In my case, I already have a rack - a cabinet, actually. I have my router and my switch installed, and having rackmount servers allows me to put everything in the cabinet and close the door. The servers are sitting on shelves but they're on shelves mounted in the cabinet, so the effect is no different from if they were mounted. I just can't as easily extend them if I need to open them up for some reason.
I've been running whitebox servers like that at home for years but recently decided, like the original poster, that I wanted to go with a rackmount setup. If you're deadset on building a custom system, then I can't offer much advise. Me, I picked up a couple of these.
Even after paying shipping and picking up a could of larger hard drives, I don't think I could have build a similar system any cheaper. One is my mail/web server and the other is an internal domain controller and file server.
They don't come with rails, so they're sitting on shelves in my rack rather than actually installed but I can live with that.
The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
I agree. The question, in many cases, isn't buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, it's buying vs not buying. This seems to be using the same flawed reasoning that the BSA and RIAA use in estimating their losses due to piracy - that every instance of piracy translates directly into a lost sale. In this case, they seem to be assuming that every use of OSS translates to a lost sale of proprietary software. That simply isn't the case. How many businesses would make do with, say, Microsoft Access (which they likely already have) if they couldn't install MySQL or Postgresql rather than pay the thousands of dollars to buy Sql Server or Oracle?
No problem. Don't park your car on the street with the keys in it and with someone standing there offering to open the door to passer-bys who want to go for a ride. If your wireless connection is unsecured and offers DHCP configuration to anyone who wants to join, it's an open invitation. Basic security and MAC filtering are easy to configure. They won't stop a determined or knowledgable hacker, but that isn't the point. Anyone who's hacking in knows they're intruding where they aren't wanted and are committing an illegal act. But if you leave it wide open and the welcome mat out, then don't be surprised if someone makes use of your network.
You're correct, of course, but a Dyson sphere, as actually imagined by Dyson, isn't a solid body like a huge, hollow planet with a sun at it's core. It's really more like a Dyson cloud - a huge collection of unconnected bodies orbiting the sun at the same distance. Niven's Ringworld was a solid body, but one could construct a ring of independent bodies like the original Dyson sphere.
If you're constructing a Dyson sphere, why on Earth (HJARF!) would you bother to haul the building materials up out of Earth's gravity well? Off the top of my head, I have no idea if there's enough asteroid material to build a Dyson sphere at roughly the Earth's orbit. But there's almost certainly enough to build a Niven ring, and by the time we reach that point we could probably start dismantling the outer planets if necessary...
You know, sometimes it helps to RTFA. One of the specific advantages of this type of system is that the energy of the sun is not directly converted to electricity, as it is with solar cells. Rather, the energy is used in the form of heat, which in turn is used (via heating a fluid) to drive a generator. That means that you don't need to store electricity - you need to store heat so that the heat can be used to drive the generator during times when the sun is not available. The article specifically mentions using oil or molten salt to store the heat. Heat up oil or molten salt, store it in well insulated containers, and it will stay hot for a very long time. When you need it, you run the hot oil or salt through a heat exchanger, extract the heat and generate more electricity - all while the sun is on the other side of the planet.
Libertarians generally reject the idea that there is a moral responsibility to help those in need.
You're conflating the issues of moral responsibility and legal responsibility. I certainly don't argue that you have no moral responsibility to help others - rather, I argue that you should not force people to live up to what you consider their moral responsibility to be. Put another way, you have a moral responsibility to respect others rights to disagree with you on what morality requires them to do. You have no right to enforce your morality on someone else.
The problem with communicating with libertarians is that they tend to think any attempt at discussion of these issues is an attempt to force them into helping others.
Well, aren't you? What were the issues that started this discussion? The claim was that, because society might pay for your medical bills, they have a right to use force to stop you from performing certain actions, such as using illegal drugs. If you aren't talking about using laws backed by the force of the state to dictate people's behavior, then what are you talking about? And if you are talking about using such force, then you've left the issue of moral responsibility behind.
The thing is, they aren't being forced. They could drop out of society.
Really? Exactly where should I go where I can "drop out of society" and, say, take my illegal drugs(1) in peace with no danger of anyone throwing me in jail for it? Exactly where should I go where no government will come and demand that I either pay into the government coffers or go to jail?
