Mozilla releases are useful for anyone that wants the latest bug fixes. I've found the last 5-8 releases to be perfectly useable and my parents both like Mozilla better because they don't have to wait 4-7 months for another updated version.
An idea I think the OSS community needs to explore in greater detail is the possibility of defeating Microsoft in its own home turf without making Linux a desktop. In public schools you'd have Mozilla, Abiword, a Win32 version of Gnumeric, etc competing with their Microsoft counterparts.
Let's face it, most people like Windows or MacOS and they aren't going to switch over to Linux. I personally happen to like Windows XP and OS X much better than KDE 3 and GNOME 1.4 as desktops (yes, I know XP/OS X are full OSs and KDE/GNOME are not). I'm using a MSDN copy of XP, but I use Mozilla for web browsing for example. Eventually when I can do things like embed tables in documents with Abiword, I'll switch to that from MS Word.
It doesn't have to be all one way or another. If it did, there wouldn't be an undeclared war between GNOME and KDE. There would be only one desktop interface for Linux users. Windows users don't have to be forced to go all Microsoft or no Microsoft. Most Windows users should have the option of running OSS alternatives to as many Microsoft products as possible... but for Windows, not just Linux/BSD.
That is the best way to help out public schools. Pay for all of their licenses for Windows so they're legal there and then help them get into OpenOffice if they feel that can replace Office without compromising any classes. Some schools may want to use Powerpoint to help students do presentations. OSS alternatives like OO have to be able to seemlessly replace Office in order for them to make the change. Home users will probably continue to use MS Office until someone gets the balls to pre-install OO, Abiword or something like that.
If people are forced to choose between all-Microsoft or no-Microsoft, if they have had success with the former, they'll most likely wholesale reject the latter right off the bat. Better the devil they know, than the one they don't. We have to change that by letting them pick and choose what to use. If Windows and OpenOffice work well for them, don't push them to go with Linux. Enough of this "the cup is half empty" attitude if people don't go completely pure OSS.
right now, type out a letter, have it create a RTF version of the document and while it is printing fill out the envelope and put a stamp on it. I don't get why so few people use Congress.org for that. It can create a formal looking letter that can be sent to your Senators in no time. It won't be ignored like email and it costs less than a dollar to send. Either send snail mail or STFU on your civil liberties. If you don't have the time to tell your Senator what you think, you don't deserve freedom.
because my AP US History text book said that the British Army sent about 20-25,000 troops to North America to fight the revolutionary war and that with the recruiting and drafting that resulted from the declaration of independence, the total global forces of the British Army reached over 100,000 back then.
No debate about the DMCA is complete without discussing my Congressman, Bob Goodlatte of the 6th District, VA. He is a fantatical support of the DMCA and has called me a thief and a supporter of theft in public because I stated my opposition to it. He is on his 6th term IIRC and he has currently no true competition worth even mentioning. The Democrats probably ran a guy against him last time in the hopes that they could raise some quick cash because right now he is totally unopposed with no hope in sight. That is bad, it means we have in the house a nearly institutional barrier that dearly loves the DMCA.
He comes from a generally right wing district (though one that is generally quite secular, the most religious person I've met in my area supports marijuana legalization for example!) and not even the LP will try to steal his seat. He has the luxury of having a district that is not dependent on government subsidies and doesn't have a large techie population therefore he can propose stuff like the DMCA and NETA safely (he is directly responsible for the latter and claims to have been heavily involved in the house version of the former).
People like Goodlatte are proof that we cannot rely on either party, we need a multiparty system where at least half the parties have clear cut political philosophies like the LP and Green Party. The LP IIRC is staunchly opposed to the DMCA and all legislation like it. It is the third largest party and that is a constant. The Green Party doesn't have even half the number of people in pubic office that the LP does. The LP is admittedly not very large, but it doesn't need a "celebrity" like Nader to get politically active people to remember that it even exists. In the last election, I could vote for the LP for governor, lt. governor and IIRC attorney general. The same could not be said about the Green Party. We need a party that has a shot of winning and we need to support it whenever possible.
