Maybe the way it was written is why FOSS is where it's at? Might not be such a bad idea to keep it around?
Then again, maybe the GPL isnotresponsible for great free software and open source software being written.
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should be allowed to pick their license of choice, including GPL. But there are plenty of examples of free software and open source software being highly successful and widely used that are not GPL'd.
The assumption that the GPL is responsible for the success of FOSS reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer is carrying a rock around that supposedly repels lions (or something). Lisa says, "That's ridiculous! What makes you think that repels lions?" and Homer replies, "You don't see any lions around, do you?"
I believe that the publicity surrounding GPL and the way it forces developers who use code licensed under it was a major factor in the expansion and acceptance of open source software. That doesn't mean that those other licenses aren't just as valuable to the ongoing health of and expansion of open source software. It just means that GPL created the mindspace to allow non-geeks to view open source as something more than a fringe element.
If you borrow the phrase 'derivative work', which is defined by copyright laws, and then the definition of 'derivative work' is changed in the copyright laws, does that mean the definition in the GPLv2 has also changed?
It doesn't matter how you word it, when the legal definition of the words you use change, what they mean in the license will change. You have to use words that have legal meaning to write your license, if the legal meaning of those words changes, the meaning of your license will change.
The GPLv2 author's "intent" is irrelevant in court.
Since the OP you are responding to appeared to be saying that the GPLv2 author's intent was to have it cover everything the common legal meaning allowed, in essence you said "You're wrong, what you said is the way it works."
Aside from the obvious absurdity of someone trying to record a movie with their laptop -- how much of a problem are off-screen recordings for the movie industry? I may be naive -- but I really have a hard time imagining someone saying -- "I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater! This is just as good! Now I don't need to go see it!"
Am I missing something here, or are these anti-piracy groups really that dense?
Actually what they are afraid of is: " I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater and now I know it sucks! I'm not going to waste my time and money going to the theater to see it." (see also someone else's comment about twits tweeting how bad the movie is).
What if your out of town on business? You are in meetings all day, your ride to and from the airport is a company provided limo, your hotel is within walking distance (but still several blocks) of the meetings, the movie theater is on the other side of the offices than your hotel.
I don't see this rule as inconveniencing very many members of a theaters potential customer base, but I see its impact on the pirating of movies as even less, so what is the point of aggravating even a small portion of your customer base in order to inconvenience an even smaller portion of those who pirate movies?
In some states a driver's license is the only valid form of identification to purchase alcohol. So those incapable of obtaining a driver's license due to disabilities cannot drink.
(Though this may actually primarily apply to out-of-staters, as this anecdote comes to me via a friend who could not use her state ID card to purchase alcohol in Utah. Or maybe Nevada, I don't remember.)
My exposure to that sort of case is that particular institutions implement an internal rule to not accept out of state non driver's license ID because the loss from the occasional lost sale this policy generates is significantly less than the loss from selling alcohol to a minor with a faked out of state non-driver's license ID (significant fines and loss of license to sell alcohol at all). I would bet that even a lawsuit based on the Americans with Disabilities Act would be cheaper than getting tagged for selling alcohol to a minor with a well forged out of state non-driver's license ID.
This cartoon certainly is real, chick publications is a somewhat whacky, apocalyptic organization that believes that the Roman Catholic Church is anti-Christian.
On the other hand, I have played with people who argued with the DM that a spell shouldn't work the way the rules specified because "that's not the way it really works". So, there are some people who play D&D and believe that the magic in the game is a representation of something that exists in the real world, just like the physics in the game is.
Under no conditions is the "reply all" function an essential function. When you end up in court, you get all sorts of inconvenient mandates put upon you, that isn't a bug, that is a feature. The system should be designed so that ending up in court is undesirable. As for the rest of your point, sometimes when you end up in court you lose access to information and services. The people who were banned from using computers had been convicted of repeatedly using computers to knowingly and maliciously commit crimes. Actions have consequences.
the email might have been informative or inquisitive, rather than inflammatory. doesnt matter. the question here is, due to a glitch in law (actually shortcoming) she would have to spend approx 1-3 hours per mass email to weed out those guy's emails. and that doesnt include their other emails that she may or may not know about.
its not the way life is. we make these laws.
