The ratifiers of the Bill of Rights agreed that a militia, not just an "army", is necessary to "the security of a free State". A militia, even in that time, was not a standing army, like the British one that had been quartered in private homes by royal command - an abuse that was addressed specifically elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. They said the US (a free state, unlike the colonies or the parent Britain) needed a militia - fighters both quartered and equipped largely privately, especially in peacetime, as well as posessing private experience in their own weapons. That would provide expertise and materiel without direct government expense - major premise of the limited taxation ratifiers, in contrast to the unlimited taxation of the defeated king. As well as deprive the limited government they specified of a centralized power prone to abuse, as they had so recently lived through under British rule, which justified the war to so many patriots.
But we've obviously chosen a different model for our military. We have a huge, expensive standing army - greater than any other at that time, before, or even now. Various government abuses of the people, usually ultimately enforced by nonmilitia, fulltime government armed forces, might have been avoided by having a militia. And perhaps we might not have defended our nation from various enemies. Those speculations are interesting, but besides the point. We do not have a militia, and unorganized people not enlisted in "state security" are neither a militia nor necessary to the defense of a free state. If you're talking about National Guard needing the right to own their own guns, that might be the case. But buying machineguns at flea markets has no protection from the Constitution, and is in fact damaging the security of our mostly free state.
I support the privilege of Americans who can handle the responsibility to own and use guns: eg. trained hunters and sportsmen, not convicted armed robbers or angry teenagers, much as "freedom of travel" is ensured even with restrictions on those who can't be trusted to drive a powerful vehicle like a car. I support revision of the 2nd Amendment, at very least to make its archaic grammar and vocabulary intelligible to modern Americans who live with it. But unless it's revised to protect a right for any American to own and use a gun without restriction, these contrived versions by 2nd Amendment fetishists are baseless. And dangerous to our security.
Jerry apparently was pretty sick of the old gang by the time he "got tired of living" - see the "candid camera" scenes in "Grateful Dog". And with these revealing looks at Hart and Kreutzmann, grabbing back recordings preserved and traded in the community with their (at least tacit) approval for decades, it's not hard to see why. Hart has been stone deaf for years, and Kreutzmann has been a sourpuss for longer - phoning it in even longer than that. Lesh's true colors obviously haven't faded. I wish Jerry had mustered the "harshness" to get off the bus along with Phil after they flogged all their old songs in 1990-3. They'd still be making fresh music, judging from Lesh's performance I saw last week. And the dream could have kept busy being born, instead of working hard at dying.
"Please don't dominate the rap Jack If you got nothing new to say If you please don't back up the track This train got to run today
Spent a little time on the mountain Spent a little time on the hill Heard some say better run away Others say you better stand still
Now I don't know but I been told It's hard to run with the weight of gold Other hand I heard it said it's just as hard with the weight of lead
Who can deny? Who can deny? It's not just a change in style One step done and another begun In I wonder how many miles?
Spent a little time on the mountain Spent a little time on the hill Things went down we don't understand But I think in time we will
Now I don't know but I been told In the heat of the sun a man died of cold Do we keep on coming or stand and wait With the sun so dark and the hour so late?
You can't overlook the lack Jack Of any other highway to ride It's got no signs or dividing lines And very few rules to guide
Spent a little time on the mountain Spent a little time on the hill I saw things getting out of hand I guess they always will
I don't know but I been told If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load I don't know whose back's that strong Maybe find out before too long
One way or another One way or another One way or another This darkness got to give One way or another One way or another One way or another This darkness got to give"
How much did Americans pay to bring Ellison to justice? How are we getting compensated for that? Ellison has $100M to pay, and billions more to spend. Why do these fines have to cost Americans so much money?
Creating.Asia without creating.Europe ,.Africa ,.NAmerica ,.SAmerica ,.Australia (and.Antarctica ) is insanity, and shows that ICANN is a gang of hacks. They can't even pull off geopolitical favoritism and apologies without underscoring their orientation along those lines. Preferential treatment of a subgroup is just as bigoted as opposition, just as "racism" means bias with respect to race, regardless of whether positive/negative. But then, what to expect from a gang which compensates for letting the US override consensus for.xxx by throwing a few parties?
"The site will restore fan-made recordings; however, the more pristine soundboard recordings will remain off-limits for now."
That article is full of PR - known to Deadheads as "BS". The band has not reversed its decision: they are keeping the soundboards off Archive.org, just like they originally did. Obviously their lawyers told them it would be much harder to control audience mic recordings that they sanctioned, which they authorized people to make, and which people likely own their own copyrights on.