(1) In point of fact, I don't actually use illegal drugs. Other than caffeine and Claritin, I seldom use legal drugs. But that's because I choose not to use them, and I respect other's right to make their own choice.
But they want the benefits of living in a society with none of the responsibilities.
Actually, Libertarians are generally supporters of use taxes, tolls and other schemes where you explicitly pay for the resources you use. That's hardly the viewpoint of someone looking for a free ride.
Your more or less saying that if anyone sees an injured person they should be left to die on their own.
No, I'm saying that your decision to assist, in whatever way, doesn't justify your imposing your will on their actions.
Once you agree that a moral person has some responsibility to help a person in need you've agreed that society has a burden based on everyones actions.
Morality is one thing. Legality is another. If you want to claim that society has a moral obligation to assist those in need, and that that in turn imposes a moral obligation to the individual to minimize actions which impose a cost on society, I may or may not agree but I'll certainly defend your right to that viewpoint. The problem is that we aren't talking about moral obligations - we're talking about legal obligations, with very real and very harsh consequences for violating them.
The only question is where you draw the line.
For me, that's a very simple and very easy question. I believe no man is a slave. Each man is his own and his only master. You draw the line where my actions have a direct and unwanted impact on your and yours. Put another way, if I'm not directly hurting you, you have no right to forcefully interfere in my actions. The only time you can interfere in my actions is an act of self defense, where you are acting to prevent me from harming you or your property. (The "you" and "me" are not necessarily _you_ and _me_ but any two people or groups of people, of course. And society is nothing more than a group of people.) Indirect possibilities, such as "Well, you might OD and then we'd have to pay for your health care" simply don't cut it.
This doesn't make any sense. Even if someone is woefully addicted, it's not like they take drugs by accident-...
Who claimed they did? I intentionally drove my car to work. Did I commit automobile abuse? So why, if I intentionally take an illegal drug, did I commit drug "abuse?" If I take a prescribed pain pill, I'm using a drug. If I take the exact same drug for the exact same condition but I purchased it from an illegal source, it's drug abuse. The point is that, generally speaking, we've allowed legislatures to define what is use and what is abuse, and that we attach moral judgments to those terms. There is no legitimate moral or rational justification for the dividing lines that are drawn, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to mindlessly follow the legislatures judgments on what constitutes use and what constitutes abuse.
Would you suggest that we call what child molesters, who might not be able to help themselves, do as "illegal children touching" instead of "child abuse"?
You're conflating different meanings of the word, or at least different ways to interpret similarly formed sentences. Child molesters are abusing children because they are harming the children. The abuse that is occurring is from the point of view of the child. Are you arguing that drug users are causing harm to the drugs? If not, then your analogy falls apart.
Horsefeathers. You (that is, society) assumed that burden on its own. It doesn't place any obligations on me. It's as if I decided to come over and mow your lawn for you. You'd probably be delighted that you didn't have to do it yourself anymore.(1) But if, six months later, I came banging on your door and demanded that you stop allowing your kids to play in your own back yard because they were leaving toys laying around that made it harder for me to mow the grass, you'd most likely tell me to take a hike.
If you don't want to pay the cost associated with my behavior, then don't pay it. If I overdose on drugs, let me lay there and die if I don't have insurance or can't pay the bill myself if you so choose. But your actions in assuming responsibility for my debts don't give you any legitimate authority over my behavior.
(1)Unless, of course, you're one of those weird people who enjoys mowing the lawn, but we're assuming for the sake of the analogy that you aren't that warped an individual.
Huh? I wasn't even addressing the issue of G-Archiver. I was pointing out the difference between a hard firewall and a software firewall running on your desktop. I agree that a neither a hardware or a software firewall would have been able to address the specific issue of G-Archiver at all, and am not sure what I said that made you think I thought otherwise. The password comment you quoted was in reference to using the same password for your desktop login and your hardware firewall login, and had nothing to do with the GMail password.
ZoneAlarm is a software firewall that runs on your desktop. The advantage of this is that it can do things like restrict access to the network or specific ports on a process basis. The disadvantage is that if your machine is pwned, your firewall is pwned too. An attacker can disable it, change the rules, replace the software with a hacked version that allows certain traffic without displaying any evidence of it, etc. (And yes, ZoneAlarm might complain about some methods of changing the rules but a competent attacker with root access should be able to get around those fairly easily.)
