How can a "bug fix" possibly degrade the quality of the code? By definition code with a bug in it is as bad as it can be. Anything that removes the bug, but does not introduce new bugs improves the quality of the code. Whether or not it is pretty to look at is irrelevant.
If a manager has fifteen year veterans that he can't control (i.e. get them to do maintenance coding) then maybe he ought to hire some programmers who are not primadonnas or take a leadership class.
Frankly, if programmers can't understand that their real value as professionals lie in their ability to maximize the usage of scarce resources, then they don't deserve "plum" assignments. That is to say, a good programmer, one who can consistently demand raises and quantify his/her value is one who can point to work done and say "this saved X number of CPU cycles" and therefore $Y on new processors, RAM, or disk. They might point out how this gets the data out Z times as fast and how this allows for X more transactions or hits or whatever.
Sure, a new program may be great in that it adds completely new value to the organization, but to take existing software and rewrite it after allowing the previous version to lag seriously behind? In the real world running projects like that is the best way to not get funding. Your rewrite, instead of being incremental, easily managed and predictable, becomes a major capital expense and very risky.
Rewriting means starting from scratch. Refactoring means doing things like analyzing existing code using code profilers and such to find weak spots or by accepting bug reports, then going into the routines that cause those bugs or weaknesses and looking for ways to improve the existing code. Maybe adding new features carefully.
Your hypothetical situation is simply too general and detached to draw conclusions from an analysis thereof. But offhand I'd say yes, much better. That's five years of finding bugs and squashing them, five years of tuning slow routines and bottlenecks, five years of security testing, and five years of usability tweaks. If you can provide all of that in just one year of development from scratch, you are a better programmer than most.
Okay. How about if I get up in arms about the five or six grammatical/spelling errors in your four sentence post? You know what feature would get me to subscribe? The ability to mark certain users as "Can't spell" and make all their posts appear in some crayon-style font-- complete with one or two backwards letters.
Ack. I meant to say that creativity *CAN* be compelled. Obviously not by brute force, but that sometimes the stress of needing to finish something can produce the desired "inspiration" that would otherwise be lacking.
That's funny, when I was in art school, nobody there had any trouble being creative in our 13 week quarters, going from no work done to small, consistent portfolio in that time. In fact, I often myself most productive if I kind of toyed with various themes or ideas and then really hammered them home later in the quarter, usually leaving me just enough time before final critique to get the stuff mounted and ready for a real display.
My programming often works the same way, if I let parts of it percolate for a while I usually think of something better than I would have if I'd just spent the time banging away at it. I'm not disputing that the two disciplines can be similar, only that creativity cannot be compelled. It's all about problem-solving, and it just may be that a little added stress *helps* the brain do that stuff. The same way an adrenaline kick helps athletes out.
You left out an option WRT to paperbacks. Scan each page as an image. Distribute as PDF or HTML bundle. With a page-feeding scanner (they do make those, right?) or a decent digital camera and a little bit of very unsophisticated software, this process is largely automatic and probably not even that time-consuming. This method reduces entirely the analog issues encountered with photocopying and doesn't require the extra effort of OCR. This method also has the benefit of preserving layout and illustrations exactly. I have heard, but not seen, that there is a small warez-type scene that does this already, but that it will grow in the near future seems inevitable. Even the FBI is involved (legally of course), check out their FOIA Reading Room. Keep in mind that once the scans are done, duplication is nearly instant and no further degradation of quality is found.
You want to know what's scariest? I've never before in life had trouble with any of the prevalent grammar/spelling errors that abound on Slashdot. But thanks to reading the articles here and the comments below, I've begun to pick them up. Whereas previously my most serious problem was whether or not to put an apostrophe in "its", now I find myself frequently confusing their/there, etc. This intellectual failing may be contagious!
The libertarian party is looking better and better all the time.