Phil Lesh, the best musician (bass) in the band after Garcia, and long the innovator in their archives, said " "I was not part of this decision-making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled". This is the guy who instigated Grefolded, probably the best production of GD recordings, and also the only post-GD performer consistently worth seeing (if you're into that kind of thing). Not only did the band change their policy against his own, but they didn't even ask or even notify him that his "legacy" was now interrupted.
David Gans, professional Deadhead (selling "official" Deadhead books and ads on his Deadhead radio show), spewed doubletalk:
'"First of all, when Jerry said that...tape trading was an important aspect of life in the Deadhead community. It was a one-to-one affair, for the most part...largely a manifestation of our love for the music and our desire to enlighten the world and turn our friends on.
"That is a far cry from what is happening now. The Internet Archive and all the other online distribution sources are high-speed, mass-distribution systems that make the best quality recording available to all who know where to look for them. That is a good thing, of course, culturally--but there is an economic element to this that must be taken into account."'
Even as he admits the Archive.org soundboards are "good culturally", he introduces his own vested interest opposing that culture: the "economic element" that appears nowhere in Garcia's original policy, or anywhere in the love for music or desire to enlighten the world or turn friends on. FWIW, Gans never respected archives except when he could profit from them. The archivist of Bill Graham Presents (long their show producer in the SF area, NYC and beyond) was shocked to find that Gans, after being left alone with the BGP archive of GD material (photos, posters, letters, etc), had cut them up and stolen a lot of irreplaceable material, to make his 1980s book. This guy doesn't care about the legacy, the archives, the music, or anyone else's access to it, except after he has taken his cut, regardless of the damage he does.
The fact is that the Grateful Dead lasted a lot longer than anyone expected: 30 years. Along the way, lots of people got a ride on the gravy train. The Dead's commercial recording releases were never that good, never made them as much money as their neverending tours. They mismanaged most of their careers, paying for a huge, fun extended family that required 200 performances a year for decades, rather than creating a self-perpetuating system to profit off the vast audience that has outlived the band (and several of its members). Free distribution among fans kept the dream going, promoting music that the music industry, including the band, never could promote commercially. Deadhead traders have always been at the forefront of field recording, reproduction/remastering, the Internet itself, as well as psychedelic frontiers for which they're better known. But now that the drummers and some hangers-on can't sell tickets to their shows, haven't invested their totally unexpectedly profitable youth in sustainable champagne and caviar for their old age, they're grabbing at any profits they see dancing away. They have become just like the rest of the poser hippies-turned-yuppies who lied about seeing them at Woodstock. Too bad they're trying to fight the Internet they helped create: just another gang of Baby Boomers who won't even be noticed as the Net drives over their carcass, roadkill on the Info Superhighway.
Who knew a legion of Autodesk TrollMods lurked on Slashdot? How could such a mild disagreement, merely citing disappointing personal experience with relevant details, could provoke them? I smell astroturf.
Several monopolies have been justified with the rationalization that they are "natural monopolies". Electric service, passenger trains, phone, natural gas - services which cannot support the waste of redundant infrastructure. Maybe that's true, but they were then regulated by government, which has typically left so many loopholes that the market has been damaged anyway. Actual businesses run by American government bureaucracies have a few strong successes, like the USPS and the VA (and other government healthcare and insurance). Government ownership of the infrastructure, contracted to private competitors by auction to meet publicly reviewed specifications, is a good compromise. Government oversight of the Internet has a lot to teach us about protecting market access to unique services - both good and bad. We've got a lot of options. Unfortunately, we tend to get the simplest, worst option: private monopoly protected from competition by government, bought by the monopolies. Even pure socialism is probably better than that, because at least democracy offers a way to change it.
The point about the drunk driver is specious: drunks are either responsible for getting drunk and taking risks, or not responsible for any risk after they're drunk, depending on how good their lawyer is. The question is whether a manufacturer of a product is liable for its use by a reasonable person. If that reasonable person believes the risk to be low, as gun makers advertise and promote, but the risk is high, as can be seen in the thousands of court decisions that people were shot accidentally, then the reasonable person can't be liable for the extra risk actually represented by the unsafe gun. Yet gun makers have got a special law protecting them from liability no matter what. It's an analogy, not a comparison of which is safer - which would be a pointless comparison.
I didn't say gun owners generally have no regard for their own or others' safety. I said that that poster, a gun owner, disregards their own and others' safety. Other gun owners of course vary - most of those who I've known have been as safe as possible. It is clear that guns are unsafe from the large and lengthy statistics of people who are found to have fired them unintentionally. That is real evidence, not theoretical speculation of what owners "should" be able to handle, or ideology about personal responsibility that is unworkable. Humans without tools are very readily responsible for their actions. When we start using tools, the more powerful and more recently (in history and in individual lives) introduced, the less safe they become. Cars and guns make otherwise safe people less safe, which is why people using them operate under more restrictions, and their makers have safety standards. You might claim that government safety standards are ineffective ("irresponsible" doesn't make any sense), but only laws requiring, for example, trigger locks, have reduced the damage guns did without them. Guns have their place. And with their use comes necessary practices, in their manufacture and in their ownership. They're not different from other products in those regards, though they now have been bought special immunity.
