Ok, explain to me exactly WHY you aren't filing suit versus the Federal Government for gross violation of your constitutional righ
I'd guess because either (1) he's broke, (2) he wants to just move on or (3) he tried , and the lawyer & judge told him "the government can't get sued for doing its job."
The first statement is a bit harsh--but the second was flase (folks have been held w/o bail hearings for centuries) and the third was probably just a judge trying to adapt to the unknown.
Too bad this entirely logical, rational, practical and most importantly, extremely likely to succeed scenerio will never happen. NASA will never give up the control.
If simply throwing money at the problems would solve them, they'd be solved by now.
Science be damned, I don't give a flying fuck how many micro-experiments some fat scientist can do light-minutes away from the danger. I care about humanity, and human achievement.
The ONLY way to get the money for good science in space is to make it either profitable in the reasonable future OR an element of human heroism.
If YOU think that you have a way to make any of those three things happen, then by all means figure out a way to get there and do it, NASA or no NASA. I wager China, Eurpoe, or Russia would listen if you were willing to go and pitch your proposal to them.
Simalcrum: from the D&D spell (and maybe from wherever that came from.)
In AD&D, a "Simalcrum" was a lesser form of a "clone", made of snow & ice and a bit of the caster's flesh.
I'm sure that there's a bigger Sci Fi reference, but I wager that most of/. (and a good portion of the net) gets the vocabulary from AD&D.
And on that note--why doens't the Jargon File mention RPGs? AD&D Trolls are most vulnerable to fire--which has always struck me as the most likely reason why "Trolls" are attacked by "flames." (I think "flame" came first, and "troll" came second.)
Absolute horseshit! Where the fuck do you get off on saying that?
It's my opinion, and I can support it rationally until the cows come home.
I don;t think I've ever heard this before. I think that's some sort of popular myth.
No, it's my opnion of how things SHOULD be. The "popular myth" is that atheism isn't a religion. It is. Agnosticism is what isn't a religion.
What they're really after, rightly so, is the freedom to enjoy the same rights that the rest of society enjoys, and to do so free from discrimination.
The only atheists who call themselves such and want anything aren't just after a place to assemble and some tax breaks for their "anti-church." They're after a descruction of what We as a Nation have given religions.
I have never heard of someone being discriminated against for being atheist--religious employment notwithstanding. I _have_, on the other hand, heard of all sorts of discrimination based on classic religion.
When a group of people with what they think are similar beliefs get together and carve things in stone or paper, that process of adaptation ceases, because all of a sudden, there's a defined set of rules, usually somebody else's rules, and what they thought were common beliefs is now a religion, with all the thought control and politics that goes with it, (and people who think that politics doesn't exist within a given religion is seriously deluding themselves)
A religion is a way of getting people to have the same faith. Every church is a means to an end, not an end in itself--and their worst problems happen when they forget that.
Is Hinduism a religion? I don't know enough about it to judge, but it does seem to have it's own form of cleric
The defining aspect of a religion is tradition, not enforcement. Wicca is a religion, despite being so segmented that no three wiccans I've talked to have told me the same thing about their faith.
Out where? You imply that, because atheists do not have a belief in some sort of supernatural being, we don't believe in anything. I believe in myself, and in the power of nature. Both, as far as I can tell, are pretty real. Bump your head into the next tree branch if you think it's not.
In the realm of the supernatural, where spirits go when they die and where God and the Angels and the Devil play games with man. Or, if you like, "everywhere."
Atheism is a rejection of divinity--"there are no Gods out there at all." It's not universal divinity--that'd be Bhuddism or Satanism. It's not the spiritual power of nature--that'd be wicca, druidism, or shinto.
Atheism is the positive belief that the God I belive in, the gods my wiccan friends believe in, and the spiritual oneness that a buddist believes in are all not just mistakes about the same thing, but totally false faries tales that are not true.
To be blunt: Atheism is science taken to a religious levels, and with the doubt removed.
Ahh...so it's something that's voted on!
Er, no. All I said was that what special benefits Christians or Jews have are a reflection of their numbers among the population. Any social group that gains a significant proportion of the populace gets special rights just on the basis of that affiliton--be they a religion or a political party.
What you're saying is that, unless you're part of the majority religion, or at least a Republicrat, you're less equal than those that are. Show me where it says that in either your consitution or mine.
(Aren't you an American?)
Bill of Rights, Freedom to Assemble. If you have ten friends, and you all put in a dollar, you can get some beer. If you have a million friends and you all put in a dollar, you can buy a small town.