No it isn't.
a) the Constitution *is* a living document. Screw Al Gore. The Founders themselves said so and provided the amendment process to make sure of it. The checks and balances are there to ensure the possibility.
b) The libertarians would suggest that shouting fire in a crowded room was a form of fraud (and therefore a form of aggression) which would allow everyone in the room to sue the shouter for damages, and if he/she couldn't pay he would have to work it off in a corporate prison. Either that or anyone injured in the panic gets to sue everyone else in the theater for panicking-- or maybe doesn't get to recover any damages at all since there wouldn't be any good witnesses to the trampling. And all of this would be adjudicated by private judges and enforced by private police forces, each apparently using their own set of laws.
c) Name five things Reno did that were scary that would've been handled all that differently by Ashcroft. Let me know when you get past Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Gonzales Boy (and I'm not sure how these would've been all that different under Ashcroft unless he would've managed to avoid them altogether, but they are the only things that spring to mind that Reno did that were scary). Ashcroft has been in office less than a year and already we have a Microsoft getting a slap on the wrist, soldiers carrying M-16s in the airports, some bigoted remarks about Islam, and now a prime example of the sort of chill-power these guys want to apply to free speech. That's pretty scary when you consider they seem to be targetting drug users and political speech. And it's only the beginning.
And before you jump on me. I didn't like Clinton/Reno either. Personally I think our best bet for true freedom and equality at this point is the Green party. They promote the end of the drug war (wonder if they'll start to be hunted by the FBI now) and they say they support freedom of speech (with the usual restrictions: "fire!", threats, incitement).
Otherwise if you can't beat 'em join 'em. Become a born-again Christian or a conservative Jew and as long as you're male and have a senator for a father, you too can run for President.:)
many of the cable cos have latched onto high speed internet access as one of the selling points to encourage people to keep cable (it worked. I love some of the satellite services and features, but I also like high speed cable internet access).
This explains why the bastards are all over the SSSCA like bees on honey. I never thought about how their TV services had serious competition and if they don't fix something all the money they spent on wiring they laid could be pretty hard to recoup.
After having my mom & pop ISP's bought out by slightly larger mom & pop's I switched to Qwest. Glad RoadRunner was available when Qwest decided to inflict MSN on their customers. I agree that cheaper and more reliable is better and that a large corporation seems poised to answer both of these concerns.
Not knowing enough about either phone wires or cable lines: is there a way this can be structured so that the lines are owned by municipalities and the service can be provided by a free market of providers? That way all providers are on truly equal footing.
As I see it now, it's ownership of the wires that's key. When "independent" companies are merely dependent on the larger wire-owning company for some of their basic services (like running a new line to a house, or switching locations), their service is always going to suffer in favor of the company that owns the wires. Even if the activities were all computer controlled and fairly instant there'd still be a delay while the "independent" provider relayed a request to the main provider.
As I read it you do not have an account with PayPal at this point. They appear to be putting plain funds into a real bank account with some partner bank. They also offer a Money Market securities product.
Who manages the Fund?
PayPal partnered with Barclays Global Investors, one of the world's leading institutional money managers, to manage this Fund. With more than $700 billion in assets under management, BGI manages the Master Portfolio in which our Fund invests as well as the money for 1 in 4 Fortune 500 Corporate list companies and 100 of the largest pension funds in the world.
Which looks to me like maybe the SEC should be taking an interest-- even if their disclosures are in order, I have to wonder if they have the appropriate licensing to sell equities. I also note that at least one state consider them to perhaps be operating an unauthorized transfer service. So maybe they'll get stomped on after all. Of course, it does appear that their main problem is convincing regulators they'll fly straight in the future. Obviously when they were small fish, nobody was paying attention. Will they be allowed to keep the gains they've made as a result of running an unlicensed operation?
Wow. First Jack Valenti accuses most internet users of being thieves. Next News Corp accuses (in a sideways fashion, of course) Intel and Microsoft of broadcasting works to which they had no right? When will the lies stop? If these people can't be trusted to tell the truth in this simple matter, how can they be trusted to tell us about important matters, like wars and campaigns and other public policy issues?
Intel and Microsoft may be guilty of other crimes, but this charge, even as an imaginary "Let's say" scenario, is spurious and dangerous! Intel and Microsoft aren't broadcasting anything that I'm aware of. The media themselves are the ones doing the broadcasting and a very very small minority of their customers take advantage of the fact that information is very difficult to fence in.
