I've heard of a few people marrying 16 year olds way back in the 1800's, but then that was the times.
My mother's aunt was married when she was barely 14. My (deceased) great uncle was 18. That was in the 1920's or 1930's (don't remember exactly when). My grandmother was married when she was 16 (and still is). And all quite happily, I should add (at least in the sense of their marriages--lots of other things were wrong, but not that aspect).
I haven't seen a piece of journalism this bad in a long time. Let's start with the title: ``Printers to get their own Web addresses'' Umm, does that mean there will be a URL scheme to go with IPP?
How about ``A system administrator could manage his printers from a hotel room.'' Haven't these guys heard of lpq(8)/telnet(1)? Geesh.
Don't let this bit of CNN reporting dissuade you from IPP, however, because it looks like it will fix some of my pet peeves with Berkeley lpd(8)--namely, no decent authentication, no queue management in the protocol beyond deleting jobs, and no thought given to the actual format of the transported data (you've got to either use Postscript queues or raw text queues or use specific printer drivers on all clients).
It should be noted that most expensive printers with network connections already support LPR and many support a strange feature where you can `print' HTML files (it's called ``Web printing'').
Actually, they aren't problems, because from what I can tell creating an account doesn't give you moderator status. The only way to get moderator status seems to be for Rob Malda (fear the taco) to give it to you. And I don't know how you qualify for that. =) It would be nice, though, to have.
Secondly, I think that out of 70,000/daughters, some of them have a low threshold (I mean, mine is -99, so I see EVERYTHING), and if you see a comment with a moderation of -10 that isn't abusive or extremely offtopic, then you should tell Rob about it, and he can look into it.
I like this system. I'm setting up my own user discussion system, and it's interesting to see how my thoughts on how to do things are similar to this.
Trust me, paid membership without anonymous access is the ONLY way to keep/. from going the way of the alt.* hierarchy.
Actually, that's not quite the case here, because alt.* is controlled by none (other than several thousand newsadmins)./. is controlled by our dear Rob Malda (fear the taco), and he can do whatever he wants to prevent the disintegration into alt.
I don't mean 17 year olds; I'm talking young (13 yrs). In addition, the conditions of such marriages within the context of the Mormon church tended to be abusive. I'm not saying this is a reason to censor mormon.org; I'm saying it wouldn't be hard to find reasons to censor it. In any case, various state statutes don't affect the ethicality or unethicality of the situation. (I personally don't have a problem with people under the age of 18 getting married, but what do I know? I can barely write a decent Xserver.)
You'll notice `unscientific' was in quotes, because I don't think the Scriptures ever are. But many others do and want to `protect' their children from such infectious ideas as are found in the Bible.
The Bible does have some pretty rough stuff in it, however, and most parents wouldn't like the material if they saw it out of context and rewritten in plain current usage. I agree, however: it wouldn't have a negative effect on children; if anything, it reenforces the child's idea of what is ethical and what is unethical.
Unless you can propose some radical economic system that drives the cost of production and distribution towards zero, rewards content creators, and yet somehow offers no protection for IP, then please enlighten us.
Go to this website and read. It has some very interesting ideas of how to musical artists could be paid by the very act of listerns and fans copying their music. I don't agree with the idea in its entirety, but at least give it some thought--there's more than just the present American system.
Stallman has written quite loquaciously on how such a society might function. Of course, he assumes that the majority of the population wants to be good and help their neighbor, which nowadays might be a misguided assumption. (That's required for any society to work correctly, though).
If you're a typical/. troller, though, don't read the GNU writings. Instead, just keep posting that we have to have the current IP scheme because otherwise we're all communists and there's no way to make money!
In fact, as the report shows, certain blocks were overridden, such as Utah's own www.mormon.com (one wonders why that was blocked in the first place). But the list of wrongly censored sites dwarfs any attempt to catch up.
That could be because IIRC that site promoted polygamy, which is illegal in the U.S., and pedophilia in the sense of promoting that minors be `married'. I'm not sure if it still does, but I do know the Mormon Church definitely promote these things a number of years ago. I do not know what they promote now.
