No doubt goats will be slaughtered, wiccans consulted, and pentagrams drawn all in the hope that our missile intercept technology will actually work in a non-staged event.
And if it works? What then? How many successful test intercepts do you need before you think that the thing might actually work? Seriously, the only reason some folks are arguing that they don't think missile defense can work is because they do not like the politics of it. Eventually, missile defense can and will work. It's just an engineering problem, after all.
I for one do not think the USA should be deploying interceptors in Poland to antagonize the Russians, but, I've got no problem with spending a bunch of billions a year to give the USA a unique capability in a world where every country is working to develop ICBMs.
let's say that I got that lucky and figure out that in fact P=NP. Oh-la-la. What I would do is create a private business around my solution, making money solving problems without giving out the details of the solution itself.
I've thought about that. Let's say you did make an Active X control that could factor large numbers, calculate the most efficient route to travel a bunch of cities, solve gigantic systems of linear equations, and, by the way, plays a perfect game of minesweeper, I'd think somebody would figure out what you did before too long.
The only way you could keep it secret, at that point, would be to keep the code on your own web server so that your code wasn't actually distributed. However, even if you did that, research into NP-Completeness would taken on a huge new level. Right now, most people think that P!=NP and so really aren't pursuing it. If you went and actually did it, and declared it a corporate secret (after they realized you did it), you would be no doubt be infiltrated with corporate and government spies, or, some government might just kidnap you and torture you until you gave it up. it's just that big of a deal to not go public with it.
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
The thing is, all of the deliberations behind what you suggest have dark sides as well. There's always going to be someone who writes a few emails saying that the sky is falling if the organization takes a particular course, and you'll always have someone with some sort of a political axe to grind on any study. So, if you have a safety study, it could also be a political tack disguised as safety. Similarly, in the case of a financial record, you'll have people arguing either way the appropriateness of a particular investment or even overall investment strategy.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but aren't patents basically to encourage and reward research? Therefore, isn't what is being protected, at core, the usage of knowledge?
That was the intent. But right now, Patents are being used to monetize investments in research, and that is not the same as promoting research. Research has its own rewards, and people are ultimately just going to do it, because they are curious. Curiosity and a sense of personal accomplishment matter and drive people in ways that, honestly, today's economy tends to constrain. Really, the only thing you need to do to protect research is to ensure that the economy is strong enough for people to have the time to do research, and it will just happen.
Patents are meant to cover a particular implementation in physical terms of a theoretical idea, and right now, they are often being used to try and cover the theory as well.
For example, my own pet hobby is working on a new way to factor large numbers. Let's say that my redneck republican self gets insanely lucky and bumbles into an algorithm that actually factors something in polynomial time, or even close enough to it so that RSA and the like are untenable. Since my approach depends on treating factor as a decision problem, it follows that if I did get really lucky and struck gold, that, it would be applicable to a wide range of other problems. Under today's law, patenting that would basically give me the right to apply that mathematical breakthrough for my own ends, when clearly, its in the interest of society that as many people should be allowed to exploit it. Basically, I would be allowed to charge money for any sort of an implementation of a combinatorial problem, which is absurd. Yes, I might theoretically build a billion dollar enterprise to milk this concept for all its worth, I would ultimately though screw everyone else with whom such a breakthrough might be useful, and damage the overall economy that many millions of times more.
Really, the dividing line is one of information and knowledge versus an actual real world device. As Jefferson so adroitly pointed out, information does not lose its value when it is copied. If I know something, and give that information to you, we both know something, and that doesn't hurt me that you know it. It does mean that I can't build some sort of an empire at your expense, but, given that we already went through the Catholic attempt, and then the various State attempts, to monopolize information, with disasterous results all the way around (and not a single success in 2000 years!), it is obvious that a social framework which allows information monopolies works to the disadvantage of mankind.
Quite ironically, those people whose livelihoods depend on information having value are the ones most arguing that information ought to be free. Patents are, in theory, today, supposed to protect IT workers and their inventions, but most GOOD IT workers these days remember that computer science as a field advanced even more before today's patent nuttiness. If we did anything, it would be to allow the shared discovery and utilitization of new techniques, but protect, if desired, commercial and open implementations. So, for example, if Microsoft invents a new GUI dongle, or on the flip side, someone invents a browser plugin, then, it would be better for everyone if you simply could not be sued for making your own implementation of that idea. That gives us a world where everyone's products can advance, we have IT for our customers and ourselves and leave the lawyers out, and everyone is happy.
