I haven't RTFA'd it yet, but lets renember that making a fusion reactior is a lot different than making a fusion reactor that can generate more energy than is used to prime it. The former we've been doing for years, the latter - making one that outputs more energy than is put into it is the real trick.
The flaw with your argument is the assumption that rights, especially property rights, come about because of government, or derive from the consent of the governed. This is not true, the only thing that derives from the consent of the governed is the right to govern, otherwise the entire purpose of government is to secure rights that already exist independently of government and independently of social opinions. It is bacially a clever way of saying that what is right and wrong, good and bad, property and not property - is subjective. Sorry, rights are not voodoo.
Your comparison to slavery is particularly offensive, by the way. No one is forcing you to listend to pop music or use Microsoft products, so stop whining about how The System is trying to keep you down.
There seems to be this attitude that the suffering and losses of slaves was only something that happened "back then", was only meaningful "back then", and doesn't apply to us because we are too much in the "modern" age. I find it offensive that in the name of civilized society people just blow off, and treat as worthless, all that suffering like it could never have any pratical or meaningful value in the information age.
You're right no one forces me to buy Microsoft products, but make no mistake - people are being forced and coerced by Microsoft and the RIAA. That's like saying that if you don't like slavery - don't own slaves !! It was a crock in that context back then, and it is a crock in this one now.
IMHO, that is because the US has a strong public education system, rather than a private one. I know that people have fears that no public education would mean kids going without and parents paying out the nose, but in practice it saves more people money on average because private schools tend to be more efficient, and in western countries that didn't have public education in the earlier days - such fears of the masses going without never materalized. A strong free market economic foundation does far more to promote education than a public school system.
The problem with the public school system is that is far more accountable to political forces than results and the best interest of the students. It also tends to ignore their individuality more because most states are such a huge bureauocracy.
Microsoft would not exist in the way that it does without a particular type of government granted monopoly called - copyright. It is not like other property rights which have natural limits in supply and demand, it is an atrificial one where Microsoft controlls all the supply. It is not true to free market philosophy any more than slavery was in the 1850's. Yeah they bought and sold those slaves like commodities, yeah the economic strength of the plantation system rested on slavery, yeah the business men who ran it were universally considered educated and ethical - and just doing normal honest business - but it was all bullshit. Slavery had to go, it had always been a burden and was always far more about controll rather than property - but as society entered the industrial age our society could no longer bear the social restrictions allowed by slavery.
Well now we are entering into the information age, and copyrights are looking far more like an untenable and eternally unenforcable restriction every day and less like a property right every day. They are not about property, commerce, freedom, or markets - but controll, and so is Microsoft and the other's like them such as the RIAA who have held themselves accountable to the same forces.
It seems to me that if we really want to protect ourselves from chemichal and bio terrorisim, what we need are a lot of researchers who are experts in that area, and a lot of R&D so as to learn how to cope, plan, and respond to disasters. Thanks to my government, just the opposite is happening. So who'se the real threat to national security?
Phew, after reading that I sensed some serious misunderstandings....
Ok, here's how it works:
a) people have rights (which do not include free room, borad, and care coerced at others expense BTW)
b) people organize in the form of government to secure those rights
c) that often implies use of force both at home and abroad
d) in order to controll that force and to keep it from getting out of hand, we have a representative democracy and a constitution that tries to check and balance powers (in the USA at least)
e) But democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool for protecting individual liverties and rights which are the true end in themselves.
f) Therefore, if you wish to have a liberal agenda, then fine, but please don't expect us not to use force to defend freedom, because that is the purpose of government, and please don't expect us not to resent all those massive government social programs because they're upheld by restricting peoples freedom (mostly in the form of coercing their earnings from others)
There are laws that exist by the nature of human existence, natural law, and then there are laws codeified my man. When they tend to match we have a just society, when they tend not to match we tend to have an unjust society. Well, I for one, want to live in a just society, which is why I hate copyrights and why I love property rights. Perhaps man made laws are the prejudice of society, but not natural law. So the question is do we want justice, or mob rule.
