Maybe you ought to read some real history rather than Wikipedia....
Read Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", especially the chapter on the roots of Nazism. He documents, quite carefully, in that chapter how socialism was the foundation of political thought in Germany long before WWI. He also documents how Marxists led out in turning the population towards the Nazi camp. It's a very interesting read, that is if you want to actually challenge your political beliefs and see if what you think is actually true.
There isn't much actual difference between all forms of collectivism. They all end up with the government telling everyone what to think, what to do, and controlling all economic activity. And since economic freedom, as even Karl Marx admitted, is the very foundation upon which all political and personal liberty has been built personal and political liberty is destroyed under collectivism. That being the case your ideas will ultimately destroy the very right you now have to hold political opinions other than the one the government will tell you to hold once you get your "ideal" of socialism.
The graph of political thought is a straight line. On one end we have the absence of all government: anarchy. On the other end we have total government control: all forms of collectivism. The United States was started on that continuum quite a bit closer to anarchy than to collectivism, as we started out with a very small, very limited, federal government. We grew rapidly under that form of government into the largest economic powerhouse the world has ever seen. We have just moved a long ways away from our constitutional laws as the federal government has usurped more and more of power the Constitution reserved to the individual states. Now we have bureaucrats in Washington D.C. making decisions for people living on the opposite end of the country and those bureaucrats have no idea as to what local conditions are really like. We also have bureaucrats, unelected officials, telling people how to run their businesses, how to run their lives, what they can believe and what they cannot speak about without government punishment, etc....
Another good book for you to read would be Rose Wilder Lane's "Give Me Liberty". It's a free download from multiple places on the internet. It's available in both pdf and epub formats.
The leading Marxists in Germany were very influential in bringing in the Nazi's. And the leading progressive/socialist intelligensia here in the United States were publicly saying that Hitler was the solution to the "German problem" and that Mussolini was the right man for the job in Italy. They kept on saying it until it became absolutely undeniable that the Nazi's were killing Jews by the millions, and that Mussolini was destroying Italy.
The Marxist labor movement in Germany led most of the young German idealists and laborers into the Nazi camp. Men such as Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle, leaders in socialist thought in Europe during their day also were the ancestors of Nazism. Werner Sombart, a German Marxist Socialist professor, who was considered to be the epitome of the persecuted Socialist intelligensia, taught that war was the sacred duty of all Germans. He, and other German socialists, saw WWI as the great war of socialism against liberal thought. (Liberal as in the historic sense of liberalism that originated in England in the 1700s with men like Adam Smith, not in today's hijacked sense of the word.)
Socialism had been embedded in Germany for a long time by the time Hitler came along. It was the dominant political thought. All HItler really did was fuse nationalism and the socialism already existing in Germany together.
It's no surprise at all to me about how dogs process speech.
I have other stories about my dog that will amaze you at how much he understands. I'll tell you one of them here.
When he eats his dry dog food he normally gets a mouthful of food and then trots off to a chair, jumps up on it, drops the kibbles out of his mouth onto the chair and then eats them one at a time. He'll do that until he's no longer hungry. ( He only weighs 5 lbs so a kibble at a time is enough for him.) One day he was actually standing at his dish and eating which is pretty rare. I happened to look up and he was picking out only certain kibbles, based on their shapes, and just leaving the rest lying on the floor from every mouthful he was taking out of his dish. He must have had a dozen or so kibbles lying on the floor. I looked at him and said, Bear, Are you really getting that picky? (He is a picky eater.) His head spun around like it was a top so he could look at me, and he had a look on his face I'd never seen before. Then he looked down at the floor at all the kibbles lying there. Once he'd done that he started eating all the kibbles he had been leaving on the floor, and once he'd cleaned those up finished his meal out of his bowl without sorting kibbles by shape any more.
Crazy dog knew exactly what I had said to him. His behavior proved it. It's far from the first time he has done things like that--understood exactly what was saiid to him when I had no idea he would understand me.
Most of his communication is non--verbal coming back to me, but every once in a while he will communicate verbally. If he's begging and not getting any food, he will sit there quietly for a while and then when I'm not paying any attention to him whatsover he'll bark really loudly and startle me. He definitely gets my attention. He will also "mutter" when he is upset about things. My wife and I will tell him no about something he really wants to do and he will walk away growling deep in this throat but opening and closing his mouth at the same time so it sounds like someone muttering in anger.
