Without spirituality humanity is lost. This doesn't mean it belongs in science class though. Science is not based on 'i just believe this is true' or any democratic process revolving around such ideas. Enough people believing something to be true doesn't make it a scientific theory. Emperical evidence and logic does.
Science is not the end-all, be-all though for explaining the universe. Science cannot prove its theories are correct -- they only seem to hold under the limited set of experiments performed. Everything can be and must be challenged. Science class would also do well explaining more about the weaknesses of science, otherwise science becomes a religion on its own.
Religion and science both have their place and inspire each other, but they cannot be combined on a fundamental level. 'God exists' cannot be proven or disproven, making it a statement with which science doesn't bother itself.
OTOH, What *would* fit in science class, is a discussion *why* ID does not belong there. Apparently thats what we forgot to teach those who are now making all the wrong decisions. Which is a bit sad, because actually such a discussion might be worth more than a lot of the other scientific theories kids learn.
And libraries like FFmpeg infringe on a zillion patents themselves, making it illegal to use them in the first place (yes, even for personal use). But now that Maui possibly tries to use FFmpeg illegally.. that is somehow different and more unfair?
I'm no fan of Maui, but this does smell like a pot/kettle type of situation.
OTOH, If subscriptions work against piracy, they will also encourage the use of free software. If John Doe can't upgrade his Office/Windows/DVD burn tools/etc illegally and for free anymore, he might actually download a free alternative instead.
It is not about the people who are able and smart. They have the power to make the choices you have and become more succesfull than the people from their environment.
It is about the people who do not have above-average skills. In rich environments, they start out decent, and have (through connections, background and money) an easier time getting a decent job. If not, they still have something to fall back on. If something in their life goes wrong (with financial impact, which it often has) before they finish education, they have a far better chance of recovering.
In poor environments, the options are more limited. You plainly have to work a lot harder for food and shelter, and education. Once harder work has to be done to get succesful, fewer will succeed (doh!).
The idea that everyone is capable of everything is a myth. Let alone regardless of connections and money. This has little to do with mindset.
Not to mention VeriSign owns Jamba!: http://jamba.de/s/dcw/html/about-us_en.html, which produces MAJORLY annoying ringtones and tv commercials to sell them. They try to rip off kids in a way which is actually often illegal (the fine print says you dont actually buy a ringtone, you buy a subscription.. which kids aren't allowed to. etc. that kind of stuff), and annoy the hell out of the rest of us. They operate all over Europe, and according to that link apparently also in North America.
Fixing these problems is not done by linking databases. It's done by reorganisation of the system, and proper regard for children's safety as *the* primary requirement.
The biggest problem here is finding the right criteria for taking the children away from their parents. Take away too few, and you end up with deaths, even if the agencies visit the family frequently. Take away too many, and you'll surely get a public outcry. If the safety of the child is the main priority, you can say 'we cannot afford to take chances' and end up letting the government take away and raise many children fitting a weak profile. Child's safety first. Also, it suddenly makes the government (politically) responsible for the actions of the parents: the government should have taken the child away if its abused. It's not a slippery slope, it's a direct consequence of saying 'the safety of the children is our primary concern'. If the child isn't safe, the government failed.
So what is the primary concern? It is finding a balance between the freedom in raising your own kids and being responsible for your behaviour, and the children's safety. A balance, because both extremes have undesirable consequences. Clear guidelines are indeed essential.
A clear and global view makes clear guidelines possible. It is essential to make informed decisions. A better record of the past, observations made by various people (doctors, police, whatever) put together help do this. Being able to keep the child you abuse merely because you move to another city is inexcusable. Not being able to prevent a child's death just because agencies didn't inform each other properly, is inexcusable too. Creating a system which collects the relevant information and can alarm the proper agencies, is a structural way to solve both.
