That's how a Union works. The rights of a worker should not be subject to a favorable job market.
Unions in the US are a vehicle for the "labor movement" to force you to pay dues and contribute to involuntary "retirement plans" where the organizers then abscond with the money before you are fully vested.
Yes, Unions are abused far too often. But that doesn't mean that they're not a good thing, and that they serve an important place in American business.
The idea that if everyone banded together then more money to pay workers would magically appear is rediculous.
That's not what Unions are for. Unions are for the workers not being bullied by management.
As long as coders are being forced to work unpaid overtime, having technical requirements set by inept managers, and being forced to compete with exported jobs, a union makes sense.
Unfortunately, the myopic view of most programmers means that a union has about as much a chance of working as a "Geek PAC."
This only applies to hourly workers who get paid less than $41/hr.
No, it applies to _anyone_ who gets paid less than $41/hr -- for the math imparied, that's either $82,000 or $85,280, depending on how you calculate your yearly hours worked.
If you make more, or if you're an exempt (management) employee, you don't get paid overtime. For the longest time it was claimed that coders were exempt because they sit in an office--which the feds apparantly found not to be true.
IANAL, but your union would probably have a few if you bothered to found one.
By "faith structures", we can say "religions" for the most part, right?
Well, yeah. I tend to think of a Religion as a body meant to bring people to a better faith / spread the good word et al, but for this discussion they're interchangeable.
I think many faith structures are much more rigid than you suppose. There's a strong unwillingness to change in fundamentalist Christianity, which is why, amazingly, there are attempts to make the fundamentals of Evolution look like a matter of continuing dispute.
The "fundamentals of evolution" are either the observable fact that creatures evolve, or the unprovable thought that _everything_ evolved.
If I proposed a scientific theory that stated, essentially, that you were born from the family dog and not your mother, you'd be pretty upset too. Especially if my standard of evidence was "look at these scratch marks from the time of your birth" and not "look, you're a dog!"
Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that science hasn't done a terrific job at explaining the why of the big bang.
Science isn't supposed to tell us WHY. It's just supposed to tells us WHAT or HOW. Religion tells us WHY.
I think the question then becomes, whatever that cause is...is it likely to look as proscribed by one of hundreds of religions? To get into that question, you have to dive pretty deeply into the apologetics of one particular belief system.
Aside from a few control-freaks that only show up in times of general turmoil--like the European Renaissance or the modern-day middle east--most religions don't say one way or the other how the world looks, what mechanism God uses to influence the World, or specifically how God created the world.
Are you KIDDING? The canonical kid question about religion is "ok, everything came from god...but where did god come from?" That is a natural question, and is a huge part of "how does God work".
"Where did God come from" and "How did God create the world" are two entirely different questions.
I don't need to know where The Great Cosmic Force That Sits Outside Of Creation came from to know that He is there, wonder about what He is like, or conjecture about how He influences creation.
Just like learning where Linux came from, and what the philoiphsy of the GPL are, won't help you figure out how the command line works beyond "its UNIXy."
I dunno, what kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "faith" to conclude that the universe just happened?
Science is the search for knowledge about the observable universe.
Faith is a belief in an entity that is beyond the knowable universe.
While Science can prove faith, it cannot disprove faith, because the boundary of the unknown keeps moving--and any one of the faith structures I have ever encountered easily can move as the boundary of the unknown moves.
Certainly non-lunatic believers have had to expand their view of how god works from a straightforward reading of holy scriptures to "god just set it up to unfold the way science is demonstrating that it did"
Only a few fanatics really cared how God worked. It has always been enough for the bulk of us to say "God works", and not to worry about how.
If the only way that God influences reality is thorough adjustments of random chance, he could still accomplish nearly every miracle attributed to Him.
No sane court could find the author's intent to be to place the work in question in the public domain, where all interests are explicitly waived.
No, but they could theoretically find, as a matter of policy, that an "anyone can use it" clause in a license is equivalent to releasing the source as public domain, because allowing folks to have a "semi PD" would be chilling to innovation and all...
Of course, that'd be easy to shoot down on the "they can just not distribute it at all", "it'd become PD in X years anyway", and "Look at all of the new stuff that OSS had produced" arguments.
