Starvation is the thing that keeps societies from growing faster than the increase in food production
Kind of, but also note that people in starving societies tend to have high birth rates, coupled with social instability which ultimately is a driver of wars. People have lots of children because they know that some of them won't make it to adulthood - and because having children is generally a financially advantageous thing to do (who cares for you in your old age?).
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole.
Small world thinking. We live in a globalised economy now. What do you think starving young people are going to do - stay on the land that isn't providing for them, or go elsewhere? More starvation leads to increased migration and wars.
Why do you limit your "let them starve" argument to people outside of "your country"? Is it because you would actually feed starving people within some imaginary made-up-by-humans geographical boundary? Why not let the people in your neighbouring town or state die if they are starving? Why does your argument not apply in this case? And what about groups of nation states like the E.U.? Should the British let the Spanish starve if there is a crop failure? What about the French? Should the English help the Scots?
if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole
And what if you can't elevate those people out of poverty? You should just let them all starve to death? This is exactly the kind of situation that results in civil war.
The only solutions that have ever been shown to work in the scenario where the land can't support the growing population of people are increased food production, mass migration, or lowering the birth rate by increasing the standard of living. You are not the first to have the "Let them starve" idea - it has actually been tried once or twice in history - and it did not go down well; e.g. the German Hunger Plan to increase food production through war and starvation of occupied populations.
It may not have occurred to you that a lot of unemployed people do, in fact, have spouses and kids. I know, isn't that really fucking selfish of them?
My intention at pointing out spouses was that many people push themselves into a poor lifestyle through wanting to live up to the life goals of a spouse. I have known men who push themselves to the limit of financial affordability, who buy a larger house than they really need, or buy new cars every year, or support their partner who stays at home, because this is the lifestyle that their partner desires. And because of this they have to work longer hours, or take on an extra job. At the end of the day, is it worth it? It doesn't seem to make them any happier, and overwork, stress and lack of personal contact is a major source of marriage breakdown.
My rent here in Australia is $1400/month (which is $1484 USD on today's exchange rate). And that's literally about as cheap as you can get in most Australian cities - it's a tiny 2 bedroom townhouse with crappy fixtures, in a kinda crappy area, in a mid-sized (~400,000 people) urban area.
That's expensive for US or Europe - you might pay that price somewhere like London or Geneva, but those are two of the most expensive cities in the world, other places are considerably cheaper.. Presumably you have this two bedroom townhouse to yourself? I flat share - it cuts my rent by at least 50% over what I was paying alone, plus all other costs (utilities, broadband, etc.) are split... it works out way cheaper.
A) Where and how is 347/wk covering all of his bills? Because it wouldn't work in Sarasota Florida, I can say from experience.
$347/wk is $18k/yr. According to Wikipedia, between 30% and 35% of the U.S. population earn less than that (though some will obviously be financially dependent on others to some extent).
It's certainly possible to live on that; if I live like a student - drink in cheap bars, flat share with several people etc. then I average about $350/wk. Rent is the biggie at $350/month but once that's paid everything else is relatively cheap. When I was an actual student I had to live on the (inflation adjusted) equivalent of what would be $10k/yr now... it's a matter of adjusting your expectations. Personally, I decided some time ago that I prefer to spend less and work less, and have the freedom to do whatever I want for most of the time instead of working 12 hour days to "live the dream" of an expensive house and spouse...
Not trying to troll here, but why would one use GNU Hurd?
Mach was just an academic research project into microkernels until Apple picked it up and ran with it. At the moment there appears to be no practical reason for most people to choose Hurd, but undoubtedly there will be someone out there who does have a reason, and who knows where that could end.
Does Debian really have nothing better to do?
"Debian" is not a monolithic corporate entity with some dynamic figurehead deciding what everyone works on this year... Hurd is interesting to some people, and they want to work on it. Why not let them? The worst that can happen is that it becomes a niche platform like Nexenta's Debian/GNU/Solaris. As long as it doesn't hold back GNU/Linux then what's the downside?
If you are going to lump all religious killings together, than I am going to lump all atheist killings together.
You are comparing "all religious killings" - i.e. every killing that was religious in nature, with "every killing ever carried out by, or on the orders of, an atheist". You are comparing apples and oranges; those two things are not the same.
For an equal comparison, try "every killing carried out by, or on the orders of, a religious person" versus "every killing carried out by, or on the orders of, an atheist". Note that the majority of German soldiers in WWII considered themselves to be Christians, and the motto of the German military was Gott mit uns (God with us). Would you attribute every killing by a German soldier who happened to be Christian to Christianity? Clearly not. So why would you attribute every killing by atheists to atheism?