The post you were responding to specified a hard firewall. It was itself in response to a post which talked about having a separate firewall running on different hardware. If your desktop is pwned, your firewall is still secure unless you do something stupid like use the same password on both machines, or it's independently attacked and compromised. That's their advantage. Their disadvantage is that they aren't privileged with info like what program or process generated a packet and therefore can't discriminate based on such things. All they have is the info that can be gleaned from the packet itself. There might be clues - like the browser ID string - in a packet stream that would allow a hard firewall to make a guess as to the source, but there's no guarantees with that and I'm not aware of any that even make the attempt.
First, I haven't advocated anyone disobeying the laws. Whether to obey or disobey an immoral law is a personal decision. I've made a personal decision to pay my taxes, despite the fact that they're largely unjustified.
Second, I don't mind paying my fair share of those services I consume. The issue isn't a free ride. The issue is what's just to impose on another person, and the optimum way of paying for services.
Third, you have a funny idea of "force or coercion." Taxes are no different from any other form of protection racket. "Hey, you pay me a little bit of money, I'll take care of you. You don't, who knows what sort of unfortunate occurrences could happen to this wonderful business you got going here?" But that's not force or coercion because you can always move your business to somewhere else? Accepting a contract has to do with deciding whether or not to enter into a mutually agreeable business deal. When the choice are accept or flee in fear of your live or liberty, it's isn't a free choice, and all of your misguided and uninformed moral indignation doesn't change that one little bit.
...should Microsoft pay taxes on the profits they make in selling their software? If so, where? If not, why the hell not?
Leaving aside the issues of libertarian principles, of the legitimacy of taxation in general, and of how much obligation a public education places on the individual and anyone who hires him, we have the issue of traditional goods as opposed to those with near-zero margin costs. Do we really want to establish a precedent where every copy of software sold is taxable by the state where the code was originally written? What happens to open source, with many contributers from many states and countries? And if you say that open source generally isn't sold but only a fee charged for distribution and for support, are you sure the state will see it that way? And is it jake for MS to sell you a copy of Windows for $1 and charge a $199 distribution and support fee? Does the same taxation ability go for other goods of this type? If I record a song in a particular state, should it have the right to take a percentage of every copy of that song I sell? What about filming a movie?
There is no valid contract for you to pay for your food when you go into a restaurant, yet few people dine and dash. No one would assume the restaurant is just giving you the food for free. What there is is an implied contract. You eat the food, you pay the bill. With government services, there is the same implied contract. If you don't want to pay the bill, don't make use of the services. If you don't agree to pay taxes, go live somewhere else, you have no right to live here.
Cute. Are you just trolling, do you really believe this drivel, or are you just hoping no one will call you on it?
There certainly is a valid contract when you eat into a restaurant. I can only assume that you meant there is no written contract. The fact that it's implied makes it no less valid.
When I walk into a restaurant, I do indeed agree to an implied contract that I will pay for whatever it is that I order. This is a contract between equals. I'm free to engage or not engage in the transaction. So is the restaurant.(1) If I don't like the prices on the menu, I can decide not to eat there. The situation is far different with government services.
I'm not free to refuse to engage in the transaction. Ask the many people who have either been fined or incarcerated for failure to pay the proper taxes or fees. I can't simply say "I don't want what it is you're selling, so I won't use it and therefore don't have to pay for it." I'd be more than happy to give up all rights to many government services, and to pay only my fair share of those services I actually use - such as public road construction and maintenance. That option doesn't exist for me, and it doesn't exist for Microsoft.
You state that I "... have no right to live here..." If that argument is valid, then I have no rights at all. Freedom of speech? Of Religion? Of anything else? "We don't like that kind of talk around here. If you want to talk like that, go live somewhere else. You have no right to live here." "We don't worship like that around here. If you don't want to worship our God the way we do it, go live some where else. You have no right to live here." Any right whatsoever can be trumped with "Do it the way we tell you to do it or go live elsewhere."