And then again, it should have been easy to get a real remedy against MS, what with the Appeals Court saying "we agree with Jackson, but he was an ass so, just to be safe, we're handing this back to the circuit court."
Yes I am. I guess I know more than you, in fact. Can you tell me why do you think otherwise?
Because you were complaining about someone Opening their code. Open--even a LITTLE open--is better that totally closed.
If we could pass a law that required any company EOLing a piece of software to that was sold in the past 18 months (or even longer--5 years, or 10, or 20...) to Public Domain their code, the world would move step closer to the Free Software ideals.
What they did was neither GNU GPL, nor BSD, nor compatible with GNU GPL. Perhaps not even with unmodified BSD, practically speaking, due to BSD having that obnoxious advertising clause...
Well, shoot. There goes the code-mixing benefit. But at least it's better than nothing.
OK, there goes the "code re-use" and "contribution to the cause" benefits.
But it still lets those who use Walcom use it, forever, and update it themselves as needs be--which was, after all, the original flash point for Free Software.
Re:The ./ obsession with a cashless society?
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You know it is illegal to 'trade' items in America? You may ONLY use cash or some form on money. You may not give me 2 sheep for 1 cow, legally.
Sure you can. You just need to declare a cash value for each sale.
i.e., if we appraise my cow at $400, and your sheep at $200, we can trade them--and then we'll have to keep track of the $40 sales tax we both owe the gov't, for when we hit the "must pay sales tax" number of transactions.
Which is why I think this sort of thing should be illegal... because, quite simply, you have no way of ensuring that the other guy on the other side votes for who he said he'd vote for. And you can't -make- it that way without impinging on your own right to vote for a candidate anonymously.
You're absolutely right. And while we're at it, let's ban political contributions (because you can't be sure that your canidate won't do a 180 on every issue once he's in office) and political parties (because you can't be sure that everone will follow the party line.)
The fact is, people are fundamentally honest. And as long as everyone is aware of the facts, and the agreements are nonbinding, there's nothing unethical, amoral or illegal about it.
Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software.
Maybe you're not up to snuff on the philosiphy of code-reuse and what Free Software means.
If software and code is a commodity, and the value then becomes it configuration/customization, then every little bit of trash that can be opened is a Very Good Thing. If the company was proprietary their entire corporate life, but releases the soruce as GPL (or BSD) when they fold, this is a Good Act and should be Lauded and Welcomed and Thanked.
The darn site's/.'ed--but as long as they use a GPL-compatbile license, there's nothing stopping the GCC folks from pouring over OpenWalcom for anything useful.
Nowhere in the OT did it say that homosexual sex is fine as long as the people involved are monogamous. Nor monogamous fornication outside of marriage.
Technically, it didn't say that homosexuality was wrong, eihter--but that may or may not have just been a lack of a herbrew word for "homosexual."
But to get back on topic--Religion backed by Science is, oddly enough, the answer to AIDS. Sleeping around is dangerous. Sleeping around in ammoral. If we all only had sex with one other person in our entire lives--or even if the "group" of those we have sex with all have to agree to add anyone--then AIDS would die out within a generation.
And to get back off of topic--it reminds me a lot about the way Christian morality works. You won't be punnished if you violate most of the laws--you just won't be rewarded.
Re:Given that live music is the best music...
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Royalties go to the Label, Producer, Studio, Artists, RIAA, and who knows who else
No. Royalties go to the artists--who may be songwrtiers, performers, mixers, or producers. Everyone else gets either a commission (a cut of those royalties) or a fee (a cut off the top.)
The label/studio loans the artists money to make the CD, from which the artists pay the studio and their non-artists assistants. The CD is then given to the Label, who makes & sells the CD for the revenue. From that, they give the artists an agreed-upon royalty, first paying back the advance that they were originally given.
This is why artists can "sell a million-copy record and not see a dime." They get their advance, they have _too much_ charged against it, and then they never see after-advance royalties.
Remember that, if you ever get into a recording deal, you need to ask "how much is that going to cost me?" And for God's sake, get a lawyer--I guarantee the studio/label/evil scumball agent all have one.
