I don't think it makes a difference whether or not you bought it for personal use or for resale either.
However, you'll see that I cleverly used those two as case examples. In the personal use example I specified that the sale price was less than the purchase price. Which is why "generally" plain old folks selling to other plain old folks does not incur any tax - the sale price of the item is generally less than the purchase price. I paired these two because that is generally going to be the case with personal use items.
In the for resale example, you'll note that I specified that the item was sold for a profit, and thus taxed. I paired these two because that is generally going to be the case for items for resale. If you note I did not specify the reason I though you bought the books you sold, simply stated that if you make money off of them it's income. Certainly I could have been more clear about the orthogonality of {profit, loss} and {personal, resale} however.
You seem to have done a complete 180 from your original statement, though:
If you sell that grill at the flea market, or on eBay, it damn sure is taxable, though. You're making money from the sale of an item -- by engaging in the sale, you are making a profit -- it is esentially self-employment even if it is not your main source of income.
This is what I was objecting to, as it is patently false as written. Most of the time, for most people, it's not taxable much less "damn sure taxable". Most of the time the sale of items from a home do not constitute a profit. It is certainly also false that "by engaging in the sale you are making a profit", as you point out quite nicely yourself above that this is only true if the sale price is above your purchase price. Even though one gets money from such a sale it is not a source of income or self-employment in these cases.
I think that the strategy of large corps is to let the patent trolls sue their smaller competitors to oblivion or at least keep them at a competitive disadvantage through having to make royalty payments. Meanwhile, make it known very clearly that your company's legal team will put the troll out of business if they should try to sue.
If you buy something for personal use, use it and sell it on ebay or a garage sale I believe that you owe no income taxes on that item if the sale price is less than the purchase price. So the sale of an old grill or suit on ebay is not generally taxable. This counts as recouping some of the money spent on the item not "making money from the sale of an item."
However, if you buy something somewhere (even used) and sell it on ebay for a profit there is income tax.
In your case, your collectible books are probably being sold at a greater price than you paid. Therefore, there is income tax. You might be "just one private citizen selling to other private citizens" but the fact that you make money means you have also generated income. The average person who pulls stuff out of their closet to sell does not generate income since the sale price is less than what they bought it for.
IANAA (i am not an accountant), go to h&r block if you really need tax advice.
If you can't deal with singing in front of a coach or teacher, then you're never going to sing in front of ANYONE -- and if that's the case, then you need to find another hobby. If you're singing just for yourself, you're really wasting your time.
Yeah, because obviously you should ultimately do your hobbies for other people's enjoyment or you're just wasting your time. Anyone spot a flaw in this line of reasoning?:)
But if this makes it into law, then it wouldn't be breaking the law, would it?
Any time I see stories like this, or making it legal for copyright holders to break into/destroy/etc. people's computers I tend to think that while it may help some big players in the short run a nice Akido type move is lurking in the background for the very small players as well.
Incorporate, create some software (or some music) and leak it to the net. Now, anyone is a possible target for you because it is possible that they could have your stuff. I would put this is a numbered list but 4. would be hijinks any mayhem I suppose, not profit!
Almost, but not quite. As I said in another post, this is true only if your code is GPLv3 as well.
For example, if you did a clean room implementation for BSD you could still find yourself facing patent lawsuits. Unless I am missing something...
Yes, however only if you utilize the same license (GPLv3).
Using any other license, even doing a clean room implementation, does not protect you from a patent lawsuit. Even someone creating a public domain implementation could still be sued, if I follow things correctly.
While this is unarguably good news if you prefer the GPLv3 for your work, it quite clearly shows how GPLv3 is an aggressive license designed to out-compete other licenses in the license world. The more patents that are aggregated under the GPLv3 umbrella, the more licenses that do not have this protection should be disadvantaged (given a non-zero probability of lawsuits on the patents).
Yes, I've heard that people on methadone treatment (who get their drugs cheaply or free) tend to go out and mug little old ladies.
Oh wait! They don't! It's only when drugs are expensive and scarce that drug addicts tend turn to criminal activities to support their habit. That's because even to an addict it's much safer not to engage in risky behaviours when there's a choice.