(1) For the peed ants, there actually is legislation which interferes with the right of the restaurant owner to practices his freedom of association. Refuse service to the wrong person and you may actually be facing a law suit. Such violations of freedom of association, while technically making the restaurant not entirely free to refuse to engage in the implied contract, doesn't really affect this situation.
Wow. A bit uptight, huh? Eating more fiber might help with that.
Personally, I'm a libertarian-leaning atheist who is all for stem cell research, cloning, gay marriage if that's your thing, and all sorts of other things the Catholic church finds objectionable. That's why I was careful to include "The issue for the Catholic church..." in my statement (you know, in the part you trimmed out when you quoted me) to indicate that I wasn't speaking of my own concerns. I guess that was a bit too subtle for you. Sorry. My bad.
If you say so. As an atheist, the whole thing is academic from my viewpoint. I was merely pointing out that the Pope hadn't avoided any of the complex doctrinal questions by his statements.
No, that's not the problem. Cloned people have souls - look at twins, for instance.
The issue for the Catholic church isn't the sharing of a set of genes, it's man interfering with the God-given natural order of conception. Since twins are perfectly natural, they're obviously part of God's plan and acceptable.
If he encouraged it, there would come some rather unpleasant questions as to what, exactly, would require baptism; if a cloned person has a cloned soul; whether you receive some of the soul of the fetus that gave the stem cells when, for whatever reason, you use said stem cells--all a bunch of nasty theological problems.
And by discouraging it, he avoids those issues how? What happens when (not if) someone clones a human being despite the church's disapproval? What happens when (not if) someone receives clone cells from a fetus as part of a medical procedure? The questions are still there, and they're still going to have to be addressed by the church.
Not sure exactly which pics you're talking about (the Mona Lisa scans or Da Vinci pics that were reversed and compared) but there's some interesting pics and additional info here, including a virtual restoration of the original pigments and some details of what was revealed.
Slashdot Mirror
In my case, I already have a rack - a cabinet, actually. I have my router and my switch installed, and having rackmount servers allows me to put everything in the cabinet and close the door. The servers are sitting on shelves but they're on shelves mounted in the cabinet, so the effect is no different from if they were mounted. I just can't as easily extend them if I need to open them up for some reason.
I've been running whitebox servers like that at home for years but recently decided, like the original poster, that I wanted to go with a rackmount setup. If you're deadset on building a custom system, then I can't offer much advise. Me, I picked up a couple of these.
Even after paying shipping and picking up a could of larger hard drives, I don't think I could have build a similar system any cheaper. One is my mail/web server and the other is an internal domain controller and file server.
They don't come with rails, so they're sitting on shelves in my rack rather than actually installed but I can live with that.
Wow! Just how much is it worth to you?
$285.14?
Seems a bit pricey to me but your nostalgic millage may vary.
The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
I agree. The question, in many cases, isn't buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, it's buying vs not buying. This seems to be using the same flawed reasoning that the BSA and RIAA use in estimating their losses due to piracy - that every instance of piracy translates directly into a lost sale. In this case, they seem to be assuming that every use of OSS translates to a lost sale of proprietary software. That simply isn't the case. How many businesses would make do with, say, Microsoft Access (which they likely already have) if they couldn't install MySQL or Postgresql rather than pay the thousands of dollars to buy Sql Server or Oracle?
No problem. Don't park your car on the street with the keys in it and with someone standing there offering to open the door to passer-bys who want to go for a ride. If your wireless connection is unsecured and offers DHCP configuration to anyone who wants to join, it's an open invitation. Basic security and MAC filtering are easy to configure. They won't stop a determined or knowledgable hacker, but that isn't the point. Anyone who's hacking in knows they're intruding where they aren't wanted and are committing an illegal act. But if you leave it wide open and the welcome mat out, then don't be surprised if someone makes use of your network.
Does it make coffee as good as this one? (Requires a little more reading than Dilbert to make sense of everything but well worth the effort...)
You're correct, of course, but a Dyson sphere, as actually imagined by Dyson, isn't a solid body like a huge, hollow planet with a sun at it's core. It's really more like a Dyson cloud - a huge collection of unconnected bodies orbiting the sun at the same distance. Niven's Ringworld was a solid body, but one could construct a ring of independent bodies like the original Dyson sphere.