Copyrights are not property rights, they derive from no physical natural limit in supply, demand, or distribution like other property rights. They are far more about controlling people to maintain a monopoly, than to deal with limited resources. The only thing that even approaches being limited is peoples time, which ironically copyrights make worthless in compaire to information whose value comes from the hype it produces more than the skill used to produce it.
We really half to get over the notion that just because an institution calls somthing a property right, means that it really is. I thought we did already from the 1850's plantation era, but I guess history repeats itself.
... put a nuclear reactor on a ship, and (with electrolosys) then sell hydrogen to the rest of the world. Not only could I get rich, but also get away from those sue-happy whacos who can't comprehend that nuclear power is far safer than any other power source ever discovered by human kind.
I just wanted to say that from the time I first started to embrace GNU/Linux in the mid-90's to now - it has been a bumpy ride, and I have suffered much scorn for my faith in it, first from my collegues who advocated SCO, then from those who advocated Solaris, and also from people who advocate Microsoft. But none the less, I still must say that my faith in Linux and the people behind it have never let me down. Thank you so much, you are making history and as the centuries pass - I truely believe that society will look back upon you as heros who have lifted humanity up with a gift that can never be taken away, not just the code, but a newfounded freedom that countless billions will addore you for.
A Palladium lattice is porous enough to let hydrogen pass thru, but not other elements. I could see all sorts of scenarios where hydrogen accumulates in the paladium lattice, and burns off with simple oxygen in the air when proded enough. Depending on at what state you observe it, or how the palladium was handled before the experiment - it could easially appear to give off more energy that was put into it, no matter how accurate your temperature sensors are.
OK, but I wish they wouldn't call patents "protection" for inventors. Patents have locked out 1000x times more inventors than they have ever protected. In fact, in the small companies I've seen - it's more like they get patnets to "protect" themselves from big companies suing and harrassing, and to have leverage for cross licensing, than to ever "protect" their inventions from immitation.
Moral of the story, when the system gives a "little guy" the power to lock out a "big guy" - it also gives the "big" guy the power to lock out 1000 "little" guys.
IMHO, the problem is that economic and political growing pains happen anytime society advances - and since the USA is ahead of the curve, it usually experiences these problems first. I don't think moving away will help much (unless you leave the fray so as to return later when things settle down) because eventually the same growing pains will reach elsewhere too.
Other cultures will be less able to protect their liberties when the onslaught of growing pains starts to knock on their front door. I wish we had a new political frontier to go to. (the ocean?)
The real enemy isn't Microsoft, IMHO they are just taking a worthless belief - "intellectual property" to its logical conclusion. Microsoft is the enemy, not because they are Microsoft, but because they have held themselves accountable to upholding and imposing an unjust and false property right.
And if I own a company, and I choose to spend my money overseas, who have I deprived? Would you be better off if I was forbidden from doing so, and so just decided to stick it in a matress, rather than loose it doing activities that were unprofitable here.
Most business people didn't get their money robbing the banks and rapeing the villages, and even if they did - then fine get on them for what they did, not just because they have money.
Most people who have money got it because people like you choose to buy their stuff, use their services, and patronize their restruants. Now to turn arround and talk about how much they owe us, and how they're obligeted to use their money on our terms is disingenuious at best.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been unemployed for the last 2 years and only recently got hired on at a fraction of what I used to make in the Silicon Valley. It was hard, I was desperate, but even so I didn't coerce old ladies to give me dough, I didn't shoplift stores, I didn't rob banks, I didn't threaten, force, or extort business men to give me cash (for obvious reasons, I hope) - yet people think that when they do these things in the form of government that it has no worthy consequence. It amazes me to see how a person could see that if he jumped off a bridge by himself, that he would break his legs if not get killed - but if he holds hands witheveryone else and does it as a group then blissifully thinks there is no real consequence.
