e.g. in Australia, you turn up to the polling station (usually a local school or whatever), go to the desk and tell them your name. they look it up in their lists of voters, and cross your name off. Then they initial and hand you your ballot papers which you take to a private voting booth and fill out. Then you fold them and drop them into the ballot boxes (one for the house of reps, one for the senate). done.
In the last few elections, the Australian Electoral Commission (an independant govt body who have the responsibility for running elections) have been mailing out helpful voter cards with your name and IIRC your address on it which you can show at the desk. These cards are completely optional, you can still vote if you forget to bring it or have lost it or never got it, and you still don't have to show any ID.
And, yes, voting is compulsory in australia. In practice, this means you just have to turn up to a polling station and get your name crossed off the list. You can then vote informally if you choose, nobody will know. If you don't turn up, you'll get a letter in the mail a few weeks later asking if you have a good excuse (like, "I was too sick to leave the house"). If not, you'll get fined.
btw, compulsory voting is a good thing. it tends to limit the excesses of the loony extreme fringes of all sides, by encouraging politicians and major parties to pander to the middle ground.
and preferential voting (i.e. ordering your preferences as 1, 2, 3, etc) is also a good thing. it allows voters to vote for third parties and independant candidates without wasting their vote - if their first choice fails to win, their 2nd choice gets their vote...and then their third, fourth, etc choices. It also allows voters to send a message or lodge a protest, e.g. vote for the socialist party 1st and Labour 2nd - Labour will still (almost certainly) end up with that person's vote but they're also telling the Labour party that their policies are too right-wing and too cozy with business.....and, hey, if the impossible happens and the pimple-faced university student from Socialist Alliance wins a seat, that'll shake things up a bit in parliament!
but since the death penalty does exist in some places, IMO the only reasonable way to do it is:
1. the victim or a close member of the victim's family MUST be the ones to do the killing. no exceptions, except for one and only one circumstance (if the victim has no living family, then the prosecutor MUST be the state's killer) - if they can't stomach doing it, then it shouldn't be done.
The method should be as gruesome yet painless as possible - knockout drugs followed by manual beheading, perhaps...but there should be no euphemistic way of disguising the fact that a state-sanctioned *murder* is being committed.
2. if it is later discovered that they executed an innocent person, then they and everyone else directly involved in the execution (prosecutor, prison guards, etc) MUST be charged with murder and also subject to the death penalty.
3. prosecutors MUST be charged with attempted murder if (while the death row prisoner is still living) it is found that they ignored or suppressed evidence that proves innocence or provides enough reasonable doubt for a jury to acquit.
This kind of thing sounded cool and amazing in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, but in real life it's just fucking creepy and perverted.
The key difference is that Stephenson's version was a primer that educated the owner about maths and science and all sorts of things, while this abomination is from a company that has a history of marketing to and exploiting children, and is a doll whose purpose is to teach rigidly oppressive gender roles, teaching girls things like "math is hard".
sadly, Stephenson's version is probably only possible in fiction. In real life, the corporate profit motive makes it just marketing spyware.
because he's a narcissist who takes any opportunity at self-promotion. his gun-fetish is just a means to that end, the consequences of his actions don't matter as long as he gets some publicity.
I propose making it a crime to say "IP" or "Intellectual Property" unironically as propaganda can cause severe damage to both the thought processes of individuals and to the judicial processes of society.
So propaganda is OK merely because it's old? In that case, how old does a propaganda term have to be before it becomes legit?
copyright infringement was called "piracy" back then in an attempt to make it seem like an actual crime, and one of the worst crimes rather than a relatively harmless evasion of rent-seeking monopoly.
BTW, corporate tax evasion sounds like a harmless white-collar crime, so i propose calling it paedophilia just so that the public understands how dangerous and destructive the crime really is. In a century or two (perhaps less), that should be OK, because propaganda is OK as long as it's traditional.
Key differences between offline counterfeiting and online piracy that the copyright maximalist fascists are glossing over include:
1. counterfeitiing of physical goods is a for-profit activity, online piracy is, mostly, not. copyright laws already have higher penalties for commercial piracy (e.g. selling copied CDs or DVDs) than non-commercial piracy.
2. counterfeiting is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. it's comparing chalk and cheese. copyright and trademarks are two completely different, unrelated things with completely different laws and rationales.
