dusqi

What's special about labour that it deserves a "minimum worth" compared to the investment of dollars in shares for example? Why doesn't the government guarantee a minimum return on investment for shareholders? Because you're talking about the same thing. You invest your time in 'work' but you think that you deserve a minimum return on your time, and other people invest money in shares, should the government give them a minimum return?

How do you justify that though? Surely people should just get paid for what they're worth? And if people are willing to do the same job for less, then whoever is willing to do it for the least should get the job?

The rich white men aren't numerous enough to generate enough votes by themselves. They're the ones that pay the money so that the poor hard working people doing 2-3 jobs at once just to pay the bills get duped ;) Seriously, you're in the richest country in the world, why should anyone have to do more than 1 job? I've never heard of a European having to do more than 1 full time job at once... and we pay higher taxes, so clearly it's not the level of tax that is affecting it.

Campaign for a decent minimum wage then ;) The problem isn't the taxes, it's the corporations that are able to take advantage of your time ;) It always amuses me that it seems to be the poorest people in America that have the most republican views, and who are getting taken advantage of the most. As to the topic, clearly it's a ridiculous idea and won't ever come into law. Whoever wrote it knows that also, and has just written it so they can say they tried.

Okay Zerocool11, sorry for turning rather rude on you there. I must admit that I get very annoyed by vandalism, since to me it seems to be a crime without a purpose. I understand your position in theory though, but still think that those kinds of things are unnecessarily involving other people who have to clean up someone else's fun, when they didn't ask for it and don't know who did it. In addition, it can make some (usually old) people quite unhappy and afraid in their own house, which is a high price to pay for a few minutes of fun.

Well, you did come on a forum to tell the story of your "adventure" to lots of people. That suggests being proud. However, if you're really not, then that's good and I respect that :) $200 isn't a massive deal, but its the completely selfish act itself which is lame ($100 worth of damage to someone else compared to a 10 second laugh for you) and not something that I hope anyone would be proud of.

I'm not proud of my mistakes.

Many credit cards automatically come with insurance which covers online purchases up to a certain amount. If you use a site like amazon, you'll have no trouble.

Why don't you put a big sign up outside of your house with a similar statement saying that you encourage teenagers to do whatever they want with your property, as long as they're enjoying themselves. Then all the teenagers within 50 miles can come and throw rocks at everything you own (which I suspect isn't much). It might divert some vandalism from the property of those who do care about what they've worked for.

Once you have to buy your own car, you'll realise how much of a loser you were as a "mischievous" teenager.

@Merficull: I don't have to show dedication in a restaurant when I'm ordering dinner. I don't have to do some test of 'worth' to make sure that I really do want what I'm ordering. I'm not saying that I don't understand why marches and such occur, because I do, I'm just saying that I don't like the reason for them being necessary. They're a reflection of politicians not taking account of our opinions unless the media forces them to.

Yea, maybe, but I don't see why anything more than having an opinion on an issue should be necessary to change government policy? Since government is meant to represent our opinions. Why should someone have to go to a march and waste 5 hours of the day to tell the government that they have an opinion, in order for it to be taken account of? It's just a waste.

You also have to remember that government doesn't want to make it seem as if an online petition (or any petition) has had an effect on decision making - because it might encourage petition writing, and make their job more difficult.

Yes, eventually, but the online petition was the first I heard in the media about him having problems. It seemed to start off the process.

I used to consider online petitions in the past as close to worthless. However, recently the leader of the Liberal Democrat party in the UK, Charles Kennedy, was forced to resign partially as the result of an online petition calling upon him to. It received quite a lot of media attention. Here is a link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4569012.stm I'm not sure why this petition was so effective compared to most other online petitions. Probably just because of the media attention, and because the people who organised it were previously supporters of the party.

Why 'hopefully it will burst'? I admire Google's vision and hope that they continue to do good things for information distribution.

It amused me when I used to be a mod here, that we'd try to censor certain words, such as "newb" (which isn't censored any more). We changed it to the phrase "fellow player". In a fairly short space of time, people were calling each other "fellow players" ingame, as if the phrase was a bad one. Then, the Runescape homepage had the phrase "fellow players" on it, in its correct context - to do with 'having fun with your fellow players', and there was a thread here on tip.it laughing about it. I think that this actively illustrates that "bad words" can easily be formed from previously innocuous phrases.

Nope. He went for this semester, and has only recently (over the Christmas holiday) decided to defer his degree until next year. I first went to the site some time in September, and he'd already sold at least 100,000 pixels by then. The difficult part of a site like he has is selling the first 10,000 pixels. He'd already managed to get an article on bbc.co.uk at the time when I first looked at his site, and that had started the ball rolling.

He goes to my university (Nottingham University). Much respect to him :) Nottingham has a good entrepreneurial reputation I believe also :D I always wondered how he got the site started in the first place though, and this thread is the first time I've heard about his professional marketing help, which is a bit disappointing really. Edit: I just read some of his blog, and he only hired his professional publicist in the middle of October, so it didn't get him started at all. Also, it says he has deferred his degree until next year, so technically he doesn't go to my university, heh :P

Happy New Year from the UK!! :D I really liked the London fireworks centred around the London Eye :D

Even if they are drunk, I don't see why that's an excuse for anything they do afterwards anyway. Drunk or not, if someone does something stupid, it's still stupid. I don't like how stupid people are allowed to get away with it by pleading inebriation, when they should be ridiculed to the full extent of their stupidity.

If someone is typing like an idiot on a forum, then I'm just more likely to skip over their post, or at least skim read faster. It's not a conscious decision, I do it automatically. In the same vein, in an online conversation I'll form an opinion of someone based on their writing. If you type like a 12 year old, then I'll think of you like one, whether you're 10 years old or 30. Newbies don't realise that on the internet, no one can judge you on your appearance, but they can on the basis of how you write.

That's what historians do. They don't sit there memorising dates. They make valued judgements based upon the facts that they know. Standardised tests are an imperfect way of testing people, but they're the cheapest and least biased for comparison between large groups of people. You have to play the system - it's just a game.

Though I hate these company finance debates, since it's none of our business really - Jagex fairly recently hit 500,000 members, that means a bit below $2.5m per month.

But, some people have more money than time. They could be earning $100 per hour or something rather than spending an hour getting $5 worth of rs gold.