Most Mormons, of course, don't believe in pedophilia, but at one time the upper administration (bishops?) of the Mormon Church had a serious problem with this. (Note that many other Churches and also many non-religious organisations have the same problems with corruption and abuse in the upper ranks).
Personally, I would have the monitors be facing in such a way so that a number of people would be able to see what someone was looking at, so hopefully the shame factor would prevent library resources being used for less-than erudite purposes.
It used to think this until I was in a couple libraries. Some people just don't care; some even use it in an exhibitionist manner. The librarians acted nervous and wouldn't do anything about it. It was quite obnoxious. I wish I'd had a program to send data with the URG bit high handy!
I still think it's a good idea; if people are reading explicit textual content, such as alt.abuse.sexual.recovery or informatoing about STDs, they can just use a small font size.
The Bible mentions incest (Lot and his daughters); prostitution in several hundred places; explicit imagry (Song of Solomon; parts of Ezekiel and Lamentations); acts of extreme violence (King Eglon; a couple places where a few thousand women and children were slain with the edge of the sword); and, of course, `unscientific' ideas.
I suppose the fact that he was a libertarian socialist (dirty word!)
No, it's not! People are free to hold a variety of political beliefs. I dislike almost all major parties, and the libertarian part isn't there (yet), so I'll grant you grace. =)
will tick off a few people on/. -- he exposes property (both physical and intellectual) as government-granted monopoly, rather than an indivudal, fundamental, undebatable right.
I believe that there is a fundamental right to physical property in the same sense you have a fundamental right of control over your own person. Take a look at the average two-year-old: they all have real proprety down pat; you can't even keep your shoes in a corner without them attempting to bring them back to you. But children don't get the idea of intellectual property very well with the exception of plagiarism (proper attribution)--no child would feel guilty for repeating a joke, but every child would take offence if another took credit for their joke (or other idea).
As for your arguments for capitalism vs socialism - are you BLIND!? You claim that socialism is bad because overall it tries to do what's best for society and screw the individual--as if capitalism doesn't cause at *least* as much harm to individuals...
The only reason socialism is wrong is because it condones one organisation (the state) bereaving everyone else (the people) of their property and then redistributing it as certain people in the state feel is `fair'. That is wrong--there is a fundamental right to property (as in physical proprety, like lands, houses, cards, food, your own person, &c.)
Capitalism by itself is worthless. Capitalism paired with a society that believes in conducting business fairly and honestly, performing good deeds for the less advantage, and not violating other's right to life and property works very well. But capitalism without ethics (or morality, if you want to call it that) is good for nothing--it's anarchy (and let's please not start talking about that).
Just remember: did your mother attend to your every need for the first year or so of your life because of a hope of making profit or because of pure love for a helpless infant?
What was it that Gordon Gecko said in Wall Street? "Greed is good. Greed works." I believe that was it. Greed seems to be the entire incentive for doing anything worthwhile in this (or most any other) country. (Not necessarily the greed of the scientists that are doing the work, but the greed of the stockholders who are expecting to make money by funding the research.)
Greed is NOT good. Greed is evil! While there is nothing wrong with wanting to create a useful product or provide a useful service by which both yourself and others may profit, greed in the sense of wanting to benefit yourself without regard for others is very, very, wrong. While civil government is not called on to prevent greed, they are called upon to prevent wrongdoing, and almost all greed involves wrongdoing. Why do you think the SEC exists in the U.S.? Why do you think there is so much regulation of things like the air travel industry? Because greed prevents these things from functioning according the law of love, which should be our motivation for all that we do. If it's not, why are we doing it?
Since our entire economy depends on the ownership of ideas, I don't know how (especially with the world economy in its present condition) we could move away from the current system. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Richard Stallman and others have proposed many ideas on how such a society might function; you can read about them at the the FSF's website. Most of the ideas are pretty wild and sound very foreign to our ears.
