Don't worry. You'll just connect to officelightjazz.com and listen to the streaming radio. Heck, some people do this already.:-)
Re:I gotta agree with Blizzard...
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EFF Takes Bnetd Case
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· Score: 1, Insightful
This watchdog element is (I'm sure they believe) crucial to sustaining their business, and Blizzard has absolutely every right to try and protect their stuff via whatever methods they want to.
Really? So you would condone murder, rape, arsin, theft, lying, cheating, bribing government officials, terrorist bombings, and other such attrocities on the part of blizzard/vivendi as long as it's to "protect their stuff"?
Man people are sad. And if you don't get the point, I know that you probably didn't mean what you said. Of course you most likely meant that Blizzard has absolutely every right to try to protect their stuff via whatever legal and moral methods they want to. The real point of contention is whether what they're doing is legal (or moral, though that's not relevant for the court case).
If I had a product and was reliant upon providing a means for people to meet up for games, and used that as a revenue source, to feed my programmers and staff, and some joe schmoe comes along with a service that bypasses all that, and makes it easier for pirates to hop on, I'd be mighty pissed, and rightly so.
You know what? I'm mighty pissed off that America hasn't decided that I deserve to live like a king and set up a tax to support me and give me all the material posessions that I want. Well, maybe I'm not actively pissed off since this has been going on for so long (or more correctly hasn't been going on for so long), but the point still stands: we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are no guarantees that we'll actually catch happiness, and while we're all beholden to feel sorry for each other if life takes turns we don't want, that's about it. It doesn't (or at least shouldn't) give us the right to go suing everyone who we think that made this world differ from our own private little dream. Heck, little hardware stores are mighty pissed when Home Depot comes to town. It's a shame, and we should all feel bad for them, but just because one person has obsoleted the comfort and security of another, doesn't mean that what they did is wholely bad or should be stopped. Or would you rather get rid of the printing press so as to preserve the incomes of the members of the scribes' guilds?
What I mean is "window managment" (meaning the positioning, decoration, moving, resizing, etc) of windows, should be part of the toolkit . The window border is no different than a button or anything elss. All sane people (there are some exceptions here) know that the drawing of the button should be up to the appliation or the shared libraries it decides to load, so why not the window borders?
First off, the window manager has nothing to do with where the mouse is. Secondly, on a local display, the communication involved between these various programs is so damn close to instantaneous that no human is going to be able to tell (note: this is on a fairly recent machine, I have no recent experience with a 486). The most likely culprit in any percieved slowness is going to be some sort of pixmap-using theme, so that for every refresh a whole bunch of pictures need to be drawn.
Anyhow, to address what you said, moving the window borders and such into the application is pure insanity. Do you really want to not be able to move, minimize, or kill an application which has frozen or is taking a long time to respond? Windows does this and it frustrates the hell out of anyone used to unix who has to use windows.
Moreover, who on earth wants to reimplement all of this every time you write an X program? It would be a bloody waste of time with no practical benefits and only problems such as someone forget to implement window shading in some particular application that you like. No, this is one of the times when we should all learn from the billions of dollars in R&D that microsoft apparently hasn't done and run away from this sort of thing like the plague.
I feel that I should note, btw, that what you want already exists. All you have to do as an X app is provide a window manager hint that you want to be an unmanaged window, and the window manager will have nothing to do with you and you're on your own to prove all the appropriate functionality. The only program that I know of that does this is xmms, though I'm sure that there are others.
Implicitly, the legal structure around corporations is already an enormous and complicated set of contracts. It's not a legal fiction (except to the extent that any contract is a legal fiction); it's more like a standardized shorthand (or, to make an analogy to code, a set of standard libraries).
Implicity, a corporation is quite a lot of things. However, a corporation is a legal person. A corporation can own property. Under the law that we have, only a person may own property. Thus we have the legal fiction, that a corporation is a person under the law. A corporation does not actually exist in any physical sense, and it sure as hell is not of the species Homo Sapiens. Yet the law treats a corporation as if it were a member of said species in certain respects. If this is not a legal fiction, then the term has no meaning (related to the two words "legal" and "fiction"). A contract, by contrast, is not treated as something which it isn't. A contract is an an agreement and law simply provides means of enforcing it.
As an example, all sorts of books were quite illegal in communist Russia.
That might be an infringement of freedom of speech or freedom of the press, but it's not infringement of freedom to think, which I thought was what part of your definition of "the right to own intellectual property" was.
Has it actually never occurred to you that the reason why people restrict speech is because they are restricting certain thoughts? Speech is simply a means of transmitting thoughts from one person to another. The reason that you don't want thoughts to be transmitted is that you don't want them at all. Moreover, holding certain positions, even if you didn't write a book about them, was illegal in communist Russia. People were tried and died (or were imprisoned) for holding certain beliefs.
Here, let me make an analogy: in the united states military, it is perfectly permissible to talk about homosexuality. However, it is not permissible to be a homosexual, even a non-practicing one. It is fine to talk about homosexuality, but not fine to think homosexual thoughts. e.g. "a homosexual man is attracted to other men" is a fine thing to say. Looking at some man and thinking "damn, I want him" is not fine (though the us military will not actively try to find out who is thinking those thoughts). You see, it can be illegal to think certain thoughts. This is even more the case if one allows vigilante justice into the discussion.