Cheap, legal drugs such as nicotine (which is, mg for mg more addictive than heroine) don't seem to have this issue. What makes you think that other drugs would?
In addition, there are two sets of people who commit criminal behaviour as addicts - those who would do so anyway (even without being addicted) and those who would not. Since the statistics lump these two together it's pretty hard to correlate drug use with criminal activity and much harder to say that it's just the drugs given the circumstances under which they have to be obtained (expensive, criminal contact just to obtain substances, etc.)
What got your panties in a twist? My guess it that you just don't like punk. And here I thought the majority on/. looked beyond outward appearances but calling him a clown seems to have got you mods so perhaps I was wrong.
Breaking down his qualities as a cyberpunk:
Cyber: "Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today..." obviously not into computers, so I can really see where you're going here...
punk: Multicolored mohawk and combat boots, classic punk. On noes! Only if his attitude and outlook are also punk! Well, that is a bit hard to call but his fashion choices certainly lends credence to it, don't you think? And unless you've met him personally I'm going to have to say you're the clown.
Perhaps you'd care to give an example of a "true cyberpunk" that happens to better fit the definition?
Well, with proper modern tachyon PTP links, UniverseNet isn't shitty either.
Problem is, I can't get that (anyone have a spare hyper-klein bottle lying around?) OR a decent DSL link. For many people DSL is not really a viable option. DSL doesn't have to be shitty, agreed. But for many people, it is - it doesn't have to be but that's not the reality on the ground.
Both "poisoning sites" as you say and DOS'ing sites are criminally illegal in the US. MD is basically saying that autoconfiguring their servers to perform illegal activities is fine but there is no difference in the legality of MD's actions whether the site they target is legitimate or not. Even if Rev3 was hosting illegal content it's still illegal to hack into their servers and it's still illegal to DOS them. Imagine that.
I believe you have a couple of facts wrong. First, the tracker was not "open" per-se. MediaDefender utilized an exploit, or hack as they are sometimes called to illegally access another system and illegally plant data. I don't know where you got the part about other people also illegally accessing Rev3's systems but perhaps I missed it. To my knowledge it was not MD noticing illegal torrents - it was MD noticing the perfectly legal torrents that Rev3 hosts themselves.
It doesn't fscking matter if it was or was not "another tracker that was tracking infringing content". It doesn't matter that MD was "completely unaware that this tracker was intended for Legal content only." It is criminally illegal in the US to 1) hack into other people's systems 2) DOS other people's systems - (and here's the point you seem to miss in your apologia) regardless of any criminal activity on those systems. Full stop.
There is no wiggle room for MD here especially since they have admitted to the crimes. The only thing that could save them is the corporate cash defense - "we have a lot of money, and corporations run by a higher law so we're obviously not guilty." Unfortunately, that one seems to work all too well today.
I certainly don't want to make light of Microsoft's blatant manipulation of the processes, but in some sense the Microsoft Office formats are `already in use and mature'. Anyone on a standards committee who is only a simple Windows/Office user because s/he is an expert in an entirely different field, may well be astonished that people would be against fast-tracking Microsoft's standards. After all, it's the only document standard they use daily. And of course all protests against the standardization are troublesome meddling by ivory-tower activists. I believe that you are incorrect. It is my understanding that Microsoft's current document output formats do not meet this standard, and will not for some time. Thus, they are not in use at all and actually probably never will be (they are already planning a revision to the spec, which probably also won't be implemented).
Re:Rise and fall and rise of the geek cool aesthet
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The Rise of Geekdom
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· Score: 1
The geek-nerd cool aesthetic can be modeled as a rising line of constant slope (b) with a sinusoidal oscillation whose angular frequency (w) and amplitude (d) must be determined by other socio-economic factors: a+bt+dsin(wt) So it can be modeled as a ringtone, then.:)
So, to restate my point (in case it wasn't clear):
Greenpeace's antics, while flawed, are not useless, as they draw attention to environmental concerns which may otherwise be overlooked in the purchasing process. In a previous post you already stated:
Note that this doesn't mean that Greenpeace doesn't use misleading information, which while not useless is detrimental. And I cannot really parse the logic of your entire argument.
