So Edwards' policy against nukes, which has a lot of strong arguments in favor of it (with which I agree) is equal to the Republican plans for ruination? Even though Edwards is rejecting nukes in favor of alternatives that Republicans don't just "not realize", but actively oppose because they're bribed by the status quo?
Democrats and Republicans are indeed different. Republicans are unacceptably bad, and immune to change (except a downward, linear slide). Democrats are sustainably mediocre, and subject to lots of change, as they scramble for more public support after a generation (except Clinton himself) without power).
Not voting doesn't work at all. In fact, it fits into plans both by Rove and his Republican legions, and the Democrats who'd rather deal with a smaller group themselves. Voting is the least you can do, and it doesn't cost hardly anything. But voting alone isn't enough: even a little activism, like just talking about real politics (like actual problems with political solutions, like healthcare, market protections, the war, etc) even a little bit with people you know, has its effect. Even if you don't change anyone's minds, just showing people that people they know can care about politics (not just the "rah rah" football/war kind of partisan electoral politics) is inspiring.
It's a lot like the open source social effects that most Slashdotters can understand. Just looking at the source, trying it for yourself, thinking about changes, and talking about it in public all makes it possible for waves of collective action to form. Unlike programming, politics doesn't even require specific collaborations on committed work, like patches. Just the design discussions can have effects, once they're buzzing among a large group of people.
You seem not to know your own power, small (though real) though it is. Try it. The alternative is to be a knowing, therefore willing, pawn in the apathy game that's killing us.
The torture has been proven. Are you claiming the US hasn't been torturing people, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?
Being angry that America is torturing people and suspending Habeas Corpus (no matter how you'd prefer to spin it) is not "hysteria". Ignoring it is some kind of zombie walk. Actively looking for ways to deny it is worse.
True, thanks for the correction. But a distinction without a difference. Not only did all the rest of the Republicans vote against all the Democrats, but the Republicans filibustered to defeat it, despite the majority passing it. Which means those 6 Republicans were free to vote in a show, especially as several of them are facing elections next year where they're likely to lose.
Sure, my pointing out with anger that Republicans have destroyed our liberties, most clearly today in habeas corpus, is "just as crazy" as Republicans destroying those liberties.
Anonymous Coward tries the last refuge of the broken but still dangerous Republican apologist: "they're both just as bad". Republicans are worse. Just look at the votes.
On basics, I tend to think any patent "reform" from the current political system (populated by its heavily bribed players) can favor only the big companies.
I think patents should require a working model of a physical device. Anything that doesn't cover should be copyrighted, or just admitted that it's "just a good idea".
When registering a patent, the inventor should register their auditable invested costs. When either 14 years (the original term the first Congress set) pass, or 10x the registered investment is taken as income (corroborated with the IRS), then the patent expires. No renewals.
Those two reforms should constitute practically all the entire system. And clean practically all of it up. Anything left to fix we can get to next. Because, as you say, we're so far from a working system that anything that works should be welcome, even just serious negotiations around it in Congress.
Those people protesting the patent reform aren't notably "inventors" so much as they're notably "incumbent patent holders". They are a group defined by holding patents themselves, under the existing broken system, and getting rich off it.
I really don't understand what effects this proposed tweak to the patent system will have. I expect no one really does: the system is so unjust and complicated that it needs to be ripped out by the roots and replaced by something simple that merely "promotes science and the useful arts", without infringing our rights to free expression (including copying) more than is absolutely necessary to protect essential commerce. But if these rich guys are protesting the tweak, which would reduce their own protection (and evidently increase the rights of the rest of us to invent freely, using other inventions), then it starts to look like the reform is at least worth trying. Because they're making their money off their monopolies under the current law, and didn't seem to be so motivated by its existing injustice as to protest the old way, or to propose a workable new regime that protects the rest of us as well as it's protected them.
I don't write down notes any more. "Sampling" posters, ads and prices is the main use for the camera I'm always carrying in my mobile phone. And I can easily send the info around, plus I get timestamps for when I got it. As long as I don't use my flash, it's even good in museums trying to prohibit copying art that's in the public domain (as long as I have the sounds muted).