And I still don't understand what you think intellectual property is if it's a right that doesn't exclude any rights of others.
I think that it's the right to think whatever thoughts that you want, etc., as I said before. I'm using property in the sense of something that one has access to and can use in the manner appropriate to the thing. I'm using exclusive property as something that one is the only person for which that's true. Note: in cases where property is by its nature exlusive, such as real goods, property is understood to mean exclusive property. Perhaps I'm being a little loose with my definition of proerty, but then again a definition of property along the lines of "that which you can prevent other people from having" leads to problems as well. If I kill some dog, I have prevented other people from having him, but is he mine? If you then require having it and being able to prevent people from having it, then fine. But what on earth is the meaning of "public property"?
It seems to me that if you can say whether something is "correct" or not, it's not a judgement, it's a statement of fact.
Nothing in this life is certain aside from mathematics. The question of whether or not, say, a particular person committed a particular crime is still a question where the judgement of the twelve people deciding the issue can be correct or incorrect.
Oh, and who decides? The most persuasive guy, unfortunately.
If by "who decides" you're trying to get into a discussing of radical skepticism, leave me out. Just go off into the woods and disbelieve in everything. Or if you're going for radical relativisim, then just admit that you're an anarchist and put it in your sig so that people can avoid you. I'm sorry if I'm being a bit snippy, but this "who decides" crap is stuff that people should have figured out by the age of about 17 or so.
Look, I'm really tired of this. We obviously just have different first principles. I happen to hold teleological beliefs (that's not a misspelling of theological, btw, it's from the greek telos) and you don't. There's really nothing of value that we can say to each other. Have a nice day.
"That's like saying you can't have a contract with more than two signatories. [elaborate reconstruction of a corporation snipped.]"
Yes, I grant the point that most of a corporation could be duplicated through an enormous and complicated set of contracts. It still lacks the limited liability of a corporation.
e.g. Bob may sign a contract saying that he will pay all of your debts incurred by any legal action, but this doesn't mean much if all of his assets have been siezed under that same legal action, and you have a judgement against you for $3,000,000, and Bob has not even a penny to give you to pay it with.
Besides which, setting up the appropriate sorts of contracts for hundreds of people would be very difficult. Moreover, suing people is expensive. If you have some sort of significant judgement against you, you will have a hard time suing someone to fulfill their end of a contract covering your liability. Moreover, just because bob has a contract saying that you're not liable, that doesn't actually prevent anyone from suing you for your own negligence relating to the contract. The sorts of things that I'm talking about are not things like non-compliance, but let's say that you're a tire manufacturer and some of the tires that you make are defective and people are killed as a result. As an agent of a corporation, you cannot be personally sued (well, you can, but unless there's something incredibly egregious going on, it would be thrown out). If nothing else, defending yourself is expensive and very inconvenient.
"...my point is that in theory you don't need governments to have corporations, just contracts."
True enough. In theory, you also don't need people for corporations, a sufficiently educated group of chimpanzees could do it too, as would, presumably, martians and colonies of microbes which have a collective "hive mind" and communicate through telepathy. However, for any system vaguely resembling our current one, corporations come from a legal fiction created by our government. Microsoft is free to use your method if they like, but they chose to be a corporation, so the theoretical aspects of how to achieve the same results as corporations are moot anyway.
"[my stuff about the rights of knowledge and teaching]. That's not a right; that really is a law of nature..."
So you have no idea what totalitarian governments are like, do you? As an example, all sorts of books were quite illegal in communist Russia. There were plenty of opinions that were illegal to hold, plenty of thoughts illegal to think. (From the government's point of view, there was simply the inconvenience of it being difficult to find out if someone was thinking illegal thoughts.)
"True. However, I would contend that the extension of that property of physical objects to a right of control over those shoes even when you're not wearing them is artificial. Even one person cannot usefully wear more than one set of shoes. Your right to exclude me from wearing your brown shoes while you're wearing your black shoes is artificial."
Actually, it comes from the fact that I cannot easily change into my shoes if they're on your feet. Moreover, you wearing them causes wear and tear on them and thus reduces their usefulness to me. Physical property is of its nature the sort of thing that bestows its benefits in an exclusive manner. Generally, there's no getting around it. Exceptions are made for some things which can be usefully shared, e.g. roads.
" I'm not trolling; I'm trying to make a philosophical point (which is a dangerous thing to do on/.). My point is that must not be taken away is a value judgement."
Please don't take this the wrong way, but that isn't much of a point, philosophical or otherwise. Of course it's a value judgement. Noone could possibly have believed otherwise. The only point of contention is whether it's a correct value judgement.
Moreover, society cannot grant an inalienable right. The very nature of being inalienable is that it is inherent. Society may consider it a right or not, it may grant it as a right upheld by that society, but it cannot grant an inalienable right. Still, this might just be bickering over terminology, so if I misunderstood you, I apologize.
As I've said above, it's not particularly relevant what possible worlds quite unlike our own might have been. There has been plenty of good science fiction on the matter, but we do happen to be in the world that we live in, and we are men, not giant newts or telepathic bacteria with a hive mind, and our government has created the legal fiction of corporations and copyrights, and many people (including the owners of microsoft) have taken advantage of these legal fictions. That is the situation we're in, and that is the government which is attempting (however imperfectly and perhaps corruptly) to rectify abuses of certain legal fictions that it created for the public good.
