Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Reasonable people from Jefferson on have interpreted that to mean two things: first, that the government cannot promote or support any religion, and second, as you say, that the government cannot ban or discriminate any religion. Like much of the Constitution, the First Amendment is a masterpiece of balance. Freedom of and freedom from religion are inseparable.
Any other interpretation is not only unreasonable, but ahistorical -- remember that the people who wrote the Constitution had rather graphic examples of the horrors of state-supported religion within living memory. These days, at least in the US, we've largely forgotten how dangerous it can be.
Among other units, books, music and video remain Amazon's biggest sellers, ringing up revenue of $538 million in the fourth quarter, but sales growth was a mere 5 percent
Electronics tools and kitchen sales were $216.6 million, down 2 percent from a year ago. Services sales were $98 million, up 3 percent.
Not sure exactly what the "services" are (like everyone else, I hope it's not 1-click licenses) but this pretty much confirms what my gut told me: Amazon is good at selling books and media, but really lousy at selling everything else. I really hope that they realize this and get out of the TV's-and-lawn-chairs business. They're still a great place to buy books, but I've never bought anything bigger than about 1 cubic foot from them, and I'm pretty sure I never will.
Give people the benefit of the doubt, okay? I've never written an Ask Slashdot without thoroughly checking out all the other resources I can find, and there's no reason to believe that other posters don't do the same. The whole idea of Ask Slashdot is for users to benefit from the knowledge of the community -- which is supposed to be one of Unix's strengths. The "RTFM" attitude is helpful to nobody. Remember, what goes around, comes around.
The people who run/. don't have the power to send people with guns to your house to arrest you. There may be censorship here, but deliberately confusing it with the government kind (or even the kind practiced by big corporations, which may not have the power to take your freedom away directly, but which are very good at getting governments to do their bidding) is absurd.
Seriously, I'll be awfully surprised if anyone is still performing the "music" of the New Kids, Britney Spears, or any manufactured teen pop star past or present, in fifty years, much less a couple of hundred.
Music at its best has always had its share of enfants terrible, genuinely talented kids with a lot to say who shake up the old order -- from Mozart to Johnny Rotten -- and they are deservedly remembered. Kids with nothing to say who are actually products of the old order, such as Fabian et seq, are something entirely different, and hopefully soon forgotten.
It wasn't always like this.. in my mind, this whole music prostitution started about fifteen years ago with the "New Kids On The Block".
Manufactured no-talent teen "musicians" are a hell of a lot older than the New Kids. Ask your parents who Fabian was some time. It goes at least back to the Fifties, and probably well before that.
... the entire TV, music, and movie industries are on the verge of bankruptcy, because of those evil digital pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of TiVo, mateys! Let's take the Digital Main!
Sheesh. The VCR was the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Recording and sharing _increases_ interest in the entertainment industry's products. Why can't they see that?
Actually, having done both, I see the levels of complexity involved as roughly equivalent. Note the original poster said "rebuilding a carb", not "building a carb" -- these are not the same process.
The difference is that, as a government contractor, you need discipline. This is very hard to come by in the dot-com world of lax business.
[Shrug] I moved from working in Big Healthcare (US Air Force medic, then Denver Health, then Kaiser) to Small Software (my current employer) and there was no difference in the discipline needed. In all circumstances, as long as I showed up and did my job, I got paid. Granted, the penalties for not doing my job were a bit worse in the USAF -- I could go to jail for not going to work, as opposed to just being fired -- but for someone with a good work ethic, it doesn't really matter. You go to work and you do your job. Everything else is details.
WTF does it matter if you've spent the last few years working for the government, a big corporation, or a dot-com-then-dot-bomb? What matters is if you're a good programmer, with the skills to analyze, plan for, and solve a specific programming problem.
Or are we really talking about managerial types, who are essentially the same (they're all suits, regardless of the color of the suit) but who love to make up fake differences for themselves and segregate into the "fast-moving, innovative" dot-bombers vs. the "disciplined, dependable" gov't and big-corp types? In which case, why should real techies care? Management will always be management, and they'll always have their turf wars and suit-speak, but meantime, those of with real technical skills will always be the ones who get the job done. It's not the corporate structure that matters. It's the quality of the code.
... is what I remember some columnist (John Dvorak, maybe?) calling the original iMac. He used basically the same arguments we've seen here: cool premium computers aren't what sells, cheap beige boxes with aggressive marketing is what sells, and Apple Just Doesn't Get It.