If the anti-circumvention part was taken out of the DMCA it wouldn't be so bad if they followed up with an ammendment that says that an ISP can add a bill of >=$1 to the home user monthly bill that would be collected and sent to the RIAA to distribute and then all home users of that ISP would be immune from not-for profit file sharing copyright prosecution or liability. If I could pay $5 a month extra to be immune from prosecution and lawsuits so that I could use whatever protocol I want to download music to sample.... that is a pretty damn small price to pay.
A lot of things are different with the look and feel of KDE/GNOME and Windows. What do you tell a person who has no experience with Linux to do when Konqueror goes crazy as it often does? You cannot simply say "oh if your desktop locks up, hit alt-control-delete select explorer.exe, hit kill, the select file, new task and type explorer.exe"
I have been dealing with a lot of inexperienced users lately. Most of you people have no clue how difficult Linux is compared to Windows ME or XP. It gets even worse when you compare it to MacOS X. Linux is quite frankly a piece of shit on the desktop for the average user. It is too hard to get used to it. For those who are into it and know how to use it, it is great but that is a real minority. People don't want to be told that their files are in some directory called/home/$username, they want something intuitive like "My Documents!" Laugh all you want, but "My Documents" makes since. It's where "my documents" are. My Pictures, etc. Microsoft has done so much more to make Windows easy to use than the KDE or GNOME teams.
If KDE 4.0 or GNOME 3.0 cannot be at least where Windows 98 or 2000 are in terms of consistency and ease of use, just give up on the desktop. Linux will never win if it cannot at least do that.
So many of you seem to think that you can explain to the average person basic UNIX concepts like setting permissions. The average user doesn't want to learn how to do anything that isn't remotely intuitive and sadly a lot of things in Linux just aren't. There are more people like my parents who can't even be bothered to remember where they saved their documents than there are people willing to learn how to use Linux in its current state. When they want to remove a program, they don't want to have to run KPackage and find a package called "Mozilla-base-20020517" They want to see remove Mozilla and have that remove Mozilla. They don't want to have to search through 50 fucking pages of documentation to figure out how to get their cd burner to work. They want to simply start up their pc, have it auto detected with minimal fuss and be able to drag and drop mp3s from their personal folder.
What's the best way to tame the best? Revoke its corporate charter. I am certainly no proponent of a generalized corporate death penalty, but the courts should have the Supreme Courts should have the discresionary power to summarily revoke not-for-profit corporate charters based on the history of the organization. The RIAA has a history of legal terrorism against any potential threat. It wields state force as a weapon via the courts in order to maintain the status quo, a strategy irreconsilably at odds with free market capitalism.
What should terrify the RIAA is the possibility that the USSC will pull a Roe v Wade re copyright law; that suddenly out of no where it will take a fish hook to copyright law and essentially disembowl it. That is what Roe v Wade did to abortion laws. There is far more constitutional ground to oppose the DMCA than old anti-abortion laws.....
That ruling on virtual child pornography should have been a wake up call for the RIAA and MPAA because it shows that there is a hardline utilitarian streak to the current USSC. That ruling showed the public that utility matters to most of the justices, especially ones like Scalia that typically rule against big government (which is what the DMCA really is, an excuse to increase police powers).
A good legal argument to use before the USSC against the DMCA is that it violates the first amendment. The bill of rights was ratified AFTER the body of the Constitution. Therefore federal copyright law must be restricted by the first amendment since it came AFTER the clause in Article I, Section 8 establishing IP enforcement powers. Since the provision that "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" came after said section, it naturally follows that said section cannot restrict freedom of speech.
(Now what would really be nasty is if the USSC ruled that because local governments and corporations are both chartered by state governments, the states can legally hold not for profits like the RIAA to the provisions of the bill of rights)
We have to do something, otherwise the Christians or Jewish will kill us.