MPAA, I'm very sorry your major members are having trouble selling high speed internet connections to further increase your profits on wiring you've already laid (in spite of the fact that cable sales seem quite brisk). I'm also very sorry that you are afraid of publishing material over the net without additional protections that your material has not enjoyed at any point in history. If you don't like it, keep your content in the vault and see how well it sells there. Or here's an idea. Simply release it on video tape and only broadcast it over analog signals-- most of us have been getting along just fine on those two technologies for years.
Even though Love hasn't put out an album in over three years, active artists like Negativland and Steve Albini don't count in your book. Did you even bother to look at the list of things Steve's been involved in? A recent Nine Inch Nails album struck my eye, certainly more popular than anything Hole put out. Also, I'm not convinced that Hole has sold more than Negativland, and certainly not more than Big Black.
Your statement "I've worked with independant artists before, you soon find out why they nobody has ever heard their music before" says little other than that you are prejudiced. In fact, by that yardstick you shouldn't pull out epithets like "dumbass corporate artist" later on. In fact, Metallica are not "dumbass corporate artists" they relied heavily on the garage scene and tape trading to become popular, and they even sued their record companies as a result of being shafted by "the math".
Um, I'm not sure which "some nobody" you're talking about. Steve Albini was the chief engineer for Nirvana's "In Utero" album released in 1993 (Kurt Cobain married Ms. Love in 1992-- so she's had opportunity to meet Albini and even absorb this idea from him) and has had several other successful projects of his own (the band Big Black to name one, plus many many jobs in a behind the scenes capacity)-- in fact, without the hard work put in by Albini and other truly independent artists, people like Courtney Love would have found a much smaller audience for their own work, and they would have lacked much of the foundation on which to build.
Similarly, Negativland has released many more studio productions that Love has. They have been involved in several court cases directly related to musician ownership of music and copyright infringement. I'm also given to understand that the principles were also primaries in a fairly long-running radio show. Finally, unlike the Salon article, the Negativland site has an in-depth discussion of more than just music industry finance. If you haven't read it, I strongly encourage you to look it over. Not only that they have some free mp3's! http://www.negativland.com/audiogadgets.html
If you accept Courtney Love's position because she is a "real artist" and not a "nobody" then you must also accept Metallica's position, because they are far less "nobody" than she. Ditto Dr. Dre-- a huge influence in the rap and hip-hop world.
Courtney Love may have been infringing on Steve Albini's intellectual property rights when she delivered that speech, and Salon is aiding and abetting! I'm kidding of course, and I'm glad that she managed to get this issue some attention and that Salon continues to provide that resource.
But please-- if you are going to read that minimal treatement of the issue-- consider also the Steve Albini version at Negativland's Intellectual Property Issues page. That page has many more essays by real artists that have been involved in a great deal of legal wrangling surrounding copyright and have been at it since the early 80's.
That is an excellent point. I will definitely look for the article to come online. Even so, it doesn't excuse the numerous aggressive acts and policies of the U.S. towards the Indians, but it certainly provides a wider understanding of the dynamics of the times.
I don't think a critique of US' aggression against foreign nations implies forgiveness for the aggression those nations may have been engaged in themselves. It certainly doesn't imply approval for slavery (which doesn't even begin to address the issue that there are many forms of slavery, all of them inappropriate, but which vary in degree). The fact that history is filled with stories of invasion, genocide, war, and plunder is not a good reason to pardon one or more groups for their aggressions, nor to endorse similar aggression in the future.
I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm trying to be accurate in response to an overly euphemistic description of history. If I am not accurate, please correct me. And you have a point that in order to be fully accurate we might put these conflicts into a larger context. That the land was stolen does not necessarily mean that it should be returned-- as you point out, they may well have stolen it from others. That an injustice was committed does not necessarily obligate descendents of the original malefactors to produce some sort of recompense. And when it comes down to it, this is land we're talking about. It's pretty hard, imho, to "own" something that predates you by millions of years and which upon your death, you will become part of.
Hmmm. Yes, this would explain the reports of numerous massacres, the Trail of Tears, and the treaties which are then abrogated almost instantly, the herding of Indians onto reservations, and the decimation of the natural resources on which they depended. It was all an accident!