But we must admit that the pure motivation for profit is not what drives a soecity to greatness. The motivitation to show love to our fellow neighbor what drives a society to greatness. Who is remembered with more adoration--the head of the East India Company or Florence Nightingale/Louisa Alcott? Who left a legacy of opression and who left a legacy of helping the hurting and sick?
Let us have Nightingale as our example. May we all do one tenth of what she did.
The trouble is: who owns the unomodified genes? Depending upon your worldview, you consider them a gift from Gaia, a gift from God, or a gift from nature (insert other religious beliefs here). Monsanto is being extremely presumptuous in assuming they can take the genes BSD-style and add their own licencing terms.
I would consider legislation to require all existing genetic material to be licenced under a GPL-like licence (which makes since, since genes really are an encoding for software) imperative. This would be an excellent solution the controversy over genetically modified plants and animals and the resultant foods--you can see the `source' (to the genes) and see what it does. It takes the fear away--at least it would for me. OTOH, having Monsanto creating seeds that spread infertility among plant crops is a criminal action tantamount to biological warfare, and no private entity should be allowed to do that. Spreading proteins that prevent proper reproduction is a weapon of mass desctruction and ought be treated so.
It costs millions to genetically engineer a new seed. If they didn't have IP protection, they'd never be able to regain their expenses...
``It takes hundreds of slaves to pick all the cotton and process it from a medium-sized field.'' Denying a fundamental liberty because it makes a certain business avenue possible is wrong. Monsanto will have to find a new profit avenue.
Which reminds me--Monsanto is in Chapter 11 and they may not be long for this world. They've had serious trouble competing, and they foray into bioengineering has been a last-ditch attempt to attract investment.
You have a very shaky understanding of American history. Slavery benefited a tiny minority of the population (at least in the South), while the 80% or so who didn't own any slaves ended up doing the bulk of the fighting (and dying) in the Civil War to defend the institution.
This is certainly true. However, the slavery system was integral to the old Southern economy. It should also be noted that many who didn't personally own slaves believed in the insitution, or didn't believe there was anything wrong with--``I wouldn't personally own any slaves, of course.''
It should also be noted that as many people didn't believe blacks to be fully human, they didn't really count as population (except for the purposes of determing the number of congressional Representatives).
This adds even more credibility to your argument, though--if copyright slavery only benefits a very few (and, indeed, it does--for example, there are but 5 major record companies today, and they each insist on owning the copyrights of their artists' work), then it should be abolished in the name of equality.
Well said. In my opinion, the current intellectual ``property'' scheme benefits almost no-one. People simply do not realise what freedoms are lost because they've never experienced anything else. Since lost of intellectual freedom is not nearly as severe as the more common losses of property, the right to own property, or of one's personal freedom to be (prison/execution), the effects are far more subtle and it's much more difficult to get people to think outside of the box of what a world without IP walls could be like (no offence intended towards a common protocol in use on internets).
But of course! It would be an absolutely TERRIBLE crime if a schoolchild used public resources to read religious materials. What would the parents think?
Seriously, I was in a school a while ago that had censorship, and it was terrible. It blocked useful sites and let some really bad stuff through (a pudgy kid in the back was hogging the printer--I can't believe no one said anything).
The only cure for this is to have adults monitoring their children when they use the Internet. Of course, that would require that a parent be involved in their child's life, and that really does take more effort than we'd like. The sad thing is that most parents don't realise how much worse the material on T.V. is. IMO (and IIRC there is research that confirms this) watching violence depicted in a moving picture is more harmful to a young child than seeing a still picture of a much worse seen. No-one wants to address these issues with the real solution, which is for parents to take care of their children. Everyone wants software and V-chips to do the parenting for them.
On the one hand I'm a Linux Geek. On the other hand I own, let's just say, many many Microsoft shares. I love and worship Linux on it's technical merits but money is kind of cool too.