And take your christian blinders off, and realize that not everybody needs that imaginary superfriends as a crutch for reality.
The veracity of my religious choice is a different matter entirely from the legal and ethical and social aspects of the individual's right to a religion.
Take your atheist blinders off, and realize that rational and intelligent people CAN believe in religion.
Whose right is being taken away? The legal IP owner who decides to license his software under the GPL? The person that wants to use the software without abiding by the IP owner's license?
Hey, I didn't write the license.
The GPL works by essentially bribing people to follow it. Yes, the fact that it is strictly voluntary is a good argument, but the GPL has sticky parts like its ambiguosness (where, exactly, is the line between "works that happen to be distributed together" and "parts of the same work"?) and its stickyness ("you can use your own license, but you can't add any restrictions and have to be at least as open as the GPL is--but if you want to give MORE away, have fun")
The right that's being taken away is the right of someone to decide how to license their work. The mechanism that takes away this right is a contract called the GPL, and everyone who uses it gets access to all of the GPL'd code in turn.
Communism, on the other hand, is a system taken up by a Nation as a Whole wherein they all cede their property to "The People." It's often through force of arms or democratic process--both perfectly legal ways of changing a corrupt government (and whatever else you may think, the precommunist governments in Russia and China _were_ corrupt.)
I get tired of such stupid comparisons. Get it straight: sharing information is not unAmerican, it violates no one's rights and it helps everyone but those who would perpetually sell you the equivalent that does not work as well.
There is a corallary between Communism and Stallmanesque Free Software : both take away a private right and, through a legal and ideally fair means, give it "the people." But since Stallman doesn't have a military or a lot of cash, he doesn't have nearly the corruption issues.:)
Of course, the comparison is foolhardly when you're talking about BSD...
Hell, even your local lobbying groups can have an affect, even if they're not affected by the foreign laws. For example, the nosey LDS (Mormon) church heavily lobbied in several states (I want to say Hawaii and Alaska) a few years ago to try to defeat state laws that would legitimize same-sex marriages. I forget what the outcome was, but ut illustrates my point.
Marriage is a power reserved to the states, and the federal government requiers states to give full weight to the actions of other states in marriages, corporate charters, contracts, et cetera.
Because of the Gay Marriage debate, the Feds gave states the right to exclude recognition of Gay Marriages. Which is why a NH Civil union won't necessarilly get you anything in NY.
Copyright is all about the control of the aritst. They (or whomever they hire to manage / sell the rights to) decide who can and cannot make copies of the copywritten work. P2P, for the largest part, is used to circumvent this right.
Take away every P2P file-transfer protocol in the world and put in the harshest DRM possible--and small acts can STILL choose to give away their music for no cost. And they'll have the added bonus of interlocking their name in with the file, thus elminating faulty ID3 tags.
RIAA has every right to lobby for and get laws passed that enforce copyright. Fair Use can flow through the analog hole just like it did before MP3, and those who want to give away the MP3s will still do so.
I don't think atheists are looking for any sort of "special rights" any more than gays and lesbians are...just the same rights that you and I already enjoy.
Every time I hear an atheist claim that atheism isn't a religion, they're looking for special rights.
As far as the government, the legal system, every business in the world, every scientific institution, and just about every other secular aspect of society is concerned, Atheism IS a religion, and should be treated as one among equals. Doing otherwise gives them special treatment. (If an atheist scientist says "there is definitly no God", he should be as ridiculed as if a Christian Scientist says "God is proven to exist.")
As for Gays and Lesbians: I'm all for government setting up a strucutre where two persons (or, heck, more than two persons) can bind their legal personage together for medical, legal, and tax purposes. The church doesn't have to let them come, regonize their union, or even treat them as human if it doesn't want to. But the agnostic government sure as heck should.
Plus, atheism/major religions and gay rights/legislated morality are two very differnet things. You don't see homosexuals saying "marriage is a myth", and you don't see atheists just wanting the right to get together and talk about how there is no god.
What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
What do you mean?
Should we withhold government money from groups that happen to be religious--despite that they serve the same purpose as non religious groups?
Should we ban speaking about religion in schools-- but allow speaking against it?
Should you be able to tell everyone who wants to prostleytize you to go away--why, sure we should, but only as much as you can tell someone who wants to sell you something to go away.
Atheism is a religion, in every practical and objective measurement of what "a religion" is. Getting into specifics such as rejection of deities is a religious argument, just as if we Christians were to say "Hinduism isn't a religion because they don't worship God."
