Ah, but can you really afford it? Or have some of the costs been hidden (or transferred to others)? The only time I can really take the environmental lobby is when they stick to the basic fact: The total cost of many items is not accurately reflected in the price sticker -- if we correctly apportioned costs, everyone would become "environmentally conscious" because it'd be the obvious selfish thing to do...
The evidence actually stacks up empirically -- the only time nuclear weapons were ever used was when one country owned a monopoly on the technology.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to argue that a single example is evidence "stacking up". The case can be made -- quite well, I think -- that the prevention of nuclear war has come about because the ownership of such weapons was restricted to blocs so powerful that they had too much to lose. Everyone having nukes leads to an equilibrium, but an unstable one: it's the Tragedy of the First Defector. Or, to put it another way -- there seem to be no shortage of people willing to blow themselves up with a car bomb. You don't think there are people willing to blow up themselves with an atomic bomb, if it means dealing a blow to their enemy? The globalization and democratization of weaponry has never really led to stability.
Ooo ooo I know! It's an office suite! What? That's wrong? Damn I wish the site said what it was! These clues are too hard to figure out!
Yes, and information on the first page of the linked site definitely helps me decide if I should bother clicking through and checking out the site. It must be nice, having a pipe so wide that your bandwidth is clairvoyant... We'll leave aside the obvious case of slashdotted sites.
The person to whom you replied was making the entirely reasonable point that perhaps, just maybe, the summary of the article should -- I'm going out on a limb here -- you know, actually summarize the thing linked to.
Or more succintly: I should have to leave slashdot.org to get an idea as to whether I want to leave slashdot.org.
Without God in our society the worst will happen, William Penn put it best:
You miss, deliberately or not, the actual point of all those quotes. The founders mostly believed in God and mostly believed that religious practice would be a wellspring of right action. So what? They also believed, strongly -- and I know it, because they wrote it into the Constitution -- that the state must not be empowered or allowed to enforce religion. It simply must not. Down that path lay all the horrors and tyrannies you fret over.
Having the state be neutral of the issue of religion does not interfere with your religion, unless your religion is based upon coercion. And to extent that it is, it is invalid -- the state has a vested interest in preventing you from exercising that coercion. You are free to practice what you believe, I am free to practice what I believe. You are free to derive your moral compass from the holy writ of your faith -- indeed, the Founders would likely say that that is the only sure source of it. But the state must not derive from it.
The intent and beauty of the American experiment is that it derives from the operation of reason and sense -- it is explicitly not found primarily on holy writ. And so all citizens of common sense and good faith can coexist peacefully and the state need not be rended by religious strife.
I honestly don't get why people have such trouble with that concept. The failure of the state to endorse your religion isn't a criticism of it. The state can't endorse any religion; it can't have an opinion on any of them. That doesn't mean you can't. For Heaven's sake, society is bigger than just the state...
Freedom of religion (if practiced) and freedom from religion (if desired) are two sides of the same coin and cannot be extricated from one another. A valid religious feeling is that there is no God. There are long-standing religions where the idea of "a God" would be insulting.
Um, obviously "under God" is only "true" if you believe there is a God. Otherwise the statement is meaningless and has no truth value.
Religious freedom was an important part of the founding of this nation -- which is why it's so important that the state be so entirely religion-neutral. Remember that the Pilgrims, whom we often see held up as the root of our religious tolerance, were not seeking religious freedom. They certainly wanted religion enforced -- except no one in England was enforcing their religion. Indeed they were being persecuted. Upon arriving on these shores, they turned around and began restricting other faiths immediately.
And that's the point: Eveyone wants a theocracy when it's their God ruling things. But no one wants to live under someone else's religion. And so in the States, through historical quirk and some incredibly far-sighted and brave people, we live under no one's religion -- allowing everyone to express their own.
