I'm against coercive force too, and that is why I take the stand I do on private ownership of natural resources. All private ownership of natural resources relies on coercive force. You take what was not yours, which you have never labored on, and call it yours. You then protect your ill gotten gains with force. You can argue "Natural Rights" all you like, but that is a nonsensical argument.
The existence or lack of existence of natural rights is a moot point that affects nothing. There may be an invisible pink unicorn in the room with me right now, but if I have no way of knowing, and it does nothing that affects me, it's existence or lack thereof is irrelevant. Similarly, if rights are not agreed to and backed up by society, their existence is a moot point. All the "Natural Rights" argument really is is an appeal to authority made without invoking God.
Without society, a person wouldn't even think of the concept of rights, only power. With society, rights boil down to contract. You agree to uphold and protect this right for me, and in exchange, I agree to uphold it for you. For property, though, the only parties to the contract are property owners. Non property owners are not a party to the contract because there is no value exchange, they get nothing and are still expected to uphold the rights in others.
This amounts to a virtual enslavement of the non-property holders. It will also lead to their actual enslavement as they do not have access to the means of production, thus they have no way of supporting themselves without entering into a contract with a property owner. It is very easy for the owning class to collude to make sure that, in order to survive, the non-owners must enter into very unfavorable contracts with them. These non-owners will never have the ability to accumulate enough wealth to become owners.
Any system of private ownership of natural resources that does not somehow garauntee every single person on the planet access to the means of their own survival is a system founded on coercion and destined for slavery.
People, including me, get quite irate sometimes in discussions about these issues. I try to remember that those of us who think about these things really all have the same goal, we just have different ideas about the right way to get there. But we all want a world without coercion, where every individual is free to be themselves.
Nah, it's still a miniature amount of mass compared to the earth. Imagine a mountain, squeezed down to the size of a stadium. Still has the mass of a mountain, but the gravitational gradient is very high. It would produce only a local gravitational effect, IIRC.
When I was in Rome, a fellow I met told me that, in Italy in general but Rome in particular, you should NEVER look while crossing the street. If the drivers see you looking, they'll know you've seen them and they won't stop. He said you should just step out into traffic without the slightest hint that you might have noticed them. Only then will they stop.
Physicist and hard sci-fi author Robert L. Forward envisioned a method to do this that violates no laws of physics. It was in one of his non-fiction collections of essays, either Future Magic or Indistinguishable from Magic. It's a bit far fetched, but quite interesting.
First, find a big asteroid. Put a bunch of metal plates around it with a carbon on the inside and nuclear bombs on the outside. Set off the bombs. If you've set it up right, the plates slam into the asteroid, compressing it tremendously. The carbon fuses into diamond, trapping the compressed asteroid, now a tiny fraction of it's original size, inside. Being very dense, it will have a high gravitational gradient.
Now comes the tricky part. Hehe.
Somehow get the thing down to earth and sit it on some big old diamond pillars. Nanotech and space elevator or space fountain technology would come in handy here. Underneath the thing, its gravity would cancel out Earth's.
Feasible? Um, no. Possible? Maybe. I'm no physicist so I can't check his calculations but he is and I suspect he did them right.
Cool! If I'm right I'm gonna rub your face in it next election. You can do the same to me, if the American Taliban gets re-elected. Of course, unlike your hero, Dear Leader Bush, the American people actually know and understand the phrase "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." So I sincerely doubt the good people of this country will bend over and let themselves be sodomized by this pack of thieves, liars and outright traitors again.
As much as you obviously hate freedom and liberty and everythign good our country stands for, why don't you go live in a more authoritarian state such as North Korea? I would imagine you'd be happier amongst people of similar mindset to you.
And you are a troll, trying to get a rise out of me. Fortunately, the country is waking up, and people like you are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. Your confused and angry lashing about as your paradigm crumbles and you can no longer hide from the inherent contradictions and hypocrisy of your world view amuses and delights me. Fortunately for you, we, the winners, are not as vindictive and violent as your kind are, or you would be up against the wall with a blindfold and a last smoke.
Does it burn that you are no longer relevant? I certainly hope so. When the last of your kind dies off, the sane and normal people will heave a sigh of relief.