How can something be detrimental and still be useful? Either something is detrimental in solving environmental problems or it is helpful in solving them. I suppose one might argue about local minima producing global optima a few layers up the chain but I don't think that's a very useful path.
If the environmental concerns they are pointing out are over the top propaganda, patently false or errors in analysis, then then are detrimental. Yes, "environmental concerns" are very real but whether these particular concerns are real does matter.
The point the GP was trying to make was that the ratings that Greenpeace has come up with are not in fact based on reality.
Why would it be "useful" in any sense to draw people's attention to "environmental concerns" that are not in fact valid? I think consumers should overlook environmental concerns that are patently false, don't you? What is the utility to drawing attention to false environmental concerns, in your mind?
If you say simple awareness that companies produce goods that have externalities or increased awareness of "the environment" I guess I could agree with that. But if the ratings are misleading, they are not "useful" in a real world sense. A consumer cannot use this ranking for the practical purpose of buying products from companies that pollute least or to force companies to become more environmentally friendly.
I really like how you totally miss the parent's point and go on a rant about Linux.
His point really boils down to:
1) Microsoft is aiming at the broad market - which includes quite a few ordinary people (kind of the definition of "broad market" if you think about it)
2) As such their software should be designed to be secure for that broad market.
3) Microsoft cannot then claim that their software is secure but the users are the problem
4) If they do make that claim, then by definition they have not designed the software to be secure for their target market.
This argument actually has very little to do with Linux.
About the only think that even tangentially hits upon Linux are the underlying questions - how do you create a secure system that is still usable by ordinary people, and is that even possible?
And what law says that I can't install Leopard on a Dell?
Oh, I get it, you're saying that the EULA is the law. Well, sorry to disabuse you of that notion but that portion of the EULA is probably not enforceable (that means it's not the law!). Even if it is enforceable, it's up to a judge to decide that, as well as whether you are breaking the law when breaking the clause.
So, at this point you cannot say someone who installs Leopard on a Dell is breaking the law or that they are not legal. It is just factually incorrect until a court case has been resolved about this (and even then, it would only be against the law in the jurisdiction of that court!).
Re:Avian Flu Vaccine For H5N1 Mutation Human to Hu
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Earthquake In China
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· Score: 1
I thought that the main trouble of flus like Avian flu was the immune system response killing the host (which is why more healthy, younger people die with these varieties - their healthier immune systems mount a much stronger response, which kills them).
Will such vaccines moderate the immune response or kill the flu so fast that a massive immune response is averted? Or am i completely wrong?:) Thanks!
Is there something about the proportions here that isn't quite right? Yes, it's your skewed sense of reality. If you don't think there were idiotic jokes, complaints about 9/11 not being 'tech', ignorant nonsense about politics, etc., you either were not paying attention or you have blinders on. You appear to be selecting your facts based on your own biases rather than reality.
This is a really cool experiment, because what was written does not change (until we really do have Big Brother!). I'm betting I could match you idiotic joke for idiotic joke, complaint for complaint, ignorant nonsense for ignorant nonsense and still have some to spare.
If you really think
response of the Americans to a major disaster in China is one ridicule and cold, heartless arrogance based on your current reading of Slashdot about the earthquake and fail to come to the same conclusion based on the same pattern in the 9/11 stories (which really did have the same pattern!) then it can only be said that your filters do not mesh with reality.
What cannot be said is that your interpretation is correct. Sorry.
I believe you are incorrect. Just because an opinion is unpopular in a particular place does not make it beyond the boundary of free speech. Shouting "Jesus loves gays" in a fundamentalist church is in no way a direct incitement to violence.
You see direct incitements to violence must be, well, direct. And then they must be incitements to violence. The statement fails both tests. Just because it is likely to produce violence does not mean the statement is inciting violence. And it is certainly not direct - there is no violence or lawlessness advocated by the statement.
Next, you've turned the whole issue upside down. While people are committing a crime when they attack you for such a statement, and your statement is a proximate cause of their actions, the statement "Jesus loves gays" in no way tries to rally the people to beat you up. That happens within their own minds as a reaction against your statement, their actions are not in agreement with your statement.
Maybe I'm too late to the discussion, but here you go.
