Then, in addition to "hacker" and "cracker", there is "idiot"... for people like me who forget to close their italics tag and don't preview before posting. Yeesh!
People who hack code have been trying since the 80's to remove the label "hacker" from computer criminals. Unfortunately, people who break into systems have always called themselves "hackers", too, and are not interested in being re-labeled as "crackers". (Hence, 2600, which has always published info about breaking into systems and has never been about programming, calls itself "The Hacker Quarterly".
I can understand why programmers don't want to be lumped in with "Cap'n Crunch" and Kevin Mitnick, but the truth is that the whole hacker/cracker semantics debate is one that nobody else really listens to.
Bottom line, more than one group of people identify themselves as "hackers".
Look at it this way... suppose all those who are into communications and security said "no, we are hackers not you. the right word for programmers is 'packers'. please refrain from EVER calling a programmer a hacker."
Sounds silly and childish, doesn't it? It sounds the same way when programmers do it.
Cracker (noun): 1. Po' White Trash 2. One who cracks copy protection on software.
Hacker (noun) 1. One who cranks out program code in a ham-fisted manner to get things done, rather than follow rigid methodologies. 2. One who rigs things up to perform functions for which they were not designed. 3. One who circumvents security of external servers owned by others for the purposes of recreation and/or intellectual curiosity. 4. One who takes advantage of network and communications technology they don't own to make money by illegal means.
You may not agree with these definitions, but I don't really agree with yours... and more people agree with mine. Usage defines language, not vice versa. Sorry if that gets under your skin, but it's the way language evolves.
It seems to me that a lot of over-reaction is going on here. I mean, I dislike Intel's price/performace ratio as much as the next guy (Boo, Intel! Rah-rah AMD!), but we are talking about a feature that is not even enabled by default, and we have not really been given any facts to establish how common the slowdown is.
The comments here make it sound like running a simple photoshop blur will make the CPU slow to a crawl in order to avoid going tits-up in under 5 minutes.
For all we know, the only way to cause the clock throttle to choke up is running the chip heavilly with no fan in close proximity to a blast furnace under direct sunlight for three days straight...
Just how hot is "too hot", and how much do you have to abuse the chip to get there? Until that question has been answered fully, I am going to view this as a lot of panic over nothing.
1. You don'd need access to the "last 50 feet" to physically disconnect somebody. They need a connection somwhere on your end, too. Just find the "switchbox" they are connect through, and cut it there.
2. Why couldn't the avitar "bend the rules? It was able to simulate changing into an agent. Also, the agenst themselves were just computer-generated avitars, and they could bend the rules better than any of the humans (other than Neo at the end).
Saw the movie about 6 times, still haven't bothered buying a copy yet. To summarize, my review is this: a very well-made, stylish, and fun movie with great wire-fu scenes, great effects, and a very, very poorly thought-out science fiction back-story.
Obviously no one likes to be busted in his house, but if it has to happen it's better if the guys doing it are not doing it because it will bring profits to shareholders. Believe me, you are safer in the hands of the cops than in the hands of any corporation private militia. Corporations don't give a shit about your civil rights. A democratic governement has at least to pretend to respect them. Big difference.
Right. That's why I am a libertarian rather than an anarchist. I support the establishment of a limited government, which does not have unilateral power to knock my door down, but must respect the cotract which gives them the right to do so under certain circumstances (the Constitution).
But it is shortsighted to assume that the government will not make moves to expand its power, and will not act against your best interests.
The important difference between the government and any given business is that we are all forced to be customers of the government's services. This is why we need to watch the government much more closely than we watch McDonald's or Best Buy.
Yes, beholden. A company cannot raize the land, because that would devalue adjacent land. Yes, and the owner of that adjacent land would have something to say about it, in court if necessary.
Responsibilities do not end with at the close of a financial transaction
Yes they do. That's what financial transactions are: closure of responisbilities. When I pay off my mortgage, my responsibility to the bank that loaned it to me ends.
so the fact that you've paid your taxes doesn't mean you're absolved of your obligations to a community.