I would rather be concerned for countries which do execute people and do drag people to camps without judge or trail "for national security" and do invade foreign nations to expand their sphere of influence, all covered with a thick layer of propaganda and national pride. *That* is I call tending towards Fascistic nature.
But linking information that's already being gathered for decades without problems? That is, except the problems of unlinked databases, which stopped us from preventing several children from being murdered by their own parents recently.. How does wanting to prevent that even come remotely close to creating WW2 like scenarios?
It's the public consensus that creates WW2 like scenarios, not governments creating systems which could theoretically be abused if they really wanted to. They don't need new systems to be able to abuse them. You have to make sure they don't want to, thats the key.
Schools are pedaphile's dream, and far easier to access too. The Internet also offers possibilities. Yet we didn't ban them. Geez. Ofcourse the system won't be 100% hack proof. No system can be. It's about the advantages (keeping troubled kids from going unnoticed by the right people) weighing against the disadvantages (chance of system abuse).
Creating this system country-wide for all citizens is probably the future. It's not creating a totally new system: we already have nation-wide systems for national ID, criminal records, taxes etc anyway. They're just not linked, causing everyone headaches and people can abuse *that* as well. And far easier, too.
Also keep in mind that we don't carry this US trauma of the government being evil.
*Once a user can be tricked into starting a downloaded/received application*, no UNIX/OSX/Linux is safe. The application can put binaries in the user's homedir and modify the user's crontab to start it, for instance.
Or merely read your Mail/Thunderbird mail settings and spam your address book with virusses. Maybe only to those who sent you mail with headers indicating they use a mac too.
Or add personal plugins. Safari allows users to add plugins to modify their Safari's behaviour.
The application can be merely an interesting-looking widget or plugin in the first place.
Also, keep in mind most people use their machines with only one user. On OSX, that user typically has OSX administrator rights. While running on OSX as an administrator requires you to enter the root password when an application needs the priviledges of UID 0, that user *is* allowed to write in the system's/Applications folder. Some applications end up being owned by the user (the applications dragged from.dmg to/Applications for instance), some are owned by root. But since the user can write to the parent/Applications directory, he can modify anything he wishes as long as the apps dont require keeping some files owned by root (mv $APP $APP.root; cp -R $APP.root $APP; rm -rf $APP.root;"modify $APP").
Once the app properly modifies a tool the user expects to ask for the root password at certain times, it can do everything else. If the user expects to enter the root password, he's not likely to expand the part of that dialog box explaining what (technical) reason the root rights are required for...
It doesn't work (well enough) because there are more ways to get people to visit a certain host or page. For instance, form submits, frames, iframes, img's src parameter, link's src parameter, setting location.href through javascript, a redirecting meta tag, "object has moved" type http responses.. just to name a few off the top of my head.
(This thread is moving increasingly off-topic, but since parent got modded up, I'm giving my response)
As a socialist, I find your argumentation very short-sighted. All governments raise taxes; calling it theft and thus illegal is just rediculous since the governments need it to perform its functions.
Ofcourse, the government shoud be kept in check how well it performs the functions it is assigned, and the government should be correctable (directly or indirectly) by the public. When socialism was invented, communistic states did not exist and this aspect was taken too lightly. Now, we know democracy and independent media, as flawed as they might be, to be usable tools to check and correct governments. Socialists nowadays do not ignore this.
Also, the free market has shown beneficial aspects in the last decades. It creates the incentive for innovation and efficiency in corporations. This was also taken too lightly when socialism was invented, but is acknowledged now.
However, while the ancient tools which socialism wanted to use (revolution, commonly owned production tools) seem flawed, new ones arise to accomplish the same goal: to raise the bottom to which people in society can fall, for people are victims of circumstances and society more often than the right wing likes to think.
