And the person who thought they legitimately paid for everything is stuck unable to get updates they may want and paid for unless they buy Windows again. Awesome.
Well, yeah, except that they didn't pay for it, they just thought they did. The consumer got ripped off, but not by Microsoft. If they want updates from Microsoft, they need to pay Microsoft for that.
The story says it is a "literal rust bucket". No, it is not a literal rust bucket, it is a FIGURATIVE rust bucket. This is a literal rust bucket. Actually, no, that isn't a literal rust bucket either, that is a literal rusty bucket, a literal rust bucket would be a bucket which holds rust.
Fair enough, especially for vegetarians. In my life, however, most of my vegan friends do it for moral reasons, even if they aren't militant about it. For vegetarians, though, yeah, there are a lot who don't like meat, a lot who only have mild moral qualms, and whatnot.
Point of order: Eskimos don't typically eat much whale, so there wouldn't be much of a shift in diet. A long time ago, yeah maybe, but not in a generation, at least. Also, chicken is healthier than whale (and tastes better.
Second point of order: the American taxpayers already wholly support the lives of Native Alaskans, from clothing to fuel to food to shelter.
But those two things you got wrong don't change your main point, which is spot on: that giving people things for which they want, usually has the ironic consequence of making them more needy, not less. That is the fundamental thing that liberal policy makers get wrong: if a person is suffering because they don't have Thing X, then giving them Thing X won't make their situation better, at least not in the long run, it'll make it worse.
Not for moral reasons, but for practical reasons. Humans are way too good at killing to be allowed to participate in nature, and this has been true since about the enlightenment or so, maybe a bit later, maybe around the start of the industrial revolution. At that point, if we let all humans kill whatever they want, we would find ourself without the nature which otherwise supports us, and also makes us feel good and we enjoy. As we have developed better weapons and grown in population, we have enacted more strict guidelines on how we harvest natural animals.
That doesn't necessarily imply we should stop all whale hunting, but it is the reason we stopped almost all whale hunting. As time has gone on, we have appropriately re-evaluated that prohibition, and should continue to do so, to balance the competing ends of tradition, desire, nature, and feeling good.
I'm surprised by your post. I think the technology used is certainly a relevant part of any tradition, and radically changing the technology has a real effect on the tradition itself. Hunting a whale with a gas-powered exploding harpoon is not the same as hunting a whale with a tiny hand-hewn spear.
Also, I don't know "who the fuck" the grandparent poster is, but your ad hominem attack doesn't distract from the fact that the tradition does have to do with the weapons used, and it's untenable to suggest otherwise.
I mean really, you can't be saying that anyone with roots in a culture which hunted whales, now has an unalienable right to hunt whales, using whatever weapons they want? That would include pretty much everyone on earth, and every weapon.
telling native peoples which traditions they can or cannot do (or even should or should not do) is simple imperialism and tramples on this priceless posession
Yes! Like when the evil brits forced native Indians (I mean, Indians in India) to stop burning their wives alive on the pyre of dead husbands! This was a priceless possession of the Indian people and for the brits to say that burning women alive is barbaric, well that's just cultural imperialism.
And now this:
it is still immoral to hunt whales... every time you eat the standard chicken you get at the supermarket, every time you eat a hamburger, and every time you eat a boiled egg... you are contributing to a system which imprisons animals in ways which are far more unethical
I've been saying this for so long: there is nothing at all which makes a chicken different than a whale. There is absolutely no reasonable way to differentiate a chicken or a cow from an whale. Some people might say, oh, but whales are highly intelligent and chickens are, well, bird brained, or that whales produce music and live in societies, while cows just fart and chew cuds. Yes, indeed, you sir, parent poster, are truly brilliant, in your rejection of any nuanced look at the differences between species.
Now I'll turn off the sarcasm.
Everything you said is crazy and wrong: "free range" chickens are, legally, just the same as other chickens, with the difference that their coops have windows so the chickens can see the outside world. Yes, that is true. A window from the outside into the coop is the legal distinction between regular and free range chicken. If you think that makes a big moral difference, that makes you an idiot. There are almost no chickens that are allowed to range freely over a big area, almost certainly not the ones you buy. The words "free range" are marketing bullshit, which you have bought, literally. Furthermore, organic foods are lower quality and more expensive than regular foods, and put market pressure on foods which raise the overall price, meaning that the world's poor can't afford the nutrition they need. So, what I'm saying is, by buying free range chicken and organic vegetables, you are first of all wasting your money on marketing bullshit, and second of all making it even more difficult for the world's poor to afford life-saving nutrition. In my opinion, that makes you a supreme asshole, because in my opinion, food should be safe, inexpensive, and available to all humans. It's okay for you to disagree, and think that the world's poor should fuck off and die, but me, I have more compassion than that, for both the humans and the whales -- but not the chickens or the cows.
