my lawyer friend said one of the first things he learned in law school was that words don't mean what they mean. he really struggled with that.
nevertheless, sometimes when a word doesn't have a well-known-to-lawyers definition, a judge will fall back to the dictionary. i recently read about a state which wanted to start taxing bottled-water companies under a hundred-year-old "beverage tax" law, which previously had not been applied to water. the judge ruled that "water is not a beverage", which i thought was totally absurd, until i looked it up in a dictionary, and in fact my dictionary explicitly excluded water from the definition:
beverage |?bev(?)rij| noun a drink, esp. one other than water.
yes, what you said doesn't counter what the parent said. we want to *deter* posession of child porno, and we want to *deter* the creation of child porno *more*.
think of it this way. say you are a pedo so you download some child porn and keep it around. if the punishment for posession is the same as for manufacture, then there is no *deterrent* from going out, finding a child, and producing some porn. there is no deterrent because the punishment will be the same. to be perfectly clear, i'll put it back in your words: the *punishment* for making child porno would not be a *deterrent*, because the posessor is already liable for that same punishment.
furthermore, all other crimes are broken down this way. take another prohibited object, like marijuana: if growing plants had the same penalty as posession the plants, then every pothead in the country would have a farm in his closet. we *deter* potheads from growing weed by adding extra penalties to that crime.
also, you are certainly wrong about one thing, in this country (well, I live in the USA) our criminal justice system acts both for prevention and retribution.
someone must point out that Taco mis-used then/than. but you got it right! good job. it's hard for me to imagine getting the words confused, since they are so lexicographically distinct, but i guess some people just spell through their tongue.
okay i'll lay it out for you. i'm sorry i wasn't clear before.
the test of whether the policy of taking knives away from citizens is "logical" is whether it is reasonable to assume it will achieve the end proponents claim. in this case, the claim is taking knives from citizens will result in a reduction of crime; so the question is whether it is reasonable to assume the prohibition will result in a reduction in crime, specifically stabbings; and the parallel policy we can look to, to see if that is a reasonable assumption, is the parallel policy of prohobition of firearms. so again, we look at the effictiveness of gun prohibition to see whether knife prohibition is "logical", and the test is whether crime went down after the firearm prohibition took effect. now, did it? i actually don't know the answer, i have only been told that it did not. so if i am right, and firearm crime did not decrease after firearm prohibition, then it is *illogical* to say that knife prohibition would result in a decrease in knife crime. that's what i meant about illogical.
in america, though, as i further said, we value more than just reducing crime, which of course is a laudable goal. in america, though, we have a preoccupation with freedom which our brithish brethren do not share (insert comment about taxation without representation here). we americans value freedom as an end of its own, and thus, the freedom to posess a firearm is something we would balance against the suggestion that we could reduce gun crime by outlawing guns. me myself, i'm not a firearm owner, i'm more of a really really cautious libertairian, fearful of a repressive government, and thus i want the citizenry armed to a level sufficient that we could defend ourselves against (this is the preposterous extreme) an occupying government (whether elected or invading).
now, your comment about columbine is inflammatory. the boys didn't shoot up the school because they had guns, they did it because they were fucked up in the head (why don't you blame Michael Ryan?). those kids also had access to bombs, as bombs are pretty easy to make and use and do a lot more damange, but they chose guns. i'm not willing to blame a tool for its user's crimes. frankly, i'm also not too worried about gun crime either, as we are currently enjoying the lowest crime in history. if your crime is so much lower, what the heck are you so worried about? and don't worry about the outcry over guns, there is a very large very vocal segment of our population which wants to do away with firearms. they might succeed, if they can ever muster a 2/3 majority of the population.
england is also the country which, when crime rates rose, gave up the right of firearm ownership, then when crime rates went up some more, they started talking about getting rid of big knives. clearly the english have a different way of looking at individual rights than americans do.
/ comment aimed at the english, not at the parent poster
oh, man, i totally agree with you. screen resolutions should continue to rise, and in fact pixel density should rise, too, by a lot. and when those things happen, all the UI widgets should be rendered based on physical size, not on pixel size.
now, i use a Mac, and Mac widgets themselves don't scale, though you can get custom UIs with larger widgets. but doesn't Windows have official themes? and Linux certainly does. so i don't agree that "major" OSs don't scale widgets. well, maybe you're talking about actually scaling them, instead of simply having a theme with larger ones.