``Money certainly is cool. That's why I traffick children. Now, I love children, and wouldn't myself do anything to hurt them--but hey, business and business, and I have to eat! Most of the children don't have much of a future anyways. They're so easy to round up and they do fetch a good price--$50 a head on the open market. You can find some deals of mine on eBay, and please be sure to leave me some good feedback.''
Please, please, please, don't be one of those people who live for stock prices. It hurts everyone involved, and the stock price does eventually come down. I personally could make lots of money by spending my life doing Windows NT coding for a product that doesn't yet have any NT port. The product is currently suffering, and I do believe I could go in and ``fix it''. But I don't want to. I'm also torn--I could get a good foot in the door in this company, and might even get them to use Linux. But I don't want to do NT coding if I don't have to.
This reminds me of coder(at)ibm.net's policy: he's been a profitable SI valley consultant for 20 years, and he won't even go near a machine using any Microsoft software. He goes so far as to block all mail from a Microsoft-controlled domain (*@*.msn.com; *@*.hotmail.com). Even I don't go that far.
<sigh> This is a bit of a rant. Go ahead and moderate it, people.
They're going to run out of points at some point and they're going to have to post a LOT of comments to get more of them.
For some reason I had a bunch of points this morning even though I had zero last night. I've so far been looking for and promoting good posts with good writing. I must confess that since we got the new/. (new box, new user-features, more moderators) the user comment forums seem to have really improved--and I keep my threshold at -99. I just seems that ``first post'' is less fun when you automatically get sent to -5 land, and so the |)00|)s have stopped doing that.
Cheers, Joshua (who is getting antialiased fonts working. XFree86 4.0 is going to be good stuff...)
I keep my threshold at -99 because I (a) can handle the first MEEPTs and might miss something interesting as well (often controversial discussions ends up in -1, especially if it's offtopic) and (b) I want to keep an eye out for people who are minusing articles. My policy is to only minus truly obnoxious articles, like the first couple hundred ``I think I'm first'' articles and obvious trolls/MEEPTs.
It's a lot more fun to plus or plusplus well-composed and clearly-thought-out articles anyway.
Of course, if you're an anonymous coward, it's rather difficult to read with a low threshold because of the hassle. That's why you should get a user account! You can still post as an AC with a user accout, and posting with a user account doesn't mean anyone actualy knows who you are (names like ``Anonymous Cowherd'' certainly aren't going to compromise your privary--but do fear the cow).
When I was in Virginia two months ago I was reading the book the ABA publishes which is IIRC called ``The Foundations of our Heritage''. It has reams of legal documents from the Magna Carta to the Consitution to various papers by John Locke, Blackstone, &c. I remember reading an excerpt from a writing of either Locke or Blackstone--I do not remember which--where he spoke against what some in England were trying to with regard to the then-fledgling copyright law. The basic argument for copyright (and especially long, as in 100-year, copyright duration) was that many orphans and widows had no source of income other than copyright licencing fees.
While that's certainly a noble reason, it doesn't apply today. While many argue that reforming intellectual ``proprety'' law would result in too much upheaval in society, did not eliminating slavery result in the same upheaval? After all, many struggling farmers and widows and orphans depended upon slavery for their daily bread.
I'm rather disappointed. I was about to order this manual in a few hours, and I won't now. I have simply had it with shareware: it tends to be of poor quality, have poor bug fixes, and shareware vendors have a habit of disappearing.
I don't know anything about 3D image rendering, but I am sure many of you do. If anyone wants to start a project for a freed software 3D image rendering tool, let me know, and I'll make space available on my website for such a project.
Glender is my first choice: it incorporates GNU, Blender (to indicate the inspiratio for thise program), and Gl (as in OpenGL).
I believe a superuser can use the SITE TIMEOUT command with as large a number as he or she desire. Note that most FTP servers don't allow the superuser to use FTP.
An easier solution is to make your FTP client send the NOOP command every other minute (with standard Berkeley or GNU inet-utils ftp, use the `quote noop' command). This keeps the connection active.
different people's fixed disks which we filled to the brim with files
WHOOPS. Change that `we' to `were'. The only interesting files which which we've (I do sometimes refer to myself in the plural number) filled up people's disks bear names like `core'.