Basically, because such a contract would be very difficult to enforce. The unit, since it is not a legal person, could not make such a contract, someone who is part of that unit would have to make such a contract on the unit's behalf, and thus they would be personally responsible for said contract. You'll have a hard time finding people to take on that roll, i.e. to take full liability for billions of dollars in possible damages.
Moreover, everyone in that unit would have unlimited liability if, say, the unit were to be sued for some tort (e.g. damages caused by negligence on the part of the unit), and everyone in that unit could loose everything they own. Their house, their car, their pet dog. Everything. Again, not many people want to be in this sort of position (partnerships involving more than just two or three people are very rare in the US for specifically this reason).
There are a lot of benefits to having a corporation be a legal entity. The fact that it can own property is another example. Would you really want your office building to be titled to some particular employee (or owner)?
>> What makes the right to own physical property more "inalienable" than the right to own intellectual property?
Allow me to clarify: I believe in the inalienable right to intellectual property. I do not believe in the inalienable right to exclusively own intellectual property. By this I mean: I believe that everyone can think whatever thoughts they want, can draw whatever pictures they like, can know anything they can legitimately find out, and can copy and bits they please, so long as they have legitimate access to those bits in the first place (i.e. breaking and entering into someone's house isn't legitimate, someone giving you access to a copy of these bits of their own free will is). Now, physical property is unfortunately exclusive by its nature. We both can't usefully own the same pair of shoes. However, this exclusivity is not a right, but an unfortunate aspect of the nature of physical objects. Were it possible for all people to usefully own the same pair of shoes (and by this I mean for everyone to be able to wear this pair of shoes at the same time and derive as much value from their use as if they had an exclusive pair of shoes), I would also be against the proposition that there is some sort of inherent reason for imposing an artificial exclusivity on them.
Note: it can be useful to impose this artificial exclusivity on "intellectual property" to encourage people to put the work into writing plays and drawing pictures and such. However, it is important to recognize that this is an artifical imposition, not an inherent quality.
>> But let's not draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say some conventions are as fundamental as laws of physics and other conventions are "created by government".
If you're not trolling you really need to read more. Noone ever meant that an inalienable right is one that cannot be taken away from a man. It merely means a right which must not be taken away from him. Do you think that people who talk about inalienable rights never heard of slavery, or prison, or even a set of handcuffs?
If you recall, the only reason that there is the idea of "intellectual property" is because the government created this legal fiction for purposes of public good. Very similar to the existence of a corporation, actually.
You see, the government grants the special status of a corporation, and the special status of copyright. Given that those are both (useful) legal fictions, it is not unreasonable that the government can take them away or control them when these government created and granted legal fictions get abused.
Noone would stomach the government telling someone that they're not allowed to distribute the source code to their own program. What a person does is up to them (subject to constrains of law at least theoretically designed to keep people from infringing on each others' rights). A person as such has (inalienable) rights, including those of property and freedom of speech. However, a corporation doesn't even exist until the government creates it, and copyright does not exist on its own without the government creating it. Seeing as how both are their creations, is it not unreasonable that the government can direct the uses of its creation to prevent their abuses?
If these people are going to roll out thousands of roughly identical desktops, their IT staff can take the time to figure out how to set the default copy and paste to be that stupid menu interface.
Which you can use anyway in most applications.
It's not like the fact that you can middle-click to paste somehow turns off the edit->paste menus or keyboard shortcuts where they are implemented.
Wait. Do you mean to say that mass transit, which is currently subsidised by the (local) government in prettymuch all cases in the united states, will be cheaper if those subsidies are removed? How?
Moreover, mass transit is only cheaper per person in large volumes, which means that everyone has to be more or less coming from the same few locations and going to the same few locations. Basically, if everyone in a city lived in some giant apartment building, and all went to some giant office building, things would work out wonderfully for mass transit.
However, if people like to live like people, not like bacteria in a biofilm (or sardines in a can, if you prefer that analogy), then mass transit breaks down horribly. If you only have four people in a bus riding to a particular stop (think later at night and a less popular destination), mass transit is far, far less efficient.
Personally, I dislike cities myself. They breed crime and pollution and other bad things. Not to mention that people just shouldn't be that close. It's not healthy, mentally speaking. People are not bees - they should not live in a hive, or even in a large herd. People should be far enough away from each other to live somewhat independently, and to live without their neighbors' noses in their business.
Mass transit isn't cheap and is currently generally subsidised by the taxpayer as well. Are you going to charge people the true costs of mass transit, too? Are you going to make people who live in slightly less popular areas pay more than people in more popular areas? People who travel later at night pay more than people who travel during rush hour? Or are you just going to shut down mass transit and everyone walks later at night?
Poor people have to act like everyone else because it's the cheapest thing to do?
Btw, the auto-whitelist feature present in spamassassin 2.0.1 should really help, too. 3 messages get through and bam! that sender isn't considered for sending spam any more. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works.
Have you considered spamassassin? I've been trying it recently and it seems to work very well.
Basically, it's a mail filter which will add a flag to mail that seems to be spam (based on a complicated scoring system, read more about it on their website). I've had good success so far. The only real problem is that it's a little over-sensitive to lists currently. The auto-whitelist feature that's currently in CVS should really help with this.