Revolutionary Marxism is an atheistic belief system. So, at best, all you have done is establish that the reason they killed was because they had a belief system that was a subset of atheism... They killed as they did because of their belief system. An integral part of their belief system was atheism.
Actually, it is a bit more complex than that - atheism was often not an integral part of the belief system for Marxist movements outside Russia. Marxism is generally interpreted as being against organised religion, but it does not require absolute atheism, although some people do interpret it in that way. Religion according to Marx: quote "In spite of his dislike towards religion, Marx did not make religion the primary enemy of his work and thoughts." and from Wikipedia "Many non-Soviet Marxists deferred from the traditional antireligious stance adopted by Marx, Engels or Lenin, and in important forms of Marxist thinking, such as in Liberation theology movements in Latin America, the antireligious doctrine was rejected entirely." Also note Christian Communists, Christian socialism etc. show that Communism/Socialism wasn't the exclusive preserve of atheists.
Mao and Stalin killed in the millions. Religious wars killed in the thousands. Even when you count all those years it does not add up to as many people.
You miss two important points:
1. The killings by Mao and Stalin were not motivated by atheism. Your argument that because they were atheists - then the killings must be caused by atheism - is the same as saying that if a Christian commits murder - then the murder must have been carried out because of Christianity. Or because George W. Bush is a Christian, then killings carried out due to his orders are Christian. Clearly this is incorrect logic. Having a leader who professes to be religious or atheist does not mean that the results of their actions are caused by that religion or atheism. In the cases of Mao and Stalin, revolutionary Marxism might be a more appropriate belief system to blame.
2. You underestimate the number of people killed in religious wars. In the Cathar Crusade alone, where the Catholic Church waged holy war against one single Christian sect, it is estimated that one million people were killed. The entire population of Béziers - 60,000 men women and children, were murdered once the city fell to the Church's forces. That is just one city, in a few days - a drop in history. The book "Encyclopedia of Wars" finds that 7% of wars involve religious conflict. That is a lot more killing than "in the thousands".
It's a little hard to take seriously a message from a web site that argues that Hitler was a "green" and that "Nazi SS doctrine (was) an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II." Seriously, what? The Nazi SS doctrine was environmentalism? Environmentalism and eco-imperialism were responsible for the Eastern Front in WWII? Crazy.
Obviously your congress decided that having US citizens extradited just because a prosecutor in the UK fancied it them was mental, so they didn't ratify that clause.
Exactly. Patents are supposed to be something innovative, something non-obvious to an expert in the field. Making a phone or tablet with a touch screen and rounded edges is obvious to everybody.
I've noticed many of their phones and the Galaxy tablet look almost identical to their Apple counterparts....
So what? You can't copyright "look and feel". And you can't patent something unless it is innovative - a thin touchscreen phone/computer with rounded edges is not innovative - it's obvious. There are many episodes of Star Trek that show the concept of a touch screen computer that would qualify as prior art.
Because these claims are subject to consumer confusion and “ordinary observer” standards, the products themselves and the packaging in which they are sold are likely to be central to any motion for preliminary injunction.
"Consumer confusion" - Apple is arguing that consumers find it difficult to tell the difference between a Galaxy S and an iPhone and might buy a Samsung product when they meant to buy an Apple one.
Somalia is a failed state. Piracy is just a symptom of the underlying problem, not the problem itself. There can be no lasting security on the seas until there is security on the land - the pirates are able to project their attacks across thousands of kilometers of ocean stretching from Somalia to the Maldives, and it is very difficult to patrol and police such a large area. The potential profits from piracy versus the risk and investment are good, and as long as this continues then Somali entrepreneurs are going to be attracted towards the business.
Providing every crew member of a vessel going through the area with access to a rifle would probably go a long way to combat the problem.
As I understand it, aren't many of the crews already armed? Maybe not every single crew member has access to a rifle, but there are armed people on board (in particular, don't the $millions oil tankers usually have a few ex-forces mercs types on board?) But life is cheap in Somalia, and the potential profits are huge, so the prospect of encountering armed defence isn't such a great deterrent as it would be elsewhere in the world.
Nice troll.. Android uses the Linux kernel.Arguing that it could use another kernel is like arguing that ios could use another kernel - possible, but not easy or likely. Apps do not need to be vm based, the web browser etc are not, and you can compile whatever code you want with gcc... Even market apps can use the ndk... And regardless of whatever you think, it's more "open source" than any other mobile os..
Um... You do realize that has absolutely no bearing on the topic at hand, right?