I took a look at the old Gentle Spirit website. It was sad reading because of all the tragedies that happened to its editors. This line especially struck me, however:
My own "children" are 26, 24, 22, 19, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 2 now, and I have four grandbabies - Elizabeth Lillian (Betsy), 3, Meadow Anne, 2, Victoria Sophia (Tori), 2, and Judah Randolph, my very first grandboy, 1. Betsy and Tori belong to my son Roland and his wife, Joci, and Meadow and Judah belong to John and Amy. Roland and John work at a company owned by Bill Gates and they have done so well. Roland was recently promoted to Technical Integrations Manager and John is the Help Desk lead for the same company. They earn great salaries and live together with their families in the same house about an hour's drive from me, and this has made visiting convenient.
I just love it when Christians who think they are as seperate from the ``world'' as can be end up participating in the worst of the world's systems to the fullest extent. Ask Cheryl Lindsey what she thinks of `free software' is and she'd probably think you were talking about Internet Explorer.
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I've heard of a few people marrying 16 year olds way back in the 1800's, but then that was the times.
My mother's aunt was married when she was barely 14. My (deceased) great uncle was 18. That was in the 1920's or 1930's (don't remember exactly when). My grandmother was married when she was 16 (and still is). And all quite happily, I should add (at least in the sense of their marriages--lots of other things were wrong, but not that aspect).
I haven't seen a piece of journalism this bad in a long time. Let's start with the title: ``Printers to get their own Web addresses'' Umm, does that mean there will be a URL scheme to go with IPP?
How about ``A system administrator could manage his printers from a hotel room.'' Haven't these guys heard of lpq(8)/telnet(1)? Geesh.
Don't let this bit of CNN reporting dissuade you from IPP, however, because it looks like it will fix some of my pet peeves with Berkeley lpd(8)--namely, no decent authentication, no queue management in the protocol beyond deleting jobs, and no thought given to the actual format of the transported data (you've got to either use Postscript queues or raw text queues or use specific printer drivers on all clients).
It should be noted that most expensive printers with network connections already support LPR and many support a strange feature where you can `print' HTML files (it's called ``Web printing'').
Secondly, I think that out of 70,000 /daughters, some of them have a low threshold (I mean, mine is -99, so I see EVERYTHING), and if you see a comment with a moderation of -10 that isn't abusive or extremely offtopic, then you should tell Rob about it, and he can look into it.
I like this system. I'm setting up my own user discussion system, and it's interesting to see how my thoughts on how to do things are similar to this.
Trust me, paid membership without anonymous access is the ONLY way to keep /. from going the way of the alt.* hierarchy.
Actually, that's not quite the case here, because alt.* is controlled by none (other than several thousand newsadmins). /. is controlled by our dear Rob Malda (fear the taco), and he can do whatever he wants to prevent the disintegration into alt.
I don't mean 17 year olds; I'm talking young (13 yrs). In addition, the conditions of such marriages within the context of the Mormon church tended to be abusive. I'm not saying this is a reason to censor mormon.org; I'm saying it wouldn't be hard to find reasons to censor it. In any case, various state statutes don't affect the ethicality or unethicality of the situation. (I personally don't have a problem with people under the age of 18 getting married, but what do I know? I can barely write a decent Xserver.)
The Bible does have some pretty rough stuff in it, however, and most parents wouldn't like the material if they saw it out of context and rewritten in plain current usage. I agree, however: it wouldn't have a negative effect on children; if anything, it reenforces the child's idea of what is ethical and what is unethical.
Unless you can propose some radical economic system that drives the cost of production and distribution towards zero, rewards content creators, and yet somehow offers no protection for IP, then please enlighten us.
Go to this website and read. It has some very interesting ideas of how to musical artists could be paid by the very act of listerns and fans copying their music. I don't agree with the idea in its entirety, but at least give it some thought--there's more than just the present American system.