I'm not following you about the whales. What predators hunt whales? Aren't whales at the top of the marine food chain?
The reason to preserve whales is that they are highly intelligent, not so much because the ecosystem can't live without them (or can only life without them). As intelligent beings ourselves, we show heightened respect for other intelligent beings.
If you want to help the earth, stop recycling! For godsake don't you know it takes more energy to recycle than it does to produce new products? What kind of environmentalist are you? If you want to reduce your energy use, throw your paper and glass in the trash, we have plenty of space to dump stuff underground, and can do so safely. (Keep recycling cans, though, that uses slightly less energy than to produce new cans, that's why they pay you to do it.)
You are right about the Eskimos, though. It's not so much that they need to give up their primitive ways, but that they already have. They already wear blue jeans, heat their homes with fossil oil, ride snowmobiles, and shoot guns (and, rape and kill eachother at abominable rates, suffer cultural alcoholism, and receive absurd amounts of money from the rest of us, via the government). If they want to go back to wearing caribou skins and hunting bowhead whales with spears and skin kayaks, then I am willing to tolerate that, but if they want to wear North Face gear and shoot bowhead whales with explosives from forty foot modern fishing boats, then I call bullshit on claiming that's a "traditional way of life".
For reference, I was born and raised and now live in Alaska.
The international community stopped hunting whales in 1989, dude. Well, except for the Japanese, they still do it on the sly, and very rarely, some Eskimos, but they only get one per year, which isn't a problem.
I live in Juneau, Alaska and we have so many fucking whales up here you can't even walk down the beach without seeing them right here in the waters offshore. That's not exactly a historical perspective, but we're not talking about the last dodo here.
The reason to stop hunting whales isn't that there are few of them, but rather that they probably have legitimate claim at the second most intelligent life from on earth, and more importantly, probably above the threshold of intelligence where we shouldn't hunt them at all. Whales, dolphins, elephants, and primates -- they are all probably above that threshold. As humans, we respect our own first, then other highly intelligent animals (which all happen to be mammals), then other mammals, then other animals, then other forms of life. People differ on where along that spectrum we should stop the killing. Vegans put the line right under all animals, I put it right under intelligent life.
If you really care about whales, then rally against their biggest problem, which is (and for 150 years has been) boat engine noise, which fucks up their ability to talk to one another.
Yeah, okay, sure man, I totally agree that it's a travesty of justice, but on the other hand, that's the way lots of laws work. Drugs are illegal because a lot of people who use them turn into lowlifes, so we don't let anyone take drugs. We put sex offenders on special lists after they get out of jail just because a lot of them are prone to recommit their crimes. All cars have to obey speed limits, even though many cars can safely be driven much faster. We force everyone to get their cars smogged, even though a very small amount are causing almost all exhaust pollution. We force all companies to file complex financial records even though most of them follow all the rules voluntarily.
As libertarians, we think all these policies are bad policies, but we don't live in a libertarian dictatorship, we live in a democracy, where we are outvoted by people who care less about freedom than about social order.
It may be outrageous, but it isn't unbelievable; and if you've never heard of imposing a requirement to make new documents, then you don't pay attention to the law.
Which is okay, you don't have to pay attention to how fucked up the law is, to be outraged by it.
The state is willing to compromise on the amount or repayment scheme on an unconscionable fine -- and you think that makes them reasonable? Dude I think you should run for legislature, or are you already too busy being a bureaucrat?
To me, reasonable would be if they never had the stupid rule to impose the stupid fine in the first place; or never levied the fine, despite the stupid rule, because they know how stupid it is; or if their "compromise" was an apology and release from the citation.
I only know of this incident what was in the article, but this is the paragraph that caught my eye:
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
I'm unclear about this. The government in America does not have the right to search your gas tank without your consent. If they were waiting outside a place where RVs congregate, the most they could do constitutionally would be to politely ask all the owners for consent to search, or ask them if they were using legal fuel. Anything more than that would be unreasonable, unwarranted, and unconstitutional. So, did the veggie oil guy, and all the other RV drivers, volunteer consent for search? Why would they do that?
a lot of people complained about a few parts they considered "obscene".