The NYT has FAR less bias than Fox News. I'd put it as far left-wing as CNN is right-wing. In any case, it's a good thing nothing in this story really needs an excuse. Because "Well, the frenchies did it too!" is not an excuse.
The NYT is "notorious for bashing and embarrassing US government institutions under this President," because this President has done so many outrageously embarassing things. Heck, I think they haven't gone far enough in uncovering his ridiculous excesses.
I love my country, but I dislike the current administration. Our country was founded by men who questioned authority. I'm more of a patriot than anyone who blindly follows authority.
Yes, yes, I know that. But you are still presumed innocent until found probably guilty! Until the DMCA, no one could just point at something you created and say "get rid of it!" without a trial and hope that anyone would comply. Your semantic nit picking missed a very important point.
Most of us do not have a rectal-capital fountain, and so we can not afford to sue if this happens to us. Here's an even better idea, get rid of the DMCA and go back to the tried and true "innocent until proven guilty." The DMCA has always been a tool to help the largest players in the entertainment industry control their market.
Yes, I was going to do a few more, but hey, if the halfwit mods can't take a joke, why bother?
If only the government made all our computers, we would all still be using a 486 that barely consumes any power at all. That's my communist opinion.
If everyone made their own power, and their own computers, this wouldn't be a problem. That's my anarchist opinion.
If we set up government programs to buy more efficient replacement computers for everyone we could reduce power consumption. That's my socialist opinion.
If only we FNORD the FNORD FNORD, we'd all FNORD. That's my discordian opinion.
First, most terrorism against America has been perpetrated by Americans. Second, if you target a specific group, they will simply recruit people who don't look like what you are targeting. Profiling based on race is worse than useless, it provides a road map to success for terrorists. Profile based on behavior. That is what the officers in your example are really doing, if they are doing their job right. They look for someone out of place, not a particular race.
You could have said everything you wanted to say (and been just as useless) without mentioning the "liberals here." What are you trying to imply? You aren't beating a sacred cow, you're just beating off. "uh, uh UH UH, YEAH! Take it right in the face, you dirty liberal whores!"
It is destined to go away completely. The problem is imbalance of information and power. Some people have a much greater ability to gather information about you than you do about them. They also tend to have a greater ability to use that information to harm you. If everyone could see what everyone else was doing, no one could misuse information to harm others without everyone else knowing about it.
The real problem will be if privacy DOESN'T disappear completely. Because privacy for the poor and powerless certainly will.
Good point about the costs of researching this particular application of the drug. Then you go and ruin it with unwarranted ad-hominems in regards to my position on information, property, and democracy.
First, about information, I said the free market doesn't handle non-exclusionary goods efficiently. I wasn't necessarily advocating open access to information. In fact, with a few modifications regarding copyright length, our IP system is not bad. But it involves the government handing out monopolies precisely because what I stated is true. Can you refute that?
Second, democratic control of resources was tried for a few years after the February revolution in Russia, but where else has it really been tried? The real problem is not with democratic control, it is with violent revolution which invariably leads to the most brutal and power hungry rising to the top. Wait, I thought of one where it is still being done: the Mondragon Collective in Spain. Well, it's kind of a hybrid system with some free-market, capitalist aspects but there is a large amount of democratic controll of resources. It's kind of hard to make a system work when most of the privileged upper class the world over has it in for you just on principle.
Lastly, you may prefer to "choose" among several different options, but it's not much of a choice if there are only a few players in the market and they collude to form an oligopoly. This is inevitable, and my argument follows. The network effect gaurantees that slight variations in popularity will be magnified due to the fact that people really don't like to have to choose amongst a set of similar alternatives and so they do what everyone else is doing, irrespective of actual quality or value. This means that markets will become dominated by a few small players who can easily collude to form an oligopoly.
The free market system is founded on two myths. One, that people are selfish. Modern economic research shows that most aren't. Second, that people are rational. They aren't, especially when it comes to basic necessities when their lives are at stake.
Personally, I'd really like to see a free market of governments with no coercion involved. We could have Capitalist-land, Commieville, Socialist Island, and so forth. You'd contract with the system you like to provide the services you need.