To do this, we want to shift responsibility and control for essential functions to the government, such as health care, education, police, national transport, public broadcasting corporations, etc. The tools described above can keep them in check. If the government is not in control of these areas, this control is left to corporations. The general public has little influence on individual companies and the market (Microsoft is a nice techie example). Since companies aim for maximum profit and target audiences, they can easily leave groups in the population deprived of basic services. Even give their employees (wal-mart) or customers (RIAA) a hard time. Corporations are generally not helt accountable (there is not one man in total control, for instance), and we cannot control them unless we have money (to buy stocks). A lack of (practical) alternatives often prevents us from letting the free marktet principle solve the problems. In the areas of basic functionality, I find this too high of a risk to take.
I have no hard time taking 50% of a CEO's salary to help lots of single mothers, poor, unemployed, etc to be able to make a living at all. Many of them work harder than the CEO per dollar. Ofcourse not all do, but I rather take that risk than create a greedy every-man-for-himself society in which I think in the end, we all lose. We are not all gifted with a good background, education, brains, hands, or whatever is needed to become succesful in society. We do not control the forces which control our lives, so we cannot always be helt accountable for our situation.
Hate to break it to you but people have not died *because* of this. They died because of a lack of understanding on *their* part.
It is amazing how you miss the obvious point that they died because someone was attacking them? How some of you are able to blame anyone but the attacker is totally beyond me.
Re:Just a proposal, hopefully...
on
Dutch Pass iPod Tax
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Regular taxes are used to pay cops. This doesn't mean I'm entitled to commit a crime proportionally to the amount of tax I pay.
The problem is, there is already tax on CDs and DVDs. It's just a few cents, so while some cry about the injustice, most don't really care. So it's only natural to extend this towards MP3 players as they perform the same function of carrying music.
This is just a proposal, and it seems like the proposers were thinking about flash-based players, not about harddisk-based MP3 players, as the price is $4 per gig. They have no choice to adapt the proposel, since killing the harddisk-based MP3 player market (maybe along with several other markets such as harddisk recording VCRs; i actually don't know those are covered as well) is clearly not the idea.
To elaborate on this, the 'precedent' system in which past rulings form a legal ground for deciding future cases is part of common law, which as the link indicates is generally found in English speaking countries.
The rest of Europe, including Norway, basically uses civil law, in which in the end only the written law counts.
So what are the odds of this thing missing earth and hitting the moon? What kind of impact can the moon handle without it disrupting its orbit around earth and thus causing havoc on life on this planet?
Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small.
Well no, because currently they only have to monitor the trackers themselves. They can then try to arrest any peer the tracker is pointing to.
Once they locate the trackers (say, suprnova), there is no need to monitor all the traffic on the Internet.
At least here in Holland, website owners are responsible for the content of their website, even if the content originated from users. That this process is fully automated and unchecked does not relief them from that responsibility.
The 'common carrier defense' does not hold, as it is publishing, not carrying, what is going on. For the same reason, a newspaper cannot publish all ads regardless of content, defending themselves by saying they have a policy of not checking them.
At least here in Holland, owners of websites are responsible for their content, even if that content was put there by users. It is the website that chooses to publish the information; that the means to do so by users are fully automated and unchecked does not free them of this.
The 'common carrier defense' does not hold, as it is not carrying but publishing whats going on.
Its not that simple. C++ doesn't provide functional programming constructs; OCaml does and encourages its use. Functional programming can cost much more resources than OO programming.
To compile functional code that looks pretty, the result is often resource wasteful:
- Memory is copied at every turn (in functional constructs, variables cannot be changed),
- About all small functions use recursive calls (no, tail-recursion doesn't solve most of them; often the result of the recursion has to be modified before returned),
- Generic functions cannot be optimised well (C++ compiles a specific version at instantiation with a template).
To name a few. If you want raw execution speed in OCaml, use the procedural constructs. The computer is built to run code like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Without spirituality humanity is lost. This doesn't mean it belongs in science class though. Science is not based on 'i just believe this is true' or any democratic process revolving around such ideas. Enough people believing something to be true doesn't make it a scientific theory. Emperical evidence and logic does.
