And won't it be a kick in the balls to supporters of C&T once they realize that this is going to negatively affect food aid to the third world.
No, it won't. They don't really care, and the holier-than-thou feeling they get from this stupid piece of legislation will obscure the facts to them anyway.
Consider, these idiots who heavily promoted and supported Ethanol from corn, not realizing they were just playing in to the hands of the farm lobby, who wanted more subsidies. It was a factor in causing world grain prices to rise, thus creating famine in the Third World.
So, if they ever realize it, which is doubtful, they probably won't care, or think its for the "greater good."
Believe it or not, the British NHS recently did an analysis and determined that smokers and the obese cost the system less money than healthy people. The reason being that these people tended to die early, before the complications and cost associated with old age set in.
Exactly! People should thank the smokers - they're national benefactors!
The conservatives you mention. By your definition they haven't had anyone to vote for in the last 100 years or so.
Seriously, if you're a conservative of that stripe...who do you vote for?
And another thing. Conservatives such as the people you describe need to *SPEAK UP* and get represented. Although I usually vote Democrat, I would happily consider people of that mind set. Anything that marginalizes the neocons is good, IMHO.
OK, I'll bite on this one...
No-one to vote for in the last 100 years? Except, of course, for Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul (as the Libertarian candidate in the 1980s) and Ron Paul in the repub primary race this year, or if you want to go further back, Calvin Coolidge (the only one of the three I listed who actually won.)
As to conservatives needing to speak up... actually many do. But REAL conservatives are usually marginalized very quickly by the current Republican (and Democartic) party. Ron Paul is a case in point. But it certainly hasn't shut him up. One political commentator on mainstream media, Glenn Beck, could definitely be called a real conservative (although some of his foreign policy views may be a bit un-conservative.)
Then there are the radio talk show hosts who are actually conservative (ie. not Rush Limbaugh types) as well as the many thousands of individuals (like myself) who constantly post true conservative views to places like Slashdot, write to magazines and newspapers and generally talk to all our friends continually about it.
Maybe all of the people you speak to are Democrat or Neocon, and you need to step outside your circle a little bit.... just a suggestion. You'll find some very intelligent, tolerant people among true Conservatives. There are some arsholes, too, but every group has those.
Maybe you could lobby for StarOffice instead? It meets the requirement of having a cost ($70 per user, on up to 5 machines, IIRC). Since StarOffice and OpenOffice look virtually identical, you might be able to slip OpenOffice to the more basic users later.
All humour aside, the sad thing is that it might actually work, and I'm going to try it.
I have had the devil of a time in my company just getting people to switch to Open Office from MS Office, and this is for people who only use basic word processing and spreadsheet functionality.
The fact that it does exactly the same things and only has a slightly different interface doesn't seem to matter - if it doesn't look exactly the same as Office they simply stare blankly at the screen, or pester me so relentlessly about walking them through every little feature that looks different until we just give in and give them an Office license.
After this I genuinely believe that they are only being stupid about it because they know it is free - they somehow feel less important if they're given a tool that wasn't paid for.
That may seem cynical but I don't think anyone who uses a computer all day at work could be so dense that they couldn't figure out how to use OOWriter instead of MSWord.
'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'
IMO this statement is both idiotic and misleading.
The bulk of the protest about privacy violation, at least for those I discuss it with, is people who you don't know, and probably never will, having more access to information about you than even your closest friends in many respects.
"She's an asshole though."
Well, but, that is not against the law...
No, but fraud and harassment are. And this sounds like a pretty clear case of using a pseudonym in a fraudulent manner in order to harass an individual. I for one do NOT hope that the judgment is vacated.
Wow. Just wow. If I tell you my name is "Betty" and then proceed to tell you to go and die, is that, in your mind, against the law?
What a terrible nanny state we live in if verbally harassing someone under a pseudonym is punishable by 3 years in prison!
Disclaimer for all the knee-jerk reactors out there: of course what this women did was wrong and mean, but illegal?
Further disclaimer to knee-jerk idiots: My name is Betty. Go and die.
Not to take up every single point in the parent post, but I'd like to point out that this sounds exactly like the Domino Theory that was so heavily pushed during the Vietnam era.
