You have been misled by the media. Both the GOP party establishment and the Dem party establishment have attempted to legalize the status of illegal immigrants now, while pushing off efforts to improve efforts to prevent illegal immigration to "sometime in the future". The GOP grassroots (and many independents) has responded by saying "address the problem of ongoing illegal immigration before deciding what to do about the illegals already here."
Quite simply neither Party wants to actually address the issue of illegal immigration. The Democrat Party establishment want to legitimatize the illegal immigrants because they will tend to vote Democrat if they gain the right to vote, but they don't want to increase legal immigration because the Unions oppose that strongly. Additionally, the Democrat Party establishment wants to keep illegal immigrants coming because it provides them with a cheap labor pool (considering that the richest people in the US are generally Democrats).
I have trouble understanding what the Republican Party establishment thinks it gains from the positions it takes on immigration. I suppose it has to do with the cheap labor pool as well. However, one would think that an analysis of risk/reward would indicate that a strong stance on INCREASING LEGAL immigration while cracking down on ILLEGAL immigration would be a winner for them.
It is not DRM that allows you to download the game onto any computer whenever and wherever you want. It is Steam that allows that. Steam could allow that without DRM, but they chose DRM because they think that their business model wouldn't work without it. But what does the DRM do for YOU as the end user?
You like Steam. You agree with them that their business model doesn't work without DRM, so you are willing to accept the DRM, but in what way is the game better because it has DRM (versus the same game delivered in the same way without DRM)?
The article is about moving control of the Domain Name System from the current relatively benign neglect of the U.S. government to control by some other governmental body. So, do you really think that the UN would not insert the bureaucratic interference that they have inserted into everything else they have handled?
The reason the Internet protocols won out over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, et al is because if you were signed up with AOL and I was signed up with Prodigy we couldn't send each other email. The Internet was a standard that everyone could sign up to without having to pay licensing fees to someone else.
AOL and several of the others attempted to remain in business as portals to the Internet, but people realized that AOL didn't really give them any value for the money. Ultimately it comes down to this: once I could get in touch with everyone on the Internet, why should I pay rent to AOL (or their competitor) to only be seen by people paying rent to AOL (but not their competitor)?
So?
The internet is designed to allow the user to control how they view content. That is what it does. Don't come whining becasue some people chose to work in that medium.
It's like that guy that buys a house near an airport and then complains the planes are loud.
Unfortunately, it is starting to look like the people who bought houses next to a farm and then got the government to stop the farmer from spreading manure on the field (that the farmer owned) next to their houses because they didn't like the smell (this actually happened).
Racism? because companies prefer to locate in cities with low crime rates (Kalamazoo) rather than cities with high crime rates (Gary)? Yeah, the companies aren't locating in Gary because of the proportionally high number of African Americans. I mean why would they care that the crime rate is much higher there?
Actually the last I knew of best road construction technology from the late 90s was to put down a concrete base then lay asphalt on top of it. This gave you the best of both worlds. The long term durability of concrete with the ease of resurfacing asphalt. The reason it wasn't done sooner was that asphalt does not easily bond to concrete (it would tend to slide off). In the late 80s, someone developed a technique to get asphalt to bond to concrete. I know of this because I was good friends at the time with an engineer for the state transportation department.
Most roads built since this technology became widespread are built this way.
You're right. If you go out and buy those things without doing any research, they won't work on Linux. Of course, they won't work on a Macintosh either. So, I guess Macintosh isn't ready for the desktop yet as well?
I went to Best Buy.com and picked the first of each that came up. The printer (Epson PictureMate Dash) probably would have worked on a Mac and maybe would have worked on Ubuntu (the flavor of Linux I use). Without buying it, I can't tell for sure, but the information I found online seemed to show that it would. Neither the wifi card I chose or the TV tuner supported Linux, but then they didn't support Mac OSX either.
So because hardware manufacturers don't support Mac OSX it just isn't ready for the average user?
The problem is that software patents are the result of court rulings, not the result of intentional law changes (I'm not sure if there was a law change that led to the court ruling or not--but my impression is not).
I completely agree with your opinion on this. However, this isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future because of several reasons
Actually, it is going to happen in the foreseeable future. It's just that it won't be from companies that dominated media sales 15 years ago. It will be from companies like Amazon and Google (or maybe from a company that doesn't exist yet). It will happen sometime in the next 10 years, probably in less than 5 years. Most of the RIAA and MPAA companies lost their opportunity to control this change. The RIAA companies could have been on top of this if they had cut a deal with Napster instead of suing them out of existence.