Crap, The only reason the USA is going there is because bush has fucked the US econamy (sic) and needs some diversion
Only? Nah. "Main" maybe, but hardly "only."
Even if you don't agree with them, it's hard not to believe that at least SOME of the folks in government really would prefer to have Saddam beaten senseless, and will take any excuse to do so, regardless of the economy.
It's sorta like the chistians who put together the bible. No matter what the truth of their religion might be, THEY believed that it was true and that they were doing The Right Thing--and attempts by historians to malign their intentions (as opposed to their methods, results, or authority) simply aren't true.
Again, what makes you think that I'm a 'christian supremacist?'
The only brick wall I'm seing here is an apparantly insecure atheist who can't get "Atheism is not a religion" out of his head long enough to let even a little bit of "atheism should be treated equal to a religion by the government" in.
Ironically, the premier of Alberta (one of the largest sources of oil in the world) seems to support the war... not sure why though...:-P
Because it's not a war about oil. Iraq has offered to sell the US oil at a 20% discount from OPEC prices, if only we leave them be. If it was about oil, we'd just pull back and let them sell--or buckle down and let them suffer, as the case may be.
The war is about pride, morality, and finishing what we started. The US did a large part to put Saddam in power during the Cold War. The US didn't remove Saddam when we had the chance. Saddam has had more than a decade to clean up his act, and he hasn't.
Plus, the bugger happened to try and kill the first President Bush--which should be the only fact anyone needs to know why our current Texan-in-Chief wants to take out Saddam if they don't believe the morality argument.
Hey, look--I'm an American, I drive through Canada on my way to MI every few years, and as far as I care--if Canada wants to sit the war out, I won't hold it against ya.;) But just don't try and keep us from flexing our overly-paid for war muscle and feeling a bit better about ourselves as we try to improve the world.
But--and this is important, so listen closen--as far as anyone who is neither atheist nor religion cares, they ARE the same thing. And since the law, business, science, and a whole load of other things are neither religious nor atheist, atheism and all 'other' religions fall under the 'religion' catagory.
Atheism is not and cannot be a religion. We do not need to hold assembly together. We do not need to be governed by a central body. We do not need to follow a leader, fictitious or real. We do not need to have a text, oral tradition or whatever that dictates a set of "divine" or other laws or rules.
Odd, the exact same things can be, and often are, said about Wicca, which is very much a religion. (And for the record, most of them could be said about my flavor of Christianity.)
So stop lumping us in with the rest of you religious types that obviously can't think for yourselves, and need all these to maintain your slim grasp on reality!
If you can't live with that, that's your tough shit!
The _only_ difference between "atheism" and "a religion" is sematnics. You're too insecure in your religious choice to state it without attacking the choices of others. You've probably experienced a bad attempt at "saving" on the hands of someone who would otherwise be close to you, and you haven't dealt with it in a healthy manner.
I haven't gone to church in years. I regularly hold discussions on my own with people who do not believe the same way that I do, and I have yet to quote religious authority to justify my morals or my beliefs--and I have almost no religious beliefs that I have not thought out and justified in an agnostic meme.
Please, for your own sake, drop the zealotry. You don't have a cause to advance, you don't have a people to applaud you, and you don't have a divinity who will reward you--that is, unless of course you're just lying.
Either way, all that you're accomplishing is making yourself look poor.
If you can't wait to save for an education, or save for a house, or save for a car, then do without them. It's an individual's problem if they are too compulsive to ever save for the things they want.
Do us all a favor. Give back everything your parents gave you, give away everything you've ever bought on credit, quit your job, change your identity (and thus lose your education), and then tell me how easy it is to save.
Being poor SUCKS in America. Hell, not being rich sucks.
There is no one within four tax brackets of me who could _ever_ hope to save for anything more than a crappy little house that won't even hold themselves and their (also-working) spouse if they couldn't get a mortage.
Society DOES promote this sense of immediate self-gratification, but no where is this a requirement
You're right. Living in an apartment and driving a beaten up car ten miles to a minimum wage job is perfectly acceptable in society. And it's also perfectly acceptable to check the credit of these people when they apply for a job, just to make sure that they're "good enough."