Yes, once you end up in court, your life is much more complicated. You have to do a lot more work in order to be sure that you are in complete compliance with the law and with court orders. That is not a "glitch" or "shortcoming" of the law. It is the nature of being in the court system. If she needed to spend that time to sort out the email addresses of the people she was ordered by the court not to have contact with, then she needs to spend that 1-3 hours doing so.
Sure it is. Day trading transfers money from idiots to those who are smarter and wiser. Every study I have seen says that day traders generally lose money over the long term.
My understanding of the markets is that there are times when day trading benefits society by rapidly moving resources from an inappropriate allocation to a more appropriate allocation. If day traders did not exist, all of the profit to be had from such activity would end of in the hands of a much smaller group of people. As it is, this profit gets spread out over a larger group of people who generally feed it back into general distribution by making bad decisions later.
I have heard of them, but I have yet to see any evidence that they were egalitarian. In all human societies that I have seen, some people were more dominant than others. Those people were always the dominant ones in that particular society. The only exceptions to this sort of social structure is when those who would otherwise be dominant choose to elevate those who would otherwise be subservient to equality, this is a short term phenomena that requires the presence of unusual individuals.
I suspect that the writer of the summary was going for the connotations of "hard-nosed" business people, rather than "hard-headed" business people and doesn't realize the different implications of the terms.
The problem with letting people have what they want is that the majority of people don't understand why things are the way they are. Tim made the right choice,
he just feels that it is wrong now because he's had to hear people complain about it for the past 15-20 years. But when it comes down to it you need some parts of a URL to indicate what something is.
I didn't read the article and I haven't given this a lot of thought, so I am not sure I am interpreting this correctly. It is possible (likely?) that a better choice than the "://" could have been made. However, if he had made that choice, people would still be complaining about it today with a similar degree of vehemence. As several people pointed out having some unique identifier there technically simplified many tasks involving the Web, so without something there would be other problems.
I Keep seeing people try and make up variations on twitter to make it more demeaning. I have never understood that. How can you demean something that outright states it is for twits? Let's get this straight: Twits tweet on Twitter. After all what is a tweet? It is traditionally an almost meaningless sound made by a bird to tell the world "Here I am." It has now been expanded to be an almost meaningless message sent over the Internet by a twit to tell the world "Here I am."
How do you make up a derogatory word for this that is more demeaning than what the creator of said system has already done?
The suggestion is not at all delusional. Limitations of personal freedom and liberty move on a scale between weak and small social dictates - you should not say x because it is inappropriate, you should not do y because it is not looked upon kindly -, more or less well founded legal threats - you must not say x because it is forbidden, you must not do y because you go to jail for it - and outright jeopardy of your own life and livelihood - you cannot say x because someone will send you to the hospital for doing this, you cannot do y because someone will shoot you for it.
.
This brings up something that people should pay attention to. It is part of what is contributing to the reduction in freedom in Western Civilization. It used to be that there was a strong, relatively common, understanding of norms that fell under the first category. Some of those norms were oppressive to one degree or another. Post World War II, a movement arose to overturn those norms. This movement pushed "tolerance" for the sake of tolerance. Society discovered that some behaviors could not be accepted, but it no longer had a functioning mechanism to ostracize people, so it had to elevate behaviors that used to lead to being ostracized to now being criminal.
I am not stating this as well as I had thought I could. There are arguments to be made about what sorts of behaviors should be tolerated, but my basic point is that there are behaviors that a functional society shouldn't tolerate, but that should not be illegal. Part of the reason those behaviors should not be illegal is because there are mitigating circumstances which create exceptions to the general rule that can only be recognized by people when the actual situation arises.
I have yet to hear of any group of people that did not have "social striations". Every group has a leader or leaders, even one as small as three. You seem to either mistake people not abusing their social leadership position for there being no social striation, or you mistake a lack of formal leadership roles for a lack of such roles.
