On the other hand, you have the Republicans creating challenge lists and preventing people from voting. They're all dirty.
Sorry, the two activities do not equate. At all. "Challenge lists" don't necessarily prevent people, who are eligible to vote, from voting. Challenging Mickey Mice is not dirty at all.
Comparing that with the flat-out replacing legitimate votes with your own is silly — that practice is far dirtier even if some legitimate voter does get challenged by the other side to prove eligibility. The challenge is no less legitimate, than the requirement to show an ID when buying alcohol or tobacco.
But that's all new topic — the original one was that neither machines nor humans can be automatically trusted to count the votes.
the humans may make errors, but those are going to be relatively small, occasional errors of being off-by-one, not significant "drop every third Democrat ballot on the floor" mistakes
One ballot was a straight Democratic "punch 10," and the precinct captain ran it through the counting machine 198 times. In order to avoid suspicion, he also ran a ballot containing some Republican votes through the machine six times.[44] All of the votes in that precinct were fraudulent except for those two original ballots.
If it weren't for the machine, the same asshole would've just recorded 198 pro-Democrat votes... It does not matter, whether it is machines, or purely human labor — significant anti-fraud measures are needed in any case.
or (if it's fair use or licenced) you provide a justication.
Well, that's just what we are discussing here — a site hosting its own music forced to (and failing) to justify its ownership of it...
One of the founding ideas of Wikipedia is that the whole project is licenced for wholesale reproduction
Really? And I thought, it was to spread the knowledge... And yet, sadly, they deleted even the images, that were given to them for "free under the wikipedia.org domain"... They didn't need to do it to bring knowledge to millions of people. They did it, because of their not-so-secret anti-copyright agenda.
There is a feature on Evite.com, which lets you associate your own icon with your "account". Obviously, using copyrighted images is prohibited.
Well, the geniuses at Evite have deleted my logo, which I created in Paintbrush back in 1993 (before switching to Unix for good), because — they thought — it can't possibly be my own creation...
Well, ass-covering, ignorant dimwits working for a corporation... Spit-spit-spit...
Let me ask you - would you consider illegally downloading music or stealing a car a more serious crime? Doesn't it seem a bit crazy to you that the penalty for downloading music is harsher than grand theft auto?
Actually, stealing a car is a felony — except, evidently, in Seattle, where it is a "gross misdemeanor". One's life is much more likely to be ruined by such a conviction, than by "financial destruction of a future" — which is a waaaay too pessimistic a term for $10-20K.
While $200 is still about 600 times the amount of the actual damages
Punitive damages are meant to punish the offender, not just compensate the victim for their loss (which, because of the legal fees and the costs of investigation are still way higher). The young woman infringed knowingly — not by accident.
She was not even stealing bread, medicine, or other vital sustenance — it was just entertainment. I have no sympathy for her, and neither should you... And yet, puzzlingly, there will, no doubt, be angry follow-ups (and negative moderations) here claiming that:
the stolen entertainment was crappy and therefor stealing it is Ok — the most befuddling illogic in this long-running debate;
copyright violation is not exactly like stealing tangible goods — and therefor there is nothing wrong with it;
it is only the middlemen like RIAA, who worry about infringement — like it matters, or like actual musicians and other content-creators don't give a damn.
Student labs tend to be administered by professional admins. Those people neither need nor will accept a one-size-fits all solution made by someone else. And they can devise a read-only boot-from-the-network solution, that works better, is easier to maintain, and is otherwise superior to a pre-made CD.
But yes, there may be cases, where a compiler could come handy even on a read-only system. Yet, when deciding, what to throw out to save space, the compiler toolchain is the obvious first candidate — right after the UUCP subsystem (if OpenBSD still includes that even in the full distribution — FreeBSD no longer does, for example).
Why would you want a compiler on a read-only system? A text-editor may be useful to craft an e-mail (in/tmp), but results of compilation are typically expected to survive a reboot or two...