It is really only the idiots at Wall Street, that have handed us the internet boom mess, the present mortgage mess and the previous S & L mess, that want to maximize every asset as much as possible with silly things like patents and create yet another bubble that will burst and screw the rest of us up. But really, Windows doesn't need any patents any more than Linux does. The value of both of those products is predicated on their overall customer experience, not some silly mining like claim staked out in Washington DC!
The problem with Wikileaks and other "expose" sites like it is that they rationalize what they do by choosing selective enforcement of privacy rights. They say that it is ok for them to trump an interest in privacy because doing so benefits the public good. While this might be laudable at the service, a more studied approach to this would show that one could also use the selective revealing of private documents to advance a political agenda. Everyone's private documents "look bad", and so, cherry picking which documents should be revealed, really just undermines the people being cherry picked.
For this reason, if you want truth, and are that interested in the truth, then you should advocate the full public disclosure of all corporate, charitable and government documents. Since this covers just about everyone, it follows that there should be no privacy at all and we ought to live in a world where everything is online. The alternative is to accept that there is a right to privacy, and if so, then institutions such as wikileaks ought to be viewed with a well deserved deep distrust, as the outcome can only be ultimately political.
Oh, it'll work out very well in the long term, that is, assuming the entire race isn't annihilated. The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive. I think the quoted researcher meant to say medium term.
No, they won't. The cultures with the strongest militaries and the willingness to use them will kill off those that don't, and take their stuff.
(yes, either of them could, Constitutional questions aside, be acheived through individual purchase mandates, but neither requires individual purchase mandates.)
Well the question here would be applicable to Clinton's health care proposal, which would require that everyone have health insurance. In fact, Obama's proposal requires the same as well, but he's treating the ends of the equation somewhat differently.
On the matter of "every citizen has a gun", Congress' power isn't the Commerce power, but the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia".
That does go back to my original point, which is, the idea of a standing Army as we have it today is rather unconstitutional, isn't it? I mean, if we conclude that the founding fathers envisioned an armed citizenry, "the militia" as not being an army, in order to have 2nd amendment rights, then, we also have to conclude that we can't really have a standing army. Or, at least, if there was one, the militia and the army is not the same thing. I think they were quite capable of saying Army even in those days and the word "militia" implies something very different than an armed citizenry AND and an army.
I only bring this up because in Jefferson's letters to Madison and vice versa, an excellent volume, both men felt the idea of a permanent army was a risk to the republic. The idea was that citizens would be armed, so, that, they could be called up in times of crisis, and repel the invader, and that was better than having a standing army, which might be used for more imperial ends, or to support a tyranny. Sure, we can say government by the consent of the governed, and Jefferson could throw out such dreamy sounding things, but, to Madison, it was a practical consideration, and his answer was that every citizen should be armed.
There is no such thing as FREE, there will always be a hook hidden somewhere in the bait.
Well even "Free" software isn't really free. Its costs of development are picked up as part of a consultancy arrangement, or, through funding by companies that distribute that software as part of some other bundled service. Like, Apache is free, but its funded, IIRC, by a coalition of large ISPs that use it. They in turn recover the costs from their hosting customers.
Bundling some sort of a music fee into digital items is not a bad business model. The record companies get their piece of the pie, consumers can get a set of appliances where they can have their music.
This actually isn't that different from the software model, pre-Microsoft. Software was ultimately bundled in with the hardware and service contract costs and so everyone could just sorta of copy software all over the place. Heck, Microsoft owes a lot of its success to this sort of model for Windows largely due to its lack of DRM. If Microsoft required the sort of authentication with DOS and Windows 3.1 that it requires for Vista, it is very doubtful they would be in the dominant position they are in today. DOS used to be $10!!!
Of course, this bundling sucks for Linux and completely free software, but one could envision a distro actually having a service plan with it for DRM content. If you throw in a few extra bucks, the content plan could actually be used to help fund further Linux development. Thus, tacking a few bucks onto teeny boppers wanting to get the latest Hannah Montana on a Linux box could actually be used to help pay for things like additional FireFox, Open Office and other Linux core applications development.
The one thing that really hurts the credibility of the music industry, aside from the obvious and vile thuggishness with which RIAA presses its claims, is that, the artist's share of the proceeds is rather small. In the CD / Vinyl days, a large cut for the industry was reasonable because of all the people that the business needed to pay to make physical copies. Now, with electronic distribution, there's really no moral reason why the artist can't get a larger piece of the pie. But as we have seen with the writer's strike, it seems that the content industry isn't really interested in promoting, well, the truly gifted people that make content, but rather, exploiting them, and that completely undermines any legitimate claim onto the advantages of copyright. The recording industry isn't really an enabler of artists, as much as it is more like the Islamic caliphs of old sitting on overland trade routes, exploiting them until the Europeans figured out how to sail around them and avoid the ridiculous surcharges.