The real threat is that when you have a closed system, you have a central point of failure (Microsoft) and you don't have the flexability to change and mondify things when you need to. Anyone who'se read the "art of war" knows that real defense is about how flexabile you are, and that you are able to deal with the exceptions, not the rules. - or how easy it is to change your stripes and addapt to changing situations and threats. You simply can't do that thru a closed one vendor system, no matter how much you plan. You simply can't do that when you can't access the source code, change it, and share those changes freely, you simply cant do that if you half to pay a subscription or royality and keep tabs on every nuck and cranny application and license - you can never decentralize, never regroup, never deal with unpredicted failures, when you're attached to a BSA dog-leash.
Just like freedom in the USA is the only real reason why it's so much better than the enemies, the freedom offered by Linux and the GPL has an internal value that makes it so much better than the alternatives. Only that is then end game, and only that is what will make us truely secure.
It can work, but be extremely carefull, I never could keep Grub from breaking the mirror, and you half to tell the boot loader not to probe the ide drives - because the controller does SCSI and ide, but if you probe IDE it stops mirroring right and partition labels get confused. I did get lilo to work, but none of the utilities. You also need their closed-source hpt linux controller, which IMHO is picky and a pain to install with.
I was just thinking, when I was a kid there was this raging debate about capitalisim and communisim. At the time the communists seemed to have bigger more advanced steel mills, the communists had the first satelite in space, the communists guaranteed a living standard, and etc etc etc... How ironic that the issue wasn't about which system had the most miscelanious features, but which offered the most controll. When you have that controll, the overall health of the system is better, more flexable, more able to adapt change and grow.
Today, when it comes to Microsoft vs Linux, everyone is arguing about this little feature or that little plus, or this little usability issue, but once again what they should be arguing about is controll. Without the proper controll, all the other issues are irrelavent and just serve as distractions to what's really going on in the industry. At this point, only a fool would bet the farm on Microsoft - they are like a big fat juicy cow going to the slaughter house. The fact that they're so big isn't going to help them in a multi trillion dollar economey.
One of my worries about this, is that thinking and understanding is the domain of people and number crunching and data processing is the domain of computers.... and until computers have true free will it will always be that way, and always should be that way...
IMHO, we shouldn't be concentrating on how to get computers to think for us, but rather how to interface in a way that is lociclly fluent and consistent.
Perhaps that might mean that people half to learn to think more locgically and be ble to express it more precicely, but IMHO that is not a bad thing.
One of the main purposes' for the University system is to dissamate general knowledge that the private sector could never provide becuase it was too locked up in propriatory knowledge and R&D. Now, with Linux - things are switching back to the private sector, and that is a good thing, becuase people will no longer half to choose between an "education" and "work" - they will come hand in hand, and the knowledge you learn in one place will be useable everywhere.
Let the universities destroy themselves, they cost too much anyhow.
Nobody has a right to drive a car over the speed limit, or to shoot a red light: provided suitable privacy protections are put in place, what exactly is wrong with this proposal?
You are correct to the extent that nobody has a right to put others safety at danger, but that is a far cry from saying that nobody has a right to drive over the speed limit, use a bus lane, park in an unauthorized space, or what not.
It is also a far cry from saying that the government should be so Orwellian. The right to privacy means nothing if it does not mean the right to privacy from government, or privacy only because they permit it thru policy.
IMHO, them Brits need to be more embracing of the "right to bear arms". You'd be amazed how much things can change when the government is made to realise who is supposed to have controll and who isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't RTFA'd it yet, but lets renember that making a fusion reactior is a lot different than making a fusion reactor that can generate more energy than is used to prime it. The former we've been doing for years, the latter - making one that outputs more energy than is put into it is the real trick.
Use anonymous transferable digital cash to host offshore services where the RIAA can touch or even identify you.
OK, try this....