I have a lot of health problems, and as a result need to nap during the day. I can say, "let's go to bed" at any time of the day and he understands the meaning. As to the context of asking him if he wants some chicken, if I say "chicken" all by itself just out of the blue he comes alert. His ears stand up and he looks at me with obvious intensity. But if I say, "do you want some chicken", or "do you want some roast beef" he will get right in front of me and start begging and dancing around. It doesn't have to be meal time, or any smell of food present. You don't even have to be in the kitchen. You can be in any room in the house, outside, in the car, anywhere. He just knows what the words mean.
A big part of an animal's understanding of human language comes from how often people talk to it. I talk to my little buddy all the time as he and I spend a lot of time alone together while my wife is at work. I have done this with him since he was 8 weeks old and he's now 7 years old. I ask him if he thinks it is time for his "mama" to come home and you ought to see his reaction. He gets excited and very alert. His ears start working back and forth listening for the sound of our car. It is obvious he understands the question as if I say "mama" in any other context his reaction is nowhere near the same.
He understands enough that we have to spell a lot of things out or he gets all excited over nothing. We can't even say the word "park" without him going nuts as he loves to go run around at the park. He gets excited even if you are talking about parking the car. To him the word only has one meaning--that grassy place with all the trees and other dogs. The same with "ride", and quite a few other words. If we don't spell ride out he hears the word and thinks he's going to go for a ride and then if it doesn't happen is very disappointed.
I have a small dog, Chihuahua/Papillon cross that understands in excess of 60 words that I have taught him to understand, although he often responds to conversations between my wife and I in ways that shows he understands exactly what we are talking about, and I know I haven't been using the words I have specifically taught him to understand. There are also phrases that he understands such as, "let's go to bed", "do you want to go for a ride", "do you want a piece of chicken". He also knows quite a few people by name.
If he is sitting in my chair and I tell him I need to sit down, he jumps down out of the chair. It's nothing I've taught him. He just gets it. He understands a lot of what goes on around him and understands what the relationships are like between people. My mother-in-law and I do not get along at all, and when she comes around he will growl at her until she leaves. Smart dog.;)
So, I wouldn't say his vocabulary is "very limited". I'd say he understands at least as much as any 5 or 6 year old kid.
Where I live, if there is a person who is constantly going around and harassing people in public places, the cops haul them off. They don't allow public harrassment, and that's exactly what we're talking about in relation to these cases.
It's true they don't haul off everyone, but if it is a recurring offense they most certainly do. They don't allow one person to get up in the face of someone else and start screaming at them in public places, and this is the equivalent of the outrageous trolling. Harassment is harassment, wherever it takes place. There are harrassment laws everywhere, and just because the harassment takes place on the internet doesn't mean it should be ignored.
Most instances I've seen of geeks defending trolling have had their base the idea that people should expect it and that most of the victims of the trolling deserve it. I find that a very slippery, dangerous, and sociopathic, slope.
That's like saying I should expect someone to get in my face and go out of their way to offend me just because I'm walking down a public street, and that because I'm out there walking on a public street I deserve it. Behavior like that is illegal and will land you in jail. There's no reason the same type of behavior on the internet should'nt result in the same penalties. They are moral equivalents and should be considered legal equivalents too.
This is pure nonesense. There are two ways of offending people. One is inadvertently offending someone and the other is being intentionally offensive like the idiots from Westboro Baptist church and the idiot in question here.
I never set out to offend people, but I've offended a lot of people. I offended one guy simply because I have three Ks in my last name and I was laughing about how that made me the KKK. I was poking fun at myself, and the subject offended his sensitivities. He got pretty angry over the entire incident. I still don't understand how making fun of myself could possibly offend someone else, but I guess there are poeple out there who are looking for something to get offended over.
It's something else altogether to go out and deliberately offend people like the incident in question here, or the woman who so tormented a young girl that the kid committed suicide. There's no way this type of deliberate malicious behavior can be considered protected speech. My rights stop where your nose begins, and vice versa. It's one thing to accidently hit someone in the nose with your elbow when turning around when your hands are held high and you don't know they are standing there, and another thing altogether to deliberately punch them in the nose. Both actions hurt the other person, but only one is considered to be assault.
As to the argument that you can't make it illegal to be an asshole, well, being an asshole is already illegal in many ways. If someone goes out and steals someone else's property they are being a major asshole, and breaking the law. If an asshole goes out and deliberately picks a fight in a bar, he's liable to spend some time in jail. When an asshole goes out and defrauds someone, he's breaking the law. That's just three instances of how being an asshole is illegal. There are many more.