To have an efficient capitalistic economy, you want to reward investment in people that actually add value, and record companies don't. So, having a more consumer friendly business model won't fix the problem. Record companies have to actually pay the artists a real percentage of the music sales. IF shareware distributors can thrive taking 10-15% of a sale, leaving artists with the lion's share, then so can record companies. The situation is different with movies, which are much more collaborative and capital intensive thing, but, even there, there's no reason that the principals of a movie can't get a bigger piece of the pie.
AmigaDOS booted from an 800k floppy and needed less than 512k of ram. It had all these basic gui things: file management, task management, a user friendly command line shell and so on. I do like the BeOS style interface, but its greatest accomplishment is not its size.
Yeah, but Amiga printing support was terrible, and that brings up an important limitation / benefit. AmigaDOS had a huge advantage that today's operating systems cannot have. It was welded directly to the hardware. Witness GDI in Windows, or, for that matter, the drawing surface in BeOS. Those surfaces completely abstract the graphics device from the user. That adds bulk and complexity to the OS code, but it means you can have an upgrade path for graphics cards.
By contrast, in Amiga OS, you could always fish your way through the display to the underlying RastPort. You could take a pointer to an Intuition object, like a Window, then go into a Screen, and from there a RastPort (or something like that)... anyway the RastPort was the animal that was the screen memory and you could write to it willy nilly. There was the whole mess of multiple graphics planes that complicated things, although you could use the Blitter.... the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Nowadays, graphics hardware is insanely complicated and you almost have to thank the Gods that nVidia and others actually write drivers for it. I would love to see a specification, at some point, that was as clear about how to drive a modern graphics card as RJ Mical's (right name) documentation for the Amiga Hardware. I still have the book, best hardware doc ever written. Given that, you could theoretically write a small OS pegged to a PC with a particular graphics card, sound card, and network, but what would that get you? Size, speed and elegance... but, ultimately, the economies of scale would screw you in favor of big fat retarded operating systems that abstract everything.
Now, there's quite a few features that AmigaDOS lacked that we would consider essential in this day and age. That would add to the bloat as well.
a) Printing. I think printers are terrible and foolish but some people can't live without them and have to have that paper copy. Does anyone remember the hype of computers bringing the paperless office? That was a few billion trees ago!
b) Scalable Fonts. Amiga DOS had nothing like True Type
c) Clear Type, font anti aliasing, scaling, etc. Amiga just had bitmap fonts. Fonts were blitted over and that was that.
d) 3d graphics.
e) Better sound. Amiga's 4 channel 8 bit sound would a bit dated by today's standard. Although, I loved how easy it was to program.
Look, I know the guy was Chinese, and was working for China, but he has these links to Iran, like, China spies on us and doesn't like us, and this guy was Chinese, so therefor, we should bomb Iran.
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
I apologize for my last post. I misread what you wrote.
There's an interesting argument here. You argue that the Congress has the power to mandate that every citizen has a gun, but, then if that were the case, would universe health care actually be constitutional? Can the Federal Government mandate that every citizen actually purchase something? Yes, the government can regulate commerce, but does it have the right to impose it?
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
You know, its funny, but its likely that we'll discover that jeez, if you bombard people with a message, they'll believe it. I mean, if showing people a million commercials about a car being cool to drive causes people to buy that car, then, why wouldn't showing people violence provoke violence, sex, provoke sex, and even pedophilia causes pedophia, gay stuff, gayness, and all the way up and down the board?
The problem there is that we only have a response to a possible threat, not the threat itself. That's not to say that there wasn't, but it doesn't necessarily mean there was one either. It's also odd that they were able to dig up the email responding to the threat, and not the threatening email itself?
As it is, the Judge ruled out that evidence from being included. So now the jury doesn't know that she felt that she was being threatened by Hans so much that she was in negotiations with him to drop charges she filed against him. That right there is motive. He killed her to keep her from going to the police. Hans might have logically concluded that, if she lives, then, he goes to jail, so, why not do her in and hope to get away with it.
I wonder why it is, here, that I am a basically patriarchal right winger, but I'm way more inclined to believe the Nina is a victim of the brutal husband theory, than I am to believe in the innocence of the man? And, on the flipside, I wonder why it is that so many liberals otherwise sympathetic to feminist causes, particularly Europeans, are more willing to believe that Hans is innocent! One would otherwise intuit that we right wingers, feeling so obviously threatened by the notion of empowered women, that, we would be more open to Hans's point of view, and similarly, lefties would be sticking up for Nina in droves. But here, it seems to be completely flipped? I wonder if it has to do with a European prejudice against the American judicial system? I wonder if they think that Law and Order is how American courts actually work? [ they don't ].
is pretty darn ambiguous, and had the founders run it through a test phase whereby people could have asked (as beta tester might have asked the developers), "umm, what does the first part of the sentence have to do with the second?