Oh, yeah, I think I saw that. Was it the one with Bush and Blair anally raping Saddam standing on one foot with jumper cables clipped to his balls? And Bush is holding some WMD behind his back with his right hand, while handing cash to Halliburton with his left, and Halliburton is dancing on the graves of weeping Iraqi mothers? And Bush has piles of dog shit falling out of his mouth? I don't see what was so obscene about it.
Is that because water on Mars doesn't have the property of absorbing all but blue light? or is it because on Earth water is blue because of Earth's blue-colored rocky surface?
The mods are right, that is +5 Funny. Too bad it's true. Yes, in fact "they" (the parents, prosecutors, and school administrators) were worried that the children would suffer actual, literal, real, factual harm.
Is it touch or multitouch? Because those are not nearly the same thing. Multitouch is a much much more complicated (to implement) yet intuitive (to use) interface, and really is the whole reason for the iPhone brouhaha.
I would say nearly all politicians will except money from anyone, except entities who are clearly negative to the mainstream (and the RIAA is NOT "clearly negative" to the mainstream).
Oops, you made a mistake: it should be, anyone accept entities who are clearly negative.
That's not an insightful comment at all, in fact it is very uninsightful, because it is a terrible analogy! If the woman's goal is to remain anonymous, which is what she says, then raising a big stink about this issue is a bad way to achieve her goal. On the other hand, the goal of the Boston Tea Party was to achieve independence, or at least get some representation, and in that the tactic was effective.
Yeah, that scene was really funny, it made up three of the eight funny minutes in that movie. Luckily, all eight funny minutes can be found in the first half hour of the movie, so if you watch from the beginning, you can just shut it off after thirty minutes.
Mod this comment +5 Informative & Insightful, because it is. I don't want anyone wasting their precious life watching the rest of that pile of shit.
Slashdot Mirror
And the person who thought they legitimately paid for everything is stuck unable to get updates they may want and paid for unless they buy Windows again. Awesome.
Well, yeah, except that they didn't pay for it, they just thought they did. The consumer got ripped off, but not by Microsoft. If they want updates from Microsoft, they need to pay Microsoft for that.
The story says it is a "literal rust bucket". No, it is not a literal rust bucket, it is a FIGURATIVE rust bucket. This is a literal rust bucket. Actually, no, that isn't a literal rust bucket either, that is a literal rusty bucket, a literal rust bucket would be a bucket which holds rust.
Tag this story: yawn
ha ha ha ha! by "who's" standards. that's hilarious.
Fair enough, especially for vegetarians. In my life, however, most of my vegan friends do it for moral reasons, even if they aren't militant about it. For vegetarians, though, yeah, there are a lot who don't like meat, a lot who only have mild moral qualms, and whatnot.
Point of order: Eskimos don't typically eat much whale, so there wouldn't be much of a shift in diet. A long time ago, yeah maybe, but not in a generation, at least. Also, chicken is healthier than whale (and tastes better.
Second point of order: the American taxpayers already wholly support the lives of Native Alaskans, from clothing to fuel to food to shelter.
But those two things you got wrong don't change your main point, which is spot on: that giving people things for which they want, usually has the ironic consequence of making them more needy, not less. That is the fundamental thing that liberal policy makers get wrong: if a person is suffering because they don't have Thing X, then giving them Thing X won't make their situation better, at least not in the long run, it'll make it worse.
Not for moral reasons, but for practical reasons. Humans are way too good at killing to be allowed to participate in nature, and this has been true since about the enlightenment or so, maybe a bit later, maybe around the start of the industrial revolution. At that point, if we let all humans kill whatever they want, we would find ourself without the nature which otherwise supports us, and also makes us feel good and we enjoy. As we have developed better weapons and grown in population, we have enacted more strict guidelines on how we harvest natural animals.
That doesn't necessarily imply we should stop all whale hunting, but it is the reason we stopped almost all whale hunting. As time has gone on, we have appropriately re-evaluated that prohibition, and should continue to do so, to balance the competing ends of tradition, desire, nature, and feeling good.
I'm surprised by your post. I think the technology used is certainly a relevant part of any tradition, and radically changing the technology has a real effect on the tradition itself. Hunting a whale with a gas-powered exploding harpoon is not the same as hunting a whale with a tiny hand-hewn spear.