I had to put deposits down on all sorts of things when I first started out on my own and had no problem with it. Eventually (usually after a year) they give it back once you've proved you are a reliable customer.
I have no problem at all with the consequneces of bad credit on people who sell you things or loan you money. Heck, I really don't even really mind if my employer checks my credit history.
But someone asked what the difference was between a credit report and any of the other reports, and I told them. Drug use is illegal and frowned upon; no one gets a criminal record unless they've done something illegal in the past.
But there is no law, no ethic, and no moral against using credit. (Whether it's 'required' or not isn't going to be settled on/.). Because of this, it shouldn't be lumped in with "all those other checks" when someone applys for a job that has nothing to do with the credit system.
I don't understand how this is different from a drug screening test. Most employers require it. How's that different from a background check?
Society does not require you to use drugs, abuse the equipment you have at work, or commit any other crimes.
But society DOES require you to use credit, if you want an education, house, reliable car, or most utilities. And becasue of that, your credit rating should no more be of relevance to a non-financial job than you should be thrown into debtor's prison.
Personally I'd be more worried if they told me they were going to do a check to make sure I didn't have Smurfs (replace with your race of choice) in my family lineage going back 100 years. Now that would be problematic.
I wouldn't be worried at all. I'd write it down, walk out, and call the local DA. And probably the FBI.
Let's learn what we can now cheaply, and regroup in 10-25 years and go to Mars, or form a colony on the moon, or do something else really radical that broadens the future for mankind.
The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, a lack of technology or science.
The problem has been, since the days of Skylab, one of money. (Trivia question: what was the first scheduled shuttle mission? A _BOOSTER_ for skylab. Had the shuttle + booster been built in time, we'd have had a space station in orbit for quite possibly just as long as the Russians.)
he magic of the internet is that people don't care who you are, unless it relates to the internet
You obviously haven't been paying attention since Sept. 11, 2001. People DO care on the 'net who and what you are in real life. It's just that it's easy to hide who you are on the 'net--though I wouldn't call that "magical."
Your religious boast is lost on me.
It's a statement, not a boast.
A boast would be, "I play RPGs, but since I'm Catholic I'm not going to hell for it."
(And if I was catholic, that'd be a pretty funny sig. Gotta tell Kovar about that one.)
That said, you probably have a point in including those two things in your.sig. So, please either explain to me how those two things relate (what, are you upset because they named a game Diablo?), or change the.sig. Because it doesn't do me any good.
Actually, I'm upset that my religion has been co-opted by people who don't like RPGs--or, alternatly, that my hobby has been demonized by those who need to demonize something else so they don't look so bad.
I see nothing against my religion in D&D or any other RPG. (Diablo, btw, is not an RPG. It's a computer game.) It's no more a sin that performing in or going to go see a Greek Tragedy is--and since there's real Good and Evil in most RPGs, it's actually better for my spiritually that, oh, kernel hacking would be.
My sig used to be "YES, I'm a Christian", to make it blindingly obvious that I am what I am and I don't care to hide it. After I got tired of the atheists and the zealots attacking me for my sig, I toned it down a bit.
You forget option #4: the lawsuit might be meritless.
That was option 3.
The misdeeds of others in unrelated matters, even if worthy of prosecution, are irrelevant to whether Mitnick was treated fairly.
Site note: if Mitnick WERE to sue them, it'd be in civil court, as "Mitnick vs. USA" or somesuch. Not criminal. The misdeeds of one person to another, even if not criminal or not provable beyond a reasonable doubt, may very well be torts provable to a purponderance of the evidence.
IANAL, but I know some legal shtuff. But I'm in NY, so that balances out and leaves me at net:cluess.
Slashdot Mirror
That's wrong. Vote with your feet.
That's how a Union works. The rights of a worker should not be subject to a favorable job market.
Unions in the US are a vehicle for the "labor movement" to force you to pay dues and contribute to involuntary "retirement plans" where the organizers then abscond with the money before you are fully vested.
Yes, Unions are abused far too often. But that doesn't mean that they're not a good thing, and that they serve an important place in American business.
The idea that if everyone banded together then more money to pay workers would magically appear is rediculous.