It would have been mighty tough to do that in an era when most people couldn't read.
As a historical note though, the idea of the 2nd amendment was in fact, to give the people the right to rebel against the government, and to eliminate the need and expense of a standing army. The FF's didn't trust the idea of a professional military at all, or really, anything that could be abused by the Federal Power, so that's why historically, America hasn't had a large military (until WWII).
So, if you are a peacenik liberal type, you couldn't really argue against the historical nature of the 2nd amendment - it is intended to be that every citizen should have a gun. But... you could also make a damned good argument against having a standing military. If the FF's saw today's DoD, they would be outraged, for sure!
The stuff in the email about threats is Nina's words and Nina's interpretation. It may even be a deliberate lie; Nina could have known it could be subpoenaed and used later in court proceedings
But then we would never agree, and in fact, we would never agree on gun control. Majority of Americans oppose gun control, which is why Democrats always lose presidential elections whenever they bring it up. Republicans could run Hitler, and Democrats, Ghandi, and if Ghandi said that guns should be banned, Ohio and PA go for Republicans, and with them, the general election.
The problem with your argument, first and foremost, is that you accept the idea that our rights are those contained in the Bill of Rights. That's not true at all. We naturally have all of the rights that are explicitly not in the Constitution. That's why you see most modern Constitutional Amendments written as "The Congress Shall Have the Power"... every amendment, paradoxically, even those that are supposed to protect civil rights, works by further constraining the rights of the people.
To reiterate, the Constitution is a sort of a treaty between the States. It gives specific powers to the Federal government, and it was understood by the framers (Madison, in particular), to mean that the Federal government could only do those things explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. If anything, the Bill of Rights only works to bar the states from enacting certain laws, but even that is a disputable interpretation.
Ironically, social conservatives who argue the unchanging Constitution are just as wrong as liberals who argue the alterable constitution. Under the Constitution, you do have a right, within your state, to own firearms, to a right to privacy and more, because there is no federal power enumerated to allow the regulation of firearms, privacy, religion, and more. So, from the get-go, by adopting the view of both political parties that says you've only got the rights that the Constitution gives you, you've just shot your freedoms in the foot!
Now, a lot of the rest of the article speaks to some need for consistency. This is an absolute non-starter, as consistency in law is the root of all tyranny. In the United States, the states all have their own courts and their own legal frameworks. Some states are in fact "states", but other states are "other things", and those things all mean something. It means something that Pennsylvania calls itself a Commonwealth and Maryland calls itself a State. Within those states, a lot of that is based on the common law, and the common law is based on the traditions of the people who live in those states. Codified law tends to arise out of a need to set it writing that part of the common law that comes up in court too much or is otherwise the subject of dispute of some kind. So, if you go and try and have a consistent law across all the states, and codify everything, you really are just trampling on all of the rights of all the people because you are inviting disputes over things that are traditions.
Nina Reiser discussed mediation between the two in the e-mail, which she apparently wrote on June 19, 2005. The judge said the jury will hear a redacted portion of the e-mail. Goodman then read sentences from Nina Reiser's e-mail that the jury will not be allowed to hear because the prejudical effect outweighs the probative value: "I will not continue mediation if you keep threatening me. When you give me a hard stare and (inaudible) that you are very good at combat, your request that I drop domestic-violence charges against you, it very much sounds like another threat. I warn you that if you are going to communicate with me in this manner, I will have to end mediation and report it to the police. However, threats are not part of the mediation process."
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No doubt goats will be slaughtered, wiccans consulted, and pentagrams drawn all in the hope that our missile intercept technology will actually work in a non-staged event.
And if it works? What then? How many successful test intercepts do you need before you think that the thing might actually work? Seriously, the only reason some folks are arguing that they don't think missile defense can work is because they do not like the politics of it. Eventually, missile defense can and will work. It's just an engineering problem, after all.
I for one do not think the USA should be deploying interceptors in Poland to antagonize the Russians, but, I've got no problem with spending a bunch of billions a year to give the USA a unique capability in a world where every country is working to develop ICBMs.
let's say that I got that lucky and figure out that in fact P=NP. Oh-la-la. What I would do is create a private business around my solution, making money solving problems without giving out the details of the solution itself.