I don't believe there is necessarily a religious connection to saying "this is wrong." Why is it wrong? For starters, do you actually believe no such creations will be allowed to come to term? If you were offered, secretly, to have a "superior, genetically enhanced" child would you not take the offer? Don't you want your offspring to be the very best they could possibly be?
But, tell me how this is wrong? I would think that it's just the opposite - if we can spare someone from having a miserable existence due to a debilitating disease shouldn't we? Or should we just say "them's the breaks". I think you are trying to use our current medical moral landscape to bolster you point where it is in itself incorrect. Western medicine is fixated on the "rightness" of correcting dis-ease and generally at the best ambivalent about actually improving people through science. They like to make sick people healthy, not healthy people whole or whole people better. So I believe your first point is playing off of that. If most everyone wants their children to be more intelligent, stronger, whatever, how is it wrong if we are able to do just that?
Genetic modification holds the promise and the threat of changing the face of humanity. Literally in some ways. But the real problem isn't just making green people but people that are not human and do not share humanity with the rest of the people on the planet. This is a fundamental point; we can have a society because of a shared heritage. Messing around with things that at this point we have little knowledge of is an open invitation to creating a branch of the human species which shares no common heritage.
How much common heritage do you really share with a native from the Amazon Basin? Do you think that you would share more or less "heritage" with someone like that or a genetically modified person who went to your Secondary School? Are you basing this division strictly on "genetic heritage"? Are you saying that a genetically modified human would no longer feel "humanity"?
Given people like you, who say things like genetically modified people "are not human and do not share humanity with the rest of people on the planet" I can see the type of bias such humans are likely to face. It will probably be a stigma for quite some time. It seems to me that you are the one who is not sharing humanity...
What would we, meaning the current humans on the planet, do with someone that was both human and not human? Not human because they, for example, believed and acted like they were a superior form of life and that all others were placed within their view for their own amusement? OK, one such being would be a curiosity. 100 would be a threat and 1000 would be a war. What part of the Star Trek episode "Botany Bay" did you not understand?
Well, I'm pretty sure I understood the part about it being a TV show. I could also swear that I've already met humans that "believed and acted like they were a superior form of life and that all others were placed within their view for their own amusement" - have you been around Slashdot long? Such an attitude seems like it would be incredibly human, the first half for sure, the second appears to be a defect (although also seen in the general population, called sociopaths).
I'm not sure I would say this is an "ethical" problem, but it certainly is a problem that we do not have to address. We can choose not to go down this road. We, as the humans on the planet, must not go down this road as it stands a really good chance of leading to disaster, potentially on a global scale.
No, we can't. I do not believe teh human race is capable of refraining from poking a stick at things that look interesting (the stick in this case being science). We search down through all avenues of knowledge and try stuff out. We will not leave anything alone unless we are certain there's nothing there for us. It's just wh
One of the conclusions of this article is that he hopes that we don't find life on Mars, or anywhere else in the galaxy, as it would mean that the Great Filter would then supposedly be ahead of us on our path.
This seems to be logically incorrect. Obviously, if we find signs of life on other planets where life no longer exists then their own particular Great Filter event already happened. So if we do find trilobites on Mars we can conclude, based on the observable evidence, that a Great Filter Event is more than 50% probable to be in the past (given the initial probabilities with no data as 50% past, 50% future).
The more and more planets we find that had life on them (without advanced civilizations) and no longer do the higher the probability that Great Filter Events are in the past.
Also, I am of the mind that there are numerous small filter events of varying probabilities in a semi continuous stream, and of which could cause a single instance to become inviable, none of which present a massively improbable barrier individually. This rather negates the argument I used above as it dismisses the theory of a Great Filter Event completely but it does not negate the poor understanding the author showes of what life on Mars would mean given that the GFE theory is correct.
Most everyone knows by now that inkjet printers are not the way to go on a price/performance standpoint. I've seen many people in this thread talking up moving to a laser printer, despite the higher initial costs.
Multifunction inkjets came out on the consumer market quite some time ago and are pretty inexpensive today (for the machine) yet have all the issues with inkjets. Multifunction laser printers are relatively new on the market and I don't have any experience with them. My injket printer died recently and I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for a home multifunction b&w (or colour) laser printer they've used. I'd like to get off the cart wagon as well...