I agree, because you do not pay your taxes to a community, you pay them to the government, so taxes only settle what is owed to the government. However, you can't pass laws requiring people to be charitable. (Well, you can, but I will always oppose them.) Check with any major charity in America, and you will find that the fast majority of their funding comes from corporate donations. They might not be contributing enough for your tastes, but most corporations are more responsible citizens than most individuals are in that area. What percentage of your income went to charity this year? I bet it is less than the percentage that your insurance company or the broker of your retirement account gave away.
Trust me, without a governement, it would be long since Microsoft had got Linus and RMS shot down and forced every linux zealot into forced labor (like maintaining some ugly Cobol legacy code).
Yet another person who needs to learn the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist".
The books "A Parliament of Whores" (by O'Rourke), or "Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist" (by William F.Buckley, Jr., the notorious editor of National Review) would be a good place to start. Seriously, you seem to be confused about this point. Do some reading.
The problem, though, is that by allowing corporations to play such a large role in the electoral process (money), there's little hope of getting the "pure" corporation espoused by Libertarians.
The road of hope is this: Limit the government to the point that corporations can't hope to make money from it. Then the electoral process stops being worth buying.
The data-buying situation reminds me of the EPA requirement put on several cities to ban all non-Ethonal gas. Cities should be allowed to regulate their own fuel consumption, but the feds stepped in. Problem is, while Ethanol succeeds at reducing CO2 emmissions, it actually results in more of certain other chemicals, like O3. So, why did the fed do it? Well, it might have something to do with the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation ("ADM - Supermarket to the world"), which owns over 90% of the Ethanol-producing corn crop.
ADM spend a fortune on both major parties, and they plenty in return for their trouble. If we, the common citizens, were to join together and say "No, dammit... you can't do shit like this! Even though clean air is a good idea, the federal government should not be making decisions for our cities!" then there would be no point in ADM buying influence anymore. Unfortuately, anybody who stands up against this particular pork project is just accused of wanting to poison the air for the sake of "big oil".
I don't blame ADM for wanting to buy this kind of graft from the government. I blame the government for grabbing the power to offer the graft to them in the first place.
1. Libertarians are not anarchists. We don't oppose the existance of government, we just think that government power should be far more limited than it is right now.
2. By misspelling "goverrnmet" to a phonetic spelling of how a redneck hick would say it, you seem to be trying to make fun of my southern rural upbringing... The fact is that I, like the vast majority of Libertarians, do not live out in the sticks, and do not live in the deep south. (In my case, I live in the suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota).
People looks at the electora map from the last election, and wrongly assume that, since Gore carried most of the biggest and most urban states, that the Republicans must be a bunch of crackers like the ones in "Deliverance".
However, if you break the numbers down by voting district, the real truth emerges. Gore won the "Squeal pig, squeal!" vote by a landslide. He also carried the worst of the urban nightmare ghettos.
Bush, on the other hand, won all of the districts that had indoor plumming, but were not covered in graffitti.
Sorry if that damages your elitist vision of how the urbane, sophisticated, and enlightened of America are all liberals, but the sad truth is that the Democratic Party base is made up almost entirely from a bizzarre coalition of redneck crackers and boyz in the hood.
Because the company uses national resources, whether it be timber, water, toxic waste dumps, or the brains and talents produced by the education system. Companies do not exist in a vacuum and are indeed beholden to the public.
Beholden? Did the companies not pay for those resources? Did they not pay the people they hired out of that education system? Is the education system not funded by taxes from their employees (and, to a large degree, by them)?
If they are not paying enough for the "national" (meaning "publicly owned", which also means "government run" resources they use, whose fault is that? It seems to me that you should complain to the people who are undercharging them for resources that your taxes paid for.
Doctor paiten confidentality is not granted by the constitution.
Nor should it be.
Your right to an education is not guarenteed by the constitution.
Not by the US Constitution, no. Educating your children is not a responsibility of the federal government. There are clauses in the constitutions of many states which guarantee the right to an education, but that is up to the citizens of each state to decide for themselves.
The constitution does not give you the right to be descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex.
Did you word that the way you mean to? Are there many people clamoring to be "descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex."... In any case, descrimination by the government based on race, religion, or sex is unconstitutional, but the constitution does not (and should not) grant government the power to interfere in the right of free association... menaing that if I want to spend all my time around black hindu women, and don't allow anybody else in my Country Club, it is my right to do so. I would be a bigot and an asshole, but there's no law against being a bigot and as asshole, nor should there be.