I've thought about that. Let's say you did make an Active X control that could factor large numbers, calculate the most efficient route to travel a bunch of cities, solve gigantic systems of linear equations, and, by the way, plays a perfect game of minesweeper, I'd think somebody would figure out what you did before too long.
The only way you could keep it secret, at that point, would be to keep the code on your own web server so that your code wasn't actually distributed. However, even if you did that, research into NP-Completeness would taken on a huge new level. Right now, most people think that P!=NP and so really aren't pursuing it. If you went and actually did it, and declared it a corporate secret (after they realized you did it), you would be no doubt be infiltrated with corporate and government spies, or, some government might just kidnap you and torture you until you gave it up. it's just that big of a deal to not go public with it.
There can be a reasonable balance between transparency and privacy. Trade secrets, proprietary processes, and national secrets, I agree, should be undisclosed, but should things like financial records, safety/environmental studies, and so on should be publicly available. If businesses don't like that, then they could easily remain private, un-incorporated entities.
The thing is, all of the deliberations behind what you suggest have dark sides as well. There's always going to be someone who writes a few emails saying that the sky is falling if the organization takes a particular course, and you'll always have someone with some sort of a political axe to grind on any study. So, if you have a safety study, it could also be a political tack disguised as safety. Similarly, in the case of a financial record, you'll have people arguing either way the appropriateness of a particular investment or even overall investment strategy.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but aren't patents basically to encourage and reward research? Therefore, isn't what is being protected, at core, the usage of knowledge?
That was the intent. But right now, Patents are being used to monetize investments in research, and that is not the same as promoting research. Research has its own rewards, and people are ultimately just going to do it, because they are curious. Curiosity and a sense of personal accomplishment matter and drive people in ways that, honestly, today's economy tends to constrain. Really, the only thing you need to do to protect research is to ensure that the economy is strong enough for people to have the time to do research, and it will just happen.
Hmmm, what exactly is NOT maths in this world? :)
Patents are meant to cover a particular implementation in physical terms of a theoretical idea, and right now, they are often being used to try and cover the theory as well.
For example, my own pet hobby is working on a new way to factor large numbers. Let's say that my redneck republican self gets insanely lucky and bumbles into an algorithm that actually factors something in polynomial time, or even close enough to it so that RSA and the like are untenable. Since my approach depends on treating factor as a decision problem, it follows that if I did get really lucky and struck gold, that, it would be applicable to a wide range of other problems. Under today's law, patenting that would basically give me the right to apply that mathematical breakthrough for my own ends, when clearly, its in the interest of society that as many people should be allowed to exploit it. Basically, I would be allowed to charge money for any sort of an implementation of a combinatorial problem, which is absurd. Yes, I might theoretically build a billion dollar enterprise to milk this concept for all its worth, I would ultimately though screw everyone else with whom such a breakthrough might be useful, and damage the overall economy that many millions of times more.
Really, the dividing line is one of information and knowledge versus an actual real world device. As Jefferson so adroitly pointed out, information does not lose its value when it is copied. If I know something, and give that information to you, we both know something, and that doesn't hurt me that you know it. It does mean that I can't build some sort of an empire at your expense, but, given that we already went through the Catholic attempt, and then the various State attempts, to monopolize information, with disasterous results all the way around (and not a single success in 2000 years!), it is obvious that a social framework which allows information monopolies works to the disadvantage of mankind.
Quite ironically, those people whose livelihoods depend on information having value are the ones most arguing that information ought to be free. Patents are, in theory, today, supposed to protect IT workers and their inventions, but most GOOD IT workers these days remember that computer science as a field advanced even more before today's patent nuttiness. If we did anything, it would be to allow the shared discovery and utilitization of new techniques, but protect, if desired, commercial and open implementations. So, for example, if Microsoft invents a new GUI dongle, or on the flip side, someone invents a browser plugin, then, it would be better for everyone if you simply could not be sued for making your own implementation of that idea. That gives us a world where everyone's products can advance, we have IT for our customers and ourselves and leave the lawyers out, and everyone is happy.
It is really only the idiots at Wall Street, that have handed us the internet boom mess, the present mortgage mess and the previous S & L mess, that want to maximize every asset as much as possible with silly things like patents and create yet another bubble that will burst and screw the rest of us up. But really, Windows doesn't need any patents any more than Linux does. The value of both of those products is predicated on their overall customer experience, not some silly mining like claim staked out in Washington DC!
Define "strongest" with respect to ancient Rome and the barbarians
In the latter days, the barbarians were stronger. That is why Rome fell.