The point is, you bought the software. That's what matters. You might not buy it again, but considering the cost and training and porting and whatever, you probably wouldn't abandon it.
The costs of training and porting are, usually, far in excess of the original purchase. Even if I did not, strictly speaking, buy anything — such as in the case of free software — my investment is substantial.
Which is why I'm still mad at the KDE project for releasing an alpha-version as "4.0". And the most recent 4.1.2 (9 months later) is still no more than beta...
The way Microsoft could spin this, would be to offer Windows as an upgrade: "Sure, you can use the government's free offering, but for a truly enjoyable experience, shell-out some money to get genuine Windows on your laptop."
It would not even be much of a stretch, to be perfectly honest. After going through pains of KDE and Gnome on FreeBSD, I decided to try it on the slick KUbuntu (maybe, I thought, the stuff sucks on FreeBSD, because developers mostly test on Linux) — and it is even worse...
KMail, despite ton of really cool features, crashes often, and its IMAP implementation is nefarious. Thunderbird is more stable, but hangs often upon a message with a Return-Receipt (!). Firefox is awesome, but Firefox3, mysteriously looses older version's bookmarks and the back-button changes are quite atrocious. OpenOffice is still way behind Microsoft's on a number of features too.
Reduced hardware support, although not the fault of the OS, is another drawback...
Copyright law as it currently exists requires either that the law be ignored and irrelevant, or that there be a worldwide totalitarian state.
The first step in avoiding the totalitarianism is by acknowledging, that violating copyright is wrong. If it is sincerely accepted as wrong, those millions of children may gradually stop doing it — or doing it less.
What we have on Slashdot, however, is perverse logic — you are advocating, that there is nothing wrong with the activity, because stopping it would require a totalitarian state!
Millions of kids (and adults) engage in other petty crimes like graffiti, littering, and graffiti. Properly stopping such things may require something "Singaporean" (which bans chewing gum sales to prevent it sticking to shoes), even if not fully totalitarian. Are you proposing, we stop not only enforcing laws against these activities, but even considering them wrong?
You are welcome to create your definitions for anything, but you should not be making parallels with the commonly accepted definition of the same term. An "economic terrorist" is no more of a "terrorist", than a guinea pig is a pig.
They dwarf all competitors, and can exert fine-grained control over the market itself by choking suppliers via big-money contracts with overreaching non-compete restrictions. Once you start selling to Walmart, you become their bitch and they effectively wind up controlling your bottom line.
As long as the following is true (and it is):
Nobody is forced to shop there;
Nobody is forced to supply them (with goods or labor)
there is nothing particularly outrageous about them.
To me, that's all sorts of wrong. It's the classic theme of a parasite growing so needy, it bleeds the host to death.
Are you seriously calling a retailer "a parasite" (of one degree of "neediness" or another)? Presumably then, "the host" is the manufacturer? Wow... Do you like buying your DVD-players and toothbrushes in bulk? 'Cause if you don't, the "parasites" all provide extremely useful service to you...
Let me tell you the real reason you hate them Wal-Mart, even though Target, Kmart, etc are doing (or trying to do) the exact same thing... Unlike others, Wal-Mart actively fights unions (you know, the racketeers miraculously exempt from anti-trust laws). Unions, understandably, hate them with passion and organize all sorts of campaigns against them. That last link says:
Those results are music to the ears of WakeUpWalMart.com, the outfit that commissioned the Zogby poll, as well as to other powerful critics arrayed against the company. Another group, Wal-Mart Watch, has backing from the United Food and Commercial Workers--which claims 1.4m members--as well as the Teamsters Union, the Sierra Club, the 1.8m-strong Service Employees International Union and some 400 other organisations across the United States. Their lobbying efforts and public campaigning are being trumpeted by a number of political groups such as MoveOn.org, which likes to assail Republicans and capitalism. Many of these groups have been lambasting Wal-Mart for years, claiming that its relentless competitiveness and sheer clout have had a damaging effect on America's workers, small firms and neighbourhoods.