Everyone said for decades that phone companies "don't understand the Internet". They understand it all right - they just don't like it. So now we've got SBC saying they want to charge companies like Google to route their traffic, even if Google is already paying another company to which Google is directly connected. And BellSouth is saying they want to charge companies like Google more to carry their traffic according to the specifications. Verizon (rhymes with "NYNEX"), typically the most evil of the RBOCs, has yet to announce their vicious attack on Google's profits, but it surely will be greedy and based on some kind of preferential treatment - or threat of witholding it.
It's obvious that these telcos are jealous of Google and the big bucks connected with it. They want their cut, not by competing to provide better products, but by threatening to make their products worse unless their extortion money is paid. Back in the 1990s, they tried to force extra fees on dialup customers, on ISPs, based on lies about phone switch capacity. They tried selling ISDN from clueless salespeople for ripoff prices after unpredictable and interminable installation delays. Then they screwed up DSL deployment on a bigger scale. All along they succeeded in buying up and regulating out the competition, while everyone said they didn't understand the Internet. Which diverted investment to companies like Google, as well as the smart entrepreneurs. Now that they've consolidated American bandwidth into the bottlenecks that they monopolize, these old dinosaurs are moving in for the kill. If there's not enough competition to let Google and mom/pop choose an equitable Internet like the one we've built these last 10-20 years, we need to snap the neck of their new monopolies with legislation. There's no reason we have to let their loophole victories over past monopoly remedies and market corrections choke off the developments that have happened despite their vile presence in the landscape.
Redundant to what? Some other post not available when I replied? Certainly not anything in the summary to which I replied. And where is another post making my point, that the existence of a movie about catastrophic climate change doesn't contradict the reality of that catastrophe?
That is a really badly written and thought-out article. The survey doesn't say Linux needs "several powerful alternative email apps", just that it needs a powerful email app. Modifying that to "alternatives to Evolution" is the unsupported assertion of the writer, who doesn't even recognize that there are already alternatives. And their other conclusion, that businesses have "culturally shifted" to acccept "open source" has no backup, even if it's true: businesses are accepting Linux as an alternative to Windows, without regard to the openness of its source - even if that's an essential property of the alternative in question.
But the article is an excuse to look at the real dynamic of the current phase of Linux acceptance. People have long noticed that minorities have to do much better than incumbent majorities to become accepted, to exploit the same opportunities, to reap the same rewards. Linux is in the position of a tiny minority, facing a highly organized, rich and powerful majority in Windows. But we've also noticed that "#2 tries harder". Apple, the #2 OS in broad terms, has produced high quality innovations (that are often validated by #1, Microsoft, copying them). So we've got to see "#3 try hardest". Fortunately, the open source of Linux and many of its apps, including email, is an advantage. Because anyone who wants to can try as hard as they want, and everyone benefits. Collectively, Linux can produce the greatest effort, the most tries at success, of all the competitors. Which can overcome all those advantages of #1: majority, incumbency, central organization, wealth, media connections, sheer momentum. With time, and a little luck, we can get the benefit of the superior effort. It helps when we help.
Right, and that's why the gun makers need artificial protection from unsafe product lawsuits.
BTW, thanks for revealing your lust for shooting people you disagree with in your bizarre comment about smart bullets. Hopefully you'll have a chance to settle your argument like a man, in a shootout with another brilliant legal mind like yourself.
Of course the NY Times looks at secondary issues like "escalating addictions" like Internet gambling when considering the "news" of Internet addiction. Why not focus on the underlying mental illness that is expressed in Internet addiction? Like antisocialization, alienation, abused childhood, and other preventable causes? Is it because the NY Times is so deeply embedded in a dysfunctional society that all its editors and reporters think it can do is complain about the further damage? Is it because the Times benefits from the various damage suffered by Americans, including Internet addiction?
No, Anonymous fruity Coward, I decline to view your honeymoon videos. My original, vintage Zep shirts do show my persistent good taste though - thanks for noticing!