The problem with Wikileaks and other "expose" sites like it is that they rationalize what they do by choosing selective enforcement of privacy rights. They say that it is ok for them to trump an interest in privacy because doing so benefits the public good. While this might be laudable at the service, a more studied approach to this would show that one could also use the selective revealing of private documents to advance a political agenda. Everyone's private documents "look bad", and so, cherry picking which documents should be revealed, really just undermines the people being cherry picked.
For this reason, if you want truth, and are that interested in the truth, then you should advocate the full public disclosure of all corporate, charitable and government documents. Since this covers just about everyone, it follows that there should be no privacy at all and we ought to live in a world where everything is online. The alternative is to accept that there is a right to privacy, and if so, then institutions such as wikileaks ought to be viewed with a well deserved deep distrust, as the outcome can only be ultimately political.
Oh, it'll work out very well in the long term, that is, assuming the entire race isn't annihilated. The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive. I think the quoted researcher meant to say medium term.
No, they won't. The cultures with the strongest militaries and the willingness to use them will kill off those that don't, and take their stuff.
Question is, when's the IPO for a company mass producing this stuff?
(yes, either of them could, Constitutional questions aside, be acheived through individual purchase mandates, but neither requires individual purchase mandates.)
Well the question here would be applicable to Clinton's health care proposal, which would require that everyone have health insurance. In fact, Obama's proposal requires the same as well, but he's treating the ends of the equation somewhat differently.
On the matter of "every citizen has a gun", Congress' power isn't the Commerce power, but the power to "To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia".
That does go back to my original point, which is, the idea of a standing Army as we have it today is rather unconstitutional, isn't it? I mean, if we conclude that the founding fathers envisioned an armed citizenry, "the militia" as not being an army, in order to have 2nd amendment rights, then, we also have to conclude that we can't really have a standing army. Or, at least, if there was one, the militia and the army is not the same thing. I think they were quite capable of saying Army even in those days and the word "militia" implies something very different than an armed citizenry AND and an army.
I only bring this up because in Jefferson's letters to Madison and vice versa, an excellent volume, both men felt the idea of a permanent army was a risk to the republic. The idea was that citizens would be armed, so, that, they could be called up in times of crisis, and repel the invader, and that was better than having a standing army, which might be used for more imperial ends, or to support a tyranny. Sure, we can say government by the consent of the governed, and Jefferson could throw out such dreamy sounding things, but, to Madison, it was a practical consideration, and his answer was that every citizen should be armed.
Of course, then it gets into, what is a citizen?
I took the plunge and got rid of 'pay-tv' once and for all right before this strike,
Once you have your first child, suddenly, UNCLE TELEVISION will become your best friend.
There is no such thing as FREE, there will always be a hook hidden somewhere in the bait.
Well even "Free" software isn't really free. Its costs of development are picked up as part of a consultancy arrangement, or, through funding by companies that distribute that software as part of some other bundled service. Like, Apache is free, but its funded, IIRC, by a coalition of large ISPs that use it. They in turn recover the costs from their hosting customers.
In the original Amiga 1000, before kickstart was moved to a ROM chip, you had to boot from TWO floppy disks (talk about bloat!!)
:-)
That was the Amiga that I had!
Bundling some sort of a music fee into digital items is not a bad business model. The record companies get their piece of the pie, consumers can get a set of appliances where they can have their music.
This actually isn't that different from the software model, pre-Microsoft. Software was ultimately bundled in with the hardware and service contract costs and so everyone could just sorta of copy software all over the place. Heck, Microsoft owes a lot of its success to this sort of model for Windows largely due to its lack of DRM. If Microsoft required the sort of authentication with DOS and Windows 3.1 that it requires for Vista, it is very doubtful they would be in the dominant position they are in today. DOS used to be $10!!!
Of course, this bundling sucks for Linux and completely free software, but one could envision a distro actually having a service plan with it for DRM content. If you throw in a few extra bucks, the content plan could actually be used to help fund further Linux development. Thus, tacking a few bucks onto teeny boppers wanting to get the latest Hannah Montana on a Linux box could actually be used to help pay for things like additional FireFox, Open Office and other Linux core applications development.
The one thing that really hurts the credibility of the music industry, aside from the obvious and vile thuggishness with which RIAA presses its claims, is that, the artist's share of the proceeds is rather small. In the CD / Vinyl days, a large cut for the industry was reasonable because of all the people that the business needed to pay to make physical copies. Now, with electronic distribution, there's really no moral reason why the artist can't get a larger piece of the pie. But as we have seen with the writer's strike, it seems that the content industry isn't really interested in promoting, well, the truly gifted people that make content, but rather, exploiting them, and that completely undermines any legitimate claim onto the advantages of copyright. The recording industry isn't really an enabler of artists, as much as it is more like the Islamic caliphs of old sitting on overland trade routes, exploiting them until the Europeans figured out how to sail around them and avoid the ridiculous surcharges.