If you really believe that one should have to answer for a crime (and, presumably, be denied employment/housing/etc. because of it) for the rest of one's life, then why not just institute life sentences for every little crime?
If someone was convicted of embezzlement, I do not think it reasonable that they be hired to handle an organization's money unless they can convince the hiring manager that it won't happen again, even after they have served their jail sentence.
You'll never get the conservatives to reform the welfare system, because they don't want it to exist.
You do know that it was conservatives who reformed the welfare system under Clinton, right? Clinton only signed on after it became apparent that it was popular and that he needed something like it to get re-elected.
IBM tried something like this back in the day. They decided to write a new operating system to limit PC's to the 286 chip. IBM made multiple mistakes in developing OS/2, but this attempt to keep PC's from eating into their mini-computer market is what led them to make most of them.
What does this say for the wisdom of non-US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication?
The same thing it says for US citizens relying on non-US companies for their business or communication. There will be times when the company you are relying on makes decisions detrimental to your interests based on said company's understanding of the laws in their country.
Or even the same thing as people relying on others in the same country for business or communication, sometimes they will act in ways that are detrimental to your interests based on what they perceive to be in their best interest.
The Amish are not anti-wealth (many Amish are fairly rich), they are anti-technology (and even that is a bit of an oversimplification). The Amish have a quite different view of what is important than most others in our society (look at their reaction to the case where a man shot up one of their schools a few years ago).
Actually, no they don't have a responsibility to society beyond their responsibility to their shareholders. However, if they do not pay attention to anything but the immediate return to their shareholders they will fail in that responsibility. The corporations that got smacked down, failed to recognize that if they fail to meet some basic level of demands that society in general puts on them, they will fail in their responsibility to their shareholders.
You mean you prefer the way the court ruled before they were on it? You know the Kelo ruling (the government can seize your property under eminent domain to give it to someone else who will pay more taxes--or at least is better connected politically).
This is one more attempt to come up with a way to get people to rent their software. Software companies have been looking for a way to force customers to pay them a steady stream of money since the PC came out. Early on someone realized that once a customer has software that does what he needs, he no longer has a reason to give the software company more money. There is a limit to how many features any given person needs/will use in a word processor. What that limit is varies from individual to individual but at some point it will be reached. That is one of the reasons MS changed the document format from Office 2003 to Office 2007--the average user has no reason to update from Office 2003. Except with the new.docx format people can tell that you have an old version of Word if you use.doc formatted documents, and nobody wants to seem out of date.
Something is immoral if it is wrong. Something is wrong if it causes harm to others and/or society (although as I have said elsewhere, if it causes harm to society, it causes harm to others).
Those who say that sex outside of wedlock is wrong would generally also say that sex outside of wedlock causes harm to society. Just because someone believes that something is harmful to society doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
If you think that something is immoral that you don't also think is harmful to society, then you are a fool.
Just because you think something is moral, doesn't mean that it is not harmful to society, no matter how much- you- wish that to be the case.
That's because it was lost between the last few months of the Bush Administration (October 2008) and the first couple of months of the Obama Administration (March 2009). So this is actually an example of an unbiased article as there is, at this time, no way of knowing under which Administration it went missing.
Personally, it seems likely to me that someone took it in order to get a free external hard drive and it has already been wiped (probably not securely).
Just because you don't believe that a behavior is harmful to others, does not mean that another person doesn't believe it is harmful to others.
You say that morality is based on belief in God, there are a lot of atheists who would disagree with you. I have seen atheists on this board claim that you don't have to believe in God in order to be moral.
I consider morality to be "do not harm others". Harm to society brings harm to others.
You believe that only things that can be scientifically proven to cause harm to be immoral and therefore those are the only things you want to have made illegal. Other people base their understanding of what is moral on other criteria.
There are two bases for some people to accept the moral statements of traditional religion. The first is, if the Creator says that such and such a behavior causes harm, then, even though I see no evidence, I believe that it causes harm. The second is, throughout history different societies have had different moral codes, the experience of societies throughout history is that these behaviors cause harm, those societies have codified these behaviors as religious rules, therefore I am not going to repeat experiments done in the past just because they were not documented clearly enough to provide scientific evidence of the conclusions.
You may not be willing to accept their morality and that is fine. Laws are based on the moral code that is accepted by the overwhelming majority, even when that acceptance is based on different criteria for determining what causes harm.
Slashdot Mirror
You have been misled by the media. Both the GOP party establishment and the Dem party establishment have attempted to legalize the status of illegal immigrants now, while pushing off efforts to improve efforts to prevent illegal immigration to "sometime in the future". The GOP grassroots (and many independents) has responded by saying "address the problem of ongoing illegal immigration before deciding what to do about the illegals already here."