As for enforcement: attendance is mandatory in all states, I believe. So participation in the pledge, or obvious separation from one's peers, is also mandatory. That's what most people objecting object to -- that the "voluntary" nature is bogus.
effectively squelching internet speech? there is no restriction on accessing the website.
The courts have (correctly, IMHO) also recognized and prevented things that have a so-called "chilling effect" on the exercise of free speech. If you start to give a speech in the town square and a law enforcement officer stands behind you menacingly tapping his billyclub, it might influence your decision to rant against the pigs. The credible threat of retaliation for the exercise of free speech is sometimes enough to cut off that speech -- and thus violates the First Amendment.
Imagine if the Bush administration declared as "terrorist" all sites painting Wesley Clark in a positive light? What if they instead very publicy declared one such site terrorist and then hauled away the webmaster in chains? A lot of people would think twice before putting up their own sites?
And though that example is currently farfetched, remember all the rabid right-wingers who, for about 18 months after 9/11, declared that criticizing the Pesident's policy was the same as attacking the office of the President and thus was only a smidge above terrorism...
Look, if you'd been bitch-slapped by democracy (Ashcroft ran against a dead man for senator of Missouri in 2000 -- and lost), you'd be down on the people, too.
It's always risky to quote the scientific journal "duh" because it isn't peer-reviewed and of course often publishes retractions. For example,
as a virus writer you want maximum penatration
Most do. Some virus writers want the acclaim and "glory" of being "the guy that brought down the Internet". And because Unix/Linux is universally considered more secure, taking it down is a sexier project. SO you might very well find that your Mozart-type virus writers actually target Linux.
Therefore if there are any bugs in a Linux system, then Linux will still end up just as subverted.
The people saying this are missing the point. The idea is, OS are not fungible. The Register writer makes the argument that Linux and MacOS are intrinsically more secure -- that not all of the problems Microsoft suffers comes just from being the biggest target. So even if Linux completely eclipsed MS, the number of exploits and viruses -- and, especially, the cumulative damage -- would not approach current levels... because the operating system is, of itself, more secure.
As long as there is software there will be bugs, no matter where it is run.
This is very true.
The statement is true but contentless, at least in the current context. The issue isn't whether software is buggy. It's whether those bugs can be used to write code that trashes a system. In a well-designed operating system, applications can crash all they want but they can't take anything else with them. In the opposite of a well-written OS -- well, just run Windows for a while and you'll see.
tobeornottobe.com is relevent to a search for "to be or not to be".
No, it is not, since I never wanted it.
See, you do want a telepathic search engine. That's be cool but I don't think it's fair to blast Google for not being it. The amazing thing is that you first attack Google for not having sites that reference Shakespeare, now you lambaste it for having pages that do.
Google has never been advertised as a giant Web-based grep. It's a search engine -- you know, a thing you go to find sites. If it only returned what you thought you wanted, it wouldn't be useful.
Google certainly has its flaws and it sometimes spits out weird or irrelevant results -- but it seems to work well enough for me. It isn't what you seem to want, but it hasn't ever claimed to be that, either.
Is 100% accurate matching results to a phrase search too much to ask for a search engine?
Um, yeah. Actually, I don't know what you're talking about. Entering the phrase "to be or not to be" -- with quotes, so as to indicate you want the phrase, not just the collection of words -- yielded the first two pages of results all having that phrase. Not all of them were for pages on Shakespeare, but then again, that phrase is now deeply buried in the common memespace. If you make the search phrase
"to be or not to be" Shakespeare
you do indeed get results with the phrase and exclusively referring to Shakespeare. Oh, I get it. You don't like the idea you need to actually construct a reasonable search phrase. You're mad that Google isn't, I don't know, telepathic. Your best bet is the SFWIWNFWIS search engine -- search for what I want, not for what I say.
bit barf dumped to a.wav file is not music because nobody can play it on an instrument
Ah. And the battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers isn't really protected as visual art, since no one could actually stage it -- all those orcs exist only as bits and not "really".