A religion is what you believe is "out there". If you believe that nothing is out there, you're an atheist and you have a positive belief in nothing. (If you _don't know_ what's out there, either by not being sure of your beliefs or being sure that you "can't know", your're agnostic, not atheist.)
When it comes down to it: Atheists allready have all of the special rights that anyone who belongs to a minority religion (like satanism or wicca) allready enjoys, and the "rights" that come with the majority religions are a reflection of numbers, and the government has litte right to interfere with that kind of thing.
To others, "computer security" means restricted hardware that filters the data it will read and write, so IP owners can exert more control.
No, that's "Trusted Computing."
A computer is "Secure" when it does what it was designed to, as instructed by its owner and only those the owner permits to use it.
A computer is apparantly "Trusted" when a third party can be sure that their software working with their files won't be corrupted by the owner of the machine who it happens to be running on.
If you don't want your PC to be "trusted", or to run "trusted" apps, then don't.:)
The beautiful thing about Columbia was not that it was an American venture, but that it contained the hopes and dreams of many nations.
Excuse me?
Columbia was an American venture, first and foremost. Any aid we may have had from the rest of the world was just that--aid.
Sure there is recognition in being first, but the glory is not that, but that this country, the USA, contributed to mankind's greater glory. Remember, "One giant step for mankind"?
You're right. But the glory is still American--the Columbia was a chiefly American loss, followed by Israel and then (distantly) by India and then the rest of the world.
It's like the friggin' Sept. 11 bombing--it wasn't an attack on "the free world" or "the west" or even "the opporessors." It was a bare-balls attack on America.
I love my country, I love my planet, and I love my species--but we're a LONG ways from doing away with nations and politics, and until we are no good comes from poaching and prending that we aren't something that we are.
Pramatically, it'd be great if the UN took up the space exploration gig, and China, Russia, the USA, & India & all the rest got together to colonize mars, harvest the moon, and expand out of our little planet. But we're not there yet, and pretending that we are won't make it come any sooner.
Atheism is no more a religion that baldness is a hair colour.
You're exactly right. Atheists had been persecuted throughout history when, almost universally, they were identical to those that persecuted them save for one aspect.
But today, we cannot allow this previous persecution to give special benefits to atheists. They should be treated, in the law and in business, just as anyone else.
No one should ever say "We're all bald, and that's the truth, and your hair is nothing more than dead cells that isn't even part of you!" (which, btw, is almost but not entirely true--my hair is very much a part of who I am.)
Also, the Geneva convention, AFAIK, only applies to wars between signatories. Also, in case you haven't noticed, only the losers of a war get tried for war crimes.
Actually, the apparant exemption is "only folks with nukes and UN veto powers" don't get tried for war crimes--though the court should (theoretically) change that.
The US doesn't lose Wars. (Anymore. yeah, yeah, Canadains burned DC almost two centuries ago....)
1: It wasn't the Canadians, it was the army of the British Empire.
2: The War of 1812 was one of the wars that we shouldn't have started, and so, not surprising, we didn't win.
3: We lost the Vietnam War--er, the "rebellion of French Indochina, wherein the French lost any hope of redemption in the American conciousness."
People really need to learn math. Are you saying that your chances are 100% right now.
Yes. If you are using P2P, your chances of getting caught are 100% of your chance of getting caught right now.
Probability, of course, is a worse lie than statistics, and I'm not qualified to compute the exact lie--but I do know that, given that there is a statute of limitations, the clock starts running the instant that a person stops, and runs until they're unprosecutable.
For example, if you didn't file your income taxes in 1993, you might as well not bother now, as the statue has long run out.
If you perform an activity and recieve for it something that you would normally pay money for, you can (and sometimes have to) consider your pay for that activity the cost of the object that you've given.
Doublespeak would be equating "financial gain" with "giving money away"--for example, if a webradio station decided to give away paid-for licenses to listen to MP3s, the station is, by no stretch of the imagination, gaining financially.
Firstly, the definition of "financial gain" only applies to Title 17. There are a whole bunch of notes that seem to exempt "financial gain" from exemptions. (yes, that's a double excemption. See why we need lawyers?)
Secondly, trading books with your mom isn't a violation of copyright, as you didn't make a copy. (duh.)
Microsoft only has the chance to do evil things because it is a monopoly, and anyway it's not like they are unduly worried about what the US govt says or thinks. They've been told to stop being evil many times, and so far haven't shown many signs of slowing down.