Stallman has written quite loquaciously on how such a society might function. Of course, he assumes that the majority of the population wants to be good and help their neighbor, which nowadays might be a misguided assumption. (That's required for any society to work correctly, though).
If you're a typical /. troller, though, don't read the GNU writings. Instead, just keep posting that we have to have the current IP scheme because otherwise we're all communists and there's no way to make money!
In fact, as the report shows, certain blocks were overridden, such as Utah's own www.mormon.com (one wonders why that was blocked in the first place). But the list of wrongly censored sites dwarfs any attempt to catch up.
That could be because IIRC that site promoted polygamy, which is illegal in the U.S., and pedophilia in the sense of promoting that minors be `married'. I'm not sure if it still does, but I do know the Mormon Church definitely promote these things a number of years ago. I do not know what they promote now.
Most Mormons, of course, don't believe in pedophilia, but at one time the upper administration (bishops?) of the Mormon Church had a serious problem with this. (Note that many other Churches and also many non-religious organisations have the same problems with corruption and abuse in the upper ranks).
Personally, I would have the monitors be facing in such a way so that a number of people would be able to see what someone was looking at, so hopefully the shame factor would prevent library resources being used for less-than erudite purposes.
It used to think this until I was in a couple libraries. Some people just don't care; some even use it in an exhibitionist manner. The librarians acted nervous and wouldn't do anything about it. It was quite obnoxious. I wish I'd had a program to send data with the URG bit high handy!
I still think it's a good idea; if people are reading explicit textual content, such as alt.abuse.sexual.recovery or informatoing about STDs, they can just use a small font size.
It's easy to be offended if you want to be.
I suppose the fact that he was a libertarian socialist (dirty word!)
No, it's not! People are free to hold a variety of political beliefs. I dislike almost all major parties, and the libertarian part isn't there (yet), so I'll grant you grace. =)
will tick off a few people on /. -- he exposes property (both physical and intellectual) as government-granted monopoly, rather than an indivudal, fundamental, undebatable right.
I believe that there is a fundamental right to physical property in the same sense you have a fundamental right of control over your own person. Take a look at the average two-year-old: they all have real proprety down pat; you can't even keep your shoes in a corner without them attempting to bring them back to you. But children don't get the idea of intellectual property very well with the exception of plagiarism (proper attribution)--no child would feel guilty for repeating a joke, but every child would take offence if another took credit for their joke (or other idea).
Cheers,
Joshua.
As for your arguments for capitalism vs socialism - are you BLIND!? You claim that socialism is bad because overall it tries to do what's best for society and screw the individual--as if capitalism doesn't cause at *least* as much harm to individuals...
The only reason socialism is wrong is because it condones one organisation (the state) bereaving everyone else (the people) of their property and then redistributing it as certain people in the state feel is `fair'. That is wrong--there is a fundamental right to property (as in physical proprety, like lands, houses, cards, food, your own person, &c.)
Capitalism by itself is worthless. Capitalism paired with a society that believes in conducting business fairly and honestly, performing good deeds for the less advantage, and not violating other's right to life and property works very well. But capitalism without ethics (or morality, if you want to call it that) is good for nothing--it's anarchy (and let's please not start talking about that).
Just remember: did your mother attend to your every need for the first year or so of your life because of a hope of making profit or because of pure love for a helpless infant?
What was it that Gordon Gecko said in Wall Street? "Greed is good. Greed works." I believe that was it. Greed seems to be the entire incentive for doing anything worthwhile in this (or most any other) country. (Not necessarily the greed of the scientists that are doing the work, but the greed of the stockholders who are expecting to make money by funding the research.)
Greed is NOT good. Greed is evil! While there is nothing wrong with wanting to create a useful product or provide a useful service by which both yourself and others may profit, greed in the sense of wanting to benefit yourself without regard for others is very, very, wrong. While civil government is not called on to prevent greed, they are called upon to prevent wrongdoing, and almost all greed involves wrongdoing. Why do you think the SEC exists in the U.S.? Why do you think there is so much regulation of things like the air travel industry? Because greed prevents these things from functioning according the law of love, which should be our motivation for all that we do. If it's not, why are we doing it?