Only assholes steal from others. Only assholes go out and pick fights. Only assholes defraud people. Being an asshole is already illegal.
LOL. You beat me to it. Our educational system is producing politically correct idiots.
I went back to school about a decade ago and the level of knowledge of the students shocked me. In the English classes I took 90 percent of the students couldn't write an intelligible sentence. They didn't know how to spell, how to use punctuation, or understand subject/verb agreement. They also couldn't deal with homophones such as: they're/their/there, are/our, your/you're, heel/heal, cite/site, right/write, cell/sell, allot/a_lot, allowed/aloud, etc....
About half the people couldn't read their own papers and tell you what they were trying to say when asked what they meant to communicate. It was so bad you couldn't even help them edit their papers because they had forgotten/never_knew what they meant themselves. Their writing was complete gibberish.
The foreign exchange students from China and Japan knew English better than the students who had gone through 12 years of classes related to the English language and spoken it all their lives.
It's no wonder there are so many socialists today. The English comprehension level of so many people is so low they don't understand the implications of what they're told or read.
I see the thought police are still out to enforce socialist thinking here on/.. When you can't defeat the reasoning the only thing left is to make sure the opposing viewpoint isn't available to the public.... Just goes to show that the left and far left cannot handle the existence of opposing thought and ideas. If they could they would discuss the ideas, not try to shut them down.
[sarcasm]Yeah, we all know the only thing the government, police, and army of any country does is abuse its own people. We all know that's the only reason for their existence. They couldn't have any legitimate reason for existing.[/sarcasm]
There are more instances of civilian-to-civilian abuse every day, by far, than there are army, police, or governmental abuses. Why aren't you worried about them? Why aren't they at the top of your list? Because you could actually care less about people, but have a large political agenda.
I have no idea what David Cameron had to say about anything. My comments are based upon the truth about human nature, not any political agenda.
If you have kids, well, just teach them to be dependent on you for everything. Don't encourage them early in life to be independent and aware that there are consequences, both good and bad, for everything they do. Teach them they aren't responsible for their own success or failure in life. Don't allow them to fail. Make believe you can protect them from all the vissicitudes of life by not allowing them to suffer the consequences for their own actions. Teach them they should given everything they get in life, not pay as they go.
Then, by the time they are in their early teens see what your kids are like. They will believe they are owed everything and will not think anyone should require them to earn what they need and desire. You know, exactly like all the rioting idiots over there in the UK right now they will think it's OK to destroy the property of others just because someone isn't giving them what they want. .
If you have such a poor understanding of human nature that you can't understand that making people dependent makes them weak, well, there isn't much hope for you recognizing truth when you see, or hear, it..
If your politicians had any brains they wouldn't be teaching your citizenry to depend on government for everything.
They would be teaching them that government can't possibly afford do that job, and because teaching people to be self-supporting and self-sustaining raises their self-esteem and confidence. Creating a welfare state kills individual initiative and ambition. It does nothing but teach people they can't succeed without the government babying them along and creates the expectation in society that everyone is entitled to do nothing for themselves and still have everything they want.
A few of those heads should roll right into jail, and the mayor should be demanding that too. The attitude that corruption should be dealt with casually is very destructive.
So, you do consider con games and planning to do you harm as friendly behavior. I have to say, you have the most warped definitions of friend and friendly I have ever seen. I guess you've never really had a friend, or have someone treat you in a friendly manner, in the true sense of the words.
So, what you're really saying is that being a two-faced, backstabbing jerk is being friendly. Methinks you have a problem with understanding the meaning of friend, as the root word of friendly is friend.
Here is Merriam-Websters definition of friendly in the context you used the word:
Definition of FRIENDLY : of, relating to, or befitting a friend: as a : showing kindly interest and goodwill
Someone who stabs you in the back is not your friend, and therefore cannot considered to be friendly by definition. You seem to equate someone playing con games with friendship, friendliness, and being friendly.
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
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[sarcasm]Yeah, one study is absolute proof.[/sarcasm]
Remember all the studies that said tobacco wasn't harmful? Remember all the studies on both sides of the caffiene/coffee issue? How about drinking alcohol? You can get studies that say it's good for you and studies that say it's bad for you. With the billions of dollars at stake here many of the studies are meaningless. It's no harder for the sugar and hfcs industries to fund "impartial studies" saying their products aren't harmful than it is for MS to fund studies bashing Linux and praising Windows. If you don't know that, you aren't nearly as well-read or smart as you think you are.
