And what was the point of that political manifesto you wrote there? Because cooperation is necessary we should resign ourselves to being servants? Because 100% freedom is impossible we should go for 0%? I think the only constraint that there should be on an individual is the constraint from constraining others.
Suck us into the fifth dimension? You're already in the fifth dimension. You're already in every dimension that exists. Saying you're not in the fifth dimension is like saying a ship has no altitude. It's incorrect - the altitude is zero relative to sea level.
Who says humans will take it sitting down as robots shoot up past us? Humans will be riding the wave of progress and will improve themselves alongside their machines. Robots won't be rising up against us, they'll be integrating with us.
The state is an organism, and you are a cell in it.
That attitude is a relic of communism and fascism and has no place in a free society.
You have some freedom to move in it, but it constrains you somewhat and demands that some of your work work for its purposes too.
You don't understand. You are not a cog in a machine, you are an individual. The government works for YOU. You pay the government a fee, just like you pay a restaurant a fee for the service of bringing you food, and the government helps you. If you live in the forest and use no services, you can pay no taxes.
Putting law enforcement backdoors into services which store information is a very bad thing. The fact that it's common doesn't make it less bad. We, however, SHOULD NOT simply accept things the way they are. If we passively accept all these injustices just because they already exist, the injustices will become acceptable. From there, the enemies of freedom have a foothold and will take their intrusion of freedom and privacy to the next level, until it becomes mundane and accepted there.
Bruce Schneier is doing a very good thing by complaining about there injustices and putting them into the public eye.
Actually, you have to pay it if you watch live terrestrial broadcasts. Owning a TV with the capability is irrelevant.
If you watch BBC1 live on iPlayer, you need a license.
Ok, I was a bit off. My point still stands, even if you watch 0 minutes of BBC, spending your time on the private channels, you still have to pay their tax.
It is a tax. You have to pay it if you have a TV that can receive channels, regardless of which channels you watch. It's like adding a $1 tax to restaurants to fund your program of giving out free vegetables there. Even if you don't eat the vegetables, you still have to pay, and the veggies are "free".
The guy's starting at over 36km. Air pressure is about one 200th that of surface pressure. Given that the acceleration needed to counter drag increases with velocity^2 (if you're going twice as fast, twice as many air particles hit you at twice the relative velocity), that means that terminal velocity is 14 times as high as usual. Terminal velocity at the surface for a mostly vertical human with gear (I estimated 0.30m^2) is 200 m/s, so up there the terminal velocity is over 2800 m/s, or about 9.5 times the speed of sound at that elevation.
Or a sales tax. Every dollar earned is $0.80 to spend. That way it doesn't matter how you earn the money, it gets taxed anyway. Sure, people who save 75% of their income would have to pay little now, but they would still have to pay eventually when the money gets spent. Mortgage-interest deductions and charity deductions would become a lot simpler - those things just don't get taxed.
Once upon a time, there was a company whose programs had a lot of bugs in them. The company decided on a simple plan to crack down: for every bug fixed, a programmer would be paid a bonus of $20. The executives put it up on the bulletin boards and had a coffee, pleased with their ingenious plan. But then programmers started deliberately introducing bugs, and soon an underground market formed where bugs were exchanged to cover the programmers' tracks. The initiative was canceled when one employee made $1700 in the first week.
Yeah, someone really needs to take all the packages that make up GNU and Linux, compile them, put them on some kind of disk and include a nice simple GUI app to automatically set them up on a computer in about 20 minutes. The guy could also make the interface, aside from a few different names for options and menus arranged differently, almost exactly like Windows until the user is ready to dig below the surface. Too bad no one's done that so far.
With unlimited contributions, paired with solid disclosure (an idea which the SCOTUS upheld today) laws, perhaps candidates would need to spend less time whoring at endless fundraisers and more time campaigning and/or reading the bills they are voting on.