I'm a deist. With few exceptions, I categorically deny the validity of organized religions. However the above quote from the first article is one that even the most hardcore tolerance nazi needs to take a good look at. Islam's interaction with other religions has always been with its followers holding a sword to the followers of the other religion's necks. It should surprise no one if anyone from another religion feels hatred toward Islam. I have no religion (deism being almost an anti-religion) and I despise this filthy religion.
Of course I'm going to get modded down for "being a racist" or "being flamebait" because God forbid someone should say that a particular religion is inferior to other religions and that it should be excluded from the global debate on how to make the world a better place because it has a truly horrific history. Islam cannot as a whole come to the table and try to make suggestions on how to make the world more peaceful and free. Individual muslims can, but not the religion itself. It has no history of being able to coexist with other religions when it didn't have a military advantage they didn't. The internet isn't going to undo so many centuries of hate for non-Islamic religions and societies.
Other religions like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca and probably a lot more allow for secular coexistance and equal rights. They allow for freedom and tolerance. They make it easy to believe and yet be a rational human being. Islam does none of those things. All of the virtues we embrace, Islam does not. When we say tolerance, we mean accepting as equals and allowing for equal rights and the right to be left alone. Islamic tolerance is the strictest intepretation of the word, it "tolerates" your not being a muslim, but there is a price in the form of less rights and a special tax (not to mention social stigma and persecution).
Let's be honest, Christianity and Judaism haven't been as bad to us as many seem to think. When people insult Christianity and Judaism and proudly declare themselves to hate Christianity or Judaism, you don't see conservative Christians and Jews lining up to strap C4 to their bodies and suicide bomb their "enemies." They may shake their fists in anger, but they don't kill you for insulting or denegrating their religion. Now, get outside the West and do that in Saudi Arabia. I dare you, go to Mecca and yell "Fuck Muhammad!" and then yell either "Jesus Christ is the only Begotten Son of God and He died for your sins." or yell "There is no God you idiots!" Before you die, try to take a bet on where the AK-47 rounds are flying from that kill you.
The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn't like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one's rights.
Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom....
The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protectrion of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.
--Leonard Peikfoff
This may actually be a VERY good thing in disguise
on
Program Tivo over AOL
·
· Score: 2
Think about it. AOL, 1/2 of AOLTW acknowledging that PVRs are actually legitimate consumer electronics and trying to get its foot in the door by adding services to them. That not only discredits that stupid TW executive because who the hell is going to take her seriously when half of AOLTW is taking PVRs seriously, it also may mean that AOLTW will find a way to get around the "theft" issue of PVRs.
If AOLTW figures out how to make a profit on broadcasting and PVRs that is a good thing. It means that we will have one less company that is sympathetic to the unproductive whiners whose state-enforced monopolies have made them into lazy little shits unable to move faster in a rapidly changing marketplace than a T-Rex caught in a tar pit.
if I'm a thief of your precious IP then you're a thief of my far more valuable freedoms. Your entire business is a government created business. It cannot exist without state intervention into the economy. In a true lassiez faire nation you would not exist or would be scraping by. Don't whine and bitch and moan to me, you people are worse than welfare babies. Both you and welfare babies have to suck off the public teat for your sustinanice, but at least the welfare babies are even a little bit greatful for what society gives them. You miserable little shits expect society to hand over its cash and rights to you and then respect you and for you to not have to in any way show appreciation.
That is what I would say to that exec if I was called a thief by such a person to my face.....
Why not get rid of NASA and encourage private companies to take over? What has NASA accomplished in the past two decades that really justify its budget? I know it's a bit idealistic right now to hope that we could get the government to cut back on its spending, pay off the national debt and create a sustained tax cut, but that's IMO the only way to spur innovation here.
Let's face it, if there were very few to no regulatory hurdles to creating private space travel, colonies, etc coupled with low enough taxes for the venture capital to be there, we could accomplish NASA's "goals" in about half the time. Telling corporate America, "you see that big, beautiful, mineral-rich asteroid worth 2 trillion USD? Well if you can get to it, you can mine it for free!" would spur space R&D faster than NASA ever could.