Also, I don't know "who the fuck" the grandparent poster is, but your ad hominem attack doesn't distract from the fact that the tradition does have to do with the weapons used, and it's untenable to suggest otherwise.
I mean really, you can't be saying that anyone with roots in a culture which hunted whales, now has an unalienable right to hunt whales, using whatever weapons they want? That would include pretty much everyone on earth, and every weapon.
I couldn't agree more. First, this:
... every time you eat the standard chicken you get at the supermarket, every time you eat a hamburger, and every time you eat a boiled egg ... you are contributing to a system which imprisons animals in ways which are far more unethical
telling native peoples which traditions they can or cannot do (or even should or should not do) is simple imperialism and tramples on this priceless posession
Yes! Like when the evil brits forced native Indians (I mean, Indians in India) to stop burning their wives alive on the pyre of dead husbands! This was a priceless possession of the Indian people and for the brits to say that burning women alive is barbaric, well that's just cultural imperialism.
And now this:
it is still immoral to hunt whales
I've been saying this for so long: there is nothing at all which makes a chicken different than a whale. There is absolutely no reasonable way to differentiate a chicken or a cow from an whale. Some people might say, oh, but whales are highly intelligent and chickens are, well, bird brained, or that whales produce music and live in societies, while cows just fart and chew cuds. Yes, indeed, you sir, parent poster, are truly brilliant, in your rejection of any nuanced look at the differences between species.
Now I'll turn off the sarcasm.
Everything you said is crazy and wrong: "free range" chickens are, legally, just the same as other chickens, with the difference that their coops have windows so the chickens can see the outside world. Yes, that is true. A window from the outside into the coop is the legal distinction between regular and free range chicken. If you think that makes a big moral difference, that makes you an idiot. There are almost no chickens that are allowed to range freely over a big area, almost certainly not the ones you buy. The words "free range" are marketing bullshit, which you have bought, literally. Furthermore, organic foods are lower quality and more expensive than regular foods, and put market pressure on foods which raise the overall price, meaning that the world's poor can't afford the nutrition they need. So, what I'm saying is, by buying free range chicken and organic vegetables, you are first of all wasting your money on marketing bullshit, and second of all making it even more difficult for the world's poor to afford life-saving nutrition. In my opinion, that makes you a supreme asshole, because in my opinion, food should be safe, inexpensive, and available to all humans. It's okay for you to disagree, and think that the world's poor should fuck off and die, but me, I have more compassion than that, for both the humans and the whales -- but not the chickens or the cows.
I'm not following you about the whales. What predators hunt whales? Aren't whales at the top of the marine food chain?
The reason to preserve whales is that they are highly intelligent, not so much because the ecosystem can't live without them (or can only life without them). As intelligent beings ourselves, we show heightened respect for other intelligent beings.
If you want to help the earth, stop recycling! For godsake don't you know it takes more energy to recycle than it does to produce new products? What kind of environmentalist are you? If you want to reduce your energy use, throw your paper and glass in the trash, we have plenty of space to dump stuff underground, and can do so safely. (Keep recycling cans, though, that uses slightly less energy than to produce new cans, that's why they pay you to do it.)
You are right about the Eskimos, though. It's not so much that they need to give up their primitive ways, but that they already have. They already wear blue jeans, heat their homes with fossil oil, ride snowmobiles, and shoot guns (and, rape and kill eachother at abominable rates, suffer cultural alcoholism, and receive absurd amounts of money from the rest of us, via the government). If they want to go back to wearing caribou skins and hunting bowhead whales with spears and skin kayaks, then I am willing to tolerate that, but if they want to wear North Face gear and shoot bowhead whales with explosives from forty foot modern fishing boats, then I call bullshit on claiming that's a "traditional way of life".
For reference, I was born and raised and now live in Alaska.
The international community stopped hunting whales in 1989, dude. Well, except for the Japanese, they still do it on the sly, and very rarely, some Eskimos, but they only get one per year, which isn't a problem.
I live in Juneau, Alaska and we have so many fucking whales up here you can't even walk down the beach without seeing them right here in the waters offshore. That's not exactly a historical perspective, but we're not talking about the last dodo here.