I just wish that the camera would embed the GPS coordinates and direction the camera was pointing, so I'd have everything recorded. There might be a nice little app to insert all my pix into a Google map, or a Second Life world, or some other model. Especially if I could collaborate with lots of other people, we might gradually piece together a good image-tiled model, even showing aging across different pix.
Democrats are trying to restore Habeas Corpus, to protect the Constitution, as they swore to do. At least they're doing the minimum to sustain the republic.
Republicans voted to suspend Habeas Corpus, violating the Constitution, and just voted again to keep it suspended.
Perfectly demonstrating Republican attacks on the republic: every Democrat voted to restore it, every Republican voted to keep it suspended.
FWIW, note that I didn't say to vote for Democrats. But voting for Republicans is suicide by politics.
First, the guy is not serving adults, he's serving children.
Second, neither the videogame salesman nor I have said that he shouldn't expect to be fired. OTOH, the pharmacists who refuse to sell some drugs they don't like do refuse to be fired. And their corporate employers are not even threatening to fire them. Plus, pharmacists swear an oath to follow the law. Videogame salesmen do no such thing.
So your comparison is really not appropriate.
Tell you what. Instead of parsing to try to find words that will sound like they support the position you already have, like a lawyer, why don't you try just thinking about this guy like a person. Try thinking whether his asking kids to have grades before buying more videogames is something you think is admirable. Then let you conscience be your guide.
The worst part of this whole scenario is all the people not thinking about what is decent, but rather what the corporate rules would prefer. Sacrificing conscience to money, even on such a small issue of this, shows the price of the money.
America will never recover from the past 7 years' descent into police state. Those records, and the system that extracts them from us, will last indefinitely, regardless of any trumped up "counterterrorism" needs.
But at least we can slow the descent into an evil empire. Go out and vote on November 4, 2008. And if you voted for a Republican sometime in the past dozen or so years, but haven't learned to change your ways, stay home.
No Republican voted with the Constitution to restore Habeas Corpus. Every Democrat voted for the Constitution, no Republicans did, and one Republican even skipped the vote, because Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has better things to do.
The traitors who should be tried for violating the Constitution and their oath to it:
Meanwhile, Republicans have filibustered a record number of bills that Democrats, who shut out Republicans in last year's elections, have been trying to pass. These Republicans, who so attacked Democrats for attempting to use an occasional filibuster while Republicans controlled the majority, now filibuster practically every bill Democrats try to pass. Republicans almost used the "nuclear option" to rewrite centuries-old Senate rules protecting the filibuster, to ram through their legislation. Now they've flipped the script, abusing the filibuster at every chance.
Before you say "that's just politics", remember that what hangs in the balance is your liberty. When the cops come to round you up in secret, on a malicious tip or just some typical bureaucratic mistake, then torture you to death because "you won't talk", the idea that it was "just politics" won't help you any.
The Congress suspended Habeas Corpus, directly violating the Constitution, when Republicans ran it for Bush. The Republicans just refused to reinstate it.
YOU ARE DEFENDING CONGRESS VIOLATING THE FUNDAMENTAL PROTECTION IN THE CONSTITUTION AGAINST TYRANNY.
Who cares what excuses you're peddling? You are backing up these criminals. YOU ARE A TRAITOR.
I'd shoot you myself if I saw you coming.
When you Republican traitors get some power to put people in concentration camps and torture them, you do it. You have no lower limit. You should be utterly destroyed, and your name remembered only as the most vile of traitors.
Every time a government agency either reads, writes or transmits any personal info on me, I want to be notified. Since it probably happens all the time, I'd settle for a monthly email notifying me of the total number of reads/writes/transmissions, with the URL of my transaction history. The history should be sortable by at least agency, case ID, type of record, and time. And of course the records should be confidential, and never sharable to private contractors without my explicit permission, even for government "outsourcing".
Since some of these transactions will be necessarily secret, those should not be included in the default report. But those should be the minimum necessary, and each secret transaction should be covered by at least a court order, ordered by a judge on evidence with accountability.
