You just hit the prime idea behind the Democratic party. The "People" are idiots and WE, the anointed few will take care of them. That is where most regulation of this sort comes from. People are too stupid to check with friends, call the BBB or know which certs hanging on a wall are worth the paper they are printed on. So WE will decide and require anyone wanting to enter a profession to obtain OUR preferred cert, pay for a license from OUR bloated govt machine (to pay for US to think for you).
And 'the People' are not just stupid, they are wicked narrowminded brutes also, so WE will take their excess cash (WE decide what is excess of course) and will do noble enlightened things with it.
Really the same mindset as Valenti & Rosen assuming everyone except them is a thief, so they demand TCPA and such to protect themselves from the rabble.
And no, this post isnt't a troll, just in an extra cynical mood today.
Nah, just get the toolbar add-on for Moz so you can spoof the user agent string. Just a day or so back I was browsing hauppage's site drooling over the just shipping WinTV-PVR 350 and it started that "You aren't running IE so go the fsck away" game." Flipped the user agent in Moz from Mozilla/Linux to IE6/XP and it never said another word. And the pages looked well rendered to me..... or as well rendered as Mozilla on Linux over does. (I know I'll rejoice with a great noise when the font situation is finally solved.... and running on MY machine.)
p.s. the WinTV PVR 350 is now shipping, but further research failed to turn up a Linux driver so it is a tough call, take the $50 discount running this month and pray or wait and see.
> Renting counts as public performance, which is also > restricted under copyright.
You, and Jack Valenti can scream that until you are blue, but the courts already ruled against you. If you OWN a thing, you can rent/lend/etc that thing. The movie studios wanted royalties from rentals, The RIAA tried to stop 2nd hand CDs and Nintendo wanted to stop cartridge rentals. All lost.
All these issues were settled years ago in court. Trust me on this one, librarians KNOW about the laws which regulate the lending of copyrighted materials.
> If they're allowed to make public performances of private > versions without permission, then exploiters will also be > allowed to redistribute private versions of GPLed programs > without permission.
Hmm. After pondering it a bit I can see one way someone could try to use clean flicks legal theory. EvilCo buys 1000 copys of RedHat. They modify it and replace the CDs in the boxes with their version and resell those RedHat boxes. Would be interesting to see how that one would play out in court.
Because the EULA doesn't mean squat. A EULA can say you have to walk around like a duck and go Quack! on every odd numbered Tuesday, doesn't mean anyone is contractually obligated to Quack. An NDA on the other hand is not a one sided contract and it is actually signed. In other words, if Contracts are to mean anything, NDAs have to be enforcable.
Reverse engineering is a time honored and legal (in most jurisdictions at least) practice. If I can figure out the secret Recipe for Coke I'm legally allowed to sell my clone. If I break into the Coke HQ and steal it or bribe someone to make a copy I go to jail. See the difference?
I only got to vote for Reagan's re-election. Do the math.;)
> You seem to have communism confused with fascism.
That is because while they differ somewhat in theory, in implementation they look pretty much the same. One maximum leader deciding what the correct allocation of resources is and when someone objects, shooting them or putting them in camps.
> And don't look at me that way- I'm an anarchist, meaning that > I don't trust you, Stalin, the assembled CEOs of the (ha!) > 'free market', or even myself if you gave me that kind of power.
You won't see me defending the mercantilism passing itself off as Capitalism these days, but I'll defend Capitalism to the end. Because it is the only system devised so far that doesn't depend on giving one maximum leader (or cabal of Congresscritters) so much power that it must corrupt. When the invisible hand of the marketplace allocates resources it is through mutually consentual transactions instead of a government decree enforced at the end of a gun.
Oh, and don't rag on Schoolhouse Rock. It does a better job of teaching civics than what goes on in actual schoolhouses these days. It pretty accurately covers the material that the elementary school set should be required to know and does it in a way that the intended audience remembers it. In reality, most high school grads can't even name the three branches of our government. Sad.
I certainly don't intend to mentor you on basic elements of 20th Century history which, if you didn't get it as part of your schooling, Google can supply.
> To give of yourself for the benefit of others is most certainly > the essence of "Goodness." If you think you have a better > objective definition, by all means try and spit it out.
No, the word you just defined is Altruism. And I'm a devoted follower of RAH on that subject.
: Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root : of all evil. : : If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine : your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you : still want to do it, wallow in it! : : From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long : (Time Enough for Love (C) 1973 Robert A. Heinlein)
>..but I do not have the knowledge to judge anyone, even > Hilter or the 9-11 hijackers or the heroes who die every > day, as "good" or "evil." And neither do you
That is where we differ. Given a chance I'd be more than willing to 'judge' Hitler or Atta straight to Hell with a.45 caliber sendoff. If you are so indecisive that you couldn't pull the trigger that is your problem. However, your continued ability to exercise your 1st Amendment right to state that view depends on people like me keeping the world survivable by culling the madmen and criminals.
> A brave German infantryman who sacraficed himself so his > comrades could escape, or who took on extra guard duty to aid > weaker soldiers, is probably a Good Person--as long as they > didn't take part in the Very Very Bad things that the Germans > did.
