Regardless of what the people decided, the best plan of action was to inform the people of the corruption. I condemn those who rioted and violently killed others.
Its actually more likely that an illegal means would have been the best solution
Are you talking about assassination or something? That definitely would NOT have been the best solution.
No offense to those who died. The people rising up violently as a result to finding out about massive corruption in their own government, in my opinion, cannot be the fault of the group who revealed the corruption.
If massive amounts of corruption that we know exist were finally brought to light in the US and the result was an armed uprising of citizens opposed to that corruption, I could not possibly blame who revealed the corruption as the cause of the violence.
As a famous saying, don't blame the messenger. This is not a situation of supposedly revealed anonymous sources and putting secret operations in jeopardy or anything of the sort. This is a case of people revolting to massive corruption.
I do not condone the violence, I mourn for those who died. However, even though the violence was a result of the release, I believe it is very important that people know of corruption in their government. If Assange had leaked some document showing corruption being perpetrated by Obama, or proving that he wasn't born in Hawaii and the result was a violent protest or uprising. I believe that Tea Party members would be calling Assange a hero for revealing the information and not blame him for the violence. Food for thought.
his stunts cause real harm to people the world over
Really? Last I heard there wasn't a single person they could prove was harmed by the wikileaks releases.
Of course the US is seeking to extradite him, to put him on trial for spying and other damages
None of which they can prove, and releasing the documents isn't illegal under US law. So what reason do they have to extradite him? Not saying it won't happen, just that it's ridiculous.
Actually the right is actively advocating violence. Especially with the rhetoric of "if we can't win at the ballot boxes, we'll win in the streets" and other such calls for revolution and using guns.
Also, there is absolutely no credible evidence that the shooter was extreme left or right. At best there is evidence of a mix of views.
It's amusing how many assumptions you make about me.
There are monopolies right now, killing all competition, only relying on the fact that they are completely government backed! WTF is wrong with you? All banks and large investment firms, all energy firms, military and insurances and communications and food and education, and utilities it's all gov't granted monopolies TODAY! And you are afraid of some hypothetical monopolies that could happen if there was no gov't monopolies? Why do YOU like gov't monopolies so much? What did they do for you except rob you of your money?
I never said our current system is perfect, nor is it good. I never said that there are no monopolies either. However, banks and large investment firms are more of an oligopoly with everyone fighting for a monopoly but unable to due to the free market. So while it is very difficult for newcomers to join the market (which is a bad thing I agree) no one bank is able to achieve a monopoly so there is some (not enough) competition to have an effect. The same problem occurs with insurances. There is no monopoly, just many oligopolies. Hard for newcomers but there is still competition. For instance, car insurance. I just changed to a different company and saved money, could I do that if there was a monopoly? Nope. Also, we should inform all the private schools and universities that there is a government monopoly on education and that they should just shut down because they can't compete...wait, that's not right...In fact, it's government regulations which protect many industries from becoming monopolies due to regulations against anti-competitive behavior and such.
You assume that government intervention is the ONLY reason the economy collapsed (which by the way it is recovering). In fact, there are many arguments which are accepted by leading economists that lack of financial regulation in many areas was a big factor in the collapse and that more regulation would have prevented it. Among other things.
Many big businesses would make more money if not for government regulations which is why they are all against regulations. Government contracts have no business in this argument because that's a factor of the private market, the government puts money into the economy by purchasing the services of private companies. It's how any economy works. You seem to have lots of talking points but no logic or substance. It's simple economics that government injects money into the economy which stimulates economic growth. Government is supposed to spend in a recession.
The point here is that the "free market" is not some be all end all solution to everything. Neither is government regulation. I don't agree with a lot of government subsidies and government established monopolies, however I also don't agree that lack of regulation would be a good thing as the businesses would just rape the consumers. One such example is that without anti-trust laws and regulations we'd have super-powerful monopolies and be unable to do anything about them abusing their market. I don't say our current system is perfect, nor is it even good, but it's a helluva lot better than pure unbridled capitalism and the "holy free market". The best economic system is a hybrid between capitalistic 'free markets' and allowing government regulation to prevent anti-competitive behavior.
Nobody personally CAN compete with machines, running 1000-5000 discovery transactions a second, that's impossible.
I imagine that immediately there would be competition in trading houses, where some of them would provide a choice to trade with only humans without machines.