And auditability. Which is the missing link in all the government data collection and sharing, even in the EU which is generations ahead of the US.
We've already got 10Gbps optical ethernet for much longer distances than USB will support, at only $40 for a PCI-X adapter. I wonder why we don't have higher speeds for shorter distances like USB peripherals. I understand optical makes the distance limits less important between a few mm and several hundred meters, but why not at least a 10Gbps USB already? If it's because ethernet is parallel, there's also 10GbE over twisted copper pair, so why not a 10Gbps USB?
When you demonstrate you lack conscience, I'll tell you. That wasn't an argument undermining your argument, but an appeal to your desire to be thought to have a conscience. When your character is in question, the "ad hominem" is relevant.
And yes, if you defy your corporate policy, you can expect to be fired. It still sucks when you're doing something small to protect children, even from themselves. When you're protecting adults from themselves, you're in an other moral space, which is much less defensible. If you required children to pass a fat or cholesterol test before selling them fattening foods, you'd probably be just as admirable.
Since you agree that the person setting the policy is less admirable for peddling videogames to kids who would be better off without them, you're saying this guy, at the retail end, is also responsible. Unless you think "just following orders" is a moral excuse - it's not. Even when you're just following orders to make more money, if it's at the expense of kids' education. And even if you can expect to be fired.
The sales guy, Brandon Scott, didn't say anything about his firing being "unjust" or "unexpected", or demand it back. All he said was that he's committed to his stand as the decent thing to do. That's admirable. Taking the hit for doing the right thing is a mark of a hero, even if just on such a small scale as this.
So true about their vulnerability to water. But we need a more permanent victory than leaving their artifacts for (even distant) future generations to unwisely discover and reassemble, motivated by science to return the beasts to their predatory rounds.
Their nest on Mars is covered in dried blood to keep the Sun's rays from ever penetrating their warrens of underground crypts. But the SOLASER can reach there from here, and probe for weaknesses. If we can destroy their upper echelons, the whole hierarchy of undead vermin will collapse. Including the ones crawling around here. The next rovers need SOLASERs and boring equipment.
These people are being attacked by Martian vampires. I expect a wave of sightings of batboy. Though such a massive undertaking as this interplanetary missile is surely part of a huge attack.
By Hallowe'en, 6 weeks from now, the biters will have amassed enough strength to finally strike when we all think it's just some kind of joke. So in the meantime, stay vigilant through the night. Vampires can be stopped in their tracks, but not permanently destroyed, by staking them through the heart (wood, metal or any other stake that stays intact driven through their chest). It's also good to chop their head off, and even stuff the neck (both ends) with wolfsbane, if you can get it from some Romanian Internet pharmacy or something.
But to permanently destroy them ("kill" the undead monster), you've got to expose them to sunlight. Stake 'em and bake 'em.
And remember that those religious charms you try to use to drive them away work only as well as the strength of your mutual belief in them. So if these Martian vampires have got beyond their fear of "god", you'll just let them come close enough to strike while you mumble and genuflect. And if their tech has made them immune to the Sun, then we're in pretty deep.
I'll be gearing up the SOLASER, but that guarantees only my safety. Get your stakes ready, and hope we can ride out this season. And then on to the Red Planet, with at least rovers fitted with stakes to drag them from their burrows and pin them on their own surface for a Martian vampbake.
No, you're wrong about everything. Sure, you might have expected I would attack you back, after you did nothing but attack me. So what? What does that prove, except that you're so stupid as to attack me, and stupid enough to think I shouldn't attack you back, and stupid enough that you can't even muster a meaningful statement about the subject that we (really just me alone) are arguing about?
Nothing. Wrong about everything. Put down the videogame and learn yourself some reality. Shithead.
Slashdot Mirror
So Edwards' policy against nukes, which has a lot of strong arguments in favor of it (with which I agree) is equal to the Republican plans for ruination? Even though Edwards is rejecting nukes in favor of alternatives that Republicans don't just "not realize", but actively oppose because they're bribed by the status quo?