Wrong. They can be 'good' only if they didn't KNOW what the Reich was doing. It isn't enough to just be lucky enough not to be assigned to guard a death camp. If you KNOW they exist and continue to serve, you crossed the line and are damned near as wicked and evil as the most feared SS monster. All that evil requires is that good men do nothing. You should defect or rebel, if you continue to serve once you have knowledge of the evil your country is doing you join the ranks of the damned as far as I'm concerned. Harsh? Yes, but life isn't easy.
Making moral choices when the cost is low confers little karma, it is doing the right thing when you know it is going to cost that matters. Most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence died or ended up destitute by the end of the war but there were few regrets because they knew they were right.
> "Lawful" and "Chaotic" are, despite RPGing's wargaming > baggage, hardly on par with Good or Evil. They're barely > even real concepts.
Law/Chaos is on a par with Good/Evil, just a different quality being measured; it is very useful to put a 2nd dimension on the moral question. Just like the Pournelle Axes chart of political thought is so much more useful than the left/right one dimensional chart; even if it illustrates some wierd associations that are hard to understand. (Google is your friend if you want more info.)
> Use a broader definition of "harm" than simple "physical > injury." Here's a few samples: > > * A man who throws himself in front of a train to push > another out of the train's way has just committed a good act.
Perhaps, but I fail to see the big win in a straight up trade of one life for another. Would I trade my life for a stranger? Probably not. Would I RISK my butt for one? Probably. For a spouse/child/friend/etc? I'd like to think so, thankfully haven't faced that test.
> * A man who pushes someone else into the train's way to save > themselves has committed an evil act.
Agreed.
> * Giving your lunch to someone who's hungry and hasn't eaten > in four days is a good act.
No real problem here either. But better still to trade with him. He still gets to eat that way and retains his honor. Man does not live by bread alone.
In case you haven't guessed yet, I'm a Libertarian. I have found that the non-initiation of force principle is a very reliable way to assess the Rightness or Wrongness of a situation.
> The GPL explicitly allows you to redistribute a bowdlerized > Red Hat, as long as you send along complete sources.
Thanks for restating my point..... and calling me obtuse (and possibly a troll even) while doing it. Perhaps you missed the original poster's parenthetical comment "(Incidentally,it would knock the teeth out of the GPL.) " which I was commenting on. Yes, I have read the GPL and most other licenses and EULAs. And for your information, there is no such thing as a copyright license. They are two entirely different beasties.
The big difference between a EULA and the GPL is that most EULAs attempt to create a one sided, unsigned contract which removes rights which exist by default and are almost certainly legally unenforcable. The GPL grants rights above and beyond those which copyright law provides. Big difference. Ignore the GPL all you want! You are still bound by copyright law which forbids all unauthorized redistribution. The clean flicks people are within the law. Copyright is NOT an absolute prohibition against any modification of a protected work. I can buy an art book, cut out the pictures and make a new work of art from the pieces. I can even sell it! What I can't do is make COPIES and sell those because the publisher was granted a monopoly by the federal government. (Which was supposed to be for a 'limited time' but that rant is for another time.)
I could buy books with dirty words/pics in them, use whiteout (tm) to blank out the words I objected to, remove the dirty pictures, etc and then resell the book 100% legally. Since you can't apply those sorts of edits to a DVD the clean flicks people buy a number of copies, replace the disc in the package with an edited version and rent them. Basically the same thing because what you are buying when you buy a DVD (note the word is BUY instead of LICENSE despite anything written on the package stating otherwise) is a bundle consisting of a box, a physical disc with bits on it and the right use those bits. Moving the bits from the original media to a working copy is legal within certain limits and I already explained how changing the bits is ok.
I actually do understand the issues fairly well, which is why I send money to the EFF whenever I can, 'cause we are so close to being totally hosed. I have followed these sort of things for years and these days I work in a public library, and everyone in this scene seems to be up to speed on IP (hate that term, see RMS's rant on the subject for why) issues. And nobody hates CIPA more than librarians do.
You mean "Facism" and "Toltaranism" and "Racism", don't you?
No, otherwise I'd have said that. Nazism was an idea (set of related ideas actually) that was and always will be evil. Go study it a bit if you don't want to take my word for it. (unless you are in Germany, then you are SOL since they are busy erasing it from their history books so it can happen again.....)
Facism is a related idea, but different. Most implementations certainly qualify as evil. Racism may or may not be evil, depends to what extent you carry it I suppose. Usually not very smart, but stupid != evil. The KKK on the other hand certainly crossed the line into evil.
> Evil is harming others to aid yourself. Good is the inverse.
Wrong again. Harming others is evil. Even if it doesn't aid anybody. And the inverse is not good. And no, valiant Germans who died for their country in WWII were not good. Glorious service in the name of evil makes one evil. Since your sig brands you as an RPG gamer I'll put in terms you might better understand. A brave and valiant SS stormtrooper would be Lawful Evil. Hitler began as Lawful Evil and ended up Chaotic Evil (Insane). A generic german soldier was Neutral Evil. Get it?