Watching child after child, grandkid after grandkid, and all my nieces and nephews act exactly the same way after I, or their parents, have fed them lots of sugar is no reason to think that sugar makes them act that way. NOT! Feed them fruits and veggies and they're not hyper. Feed them a balanced meal and they aren't hyper. Feed them candy bars and a drink with a high sugar content, or a big bowl of icecream, and they are running around screaming, fighting, and picking at each other a short time after eating. Feeding them sugar is like turning on the bad behavior switch and I've seen this in every kid I've ever been around.
Diet makes a lot of difference in most animals. Take a mule, for instance. Feed him too rich of food and he'll act up. He won't obey. He'll be ornery with whoever is handling/training/riding him. He'll make himself hard to catch. He'll spook at shadows or rocks on the trail. Change his diet so it isn't so rich, and his bad behavior goes away in a matter of days as he becomes trainable again. Change it back and his bad behavior returns. Many mule trainers have found this to be true. Are you going to say mules are brainwashed into thinking their diet affects their behavior too?
Diet for any animal, including human beings, makes a big difference in behavior, thought patterns, aggression, ability to concentrate, etc... as it affects how you feel physically. You are what you eat....
Re:Sugar is not only toxic but it's addictive.
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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[sarcasm]Yeah, the reason preschoolers get hyper when you feed them soda and candy is because they're brainwashed from watching so many TV documentaries, and reading so much media hype in health magazines, on the evils of sugar intake. [/sarcasm]
I have a GBC that still works, it's well over 10 years old, they're cheap and well-known for being able to take a beating. Why can't the ebook reader be built like one of those? Once circuit board with a strong, thick ABS plastic shell. I have other systems that have lasted over 20 years, but those were pampered compared to the GBC.
IP issues could be a real problem but are beside the point of an ebook reader's durability.
As for formats, that's no problem. Use something open, and unless all civilization is wiped out, you'll be able to read it in the future.
Ummm... We're talking local government entities when we talk libraries. There will be immense pressure, plus much other skullduggery behind the scenes, applied to keep the formats proprietary. Yes, I'd much rather see open formats too, but I don't think we would see that come to fruition. Since when has government done the logical, sensible things, rather than selling out? Seen all the negative publicity the tea parties get? And all they want to do is cut spending and put our country back on a sustainable economic path.
Well, I will dispute this. I don't have single electronic item in my home that has lasted 10 years, and I don't abuse my possessions. You can bet the ereaders lent out to the general population will be badly abused. A 1 to 3 year life span, after being ruggedized, would be more like it, and that doesn't count take into account the failures that happen just because they are built by humans. I'd doubt a non-ruggedized ebook reader would last on average much more than 3 to 6 months.
You have also omitted the cost of the ebooks themselves and how the publishers will view the lending of their ebooks. I'll bet they would tack on a fairly steep per rental charge to the library, something which a book does not have. Plus, ebooks are fairly new and who knows where the file format will go, so depending on a decade lifespan for an ebook reader to figure costs is pretty iffy.
Outside of that you need to consider the reading habits of the general population. I know very few people in the general population who will choose an ebook over a paper book. I'm into technology, but I'll take a paper book over an ebook every time. Less eyestrain. Better tactile feel. Much easier to read in sunlight. Much longer lifespan.
I own books published back to the late 1800's. You're never going to get a digital file format to last that long.
The average library throws out books fairly regularly, not because they are worn out, necessarily, but to create room for new books. And, they get rid of books by usage patterns, not by age. If newer books aren't read they get rid of them rather than popular older books.
As to the cost organizing books, well, once that's done the first time it's not the regular paid employees who do that work but high school and college students working at minimum wage, or thereabouts, or participating in work/study programs. That's how the libraries I've used have done that, and I've used the local libraries wherever I've lived quite a bit.
The local library where I live has a lot of books well above the 20 year old mark. Many of the authors of the books on the shelves have been dead for more than 30 years and they are read on a regular basis. Frederick Faust(Max Brand) died in 1944. Robert Hienlien died in 1988. Isaac Asimov died in 1992. Louis L'Amour died in 1988. All of these guys have books on public library shelves written decades before they died. They are just some of the more famous authors whose decades old books are still to be found in the public library.
Yeah, it's stupid to store objects that will last 20 to 50 years, even when being lent out to the general public, and replace them with objects that have about 1/10 the lifespan and cost twice as much. You must be a genius at figuring out how to cut spending.
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Maybe you ought to read some real history rather than Wikipedia....