Many settlers may have been largely peaceful people, but they were dependent on and willingly paid taxes to an army and a national policy that can only be described as expansionist. Even if many Indian populations died from diseases unintentionally transmitted by Europeans, there were plenty still alive that rightfully owned the land and from whom the land was taken either by force or by trickery. Given that there were *any* battles over land implies that the land was stolen, since it clearly did not first belong to the Europeans who ended up owning it.
Others have pointed out that while this *is* a correlation, it does not imply causality. But remember it was the RIAA who frequently asserted a different causality, that Napster promoted "theft" and thereby lowered sales. Now that Napster is gone, their sales are down. This clearly indicates that their assertion was not only a logical fallacy, but patently untrue. The other considerations to keep in mind are that the RIAA seems to have upset some of its major customers-- us geeks.
I'm certain that previous to Napster, I bought a lot more music than I do now that I'm boycotting. I get the sense that others are also upset, people who were previously purchasing music. If anything, treating customers as criminals has heightened the sense (in the customers' minds) that we should just copy everything as much as possible to get back at them for first gouging us on CD prices (which none of us minded that much), but then coming after us when we were attempting to share music (which allowed us to pretest albums before purchasing, thereby feeling less gouged when we went to buy stuff).
Also, half the stuff that was being shared on Napster was stuff we've all been hearing for years and years for free on the radio, but never would've spent a cent to buy. Or we knew we liked the one song, but couldn't care less about the rest of the CD.
The point I'm belaboring here is that there *may* be some correlation to the drop in sales and the closing of Napster. I'm not saying it's 100% for sure, but it's a possible influence.
Will you people stop asking for explanations of moderations? If it's really that important to you, metamoderate and be done with it. The moderation system on Slashdot is the best troll around!
First paragraph, I have no idea what you're saying. Please explain.
Second paragraph, I believe the idea is that the rights of the sheep not to be voted *as* dinner must be protected. The full quote is "Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." Compare to this snippet from former President Thomas Jefferson "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
Yeah, but the ballot box is within reach of the average person, and most of them don't even bother to stretch out their arm to grab hold of it. What difference does it make about some of the finer points of campaign finance when Americans are too [expletive deleted] to exercise the primary right given to them to have a say in their government?
Slashdot Mirror
How can a "bug fix" possibly degrade the quality of the code? By definition code with a bug in it is as bad as it can be. Anything that removes the bug, but does not introduce new bugs improves the quality of the code. Whether or not it is pretty to look at is irrelevant.
If a manager has fifteen year veterans that he can't control (i.e. get them to do maintenance coding) then maybe he ought to hire some programmers who are not primadonnas or take a leadership class.
Frankly, if programmers can't understand that their real value as professionals lie in their ability to maximize the usage of scarce resources, then they don't deserve "plum" assignments. That is to say, a good programmer, one who can consistently demand raises and quantify his/her value is one who can point to work done and say "this saved X number of CPU cycles" and therefore $Y on new processors, RAM, or disk. They might point out how this gets the data out Z times as fast and how this allows for X more transactions or hits or whatever.
Sure, a new program may be great in that it adds completely new value to the organization, but to take existing software and rewrite it after allowing the previous version to lag seriously behind? In the real world running projects like that is the best way to not get funding. Your rewrite, instead of being incremental, easily managed and predictable, becomes a major capital expense and very risky.
No and maybe, maybe not.
Rewriting means starting from scratch. Refactoring means doing things like analyzing existing code using code profilers and such to find weak spots or by accepting bug reports, then going into the routines that cause those bugs or weaknesses and looking for ways to improve the existing code. Maybe adding new features carefully.
Your hypothetical situation is simply too general and detached to draw conclusions from an analysis thereof. But offhand I'd say yes, much better. That's five years of finding bugs and squashing them, five years of tuning slow routines and bottlenecks, five years of security testing, and five years of usability tweaks. If you can provide all of that in just one year of development from scratch, you are a better programmer than most.