Harming yourself to help others may or may not make you good. It might also make you stupid. Helping yourself while helping others is the greatest good though. Henry Ford helped far more people while making himself filthy rich than 10,000 do-gooders working in soup kitchens on their day off.
> You throw around the "p" word as if owning something or the sole > right to change it makes it less worthy. Everything worth > something has a proprietary component. Even Linux. Your nose is > bleeding from sitting so high on your horse.
It does make it less worthy in my eyes as a buyer of technology. When I see the "p" word in ad copy I cringe. I might still buy, but the "p" is always a negative. It means more expensive, harder to maintain and usually single source products. All bad things from the perspective of the buyer. Name the positive virtues you associate with the word; from the point of view of a CUSTOMER. Bet you can't.
As for Linux having a proprietary component, huh? Some distros do, such as SUSE and Mandrake and Redhat used to flirt with the dark side, but Linux itself has no such attachments. RedHat != Linux.
I lived through the PC revolution and saw great systems, innovative software and countless products die because of being proprietary and therefore incapable of surviving the death of their manufacturer. Never again will I walk into the trap of depending of a proprietary product for anything important.
There are laws against selling used parts in 'new' equipment. And remember that these drives aren't big assed 3 1/2" drives. They ain't even 2 1/2 laptop drives. The iPod uses tiny little PC Card drives that aren't cheap.
> This confuses the issue, because it's not defending an existing > right, it's trying to create a new one that not even Schlafly > would want if she thought about it for a moment. (Incidentally, > it would knock the teeth out of the GPL.)
If RedHat decided to pull every occurance of 'fuck' from the comments of the Linux source, this would violate the GPL how?
While I wouldn't want to rent an edited video, I have no problem if others do and people supply that demand. They buy a copy of the movie for every copy they circulate so the creators are compensated the same, the modified copies are clearly marked so there is no attempt to deceive, in short there is no foul.
And as for Phyllis Schlafly joining the battle on our side, it is very encouraging. Her contributions are not very well known outside the hardcore conservative camp, but she has been tirelessly fighting for causes she believes in and winning more than her fair share of fights for decades. Agree or disagree with her, most who know much about her will concede she IS a high wattage thinker and so having a heavyweight like her on our side means just about every other serious thinker on the Right will read her column and give the ideas in it serious thought because they all know her and respect her opinions. And she is in a position to influence the innermost circles of the Republican power structure. Regardless of whether you consider it a good or bad thing, remember who controls Congress now.
> If Phyllis writes an editorial with which you agree, send her > mail and say, "You and I disagree about many issues, but we're > on the same wavelength here. Thanks!" Take help where you can > find it, folks.
This part is spot on. I hit sites like drudgereport and follow the links off to columnists of all stripes. Just when you think you can predict what one will say about an issue one of em will shock you. Few intelligent people are 100% in one of the three major camps (Classical Liberal/Conservative, Libertarian or Modern Liberal/Socialist/Labor).
> one of the most insidious and dangerous intellectual crutches > many people use is this false dichotomy of "good" or "bad" > people or ideas. No person, and precious few ideas, are wholly > good or bad - most are some sort of compromise.
Uh huh. NO good or evil, just shades of grey. Bullcrap. Agreed that most evil people have a few qualities we could all agree are admirable, but that doesn't make them any less evil on balance. Hell, we can all probably agree that Hitler & Stalin were gonzo super achievers. But what they choose to achive was undeniably wicked and they were EVIL men. Grow a pair and learn to discriminate between good and evil and have the courage of your conviction to state your call and stand by it.. Discrimination isn't a bad thing either, depends what it's used for.
While most people and ideas are in grey areas, some can only be called grey by people with a busted moral compass. Nazism, Communism, and the KKK are examples of ideas which are evil. Osama Bin Laden is evil. Any definition of the word 'evil' which excludes any of those people/ideas is a word devoid of any meaning. Others are more debatable. Lincoln for example has both detractors and defenders who are all reasonable people.
Yes, but most of the viewers on Conservative TownHall or the papers who carry her column aren't/. readers so it is all good. Just about every sane person not employed by a member of the MPAA/RIAA will end up turning against their power grab as soon as they find out what is going on. Columns like this one are key to that education process.
Yup, it's in the parallel universe. The ruling you are thinking of came from the Court of Appeals and Ashcroft & Co. are appealing to the Supremes. The opinion of the American Library Associations legal minds is that until it is actually over we still must filter and the verdict my director handed down unto me after consulting with other libraries in the state is to continue treating adults as children. We do NOT like it. I was even allowed a bit of activism by putting a big disclaimer on the login for patrons who would otherwise be unfiltered stating that basically we are doing it under duress and that all complaints should be directed to their elected officials and then listing the contact info for our Rep and Senators.
And of course by the time the Supremes DO strike this crap down Congress will have passed a new version and we will rinse & repeat.
They could care less what you have on your machine. They only care that it IS a machine connected to the Net. They can use it to attack other people, use it as a safe exchange point for warez/porn (especially illegal stuff like kiddie porn). They can run IRC bots on it. They use them as 'currency' to trade for more desirable things like the latest exploit scripts, etc. All script kiddies strive to maintain a stable of zombies to be used as needed.