No generation of Americans has ever had simultaneously the kind of economy we have and the scientific know-how. The only thing keeping us back is the government. The national debt's interest alone consumes 13% of the budget! If we got rid of it, filed the charters of 70% of the federal agencies in file 13, booted the majority of people off social security and medicare (keep only those that even if they stuck only to survival, could not pay for medical care) and cut the taxes to something minimal who knows what we could accomplish. There would be so much money availible for private research grants that it would be mind boggling.
I am probably making a mistake by trusting the slashdot editors since they typically don't edit any posts for clarity, but if the mini-description is true, then what is the point? If someone finds a new way to embed AGFA TT fonts then isn't that financially, a VERY GOOD THING for AGFA? Normally corporate executives are deleriously happy when someone finds a new legitimate use for their products because that creates potential for more customers. Of course since copyright is involved, all logic goes out the window. Copyright companies would rather have power than an ever expanding bottom line and/or relevence in the market; Sony, AGFA, et al would rather be able to wield terrible power over their customers' use of their products than have virtually no power and be almost unable to have production meet demand because their products are so hot.
What I meant is that if you maliciously fail to give credit then the government could define that as a crime or make you civily liable. For example, if a member of academia plagarizes someone else's work and makes money off of that the government could give the original creator a choice: sue the person or send him to prison.
Level 0: lifetime control over credit for work, no control over production. Level 1: 25 year exclusive monopoly, complete control over who produces, non-extendable. Level 2: 25 years, anyone can manufacture for a profit provided they give you a standard fee you declare in your copyright application; fee cannot under any circumstances be increased, only lower; copyright renewable once. Level 3: 20 years, anyone can produce provided they give up at least half of what you declare in your application; renewable for up to 3 terms.
Anyone seeking a copyright would have to apply for one of the 3 levels. Each level provides advantages and disadvantages for the holder.
All source code would have to become public domain once the copyright is demoted to level 0. For software, each copyright level would be reduced by 75% in the term of coverage it provides.
By law, any product produced with tax payers' money must be released to the public under a Level 0 copyright regardless of how much money was involved.
it sounds like socialism to the majority of people in the U.S. at least. It probably also sounds like that to those in the EU regimes that are socialists only so far as they can use socialist economics to control the lower and middle classes (ie the aristocrats that want to tax you and me 60-80% but want their yacts and porsches). And yes, I know socialism is not really the dirty word in Europe that it is in the US, but it can still influence center, right wing and the equivalent (if they even exist in Europe) of libertarians. Therefore insinuating a socialist connection with OSS can have an effective propaganda effect.
Truepath for those that haven't checked it out, is indeed a christian-themed hosting service. Now obviously someone may have used that to their advantage to do a hoax, but remember.... there are plenty of fundamentalists that say that magic the gathering, martial arts and star wars are satanic too. I remember seeing something on CBN saying that the Phantom Menace was anti-christian because anakin skywalker was called the "chosen one" and only Jesus can be the chosen one. And of course, the day you can show me a fundamentalist that knows any appreciable amount of information about any scientific discipline is the day that sufficient evidence to prove macroevolution beyond any shadow of a doubt will happen.
I'm strongly considering going into ROTC or getting a scholarship from a branch that doesn't have ROTC at my university. What's being missed here is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can do military IT service active duty for four years and then go into the reserves if you want to keep your foot in the door. Thus you can go active duty again if your company goes bankrupt IIRC
Wouldn't SPARC in your scenario interfere with PowerPC development? The way I see it, IBM would be much better off concentrating on 64bit PowerPC than SPARC.
Would they be willing to accept say.... $.10 per episode per viewer? That's what they'd have to do in order to stay in business thanks to the expectations on price created by cable and satellite.
Goodlatte is an ardent supporter of the DMCA. We need to let him know in clear and unambiguous language that he will lose votes if he doesn't put his constituents first on this issue.
