Well I suppose that's at least an improvement over the Old Testament laws where rape victims should be publicly executed if they don't yell loud enough for help.
Maybe you missed the article a few days ago about how the US is barring critics/dissidents from entering the country? Not criminals, not "terrorists", simply people who disagree cannot travel freely. This really is a police state now, and it's only a matter of time before the 1st Amendment becomes about as well honored as the 2nd, which is to say wholly selectively suiting the needs of the state based on arbitrary standards the founders were explicitly against in their writings.
If you send mail to your congressperson, it's rather certain that an intern reads it. Do you get notified of this? Of course not. All this BS about Google is just ad-hating angst. Because I totally want another bill to pay instead of ignoring ads. All the whiners and mock-appalled/offended need to grow up.
To say that the Atlantic wasn't opened by private enterprise is obtusely semantic. While the companies that established, operated and expanded settlements, trade, etc. in New World colonies were endorsed/authorized by the various European monarchies, these operations yielded both public and private profits, and initially more direction and oversight was provided at the company level than the government level. It's sometimes hard to distinguish where public interests end and private interests begin in an imperial aristocracy, but it's disingenuous to pretend that it was wholly one or the other.
Sparky, I come from a fundamentalist Baptist family that homeschooled me for nine years, during which I was required to study the Bible every day. I've read it cover to cover with various commentaries and analyses several times over. Of course the aforesaid commentaries/analyses don't talk about flaws and inconsistencies, because that would be *heresy*. I've actually met/seen a lot of atheists who became apostate precisely for the same reason I did, they actually just read their Bibles with open eyes, looking at what it plainly says instead of what other people whose livelihoods depend on your accepting it say it says.
What do you know about Jepthah's daughter? About Yahweh's command for the Jews to put thousands of babies to the sword, merely because they had penises and the wrong parents? Oh and the babies with vaginas got off with just becoming war prize chattel property to be systematically raped/sold/killed. Yup, Yahweh's a real unimpeachable moral guide. That's why the Marcionites tried to jettison all that, for which they were condemned by the proto-Orthodox Christians as heretics and some were killed.
As for worldly stuff, it's awesome. Actually, I've felt consistently better about myself since my apostasy. Leaving Christianity felt a lot like I imagine leaving a gulag would feel like. I could finally stop pretending that every evil I was told was good for the party/people/dear leader were all totally not evil even though the same things would be evil in a different context (see killing babies above). The dear leader... I mean "god" is so loving, that's why he has to punish finite beings' shortcomings with infinite torture! Being a non-believer has made me more tolerant, more able to interact with people without prejudice. I feel better about myself and society. It's funny really, a ton of the positive things I heard about how people experienced their lives while "in" the faith I could only nod along abstractly, I didn't actually feel that way or experience those things until I ditched the nonsense.
So yeah, my life experience and knowledge are broad and well examined. You should try to do the same.
You really should study the historical reality of the Cuban Missile Crisis in depth. Both sides were coiled tighter than overwound clocks (a metaphor which might be too old for your ken) and were actively hovering over preemptive nuclear strike as an option, with or without even the slightest provocation as a cover/excuse/defense. It is far too easy to take for granted after the fact that the world wasn't effectively destroyed during that time.
Actually, prominent atheists like Daniel Dennett "believe in" free will (if such can be parsed for something like compatiblism). However if you are a Christian, you cannot, since in various points of the story of Moses' interactions with Pharaoh it is said that Yahweh 'hardens his heart' and makes him do things he otherwise would not. Oh and the cool part is Pharaoh is still blamed for these actions which a supposedly omnipotent divine force made him do, because it's totally the sock puppet's ethical culpability for what the puppeteer says and does. I can't wait to test that in court.
It's just you. I have no desire for Slashdot to look like Every Tech Blog Ever(TM) with metric fucktons of wasted white space by design. Who cares though? We've got to appeal to everybody who thinks 720 pixels is HIGH resolution on their postage stamp screens.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't understand microeconomics. I have about half a million in total assets. Most of these aren't liquid, and moreover my various obligations are fairly close to my income, which is to say I'm close to broke most of the time. Being broke means you don't have disposable income, not that you don't have assets or income, and that in order to spend more you must go into debt.