I'm sysadmin at a public library with public dialup access. They get Klez by the dozens every month so I wonder where the writer is looking for 'typical users'? I'm sitting in a rural parish (county for the rest of the US) in LA and have a pretty typical bunch of 'end users' in our population with the one exception that I try as hard as I can to educate them as to the evils of Outlook (which falls on deaf ears) and pass out CD-ROMS and setup manuals documenting Netscape for web & E-Mail (which they ignore, whining about having problems getting Outlook Expresss configured.). The only concession to unsafe computing is that I do give detailed configuration steps on getting IE past our federally mandated filtering system because I know that a lot of sites and third party software depends on IE.
Yes, communism is Evil. Everywhere it has been tried it has ended in millions of bodies in unmarked graves. Everywhere. Don't even start that crap about some wicked people getting in control and screwing up a good idea. It has to be that way, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Communism is based on the idea that one absolute dictator will decide what is best for everyone (the Seven Year Plan) and everyone else will selflessly put out a 100% effort to achieve the goal. When the reality that people won't put out much effort with no hope of a reward, the 'malcontents' start get shipped off to the deathcamps.
If the maximum leader actually responds to the wishes of the lead, he isn't a maximum leader anymore and the government drifts away from communism because 'the people' never actually want communism. They might SAY they want some of the trappings of it, but offer them the whole package and as soon as they figure out how badly they get screwed along with 'the evil rich' they want nothing to do with it. Then it's either popular rule or rule from the muzzle of a gun. Popular rule means slide towards a European style Welfare State Socialism with a stagnant economy or keep going towards a full Free Market. The other option is for starry eyed communism to turn into Stalinism, which is historically the more popular choice since those in power never want to give it up without a fight. After all, they have convinced themselves they are the most wise and enlightened leaders in the land and are most fit to rule.
It is you who has the mental problem. You sound like one of those panty waist liberals who have an irrational fear of firearms, usually because deep down you don't trust YOURSELF around them and project that onto others. A firearm is a tool, nothing more. The average household has many dangers for a child, many more dangerous and most far easier to get into for a curious kid. You teach kids to avoid matches and later how to safely use them. Don't play in the pool unless an adult/older kid is around. Don't mess with those chemicals in the garage, the stuff in the medicine cabinet and most certainly the stuff under the sink. Don't play in traffic. Don't talk to strangers. A cow can kill you without even meaning to, so be careful around them and don't startle them. And so on and so on.
Lots of dangers in the world. Which is why you must both educate children and enforce boundaries. And as for guns, teach em at the earliest opportunity what guns are and how much damage they can do. Let em blast a watermelon. Teach them 1) assume all guns are loaded 2) never point one at anything you aren't sure you want dead and 3) touch one when they shouldn't and they will WISH they were dead.:)
> oh, so since idiots can not watch their kids around > pools it is ok then to let kids die from hand gun accidents.
In the end, yes. Because I wouldn't want to give our children a world that had been made completely 'child proof' when they grow up. I won't force them to pay that high a price tomorrow just so a few liberals can have their self esteem boosted today.
You see, I'm totally consistent. I oppose COPA/CIPA/etc because they are all based on the idea that to 'protect the children' we must treat all adults like children. I oppose attempts to pass victim disarmament laws that use the 'for the children' pitch as well and for much the same reason.
The world is NOT a safe place for children. It is the duty of parents to create an environment that is AS SAFE AS PRACTICAL for their children, but 100% is both unattainable and undesirable. It is also up to the parents to decide for themselves how best to raise their children. Personally I'd keep loaded weapons away from any child I didn't know for a fact was trained to either keep away from or properly use a weapon. But if I knew a 5yo had the proper respect for what a gun can do, I'd not think twice about leaving a pistol on the nightstand.
In small embedded spaces it IS just Linux, even if you are GNU zealot. The GNU tools are almost always absent. If the Flash isn't totally puny you get busybox.
No dark conspiracy theories needed to answer your "Why this Fantasy? question.
1. LOTR is the best and most well known work of epic fantasy written in the 20th century.
2. Advances in technology finally made it possible to film the story for only $100mil per episode. Remember that attempts had already been made, but failed to succeed because they were forced to animation for lack of any workable method to film the fantastic visions of Middle Earth.
3. Hollywood is currently obsessed by epic storytelling. Wars, lots of stuff going FOOM! LOTR is perfect source material for the CGI age of moviemaking.
Had New Line & Peter Jackson failed to take it on when they did it WOULD have been filmed by someone within the decade. I'm only thankful some idiot like Paul Verhoeven didn't get first crack at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh huh. And just where do you connect this cable wire on the back of your DirecTivo? Hint, it ain't there because it doesn't have a TUNER.
Didn't work for me. It quit bitchin about not running Windows but still said I had an unsupported browser. I'm running Moz on Linux btw.
I just tried PrefBar's browser spoofing. Saying I'm on Win or Mac gets me past the platform test and then says my browser isn't supported.