Macs scale icons now, so maybe a wholly scaling theme could be done. maybe. grandmothers would certainly be happy.
i've never heard of FEAR or Warhammer. what are those, games or something? i guess everyone has their personal killer app.
i remember when i was in junior high school, everyone made fun of Macs because they were "just gaming machines"; now, games are the only thing that Windows fans can point to which won't run on a Mac. of course, i also remember how all the Mac folks made fun of Windows for having a command line, even a hidden one, which is now touted by many (myself included) as a premier power feature of the OS.
i agree with everything you say. i buy CDs regularly (i like half.com) and never listen to the CDs at all, i rip them and listen to the music on my computer. that's far easier than trying to download a (purchased) song and trying to unwrap the DRM. (i download single songs on gnutella, but i don't do that for albums, which i prefer, rather i try to get my hands on the CD and rip it myself.)
twice, i lost my music collection due to hard drive failure, and i was able to reconstruct a large part of my library from my tall stack of CDs. i also appreciate the fact that when i get a nicer stereo (and larger hard drive) i can re-rip my CDs to a lossless format.
i also agree that i would return a defective CD to the store post-haste. it's juuuuust possible, also, that i'm that rare consumer who would bother to file a lawsuit over it, too.
oh, i don't know, i am "angry" but i still buy music (from the RIAA). i just won't buy anything but CDs, (vanilla CDs) because that's the only capital-F Free music they sell. i won't pay for a download because it's not even as good as the Free/free (unencumbered) download i can get from gnutella. if iTunes Music Store sold MP3s, i would likely (though not definitely) use them instead of gnutella, for quality and convenience.
is that sarcasm? or do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?
okay, how about this, do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will *necessarily* offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?
furthermore, even if the RIAA got 100% of that money, which they don't, not even close, that's $40 million, do you think forty million will make all the difference in their profitability?
i bet you were being sarcastic. i'm sorry for misreading you.
your argument is not completely absurd in the abstract, but we in fact know from history that your argument is absured in reality.
1.) lots of people produce things for reasons other than monetary gain 2.) lots of money can be made even when the producer does not control distribution and therefore lack of distribution control has not, does not, and will not lead to a lack of production
really? is that a lot more expensive than buying regular service?
cause you know in America we have these pre-paid phones, which sound similar, except they are a little more than twice as expensive as traditional phone plans. i was going to get one because i was fed up with two-year contracts, but i just couldn't afford it. strange those things are marketed at the poor.
ten years ago in high school i had a teacher who told all us students that "every interestate phone call made in the united states is recorded and reviewed by US government computers, and humans". i called it bull until i was in college and i found out it was true, when all the Echelon shit hit the fan.
the government doesn't have concern for what you, personally, are doing (i presume you aren't a criminal), but they are listening anyway.
i'm not a criminal either, i just don't like the government (or anyone else) all up in my business.
nope, you simply have your requirements wrong. worship and mythology about the origin of the universe are not qualifying characteristics of a religion.
(in fact, "religion" is a notoriously difficult thing to define, in academic circles.)
a lot of people think of religion and base their model on the canonical examples of christianity, islam, and judaism, but of course this is a teensy weensy slice of the human religious landscape (although, today, they represent the majority of individuals). i'm not clear on what other religions you might be thinking of having worship and origin-of-universe.
funny, many people equate religion with belief in a god or gods, but of course this too is not a universal characteristic of religion. (maybe you equate "worship" with "worship of a god", but again of course that isn't universally true.)
okay. well software is different than encyclopedia articles, and i might agree that the exact wiki model might not translate to software (then again, it might).
nevertheless, what i'm saying is that contrary to your claim that wiki articles could never be high quality due to their being edited by unpaid authors, in fact we know that wiki articles can be high quality under that model, because we in fact have that (again, proof by construction).
of course, all that is an opinion, my opinion. a person such as yourself, who thinks wiki articles are low quality, might say the opposite: that the low quality of the information implies or at least suggests that the model does not or can not produce quality articles. it's all in how you see the Wiki, and i happen to agree with the huge number of people who think Wikipedia is highly useable.
the only thing you said which is clearly not true is that unpaid individuals would never bother to add their drop to the bucket of public knowledge. economists call this the tragedy of the commons, but it isn't an absolute law or anything like that, and Wikipedia is a pretty good example of how a commons-owned good can flourish.