What you and the broader industry keep assuming is that there is only one model, 'create stuff to get paid' which also frequently assumes some sort of royalty model for getting paid in perpetuity for some nice thing made a ludicrously long time ago. There is a good reason this sticks in the craw of so many people. The rest of the world that labors and toils for the infrastructure that allows society to live doesn't get to be paid in perpetuity for work they've done. They 'get paid to do work' and that pay (generally speaking) happens once per unit of work. There is nothing today that prevents artists from 'getting paid to create' instead of 'creating to get paid'. We live in a kickstarter era, if you have proof of talent you can take that to the market and simply ask them, 'will you pay me to make a thing?' And if so, they will get as much money as the market will support in advance. There is then NO REASON for them to be paid in perpetuity for that thing every time somebody copies/references/remixs it. They've gotten the money the market wanted to give them already. It should now be free to the rest of the world.
My fundamental problem with all IP law (copyrights and patents etc.) is that it presumes to dictate to people how they can and cannot use or configure their own property. If I have a storage medium, no government or corporation should be able to tell me that the way I order the bits on it magically makes it legal or illegal. Similarly for patents, if I want to use my tools and my raw materials to make something, the fact that somebody else thought of it first should be immaterial. And don't bring me any bullshit about innovation. More innovation is being stifled by patent law than buoyed by it, and indeed the winners are often not the small fry inventors but the conglomerates who get wind of their work and have both faster R&D and bigger legal departments. Patents go to people with the best patent lawyers, not necessarily actual inventors.
You it's sad, but that is such a typical distillation that I thought it was a real post on my first casual read through. Then I looked for the parent and realized it was an exercise in performance art. Well played, sir.
You are a fool. The majority of murders are carried out with hands and feet. And the people with any sense in their skulls are not going to wait and see how things go before they defend themselves, because at that point, they're either dead or dying. A teenage kid can kill a grown man with one punch. I for one will never underestimate somebody who has chosen to become violent. They might actually be emboldened to make such a choice because they are good at it, and anybody who lets them gain the upper hand deserves what follows. For my part I'm not going to wait for my own funeral.
You can build things without degrees. I'm pretty sure that the Greeks who built the 2800+ year old caravan bridge didn't have engineering degrees, and that has survived continuous use from the time of Homer to commuter buses.
Because people won't mangle the pronunciation of "Germany" as often or as badly as the might mangle "Deutschland" for instance. This is why I still say "Burma" instead of "Myanmar". As far as I'm concerned, it's the English word for Myanmar. And if you disagree, I expect you to start calling Sweden "Sverige" immediately.
This old chestnut? Really? My dad used to peddle this bullshit to me when I was kid, and I didn't buy it then either.
I understand my mother, my wife, my daughter, my female coworkers and friends as well as I understand all male analogues throughout humanity. Those men and women who are somewhat limited in their capacity to understand people shouldn't a) project those limits onto other men and women and b) perpetuate the bullshit that it's some inherent insurmountable gap between monolithic halves of humanity. Gender is not a monolith, and treating it as such leads to discriminatory indictments lobbed carelessly in both directions (I'm looking at you, feminists).
Luckily there are people who are not as narrow-minded as you to move us forward.
1) Not everybody has hands or control over them. Technology like this will be priceless for amputees and people with muscular or other degenerative diseases.
2) This is a first generation technology, as systems like this are refined, they can potentially exceed the range of our physical control through cutting response time and scaling up the "granularity" of control while eliminating "interference" (e.g. the involuntary shaking of muscles).
Civilization doesn't turn on one axis. Egypt had decent periods after Amarna, indeed the consequent 19th dynasty that followed included Ramesses the Great. Good periods neither negate nor exculpate bad periods, but it does not follow that negative events necessarily beget more of the same, or no civilization could or would exist. There is always room for reversal of fortune in either direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I suppose that's at least an improvement over the Old Testament laws where rape victims should be publicly executed if they don't yell loud enough for help.
Maybe you missed the article a few days ago about how the US is barring critics/dissidents from entering the country? Not criminals, not "terrorists", simply people who disagree cannot travel freely. This really is a police state now, and it's only a matter of time before the 1st Amendment becomes about as well honored as the 2nd, which is to say wholly selectively suiting the needs of the state based on arbitrary standards the founders were explicitly against in their writings.