Now, I doubt, you'd have the personal integrity and honesty to admit to being a union sheeple, so I'll just leave this "debate" at that. So long...
Destructive because of exploitative hiring practices, strong-armed buying tactics often putting their suppliers in financial peril for Walmart's profit, the systematic siphoning of money to China's manufacturing industry, and of course the ripple effects these have on communities and the economy at large.
Propaganda bullshit. Buy low, sell high, bend over backwards to please your customers — that's how a business is supposed to run. Walmart is just very good at it, much to the customers' delight and the competition's chagrin.
The term "economic terrorist" comes to mind.
Does it? Well, please, explain, how the term "terrorism", which is defined as:
terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)
apply to Walmart?
Or were you simply using the loaded term as a general purpose dirty word? Seems like it...
Well, when that day comes, those farmers better make damn sure that none of the carbon dioxide those plants consume comes from my lungs.
Well, if it came out of your lungs into atmosphere — it is everybody's. But you are, of course, entitled to collect your own CO2, if you'd like and sell it on the free market.
But farmers are sensible enough to know that it would be totally impractical to try to charge for the oxygen their plants release into the atmosphere.
Only until it becomes practical to do that. When it does, expect the market of all sorts of airs ("Wisconsin Pasture", "Vermont Forest") — and expect people trying to sneak into the crops-covering air-collecting canopy for a sniff to get busted (deservingly).
So long as they only vote Democrat/Republican (US) or Labor/Tory (UK) those in authority probably don't care.
Well, as long as the fraudsters favor all parties equally I don't really care... But there is evidence, that they don't. ACORN — an organization tied to the most such frad — is very far to the left, for example, and US already had one presidency "delivered" by such methods. Interestingly, the vote-stealing, that gave the US the disaster called JFK, took place in the same city, where the Left's current super-star chose to make his career...
First, caribou would be a renewable energy source.
That's cool. I'll use that to defend a new Alaska drilling project as "using renewable energy".
But allow me to rephrase my point, lest it may be lost in the debate on whether caribou are renewable (and at what rate). How about: It wouldn't be unconscionable to power the thing by waterboarding caribou in order to preserve the nation's power grid and communications?..
A number of renewable energy sources don't require any sort of fuel distribution network.
Well, if the result of their work ends up using a renewable energy source for this reason, that's fine with me. What I object to is their ruling out all other energy sources a priori.
A solar panel just needs sunlight (even cloudy skys would generate some power) and a windfarm needs wind.
Neither is likely to survive a nuclear bomb, however... The energy source needs to be compact and well-protected. Whether it is renewable is (or ought to be) irrelevant — the system is not supposed to work forever — only for a short time after the disaster.
a $165,000 project recently approved by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program -- to create renewable energy-powered, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)-protected microgrids
No part of the objective seems to require the solution to be renewable energy-powered. It wouldn't be unconscionable to power the thing by burning caribou in order to preserve the nation's power grid, and communications...
But somebody had money earmarked to "renewable energy" and somebody else knew, how to craft a proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, the two activities do not equate. At all. "Challenge lists" don't necessarily prevent people, who are eligible to vote, from voting. Challenging Mickey Mice is not dirty at all.
Comparing that with the flat-out replacing legitimate votes with your own is silly — that practice is far dirtier even if some legitimate voter does get challenged by the other side to prove eligibility. The challenge is no less legitimate, than the requirement to show an ID when buying alcohol or tobacco.
But that's all new topic — the original one was that neither machines nor humans can be automatically trusted to count the votes.
No, not every third Democrat. More like: Drop all Republicans on the floor:
If it weren't for the machine, the same asshole would've just recorded 198 pro-Democrat votes... It does not matter, whether it is machines, or purely human labor — significant anti-fraud measures are needed in any case.
Ever since there was piracy, there were attempts to profit from it.
And attempts to fight it were, every once in a while, called "futile".