Science is not the end-all, be-all though for explaining the universe. Science cannot prove its theories are correct -- they only seem to hold under the limited set of experiments performed. Everything can be and must be challenged. Science class would also do well explaining more about the weaknesses of science, otherwise science becomes a religion on its own.
Religion and science both have their place and inspire each other, but they cannot be combined on a fundamental level. 'God exists' cannot be proven or disproven, making it a statement with which science doesn't bother itself.
OTOH, What *would* fit in science class, is a discussion *why* ID does not belong there. Apparently thats what we forgot to teach those who are now making all the wrong decisions. Which is a bit sad, because actually such a discussion might be worth more than a lot of the other scientific theories kids learn.
And libraries like FFmpeg infringe on a zillion patents themselves, making it illegal to use them in the first place (yes, even for personal use). But now that Maui possibly tries to use FFmpeg illegally.. that is somehow different and more unfair?
I'm no fan of Maui, but this does smell like a pot/kettle type of situation.
OTOH, If subscriptions work against piracy, they will also encourage the use of free software. If John Doe can't upgrade his Office/Windows/DVD burn tools/etc illegally and for free anymore, he might actually download a free alternative instead.
It is not about the people who are able and smart. They have the power to make the choices you have and become more succesfull than the people from their environment.
It is about the people who do not have above-average skills. In rich environments, they start out decent, and have (through connections, background and money) an easier time getting a decent job. If not, they still have something to fall back on. If something in their life goes wrong (with financial impact, which it often has) before they finish education, they have a far better chance of recovering.
In poor environments, the options are more limited. You plainly have to work a lot harder for food and shelter, and education. Once harder work has to be done to get succesful, fewer will succeed (doh!).
The idea that everyone is capable of everything is a myth. Let alone regardless of connections and money. This has little to do with mindset.
Not to mention VeriSign owns Jamba!: http://jamba.de/s/dcw/html/about-us_en.html, which produces MAJORLY annoying ringtones and tv commercials to sell them. They try to rip off kids in a way which is actually often illegal (the fine print says you dont actually buy a ringtone, you buy a subscription.. which kids aren't allowed to. etc. that kind of stuff), and annoy the hell out of the rest of us. They operate all over Europe, and according to that link apparently also in North America.
Fixing these problems is not done by linking databases. It's done by reorganisation of the system, and proper regard for children's safety as *the* primary requirement.
The biggest problem here is finding the right criteria for taking the children away from their parents. Take away too few, and you end up with deaths, even if the agencies visit the family frequently. Take away too many, and you'll surely get a public outcry. If the safety of the child is the main priority, you can say 'we cannot afford to take chances' and end up letting the government take away and raise many children fitting a weak profile. Child's safety first. Also, it suddenly makes the government (politically) responsible for the actions of the parents: the government should have taken the child away if its abused. It's not a slippery slope, it's a direct consequence of saying 'the safety of the children is our primary concern'. If the child isn't safe, the government failed.
So what is the primary concern? It is finding a balance between the freedom in raising your own kids and being responsible for your behaviour, and the children's safety. A balance, because both extremes have undesirable consequences. Clear guidelines are indeed essential.
A clear and global view makes clear guidelines possible. It is essential to make informed decisions. A better record of the past, observations made by various people (doctors, police, whatever) put together help do this. Being able to keep the child you abuse merely because you move to another city is inexcusable. Not being able to prevent a child's death just because agencies didn't inform each other properly, is inexcusable too. Creating a system which collects the relevant information and can alarm the proper agencies, is a structural way to solve both.
I would rather be concerned for countries which do execute people and do drag people to camps without judge or trail "for national security" and do invade foreign nations to expand their sphere of influence, all covered with a thick layer of propaganda and national pride. *That* is I call tending towards Fascistic nature.