But the fact is that the original iMac was the single most successful personal computer model in history, and it pretty much saved Apple. I'd say that this is proof that Apple Does Get It, in a way that most columnists apparently don't. Look, Apple will never take over the world, and we Macheads know that. That's okay. What matters is that Apple keeps making the world's best computers, and enough people (4.5% is a small slice of a really enormous pie, and that's okay too) keep buying them so they stay in business.
Oh yeah... take a look at Apple's financials vs. those of Dell, Compaq, HP, or IBM's PC division. Not only do they Get It regarding design and marketing, apparently they Get It regarding the bottom line too, because they're making money hand over fist at a time when almost all other personal computer makers are struggling.
Yes, if Apple had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
And if Sun had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
And if Oracle had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
And if IBM had 90+% market share... wait a minute, never mind.
The point is not how vicious other companies beside Microsoft may be (though I'll note that Apple has become considerably less closed in the OS X age than it used to be.) The point is that Microsoft has unique monopoly power right now, and that they are everyone's enemy. Let me make that clear: if you work for Apple or Sun or Oracle or IBM or any other computer company that is not Microsoft; if you prefer MacOS or Solaris or Linux or any operating system that is not Windows; if, in fact, you do not actually work for Microsoft or for some "company" that is really a marketing arm of Wintel, Inc. (e.g. Dell), Microsoft is your enemy.
If and when Microsoft is toppled from its throne (and I sincerely hope it happens soon) there will be another company waiting to take its place, no doubt -- and it's entirely possible that one of the companies I mentioned above will be it. (Probably not; it will probably be someone we either don't know about or aren't particularly afraid of... like Microsoft itself was in the days of IBM dominance. Maybe Red Hat?) Whoever it is, they will try all the same monopolistic dirty tricks as Microsoft has, and that IBM did before it, no doubt. And we will have to be on our guard against them, and fight them every step of the way -- hopefully we can keep them from ever getting that powerful, but if not, expect yet another long anti-trust saga that leaves no one satisfied.
But right now, in 2002, that doesn't matter. What matters is that Microsoft is much too big and too powerful, that it is crushing innovation, that it is evil. Remember that Churchill and Roosevelt allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, and they were right to do so.
Go ahead. Claim your name, DOB, SNN, address, etc. as IP. Tell people who try to collect it that they're violating DMCA or the UCITA or something. And watch them laugh in your face. Because you'll be going up against big corporations, which have infinitely more money than you, and against the government, which has not only money but also guns. Lots of guns.
"Big Brother and Big Corp" run the game. They set the rules. There is effectively nothing that private citizens can do to change this.
Yes, exactly. Note that unanimous Supreme Court decisions are very rare in any case where there's substantial controversy -- I strongly suspect that this individual really didn't have very strong case (or maybe she had a really lousy lawyer.) I would be very surprised if this case turned out to set any significant precedent.
I've been known to brag to out-of-towners about Denver's light rail system (which is excellent -- the only problem with it is that it's not big or interconnected enough yet.) If done right, a municipal network could be a wonderful thing, fully as much of an asset to the community as a good transit system -- and the much-maligned El train is actually a pretty good way to get around Chicago, IIRC from the limited amount of time I've spent there.
OTOH, since the article says they're planning to have private contractors handle most of it... eh. To me that implies massive cost overruns and lots of taxpayer money disappearing into executives' pockets. Public is good, private is good, the combination of the two is usually a two-headed monster that makes a few people very rich and does no one else any good at all (e.g., Denver's experiments with privatizing chunks of our bus system.) If they want a public network, that's what they should build.
... just bought themselves another couple of years or so worth of computing progress before mainstream small-busines servers fall into the restricted category. [sigh] This is just as stupid as restrictions on encryption software. When the hell are the feds going to learn that the US isn't the world's only source for computing technology (hardware, software, and combinations thereof) and the only thing these export restrictions accomplish is to weaken US companies against foreign competition?
Well, yeah... make it truly POSIX-compliant (not the pseudo POSIX-compliance M$ put into Windows NT to meet gov't requirements, but something more on the level of what the BeOS had) and "OpenAmiga" would have been a hit, the Linux of its time. But that's kind of my point. An open-source MS-DOS clone (and of course there were some pretty good competing DOS's) would have been interesting, but not all that useful, and ultimately wouldn't have hurt M$ one bit. And I see open-source.NET clones as the modern-day equivalent of that sort of effort. I'd rather see talented Linux developers putting their time into Linux-y things that might help dislodge Windows' desktop dominance, not playing catch-up with Microsoft products that are pretty much guaranteed to be crap anyway.
