Which interestingly enough illustrates my point, not yours:
Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Constitution of the United States of America, Article 1, Section 2,
Clause 3:
"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States which may be included within this Union,
according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by
adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to
Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three
fifths of all other Persons." [tacit approval of a class of people
outside of the group of "free Persons," actually a way of setting up
government representation with some notion of accounting for slaves
and Indians]
So the Founding Fathers' hypocracy about the founding vision of
America was initially ensconced in the Constitution, and was
never part of the Declaration...
* property ownership required for citizenship
* no suffarage for women
All these items were in the Constitution at one point, but
never in the Declaration... and they may never have been in the
Constitution at all if people (lawmakers, judges) had just
stuck to the ideals espoused in the Declaration in the first
place...
* no explicit right to privacy
Rights don't have to be "explicitly" listed in the
Constitution to be rights. You haven't been paying
attention to what I have been saying from the start of this thread.
The Declaration says people have all the rights, and
government must make the case to curtail them in only the most
needful of cases:
"That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of
the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or
to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness.
And to address the rest of your points:
That's why I'd much rather have the ammendable and
interpretable constituation than some persons notion of what the
Founding Fathers would have wanted (WWFFD - what would the founding
fathers do?).
And if people would have kept the ideals of the Declaration in
mind in the first place, there wouldn't have been so many abuses of
the American Ideal put into (and taken out of) the
Constitution in the first place...
For example, you'll hear some people justify a partial
theocracy based on their believe that all the founding fathers were
christian (even though all of them weren't) rather than trying to
deal with the intent of the 1st ammendment, which they
wrote.
Theocracy is a good part of what that big wave of Protestants were
trying to escape when they founded a nation that wasn't in the back
pocket of the Caltholic Church. I think people harken to the fact
that so many Founding Fathers were Christian (or at least Deists) as
a way of reminding them of their own cultural heritage, which like it
or not, is also found in many of the initial documents and opinions
and thoughts of so many of the Founders.
And this will remain a fact, until Political Correctness
reaches Orwellian proportions, and "necessary editing" of the past
occurs in an attempt at "cultural cleansing..." which is the
equivalent of "ethnic cleansing," except you're killing ideas
instead of people... which oddly enough falls under the purview of the
very first Amendment to the Constitution.
This founding father interpretation is a slippery
slope.
I think even a blind man can see by now that
the slippery slope has been, and continues to be when people
don't adhere to the Founding Fathers' vision as set forth in
the Declaration.
However, the sway of popular opinion weakly expressed through the interpretations of the judicial system have more of an impact on the constitution than the Declaration of independence ever will. Both are on similar legal footing (i.e. poor) when it comes to their legitimacy as factors for modifying the intent of the Constitution.
What I call the "spirit of freedom" or "the founding vision" was never clearer than when the Declaration of Independence was written. The nuts and bolts of how this vision applied to a civil law is what The Constitution attempts to address. So when a new law and the vision are at odds, you have to go with the vision... unless you value living in a nation of lawyers above all else.
The rights enumerated in the Declaration have no legal bearing on the US government.
You are absolutely right: as long as you don't regard dissolution of previous political/legal ties and establisment of a sovereign state as a "legal matter." And as long as you choose to ingnore the fact that The Constitution doesn't exist in a vacuum by itself, and that even "the law" doesn't exist in a vacuum, as soon as you do that, it's time for another Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence has no legal bearing on the operation of the US Government. The Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land.
I beg to differ: it is the very moral and political foundation of The Constitution. Without it, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights are no more than the musings of another cadre of rebels who couldn't live by a contract. There is a philosophy behind the founding of this nation, but that idea is anathema to those who realize a heritage of true freedom will only foment more rebellion when people start to realize what's really going on in America...
85% of the market? How long will that take? Seriously, a majority of the Windows market is still using 98, and intends to keep on using it for years.