But linking information that's already being gathered for decades without problems? That is, except the problems of unlinked databases, which stopped us from preventing several children from being murdered by their own parents recently.. How does wanting to prevent that even come remotely close to creating WW2 like scenarios?
It's the public consensus that creates WW2 like scenarios, not governments creating systems which could theoretically be abused if they really wanted to. They don't need new systems to be able to abuse them. You have to make sure they don't want to, thats the key.
You mean by opening these files we're only *this* close to the police busting in houses searching for jews and drag them to the gas chamber?
Schools are pedaphile's dream, and far easier to access too. The Internet also offers possibilities. Yet we didn't ban them. Geez. Ofcourse the system won't be 100% hack proof. No system can be. It's about the advantages (keeping troubled kids from going unnoticed by the right people) weighing against the disadvantages (chance of system abuse).
Creating this system country-wide for all citizens is probably the future. It's not creating a totally new system: we already have nation-wide systems for national ID, criminal records, taxes etc anyway. They're just not linked, causing everyone headaches and people can abuse *that* as well. And far easier, too.
Also keep in mind that we don't carry this US trauma of the government being evil.
*Once a user can be tricked into starting a downloaded/received application*, no UNIX/OSX/Linux is safe. The application can put binaries in the user's homedir and modify the user's crontab to start it, for instance.
/Applications folder. Some applications end up being owned by the user (the applications dragged from .dmg to /Applications for instance), some are owned by root. But since the user can write to the parent /Applications directory, he can modify anything he wishes as long as the apps dont require keeping some files owned by root (mv $APP $APP.root; cp -R $APP.root $APP; rm -rf $APP.root;"modify $APP").
Or merely read your Mail/Thunderbird mail settings and spam your address book with virusses. Maybe only to those who sent you mail with headers indicating they use a mac too.
Or add personal plugins. Safari allows users to add plugins to modify their Safari's behaviour.
The application can be merely an interesting-looking widget or plugin in the first place.
Also, keep in mind most people use their machines with only one user. On OSX, that user typically has OSX administrator rights. While running on OSX as an administrator requires you to enter the root password when an application needs the priviledges of UID 0, that user *is* allowed to write in the system's
Once the app properly modifies a tool the user expects to ask for the root password at certain times, it can do everything else. If the user expects to enter the root password, he's not likely to expand the part of that dialog box explaining what (technical) reason the root rights are required for...
It doesn't work (well enough) because there are more ways to get people to visit a certain host or page. For instance, form submits, frames, iframes, img's src parameter, link's src parameter, setting location.href through javascript, a redirecting meta tag, "object has moved" type http responses.. just to name a few off the top of my head.
When MS has to keep releasing -N versions, at least it can never claim WMP is part of the OS which cannot be removed or replaced.
(This thread is moving increasingly off-topic, but since parent got modded up, I'm giving my response)
As a socialist, I find your argumentation very short-sighted. All governments raise taxes; calling it theft and thus illegal is just rediculous since the governments need it to perform its functions.
Ofcourse, the government shoud be kept in check how well it performs the functions it is assigned, and the government should be correctable (directly or indirectly) by the public. When socialism was invented, communistic states did not exist and this aspect was taken too lightly. Now, we know democracy and independent media, as flawed as they might be, to be usable tools to check and correct governments. Socialists nowadays do not ignore this.
Also, the free market has shown beneficial aspects in the last decades. It creates the incentive for innovation and efficiency in corporations. This was also taken too lightly when socialism was invented, but is acknowledged now.
However, while the ancient tools which socialism wanted to use (revolution, commonly owned production tools) seem flawed, new ones arise to accomplish the same goal: to raise the bottom to which people in society can fall, for people are victims of circumstances and society more often than the right wing likes to think.