Because the NYT hates America, right? Glad you rectified their egregious oversight.
They don't "call out" the US. They happen to mention that as a small part of a larger story that really "calls out" the Chinese, if anyone. But we can't let any slight against the US, no matter how small or even entirely in your head it might be, go unchallenged. And of course, the best way to excuse anything is to point out that someone else is also doing it.
So that means you can afford huge sun lamps to combat the pervasive Seasonal Affective Disorder brought on by the constant clouds, eh? I keed, I keed. Seattle's a beautiful place with a lovely climate. All that stuff about rain is just a rumor spread to keep the Californians out. Really, it's sunny all summer long in Seattle. And if summer happens to fall on a weekend, everyone goes on a picnic!
That was my first thought, as well. "Linux" as people know it is not just the kernel. It is the toolchain, the desktop environment, and the applications as well, much of which could easily be released under GPLv3. And GPLv3 could easily contain provisions prohibiting this kind of deal. That's more than likely many years down the road, but it could have an impact. My question is, would it only impact SLES and SLED, or would the restrictions apply to OpenSUSE as well? We use all three where I work...
Maybe if you hadn't been trying for first post, and had spent as much time on your original comment as you did on this one, the original would have been modded like this one was, even though it and this are still far, far off topic. Cry me a fucking river. You know exactly what you did and why you were down-modded.
You can say anything you want on Slashdot and get modded up for it. Just refrain from being an asshole.
What gets me is that this is as much as admitting that you worship a chump, a rube. If you can pull the wool over God's eyes with semantic tricks, maybe He's not worth going to the trouble over, hmmm?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm against coercive force too, and that is why I take the stand I do on private ownership of natural resources. All private ownership of natural resources relies on coercive force. You take what was not yours, which you have never labored on, and call it yours. You then protect your ill gotten gains with force. You can argue "Natural Rights" all you like, but that is a nonsensical argument.
The existence or lack of existence of natural rights is a moot point that affects nothing. There may be an invisible pink unicorn in the room with me right now, but if I have no way of knowing, and it does nothing that affects me, it's existence or lack thereof is irrelevant. Similarly, if rights are not agreed to and backed up by society, their existence is a moot point. All the "Natural Rights" argument really is is an appeal to authority made without invoking God.
Without society, a person wouldn't even think of the concept of rights, only power. With society, rights boil down to contract. You agree to uphold and protect this right for me, and in exchange, I agree to uphold it for you. For property, though, the only parties to the contract are property owners. Non property owners are not a party to the contract because there is no value exchange, they get nothing and are still expected to uphold the rights in others.
This amounts to a virtual enslavement of the non-property holders. It will also lead to their actual enslavement as they do not have access to the means of production, thus they have no way of supporting themselves without entering into a contract with a property owner. It is very easy for the owning class to collude to make sure that, in order to survive, the non-owners must enter into very unfavorable contracts with them. These non-owners will never have the ability to accumulate enough wealth to become owners.
Any system of private ownership of natural resources that does not somehow garauntee every single person on the planet access to the means of their own survival is a system founded on coercion and destined for slavery.
People, including me, get quite irate sometimes in discussions about these issues. I try to remember that those of us who think about these things really all have the same goal, we just have different ideas about the right way to get there. But we all want a world without coercion, where every individual is free to be themselves.
Nah, it's still a miniature amount of mass compared to the earth. Imagine a mountain, squeezed down to the size of a stadium. Still has the mass of a mountain, but the gravitational gradient is very high. It would produce only a local gravitational effect, IIRC.
When I was in Rome, a fellow I met told me that, in Italy in general but Rome in particular, you should NEVER look while crossing the street. If the drivers see you looking, they'll know you've seen them and they won't stop. He said you should just step out into traffic without the slightest hint that you might have noticed them. Only then will they stop.
Physicist and hard sci-fi author Robert L. Forward envisioned a method to do this that violates no laws of physics. It was in one of his non-fiction collections of essays, either Future Magic or Indistinguishable from Magic. It's a bit far fetched, but quite interesting.