The problem you are addressing is a result of Gene Roddenberry's religious beliefs (he would have said philosophical, but having interacted with many who shared them, I am convinced that they are actually religious). He believed that evil (which kidnapping, etc are an expression of) was a product of ignorance and as a result as mankind learned more, we would put such behaviors behind us. The only "evil" he had in the show was that necessary to drive the plot of that episode.
Hollywood has trouble understanding that a good science fiction show/movie could be created by considering some kind of technological advance and writing a story about how that effects the way society works. Larry Niven did a great short story about the effects of instantaneous transporters on society and how society/law enforcement could deal with some of the problems (actually, I think it was several short stories). That would have made a great movie (If I am right that it was more than one story, it indicates that a TV series would have been possible).
>>>if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Um yeah..... except even though we may not know the future, we still know there are certain things that are simply impossible. Giant viruses can't exist because the sheer weight of their internal liquid would make them either collapse flat to the ground, or burst open like a water balloon. Same applies to those movies which show ants scaled to the size of a house - they would suffocate (no lungs to circulate the air internally). In another example Babylon 5 described Jupiter's temperature as about -400 degrees Celsius. Too bad that's impossible since it's below absolute zero (-273 celsius).
You make good points except about viruses. Viruses do not have internal liquid. Viruses are single RNA or DNA molecules coated with protein molecules. However, viruses would not be affected by growth hormone of any kind (they don't grow, once they are constructed that's it). They also don't fly. They may be airborne because they are light enough to remain suspended in the air or because they are being propelled by a sneeze (or some similar forcible method). Viruses that are large enough to be seen would be unlikely to be airborne. I, also, suspect that it would be difficult if not impossible to construct a DNA or RNA molecule that would be visible to the naked eye (even if one includes the protein coating).
So are you in favor of public funding of highways? Or do you think that this subsidy for commuters and the freight industry means that they are not economically viable?
How about corn farming? It's obviously not economically viable, since it requires subsidization..
I am not the original poster, however, I largely agree with the point he made.
I am in favor of public funding of highways. It should be paid for with the revenue gained from fuel taxes. At this time, alternative vehicles are not a significant enough number of those using the roads to matter so, for now, they can be left out.
I am opposed to subsidizing farming, it is not necessary and leads to counterproductive behaviors on the part of farmers. Additionally, it is generally sold as going to "family farms", but the overwhelming majority goes to corporate farms (I don't have a source at the moment, but over the years I have seen several reports that indicate that most farm subsidies go to farms owned by large corporations).
The problem with alternative energy subsidies is that they tend to encourage technologies that have political favor as opposed to technologies that are likely to actually be economically viable. On the other hand, I am willing to accept a "subsidy" for alternative energy vehicles in that if they don't use traditional fuels they can avoid the fuel tax for highways (until such a time that they become well enough established that they are a significant number of the vehicles on the road). When (if) a particular alternative fuel technology becomes viable enough to be a significant player in the economy will be time enough to figure out how to tax it to pay for the wear and tear on the roads it uses.
Excuse me IANAL, but isn't the truth never libelous? Even opinion is supposed to receive the utmost protection. Libel is reserved for those know knowingly lie simply to inflict harm. I mean sure the RIAA doesn't agree with Ray's angle, but since when is well stated opinion backed by dozens of sources, and agreed upon by pretty much everybody who isn't a RIAA fascist suddenly become illegal to share? Thank god the judge dismissed it, but the fact that he didn't slap them in hard for trying to silence a critic makes me understand why in the eyes of the law, we the people are fucked.
Part of the reason that the judge didn't slap the RIAA hard is because Ray was (is?) in court opposing the RIAA. When one is in litigation (whether as one of the litigants or as one of their lawyers) there are legal limits about what one is allowed to say about the case. Those limits vary from case to case.
I am mostly liberal, which means (in this case) that I believe in government intervention in commerce, but that personal choices should be left to people until they affect others. I also have a lot of radical ideas about how society should be structured for maximum fairness, but they are not really germane to this conversation.