I'd rather have FrankensteinBeOS than deadBeOS R5 that can't run on my new hardware. Perhaps you should help him rather than just bitch about it being a patchwork of different projects
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla releases are useful for anyone that wants the latest bug fixes. I've found the last 5-8 releases to be perfectly useable and my parents both like Mozilla better because they don't have to wait 4-7 months for another updated version.
An idea I think the OSS community needs to explore in greater detail is the possibility of defeating Microsoft in its own home turf without making Linux a desktop. In public schools you'd have Mozilla, Abiword, a Win32 version of Gnumeric, etc competing with their Microsoft counterparts.
Let's face it, most people like Windows or MacOS and they aren't going to switch over to Linux. I personally happen to like Windows XP and OS X much better than KDE 3 and GNOME 1.4 as desktops (yes, I know XP/OS X are full OSs and KDE/GNOME are not). I'm using a MSDN copy of XP, but I use Mozilla for web browsing for example. Eventually when I can do things like embed tables in documents with Abiword, I'll switch to that from MS Word.
It doesn't have to be all one way or another. If it did, there wouldn't be an undeclared war between GNOME and KDE. There would be only one desktop interface for Linux users. Windows users don't have to be forced to go all Microsoft or no Microsoft. Most Windows users should have the option of running OSS alternatives to as many Microsoft products as possible... but for Windows, not just Linux/BSD.
That is the best way to help out public schools. Pay for all of their licenses for Windows so they're legal there and then help them get into OpenOffice if they feel that can replace Office without compromising any classes. Some schools may want to use Powerpoint to help students do presentations. OSS alternatives like OO have to be able to seemlessly replace Office in order for them to make the change. Home users will probably continue to use MS Office until someone gets the balls to pre-install OO, Abiword or something like that.
If people are forced to choose between all-Microsoft or no-Microsoft, if they have had success with the former, they'll most likely wholesale reject the latter right off the bat. Better the devil they know, than the one they don't. We have to change that by letting them pick and choose what to use. If Windows and OpenOffice work well for them, don't push them to go with Linux. Enough of this "the cup is half empty" attitude if people don't go completely pure OSS.
right now, type out a letter, have it create a RTF version of the document and while it is printing fill out the envelope and put a stamp on it. I don't get why so few people use Congress.org for that. It can create a formal looking letter that can be sent to your Senators in no time. It won't be ignored like email and it costs less than a dollar to send. Either send snail mail or STFU on your civil liberties. If you don't have the time to tell your Senator what you think, you don't deserve freedom.
because my AP US History text book said that the British Army sent about 20-25,000 troops to North America to fight the revolutionary war and that with the recruiting and drafting that resulted from the declaration of independence, the total global forces of the British Army reached over 100,000 back then.
No debate about the DMCA is complete without discussing my Congressman, Bob Goodlatte of the 6th District, VA. He is a fantatical support of the DMCA and has called me a thief and a supporter of theft in public because I stated my opposition to it. He is on his 6th term IIRC and he has currently no true competition worth even mentioning. The Democrats probably ran a guy against him last time in the hopes that they could raise some quick cash because right now he is totally unopposed with no hope in sight. That is bad, it means we have in the house a nearly institutional barrier that dearly loves the DMCA.
He comes from a generally right wing district (though one that is generally quite secular, the most religious person I've met in my area supports marijuana legalization for example!) and not even the LP will try to steal his seat. He has the luxury of having a district that is not dependent on government subsidies and doesn't have a large techie population therefore he can propose stuff like the DMCA and NETA safely (he is directly responsible for the latter and claims to have been heavily involved in the house version of the former).
People like Goodlatte are proof that we cannot rely on either party, we need a multiparty system where at least half the parties have clear cut political philosophies like the LP and Green Party. The LP IIRC is staunchly opposed to the DMCA and all legislation like it. It is the third largest party and that is a constant. The Green Party doesn't have even half the number of people in pubic office that the LP does. The LP is admittedly not very large, but it doesn't need a "celebrity" like Nader to get politically active people to remember that it even exists. In the last election, I could vote for the LP for governor, lt. governor and IIRC attorney general. The same could not be said about the Green Party. We need a party that has a shot of winning and we need to support it whenever possible.