Democrats and Republicans are indeed different. Republicans are unacceptably bad, and immune to change (except a downward, linear slide). Democrats are sustainably mediocre, and subject to lots of change, as they scramble for more public support after a generation (except Clinton himself) without power).
Not voting doesn't work at all. In fact, it fits into plans both by Rove and his Republican legions, and the Democrats who'd rather deal with a smaller group themselves. Voting is the least you can do, and it doesn't cost hardly anything. But voting alone isn't enough: even a little activism, like just talking about real politics (like actual problems with political solutions, like healthcare, market protections, the war, etc) even a little bit with people you know, has its effect. Even if you don't change anyone's minds, just showing people that people they know can care about politics (not just the "rah rah" football/war kind of partisan electoral politics) is inspiring.
It's a lot like the open source social effects that most Slashdotters can understand. Just looking at the source, trying it for yourself, thinking about changes, and talking about it in public all makes it possible for waves of collective action to form. Unlike programming, politics doesn't even require specific collaborations on committed work, like patches. Just the design discussions can have effects, once they're buzzing among a large group of people.
You seem not to know your own power, small (though real) though it is. Try it. The alternative is to be a knowing, therefore willing, pawn in the apathy game that's killing us.
The torture has been proven. Are you claiming the US hasn't been torturing people, in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?
Being angry that America is torturing people and suspending Habeas Corpus (no matter how you'd prefer to spin it) is not "hysteria". Ignoring it is some kind of zombie walk. Actively looking for ways to deny it is worse.
True, thanks for the correction. But a distinction without a difference. Not only did all the rest of the Republicans vote against all the Democrats, but the Republicans filibustered to defeat it, despite the majority passing it. Which means those 6 Republicans were free to vote in a show, especially as several of them are facing elections next year where they're likely to lose.
Right. Congress suspends Habeas Corpus, but there's nothing to see here. Move along.
Americans torture people to death in those "loopholes" you're defending. Congratulations.
Sure, my pointing out with anger that Republicans have destroyed our liberties, most clearly today in habeas corpus, is "just as crazy" as Republicans destroying those liberties.
Anonymous Coward tries the last refuge of the broken but still dangerous Republican apologist: "they're both just as bad". Republicans are worse. Just look at the votes.
On basics, I tend to think any patent "reform" from the current political system (populated by its heavily bribed players) can favor only the big companies.
I think patents should require a working model of a physical device. Anything that doesn't cover should be copyrighted, or just admitted that it's "just a good idea".
When registering a patent, the inventor should register their auditable invested costs. When either 14 years (the original term the first Congress set) pass, or 10x the registered investment is taken as income (corroborated with the IRS), then the patent expires. No renewals.
Those two reforms should constitute practically all the entire system. And clean practically all of it up. Anything left to fix we can get to next. Because, as you say, we're so far from a working system that anything that works should be welcome, even just serious negotiations around it in Congress.
Those people protesting the patent reform aren't notably "inventors" so much as they're notably "incumbent patent holders". They are a group defined by holding patents themselves, under the existing broken system, and getting rich off it.
I really don't understand what effects this proposed tweak to the patent system will have. I expect no one really does: the system is so unjust and complicated that it needs to be ripped out by the roots and replaced by something simple that merely "promotes science and the useful arts", without infringing our rights to free expression (including copying) more than is absolutely necessary to protect essential commerce. But if these rich guys are protesting the tweak, which would reduce their own protection (and evidently increase the rights of the rest of us to invent freely, using other inventions), then it starts to look like the reform is at least worth trying. Because they're making their money off their monopolies under the current law, and didn't seem to be so motivated by its existing injustice as to protest the old way, or to propose a workable new regime that protects the rest of us as well as it's protected them.
That would be the day that all the Senate Republicans stopped all the Senate Democrats from restoring Habeas Corpus.
Which is exactly what I'm talking about.
I don't write down notes any more. "Sampling" posters, ads and prices is the main use for the camera I'm always carrying in my mobile phone. And I can easily send the info around, plus I get timestamps for when I got it. As long as I don't use my flash, it's even good in museums trying to prohibit copying art that's in the public domain (as long as I have the sounds muted).
