Well according to doctors penile curvature is caused by always masturbating with the same hand so if only for aesthetic reasons you should alternate hands between sessions anyway.
Oh who am I kidding, this is/. who cares about aesthetics ? It's not like anybody else will ever see your penis anyway.
>People routinely record sport matches? I would think that porn would easily be a bigger factor than that.
There are far more football watching jocks in the world than/. geeks dude.
This was even MORE true in the 1980's when the betamax/vhs war was on.
I know people who have stacks of their most favorite games recorded and kept for years to rewatch. And certainly whenever they are just not able to make it to a TV at game time (perhaps they had to work) - they will want the recording. Hell I know some sports nuts who demand their wives tape the game WHEN THEY ARE GOING TO WATCH IT LIVE. So they can rewatch it at home with commentary and double-check on that questionable referee decision that every game has to have by law.
>What about the cheaters who get divorced in order to marry their other lover? Is their partner on the hook for that?
Sometimes.
There is no real universal here. Imagine X and Y are married. X is abusive. Y meets the very cute Z and sees just how different things can be with somebody who actually respects and cares for you. X lashes out once more one night, Y jumps in the car and drives off to seek comfort with friend Z. Holding each other, crying and consoling and maybe having alcohol- one thing leads to another and Y sleeps with Z. Y comes home and demands a divorce from X.
Do you really want to tell me that Y and Z did anything wrong here ? Technically they cheated but I lay the blame for their failed marriage squarely before the door of X.
And before you ask, not only do I know several people who went through this exact story, I'm one of them.
Of course I'm sure my X (see the clever pun there) would have a different version, but then X was never particularly good at telling the difference between reality and wishful thinking. The abuse in that case in fact, was most frequently based on the believe that you can turn the real world into whatever you demand it be by shouting, hitting, dehumanizing and withholding sex from anybody who dares to love you. Well suffice to say - sooner or later, that person stops loving you if you do that, and realizes that whatever the hell you may feel for him or her isn't love. If it takes another kinder, gentler person to show him or her that - then I still fail to see how you can blame that divorce on the people cheating.
I'm not concerned with privacy writing this - male abuse happens as much as female abuse but is hardly ever talked about, so I make a point of talking about it, because it may encourage somebody else to do the right thing and leave before the day you hit back. Hell I wrote an article (under my own name) for a major woman's magazine about it. Besides, my divorce is long finished and hardly a secret so it's not like it's going to have any negative consequences for me.
Worst and most factually incorrect piece of misogynistic bullshit in this thread so far.
You're about one step away from "back to the kitchen, no votes for you".
Face it - feminism happened because men dominated instead of... oh I don't know FORMING A PARTERSHIP with their partners ?
Well I rather LIKE forming partnerships. I like the idea of working TOGETHER. Without a boss-figure or a "head of the household". Because I am not ARROGANT enough to think I always know better. There is nothing more primitive and barbarian left in our world today than the idea that somebody always HAS to be in charge. I certainly will not be that barbarian in my own home - and I suggest you rethink the complete and utter lack of respect you show to woman.
Stupid feminists said "a woman can do everything a man can." but it had to be said, you're judging based on first-wave feminism though- it had to be said THEN. Current so-called 3rd-wave feminists have a very different view. They tend to be sex-positive, porn-positive woman whose idea of equality is that a man should be able to enjoy being a man, and a woman should be able to enjoy being a woman. When they are together they should be able to form a partnership in which both of them can find intellectual, emotional and sexual fulfillment.
The nice about that is, that it doesn't make the stupid mistake you, the first wave feminists and all the men they rallied against (and their intellectual descendent's still do) are making: generalizing based on sex.
The single greatest definition of sexism I ever read was: "Sexism is to consider about the sex of a person when it is not a relevant concern."
When IS it a relevant concern ? When you go to a urologist or a are trying to make a baby together - your respective sexes matter. You can't swap jobs for those kinds of things (yet anyway). That is IT. Every other time the question to ask is "Which one of us is most capable of making this decision" and should be answered honestly by you both - and the decision given to the one who is best suited for the task. The sex of the person will never having anything to do with the answer. Not EVER. The nice thing about this system is it works just as well for polygamous or same-sex relationships.
While I think you are right, I think you're missing out another aspect. Maps are a crucial propaganda tool though they may not look like it at first sight, and the Chinese government is certainly a massive propaganda machine. To give an illustration by example. Back in the early 80's South Africa's apartheid policy had included creating a number of so-called separate republics for certain ethnic groups to live in. Of course no other country but South Africa recognized them as independent states but they allowed the apartheid government to shove most of it's poor and oppressed black population under the auspices of "another country" and thus be deemed a first-world nation. The fact that South Africa influenced their laws and proscribed many of them aside. Of these only Lesotho and Swaziland remained independent after the end of apartheid (interestingly the only ones that were NOT using a republican governmental system but instead are both monarchies) - but exactly that and their genuine single-culture population make-up and desire for independence is what got the UN to recognize them.
The others were the so-called TBVC-states, Transkey, Bophutatswana, Venda and Ciskey. All existing entirely surrounded by on all borders by South Africa. But television weather maps from the time (remember the television was (and largely remains) state-controlled) did not show Bophutatswana at all, it was just completely left off the map. Why ? Because Bophutatswana consisted of no less than 6 places that were completely geographically separated with bits of South Africa in between. Calling this spatter of blotches a "country" was a flying piece of proof of just how flawed the apartheid ideal was particularly in it's execution. It was fine to talk about it, but the government did not want people seeing and thinking about the structure of this 'state' - especially as the "president" Lucas Mangope was one of the only black leaders who supported apartheid (well he would, they gave him the power he held). So to prevent people thinking about it, the easiest way was to stop them seeing it. Most people saw the weather map every day. Solution, just leave the place out entirely.
I would be very surprised if China does not want mapping services overseen by a government agency to ensure that their own map-propaganda is left intact. With issues like Tibet in particular I can see them wanting to be very picky about how maps are labelled so it suits the message they want to send.
So we're back to calling my claims "theoretical", "insane", "stupid' etc. without giving the slightest backing to your argument.
Why did I pay a lawyer (well I didn't pay much, it helps to have a couple in the family)... duh, because having it written by a lawyer means I could ensure that it wouldn't be easy to just work-around by using a minor modification. It also meant that in the event of a complaint, it had a much smaller chance of being struck down.
You know what though... while people like Andrew Rens says "software patents are explicitly forbidden under South African law", and while we are a country with a Dutch-Roman legal system NOT an Anglican legal system like yours, I will trust the law professors HERE rather than you.
Either way this discussion is going in circles. I will keep giving arguments based on evidence and proof, you will keep giving counter-arguments based on neener-neener-neener, and eventually, I' sure, you'll drag it back to the substance of patents as opposed to the questions *I* am asking which is: What are their benefits ? What are their cons ? Adding up both - does it make sense to still have them ?
For me the calculation comes to a clear: no.
You have given absolutely NO answers to these questions, you have made no effort to quantify their impact on society and show them as being a positive thing. You just declared them impossible to be rid off. Like you're saying "if their good, great because their here to stay, if they are bad well they are here to stay so no point caring."
Well... I don't agree with that way of thinking. Since I don't feel like going round the circle again however. This is my final post on the topic. Welcome to my foes list. I've been on slashdot since 1999 (though this is my second account)... you're the first person EVER to get on it.
You're going to do a patent search in the South African patent office (which does not have an online search facility b.t.w) just to try and prove me ignorant of patents ? And I'm supposed to be so indignant that I call your bluff or if I don't then you win ?
*yawn*... Oh... and you still haven't told me what this has to do with anything I said ? I never discussed the structure of the patent system so even if you were right here... SO WHAT ? You never answered, at all, any of the things I actually said. So how does it feel when I now completely ignore YOUR point ? Especially since it's completely irrelevant ?
>Software patents are legal in South Africa as they are anywhere else, >both with and without the patent reforms advocated by "slashdotters".
No. They are NOT. In fact the law specifically PROHIBITS them. The problem here is something else. We have no patent checking process. All patent applications are granted by default, and then revoked if there is a complaint (and this complaint is found valid) so despite software patents beings specifically illegal, microsoft now holds over 300 of them in South Africa. Including a patent on Tabbed-browsing (like they could possibly have invented that...) http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/9622.html
So much so has their actions been that there is in fact now a non-profit organisation here that specifically exists just to file complaints against their patents (well they do activism and stuff too but that's the core of it - and yes, I'm a member and contributor): http://ftisa.org.za/ People who are actually law professors in South Africa like Andrew Rens (Author of the South African Creative Commons License) do not agree with your claims about it. I believe them better informed about South African law than you are.
>You just need add to the prologue of the patent text "a generic computer >comprising of CPU and volatile storage..." and then it is no longer a >"software patent".
Sorry my friend, but you don't even understand our legal SYSTEM let alone our laws. It doesn't WORK like that here, NOTHING does. Here judge's word have the force of law (in fact the body of legal decisions are known as the "common-law"). More importantly in any ruling our law requires a judge to rule on the SPIRIT and INTENT of the law, NOT it's letter. Nobody here ever gets off on a technicality and clever wordplay won't let you file a patent that's illegal.