That's not what Unions are for. Unions are for the workers not being bullied by management.
As long as coders are being forced to work unpaid overtime, having technical requirements set by inept managers, and being forced to compete with exported jobs, a union makes sense.
Unfortunately, the myopic view of most programmers means that a union has about as much a chance of working as a "Geek PAC."
This only applies to hourly workers who get paid less than $41/hr.
No, it applies to _anyone_ who gets paid less than $41/hr -- for the math imparied, that's either $82,000 or $85,280, depending on how you calculate your yearly hours worked.
If you make more, or if you're an exempt (management) employee, you don't get paid overtime. For the longest time it was claimed that coders were exempt because they sit in an office--which the feds apparantly found not to be true.
IANAL, but your union would probably have a few if you bothered to found one.
By "faith structures", we can say "religions" for the most part, right?
Well, yeah. I tend to think of a Religion as a body meant to bring people to a better faith / spread the good word et al, but for this discussion they're interchangeable.
I think many faith structures are much more rigid than you suppose. There's a strong unwillingness to change in fundamentalist Christianity, which is why, amazingly, there are attempts to make the fundamentals of Evolution look like a matter of continuing dispute.
The "fundamentals of evolution" are either the observable fact that creatures evolve, or the unprovable thought that _everything_ evolved.
If I proposed a scientific theory that stated, essentially, that you were born from the family dog and not your mother, you'd be pretty upset too. Especially if my standard of evidence was "look at these scratch marks from the time of your birth" and not "look, you're a dog!"
Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that science hasn't done a terrific job at explaining the why of the big bang.
Science isn't supposed to tell us WHY. It's just supposed to tells us WHAT or HOW. Religion tells us WHY.
I think the question then becomes, whatever that cause is...is it likely to look as proscribed by one of hundreds of religions? To get into that question, you have to dive pretty deeply into the apologetics of one particular belief system.
Aside from a few control-freaks that only show up in times of general turmoil--like the European Renaissance or the modern-day middle east--most religions don't say one way or the other how the world looks, what mechanism God uses to influence the World, or specifically how God created the world.
Are you KIDDING? The canonical kid question about religion is "ok, everything came from god...but where did god come from?" That is a natural question, and is a huge part of "how does God work".
"Where did God come from" and "How did God create the world" are two entirely different questions.
I don't need to know where The Great Cosmic Force That Sits Outside Of Creation came from to know that He is there, wonder about what He is like, or conjecture about how He influences creation.
Just like learning where Linux came from, and what the philoiphsy of the GPL are, won't help you figure out how the command line works beyond "its UNIXy."
I dunno, what kind of cosmic evidence would it take for "faith" to conclude that the universe just happened?
Science is the search for knowledge about the observable universe.
Faith is a belief in an entity that is beyond the knowable universe.
While Science can prove faith, it cannot disprove faith, because the boundary of the unknown keeps moving--and any one of the faith structures I have ever encountered easily can move as the boundary of the unknown moves.
Certainly non-lunatic believers have had to expand their view of how god works from a straightforward reading of holy scriptures to "god just set it up to unfold the way science is demonstrating that it did"
Only a few fanatics really cared how God worked. It has always been enough for the bulk of us to say "God works", and not to worry about how.
If the only way that God influences reality is thorough adjustments of random chance, he could still accomplish nearly every miracle attributed to Him.
No sane court could find the author's intent to be to place the work in question in the public domain, where all interests are explicitly waived.
No, but they could theoretically find, as a matter of policy, that an "anyone can use it" clause in a license is equivalent to releasing the source as public domain, because allowing folks to have a "semi PD" would be chilling to innovation and all...
Of course, that'd be easy to shoot down on the "they can just not distribute it at all", "it'd become PD in X years anyway", and "Look at all of the new stuff that OSS had produced" arguments.
And then again, it should have been easy to get a real remedy against MS, what with the Appeals Court saying "we agree with Jackson, but he was an ass so, just to be safe, we're handing this back to the circuit court."
(IANAL,duh)
Yes I am. I guess I know more than you, in fact. Can you tell me why do you think otherwise?
Because you were complaining about someone Opening their code. Open--even a LITTLE open--is better that totally closed.