The government does have the right to tax your income based on Section 6 of the Constitution, "All Bills for raising Revenue " It does not say or limit how this revenue is to be obtained. Also from Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes." for things including "and general Welfare of the United States" That happens to include it's citizens.
The key word here is "general welfare of the United States"... meaning programs that benifit everybody (like social security) are constitutional, but programs that only benifit a few people (like a farm subsidy for ADM Corporation, or national funding for AFDC) are not.
The rest of what you said, I agree with. I especially liked your opening comment that rights not explicitly spelled out are not neccesarrilly denied. There are some people (myself among them) that believe that the Constitution was not meant to spell out our rights, but to spell out the few cases in which the government has power over those rights. Had we held fast to this dogma, the Bill Of Rights would have been redundant: The government could not , for example, restrict free speech or gun rights because the constitution never granted them the power to do so.
Pragmatic people recognized that this concept might not be held as sacred as it should, so the Bill of Rights was written as a safe-guard, although several of the "founding fathers" saw that it had the potential to diminish our rights, because people might start to think, as some people today think, that Americans do not have rights beyond those itemized.
Except that someone has to do the work, and if it's not the governement it's the corporations. What "work" are you referring to that has to be done?
Between two evils, I'd rather pick the lesser one.
Between the corporate world and the governement, that would be corporations. Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products. They exist only by our consent, and the day we all stop buying their stuff is the day they go away. With government, you don't get the choice of not being a customer.
P.J. O'Rourke (my favorite libertarian writer) once offered the "dead grandmother" litmus as a method of determining whether a government program should go forward. It went like this:
Government pays for programs with taxes, which they collect from everybody, including your sweet old grandma.
If you don't pay your taxes, you are fined; don't pay the fine, and you are jailed; break out of jail, you can be shot.
Therefore, everything the government does is accomplished by putting a gun to your grandma's head and forcing her to pay for it.
Using that logic, whenever considering whether to support a government program, you should ask yourself, "would I be willing to shoot my grandmother over this?"
The military? Yes. "Sorry grandma, but we are all in the same boat if those Canadians start storming over the border. Pony up like the rest of us!"
The BATF? No. "A bunch of redneck cultists have almost as many guns per capita as the average Texan... we need to roll in the tanks and firebomb them, grandma."
The National Endowment for the Arts. Hell no. "Pay up for the Maplethorpe exibit, or it's curtains for you, Grandma!"
As for corporations, as long as they stay within the law, and are not using the power of the gun against me (which the government is), they can be as greedy and corrupt as they like.
With corporations, the CEO is only choosen by stockholders and doesn't care about pleasing anyone else.
As it should be. Nobody else owns the company, so why should anybody else have a say in who they are trying to please?
If you fail to understand why a large institution can be less humane that an individual, you have not lived in the world long enough to know a damned thing about anything yet.
The government works for us. We established it to do one thing for us: protect our lives, property, and liberties from anyone who threatens them. Over the course of the last Century, we concluded that allowing the government to redistribute some resources to those who need it might make our society safer and happier (it hasn't, but that's another argument), and therefore promotes the general welfare of the whole nation.
Beyond these limited functions, the less the government does, the better. They should not be in the business of limiting freedoms which we put them in place to protect.
Our government has become a massive institution, with power of life and death over 270 million people (more than that, if you consider that our military is spread all over the world).
It reminds me of one of Asimov's robot stories... Robots were programmed with the following priorities 1: protect people from harm, 2: follow orders, and 3: self-preservation. The thinking was that it would make robots perfect servants. Unfortunately, the robots saw that man often does self-destructive things (such as smoking, drinking, starting stupid wars, etc), so the robots decided that they had to take over to protect us from ourselves. They ignored orders to let us free, because following orders was a lower priority than protecting us.
Unfortunately, our government has moved towards behaving more and more like the robots of Asimov's stories.
As I recall, the robots were persuaded to free people when it was pointed out to them that restricting a man's freedom does him harm, and therefore taking away freedoms is not protection, but quite the opposite.