How do you think Win 98 got to a majority of the Windows market over 95? There is a herd of clueless newbies rushing into the PC market every day. And it only takes a few years of XP-only PC purchases before they become the "majority" and are all agreeing with Micro$oft that DRM is a good thing and the rest of the world are nasty Linux/Mac using hackers/theives that need DRM-only laws to force them to use Palladium, because Micro$oft told them so when they bought their shiny new wonderful computer in 2002.
I think there's some danger here in enumerating the right to copy CD's, etc. It's the same issue that John Adams had with the Bill of Rights. If you enumerate some rights, it implies that other rights don't exist until they're enumerated. Take for example the right to privacy. The Bill of Rights doesn't list it, and therefor much debate ensues about whether or not such a right exists.
Unfortunately this is a common misconception in America: We think the Bill of Rights enumerates our Rights. In reality, it actually puts restrictions on what the Government(tm) can do to our rights... which according to The Declaration of Independence were granted to us by a higher power, the "Creator."
Remember that Microsoft is the one that A) voted AGAINST legislation for DRM and
I wouldn't paint Microsoft as "righteous" just because they want to deny the government power that they are going to take and profit from exclusively themselves. They weren't "striking a blow for freedom," merely "protecting and growing the monopoly," as always...
B) has opted to make it a consumer choice as to whethor or not you want Windows to boot in "DRM" mode or not. If you're not in DRM mode, you simply can't play purchased digial music.
Most consumers don't even understand what DRM is. It turns itself on and off (and may be a default, I don't know) just like your default browser changes mysteriously to Internet Explorer.
Big deal - I'm not buying crippled music. However, you can still play all of your "insecure" MP3's and WMA's.
"Insecure?" Not any less secure than any other file on my hard-drive. And if someone somehow busted into my computer and stole my MP3's... why would I care... that would be the least of my worries... but at the top of the list for M$ and the RIAA. Nevermind that it isn't even any of their concern what I do with my computer.
But if you're happy with a DRM OS and a DRM P4, you can still play your "secure" MP3's... until the next DRS (Digital Rights Screwup) when you put in a new card or make an "unauthorized" copy.
What I am going to dispute is the fact that you state that Firewire is faster than USB-2 (as you put it.) It is not. I won't dispute the 'better' part, but Firewire (as currently available) is 400Mbps, and USB 2.0 (a.k.a USB High Speed) is 480Mbps.
You need to read some real-world comparisons between USB 2.0 and Firewire. Firewire always wins.
The 'specs' are only on paper. And USB-2 doesn't come anywhere close to a theoretical 480Mbps, much less 400Mbps, which you would expect now in the beta-stages of USB-2. And I said "beta" in the sense that this product has been released as a product for you to beta-test... unofficially. (Another "subjective" argument, based on the fact of the performance disparity.)
It looks like satellite internet is one of those wonky markets that doesn't make any sense except to those people trying to pinch pennies or get ahead where there isn't broadband already available. That being said, most Mac users are used to paying for superior service and probably already have ADSL/cable internet access anyway...
It's kind of like whining about a lack of USB-2 drivers on the Mac when Firewire has already been there for the past 4 years both faster and better...
Eve ate apple from the Tree of Knowledge and thus gained god-like insight into the human plight. Or at least, that's the metaphor.
But these bums who obsess on controlling the internet and all knowlege would be like a Bureaucrat, a Politician, and an Entrepreneur who entered the Garden, kicked G-d out and set up Garden of Eden Apples Lmt. They would then eat apple-sauce, apple cider, and apple apples.
Meanwhile GOAL would contract out to the timber industry for sawdust and the slop industry for protein, and use a Red #5 and a factory to produce Consumer Renewable Apple Protien-Supplement for consumption by the general populace.
Ohhh, and somewhere along the way, they would also convince everyone that due to G-d's absence, they in fact were G-d.
i.e. -- we need to pay politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what to do in cyberspace... the one place where the 1st Amendment should reign supreme...
"With DRM computer at U.C. Irvine, P2P computer shares you... with university authorities!"