If most collisions with Fords were results of brakes not designed to cope with people standing on them at high speeds, if Ford collisions were sworn by thousands of people a year to have happened when "I didn't know it was moving", then yes: you are dealing with an unsafe product. I don't know about how liable is a drunk for using any unsafe product. But where in the Brady Campaign link does it say anything about armed drunks? All it says is that the gun industry has bought unlimited liability protection, even when they have an unsafe product. Since thousands of Americans every year shoot people "accidentally", as they claim under oath, there's plenty of evidence that guns are unsafe.
Now that I've answered your question straight, I'll point out that your poorly constructed drunk driving parallel is just a ploy to protect your right to own one of these unsafe products yourself. Without regard to the risks they pose to other people. And clearly without even regard to the increased liability you will now assume, without the gun makers assuming any liability. To say nothing of your increased risks of being shot yourself. Hardly an enviable position.
Actually, some small companies do patch all their bugs. Especially when we're talking about reality, the facts that matter: reported bugs, known bugs, security bugs. While Microsoft, which could patch all those bugs with their vast resources and experience, does not.
Some more points about your criticism: strawman arguments aren't what you accuse the original post of being. They are weak or sham arguments created by an opponent to easily refute, not arguments made by the original party. And your Opera example is predicated on exactly the strawman I pointed out in the reponse to the original post: you read "if smaller software companies" as "if all smaller software companies", and then argues that one smaller company doesn't patch all of their bugs. When in fact the implicit qualifier in "if smaller software companies" is "if some (or any) smaller software companies". So their predicate is valid if even a single smaller software company patches all its bugs. And, as I mentioned, the bugs that matter in this argument are those that are reported, known, and security. If you insist on "all bugs" being literally all-inclusive, you're arguing for that release to be the final one, without even new features - sometimes known to some users as fixing bugs of omitted features.
So, as usually seen in posts by people who call factual, logical criticism "bashing" (of MS or any other party), you at last accuse the fair criticism of being "sophistry" and "sport". True to form, you project the serious flaws in your own strawman and absurdly reductionist argument onto your targets. It might be sport for you, but it's unsporting conduct.
The remedy for disliked speech is more speech opposing it. Courts might offer remedies against publishing lies, or unproven assertions. But getting a remedy from an anonymous, transient contributor will prove difficult to impossible, and rare - while the long process allows the damage to be done if unhindered by the inhibitions of deterrence from the threat of a verdict.
Instead, people should learn to have no respect for publications without accountability. We already have societal values where everyone learns that statements must be backed with evidence to be credible. Perhaps "common carrier" publications need to allow unedited responses to any publication to avoid liability. For example, recent editing in Wikipedia's "swiftboating" entry first saw a battle between two polarized, exclusive political meanings of the current term and its practice. But now it has settled to an informative version, largely acceptable to consensus. We're still experimenting with free expression. The more we talk about it freely, the better we'll get at it. And now that we do it so much, it's clear that the right to express comes with a responsibility not just to express accurately when damage is at stake, but also to consider the expression with clarity and skepticism.
Maybe Ou is up at 4AM protecting Microsoft's customers for free because it doesn't cost Microsoft anything. Microsoft needs a class action suit loss, or steep hikes in their insurance rates anticipating such a loss. The days when publication of unsafe product exposés like Unsafe at Any Speed transform an industry are long gone. Industries have learned to insulate themselves from books read only by the tiny American intelligentsia by publishing vast overbalancing PR. Some industries even have bought immunity from liability for their unsafe products. Since the Supreme Court has now found that software companies are liable for damages caused by their users' use of their unmodified products, maybe we will see Microsoft liable for the vast damage caused when people use their products the way they promote them. Or maybe we're looking forward to an imminent release of a WiFi "Microsoft Machinegun".
You mean like when someone says "if smaller software companies can patch all of their bugs" means "if all smaller software companies can patch all of their bugs"? Thanks for the permission to flag all of your future posts as "joke".
What are you talking about, "sentient"? A rock responds to being raised above the ground and relesed by falling back to the ground - that's not sentient. Even your own post says first "the Earth [...] does not respond", then "it [the Earth] responds" - pure gibberish. This idea of sentience is your own strawman, that you then attack with self-contradictory nonsense. You don't appear to have any authority to speak of "sentience".
Of course the Earth regulates itself in response to atmospheric changes - that's what the Greenhouse is: "Bryden speculates that the warming may have been part of a global temperature increase brought about by man-made greenhouse warming, and that this is now being counteracted by a decrease in the northward flow of warm water". If you think it's all just "warming", you don't really understand climatology - a complex subject barely understood even by experts like 50 Cent.
No no no - they made a lame big-budget disaster movie impossibly exaggerating that catastrophe for Hollywood shock, so of course it can't really be true.