The problem with identifying yourself as a "liberal" is that it does not really say anything. However, from some of your other comments, you appear to be on the centralist side of the political spectrum. I am on the individualist side of the political spectrum.
Client/server architecture (which we seem to agree that cloud computing is a variation on) is about centralized control of computing (which you appear to disagree with). There has long been a conflict between centralized control of computing resources and individual control of computing resources. I believe we share some common ground on how we understand "cloud" computing and even the political spectrum although we are at different places as to what we believe is the correct balance between the individual and central control (and the importance of that method of organizing ideas). Please keep this discussion in mind when we exchange ideas on other threads and I will try to remember your user id in mind so that we can continue to make constructive exchanges of ideas and build on this exchange (I know that is heresy here on slashdot).
Every time this comes around, though, it gains a little more ground because technological limitations have been eliminated, or at least pushed back.
I actually believe that the share of the computing market that this type of system applies to remains pretty much the same. However, every time the next wave of this comes around, some segment of the market discovers that they should be using it. So in a way it does increase each time, but only because industries/uses that advances in technology have only recently gotten computerized discover that this is the model they should be using.
However, if you are of toward the libertarian end of the political spectrum (as opposed to the statist end) you should be resistant to this paradigm each time it comes around because it is about centralized control rather than individualized control.
In my opinion, the true political spectrum runs from those who believe that the individual should have complete control over their actions and complete responsibility for the consequences of those actions and those who believe that their should be complete centralized control over people's actions and centralized mitigation of the consequences of those actions. Most "conservatives" on this board tend toward the individualist end of this spectrum, most Democrats on this board tend toward the centralist end of this spectrum. The "liberals' on this board vary as to where they fall largely because they have been trained to think of the political spectrum as being communism on one end and fascism on the other end, there is also a group opposite the "liberals" with a similar mistake (although I think that group is underrepresented on slashdot...not a bad thing).
exact same thing happened to one of my friends who was fighting a corrupt foundation who uses a lot of dirty tricks, in the courts. one of those is a similar trick ; first the foundation's lawyer acquired a restraining order from court. then, one of the foundation members has sent an extremely inflammatory email cced to hundreds of people working in the relevant area, including my friend, AND the lawyer. naturally, my friend responded to inflammatory and defamating remarks by using 'reply all' feature, so that everyone in the mailing list would see the other side of the story. then the smartypants lawyer went to the court, showing the email he received through 'reply all'. and the court, being ignorant in that regard took up the case and now prosecuting my friend.
it is quite possible that this woman/man (whatever it was) purposefully arranged such a setup to get back at the defendant, just like what this smartypants fucktard did here.
Your friend made a serious mistake, they should have taken said inflammatory email to the court (and perhaps various news organizations) rather than replying. Further if there were people on that needed to be replied to (even all of them), they should have taken the time to reply individually. There is significant chance that this email would have been actionable. Even if it wasn't, the court would not have looked kindly on the initiator of an inflammatory email relating to a case before it.
Once you end up in the courts, it is time to be very deliberate and careful in all of your actions. That may be a lot of work, but that is the way life is.
you can NOT bar people from using the technical amenities of modern information technology ( reply all feature, social networking sites' various features, etc). its against human rights.
i dont give a FLYING fuck about the person who was 'disturbed' by the poke - what s/he did is basically violating someone's rights. its as if having courts ban someone from using long distance calls, because if someone does a long distance call, the call will pass through a node that the person with the restraining order is also connected to.
Yes, you can bar someone from using the "reply all" feature. There are people who would use something like that to set up a way to intimidate someone. People have been banned by the courts from using computers for a certain length of time (all of the cases I know of were hackers). People have been banned from using the phone for a certain length of time (all the cases I know of were phreaks). It happens and in all of the cases that I know of, it was justified.
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Maybe the way it was written is why FOSS is where it's at? Might not be such a bad idea to keep it around?
Then again, maybe the GPL is not responsible for great free software and open source software being written.