I do not believe you know how your supposed free market would work. If nobody can personally compete against machine run trading houses, then competition in a "Free market" with no government regulation would results in the human trading houses going out of business in favor of the automatic ones because they are more efficient and would thus get more customers because they are "better". Without regulation against anti-competitive behaviors and monopolies then the entire economy would devolve into a series of monopolies much worse than anything going on right now.
Get rid of gov't from all aspects of economy and stand back and watch how the real free market works
Would be the day business would jump for joy as they sat back and raped the consumers because unbridled unrestricted capitalism would lead to even more greedy and corrupt businesses, large unregulated monopolies, and ultimately would collapse the economy.
This is the problem though. The word should not be a distraction. In fact keeping it used, keeping it in the book, is the best thing that can be done because it reduces the shock value. The word is only shocking and a distraction because it is taboo. The word itself is not the problem though..
Tell that to the school I went to. We read Huck Finn in it's original writing, without sanitizing it, saying nigger as we read it. We all knew the connotations, the meaning it had. Younger students would have just been informed by their teacher the same way that Shakespeare is taught in school.
but you have to replace that self-delusion with something probably just as irrational.
Why? What's wrong with simply striving to be a good person? To do right by others so that they will do right by you? Why do you need religion for that?
Without religious meaning, you have to give things your own meaning. That is particularly difficult.
Not so much, the meaning you give things usually derives from parents/friends/other loved ones. Even with religious meaning, the meanings you give things still derives from those you care about and those who influence you, not necessarily from the religion itself. Religion is merely the driving force rather than the source of meaning. The source of meaning is the way those you trust and look to for advice interpret that religion. Which means that religion itself is not necessary and can easily be replaced by a simple drive to be a good person or some other philosophical ideal. Not all philosophies are as irrational as religion.
Without religious acceptance (the idea that there is someone who will always love you), you may be forever chasing self-improvement to unhealthy levels.
With religious acceptance, you might still do the same thing. At the same time, religious unacceptance can drive you even further into unhealthy ideas due to the bigotry of some religious (being homosexual in a highly religious intolerant family and community for example). Personally I think that the idea of religious acceptance as you define it is ridiculous and contradictory. Either you remove all consequences because the big guy will always love you no matter what or you contradict yourself because He loves you so much that he'll put you into eternal torture and damnation because you didn't do what he asked.
Irrationality comes natural to most people, it's kinda hardwired into humans to believe in something greater than themselves. However, the irrationality of religion can be replaced with simple rational ideals without the irrational parts and still be just as fulfilling without the self-delusion.
It's also very difficult to know which device to even upgrade to! It's not like PCs where you can say, "well, this game needs a 5770 and a Core i5 quad" and you can just spec out an upgrade to give you that. It's more like, "this app is slow. which phone can run it better?", which will leave most consumers confounded, and they will be forced to opt for the "find some other preoccupation" route, which is going to really sour their experience.
Do you think consumers in the 80s were any smarter than the modern day counterparts? How do you think consumers knew which IBM clone had what specs to run which game? They went to a store and asked some guy there "will this run such and such?" and found a computer that fits their needs. The same thing can happen with phones. The consumer walks into the store for their upgrade and says "I have such and such slow phone. I need a phone that is faster." and the clerk, just like in the 80s, points to the various phones and says which ones are faster or not.
How about the court case determining that if the EULA says so, you can't resell your software, even if you otherwise would be able to? Allowing EULA's to utterly decimate the right of first sale.
The only people a move like this can affect are the drunk drivers. If you're not drunk, then why refuse to blow? It's non-intrusive, takes a couple seconds of your time, and has a virtually non-existant false positive rate.
Actually it takes more than a couple seconds if you're talking about these no-refusal checkpoints. You have the time delay caused by the traffic slow down that would result from it, the time it takes to be stopped and have everything explained, and then the short time it takes to administer the test. The other point to make is that the machines actually have a very real false positive rate. Diabetics will set it off. If you just filled your car with gas and decided to breath well while you're there, then you'll test positive. if you had one drink over an hour ago, and happened to burp within 10 minutes of the test, you'll test positive. Among various other situations that could cause the false positives.
It's actually not illegal to release documents regardless whether they were illegally obtained. In this case the only law broken was by the person who gave the documents to wikileaks in the first place.