For the "Communists" of the Domino Theory, replace with "Terrorists" and you have exactly the same theory being promulgated today as a "justification."
What happened when the USA left Vietnam? Perhaps it wasn't pretty for Vietnam, but within 15 years the Soviet Union was no longer a threat. The Domino Theory never came true (at least not in terms of all of SE Asia becoming communist.
I wish that people would learn a bit more from history - I don't think most of them realize that they're essentially spouting propaganda from the Cold War, and that it isn't any more true now than it was then.
Of course. Abject apologies. Since my sampling only includes about 30 Libertarians that I personally know, and about 25 welfare-state types, I suppose it has no validity at all.
Conversely, I'm sure that the GP has a much broader sampling for his views, and that my examples are pure flukes.
On the positive side, I don't live in my mother's basement, either.
But, I'd like to respond to what will, I'm sure, become flood of libertarian posts by people who managed to pick themselves up by their parent's bootstraps.
Wow. Just wow. Every single one of the Libertarians that I know are people who grew up poor, or with nothing "handed" to them, and have pulled themselves up by their OWN bootstraps.
Conversely, anyone I know that even TALKS about social welfare as an "obligation" is a democrat who grew up wealthy or well-off, who never HAD to work to survive.
To be honest, I think only a person that isn't used to working for what they have can decide that people should not be entitled to 35% of their own income, and that THEY (ie. welfarists) should decide what it gets spent on.
I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
Ridiculous. You clearly don't understand the Libertarian or "small government" philosophy. What "real welfare system?" Why can I not decide what I do and do not give "welfare" to?
I think the whole welfare state is predicated on a very cynical view of mankind. It basically assumes that, given the opportunity, people will not "do the right thing" and that they have to be forced to do so.
Advocates of a mandatory welfare system kept in place by violence and threats (anyone who supports the present system) think that a) they know better than you, and b) that you're basically a bad person and have to be forced to give charity.
Short answer: Truecrypt (as you mentioned in the summary.)
Is it worth looking into? Yes.
Are you being overly paranoid? No. Seriously, have you noticed the big brother trends recently? Truecrypt is very simply and effective encryption, in several forms, from simple encrypted containers to hidden O/S partitions. To take such a simple precaution is not, IMHO, overly paranoid.
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
How do you even know the parent is a Republican? Just because he has exposed corruption in some of the messiaXXXXX Obama's cohorts? Or blamed Democrats for something?
I blame Democrats for lots of things, but I'm certainly no Republican.
But then again, knee-jerk reactions like that enable you and others like you to keep the debate focused on narrow acrimonious issues rather than examining the problem with no political bias.
Russia is a Union of States.
Brasil is a Union of States.
Mexico is a Union of States.
Germany is a Union of States.
Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
Of the examples above, only Germany is even vaguely comparable.
Brazil and Mexico were single colonies of a single foreign power (Spain and Portugal) before becoming independent countries. The USA (before it existed) was made up of 13 separate colonies that were all administered quite separately, with different customs, political biases, etc.
Germany as a country is a recent invention, and is the result of Bismarck's enforced union in the 19th Century of entirely separate German-speaking countries, under Prussian domination. The only reason Austria isn't part of "Germany" is because they were already a fairly strong empire in their own right at the time (the Austro-Hungarian empire.)
My Austrian friends hate to hear this, and claim a political difference in the present day reflects the difference back then. The truth is that at the time of German unification, they had more in common with most Germans that the Bavarians, for example, who had customs and even language that diverged significantly from the rest of Germany. The only difference was Bavaria had a weaker ruler and was more easily forced into the federal system.
For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
Maybe that's why republicans think you can cut taxes and increase spending and everything will work out okay.
OK, I'll bite.
The truth is that for the last 50 years or so, the "profession" of "economist" has attracted what you would call "liberals" (or what I would call "statists") who believe in increased government control of or interference in economic affairs.
Since the late 1940s Keynesian macroeconomics have been the fashion with the vast majority of economists. Therefore, economics has tended to attract people who agree with his theories, ie. central government planning of the economy.
Keynesian theories are regarded as "gospel" for most economists. People who view it as wrong are generally not considered "credible." It's not hard to see how this profession would then attract people with a similar political philosophy.