PS one of the few times i ever "contributed" to an open-source program, i changed one, maybe two lines of code, to make it work slightly differently, the way i wanted it to. i'm not sure whether or not that would fit your hypothetical or not, but the software continued to work great.
counterpoint: i find wikipedia highly useful and accurate. i don't quote it in cites because it isn't authoritative, as you note, and i also read it with an eye for misinformation, which you also note, but neither of those things discredits the mind-boggling quantity of valid information to be gleaned from the articles.
furthermore, all those "stub" articles are often acceptably informative on their own. often two sentences is all i need.
finally, your question as to who would bother to put information into Wikipedia, which rhetorically implies that the answer is "nobody", is disingenuous, as it is clearly evident that in fact the answer is "lots of people". i myself have, on a couple rare occasions, started or contributed to articles; and there is apparently a whole subculture of people who do it constantly.
your beef sounds like the famous quote where Bill Gates asked "who would write software for free?" golly gee, free software could never be as good as software you pay for. only... it is, abstract theories of human behavior be damned. we know that it works, because in fact it exists. in math and computer science they call that "proof by construction", which is proving that something can be built by... building it.
Slashdot Mirror
my lawyer friend said one of the first things he learned in law school was that words don't mean what they mean. he really struggled with that.
nevertheless, sometimes when a word doesn't have a well-known-to-lawyers definition, a judge will fall back to the dictionary. i recently read about a state which wanted to start taxing bottled-water companies under a hundred-year-old "beverage tax" law, which previously had not been applied to water. the judge ruled that "water is not a beverage", which i thought was totally absurd, until i looked it up in a dictionary, and in fact my dictionary explicitly excluded water from the definition:
beverage |?bev(?)rij| noun a drink, esp. one other than water.
crazy.
yes, what you said doesn't counter what the parent said. we want to *deter* posession of child porno, and we want to *deter* the creation of child porno *more*.
think of it this way. say you are a pedo so you download some child porn and keep it around. if the punishment for posession is the same as for manufacture, then there is no *deterrent* from going out, finding a child, and producing some porn. there is no deterrent because the punishment will be the same. to be perfectly clear, i'll put it back in your words: the *punishment* for making child porno would not be a *deterrent*, because the posessor is already liable for that same punishment.
furthermore, all other crimes are broken down this way. take another prohibited object, like marijuana: if growing plants had the same penalty as posession the plants, then every pothead in the country would have a farm in his closet. we *deter* potheads from growing weed by adding extra penalties to that crime.
also, you are certainly wrong about one thing, in this country (well, I live in the USA) our criminal justice system acts both for prevention and retribution.
someone must point out that Taco mis-used then/than. but you got it right! good job. it's hard for me to imagine getting the words confused, since they are so lexicographically distinct, but i guess some people just spell through their tongue.
okay i'll lay it out for you. i'm sorry i wasn't clear before.
the test of whether the policy of taking knives away from citizens is "logical" is whether it is reasonable to assume it will achieve the end proponents claim. in this case, the claim is taking knives from citizens will result in a reduction of crime; so the question is whether it is reasonable to assume the prohibition will result in a reduction in crime, specifically stabbings; and the parallel policy we can look to, to see if that is a reasonable assumption, is the parallel policy of prohobition of firearms. so again, we look at the effictiveness of gun prohibition to see whether knife prohibition is "logical", and the test is whether crime went down after the firearm prohibition took effect. now, did it? i actually don't know the answer, i have only been told that it did not. so if i am right, and firearm crime did not decrease after firearm prohibition, then it is *illogical* to say that knife prohibition would result in a decrease in knife crime. that's what i meant about illogical.