Read Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", especially the chapter on the roots of Nazism. He documents, quite carefully, in that chapter how socialism was the foundation of political thought in Germany long before WWI. He also documents how Marxists led out in turning the population towards the Nazi camp. It's a very interesting read, that is if you want to actually challenge your political beliefs and see if what you think is actually true.
There isn't much actual difference between all forms of collectivism. They all end up with the government telling everyone what to think, what to do, and controlling all economic activity. And since economic freedom, as even Karl Marx admitted, is the very foundation upon which all political and personal liberty has been built personal and political liberty is destroyed under collectivism. That being the case your ideas will ultimately destroy the very right you now have to hold political opinions other than the one the government will tell you to hold once you get your "ideal" of socialism.
The graph of political thought is a straight line. On one end we have the absence of all government: anarchy. On the other end we have total government control: all forms of collectivism. The United States was started on that continuum quite a bit closer to anarchy than to collectivism, as we started out with a very small, very limited, federal government. We grew rapidly under that form of government into the largest economic powerhouse the world has ever seen. We have just moved a long ways away from our constitutional laws as the federal government has usurped more and more of power the Constitution reserved to the individual states. Now we have bureaucrats in Washington D.C. making decisions for people living on the opposite end of the country and those bureaucrats have no idea as to what local conditions are really like. We also have bureaucrats, unelected officials, telling people how to run their businesses, how to run their lives, what they can believe and what they cannot speak about without government punishment, etc....
Another good book for you to read would be Rose Wilder Lane's "Give Me Liberty". It's a free download from multiple places on the internet. It's available in both pdf and epub formats.
You need to read a little history.
The leading Marxists in Germany were very influential in bringing in the Nazi's. And the leading progressive/socialist intelligensia here in the United States were publicly saying that Hitler was the solution to the "German problem" and that Mussolini was the right man for the job in Italy. They kept on saying it until it became absolutely undeniable that the Nazi's were killing Jews by the millions, and that Mussolini was destroying Italy.
The Marxist labor movement in Germany led most of the young German idealists and laborers into the Nazi camp. Men such as Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle, leaders in socialist thought in Europe during their day also were the ancestors of Nazism. Werner Sombart, a German Marxist Socialist professor, who was considered to be the epitome of the persecuted Socialist intelligensia, taught that war was the sacred duty of all Germans. He, and other German socialists, saw WWI as the great war of socialism against liberal thought. (Liberal as in the historic sense of liberalism that originated in England in the 1700s with men like Adam Smith, not in today's hijacked sense of the word.)
Socialism had been embedded in Germany for a long time by the time Hitler came along. It was the dominant political thought. All HItler really did was fuse nationalism and the socialism already existing in Germany together.
It's no surprise at all to me about how dogs process speech.
I have other stories about my dog that will amaze you at how much he understands. I'll tell you one of them here.
When he eats his dry dog food he normally gets a mouthful of food and then trots off to a chair, jumps up on it, drops the kibbles out of his mouth onto the chair and then eats them one at a time. He'll do that until he's no longer hungry. ( He only weighs 5 lbs so a kibble at a time is enough for him.) One day he was actually standing at his dish and eating which is pretty rare. I happened to look up and he was picking out only certain kibbles, based on their shapes, and just leaving the rest lying on the floor from every mouthful he was taking out of his dish. He must have had a dozen or so kibbles lying on the floor. I looked at him and said, Bear, Are you really getting that picky? (He is a picky eater.) His head spun around like it was a top so he could look at me, and he had a look on his face I'd never seen before. Then he looked down at the floor at all the kibbles lying there. Once he'd done that he started eating all the kibbles he had been leaving on the floor, and once he'd cleaned those up finished his meal out of his bowl without sorting kibbles by shape any more.
Crazy dog knew exactly what I had said to him. His behavior proved it. It's far from the first time he has done things like that--understood exactly what was saiid to him when I had no idea he would understand me.
Most of his communication is non--verbal coming back to me, but every once in a while he will communicate verbally. If he's begging and not getting any food, he will sit there quietly for a while and then when I'm not paying any attention to him whatsover he'll bark really loudly and startle me. He definitely gets my attention. He will also "mutter" when he is upset about things. My wife and I will tell him no about something he really wants to do and he will walk away growling deep in this throat but opening and closing his mouth at the same time so it sounds like someone muttering in anger.
Animals do communicate. No doubt about it.
