He certainly was a strange one. The sign outside the building doesn't even have his name on it because the city council didn't want to honor him.
In the end, I think there must be a balance struck. Unless the site is incredibly valuable to history, it should be thoroughly documented (including the transfer of any and all objects/materials related to the site to a historical society) and then allowed to be replaced or torn down. While I found the issue interesting, I actually agree. The building itself seems to offer little historical value and has no apparent architectural interest.
It still isn't theft, because no one, not the seeder nor the copyright holder, is deprived of the thing that you download. After you download a song, everyone involved still has everything they did before you downloaded it. Are you even aware of the purpose of copyrights? When you download a song from your favorite P2P network, you have deprived the copyright holder of their right to control distribution of their work. I certainly don't agree with the music labels and their raping of the fair use doctrine, but blatant inaccuracies like this are of no help.
You make good points, but it'd be creepy to sit down and watch porn with your kid. Heh. I was thinking that you would supervise your kids so you know what they are doing and they know what they are allowed to do. Not that you would teach them the best places to find goatse:)
That implies there should be some leeway for parents to treat their children like an adult before that, under supervision. i.e.: Let them drive in a parking lot before they are 16. Let them see an R-rated movie. Let them have a small drink before 21...Censorware gives that kind of control to a parent... When your kid is 15, do you hand him the keys and say "Have fun in the parking lot. See you this evening." Or, do you sit in the passenger's seat and coach his driving skills? Do you give him unfettered access to the liquor cabinet or do you let him have a glass of wine at dinner with the rest of the family? Many people want the censorware so they don't have to worry about where Johnny and Susie go on the Internet - so they can let them onto the information superhighway without any supervision.
I don't have a problem with reasonable filtering software being used in schools, libraries, etc, where kids will have Internet access without the option of parental supervision. However, parents should realize that NetNanny is not a replacement for parental oversight and involvement.
I don't understand why people act like censorware's mere existence is a bad thing. It is a good way for people to police themselves, which is how most enforcement of morality should be. When I have kids, I plan to use it. I have no problem with its existence - but I hate to see parents think it is a suitable replacement for parenting. As indicated in the article and its links, the software both fails to block porn and it blocks non-porn. Plus, the world doesn't have filters installed.
I also plan to teach them, especially my sons, about the dangers that come with it so that they know that it's worse than they suspect. To be honest, as a Christian, I'd far rather walk in on my kids getting wasted or stoned, and I say that as someone who comes from a line of alcoholics. Now you've completely lost me. I certainly control what my kids are allowed to see on the TV and computer, but I would rather find them with a dirty magazine than wasted on drugs. Your kids will most likely see a naked person at some point in their life, both in real life and in replications (movies, pictures, statues, etc) so how can you imagine that seeing a picture of a topless woman is worse than losing brain cells to drugs?
What is needed is a comprehensive, open source filtering system that requires you to contribute without any anonymity. Imagine something like the Wikipedia for filtering, but you have to mail a copy of your identifying information, and contribute under your real name to control trolling. That, and a multi-tiered categorization scheme to capture such nuance as "bland, risque, sexy, NSFW--ever!! and Possibly Illegal porn." Oversimplification perhaps, but just a thought. I think a great filtering system could be built if it were done in public, with transparency and room for people to configure it to their moral views. The problem is that we all have slightly different flavors of morality. Some people would classify a Lindsay Lohan nipple slip as porn that should be illegal while others would have no problem seeing it on the cover of a magazine. My wife used to get a parenting magazine that made a big stink a few years ago by putting a breastfeeding baby on the cover - no nipple mind you, just the baby's face and the side of a breast. Outraged readers railed about breasts being sexual objects, about hiding the magazine so their husband didn't see it, and so forth. Call when you develop a porn classification system that everyone accepts.
When you're talking about a supply of content that is so large that nobody could finish looking at it all if they spent the rest of their life trying, it doesn't really matter if 25% or 50% or 75% is located within your legal jurisdiction. Boy oh boy do I look forward to proving this guy wrong!