in america, though, as i further said, we value more than just reducing crime, which of course is a laudable goal. in america, though, we have a preoccupation with freedom which our brithish brethren do not share (insert comment about taxation without representation here). we americans value freedom as an end of its own, and thus, the freedom to posess a firearm is something we would balance against the suggestion that we could reduce gun crime by outlawing guns. me myself, i'm not a firearm owner, i'm more of a really really cautious libertairian, fearful of a repressive government, and thus i want the citizenry armed to a level sufficient that we could defend ourselves against (this is the preposterous extreme) an occupying government (whether elected or invading).
now, your comment about columbine is inflammatory. the boys didn't shoot up the school because they had guns, they did it because they were fucked up in the head (why don't you blame Michael Ryan?). those kids also had access to bombs, as bombs are pretty easy to make and use and do a lot more damange, but they chose guns. i'm not willing to blame a tool for its user's crimes. frankly, i'm also not too worried about gun crime either, as we are currently enjoying the lowest crime in history. if your crime is so much lower, what the heck are you so worried about? and don't worry about the outcry over guns, there is a very large very vocal segment of our population which wants to do away with firearms. they might succeed, if they can ever muster a 2/3 majority of the population.
anyway i hope that logic thing is clear now.
that's a comically hyperbolical post, but come on mods, it should be moderated funny, not insightful.
i think that's absurd.
england is also the country which, when crime rates rose, gave up the right of firearm ownership, then when crime rates went up some more, they started talking about getting rid of big knives. clearly the english have a different way of looking at individual rights than americans do.
/ comment aimed at the english, not at the parent poster
not if the website sells a popup blocker
oh, man, i totally agree with you. screen resolutions should continue to rise, and in fact pixel density should rise, too, by a lot. and when those things happen, all the UI widgets should be rendered based on physical size, not on pixel size.
now, i use a Mac, and Mac widgets themselves don't scale, though you can get custom UIs with larger widgets. but doesn't Windows have official themes? and Linux certainly does. so i don't agree that "major" OSs don't scale widgets. well, maybe you're talking about actually scaling them, instead of simply having a theme with larger ones.
Macs scale icons now, so maybe a wholly scaling theme could be done. maybe. grandmothers would certainly be happy.
i've never heard of FEAR or Warhammer. what are those, games or something? i guess everyone has their personal killer app.
i remember when i was in junior high school, everyone made fun of Macs because they were "just gaming machines"; now, games are the only thing that Windows fans can point to which won't run on a Mac. of course, i also remember how all the Mac folks made fun of Windows for having a command line, even a hidden one, which is now touted by many (myself included) as a premier power feature of the OS.
things do change.
wow dude! your /. number is, like, really low! you must have signed up a LONG time ago!
i agree with everything you say. i buy CDs regularly (i like half.com) and never listen to the CDs at all, i rip them and listen to the music on my computer. that's far easier than trying to download a (purchased) song and trying to unwrap the DRM. (i download single songs on gnutella, but i don't do that for albums, which i prefer, rather i try to get my hands on the CD and rip it myself.)
twice, i lost my music collection due to hard drive failure, and i was able to reconstruct a large part of my library from my tall stack of CDs. i also appreciate the fact that when i get a nicer stereo (and larger hard drive) i can re-rip my CDs to a lossless format.
i also agree that i would return a defective CD to the store post-haste. it's juuuuust possible, also, that i'm that rare consumer who would bother to file a lawsuit over it, too.
oh, i don't know, i am "angry" but i still buy music (from the RIAA). i just won't buy anything but CDs, (vanilla CDs) because that's the only capital-F Free music they sell. i won't pay for a download because it's not even as good as the Free/free (unencumbered) download i can get from gnutella. if iTunes Music Store sold MP3s, i would likely (though not definitely) use them instead of gnutella, for quality and convenience.
is that sarcasm? or do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?
okay, how about this, do you seriously think that one week of increased sales will *necessarily* offset fifty-one weeks of decreased sales?
furthermore, even if the RIAA got 100% of that money, which they don't, not even close, that's $40 million, do you think forty million will make all the difference in their profitability?
i bet you were being sarcastic. i'm sorry for misreading you.
your argument is not completely absurd in the abstract, but we in fact know from history that your argument is absured in reality.