> Because the consumers are mostly idiots?
You just hit the prime idea behind the Democratic party. The "People" are idiots and WE, the anointed few will take care of them. That is where most regulation of this sort comes from. People are too stupid to check with friends, call the BBB or know which certs hanging on a wall are worth the paper they are printed on. So WE will decide and require anyone wanting to enter a profession to obtain OUR preferred cert, pay for a license from OUR bloated govt machine (to pay for US to think for you).
And 'the People' are not just stupid, they are wicked narrowminded brutes also, so WE will take their excess cash (WE decide what is excess of course) and will do noble enlightened things with it.
Really the same mindset as Valenti & Rosen assuming everyone except them is a thief, so they demand TCPA and such to protect themselves from the rabble.
And no, this post isnt't a troll, just in an extra cynical mood today.
Nah, just get the toolbar add-on for Moz so you can spoof the user agent string. Just a day or so back I was browsing hauppage's site drooling over the just shipping WinTV-PVR 350 and it started that "You aren't running IE so go the fsck away" game." Flipped the user agent in Moz from Mozilla/Linux to IE6/XP and it never said another word. And the pages looked well rendered to me..... or as well rendered as Mozilla on Linux over does. (I know I'll rejoice with a great noise when the font situation is finally solved.... and running on MY machine.)
p.s. the WinTV PVR 350 is now shipping, but further research failed to turn up a Linux driver so it is a tough call, take the $50 discount running this month and pray or wait and see.
> I wrote that myself.
:(
My bad, didn't reread the thread very well.
> Renting counts as public performance, which is also
> restricted under copyright.
You, and Jack Valenti can scream that until you are blue, but the courts already ruled against you. If you OWN a thing, you can rent/lend/etc that thing. The movie studios wanted royalties from rentals, The RIAA tried to stop 2nd hand CDs and Nintendo wanted to stop cartridge rentals. All lost.
All these issues were settled years ago in court. Trust me on this one, librarians KNOW about the laws which regulate the lending of copyrighted materials.
> If they're allowed to make public performances of private
> versions without permission, then exploiters will also be
> allowed to redistribute private versions of GPLed programs
> without permission.
Hmm. After pondering it a bit I can see one way someone could try to use clean flicks legal theory. EvilCo buys 1000 copys of RedHat. They modify it and replace the CDs in the boxes with their version and resell those RedHat boxes. Would be interesting to see how that one would play out in court.
True. So s/Coke/KFC's Secret Receipe/
Because the EULA doesn't mean squat. A EULA can say you have to walk around like a duck and go Quack! on every odd numbered Tuesday, doesn't mean anyone is contractually obligated to Quack. An NDA on the other hand is not a one sided contract and it is actually signed. In other words, if Contracts are to mean anything, NDAs have to be enforcable.
Reverse engineering is a time honored and legal (in most jurisdictions at least) practice. If I can figure out the secret Recipe for Coke I'm legally allowed to sell my clone. If I break into the Coke HQ and steal it or bribe someone to make a copy I go to jail. See the difference?
> How old are you? :D
;)
I only got to vote for Reagan's re-election. Do the math.
> You seem to have communism confused with fascism.
That is because while they differ somewhat in theory, in implementation they look pretty much the same. One maximum leader deciding what the correct allocation of resources is and when someone objects, shooting them or putting them in camps.
> And don't look at me that way- I'm an anarchist, meaning that
> I don't trust you, Stalin, the assembled CEOs of the (ha!)
> 'free market', or even myself if you gave me that kind of power.
You won't see me defending the mercantilism passing itself off as Capitalism these days, but I'll defend Capitalism to the end. Because it is the only system devised so far that doesn't depend on giving one maximum leader (or cabal of Congresscritters) so much power that it must corrupt. When the invisible hand of the marketplace allocates resources it is through mutually consentual transactions instead of a government decree enforced at the end of a gun.
Oh, and don't rag on Schoolhouse Rock. It does a better job of teaching civics than what goes on in actual schoolhouses these days. It pretty accurately covers the material that the elementary school set should be required to know and does it in a way that the intended audience remembers it. In reality, most high school grads can't even name the three branches of our government. Sad.
> What was Nazism, exactly--and why is it evil?
..but I do not have the knowledge to judge anyone, even
.45 caliber sendoff. If you are so indecisive that you couldn't pull the trigger that is your problem. However, your continued ability to exercise your 1st Amendment right to state that view depends on people like me keeping the world survivable by culling the madmen and criminals.
I certainly don't intend to mentor you on basic elements of 20th Century history which, if you didn't get it as part of your schooling, Google can supply.
> To give of yourself for the benefit of others is most certainly
> the essence of "Goodness." If you think you have a better
> objective definition, by all means try and spit it out.
No, the word you just defined is Altruism. And I'm a devoted follower of RAH on that subject.
: Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root
: of all evil.
:
: If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine
: your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you
: still want to do it, wallow in it!