Quite simply neither Party wants to actually address the issue of illegal immigration. The Democrat Party establishment want to legitimatize the illegal immigrants because they will tend to vote Democrat if they gain the right to vote, but they don't want to increase legal immigration because the Unions oppose that strongly. Additionally, the Democrat Party establishment wants to keep illegal immigrants coming because it provides them with a cheap labor pool (considering that the richest people in the US are generally Democrats).
I have trouble understanding what the Republican Party establishment thinks it gains from the positions it takes on immigration. I suppose it has to do with the cheap labor pool as well. However, one would think that an analysis of risk/reward would indicate that a strong stance on INCREASING LEGAL immigration while cracking down on ILLEGAL immigration would be a winner for them.
It is not DRM that allows you to download the game onto any computer whenever and wherever you want. It is Steam that allows that. Steam could allow that without DRM, but they chose DRM because they think that their business model wouldn't work without it. But what does the DRM do for YOU as the end user?
You like Steam. You agree with them that their business model doesn't work without DRM, so you are willing to accept the DRM, but in what way is the game better because it has DRM (versus the same game delivered in the same way without DRM)?
The article is about moving control of the Domain Name System from the current relatively benign neglect of the U.S. government to control by some other governmental body. So, do you really think that the UN would not insert the bureaucratic interference that they have inserted into everything else they have handled?
Remember when DNS registr* wasn't an extortion racket?
No. When did this magic day exist?
When there was no economic benefit from having a registered DN.
The reason the Internet protocols won out over AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, et al is because if you were signed up with AOL and I was signed up with Prodigy we couldn't send each other email. The Internet was a standard that everyone could sign up to without having to pay licensing fees to someone else.
AOL and several of the others attempted to remain in business as portals to the Internet, but people realized that AOL didn't really give them any value for the money. Ultimately it comes down to this: once I could get in touch with everyone on the Internet, why should I pay rent to AOL (or their competitor) to only be seen by people paying rent to AOL (but not their competitor)?
So? The internet is designed to allow the user to control how they view content. That is what it does. Don't come whining becasue some people chose to work in that medium.
It's like that guy that buys a house near an airport and then complains the planes are loud.
Unfortunately, it is starting to look like the people who bought houses next to a farm and then got the government to stop the farmer from spreading manure on the field (that the farmer owned) next to their houses because they didn't like the smell (this actually happened).
.
I'm no Muslim, in fact I'm an atheist and think the whole business of organised religion has been proven by history to be dangerous beyond compare,
How about organized atheism? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Do those names ring a bell? Please name one incident by organized religion that comes even close.
Racism? because companies prefer to locate in cities with low crime rates (Kalamazoo) rather than cities with high crime rates (Gary)? Yeah, the companies aren't locating in Gary because of the proportionally high number of African Americans. I mean why would they care that the crime rate is much higher there?
Actually the last I knew of best road construction technology from the late 90s was to put down a concrete base then lay asphalt on top of it. This gave you the best of both worlds. The long term durability of concrete with the ease of resurfacing asphalt. The reason it wasn't done sooner was that asphalt does not easily bond to concrete (it would tend to slide off). In the late 80s, someone developed a technique to get asphalt to bond to concrete. I know of this because I was good friends at the time with an engineer for the state transportation department.
Most roads built since this technology became widespread are built this way.
You're right. If you go out and buy those things without doing any research, they won't work on Linux. Of course, they won't work on a Macintosh either. So, I guess Macintosh isn't ready for the desktop yet as well?
I went to Best Buy.com and picked the first of each that came up. The printer (Epson PictureMate Dash) probably would have worked on a Mac and maybe would have worked on Ubuntu (the flavor of Linux I use). Without buying it, I can't tell for sure, but the information I found online seemed to show that it would. Neither the wifi card I chose or the TV tuner supported Linux, but then they didn't support Mac OSX either.
So because hardware manufacturers don't support Mac OSX it just isn't ready for the average user?
Why only German politicians?
The problem is that software patents are the result of court rulings, not the result of intentional law changes (I'm not sure if there was a law change that led to the court ruling or not--but my impression is not).
I completely agree with your opinion on this. However, this isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future because of several reasons
Actually, it is going to happen in the foreseeable future. It's just that it won't be from companies that dominated media sales 15 years ago. It will be from companies like Amazon and Google (or maybe from a company that doesn't exist yet). It will happen sometime in the next 10 years, probably in less than 5 years. Most of the RIAA and MPAA companies lost their opportunity to control this change. The RIAA companies could have been on top of this if they had cut a deal with Napster instead of suing them out of existence.