3. counterfeiting also affects the consumers and is often an act of deception against them. In some cases, that doesn't matter much (where the buyer knows they're buying a "fake" because, e.g., one t-shirt or handbag or gaudy watch is pretty much the same as any other), in other cases it matters a lot because the consumer can get an inferior, or at least wildly different, product to what they thought they were buying.
Pragmatism is only a secondary concern for free software (as opposed to open source).
People who license their software under copyleft terms don't want people who wont license their software as copyleft to benefit from their work. In that sense, them wasting their time is also the GPL working as intended. If they're not willing to pay the license "fee", then why the hell should they benefit? In other words, if you won't share, then write your own code or pay a commercial licence for proprietary code.
The GPL is more than just a software license, it's a political statement and political action about sharing and freedom for ALL users, not just for a handful of developers who want to use other people's work for free. If you want to benefit from sharing, then you also have to share.
if you don't like it or don't want to accept the terms, that's fine - but write your own code.
under international law, it is illegal for a country to render a person stateless.
i.e. it is (or can be) legal to revoke citizenship of someone with dual citizenship, but not to revoke it for someone who is a citizen of only one country.
(this is the loophole that the australian government is currently considering exploiting in order to punish australian citizens with dual citizenship who go to, e.g., syria to fight.)
no, it's not the mistake of a junior dev - it's quite clear that vmkernel is entirely based around the linux kernel, most of the code is linux with some changes and additions.
either:
1. they're recklessly ignorant about software licenses
2. they're unable/unwilling to see the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code
3. they thought they'd get away with it, either because they thought nobody would notice or because the legal costs of license enforcement would be prohibitive.
if someone sees the terms of the GPL and then chooses not to use GPL-ed code, then that is the GPL working as intended. You're only supposed to use GPL code if you are willing to pay the licensing "fee", which is that your derivative work can only be distributed under the same terms.
If you choose not to use GPL code, that's perfectly OK. That's not a bug in the GPL, it's an intended feature.
vmware's fault is that they chose to use GPL-ed code while refusing to pay the license "fee". This directly harms not only their users (whose GPL rights to the derivative work they've bought from vmware have been infringed) and Christoph Hellwig but also everyone who has ever contributed in any way to the linux kernel, as those contributions were made with an expectation that any derivative work would only be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
i'm very much in favour of regulation of businesses, but that's one of the things that I think the government has no business regulating. Govt SHOULD be regulating google's surveillance of the public, google's business practices, google's tax evasion and many other things, but the content of google's website should be beyond their ability to regulate.
it's their site, their search engine - it's entirely up to them what criteria they use for ranking pages and when and how they change that algorithm. Nobody has a *right* to either appear on google's search or to a particular page-ranking.
and from a pragmatic POV, changing the ranking algorithms is the only way that google can keep ahead of SEO spammers and the like who would otherwise make search engines complely fucking useless because you'd never find anything but spammed crap.
it's not a binary choice to regular google or to not regulate "Google-level internet entities" - of course they should be regulated, humans need protection against corporations, but it's a matter of which things can and should be regulated and which should not.
now that i think about it i can see that you're absolutely right -saying "come and murder people for god" is totally acceptable and preventing people from saying it is just as bad - worse, even - than beheading people.
Christians don't want to take over the world for the same reason that corporations don't want to take over the US, the same reason that Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to take over News Corp or Fox.
your government has created a monster that they don't dare rein in - any serious attempt to do so would be political suicide because the spies can dig up dirt (and probably already have done so) on all of them.
the dirt doesn't even have to be evidence of wrong-doing or illegality, as long as it's disturbing or annoying to enough of the public (and the american public are mostly judgemental arseholes over even trivial things)....has a mistress, is a closet homosexual, did drugs (and inhaled!) and other irrelevancies.
even those who have "nothing to hide" can't and won't act because they are in the minority and under severe pressure from their colleagues who do....make a principled stand now, be booted from the party and any chance of election next time.
this is, no doubt, why allegedly democratic governments around the world are rushing to introduce legislation allowing and even requiring the mass surveillance of citizens - they don't dare not to, too much dirt on them will be exposed.
and then, of course, there's all the corporate lobbying in favour of spying on the public - from simple stuff like RIAA and MPAA wanting data on downloaders to corporates wanting dossiers on "evil terrorists" who go to protest rallies and leak info on the evil shit they're doing.
As an atheist, I am completely confident in saying that while it is theoretically possible that some entity or force that could be described as "god" or "godlike" might exist, I am absolutely certain that the patriarchal god of middle-eastern sheep-herders is not and can not be it.