From there, it's not such a stretch to see a fairly heavy statist-leaning bias in this survey of economists.
N.B. : I am not saying one or the other is right, nor faulting Scott Adams in least. I'm merely trying to point out the flaws inherent in the system....
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice...
Indeed... They were so against the practice that two catholic inquisitors published a guide to help magistrates find them and convict them, ie. put them to death.
Ironically enough, the spread of this odious work was even enhanced by "modern" technology, in the form of Mr Guttenberg's little invention.
Common estimates for deaths are from 40,000 to 100,000, and mostly women.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I disrupt your little piece of historical revisionism there? My bad.
Rather, look at how they've voted. unfortunately, Obama's a first term Senator and hasn't cast enough votes to get a good picture of where he really stands.
Au contraire. I think we've been able to see exactly where he stands: in the same place as every other main party politician, when he went back on a very strong promise NOT to vote for any bill that included telco immunity.
And where is that? A little place I like to call "whateverwheneverwhereverwillgetmeelected."
"I'd like to straddle you and let my motuh wander over your ears, licking them while you tell me how I shouldn't have done what I did. You grab my hair and..."
Slashdot Mirror
They even have legal recourse to go after jailbreakers of iPhone or people who make the tools, but they don't bother.
That's how they have demonstrated they don't think one really "owns" it - by having such a system in place, whether they bother to use it or not.
And won't it be a kick in the balls to supporters of C&T once they realize that this is going to negatively affect food aid to the third world.
No, it won't. They don't really care, and the holier-than-thou feeling they get from this stupid piece of legislation will obscure the facts to them anyway.
Consider, these idiots who heavily promoted and supported Ethanol from corn, not realizing they were just playing in to the hands of the farm lobby, who wanted more subsidies. It was a factor in causing world grain prices to rise, thus creating famine in the Third World.
So, if they ever realize it, which is doubtful, they probably won't care, or think its for the "greater good."
Believe it or not, the British NHS recently did an analysis and determined that smokers and the obese cost the system less money than healthy people. The reason being that these people tended to die early, before the complications and cost associated with old age set in.
Exactly! People should thank the smokers - they're national benefactors!
Please remove semetic.
I agree. Why don't we replace it with a word like, say "Semitic?"
You are a sandwich and you're in a dark room. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I put on my wizard hat...
The conservatives you mention. By your definition they haven't had anyone to vote for in the last 100 years or so.
Seriously, if you're a conservative of that stripe...who do you vote for?
And another thing. Conservatives such as the people you describe need to *SPEAK UP* and get represented. Although I usually vote Democrat, I would happily consider people of that mind set. Anything that marginalizes the neocons is good, IMHO.
OK, I'll bite on this one...
No-one to vote for in the last 100 years? Except, of course, for Barry Goldwater, Ron Paul (as the Libertarian candidate in the 1980s) and Ron Paul in the repub primary race this year, or if you want to go further back, Calvin Coolidge (the only one of the three I listed who actually won.)
As to conservatives needing to speak up... actually many do. But REAL conservatives are usually marginalized very quickly by the current Republican (and Democartic) party. Ron Paul is a case in point. But it certainly hasn't shut him up. One political commentator on mainstream media, Glenn Beck, could definitely be called a real conservative (although some of his foreign policy views may be a bit un-conservative.)
Then there are the radio talk show hosts who are actually conservative (ie. not Rush Limbaugh types) as well as the many thousands of individuals (like myself) who constantly post true conservative views to places like Slashdot, write to magazines and newspapers and generally talk to all our friends continually about it.
Maybe all of the people you speak to are Democrat or Neocon, and you need to step outside your circle a little bit.... just a suggestion. You'll find some very intelligent, tolerant people among true Conservatives. There are some arsholes, too, but every group has those.
Maybe you could lobby for StarOffice instead? It meets the requirement of having a cost ($70 per user, on up to 5 machines, IIRC). Since StarOffice and OpenOffice look virtually identical, you might be able to slip OpenOffice to the more basic users later.
All humour aside, the sad thing is that it might actually work, and I'm going to try it.
I wish I was able to move more things to OSS.