I have a lot of health problems, and as a result need to nap during the day. I can say, "let's go to bed" at any time of the day and he understands the meaning. As to the context of asking him if he wants some chicken, if I say "chicken" all by itself just out of the blue he comes alert. His ears stand up and he looks at me with obvious intensity. But if I say, "do you want some chicken", or "do you want some roast beef" he will get right in front of me and start begging and dancing around. It doesn't have to be meal time, or any smell of food present. You don't even have to be in the kitchen. You can be in any room in the house, outside, in the car, anywhere. He just knows what the words mean.
A big part of an animal's understanding of human language comes from how often people talk to it. I talk to my little buddy all the time as he and I spend a lot of time alone together while my wife is at work. I have done this with him since he was 8 weeks old and he's now 7 years old. I ask him if he thinks it is time for his "mama" to come home and you ought to see his reaction. He gets excited and very alert. His ears start working back and forth listening for the sound of our car. It is obvious he understands the question as if I say "mama" in any other context his reaction is nowhere near the same.
He understands enough that we have to spell a lot of things out or he gets all excited over nothing. We can't even say the word "park" without him going nuts as he loves to go run around at the park. He gets excited even if you are talking about parking the car. To him the word only has one meaning--that grassy place with all the trees and other dogs. The same with "ride", and quite a few other words. If we don't spell ride out he hears the word and thinks he's going to go for a ride and then if it doesn't happen is very disappointed.
What do you mean by "very limited"?
I have a small dog, Chihuahua/Papillon cross that understands in excess of 60 words that I have taught him to understand, although he often responds to conversations between my wife and I in ways that shows he understands exactly what we are talking about, and I know I haven't been using the words I have specifically taught him to understand. There are also phrases that he understands such as, "let's go to bed", "do you want to go for a ride", "do you want a piece of chicken". He also knows quite a few people by name.
If he is sitting in my chair and I tell him I need to sit down, he jumps down out of the chair. It's nothing I've taught him. He just gets it. He understands a lot of what goes on around him and understands what the relationships are like between people. My mother-in-law and I do not get along at all, and when she comes around he will growl at her until she leaves. Smart dog. ;)
So, I wouldn't say his vocabulary is "very limited". I'd say he understands at least as much as any 5 or 6 year old kid.
Where I live, if there is a person who is constantly going around and harassing people in public places, the cops haul them off. They don't allow public harrassment, and that's exactly what we're talking about in relation to these cases.
It's true they don't haul off everyone, but if it is a recurring offense they most certainly do. They don't allow one person to get up in the face of someone else and start screaming at them in public places, and this is the equivalent of the outrageous trolling. Harassment is harassment, wherever it takes place. There are harrassment laws everywhere, and just because the harassment takes place on the internet doesn't mean it should be ignored.
Most instances I've seen of geeks defending trolling have had their base the idea that people should expect it and that most of the victims of the trolling deserve it. I find that a very slippery, dangerous, and sociopathic, slope.
That's like saying I should expect someone to get in my face and go out of their way to offend me just because I'm walking down a public street, and that because I'm out there walking on a public street I deserve it. Behavior like that is illegal and will land you in jail. There's no reason the same type of behavior on the internet should'nt result in the same penalties. They are moral equivalents and should be considered legal equivalents too.
This is pure nonesense. There are two ways of offending people. One is inadvertently offending someone and the other is being intentionally offensive like the idiots from Westboro Baptist church and the idiot in question here.
I never set out to offend people, but I've offended a lot of people. I offended one guy simply because I have three Ks in my last name and I was laughing about how that made me the KKK. I was poking fun at myself, and the subject offended his sensitivities. He got pretty angry over the entire incident. I still don't understand how making fun of myself could possibly offend someone else, but I guess there are poeple out there who are looking for something to get offended over.
It's something else altogether to go out and deliberately offend people like the incident in question here, or the woman who so tormented a young girl that the kid committed suicide. There's no way this type of deliberate malicious behavior can be considered protected speech. My rights stop where your nose begins, and vice versa. It's one thing to accidently hit someone in the nose with your elbow when turning around when your hands are held high and you don't know they are standing there, and another thing altogether to deliberately punch them in the nose. Both actions hurt the other person, but only one is considered to be assault.
As to the argument that you can't make it illegal to be an asshole, well, being an asshole is already illegal in many ways. If someone goes out and steals someone else's property they are being a major asshole, and breaking the law. If an asshole goes out and deliberately picks a fight in a bar, he's liable to spend some time in jail. When an asshole goes out and defrauds someone, he's breaking the law. That's just three instances of how being an asshole is illegal. There are many more.
Only assholes steal from others. Only assholes go out and pick fights. Only assholes defraud people. Being an asshole is already illegal.