.login
.xinitrc
.bashrc
/etc/X11/xdm?or_somewhere_under_there
echo startx >
echo ssh -C user@remote.home.com mywimgr >
alias bash 'ssh -C user@remote.host.com xterm - bash' >>
actually there are much better ways to config xdm or gdm to do this for you in
What he described sounded like pretty neat technology, but could be implemented very easially in linux:
/tmp/home" > .login
/tmp/home user@home.server.com:/home/dir/" > .logout
....
echo "rsync -e \"ssh -I smart.card.device\" user@home.server.com:/home/dir/
echo "rsync -e \"ssh -I smart.card.device\"
and perhaps set up an ldap server for logins? , you get the gist
Am I missing something here?
Yeah! And I even know of a 12 yr old girl and welfare mom who would be good starter candidates :)
The flaw with your argument is the assumption that rights, especially property rights, come about because of government, or derive from the consent of the governed. This is not true, the only thing that derives from the consent of the governed is the right to govern, otherwise the entire purpose of government is to secure rights that already exist independently of government and independently of social opinions. It is bacially a clever way of saying that what is right and wrong, good and bad, property and not property - is subjective. Sorry, rights are not voodoo.
Your comparison to slavery is particularly offensive, by the way. No one is forcing you to listend to pop music or use Microsoft products, so stop whining about how The System is trying to keep you down.
There seems to be this attitude that the suffering and losses of slaves was only something that happened "back then", was only meaningful "back then", and doesn't apply to us because we are too much in the "modern" age. I find it offensive that in the name of civilized society people just blow off, and treat as worthless, all that suffering like it could never have any pratical or meaningful value in the information age.
You're right no one forces me to buy Microsoft products, but make no mistake - people are being forced and coerced by Microsoft and the RIAA. That's like saying that if you don't like slavery - don't own slaves !! It was a crock in that context back then, and it is a crock in this one now.
IMHO, that is because the US has a strong public education system, rather than a private one. I know that people have fears that no public education would mean kids going without and parents paying out the nose, but in practice it saves more people money on average because private schools tend to be more efficient, and in western countries that didn't have public education in the earlier days - such fears of the masses going without never materalized. A strong free market economic foundation does far more to promote education than a public school system.
The problem with the public school system is that is far more accountable to political forces than results and the best interest of the students. It also tends to ignore their individuality more because most states are such a huge bureauocracy.
Microsoft would not exist in the way that it does without a particular type of government granted monopoly called - copyright. It is not like other property rights which have natural limits in supply and demand, it is an atrificial one where Microsoft controlls all the supply. It is not true to free market philosophy any more than slavery was in the 1850's. Yeah they bought and sold those slaves like commodities, yeah the economic strength of the plantation system rested on slavery, yeah the business men who ran it were universally considered educated and ethical - and just doing normal honest business - but it was all bullshit. Slavery had to go, it had always been a burden and was always far more about controll rather than property - but as society entered the industrial age our society could no longer bear the social restrictions allowed by slavery.
Well now we are entering into the information age, and copyrights are looking far more like an untenable and eternally unenforcable restriction every day and less like a property right every day. They are not about property, commerce, freedom, or markets - but controll, and so is Microsoft and the other's like them such as the RIAA who have held themselves accountable to the same forces.
It seems to me that if we really want to protect ourselves from chemichal and bio terrorisim, what we need are a lot of researchers who are experts in that area, and a lot of R&D so as to learn how to cope, plan, and respond to disasters. Thanks to my government, just the opposite is happening. So who'se the real threat to national security?
Phew, after reading that I sensed some serious misunderstandings....
Ok, here's how it works:
a) people have rights (which do not include free room, borad, and care coerced at others expense BTW)
b) people organize in the form of government to secure those rights
c) that often implies use of force both at home and abroad
d) in order to controll that force and to keep it from getting out of hand, we have a representative democracy and a constitution that tries to check and balance powers (in the USA at least)
e) But democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool for protecting individual liverties and rights which are the true end in themselves.
f) Therefore, if you wish to have a liberal agenda, then fine, but please don't expect us not to use force to defend freedom, because that is the purpose of government, and please don't expect us not to resent all those massive government social programs because they're upheld by restricting peoples freedom (mostly in the form of coercing their earnings from others)
Hope that helps.