It's about time that more of us made this same explanation to those who govern.
You caught the flaw in the editors logic. Thank you.
(You also explained it a little faster than me... my response was about 20 posts later than yours, even though started entering my answer just after the fp'ers.)
Things like this are why I just don't understand the typical Libertarian babble that government data collection is bad, but corporations should be allowed to collect and sell whatever data they want.
The Libertarian objection here is that the FBI is buying the data. Collect or buy, it is still the government action that one would be objecting to.
Also, this is aggregate data, meaning that nobody is identified, so who gives a flying fuck? Post it on a public website for all I care. It's just a bunch of statistics. Sheesh!
The thing to do is this: Take reasonable steps to be compliant. If you find out that you are not paying somebody who is entitled to licensing (and can prove it to your satisfaction), settle it up with them right away. License holders are generally more interested in getting paid than in legal fights.
Should you get dragged into court, you can avoid a lot of penalties by being able to show that you made a serious effort in good faith to comply with all licensing requirements.
So the message here is: don't go into business expecting a tiny ammount of ad revenue to be enough. Make sure that your business model and starting revenue is robust enough to absorb unexpected costs.
License costs are not that bad compared to the total cost of doing business, so if they are the straw that breaks the camel's back, you probably did not have a very sound business model to begin with.
If you are just running a hobby site, and hope to reduce your costs by selling ads, remember that selling ads, even at a loss, is comercially exploiting your content, so you had better make damned sure the content is yours to exploit.
A better choice for reducing the cost of a hobby site would be to rely on donations, or perhaps share ownership of the site with a few of your more supportive visitors.
They did trace the traffic. The phone calls. Through avatars (the metamorphosis). And its not a great feat for someone competent to walk into a busy system today, in real life, and get unnoticed for a long while, even with competent admins.
Except they were not merely admins. They were super-intelligent robots. Why would they need an avitar, or anything as clumsy as a user interface, when they themselves think the same way as a the computer? The question isn't just "why didn't they know", it's "how could they not know!?"
Nowhere was it established that mere disconnecting would kill anyone.
When the Joey Pants character betrayed Morpheus, he killed three people by merely disconnecting them. Remember the girl in while pleading "not like this" right before she died?
They did not interact or control the matrix through the console. They watched it. Same thing if someone scans the radio waves for cell phone conversations. To control the matrix you had to log online.
That makes no sense at all! If it is possible to get a console to monitor the system, and an interface that lets you plug your head in, than it would have to be possible to send I/O signals through a console program.
Umm, cause the avatars did not have the AI to do it by themselves.
A computer avitar, like the woman in the red dress, does not need AI to follow a simple set of instructions. They established that it was advanced enough to program her to be a sex toy, so just program her to go on your missions for you.
Every scifi movie ever made has had holes in it big enough to fit elephants through.
Kindly name some holes in 2001. If you can do it, I will be pretty impressed.
If you have any kind of ad revenue coming in at all, the ascap fees are not really all that unmanagable.
I used to work as a wedding DJ when I was younger. In the early 90's, ascap started clamping down on mobile DJ companies, insisting that license fees needed to be paid for public "performances" of their music (even though the were playing at private parties).
The DJ company I woked for just paid the fees, raised their price a little, and life went on pretty much the same as it always had. (Although we felt more free to burn our own mix CD's, because we were paying a per-song fee anyway. Before all the license issues were sorted out we were careful about using original paid-for disks only.)
If you are running a serious business, the ascap fees will be one of your smallest expenses.
In any case, paying fees on music is certainly less expensive than hiring live on-air talent to run a talk station.
I agree that this is potentially a net good. It means that the big players in the radio business have now been more or less frozen out of leveraging their product to dominate the internet, while internet-only companies run by smaller, more interesting companies will get a chance to thrive and build a market.
How will the union respond to that? By trying to expand to include internet DJ's, of course.
Look at the Verizon strike of a few months ago. It wasn't really about wages or benifits... It was that the union was upset that the people who worked for ISP's that verizon took over were all non-union workers (because, unlike the telephone industry, the data communications industry has tradionally not been run by unions).