That god is just too absurd, too far from any description of reality, and far too self-contradictory.....and, if by some horrible chance the world is far fucking weirder than it seems to be and that god did exist, then it would be an evil god deserving our hatred and resistance, not our worship.
it's not a choice between a) not believing in god(s) and b) believing in YOUR god. There are far more possibilities than that, an infinite variety of god delusions - and many gods that are, while just as fictitious as yours, far more credible.
At one time opium was legal in the US. It was banned due to serious problems with it's abuse.
it was banned because it was popular with chinese immigrants, thus giving police (and the white society who owned them) the power to harass imprison them
Alcohol was at one time banned as well but it proved too popular to ban.
alcohol was too popular with WHITES to remain banned.
Having received morphine and other opiates in hospital for intense pain, i can assure you that it is indeed very pleasurable. One moment you are in excruciating pain, the next in bliss. I've tried street heroin once too, many years ago and IMO it wasn't anywhere near as good or pleasurable as the morphine - probably because i wasn't in any significant physical or emotional pain at the time....it certainly wasn't even good enough to be worth bothering to repeat the experience.
i've also had numerous prescriptions for oxycodone (aka "hillbilly heroin", reputedly far more addictive than heroin) for chronic pain management over the years, and have managed to remain non-addicted (i.e. i take it when i'm in pain and don't even think about it when i'm not in pain). this is because aside from occasional bouts of excruciating pain, my life isn't terrible.
It has been proven many times that addiction is a result of miserable living conditions - social, economic, and/or psychological - not a result of the drugs themselves. the addiction is to the relief of pain, whether physical or psychological.
you say that as if addiction itself is an inherently and undeniably bad thing, but just stop and think about that for a minute: as long as the addict has a good, clean supply what's so bad about addiction?
in any case, addiction is a result of miserable social and economic conditions rather than any drug - this has been proven in numerous studies.
Slashdot Mirror
ID is not necessarily required.
e.g. in Australia, you turn up to the polling station (usually a local school or whatever), go to the desk and tell them your name. they look it up in their lists of voters, and cross your name off. Then they initial and hand you your ballot papers which you take to a private voting booth and fill out. Then you fold them and drop them into the ballot boxes (one for the house of reps, one for the senate). done.
In the last few elections, the Australian Electoral Commission (an independant govt body who have the responsibility for running elections) have been mailing out helpful voter cards with your name and IIRC your address on it which you can show at the desk. These cards are completely optional, you can still vote if you forget to bring it or have lost it or never got it, and you still don't have to show any ID.
And, yes, voting is compulsory in australia. In practice, this means you just have to turn up to a polling station and get your name crossed off the list. You can then vote informally if you choose, nobody will know. If you don't turn up, you'll get a letter in the mail a few weeks later asking if you have a good excuse (like, "I was too sick to leave the house"). If not, you'll get fined.
btw, compulsory voting is a good thing. it tends to limit the excesses of the loony extreme fringes of all sides, by encouraging politicians and major parties to pander to the middle ground.
and preferential voting (i.e. ordering your preferences as 1, 2, 3, etc) is also a good thing. it allows voters to vote for third parties and independant candidates without wasting their vote - if their first choice fails to win, their 2nd choice gets their vote...and then their third, fourth, etc choices. It also allows voters to send a message or lodge a protest, e.g. vote for the socialist party 1st and Labour 2nd - Labour will still (almost certainly) end up with that person's vote but they're also telling the Labour party that their policies are too right-wing and too cozy with business.....and, hey, if the impossible happens and the pimple-faced university student from Socialist Alliance wins a seat, that'll shake things up a bit in parliament!
it's just too dangerous a power for them to have.
but since the death penalty does exist in some places, IMO the only reasonable way to do it is:
1. the victim or a close member of the victim's family MUST be the ones to do the killing. no exceptions, except for one and only one circumstance (if the victim has no living family, then the prosecutor MUST be the state's killer) - if they can't stomach doing it, then it shouldn't be done.
The method should be as gruesome yet painless as possible - knockout drugs followed by manual beheading, perhaps...but there should be no euphemistic way of disguising the fact that a state-sanctioned *murder* is being committed.
2. if it is later discovered that they executed an innocent person, then they and everyone else directly involved in the execution (prosecutor, prison guards, etc) MUST be charged with murder and also subject to the death penalty.