There are laws that exist by the nature of human existence, natural law, and then there are laws codeified my man. When they tend to match we have a just society, when they tend not to match we tend to have an unjust society. Well, I for one, want to live in a just society, which is why I hate copyrights and why I love property rights. Perhaps man made laws are the prejudice of society, but not natural law. So the question is do we want justice, or mob rule.
Copyrights are not property rights, they derive from no physical natural limit in supply, demand, or distribution like other property rights. They are far more about controlling people to maintain a monopoly, than to deal with limited resources. The only thing that even approaches being limited is peoples time, which ironically copyrights make worthless in compaire to information whose value comes from the hype it produces more than the skill used to produce it.
We really half to get over the notion that just because an institution calls somthing a property right, means that it really is. I thought we did already from the 1850's plantation era, but I guess history repeats itself.
... put a nuclear reactor on a ship, and (with electrolosys) then sell hydrogen to the rest of the world. Not only could I get rich, but also get away from those sue-happy whacos who can't comprehend that nuclear power is far safer than any other power source ever discovered by human kind.
I just wanted to say that from the time I first started to embrace GNU/Linux in the mid-90's to now - it has been a bumpy ride, and I have suffered much scorn for my faith in it, first from my collegues who advocated SCO, then from those who advocated Solaris, and also from people who advocate Microsoft. But none the less, I still must say that my faith in Linux and the people behind it have never let me down. Thank you so much, you are making history and as the centuries pass - I truely believe that society will look back upon you as heros who have lifted humanity up with a gift that can never be taken away, not just the code, but a newfounded freedom that countless billions will addore you for.
A Palladium lattice is porous enough to let hydrogen pass thru, but not other elements. I could see all sorts of scenarios where hydrogen accumulates in the paladium lattice, and burns off with simple oxygen in the air when proded enough. Depending on at what state you observe it, or how the palladium was handled before the experiment - it could easially appear to give off more energy that was put into it, no matter how accurate your temperature sensors are.
OK, but I wish they wouldn't call patents "protection" for inventors. Patents have locked out 1000x times more inventors than they have ever protected. In fact, in the small companies I've seen - it's more like they get patnets to "protect" themselves from big companies suing and harrassing, and to have leverage for cross licensing, than to ever "protect" their inventions from immitation.
Moral of the story, when the system gives a "little guy" the power to lock out a "big guy" - it also gives the "big" guy the power to lock out 1000 "little" guys.
IMHO, the problem is that economic and political growing pains happen anytime society advances - and since the USA is ahead of the curve, it usually experiences these problems first. I don't think moving away will help much (unless you leave the fray so as to return later when things settle down) because eventually the same growing pains will reach elsewhere too.
Other cultures will be less able to protect their liberties when the onslaught of growing pains starts to knock on their front door. I wish we had a new political frontier to go to. (the ocean?)
How about the right of customers to copy distribute and modify freely. The other problems will take care of themselves.
The real enemy isn't Microsoft, IMHO they are just taking a worthless belief - "intellectual property" to its logical conclusion. Microsoft is the enemy, not because they are Microsoft, but because they have held themselves accountable to upholding and imposing an unjust and false property right.
And if I own a company, and I choose to spend my money overseas, who have I deprived? Would you be better off if I was forbidden from doing so, and so just decided to stick it in a matress, rather than loose it doing activities that were unprofitable here.
Most business people didn't get their money robbing the banks and rapeing the villages, and even if they did - then fine get on them for what they did, not just because they have money.
