With a constitutional bill of rights you give unelected judges (or in the case of the US - elected judges) the ability to effectively write law that cannot be overturned except by constitutional reform (or in the case of the US, by electing judges on a political basis instead of choosing the most impartial and best performing judges on their merit). So if someone could tie their right to own a fully loaded and operational rocket launcher (for example) into the bill of rights, it would take a referendum to revoke that decision. At least now when stupid laws are made we can effect change by throwing out the old government... or at least lobbying the current one.
Everywhere that has a constitutional bill of rights has had stupid decisions tied into it and unbreakable law being made because of it. No thanks, not in my country.
In Australia we have a conservative Liberal party, a liberal Labor party (which is the political arm of the union movement), a green party which doesn't support cutting greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. using nuclear power) but supports gay rights and a democrat party who kept the bastards honest by committing political suicide.
The level of compassion that is shown towards the cylons is unacceptable in my opinion. It almost detracts from the show. The Cylons murdered, brutalised and betrayed the humans - their creators. They launched surprise nuclear attacks without provocation after a forty year cease fire. They are machines, created beings, and based on their actions deserve no pity from the humans.
What really got under my skin though was the absolute merciless way that many of the humans treated their own kind, while showing far more sympathy for Cylons. If you saw a traitor attempt to assassinate your commanding officer, you would have no hesitation to put fifteen bullets into their skull before they left the room. Similarly, most humans would be far more forgiving of "collaborators" in an apparently hopeless situation. Yet the "collaborators" got spaced (an incredibly horrible way to die) and the would-be assassin gets off scott free. There only needed to be one major character with this viewpoint, but they're all wishy-washy "oooh machines have rights too" idiots.
Sadly the best opportunity for the writers to really make the show into something special was when they failed to kill off adama (even though I love the character) at the end of season 1. With Adama dead there would have been noone to unite the military and they writers could have shown the stress and internal power struggles that ensued. That would have made the show far more interesting - to see the crew fractured and divided against each other while still having to repel the relentless assault of the mindless machines.
Can't wait for the Copyright Elite to buy a copyright extension to one BILLION years, retroactively somewhere, and then going around using the WIPO and whatever to enforce it against people under the threat of expensive litigation.
One billion is not high enough. Scientologists have a six billion year mission. Obviously, we don't want scientologists losing their copyrights with only 1/6 of their mission complete.
Your system sounds great in theory but there are many problems. Who would administer these tests? How do you measure wisdom? What inevitably would happen would be pandering by those in power to those who have the strongest weight of votes. This is what happens now except that at least now decisions more reflect the state of society itself.
I say everyone votes, some just count for more than others.
And so what if you are determined to have the minimum vote? Would you like the system then?
Yes, which is why Communism was so successful in Russia and why China has a stronger economy and has made more technological advances than the US.
The fact is buddy, that your arguement is simply untrue. Why it is untrue is anyone's guess, but my own belief is that as humans accumulate power they tend to be drawn towards corruption. By restricting control of the major decisions regarding the government of people to only a select few, you are basically ensuring that those select few will use that power to reinforce their power, unless public checks and balances are put in place. This is why democracy is a horrible system, but it's the best system of government that man has yet devised.
A society of equal opinion can never work for fairly obvious reasons.
Except that it has worked for thousands of years, and only when the population has given up their power to another body (the church, their government or whoever) has the system failed. It's the idiot masses who ensure that the intelligent evil do not cause even more damage than they already do.
Suprised noone has picked up on my grammatical mistake. I actually meant to have "insert boot disk" but I enclosed it in html braces, which meant it didn't show.
The real issue with banning the bundling of operating systems is that it will incur extra cost and frustration for non-geeks (i.e. mums and dads everywhere) who don't know how to install an OS. Picture this: a random person decides to buy a computer and take it home. They get home, plug in and boot up. They hit a black screen with or something similar on it. They complain, try to take it back only to find out that they need to spend another $x on labour costs. The consumer is unhappy, the vendor is unhappy because they have an unhappy customer. But at least M$ gets shafted!
Really, vendors should be forced to ask the consumer which operating system their client wants and give prices for them to their customer for every new PC sale. That would promote fair market better than "banning bundling".
I am very concerned about this lawsuit. There are two very real outcomes that could occur should whirlpool lose.
Firstly, whirlpool are THE resource for finding out about ISPs in Australia. Their neutrality and open forums, should they be lost, would be very, very bad for consumers.
Secondly, a ruling against whirlpool means a precedent would be set which basically ensured that forums in Australia would be practically eliminated. This is both bad for a lot of businesses and bad for users.
For these reasons I really really hope that whirlpool wins (well, for those reasons and the obvious moral reasons).