>It is only PURE software patents that are excluded by anti-software >legislation. It so happens that there are almost no PURE software >patents anywhere because lawyers are always careful to include the >text above just to be sure. And in any case, a PURE software >patent would have no utility so would be excluded from admission >in any case.
Let me take it a step further and say that software patent, regardless of whether it includes your little disclaimer, does not have any utitility and should be excluded in any case. Many people believe that a patent system is a good thing, and here on/. many of them advocate it - merely restricted to exclude certain things, like e.g. maths and software and plots for books. But knowing that lawyers think like you, that they think adding a stupid sentence to the top of the page changes a bad patent into a good one without altering what it covers in any way... well that's why I no longer believe patents are a good thing AT ALL. I actually think they were a pretty good thing in for example the automotive industry. But they way they are used in the software industry and pharmaceuticals is so incredibly bad that I would wager the small advantage they give in those industries they were meant for are greatly outweighed by the massive harm they do in others. Trying to restrict them out of those clearly won't work because lawy
Why yes, I HAVE in fact read multiple patents in full.
In fact, this is going to shock you, I OWN four different patents. On mechanical inventions not software.
See I didn't ALWAYS believe patents were bad. That knowledge came with increased study. The fact that this would cost me the (not insignificant) monetary value of my four inventions as ideas is to me, of no consequence. In fact, I believe I will ultimately be able to capitalize and monetize my patented inventions BETTER in the ABSENCE of patents.
So I read (and in fact insisted on overviewing with te lawyer every step of WRITING) those patents. I also read several others in full, including Microsofts XML patent which they filed in South Africa and which I was an active activist in the complaint against (because software patents aren't legal here and it should never have been granted).
I will admit that I have read rather fewer US patents and the (small) legal differences does mean they are not exactly the same, but I have read a few and understood them for the most part. Did I mention I read groklaw on a regular basis as well to supplement my own understanding with those of practicing lawyers ?
I don't believe you have the slightest evidence by which to measure what I may or may not know about the patent system. All your post did now was to describe weak analogies - but an analogy is only weak if you are not aware of it's limitations or assume that where there are crucial differences, the behavior of A must be similar to that of B.
There is no problem in using an analogy to show how the things that are SIMILIAR between A and B can help you successfully predict how B will behave. What I did was show you examples of laws that were once thought intrinsic to society and impossibly idealistic to want to change, all of which, nevertheless did change. Since the only point I was making was that patents are also a matter of law, and thus are mutable or even discardable, there is absolutely no knowledge of the fine details of the patent system REQUIRED for my statement to be true.
Hence I did not bother to elaborate. My analogy was based only on what these things have in COMMON - they were all LAWS. Human IDEAS. That were changed. Patents share this attribute, and it's therefore fully logical to assume that since any law CAN change, there is no reason patents couldn't.
There may be practical difficulties to overcome first, but there ALWAYS are. You assume those practical difficulties to be impossible and insurmountable, I do not. History shows that they never are. Now speaking as somebody who is very informed of both the history and nature of the patent system and has been making an active study of it for nearly a decade: In fact, on the contrary - the practical difficulties in getting rid of the patent system are significantly smaller than the other examples I have mentioned.
The risks we'd need to take, the potential short term losses are all massively smaller than what it took for any of the other changes I stated. Far greater difficulties have been overcome to change bad systems, and interestingly somebody who was directly involved in such a process, maybe you've heard of him fellow by the name of Benjamin Franklin. Pretty clever guy, you know he was also one of the most prolific inventors of his generation - and VOCALLY opposed to the idea of a patent system. His incredibly opposition was the main reason there ISN'T one in the US constitution, though it was decided not to actually prohibit one, so that later congresses could deal with the issues if new circumstances were to arise that changed things.
I wish he had been more insistent -because he was right, the very idea of owning invention (even for a short time) is an affront to human dignity.
But none of this even matters much. We never discussed why I am against and you are in favor of patents. You declared such a discussion worthless because you - according to you, it would be impossible to abolish the patent system, ever.
I proved that the patent system, like any other bad legal system can and must be changeable or abolishable.
Now before you say it, yes indeed the stakes of the ordinary person affected by for example slavery was higher than patents so they were more motivated to change it, but then the difficulties to overcome was much higher as well. For most of them - it meant risking life and limb in wars. Slavery got abolished though, eventually worldwide.
Patents have a lesser impact on ordinary citizens (but that impact is growing exponentially, each year more businesses are unable to be started because of patent-nets protecting the incumbents. More products are getting more expensive for normal people because of patents preventing competition. Right now it's reaching critical status in pharmaceuticals and other industries MUST follow) so the motivation for abolishing patents will only get bigger. The practical difficulties however are not going to get bigger. They are, right now, as bad as they will ever be. A fairly intense (but short-term) economic knockback, which will see several huge industries radically altered or even disappear, but yes it's very short-term because you will immedia
Wow, you're posts are getting more worthless with each reply. You've now dropped any pretense of sensible argument and simply resorted to plain good old fashioned ad hominem.
Ever post I've made in this thread has PROVEN your "pure theory" idea to be the utter bullshit it is with multiple constant examples showing how systems that were once intrinsic were dismantled when they were no longer useful. Moreover I made the very crucial claim that if ANY system EVER became IMPOSSIBLE to dismantle even when it did more harm than good, that humanity would actually start REGRESSING instead of PROGRESSING. So it's really GOOD for us as that the only impossible thing is for a human construct to become impossible to be deconstruct.
Ultimately a patent is not some material thing. It's a concept. Patent laws (in fact all laws) are IDEAS. And ALL ideas CAN and MUST change over time. That is the very essence of human development.
So the very foundation of your argument is complete and utter bullshit and all of human history proves it so. In fact, that's what MAKES it human history. The neanderthals should at first sight have ousted us. They were stronger than us, when they started at least as technologically advanced as when we did (we both started with pretty much: fire and a spear).
Thing is... thirty thousand years later, they STILL had... fire and a spear. We had been around for ten thousand years by then - and we were well past the wheel already. In the five-thousand odd years since we've invented civilization, literature, writing, beer, computers and space travel.
We've remade the entire PLANET to our desires... and you want to tell me that an IDEA is impossible to change. I have never heard a more nonsensically and intrinsically stupid argument in my entire life. You make me want to nominate the very first "cupholder guy" for a nobel prize.
Man you make a lot of assumptions. Not so long ago the HORSE was intrinsic to how large sections of the economy work. The same can be said of all three my examples. Monarchism was once intrinsic to how much of the economy worked. Slavery even moreso - in fact the sectors it was most intrinsic to was, at that stage, by far the most important parts of it (agriculture in particular). So your argument is a strawman. Things that are intrinsic to the economy is by no means unchangeable because the economy is a human construct and can be altered to reflect changes we wish to accomplish.
Some of those industries that today depend on the patent system will find new ways to operate, some will cease to exist - well so what ? Practically every human advancement puts somebody out of business, and a bunch of new people in business. What do you think Watt's commercially viable steam engines did to the mailcoach industry ?
Everyone of those laws I mentioned was once deemed so intrinsic to the very fabric of society that even those who believed they were wrong frequently declared their abhollition impossible. George Washington was an abholitionist but never acted on this (he even owned slaves) because he believed it an unattainable goal... I'll bet every single African American is really happy that Lincoln didn't agree. I lived through the end of apartheid, from the time when it was believed that it would be impossible to deconstruct this system without abandoning the country to a massacre - and saw us emerge as a peaceful society on the other side of it's destruction - adapted and renewed and the better for it. Monarchism stood for thousands of years as the only form of government in any society larger than a single village (and even in most of those)... republican ideals were floated all too often and basically never realized except for a short (and partial) part of the roman empire. This didn't stop Robbespiere from advocating it's destruction - and it didn't stop the French Revolution from happening - which in turn changed the entire planet. It didn't stop your own founding fathers from shirking off monarchic rule in America (actually a little before the French - but you were a colony, they threw of a monarch in their OWN country).
In short you are ridiculously ill-informed about history. Every single event in history we actually bother to record has this in common: it changed something that was, until that time, generally believed to be unchangeable. We owe it to ourselves as a species to learn from history - to ALWAYS reevaluate our systems and determine if they are still relevant and get rid of those that aren't and replace those for which better systems are available. Essentially your entire argument comes down to a call to tradition - which is a fallacy. Your attempt to paint mine as reducto et absurdium is false, and therefore a strawman.
The patent system came to being because it was, apparently, at the time a good idea. We HAVE to be able to ask if this is still true- and when the clear answer is no (and the only consenting voices are those giant corporations with a vested interest in they very REASONS why it's a bad idea now) then we have to advocate it's end. Saying it's "intrinsic" and therefore cannot ever be changed is well... stupid. We created it, we can destroy it - and your fatalistic claims are... stupid.
You mouth off, but all you can say is that slavery laws must be scrapped.
Scrapping slavery law is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least because you believe such studies - without having read them.
-paul
---------- You mouth off, but all you can say is that appartheid law must be scrapped.
Scrapping appartheid law is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least because you believe such studies - without having read them.