Your post suggests that if a certain number of people contribute, there is no reason to get even more money, a concept of "enough", if you will. Politicians and corporations do not recognize this concept. For them, if they have $1 million and can get $2 million, they'll go for the million. If they have $100 million and can get $110 million, they'll go for the $10 million with the same greed. Flooding political campaigns with money is, thus, not the answer. Putting a hard cap on total campaign spending, however, ensures that there's no point in going above $X million, solving the problem.
and for the sake of argument, let's just assume that everything created is copyrighted by default, published or not, since that's pretty much the case these days
Given that that is true, I agree it's impractical to ensure that every copyrighted work, once in the public domain, comes with source code. That's why I also advocate mandatory copyright registration, where you have to send everything to the copyright office (it can be a 1 click, even anonymous, process). With the current regime, copyright is being applies to works where the author doesn't even care, harming everyone trying to use that work while benefitting no one. People are scared to build off of anything they find unless it has a license or is clearly public domain.
Yes, I know about the Berne Convention. But I think here the US can use its massive bargaining power for good.
So Google News, which is stealing content from other news sites without payment or permission, is actually sending half of its readers to the sites themselves? This will probably get modded redundant, but Murdoch is an idiot.
No, he used it to make a point. The point is that Obama's hope and change is mostly a fraud and that he's not, as was a common opinion on Slashdot before 2009, going to make everything all right. The point is that he's a politician with his hands in shady pocket just like most of the others before him. You may not agree with that point, but that does not make him a sensationalist.
Slashdot Mirror
And what was the point of that political manifesto you wrote there? Because cooperation is necessary we should resign ourselves to being servants? Because 100% freedom is impossible we should go for 0%? I think the only constraint that there should be on an individual is the constraint from constraining others.
Suck us into the fifth dimension? You're already in the fifth dimension. You're already in every dimension that exists. Saying you're not in the fifth dimension is like saying a ship has no altitude. It's incorrect - the altitude is zero relative to sea level.
Who says humans will take it sitting down as robots shoot up past us? Humans will be riding the wave of progress and will improve themselves alongside their machines. Robots won't be rising up against us, they'll be integrating with us.
The state is an organism, and you are a cell in it.
That attitude is a relic of communism and fascism and has no place in a free society.
You have some freedom to move in it, but it constrains you somewhat and demands that some of your work work for its purposes too.
You don't understand. You are not a cog in a machine, you are an individual. The government works for YOU. You pay the government a fee, just like you pay a restaurant a fee for the service of bringing you food, and the government helps you. If you live in the forest and use no services, you can pay no taxes.
Putting law enforcement backdoors into services which store information is a very bad thing. The fact that it's common doesn't make it less bad. We, however, SHOULD NOT simply accept things the way they are. If we passively accept all these injustices just because they already exist, the injustices will become acceptable. From there, the enemies of freedom have a foothold and will take their intrusion of freedom and privacy to the next level, until it becomes mundane and accepted there.
Bruce Schneier is doing a very good thing by complaining about there injustices and putting them into the public eye.
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
Time for Linux users to face reality and just give up and use Windows, as most other people have done.
Oh, we didn't do that in 2000 and we have a strong, functioning, free as in freedom operating system now? I wonder how that could have happened.
Sales tax isn't compulsory - make everything you use yourself and you won't ever have to pay for it.
Actually, you have to pay it if you watch live terrestrial broadcasts. Owning a TV with the capability is irrelevant.
If you watch BBC1 live on iPlayer, you need a license.
Ok, I was a bit off. My point still stands, even if you watch 0 minutes of BBC, spending your time on the private channels, you still have to pay their tax.
It is a tax. You have to pay it if you have a TV that can receive channels, regardless of which channels you watch. It's like adding a $1 tax to restaurants to fund your program of giving out free vegetables there. Even if you don't eat the vegetables, you still have to pay, and the veggies are "free".
Yes, fail means death. Yes, there are people willing to take a 95% chance of dying for a 5% chance of making a world record.