MS has been doing evil things for a long, long time. The monopoly only keeps those who dislike their evil from finding an equally viable alternative (though Openoffice is, praise be to the coders, just about what I want. Developer build 643 fixed the last major bug, and once it rolls into 1.1 I can learn to live without Word's Outline View.)
Other than the fact that $25 is still $25 higher than Windows (and many, many people get windows "for free"), I think that'd do jack all to stop Linux.
I didn't say stop Linux, I said stop Windows piracy. $100 for the right to install Windows on a second PC is too much. $25 is just about right.
Huh? How does that work? If anything that description would apply to Apple which is firmly under Microsofts thumb, and couldn't get high market share anyway due to not using commodity hardware.
The benefits of competition for anyone are a drive to improve their product--and in the case of noncopyrightable nonpatentable ideas, a way to get new ideas and yet another source of feedback on the UI.
OpenOffice has some elements of it that are simply better than Word--I haven't used it extensively, and I can tell that. The UI folks at MS are probably looking over every new Word Processor, to see what the "scratch and itch" coders of Linux think should be done differently (and how well their changes work.)
A monopoly is about the most valuable thing you can have.
No, it isn't. Monopolies bring regulation and obstruction and resentment. The most valuable business line is a product that is capitalistically better than anything else in the market--but isn't a monopoly.
Anyway, if they weren't interested in wiping it out why all the anti-GPL rhetoric earlier? Why have they been going around telling people Linux might open them up to patent lawsuits?
Because the GPL works against them--and it isn't a core part of Linux. If MS got the GPL outlawed, it'd take all of a month for Linux to be re-released under a new license.
Also, MS is trying to marginalize / minimize Linux--but that's not equal to wiping it from the face of the Earth.
No, I'm sure any MS rep would tell you Windows 2000 would make a far better server platform
And when the client says "I run two webservers and your OS license is too much", they'll likely say something like "well, if you really want to run the risk of X, X, and X, we'll help you by doing Y."
But what sales reps say and what the company knows are two entirely different things.
Commmercial skipping algorithms have already been developed for VCRs.
Those work only because the TV broadcast leaves room for the commercial-skipping algorithims to catch. Edit out the blackspace on you digital TV download, and you've got yourself a much more difficult problem.
Plus, TV can always go back the old model of interweaving advertisments with the show. Either a "thank the sponsors" segment, or a direct promotion--both of which are likely to be left in even by commerical-clippers.
Let's not forget the facts though, Microsoft is literally trying to wipe linux from the face of the earth.(I'd like to see someone argue with that fact)
OK.
Linux, in its current form, is MS's best way to solve its two biggest problems.
Firstly, if a significant share of the "wintel" market goes to Linux, MS will no longer be a monopoly--and can go back to doing whatever cuthroat things it wants to for another twenty years, without the government having cause to intervene and tell it to stop being evil.
Secondly, the presence of a free Linux gives it an escape vector to channel software pirates to. If MS _really_ wanted to wipe Linux from the world, they could simply cut the prices on their OS distributions for home users to $25 a pop, which would effectively kill of piracy of windows.
The really nice bit is that Linux / OpenOffice / KOffice provide MS with all of the beneifts of serious competition without any of the real competition. (When was the last time that you saw a Linux flyer in the mail?) There are all sorts of innovative ideas that Linux software comes up with, and MS can steal and benefit from them as much as they benefit from MS.
In short: MS benefits from Linux as much as Intel benefits from AMD, and wiping it out is far, far more trouble than it's worth. MS just wants to marginalize Linux so it can maximize its profit margin, and let Linux & Apple fill in the rest.
Plus, MS knows that Linux is better in some situations, and supports it. Heck, my webpage runs on Frontpage under Linux!
Ok, so rather than assign blame to whomever leaked their unfinished content to Napster these artists chose to blame the medium that the culprit used. Am I missing something here? (Honest question, no sarcasm intended.)
Anyone with half a brain realized twenty years ago that the bootleg/file-sharing network essentially relied on being under the artists's collective radar for existance.
Napster created a medium that encouraged sharing of _any_ MP3 file, and had no checks whatsoever--not even bad ones--on catching songs that would likely get RIAA angry.
Unless I'm missing some important details, your logic would have me persecuting the various telcos and makers of fax machines if someone were to steal my industrial trade secrets and fax them to a member of the press.
Napster was less like a fax machine company and more like a broadcast network or a "file swapper's convention." If the former stepped out of line, they would directly be sued. If the later stepped out of line and had a big enough audience, they would be sued.