Shrug. You brought it up. "why should other companies be allowed to copy them?" - because you can't copyright "look and feel". Oh, but you will argue, this isn't about copyright - this is about patents! And technically that is true. But ask yourself - do you honestly believe that these user interface patents are valid? That they represent true innovations, that would not be obvious to an expert in the field? Apple's complaint compares the form of Samsung's phone to that of the iPhone, and compares the menu and button placement to that of the iPhone. These are issues of "look and feel". The idea of having a graphical program launcher is not innovative. Having rounded corners on a phone is not innovative. Having buttons at the bottom of the screen is not innovative. These ideas are obvious to an expert in the field, and hence not patentable by definition. And without patent protection, all you are left with is copyright, which, again, does not apply to "look and feel"...
Apple has always maintained the look and feel of their products as something unique to them. They created it, why should other companies be allowed to copy them?
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation - where the courts ruled that "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". That's why.
I wonder if all those people who helped OpenStreetMap are aware that OpenStreetMap knows the exact location where they were when they collected the data.
Two big differences:
OpenStreetMap data points can be submitted without timestamp, so quite different from the Apple data in question.
OpenStreetMap accounts aren't tied to your real info (no billing etc.)
Can a user download DRMed music from a company that isn't Apple and put it on their ipod? I don't even know why people are bothering to argue this point - Apple blatantly does have a monopoly on being able to produce FairPlay compatible files for iPods. The real question is whether the courts will decide that this monopoly, and Apple's behaviour in blocking RealPlayer's FairPlay converter, is enough to invoke antitrust law.
Exactly, that bastard Steve forced the record companies to accept his tyrannical 99 cent pricing policy and allow me to burn purchased songs to CD's where they can be ripped back to MP3 free of the restrictions
Points which are irrelevant to the antitrust case in question. Back in 2004, RealPlayer could be used to transfer FairPlay compatible music to the ipod. Apple said "We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod, and we are investigating the implications of their actions under the DMCA and other laws." After that, Apple changed the firmware to break the RealPlayer generated files.
If the Zune had reached 74% market share, and Apple had responded by adding the capability to download itunes music to the Zune, and Microsoft then broke that and blocked Apple from the market, you would be outraged. This is no different.
write down one digit wrong (or slighly unreadable) and the code is invalid.
Not necessarily true. I would assume that they built some redundancy in to the actual code. Also, who says that the code is numeric? I would assume it is alphanumeric, as the OCR systems are already capable of reading alphanumeric addresses etc.
I want to start a government aligned entirely under my own rule and that of my heirs in perpetuity. I know! I'll call it a republic and that will make it one.
The passing of power from an emperor to his son is not incompatible with being a republic - see for example the Roman Republic.
Are they also going to teach about those other great republics.. the People's Republic of China (PRC), Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the German Democratic Republic (DDR), and the Islamic Republic?
Or are they only going to teach kids that USA==republic, and forget the inconvenient republics?
Slashdot Mirror
Starvation is the thing that keeps societies from growing faster than the increase in food production
Kind of, but also note that people in starving societies tend to have high birth rates, coupled with social instability which ultimately is a driver of wars. People have lots of children because they know that some of them won't make it to adulthood - and because having children is generally a financially advantageous thing to do (who cares for you in your old age?).
Helping people in your own country would make far more sense, since if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole.
Small world thinking. We live in a globalised economy now. What do you think starving young people are going to do - stay on the land that isn't providing for them, or go elsewhere? More starvation leads to increased migration and wars.
Why do you limit your "let them starve" argument to people outside of "your country"? Is it because you would actually feed starving people within some imaginary made-up-by-humans geographical boundary? Why not let the people in your neighbouring town or state die if they are starving? Why does your argument not apply in this case? And what about groups of nation states like the E.U.? Should the British let the Spanish starve if there is a crop failure? What about the French? Should the English help the Scots?
if you can elevate THOSE people out of poverty, they may be able to become productive and to add value to society as a whole
And what if you can't elevate those people out of poverty? You should just let them all starve to death? This is exactly the kind of situation that results in civil war.
The only solutions that have ever been shown to work in the scenario where the land can't support the growing population of people are increased food production, mass migration, or lowering the birth rate by increasing the standard of living. You are not the first to have the "Let them starve" idea - it has actually been tried once or twice in history - and it did not go down well; e.g. the German Hunger Plan to increase food production through war and starvation of occupied populations.
It may not have occurred to you that a lot of unemployed people do, in fact, have spouses and kids. I know, isn't that really fucking selfish of them?