Well, actually, the world might be a better place if more programs were still being written in Cobol.:) It's not nearly as powerful a general-purpose language as C++, but it was (and is, considering how many Cobol programs are still in use) very very good at what it did for specific applications.
But. This is a completely different situation from C vs. Cobol, or C++ vs. C, or Java vs. C++, or whatever. This is about people buying into a closed, proprietary application framework put out by a viciously monopolistic company with a history of creating terrible software, when those same people have talents which could be put to work making open-source software which is already quite good even better. Imagine what a dreary place the world would be today if Linus (or maybe a better comparison is the original BSD team) had decided to drop this whole free-Unix-clone idea in favor of making clones of MS-DOS.
Yep. I was a medic in the Air Force for eight years, and worked in the base E.R. for most of that time. I ended up working Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter -- the big "family" holidays -- most years since the folks who were married with kids always wanted those holidays off. Never bothered me very much, but it was funny sometimes.
My favorite was the lady who walked in on Christmas day with a sore throat she'd had for two weeks. While I was checking her in, she told me, "I can't believe they make you guys work on Christmas." I refrained from answering, "Well, I guess you'd be pretty upset if you came to the E.R. and we had a 'Closed for the holidays' sign on the door..."
I agree with the parent poster and am saddened, but not surprised, to see the post modded "flamebait." Apparently anyone who dares to criticize anything Christmas-y, even on a forum usually as progressive and freethinking as Slashdot, is eeevil and must be silenced. [sigh]
Okay. So many people equate open source and free software with communism, apparently not in jest, that I have a rather short fuse on the matter. Sorry if I overreacted.
Free software is no more "communism" than, say, commercial software (by which I mean the Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, etc. business model) is "fascism," or the academic (e.g. BSD) model is "theocracy." Using terms which invoke the suffering and death of millions of people to argue about software isn't just absurd; it insults the memory of those who suffered and died under the real thing. People who call Linux "commie software" ought to try living in Cuba or the PRC for a while to learn what real communism is like.
Slashdot Mirror
The full clause is:
Reasonable people from Jefferson on have interpreted that to mean two things: first, that the government cannot promote or support any religion, and second, as you say, that the government cannot ban or discriminate any religion. Like much of the Constitution, the First Amendment is a masterpiece of balance. Freedom of and freedom from religion are inseparable.
Any other interpretation is not only unreasonable, but ahistorical -- remember that the people who wrote the Constitution had rather graphic examples of the horrors of state-supported religion within living memory. These days, at least in the US, we've largely forgotten how dangerous it can be.
From the article:
Not sure exactly what the "services" are (like everyone else, I hope it's not 1-click licenses) but this pretty much confirms what my gut told me: Amazon is good at selling books and media, but really lousy at selling everything else. I really hope that they realize this and get out of the TV's-and-lawn-chairs business. They're still a great place to buy books, but I've never bought anything bigger than about 1 cubic foot from them, and I'm pretty sure I never will.
Give people the benefit of the doubt, okay? I've never written an Ask Slashdot without thoroughly checking out all the other resources I can find, and there's no reason to believe that other posters don't do the same. The whole idea of Ask Slashdot is for users to benefit from the knowledge of the community -- which is supposed to be one of Unix's strengths. The "RTFM" attitude is helpful to nobody. Remember, what goes around, comes around.
The people who run /. don't have the power to send people with guns to your house to arrest you. There may be censorship here, but deliberately confusing it with the government kind (or even the kind practiced by big corporations, which may not have the power to take your freedom away directly, but which are very good at getting governments to do their bidding) is absurd.
:)
Seriously, I'll be awfully surprised if anyone is still performing the "music" of the New Kids, Britney Spears, or any manufactured teen pop star past or present, in fifty years, much less a couple of hundred.
Music at its best has always had its share of enfants terrible, genuinely talented kids with a lot to say who shake up the old order -- from Mozart to Johnny Rotten -- and they are deservedly remembered. Kids with nothing to say who are actually products of the old order, such as Fabian et seq, are something entirely different, and hopefully soon forgotten.
Manufactured no-talent teen "musicians" are a hell of a lot older than the New Kids. Ask your parents who Fabian was some time. It goes at least back to the Fifties, and probably well before that.