Don't get me wrong, I think developers should be allowed to pick their license of choice, including GPL. But there are plenty of examples of free software and open source software being highly successful and widely used that are not GPL'd.
The assumption that the GPL is responsible for the success of FOSS reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer is carrying a rock around that supposedly repels lions (or something). Lisa says, "That's ridiculous! What makes you think that repels lions?" and Homer replies, "You don't see any lions around, do you?"
I believe that the publicity surrounding GPL and the way it forces developers who use code licensed under it was a major factor in the expansion and acceptance of open source software. That doesn't mean that those other licenses aren't just as valuable to the ongoing health of and expansion of open source software. It just means that GPL created the mindspace to allow non-geeks to view open source as something more than a fringe element.
If you don't think that's fair I'd be interested to hear why not.
I don't care if its "fair". Life isn't fair, never has been, never will be, get used to it.
If you borrow the phrase 'derivative work', which is defined by copyright laws, and then the definition of 'derivative work' is changed in the copyright laws, does that mean the definition in the GPLv2 has also changed?
It doesn't matter how you word it, when the legal definition of the words you use change, what they mean in the license will change. You have to use words that have legal meaning to write your license, if the legal meaning of those words changes, the meaning of your license will change.
The GPLv2 author's "intent" is irrelevant in court.
Since the OP you are responding to appeared to be saying that the GPLv2 author's intent was to have it cover everything the common legal meaning allowed, in essence you said "You're wrong, what you said is the way it works."
Aside from the obvious absurdity of someone trying to record a movie with their laptop -- how much of a problem are off-screen recordings for the movie industry? I may be naive -- but I really have a hard time imagining someone saying -- "I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater! This is just as good! Now I don't need to go see it!" Am I missing something here, or are these anti-piracy groups really that dense?
Actually what they are afraid of is: " I was gonna go see this movie in the theater, but I have a copy that someone recorded with a video camera in the theater and now I know it sucks! I'm not going to waste my time and money going to the theater to see it." (see also someone else's comment about twits tweeting how bad the movie is).
What if your out of town on business? You are in meetings all day, your ride to and from the airport is a company provided limo, your hotel is within walking distance (but still several blocks) of the meetings, the movie theater is on the other side of the offices than your hotel.
I don't see this rule as inconveniencing very many members of a theaters potential customer base, but I see its impact on the pirating of movies as even less, so what is the point of aggravating even a small portion of your customer base in order to inconvenience an even smaller portion of those who pirate movies?
In some states a driver's license is the only valid form of identification to purchase alcohol. So those incapable of obtaining a driver's license due to disabilities cannot drink.
(Though this may actually primarily apply to out-of-staters, as this anecdote comes to me via a friend who could not use her state ID card to purchase alcohol in Utah. Or maybe Nevada, I don't remember.)
My exposure to that sort of case is that particular institutions implement an internal rule to not accept out of state non driver's license ID because the loss from the occasional lost sale this policy generates is significantly less than the loss from selling alcohol to a minor with a faked out of state non-driver's license ID (significant fines and loss of license to sell alcohol at all). I would bet that even a lawsuit based on the Americans with Disabilities Act would be cheaper than getting tagged for selling alcohol to a minor with a well forged out of state non-driver's license ID.
This cartoon certainly is real, chick publications is a somewhat whacky, apocalyptic organization that believes that the Roman Catholic Church is anti-Christian.
On the other hand, I have played with people who argued with the DM that a spell shouldn't work the way the rules specified because "that's not the way it really works". So, there are some people who play D&D and believe that the magic in the game is a representation of something that exists in the real world, just like the physics in the game is.
Under no conditions is the "reply all" function an essential function. When you end up in court, you get all sorts of inconvenient mandates put upon you, that isn't a bug, that is a feature. The system should be designed so that ending up in court is undesirable. As for the rest of your point, sometimes when you end up in court you lose access to information and services. The people who were banned from using computers had been convicted of repeatedly using computers to knowingly and maliciously commit crimes. Actions have consequences.
the email might have been informative or inquisitive, rather than inflammatory. doesnt matter. the question here is, due to a glitch in law (actually shortcoming) she would have to spend approx 1-3 hours per mass email to weed out those guy's emails. and that doesnt include their other emails that she may or may not know about.
its not the way life is. we make these laws.