Since our entire economy depends on the ownership of ideas, I don't know how (especially with the world economy in its present condition) we could move away from the current system. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
Richard Stallman and others have proposed many ideas on how such a society might function; you can read about them at the the FSF's website. Most of the ideas are pretty wild and sound very foreign to our ears.
But we must admit that the pure motivation for profit is not what drives a soecity to greatness. The motivitation to show love to our fellow neighbor what drives a society to greatness. Who is remembered with more adoration--the head of the East India Company or Florence Nightingale/Louisa Alcott? Who left a legacy of opression and who left a legacy of helping the hurting and sick?
Let us have Nightingale as our example. May we all do one tenth of what she did.
Cheers,
Joshua.
I would consider legislation to require all existing genetic material to be licenced under a GPL-like licence (which makes since, since genes really are an encoding for software) imperative. This would be an excellent solution the controversy over genetically modified plants and animals and the resultant foods--you can see the `source' (to the genes) and see what it does. It takes the fear away--at least it would for me. OTOH, having Monsanto creating seeds that spread infertility among plant crops is a criminal action tantamount to biological warfare, and no private entity should be allowed to do that. Spreading proteins that prevent proper reproduction is a weapon of mass desctruction and ought be treated so.
Cheers,
Joshua.
It costs millions to genetically engineer a new seed. If they didn't have IP protection, they'd never be able to regain their expenses...
``It takes hundreds of slaves to pick all the cotton and process it from a medium-sized field.'' Denying a fundamental liberty because it makes a certain business avenue possible is wrong. Monsanto will have to find a new profit avenue.
Which reminds me--Monsanto is in Chapter 11 and they may not be long for this world. They've had serious trouble competing, and they foray into bioengineering has been a last-ditch attempt to attract investment.
Cheers,
Joshua.
You have a very shaky understanding of American history. Slavery benefited a tiny minority of the population (at least in the South), while the 80% or so who didn't own any slaves ended up doing the bulk of the fighting (and dying) in the Civil War to defend the institution.
This is certainly true. However, the slavery system was integral to the old Southern economy. It should also be noted that many who didn't personally own slaves believed in the insitution, or didn't believe there was anything wrong with--``I wouldn't personally own any slaves, of course.''
It should also be noted that as many people didn't believe blacks to be fully human, they didn't really count as population (except for the purposes of determing the number of congressional Representatives).
This adds even more credibility to your argument, though--if copyright slavery only benefits a very few (and, indeed, it does--for example, there are but 5 major record companies today, and they each insist on owning the copyrights of their artists' work), then it should be abolished in the name of equality.
Well said. In my opinion, the current intellectual ``property'' scheme benefits almost no-one. People simply do not realise what freedoms are lost because they've never experienced anything else. Since lost of intellectual freedom is not nearly as severe as the more common losses of property, the right to own property, or of one's personal freedom to be (prison/execution), the effects are far more subtle and it's much more difficult to get people to think outside of the box of what a world without IP walls could be like (no offence intended towards a common protocol in use on internets).
Cheers,
Joshua.
Seriously, I was in a school a while ago that had censorship, and it was terrible. It blocked useful sites and let some really bad stuff through (a pudgy kid in the back was hogging the printer--I can't believe no one said anything).
The only cure for this is to have adults monitoring their children when they use the Internet. Of course, that would require that a parent be involved in their child's life, and that really does take more effort than we'd like. The sad thing is that most parents don't realise how much worse the material on T.V. is. IMO (and IIRC there is research that confirms this) watching violence depicted in a moving picture is more harmful to a young child than seeing a still picture of a much worse seen. No-one wants to address these issues with the real solution, which is for parents to take care of their children. Everyone wants software and V-chips to do the parenting for them.
Cheers,
Joshua (hi Orwell!)