The reason to stop hunting whales isn't that there are few of them, but rather that they probably have legitimate claim at the second most intelligent life from on earth, and more importantly, probably above the threshold of intelligence where we shouldn't hunt them at all. Whales, dolphins, elephants, and primates -- they are all probably above that threshold. As humans, we respect our own first, then other highly intelligent animals (which all happen to be mammals), then other mammals, then other animals, then other forms of life. People differ on where along that spectrum we should stop the killing. Vegans put the line right under all animals, I put it right under intelligent life.
If you really care about whales, then rally against their biggest problem, which is (and for 150 years has been) boat engine noise, which fucks up their ability to talk to one another.
Yeah, okay, sure man, I totally agree that it's a travesty of justice, but on the other hand, that's the way lots of laws work. Drugs are illegal because a lot of people who use them turn into lowlifes, so we don't let anyone take drugs. We put sex offenders on special lists after they get out of jail just because a lot of them are prone to recommit their crimes. All cars have to obey speed limits, even though many cars can safely be driven much faster. We force everyone to get their cars smogged, even though a very small amount are causing almost all exhaust pollution. We force all companies to file complex financial records even though most of them follow all the rules voluntarily.
As libertarians, we think all these policies are bad policies, but we don't live in a libertarian dictatorship, we live in a democracy, where we are outvoted by people who care less about freedom than about social order.
It may be outrageous, but it isn't unbelievable; and if you've never heard of imposing a requirement to make new documents, then you don't pay attention to the law.
Which is okay, you don't have to pay attention to how fucked up the law is, to be outraged by it.
The state is willing to compromise on the amount or repayment scheme on an unconscionable fine -- and you think that makes them reasonable? Dude I think you should run for legislature, or are you already too busy being a bureaucrat?
To me, reasonable would be if they never had the stupid rule to impose the stupid fine in the first place; or never levied the fine, despite the stupid rule, because they know how stupid it is; or if their "compromise" was an apology and release from the citation.
I only know of this incident what was in the article, but this is the paragraph that caught my eye:
Teixeira's story began near Lowe's Motor Speedway on May 14. As recreational vehicles streamed in for race week, revenue investigators were checking fuel tanks of diesel RVs for illegal fuel.
I'm unclear about this. The government in America does not have the right to search your gas tank without your consent. If they were waiting outside a place where RVs congregate, the most they could do constitutionally would be to politely ask all the owners for consent to search, or ask them if they were using legal fuel. Anything more than that would be unreasonable, unwarranted, and unconstitutional. So, did the veggie oil guy, and all the other RV drivers, volunteer consent for search? Why would they do that?
a lot of people complained about a few parts they considered "obscene".
Oh, yeah, I think I saw that. Was it the one with Bush and Blair anally raping Saddam standing on one foot with jumper cables clipped to his balls? And Bush is holding some WMD behind his back with his right hand, while handing cash to Halliburton with his left, and Halliburton is dancing on the graves of weeping Iraqi mothers? And Bush has piles of dog shit falling out of his mouth? I don't see what was so obscene about it.
Is that because water on Mars doesn't have the property of absorbing all but blue light? or is it because on Earth water is blue because of Earth's blue-colored rocky surface?
The mods are right, that is +5 Funny. Too bad it's true. Yes, in fact "they" (the parents, prosecutors, and school administrators) were worried that the children would suffer actual, literal, real, factual harm.
Now it's tragicomedy.
No, it's a traveshamockery.
Is it touch or multitouch? Because those are not nearly the same thing. Multitouch is a much much more complicated (to implement) yet intuitive (to use) interface, and really is the whole reason for the iPhone brouhaha.
I would say nearly all politicians will except money from anyone, except entities who are clearly negative to the mainstream (and the RIAA is NOT "clearly negative" to the mainstream).
Oops, you made a mistake: it should be, anyone accept entities who are clearly negative.
That's not an insightful comment at all, in fact it is very uninsightful, because it is a terrible analogy! If the woman's goal is to remain anonymous, which is what she says, then raising a big stink about this issue is a bad way to achieve her goal. On the other hand, the goal of the Boston Tea Party was to achieve independence, or at least get some representation, and in that the tactic was effective.
So, bad analogy, dude.
If you block your phone number, they won't know who not to call back.
Yeah, that scene was really funny, it made up three of the eight funny minutes in that movie. Luckily, all eight funny minutes can be found in the first half hour of the movie, so if you watch from the beginning, you can just shut it off after thirty minutes.
Mod this comment +5 Informative & Insightful, because it is. I don't want anyone wasting their precious life watching the rest of that pile of shit.