-paul
----- You mouth off, but all you can say is that monarchism must be scrapped.
Scrapping monarchism is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least because you believe such studies - without having read them.
Easy - here's a patent law that will have no adverse effects, and (studies have repeatedly shown) will in fact have major benefits on the economy of any country that uses it. In fact, the only adverse effect whatsoever is that it will subject the nation in question to significant international pressure, but it's likely success suggests this is a short term problem as the countries this pressure comes from will be unable to deny it's success to their own citizens in the long term - and be forced to adopt it as well.
Right... that's a very thinly veiled call to tradition you got there - a fallacy. It's okay for a sense of superiority because every OTHER superpower did the same when THEY were in power, and a bit of the old naturalistic fallacy just to mix it up "it's human nature"...
Sorry, they are both fallacies for a reason - they hold NO water in a sensible argument.
And while it's true that there are those who would hate a superpower simply for being a superpower, you answer my "ALL who deal with them" with this as an excuse ? So you suggest ALL people are like that ? Nobody would like you even if you WERE being good guys ?
Here's a voice from outside. I was working at university radio during 2001 as a newscaster. I had to read the 9/11 story. It was the most emotional moment of my two year career as a journalist. I felt such sympathy, such enormous empathy with your people. I supported the Afghanistan war DESPITE being a pacifist, I felt it was truly a defensive war... but by the time of the Iraq war I had come to despise your president. He made MY life miserable and I didn't even GET the option to vote against him.
No you're wrong. When the holder of power is benevolent in how they use that power, the majority of people will welcome it. We despise America not for HAVING power, but for ABUSING it.
And enforcing your way of life onto other cultures IS abusing your power. Assumning it's better is by any kind of reasoning wrong. Quite frankly, my little poor country has a MORE liberal (in the proper sense of the word, not the American political definition) constitution than yours does ! And the greatest power in the land here is NOT the executive government. It's the constitutional court which has the right to 1) Enforce policy [if certain policy decisions would need to be made in order to follow the constitution] 2) Require governement to make or abolish laws [if said laws are against the constitution / required to uphold it]
In my country, do you know what it took to get gay marriage legalized ? One court case. A lesbian couple went to the constitutional court. The court ONLY asked ONE question: are gay people being treated differently ? Answer: yes. That violates article one of our constitution which bans discrimination on any grounds, ever.
Ergo the court FORCED the government to legalize gay marriage. That simple. My poor country, most powerful in it's region but not even IN the G8 globally, actually has a governmental system that gives MORE power to the citizens than yours does because ANYBODY can bring a constitutional court case and thus far, the majority of times - it has been the citizens bringing those cases who have won. The same court made nevaripine not only legal but REQUIRED the government to supply it free of charge in state hospitals and to rape victims.
Your supreme court comes CLOSE to that, but it isn't quite there, it cannot actually FORCE the government to make a law or enact a policy on behest of ANY citizen who has a case.
Yet YOU are the bastion of freedom ? Hell you could take LESSONS from us. Despite our numerous problems, including corrupt government - we're a freer society than you are. In my home city of Cape Town, individualism is so highly prized that I would say it EXCEEDS America at the time in it's long forgotten history when you called that your greatest value.
You're not really a Cape Townian until you've done something so completely outrageous that nowhere else in the world (except maybe San Francisco) would it be tolerated, and noticed how nobody even cared. Like ferrying 5 people on a scooter while wearing a wizards robe in the middle of the day in the middle of the busines district... that kind of thing is NORMAL here.
Why do I tell you this ? To say to you - your assumptions are wrong. Many cultures have entirely moved beyond prescription and self glorification and see that as tribal or barbarian traits and America appears to be stuck in those ancient stupidities. For us... it's lost.
Sorry but any country whose citizens routinely describe it as "the best country in the world" while having - as per your own post - exactly ZERO grounds for comparison IS arrogant (to say the least).
It is also exactly that same uninformed and uncritical nationalism that drives imperialism. It worked for France, then for England and now for you. Ultimately, like everybody else before you the only possible outcome is you eventually getting a major knock back and then discovering you were never all THAT great after all - and like everybody else who made the mistake before you - realizing that nationalism is a stupid philosophy that has in all of human history never been usefull for anything except an excuse for atrocity. And believe me I know, the government that committed some of the worst atrocities in the history of my nation were even CALLED the Nationalist Party. For that matter, at risk of Godwin'ing myself, nationalism was a fundamental part of Hitler's philosophy as well...
Why do you think American nationalism (or patriotism as you prefer to call it- but seriously, the words are exact synonyms) is any different ? Why do you think people in South Africa hear your presidents' (yes, I was using it in the plural possessive so my apostrophe is correct, now shut up grammar nazis) speeches and are strangely reminded of H.F. Verwoerd, B.J. Vorster and P.W. Botha (hell the last one was utterly indistinguishable from G.W. Bush - they even had the same catch-phrase-like finger-in-the-air stance !). Because it's the exact same rhetoric. We are the chosen nation of god. The flame of liberty. The free and the fair and everybody else is godless communists and muslims and faggots.
"We are the true human beings"... how much more tribal can you get ? You don't GET to be called a civilization until you stop thinking like a tribe, and certainly not until you stop being barbarians when it comes to how you treat every other country out there.
I speak with plenty of self-critique a large part of the current generation here hasn't even learned from the fall of nationalism in my country yet and long for the "Good old days"... but they are dying breed, the majority of us have realized that in embracing people regardless of culture, and making all cultures your own you become a fuller human being with more empathy, and kindness and importantly a more fullfilling life as your experiences in this world is not limited to the narrow scope of one worldview only.
I'm sorry, but those Americans who decry the situation your country speak from having studied history, and having seen other nations and THEIR histories and want to warn you not to repeat their mistakes. Well... it doesn't look like anybody's listening.
Wouldn't it be great if, just for once, the most powerful nation around actually learned something from history, and used an approach and attitude toward the rest of the world that was devoid of such arrogance and self-superiority and perhaps didn't have to end up like the previous ones... perhaps didn't end up hated by every other nation they had any dealings with ?
My country was never the most powerful in the world but we were and are without a doubt the most powerful on our continent... we've been everybody's love-to-hate, now we're the country everybody else in Africa wishes they lived in (hence the one with the constant flood of illegal immigrants and refugees) - and the single most important element that changed to make this happen was to replace a nationalistic government with an all-embracing one (granted, that is often more true in theory than practise but it's at least a BETTER theory).
>Getting humans, their life support equipment and their supplies into space is outrageously expensive using chemical rockets
But honestly, rockets are by far the most primitive part of the entire space program. Getting into space by strapping yourself to a giant firework has all the design elegance of a Wile E. Coyote contraption. Sadly though - none of the possible alternatives are (yet) viable. The X-prize vehicles are still rocket powered, they just use smaller rockets because they hitch a plane-ride for the first piece of the trip... wasteful and inelegant. Lazer-beam projection seems good but requires massive power bases (though at least on the ground) - but that only works while still in the atmosphere - once you leave it, you're back to needing some other propulsion system (though lazer-beam + solar sail could be a nice one) current experiments are limited to about 90ft however and rather depends on spinning the capsule at several thousand RPM the entire trip... I'm sure that would be enough to make even astronaughts feel a bit queezy.
The space elevator is probably the most elegant - especially since it can become a near-zero running energy cost (the weight coming down lifts the weight going up) but the initial cost to build it seems massively prohibitive.
Space Bolas have the same problem - and in fact a few new ones. The Elevator only has to worry about stuff flying into the cable - the Bolas has the additionally worry of potentially flying into stuff. No you can't solve it all with proper air-space management, not everything flying around is sentient human beings or even built by sentient human beings.
Even if you solve that... well both depend on cables with tensile-strength-to-thickness ratios that currently don't exist. Some carbon nanotubes have come close... if you don't mind your space elevator having a milionth-of-a-micron cable... which is as long as we can currently make them. If it turns out possible to thread them and make a longer things out of them - well their not strong enough anyway, maybe we can make them stronger, maybe we can't -nobody actually knows yet.
So basically, the hard part of space travel remains the same as always, it takes a lot of energy to escape earth's gravity well, the stuff outside is advancing wonderfully because that's EASY - energy is cheap in space - and frankly since Verne's "A trip to the moon" the only actual advance we've made was to figure out that riding the gun is better than riding the bullet...
>When we do need to send Bruce Willis up to the asteroid to blow it out of the way, we are really going to wish we had a suitable manned space program.
Can we make a case to send Bruce Willis up to an asteroid to blow it up even if it's technically headed toward Jupiter ? I mean sure it would be pricey but honestly, anything to get rid of the guy...:P
And to be semi-on-topic I didn't just arbitrarily say "Jupiter" - if it wasn't for our really big cousin, we'd get hit by a LOT more space debris than we do (and bigger stuff too) but it's massive gravity is what means stuff like Shoemacher-Levy tend to get pulled there instead of here. On the other hand... if it wasn't for that same massive gravity well, a LOT fewer KBO's would get pulled out of their orbits into solar orbits - fewer comets would mean fewer potential earth-approachers...