:
: From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long
: (Time Enough for Love (C) 1973 Robert A. Heinlein)
>
> Hilter or the 9-11 hijackers or the heroes who die every
> day, as "good" or "evil." And neither do you
That is where we differ. Given a chance I'd be more than willing to 'judge' Hitler or Atta straight to Hell with a
> A brave German infantryman who sacraficed himself so his
> comrades could escape, or who took on extra guard duty to aid
> weaker soldiers, is probably a Good Person--as long as they
> didn't take part in the Very Very Bad things that the Germans
> did.
Wrong. They can be 'good' only if they didn't KNOW what the Reich was doing. It isn't enough to just be lucky enough not to be assigned to guard a death camp. If you KNOW they exist and continue to serve, you crossed the line and are damned near as wicked and evil as the most feared SS monster. All that evil requires is that good men do nothing. You should defect or rebel, if you continue to serve once you have knowledge of the evil your country is doing you join the ranks of the damned as far as I'm concerned. Harsh? Yes, but life isn't easy.
Making moral choices when the cost is low confers little karma, it is doing the right thing when you know it is going to cost that matters. Most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence died or ended up destitute by the end of the war but there were few regrets because they knew they were right.
> "Lawful" and "Chaotic" are, despite RPGing's wargaming
> baggage, hardly on par with Good or Evil. They're barely
> even real concepts.
Law/Chaos is on a par with Good/Evil, just a different quality being measured; it is very useful to put a 2nd dimension on the moral question. Just like the Pournelle Axes chart of political thought is so much more useful than the left/right one dimensional chart; even if it illustrates some wierd associations that are hard to understand. (Google is your friend if you want more info.)
> Use a broader definition of "harm" than simple "physical
> injury." Here's a few samples:
>
> * A man who throws himself in front of a train to push
> another out of the train's way has just committed a good act.
Perhaps, but I fail to see the big win in a straight up trade of one life for another. Would I trade my life for a stranger? Probably not. Would I RISK my butt for one? Probably. For a spouse/child/friend/etc? I'd like to think so, thankfully haven't faced that test.
> * A man who pushes someone else into the train's way to save
> themselves has committed an evil act.
Agreed.
> * Giving your lunch to someone who's hungry and hasn't eaten
> in four days is a good act.
No real problem here either. But better still to trade with him. He still gets to eat that way and retains his honor. Man does not live by bread alone.
In case you haven't guessed yet, I'm a Libertarian. I have found that the non-initiation of force principle is a very reliable way to assess the Rightness or Wrongness of a situation.
> The GPL explicitly allows you to redistribute a bowdlerized
> Red Hat, as long as you send along complete sources.
Thanks for restating my point..... and calling me obtuse (and possibly a troll even) while doing it. Perhaps you missed the original poster's parenthetical comment "(Incidentally,it would knock the teeth out of the GPL.) " which I was commenting on. Yes, I have read the GPL and most other licenses and EULAs. And for your information, there is no such thing as a copyright license. They are two entirely different beasties.
The big difference between a EULA and the GPL is that most EULAs attempt to create a one sided, unsigned contract which removes rights which exist by default and are almost certainly legally unenforcable. The GPL grants rights above and beyond those which copyright law provides. Big difference. Ignore the GPL all you want! You are still bound by copyright law which forbids all unauthorized redistribution. The clean flicks people are within the law. Copyright is NOT an absolute prohibition against any modification of a protected work. I can buy an art book, cut out the pictures and make a new work of art from the pieces. I can even sell it! What I can't do is make COPIES and sell those because the publisher was granted a monopoly by the federal government. (Which was supposed to be for a 'limited time' but that rant is for another time.)
I could buy books with dirty words/pics in them, use whiteout (tm) to blank out the words I objected to, remove the dirty pictures, etc and then resell the book 100% legally. Since you can't apply those sorts of edits to a DVD the clean flicks people buy a number of copies, replace the disc in the package with an edited version and rent them. Basically the same thing because what you are buying when you buy a DVD (note the word is BUY instead of LICENSE despite anything written on the package stating otherwise) is a bundle consisting of a box, a physical disc with bits on it and the right use those bits. Moving the bits from the original media to a working copy is legal within certain limits and I already explained how changing the bits is ok.
I actually do understand the issues fairly well, which is why I send money to the EFF whenever I can, 'cause we are so close to being totally hosed. I have followed these sort of things for years and these days I work in a public library, and everyone in this scene seems to be up to speed on IP (hate that term, see RMS's rant on the subject for why) issues. And nobody hates CIPA more than librarians do.
You mean "Facism" and "Toltaranism" and "Racism", don't you?
No, otherwise I'd have said that. Nazism was an idea (set of related ideas actually) that was and always will be evil. Go study it a bit if you don't want to take my word for it. (unless you are in Germany, then you are SOL since they are busy erasing it from their history books so it can happen again.....)
Facism is a related idea, but different. Most implementations certainly qualify as evil. Racism may or may not be evil, depends to what extent you carry it I suppose. Usually not very smart, but stupid != evil. The KKK on the other hand certainly crossed the line into evil.
> Evil is harming others to aid yourself. Good is the inverse.