Re:"Benefits" of killing the Alpha and PA-RISC...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
Saddest sentence in the whole article:
"There are other benefits for Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium allows the company to eliminate both of its current 64-bit chips -- the H.P. PA-RISC and Compaq Alpha. That alone should save the company $200 million to $400 million annually in development and manufacturing costs, according to Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch."
Yeah... at the rate HP was losing money there, it's a wonder they ever started 64-bit chips! </sarcasm>
It's as if Brainiac Steven M. Milunovich never heard the axiom: "You need to spend money to make money," but reason has nothing to do with what he said, and everything to do with "spin."
Re:One Thing I Never Understood...
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
Intel is "starting over" with all-new 64-bit architecture because they already have almost 20 years of Real/32-bit/etc. "modes" built on top of each other in the Pentium 4. There's only so high you can stack a house of cards before it becomes exceedingly tedious , dangerous, and expensive (in Intel's case) to stack any more.
It has gotten to the point where the 32-bit architecture is almost officially "Out of Ideas" and the only thing left for the engineers to do to add value, is to make the chip's pipelines so comedically deep that they can wow everybody with Gigahertz... kind of like the best fireworks going off at the end of a 4th-of July evening.
It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power -- low power, because data centers can consume as much electricity as a city.
And it looks like Itanium is closer to the "San Francisco" end of the meter than the "San Dimas" side.
If power efficiency does indeed trump processing speed, everything that Intel and Hewlett-Packard have done to pack raw power into the 221 million transistors of the new Itanium 2 could now be a handicap. The chip, which is as large as a silver dollar and whose 130 watts of power dissipation are enough to fry the proverbial egg, is not even a contender in the Google universe. "We're incredibly, incredibly power sensitive, and we've been talking to Intel about that," Dr. Schmidt said.
That said, 64-bit processing just doesn't seem to be needed for the majority of tasks yet. We've had 64-bit computers for years now and it's not like there is a great demand for them.
Perfect trailing-edge-technology mentality. This is why Microsoft was behind all other OS's moving to 32-bit (in '96), why the first USB devices were multi-colored (to match iMacs), and why DV-editing/DVD-authoring at the consumer level won't be widely available on M$ OS's for the next year or two (and already 2 years behind).
Re:IBM's Processor
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The IBM 64-bit processor is reported to be much lower power than the Power 4 chip it is derived from, and the actual chip is rougly the size of the Intel Celeron.
See article.
How exactly is MacOS X going to be able to play next-gen DVDs, open Word documents, read email from Outlook users, etc, if Apple doesn't implement Palladium?
Simple:
FUD: next-gen DVD's don't need Paladium,
Word and Office apps are about to go down the digital toilet with the rent-your-software/DRM model. Open Office will rule!,
You need digital rights to read E-MAIL? Outlook goes into the digital toilet... bye bye!
Apple is closed, proprietary hardware and software. Aren't we supposed to inherently distrust closed software because we can't audit the code for bugs and security problems?
We shouldn't trust Apple farther than we can throw them, but we're promoting the use of their closed OS (and an overpriced one, at that.). What gives?
Could it have something to do with the fact that the one company you really can't trust co-opting your "open" architecture and selling your digital ass down the river with DRM?
It is a nice gui/os but damn if I can't get past the fact taht I can only buy my hardware for the OS from one vendor. That's why I'll never buy a mac. I don't like their hardware, because it's proprietary.
Bet you don't own a car either. After all, once you buy a Ford car, you are locked into one vendor. Ford is proprietary!
Slashdot Mirror
Which interestingly enough illustrates my point, not yours:
Declaration of Independence: Constitution of the United States of America, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3: So the Founding Fathers' hypocracy about the founding vision of America was initially ensconced in the Constitution, and was never part of the Declaration...
* property ownership required for citizenship
* no suffarage for women
All these items were in the Constitution at one point, but never in the Declaration... and they may never have been in the Constitution at all if people (lawmakers, judges) had just stuck to the ideals espoused in the Declaration in the first place...
* no explicit right to privacy
Rights don't have to be "explicitly" listed in the Constitution to be rights. You haven't been paying attention to what I have been saying from the start of this thread.