I have had the devil of a time in my company just getting people to switch to Open Office from MS Office, and this is for people who only use basic word processing and spreadsheet functionality.
The fact that it does exactly the same things and only has a slightly different interface doesn't seem to matter - if it doesn't look exactly the same as Office they simply stare blankly at the screen, or pester me so relentlessly about walking them through every little feature that looks different until we just give in and give them an Office license.
After this I genuinely believe that they are only being stupid about it because they know it is free - they somehow feel less important if they're given a tool that wasn't paid for.
That may seem cynical but I don't think anyone who uses a computer all day at work could be so dense that they couldn't figure out how to use OOWriter instead of MSWord.
I completely agree.
The summary states
'For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,' Dr. Malone said. 'In some sense we're becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.'
IMO this statement is both idiotic and misleading.
The bulk of the protest about privacy violation, at least for those I discuss it with, is people who you don't know, and probably never will, having more access to information about you than even your closest friends in many respects.
Where are my mod points when I need them?
The parent hits the nail on the head of the unacknowledged problem here and the reason it is almost never resolved.
People continue to cry out to the Government for solutions, not realizing it is their intervention that has created the problem in the first place.
No, but fraud and harassment are. And this sounds like a pretty clear case of using a pseudonym in a fraudulent manner in order to harass an individual. I for one do NOT hope that the judgment is vacated.
Wow. Just wow. If I tell you my name is "Betty" and then proceed to tell you to go and die, is that, in your mind, against the law?
What a terrible nanny state we live in if verbally harassing someone under a pseudonym is punishable by 3 years in prison!
Disclaimer for all the knee-jerk reactors out there: of course what this women did was wrong and mean, but illegal?
Further disclaimer to knee-jerk idiots: My name is Betty. Go and die.
Why is this especially new anyway? I can already use IETAB in Firefox to view pages in IE rendering.
So, this is new because... they've added a Safari user agent?
Meh.
Not to take up every single point in the parent post, but I'd like to point out that this sounds exactly like the Domino Theory that was so heavily pushed during the Vietnam era.
For the "Communists" of the Domino Theory, replace with "Terrorists" and you have exactly the same theory being promulgated today as a "justification."
What happened when the USA left Vietnam? Perhaps it wasn't pretty for Vietnam, but within 15 years the Soviet Union was no longer a threat. The Domino Theory never came true (at least not in terms of all of SE Asia becoming communist.
I wish that people would learn a bit more from history - I don't think most of them realize that they're essentially spouting propaganda from the Cold War, and that it isn't any more true now than it was then.
Of course. Abject apologies. Since my sampling only includes about 30 Libertarians that I personally know, and about 25 welfare-state types, I suppose it has no validity at all.
Conversely, I'm sure that the GP has a much broader sampling for his views, and that my examples are pure flukes.
On the positive side, I don't live in my mother's basement, either.
But, I'd like to respond to what will, I'm sure, become flood of libertarian posts by people who managed to pick themselves up by their parent's bootstraps.
Wow. Just wow. Every single one of the Libertarians that I know are people who grew up poor, or with nothing "handed" to them, and have pulled themselves up by their OWN bootstraps.
Conversely, anyone I know that even TALKS about social welfare as an "obligation" is a democrat who grew up wealthy or well-off, who never HAD to work to survive.
To be honest, I think only a person that isn't used to working for what they have can decide that people should not be entitled to 35% of their own income, and that THEY (ie. welfarists) should decide what it gets spent on.
I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
Ridiculous. You clearly don't understand the Libertarian or "small government" philosophy. What "real welfare system?" Why can I not decide what I do and do not give "welfare" to?
I think the whole welfare state is predicated on a very cynical view of mankind. It basically assumes that, given the opportunity, people will not "do the right thing" and that they have to be forced to do so.
Advocates of a mandatory welfare system kept in place by violence and threats (anyone who supports the present system) think that a) they know better than you, and b) that you're basically a bad person and have to be forced to give charity.
Why do you hate freedom?
Short answer: Truecrypt (as you mentioned in the summary.) Is it worth looking into? Yes. Are you being overly paranoid? No. Seriously, have you noticed the big brother trends recently? Truecrypt is very simply and effective encryption, in several forms, from simple encrypted containers to hidden O/S partitions. To take such a simple precaution is not, IMHO, overly paranoid.