Yes, once you end up in court, your life is much more complicated. You have to do a lot more work in order to be sure that you are in complete compliance with the law and with court orders. That is not a "glitch" or "shortcoming" of the law. It is the nature of being in the court system. If she needed to spend that time to sort out the email addresses of the people she was ordered by the court not to have contact with, then she needs to spend that 1-3 hours doing so.
Sure it is. Day trading transfers money from idiots to those who are smarter and wiser. Every study I have seen says that day traders generally lose money over the long term.
My understanding of the markets is that there are times when day trading benefits society by rapidly moving resources from an inappropriate allocation to a more appropriate allocation. If day traders did not exist, all of the profit to be had from such activity would end of in the hands of a much smaller group of people. As it is, this profit gets spread out over a larger group of people who generally feed it back into general distribution by making bad decisions later.
I have heard of them, but I have yet to see any evidence that they were egalitarian. In all human societies that I have seen, some people were more dominant than others. Those people were always the dominant ones in that particular society. The only exceptions to this sort of social structure is when those who would otherwise be dominant choose to elevate those who would otherwise be subservient to equality, this is a short term phenomena that requires the presence of unusual individuals.
I suspect that the writer of the summary was going for the connotations of "hard-nosed" business people, rather than "hard-headed" business people and doesn't realize the different implications of the terms.
The problem with letting people have what they want is that the majority of people don't understand why things are the way they are. Tim made the right choice, he just feels that it is wrong now because he's had to hear people complain about it for the past 15-20 years. But when it comes down to it you need some parts of a URL to indicate what something is.
I didn't read the article and I haven't given this a lot of thought, so I am not sure I am interpreting this correctly. It is possible (likely?) that a better choice than the "://" could have been made. However, if he had made that choice, people would still be complaining about it today with a similar degree of vehemence. As several people pointed out having some unique identifier there technically simplified many tasks involving the Web, so without something there would be other problems.
will ever be replaced by fecebook and twatter???
I Keep seeing people try and make up variations on twitter to make it more demeaning. I have never understood that. How can you demean something that outright states it is for twits? Let's get this straight: Twits tweet on Twitter. After all what is a tweet? It is traditionally an almost meaningless sound made by a bird to tell the world "Here I am." It has now been expanded to be an almost meaningless message sent over the Internet by a twit to tell the world "Here I am."
How do you make up a derogatory word for this that is more demeaning than what the creator of said system has already done?
The suggestion is not at all delusional. Limitations of personal freedom and liberty move on a scale between weak and small social dictates - you should not say x because it is inappropriate, you should not do y because it is not looked upon kindly -, more or less well founded legal threats - you must not say x because it is forbidden, you must not do y because you go to jail for it - and outright jeopardy of your own life and livelihood - you cannot say x because someone will send you to the hospital for doing this, you cannot do y because someone will shoot you for it.
.
This brings up something that people should pay attention to. It is part of what is contributing to the reduction in freedom in Western Civilization. It used to be that there was a strong, relatively common, understanding of norms that fell under the first category. Some of those norms were oppressive to one degree or another. Post World War II, a movement arose to overturn those norms. This movement pushed "tolerance" for the sake of tolerance. Society discovered that some behaviors could not be accepted, but it no longer had a functioning mechanism to ostracize people, so it had to elevate behaviors that used to lead to being ostracized to now being criminal.
I am not stating this as well as I had thought I could. There are arguments to be made about what sorts of behaviors should be tolerated, but my basic point is that there are behaviors that a functional society shouldn't tolerate, but that should not be illegal. Part of the reason those behaviors should not be illegal is because there are mitigating circumstances which create exceptions to the general rule that can only be recognized by people when the actual situation arises.