But if you're really that afraid of your kids, you can stop that for free, right? Just password your BIOS setup at boot and disable boot from cd/disk. Then, later, if you need to boot from CD/disk for some reason, you have the password to re-enable it.
Wouldn't that fix the issue?
If you're that afraid of your kids, get them the hell off the computer.
As for your solution, a kid that will burn a linux CD and boot from it just to find some porn probably would be able to crack the case and reset the BIOS password.
However, if you were to apply that untested P.O.S. across the world in tons of real environments, you'd probably have a shitton of problems. At least we knowthisdoesn'thappenwithMicrosoftpatches.
The only caveat I would make is not the ability to just recognize rights, but also respect the rights of others. Clearly, animals don't do this. The only time they recognize the "rights" of other animals is through the threat of force. The predator only recognizes the prey's right to live if the prey fends the predator off.
There are many interactions between animals that are more complicated than predator/prey. All animals have some sort of social structure, including some highly developed communities. Other primates in particular have societies that resemble early human ones. It is quite common in mammals of many sorts for communities to help care for the young, to share hunting responsibilities, and to mourn for their dead.
There are many different types of human communities with widely-varying standards on rights and responsibilities, some with decidedly uncivilized "human" morals and no respect for what you might consider basic rights.
What the article describes is actually not a 'right' for animals like chimps, it's more a restriction on human activity so should just be called that. Most "rights" are restrictions on the activity of other humans. How is this any different than the rights we provide others who may need protection, such as children, the mentally retarded, or minority groups of various flavors?
My personal view is that rights are not granted unless there is a reciprocal responsibility...If it can be shown that other animals have the capacity to understand, recognize, and uphold rights, then I'd be willing to accept granting them rights...So far as I've been able to observe, only humans have the concept of 'rights'. As you point out, the "rights" discussed in TFAs are pretty basic "the right not to be abused" kind of things. Saying that a chimp is human enough to be granted a legal guardian doesn't entail any reciprocal responsibility on their part. In fact, this actually reduces down to the right of a particular person to have legal guardianship of the animal, more of an end run around legal ownership issues.
Same goes for artificial intelligence: rights should only be granted when the entity receiving the rights is able to recognize the rights of others. So you're willing to grant software the right to life as long as it agrees you have the same right? I fail to see how you can have an easier time extending human rights to hardware and software created by humans instead of nearly-human animals.
Just to be clear, I'm aware of the very slippery slope and generally do not agree with attempts to grant legal standing (for purposes of lawsuits) to non-human animals. However, I am amazed at the logic used by most posters in this thread. Keep in mind that it wasn't many years ago that the US didn't grant full human status to those with dark skin. Simply relying on the human-created species barrier is extremely shallow intellectually.
There is at least one big difference between humans and animals. In most cases, when a human kills another human, they feel remorse. Murderers typically know and believe what they have done is wrong. There's no evidence that when a chimp kills another chimp that they feel any remorse whatsoever. You are confusing socially-ingrained morals with innate feelings. Your concepts of remorse and wrongness are completely relative terms and are defined by the group in which these humans were raised and/or live. Do some studies of Quakers, inner city gang bangers, Marine snipers, and various secluded "primitive" peoples, then tell me how murderers "typically" feel. The word itself is subject to varying definitions - do you consider it murder to kill in self defense or on the battlefield?
Also, humans are animals. At least say "other" animals when making such silly claims.
CTG please note; the voting machines are actually required to do less than an ATM. That depends on what you expect a voting machine to do.
1) ATMs are required to have secure communications capabilities, but the voting machines are required NOT to have any communications capabilities. ATMs used to be abused by people who would capture the dispense packets coming off the modem and then replay them until the machine was dry. I doubt this happens now that they (Diebold, at least) use 3DES. Several of the voting machines did in fact have and use network capabilities (most were via modem). I'm not saying this is the right way to do it, but there clearly is no requirement that voting machines have no communications capabilities.