Just an FYI for everyone out there, the Chaser is a show which is broadcast by the ABC, a PUBLICALLY FUNDED channel here in Australia. They constantly poke fun of security, politicians and current affairs shows (among other things). They are a great example of democracy done right.
Are you kidding? The coallition members are by far more cooperative with the Chaser guys, particularly Costello. It's the labor party members (I'm looking at you Beazley) that have traditionally reacted badly to them.
You have enough fodder to criticise the coallition without slandering them. Locking these guys up was procedure for anyone who broke through security, which they did. I doubt that the PM even found out about it until after the news had broke and they'd been incarcerated.
Quite often on here and in other places (the linked bad astronomer article) there is undue criticism thrown towards creations, under the false assumption that all creationists are a) extreme right-wing fundamentalist American evangalists, b) believe in a 100% "literal" interpretation of [insert holy text here] c) believe in a young universe and d) disbelieve in scientific discoveries.
The truth of the matter is that the people who fall into this stereotype are only a very small minority of people who believe in a creator. One cannot forget that it was a minister who came up with the Big Bang Theory in the first place and that it was atheists who only believed in "science" that were the biggest initial critics of the theory. In fact many atheists of the time believed in an infinite universe, as that gives enough time for life to have randomly began at some stage on some planet in the universe (which was thought to be necessary for abiogenesis at the time).
We now know that the evidence suggests that the Big Bang is what happened several billion years ago. However we do not know if there is missing information which would lead us to different conclusions (like how scientists from 100 billion years into the future will believe the universe is infinite based on the lack of cosmic background radiation).
The question of whether or not the universe was created by an intelligence or not is a question that can only be answered one way or another by religious belief (and I'm counting atheistic beliefs among these) and never by science. Science may inform religion and religion may shed light into some of the sciences, but they are as seperate disciplines as screenwriting and calligraphy.
How the hell did this post get modded insightful? This was flamebait through and through. Not even our top scientists can agree on whether there is a God or not, so how can one/.er make those claims with absolute assurance and then get modded up?
From my observations this post is 100% correct. I know WoW players in all four categories.
It's strange but the people who enjoy the game the most seem to be the people in Phase one and two. Some phase 3 people still enjoy the game, but not many do. Fortunately I slot quite neatly into Phase 2.
Google has too much invested in Youtube to allow any corporate action to kill it. Until Viacom realise this they are on the losing side.
EMI appear to be begrudgingly accepting that their antiquated business models need some reform. It is only a matter of time before the other labels follow suit.
Look I can understand if people are upset about it. But really the extremes that are being mentioned in the article are just way too much in my opinion. I found the whole digg revolt amusing, yet since then I don't visit the site any more and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Digg's business is suffering because they made a stupid decision. Even if LiveJournal reinstated all of the blogs that they deleted, do they really deserve our business? No. Which is why I feel a protest against a company in an essentially commoditized market is not exactly the most productive use of time.
Granted I was wrong about people paying for the service. That does not mean that there are not similar, viable businesses out there that aren't more deserving of your business than LJ. Instead LiveJournal get a massive amount of hits and publicity and when they reinstate the posts they might even have more users than before. A protest campaign is never the way to deal with a business you don't like (look at what protesting "Deep Throat" and "Baise Moire" did in the US and Australia respectively).
Even in the US your right to free speech constitutionally only extends to the level that the government is not allowed to interfere. It never states anything about private companies. If you are on someone else's property, they have the right to evict you. If you are using someone else's web site they have the right to cancel your account.
Having said that I will say that the paid users of the site do have a right to complain if they are the ones who are being targeted. Again, if I were banned I would be moving instantly to another service and not returning, particularly if I was a paying customer (after filing a "I was hardly done-by so you can redeem yourselves by giving me free stuff" complaint).
Actually no, it wouldn't change. I do use free journal services occasionally, and I would probably be a little annoyed if my posts got censored, but if they DID get censored, I would simply either move to another service or pay for my own hosting (oh my gosh, using my free will to boycott products I don't like - how horrifying).
If you believe that what you say is that important that it simply has to be on the internet, then you will make it happen.
The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law.
If you are really that concerned about being able to post whatever you wish, register yourself a domain name (your own name or a variation thereof should be available), learn some basic html (or get someone else to do it for you) and post your journals to your own site. Include a few google ads and use that to pay for any hosting fees.
These sites are allowed to censor whatever they wish whenever they wish because it's their site. If you're upset with the service find somewhere better or stop complaining. It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully lamb:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9wPyGnWxE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3w2xHOkhmY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPGSs56lZEQ
And thank goodness for that.