The guy's starting at over 36km. Air pressure is about one 200th that of surface pressure. Given that the acceleration needed to counter drag increases with velocity^2 (if you're going twice as fast, twice as many air particles hit you at twice the relative velocity), that means that terminal velocity is 14 times as high as usual. Terminal velocity at the surface for a mostly vertical human with gear (I estimated 0.30m^2) is 200 m/s, so up there the terminal velocity is over 2800 m/s, or about 9.5 times the speed of sound at that elevation.
If you like that kind of thing, other companies will gladly accept you.
I prefer Google the way it is.
Or a sales tax. Every dollar earned is $0.80 to spend. That way it doesn't matter how you earn the money, it gets taxed anyway. Sure, people who save 75% of their income would have to pay little now, but they would still have to pay eventually when the money gets spent. Mortgage-interest deductions and charity deductions would become a lot simpler - those things just don't get taxed.
Red Hat 11.2%
Novell 8.9%
Linux Foundation 2.6%
Oracle 1.3%
(among others)
Source: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
...or bugs fixed is probably a better measure.
True story:
Once upon a time, there was a company whose programs had a lot of bugs in them. The company decided on a simple plan to crack down: for every bug fixed, a programmer would be paid a bonus of $20. The executives put it up on the bulletin boards and had a coffee, pleased with their ingenious plan. But then programmers started deliberately introducing bugs, and soon an underground market formed where bugs were exchanged to cover the programmers' tracks. The initiative was canceled when one employee made $1700 in the first week.
Yeah, someone really needs to take all the packages that make up GNU and Linux, compile them, put them on some kind of disk and include a nice simple GUI app to automatically set them up on a computer in about 20 minutes. The guy could also make the interface, aside from a few different names for options and menus arranged differently, almost exactly like Windows until the user is ready to dig below the surface. Too bad no one's done that so far.
I don't think so.
English version: a few pretty colorful images, one broken bicycle image, 11 tank men.
Chinese version: 1 tank man, one broken bicycle image, 14 pretty pictures.
Looks censored to me, with one tank and one broken bicycle so it doesn't look whitewashed.
With unlimited contributions, paired with solid disclosure (an idea which the SCOTUS upheld today) laws, perhaps candidates would need to spend less time whoring at endless fundraisers and more time campaigning and/or reading the bills they are voting on.
Your post suggests that if a certain number of people contribute, there is no reason to get even more money, a concept of "enough", if you will. Politicians and corporations do not recognize this concept. For them, if they have $1 million and can get $2 million, they'll go for the million. If they have $100 million and can get $110 million, they'll go for the $10 million with the same greed. Flooding political campaigns with money is, thus, not the answer. Putting a hard cap on total campaign spending, however, ensures that there's no point in going above $X million, solving the problem.
That sounds like a combination that an idiot would put on his luggage.
and for the sake of argument, let's just assume that everything created is copyrighted by default, published or not, since that's pretty much the case these days
Given that that is true, I agree it's impractical to ensure that every copyrighted work, once in the public domain, comes with source code. That's why I also advocate mandatory copyright registration, where you have to send everything to the copyright office (it can be a 1 click, even anonymous, process). With the current regime, copyright is being applies to works where the author doesn't even care, harming everyone trying to use that work while benefitting no one. People are scared to build off of anything they find unless it has a license or is clearly public domain.
Yes, I know about the Berne Convention. But I think here the US can use its massive bargaining power for good.
And you have no right to force me not to mercilessly redistribute your stuff.
Either I can build off of your works once the time is up or you can't have your legal protection. Taking both is an abuse of the social contract.
Have you ever thought of the idea that some people actually like helping people?
So Google News, which is stealing content from other news sites without payment or permission, is actually sending half of its readers to the sites themselves? This will probably get modded redundant, but Murdoch is an idiot.
Because Obama claimed that he was going to implement hope and change and fix everything?
No, he used it to make a point. The point is that Obama's hope and change is mostly a fraud and that he's not, as was a common opinion on Slashdot before 2009, going to make everything all right. The point is that he's a politician with his hands in shady pocket just like most of the others before him. You may not agree with that point, but that does not make him a sensationalist.