Or the people, who count the paper ballots... I'd rather trust a machine, however imperfect...
Well, that's just what we are discussing here — a site hosting its own music forced to (and failing) to justify its ownership of it...
Really? And I thought, it was to spread the knowledge... And yet, sadly, they deleted even the images, that were given to them for "free under the wikipedia.org domain"... They didn't need to do it to bring knowledge to millions of people. They did it, because of their not-so-secret anti-copyright agenda.
Right. Even if it is my own creation, I must allow everyone else to use it, or else even I can't use it — not even on my own user page.
Indeed. Such is the Wikipedia's rulers' zeal — and to me, it is far more worrying, than that of the Evite employees...
There is a feature on Evite.com, which lets you associate your own icon with your "account". Obviously, using copyrighted images is prohibited.
Well, the geniuses at Evite have deleted my logo, which I created in Paintbrush back in 1993 (before switching to Unix for good), because — they thought — it can't possibly be my own creation...
Well, ass-covering, ignorant dimwits working for a corporation... Spit-spit-spit...
Years later, the same image is forcibly deleted by Wikipedia — where it was only used on my own user-page.
The idiocy spreads...
Maybe, there is some artistic merit to that poorly-drawn cat on a castle wall? Should I try selling it or something?
Actually, stealing a car is a felony — except, evidently, in Seattle, where it is a "gross misdemeanor". One's life is much more likely to be ruined by such a conviction, than by "financial destruction of a future" — which is a waaaay too pessimistic a term for $10-20K.
Punitive damages are meant to punish the offender, not just compensate the victim for their loss (which, because of the legal fees and the costs of investigation are still way higher). The young woman infringed knowingly — not by accident.
She was not even stealing bread, medicine, or other vital sustenance — it was just entertainment. I have no sympathy for her, and neither should you... And yet, puzzlingly, there will, no doubt, be angry follow-ups (and negative moderations) here claiming that:
Student labs tend to be administered by professional admins. Those people neither need nor will accept a one-size-fits all solution made by someone else. And they can devise a read-only boot-from-the-network solution, that works better, is easier to maintain, and is otherwise superior to a pre-made CD.
But yes, there may be cases, where a compiler could come handy even on a read-only system. Yet, when deciding, what to throw out to save space, the compiler toolchain is the obvious first candidate — right after the UUCP subsystem (if OpenBSD still includes that even in the full distribution — FreeBSD no longer does, for example).
Why would you want a compiler on a read-only system? A text-editor may be useful to craft an e-mail (in /tmp), but results of compilation are typically expected to survive a reboot or two...
The costs of training and porting are, usually, far in excess of the original purchase. Even if I did not, strictly speaking, buy anything — such as in the case of free software — my investment is substantial.
Which is why I'm still mad at the KDE project for releasing an alpha-version as "4.0". And the most recent 4.1.2 (9 months later) is still no more than beta...
Is "shuffling aimlessly", what you are going to decide on?
Sorry, the important things are in the transcript — even if it takes a dedicated pundit to fish out the particularly striking idiocies.
"French kicked out Hezbollah," — said the supposed "foreign policy expert" — that's what I'm going to be making fun of, for sure...
The way Microsoft could spin this, would be to offer Windows as an upgrade: "Sure, you can use the government's free offering, but for a truly enjoyable experience, shell-out some money to get genuine Windows on your laptop."
It would not even be much of a stretch, to be perfectly honest. After going through pains of KDE and Gnome on FreeBSD, I decided to try it on the slick KUbuntu (maybe, I thought, the stuff sucks on FreeBSD, because developers mostly test on Linux) — and it is even worse...
KMail, despite ton of really cool features, crashes often, and its IMAP implementation is nefarious. Thunderbird is more stable, but hangs often upon a message with a Return-Receipt (!). Firefox is awesome, but Firefox3, mysteriously looses older version's bookmarks and the back-button changes are quite atrocious. OpenOffice is still way behind Microsoft's on a number of features too.