I have yet to hear of any group of people that did not have "social striations". Every group has a leader or leaders, even one as small as three. You seem to either mistake people not abusing their social leadership position for there being no social striation, or you mistake a lack of formal leadership roles for a lack of such roles.
The problem you are addressing is a result of Gene Roddenberry's religious beliefs (he would have said philosophical, but having interacted with many who shared them, I am convinced that they are actually religious). He believed that evil (which kidnapping, etc are an expression of) was a product of ignorance and as a result as mankind learned more, we would put such behaviors behind us. The only "evil" he had in the show was that necessary to drive the plot of that episode.
Hollywood has trouble understanding that a good science fiction show/movie could be created by considering some kind of technological advance and writing a story about how that effects the way society works. Larry Niven did a great short story about the effects of instantaneous transporters on society and how society/law enforcement could deal with some of the problems (actually, I think it was several short stories). That would have made a great movie (If I am right that it was more than one story, it indicates that a TV series would have been possible).
>>>if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Um yeah..... except even though we may not know the future, we still know there are certain things that are simply impossible. Giant viruses can't exist because the sheer weight of their internal liquid would make them either collapse flat to the ground, or burst open like a water balloon. Same applies to those movies which show ants scaled to the size of a house - they would suffocate (no lungs to circulate the air internally). In another example Babylon 5 described Jupiter's temperature as about -400 degrees Celsius. Too bad that's impossible since it's below absolute zero (-273 celsius).
You make good points except about viruses. Viruses do not have internal liquid. Viruses are single RNA or DNA molecules coated with protein molecules. However, viruses would not be affected by growth hormone of any kind (they don't grow, once they are constructed that's it). They also don't fly. They may be airborne because they are light enough to remain suspended in the air or because they are being propelled by a sneeze (or some similar forcible method). Viruses that are large enough to be seen would be unlikely to be airborne. I, also, suspect that it would be difficult if not impossible to construct a DNA or RNA molecule that would be visible to the naked eye (even if one includes the protein coating).
So are you in favor of public funding of highways? Or do you think that this subsidy for commuters and the freight industry means that they are not economically viable? How about corn farming? It's obviously not economically viable, since it requires subsidization. .
I am not the original poster, however, I largely agree with the point he made.
I am in favor of public funding of highways. It should be paid for with the revenue gained from fuel taxes. At this time, alternative vehicles are not a significant enough number of those using the roads to matter so, for now, they can be left out.
I am opposed to subsidizing farming, it is not necessary and leads to counterproductive behaviors on the part of farmers. Additionally, it is generally sold as going to "family farms", but the overwhelming majority goes to corporate farms (I don't have a source at the moment, but over the years I have seen several reports that indicate that most farm subsidies go to farms owned by large corporations).
The problem with alternative energy subsidies is that they tend to encourage technologies that have political favor as opposed to technologies that are likely to actually be economically viable. On the other hand, I am willing to accept a "subsidy" for alternative energy vehicles in that if they don't use traditional fuels they can avoid the fuel tax for highways (until such a time that they become well enough established that they are a significant number of the vehicles on the road). When (if) a particular alternative fuel technology becomes viable enough to be a significant player in the economy will be time enough to figure out how to tax it to pay for the wear and tear on the roads it uses.
Excuse me IANAL, but isn't the truth never libelous? Even opinion is supposed to receive the utmost protection. Libel is reserved for those know knowingly lie simply to inflict harm. I mean sure the RIAA doesn't agree with Ray's angle, but since when is well stated opinion backed by dozens of sources, and agreed upon by pretty much everybody who isn't a RIAA fascist suddenly become illegal to share? Thank god the judge dismissed it, but the fact that he didn't slap them in hard for trying to silence a critic makes me understand why in the eyes of the law, we the people are fucked.
Part of the reason that the judge didn't slap the RIAA hard is because Ray was (is?) in court opposing the RIAA. When one is in litigation (whether as one of the litigants or as one of their lawyers) there are legal limits about what one is allowed to say about the case. Those limits vary from case to case.