2) ATM's are required to read a mag stripe, but the voting machines are NOT required to read a mag stripe{or any type of card} How does the voting machine know that a valid voter needs to use the machine? Most implementations use a fob, smart card, USB key, or other removable media that is provided to each voter. Otherwise, what's to stop someone from voting repeatedly?
3) ATM's are required to display and print a number of various types of forms and formats, but voting machines are NOT. Like most ATMS now, voting machines use touch screens for input and output. Any worthwhile voting machine also would have some sort of reciept printer, just like an ATM does.
So the OS in the category of voting machine can and should have limited capabilities in respect to the OS in the category of ATM. I don't disagree that using Windows XP for voting machines (as well as ATMs) is a bad idea. However, I don't follow your attempt to draw such a big line between ATMs and voting machines.
The bill shouldn't discriminate between the OS and the voting software. This is not a general purpose machine that requires an advanced OS -- it requires a bare minimum system that can count votes and print ballots! The machines that do these very limited tasks should not be something which Microsoft targets as a significant market for their standard operating systems. And an ATM would seem to fall into this category as well, if not more so (read a mag stripe, manage output to a small CRT, print receipts, dispense cash, and communicate via modem to a private network). Yet, Diebold used OS/2 Warp for years and finally switched to Windows XP a few years ago. The ATMs are PCs inside - consumer-grade mobo, hard drive, processor, RAM, etc.
If people ate the grain fed to beef, instead of the beef, they'd only need to consume one tenth of the grain (ie grain to beef is only approx 10% efficient).
Each pound of beef requires about 3-4 pounds of oil.
Thus, switching to significantly reduced meat intake would use vastly less oil and free up a lot of land that could be put to other uses (eg. biofuels). Actually, using more responsible farming practices would help greatly. Beef requires so much petroleum due to the industrial agricultural machine, from over-reliance on fertilizer used to grow the corn for feed to the gasoline and diesel used transporting feed, cattle, and meat across the country. Smaller, more diverse farms can virtually eliminate petroleum-based fertilizers and selling the meat locally decreases fuel consumed by transportation. Unfortunately, the vegetarian utopia you described is unlikely to help at all.
As for musicians, many here are advocating they tour for the rest of their natural lives in order to egg out a meager living. Who the hell actually wants to be touring when they are in their 50s? Why do you believe that musicians should be exempted from life? I doubt that I'll still want to be an IT manager in my 50s, but I may be because of the same reason I am now - my family and I need money that is provided by my job. Being a touring musician is a job, and one that many people would love to do into their 50s. Musicians are somehow special and should be able to retire at 22 from one over-produced CD of teeny-pop trash?
Copyright isn't going away and most here do not call for a complete dismantling. However, corporate control of the current system has poisoned it so that it no longer serves its initial purpose nor does it serve the public.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/12
I don't have a problem with reasonable filtering software being used in schools, libraries, etc, where kids will have Internet access without the option of parental supervision. However, parents should realize that NetNanny is not a replacement for parental oversight and involvement.
Don't forget that our 17 year olds can be sent to Iraq to kill but can't buy a beer when they get home.
http://carcino.gen.nz/images/index.php/00b9a680/30 bd63e3
Wouldn't that fix the issue?
If you're that afraid of your kids, get them the hell off the computer. As for your solution, a kid that will burn a linux CD and boot from it just to find some porn probably would be able to crack the case and reset the BIOS password.There are many different types of human communities with widely-varying standards on rights and responsibilities, some with decidedly uncivilized "human" morals and no respect for what you might consider basic rights.
Just to be clear, I'm aware of the very slippery slope and generally do not agree with attempts to grant legal standing (for purposes of lawsuits) to non-human animals. However, I am amazed at the logic used by most posters in this thread. Keep in mind that it wasn't many years ago that the US didn't grant full human status to those with dark skin. Simply relying on the human-created species barrier is extremely shallow intellectually.
Copyright isn't going away and most here do not call for a complete dismantling. However, corporate control of the current system has poisoned it so that it no longer serves its initial purpose nor does it serve the public.