Reduced hardware support, although not the fault of the OS, is another drawback...
The first step in avoiding the totalitarianism is by acknowledging, that violating copyright is wrong. If it is sincerely accepted as wrong, those millions of children may gradually stop doing it — or doing it less.
What we have on Slashdot, however, is perverse logic — you are advocating, that there is nothing wrong with the activity, because stopping it would require a totalitarian state!
Millions of kids (and adults) engage in other petty crimes like graffiti, littering, and graffiti. Properly stopping such things may require something "Singaporean" (which bans chewing gum sales to prevent it sticking to shoes), even if not fully totalitarian. Are you proposing, we stop not only enforcing laws against these activities, but even considering them wrong?
Should have had, you bloody idiot!! Chew some dough or something...
You are welcome to create your definitions for anything, but you should not be making parallels with the commonly accepted definition of the same term. An "economic terrorist" is no more of a "terrorist", than a guinea pig is a pig.
As long as the following is true (and it is):
there is nothing particularly outrageous about them.
Are you seriously calling a retailer "a parasite" (of one degree of "neediness" or another)? Presumably then, "the host" is the manufacturer? Wow... Do you like buying your DVD-players and toothbrushes in bulk? 'Cause if you don't, the "parasites" all provide extremely useful service to you...
Let me tell you the real reason you hate them Wal-Mart, even though Target, Kmart, etc are doing (or trying to do) the exact same thing... Unlike others, Wal-Mart actively fights unions (you know, the racketeers miraculously exempt from anti-trust laws). Unions, understandably, hate them with passion and organize all sorts of campaigns against them. That last link says:
Now, I doubt, you'd have the personal integrity and honesty to admit to being a union sheeple, so I'll just leave this "debate" at that. So long...
Propaganda bullshit. Buy low, sell high, bend over backwards to please your customers — that's how a business is supposed to run. Walmart is just very good at it, much to the customers' delight and the competition's chagrin.
Does it? Well, please, explain, how the term "terrorism", which is defined as:
apply to Walmart?
Or were you simply using the loaded term as a general purpose dirty word? Seems like it...
Well, if it came out of your lungs into atmosphere — it is everybody's. But you are, of course, entitled to collect your own CO2, if you'd like and sell it on the free market.
Only until it becomes practical to do that. When it does, expect the market of all sorts of airs ("Wisconsin Pasture", "Vermont Forest") — and expect people trying to sneak into the crops-covering air-collecting canopy for a sniff to get busted (deservingly).
Well, as long as the fraudsters favor all parties equally I don't really care... But there is evidence, that they don't. ACORN — an organization tied to the most such frad — is very far to the left, for example, and US already had one presidency "delivered" by such methods. Interestingly, the vote-stealing, that gave the US the disaster called JFK, took place in the same city, where the Left's current super-star chose to make his career...
Obama is not a Chicago-native, you know...
That's cool. I'll use that to defend a new Alaska drilling project as "using renewable energy".
But allow me to rephrase my point, lest it may be lost in the debate on whether caribou are renewable (and at what rate). How about: It wouldn't be unconscionable to power the thing by waterboarding caribou in order to preserve the nation's power grid and communications?..
Well, if the result of their work ends up using a renewable energy source for this reason, that's fine with me. What I object to is their ruling out all other energy sources a priori.
Neither is likely to survive a nuclear bomb, however... The energy source needs to be compact and well-protected. Whether it is renewable is (or ought to be) irrelevant — the system is not supposed to work forever — only for a short time after the disaster.
No part of the objective seems to require the solution to be renewable energy-powered. It wouldn't be unconscionable to power the thing by burning caribou in order to preserve the nation's power grid, and communications...
But somebody had money earmarked to "renewable energy" and somebody else knew, how to craft a proposal.
Your taxes hard at work — at getting wasted.
Meanwhile, OUR wonderful governments here can not secure the voting rights against the scammers...
Dead people voting? No computers raising alarms...
"Destructive"? WTF?..