I'm going to have to say that when dealing with people - past performance is an indication of future behaviour. In fact, it is generally the most reliable predictor.
So the person killed someone as a result of a drunken rage. While some percentage of people would have their lives straightened out by the act itself, a much larger percentage would not. I'm fairly certain I'd like them behind bars either way, since there is no reliable way of telling one from the other. Is the first time free, and then after they kill someone else we put them in jail?
By the way, murdering someone is *not* "a few seconds of stupidity" in my book - it shows a much more fundamental problem than 'mere' stupidity.
On a modern OS you have to work hard to make malloc fail.
The only way I've seen to get it to consistently fail is not on low memory but by asking for ludicrous amounts like 4GB... So, in other words, you don't have to try very hard at all?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it makes a difference whether or not you bought it for personal use or for resale either.
However, you'll see that I cleverly used those two as case examples. In the personal use example I specified that the sale price was less than the purchase price. Which is why "generally" plain old folks selling to other plain old folks does not incur any tax - the sale price of the item is generally less than the purchase price. I paired these two because that is generally going to be the case with personal use items.
In the for resale example, you'll note that I specified that the item was sold for a profit, and thus taxed. I paired these two because that is generally going to be the case for items for resale. If you note I did not specify the reason I though you bought the books you sold, simply stated that if you make money off of them it's income. Certainly I could have been more clear about the orthogonality of {profit, loss} and {personal, resale} however.
You seem to have done a complete 180 from your original statement, though:
If you sell that grill at the flea market, or on eBay, it damn sure is taxable, though. You're making money from the sale of an item -- by engaging in the sale, you are making a profit -- it is esentially self-employment even if it is not your main source of income.
This is what I was objecting to, as it is patently false as written. Most of the time, for most people, it's not taxable much less "damn sure taxable". Most of the time the sale of items from a home do not constitute a profit. It is certainly also false that "by engaging in the sale you are making a profit", as you point out quite nicely yourself above that this is only true if the sale price is above your purchase price. Even though one gets money from such a sale it is not a source of income or self-employment in these cases.
I think that the strategy of large corps is to let the patent trolls sue their smaller competitors to oblivion or at least keep them at a competitive disadvantage through having to make royalty payments. Meanwhile, make it known very clearly that your company's legal team will put the troll out of business if they should try to sue.
I believe that you are slightly off track.
If you buy something for personal use, use it and sell it on ebay or a garage sale I believe that you owe no income taxes on that item if the sale price is less than the purchase price. So the sale of an old grill or suit on ebay is not generally taxable. This counts as recouping some of the money spent on the item not "making money from the sale of an item."
However, if you buy something somewhere (even used) and sell it on ebay for a profit there is income tax.
In your case, your collectible books are probably being sold at a greater price than you paid. Therefore, there is income tax. You might be "just one private citizen selling to other private citizens" but the fact that you make money means you have also generated income. The average person who pulls stuff out of their closet to sell does not generate income since the sale price is less than what they bought it for.
IANAA (i am not an accountant), go to h&r block if you really need tax advice.
If you can't deal with singing in front of a coach or teacher, then you're never going to sing in front of ANYONE -- and if that's the case, then you need to find another hobby. If you're singing just for yourself, you're really wasting your time.
Yeah, because obviously you should ultimately do your hobbies for other people's enjoyment or you're just wasting your time. Anyone spot a flaw in this line of reasoning? :)
But if this makes it into law, then it wouldn't be breaking the law, would it?
Any time I see stories like this, or making it legal for copyright holders to break into/destroy/etc. people's computers I tend to think that while it may help some big players in the short run a nice Akido type move is lurking in the background for the very small players as well.
Incorporate, create some software (or some music) and leak it to the net. Now, anyone is a possible target for you because it is possible that they could have your stuff. I would put this is a numbered list but 4. would be hijinks any mayhem I suppose, not profit!
Almost, but not quite. As I said in another post, this is true only if your code is GPLv3 as well. For example, if you did a clean room implementation for BSD you could still find yourself facing patent lawsuits. Unless I am missing something...
Yes, however only if you utilize the same license (GPLv3).