Advocates of P2P (who, IMO [IANAL,duh], are legally on the same footing as advocates of automatic assault weapons being used for hunting) realized that Napster got sued because they were a central authority, and all follow-ups to Napster have relied on convoluted schemes to avoid this.
But file-sharing is a legal problem, and just as there shouldn't be a technology-based answer to a legal problem, neither should there be a technology-based loophole. RIAA _should_ be able to stop anyone from trading their songs for any reason--which will hasten their (much needed) demise.
A company is sometimes better than a unixlike monolithic kernel? Right. I to disagree about that, if the company happens to be Microsoft, anyway.
Why, yes. I tried asking the Linux kernel for support, and it didn't respond at all! At least MS gave me the pleasure of lying to me and letting me be ignored by real live idiots...;)
I found it interesting that some outfit called 'Swords and Sorcery Studios' has partnered with Blizzard to put out the Dungeons & Dragons WarCraft RPG too. I'm sure there's a couple of geeks who still get off on spinning 20 sided dice for kicks.
SSS is a great company. They're a subsidiary of another company you may have heard of: White Wolf, makers of the Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/Hunter storyteller games.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, explain to me exactly WHY you aren't filing suit versus the Federal Government for gross violation of your constitutional righ
I'd guess because either (1) he's broke, (2) he wants to just move on or (3) he tried , and the lawyer & judge told him "the government can't get sued for doing its job."
The first statement is a bit harsh--but the second was flase (folks have been held w/o bail hearings for centuries) and the third was probably just a judge trying to adapt to the unknown.
Too bad this entirely logical, rational, practical and most importantly, extremely likely to succeed scenerio will never happen. NASA will never give up the control.
If simply throwing money at the problems would solve them, they'd be solved by now.
Science be damned, I don't give a flying fuck how many micro-experiments some fat scientist can do light-minutes away from the danger. I care about humanity, and human achievement.
The ONLY way to get the money for good science in space is to make it either profitable in the reasonable future OR an element of human heroism.
If YOU think that you have a way to make any of those three things happen, then by all means figure out a way to get there and do it, NASA or no NASA. I wager China, Eurpoe, or Russia would listen if you were willing to go and pitch your proposal to them.
Simalcrum: from the D&D spell (and maybe from wherever that came from.)
/. (and a good portion of the net) gets the vocabulary from AD&D.
In AD&D, a "Simalcrum" was a lesser form of a "clone", made of snow & ice and a bit of the caster's flesh.
I'm sure that there's a bigger Sci Fi reference, but I wager that most of
And on that note--why doens't the Jargon File mention RPGs? AD&D Trolls are most vulnerable to fire--which has always struck me as the most likely reason why "Trolls" are attacked by "flames." (I think "flame" came first, and "troll" came second.)
Absolute horseshit! Where the fuck do you get off on saying that?
It's my opinion, and I can support it rationally until the cows come home.
I don;t think I've ever heard this before. I think that's some sort of popular myth.
No, it's my opnion of how things SHOULD be. The "popular myth" is that atheism isn't a religion. It is. Agnosticism is what isn't a religion.
What they're really after, rightly so, is the freedom to enjoy the same rights that the rest of society enjoys, and to do so free from discrimination.
The only atheists who call themselves such and want anything aren't just after a place to assemble and some tax breaks for their "anti-church." They're after a descruction of what We as a Nation have given religions.
I have never heard of someone being discriminated against for being atheist--religious employment notwithstanding. I _have_, on the other hand, heard of all sorts of discrimination based on classic religion.
When a group of people with what they think are similar beliefs get together and carve things in stone or paper, that process of adaptation ceases, because all of a sudden, there's a defined set of rules, usually somebody else's rules, and what they thought were common beliefs is now a religion, with all the thought control and politics that goes with it, (and people who think that politics doesn't exist within a given religion is seriously deluding themselves)
A religion is a way of getting people to have the same faith. Every church is a means to an end, not an end in itself--and their worst problems happen when they forget that.
Is Hinduism a religion? I don't know enough about it to judge, but it does seem to have it's own form of cleric
The defining aspect of a religion is tradition, not enforcement. Wicca is a religion, despite being so segmented that no three wiccans I've talked to have told me the same thing about their faith.
Out where? You imply that, because atheists do not have a belief in some sort of supernatural being, we don't believe in anything. I believe in myself, and in the power of nature. Both, as far as I can tell, are pretty real. Bump your head into the next tree branch if you think it's not.
In the realm of the supernatural, where spirits go when they die and where God and the Angels and the Devil play games with man. Or, if you like, "everywhere."