If you're constructing a Dyson sphere, why on Earth (HJARF!) would you bother to haul the building materials up out of Earth's gravity well? Off the top of my head, I have no idea if there's enough asteroid material to build a Dyson sphere at roughly the Earth's orbit. But there's almost certainly enough to build a Niven ring, and by the time we reach that point we could probably start dismantling the outer planets if necessary...
You know, sometimes it helps to RTFA. One of the specific advantages of this type of system is that the energy of the sun is not directly converted to electricity, as it is with solar cells. Rather, the energy is used in the form of heat, which in turn is used (via heating a fluid) to drive a generator. That means that you don't need to store electricity - you need to store heat so that the heat can be used to drive the generator during times when the sun is not available. The article specifically mentions using oil or molten salt to store the heat. Heat up oil or molten salt, store it in well insulated containers, and it will stay hot for a very long time. When you need it, you run the hot oil or salt through a heat exchanger, extract the heat and generate more electricity - all while the sun is on the other side of the planet.
Libertarians generally reject the idea that there is a moral responsibility to help those in need.
You're conflating the issues of moral responsibility and legal responsibility. I certainly don't argue that you have no moral responsibility to help others - rather, I argue that you should not force people to live up to what you consider their moral responsibility to be. Put another way, you have a moral responsibility to respect others rights to disagree with you on what morality requires them to do. You have no right to enforce your morality on someone else.
The problem with communicating with libertarians is that they tend to think any attempt at discussion of these issues is an attempt to force them into helping others.
Well, aren't you? What were the issues that started this discussion? The claim was that, because society might pay for your medical bills, they have a right to use force to stop you from performing certain actions, such as using illegal drugs. If you aren't talking about using laws backed by the force of the state to dictate people's behavior, then what are you talking about? And if you are talking about using such force, then you've left the issue of moral responsibility behind.
The thing is, they aren't being forced. They could drop out of society.
Really? Exactly where should I go where I can "drop out of society" and, say, take my illegal drugs(1) in peace with no danger of anyone throwing me in jail for it? Exactly where should I go where no government will come and demand that I either pay into the government coffers or go to jail?
(1) In point of fact, I don't actually use illegal drugs. Other than caffeine and Claritin, I seldom use legal drugs. But that's because I choose not to use them, and I respect other's right to make their own choice.
But they want the benefits of living in a society with none of the responsibilities.
Actually, Libertarians are generally supporters of use taxes, tolls and other schemes where you explicitly pay for the resources you use. That's hardly the viewpoint of someone looking for a free ride.
Your more or less saying that if anyone sees an injured person they should be left to die on their own.
No, I'm saying that your decision to assist, in whatever way, doesn't justify your imposing your will on their actions.
Once you agree that a moral person has some responsibility to help a person in need you've agreed that society has a burden based on everyones actions.
Morality is one thing. Legality is another. If you want to claim that society has a moral obligation to assist those in need, and that that in turn imposes a moral obligation to the individual to minimize actions which impose a cost on society, I may or may not agree but I'll certainly defend your right to that viewpoint. The problem is that we aren't talking about moral obligations - we're talking about legal obligations, with very real and very harsh consequences for violating them.
The only question is where you draw the line.
For me, that's a very simple and very easy question. I believe no man is a slave. Each man is his own and his only master. You draw the line where my actions have a direct and unwanted impact on your and yours. Put another way, if I'm not directly hurting you, you have no right to forcefully interfere in my actions. The only time you can interfere in my actions is an act of self defense, where you are acting to prevent me from harming you or your property. (The "you" and "me" are not necessarily _you_ and _me_ but any two people or groups of people, of course. And society is nothing more than a group of people.) Indirect possibilities, such as "Well, you might OD and then we'd have to pay for your health care" simply don't cut it.
This doesn't make any sense. Even if someone is woefully addicted, it's not like they take drugs by accident-...
Who claimed they did? I intentionally drove my car to work. Did I commit automobile abuse? So why, if I intentionally take an illegal drug, did I commit drug "abuse?" If I take a prescribed pain pill, I'm using a drug. If I take the exact same drug for the exact same condition but I purchased it from an illegal source, it's drug abuse. The point is that, generally speaking, we've allowed legislatures to define what is use and what is abuse, and that we attach moral judgments to those terms. There is no legitimate moral or rational justification for the dividing lines that are drawn, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to mindlessly follow the legislatures judgments on what constitutes use and what constitutes abuse.