The big unions are hoping to use the fact that baby-bells are moving into the Internet business to turn all those brash young Internet workers into dues-paying members. Over time, don't be surprised if the unions try to get a hold of more of the IT industry over the next 10 years... not because IT workers need a union, but because the unions' numbers have been dwindling over the last two decades, and with it, so has their money, power and influence. We don't need them, but they certainly need us.
A lack of unions would mean long shifts and minimum wage for auto workers? What are you basing that claim on? Because that's how auto workers were treated in 1930? Have you stopped to consider that our current ecomony does not really resemble that time in history very much? That maybe you would have a hard time getting good people to work in an auto plant for minimum wage, when the local Starbucks is paying $10.50 an hour for much easier work?
The scenario you are reciting is a total myth. Every time somebody points out that unions are redundant, corrupt, and bad for everybody who is not a union boss (and they are), somebody drags out the old saw of "well, you would be working like a slave for change found in the couch if it wasn't for the union", which is total BS.
I'm not in a union, and I make great money. Everybody I know who is in a union is only in it because joining was a requirement of the job. Unions are nothing but a mob racket these days, and anybody who doesn't see that must be blinded by their hate of industry and capitalism, because it should be obvious to anybody who looks at it objectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, in addition to "hacker" and "cracker", there is "idiot"... for people like me who forget to close their italics tag and don't preview before posting. Yeesh!
People who hack code have been trying since the 80's to remove the label "hacker" from computer criminals. Unfortunately, people who break into systems have always called themselves "hackers", too, and are not interested in being re-labeled as "crackers". (Hence, 2600, which has always published info about breaking into systems and has never been about programming, calls itself "The Hacker Quarterly".
I can understand why programmers don't want to be lumped in with "Cap'n Crunch" and Kevin Mitnick, but the truth is that the whole hacker/cracker semantics debate is one that nobody else really listens to.
Bottom line, more than one group of people identify themselves as "hackers".
Look at it this way... suppose all those who are into communications and security said "no, we are hackers not you. the right word for programmers is 'packers'. please refrain from EVER calling a programmer a hacker."
Sounds silly and childish, doesn't it? It sounds the same way when programmers do it.
A post in reply to a troll complaining about all the posts responding to trolls... delicious.
Why has nobody modded you "+1 Funny" for that yet?
I agree with the rest of what you said... it just struck me as really funny that you fed the troll with a "don't feed the trolls" message.
1. Po' White Trash
2. One who cracks copy protection on software.
Hacker (noun)
1. One who cranks out program code in a ham-fisted manner to get things done, rather than follow rigid methodologies.
2. One who rigs things up to perform functions for which they were not designed.
3. One who circumvents security of external servers owned by others for the purposes of recreation and/or intellectual curiosity.
4. One who takes advantage of network and communications technology they don't own to make money by illegal means.
You may not agree with these definitions, but I don't really agree with yours... and more people agree with mine. Usage defines language, not vice versa. Sorry if that gets under your skin, but it's the way language evolves.
The comments here make it sound like running a simple photoshop blur will make the CPU slow to a crawl in order to avoid going tits-up in under 5 minutes.
For all we know, the only way to cause the clock throttle to choke up is running the chip heavilly with no fan in close proximity to a blast furnace under direct sunlight for three days straight...
Just how hot is "too hot", and how much do you have to abuse the chip to get there? Until that question has been answered fully, I am going to view this as a lot of panic over nothing.
2. Why couldn't the avitar "bend the rules? It was able to simulate changing into an agent. Also, the agenst themselves were just computer-generated avitars, and they could bend the rules better than any of the humans (other than Neo at the end).
Saw the movie about 6 times, still haven't bothered buying a copy yet. To summarize, my review is this: a very well-made, stylish, and fun movie with great wire-fu scenes, great effects, and a very, very poorly thought-out science fiction back-story.
Right. That's why I am a libertarian rather than an anarchist. I support the establishment of a limited government, which does not have unilateral power to knock my door down, but must respect the cotract which gives them the right to do so under certain circumstances (the Constitution).
But it is shortsighted to assume that the government will not make moves to expand its power, and will not act against your best interests.
The important difference between the government and any given business is that we are all forced to be customers of the government's services. This is why we need to watch the government much more closely than we watch McDonald's or Best Buy.
