Bay 12 Games Forum

Th'mega folks were using data centers that were in (or at least headquartered or partly set up in) the US, apparently, at least in part. It's in the indictment.

So the public health risk does not concern you at all

Well, we've still got alcohol and tobacco being sold en masse, so it's pretty obvious that public health risk isn't what the folks working with drug laws are concerned with, at all.

Then you've got stuff like that massive cancer-inducing X-rays on the border thing, which says pretty bluntly that public health risk is precisely what people give not two shits about.

Basically public health is apparently not what the folks putting this stuff into practice care about. If sane drug laws are going to come into effect (Currently not there!) we're going to have to work with the axioms already in place, first. The axiom that public health matters either isn't being considered or is insufficient to induce change and is thus largely irrelevant (from a practical standpoint) to the discussion.

Unfortunately.

A few throwaway thoughts re: Hydromancy: Water manipulation is often seen as part of the traditional arts of fleshcrafting of various sorts in fantasy settings. Mutation, creature husbandry, crossbreeding, etc. There was a particular race of seadwellers in a fantasy setting I worked with a bit that were basically magical bioengineers, ferex, breeding ships and various servant species for personal use and trade. If you're looking for strategic applications for it, crossbreeding, mutations, strange beasts, etc., is a thematically viable direction to go. Biological battering rams, artillery, specially bred domestic creatures (Food/moral bonii), so on, so forth.

It's also not uncommon for it to turn towards blood manipulation if you're getting particularly nasty about things.

The copyright infringement is obvious- what's with the racketeering and money laundering?

Read the FBI press release I linked, it goes into a bit more detail. The laundering, at least, is specifically mentioned; I've already forgotten how the racketeering comes into it.

The FBI press release.

This one was a fun one to me:

As alleged in the indictment, the conspirators failed to terminate accounts of users with known copyright infringement, selectively complied with their obligations to remove copyrighted materials from their servers and deliberately misrepresented to copyright holders that they had removed infringing content. For example, when notified by a rights holder that a file contained infringing content, the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place to make it seamlessly available to millions of users to access through any one of the many duplicate links available for that file.

Someone has no g'damn idea how filesharing sites work, don't they? Those aren't duplicate links to the same file nitwits, they're entirely different files.

The actual trial should be interesting, though.

... take a character editor to it to fix the problem?

"If you took all the income of people over $200,000, it would yield about $1.89 trillion, enough revenue to cover the 2012 bill for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security"

Ngh. I have trouble believing that, honestly, when there's 7 people (Th'wal-mart fellow's inheritors) in the US who have a collective wealth greater than the combined value of the bottom 30% of the population. I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if that's not including the pieces of filth that do crap like get a $1 income but are making millions through other means.

You'd want to be including everyone making over $100k, though. With that, you've got over two trillion in raw income, to say nothing about the other tricks many of them are pulling.

But hell, if that's accurate and the other points brought up while I was typing this not applicable? We're screwed, there's absolutely nothing we can do. Cutting won't save our asses, because if we do vital stuff's going to collapse.

90% of the wealth of America is in the hands of 10% of the population (That was a few years back, actually. It's probably gotten worse by now.). If they can't cover it when the other 90% is already doing their damnedest to, well. Guess what rest of world, ahahahaha!? We're going to take you all with us.

Hey, if you guys believe that government spending can continue at it's current rate, and the solution to all your problems is to take your money from the wealthy, I don't live in the states, I have no skin in the game, go ahead.
I'm just explaining the reasoning behind those who seek a different alternative.

That, honestly, isn't really what a lot of us want to happen. We want the rich to be paying a fair tax, same as everyone else does. They're not. It's beginning to royally infuriate people.

Locked up everyone, you mean. I'd imagine at least 50% of the country has wished death on one president or another in the last decade or two.

Selectively enforced law? Oh you bet your behind it is.