If you get inundated with spam, I suggest trying it out.
The problem with what you suggested is that dpkg is inherently interactive. I don't believe that there is a way to get it to not ask questions, at least at the "critical" level, nor would it even necessarily be a good idea not to.
I believe that the purpose of a service such as redhat's is that you answer all of those questions once for your 300+ machines and then it goes and does all of the installation, with those answers.
it would be nice if debian supported such a thing, but I don't know of any particularly good way to handle it.
Of course, for a single machine, if you're decently stilled, debian is an absolute dream.
I bought tribes2, and I like it a lot.
I just didn't find any of their other titles interesting.
Well, a while ago I bought railraod tycoon II, but while the graphics are nice that game sucks big time compared to railroad tycoon (original).
What idiot thought that the default mode for a game where you build up a railroad empire is to have it last 15-20 years only, and then everything stops?
In railroad tycoon I, you got over 100 years to build your railroad empire. That's a heck of a lot more satisfying.
Oh well. The real problem, I believe, is the way that most games appeal to a relatively narrow variety of interests. When your population is big enough to only support a few games, not enough people will be interested in them, since you're still probably going to see a relatively similar array of interests in the linux community.
It's a pity that there aren't more games with a wide appeal.
If Jupiter were to light in the way that you describe, isn't it quite possible that it wouldn't have enough mass (-> gravity) to hold itself together under the massive outward pressure of fusion in its core? Thus it could get lit for a relatively short period of time, but it could easily not last given its mass.
As an extreme example, our nuclear bombs work on the principle that you're describing to light jupiter, but they don't exactly last very long.
My very imprecise understanding of it (IANAA <- I Am Not An Astrophysicist) is that the reason that the sun doesn't blow apart is the extreme gravity holds it together. That's why in several billion years as the mass of the sun decreases through fusion (and subsequent radiation), it won't have the mass to keep itself so compact so it will get bigger from the outward pressure of the fusion in its core.
Then for really big stars, when they run out of fuel, that outward pressure dissapears rather suddenly and everything falls back in. This creates an incredible amount of pressure inside and 'lights' the star for one last time, fusing heavier elements to get the really big stuff (such as lead, uranium, etc.). Unfortunately, this doesn't last very long as the energy released is incredibly huge, and the outward pressure wins over the gravity in a rather dramatic fashion called a supernova.
Now, getting back to Jupiter, given that it's not massive enough to light itself through the pressure exerted by gravity, isn't it rather likely that if it were to get artificially 'lit', it wouldn't have enough mass to hold itself together and it would go boom, rather than burn?
No boom Today, Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. -Ivanova
What criteria are you using? Sure it has lots of features, but the only possible explanation for how many misfeatures (most likely bugs, but you never know) it has is that the people who write it don't use it. It makes all but the most basic of tasks anywhere from annoying to painful. Writing macros for it is an exercise in masochism, especially with its oh-so-helpful error messages which can usually be summarized as "something bad happened". At least someone had the good idea to make the debugger stop on the line where something bad happened or it would be impossible to write macros in it.
Excel might be many things, but the only thing that it's the best at is causing pain. Well, it's reasonably good at the various embedding that microsoft is so fond of (and even a few non-ms people like too, apparently).
Still, I haven't met any people face to face who actually claimed to like excel, and I'm talking about the various non-technical people at a bank, most of whom have little more than heard of linux.
That microsoft held a trademark not on "Windows", but on "Microsoft Windows", since windows is both so common and the idea of a windowing interface preceded their use of it anyway (and was so common to refer to the interface type in this industry). Now, if this is the case, and the product is not "Microsoft Lindows", would there still be a problem?
Actually, he was saying that the phrase "devout Christian" is slowly being transformed in modern language from a generic term to one which refers primarily to a bunch of half-baked nuts who happen to be Christians.
I'm dubious about the point, the word devout rarely is used in connection with people like Jack Chick. Devout seems to tend to refer to people of popular sympathy like the Pope and Mother Teresa, whereas Jack Chick is a "fanatic", "Lunatic", or "Nut". People a little bit less absurd than Chick, such as the guy who blamed the 9/11 attacks on gays and lesbians etc. are generally termed "right-wing christian extremsists", though it is occasionally shortened to "right-wing christians" or sometimes just "right-wingers", etc.
However, it is certainly true that there are plenty of people who at least call themselves Christian who seem to have decided that reason is not particularly important, and it is true that their great numbers and vocal political stances do tend permute the general image of a "Christian" to be one of them, rather than the Christians who like reason and logic and so forth.
As to where his point stands, I don't know. But what he's talking about is the gradual association of "illogical idiot" with "Christian" because there happen to be some of the former who are some of the latter who are very vocal (see the entire creation vs. evolution debate).
It's a real shame, but he certainly wasn't advocating loose moral standards, actually somewhat tighter ones that the people he disagreed with - he wants standards of intellectual honesty, as well as the other standards.
Linux runs on machines from a wristwatch to an S/390.
2000/XP runs on? Oh, that's right. A PIII through a PIV. Yup. Those microsoft guys make real OS's that run on real hardware.
As for commercial Unices, well, what exactly classifies one as a commercial UNIX? Are you counting unix-type systems that are sold for money, or does the code have to have been licensed from sys V at some point? If it's the former definition, then linux is a commercial UNIX (IIRC it even got unix98 certified).