... the entire TV, music, and movie industries are on the verge of bankruptcy, because of those evil digital pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of TiVo, mateys! Let's take the Digital Main!
Sheesh. The VCR was the best thing that ever happened to Hollywood. Recording and sharing _increases_ interest in the entertainment industry's products. Why can't they see that?
Actually, having done both, I see the levels of complexity involved as roughly equivalent. Note the original poster said "rebuilding a carb", not "building a carb" -- these are not the same process.
[Shrug] I moved from working in Big Healthcare (US Air Force medic, then Denver Health, then Kaiser) to Small Software (my current employer) and there was no difference in the discipline needed. In all circumstances, as long as I showed up and did my job, I got paid. Granted, the penalties for not doing my job were a bit worse in the USAF -- I could go to jail for not going to work, as opposed to just being fired -- but for someone with a good work ethic, it doesn't really matter. You go to work and you do your job. Everything else is details.
WTF does it matter if you've spent the last few years working for the government, a big corporation, or a dot-com-then-dot-bomb? What matters is if you're a good programmer, with the skills to analyze, plan for, and solve a specific programming problem.
Or are we really talking about managerial types, who are essentially the same (they're all suits, regardless of the color of the suit) but who love to make up fake differences for themselves and segregate into the "fast-moving, innovative" dot-bombers vs. the "disciplined, dependable" gov't and big-corp types? In which case, why should real techies care? Management will always be management, and they'll always have their turf wars and suit-speak, but meantime, those of with real technical skills will always be the ones who get the job done. It's not the corporate structure that matters. It's the quality of the code.
... is what I remember some columnist (John Dvorak, maybe?) calling the original iMac. He used basically the same arguments we've seen here: cool premium computers aren't what sells, cheap beige boxes with aggressive marketing is what sells, and Apple Just Doesn't Get It.
... take a look at Apple's financials vs. those of Dell, Compaq, HP, or IBM's PC division. Not only do they Get It regarding design and marketing, apparently they Get It regarding the bottom line too, because they're making money hand over fist at a time when almost all other personal computer makers are struggling.
But the fact is that the original iMac was the single most successful personal computer model in history, and it pretty much saved Apple. I'd say that this is proof that Apple Does Get It, in a way that most columnists apparently don't. Look, Apple will never take over the world, and we Macheads know that. That's okay. What matters is that Apple keeps making the world's best computers, and enough people (4.5% is a small slice of a really enormous pie, and that's okay too) keep buying them so they stay in business.
Oh yeah
Yes, if Apple had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
... wait a minute, never mind.
... like Microsoft itself was in the days of IBM dominance. Maybe Red Hat?) Whoever it is, they will try all the same monopolistic dirty tricks as Microsoft has, and that IBM did before it, no doubt. And we will have to be on our guard against them, and fight them every step of the way -- hopefully we can keep them from ever getting that powerful, but if not, expect yet another long anti-trust saga that leaves no one satisfied.
And if Sun had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
And if Oracle had 90+% market share, they would be just as bad as Microsoft, maybe worse.
And if IBM had 90+% market share
The point is not how vicious other companies beside Microsoft may be (though I'll note that Apple has become considerably less closed in the OS X age than it used to be.) The point is that Microsoft has unique monopoly power right now, and that they are everyone's enemy. Let me make that clear: if you work for Apple or Sun or Oracle or IBM or any other computer company that is not Microsoft; if you prefer MacOS or Solaris or Linux or any operating system that is not Windows; if, in fact, you do not actually work for Microsoft or for some "company" that is really a marketing arm of Wintel, Inc. (e.g. Dell), Microsoft is your enemy.
If and when Microsoft is toppled from its throne (and I sincerely hope it happens soon) there will be another company waiting to take its place, no doubt -- and it's entirely possible that one of the companies I mentioned above will be it. (Probably not; it will probably be someone we either don't know about or aren't particularly afraid of
But right now, in 2002, that doesn't matter. What matters is that Microsoft is much too big and too powerful, that it is crushing innovation, that it is evil. Remember that Churchill and Roosevelt allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, and they were right to do so.
Philips says copy-protected CDs have no future at New Scientist. As an aside, I find New Scientist to be one of the best all-around sources for sci/tech news.
Go ahead. Claim your name, DOB, SNN, address, etc. as IP. Tell people who try to collect it that they're violating DMCA or the UCITA or something. And watch them laugh in your face. Because you'll be going up against big corporations, which have infinitely more money than you, and against the government, which has not only money but also guns. Lots of guns.