Okay. How about if I get up in arms about the five or six grammatical/spelling errors in your four sentence post? You know what feature would get me to subscribe? The ability to mark certain users as "Can't spell" and make all their posts appear in some crayon-style font-- complete with one or two backwards letters.
Ack. I meant to say that creativity *CAN* be compelled. Obviously not by brute force, but that sometimes the stress of needing to finish something can produce the desired "inspiration" that would otherwise be lacking.
That's funny, when I was in art school, nobody there had any trouble being creative in our 13 week quarters, going from no work done to small, consistent portfolio in that time. In fact, I often myself most productive if I kind of toyed with various themes or ideas and then really hammered them home later in the quarter, usually leaving me just enough time before final critique to get the stuff mounted and ready for a real display.
My programming often works the same way, if I let parts of it percolate for a while I usually think of something better than I would have if I'd just spent the time banging away at it. I'm not disputing that the two disciplines can be similar, only that creativity cannot be compelled. It's all about problem-solving, and it just may be that a little added stress *helps* the brain do that stuff. The same way an adrenaline kick helps athletes out.
You left out an option WRT to paperbacks. Scan each page as an image. Distribute as PDF or HTML bundle. With a page-feeding scanner (they do make those, right?) or a decent digital camera and a little bit of very unsophisticated software, this process is largely automatic and probably not even that time-consuming. This method reduces entirely the analog issues encountered with photocopying and doesn't require the extra effort of OCR. This method also has the benefit of preserving layout and illustrations exactly. I have heard, but not seen, that there is a small warez-type scene that does this already, but that it will grow in the near future seems inevitable. Even the FBI is involved (legally of course), check out their FOIA Reading Room. Keep in mind that once the scans are done, duplication is nearly instant and no further degradation of quality is found.
You want to know what's scariest? I've never before in life had trouble with any of the prevalent grammar/spelling errors that abound on Slashdot. But thanks to reading the articles here and the comments below, I've begun to pick them up. Whereas previously my most serious problem was whether or not to put an apostrophe in "its", now I find myself frequently confusing their/there, etc. This intellectual failing may be contagious!
Yeah, but will they make 'em somehow work with all those CueCats everyone has laying around?
Thank you for pointing out my innaccuracy! In fact, that would've happened on the prior Bush watch. Very very scary indeed.
Why? Unless you incorporate it wholesale or re-use a patented algorithm, you do have Fair Use rights under existing copyright law.
The libertarian party is looking better and better all the time.
:)
No it isn't.
a) the Constitution *is* a living document. Screw Al Gore. The Founders themselves said so and provided the amendment process to make sure of it. The checks and balances are there to ensure the possibility.
b) The libertarians would suggest that shouting fire in a crowded room was a form of fraud (and therefore a form of aggression) which would allow everyone in the room to sue the shouter for damages, and if he/she couldn't pay he would have to work it off in a corporate prison. Either that or anyone injured in the panic gets to sue everyone else in the theater for panicking-- or maybe doesn't get to recover any damages at all since there wouldn't be any good witnesses to the trampling. And all of this would be adjudicated by private judges and enforced by private police forces, each apparently using their own set of laws.
c) Name five things Reno did that were scary that would've been handled all that differently by Ashcroft. Let me know when you get past Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Gonzales Boy (and I'm not sure how these would've been all that different under Ashcroft unless he would've managed to avoid them altogether, but they are the only things that spring to mind that Reno did that were scary). Ashcroft has been in office less than a year and already we have a Microsoft getting a slap on the wrist, soldiers carrying M-16s in the airports, some bigoted remarks about Islam, and now a prime example of the sort of chill-power these guys want to apply to free speech. That's pretty scary when you consider they seem to be targetting drug users and political speech. And it's only the beginning.
And before you jump on me. I didn't like Clinton/Reno either. Personally I think our best bet for true freedom and equality at this point is the Green party. They promote the end of the drug war (wonder if they'll start to be hunted by the FBI now) and they say they support freedom of speech (with the usual restrictions: "fire!", threats, incitement).
Otherwise if you can't beat 'em join 'em. Become a born-again Christian or a conservative Jew and as long as you're male and have a senator for a father, you too can run for President.
many of the cable cos have latched onto high speed internet access as one of the selling points to encourage people to keep cable (it worked. I love some of the satellite services and features, but I also like high speed cable internet access).