So now explain this ONE to the politicians... do we send old Bruce up there to protect Jupiter or to blow it to smithereens ?:P
You're allowed your opinion of them - heck I don't like them because right now, their a net harm on the games playability for everybody else. The reality though - is that quite a lot of them really are in a state of - if I do this my kids eat tonight, if I don't they don't and working for a salary, it's their bosses who make the money. You wanna hate those bosses, hey I'm right there with you - I despise sweatshop labor of ALL kinds.. but simple reality is, what really feeds the market is gold BUYERS. Now them I REALLY hate. They are NOT playing fair, they are cheating and making the game less fun for all the rest of us -and they have no excuse, their NOT just doing a job for a salary without any real means of understand why they are unpopular, they are just freeloading cheaters.
None of this however is particularly important to the premise of the book. The book is about sweatshop labor and economics, the games are a mileu of workers united via the internet - which is a core plot requirement, but the particular ethics of gold farming is really not relevant to the point of the book, so while it's an interesting discussion, it's not interesting as part of a discussion about the book in question.
From my own post: When has pointing out parts of their text being at odds with their proclaimed interpretations ever cause a fundamentalist to reconsider those interpretations ?
All you've done is given your reasons FOR your interpretation ALL of them "well read between the lines" kind of things... while IGNORING the fact that the entire history of the bible it's filled with polygamy as the NORM. First major assault on those interpretations. This interpretation was a New Testament thing, it didn't exist before.
You ignored my other examples of misinterpretation of the SAME text... seems the ONLY thing you actually corrected me on was which book the line occured in, sorry - I stopped going to church a decade ago and my memory isn't 100% perfect.
In the end, here's what I know. If the church was only 50% as tolerant as Jesus was... we wouldn't be arguing.
The Jesus I read about, he had a prostitute in his entourage, he had one in his ancestry as well - and he calls her a HERO of the faith. He ate with the corrupt tax collectors, and never once speaks out against him in judgement - by simple example he leads a man who impoverishes others to be a force for good in the world.
When the NON-believer comes to him and begs for her child's life, he asks her "should I give hte food meant for the children to the dogs ?"... and he doesn't mean what he is saying. He is asking it to make a point to the Jews around him - that it should NOT work that way. When she answers "but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table" - she is in my view underestimating what HE feels she deserves, and he responds by giving her exactly what she asked for. No crumbs, the whole deal.
Because unlike the food for the children, he is saying- the love of god does not run out.
So you see... you really did prove my point for me. You ignored everything I said that was important, and simply stated the meme of the church with no consideration for anything else. Bugger the fact that we're not TALKING about whether monogamy is a christian value (or should be) we only looked at that because it MOTIVATES behavior we were discussing. We're TALKING about whether abstince-only sex ed can ever be justified considering it's apaling results and innate dishonesty. And we're talking about whether sexual imagery is harmful, and ultimately - MORE harmful than VIOLENT imagery ? Because THAT is what the actual discussion is about.
You said nothing of use to the debate at all, you just gave a sermon... too bad for you, I love to fuck, and any god who made it THAT much fun, and then made it a sin is so fucking vindictive he doesn't DESERVE my faith. If there IS a god, he won't BE that fucking dumb, mean and stupid. You can't be THAT stupid, and STILL be smart enough to create universes.
And this is why I'm an agnostic bordering on atheist now.
>It's already happened somewhere in the multiverse, so all we have to do is establish a link to a universe where 3D Realms wasn't made up of a bunch of lazy fucktards and steal a copy.
The multiverse theory only predicts the existence of any POSSIBLE universe. A universe like you describe would probably require a radical rethink of the entire nature of time to even be conceivable...
safely addapt Stephen Hawking's theory to this situation and state that laws of the universe conspire to prevent anybody ever actually finishing the development of Duke Nukem Forever. True the evidence is purely anecdotal, but then the same goes for his original application of the concept to time machines so that's alright then.
Okay... and you are citing which expert ? Violet Blue actually being an expert on human sexuality (who also actually LIVES the values she preaches..)... I'll stick to her articles and cited research unless you got something better than "because I said so". Correlation does not prove causation and the British sex-ed campaign did not fail because it increased rates of sexual activity, one could say it failed to decrease it, but more accurately - it failed to get the SAFE SEX message across. That is a very different failure.
Besides that, you're now guilty of argumentum ad consequantum. The ONLY evidence you offer for your argument is that you don't like the potential consequences of mine. You ignore the other points I raised... like that people have a basic RIGHT to know their own anatomy. That not TELLING girls they have a clitoris (something many fundamentalists are distinctly uncomfortable about - and in some cultures to the extent where they cut them off !) is somehow okay. That not being HONEST about what sex IS, and what role it plays in human relations and relationships is in my view unjustifiable dishonesty. Every person has the RIGHT to make informed choices about their own bodies - sorry, no, their churches and parents do NOT have the right to make those choices FOR them. They can disagree with those choices, but they can't enforce their own choices.
Now here's a little tidbit for you - numerous studies have shown that the Urban population subgroup in the US with the LOWEST incidence of STD infection is the swinger community... those who engage in the most extra-marital sex, DESPITE the fact the use of protection in specifically the US swinger community is very low. There is only one other explanation... swingers don't lie about their trysts it happens openly, honestly and with consent. Not that "truth" can stop germs... but it DOES stop the secret behavior that allows STD's to spread very far before people even knew they WERE at risk.
>The Hebrew book of Enoch has the only mention of homosexuality that I remember, but that isn't scripture and I think only one small group of Christians considers it canon
Another posted pointed out Lev. 18 so I thought I would mention that while I agree with your entire post it's true that specifically homosexual behaviour between men are outright prohibited in Lev. 18. But what he (and everybody else) seems to happily ignore is that the very next verse prohibits a woman from having sex during her period and the verse after that bans the eating of pork. In fact, Christians have in Paul's time already decreed the entire CHAPTER to be a set of norms for higiene during Israel's desert trip which simply does not *apply* anymore. We eat pork all we want, and all the other foods it prohibits. One could make a claim that a higiene restriction on gay sex would STILL make sense in Paul's time... perhaps that's why it's the ONLY entry in the entire CHAPTER that wasn't outright made okay ? Well... we live in the age of modern science and medicine where there really is no practical reason why gay sex needs to be more unhygienic than any other kind. So if pork stopped applying when we had the ability to farm them cleanly... why would gay people still be under a ridiculous restriction ?[1]
Lev. 19 has a long list of other sexual activities which are outright prohibited, specifically various forms of incest, step-parents and such. All things which modern science tells us really IS a bad idea usually - most because of the closeness of genetics. The step-parents one also make sense, screwing your own dad's second wife is pretty sure to cause a major row, the kind of row that ends up with murders and orphans and other highly undesirable consequences. None of the latter stuff are absolutes, but the prohibition does at least make some sense... Interestingly, in a list of nearly 30 kinds of couplings that are forbidden, the ONE combination that NEVER occurs is two unmarried and unrelated people. Every single combination is either a direct blood relative, or at least one of the people is married to somebody else.... it never actually prohibits PREMARITAL sex at all...
In fact the ENTIRE Christian idea of monogamy and marital-only sex is built on a single line in Paul's letter to the Romans which reads: "An elder of the Church should be a man of one woman." That's it. It doesn't actually SAY anything about all the people who are NOT elders, but from that it was surmised that being a man of ONE woman is better. Of course he could have just meant that maybe a man who has to deal with making many wives happy after doing his normal job probably won't have the energy to be a good elder... I know of one Church that actually interpreted it as a DEMAND. They refuse to elect anybody who is NOT YET married as an elder (and they extended it to deacons too - a role which in protestant Churches is traditionally filled by the younger men in the congregation). Ironically - those churches that continue to rally against female deacons, elders and ministers use the exact same quote to justify that (it has to be a MAN of one woman...) while IGNORING that in Acts it not only specifies that women CAN be deacons, but even what sort of women are best at the job (Widows over 40 it suggests).
But when has a fundamentalist ever reconsidered his views just because you prove to him that the very source of those views advocate a different view ? Those who would use the scripture of any religion to justify treating people unequally will never listen to the admonishment of said scripture to do the opposite, never have, never will. Whether it's an extremist Islam or a fundamentalist Christian - it always ends up the same. The majority of the people in both religion may well be peaceful and decent people - but in both cases they lose all respect unless they are willing to vocally speak out against those fundamentalists. Silence is acceptance and allowance. I still have my doubts about God - I'm not CONVINCED there CAN'T be
I know that just as you do... but seriously, think after getting fucked in the ass you are still any kind of pure ? It just goes to show how incredibly naive the moral brigade is... and how stupid the choices people make when you don't give them information. If you want to be genuinely pure on your wedding night... fine that's your right, your decision to make and I respect it... but to imagine that everybody will live up to this ideal if you just don't tell them it's fun to fuck... well that's just plain bloody stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Lol.
Well according to doctors penile curvature is caused by always masturbating with the same hand so if only for aesthetic reasons you should alternate hands between sessions anyway.
Oh who am I kidding, this is /. who cares about aesthetics ? It's not like anybody else will ever see your penis anyway.
>People routinely record sport matches? I would think that porn would easily be a bigger factor than that.