Responsibilities do not end with at the close of a financial transaction
Yes they do. That's what financial transactions are: closure of responisbilities. When I pay off my mortgage, my responsibility to the bank that loaned it to me ends.
so the fact that you've paid your taxes doesn't mean you're absolved of your obligations to a community.
I agree, because you do not pay your taxes to a community, you pay them to the government, so taxes only settle what is owed to the government. However, you can't pass laws requiring people to be charitable. (Well, you can, but I will always oppose them.) Check with any major charity in America, and you will find that the fast majority of their funding comes from corporate donations. They might not be contributing enough for your tastes, but most corporations are more responsible citizens than most individuals are in that area. What percentage of your income went to charity this year? I bet it is less than the percentage that your insurance company or the broker of your retirement account gave away.
Yet another person who needs to learn the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist".
The books "A Parliament of Whores" (by O'Rourke), or "Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist" (by William F.Buckley, Jr., the notorious editor of National Review) would be a good place to start. Seriously, you seem to be confused about this point. Do some reading.
The road of hope is this: Limit the government to the point that corporations can't hope to make money from it. Then the electoral process stops being worth buying.
The data-buying situation reminds me of the EPA requirement put on several cities to ban all non-Ethonal gas. Cities should be allowed to regulate their own fuel consumption, but the feds stepped in. Problem is, while Ethanol succeeds at reducing CO2 emmissions, it actually results in more of certain other chemicals, like O3. So, why did the fed do it? Well, it might have something to do with the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation ("ADM - Supermarket to the world"), which owns over 90% of the Ethanol-producing corn crop.
ADM spend a fortune on both major parties, and they plenty in return for their trouble. If we, the common citizens, were to join together and say "No, dammit... you can't do shit like this! Even though clean air is a good idea, the federal government should not be making decisions for our cities!" then there would be no point in ADM buying influence anymore. Unfortuately, anybody who stands up against this particular pork project is just accused of wanting to poison the air for the sake of "big oil".
I don't blame ADM for wanting to buy this kind of graft from the government. I blame the government for grabbing the power to offer the graft to them in the first place.
1. Libertarians are not anarchists. We don't oppose the existance of government, we just think that government power should be far more limited than it is right now.
2. By misspelling "goverrnmet" to a phonetic spelling of how a redneck hick would say it, you seem to be trying to make fun of my southern rural upbringing... The fact is that I, like the vast majority of Libertarians, do not live out in the sticks, and do not live in the deep south. (In my case, I live in the suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota).
People looks at the electora map from the last election, and wrongly assume that, since Gore carried most of the biggest and most urban states, that the Republicans must be a bunch of crackers like the ones in "Deliverance".
However, if you break the numbers down by voting district, the real truth emerges. Gore won the "Squeal pig, squeal!" vote by a landslide. He also carried the worst of the urban nightmare ghettos.
Bush, on the other hand, won all of the districts that had indoor plumming, but were not covered in graffitti.
Sorry if that damages your elitist vision of how the urbane, sophisticated, and enlightened of America are all liberals, but the sad truth is that the Democratic Party base is made up almost entirely from a bizzarre coalition of redneck crackers and boyz in the hood.
Or, as it was once put: "When government gets involved in commerce, the first thing to be bought and sold is the government."
Beholden? Did the companies not pay for those resources? Did they not pay the people they hired out of that education system? Is the education system not funded by taxes from their employees (and, to a large degree, by them)?
If they are not paying enough for the "national" (meaning "publicly owned", which also means "government run" resources they use, whose fault is that? It seems to me that you should complain to the people who are undercharging them for resources that your taxes paid for.
Nor should it be.
Your right to an education is not guarenteed by the constitution.
Not by the US Constitution, no. Educating your children is not a responsibility of the federal government. There are clauses in the constitutions of many states which guarantee the right to an education, but that is up to the citizens of each state to decide for themselves.
The constitution does not give you the right to be descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex.
Did you word that the way you mean to? Are there many people clamoring to be "descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex."... In any case, descrimination by the government based on race, religion, or sex is unconstitutional, but the constitution does not (and should not) grant government the power to interfere in the right of free association... menaing that if I want to spend all my time around black hindu women, and don't allow anybody else in my Country Club, it is my right to do so. I would be a bigot and an asshole, but there's no law against being a bigot and as asshole, nor should there be.