If the anti-circumvention part was taken out of the DMCA it wouldn't be so bad if they followed up with an ammendment that says that an ISP can add a bill of >=$1 to the home user monthly bill that would be collected and sent to the RIAA to distribute and then all home users of that ISP would be immune from not-for profit file sharing copyright prosecution or liability. If I could pay $5 a month extra to be immune from prosecution and lawsuits so that I could use whatever protocol I want to download music to sample.... that is a pretty damn small price to pay.
A lot of things are different with the look and feel of KDE/GNOME and Windows. What do you tell a person who has no experience with Linux to do when Konqueror goes crazy as it often does? You cannot simply say "oh if your desktop locks up, hit alt-control-delete select explorer.exe, hit kill, the select file, new task and type explorer.exe"
/home/$username, they want something intuitive like "My Documents!" Laugh all you want, but "My Documents" makes since. It's where "my documents" are. My Pictures, etc. Microsoft has done so much more to make Windows easy to use than the KDE or GNOME teams.
I have been dealing with a lot of inexperienced users lately. Most of you people have no clue how difficult Linux is compared to Windows ME or XP. It gets even worse when you compare it to MacOS X. Linux is quite frankly a piece of shit on the desktop for the average user. It is too hard to get used to it. For those who are into it and know how to use it, it is great but that is a real minority. People don't want to be told that their files are in some directory called
If KDE 4.0 or GNOME 3.0 cannot be at least where Windows 98 or 2000 are in terms of consistency and ease of use, just give up on the desktop. Linux will never win if it cannot at least do that.
So many of you seem to think that you can explain to the average person basic UNIX concepts like setting permissions. The average user doesn't want to learn how to do anything that isn't remotely intuitive and sadly a lot of things in Linux just aren't. There are more people like my parents who can't even be bothered to remember where they saved their documents than there are people willing to learn how to use Linux in its current state. When they want to remove a program, they don't want to have to run KPackage and find a package called "Mozilla-base-20020517" They want to see remove Mozilla and have that remove Mozilla. They don't want to have to search through 50 fucking pages of documentation to figure out how to get their cd burner to work. They want to simply start up their pc, have it auto detected with minimal fuss and be able to drag and drop mp3s from their personal folder.
What's the best way to tame the best? Revoke its corporate charter. I am certainly no proponent of a generalized corporate death penalty, but the courts should have the Supreme Courts should have the discresionary power to summarily revoke not-for-profit corporate charters based on the history of the organization. The RIAA has a history of legal terrorism against any potential threat. It wields state force as a weapon via the courts in order to maintain the status quo, a strategy irreconsilably at odds with free market capitalism.
What should terrify the RIAA is the possibility that the USSC will pull a Roe v Wade re copyright law; that suddenly out of no where it will take a fish hook to copyright law and essentially disembowl it. That is what Roe v Wade did to abortion laws. There is far more constitutional ground to oppose the DMCA than old anti-abortion laws.....
That ruling on virtual child pornography should have been a wake up call for the RIAA and MPAA because it shows that there is a hardline utilitarian streak to the current USSC. That ruling showed the public that utility matters to most of the justices, especially ones like Scalia that typically rule against big government (which is what the DMCA really is, an excuse to increase police powers).
A good legal argument to use before the USSC against the DMCA is that it violates the first amendment. The bill of rights was ratified AFTER the body of the Constitution. Therefore federal copyright law must be restricted by the first amendment since it came AFTER the clause in Article I, Section 8 establishing IP enforcement powers. Since the provision that "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" came after said section, it naturally follows that said section cannot restrict freedom of speech.
(Now what would really be nasty is if the USSC ruled that because local governments and corporations are both chartered by state governments, the states can legally hold not for profits like the RIAA to the provisions of the bill of rights)
We have to do something, otherwise the Christians or Jewish will kill us.