There are far more football watching jocks in the world than /. geeks dude.
This was even MORE true in the 1980's when the betamax/vhs war was on.
I know people who have stacks of their most favorite games recorded and kept for years to rewatch. And certainly whenever they are just not able to make it to a TV at game time (perhaps they had to work) - they will want the recording. Hell I know some sports nuts who demand their wives tape the game WHEN THEY ARE GOING TO WATCH IT LIVE. So they can rewatch it at home with commentary and double-check on that questionable referee decision that every game has to have by law.
>What about the cheaters who get divorced in order to marry their other lover? Is their partner on the hook for that?
Sometimes.
There is no real universal here. Imagine X and Y are married. X is abusive. Y meets the very cute Z and sees just how different things can be with somebody who actually respects and cares for you. X lashes out once more one night, Y jumps in the car and drives off to seek comfort with friend Z. Holding each other, crying and consoling and maybe having alcohol- one thing leads to another and Y sleeps with Z.
Y comes home and demands a divorce from X.
Do you really want to tell me that Y and Z did anything wrong here ? Technically they cheated but I lay the blame for their failed marriage squarely before the door of X.
And before you ask, not only do I know several people who went through this exact story, I'm one of them.
Of course I'm sure my X (see the clever pun there) would have a different version, but then X was never particularly good at telling the difference between reality and wishful thinking. The abuse in that case in fact, was most frequently based on the believe that you can turn the real world into whatever you demand it be by shouting, hitting, dehumanizing and withholding sex from anybody who dares to love you.
Well suffice to say - sooner or later, that person stops loving you if you do that, and realizes that whatever the hell you may feel for him or her isn't love. If it takes another kinder, gentler person to show him or her that - then I still fail to see how you can blame that divorce on the people cheating.
I'm not concerned with privacy writing this - male abuse happens as much as female abuse but is hardly ever talked about, so I make a point of talking about it, because it may encourage somebody else to do the right thing and leave before the day you hit back. Hell I wrote an article (under my own name) for a major woman's magazine about it.
Besides, my divorce is long finished and hardly a secret so it's not like it's going to have any negative consequences for me.
Worst and most factually incorrect piece of misogynistic bullshit in this thread so far.
You're about one step away from "back to the kitchen, no votes for you".
Face it - feminism happened because men dominated instead of... oh I don't know FORMING A PARTERSHIP with their partners ?
Well I rather LIKE forming partnerships. I like the idea of working TOGETHER. Without a boss-figure or a "head of the household". Because I am not ARROGANT enough to think I always know better.
There is nothing more primitive and barbarian left in our world today than the idea that somebody always HAS to be in charge. I certainly will not be that barbarian in my own home - and I suggest you rethink the complete and utter lack of respect you show to woman.
Stupid feminists said "a woman can do everything a man can." but it had to be said, you're judging based on first-wave feminism though- it had to be said THEN.
Current so-called 3rd-wave feminists have a very different view. They tend to be sex-positive, porn-positive woman whose idea of equality is that a man should be able to enjoy being a man, and a woman should be able to enjoy being a woman. When they are together they should be able to form a partnership in which both of them can find intellectual, emotional and sexual fulfillment.
The nice about that is, that it doesn't make the stupid mistake you, the first wave feminists and all the men they rallied against (and their intellectual descendent's still do) are making: generalizing based on sex.
The single greatest definition of sexism I ever read was: "Sexism is to consider about the sex of a person when it is not a relevant concern."
When IS it a relevant concern ? When you go to a urologist or a are trying to make a baby together - your respective sexes matter. You can't swap jobs for those kinds of things (yet anyway).
That is IT. Every other time the question to ask is "Which one of us is most capable of making this decision" and should be answered honestly by you both - and the decision given to the one who is best suited for the task. The sex of the person will never having anything to do with the answer. Not EVER.
The nice thing about this system is it works just as well for polygamous or same-sex relationships.
While I think you are right, I think you're missing out another aspect.
Maps are a crucial propaganda tool though they may not look like it at first sight, and the Chinese government is certainly a massive propaganda machine.
To give an illustration by example. Back in the early 80's South Africa's apartheid policy had included creating a number of so-called separate republics for certain ethnic groups to live in. Of course no other country but South Africa recognized them as independent states but they allowed the apartheid government to shove most of it's poor and oppressed black population under the auspices of "another country" and thus be deemed a first-world nation. The fact that South Africa influenced their laws and proscribed many of them aside.
Of these only Lesotho and Swaziland remained independent after the end of apartheid (interestingly the only ones that were NOT using a republican governmental system but instead are both monarchies) - but exactly that and their genuine single-culture population make-up and desire for independence is what got the UN to recognize them.
The others were the so-called TBVC-states, Transkey, Bophutatswana, Venda and Ciskey. All existing entirely surrounded by on all borders by South Africa.
But television weather maps from the time (remember the television was (and largely remains) state-controlled) did not show Bophutatswana at all, it was just completely left off the map. Why ? Because Bophutatswana consisted of no less than 6 places that were completely geographically separated with bits of South Africa in between. Calling this spatter of blotches a "country" was a flying piece of proof of just how flawed the apartheid ideal was particularly in it's execution.
It was fine to talk about it, but the government did not want people seeing and thinking about the structure of this 'state' - especially as the "president" Lucas Mangope was one of the only black leaders who supported apartheid (well he would, they gave him the power he held).
So to prevent people thinking about it, the easiest way was to stop them seeing it. Most people saw the weather map every day. Solution, just leave the place out entirely.
I would be very surprised if China does not want mapping services overseen by a government agency to ensure that their own map-propaganda is left intact. With issues like Tibet in particular I can see them wanting to be very picky about how maps are labelled so it suits the message they want to send.
So we're back to calling my claims "theoretical", "insane", "stupid' etc. without giving the slightest backing to your argument.
Why did I pay a lawyer (well I didn't pay much, it helps to have a couple in the family) ... duh, because having it written by a lawyer means I could ensure that it wouldn't be easy to just work-around by using a minor modification. It also meant that in the event of a complaint, it had a much smaller chance of being struck down.
You know what though... while people like Andrew Rens says "software patents are explicitly forbidden under South African law", and while we are a country with a Dutch-Roman legal system NOT an Anglican legal system like yours, I will trust the law professors HERE rather than you.
Either way this discussion is going in circles. I will keep giving arguments based on evidence and proof, you will keep giving counter-arguments based on neener-neener-neener, and eventually, I' sure, you'll drag it back to the substance of patents as opposed to the questions *I* am asking which is:
What are their benefits ?
What are their cons ?
Adding up both - does it make sense to still have them ?
For me the calculation comes to a clear: no.
You have given absolutely NO answers to these questions, you have made no effort to quantify their impact on society and show them as being a positive thing. You just declared them impossible to be rid off. Like you're saying "if their good, great because their here to stay, if they are bad well they are here to stay so no point caring."
Well... I don't agree with that way of thinking. Since I don't feel like going round the circle again however. This is my final post on the topic. Welcome to my foes list. I've been on slashdot since 1999 (though this is my second account)... you're the first person EVER to get on it.
>Then can I please have your four patent numbers.
You're going to do a patent search in the South African patent office (which does not have an online search facility b.t.w) just to try and prove me ignorant of patents ? And I'm supposed to be so indignant that I call your bluff or if I don't then you win ?
*yawn*...
Oh... and you still haven't told me what this has to do with anything I said ? I never discussed the structure of the patent system so even if you were right here... SO WHAT ? You never answered, at all, any of the things I actually said. So how does it feel when I now completely ignore YOUR point ? Especially since it's completely irrelevant ?
>Software patents are legal in South Africa as they are anywhere else,
>both with and without the patent reforms advocated by "slashdotters".
No. They are NOT. In fact the law specifically PROHIBITS them. The problem here is something else. We have no patent checking process. All patent applications are granted by default, and then revoked if there is a complaint (and this complaint is found valid) so despite software patents beings specifically illegal, microsoft now holds over 300 of them in South Africa. Including a patent on Tabbed-browsing (like they could possibly have invented that...)
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Software/9622.html
So much so has their actions been that there is in fact now a non-profit organisation here that specifically exists just to file complaints against their patents (well they do activism and stuff too but that's the core of it - and yes, I'm a member and contributor): http://ftisa.org.za/
People who are actually law professors in South Africa like Andrew Rens (Author of the South African Creative Commons License) do not agree with your claims about it. I believe them better informed about South African law than you are.
>You just need add to the prologue of the patent text "a generic computer
>comprising of CPU and volatile storage..." and then it is no longer a
>"software patent".
Sorry my friend, but you don't even understand our legal SYSTEM let alone our laws. It doesn't WORK like that here, NOTHING does. Here judge's word have the force of law (in fact the body of legal decisions are known as the "common-law"). More importantly in any ruling our law requires a judge to rule on the SPIRIT and INTENT of the law, NOT it's letter. Nobody here ever gets off on a technicality and clever wordplay won't let you file a patent that's illegal.
>It is only PURE software patents that are excluded by anti-software
>legislation. It so happens that there are almost no PURE software
>patents anywhere because lawyers are always careful to include the
>text above just to be sure. And in any case, a PURE software
>patent would have no utility so would be excluded from admission
>in any case.