The government does have the right to tax your income based on Section 6 of the Constitution, "All Bills for raising Revenue " It does not say or limit how this revenue is to be obtained. Also from Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes." for things including "and general Welfare of the United States" That happens to include it's citizens.
The key word here is "general welfare of the United States"... meaning programs that benifit everybody (like social security) are constitutional, but programs that only benifit a few people (like a farm subsidy for ADM Corporation, or national funding for AFDC) are not.
The rest of what you said, I agree with. I especially liked your opening comment that rights not explicitly spelled out are not neccesarrilly denied. There are some people (myself among them) that believe that the Constitution was not meant to spell out our rights, but to spell out the few cases in which the government has power over those rights. Had we held fast to this dogma, the Bill Of Rights would have been redundant: The government could not , for example, restrict free speech or gun rights because the constitution never granted them the power to do so.
Pragmatic people recognized that this concept might not be held as sacred as it should, so the Bill of Rights was written as a safe-guard, although several of the "founding fathers" saw that it had the potential to diminish our rights, because people might start to think, as some people today think, that Americans do not have rights beyond those itemized.
Between two evils, I'd rather pick the lesser one.
Between the corporate world and the governement, that would be corporations. Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products. They exist only by our consent, and the day we all stop buying their stuff is the day they go away. With government, you don't get the choice of not being a customer.
P.J. O'Rourke (my favorite libertarian writer) once offered the "dead grandmother" litmus as a method of determining whether a government program should go forward. It went like this:
Government pays for programs with taxes, which they collect from everybody, including your sweet old grandma.
If you don't pay your taxes, you are fined; don't pay the fine, and you are jailed; break out of jail, you can be shot.
Therefore, everything the government does is accomplished by putting a gun to your grandma's head and forcing her to pay for it.
Using that logic, whenever considering whether to support a government program, you should ask yourself, "would I be willing to shoot my grandmother over this?"
The military? Yes. "Sorry grandma, but we are all in the same boat if those Canadians start storming over the border. Pony up like the rest of us!"
The BATF? No. "A bunch of redneck cultists have almost as many guns per capita as the average Texan... we need to roll in the tanks and firebomb them, grandma."
The National Endowment for the Arts. Hell no. "Pay up for the Maplethorpe exibit, or it's curtains for you, Grandma!"
As for corporations, as long as they stay within the law, and are not using the power of the gun against me (which the government is), they can be as greedy and corrupt as they like.
With corporations, the CEO is only choosen by stockholders and doesn't care about pleasing anyone else.
As it should be. Nobody else owns the company, so why should anybody else have a say in who they are trying to please?
The government works for us. We established it to do one thing for us: protect our lives, property, and liberties from anyone who threatens them. Over the course of the last Century, we concluded that allowing the government to redistribute some resources to those who need it might make our society safer and happier (it hasn't, but that's another argument), and therefore promotes the general welfare of the whole nation.
Beyond these limited functions, the less the government does, the better. They should not be in the business of limiting freedoms which we put them in place to protect.
Our government has become a massive institution, with power of life and death over 270 million people (more than that, if you consider that our military is spread all over the world).
It reminds me of one of Asimov's robot stories... Robots were programmed with the following priorities 1: protect people from harm, 2: follow orders, and 3: self-preservation. The thinking was that it would make robots perfect servants. Unfortunately, the robots saw that man often does self-destructive things (such as smoking, drinking, starting stupid wars, etc), so the robots decided that they had to take over to protect us from ourselves. They ignored orders to let us free, because following orders was a lower priority than protecting us.
Unfortunately, our government has moved towards behaving more and more like the robots of Asimov's stories.
As I recall, the robots were persuaded to free people when it was pointed out to them that restricting a man's freedom does him harm, and therefore taking away freedoms is not protection, but quite the opposite.
It's about time that more of us made this same explanation to those who govern.
Libertarians just want a small government that does not trample on our rights.
I wish more people understood this subtle (but very important) difference.
You caught the flaw in the editors logic. Thank you.