Would you suggest that we call what child molesters, who might not be able to help themselves, do as "illegal children touching" instead of "child abuse"?
You're conflating different meanings of the word, or at least different ways to interpret similarly formed sentences. Child molesters are abusing children because they are harming the children. The abuse that is occurring is from the point of view of the child. Are you arguing that drug users are causing harm to the drugs? If not, then your analogy falls apart.
Horsefeathers. You (that is, society) assumed that burden on its own. It doesn't place any obligations on me. It's as if I decided to come over and mow your lawn for you. You'd probably be delighted that you didn't have to do it yourself anymore.(1) But if, six months later, I came banging on your door and demanded that you stop allowing your kids to play in your own back yard because they were leaving toys laying around that made it harder for me to mow the grass, you'd most likely tell me to take a hike.
If you don't want to pay the cost associated with my behavior, then don't pay it. If I overdose on drugs, let me lay there and die if I don't have insurance or can't pay the bill myself if you so choose. But your actions in assuming responsibility for my debts don't give you any legitimate authority over my behavior.
(1)Unless, of course, you're one of those weird people who enjoys mowing the lawn, but we're assuming for the sake of the analogy that you aren't that warped an individual.
Huh? I wasn't even addressing the issue of G-Archiver. I was pointing out the difference between a hard firewall and a software firewall running on your desktop. I agree that a neither a hardware or a software firewall would have been able to address the specific issue of G-Archiver at all, and am not sure what I said that made you think I thought otherwise. The password comment you quoted was in reference to using the same password for your desktop login and your hardware firewall login, and had nothing to do with the GMail password.
ZoneAlarm is a software firewall that runs on your desktop. The advantage of this is that it can do things like restrict access to the network or specific ports on a process basis. The disadvantage is that if your machine is pwned, your firewall is pwned too. An attacker can disable it, change the rules, replace the software with a hacked version that allows certain traffic without displaying any evidence of it, etc. (And yes, ZoneAlarm might complain about some methods of changing the rules but a competent attacker with root access should be able to get around those fairly easily.)
The post you were responding to specified a hard firewall. It was itself in response to a post which talked about having a separate firewall running on different hardware. If your desktop is pwned, your firewall is still secure unless you do something stupid like use the same password on both machines, or it's independently attacked and compromised. That's their advantage. Their disadvantage is that they aren't privileged with info like what program or process generated a packet and therefore can't discriminate based on such things. All they have is the info that can be gleaned from the packet itself. There might be clues - like the browser ID string - in a packet stream that would allow a hard firewall to make a guess as to the source, but there's no guarantees with that and I'm not aware of any that even make the attempt.
First, I haven't advocated anyone disobeying the laws. Whether to obey or disobey an immoral law is a personal decision. I've made a personal decision to pay my taxes, despite the fact that they're largely unjustified.
Second, I don't mind paying my fair share of those services I consume. The issue isn't a free ride. The issue is what's just to impose on another person, and the optimum way of paying for services.
Third, you have a funny idea of "force or coercion." Taxes are no different from any other form of protection racket. "Hey, you pay me a little bit of money, I'll take care of you. You don't, who knows what sort of unfortunate occurrences could happen to this wonderful business you got going here?" But that's not force or coercion because you can always move your business to somewhere else? Accepting a contract has to do with deciding whether or not to enter into a mutually agreeable business deal. When the choice are accept or flee in fear of your live or liberty, it's isn't a free choice, and all of your misguided and uninformed moral indignation doesn't change that one little bit.
...should Microsoft pay taxes on the profits they make in selling their software? If so, where? If not, why the hell not?
Leaving aside the issues of libertarian principles, of the legitimacy of taxation in general, and of how much obligation a public education places on the individual and anyone who hires him, we have the issue of traditional goods as opposed to those with near-zero margin costs. Do we really want to establish a precedent where every copy of software sold is taxable by the state where the code was originally written? What happens to open source, with many contributers from many states and countries? And if you say that open source generally isn't sold but only a fee charged for distribution and for support, are you sure the state will see it that way? And is it jake for MS to sell you a copy of Windows for $1 and charge a $199 distribution and support fee? Does the same taxation ability go for other goods of this type? If I record a song in a particular state, should it have the right to take a percentage of every copy of that song I sell? What about filming a movie?