This explains why the bastards are all over the SSSCA like bees on honey. I never thought about how their TV services had serious competition and if they don't fix something all the money they spent on wiring they laid could be pretty hard to recoup.
After having my mom & pop ISP's bought out by slightly larger mom & pop's I switched to Qwest. Glad RoadRunner was available when Qwest decided to inflict MSN on their customers. I agree that cheaper and more reliable is better and that a large corporation seems poised to answer both of these concerns.
Not knowing enough about either phone wires or cable lines: is there a way this can be structured so that the lines are owned by municipalities and the service can be provided by a free market of providers? That way all providers are on truly equal footing.
As I see it now, it's ownership of the wires that's key. When "independent" companies are merely dependent on the larger wire-owning company for some of their basic services (like running a new line to a house, or switching locations), their service is always going to suffer in favor of the company that owns the wires. Even if the activities were all computer controlled and fairly instant there'd still be a delay while the "independent" provider relayed a request to the main provider.
Wow. First Jack Valenti accuses most internet users of being thieves. Next News Corp accuses (in a sideways fashion, of course) Intel and Microsoft of broadcasting works to which they had no right? When will the lies stop? If these people can't be trusted to tell the truth in this simple matter, how can they be trusted to tell us about important matters, like wars and campaigns and other public policy issues?
Intel and Microsoft may be guilty of other crimes, but this charge, even as an imaginary "Let's say" scenario, is spurious and dangerous! Intel and Microsoft aren't broadcasting anything that I'm aware of. The media themselves are the ones doing the broadcasting and a very very small minority of their customers take advantage of the fact that information is very difficult to fence in.
MPAA, I'm very sorry your major members are having trouble selling high speed internet connections to further increase your profits on wiring you've already laid (in spite of the fact that cable sales seem quite brisk). I'm also very sorry that you are afraid of publishing material over the net without additional protections that your material has not enjoyed at any point in history. If you don't like it, keep your content in the vault and see how well it sells there. Or here's an idea. Simply release it on video tape and only broadcast it over analog signals-- most of us have been getting along just fine on those two technologies for years.
You're funny. :)
Even though Love hasn't put out an album in over three years, active artists like Negativland and Steve Albini don't count in your book. Did you even bother to look at the list of things Steve's been involved in? A recent Nine Inch Nails album struck my eye, certainly more popular than anything Hole put out. Also, I'm not convinced that Hole has sold more than Negativland, and certainly not more than Big Black.
Your statement "I've worked with independant artists before, you soon find out why they nobody has ever heard their music before" says little other than that you are prejudiced. In fact, by that yardstick you shouldn't pull out epithets like "dumbass corporate artist" later on. In fact, Metallica are not "dumbass corporate artists" they relied heavily on the garage scene and tape trading to become popular, and they even sued their record companies as a result of being shafted by "the math".
Um, I'm not sure which "some nobody" you're talking about. Steve Albini was the chief engineer for Nirvana's "In Utero" album released in 1993 (Kurt Cobain married Ms. Love in 1992-- so she's had opportunity to meet Albini and even absorb this idea from him) and has had several other successful projects of his own (the band Big Black to name one, plus many many jobs in a behind the scenes capacity)-- in fact, without the hard work put in by Albini and other truly independent artists, people like Courtney Love would have found a much smaller audience for their own work, and they would have lacked much of the foundation on which to build.
Similarly, Negativland has released many more studio productions that Love has. They have been involved in several court cases directly related to musician ownership of music and copyright infringement. I'm also given to understand that the principles were also primaries in a fairly long-running radio show. Finally, unlike the Salon article, the Negativland site has an in-depth discussion of more than just music industry finance. If you haven't read it, I strongly encourage you to look it over. Not only that they have some free mp3's! http://www.negativland.com/audiogadgets.html
If you accept Courtney Love's position because she is a "real artist" and not a "nobody" then you must also accept Metallica's position, because they are far less "nobody" than she. Ditto Dr. Dre-- a huge influence in the rap and hip-hop world.