Using any other license, even doing a clean room implementation, does not protect you from a patent lawsuit. Even someone creating a public domain implementation could still be sued, if I follow things correctly.
While this is unarguably good news if you prefer the GPLv3 for your work, it quite clearly shows how GPLv3 is an aggressive license designed to out-compete other licenses in the license world. The more patents that are aggregated under the GPLv3 umbrella, the more licenses that do not have this protection should be disadvantaged (given a non-zero probability of lawsuits on the patents).
Yes, I've heard that people on methadone treatment (who get their drugs cheaply or free) tend to go out and mug little old ladies.
Oh wait! They don't! It's only when drugs are expensive and scarce that drug addicts tend turn to criminal activities to support their habit. That's because even to an addict it's much safer not to engage in risky behaviours when there's a choice.
Cheap, legal drugs such as nicotine (which is, mg for mg more addictive than heroine) don't seem to have this issue. What makes you think that other drugs would?
In addition, there are two sets of people who commit criminal behaviour as addicts - those who would do so anyway (even without being addicted) and those who would not. Since the statistics lump these two together it's pretty hard to correlate drug use with criminal activity and much harder to say that it's just the drugs given the circumstances under which they have to be obtained (expensive, criminal contact just to obtain substances, etc.)
What got your panties in a twist? My guess it that you just don't like punk. And here I thought the majority on /. looked beyond outward appearances but calling him a clown seems to have got you mods so perhaps I was wrong.
Breaking down his qualities as a cyberpunk:
Cyber: "Netscape/Mozilla developers who laid the foundations for our Firefox of today..." obviously not into computers, so I can really see where you're going here...
punk: Multicolored mohawk and combat boots, classic punk. On noes! Only if his attitude and outlook are also punk! Well, that is a bit hard to call but his fashion choices certainly lends credence to it, don't you think? And unless you've met him personally I'm going to have to say you're the clown.
Perhaps you'd care to give an example of a "true cyberpunk" that happens to better fit the definition?
Well, with proper modern tachyon PTP links, UniverseNet isn't shitty either.
Problem is, I can't get that (anyone have a spare hyper-klein bottle lying around?) OR a decent DSL link. For many people DSL is not really a viable option. DSL doesn't have to be shitty, agreed. But for many people, it is - it doesn't have to be but that's not the reality on the ground.
Both "poisoning sites" as you say and DOS'ing sites are criminally illegal in the US. MD is basically saying that autoconfiguring their servers to perform illegal activities is fine but there is no difference in the legality of MD's actions whether the site they target is legitimate or not. Even if Rev3 was hosting illegal content it's still illegal to hack into their servers and it's still illegal to DOS them. Imagine that.
I believe you have a couple of facts wrong. First, the tracker was not "open" per-se. MediaDefender utilized an exploit, or hack as they are sometimes called to illegally access another system and illegally plant data. I don't know where you got the part about other people also illegally accessing Rev3's systems but perhaps I missed it. To my knowledge it was not MD noticing illegal torrents - it was MD noticing the perfectly legal torrents that Rev3 hosts themselves.
It doesn't fscking matter if it was or was not "another tracker that was tracking infringing content". It doesn't matter that MD was "completely unaware that this tracker was intended for Legal content only." It is criminally illegal in the US to 1) hack into other people's systems 2) DOS other people's systems - (and here's the point you seem to miss in your apologia) regardless of any criminal activity on those systems. Full stop.
There is no wiggle room for MD here especially since they have admitted to the crimes. The only thing that could save them is the corporate cash defense - "we have a lot of money, and corporations run by a higher law so we're obviously not guilty." Unfortunately, that one seems to work all too well today.
Greenpeace's antics, while flawed, are not useless, as they draw attention to environmental concerns which may otherwise be overlooked in the purchasing process. In a previous post you already stated: Note that this doesn't mean that Greenpeace doesn't use misleading information, which while not useless is detrimental. And I cannot really parse the logic of your entire argument.
How can something be detrimental and still be useful? Either something is detrimental in solving environmental problems or it is helpful in solving them. I suppose one might argue about local minima producing global optima a few layers up the chain but I don't think that's a very useful path.