"Big Brother and Big Corp" run the game. They set the rules. There is effectively nothing that private citizens can do to change this.
Yes, exactly. Note that unanimous Supreme Court decisions are very rare in any case where there's substantial controversy -- I strongly suspect that this individual really didn't have very strong case (or maybe she had a really lousy lawyer.) I would be very surprised if this case turned out to set any significant precedent.
I've been known to brag to out-of-towners about Denver's light rail system (which is excellent -- the only problem with it is that it's not big or interconnected enough yet.) If done right, a municipal network could be a wonderful thing, fully as much of an asset to the community as a good transit system -- and the much-maligned El train is actually a pretty good way to get around Chicago, IIRC from the limited amount of time I've spent there.
... eh. To me that implies massive cost overruns and lots of taxpayer money disappearing into executives' pockets. Public is good, private is good, the combination of the two is usually a two-headed monster that makes a few people very rich and does no one else any good at all (e.g., Denver's experiments with privatizing chunks of our bus system.) If they want a public network, that's what they should build.
OTOH, since the article says they're planning to have private contractors handle most of it
We've been doing immorality for quite a while now. I'd say we're not only ready for it, we're very good at it.
...
Immortality, now, that's another question
... just bought themselves another couple of years or so worth of computing progress before mainstream small-busines servers fall into the restricted category. [sigh] This is just as stupid as restrictions on encryption software. When the hell are the feds going to learn that the US isn't the world's only source for computing technology (hardware, software, and combinations thereof) and the only thing these export restrictions accomplish is to weaken US companies against foreign competition?
Well, yeah ... make it truly POSIX-compliant (not the pseudo POSIX-compliance M$ put into Windows NT to meet gov't requirements, but something more on the level of what the BeOS had) and "OpenAmiga" would have been a hit, the Linux of its time. But that's kind of my point. An open-source MS-DOS clone (and of course there were some pretty good competing DOS's) would have been interesting, but not all that useful, and ultimately wouldn't have hurt M$ one bit. And I see open-source .NET clones as the modern-day equivalent of that sort of effort. I'd rather see talented Linux developers putting their time into Linux-y things that might help dislodge Windows' desktop dominance, not playing catch-up with Microsoft products that are pretty much guaranteed to be crap anyway.
Well, actually, the world might be a better place if more programs were still being written in Cobol. :) It's not nearly as powerful a general-purpose language as C++, but it was (and is, considering how many Cobol programs are still in use) very very good at what it did for specific applications.
But. This is a completely different situation from C vs. Cobol, or C++ vs. C, or Java vs. C++, or whatever. This is about people buying into a closed, proprietary application framework put out by a viciously monopolistic company with a history of creating terrible software, when those same people have talents which could be put to work making open-source software which is already quite good even better. Imagine what a dreary place the world would be today if Linus (or maybe a better comparison is the original BSD team) had decided to drop this whole free-Unix-clone idea in favor of making clones of MS-DOS.
Yep. I was a medic in the Air Force for eight years, and worked in the base E.R. for most of that time. I ended up working Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter -- the big "family" holidays -- most years since the folks who were married with kids always wanted those holidays off. Never bothered me very much, but it was funny sometimes.
..."
My favorite was the lady who walked in on Christmas day with a sore throat she'd had for two weeks. While I was checking her in, she told me, "I can't believe they make you guys work on Christmas." I refrained from answering, "Well, I guess you'd be pretty upset if you came to the E.R. and we had a 'Closed for the holidays' sign on the door
I agree with the parent poster and am saddened, but not surprised, to see the post modded "flamebait." Apparently anyone who dares to criticize anything Christmas-y, even on a forum usually as progressive and freethinking as Slashdot, is eeevil and must be silenced. [sigh]
They're not variants or dialects of English, but --
if
else
do
while
select
from
where
-- are all a whole lot more obvious if you know what the words mean in everyday (English) usage.
Okay. So many people equate open source and free software with communism, apparently not in jest, that I have a rather short fuse on the matter. Sorry if I overreacted.
Free software is no more "communism" than, say, commercial software (by which I mean the Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, etc. business model) is "fascism," or the academic (e.g. BSD) model is "theocracy." Using terms which invoke the suffering and death of millions of people to argue about software isn't just absurd; it insults the memory of those who suffered and died under the real thing. People who call Linux "commie software" ought to try living in Cuba or the PRC for a while to learn what real communism is like.