With a constitutional bill of rights you give unelected judges (or in the case of the US - elected judges) the ability to effectively write law that cannot be overturned except by constitutional reform (or in the case of the US, by electing judges on a political basis instead of choosing the most impartial and best performing judges on their merit). So if someone could tie their right to own a fully loaded and operational rocket launcher (for example) into the bill of rights, it would take a referendum to revoke that decision. At least now when stupid laws are made we can effect change by throwing out the old government... or at least lobbying the current one.
Everywhere that has a constitutional bill of rights has had stupid decisions tied into it and unbreakable law being made because of it. No thanks, not in my country.
In Australia we have a conservative Liberal party, a liberal Labor party (which is the political arm of the union movement), a green party which doesn't support cutting greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. using nuclear power) but supports gay rights and a democrat party who kept the bastards honest by committing political suicide.
We are a strange country.
I would have to say I disagree with you.
The level of compassion that is shown towards the cylons is unacceptable in my opinion. It almost detracts from the show. The Cylons murdered, brutalised and betrayed the humans - their creators. They launched surprise nuclear attacks without provocation after a forty year cease fire. They are machines, created beings, and based on their actions deserve no pity from the humans.
What really got under my skin though was the absolute merciless way that many of the humans treated their own kind, while showing far more sympathy for Cylons. If you saw a traitor attempt to assassinate your commanding officer, you would have no hesitation to put fifteen bullets into their skull before they left the room. Similarly, most humans would be far more forgiving of "collaborators" in an apparently hopeless situation. Yet the "collaborators" got spaced (an incredibly horrible way to die) and the would-be assassin gets off scott free. There only needed to be one major character with this viewpoint, but they're all wishy-washy "oooh machines have rights too" idiots.
Sadly the best opportunity for the writers to really make the show into something special was when they failed to kill off adama (even though I love the character) at the end of season 1. With Adama dead there would have been noone to unite the military and they writers could have shown the stress and internal power struggles that ensued. That would have made the show far more interesting - to see the crew fractured and divided against each other while still having to repel the relentless assault of the mindless machines.
To be completely honest, that's the only reason I actually read any of the comments in this thread.
The fact is buddy, that your arguement is simply untrue. Why it is untrue is anyone's guess, but my own belief is that as humans accumulate power they tend to be drawn towards corruption. By restricting control of the major decisions regarding the government of people to only a select few, you are basically ensuring that those select few will use that power to reinforce their power, unless public checks and balances are put in place. This is why democracy is a horrible system, but it's the best system of government that man has yet devised.
Except that it has worked for thousands of years, and only when the population has given up their power to another body (the church, their government or whoever) has the system failed. It's the idiot masses who ensure that the intelligent evil do not cause even more damage than they already do.
Seriously, was this tagged goatse to stop me clicking the link? I mean this is slashdot, it's not like I would have clicked the link anyway.
I for one welcome our new [noun] overlords. In Soviet Russia [noun] [verb]s you.
Suprised noone has picked up on my grammatical mistake. I actually meant to have "insert boot disk" but I enclosed it in html braces, which meant it didn't show.
The real issue with banning the bundling of operating systems is that it will incur extra cost and frustration for non-geeks (i.e. mums and dads everywhere) who don't know how to install an OS. Picture this: a random person decides to buy a computer and take it home. They get home, plug in and boot up. They hit a black screen with or something similar on it. They complain, try to take it back only to find out that they need to spend another $x on labour costs. The consumer is unhappy, the vendor is unhappy because they have an unhappy customer. But at least M$ gets shafted!
Really, vendors should be forced to ask the consumer which operating system their client wants and give prices for them to their customer for every new PC sale. That would promote fair market better than "banning bundling".
- Firstly, whirlpool are THE resource for finding out about ISPs in Australia. Their neutrality and open forums, should they be lost, would be very, very bad for consumers.
- Secondly, a ruling against whirlpool means a precedent would be set which basically ensured that forums in Australia would be practically eliminated. This is both bad for a lot of businesses and bad for users.
For these reasons I really really hope that whirlpool wins (well, for those reasons and the obvious moral reasons).The reason I posted the youtube links was to avoid overburdening the already resource-limited ABC site.
Just an FYI for everyone out there, the Chaser is a show which is broadcast by the ABC, a PUBLICALLY FUNDED channel here in Australia. They constantly poke fun of security, politicians and current affairs shows (among other things). They are a great example of democracy done right.
For some interesting clips see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs3SfNANtig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnP0snh_1cU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3grHjibNdA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BOMOVV2pf0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc5xTZGUrRQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GViD0Zwc3Bg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-6F8GN8eXI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwJ9s1RdGhc&
Many more are freely available on youtube and other sites. The ABC doesn't mind you distributing them either.