Courtney Love may have been infringing on Steve Albini's intellectual property rights when she delivered that speech, and Salon is aiding and abetting! I'm kidding of course, and I'm glad that she managed to get this issue some attention and that Salon continues to provide that resource.
But please-- if you are going to read that minimal treatement of the issue-- consider also the Steve Albini version at Negativland's Intellectual Property Issues page. That page has many more essays by real artists that have been involved in a great deal of legal wrangling surrounding copyright and have been at it since the early 80's.
That is an excellent point. I will definitely look for the article to come online. Even so, it doesn't excuse the numerous aggressive acts and policies of the U.S. towards the Indians, but it certainly provides a wider understanding of the dynamics of the times.
I don't think a critique of US' aggression against foreign nations implies forgiveness for the aggression those nations may have been engaged in themselves. It certainly doesn't imply approval for slavery (which doesn't even begin to address the issue that there are many forms of slavery, all of them inappropriate, but which vary in degree). The fact that history is filled with stories of invasion, genocide, war, and plunder is not a good reason to pardon one or more groups for their aggressions, nor to endorse similar aggression in the future.
I'm not trying to be politically correct. I'm trying to be accurate in response to an overly euphemistic description of history. If I am not accurate, please correct me. And you have a point that in order to be fully accurate we might put these conflicts into a larger context. That the land was stolen does not necessarily mean that it should be returned-- as you point out, they may well have stolen it from others. That an injustice was committed does not necessarily obligate descendents of the original malefactors to produce some sort of recompense. And when it comes down to it, this is land we're talking about. It's pretty hard, imho, to "own" something that predates you by millions of years and which upon your death, you will become part of.
Hmmm. Yes, this would explain the reports of numerous massacres, the Trail of Tears, and the treaties which are then abrogated almost instantly, the herding of Indians onto reservations, and the decimation of the natural resources on which they depended. It was all an accident!
Many settlers may have been largely peaceful people, but they were dependent on and willingly paid taxes to an army and a national policy that can only be described as expansionist. Even if many Indian populations died from diseases unintentionally transmitted by Europeans, there were plenty still alive that rightfully owned the land and from whom the land was taken either by force or by trickery. Given that there were *any* battles over land implies that the land was stolen, since it clearly did not first belong to the Europeans who ended up owning it.
Others have pointed out that while this *is* a correlation, it does not imply causality. But remember it was the RIAA who frequently asserted a different causality, that Napster promoted "theft" and thereby lowered sales. Now that Napster is gone, their sales are down. This clearly indicates that their assertion was not only a logical fallacy, but patently untrue. The other considerations to keep in mind are that the RIAA seems to have upset some of its major customers-- us geeks.
I'm certain that previous to Napster, I bought a lot more music than I do now that I'm boycotting. I get the sense that others are also upset, people who were previously purchasing music. If anything, treating customers as criminals has heightened the sense (in the customers' minds) that we should just copy everything as much as possible to get back at them for first gouging us on CD prices (which none of us minded that much), but then coming after us when we were attempting to share music (which allowed us to pretest albums before purchasing, thereby feeling less gouged when we went to buy stuff).
Also, half the stuff that was being shared on Napster was stuff we've all been hearing for years and years for free on the radio, but never would've spent a cent to buy. Or we knew we liked the one song, but couldn't care less about the rest of the CD.
The point I'm belaboring here is that there *may* be some correlation to the drop in sales and the closing of Napster. I'm not saying it's 100% for sure, but it's a possible influence.
Will you people stop asking for explanations of moderations? If it's really that important to you, metamoderate and be done with it. The moderation system on Slashdot is the best troll around!
First paragraph, I have no idea what you're saying. Please explain.
Second paragraph, I believe the idea is that the rights of the sheep not to be voted *as* dinner must be protected. The full quote is "Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." Compare to this snippet from former President Thomas Jefferson "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
Yeah, but the ballot box is within reach of the average person, and most of them don't even bother to stretch out their arm to grab hold of it. What difference does it make about some of the finer points of campaign finance when Americans are too [expletive deleted] to exercise the primary right given to them to have a say in their government?