If we could pass a law that required any company EOLing a piece of software to that was sold in the past 18 months (or even longer--5 years, or 10, or 20...) to Public Domain their code, the world would move step closer to the Free Software ideals.
What they did was neither GNU GPL, nor BSD, nor compatible with GNU GPL. Perhaps not even with unmodified BSD, practically speaking, due to BSD having that obnoxious advertising clause...
Well, shoot. There goes the code-mixing benefit. But at least it's better than nothing.
As the parent post said, it is GPL incompatible.
OK, there goes the "code re-use" and "contribution to the cause" benefits.
But it still lets those who use Walcom use it, forever, and update it themselves as needs be--which was, after all, the original flash point for Free Software.
You know it is illegal to 'trade' items in America? You may ONLY use cash or some form on money. You may not give me 2 sheep for 1 cow, legally.
Sure you can. You just need to declare a cash value for each sale.
i.e., if we appraise my cow at $400, and your sheep at $200, we can trade them--and then we'll have to keep track of the $40 sales tax we both owe the gov't, for when we hit the "must pay sales tax" number of transactions.
Which is why I think this sort of thing should be illegal... because, quite simply, you have no way of ensuring that the other guy on the other side votes for who he said he'd vote for. And you can't -make- it that way without impinging on your own right to vote for a candidate anonymously.
You're absolutely right. And while we're at it, let's ban political contributions (because you can't be sure that your canidate won't do a 180 on every issue once he's in office) and political parties (because you can't be sure that everone will follow the party line.)
The fact is, people are fundamentally honest. And as long as everyone is aware of the facts, and the agreements are nonbinding, there's nothing unethical, amoral or illegal about it.
Yet another company trying to use free software as a dumping ground for useless software.
/.'ed--but as long as they use a GPL-compatbile license, there's nothing stopping the GCC folks from pouring over OpenWalcom for anything useful.
Maybe you're not up to snuff on the philosiphy of code-reuse and what Free Software means.
If software and code is a commodity, and the value then becomes it configuration/customization, then every little bit of trash that can be opened is a Very Good Thing. If the company was proprietary their entire corporate life, but releases the soruce as GPL (or BSD) when they fold, this is a Good Act and should be Lauded and Welcomed and Thanked.
The darn site's
Nowhere in the OT did it say that homosexual sex is fine as long as the people involved are monogamous. Nor monogamous fornication outside of marriage.
Technically, it didn't say that homosexuality was wrong, eihter--but that may or may not have just been a lack of a herbrew word for "homosexual."
But to get back on topic--Religion backed by Science is, oddly enough, the answer to AIDS. Sleeping around is dangerous. Sleeping around in ammoral. If we all only had sex with one other person in our entire lives--or even if the "group" of those we have sex with all have to agree to add anyone--then AIDS would die out within a generation.
And to get back off of topic--it reminds me a lot about the way Christian morality works. You won't be punnished if you violate most of the laws--you just won't be rewarded.
Royalties go to the Label, Producer, Studio, Artists, RIAA, and who knows who else
No. Royalties go to the artists--who may be songwrtiers, performers, mixers, or producers. Everyone else gets either a commission (a cut of those royalties) or a fee (a cut off the top.)
The label/studio loans the artists money to make the CD, from which the artists pay the studio and their non-artists assistants. The CD is then given to the Label, who makes & sells the CD for the revenue. From that, they give the artists an agreed-upon royalty, first paying back the advance that they were originally given.
This is why artists can "sell a million-copy record and not see a dime." They get their advance, they have _too much_ charged against it, and then they never see after-advance royalties.
Remember that, if you ever get into a recording deal, you need to ask "how much is that going to cost me?" And for God's sake, get a lawyer--I guarantee the studio/label/evil scumball agent all have one.
Crap, The only reason the USA is going there is because bush has fucked the US econamy (sic) and needs some diversion
;)
Only? Nah. "Main" maybe, but hardly "only."
Even if you don't agree with them, it's hard not to believe that at least SOME of the folks in government really would prefer to have Saddam beaten senseless, and will take any excuse to do so, regardless of the economy.