Btw, did you recommend that people move off of NT when there were the alpha and beta builds of 2000 being circulated around?
Oh well, enough feeding the trolls. Back to studying for real analysis. It would be nice to actually help out on this kernel, too. From what I can gather there are plenty of jobs that are quite doable by non-experts. For example, adapting block drivers to the new interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry. You'll just connect to officelightjazz.com and listen to the streaming radio. Heck, some people do this already. :-)
Really? So you would condone murder, rape, arsin, theft, lying, cheating, bribing government officials, terrorist bombings, and other such attrocities on the part of blizzard/vivendi as long as it's to "protect their stuff"?
Man people are sad. And if you don't get the point, I know that you probably didn't mean what you said. Of course you most likely meant that Blizzard has absolutely every right to try to protect their stuff via whatever legal and moral methods they want to. The real point of contention is whether what they're doing is legal (or moral, though that's not relevant for the court case).
You know what? I'm mighty pissed off that America hasn't decided that I deserve to live like a king and set up a tax to support me and give me all the material posessions that I want. Well, maybe I'm not actively pissed off since this has been going on for so long (or more correctly hasn't been going on for so long), but the point still stands: we have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are no guarantees that we'll actually catch happiness, and while we're all beholden to feel sorry for each other if life takes turns we don't want, that's about it. It doesn't (or at least shouldn't) give us the right to go suing everyone who we think that made this world differ from our own private little dream. Heck, little hardware stores are mighty pissed when Home Depot comes to town. It's a shame, and we should all feel bad for them, but just because one person has obsoleted the comfort and security of another, doesn't mean that what they did is wholely bad or should be stopped. Or would you rather get rid of the printing press so as to preserve the incomes of the members of the scribes' guilds?
First off, the window manager has nothing to do with where the mouse is. Secondly, on a local display, the communication involved between these various programs is so damn close to instantaneous that no human is going to be able to tell (note: this is on a fairly recent machine, I have no recent experience with a 486). The most likely culprit in any percieved slowness is going to be some sort of pixmap-using theme, so that for every refresh a whole bunch of pictures need to be drawn.
Anyhow, to address what you said, moving the window borders and such into the application is pure insanity. Do you really want to not be able to move, minimize, or kill an application which has frozen or is taking a long time to respond? Windows does this and it frustrates the hell out of anyone used to unix who has to use windows.
Moreover, who on earth wants to reimplement all of this every time you write an X program? It would be a bloody waste of time with no practical benefits and only problems such as someone forget to implement window shading in some particular application that you like. No, this is one of the times when we should all learn from the billions of dollars in R&D that microsoft apparently hasn't done and run away from this sort of thing like the plague.
I feel that I should note, btw, that what you want already exists. All you have to do as an X app is provide a window manager hint that you want to be an unmanaged window, and the window manager will have nothing to do with you and you're on your own to prove all the appropriate functionality. The only program that I know of that does this is xmms, though I'm sure that there are others.
Implicity, a corporation is quite a lot of things. However, a corporation is a legal person. A corporation can own property. Under the law that we have, only a person may own property. Thus we have the legal fiction, that a corporation is a person under the law. A corporation does not actually exist in any physical sense, and it sure as hell is not of the species Homo Sapiens. Yet the law treats a corporation as if it were a member of said species in certain respects. If this is not a legal fiction, then the term has no meaning (related to the two words "legal" and "fiction"). A contract, by contrast, is not treated as something which it isn't. A contract is an an agreement and law simply provides means of enforcing it.
Has it actually never occurred to you that the reason why people restrict speech is because they are restricting certain thoughts? Speech is simply a means of transmitting thoughts from one person to another. The reason that you don't want thoughts to be transmitted is that you don't want them at all. Moreover, holding certain positions, even if you didn't write a book about them, was illegal in communist Russia. People were tried and died (or were imprisoned) for holding certain beliefs.
Here, let me make an analogy: in the united states military, it is perfectly permissible to talk about homosexuality. However, it is not permissible to be a homosexual, even a non-practicing one. It is fine to talk about homosexuality, but not fine to think homosexual thoughts. e.g. "a homosexual man is attracted to other men" is a fine thing to say. Looking at some man and thinking "damn, I want him" is not fine (though the us military will not actively try to find out who is thinking those thoughts). You see, it can be illegal to think certain thoughts. This is even more the case if one allows vigilante justice into the discussion.
I think that it's the right to think whatever thoughts that you want, etc., as I said before. I'm using property in the sense of something that one has access to and can use in the manner appropriate to the thing. I'm using exclusive property as something that one is the only person for which that's true. Note: in cases where property is by its nature exlusive, such as real goods, property is understood to mean exclusive property. Perhaps I'm being a little loose with my definition of proerty, but then again a definition of property along the lines of "that which you can prevent other people from having" leads to problems as well. If I kill some dog, I have prevented other people from having him, but is he mine? If you then require having it and being able to prevent people from having it, then fine. But what on earth is the meaning of "public property"?
Nothing in this life is certain aside from mathematics. The question of whether or not, say, a particular person committed a particular crime is still a question where the judgement of the twelve people deciding the issue can be correct or incorrect.
Oh, and who decides? The most persuasive guy, unfortunately.