1.) lots of people produce things for reasons other than monetary gain
2.) lots of money can be made even when the producer does not control distribution
and therefore lack of distribution control has not, does not, and will not lead to a lack of production
a standard DVD is more than good enough for most people
mmm hmmm. so is a casette tape.
If you have CDs, then you (can) have MP3s, you wag.
What do you mean by saying you want to transfer "files" to your car, but yet "MP3s" aren't acceptable because you don't have any? That's nonsensical.
really? is that a lot more expensive than buying regular service?
cause you know in America we have these pre-paid phones, which sound similar, except they are a little more than twice as expensive as traditional phone plans. i was going to get one because i was fed up with two-year contracts, but i just couldn't afford it. strange those things are marketed at the poor.
ten years ago in high school i had a teacher who told all us students that "every interestate phone call made in the united states is recorded and reviewed by US government computers, and humans". i called it bull until i was in college and i found out it was true, when all the Echelon shit hit the fan.
the government doesn't have concern for what you, personally, are doing (i presume you aren't a criminal), but they are listening anyway.
i'm not a criminal either, i just don't like the government (or anyone else) all up in my business.
you pay for your privacy. that's a nice luxury. the rest of us wish we could have it for free.
nope, you simply have your requirements wrong. worship and mythology about the origin of the universe are not qualifying characteristics of a religion.
(in fact, "religion" is a notoriously difficult thing to define, in academic circles.)
a lot of people think of religion and base their model on the canonical examples of christianity, islam, and judaism, but of course this is a teensy weensy slice of the human religious landscape (although, today, they represent the majority of individuals). i'm not clear on what other religions you might be thinking of having worship and origin-of-universe.
funny, many people equate religion with belief in a god or gods, but of course this too is not a universal characteristic of religion. (maybe you equate "worship" with "worship of a god", but again of course that isn't universally true.)
(rolls eyes) yeah, someone needs to do something about pacifist buddhist monks. they're ruining everything.
/ disproof by counterexample
okay. well software is different than encyclopedia articles, and i might agree that the exact wiki model might not translate to software (then again, it might).
nevertheless, what i'm saying is that contrary to your claim that wiki articles could never be high quality due to their being edited by unpaid authors, in fact we know that wiki articles can be high quality under that model, because we in fact have that (again, proof by construction).
of course, all that is an opinion, my opinion. a person such as yourself, who thinks wiki articles are low quality, might say the opposite: that the low quality of the information implies or at least suggests that the model does not or can not produce quality articles. it's all in how you see the Wiki, and i happen to agree with the huge number of people who think Wikipedia is highly useable.
the only thing you said which is clearly not true is that unpaid individuals would never bother to add their drop to the bucket of public knowledge. economists call this the tragedy of the commons, but it isn't an absolute law or anything like that, and Wikipedia is a pretty good example of how a commons-owned good can flourish.
PS one of the few times i ever "contributed" to an open-source program, i changed one, maybe two lines of code, to make it work slightly differently, the way i wanted it to. i'm not sure whether or not that would fit your hypothetical or not, but the software continued to work great.
counterpoint: i find wikipedia highly useful and accurate. i don't quote it in cites because it isn't authoritative, as you note, and i also read it with an eye for misinformation, which you also note, but neither of those things discredits the mind-boggling quantity of valid information to be gleaned from the articles.
furthermore, all those "stub" articles are often acceptably informative on their own. often two sentences is all i need.
finally, your question as to who would bother to put information into Wikipedia, which rhetorically implies that the answer is "nobody", is disingenuous, as it is clearly evident that in fact the answer is "lots of people". i myself have, on a couple rare occasions, started or contributed to articles; and there is apparently a whole subculture of people who do it constantly.
your beef sounds like the famous quote where Bill Gates asked "who would write software for free?" golly gee, free software could never be as good as software you pay for. only... it is, abstract theories of human behavior be damned. we know that it works, because in fact it exists. in math and computer science they call that "proof by construction", which is proving that something can be built by... building it.
i share your indignation. i've heard complaints about the editor "Zonk" who approved this story -- do you think he deserves the blame?
don't you remember NASA crashing a spacecraft because they couldn't covert between feet and meters?