It's sorta like the chistians who put together the bible. No matter what the truth of their religion might be, THEY believed that it was true and that they were doing The Right Thing--and attempts by historians to malign their intentions (as opposed to their methods, results, or authority) simply aren't true.
Back on topic, though... GLASS IRAQ!
Talking to a christian supremacist
Again, what makes you think that I'm a 'christian supremacist?'
The only brick wall I'm seing here is an apparantly insecure atheist who can't get "Atheism is not a religion" out of his head long enough to let even a little bit of "atheism should be treated equal to a religion by the government" in.
*sigh*
Ironically, the premier of Alberta (one of the largest sources of oil in the world) seems to support the war... not sure why though... :-P
;) But just don't try and keep us from flexing our overly-paid for war muscle and feeling a bit better about ourselves as we try to improve the world.
Because it's not a war about oil. Iraq has offered to sell the US oil at a 20% discount from OPEC prices, if only we leave them be. If it was about oil, we'd just pull back and let them sell--or buckle down and let them suffer, as the case may be.
The war is about pride, morality, and finishing what we started. The US did a large part to put Saddam in power during the Cold War. The US didn't remove Saddam when we had the chance. Saddam has had more than a decade to clean up his act, and he hasn't.
Plus, the bugger happened to try and kill the first President Bush--which should be the only fact anyone needs to know why our current Texan-in-Chief wants to take out Saddam if they don't believe the morality argument.
Hey, look--I'm an American, I drive through Canada on my way to MI every few years, and as far as I care--if Canada wants to sit the war out, I won't hold it against ya.
Atheism is not and cannot be a religion.
And baldness is not and cannot be a hair color.
But--and this is important, so listen closen--as far as anyone who is neither atheist nor religion cares, they ARE the same thing. And since the law, business, science, and a whole load of other things are neither religious nor atheist, atheism and all 'other' religions fall under the 'religion' catagory.
Atheism is not and cannot be a religion. We do not need to hold assembly together. We do not need to be governed by a central body. We do not need to follow a leader, fictitious or real. We do not need to have a text, oral tradition or whatever that dictates a set of "divine" or other laws or rules.
Odd, the exact same things can be, and often are, said about Wicca, which is very much a religion. (And for the record, most of them could be said about my flavor of Christianity.)
So stop lumping us in with the rest of you religious types that obviously can't think for yourselves, and need all these to maintain your slim grasp on reality!
If you can't live with that, that's your tough shit!
The _only_ difference between "atheism" and "a religion" is sematnics. You're too insecure in your religious choice to state it without attacking the choices of others. You've probably experienced a bad attempt at "saving" on the hands of someone who would otherwise be close to you, and you haven't dealt with it in a healthy manner.
I haven't gone to church in years. I regularly hold discussions on my own with people who do not believe the same way that I do, and I have yet to quote religious authority to justify my morals or my beliefs--and I have almost no religious beliefs that I have not thought out and justified in an agnostic meme.
Please, for your own sake, drop the zealotry. You don't have a cause to advance, you don't have a people to applaud you, and you don't have a divinity who will reward you--that is, unless of course you're just lying.
Either way, all that you're accomplishing is making yourself look poor.
If you can't wait to save for an education, or save for a house, or save for a car, then do without them. It's an individual's problem if they are too compulsive to ever save for the things they want.
/.). Because of this, it shouldn't be lumped in with "all those other checks" when someone applys for a job that has nothing to do with the credit system.
Do us all a favor. Give back everything your parents gave you, give away everything you've ever bought on credit, quit your job, change your identity (and thus lose your education), and then tell me how easy it is to save.
Being poor SUCKS in America. Hell, not being rich sucks.
There is no one within four tax brackets of me who could _ever_ hope to save for anything more than a crappy little house that won't even hold themselves and their (also-working) spouse if they couldn't get a mortage.
Society DOES promote this sense of immediate self-gratification, but no where is this a requirement
You're right. Living in an apartment and driving a beaten up car ten miles to a minimum wage job is perfectly acceptable in society. And it's also perfectly acceptable to check the credit of these people when they apply for a job, just to make sure that they're "good enough."
I had to put deposits down on all sorts of things when I first started out on my own and had no problem with it. Eventually (usually after a year) they give it back once you've proved you are a reliable customer.