Slashdot Mirror
The ratifiers of the Bill of Rights agreed that a militia, not just an "army", is necessary to "the security of a free State". A militia, even in that time, was not a standing army, like the British one that had been quartered in private homes by royal command - an abuse that was addressed specifically elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. They said the US (a free state, unlike the colonies or the parent Britain) needed a militia - fighters both quartered and equipped largely privately, especially in peacetime, as well as posessing private experience in their own weapons. That would provide expertise and materiel without direct government expense - major premise of the limited taxation ratifiers, in contrast to the unlimited taxation of the defeated king. As well as deprive the limited government they specified of a centralized power prone to abuse, as they had so recently lived through under British rule, which justified the war to so many patriots.
But we've obviously chosen a different model for our military. We have a huge, expensive standing army - greater than any other at that time, before, or even now. Various government abuses of the people, usually ultimately enforced by nonmilitia, fulltime government armed forces, might have been avoided by having a militia. And perhaps we might not have defended our nation from various enemies. Those speculations are interesting, but besides the point. We do not have a militia, and unorganized people not enlisted in "state security" are neither a militia nor necessary to the defense of a free state. If you're talking about National Guard needing the right to own their own guns, that might be the case. But buying machineguns at flea markets has no protection from the Constitution, and is in fact damaging the security of our mostly free state.
I support the privilege of Americans who can handle the responsibility to own and use guns: eg. trained hunters and sportsmen, not convicted armed robbers or angry teenagers, much as "freedom of travel" is ensured even with restrictions on those who can't be trusted to drive a powerful vehicle like a car. I support revision of the 2nd Amendment, at very least to make its archaic grammar and vocabulary intelligible to modern Americans who live with it. But unless it's revised to protect a right for any American to own and use a gun without restriction, these contrived versions by 2nd Amendment fetishists are baseless. And dangerous to our security.
Jerry apparently was pretty sick of the old gang by the time he "got tired of living" - see the "candid camera" scenes in "Grateful Dog". And with these revealing looks at Hart and Kreutzmann, grabbing back recordings preserved and traded in the community with their (at least tacit) approval for decades, it's not hard to see why. Hart has been stone deaf for years, and Kreutzmann has been a sourpuss for longer - phoning it in even longer than that. Lesh's true colors obviously haven't faded. I wish Jerry had mustered the "harshness" to get off the bus along with Phil after they flogged all their old songs in 1990-3. They'd still be making fresh music, judging from Lesh's performance I saw last week. And the dream could have kept busy being born, instead of working hard at dying.
"Please don't dominate the rap Jack
If you got nothing new to say
If you please don't back up the track
This train got to run today
Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
Heard some say better run away
Others say you better stand still
Now I don't know but I been told
It's hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I heard it said
it's just as hard with the weight of lead
Who can deny? Who can deny?
It's not just a change in style
One step done and another begun
In I wonder how many miles?
Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don't understand
But I think in time we will
Now I don't know but I been told
In the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or stand and wait
With the sun so dark and the hour so late?
You can't overlook the lack Jack
Of any other highway to ride
It's got no signs or dividing lines
And very few rules to guide
Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
I saw things getting out of hand
I guess they always will
I don't know but I been told
If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load
I don't know whose back's that strong
Maybe find out before too long
One way or another
One way or another
One way or another
This darkness got to give
One way or another
One way or another
One way or another
This darkness got to give"
- "New Speedway Boogie", The Grateful Dead
How much did Americans pay to bring Ellison to justice? How are we getting compensated for that? Ellison has $100M to pay, and billions more to spend. Why do these fines have to cost Americans so much money?
Creating .Asia without creating .Europe , .Africa , .NAmerica , .SAmerica , .Australia (and .Antarctica ) is insanity, and shows that ICANN is a gang of hacks. They can't even pull off geopolitical favoritism and apologies without underscoring their orientation along those lines. Preferential treatment of a subgroup is just as bigoted as opposition, just as "racism" means bias with respect to race, regardless of whether positive/negative. But then, what to expect from a gang which compensates for letting the US override consensus for .xxx by throwing a few parties?
I miss Jon Postel.
"The site will restore fan-made recordings; however, the more pristine soundboard recordings will remain off-limits for now."
That article is full of PR - known to Deadheads as "BS". The band has not reversed its decision: they are keeping the soundboards off Archive.org, just like they originally did. Obviously their lawyers told them it would be much harder to control audience mic recordings that they sanctioned, which they authorized people to make, and which people likely own their own copyrights on.
Phil Lesh, the best musician (bass) in the band after Garcia, and long the innovator in their archives, said " "I was not part of this decision-making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled". This is the guy who instigated Grefolded, probably the best production of GD recordings, and also the only post-GD performer consistently worth seeing (if you're into that kind of thing). Not only did the band change their policy against his own, but they didn't even ask or even notify him that his "legacy" was now interrupted.