Let me take it a step further and say that software patent, regardless of whether it includes your little disclaimer, does not have any utitility and should be excluded in any case. Many people believe that a patent system is a good thing, and here on /. many of them advocate it - merely restricted to exclude certain things, like e.g. maths and software and plots for books.
But knowing that lawyers think like you, that they think adding a stupid sentence to the top of the page changes a bad patent into a good one without altering what it covers in any way... well that's why I no longer believe patents are a good thing AT ALL.
I actually think they were a pretty good thing in for example the automotive industry. But they way they are used in the software industry and pharmaceuticals is so incredibly bad that I would wager the small advantage they give in those industries they were meant for are greatly outweighed by the massive harm they do in others. Trying to restrict them out of those clearly won't work because lawy
Why would I admit something that isn't true ?
Why yes, I HAVE in fact read multiple patents in full.
In fact, this is going to shock you, I OWN four different patents. On mechanical inventions not software.
See I didn't ALWAYS believe patents were bad. That knowledge came with increased study. The fact that this would cost me the (not insignificant) monetary value of my four inventions as ideas is to me, of no consequence. In fact, I believe I will ultimately be able to capitalize and monetize my patented inventions BETTER in the ABSENCE of patents.
So I read (and in fact insisted on overviewing with te lawyer every step of WRITING) those patents. I also read several others in full, including Microsofts XML patent which they filed in South Africa and which I was an active activist in the complaint against (because software patents aren't legal here and it should never have been granted).
I will admit that I have read rather fewer US patents and the (small) legal differences does mean they are not exactly the same, but I have read a few and understood them for the most part.
Did I mention I read groklaw on a regular basis as well to supplement my own understanding with those of practicing lawyers ?
I don't believe you have the slightest evidence by which to measure what I may or may not know about the patent system. All your post did now was to describe weak analogies - but an analogy is only weak if you are not aware of it's limitations or assume that where there are crucial differences, the behavior of A must be similar to that of B.
There is no problem in using an analogy to show how the things that are SIMILIAR between A and B can help you successfully predict how B will behave.
What I did was show you examples of laws that were once thought intrinsic to society and impossibly idealistic to want to change, all of which, nevertheless did change. Since the only point I was making was that patents are also a matter of law, and thus are mutable or even discardable, there is absolutely no knowledge of the fine details of the patent system REQUIRED for my statement to be true.
Hence I did not bother to elaborate. My analogy was based only on what these things have in COMMON - they were all LAWS. Human IDEAS. That were changed. Patents share this attribute, and it's therefore fully logical to assume that since any law CAN change, there is no reason patents couldn't.
There may be practical difficulties to overcome first, but there ALWAYS are. You assume those practical difficulties to be impossible and insurmountable, I do not. History shows that they never are.
Now speaking as somebody who is very informed of both the history and nature of the patent system and has been making an active study of it for nearly a decade: In fact, on the contrary - the practical difficulties in getting rid of the patent system are significantly smaller than the other examples I have mentioned.
The risks we'd need to take, the potential short term losses are all massively smaller than what it took for any of the other changes I stated. Far greater difficulties have been overcome to change bad systems, and interestingly somebody who was directly involved in such a process, maybe you've heard of him fellow by the name of Benjamin Franklin. Pretty clever guy, you know he was also one of the most prolific inventors of his generation - and VOCALLY opposed to the idea of a patent system. His incredibly opposition was the main reason there ISN'T one in the US constitution, though it was decided not to actually prohibit one, so that later congresses could deal with the issues if new circumstances were to arise that changed things.
I wish he had been more insistent -because he was right, the very idea of owning invention (even for a short time) is an affront to human dignity.
But none of this even matters much. We never discussed why I am against and you are in favor of patents. You declared such a discussion worthless because you - according to you, it would be impossible to abolish the patent system, ever.
I proved that the patent system, like any other bad legal system can and must be changeable or abolishable.
Now before you say it, yes indeed the stakes of the ordinary person affected by for example slavery was higher than patents so they were more motivated to change it, but then the difficulties to overcome was much higher as well. For most of them - it meant risking life and limb in wars. Slavery got abolished though, eventually worldwide.
Patents have a lesser impact on ordinary citizens (but that impact is growing exponentially, each year more businesses are unable to be started because of patent-nets protecting the incumbents. More products are getting more expensive for normal people because of patents preventing competition. Right now it's reaching critical status in pharmaceuticals and other industries MUST follow) so the motivation for abolishing patents will only get bigger. The practical difficulties however are not going to get bigger. They are, right now, as bad as they will ever be.
A fairly intense (but short-term) economic knockback, which will see several huge industries radically altered or even disappear, but yes it's very short-term because you will immedia
Wow, you're posts are getting more worthless with each reply. You've now dropped any pretense of sensible argument and simply resorted to plain good old fashioned ad hominem.
Ever post I've made in this thread has PROVEN your "pure theory" idea to be the utter bullshit it is with multiple constant examples showing how systems that were once intrinsic were dismantled when they were no longer useful. Moreover I made the very crucial claim that if ANY system EVER became IMPOSSIBLE to dismantle even when it did more harm than good, that humanity would actually start REGRESSING instead of PROGRESSING.
So it's really GOOD for us as that the only impossible thing is for a human construct to become impossible to be deconstruct.
Ultimately a patent is not some material thing. It's a concept. Patent laws (in fact all laws) are IDEAS. And ALL ideas CAN and MUST change over time. That is the very essence of human development.
So the very foundation of your argument is complete and utter bullshit and all of human history proves it so. In fact, that's what MAKES it human history. The neanderthals should at first sight have ousted us. They were stronger than us, when they started at least as technologically advanced as when we did (we both started with pretty much: fire and a spear).
Thing is... thirty thousand years later, they STILL had... fire and a spear.
We had been around for ten thousand years by then - and we were well past the wheel already. In the five-thousand odd years since we've invented civilization, literature, writing, beer, computers and space travel.
We've remade the entire PLANET to our desires... and you want to tell me that an IDEA is impossible to change. I have never heard a more nonsensically and intrinsically stupid argument in my entire life. You make me want to nominate the very first "cupholder guy" for a nobel prize.
Man you make a lot of assumptions. Not so long ago the HORSE was intrinsic to how large sections of the economy work. The same can be said of all three my examples.
Monarchism was once intrinsic to how much of the economy worked. Slavery even moreso - in fact the sectors it was most intrinsic to was, at that stage, by far the most important parts of it (agriculture in particular).
So your argument is a strawman. Things that are intrinsic to the economy is by no means unchangeable because the economy is a human construct and can be altered to reflect changes we wish to accomplish.
Some of those industries that today depend on the patent system will find new ways to operate, some will cease to exist - well so what ? Practically every human advancement puts somebody out of business, and a bunch of new people in business. What do you think Watt's commercially viable steam engines did to the mailcoach industry ?
Everyone of those laws I mentioned was once deemed so intrinsic to the very fabric of society that even those who believed they were wrong frequently declared their abhollition impossible. George Washington was an abholitionist but never acted on this (he even owned slaves) because he believed it an unattainable goal... I'll bet every single African American is really happy that Lincoln didn't agree.
I lived through the end of apartheid, from the time when it was believed that it would be impossible to deconstruct this system without abandoning the country to a massacre - and saw us emerge as a peaceful society on the other side of it's destruction - adapted and renewed and the better for it.
Monarchism stood for thousands of years as the only form of government in any society larger than a single village (and even in most of those)... republican ideals were floated all too often and basically never realized except for a short (and partial) part of the roman empire.
This didn't stop Robbespiere from advocating it's destruction - and it didn't stop the French Revolution from happening - which in turn changed the entire planet. It didn't stop your own founding fathers from shirking off monarchic rule in America (actually a little before the French - but you were a colony, they threw of a monarch in their OWN country).
In short you are ridiculously ill-informed about history. Every single event in history we actually bother to record has this in common: it changed something that was, until that time, generally believed to be unchangeable.
We owe it to ourselves as a species to learn from history - to ALWAYS reevaluate our systems and determine if they are still relevant and get rid of those that aren't and replace those for which better systems are available.
Essentially your entire argument comes down to a call to tradition - which is a fallacy. Your attempt to paint mine as reducto et absurdium is false, and therefore a strawman.
The patent system came to being because it was, apparently, at the time a good idea. We HAVE to be able to ask if this is still true- and when the clear answer is no (and the only consenting voices are those giant corporations with a vested interest in they very REASONS why it's a bad idea now) then we have to advocate it's end. ... stupid.
Saying it's "intrinsic" and therefore cannot ever be changed is well... stupid. We created it, we can destroy it - and your fatalistic claims are
You mouth off, but all you can say is that slavery laws must be
scrapped.
Scrapping slavery law is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical
stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league
as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global
warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least
because you believe such studies - without having read them.
-paul
----------
You mouth off, but all you can say is that appartheid law must be
scrapped.
Scrapping appartheid law is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical
stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league
as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global
warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least
because you believe such studies - without having read them.
-paul
-----
You mouth off, but all you can say is that monarchism must be
scrapped.