If you send mail to your congressperson, it's rather certain that an intern reads it. Do you get notified of this? Of course not. All this BS about Google is just ad-hating angst. Because I totally want another bill to pay instead of ignoring ads. All the whiners and mock-appalled/offended need to grow up.
As the electronics payloads continue to be more and more miniaturizable, even unwieldy gossamer aircraft become a viable platform.
Actually you are wrong, there is at least one organism that can live forever: the turritopsis nutricula
To say that the Atlantic wasn't opened by private enterprise is obtusely semantic. While the companies that established, operated and expanded settlements, trade, etc. in New World colonies were endorsed/authorized by the various European monarchies, these operations yielded both public and private profits, and initially more direction and oversight was provided at the company level than the government level. It's sometimes hard to distinguish where public interests end and private interests begin in an imperial aristocracy, but it's disingenuous to pretend that it was wholly one or the other.
Sparky, I come from a fundamentalist Baptist family that homeschooled me for nine years, during which I was required to study the Bible every day. I've read it cover to cover with various commentaries and analyses several times over. Of course the aforesaid commentaries/analyses don't talk about flaws and inconsistencies, because that would be *heresy*. I've actually met/seen a lot of atheists who became apostate precisely for the same reason I did, they actually just read their Bibles with open eyes, looking at what it plainly says instead of what other people whose livelihoods depend on your accepting it say it says.
What do you know about Jepthah's daughter? About Yahweh's command for the Jews to put thousands of babies to the sword, merely because they had penises and the wrong parents? Oh and the babies with vaginas got off with just becoming war prize chattel property to be systematically raped/sold/killed. Yup, Yahweh's a real unimpeachable moral guide. That's why the Marcionites tried to jettison all that, for which they were condemned by the proto-Orthodox Christians as heretics and some were killed.
As for worldly stuff, it's awesome. Actually, I've felt consistently better about myself since my apostasy. Leaving Christianity felt a lot like I imagine leaving a gulag would feel like. I could finally stop pretending that every evil I was told was good for the party/people/dear leader were all totally not evil even though the same things would be evil in a different context (see killing babies above). The dear leader... I mean "god" is so loving, that's why he has to punish finite beings' shortcomings with infinite torture! Being a non-believer has made me more tolerant, more able to interact with people without prejudice. I feel better about myself and society. It's funny really, a ton of the positive things I heard about how people experienced their lives while "in" the faith I could only nod along abstractly, I didn't actually feel that way or experience those things until I ditched the nonsense.
So yeah, my life experience and knowledge are broad and well examined. You should try to do the same.
You really should study the historical reality of the Cuban Missile Crisis in depth. Both sides were coiled tighter than overwound clocks (a metaphor which might be too old for your ken) and were actively hovering over preemptive nuclear strike as an option, with or without even the slightest provocation as a cover/excuse/defense. It is far too easy to take for granted after the fact that the world wasn't effectively destroyed during that time.
Actually, prominent atheists like Daniel Dennett "believe in" free will (if such can be parsed for something like compatiblism). However if you are a Christian, you cannot, since in various points of the story of Moses' interactions with Pharaoh it is said that Yahweh 'hardens his heart' and makes him do things he otherwise would not. Oh and the cool part is Pharaoh is still blamed for these actions which a supposedly omnipotent divine force made him do, because it's totally the sock puppet's ethical culpability for what the puppeteer says and does. I can't wait to test that in court.
It's just you. I have no desire for Slashdot to look like Every Tech Blog Ever(TM) with metric fucktons of wasted white space by design. Who cares though? We've got to appeal to everybody who thinks 720 pixels is HIGH resolution on their postage stamp screens.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't understand microeconomics. I have about half a million in total assets. Most of these aren't liquid, and moreover my various obligations are fairly close to my income, which is to say I'm close to broke most of the time. Being broke means you don't have disposable income, not that you don't have assets or income, and that in order to spend more you must go into debt.
Don't worry, when Dice rolls out the 'new slashdot' that won't be an option anymore. And there will be more ads.