Most people who have money got it because people like you choose to buy their stuff, use their services, and patronize their restruants. Now to turn arround and talk about how much they owe us, and how they're obligeted to use their money on our terms is disingenuious at best.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been unemployed for the last 2 years and only recently got hired on at a fraction of what I used to make in the Silicon Valley. It was hard, I was desperate, but even so I didn't coerce old ladies to give me dough, I didn't shoplift stores, I didn't rob banks, I didn't threaten, force, or extort business men to give me cash (for obvious reasons, I hope) - yet people think that when they do these things in the form of government that it has no worthy consequence. It amazes me to see how a person could see that if he jumped off a bridge by himself, that he would break his legs if not get killed - but if he holds hands witheveryone else and does it as a group then blissifully thinks there is no real consequence.
The real threat is that when you have a closed system, you have a central point of failure (Microsoft) and you don't have the flexability to change and mondify things when you need to. Anyone who'se read the "art of war" knows that real defense is about how flexabile you are, and that you are able to deal with the exceptions, not the rules. - or how easy it is to change your stripes and addapt to changing situations and threats. You simply can't do that thru a closed one vendor system, no matter how much you plan. You simply can't do that when you can't access the source code, change it, and share those changes freely, you simply cant do that if you half to pay a subscription or royality and keep tabs on every nuck and cranny application and license - you can never decentralize, never regroup, never deal with unpredicted failures, when you're attached to a BSA dog-leash.
Just like freedom in the USA is the only real reason why it's so much better than the enemies, the freedom offered by Linux and the GPL has an internal value that makes it so much better than the alternatives. Only that is then end game, and only that is what will make us truely secure.
It can work, but be extremely carefull, I never could keep Grub from breaking the mirror, and you half to tell the boot loader not to probe the ide drives - because the controller does SCSI and ide, but if you probe IDE it stops mirroring right and partition labels get confused. I did get lilo to work, but none of the utilities. You also need their closed-source hpt linux controller, which IMHO is picky and a pain to install with.
I was just thinking, when I was a kid there was this raging debate about capitalisim and communisim. At the time the communists seemed to have bigger more advanced steel mills, the communists had the first satelite in space, the communists guaranteed a living standard, and etc etc etc ... How ironic that the issue wasn't about which system had the most miscelanious features, but which offered the most controll. When you have that controll, the overall health of the system is better, more flexable, more able to adapt change and grow.
Today, when it comes to Microsoft vs Linux, everyone is arguing about this little feature or that little plus, or this little usability issue, but once again what they should be arguing about is controll. Without the proper controll, all the other issues are irrelavent and just serve as distractions to what's really going on in the industry. At this point, only a fool would bet the farm on Microsoft - they are like a big fat juicy cow going to the slaughter house. The fact that they're so big isn't going to help them in a multi trillion dollar economey.
One of my worries about this, is that thinking and understanding is the domain of people and number crunching and data processing is the domain of computers. ... and until computers have true free will it will always be that way, and always should be that way ...
IMHO, we shouldn't be concentrating on how to get computers to think for us, but rather how to interface in a way that is lociclly fluent and consistent.
Perhaps that might mean that people half to learn to think more locgically and be ble to express it more precicely, but IMHO that is not a bad thing.
One of the main purposes' for the University system is to dissamate general knowledge that the private sector could never provide becuase it was too locked up in propriatory knowledge and R&D. Now, with Linux - things are switching back to the private sector, and that is a good thing, becuase people will no longer half to choose between an "education" and "work" - they will come hand in hand, and the knowledge you learn in one place will be useable everywhere.
Let the universities destroy themselves, they cost too much anyhow.
Nobody has a right to drive a car over the speed limit, or to shoot a red light: provided suitable privacy protections are put in place, what exactly is wrong with this proposal?
You are correct to the extent that nobody has a right to put others safety at danger, but that is a far cry from saying that nobody has a right to drive over the speed limit, use a bus lane, park in an unauthorized space, or what not.
It is also a far cry from saying that the government should be so Orwellian. The right to privacy means nothing if it does not mean the right to privacy from government, or privacy only because they permit it thru policy.
IMHO, them Brits need to be more embracing of the "right to bear arms". You'd be amazed how much things can change when the government is made to realise who is supposed to have controll and who isn't.