If you don't believe me, look at the incident with the Pentagon papers.
You're still wrong. The big machine is still less accurate than a blood test and thus will often be higher than the blood test depending on your situation and personal body type.
I believe you quoted the wrong part of my comment for the point you were trying to make.
Everyday information is not intellectual property and it is not physical property. Since those are the only two types of property recognized by law then it cannot, in fact, be considered property.
Your response:
Wrong. The definition of property has been expended to include intellectual property. This is my point about the opinion being "reactionary denialism". You are refusing to allow for an expanded definition of "property" simply on arbitrary grounds that property did not include such things at one point.
Perhaps you can see that you are wrong. I know that the definition of property has been expanded to include intellectual property. I specifically pointed out that not all information is intellectual property. For example in this case, the information about his wife having an affair is not intellectual property in any way. It cannot be protected by copyright nor by patents. Therefore by the current expanded definition of property, information in general is not property. This is not arbitrary, it is not reactionary, it is logical.
Wow, you should probably read the comments in a thread before just replying to one. Here's a summary:
It was postulated that the free market is the ultimate form of democracy where dollars are your votes. Against that argument was that if one person can cast more votes than another person, it isn't democracy. The rebuttal was that as long as everyone has a voice it is a democracy, just not necessarily a fair one. Thus, my comment that poor and homeless people do not have a voice is within the spectrum of the idea that the free market is a democracy where dollars are votes. Obviously if you have no dollars, you have no votes and therefore no voice.
Thanks for playing though!
By the way, if you don't understand how the current political landscape is run by money and corporations rather than actual "votes" then I feel sorry for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that h.264 is not a "common web standard" I don't see your point. Also you are wrong:
Chrome/WebM vs H.264/everyone else
It's actually Chrome+Opera+Firefox/WebM vs Safari+IE/H.264 Which means that more than half the market will be WebM.
Regardless of what the people decided, the best plan of action was to inform the people of the corruption. I condemn those who rioted and violently killed others.
Its actually more likely that an illegal means would have been the best solution
Are you talking about assassination or something? That definitely would NOT have been the best solution.
No offense to those who died. The people rising up violently as a result to finding out about massive corruption in their own government, in my opinion, cannot be the fault of the group who revealed the corruption.
If massive amounts of corruption that we know exist were finally brought to light in the US and the result was an armed uprising of citizens opposed to that corruption, I could not possibly blame who revealed the corruption as the cause of the violence.
As a famous saying, don't blame the messenger. This is not a situation of supposedly revealed anonymous sources and putting secret operations in jeopardy or anything of the sort. This is a case of people revolting to massive corruption.
I do not condone the violence, I mourn for those who died. However, even though the violence was a result of the release, I believe it is very important that people know of corruption in their government. If Assange had leaked some document showing corruption being perpetrated by Obama, or proving that he wasn't born in Hawaii and the result was a violent protest or uprising. I believe that Tea Party members would be calling Assange a hero for revealing the information and not blame him for the violence. Food for thought.
his stunts cause real harm to people the world over
Really? Last I heard there wasn't a single person they could prove was harmed by the wikileaks releases.
Of course the US is seeking to extradite him, to put him on trial for spying and other damages
None of which they can prove, and releasing the documents isn't illegal under US law. So what reason do they have to extradite him? Not saying it won't happen, just that it's ridiculous.
And if it does, pray that whoever invaded my home doesn't find and use my own weapon against me...
^ This needs to be modded up. Severely. To 11.
Actually the right is actively advocating violence. Especially with the rhetoric of "if we can't win at the ballot boxes, we'll win in the streets" and other such calls for revolution and using guns.
Also, there is absolutely no credible evidence that the shooter was extreme left or right. At best there is evidence of a mix of views.
But what if she voted against the war, is pro-legalization of marijuana and voted against the tax cuts?
Would you care then, if she was actually in agreement with you and your opinions?
The Great Depression was fixed by government spending and increases in taxes. There's your example.
The rest of your words are based on rhetoric rather than fact. It's pointless to continue this.
It's amusing how many assumptions you make about me.
There are monopolies right now, killing all competition, only relying on the fact that they are completely government backed! WTF is wrong with you? All banks and large investment firms, all energy firms, military and insurances and communications and food and education, and utilities it's all gov't granted monopolies TODAY! And you are afraid of some hypothetical monopolies that could happen if there was no gov't monopolies? Why do YOU like gov't monopolies so much? What did they do for you except rob you of your money?