First, find a big asteroid. Put a bunch of metal plates around it with a carbon on the inside and nuclear bombs on the outside. Set off the bombs. If you've set it up right, the plates slam into the asteroid, compressing it tremendously. The carbon fuses into diamond, trapping the compressed asteroid, now a tiny fraction of it's original size, inside. Being very dense, it will have a high gravitational gradient.
Now comes the tricky part. Hehe.
Somehow get the thing down to earth and sit it on some big old diamond pillars. Nanotech and space elevator or space fountain technology would come in handy here. Underneath the thing, its gravity would cancel out Earth's.
Feasible? Um, no. Possible? Maybe. I'm no physicist so I can't check his calculations but he is and I suspect he did them right.
Cool! If I'm right I'm gonna rub your face in it next election. You can do the same to me, if the American Taliban gets re-elected. Of course, unlike your hero, Dear Leader Bush, the American people actually know and understand the phrase "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." So I sincerely doubt the good people of this country will bend over and let themselves be sodomized by this pack of thieves, liars and outright traitors again.
As much as you obviously hate freedom and liberty and everythign good our country stands for, why don't you go live in a more authoritarian state such as North Korea? I would imagine you'd be happier amongst people of similar mindset to you.
Let's not forget Lake Titicaca. In case you didn't know, it's right near Lake Poopó. I shit you not.
And you are a troll, trying to get a rise out of me. Fortunately, the country is waking up, and people like you are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. Your confused and angry lashing about as your paradigm crumbles and you can no longer hide from the inherent contradictions and hypocrisy of your world view amuses and delights me. Fortunately for you, we, the winners, are not as vindictive and violent as your kind are, or you would be up against the wall with a blindfold and a last smoke.
Does it burn that you are no longer relevant? I certainly hope so. When the last of your kind dies off, the sane and normal people will heave a sigh of relief.
I KNEW that bitch was using an aimbot!
The NYT has FAR less bias than Fox News. I'd put it as far left-wing as CNN is right-wing. In any case, it's a good thing nothing in this story really needs an excuse. Because "Well, the frenchies did it too!" is not an excuse.
The NYT is "notorious for bashing and embarrassing US government institutions under this President," because this President has done so many outrageously embarassing things. Heck, I think they haven't gone far enough in uncovering his ridiculous excesses.
I love my country, but I dislike the current administration. Our country was founded by men who questioned authority. I'm more of a patriot than anyone who blindly follows authority.
Yes, yes, I know that. But you are still presumed innocent until found probably guilty! Until the DMCA, no one could just point at something you created and say "get rid of it!" without a trial and hope that anyone would comply. Your semantic nit picking missed a very important point.
Most of us do not have a rectal-capital fountain, and so we can not afford to sue if this happens to us. Here's an even better idea, get rid of the DMCA and go back to the tried and true "innocent until proven guilty." The DMCA has always been a tool to help the largest players in the entertainment industry control their market.
Good evening Mr. Pot, my name is Kettle and I'll be your server. Try the irony, it's delicious.
Yes, I was going to do a few more, but hey, if the halfwit mods can't take a joke, why bother?
If only the government made all our computers, we would all still be using a 486 that barely consumes any power at all. That's my communist opinion.
If everyone made their own power, and their own computers, this wouldn't be a problem. That's my anarchist opinion.
If we set up government programs to buy more efficient replacement computers for everyone we could reduce power consumption. That's my socialist opinion.
If only we FNORD the FNORD FNORD, we'd all FNORD. That's my discordian opinion.
And so forth.
First, most terrorism against America has been perpetrated by Americans. Second, if you target a specific group, they will simply recruit people who don't look like what you are targeting. Profiling based on race is worse than useless, it provides a road map to success for terrorists. Profile based on behavior. That is what the officers in your example are really doing, if they are doing their job right. They look for someone out of place, not a particular race.
You could have said everything you wanted to say (and been just as useless) without mentioning the "liberals here." What are you trying to imply? You aren't beating a sacred cow, you're just beating off. "uh, uh UH UH, YEAH! Take it right in the face, you dirty liberal whores!"