To do this, we want to shift responsibility and control for essential functions to the government, such as health care, education, police, national transport, public broadcasting corporations, etc. The tools described above can keep them in check. If the government is not in control of these areas, this control is left to corporations. The general public has little influence on individual companies and the market (Microsoft is a nice techie example). Since companies aim for maximum profit and target audiences, they can easily leave groups in the population deprived of basic services. Even give their employees (wal-mart) or customers (RIAA) a hard time. Corporations are generally not helt accountable (there is not one man in total control, for instance), and we cannot control them unless we have money (to buy stocks). A lack of (practical) alternatives often prevents us from letting the free marktet principle solve the problems. In the areas of basic functionality, I find this too high of a risk to take.
I have no hard time taking 50% of a CEO's salary to help lots of single mothers, poor, unemployed, etc to be able to make a living at all. Many of them work harder than the CEO per dollar. Ofcourse not all do, but I rather take that risk than create a greedy every-man-for-himself society in which I think in the end, we all lose. We are not all gifted with a good background, education, brains, hands, or whatever is needed to become succesful in society. We do not control the forces which control our lives, so we cannot always be helt accountable for our situation.
Hate to break it to you but people have not died *because* of this. They died because of a lack of understanding on *their* part.
It is amazing how you miss the obvious point that they died because someone was attacking them? How some of you are able to blame anyone but the attacker is totally beyond me.
Regular taxes are used to pay cops. This doesn't mean I'm entitled to commit a crime proportionally to the amount of tax I pay.
The problem is, there is already tax on CDs and DVDs. It's just a few cents, so while some cry about the injustice, most don't really care. So it's only natural to extend this towards MP3 players as they perform the same function of carrying music.
This is just a proposal, and it seems like the proposers were thinking about flash-based players, not about harddisk-based MP3 players, as the price is $4 per gig. They have no choice to adapt the proposel, since killing the harddisk-based MP3 player market (maybe along with several other markets such as harddisk recording VCRs; i actually don't know those are covered as well) is clearly not the idea.
For that matter, what is going to stop them from making the stripped down version cost more than the original one?
To elaborate on this, the 'precedent' system in which past rulings form a legal ground for deciding future cases is part of common law, which as the link indicates is generally found in English speaking countries.
The rest of Europe, including Norway, basically uses civil law, in which in the end only the written law counts.
So what are the odds of this thing missing earth and hitting the moon? What kind of impact can the moon handle without it disrupting its orbit around earth and thus causing havoc on life on this planet?
hey they have the stats per country too.. (google.nl/zeitgeist in my case) cool :)
Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small.
Well no, because currently they only have to monitor the trackers themselves. They can then try to arrest any peer the tracker is pointing to.
Once they locate the trackers (say, suprnova), there is no need to monitor all the traffic on the Internet.
At least here in Holland, website owners are responsible for the content of their website, even if the content originated from users. That this process is fully automated and unchecked does not relief them from that responsibility.
The 'common carrier defense' does not hold, as it is publishing, not carrying, what is going on. For the same reason, a newspaper cannot publish all ads regardless of content, defending themselves by saying they have a policy of not checking them.
At least here in Holland, owners of websites are responsible for their content, even if that content was put there by users. It is the website that chooses to publish the information; that the means to do so by users are fully automated and unchecked does not free them of this.
The 'common carrier defense' does not hold, as it is not carrying but publishing whats going on.
The deal is about a contract for 5 years; while for a government this may be 'short term', for the software world its a long time.
Its not that simple. C++ doesn't provide functional programming constructs; OCaml does and encourages its use. Functional programming can cost much more resources than OO programming.
To compile functional code that looks pretty, the result is often resource wasteful:
- Memory is copied at every turn (in functional constructs, variables cannot be changed),
- About all small functions use recursive calls (no, tail-recursion doesn't solve most of them; often the result of the recursion has to be modified before returned),
- Generic functions cannot be optimised well (C++ compiles a specific version at instantiation with a template).
To name a few. If you want raw execution speed in OCaml, use the procedural constructs. The computer is built to run code like that.