If by "who decides" you're trying to get into a discussing of radical skepticism, leave me out. Just go off into the woods and disbelieve in everything. Or if you're going for radical relativisim, then just admit that you're an anarchist and put it in your sig so that people can avoid you. I'm sorry if I'm being a bit snippy, but this "who decides" crap is stuff that people should have figured out by the age of about 17 or so.
Look, I'm really tired of this. We obviously just have different first principles. I happen to hold teleological beliefs (that's not a misspelling of theological, btw, it's from the greek telos) and you don't. There's really nothing of value that we can say to each other. Have a nice day.
Yes, I grant the point that most of a corporation could be duplicated through an enormous and complicated set of contracts. It still lacks the limited liability of a corporation.
e.g. Bob may sign a contract saying that he will pay all of your debts incurred by any legal action, but this doesn't mean much if all of his assets have been siezed under that same legal action, and you have a judgement against you for $3,000,000, and Bob has not even a penny to give you to pay it with.
Besides which, setting up the appropriate sorts of contracts for hundreds of people would be very difficult. Moreover, suing people is expensive. If you have some sort of significant judgement against you, you will have a hard time suing someone to fulfill their end of a contract covering your liability. Moreover, just because bob has a contract saying that you're not liable, that doesn't actually prevent anyone from suing you for your own negligence relating to the contract. The sorts of things that I'm talking about are not things like non-compliance, but let's say that you're a tire manufacturer and some of the tires that you make are defective and people are killed as a result. As an agent of a corporation, you cannot be personally sued (well, you can, but unless there's something incredibly egregious going on, it would be thrown out). If nothing else, defending yourself is expensive and very inconvenient.
"...my point is that in theory you don't need governments to have corporations, just contracts."True enough. In theory, you also don't need people for corporations, a sufficiently educated group of chimpanzees could do it too, as would, presumably, martians and colonies of microbes which have a collective "hive mind" and communicate through telepathy. However, for any system vaguely resembling our current one, corporations come from a legal fiction created by our government. Microsoft is free to use your method if they like, but they chose to be a corporation, so the theoretical aspects of how to achieve the same results as corporations are moot anyway.
"[my stuff about the rights of knowledge and teaching]. That's not a right; that really is a law of nature..."So you have no idea what totalitarian governments are like, do you? As an example, all sorts of books were quite illegal in communist Russia. There were plenty of opinions that were illegal to hold, plenty of thoughts illegal to think. (From the government's point of view, there was simply the inconvenience of it being difficult to find out if someone was thinking illegal thoughts.)
"True. However, I would contend that the extension of that property of physical objects to a right of control over those shoes even when you're not wearing them is artificial. Even one person cannot usefully wear more than one set of shoes. Your right to exclude me from wearing your brown shoes while you're wearing your black shoes is artificial."Actually, it comes from the fact that I cannot easily change into my shoes if they're on your feet. Moreover, you wearing them causes wear and tear on them and thus reduces their usefulness to me. Physical property is of its nature the sort of thing that bestows its benefits in an exclusive manner. Generally, there's no getting around it. Exceptions are made for some things which can be usefully shared, e.g. roads.
" I'm not trolling; I'm trying to make a philosophical point (which is a dangerous thing to do onPlease don't take this the wrong way, but that isn't much of a point, philosophical or otherwise. Of course it's a value judgement. Noone could possibly have believed otherwise. The only point of contention is whether it's a correct value judgement.
Moreover, society cannot grant an inalienable right. The very nature of being inalienable is that it is inherent. Society may consider it a right or not, it may grant it as a right upheld by that society, but it cannot grant an inalienable right. Still, this might just be bickering over terminology, so if I misunderstood you, I apologize.
As I've said above, it's not particularly relevant what possible worlds quite unlike our own might have been. There has been plenty of good science fiction on the matter, but we do happen to be in the world that we live in, and we are men, not giant newts or telepathic bacteria with a hive mind, and our government has created the legal fiction of corporations and copyrights, and many people (including the owners of microsoft) have taken advantage of these legal fictions. That is the situation we're in, and that is the government which is attempting (however imperfectly and perhaps corruptly) to rectify abuses of certain legal fictions that it created for the public good.
>> How is the government involved there?
Basically, because such a contract would be very difficult to enforce. The unit, since it is not a legal person, could not make such a contract, someone who is part of that unit would have to make such a contract on the unit's behalf, and thus they would be personally responsible for said contract. You'll have a hard time finding people to take on that roll, i.e. to take full liability for billions of dollars in possible damages.
Moreover, everyone in that unit would have unlimited liability if, say, the unit were to be sued for some tort (e.g. damages caused by negligence on the part of the unit), and everyone in that unit could loose everything they own. Their house, their car, their pet dog. Everything. Again, not many people want to be in this sort of position (partnerships involving more than just two or three people are very rare in the US for specifically this reason).
There are a lot of benefits to having a corporation be a legal entity. The fact that it can own property is another example. Would you really want your office building to be titled to some particular employee (or owner)?