I'm a deist. With few exceptions, I categorically deny the validity of organized religions. However the above quote from the first article is one that even the most hardcore tolerance nazi needs to take a good look at. Islam's interaction with other religions has always been with its followers holding a sword to the followers of the other religion's necks. It should surprise no one if anyone from another religion feels hatred toward Islam. I have no religion (deism being almost an anti-religion) and I despise this filthy religion.
Of course I'm going to get modded down for "being a racist" or "being flamebait" because God forbid someone should say that a particular religion is inferior to other religions and that it should be excluded from the global debate on how to make the world a better place because it has a truly horrific history. Islam cannot as a whole come to the table and try to make suggestions on how to make the world more peaceful and free. Individual muslims can, but not the religion itself. It has no history of being able to coexist with other religions when it didn't have a military advantage they didn't. The internet isn't going to undo so many centuries of hate for non-Islamic religions and societies.
Other religions like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Wicca and probably a lot more allow for secular coexistance and equal rights. They allow for freedom and tolerance. They make it easy to believe and yet be a rational human being. Islam does none of those things. All of the virtues we embrace, Islam does not. When we say tolerance, we mean accepting as equals and allowing for equal rights and the right to be left alone. Islamic tolerance is the strictest intepretation of the word, it "tolerates" your not being a muslim, but there is a price in the form of less rights and a special tax (not to mention social stigma and persecution).
Let's be honest, Christianity and Judaism haven't been as bad to us as many seem to think. When people insult Christianity and Judaism and proudly declare themselves to hate Christianity or Judaism, you don't see conservative Christians and Jews lining up to strap C4 to their bodies and suicide bomb their "enemies." They may shake their fists in anger, but they don't kill you for insulting or denegrating their religion. Now, get outside the West and do that in Saudi Arabia. I dare you, go to Mecca and yell "Fuck Muhammad!" and then yell either "Jesus Christ is the only Begotten Son of God and He died for your sins." or yell "There is no God you idiots!" Before you die, try to take a bet on where the AK-47 rounds are flying from that kill you.
The American system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule; the classic example is ancient Athens. And the symbol of it is the fate of Socrates, who was put to death legally, because the majority didn't like what he was saying, although he had initiated no force and had violated no one's rights.
Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom....
The American system is a constitutionally limited republic, restricted to the protectrion of individual rights. In such a system, majority rule is applicable only to lesser details, such as the selection of certain personnel. But the majority has no say over the basic principles governing the government. It has no power to ask for or gain the infringement of individual rights.
--Leonard Peikfoff
Think about it. AOL, 1/2 of AOLTW acknowledging that PVRs are actually legitimate consumer electronics and trying to get its foot in the door by adding services to them. That not only discredits that stupid TW executive because who the hell is going to take her seriously when half of AOLTW is taking PVRs seriously, it also may mean that AOLTW will find a way to get around the "theft" issue of PVRs.
If AOLTW figures out how to make a profit on broadcasting and PVRs that is a good thing. It means that we will have one less company that is sympathetic to the unproductive whiners whose state-enforced monopolies have made them into lazy little shits unable to move faster in a rapidly changing marketplace than a T-Rex caught in a tar pit.
if I'm a thief of your precious IP then you're a thief of my far more valuable freedoms. Your entire business is a government created business. It cannot exist without state intervention into the economy. In a true lassiez faire nation you would not exist or would be scraping by. Don't whine and bitch and moan to me, you people are worse than welfare babies. Both you and welfare babies have to suck off the public teat for your sustinanice, but at least the welfare babies are even a little bit greatful for what society gives them. You miserable little shits expect society to hand over its cash and rights to you and then respect you and for you to not have to in any way show appreciation.
That is what I would say to that exec if I was called a thief by such a person to my face.....
Why not get rid of NASA and encourage private companies to take over? What has NASA accomplished in the past two decades that really justify its budget? I know it's a bit idealistic right now to hope that we could get the government to cut back on its spending, pay off the national debt and create a sustained tax cut, but that's IMO the only way to spur innovation here.