To have an efficient capitalistic economy, you want to reward investment in people that actually add value, and record companies don't. So, having a more consumer friendly business model won't fix the problem. Record companies have to actually pay the artists a real percentage of the music sales. IF shareware distributors can thrive taking 10-15% of a sale, leaving artists with the lion's share, then so can record companies. The situation is different with movies, which are much more collaborative and capital intensive thing, but, even there, there's no reason that the principals of a movie can't get a bigger piece of the pie.
AmigaDOS booted from an 800k floppy and needed less than 512k of ram. It had all these basic gui things: file management, task management, a user friendly command line shell and so on. I do like the BeOS style interface, but its greatest accomplishment is not its size.
Yeah, but Amiga printing support was terrible, and that brings up an important limitation / benefit. AmigaDOS had a huge advantage that today's operating systems cannot have. It was welded directly to the hardware. Witness GDI in Windows, or, for that matter, the drawing surface in BeOS. Those surfaces completely abstract the graphics device from the user. That adds bulk and complexity to the OS code, but it means you can have an upgrade path for graphics cards.
By contrast, in Amiga OS, you could always fish your way through the display to the underlying RastPort. You could take a pointer to an Intuition object, like a Window, then go into a Screen, and from there a RastPort (or something like that)... anyway the RastPort was the animal that was the screen memory and you could write to it willy nilly. There was the whole mess of multiple graphics planes that complicated things, although you could use the Blitter.... the point is, if you liked hacking on hardware, (which was the best part of 80's computing), you could do whatever you wanted, but that ultimately married your application to that hardware. Windows changed that... but that made it more complex.
Nowadays, graphics hardware is insanely complicated and you almost have to thank the Gods that nVidia and others actually write drivers for it. I would love to see a specification, at some point, that was as clear about how to drive a modern graphics card as RJ Mical's (right name) documentation for the Amiga Hardware. I still have the book, best hardware doc ever written. Given that, you could theoretically write a small OS pegged to a PC with a particular graphics card, sound card, and network, but what would that get you? Size, speed and elegance... but, ultimately, the economies of scale would screw you in favor of big fat retarded operating systems that abstract everything.
Now, there's quite a few features that AmigaDOS lacked that we would consider essential in this day and age. That would add to the bloat as well.
a) Printing. I think printers are terrible and foolish but some people can't live without them and have to have that paper copy. Does anyone remember the hype of computers bringing the paperless office? That was a few billion trees ago!
b) Scalable Fonts. Amiga DOS had nothing like True Type
c) Clear Type, font anti aliasing, scaling, etc. Amiga just had bitmap fonts. Fonts were blitted over and that was that.
d) 3d graphics.
e) Better sound. Amiga's 4 channel 8 bit sound would a bit dated by today's standard. Although, I loved how easy it was to program.
Look, I know the guy was Chinese, and was working for China, but he has these links to Iran, like, China spies on us and doesn't like us, and this guy was Chinese, so therefor, we should bomb Iran.
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
I apologize for my last post. I misread what you wrote.
There's an interesting argument here. You argue that the Congress has the power to mandate that every citizen has a gun, but, then if that were the case, would universe health care actually be constitutional? Can the Federal Government mandate that every citizen actually purchase something? Yes, the government can regulate commerce, but does it have the right to impose it?
Me thinks not.
No, its not. "Every citizen should have a gun" is arguably something within Congress' Article I powers should it have ever decided to exercise them that way, but Amendment II neither has the purpose nor the effect of mandating or even encouraging the citizenry to arm themselves, it simply restricts the federal government from prohibiting that (or, at least, from prohibiting the states from allowing it.)
I simply disagree with both assertions.
You know, its funny, but its likely that we'll discover that jeez, if you bombard people with a message, they'll believe it. I mean, if showing people a million commercials about a car being cool to drive causes people to buy that car, then, why wouldn't showing people violence provoke violence, sex, provoke sex, and even pedophilia causes pedophia, gay stuff, gayness, and all the way up and down the board?
The problem there is that we only have a response to a possible threat, not the threat itself. That's not to say that there wasn't, but it doesn't necessarily mean there was one either. It's also odd that they were able to dig up the email responding to the threat, and not the threatening email itself?