It is destined to go away completely. The problem is imbalance of information and power. Some people have a much greater ability to gather information about you than you do about them. They also tend to have a greater ability to use that information to harm you. If everyone could see what everyone else was doing, no one could misuse information to harm others without everyone else knowing about it.
The real problem will be if privacy DOESN'T disappear completely. Because privacy for the poor and powerless certainly will.
If only people would stop saying things I don't agree with, I wouldn't have to mod them down. That's my slashdot moderator opinion.
Good point about the costs of researching this particular application of the drug. Then you go and ruin it with unwarranted ad-hominems in regards to my position on information, property, and democracy.
First, about information, I said the free market doesn't handle non-exclusionary goods efficiently. I wasn't necessarily advocating open access to information. In fact, with a few modifications regarding copyright length, our IP system is not bad. But it involves the government handing out monopolies precisely because what I stated is true. Can you refute that?
Second, democratic control of resources was tried for a few years after the February revolution in Russia, but where else has it really been tried? The real problem is not with democratic control, it is with violent revolution which invariably leads to the most brutal and power hungry rising to the top. Wait, I thought of one where it is still being done: the Mondragon Collective in Spain. Well, it's kind of a hybrid system with some free-market, capitalist aspects but there is a large amount of democratic controll of resources. It's kind of hard to make a system work when most of the privileged upper class the world over has it in for you just on principle.
Lastly, you may prefer to "choose" among several different options, but it's not much of a choice if there are only a few players in the market and they collude to form an oligopoly. This is inevitable, and my argument follows. The network effect gaurantees that slight variations in popularity will be magnified due to the fact that people really don't like to have to choose amongst a set of similar alternatives and so they do what everyone else is doing, irrespective of actual quality or value. This means that markets will become dominated by a few small players who can easily collude to form an oligopoly.
The free market system is founded on two myths. One, that people are selfish. Modern economic research shows that most aren't. Second, that people are rational. They aren't, especially when it comes to basic necessities when their lives are at stake.
Personally, I'd really like to see a free market of governments with no coercion involved. We could have Capitalist-land, Commieville, Socialist Island, and so forth. You'd contract with the system you like to provide the services you need.
Because the NYT hates America, right? Glad you rectified their egregious oversight.
They don't "call out" the US. They happen to mention that as a small part of a larger story that really "calls out" the Chinese, if anyone. But we can't let any slight against the US, no matter how small or even entirely in your head it might be, go unchallenged. And of course, the best way to excuse anything is to point out that someone else is also doing it.
Rah! Rah! Rah! We're number one! USA! USA! USA!
Here I pay about 4 cents per KwH. Nice, huh?
So that means you can afford huge sun lamps to combat the pervasive Seasonal Affective Disorder brought on by the constant clouds, eh? I keed, I keed. Seattle's a beautiful place with a lovely climate. All that stuff about rain is just a rumor spread to keep the Californians out. Really, it's sunny all summer long in Seattle. And if summer happens to fall on a weekend, everyone goes on a picnic!
If only government got out of the way, PCs could be powered by watch batteries. That's my libertarian opinion.
That was my first thought, as well. "Linux" as people know it is not just the kernel. It is the toolchain, the desktop environment, and the applications as well, much of which could easily be released under GPLv3. And GPLv3 could easily contain provisions prohibiting this kind of deal. That's more than likely many years down the road, but it could have an impact. My question is, would it only impact SLES and SLED, or would the restrictions apply to OpenSUSE as well? We use all three where I work...
We could make sure sex offenders do not have genitalia, or access to genitalia.
Maybe if you hadn't been trying for first post, and had spent as much time on your original comment as you did on this one, the original would have been modded like this one was, even though it and this are still far, far off topic. Cry me a fucking river. You know exactly what you did and why you were down-modded.
You can say anything you want on Slashdot and get modded up for it. Just refrain from being an asshole.
CMOT Dibbler rocks!!
Yes, I would imagine that rocks are about the least offensive thing one might find in Dibbler's "food."
What gets me is that this is as much as admitting that you worship a chump, a rube. If you can pull the wool over God's eyes with semantic tricks, maybe He's not worth going to the trouble over, hmmm?