David Gans, professional Deadhead (selling "official" Deadhead books and ads on his Deadhead radio show), spewed doubletalk:
'"First of all, when Jerry said that...tape trading was an important aspect of life in the Deadhead community. It was a one-to-one affair, for the most part...largely a manifestation of our love for the music and our desire to enlighten the world and turn our friends on.
"That is a far cry from what is happening now. The Internet Archive and all the other online distribution sources are high-speed, mass-distribution systems that make the best quality recording available to all who know where to look for them. That is a good thing, of course, culturally--but there is an economic element to this that must be taken into account."'
Even as he admits the Archive.org soundboards are "good culturally", he introduces his own vested interest opposing that culture: the "economic element" that appears nowhere in Garcia's original policy, or anywhere in the love for music or desire to enlighten the world or turn friends on. FWIW, Gans never respected archives except when he could profit from them. The archivist of Bill Graham Presents (long their show producer in the SF area, NYC and beyond) was shocked to find that Gans, after being left alone with the BGP archive of GD material (photos, posters, letters, etc), had cut them up and stolen a lot of irreplaceable material, to make his 1980s book. This guy doesn't care about the legacy, the archives, the music, or anyone else's access to it, except after he has taken his cut, regardless of the damage he does.
The fact is that the Grateful Dead lasted a lot longer than anyone expected: 30 years. Along the way, lots of people got a ride on the gravy train. The Dead's commercial recording releases were never that good, never made them as much money as their neverending tours. They mismanaged most of their careers, paying for a huge, fun extended family that required 200 performances a year for decades, rather than creating a self-perpetuating system to profit off the vast audience that has outlived the band (and several of its members). Free distribution among fans kept the dream going, promoting music that the music industry, including the band, never could promote commercially. Deadhead traders have always been at the forefront of field recording, reproduction/remastering, the Internet itself, as well as psychedelic frontiers for which they're better known. But now that the drummers and some hangers-on can't sell tickets to their shows, haven't invested their totally unexpectedly profitable youth in sustainable champagne and caviar for their old age, they're grabbing at any profits they see dancing away. They have become just like the rest of the poser hippies-turned-yuppies who lied about seeing them at Woodstock. Too bad they're trying to fight the Internet they helped create: just another gang of Baby Boomers who won't even be noticed as the Net drives over their carcass, roadkill on the Info Superhighway.
Moderation 0
50% Flamebait
50% Interesting
Who knew a legion of Autodesk TrollMods lurked on Slashdot? How could such a mild disagreement, merely citing disappointing personal experience with relevant details, could provoke them? I smell astroturf.
Several monopolies have been justified with the rationalization that they are "natural monopolies". Electric service, passenger trains, phone, natural gas - services which cannot support the waste of redundant infrastructure. Maybe that's true, but they were then regulated by government, which has typically left so many loopholes that the market has been damaged anyway. Actual businesses run by American government bureaucracies have a few strong successes, like the USPS and the VA (and other government healthcare and insurance). Government ownership of the infrastructure, contracted to private competitors by auction to meet publicly reviewed specifications, is a good compromise. Government oversight of the Internet has a lot to teach us about protecting market access to unique services - both good and bad. We've got a lot of options. Unfortunately, we tend to get the simplest, worst option: private monopoly protected from competition by government, bought by the monopolies. Even pure socialism is probably better than that, because at least democracy offers a way to change it.
The point about the drunk driver is specious: drunks are either responsible for getting drunk and taking risks, or not responsible for any risk after they're drunk, depending on how good their lawyer is. The question is whether a manufacturer of a product is liable for its use by a reasonable person. If that reasonable person believes the risk to be low, as gun makers advertise and promote, but the risk is high, as can be seen in the thousands of court decisions that people were shot accidentally, then the reasonable person can't be liable for the extra risk actually represented by the unsafe gun. Yet gun makers have got a special law protecting them from liability no matter what. It's an analogy, not a comparison of which is safer - which would be a pointless comparison.
I didn't say gun owners generally have no regard for their own or others' safety. I said that that poster, a gun owner, disregards their own and others' safety. Other gun owners of course vary - most of those who I've known have been as safe as possible. It is clear that guns are unsafe from the large and lengthy statistics of people who are found to have fired them unintentionally. That is real evidence, not theoretical speculation of what owners "should" be able to handle, or ideology about personal responsibility that is unworkable. Humans without tools are very readily responsible for their actions. When we start using tools, the more powerful and more recently (in history and in individual lives) introduced, the less safe they become. Cars and guns make otherwise safe people less safe, which is why people using them operate under more restrictions, and their makers have safety standards. You might claim that government safety standards are ineffective ("irresponsible" doesn't make any sense), but only laws requiring, for example, trigger locks, have reduced the damage guns did without them. Guns have their place. And with their use comes necessary practices, in their manufacture and in their ownership. They're not different from other products in those regards, though they now have been bought special immunity.