As it is, the Judge ruled out that evidence from being included. So now the jury doesn't know that she felt that she was being threatened by Hans so much that she was in negotiations with him to drop charges she filed against him. That right there is motive. He killed her to keep her from going to the police. Hans might have logically concluded that, if she lives, then, he goes to jail, so, why not do her in and hope to get away with it.
I wonder why it is, here, that I am a basically patriarchal right winger, but I'm way more inclined to believe the Nina is a victim of the brutal husband theory, than I am to believe in the innocence of the man? And, on the flipside, I wonder why it is that so many liberals otherwise sympathetic to feminist causes, particularly Europeans, are more willing to believe that Hans is innocent! One would otherwise intuit that we right wingers, feeling so obviously threatened by the notion of empowered women, that, we would be more open to Hans's point of view, and similarly, lefties would be sticking up for Nina in droves. But here, it seems to be completely flipped? I wonder if it has to do with a European prejudice against the American judicial system? I wonder if they think that Law and Order is how American courts actually work? [ they don't ].
is pretty darn ambiguous, and had the founders run it through a test phase whereby people could have asked (as beta tester might have asked the developers), "umm, what does the first part of the sentence have to do with the second?
It would have been mighty tough to do that in an era when most people couldn't read.
As a historical note though, the idea of the 2nd amendment was in fact, to give the people the right to rebel against the government, and to eliminate the need and expense of a standing army. The FF's didn't trust the idea of a professional military at all, or really, anything that could be abused by the Federal Power, so that's why historically, America hasn't had a large military (until WWII).
So, if you are a peacenik liberal type, you couldn't really argue against the historical nature of the 2nd amendment - it is intended to be that every citizen should have a gun. But... you could also make a damned good argument against having a standing military. If the FF's saw today's DoD, they would be outraged, for sure!
The stuff in the email about threats is Nina's words and Nina's interpretation. It may even be a deliberate lie; Nina could have known it could be subpoenaed and used later in court proceedings
Or maybe, she was just threatened.
...is the second amendment!
But then we would never agree, and in fact, we would never agree on gun control. Majority of Americans oppose gun control, which is why Democrats always lose presidential elections whenever they bring it up. Republicans could run Hitler, and Democrats, Ghandi, and if Ghandi said that guns should be banned, Ohio and PA go for Republicans, and with them, the general election.
amendment says ...yet we allow for exceptions
The problem with your argument, first and foremost, is that you accept the idea that our rights are those contained in the Bill of Rights. That's not true at all. We naturally have all of the rights that are explicitly not in the Constitution. That's why you see most modern Constitutional Amendments written as "The Congress Shall Have the Power"... every amendment, paradoxically, even those that are supposed to protect civil rights, works by further constraining the rights of the people.
To reiterate, the Constitution is a sort of a treaty between the States. It gives specific powers to the Federal government, and it was understood by the framers (Madison, in particular), to mean that the Federal government could only do those things explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. If anything, the Bill of Rights only works to bar the states from enacting certain laws, but even that is a disputable interpretation.
Ironically, social conservatives who argue the unchanging Constitution are just as wrong as liberals who argue the alterable constitution. Under the Constitution, you do have a right, within your state, to own firearms, to a right to privacy and more, because there is no federal power enumerated to allow the regulation of firearms, privacy, religion, and more. So, from the get-go, by adopting the view of both political parties that says you've only got the rights that the Constitution gives you, you've just shot your freedoms in the foot!
Now, a lot of the rest of the article speaks to some need for consistency. This is an absolute non-starter, as consistency in law is the root of all tyranny. In the United States, the states all have their own courts and their own legal frameworks. Some states are in fact "states", but other states are "other things", and those things all mean something. It means something that Pennsylvania calls itself a Commonwealth and Maryland calls itself a State. Within those states, a lot of that is based on the common law, and the common law is based on the traditions of the people who live in those states. Codified law tends to arise out of a need to set it writing that part of the common law that comes up in court too much or is otherwise the subject of dispute of some kind. So, if you go and try and have a consistent law across all the states, and codify everything, you really are just trampling on all of the rights of all the people because you are inviting disputes over things that are traditions.
Nina Reiser discussed mediation between the two in the e-mail, which she apparently wrote on June 19, 2005. The judge said the jury will hear a redacted portion of the e-mail. Goodman then read sentences from Nina Reiser's e-mail that the jury will not be allowed to hear because the prejudical effect outweighs the probative value: "I will not continue mediation if you keep threatening me. When you give me a hard stare and (inaudible) that you are very good at combat, your request that I drop domestic-violence charges against you, it very much sounds like another threat. I warn you that if you are going to communicate with me in this manner, I will have to end mediation and report it to the police. However, threats are not part of the mediation process."
But of course, that's not admitted.