``Money certainly is cool. That's why I traffick children. Now, I love children, and wouldn't myself do anything to hurt them--but hey, business and business, and I have to eat! Most of the children don't have much of a future anyways. They're so easy to round up and they do fetch a good price--$50 a head on the open market. You can find some deals of mine on eBay, and please be sure to leave me some good feedback.''
Please, please, please, don't be one of those people who live for stock prices. It hurts everyone involved, and the stock price does eventually come down. I personally could make lots of money by spending my life doing Windows NT coding for a product that doesn't yet have any NT port. The product is currently suffering, and I do believe I could go in and ``fix it''. But I don't want to. I'm also torn--I could get a good foot in the door in this company, and might even get them to use Linux. But I don't want to do NT coding if I don't have to.
This reminds me of coder(at)ibm.net's policy: he's been a profitable SI valley consultant for 20 years, and he won't even go near a machine using any Microsoft software. He goes so far as to block all mail from a Microsoft-controlled domain (*@*.msn.com; *@*.hotmail.com). Even I don't go that far.
<sigh> This is a bit of a rant. Go ahead and moderate it, people.
Cheers,
Joshua.
They're going to run out of points at some point and they're going to have to post a LOT of comments to get more of them.
For some reason I had a bunch of points this morning even though I had zero last night. I've so far been looking for and promoting good posts with good writing. I must confess that since we got the new /. (new box, new user-features, more moderators) the user comment forums seem to have really improved--and I keep my threshold at -99. I just seems that ``first post'' is less fun when you automatically get sent to -5 land, and so the |)00|)s have stopped doing that.
Cheers,
Joshua (who is getting antialiased fonts working. XFree86 4.0 is going to be good stuff...)
It's a lot more fun to plus or plusplus well-composed and clearly-thought-out articles anyway.
Of course, if you're an anonymous coward, it's rather difficult to read with a low threshold because of the hassle. That's why you should get a user account! You can still post as an AC with a user accout, and posting with a user account doesn't mean anyone actualy knows who you are (names like ``Anonymous Cowherd'' certainly aren't going to compromise your privary--but do fear the cow).
Cheers,
Joshua.
While that's certainly a noble reason, it doesn't apply today. While many argue that reforming intellectual ``proprety'' law would result in too much upheaval in society, did not eliminating slavery result in the same upheaval? After all, many struggling farmers and widows and orphans depended upon slavery for their daily bread.
Cheers,
Joshua.
I don't know anything about 3D image rendering, but I am sure many of you do. If anyone wants to start a project for a freed software 3D image rendering tool, let me know, and I'll make space available on my website for such a project.
Glender is my first choice: it incorporates GNU, Blender (to indicate the inspiratio for thise program), and Gl (as in OpenGL).
Cheers,
Joshua.
An easier solution is to make your FTP client send the NOOP command every other minute (with standard Berkeley or GNU inet-utils ftp, use the `quote noop' command). This keeps the connection active.
Cheers,
Joshua.
different people's fixed disks which we filled to the brim with files
WHOOPS. Change that `we' to `were'. The only interesting files which which we've (I do sometimes refer to myself in the plural number) filled up people's disks bear names like `core'.
My own "children" are 26, 24, 22, 19, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 2 now, and I have four grandbabies - Elizabeth Lillian (Betsy), 3, Meadow Anne, 2, Victoria Sophia (Tori), 2, and Judah Randolph, my very first grandboy, 1. Betsy and Tori belong to my son Roland and his wife, Joci, and Meadow and Judah belong to John and Amy. Roland and John work at a company owned by Bill Gates and they have done so well. Roland was recently promoted to Technical Integrations Manager and John is the Help Desk lead for the same company. They earn great salaries and live together with their families in the same house about an hour's drive from me, and this has made visiting convenient.
I just love it when Christians who think they are as seperate from the ``world'' as can be end up participating in the worst of the world's systems to the fullest extent. Ask Cheryl Lindsey what she thinks of `free software' is and she'd probably think you were talking about Internet Explorer.
Oh well. This is rather offtopic--forgive me.