I never said our current system is perfect, nor is it good. I never said that there are no monopolies either. However, banks and large investment firms are more of an oligopoly with everyone fighting for a monopoly but unable to due to the free market. So while it is very difficult for newcomers to join the market (which is a bad thing I agree) no one bank is able to achieve a monopoly so there is some (not enough) competition to have an effect. The same problem occurs with insurances. There is no monopoly, just many oligopolies. Hard for newcomers but there is still competition. For instance, car insurance. I just changed to a different company and saved money, could I do that if there was a monopoly? Nope. Also, we should inform all the private schools and universities that there is a government monopoly on education and that they should just shut down because they can't compete...wait, that's not right...In fact, it's government regulations which protect many industries from becoming monopolies due to regulations against anti-competitive behavior and such.
You assume that government intervention is the ONLY reason the economy collapsed (which by the way it is recovering). In fact, there are many arguments which are accepted by leading economists that lack of financial regulation in many areas was a big factor in the collapse and that more regulation would have prevented it. Among other things.
Many big businesses would make more money if not for government regulations which is why they are all against regulations. Government contracts have no business in this argument because that's a factor of the private market, the government puts money into the economy by purchasing the services of private companies. It's how any economy works. You seem to have lots of talking points but no logic or substance. It's simple economics that government injects money into the economy which stimulates economic growth. Government is supposed to spend in a recession.
The point here is that the "free market" is not some be all end all solution to everything. Neither is government regulation. I don't agree with a lot of government subsidies and government established monopolies, however I also don't agree that lack of regulation would be a good thing as the businesses would just rape the consumers. One such example is that without anti-trust laws and regulations we'd have super-powerful monopolies and be unable to do anything about them abusing their market. I don't say our current system is perfect, nor is it even good, but it's a helluva lot better than pure unbridled capitalism and the "holy free market". The best economic system is a hybrid between capitalistic 'free markets' and allowing government regulation to prevent anti-competitive behavior.
Nobody personally CAN compete with machines, running 1000-5000 discovery transactions a second, that's impossible.
I imagine that immediately there would be competition in trading houses, where some of them would provide a choice to trade with only humans without machines.
I do not believe you know how your supposed free market would work. If nobody can personally compete against machine run trading houses, then competition in a "Free market" with no government regulation would results in the human trading houses going out of business in favor of the automatic ones because they are more efficient and would thus get more customers because they are "better". Without regulation against anti-competitive behaviors and monopolies then the entire economy would devolve into a series of monopolies much worse than anything going on right now.
Get rid of gov't from all aspects of economy and stand back and watch how the real free market works
Would be the day business would jump for joy as they sat back and raped the consumers because unbridled unrestricted capitalism would lead to even more greedy and corrupt businesses, large unregulated monopolies, and ultimately would collapse the economy.
The word itself is a constant distraction.
This is the problem though. The word should not be a distraction. In fact keeping it used, keeping it in the book, is the best thing that can be done because it reduces the shock value. The word is only shocking and a distraction because it is taboo. The word itself is not the problem though..
Tell that to the school I went to. We read Huck Finn in it's original writing, without sanitizing it, saying nigger as we read it. We all knew the connotations, the meaning it had. Younger students would have just been informed by their teacher the same way that Shakespeare is taught in school.
but you have to replace that self-delusion with something probably just as irrational.
Why? What's wrong with simply striving to be a good person? To do right by others so that they will do right by you? Why do you need religion for that?
Without religious meaning, you have to give things your own meaning. That is particularly difficult.
Not so much, the meaning you give things usually derives from parents/friends/other loved ones. Even with religious meaning, the meanings you give things still derives from those you care about and those who influence you, not necessarily from the religion itself. Religion is merely the driving force rather than the source of meaning. The source of meaning is the way those you trust and look to for advice interpret that religion. Which means that religion itself is not necessary and can easily be replaced by a simple drive to be a good person or some other philosophical ideal. Not all philosophies are as irrational as religion.
Without religious acceptance (the idea that there is someone who will always love you), you may be forever chasing self-improvement to unhealthy levels.