Wrong again. Harming others is evil. Even if it doesn't aid anybody. And the inverse is not good. And no, valiant Germans who died for their country in WWII were not good. Glorious service in the name of evil makes one evil. Since your sig brands you as an RPG gamer I'll put in terms you might better understand. A brave and valiant SS stormtrooper would be Lawful Evil. Hitler began as Lawful Evil and ended up Chaotic Evil (Insane). A generic german soldier was Neutral Evil. Get it?
Harming yourself to help others may or may not make you good. It might also make you stupid. Helping yourself while helping others is the greatest good though. Henry Ford helped far more people while making himself filthy rich than 10,000 do-gooders working in soup kitchens on their day off.
> You throw around the "p" word as if owning something or the sole
> right to change it makes it less worthy. Everything worth
> something has a proprietary component. Even Linux. Your nose is
> bleeding from sitting so high on your horse.
It does make it less worthy in my eyes as a buyer of technology. When I see the "p" word in ad copy I cringe. I might still buy, but the "p" is always a negative. It means more expensive, harder to maintain and usually single source products. All bad things from the perspective of the buyer. Name the positive virtues you associate with the word; from the point of view of a CUSTOMER. Bet you can't.
As for Linux having a proprietary component, huh? Some distros do, such as SUSE and Mandrake and Redhat used to flirt with the dark side, but Linux itself has no such attachments. RedHat != Linux.
I lived through the PC revolution and saw great systems, innovative software and countless products die because of being proprietary and therefore incapable of surviving the death of their manufacturer. Never again will I walk into the trap of depending of a proprietary product for anything important.
There are laws against selling used parts in 'new' equipment. And remember that these drives aren't big assed 3 1/2" drives. They ain't even 2 1/2 laptop drives. The iPod uses tiny little PC Card drives that aren't cheap.
> This confuses the issue, because it's not defending an existing
> right, it's trying to create a new one that not even Schlafly
> would want if she thought about it for a moment. (Incidentally,
> it would knock the teeth out of the GPL.)
If RedHat decided to pull every occurance of 'fuck' from the comments of the Linux source, this would violate the GPL how?
While I wouldn't want to rent an edited video, I have no problem if others do and people supply that demand. They buy a copy of the movie for every copy they circulate so the creators are compensated the same, the modified copies are clearly marked so there is no attempt to deceive, in short there is no foul.
And as for Phyllis Schlafly joining the battle on our side, it is very encouraging. Her contributions are not very well known outside the hardcore conservative camp, but she has been tirelessly fighting for causes she believes in and winning more than her fair share of fights for decades. Agree or disagree with her, most who know much about her will concede she IS a high wattage thinker and so having a heavyweight like her on our side means just about every other serious thinker on the Right will read her column and give the ideas in it serious thought because they all know her and respect her opinions. And she is in a position to influence the innermost circles of the Republican power structure. Regardless of whether you consider it a good or bad thing, remember who controls Congress now.
> If Phyllis writes an editorial with which you agree, send her
> mail and say, "You and I disagree about many issues, but we're
> on the same wavelength here. Thanks!" Take help where you can
> find it, folks.
This part is spot on. I hit sites like drudgereport and follow the links off to columnists of all stripes. Just when you think you can predict what one will say about an issue one of em will shock you. Few intelligent people are 100% in one of the three major camps (Classical Liberal/Conservative, Libertarian or Modern Liberal/Socialist/Labor).
> one of the most insidious and dangerous intellectual crutches
> many people use is this false dichotomy of "good" or "bad"
> people or ideas. No person, and precious few ideas, are wholly
> good or bad - most are some sort of compromise.
Uh huh. NO good or evil, just shades of grey. Bullcrap. Agreed that most evil people have a few qualities we could all agree are admirable, but that doesn't make them any less evil on balance. Hell, we can all probably agree that Hitler & Stalin were gonzo super achievers. But what they choose to achive was undeniably wicked and they were EVIL men. Grow a pair and learn to discriminate between good and evil and have the courage of your conviction to state your call and stand by it.. Discrimination isn't a bad thing either, depends what it's used for.
While most people and ideas are in grey areas, some can only be called grey by people with a busted moral compass. Nazism, Communism, and the KKK are examples of ideas which are evil. Osama Bin Laden is evil. Any definition of the word 'evil' which excludes any of those people/ideas is a word devoid of any meaning. Others are more debatable. Lincoln for example has both detractors and defenders who are all reasonable people.
Yes, but most of the viewers on Conservative TownHall or the papers who carry her column aren't /. readers so it is all good. Just about every sane person not employed by a member of the MPAA/RIAA will end up turning against their power grab as soon as they find out what is going on. Columns like this one are key to that education process.
Yup, it's in the parallel universe. The ruling you are thinking of came from the Court of Appeals and Ashcroft & Co. are appealing to the Supremes. The opinion of the American Library Associations legal minds is that until it is actually over we still must filter and the verdict my director handed down unto me after consulting with other libraries in the state is to continue treating adults as children. We do NOT like it. I was even allowed a bit of activism by putting a big disclaimer on the login for patrons who would otherwise be unfiltered stating that basically we are doing it under duress and that all complaints should be directed to their elected officials and then listing the contact info for our Rep and Senators.