I just wish that the camera would embed the GPS coordinates and direction the camera was pointing, so I'd have everything recorded. There might be a nice little app to insert all my pix into a Google map, or a Second Life world, or some other model. Especially if I could collaborate with lots of other people, we might gradually piece together a good image-tiled model, even showing aging across different pix.
Here's one very good example, just from today.
Democrats are trying to restore Habeas Corpus, to protect the Constitution, as they swore to do. At least they're doing the minimum to sustain the republic.
Republicans voted to suspend Habeas Corpus, violating the Constitution, and just voted again to keep it suspended.
Perfectly demonstrating Republican attacks on the republic: every Democrat voted to restore it, every Republican voted to keep it suspended.
FWIW, note that I didn't say to vote for Democrats. But voting for Republicans is suicide by politics.
First, the guy is not serving adults, he's serving children.
Second, neither the videogame salesman nor I have said that he shouldn't expect to be fired. OTOH, the pharmacists who refuse to sell some drugs they don't like do refuse to be fired. And their corporate employers are not even threatening to fire them. Plus, pharmacists swear an oath to follow the law. Videogame salesmen do no such thing.
So your comparison is really not appropriate.
Tell you what. Instead of parsing to try to find words that will sound like they support the position you already have, like a lawyer, why don't you try just thinking about this guy like a person. Try thinking whether his asking kids to have grades before buying more videogames is something you think is admirable. Then let you conscience be your guide.
The worst part of this whole scenario is all the people not thinking about what is decent, but rather what the corporate rules would prefer. Sacrificing conscience to money, even on such a small issue of this, shows the price of the money.
Right about the time that the Republican Congress was impeaching Clinton, and writing laws like ATS.
America will never recover from the past 7 years' descent into police state. Those records, and the system that extracts them from us, will last indefinitely, regardless of any trumped up "counterterrorism" needs.
But at least we can slow the descent into an evil empire. Go out and vote on November 4, 2008. And if you voted for a Republican sometime in the past dozen or so years, but haven't learned to change your ways, stay home.
The traitors who should be tried for violating the Constitution and their oath to it:
Meanwhile, Republicans have filibustered a record number of bills that Democrats, who shut out Republicans in last year's elections, have been trying to pass. These Republicans, who so attacked Democrats for attempting to use an occasional filibuster while Republicans controlled the majority, now filibuster practically every bill Democrats try to pass. Republicans almost used the "nuclear option" to rewrite centuries-old Senate rules protecting the filibuster, to ram through their legislation. Now they've flipped the script, abusing the filibuster at every chance.
Before you say "that's just politics", remember that what hangs in the balance is your liberty. When the cops come to round you up in secret, on a malicious tip or just some typical bureaucratic mistake, then torture you to death because "you won't talk", the idea that it was "just politics" won't help you any.
The Congress suspended Habeas Corpus, directly violating the Constitution, when Republicans ran it for Bush. The Republicans just refused to reinstate it.
YOU ARE DEFENDING CONGRESS VIOLATING THE FUNDAMENTAL PROTECTION IN THE CONSTITUTION AGAINST TYRANNY.
Who cares what excuses you're peddling? You are backing up these criminals. YOU ARE A TRAITOR.
I'd shoot you myself if I saw you coming.
When you Republican traitors get some power to put people in concentration camps and torture them, you do it. You have no lower limit. You should be utterly destroyed, and your name remembered only as the most vile of traitors.
Every time a government agency either reads, writes or transmits any personal info on me, I want to be notified. Since it probably happens all the time, I'd settle for a monthly email notifying me of the total number of reads/writes/transmissions, with the URL of my transaction history. The history should be sortable by at least agency, case ID, type of record, and time. And of course the records should be confidential, and never sharable to private contractors without my explicit permission, even for government "outsourcing".
Since some of these transactions will be necessarily secret, those should not be included in the default report. But those should be the minimum necessary, and each secret transaction should be covered by at least a court order, ordered by a judge on evidence with accountability.
And auditability. Which is the missing link in all the government data collection and sharing, even in the EU which is generations ahead of the US.