The Declaration says people have all the rights, and government must make the case to curtail them in only the most needful of cases:
And to address the rest of your points:
And if people would have kept the ideals of the Declaration in mind in the first place, there wouldn't have been so many abuses of the American Ideal put into (and taken out of) the Constitution in the first place... Theocracy is a good part of what that big wave of Protestants were trying to escape when they founded a nation that wasn't in the back pocket of the Caltholic Church. I think people harken to the fact that so many Founding Fathers were Christian (or at least Deists) as a way of reminding them of their own cultural heritage, which like it or not, is also found in many of the initial documents and opinions and thoughts of so many of the Founders.
And this will remain a fact, until Political Correctness reaches Orwellian proportions, and "necessary editing" of the past occurs in an attempt at "cultural cleansing..." which is the equivalent of "ethnic cleansing," except you're killing ideas instead of people... which oddly enough falls under the purview of the very first Amendment to the Constitution. I think even a blind man can see by now that the slippery slope has been, and continues to be when people don't adhere to the Founding Fathers' vision as set forth in the Declaration.
But if you're happy with a DRM OS and a DRM P4, you can still play your "secure" MP3's... until the next DRS (Digital Rights Screwup) when you put in a new card or make an "unauthorized" copy.
The articles I looked at on the relative performance were these:
mobilecomputing
toms hardware
The 'specs' are only on paper. And USB-2 doesn't come anywhere close to a theoretical 480Mbps, much less 400Mbps, which you would expect now in the beta-stages of USB-2. And I said "beta" in the sense that this product has been released as a product for you to beta-test... unofficially. (Another "subjective" argument, based on the fact of the performance disparity.)
It looks like satellite internet is one of those wonky markets that doesn't make any sense except to those people trying to pinch pennies or get ahead where there isn't broadband already available. That being said, most Mac users are used to paying for superior service and probably already have ADSL/cable internet access anyway... It's kind of like whining about a lack of USB-2 drivers on the Mac when Firewire has already been there for the past 4 years both faster and better...
Eve ate apple from the Tree of Knowledge and thus gained god-like insight into the human plight. Or at least, that's the metaphor.
But these bums who obsess on controlling the internet and all knowlege would be like a Bureaucrat, a Politician, and an Entrepreneur who entered the Garden, kicked G-d out and set up Garden of Eden Apples Lmt. They would then eat apple-sauce, apple cider, and apple apples.
Meanwhile GOAL would contract out to the timber industry for sawdust and the slop industry for protein, and use a Red #5 and a factory to produce Consumer Renewable Apple Protien-Supplement for consumption by the general populace.
Ohhh, and somewhere along the way, they would also convince everyone that due to G-d's absence, they in fact were G-d.
"no guidance by policy makers"
i.e. -- we need to pay politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what to do in cyberspace... the one place where the 1st Amendment should reign supreme...
If you just can't stand not knowing what's coming up in the next movie, rumor has it the 2nd book (and even the 3rd and final book) are out now! ;c)
"With DRM computer at U.C. Irvine, P2P computer shares you... with university authorities!"
It's as if Brainiac Steven M. Milunovich never heard the axiom: "You need to spend money to make money," but reason has nothing to do with what he said, and everything to do with "spin."
Intel is "starting over" with all-new 64-bit architecture because they already have almost 20 years of Real/32-bit/etc. "modes" built on top of each other in the Pentium 4. There's only so high you can stack a house of cards before it becomes exceedingly tedious , dangerous, and expensive (in Intel's case) to stack any more.
It has gotten to the point where the 32-bit architecture is almost officially "Out of Ideas" and the only thing left for the engineers to do to add value, is to make the chip's pipelines so comedically deep that they can wow everybody with Gigahertz... kind of like the best fireworks going off at the end of a 4th-of July evening.
The IBM 64-bit processor is reported to be much lower power than the Power 4 chip it is derived from, and the actual chip is rougly the size of the Intel Celeron. See article.
I'll bet SPECint and SPECfp are through the roof!!!