What a goofy argument. How can you restrict music to only that which can be played in physical space on physical instruments? Do you invalidate multi-track recording, too, since no single ear can hear everything the way the disc sounds? What about instruments we haven't imagined, or that exist only as a sequence of algorithms that drive a speaker a particular way?
There is more in heavan and earth than, apparently, dreamt of in your philosophy...
All digital content is stored as a sequence of 1s and 0s. That sequence has a particular order. A string of 1s and 0s in a particular order is simply the binary representation of a number. And numbers cannot be copyrighted, patented, or trademarked.
In other words, the entire intellectual "property" regime is a house of cards resting on an unspoken mis-truth.
But the paranoia involving all motherboards in the future to require Windows is obsurd because that is the sort of thing the justice department would not allow Microsoft/Motherboard manufactorers to do.
Of course. Because this Justice Department has shown itself to be the ever-vigilant foe of monopolies, Microsoft in particular. It only took a six-year, multimillion dollar lawsuit among a dozen states and the federal government to end up causing Microsoft to do exactly nothing... Don't look to the DoJ to fix these wrongs -- Microsoft has the $$.
While the initial open source software may be ?free,? most studies conclude that acquisition costs represent only 5 to 10 percent of total cost of ownership.
OK, so the purchase price P is only 5% of the total cost T. Let's find the total cost for this nonimal Linux migration:
0.05 T = P T = P / 0.05 = 20 P = 20 * 0 = 0
So even by their own arguments, CCAWG seems to prove that the total cost to own Linux is 0.:)
Err, how do you get to the asteroid and move it? Isn't that transport.
With the large number of Earth-crossing asteroids, it might take only a small nudge to get one to stick around. Or, put another way, they're already nearly in orbit -- God picked up the tab.
It IS copyrighted.. so that page COULD be shut down by ( i think ) hasbro..
The original poster was not saying that making Silly Putty might be a copyright violation. He was saying that the use of Silly Putty -- to wit, to copy (say) your Sunday comics and then stretch them -- was employing a "circumvention device".
Um, it's the "laws against mugging" that make mugging a crime. So if you hypothesize that muggers have a "right to a living", then the laws against armed robbery interfere with that "right". The analogy is actually a pretty strong one.
You're upset because you see Barry making a moral equivalence between the two, but he's talking only about the "right to a living" argument. He's not saying telemarketers are as bad as muggers -- or if he is, it's irrelevant to this particular argument -- only that their position is as untenable as a mugger's would be.
My only quibble is that the analogy would have been even better had he used, not mugging, but house burgulary. In both cases someone comes uninvited into your house -- even when you take steps to keep them out -- and take something precious (in the telemarketers' case, your time).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but can you really afford it? Or have some of the costs been hidden (or transferred to others)? The only time I can really take the environmental lobby is when they stick to the basic fact: The total cost of many items is not accurately reflected in the price sticker -- if we correctly apportioned costs, everyone would become "environmentally conscious" because it'd be the obvious selfish thing to do...
I think it's a bit disingenuous to argue that a single example is evidence "stacking up". The case can be made -- quite well, I think -- that the prevention of nuclear war has come about because the ownership of such weapons was restricted to blocs so powerful that they had too much to lose. Everyone having nukes leads to an equilibrium, but an unstable one: it's the Tragedy of the First Defector. Or, to put it another way -- there seem to be no shortage of people willing to blow themselves up with a car bomb. You don't think there are people willing to blow up themselves with an atomic bomb, if it means dealing a blow to their enemy?
The globalization and democratization of weaponry has never really led to stability.
Sure. And the best way to avoid nuclear war is to give every Joe his own a-bomb. Vernor Vinge would be proud.
Yes, and information on the first page of the linked site definitely helps me decide if I should bother clicking through and checking out the site. It must be nice, having a pipe so wide that your bandwidth is clairvoyant... We'll leave aside the obvious case of slashdotted sites.