If the environmental concerns they are pointing out are over the top propaganda, patently false or errors in analysis, then then are detrimental. Yes, "environmental concerns" are very real but whether these particular concerns are real does matter.
The point the GP was trying to make was that the ratings that Greenpeace has come up with are not in fact based on reality.
Why would it be "useful" in any sense to draw people's attention to "environmental concerns" that are not in fact valid? I think consumers should overlook environmental concerns that are patently false, don't you? What is the utility to drawing attention to false environmental concerns, in your mind?
If you say simple awareness that companies produce goods that have externalities or increased awareness of "the environment" I guess I could agree with that. But if the ratings are misleading, they are not "useful" in a real world sense. A consumer cannot use this ranking for the practical purpose of buying products from companies that pollute least or to force companies to become more environmentally friendly.
I really like how you totally miss the parent's point and go on a rant about Linux.
His point really boils down to:
1) Microsoft is aiming at the broad market - which includes quite a few ordinary people (kind of the definition of "broad market" if you think about it)
2) As such their software should be designed to be secure for that broad market.
3) Microsoft cannot then claim that their software is secure but the users are the problem
4) If they do make that claim, then by definition they have not designed the software to be secure for their target market.
This argument actually has very little to do with Linux.
About the only think that even tangentially hits upon Linux are the underlying questions - how do you create a secure system that is still usable by ordinary people, and is that even possible?
And what law says that I can't install Leopard on a Dell?
Oh, I get it, you're saying that the EULA is the law. Well, sorry to disabuse you of that notion but that portion of the EULA is probably not enforceable (that means it's not the law!). Even if it is enforceable, it's up to a judge to decide that, as well as whether you are breaking the law when breaking the clause.
So, at this point you cannot say someone who installs Leopard on a Dell is breaking the law or that they are not legal. It is just factually incorrect until a court case has been resolved about this (and even then, it would only be against the law in the jurisdiction of that court!).
I thought that the main trouble of flus like Avian flu was the immune system response killing the host (which is why more healthy, younger people die with these varieties - their healthier immune systems mount a much stronger response, which kills them).
:) Thanks!
Will such vaccines moderate the immune response or kill the flu so fast that a massive immune response is averted? Or am i completely wrong?
This is a really cool experiment, because what was written does not change (until we really do have Big Brother!). I'm betting I could match you idiotic joke for idiotic joke, complaint for complaint, ignorant nonsense for ignorant nonsense and still have some to spare.
If you really think response of the Americans to a major disaster in China is one ridicule and cold, heartless arrogance based on your current reading of Slashdot about the earthquake and fail to come to the same conclusion based on the same pattern in the 9/11 stories (which really did have the same pattern!) then it can only be said that your filters do not mesh with reality.
What cannot be said is that your interpretation is correct. Sorry.
I believe you are incorrect. Just because an opinion is unpopular in a particular place does not make it beyond the boundary of free speech. Shouting "Jesus loves gays" in a fundamentalist church is in no way a direct incitement to violence.
You see direct incitements to violence must be, well, direct. And then they must be incitements to violence. The statement fails both tests. Just because it is likely to produce violence does not mean the statement is inciting violence. And it is certainly not direct - there is no violence or lawlessness advocated by the statement.
Next, you've turned the whole issue upside down. While people are committing a crime when they attack you for such a statement, and your statement is a proximate cause of their actions, the statement "Jesus loves gays" in no way tries to rally the people to beat you up. That happens within their own minds as a reaction against your statement, their actions are not in agreement with your statement.
Maybe I'm too late to the discussion, but here you go.
I don't believe there is necessarily a religious connection to saying "this is wrong." Why is it wrong? For starters, do you actually believe no such creations will be allowed to come to term? If you were offered, secretly, to have a "superior, genetically enhanced" child would you not take the offer? Don't you want your offspring to be the very best they could possibly be?
But, tell me how this is wrong? I would think that it's just the opposite - if we can spare someone from having a miserable existence due to a debilitating disease shouldn't we? Or should we just say "them's the breaks". I think you are trying to use our current medical moral landscape to bolster you point where it is in itself incorrect. Western medicine is fixated on the "rightness" of correcting dis-ease and generally at the best ambivalent about actually improving people through science. They like to make sick people healthy, not healthy people whole or whole people better. So I believe your first point is playing off of that. If most everyone wants their children to be more intelligent, stronger, whatever, how is it wrong if we are able to do just that?