(You also explained it a little faster than me... my response was about 20 posts later than yours, even though started entering my answer just after the fp'ers.)
Somebody mod this guy up.
The Libertarian objection here is that the FBI is buying the data. Collect or buy, it is still the government action that one would be objecting to.
Also, this is aggregate data, meaning that nobody is identified, so who gives a flying fuck? Post it on a public website for all I care. It's just a bunch of statistics. Sheesh!
Should you get dragged into court, you can avoid a lot of penalties by being able to show that you made a serious effort in good faith to comply with all licensing requirements.
So the message here is: don't go into business expecting a tiny ammount of ad revenue to be enough. Make sure that your business model and starting revenue is robust enough to absorb unexpected costs.
License costs are not that bad compared to the total cost of doing business, so if they are the straw that breaks the camel's back, you probably did not have a very sound business model to begin with.
If you are just running a hobby site, and hope to reduce your costs by selling ads, remember that selling ads, even at a loss, is comercially exploiting your content, so you had better make damned sure the content is yours to exploit.
A better choice for reducing the cost of a hobby site would be to rely on donations, or perhaps share ownership of the site with a few of your more supportive visitors.
Except they were not merely admins. They were super-intelligent robots. Why would they need an avitar, or anything as clumsy as a user interface, when they themselves think the same way as a the computer? The question isn't just "why didn't they know", it's "how could they not know!?"
Nowhere was it established that mere disconnecting would kill anyone.
When the Joey Pants character betrayed Morpheus, he killed three people by merely disconnecting them. Remember the girl in while pleading "not like this" right before she died?
They did not interact or control the matrix through the console. They watched it. Same thing if someone scans the radio waves for cell phone conversations. To control the matrix you had to log online.
That makes no sense at all! If it is possible to get a console to monitor the system, and an interface that lets you plug your head in, than it would have to be possible to send I/O signals through a console program.
Umm, cause the avatars did not have the AI to do it by themselves.
A computer avitar, like the woman in the red dress, does not need AI to follow a simple set of instructions. They established that it was advanced enough to program her to be a sex toy, so just program her to go on your missions for you.
Every scifi movie ever made has had holes in it big enough to fit elephants through.
Kindly name some holes in 2001. If you can do it, I will be pretty impressed.
The very link you point to shows that Buffalo 66 came out just 3 years ago. The Miller ad was older.
I used to work as a wedding DJ when I was younger. In the early 90's, ascap started clamping down on mobile DJ companies, insisting that license fees needed to be paid for public "performances" of their music (even though the were playing at private parties).
The DJ company I woked for just paid the fees, raised their price a little, and life went on pretty much the same as it always had. (Although we felt more free to burn our own mix CD's, because we were paying a per-song fee anyway. Before all the license issues were sorted out we were careful about using original paid-for disks only.)
If you are running a serious business, the ascap fees will be one of your smallest expenses.
In any case, paying fees on music is certainly less expensive than hiring live on-air talent to run a talk station.
How will the union respond to that? By trying to expand to include internet DJ's, of course.
Look at the Verizon strike of a few months ago. It wasn't really about wages or benifits... It was that the union was upset that the people who worked for ISP's that verizon took over were all non-union workers (because, unlike the telephone industry, the data communications industry has tradionally not been run by unions).
The big unions are hoping to use the fact that baby-bells are moving into the Internet business to turn all those brash young Internet workers into dues-paying members. Over time, don't be surprised if the unions try to get a hold of more of the IT industry over the next 10 years... not because IT workers need a union, but because the unions' numbers have been dwindling over the last two decades, and with it, so has their money, power and influence. We don't need them, but they certainly need us.
The scenario you are reciting is a total myth. Every time somebody points out that unions are redundant, corrupt, and bad for everybody who is not a union boss (and they are), somebody drags out the old saw of "well, you would be working like a slave for change found in the couch if it wasn't for the union", which is total BS.
I'm not in a union, and I make great money. Everybody I know who is in a union is only in it because joining was a requirement of the job. Unions are nothing but a mob racket these days, and anybody who doesn't see that must be blinded by their hate of industry and capitalism, because it should be obvious to anybody who looks at it objectively.