>> What makes the right to own physical property more "inalienable" than the right to own intellectual property?Allow me to clarify: I believe in the inalienable right to intellectual property. I do not believe in the inalienable right to exclusively own intellectual property. By this I mean: I believe that everyone can think whatever thoughts they want, can draw whatever pictures they like, can know anything they can legitimately find out, and can copy and bits they please, so long as they have legitimate access to those bits in the first place (i.e. breaking and entering into someone's house isn't legitimate, someone giving you access to a copy of these bits of their own free will is). Now, physical property is unfortunately exclusive by its nature. We both can't usefully own the same pair of shoes. However, this exclusivity is not a right, but an unfortunate aspect of the nature of physical objects. Were it possible for all people to usefully own the same pair of shoes (and by this I mean for everyone to be able to wear this pair of shoes at the same time and derive as much value from their use as if they had an exclusive pair of shoes), I would also be against the proposition that there is some sort of inherent reason for imposing an artificial exclusivity on them.
Note: it can be useful to impose this artificial exclusivity on "intellectual property" to encourage people to put the work into writing plays and drawing pictures and such. However, it is important to recognize that this is an artifical imposition, not an inherent quality.
>> But let's not draw arbitrary lines in the sand and say some conventions are as fundamental as laws of physics and other conventions are "created by government".If you're not trolling you really need to read more. Noone ever meant that an inalienable right is one that cannot be taken away from a man. It merely means a right which must not be taken away from him. Do you think that people who talk about inalienable rights never heard of slavery, or prison, or even a set of handcuffs?
If you recall, the only reason that there is the idea of "intellectual property" is because the government created this legal fiction for purposes of public good. Very similar to the existence of a corporation, actually.
You see, the government grants the special status of a corporation, and the special status of copyright. Given that those are both (useful) legal fictions, it is not unreasonable that the government can take them away or control them when these government created and granted legal fictions get abused.
Noone would stomach the government telling someone that they're not allowed to distribute the source code to their own program. What a person does is up to them (subject to constrains of law at least theoretically designed to keep people from infringing on each others' rights). A person as such has (inalienable) rights, including those of property and freedom of speech. However, a corporation doesn't even exist until the government creates it, and copyright does not exist on its own without the government creating it. Seeing as how both are their creations, is it not unreasonable that the government can direct the uses of its creation to prevent their abuses?
If these people are going to roll out thousands of roughly identical desktops, their IT staff can take the time to figure out how to set the default copy and paste to be that stupid menu interface. Which you can use anyway in most applications. It's not like the fact that you can middle-click to paste somehow turns off the edit->paste menus or keyboard shortcuts where they are implemented.
Wait. Do you mean to say that mass transit, which is currently subsidised by the (local) government in prettymuch all cases in the united states, will be cheaper if those subsidies are removed? How?
Moreover, mass transit is only cheaper per person in large volumes, which means that everyone has to be more or less coming from the same few locations and going to the same few locations. Basically, if everyone in a city lived in some giant apartment building, and all went to some giant office building, things would work out wonderfully for mass transit.
However, if people like to live like people, not like bacteria in a biofilm (or sardines in a can, if you prefer that analogy), then mass transit breaks down horribly. If you only have four people in a bus riding to a particular stop (think later at night and a less popular destination), mass transit is far, far less efficient.
Personally, I dislike cities myself. They breed crime and pollution and other bad things. Not to mention that people just shouldn't be that close. It's not healthy, mentally speaking. People are not bees - they should not live in a hive, or even in a large herd. People should be far enough away from each other to live somewhat independently, and to live without their neighbors' noses in their business.
Mass transit isn't cheap and is currently generally subsidised by the taxpayer as well. Are you going to charge people the true costs of mass transit, too? Are you going to make people who live in slightly less popular areas pay more than people in more popular areas? People who travel later at night pay more than people who travel during rush hour? Or are you just going to shut down mass transit and everyone walks later at night? Poor people have to act like everyone else because it's the cheapest thing to do?
Btw, the auto-whitelist feature present in spamassassin 2.0.1 should really help, too. 3 messages get through and bam! that sender isn't considered for sending spam any more. I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works.
Have you considered spamassassin? I've been trying it recently and it seems to work very well.
Basically, it's a mail filter which will add a flag to mail that seems to be spam (based on a complicated scoring system, read more about it on their website). I've had good success so far. The only real problem is that it's a little over-sensitive to lists currently. The auto-whitelist feature that's currently in CVS should really help with this.
If you get inundated with spam, I suggest trying it out.
Debian is a semi-loose collection of volunteers.
Though I realy like your revised logic "debian will die therefore debian will die".
Btw, what are you going to do with that $200,000 bonus? By some pubic hair to tide you over until you develop some of your own?
Slashdot trolls are so funny!
Yup, that debian company. I wonder what their stock symbol is...
The problem with what you suggested is that dpkg is inherently interactive. I don't believe that there is a way to get it to not ask questions, at least at the "critical" level, nor would it even necessarily be a good idea not to.
I believe that the purpose of a service such as redhat's is that you answer all of those questions once for your 300+ machines and then it goes and does all of the installation, with those answers.
it would be nice if debian supported such a thing, but I don't know of any particularly good way to handle it.
Of course, for a single machine, if you're decently stilled, debian is an absolute dream.