Genetic modification holds the promise and the threat of changing the face of humanity. Literally in some ways. But the real problem isn't just making green people but people that are not human and do not share humanity with the rest of the people on the planet. This is a fundamental point; we can have a society because of a shared heritage. Messing around with things that at this point we have little knowledge of is an open invitation to creating a branch of the human species which shares no common heritage.
How much common heritage do you really share with a native from the Amazon Basin? Do you think that you would share more or less "heritage" with someone like that or a genetically modified person who went to your Secondary School? Are you basing this division strictly on "genetic heritage"? Are you saying that a genetically modified human would no longer feel "humanity"?
Given people like you, who say things like genetically modified people "are not human and do not share humanity with the rest of people on the planet" I can see the type of bias such humans are likely to face. It will probably be a stigma for quite some time. It seems to me that you are the one who is not sharing humanity...
What would we, meaning the current humans on the planet, do with someone that was both human and not human? Not human because they, for example, believed and acted like they were a superior form of life and that all others were placed within their view for their own amusement? OK, one such being would be a curiosity. 100 would be a threat and 1000 would be a war. What part of the Star Trek episode "Botany Bay" did you not understand?
Well, I'm pretty sure I understood the part about it being a TV show. I could also swear that I've already met humans that "believed and acted like they were a superior form of life and that all others were placed within their view for their own amusement" - have you been around Slashdot long? Such an attitude seems like it would be incredibly human, the first half for sure, the second appears to be a defect (although also seen in the general population, called sociopaths).
I'm not sure I would say this is an "ethical" problem, but it certainly is a problem that we do not have to address. We can choose not to go down this road. We, as the humans on the planet, must not go down this road as it stands a really good chance of leading to disaster, potentially on a global scale.
No, we can't. I do not believe teh human race is capable of refraining from poking a stick at things that look interesting (the stick in this case being science). We search down through all avenues of knowledge and try stuff out. We will not leave anything alone unless we are certain there's nothing there for us. It's just wh
One of the conclusions of this article is that he hopes that we don't find life on Mars, or anywhere else in the galaxy, as it would mean that the Great Filter would then supposedly be ahead of us on our path.
This seems to be logically incorrect. Obviously, if we find signs of life on other planets where life no longer exists then their own particular Great Filter event already happened. So if we do find trilobites on Mars we can conclude, based on the observable evidence, that a Great Filter Event is more than 50% probable to be in the past (given the initial probabilities with no data as 50% past, 50% future).
The more and more planets we find that had life on them (without advanced civilizations) and no longer do the higher the probability that Great Filter Events are in the past.
Also, I am of the mind that there are numerous small filter events of varying probabilities in a semi continuous stream, and of which could cause a single instance to become inviable, none of which present a massively improbable barrier individually. This rather negates the argument I used above as it dismisses the theory of a Great Filter Event completely but it does not negate the poor understanding the author showes of what life on Mars would mean given that the GFE theory is correct.
Most everyone knows by now that inkjet printers are not the way to go on a price/performance standpoint. I've seen many people in this thread talking up moving to a laser printer, despite the higher initial costs.
Multifunction inkjets came out on the consumer market quite some time ago and are pretty inexpensive today (for the machine) yet have all the issues with inkjets. Multifunction laser printers are relatively new on the market and I don't have any experience with them. My injket printer died recently and I was wondering if anyone has recommendations for a home multifunction b&w (or colour) laser printer they've used. I'd like to get off the cart wagon as well...
I'm going to have to say that when dealing with people - past performance is an indication of future behaviour. In fact, it is generally the most reliable predictor.
So the person killed someone as a result of a drunken rage. While some percentage of people would have their lives straightened out by the act itself, a much larger percentage would not. I'm fairly certain I'd like them behind bars either way, since there is no reliable way of telling one from the other. Is the first time free, and then after they kill someone else we put them in jail?
By the way, murdering someone is *not* "a few seconds of stupidity" in my book - it shows a much more fundamental problem than 'mere' stupidity.