My intention at pointing out spouses was that many people push themselves into a poor lifestyle through wanting to live up to the life goals of a spouse. I have known men who push themselves to the limit of financial affordability, who buy a larger house than they really need, or buy new cars every year, or support their partner who stays at home, because this is the lifestyle that their partner desires. And because of this they have to work longer hours, or take on an extra job. At the end of the day, is it worth it? It doesn't seem to make them any happier, and overwork, stress and lack of personal contact is a major source of marriage breakdown.
My rent here in Australia is $1400/month (which is $1484 USD on today's exchange rate). And that's literally about as cheap as you can get in most Australian cities - it's a tiny 2 bedroom townhouse with crappy fixtures, in a kinda crappy area, in a mid-sized (~400,000 people) urban area.
That's expensive for US or Europe - you might pay that price somewhere like London or Geneva, but those are two of the most expensive cities in the world, other places are considerably cheaper.. Presumably you have this two bedroom townhouse to yourself? I flat share - it cuts my rent by at least 50% over what I was paying alone, plus all other costs (utilities, broadband, etc.) are split... it works out way cheaper.
A) Where and how is 347/wk covering all of his bills? Because it wouldn't work in Sarasota Florida, I can say from experience.
$347/wk is $18k/yr. According to Wikipedia, between 30% and 35% of the U.S. population earn less than that (though some will obviously be financially dependent on others to some extent).
It's certainly possible to live on that; if I live like a student - drink in cheap bars, flat share with several people etc. then I average about $350/wk. Rent is the biggie at $350/month but once that's paid everything else is relatively cheap. When I was an actual student I had to live on the (inflation adjusted) equivalent of what would be $10k/yr now... it's a matter of adjusting your expectations. Personally, I decided some time ago that I prefer to spend less and work less, and have the freedom to do whatever I want for most of the time instead of working 12 hour days to "live the dream" of an expensive house and spouse...
Not trying to troll here, but why would one use GNU Hurd?
Mach was just an academic research project into microkernels until Apple picked it up and ran with it. At the moment there appears to be no practical reason for most people to choose Hurd, but undoubtedly there will be someone out there who does have a reason, and who knows where that could end.
Does Debian really have nothing better to do?
"Debian" is not a monolithic corporate entity with some dynamic figurehead deciding what everyone works on this year... Hurd is interesting to some people, and they want to work on it. Why not let them? The worst that can happen is that it becomes a niche platform like Nexenta's Debian/GNU/Solaris. As long as it doesn't hold back GNU/Linux then what's the downside?
So yeah it'll mostly be clueless people who haven't secured their home WiFi networks, it seems.
You mean clueless people like Bruce Schneier?
If you are going to lump all religious killings together, than I am going to lump all atheist killings together.
You are comparing "all religious killings" - i.e. every killing that was religious in nature, with "every killing ever carried out by, or on the orders of, an atheist". You are comparing apples and oranges; those two things are not the same. For an equal comparison, try "every killing carried out by, or on the orders of, a religious person" versus "every killing carried out by, or on the orders of, an atheist". Note that the majority of German soldiers in WWII considered themselves to be Christians, and the motto of the German military was Gott mit uns (God with us). Would you attribute every killing by a German soldier who happened to be Christian to Christianity? Clearly not. So why would you attribute every killing by atheists to atheism?
Revolutionary Marxism is an atheistic belief system. So, at best, all you have done is establish that the reason they killed was because they had a belief system that was a subset of atheism... They killed as they did because of their belief system. An integral part of their belief system was atheism.
Actually, it is a bit more complex than that - atheism was often not an integral part of the belief system for Marxist movements outside Russia. Marxism is generally interpreted as being against organised religion, but it does not require absolute atheism, although some people do interpret it in that way. Religion according to Marx: quote "In spite of his dislike towards religion, Marx did not make religion the primary enemy of his work and thoughts." and from Wikipedia "Many non-Soviet Marxists deferred from the traditional antireligious stance adopted by Marx, Engels or Lenin, and in important forms of Marxist thinking, such as in Liberation theology movements in Latin America, the antireligious doctrine was rejected entirely." Also note Christian Communists, Christian socialism etc. show that Communism/Socialism wasn't the exclusive preserve of atheists.
Mao and Stalin killed in the millions. Religious wars killed in the thousands. Even when you count all those years it does not add up to as many people.
You miss two important points:
It's not the messenger, it's the message.
It's a little hard to take seriously a message from a web site that argues that Hitler was a "green" and that "Nazi SS doctrine (was) an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II." Seriously, what? The Nazi SS doctrine was environmentalism? Environmentalism and eco-imperialism were responsible for the Eastern Front in WWII? Crazy.
Obviously your congress decided that having US citizens extradited just because a prosecutor in the UK fancied it them was mental, so they didn't ratify that clause.
No. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty in 2006 - see Extradition Act 2003 (US ratification 2006).
Exactly. Patents are supposed to be something innovative, something non-obvious to an expert in the field. Making a phone or tablet with a touch screen and rounded edges is obvious to everybody.
I've noticed many of their phones and the Galaxy tablet look almost identical to their Apple counterparts....
So what? You can't copyright "look and feel". And you can't patent something unless it is innovative - a thin touchscreen phone/computer with rounded edges is not innovative - it's obvious. There are many episodes of Star Trek that show the concept of a touch screen computer that would qualify as prior art.
Because these claims are subject to consumer confusion and “ordinary observer” standards, the products themselves and the packaging in which they are sold are likely to be central to any motion for preliminary injunction.
"Consumer confusion" - Apple is arguing that consumers find it difficult to tell the difference between a Galaxy S and an iPhone and might buy a Samsung product when they meant to buy an Apple one.
Providing every crew member of a vessel going through the area with access to a rifle would probably go a long way to combat the problem.
As I understand it, aren't many of the crews already armed? Maybe not every single crew member has access to a rifle, but there are armed people on board (in particular, don't the $millions oil tankers usually have a few ex-forces mercs types on board?) But life is cheap in Somalia, and the potential profits are huge, so the prospect of encountering armed defence isn't such a great deterrent as it would be elsewhere in the world.
You lose a left testicle. It is trivial to run ARM Debian on Android, leaving several thousand packages that run without any recompilation whatsoever.
Nice troll.. Android uses the Linux kernel.Arguing that it could use another kernel is like arguing that ios could use another kernel - possible, but not easy or likely. Apps do not need to be vm based, the web browser etc are not, and you can compile whatever code you want with gcc ... Even market apps can use the ndk... And regardless of whatever you think, it's more "open source" than any other mobile os..
Um... You do realize that has absolutely no bearing on the topic at hand, right?
Shrug. You brought it up. "why should other companies be allowed to copy them?" - because you can't copyright "look and feel". Oh, but you will argue, this isn't about copyright - this is about patents! And technically that is true. But ask yourself - do you honestly believe that these user interface patents are valid? That they represent true innovations, that would not be obvious to an expert in the field? Apple's complaint compares the form of Samsung's phone to that of the iPhone, and compares the menu and button placement to that of the iPhone. These are issues of "look and feel". The idea of having a graphical program launcher is not innovative. Having rounded corners on a phone is not innovative. Having buttons at the bottom of the screen is not innovative. These ideas are obvious to an expert in the field, and hence not patentable by definition. And without patent protection, all you are left with is copyright, which, again, does not apply to "look and feel"...
Apple has always maintained the look and feel of their products as something unique to them. They created it, why should other companies be allowed to copy them?
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation - where the courts ruled that "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". That's why.
I wonder if all those people who helped OpenStreetMap are aware that OpenStreetMap knows the exact location where they were when they collected the data.
Two big differences:
Can a user download DRMed music from a company that isn't Apple and put it on their ipod? I don't even know why people are bothering to argue this point - Apple blatantly does have a monopoly on being able to produce FairPlay compatible files for iPods. The real question is whether the courts will decide that this monopoly, and Apple's behaviour in blocking RealPlayer's FairPlay converter, is enough to invoke antitrust law.
Exactly, that bastard Steve forced the record companies to accept his tyrannical 99 cent pricing policy and allow me to burn purchased songs to CD's where they can be ripped back to MP3 free of the restrictions
Points which are irrelevant to the antitrust case in question. Back in 2004, RealPlayer could be used to transfer FairPlay compatible music to the ipod. Apple said "We are stunned that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod, and we are investigating the implications of their actions under the DMCA and other laws." After that, Apple changed the firmware to break the RealPlayer generated files.
If the Zune had reached 74% market share, and Apple had responded by adding the capability to download itunes music to the Zune, and Microsoft then broke that and blocked Apple from the market, you would be outraged. This is no different.
write down one digit wrong (or slighly unreadable) and the code is invalid.
Not necessarily true. I would assume that they built some redundancy in to the actual code. Also, who says that the code is numeric? I would assume it is alphanumeric, as the OCR systems are already capable of reading alphanumeric addresses etc.
I want to start a government aligned entirely under my own rule and that of my heirs in perpetuity. I know! I'll call it a republic and that will make it one.
The passing of power from an emperor to his son is not incompatible with being a republic - see for example the Roman Republic.
Or are they only going to teach kids that USA==republic, and forget the inconvenient republics?
a democracy is where everyone makes every decision
Wrong. What you're thinking of is direct democracy. Contrast that with, say, representative democracy.