LOL. You beat me to it. Our educational system is producing politically correct idiots.
I went back to school about a decade ago and the level of knowledge of the students shocked me. In the English classes I took 90 percent of the students couldn't write an intelligible sentence. They didn't know how to spell, how to use punctuation, or understand subject/verb agreement. They also couldn't deal with homophones such as: they're/their/there, are/our, your/you're, heel/heal, cite/site, right/write, cell/sell, allot/a_lot, allowed/aloud, etc....
About half the people couldn't read their own papers and tell you what they were trying to say when asked what they meant to communicate. It was so bad you couldn't even help them edit their papers because they had forgotten/never_knew what they meant themselves. Their writing was complete gibberish.
The foreign exchange students from China and Japan knew English better than the students who had gone through 12 years of classes related to the English language and spoken it all their lives.
It's no wonder there are so many socialists today. The English comprehension level of so many people is so low they don't understand the implications of what they're told or read.
I see the thought police are still out to enforce socialist thinking here on /.. When you can't defeat the reasoning the only thing left is to make sure the opposing viewpoint isn't available to the public.... Just goes to show that the left and far left cannot handle the existence of opposing thought and ideas. If they could they would discuss the ideas, not try to shut them down.
What a distorted view of reality. Just how long did it take to brainwash you into this line of reasoning?
[sarcasm]Yeah, we all know the only thing the government, police, and army of any country does is abuse its own people. We all know that's the only reason for their existence. They couldn't have any legitimate reason for existing.[/sarcasm]
There are more instances of civilian-to-civilian abuse every day, by far, than there are army, police, or governmental abuses. Why aren't you worried about them? Why aren't they at the top of your list? Because you could actually care less about people, but have a large political agenda.
I have no idea what David Cameron had to say about anything. My comments are based upon the truth about human nature, not any political agenda.
If you have kids, well, just teach them to be dependent on you for everything. Don't encourage them early in life to be independent and aware that there are consequences, both good and bad, for everything they do. Teach them they aren't responsible for their own success or failure in life. Don't allow them to fail. Make believe you can protect them from all the vissicitudes of life by not allowing them to suffer the consequences for their own actions. Teach them they should given everything they get in life, not pay as they go.
Then, by the time they are in their early teens see what your kids are like. They will believe they are owed everything and will not think anyone should require them to earn what they need and desire. You know, exactly like all the rioting idiots over there in the UK right now they will think it's OK to destroy the property of others just because someone isn't giving them what they want. .
Oh, please! Not this socialist twaddle again....
If you have such a poor understanding of human nature that you can't understand that making people dependent makes them weak, well, there isn't much hope for you recognizing truth when you see, or hear, it..
If your politicians had any brains they wouldn't be teaching your citizenry to depend on government for everything.
They would be teaching them that government can't possibly afford do that job, and because teaching people to be self-supporting and self-sustaining raises their self-esteem and confidence. Creating a welfare state kills individual initiative and ambition. It does nothing but teach people they can't succeed without the government babying them along and creates the expectation in society that everyone is entitled to do nothing for themselves and still have everything they want.
There is no surer way to kill a civilization.
A few of those heads should roll right into jail, and the mayor should be demanding that too. The attitude that corruption should be dealt with casually is very destructive.
Mod the man up. He gets it. He understands what makes a society stable and friendly to its citizens.
So, you do consider con games and planning to do you harm as friendly behavior. I have to say, you have the most warped definitions of friend and friendly I have ever seen. I guess you've never really had a friend, or have someone treat you in a friendly manner, in the true sense of the words.
So, what you're really saying is that being a two-faced, backstabbing jerk is being friendly. Methinks you have a problem with understanding the meaning of friend, as the root word of friendly is friend.
Here is Merriam-Websters definition of friendly in the context you used the word:
Definition of FRIENDLY
: of, relating to, or befitting a friend: as
a : showing kindly interest and goodwill
Someone who stabs you in the back is not your friend, and therefore cannot considered to be friendly by definition. You seem to equate someone playing con games with friendship, friendliness, and being friendly.
[sarcasm]Yeah, one study is absolute proof.[/sarcasm]
Remember all the studies that said tobacco wasn't harmful? Remember all the studies on both sides of the caffiene/coffee issue? How about drinking alcohol? You can get studies that say it's good for you and studies that say it's bad for you. With the billions of dollars at stake here many of the studies are meaningless. It's no harder for the sugar and hfcs industries to fund "impartial studies" saying their products aren't harmful than it is for MS to fund studies bashing Linux and praising Windows. If you don't know that, you aren't nearly as well-read or smart as you think you are.