You're so full of misinformation. Barney Frank was the one who passed regulations on Freddie & Fannie. In July 2007 Frank became chairman and he and the Democrats passed regulations within two months. These regulations had been blocked by the house Republicans since 1994.
It's incredible that the Republicans claim the big mean Democrats prevented them from instituting a proper regulatory framework despite over a decade of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
How do you even know the parent is a Republican? Just because he has exposed corruption in some of the messiaXXXXX Obama's cohorts? Or blamed Democrats for something?
I blame Democrats for lots of things, but I'm certainly no Republican.
But then again, knee-jerk reactions like that enable you and others like you to keep the debate focused on narrow acrimonious issues rather than examining the problem with no political bias.
Well done.
Your definition of "civilized" may vary, but:
Russia is a Union of States. Brasil is a Union of States. Mexico is a Union of States. Germany is a Union of States. Austria is a Union of States.
The concept seems to be quite common.
Of the examples above, only Germany is even vaguely comparable.
Brazil and Mexico were single colonies of a single foreign power (Spain and Portugal) before becoming independent countries. The USA (before it existed) was made up of 13 separate colonies that were all administered quite separately, with different customs, political biases, etc.
Germany as a country is a recent invention, and is the result of Bismarck's enforced union in the 19th Century of entirely separate German-speaking countries, under Prussian domination. The only reason Austria isn't part of "Germany" is because they were already a fairly strong empire in their own right at the time (the Austro-Hungarian empire.)
My Austrian friends hate to hear this, and claim a political difference in the present day reflects the difference back then. The truth is that at the time of German unification, they had more in common with most Germans that the Bavarians, for example, who had customs and even language that diverged significantly from the rest of Germany. The only difference was Bavaria had a weaker ruler and was more easily forced into the federal system.
For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
Maybe that's why republicans think you can cut taxes and increase spending and everything will work out okay.
OK, I'll bite.
The truth is that for the last 50 years or so, the "profession" of "economist" has attracted what you would call "liberals" (or what I would call "statists") who believe in increased government control of or interference in economic affairs.
Since the late 1940s Keynesian macroeconomics have been the fashion with the vast majority of economists. Therefore, economics has tended to attract people who agree with his theories, ie. central government planning of the economy.
Keynesian theories are regarded as "gospel" for most economists. People who view it as wrong are generally not considered "credible." It's not hard to see how this profession would then attract people with a similar political philosophy.
From there, it's not such a stretch to see a fairly heavy statist-leaning bias in this survey of economists.
N.B. : I am not saying one or the other is right, nor faulting Scott Adams in least. I'm merely trying to point out the flaws inherent in the system....
Except of course that in the Dark Ages they did not burn Witches (most were hung) and they were not as many as people think (only a few thousand over 150 years) and many where not old and not women, and the Church were against the practice ...
Indeed... They were so against the practice that two catholic inquisitors published a guide to help magistrates find them and convict them, ie. put them to death.
Ironically enough, the spread of this odious work was even enhanced by "modern" technology, in the form of Mr Guttenberg's little invention.
Common estimates for deaths are from 40,000 to 100,000, and mostly women.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I disrupt your little piece of historical revisionism there? My bad.
Rather, look at how they've voted. unfortunately, Obama's a first term Senator and hasn't cast enough votes to get a good picture of where he really stands.
Au contraire. I think we've been able to see exactly where he stands: in the same place as every other main party politician, when he went back on a very strong promise NOT to vote for any bill that included telco immunity.
And where is that? A little place I like to call "whateverwheneverwhereverwillgetmeelected."
I think I can guess what came next:
Why does a dog always have to be kicked? Why can't it be a cat or a rabbit?
The purpose of the dog being kicked is to show how bad something is... Dogs are awesome, so anyone who kicks dogs is bad. QED.
Cats, on the other hand, are demon spawn of Satan, and should be kicked.
Surely, that's not the only porpoise this could be used for.....
Oh, and I forgot to ask - why has Taco linked to a "review" by someone who openly admits to not having even downloaded the product!?
You must be new here....