for running for president when it was the *millions* of other people who voted for the guy who was actually elected? Or are people not suppose to vote for the guy who they feel is the most qualified? When did casting a ballot equate to throwing away your vote if your guy doesn't get elected?

What kind of democracy do you expect to have, where any qualified candidate is required to sell their soul for the funding required from one of your two parties, who stand for nothing more than merely getting their own reelected? They've both been running to center trying to grind out the votes necessary to win without any concern for what principles or political values they're even suppose to stand for anymore. Isn't politics suppose to be the art of comprise rather than forcing down your tyranny of the majority as an entitlement program? Shouldn't be have politicians more focused on what is best for all of us, rather than those they are beholden to? Do you really enjoy run on sound bites and highlight reels rather than any meaningful political discourse?

I understand you're bitter. I'm pretty bitter too. But why derisively spit at anyone who wants to try and stand up and thinks they might be able to do a better job than the other guy. Or maybe just because they believe the other guy is wrong. Do you really find that the politicians getting elected actually represent you and your world view?

But you're basically suggesting that every image and video recorded by the police, doctors, hospitals, and so on is "destined" to be public domain.

Yeah, that whole 'for a limited time' in the copyright clause in the Constitution seems kinda freaky, doesn't it?

Is this really where we're headed as a society? Idea ownership is normal and ideas being open and free for anyone to use is strange?

They did sue the police department:

In March 2008, it was dismissed by a superior-court judge, who ruled that while the dispatchers' conduct was "utterly reprehensible," it hadn't violated the law. "No duty exists between the surviving family and defendant," the opinion reads, because privacy rights don't extend to the dead. "It's an unfortunate situation, and our heart goes out to the family," says R. Rex Parris, the attorney representing O'Donnell. "But this is America, and there's a freedom of information."

There is still an appeal pending, but really, what would you want to see happen? As we blaze forward into the future it's going to becoming increasingly likely that some technology will capture some event most of us would rather not remember. Yet trying to lock up ownership of the past would be even worse than the ridiculous problems copyright laws are causing here in the digital age. You've already acknowledged that once the images have escaped it's basically impossible to put them back in the bottle. Trying to target the original source of their escape seems just as quixotic to me as going after any of the subsequent copies. Certainly, from a legal standpoint it might be easier to discourage and prosecute the source of a 'leak', but towards what end? A sanitized world in which we can all happily only view those events we all agree should be remembered?

No one should actually get back more [in taxes] than they pay in!!

I was right up with you on your laundry list of changes and problems in the current tax system until you carted out this refrain. And maybe you're just talking about direct currency hand outs rather than social services, so slice this however you want. While I can completely understand your sentiment, I'm not entirely comfortable agreeing with it. Should we extend this theory to say that no one should offer police or fire or emergency medical treatment to the poor because they can't afford it?

Maybe sometimes justice dozen't mean what's fair and equitable. Or maybe it does, and it just boils down to how you want to measure or perceive it. But I don't like the idea of walled gardens of civility and formally instate a class system that delineates between the haves and the have nots. Because that just seems to end up with less haves having a lot more, and piles more who have not.

Of course, in reality, we always draw these lines anyways. Scarcity is real, there simply isn't enough to go around, and we as a society have to decide how things get divided up. I'm just saying we might want to carefully consider where we draw such lines, and how we measure concepts like 'enough'.

In retail you measure unaccounted for inventory as 'shrink'. This will be from shoplifting, employee theft, and just plain clerical errors. The average rate is hard outsiders to measure, because a lot of chains don't like to talk about it. Depending on industry and location, the numbers I've seen are in the 1% to 4% of sales range. Which means that for every 50 items a store (thinks they) purchased from suppliers, they only end up recording sales for 49 of them. Different stores record this shrink on their books differently. Some report it as a loss at cost. Which means they just write off the missing items at the price they paid their suppliers for them. Others report it based on retail sale price, which means they write the items based of what they should have been sold for. It all ends up as accountancy magic, and has to do with how you 'value' your inventory. This has a real and measurable impact on their books. In some industries the retail shrink ends up being larger than their profit margins, yet they still remain in business as it is still ultimately profitable for them.

Of course, these retail stores are buying and selling real physical items. Their 'loss' at the end of the year means inventory they can't sell. This occurs because they need to balance their books at the end of the year, and adjust what assets they thought they still had for sale down to what they actually still possess.

Now, typically, save for original media transit disasters or amazingly catastrophic IT blunders, this will be something that never needs to be done in the virtual world. As long as they still retain a copy of their virtual assets, they can continue to offer it for sale endlessly. There is no 'shrink' to write off, because they're already recorded their magic accountancy numbers. Namely, the Cost of acquiring the virtual asset for sale. Which is what it all comes down to in the end. You take the total cost, and you subtract your sales, and your left with profit. In accountancy, there is no magic formula for recording sales you 'wish' you made, or think you 'deserve' to have made.

I'm really tired of hearing about all the 'losses' due to copyright violations. In business, there is only the money you received. You can play marketing and sales games, as you try and measure the size of the market you're in, and the maximum potential sales for your industry, and from how much of the pie you're getting a slice. But this doesn't go on your accounting books.

What's really happening here, is that the media industries are beating their war drums and proclaiming that they're not making the amount of money they think they deserve. You know what I think? I think they amount of money their customers are willing to give them is exactly the amount of money they deserve. And if they don't like it, they should get out of the buggy whip industry.

All the independent work I've ever done has been because someone knew someone who knew someone. It started with a helping a friend out with some trouble they were having at their work, which lead to helping out more friends of friends, and then other businesses who heard friends of friends talking.

But trying to work a full time job and make time for my side work was sucking the life out of me. I don't like to leave work unfinished, which makes me a hell of a work horse, but only by pulling time away from every else. And once there was no time left to cut I just started sleeping less. So after only a few months I left my steady and well paying job to go solo for awhile.

If I were more motivated, I might still be trying to fly solo, but I really didn't like all the extra work. Not the extra development work, which I loved. It was all the other work. As a corporate drone I spent a lot of my time in development. Working for myself, I also had to be the salesdroid, and the accountant, and the business manager, and health care consultant, and all the rest of the hats that needed wearing. I also could never really enjoy my 'time off' since I was never sure where or when my next paycheck might be coming.

So after a few years I went back to a steady and well paying job. Which, right now, I'm pretty thankful to have. And these days I just actively work to fix some of those annoying bureaucratic problems. Which can certainly involve wearing a few of those extra hats I didn't like... but we all learn to pick and choose which battles are worth fighting. And I guess for me, it's in the corporate trenches.