Watching child after child, grandkid after grandkid, and all my nieces and nephews act exactly the same way after I, or their parents, have fed them lots of sugar is no reason to think that sugar makes them act that way. NOT! Feed them fruits and veggies and they're not hyper. Feed them a balanced meal and they aren't hyper. Feed them candy bars and a drink with a high sugar content, or a big bowl of icecream, and they are running around screaming, fighting, and picking at each other a short time after eating. Feeding them sugar is like turning on the bad behavior switch and I've seen this in every kid I've ever been around.
Diet makes a lot of difference in most animals. Take a mule, for instance. Feed him too rich of food and he'll act up. He won't obey. He'll be ornery with whoever is handling/training/riding him. He'll make himself hard to catch. He'll spook at shadows or rocks on the trail. Change his diet so it isn't so rich, and his bad behavior goes away in a matter of days as he becomes trainable again. Change it back and his bad behavior returns. Many mule trainers have found this to be true. Are you going to say mules are brainwashed into thinking their diet affects their behavior too?
Diet for any animal, including human beings, makes a big difference in behavior, thought patterns, aggression, ability to concentrate, etc... as it affects how you feel physically. You are what you eat....
[sarcasm]Yeah, the reason preschoolers get hyper when you feed them soda and candy is because they're brainwashed from watching so many TV documentaries, and reading so much media hype in health magazines, on the evils of sugar intake. [/sarcasm]
I have a GBC that still works, it's well over 10 years old, they're cheap and well-known for being able to take a beating. Why can't the ebook reader be built like one of those? Once circuit board with a strong, thick ABS plastic shell. I have other systems that have lasted over 20 years, but those were pampered compared to the GBC.
IP issues could be a real problem but are beside the point of an ebook reader's durability.
As for formats, that's no problem. Use something open, and unless all civilization is wiped out, you'll be able to read it in the future.
Ummm... We're talking local government entities when we talk libraries. There will be immense pressure, plus much other skullduggery behind the scenes, applied to keep the formats proprietary. Yes, I'd much rather see open formats too, but I don't think we would see that come to fruition. Since when has government done the logical, sensible things, rather than selling out? Seen all the negative publicity the tea parties get? And all they want to do is cut spending and put our country back on a sustainable economic path.
Well, I will dispute this. I don't have single electronic item in my home that has lasted 10 years, and I don't abuse my possessions. You can bet the ereaders lent out to the general population will be badly abused. A 1 to 3 year life span, after being ruggedized, would be more like it, and that doesn't count take into account the failures that happen just because they are built by humans. I'd doubt a non-ruggedized ebook reader would last on average much more than 3 to 6 months.
You have also omitted the cost of the ebooks themselves and how the publishers will view the lending of their ebooks. I'll bet they would tack on a fairly steep per rental charge to the library, something which a book does not have. Plus, ebooks are fairly new and who knows where the file format will go, so depending on a decade lifespan for an ebook reader to figure costs is pretty iffy.
Outside of that you need to consider the reading habits of the general population. I know very few people in the general population who will choose an ebook over a paper book. I'm into technology, but I'll take a paper book over an ebook every time. Less eyestrain. Better tactile feel. Much easier to read in sunlight. Much longer lifespan.
I own books published back to the late 1800's. You're never going to get a digital file format to last that long.
The average library throws out books fairly regularly, not because they are worn out, necessarily, but to create room for new books. And, they get rid of books by usage patterns, not by age. If newer books aren't read they get rid of them rather than popular older books.
As to the cost organizing books, well, once that's done the first time it's not the regular paid employees who do that work but high school and college students working at minimum wage, or thereabouts, or participating in work/study programs. That's how the libraries I've used have done that, and I've used the local libraries wherever I've lived quite a bit.
The local library where I live has a lot of books well above the 20 year old mark. Many of the authors of the books on the shelves have been dead for more than 30 years and they are read on a regular basis. Frederick Faust(Max Brand) died in 1944. Robert Hienlien died in 1988. Isaac Asimov died in 1992. Louis L'Amour died in 1988. All of these guys have books on public library shelves written decades before they died. They are just some of the more famous authors whose decades old books are still to be found in the public library.
Yeah, it's stupid to store objects that will last 20 to 50 years, even when being lent out to the general public, and replace them with objects that have about 1/10 the lifespan and cost twice as much. You must be a genius at figuring out how to cut spending.