We've already got 10Gbps optical ethernet for much longer distances than USB will support, at only $40 for a PCI-X adapter. I wonder why we don't have higher speeds for shorter distances like USB peripherals. I understand optical makes the distance limits less important between a few mm and several hundred meters, but why not at least a 10Gbps USB already? If it's because ethernet is parallel, there's also 10GbE over twisted copper pair, so why not a 10Gbps USB?
In your dreams!
I'd like to be able to go to sleep in one world, and dream I'm in another, only to wake back home when I die in the dream.
And I want to visit worlds where girls who wouldn't date me at home are instead suddenly nyphomaniacs.
When you demonstrate you lack conscience, I'll tell you. That wasn't an argument undermining your argument, but an appeal to your desire to be thought to have a conscience. When your character is in question, the "ad hominem" is relevant.
And yes, if you defy your corporate policy, you can expect to be fired. It still sucks when you're doing something small to protect children, even from themselves. When you're protecting adults from themselves, you're in an other moral space, which is much less defensible. If you required children to pass a fat or cholesterol test before selling them fattening foods, you'd probably be just as admirable.
Since you agree that the person setting the policy is less admirable for peddling videogames to kids who would be better off without them, you're saying this guy, at the retail end, is also responsible. Unless you think "just following orders" is a moral excuse - it's not. Even when you're just following orders to make more money, if it's at the expense of kids' education. And even if you can expect to be fired.
The sales guy, Brandon Scott, didn't say anything about his firing being "unjust" or "unexpected", or demand it back. All he said was that he's committed to his stand as the decent thing to do. That's admirable. Taking the hit for doing the right thing is a mark of a hero, even if just on such a small scale as this.
So true about their vulnerability to water. But we need a more permanent victory than leaving their artifacts for (even distant) future generations to unwisely discover and reassemble, motivated by science to return the beasts to their predatory rounds.
Their nest on Mars is covered in dried blood to keep the Sun's rays from ever penetrating their warrens of underground crypts. But the SOLASER can reach there from here, and probe for weaknesses. If we can destroy their upper echelons, the whole hierarchy of undead vermin will collapse. Including the ones crawling around here. The next rovers need SOLASERs and boring equipment.
Moderation 0
50% Flamebait
50% Interesting
China's anonymous TrollMod army are ever vigilant. Cheaper than cleaning up the air, I suppose, is keeping them on the job.
These people are being attacked by Martian vampires. I expect a wave of sightings of batboy. Though such a massive undertaking as this interplanetary missile is surely part of a huge attack.
By Hallowe'en, 6 weeks from now, the biters will have amassed enough strength to finally strike when we all think it's just some kind of joke. So in the meantime, stay vigilant through the night. Vampires can be stopped in their tracks, but not permanently destroyed, by staking them through the heart (wood, metal or any other stake that stays intact driven through their chest). It's also good to chop their head off, and even stuff the neck (both ends) with wolfsbane, if you can get it from some Romanian Internet pharmacy or something.
But to permanently destroy them ("kill" the undead monster), you've got to expose them to sunlight. Stake 'em and bake 'em.
And remember that those religious charms you try to use to drive them away work only as well as the strength of your mutual belief in them. So if these Martian vampires have got beyond their fear of "god", you'll just let them come close enough to strike while you mumble and genuflect. And if their tech has made them immune to the Sun, then we're in pretty deep.
I'll be gearing up the SOLASER, but that guarantees only my safety. Get your stakes ready, and hope we can ride out this season. And then on to the Red Planet, with at least rovers fitted with stakes to drag them from their burrows and pin them on their own surface for a Martian vampbake.
No, you're wrong about everything. Sure, you might have expected I would attack you back, after you did nothing but attack me. So what? What does that prove, except that you're so stupid as to attack me, and stupid enough to think I shouldn't attack you back, and stupid enough that you can't even muster a meaningful statement about the subject that we (really just me alone) are arguing about?
Nothing. Wrong about everything. Put down the videogame and learn yourself some reality. Shithead.
Thanks for proving you corporatists can't think through much if it isn't in your official employee sniveling manual.
Fuck you too, prick.