Scrapping monarchism is under the catagory of ridiculous theoretical
stuff that is just not going to happen. Sort of in the same league
as moving the earth further from the sun in order to reduce global
warming.
This strips you of any credibility you may have had. Not the least
because you believe such studies - without having read them.
-paul
----
Have I made my point yet ?
Easy - here's a patent law that will have no adverse effects, and (studies have repeatedly shown) will in fact have major benefits on the economy of any country that uses it. In fact, the only adverse effect whatsoever is that it will subject the nation in question to significant international pressure, but it's likely success suggests this is a short term problem as the countries this pressure comes from will be unable to deny it's success to their own citizens in the long term - and be forced to adopt it as well.
The perfect patent law: ""
Heh, my pleasure :D
Right... that's a very thinly veiled call to tradition you got there - a fallacy. It's okay for a sense of superiority because every OTHER superpower did the same when THEY were in power, and a bit of the old naturalistic fallacy just to mix it up "it's human nature"...
Sorry, they are both fallacies for a reason - they hold NO water in a sensible argument.
And while it's true that there are those who would hate a superpower simply for being a superpower, you answer my "ALL who deal with them" with this as an excuse ? So you suggest ALL people are like that ? Nobody would like you even if you WERE being good guys ?
Here's a voice from outside. I was working at university radio during 2001 as a newscaster. I had to read the 9/11 story. It was the most emotional moment of my two year career as a journalist. I felt such sympathy, such enormous empathy with your people. I supported the Afghanistan war DESPITE being a pacifist, I felt it was truly a defensive war... but by the time of the Iraq war I had come to despise your president.
He made MY life miserable and I didn't even GET the option to vote against him.
No you're wrong. When the holder of power is benevolent in how they use that power, the majority of people will welcome it. We despise America not for HAVING power, but for ABUSING it.
And enforcing your way of life onto other cultures IS abusing your power. Assumning it's better is by any kind of reasoning wrong. Quite frankly, my little poor country has a MORE liberal (in the proper sense of the word, not the American political definition) constitution than yours does ! And the greatest power in the land here is NOT the executive government. It's the constitutional court which has the right to
1) Enforce policy [if certain policy decisions would need to be made in order to follow the constitution]
2) Require governement to make or abolish laws [if said laws are against the constitution / required to uphold it]
In my country, do you know what it took to get gay marriage legalized ? One court case. A lesbian couple went to the constitutional court. The court ONLY asked ONE question: are gay people being treated differently ? Answer: yes.
That violates article one of our constitution which bans discrimination on any grounds, ever.
Ergo the court FORCED the government to legalize gay marriage. That simple. My poor country, most powerful in it's region but not even IN the G8 globally, actually has a governmental system that gives MORE power to the citizens than yours does because ANYBODY can bring a constitutional court case and thus far, the majority of times - it has been the citizens bringing those cases who have won.
The same court made nevaripine not only legal but REQUIRED the government to supply it free of charge in state hospitals and to rape victims.
Your supreme court comes CLOSE to that, but it isn't quite there, it cannot actually FORCE the government to make a law or enact a policy on behest of ANY citizen who has a case.
Yet YOU are the bastion of freedom ? Hell you could take LESSONS from us. Despite our numerous problems, including corrupt government - we're a freer society than you are. In my home city of Cape Town, individualism is so highly prized that I would say it EXCEEDS America at the time in it's long forgotten history when you called that your greatest value.
You're not really a Cape Townian until you've done something so completely outrageous that nowhere else in the world (except maybe San Francisco) would it be tolerated, and noticed how nobody even cared. Like ferrying 5 people on a scooter while wearing a wizards robe in the middle of the day in the middle of the busines district... that kind of thing is NORMAL here.
Why do I tell you this ? To say to you - your assumptions are wrong. Many cultures have entirely moved beyond prescription and self glorification and see that as tribal or barbarian traits and America appears to be stuck in those ancient stupidities. For us... it's lost.
Another poster a
Sorry but any country whose citizens routinely describe it as "the best country in the world" while having - as per your own post - exactly ZERO grounds for comparison IS arrogant (to say the least).
It is also exactly that same uninformed and uncritical nationalism that drives imperialism. It worked for France, then for England and now for you. Ultimately, like everybody else before you the only possible outcome is you eventually getting a major knock back and then discovering you were never all THAT great after all - and like everybody else who made the mistake before you - realizing that nationalism is a stupid philosophy that has in all of human history never been usefull for anything except an excuse for atrocity.
And believe me I know, the government that committed some of the worst atrocities in the history of my nation were even CALLED the Nationalist Party. For that matter, at risk of Godwin'ing myself, nationalism was a fundamental part of Hitler's philosophy as well...
Why do you think American nationalism (or patriotism as you prefer to call it- but seriously, the words are exact synonyms) is any different ? Why do you think people in South Africa hear your presidents' (yes, I was using it in the plural possessive so my apostrophe is correct, now shut up grammar nazis) speeches and are strangely reminded of H.F. Verwoerd, B.J. Vorster and P.W. Botha (hell the last one was utterly indistinguishable from G.W. Bush - they even had the same catch-phrase-like finger-in-the-air stance !).
Because it's the exact same rhetoric. We are the chosen nation of god. The flame of liberty. The free and the fair and everybody else is godless communists and muslims and faggots.
"We are the true human beings"... how much more tribal can you get ? You don't GET to be called a civilization until you stop thinking like a tribe, and certainly not until you stop being barbarians when it comes to how you treat every other country out there.
I speak with plenty of self-critique a large part of the current generation here hasn't even learned from the fall of nationalism in my country yet and long for the "Good old days"... but they are dying breed, the majority of us have realized that in embracing people regardless of culture, and making all cultures your own you become a fuller human being with more empathy, and kindness and importantly a more fullfilling life as your experiences in this world is not limited to the narrow scope of one worldview only.
I'm sorry, but those Americans who decry the situation your country speak from having studied history, and having seen other nations and THEIR histories and want to warn you not to repeat their mistakes. Well... it doesn't look like anybody's listening.
Wouldn't it be great if, just for once, the most powerful nation around actually learned something from history, and used an approach and attitude toward the rest of the world that was devoid of such arrogance and self-superiority and perhaps didn't have to end up like the previous ones ... perhaps didn't end up hated by every other nation they had any dealings with ?
My country was never the most powerful in the world but we were and are without a doubt the most powerful on our continent... we've been everybody's love-to-hate, now we're the country everybody else in Africa wishes they lived in (hence the one with the constant flood of illegal immigrants and refugees) - and the single most important element that changed to make this happen was to replace a nationalistic government with an all-embracing one (granted, that is often more true in theory than practise but it's at least a BETTER theory).
>Getting humans, their life support equipment and their supplies into space is outrageously expensive using chemical rockets
But honestly, rockets are by far the most primitive part of the entire space program. Getting into space by strapping yourself to a giant firework has all the design elegance of a Wile E. Coyote contraption.
Sadly though - none of the possible alternatives are (yet) viable. The X-prize vehicles are still rocket powered, they just use smaller rockets because they hitch a plane-ride for the first piece of the trip... wasteful and inelegant. Lazer-beam projection seems good but requires massive power bases (though at least on the ground) - but that only works while still in the atmosphere - once you leave it, you're back to needing some other propulsion system (though lazer-beam + solar sail could be a nice one) current experiments are limited to about 90ft however and rather depends on spinning the capsule at several thousand RPM the entire trip... I'm sure that would be enough to make even astronaughts feel a bit queezy.
The space elevator is probably the most elegant - especially since it can become a near-zero running energy cost (the weight coming down lifts the weight going up) but the initial cost to build it seems massively prohibitive.
Space Bolas have the same problem - and in fact a few new ones. The Elevator only has to worry about stuff flying into the cable - the Bolas has the additionally worry of potentially flying into stuff.
No you can't solve it all with proper air-space management, not everything flying around is sentient human beings or even built by sentient human beings.
Even if you solve that... well both depend on cables with tensile-strength-to-thickness ratios that currently don't exist. Some carbon nanotubes have come close... if you don't mind your space elevator having a milionth-of-a-micron cable... which is as long as we can currently make them. If it turns out possible to thread them and make a longer things out of them - well their not strong enough anyway, maybe we can make them stronger, maybe we can't -nobody actually knows yet.
So basically, the hard part of space travel remains the same as always, it takes a lot of energy to escape earth's gravity well, the stuff outside is advancing wonderfully because that's EASY - energy is cheap in space - and frankly since Verne's "A trip to the moon" the only actual advance we've made was to figure out that riding the gun is better than riding the bullet...
meh.
>When we do need to send Bruce Willis up to the asteroid to blow it out of the way, we are really going to wish we had a suitable manned space program.
Can we make a case to send Bruce Willis up to an asteroid to blow it up even if it's technically headed toward Jupiter ? I mean sure it would be pricey but honestly, anything to get rid of the guy... :P
And to be semi-on-topic I didn't just arbitrarily say "Jupiter" - if it wasn't for our really big cousin, we'd get hit by a LOT more space debris than we do (and bigger stuff too) but it's massive gravity is what means stuff like Shoemacher-Levy tend to get pulled there instead of here.