The person to whom you replied was making the entirely reasonable point that perhaps, just maybe, the summary of the article should -- I'm going out on a limb here -- you know, actually summarize the thing linked to.
Or more succintly: I should have to leave slashdot.org to get an idea as to whether I want to leave slashdot.org.
You miss, deliberately or not, the actual point of all those quotes. The founders mostly believed in God and mostly believed that religious practice would be a wellspring of right action. So what? They also believed, strongly -- and I know it, because they wrote it into the Constitution -- that the state must not be empowered or allowed to enforce religion. It simply must not. Down that path lay all the horrors and tyrannies you fret over.
Having the state be neutral of the issue of religion does not interfere with your religion, unless your religion is based upon coercion. And to extent that it is, it is invalid -- the state has a vested interest in preventing you from exercising that coercion. You are free to practice what you believe, I am free to practice what I believe. You are free to derive your moral compass from the holy writ of your faith -- indeed, the Founders would likely say that that is the only sure source of it. But the state must not derive from it.
The intent and beauty of the American experiment is that it derives from the operation of reason and sense -- it is explicitly not found primarily on holy writ. And so all citizens of common sense and good faith can coexist peacefully and the state need not be rended by religious strife.
I honestly don't get why people have such trouble with that concept. The failure of the state to endorse your religion isn't a criticism of it. The state can't endorse any religion; it can't have an opinion on any of them. That doesn't mean you can't. For Heaven's sake, society is bigger than just the state...
Freedom of religion (if practiced) and freedom from religion (if desired) are two sides of the same coin and cannot be extricated from one another. A valid religious feeling is that there is no God. There are long-standing religions where the idea of "a God" would be insulting.
Religious freedom was an important part of the founding of this nation -- which is why it's so important that the state be so entirely religion-neutral. Remember that the Pilgrims, whom we often see held up as the root of our religious tolerance, were not seeking religious freedom. They certainly wanted religion enforced -- except no one in England was enforcing their religion. Indeed they were being persecuted. Upon arriving on these shores, they turned around and began restricting other faiths immediately.
And that's the point: Eveyone wants a theocracy when it's their God ruling things. But no one wants to live under someone else's religion. And so in the States, through historical quirk and some incredibly far-sighted and brave people, we live under no one's religion -- allowing everyone to express their own.
As for enforcement: attendance is mandatory in all states, I believe. So participation in the pledge, or obvious separation from one's peers, is also mandatory. That's what most people objecting object to -- that the "voluntary" nature is bogus.
and
(emphasis added)
I guess it averages out to being simply "whelmed".
The courts have (correctly, IMHO) also recognized and prevented things that have a so-called "chilling effect" on the exercise of free speech. If you start to give a speech in the town square and a law enforcement officer stands behind you menacingly tapping his billyclub, it might influence your decision to rant against the pigs. The credible threat of retaliation for the exercise of free speech is sometimes enough to cut off that speech -- and thus violates the First Amendment.
Imagine if the Bush administration declared as "terrorist" all sites painting Wesley Clark in a positive light? What if they instead very publicy declared one such site terrorist and then hauled away the webmaster in chains? A lot of people would think twice before putting up their own sites?
And though that example is currently farfetched, remember all the rabid right-wingers who, for about 18 months after 9/11, declared that criticizing the Pesident's policy was the same as attacking the office of the President and thus was only a smidge above terrorism...
Look, if you'd been bitch-slapped by democracy (Ashcroft ran against a dead man for senator of Missouri in 2000 -- and lost), you'd be down on the people, too.
Most do. Some virus writers want the acclaim and "glory" of being "the guy that brought down the Internet". And because Unix/Linux is universally considered more secure, taking it down is a sexier project. SO you might very well find that your Mozart-type virus writers actually target Linux.
The people saying this are missing the point. The idea is, OS are not fungible. The Register writer makes the argument that Linux and MacOS are intrinsically more secure -- that not all of the problems Microsoft suffers comes just from being the biggest target. So even if Linux completely eclipsed MS, the number of exploits and viruses -- and, especially, the cumulative damage -- would not approach current levels... because the operating system is, of itself, more secure.
