I live in Springfield, MO, which is Mr. Ashcroft's home town. In fact, I'm in the same Sunday School class as him, though I've never met him.
There is precisely one reason why Mel Carnahan won the Senate race: SYMPATHY. It is, simply, impossible to campaign against a dead man and maintain any semblance of decency. Despite my disagreements with him, I have to acknowledge that Gov. Carnahan was a decent guy; any attempts to campaign against him would have been political suicide.
That having been said, I'm glad he got the nod for the AG post. As far as Ashcroft's actual statements, I'm not sure that violent video games are entirely responsible. I think it's foolish, though, to simply dismiss their influence out of hand.
I think the stronger point that needs to be made, though, is that the restraints against violence need to be internal and cultural, rather than enforced by an external authority, usually government. I don't think there's a/.er out there that wants more government control on anything; if people control themselves, there is no need for excessive government control.
Considering all of the mess about George Lucas not wanting the SW movies to come out on DVD, at least for a while, I wonder if he will have a problem with people using one of his terms to describe their own religion. Is Jedi a trademark or some other sort of IP (in the intellectual property sense) registered to Lucas, et al? If so, do these people's minds now belong to him, or at least their religious beliefs? Will one of them preaching violate the DMCA somehow?
As long as a company is restricting your employment, you are still effectively under their control. Therefore, it seems reasonable that if they can restrict what you do with your day, they should pay you for your time.
If they're still paying you, you can sit at home and do whatever you want with your time, I guess as long as your not making money off it or helping anybody else make money. This sounds to me like a good time to contribute to some open source projects, do some good to the community, keep your skills up, and get paid at the same time!
IIRC, Napster explicitly states that bots are not to be run on the service. Assuming that copyright.net doesn't have enough employees to do manual searches against 350,000 users, wouldn't they have had to employ a bot? Shouldn't their napster account have been removed? Why didn't the napster server pick up the bot activity?
Many volumes have been written on the creation/evolution debate, and I will not attempt to rehash any of that.
However, I wish to respond to the point that Caplan seems to make. If I am reading him properly, he says that because similar genes for similar functions occur in different species, there must be an evolutionary relationship. However, as anyone from/. should know, similar or identical code often pops in different projects that a programmer has written. Those programs have not morphed themselves into new software (unless they're running on a transmeta processor); rather, something that works well in one place is simply being implemented in another place. This is actually what could be expected of an intelligent designer, and seems (to me, at least) a more logical conclusion than saying that bacteria made themselves into humans (over the course of time, natural forces, yes, I'm quite familiar with the arguments...).
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Maybe they intentionally put this stupidity in the article to try to draw would-be criminals into trying it and then getting caught...
There is precisely one reason why Mel Carnahan won the Senate race: SYMPATHY. It is, simply, impossible to campaign against a dead man and maintain any semblance of decency. Despite my disagreements with him, I have to acknowledge that Gov. Carnahan was a decent guy; any attempts to campaign against him would have been political suicide.
That having been said, I'm glad he got the nod for the AG post. As far as Ashcroft's actual statements, I'm not sure that violent video games are entirely responsible. I think it's foolish, though, to simply dismiss their influence out of hand.
I think the stronger point that needs to be made, though, is that the restraints against violence need to be internal and cultural, rather than enforced by an external authority, usually government. I don't think there's a /.er out there that wants more government control on anything; if people control themselves, there is no need for excessive government control.
Considering all of the mess about George Lucas not wanting the SW movies to come out on DVD, at least for a while, I wonder if he will have a problem with people using one of his terms to describe their own religion. Is Jedi a trademark or some other sort of IP (in the intellectual property sense) registered to Lucas, et al? If so, do these people's minds now belong to him, or at least their religious beliefs? Will one of them preaching violate the DMCA somehow?
If they're still paying you, you can sit at home and do whatever you want with your time, I guess as long as your not making money off it or helping anybody else make money. This sounds to me like a good time to contribute to some open source projects, do some good to the community, keep your skills up, and get paid at the same time!
IIRC, Napster explicitly states that bots are not to be run on the service. Assuming that copyright.net doesn't have enough employees to do manual searches against 350,000 users, wouldn't they have had to employ a bot? Shouldn't their napster account have been removed? Why didn't the napster server pick up the bot activity?
However, I wish to respond to the point that Caplan seems to make. If I am reading him properly, he says that because similar genes for similar functions occur in different species, there must be an evolutionary relationship. However, as anyone from /. should know, similar or identical code often pops in different projects that a programmer has written. Those programs have not morphed themselves into new software (unless they're running on a transmeta processor); rather, something that works well in one place is simply being implemented in another place. This is actually what could be expected of an intelligent designer, and seems (to me, at least) a more logical conclusion than saying that bacteria made themselves into humans (over the course of time, natural forces, yes, I'm quite familiar with the arguments...).