Are you kidding? The coallition members are by far more cooperative with the Chaser guys, particularly Costello. It's the labor party members (I'm looking at you Beazley) that have traditionally reacted badly to them.
You have enough fodder to criticise the coallition without slandering them. Locking these guys up was procedure for anyone who broke through security, which they did. I doubt that the PM even found out about it until after the news had broke and they'd been incarcerated.
If I had mod points, I would mod you up.
Quite often on here and in other places (the linked bad astronomer article) there is undue criticism thrown towards creations, under the false assumption that all creationists are a) extreme right-wing fundamentalist American evangalists, b) believe in a 100% "literal" interpretation of [insert holy text here] c) believe in a young universe and d) disbelieve in scientific discoveries.
The truth of the matter is that the people who fall into this stereotype are only a very small minority of people who believe in a creator. One cannot forget that it was a minister who came up with the Big Bang Theory in the first place and that it was atheists who only believed in "science" that were the biggest initial critics of the theory. In fact many atheists of the time believed in an infinite universe, as that gives enough time for life to have randomly began at some stage on some planet in the universe (which was thought to be necessary for abiogenesis at the time).
We now know that the evidence suggests that the Big Bang is what happened several billion years ago. However we do not know if there is missing information which would lead us to different conclusions (like how scientists from 100 billion years into the future will believe the universe is infinite based on the lack of cosmic background radiation).
The question of whether or not the universe was created by an intelligence or not is a question that can only be answered one way or another by religious belief (and I'm counting atheistic beliefs among these) and never by science. Science may inform religion and religion may shed light into some of the sciences, but they are as seperate disciplines as screenwriting and calligraphy.
How the hell did this post get modded insightful? This was flamebait through and through. Not even our top scientists can agree on whether there is a God or not, so how can one /.er make those claims with absolute assurance and then get modded up?
From my observations this post is 100% correct. I know WoW players in all four categories.
It's strange but the people who enjoy the game the most seem to be the people in Phase one and two. Some phase 3 people still enjoy the game, but not many do. Fortunately I slot quite neatly into Phase 2.
Google has too much invested in Youtube to allow any corporate action to kill it. Until Viacom realise this they are on the losing side.
EMI appear to be begrudgingly accepting that their antiquated business models need some reform. It is only a matter of time before the other labels follow suit.
Look I can understand if people are upset about it. But really the extremes that are being mentioned in the article are just way too much in my opinion. I found the whole digg revolt amusing, yet since then I don't visit the site any more and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Digg's business is suffering because they made a stupid decision. Even if LiveJournal reinstated all of the blogs that they deleted, do they really deserve our business? No. Which is why I feel a protest against a company in an essentially commoditized market is not exactly the most productive use of time.
Granted I was wrong about people paying for the service. That does not mean that there are not similar, viable businesses out there that aren't more deserving of your business than LJ. Instead LiveJournal get a massive amount of hits and publicity and when they reinstate the posts they might even have more users than before. A protest campaign is never the way to deal with a business you don't like (look at what protesting "Deep Throat" and "Baise Moire" did in the US and Australia respectively).
Even in the US your right to free speech constitutionally only extends to the level that the government is not allowed to interfere. It never states anything about private companies. If you are on someone else's property, they have the right to evict you. If you are using someone else's web site they have the right to cancel your account.
Having said that I will say that the paid users of the site do have a right to complain if they are the ones who are being targeted. Again, if I were banned I would be moving instantly to another service and not returning, particularly if I was a paying customer (after filing a "I was hardly done-by so you can redeem yourselves by giving me free stuff" complaint).
Actually no, it wouldn't change. I do use free journal services occasionally, and I would probably be a little annoyed if my posts got censored, but if they DID get censored, I would simply either move to another service or pay for my own hosting (oh my gosh, using my free will to boycott products I don't like - how horrifying).
If you believe that what you say is that important that it simply has to be on the internet, then you will make it happen.
The owners of livejournal have the right to do whatever they like with their website, provided that it is within the law.
If you are really that concerned about being able to post whatever you wish, register yourself a domain name (your own name or a variation thereof should be available), learn some basic html (or get someone else to do it for you) and post your journals to your own site. Include a few google ads and use that to pay for any hosting fees.
These sites are allowed to censor whatever they wish whenever they wish because it's their site. If you're upset with the service find somewhere better or stop complaining. It's not like the users are paying for the privilege. If the journals are lost for good then it really is the users fault for not backing up their own stuff.
JFK: You, err, want me to assassinate myself.
Lister: Yeah, sure it'll drive the conspiracy nuts crazy but they'll never figure it out.