On the other hand... if it wasn't for that same massive gravity well, a LOT fewer KBO's would get pulled out of their orbits into solar orbits - fewer comets would mean fewer potential earth-approachers...
So now explain this ONE to the politicians... do we send old Bruce up there to protect Jupiter or to blow it to smithereens ? :P
You're allowed your opinion of them - heck I don't like them because right now, their a net harm on the games playability for everybody else.
The reality though - is that quite a lot of them really are in a state of - if I do this my kids eat tonight, if I don't they don't and working for a salary, it's their bosses who make the money.
You wanna hate those bosses, hey I'm right there with you - I despise sweatshop labor of ALL kinds.. but simple reality is, what really feeds the market is gold BUYERS.
Now them I REALLY hate. They are NOT playing fair, they are cheating and making the game less fun for all the rest of us -and they have no excuse, their NOT just doing a job for a salary without any real means of understand why they are unpopular, they are just freeloading cheaters.
None of this however is particularly important to the premise of the book. The book is about sweatshop labor and economics, the games are a mileu of workers united via the internet - which is a core plot requirement, but the particular ethics of gold farming is really not relevant to the point of the book, so while it's an interesting discussion, it's not interesting as part of a discussion about the book in question.
Thanks for proving my point.
From my own post: When has pointing out parts of their text being at odds with their proclaimed interpretations ever cause a fundamentalist to reconsider those interpretations ?
All you've done is given your reasons FOR your interpretation ALL of them "well read between the lines" kind of things... while IGNORING the fact that the entire history of the bible it's filled with polygamy as the NORM.
First major assault on those interpretations. This interpretation was a New Testament thing, it didn't exist before.
You ignored my other examples of misinterpretation of the SAME text... seems the ONLY thing you actually corrected me on was which book the line occured in, sorry - I stopped going to church a decade ago and my memory isn't 100% perfect.
In the end, here's what I know. If the church was only 50% as tolerant as Jesus was... we wouldn't be arguing.
The Jesus I read about, he had a prostitute in his entourage, he had one in his ancestry as well - and he calls her a HERO of the faith. He ate with the corrupt tax collectors, and never once speaks out against him in judgement - by simple example he leads a man who impoverishes others to be a force for good in the world.
When the NON-believer comes to him and begs for her child's life, he asks her "should I give hte food meant for the children to the dogs ?"... and he doesn't mean what he is saying. He is asking it to make a point to the Jews around him - that it should NOT work that way.
When she answers "but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table" - she is in my view underestimating what HE feels she deserves, and he responds by giving her exactly what she asked for. No crumbs, the whole deal.
Because unlike the food for the children, he is saying- the love of god does not run out.
So you see... you really did prove my point for me. You ignored everything I said that was important, and simply stated the meme of the church with no consideration for anything else. Bugger the fact that we're not TALKING about whether monogamy is a christian value (or should be) we only looked at that because it MOTIVATES behavior we were discussing.
We're TALKING about whether abstince-only sex ed can ever be justified considering it's apaling results and innate dishonesty. And we're talking about whether sexual imagery is harmful, and ultimately - MORE harmful than VIOLENT imagery ? Because THAT is what the actual discussion is about.
You said nothing of use to the debate at all, you just gave a sermon... too bad for you, I love to fuck, and any god who made it THAT much fun, and then made it a sin is so fucking vindictive he doesn't DESERVE my faith. If there IS a god, he won't BE that fucking dumb, mean and stupid. You can't be THAT stupid, and STILL be smart enough to create universes.
And this is why I'm an agnostic bordering on atheist now.
>It's already happened somewhere in the multiverse, so all we have to do is establish a link to a universe where 3D Realms wasn't made up of a bunch of lazy fucktards and steal a copy.
The multiverse theory only predicts the existence of any POSSIBLE universe. A universe like you describe would probably require a radical rethink of the entire nature of time to even be conceivable...
safely addapt Stephen Hawking's theory to this situation and state that laws of the universe conspire to prevent anybody ever actually finishing the development of Duke Nukem Forever.
True the evidence is purely anecdotal, but then the same goes for his original application of the concept to time machines so that's alright then.
Okay... and you are citing which expert ? ... I'll stick to her articles and cited research unless you got something better than "because I said so".
Violet Blue actually being an expert on human sexuality (who also actually LIVES the values she preaches..)
Correlation does not prove causation and the British sex-ed campaign did not fail because it increased rates of sexual activity, one could say it failed to decrease it, but more accurately - it failed to get the SAFE SEX message across. That is a very different failure.
Besides that, you're now guilty of argumentum ad consequantum. The ONLY evidence you offer for your argument is that you don't like the potential consequences of mine. You ignore the other points I raised... like that people have a basic RIGHT to know their own anatomy. That not TELLING girls they have a clitoris (something many fundamentalists are distinctly uncomfortable about - and in some cultures to the extent where they cut them off !) is somehow okay. That not being HONEST about what sex IS, and what role it plays in human relations and relationships is in my view unjustifiable dishonesty.
Every person has the RIGHT to make informed choices about their own bodies - sorry, no, their churches and parents do NOT have the right to make those choices FOR them. They can disagree with those choices, but they can't enforce their own choices.
Now here's a little tidbit for you - numerous studies have shown that the Urban population subgroup in the US with the LOWEST incidence of STD infection is the swinger community... those who engage in the most extra-marital sex, DESPITE the fact the use of protection in specifically the US swinger community is very low. There is only one other explanation... swingers don't lie about their trysts it happens openly, honestly and with consent. Not that "truth" can stop germs... but it DOES stop the secret behavior that allows STD's to spread very far before people even knew they WERE at risk.
>The Hebrew book of Enoch has the only mention of homosexuality that I remember, but that isn't scripture and I think only one small group of Christians considers it canon
Another posted pointed out Lev. 18 so I thought I would mention that while I agree with your entire post it's true that specifically homosexual behaviour between men are outright prohibited in Lev. 18.
But what he (and everybody else) seems to happily ignore is that the very next verse prohibits a woman from having sex during her period and the verse after that bans the eating of pork. In fact, Christians have in Paul's time already decreed the entire CHAPTER to be a set of norms for higiene during Israel's desert trip which simply does not *apply* anymore. We eat pork all we want, and all the other foods it prohibits.
One could make a claim that a higiene restriction on gay sex would STILL make sense in Paul's time... perhaps that's why it's the ONLY entry in the entire CHAPTER that wasn't outright made okay ? Well... we live in the age of modern science and medicine where there really is no practical reason why gay sex needs to be more unhygienic than any other kind. So if pork stopped applying when we had the ability to farm them cleanly... why would gay people still be under a ridiculous restriction ?[1]
Lev. 19 has a long list of other sexual activities which are outright prohibited, specifically various forms of incest, step-parents and such. All things which modern science tells us really IS a bad idea usually - most because of the closeness of genetics. The step-parents one also make sense, screwing your own dad's second wife is pretty sure to cause a major row, the kind of row that ends up with murders and orphans and other highly undesirable consequences.
None of the latter stuff are absolutes, but the prohibition does at least make some sense...
Interestingly, in a list of nearly 30 kinds of couplings that are forbidden, the ONE combination that NEVER occurs is two unmarried and unrelated people. Every single combination is either a direct blood relative, or at least one of the people is married to somebody else.... it never actually prohibits PREMARITAL sex at all...
In fact the ENTIRE Christian idea of monogamy and marital-only sex is built on a single line in Paul's letter to the Romans which reads:
"An elder of the Church should be a man of one woman."
That's it. It doesn't actually SAY anything about all the people who are NOT elders, but from that it was surmised that being a man of ONE woman is better. Of course he could have just meant that maybe a man who has to deal with making many wives happy after doing his normal job probably won't have the energy to be a good elder... I know of one Church that actually interpreted it as a DEMAND. They refuse to elect anybody who is NOT YET married as an elder (and they extended it to deacons too - a role which in protestant Churches is traditionally filled by the younger men in the congregation). Ironically - those churches that continue to rally against female deacons, elders and ministers use the exact same quote to justify that (it has to be a MAN of one woman...) while IGNORING that in Acts it not only specifies that women CAN be deacons, but even what sort of women are best at the job (Widows over 40 it suggests).
But when has a fundamentalist ever reconsidered his views just because you prove to him that the very source of those views advocate a different view ? Those who would use the scripture of any religion to justify treating people unequally will never listen to the admonishment of said scripture to do the opposite, never have, never will. Whether it's an extremist Islam or a fundamentalist Christian - it always ends up the same.
The majority of the people in both religion may well be peaceful and decent people - but in both cases they lose all respect unless they are willing to vocally speak out against those fundamentalists. Silence is acceptance and allowance. I still have my doubts about God - I'm not CONVINCED there CAN'T be
I know that just as you do... but seriously, think after getting fucked in the ass you are still any kind of pure ? It just goes to show how incredibly naive the moral brigade is... and how stupid the choices people make when you don't give them information.
If you want to be genuinely pure on your wedding night... fine that's your right, your decision to make and I respect it... but to imagine that everybody will live up to this ideal if you just don't tell them it's fun to fuck... well that's just plain bloody stupid.