Everyone said for decades that phone companies "don't understand the Internet". They understand it all right - they just don't like it. So now we've got SBC saying they want to charge companies like Google to route their traffic, even if Google is already paying another company to which Google is directly connected. And BellSouth is saying they want to charge companies like Google more to carry their traffic according to the specifications. Verizon (rhymes with "NYNEX"), typically the most evil of the RBOCs, has yet to announce their vicious attack on Google's profits, but it surely will be greedy and based on some kind of preferential treatment - or threat of witholding it.
It's obvious that these telcos are jealous of Google and the big bucks connected with it. They want their cut, not by competing to provide better products, but by threatening to make their products worse unless their extortion money is paid. Back in the 1990s, they tried to force extra fees on dialup customers, on ISPs, based on lies about phone switch capacity. They tried selling ISDN from clueless salespeople for ripoff prices after unpredictable and interminable installation delays. Then they screwed up DSL deployment on a bigger scale. All along they succeeded in buying up and regulating out the competition, while everyone said they didn't understand the Internet. Which diverted investment to companies like Google, as well as the smart entrepreneurs. Now that they've consolidated American bandwidth into the bottlenecks that they monopolize, these old dinosaurs are moving in for the kill. If there's not enough competition to let Google and mom/pop choose an equitable Internet like the one we've built these last 10-20 years, we need to snap the neck of their new monopolies with legislation. There's no reason we have to let their loophole victories over past monopoly remedies and market corrections choke off the developments that have happened despite their vile presence in the landscape.
Moderation -2
100% Redundant
Redundant to what? Some other post not available when I replied? Certainly not anything in the summary to which I replied. And where is another post making my point, that the existence of a movie about catastrophic climate change doesn't contradict the reality of that catastrophe?
That is a really badly written and thought-out article. The survey doesn't say Linux needs "several powerful alternative email apps", just that it needs a powerful email app. Modifying that to "alternatives to Evolution" is the unsupported assertion of the writer, who doesn't even recognize that there are already alternatives. And their other conclusion, that businesses have "culturally shifted" to acccept "open source" has no backup, even if it's true: businesses are accepting Linux as an alternative to Windows, without regard to the openness of its source - even if that's an essential property of the alternative in question.
But the article is an excuse to look at the real dynamic of the current phase of Linux acceptance. People have long noticed that minorities have to do much better than incumbent majorities to become accepted, to exploit the same opportunities, to reap the same rewards. Linux is in the position of a tiny minority, facing a highly organized, rich and powerful majority in Windows. But we've also noticed that "#2 tries harder". Apple, the #2 OS in broad terms, has produced high quality innovations (that are often validated by #1, Microsoft, copying them). So we've got to see "#3 try hardest". Fortunately, the open source of Linux and many of its apps, including email, is an advantage. Because anyone who wants to can try as hard as they want, and everyone benefits. Collectively, Linux can produce the greatest effort, the most tries at success, of all the competitors. Which can overcome all those advantages of #1: majority, incumbency, central organization, wealth, media connections, sheer momentum. With time, and a little luck, we can get the benefit of the superior effort. It helps when we help.
Right, and that's why the gun makers need artificial protection from unsafe product lawsuits.
BTW, thanks for revealing your lust for shooting people you disagree with in your bizarre comment about smart bullets. Hopefully you'll have a chance to settle your argument like a man, in a shootout with another brilliant legal mind like yourself.
Of course the NY Times looks at secondary issues like "escalating addictions" like Internet gambling when considering the "news" of Internet addiction. Why not focus on the underlying mental illness that is expressed in Internet addiction? Like antisocialization, alienation, abused childhood, and other preventable causes? Is it because the NY Times is so deeply embedded in a dysfunctional society that all its editors and reporters think it can do is complain about the further damage? Is it because the Times benefits from the various damage suffered by Americans, including Internet addiction?
Yes, physics is on my side in many ways, even if my sentience as powerful than my peeing instrument.
No, Anonymous fruity Coward, I decline to view your honeymoon videos. My original, vintage Zep shirts do show my persistent good taste though - thanks for noticing!
If most collisions with Fords were results of brakes not designed to cope with people standing on them at high speeds, if Ford collisions were sworn by thousands of people a year to have happened when "I didn't know it was moving", then yes: you are dealing with an unsafe product. I don't know about how liable is a drunk for using any unsafe product. But where in the Brady Campaign link does it say anything about armed drunks? All it says is that the gun industry has bought unlimited liability protection, even when they have an unsafe product. Since thousands of Americans every year shoot people "accidentally", as they claim under oath, there's plenty of evidence that guns are unsafe.