What you and the broader industry keep assuming is that there is only one model, 'create stuff to get paid' which also frequently assumes some sort of royalty model for getting paid in perpetuity for some nice thing made a ludicrously long time ago. There is a good reason this sticks in the craw of so many people. The rest of the world that labors and toils for the infrastructure that allows society to live doesn't get to be paid in perpetuity for work they've done. They 'get paid to do work' and that pay (generally speaking) happens once per unit of work. There is nothing today that prevents artists from 'getting paid to create' instead of 'creating to get paid'. We live in a kickstarter era, if you have proof of talent you can take that to the market and simply ask them, 'will you pay me to make a thing?' And if so, they will get as much money as the market will support in advance. There is then NO REASON for them to be paid in perpetuity for that thing every time somebody copies/references/remixs it. They've gotten the money the market wanted to give them already. It should now be free to the rest of the world.
My fundamental problem with all IP law (copyrights and patents etc.) is that it presumes to dictate to people how they can and cannot use or configure their own property. If I have a storage medium, no government or corporation should be able to tell me that the way I order the bits on it magically makes it legal or illegal. Similarly for patents, if I want to use my tools and my raw materials to make something, the fact that somebody else thought of it first should be immaterial. And don't bring me any bullshit about innovation. More innovation is being stifled by patent law than buoyed by it, and indeed the winners are often not the small fry inventors but the conglomerates who get wind of their work and have both faster R&D and bigger legal departments. Patents go to people with the best patent lawyers, not necessarily actual inventors.
You it's sad, but that is such a typical distillation that I thought it was a real post on my first casual read through. Then I looked for the parent and realized it was an exercise in performance art. Well played, sir.
So all the people who paid out the ass to do it right now are figments of the imagination? And so all the people planning to do it upon release?
Grow up. The world is not a scaled up monolith of 'you'.
Who said anything about limiting things to the US? Most of the world is neither wealthy enough nor empowered by their government to carry guns.
You are a fool. The majority of murders are carried out with hands and feet. And the people with any sense in their skulls are not going to wait and see how things go before they defend themselves, because at that point, they're either dead or dying. A teenage kid can kill a grown man with one punch. I for one will never underestimate somebody who has chosen to become violent. They might actually be emboldened to make such a choice because they are good at it, and anybody who lets them gain the upper hand deserves what follows. For my part I'm not going to wait for my own funeral.
You can build things without degrees. I'm pretty sure that the Greeks who built the 2800+ year old caravan bridge didn't have engineering degrees, and that has survived continuous use from the time of Homer to commuter buses.
Because people won't mangle the pronunciation of "Germany" as often or as badly as the might mangle "Deutschland" for instance. This is why I still say "Burma" instead of "Myanmar". As far as I'm concerned, it's the English word for Myanmar. And if you disagree, I expect you to start calling Sweden "Sverige" immediately.
Oh wow, nothing but vague dismissal and no substance. Good job.
This old chestnut? Really? My dad used to peddle this bullshit to me when I was kid, and I didn't buy it then either.
I understand my mother, my wife, my daughter, my female coworkers and friends as well as I understand all male analogues throughout humanity. Those men and women who are somewhat limited in their capacity to understand people shouldn't a) project those limits onto other men and women and b) perpetuate the bullshit that it's some inherent insurmountable gap between monolithic halves of humanity. Gender is not a monolith, and treating it as such leads to discriminatory indictments lobbed carelessly in both directions (I'm looking at you, feminists).
Luckily there are people who are not as narrow-minded as you to move us forward.
1) Not everybody has hands or control over them. Technology like this will be priceless for amputees and people with muscular or other degenerative diseases.
2) This is a first generation technology, as systems like this are refined, they can potentially exceed the range of our physical control through cutting response time and scaling up the "granularity" of control while eliminating "interference" (e.g. the involuntary shaking of muscles).
That was just a cover-up for chicken and cow! The truth is out there!
Considering the health of the lolicon industry in Japan, I think that would be about as necessary as a campaign to convince the Japanese to eat rice.
Civilization doesn't turn on one axis. Egypt had decent periods after Amarna, indeed the consequent 19th dynasty that followed included Ramesses the Great. Good periods neither negate nor exculpate bad periods, but it does not follow that negative events necessarily beget more of the same, or no civilization could or would exist. There is always room for reversal of fortune in either direction.