Let's face it, if there were very few to no regulatory hurdles to creating private space travel, colonies, etc coupled with low enough taxes for the venture capital to be there, we could accomplish NASA's "goals" in about half the time. Telling corporate America, "you see that big, beautiful, mineral-rich asteroid worth 2 trillion USD? Well if you can get to it, you can mine it for free!" would spur space R&D faster than NASA ever could.
No generation of Americans has ever had simultaneously the kind of economy we have and the scientific know-how. The only thing keeping us back is the government. The national debt's interest alone consumes 13% of the budget! If we got rid of it, filed the charters of 70% of the federal agencies in file 13, booted the majority of people off social security and medicare (keep only those that even if they stuck only to survival, could not pay for medical care) and cut the taxes to something minimal who knows what we could accomplish. There would be so much money availible for private research grants that it would be mind boggling.
I am probably making a mistake by trusting the slashdot editors since they typically don't edit any posts for clarity, but if the mini-description is true, then what is the point? If someone finds a new way to embed AGFA TT fonts then isn't that financially, a VERY GOOD THING for AGFA? Normally corporate executives are deleriously happy when someone finds a new legitimate use for their products because that creates potential for more customers. Of course since copyright is involved, all logic goes out the window. Copyright companies would rather have power than an ever expanding bottom line and/or relevence in the market; Sony, AGFA, et al would rather be able to wield terrible power over their customers' use of their products than have virtually no power and be almost unable to have production meet demand because their products are so hot.
What I meant is that if you maliciously fail to give credit then the government could define that as a crime or make you civily liable. For example, if a member of academia plagarizes someone else's work and makes money off of that the government could give the original creator a choice: sue the person or send him to prison.
it sounds like socialism to the majority of people in the U.S. at least. It probably also sounds like that to those in the EU regimes that are socialists only so far as they can use socialist economics to control the lower and middle classes (ie the aristocrats that want to tax you and me 60-80% but want their yacts and porsches). And yes, I know socialism is not really the dirty word in Europe that it is in the US, but it can still influence center, right wing and the equivalent (if they even exist in Europe) of libertarians. Therefore insinuating a socialist connection with OSS can have an effective propaganda effect.
I agree, but that doesn't mean that some bible thumping christian reconstructionist bitch doesn't disagree with us
Truepath for those that haven't checked it out, is indeed a christian-themed hosting service. Now obviously someone may have used that to their advantage to do a hoax, but remember.... there are plenty of fundamentalists that say that magic the gathering, martial arts and star wars are satanic too. I remember seeing something on CBN saying that the Phantom Menace was anti-christian because anakin skywalker was called the "chosen one" and only Jesus can be the chosen one. And of course, the day you can show me a fundamentalist that knows any appreciable amount of information about any scientific discipline is the day that sufficient evidence to prove macroevolution beyond any shadow of a doubt will happen.
I'm strongly considering going into ROTC or getting a scholarship from a branch that doesn't have ROTC at my university. What's being missed here is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. You can do military IT service active duty for four years and then go into the reserves if you want to keep your foot in the door. Thus you can go active duty again if your company goes bankrupt IIRC
Wouldn't SPARC in your scenario interfere with PowerPC development? The way I see it, IBM would be much better off concentrating on 64bit PowerPC than SPARC.
The more they do this the more enemies they will get and the less sympathy they will get from the public!!
Would they be willing to accept say.... $.10 per episode per viewer? That's what they'd have to do in order to stay in business thanks to the expectations on price created by cable and satellite.
Goodlatte is an ardent supporter of the DMCA. We need to let him know in clear and unambiguous language that he will lose votes if he doesn't put his constituents first on this issue.
I'd rather have FrankensteinBeOS than deadBeOS R5 that can't run on my new hardware. Perhaps you should help him rather than just bitch about it being a patchwork of different projects
Orwell did not advocate tyranny! He would be saddened if anything by this were he alive today