I bought tribes2, and I like it a lot. I just didn't find any of their other titles interesting. Well, a while ago I bought railraod tycoon II, but while the graphics are nice that game sucks big time compared to railroad tycoon (original). What idiot thought that the default mode for a game where you build up a railroad empire is to have it last 15-20 years only, and then everything stops? In railroad tycoon I, you got over 100 years to build your railroad empire. That's a heck of a lot more satisfying. Oh well. The real problem, I believe, is the way that most games appeal to a relatively narrow variety of interests. When your population is big enough to only support a few games, not enough people will be interested in them, since you're still probably going to see a relatively similar array of interests in the linux community. It's a pity that there aren't more games with a wide appeal.
How do you enable Silken Mouse in XFree86 4.x?
Hi, I was just wondering if you have an email address that I could contact you at, I have a few more questions relating to this.
If Jupiter were to light in the way that you describe, isn't it quite possible that it wouldn't have enough mass (-> gravity) to hold itself together under the massive outward pressure of fusion in its core? Thus it could get lit for a relatively short period of time, but it could easily not last given its mass.
As an extreme example, our nuclear bombs work on the principle that you're describing to light jupiter, but they don't exactly last very long.
My very imprecise understanding of it (IANAA <- I Am Not An Astrophysicist) is that the reason that the sun doesn't blow apart is the extreme gravity holds it together. That's why in several billion years as the mass of the sun decreases through fusion (and subsequent radiation), it won't have the mass to keep itself so compact so it will get bigger from the outward pressure of the fusion in its core.
Then for really big stars, when they run out of fuel, that outward pressure dissapears rather suddenly and everything falls back in. This creates an incredible amount of pressure inside and 'lights' the star for one last time, fusing heavier elements to get the really big stuff (such as lead, uranium, etc.). Unfortunately, this doesn't last very long as the energy released is incredibly huge, and the outward pressure wins over the gravity in a rather dramatic fashion called a supernova.
Now, getting back to Jupiter, given that it's not massive enough to light itself through the pressure exerted by gravity, isn't it rather likely that if it were to get artificially 'lit', it wouldn't have enough mass to hold itself together and it would go boom, rather than burn?
are you sure that you uploaded the entire thing? it doesn't seem to work.
What criteria are you using? Sure it has lots of features, but the only possible explanation for how many misfeatures (most likely bugs, but you never know) it has is that the people who write it don't use it. It makes all but the most basic of tasks anywhere from annoying to painful. Writing macros for it is an exercise in masochism, especially with its oh-so-helpful error messages which can usually be summarized as "something bad happened". At least someone had the good idea to make the debugger stop on the line where something bad happened or it would be impossible to write macros in it.
Excel might be many things, but the only thing that it's the best at is causing pain. Well, it's reasonably good at the various embedding that microsoft is so fond of (and even a few non-ms people like too, apparently).
Still, I haven't met any people face to face who actually claimed to like excel, and I'm talking about the various non-technical people at a bank, most of whom have little more than heard of linux.
That microsoft held a trademark not on "Windows", but on "Microsoft Windows", since windows is both so common and the idea of a windowing interface preceded their use of it anyway (and was so common to refer to the interface type in this industry). Now, if this is the case, and the product is not "Microsoft Lindows", would there still be a problem?
I don't normally do this, but you're either a moron or a troll. Either way, please go away.
/. supported killfiles...
X is not hard to install if you use the tools to install it provided by people like mandrake or redhat.
X is not slow.
X is not bloated.
What X is is flexible, powerful, and unfortunately restricted by a bunch of moronic hardware companies who hate to release specs.
I really wish that
Actually, he was saying that the phrase "devout Christian" is slowly being transformed in modern language from a generic term to one which refers primarily to a bunch of half-baked nuts who happen to be Christians.
I'm dubious about the point, the word devout rarely is used in connection with people like Jack Chick. Devout seems to tend to refer to people of popular sympathy like the Pope and Mother Teresa, whereas Jack Chick is a "fanatic", "Lunatic", or "Nut". People a little bit less absurd than Chick, such as the guy who blamed the 9/11 attacks on gays and lesbians etc. are generally termed "right-wing christian extremsists", though it is occasionally shortened to "right-wing christians" or sometimes just "right-wingers", etc.
However, it is certainly true that there are plenty of people who at least call themselves Christian who seem to have decided that reason is not particularly important, and it is true that their great numbers and vocal political stances do tend permute the general image of a "Christian" to be one of them, rather than the Christians who like reason and logic and so forth.
As to where his point stands, I don't know. But what he's talking about is the gradual association of "illogical idiot" with "Christian" because there happen to be some of the former who are some of the latter who are very vocal (see the entire creation vs. evolution debate).
It's a real shame, but he certainly wasn't advocating loose moral standards, actually somewhat tighter ones that the people he disagreed with - he wants standards of intellectual honesty, as well as the other standards.
Linux runs on machines from a wristwatch to an S/390.
2000/XP runs on? Oh, that's right. A PIII through a PIV. Yup. Those microsoft guys make real OS's that run on real hardware.
As for commercial Unices, well, what exactly classifies one as a commercial UNIX? Are you counting unix-type systems that are sold for money, or does the code have to have been licensed from sys V at some point? If it's the former definition, then linux is a commercial UNIX (IIRC it even got unix98 certified).
Btw, did you recommend that people move off of NT when there were the alpha and beta builds of 2000 being circulated around?
Oh well, enough feeding the trolls. Back to studying for real analysis. It would be nice to actually help out on this kernel, too. From what I can gather there are plenty of jobs that are quite doable by non-experts. For example, adapting block drivers to the new interface.