If you really believe that one should have to answer for a crime (and, presumably, be denied employment/housing/etc. because of it) for the rest of one's life, then why not just institute life sentences for every little crime?
If someone was convicted of embezzlement, I do not think it reasonable that they be hired to handle an organization's money unless they can convince the hiring manager that it won't happen again, even after they have served their jail sentence.
If he's a lawyer, I'd think a burglary accusation would just show early adoption of "professional" ethics.
You'll never get the conservatives to reform the welfare system, because they don't want it to exist.
You do know that it was conservatives who reformed the welfare system under Clinton, right? Clinton only signed on after it became apparent that it was popular and that he needed something like it to get re-elected.
IBM tried something like this back in the day. They decided to write a new operating system to limit PC's to the 286 chip. IBM made multiple mistakes in developing OS/2, but this attempt to keep PC's from eating into their mini-computer market is what led them to make most of them.
What does this say for the wisdom of non-US citizens relying on US companies for their business or communication?
The same thing it says for US citizens relying on non-US companies for their business or communication. There will be times when the company you are relying on makes decisions detrimental to your interests based on said company's understanding of the laws in their country.
Or even the same thing as people relying on others in the same country for business or communication, sometimes they will act in ways that are detrimental to your interests based on what they perceive to be in their best interest.
The Amish are not anti-wealth (many Amish are fairly rich), they are anti-technology (and even that is a bit of an oversimplification). The Amish have a quite different view of what is important than most others in our society (look at their reaction to the case where a man shot up one of their schools a few years ago).
Actually, no they don't have a responsibility to society beyond their responsibility to their shareholders. However, if they do not pay attention to anything but the immediate return to their shareholders they will fail in that responsibility. The corporations that got smacked down, failed to recognize that if they fail to meet some basic level of demands that society in general puts on them, they will fail in their responsibility to their shareholders.
You mean you prefer the way the court ruled before they were on it? You know the Kelo ruling (the government can seize your property under eminent domain to give it to someone else who will pay more taxes--or at least is better connected politically).
This is one more attempt to come up with a way to get people to rent their software. Software companies have been looking for a way to force customers to pay them a steady stream of money since the PC came out. Early on someone realized that once a customer has software that does what he needs, he no longer has a reason to give the software company more money. There is a limit to how many features any given person needs/will use in a word processor. What that limit is varies from individual to individual but at some point it will be reached. That is one of the reasons MS changed the document format from Office 2003 to Office 2007--the average user has no reason to update from Office 2003. Except with the new .docx format people can tell that you have an old version of Word if you use .doc formatted documents, and nobody wants to seem out of date.
Something is immoral if it is wrong. Something is wrong if it causes harm to others and/or society (although as I have said elsewhere, if it causes harm to society, it causes harm to others).
Those who say that sex outside of wedlock is wrong would generally also say that sex outside of wedlock causes harm to society. Just because someone believes that something is harmful to society doesn't necessarily mean that it is.
If you think that something is immoral that you don't also think is harmful to society, then you are a fool.
Just because you think something is moral, doesn't mean that it is not harmful to society, no matter how much- you- wish that to be the case.
That's because it was lost between the last few months of the Bush Administration (October 2008) and the first couple of months of the Obama Administration (March 2009). So this is actually an example of an unbiased article as there is, at this time, no way of knowing under which Administration it went missing.
Personally, it seems likely to me that someone took it in order to get a free external hard drive and it has already been wiped (probably not securely).
Just because you don't believe that a behavior is harmful to others, does not mean that another person doesn't believe it is harmful to others.
You say that morality is based on belief in God, there are a lot of atheists who would disagree with you. I have seen atheists on this board claim that you don't have to believe in God in order to be moral.
I consider morality to be "do not harm others". Harm to society brings harm to others.
You believe that only things that can be scientifically proven to cause harm to be immoral and therefore those are the only things you want to have made illegal. Other people base their understanding of what is moral on other criteria.
There are two bases for some people to accept the moral statements of traditional religion. The first is, if the Creator says that such and such a behavior causes harm, then, even though I see no evidence, I believe that it causes harm. The second is, throughout history different societies have had different moral codes, the experience of societies throughout history is that these behaviors cause harm, those societies have codified these behaviors as religious rules, therefore I am not going to repeat experiments done in the past just because they were not documented clearly enough to provide scientific evidence of the conclusions.
You may not be willing to accept their morality and that is fine. Laws are based on the moral code that is accepted by the overwhelming majority, even when that acceptance is based on different criteria for determining what causes harm.