There is no valid contract for you to pay for your food when you go into a restaurant, yet few people dine and dash. No one would assume the restaurant is just giving you the food for free. What there is is an implied contract. You eat the food, you pay the bill. With government services, there is the same implied contract. If you don't want to pay the bill, don't make use of the services. If you don't agree to pay taxes, go live somewhere else, you have no right to live here.
Cute. Are you just trolling, do you really believe this drivel, or are you just hoping no one will call you on it?
There certainly is a valid contract when you eat into a restaurant. I can only assume that you meant there is no written contract. The fact that it's implied makes it no less valid.
When I walk into a restaurant, I do indeed agree to an implied contract that I will pay for whatever it is that I order. This is a contract between equals. I'm free to engage or not engage in the transaction. So is the restaurant.(1) If I don't like the prices on the menu, I can decide not to eat there. The situation is far different with government services.
I'm not free to refuse to engage in the transaction. Ask the many people who have either been fined or incarcerated for failure to pay the proper taxes or fees. I can't simply say "I don't want what it is you're selling, so I won't use it and therefore don't have to pay for it." I'd be more than happy to give up all rights to many government services, and to pay only my fair share of those services I actually use - such as public road construction and maintenance. That option doesn't exist for me, and it doesn't exist for Microsoft.
You state that I "... have no right to live here..." If that argument is valid, then I have no rights at all. Freedom of speech? Of Religion? Of anything else? "We don't like that kind of talk around here. If you want to talk like that, go live somewhere else. You have no right to live here." "We don't worship like that around here. If you don't want to worship our God the way we do it, go live some where else. You have no right to live here." Any right whatsoever can be trumped with "Do it the way we tell you to do it or go live elsewhere."
(1) For the peed ants, there actually is legislation which interferes with the right of the restaurant owner to practices his freedom of association. Refuse service to the wrong person and you may actually be facing a law suit. Such violations of freedom of association, while technically making the restaurant not entirely free to refuse to engage in the implied contract, doesn't really affect this situation.
Easy solution which will work - change your name to John Smith.
My real name is almost that common. Good luck trying to find any signal amongst the massive amount of noise a search generates.
LOL. I was raised Southern Baptist, and rejected that before I hit my teens. I'm not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Catholic church.
Wow. A bit uptight, huh? Eating more fiber might help with that.
Personally, I'm a libertarian-leaning atheist who is all for stem cell research, cloning, gay marriage if that's your thing, and all sorts of other things the Catholic church finds objectionable. That's why I was careful to include "The issue for the Catholic church..." in my statement (you know, in the part you trimmed out when you quoted me) to indicate that I wasn't speaking of my own concerns. I guess that was a bit too subtle for you. Sorry. My bad.
If you say so. As an atheist, the whole thing is academic from my viewpoint. I was merely pointing out that the Pope hadn't avoided any of the complex doctrinal questions by his statements.
No, that's not the problem. Cloned people have souls - look at twins, for instance.
The issue for the Catholic church isn't the sharing of a set of genes, it's man interfering with the God-given natural order of conception. Since twins are perfectly natural, they're obviously part of God's plan and acceptable.
If he encouraged it, there would come some rather unpleasant questions as to what, exactly, would require baptism; if a cloned person has a cloned soul; whether you receive some of the soul of the fetus that gave the stem cells when, for whatever reason, you use said stem cells--all a bunch of nasty theological problems.
And by discouraging it, he avoids those issues how? What happens when (not if) someone clones a human being despite the church's disapproval? What happens when (not if) someone receives clone cells from a fetus as part of a medical procedure? The questions are still there, and they're still going to have to be addressed by the church.
This thread is useless without pics.
Not sure exactly which pics you're talking about (the Mona Lisa scans or Da Vinci pics that were reversed and compared) but there's some interesting pics and additional info here, including a virtual restoration of the original pigments and some details of what was revealed.