The statement is true but contentless, at least in the current context. The issue isn't whether software is buggy. It's whether those bugs can be used to write code that trashes a system. In a well-designed operating system, applications can crash all they want but they can't take anything else with them. In the opposite of a well-written OS -- well, just run Windows for a while and you'll see.
See, you do want a telepathic search engine. That's be cool but I don't think it's fair to blast Google for not being it. The amazing thing is that you first attack Google for not having sites that reference Shakespeare, now you lambaste it for having pages that do.
Google has never been advertised as a giant Web-based grep. It's a search engine -- you know, a thing you go to find sites. If it only returned what you thought you wanted, it wouldn't be useful.
Google certainly has its flaws and it sometimes spits out weird or irrelevant results -- but it seems to work well enough for me. It isn't what you seem to want, but it hasn't ever claimed to be that, either.
Um, yeah. Actually, I don't know what you're talking about. Entering the phrase "to be or not to be" -- with quotes, so as to indicate you want the phrase, not just the collection of words -- yielded the first two pages of results all having that phrase. Not all of them were for pages on Shakespeare, but then again, that phrase is now deeply buried in the common memespace. If you make the search phrase
you do indeed get results with the phrase and exclusively referring to Shakespeare. Oh, I get it. You don't like the idea you need to actually construct a reasonable search phrase. You're mad that Google isn't, I don't know, telepathic. Your best bet is the SFWIWNFWIS search engine -- search for what I want, not for what I say.
Ah. And the battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers isn't really protected as visual art, since no one could actually stage it -- all those orcs exist only as bits and not "really".
What a goofy argument. How can you restrict music to only that which can be played in physical space on physical instruments? Do you invalidate multi-track recording, too, since no single ear can hear everything the way the disc sounds? What about instruments we haven't imagined, or that exist only as a sequence of algorithms that drive a speaker a particular way?
There is more in heavan and earth than, apparently, dreamt of in your philosophy...
All digital content is stored as a sequence of 1s and 0s. That sequence has a particular order. A string of 1s and 0s in a particular order is simply the binary representation of a number. And numbers cannot be copyrighted, patented, or trademarked.
In other words, the entire intellectual "property" regime is a house of cards resting on an unspoken mis-truth.
Of course. Because this Justice Department has shown itself to be the ever-vigilant foe of monopolies, Microsoft in particular. It only took a six-year, multimillion dollar lawsuit among a dozen states and the federal government to end up causing Microsoft to do exactly nothing...
Don't look to the DoJ to fix these wrongs -- Microsoft has the $$.
Then they can stay the hell away from it. When it comes to networking, the boys in Redmond are still the amaeteurs.
OK, so the purchase price P is only 5% of the total cost T. Let's find the total cost for this nonimal Linux migration:
So even by their own arguments, CCAWG seems to prove that the total cost to own Linux is 0.
And, as runners will tell you, 90% is only halfway.
With the large number of Earth-crossing asteroids, it might take only a small nudge to get one to stick around. Or, put another way, they're already nearly in orbit -- God picked up the tab.
The launch was successful. The landing, however, needs some work... :)
The original poster was not saying that making Silly Putty might be a copyright violation. He was saying that the use of Silly Putty -- to wit, to copy (say) your Sunday comics and then stretch them -- was employing a "circumvention device".
You're upset because you see Barry making a moral equivalence between the two, but he's talking only about the "right to a living" argument. He's not saying telemarketers are as bad as muggers -- or if he is, it's irrelevant to this particular argument -- only that their position is as untenable as a mugger's would be.
My only quibble is that the analogy would have been even better had he used, not mugging, but house burgulary. In both cases someone comes uninvited into your house -- even when you take steps to keep them out -- and take something precious (in the telemarketers' case, your time).