3. prosecutors MUST be charged with attempted murder if (while the death row prisoner is still living) it is found that they ignored or suppressed evidence that proves innocence or provides enough reasonable doubt for a jury to acquit.
This kind of thing sounded cool and amazing in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, but in real life it's just fucking creepy and perverted.
The key difference is that Stephenson's version was a primer that educated the owner about maths and science and all sorts of things, while this abomination is from a company that has a history of marketing to and exploiting children, and is a doll whose purpose is to teach rigidly oppressive gender roles, teaching girls things like "math is hard".
sadly, Stephenson's version is probably only possible in fiction. In real life, the corporate profit motive makes it just marketing spyware.
those are not the only two options available.
even five year olds can see through bullshit false dichotomies, why can't libertarians?
why all the attention?
because he's a narcissist who takes any opportunity at self-promotion. his gun-fetish is just a means to that end, the consequences of his actions don't matter as long as he gets some publicity.
in short, just another libtard psychopath.
I propose making it a crime to say "IP" or "Intellectual Property" unironically as propaganda can cause severe damage to both the thought processes of individuals and to the judicial processes of society.
So propaganda is OK merely because it's old? In that case, how old does a propaganda term have to be before it becomes legit?
copyright infringement was called "piracy" back then in an attempt to make it seem like an actual crime, and one of the worst crimes rather than a relatively harmless evasion of rent-seeking monopoly.
BTW, corporate tax evasion sounds like a harmless white-collar crime, so i propose calling it paedophilia just so that the public understands how dangerous and destructive the crime really is. In a century or two (perhaps less), that should be OK, because propaganda is OK as long as it's traditional.
Key differences between offline counterfeiting and online piracy that the copyright maximalist fascists are glossing over include:
1. counterfeitiing of physical goods is a for-profit activity, online piracy is, mostly, not. copyright laws already have higher penalties for commercial piracy (e.g. selling copied CDs or DVDs) than non-commercial piracy.
2. counterfeiting is trademark infringement, not copyright infringement. it's comparing chalk and cheese. copyright and trademarks are two completely different, unrelated things with completely different laws and rationales.
3. counterfeiting also affects the consumers and is often an act of deception against them. In some cases, that doesn't matter much (where the buyer knows they're buying a "fake" because, e.g., one t-shirt or handbag or gaudy watch is pretty much the same as any other), in other cases it matters a lot because the consumer can get an inferior, or at least wildly different, product to what they thought they were buying.
Pragmatism is only a secondary concern for free software (as opposed to open source).
People who license their software under copyleft terms don't want people who wont license their software as copyleft to benefit from their work. In that sense, them wasting their time is also the GPL working as intended. If they're not willing to pay the license "fee", then why the hell should they benefit? In other words, if you won't share, then write your own code or pay a commercial licence for proprietary code.
The GPL is more than just a software license, it's a political statement and political action about sharing and freedom for ALL users, not just for a handful of developers who want to use other people's work for free. If you want to benefit from sharing, then you also have to share.
if you don't like it or don't want to accept the terms, that's fine - but write your own code.
under international law, it is illegal for a country to render a person stateless.
i.e. it is (or can be) legal to revoke citizenship of someone with dual citizenship, but not to revoke it for someone who is a citizen of only one country.
(this is the loophole that the australian government is currently considering exploiting in order to punish australian citizens with dual citizenship who go to, e.g., syria to fight.)
no, it's not the mistake of a junior dev - it's quite clear that vmkernel is entirely based around the linux kernel, most of the code is linux with some changes and additions.
either:
1. they're recklessly ignorant about software licenses
2. they're unable/unwilling to see the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code
3. they thought they'd get away with it, either because they thought nobody would notice or because the legal costs of license enforcement would be prohibitive.
if someone sees the terms of the GPL and then chooses not to use GPL-ed code, then that is the GPL working as intended. You're only supposed to use GPL code if you are willing to pay the licensing "fee", which is that your derivative work can only be distributed under the same terms.