I have no problem at all with the consequneces of bad credit on people who sell you things or loan you money. Heck, I really don't even really mind if my employer checks my credit history.
But someone asked what the difference was between a credit report and any of the other reports, and I told them. Drug use is illegal and frowned upon; no one gets a criminal record unless they've done something illegal in the past.
But there is no law, no ethic, and no moral against using credit. (Whether it's 'required' or not isn't going to be settled on
I don't understand how this is different from a drug screening test. Most employers require it. How's that different from a background check?
Society does not require you to use drugs, abuse the equipment you have at work, or commit any other crimes.
But society DOES require you to use credit, if you want an education, house, reliable car, or most utilities. And becasue of that, your credit rating should no more be of relevance to a non-financial job than you should be thrown into debtor's prison.
Personally I'd be more worried if they told me they were going to do a check to make sure I didn't have Smurfs (replace with your race of choice) in my family lineage going back 100 years. Now that would be problematic.
I wouldn't be worried at all. I'd write it down, walk out, and call the local DA. And probably the FBI.
The problem hasn't been money, it's spending the money on the right thing.
;)
That's still a money problem; it would fundamentally be solved "simply" by giving NASA an unlimited budget.
Let's learn what we can now cheaply, and regroup in 10-25 years and go to Mars, or form a colony on the moon, or do something else really radical that broadens the future for mankind.
The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, a lack of technology or science.
The problem has been, since the days of Skylab, one of money. (Trivia question: what was the first scheduled shuttle mission? A _BOOSTER_ for skylab. Had the shuttle + booster been built in time, we'd have had a space station in orbit for quite possibly just as long as the Russians.)
he magic of the internet is that people don't care who you are, unless it relates to the internet
.sig. So, please either explain to me how those two things relate (what, are you upset because they named a game Diablo?), or change the .sig. Because it doesn't do me any good.
You obviously haven't been paying attention since Sept. 11, 2001. People DO care on the 'net who and what you are in real life. It's just that it's easy to hide who you are on the 'net--though I wouldn't call that "magical."
Your religious boast is lost on me.
It's a statement, not a boast.
A boast would be, "I play RPGs, but since I'm Catholic I'm not going to hell for it."
(And if I was catholic, that'd be a pretty funny sig. Gotta tell Kovar about that one.)
That said, you probably have a point in including those two things in your
Actually, I'm upset that my religion has been co-opted by people who don't like RPGs--or, alternatly, that my hobby has been demonized by those who need to demonize something else so they don't look so bad.
I see nothing against my religion in D&D or any other RPG. (Diablo, btw, is not an RPG. It's a computer game.) It's no more a sin that performing in or going to go see a Greek Tragedy is--and since there's real Good and Evil in most RPGs, it's actually better for my spiritually that, oh, kernel hacking would be.
My sig used to be "YES, I'm a Christian", to make it blindingly obvious that I am what I am and I don't care to hide it. After I got tired of the atheists and the zealots attacking me for my sig, I toned it down a bit.
So, what's your story?
You forget option #4: the lawsuit might be meritless.
That was option 3.
The misdeeds of others in unrelated matters, even if worthy of prosecution, are irrelevant to whether Mitnick was treated fairly.
Site note: if Mitnick WERE to sue them, it'd be in civil court, as "Mitnick vs. USA" or somesuch. Not criminal. The misdeeds of one person to another, even if not criminal or not provable beyond a reasonable doubt, may very well be torts provable to a purponderance of the evidence.
IANAL, but I know some legal shtuff. But I'm in NY, so that balances out and leaves me at net:cluess.
Just out of curiousity, could you give a specific example of this?
* Residents of Boston, 1775
* Union Dissidents, circa Civil War
* Native Americans, pre-1950ish (and post)
* Japanese Americans, cira WWII
Oddly enough, AFAIK the same justification was used in all instances: "National Security."
(IANAH)
But why send astronauts into space at all, anywhere, at this point?
Because astronauts can check their telemetry, and not bounce off of mars.
Because humans are _still_ more efficient at direct science.
Because it inspires the country, and makes space travel worthwhile AT ALL.