Now that I've answered your question straight, I'll point out that your poorly constructed drunk driving parallel is just a ploy to protect your right to own one of these unsafe products yourself. Without regard to the risks they pose to other people. And clearly without even regard to the increased liability you will now assume, without the gun makers assuming any liability. To say nothing of your increased risks of being shot yourself. Hardly an enviable position.
Actually, some small companies do patch all their bugs. Especially when we're talking about reality, the facts that matter: reported bugs, known bugs, security bugs. While Microsoft, which could patch all those bugs with their vast resources and experience, does not.
Some more points about your criticism: strawman arguments aren't what you accuse the original post of being. They are weak or sham arguments created by an opponent to easily refute, not arguments made by the original party. And your Opera example is predicated on exactly the strawman I pointed out in the reponse to the original post: you read "if smaller software companies" as "if all smaller software companies", and then argues that one smaller company doesn't patch all of their bugs. When in fact the implicit qualifier in "if smaller software companies" is "if some (or any) smaller software companies". So their predicate is valid if even a single smaller software company patches all its bugs. And, as I mentioned, the bugs that matter in this argument are those that are reported, known, and security. If you insist on "all bugs" being literally all-inclusive, you're arguing for that release to be the final one, without even new features - sometimes known to some users as fixing bugs of omitted features.
So, as usually seen in posts by people who call factual, logical criticism "bashing" (of MS or any other party), you at last accuse the fair criticism of being "sophistry" and "sport". True to form, you project the serious flaws in your own strawman and absurdly reductionist argument onto your targets. It might be sport for you, but it's unsporting conduct.
Moderation +1
:P.
100% Funny
Your joke isn't funny, even if some mods think so
The remedy for disliked speech is more speech opposing it. Courts might offer remedies against publishing lies, or unproven assertions. But getting a remedy from an anonymous, transient contributor will prove difficult to impossible, and rare - while the long process allows the damage to be done if unhindered by the inhibitions of deterrence from the threat of a verdict.
Instead, people should learn to have no respect for publications without accountability. We already have societal values where everyone learns that statements must be backed with evidence to be credible. Perhaps "common carrier" publications need to allow unedited responses to any publication to avoid liability. For example, recent editing in Wikipedia's "swiftboating" entry first saw a battle between two polarized, exclusive political meanings of the current term and its practice. But now it has settled to an informative version, largely acceptable to consensus. We're still experimenting with free expression. The more we talk about it freely, the better we'll get at it. And now that we do it so much, it's clear that the right to express comes with a responsibility not just to express accurately when damage is at stake, but also to consider the expression with clarity and skepticism.
Maybe Ou is up at 4AM protecting Microsoft's customers for free because it doesn't cost Microsoft anything. Microsoft needs a class action suit loss, or steep hikes in their insurance rates anticipating such a loss. The days when publication of unsafe product exposés like Unsafe at Any Speed transform an industry are long gone. Industries have learned to insulate themselves from books read only by the tiny American intelligentsia by publishing vast overbalancing PR. Some industries even have bought immunity from liability for their unsafe products. Since the Supreme Court has now found that software companies are liable for damages caused by their users' use of their unmodified products, maybe we will see Microsoft liable for the vast damage caused when people use their products the way they promote them. Or maybe we're looking forward to an imminent release of a WiFi "Microsoft Machinegun".
You mean like when someone says "if smaller software companies can patch all of their bugs" means "if all smaller software companies can patch all of their bugs"? Thanks for the permission to flag all of your future posts as "joke".
What are you talking about, "sentient"? A rock responds to being raised above the ground and relesed by falling back to the ground - that's not sentient. Even your own post says first "the Earth [...] does not respond", then "it [the Earth] responds" - pure gibberish. This idea of sentience is your own strawman, that you then attack with self-contradictory nonsense. You don't appear to have any authority to speak of "sentience".
Of course the Earth regulates itself in response to atmospheric changes - that's what the Greenhouse is: "Bryden speculates that the warming may have been part of a global temperature increase brought about by man-made greenhouse warming, and that this is now being counteracted by a decrease in the northward flow of warm water". If you think it's all just "warming", you don't really understand climatology - a complex subject barely understood even by experts like 50 Cent.
No no no - they made a lame big-budget disaster movie impossibly exaggerating that catastrophe for Hollywood shock, so of course it can't really be true.
And if you've got a 1.3TB RAID server lying around, you don't have to spend anything.