If you choose not to use GPL code, that's perfectly OK. That's not a bug in the GPL, it's an intended feature.
vmware's fault is that they chose to use GPL-ed code while refusing to pay the license "fee". This directly harms not only their users (whose GPL rights to the derivative work they've bought from vmware have been infringed) and Christoph Hellwig but also everyone who has ever contributed in any way to the linux kernel, as those contributions were made with an expectation that any derivative work would only be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
i'm very much in favour of regulation of businesses, but that's one of the things that I think the government has no business regulating. Govt SHOULD be regulating google's surveillance of the public, google's business practices, google's tax evasion and many other things, but the content of google's website should be beyond their ability to regulate.
it's their site, their search engine - it's entirely up to them what criteria they use for ranking pages and when and how they change that algorithm. Nobody has a *right* to either appear on google's search or to a particular page-ranking.
and from a pragmatic POV, changing the ranking algorithms is the only way that google can keep ahead of SEO spammers and the like who would otherwise make search engines complely fucking useless because you'd never find anything but spammed crap.
it's not a binary choice to regular google or to not regulate "Google-level internet entities" - of course they should be regulated, humans need protection against corporations, but it's a matter of which things can and should be regulated and which should not.
Rapist or wannabe.
Girls are for doing whatever they want to do.
Read the law.
now that i think about it i can see that you're absolutely right -saying "come and murder people for god" is totally acceptable and preventing people from saying it is just as bad - worse, even - than beheading people.
Christians don't want to take over the world for the same reason that corporations don't want to take over the US, the same reason that Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to take over News Corp or Fox.
they thought nothing of snowden because they're too busy being distracted by important stuff like blue-white dresses and llamas.
your government has created a monster that they don't dare rein in - any serious attempt to do so would be political suicide because the spies can dig up dirt (and probably already have done so) on all of them.
the dirt doesn't even have to be evidence of wrong-doing or illegality, as long as it's disturbing or annoying to enough of the public (and the american public are mostly judgemental arseholes over even trivial things)....has a mistress, is a closet homosexual, did drugs (and inhaled!) and other irrelevancies.
even those who have "nothing to hide" can't and won't act because they are in the minority and under severe pressure from their colleagues who do....make a principled stand now, be booted from the party and any chance of election next time.
this is, no doubt, why allegedly democratic governments around the world are rushing to introduce legislation allowing and even requiring the mass surveillance of citizens - they don't dare not to, too much dirt on them will be exposed.
and then, of course, there's all the corporate lobbying in favour of spying on the public - from simple stuff like RIAA and MPAA wanting data on downloaders to corporates wanting dossiers on "evil terrorists" who go to protest rallies and leak info on the evil shit they're doing.
for more info on the existence of Big Bunny, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Your conviction is wrong because space bunnies don't need atmosphere. Big Bunny made them that way.
As an atheist, I am completely confident in saying that while it is theoretically possible that some entity or force that could be described as "god" or "godlike" might exist, I am absolutely certain that the patriarchal god of middle-eastern sheep-herders is not and can not be it.
That god is just too absurd, too far from any description of reality, and far too self-contradictory.....and, if by some horrible chance the world is far fucking weirder than it seems to be and that god did exist, then it would be an evil god deserving our hatred and resistance, not our worship.
it's not a choice between a) not believing in god(s) and b) believing in YOUR god. There are far more possibilities than that, an infinite variety of god delusions - and many gods that are, while just as fictitious as yours, far more credible.
1. a god that communicates only through "ephemeral" "meta-communication" is either a retard or too ludicrous to believe in.
2. Mother Teresa was a sadistic psychopath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
it was banned because it was popular with chinese immigrants, thus giving police (and the white society who owned them) the power to harass imprison them
alcohol was too popular with WHITES to remain banned.
Having received morphine and other opiates in hospital for intense pain, i can assure you that it is indeed very pleasurable. One moment you are in excruciating pain, the next in bliss. I've tried street heroin once too, many years ago and IMO it wasn't anywhere near as good or pleasurable as the morphine - probably because i wasn't in any significant physical or emotional pain at the time....it certainly wasn't even good enough to be worth bothering to repeat the experience.
i've also had numerous prescriptions for oxycodone (aka "hillbilly heroin", reputedly far more addictive than heroin) for chronic pain management over the years, and have managed to remain non-addicted (i.e. i take it when i'm in pain and don't even think about it when i'm not in pain). this is because aside from occasional bouts of excruciating pain, my life isn't terrible.
It has been proven many times that addiction is a result of miserable living conditions - social, economic, and/or psychological - not a result of the drugs themselves. the addiction is to the relief of pain, whether physical or psychological.
you say that as if addiction itself is an inherently and undeniably bad thing, but just stop and think about that for a minute: as long as the addict has a good, clean supply what's so bad about addiction?
in any case, addiction is a result of miserable social and economic conditions rather than any drug - this has been proven in numerous studies.