And of course by the time the Supremes DO strike this crap down Congress will have passed a new version and we will rinse & repeat.
They could care less what you have on your machine. They only care that it IS a machine connected to the Net. They can use it to attack other people, use it as a safe exchange point for warez/porn (especially illegal stuff like kiddie porn). They can run IRC bots on it. They use them as 'currency' to trade for more desirable things like the latest exploit scripts, etc. All script kiddies strive to maintain a stable of zombies to be used as needed.
I'm sysadmin at a public library with public dialup access. They get Klez by the dozens every month so I wonder where the writer is looking for 'typical users'? I'm sitting in a rural parish (county for the rest of the US) in LA and have a pretty typical bunch of 'end users' in our population with the one exception that I try as hard as I can to educate them as to the evils of Outlook (which falls on deaf ears) and pass out CD-ROMS and setup manuals documenting Netscape for web & E-Mail (which they ignore, whining about having problems getting Outlook Expresss configured.). The only concession to unsafe computing is that I do give detailed configuration steps on getting IE past our federally mandated filtering system because I know that a lot of sites and third party software depends on IE.
Yes, communism is Evil. Everywhere it has been tried it has ended in millions of bodies in unmarked graves. Everywhere. Don't even start that crap about some wicked people getting in control and screwing up a good idea. It has to be that way, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Communism is based on the idea that one absolute dictator will decide what is best for everyone (the Seven Year Plan) and everyone else will selflessly put out a 100% effort to achieve the goal. When the reality that people won't put out much effort with no hope of a reward, the 'malcontents' start get shipped off to the deathcamps.
If the maximum leader actually responds to the wishes of the lead, he isn't a maximum leader anymore and the government drifts away from communism because 'the people' never actually want communism. They might SAY they want some of the trappings of it, but offer them the whole package and as soon as they figure out how badly they get screwed along with 'the evil rich' they want nothing to do with it. Then it's either popular rule or rule from the muzzle of a gun. Popular rule means slide towards a European style Welfare State Socialism with a stagnant economy or keep going towards a full Free Market. The other option is for starry eyed communism to turn into Stalinism, which is historically the more popular choice since those in power never want to give it up without a fight. After all, they have convinced themselves they are the most wise and enlightened leaders in the land and are most fit to rule.
It is you who has the mental problem. You sound like one of those panty waist liberals who have an irrational fear of firearms, usually because deep down you don't trust YOURSELF around them and project that onto others. A firearm is a tool, nothing more. The average household has many dangers for a child, many more dangerous and most far easier to get into for a curious kid. You teach kids to avoid matches and later how to safely use them. Don't play in the pool unless an adult/older kid is around. Don't mess with those chemicals in the garage, the stuff in the medicine cabinet and most certainly the stuff under the sink. Don't play in traffic. Don't talk to strangers. A cow can kill you without even meaning to, so be careful around them and don't startle them. And so on and so on.
:)
Lots of dangers in the world. Which is why you must both educate children and enforce boundaries. And as for guns, teach em at the earliest opportunity what guns are and how much damage they can do. Let em blast a watermelon. Teach them 1) assume all guns are loaded 2) never point one at anything you aren't sure you want dead and 3) touch one when they shouldn't and they will WISH they were dead.
> oh, so since idiots can not watch their kids around
> pools it is ok then to let kids die from hand gun accidents.
In the end, yes. Because I wouldn't want to give our children a world that had been made completely 'child proof' when they grow up. I won't force them to pay that high a price tomorrow just so a few liberals can have their self esteem boosted today.
You see, I'm totally consistent. I oppose COPA/CIPA/etc because they are all based on the idea that to 'protect the children' we must treat all adults like children. I oppose attempts to pass victim disarmament laws that use the 'for the children' pitch as well and for much the same reason.
The world is NOT a safe place for children. It is the duty of parents to create an environment that is AS SAFE AS PRACTICAL for their children, but 100% is both unattainable and undesirable. It is also up to the parents to decide for themselves how best to raise their children. Personally I'd keep loaded weapons away from any child I didn't know for a fact was trained to either keep away from or properly use a weapon. But if I knew a 5yo had the proper respect for what a gun can do, I'd not think twice about leaving a pistol on the nightstand.
In small embedded spaces it IS just Linux, even if you are GNU zealot. The GNU tools are almost always absent. If the Flash isn't totally puny you get busybox.
No dark conspiracy theories needed to answer your "Why this Fantasy? question.
1. LOTR is the best and most well known work of epic fantasy written in the 20th century.
2. Advances in technology finally made it possible to film the story for only $100mil per episode. Remember that attempts had already been made, but failed to succeed because they were forced to animation for lack of any workable method to film the fantastic visions of Middle Earth.
3. Hollywood is currently obsessed by epic storytelling. Wars, lots of stuff going FOOM! LOTR is perfect source material for the CGI age of moviemaking.
Had New Line & Peter Jackson failed to take it on when they did it WOULD have been filmed by someone within the decade. I'm only thankful some idiot like Paul Verhoeven didn't get first crack at it.