With religious acceptance, you might still do the same thing. At the same time, religious unacceptance can drive you even further into unhealthy ideas due to the bigotry of some religious (being homosexual in a highly religious intolerant family and community for example). Personally I think that the idea of religious acceptance as you define it is ridiculous and contradictory. Either you remove all consequences because the big guy will always love you no matter what or you contradict yourself because He loves you so much that he'll put you into eternal torture and damnation because you didn't do what he asked.
Irrationality comes natural to most people, it's kinda hardwired into humans to believe in something greater than themselves. However, the irrationality of religion can be replaced with simple rational ideals without the irrational parts and still be just as fulfilling without the self-delusion.
The valid reason to have that word as part of the story is that is how the author wrote it.
Buy a fucking phone... then subscribe to whatever plan that fulfills your mobile communication needs... and not more then that...
Most of us would love to do this. It's just not available in the US on most major Carriers. Which fucking sucks.
It's also very difficult to know which device to even upgrade to! It's not like PCs where you can say, "well, this game needs a 5770 and a Core i5 quad" and you can just spec out an upgrade to give you that. It's more like, "this app is slow. which phone can run it better?", which will leave most consumers confounded, and they will be forced to opt for the "find some other preoccupation" route, which is going to really sour their experience.
Do you think consumers in the 80s were any smarter than the modern day counterparts? How do you think consumers knew which IBM clone had what specs to run which game? They went to a store and asked some guy there "will this run such and such?" and found a computer that fits their needs. The same thing can happen with phones. The consumer walks into the store for their upgrade and says "I have such and such slow phone. I need a phone that is faster." and the clerk, just like in the 80s, points to the various phones and says which ones are faster or not.
It's the exact same situation.
How about the court case determining that if the EULA says so, you can't resell your software, even if you otherwise would be able to? Allowing EULA's to utterly decimate the right of first sale.
But it is not illegal for Apple to withdraw their warranty if you do not use a provider of their saying.
I would have found a lawyer and sued the police for the treatment.
The only people a move like this can affect are the drunk drivers. If you're not drunk, then why refuse to blow? It's non-intrusive, takes a couple seconds of your time, and has a virtually non-existant false positive rate.
Actually it takes more than a couple seconds if you're talking about these no-refusal checkpoints. You have the time delay caused by the traffic slow down that would result from it, the time it takes to be stopped and have everything explained, and then the short time it takes to administer the test. The other point to make is that the machines actually have a very real false positive rate. Diabetics will set it off. If you just filled your car with gas and decided to breath well while you're there, then you'll test positive. if you had one drink over an hour ago, and happened to burp within 10 minutes of the test, you'll test positive. Among various other situations that could cause the false positives.
It's actually not illegal to release documents regardless whether they were illegally obtained. In this case the only law broken was by the person who gave the documents to wikileaks in the first place.
If you don't believe me, look at the incident with the Pentagon papers.
You're still wrong. The big machine is still less accurate than a blood test and thus will often be higher than the blood test depending on your situation and personal body type.
I believe you quoted the wrong part of my comment for the point you were trying to make.
Everyday information is not intellectual property and it is not physical property. Since those are the only two types of property recognized by law then it cannot, in fact, be considered property.
Your response:
Wrong. The definition of property has been expended to include intellectual property. This is my point about the opinion being "reactionary denialism". You are refusing to allow for an expanded definition of "property" simply on arbitrary grounds that property did not include such things at one point.
Perhaps you can see that you are wrong. I know that the definition of property has been expanded to include intellectual property. I specifically pointed out that not all information is intellectual property. For example in this case, the information about his wife having an affair is not intellectual property in any way. It cannot be protected by copyright nor by patents. Therefore by the current expanded definition of property, information in general is not property. This is not arbitrary, it is not reactionary, it is logical.
Wow, you should probably read the comments in a thread before just replying to one. Here's a summary:
It was postulated that the free market is the ultimate form of democracy where dollars are your votes. Against that argument was that if one person can cast more votes than another person, it isn't democracy. The rebuttal was that as long as everyone has a voice it is a democracy, just not necessarily a fair one. Thus, my comment that poor and homeless people do not have a voice is within the spectrum of the idea that the free market is a democracy where dollars are votes. Obviously if you have no dollars, you have no votes and therefore no voice.
Thanks for playing though!
By the way, if you don't understand how the current political landscape is run by money and corporations rather than actual "votes" then I feel sorry for you.