...they don't lose the skills they have already learned.

Of course, it is possible to lose skills. In Eve, loss of ship is fairly common. It is also possible to die if you have lost your ship and then also get your pod blown up, in which case your consciousness is restored into a clone (naturally). The trick of it is, you must purchase a clone of sufficient quality to hold all of the skill points you've accumulated. If you don't you will lose some of your skills. With Tech 3 ships, losing the ship causes "neural trauma" and you may lose some of your Strategic Cruiser skills.

If you fail hard enough, you can lose everything you've accumulated, usually at the hands of other players. This is where the meat of the game is. The striving for sovereignty, the warfare between large player factions, each one attempting to protect their own supply lines while damaging their opponents. The "play" extends right down to spies infiltrating rival player corporations and playing trust games to gain access to assets and liquidate them. More than most MMOs, this is a true sandbox game.

WoW funnels its players into "content" using "instancing" to fragment the gameplay player-by-player. EVE puts everyone in the same world, at the same time.

EVE is terrible, CCP is terrible.

Obligatory: Before you emo-rage-quit, can I have your stuff?

Wait, wait, wait... We're for the new Net Neutrality now?

A little history, the original Net Neutrality was essentially an anti-"toll road" proposal. It then morphed into a pro-"toll road" proposal at the hands of the telecoms. Then it became something completely different once Google did their deal. The version the FCC has decided to impose includes the ability to regulate speech. Say something or post something the FCC doesn't like and they take your blog down. You have to file an after-the-fact grievance, DMCA-style. Toll-roads are still there, they just follow the Google deal.

I thought that was a bad thing.

It's worse than that because it is being put in place as a power grab by the FCC, not as a power granted by new law. The House resolution was mainly to swat down the power grab... You know, balance of powers...

I thought that was a good thing.

If I understand your intent, I believe you've mixed up the use of the word "public" in your rewrite. My use of the word "public" meant "governmental". A taxpayer enterprise, would still mean the government, and yes, quasi-corporations run by the government are also bogus; see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were originally created as way to get government-held (public) debt off the budget reports.

One of your other possible meanings was simply to say publicly traded corporations are bad. That's both silly and a non-sequitur. Alternatively, you meant to say that governments paying private corporations for goods and services is bad. Again, that's fairly difficult to support.

If on the other hand, you were attempting to make some comment on the power of for-profit corporations when they lobby government officials, I'd probably agree that it can be bad thing. Unfortunately, your rewrite didn't clearly convey any of these messages, and again, had it done so, it would have been unrelated.

As you point out, this was a much simpler story: a whitelist issue on a guest network.

...that's obviously a free speech issue.

No it is obviously not a free speech issue. The civil right to say what you want does not include the right to use an employer's equipment to read or view whatever you want.

If the State Capitol wanted to increase worker productivity, they would block ESPN, not a pro-labor site.

It is not a pro-labor site as in "we favor doing your job well". It is a pro-labor-movement site and as such, contributes zero to getting work done. As to blocking ESPN, my guess is that the network admin would do so if the traffic grew to be a problem.

It's perfectly acceptable to surf the web during one's OSHA mandated break. The only reason to block the site...

Agreed. But if you use someone else's equipment, they get to decide what you look at. There's nothing to stop them from using their own smart phones to read the site. As for reasons why, I've given you at least one other reason; network traffic.

As far as the pro-labor movement goes, I tend to think unions are fine for workers in the private sector that need them. But unions for workers that get paid by taxpayers? That makes no sense at all. The people they "bargain" with have no incentive for efficiency, so very little pressure to negotiate vigorously for the side they represent (the taxpayers). The public unions are often "bargaining" with people whose campaigns they funnel money into, so there's also a conflict of interest. This inevitably leads to public unions becoming a faction organized against the public good, the very thing James Madison warned against. So government workers can't view a website aimed against the public interest using government PCs: boo hoo.

No, the phrase isn't cool (sadly). He ran as "One tough nerd." Therefore, he's keeping in character by making a software reference.

Might I recommend to you Eve On-line. It allows other players to punish the dumb. That's essentially what keeps the Eve economy running.

Even in PvE, the game finds ways to punish the loserly: get your tech-level 3 ship blown up and you lose some of the skills (trained in real time) used to run it. Also makes for some nice holy-crap moments in PvP.

I could be wrong, but I suspect you missed the point. The more debt China buys, the larger the chunk of U.S. citizen's lives China owns.

Our children will be the slaves when the bill comes due.

...Witness the Republican outrage over TSA's antics now that a Democrat is calling the shots and contrast it against the silence when GWB was calling the shots....

I don't think it's just Republican outrage... The TSA weren't running nudie scanners with the alternative being a junk-touching session when GWB was calling the shots. That's a brand new wrinkle that brings the privacy outrage up close and personal. I've always assumed that the government could listen into phone calls anyway (not legally, they just didn't blab about doing it), and that actual private conversations could only occur face-to-face. I'd also argue that these two kinds of privacy are of a very different quality. Privacy of one's communications is not the same as privacy of one's body.

You're making the false assumption that regulation will fix the problem. There's little guarantee or recourse for the viewer if the volume is too loud in spite of the law.

Granted, you can pay people in every TV market across the U.S. to sit and watch TV with tax-payer money to make sure of compliance. Or better, let's have the government commission the creation of software that monitors these levels for every broadcast and cable transmission everywhere, again with tax-payer dollars. We know how efficient the government is at software projects, for example that 18 million dollar web site... All of this seems drastically more wasteful than relying on the viewer to USE THE FREAKING MUTE BUTTON.

It is ridiculous that congress wasted time on this.

Newer hypotheses say that wolves domesticated themselves. The ones able to suppress their fear well enough to get close to humans benefited from getting an easier food supply. The ones that made their home near human settlements acted as an early warning system for human camps, probably earning these animals direct rewards. The trick of it was that they had to have a genetic predisposition that let the curiosity pups normally grow out of last a little into early adulthood. From there, all that really needed to happen was for the humans not to prey on the curious ones.

Definition: Observation - The act of making and recording a measurement

In the case of an electron, it is the means used to measure position or energy that necessarily precludes the ability to know both. If I remember my lay-physics right, it has to do with choosing to measure a wave or a particle. Measure one, and measurements of the other become impossible. (Someone please correct my interpretation.)

"If you had invented FaceWave, you would've invented FaceWave."

Yes. That unfairly got my hopes up that we had legislated the healing liquid from Star Wars into being. I was thinking, "Wow! That's an awesome fix bill to ObamaCare!" only to be crushed by disappointment after checking the spelling.

The reason:

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars. -- Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5, Season 1 Episode 4

Have you learned nothing from the story of Odysseus? "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." We do that which is difficult because it is difficult, and in the practice of doing it, improve ourselves.