I am mostly liberal, which means (in this case) that I believe in government intervention in commerce, but that personal choices should be left to people until they affect others. I also have a lot of radical ideas about how society should be structured for maximum fairness, but they are not really germane to this conversation.
The problem with identifying yourself as a "liberal" is that it does not really say anything. However, from some of your other comments, you appear to be on the centralist side of the political spectrum. I am on the individualist side of the political spectrum.
Client/server architecture (which we seem to agree that cloud computing is a variation on) is about centralized control of computing (which you appear to disagree with). There has long been a conflict between centralized control of computing resources and individual control of computing resources. I believe we share some common ground on how we understand "cloud" computing and even the political spectrum although we are at different places as to what we believe is the correct balance between the individual and central control (and the importance of that method of organizing ideas).
Please keep this discussion in mind when we exchange ideas on other threads and I will try to remember your user id in mind so that we can continue to make constructive exchanges of ideas and build on this exchange (I know that is heresy here on slashdot).
Every time this comes around, though, it gains a little more ground because technological limitations have been eliminated, or at least pushed back.
I actually believe that the share of the computing market that this type of system applies to remains pretty much the same. However, every time the next wave of this comes around, some segment of the market discovers that they should be using it. So in a way it does increase each time, but only because industries/uses that advances in technology have only recently gotten computerized discover that this is the model they should be using.
However, if you are of toward the libertarian end of the political spectrum (as opposed to the statist end) you should be resistant to this paradigm each time it comes around because it is about centralized control rather than individualized control.
In my opinion, the true political spectrum runs from those who believe that the individual should have complete control over their actions and complete responsibility for the consequences of those actions and those who believe that their should be complete centralized control over people's actions and centralized mitigation of the consequences of those actions. Most "conservatives" on this board tend toward the individualist end of this spectrum, most Democrats on this board tend toward the centralist end of this spectrum. The "liberals' on this board vary as to where they fall largely because they have been trained to think of the political spectrum as being communism on one end and fascism on the other end, there is also a group opposite the "liberals" with a similar mistake (although I think that group is underrepresented on slashdot...not a bad thing).
exact same thing happened to one of my friends who was fighting a corrupt foundation who uses a lot of dirty tricks, in the courts. one of those is a similar trick ; first the foundation's lawyer acquired a restraining order from court. then, one of the foundation members has sent an extremely inflammatory email cced to hundreds of people working in the relevant area, including my friend, AND the lawyer. naturally, my friend responded to inflammatory and defamating remarks by using 'reply all' feature, so that everyone in the mailing list would see the other side of the story. then the smartypants lawyer went to the court, showing the email he received through 'reply all'. and the court, being ignorant in that regard took up the case and now prosecuting my friend.
it is quite possible that this woman/man (whatever it was) purposefully arranged such a setup to get back at the defendant, just like what this smartypants fucktard did here.
Your friend made a serious mistake, they should have taken said inflammatory email to the court (and perhaps various news organizations) rather than replying. Further if there were people on that needed to be replied to (even all of them), they should have taken the time to reply individually. There is significant chance that this email would have been actionable. Even if it wasn't, the court would not have looked kindly on the initiator of an inflammatory email relating to a case before it.
Once you end up in the courts, it is time to be very deliberate and careful in all of your actions. That may be a lot of work, but that is the way life is.
you can NOT bar people from using the technical amenities of modern information technology ( reply all feature, social networking sites' various features, etc). its against human rights.
i dont give a FLYING fuck about the person who was 'disturbed' by the poke - what s/he did is basically violating someone's rights. its as if having courts ban someone from using long distance calls, because if someone does a long distance call, the call will pass through a node that the person with the restraining order is also connected to.
Yes, you can bar someone from using the "reply all" feature. There are people who would use something like that to set up a way to intimidate someone. People have been banned by the courts from using computers for a certain length of time (all of the cases I know of were hackers). People have been banned from using the phone for a certain length of time (all the cases I know of were phreaks). It happens and in all of the cases that I know of, it was justified.