Atheism is a rejection of divinity--"there are no Gods out there at all." It's not universal divinity--that'd be Bhuddism or Satanism. It's not the spiritual power of nature--that'd be wicca, druidism, or shinto.
Atheism is the positive belief that the God I belive in, the gods my wiccan friends believe in, and the spiritual oneness that a buddist believes in are all not just mistakes about the same thing, but totally false faries tales that are not true.
To be blunt: Atheism is science taken to a religious levels, and with the doubt removed.
Ahh...so it's something that's voted on!
Er, no. All I said was that what special benefits Christians or Jews have are a reflection of their numbers among the population. Any social group that gains a significant proportion of the populace gets special rights just on the basis of that affiliton--be they a religion or a political party.
What you're saying is that, unless you're part of the majority religion, or at least a Republicrat, you're less equal than those that are. Show me where it says that in either your consitution or mine.
(Aren't you an American?)
Bill of Rights, Freedom to Assemble. If you have ten friends, and you all put in a dollar, you can get some beer. If you have a million friends and you all put in a dollar, you can buy a small town.
And take your christian blinders off, and realize that not everybody needs that imaginary superfriends as a crutch for reality.
The veracity of my religious choice is a different matter entirely from the legal and ethical and social aspects of the individual's right to a religion.
Take your atheist blinders off, and realize that rational and intelligent people CAN believe in religion.
Whose right is being taken away? The legal IP owner who decides to license his software under the GPL? The person that wants to use the software without abiding by the IP owner's license?
Hey, I didn't write the license.
The GPL works by essentially bribing people to follow it. Yes, the fact that it is strictly voluntary is a good argument, but the GPL has sticky parts like its ambiguosness (where, exactly, is the line between "works that happen to be distributed together" and "parts of the same work"?) and its stickyness ("you can use your own license, but you can't add any restrictions and have to be at least as open as the GPL is--but if you want to give MORE away, have fun")
The right that's being taken away is the right of someone to decide how to license their work. The mechanism that takes away this right is a contract called the GPL, and everyone who uses it gets access to all of the GPL'd code in turn.
Communism, on the other hand, is a system taken up by a Nation as a Whole wherein they all cede their property to "The People." It's often through force of arms or democratic process--both perfectly legal ways of changing a corrupt government (and whatever else you may think, the precommunist governments in Russia and China _were_ corrupt.)
I get tired of such stupid comparisons. Get it straight: sharing information is not unAmerican, it violates no one's rights and it helps everyone but those who would perpetually sell you the equivalent that does not work as well.
:)
There is a corallary between Communism and Stallmanesque Free Software : both take away a private right and, through a legal and ideally fair means, give it "the people." But since Stallman doesn't have a military or a lot of cash, he doesn't have nearly the corruption issues.
Of course, the comparison is foolhardly when you're talking about BSD...
Hell, even your local lobbying groups can have an affect, even if they're not affected by the foreign laws. For example, the nosey LDS (Mormon) church heavily lobbied in several states (I want to say Hawaii and Alaska) a few years ago to try to defeat state laws that would legitimize same-sex marriages. I forget what the outcome was, but ut illustrates my point.
Marriage is a power reserved to the states, and the federal government requiers states to give full weight to the actions of other states in marriages, corporate charters, contracts, et cetera.
Because of the Gay Marriage debate, the Feds gave states the right to exclude recognition of Gay Marriages. Which is why a NH Civil union won't necessarilly get you anything in NY.
Oh, for crying out loud.
Copyright is all about the control of the aritst. They (or whomever they hire to manage / sell the rights to) decide who can and cannot make copies of the copywritten work. P2P, for the largest part, is used to circumvent this right.
Take away every P2P file-transfer protocol in the world and put in the harshest DRM possible--and small acts can STILL choose to give away their music for no cost. And they'll have the added bonus of interlocking their name in with the file, thus elminating faulty ID3 tags.
RIAA has every right to lobby for and get laws passed that enforce copyright. Fair Use can flow through the analog hole just like it did before MP3, and those who want to give away the MP3s will still do so.
I don't think atheists are looking for any sort of "special rights" any more than gays and lesbians are...just the same rights that you and I already enjoy.
Every time I hear an atheist claim that atheism isn't a religion, they're looking for special rights.
As far as the government, the legal system, every business in the world, every scientific institution, and just about every other secular aspect of society is concerned, Atheism IS a religion, and should be treated as one among equals. Doing otherwise gives them special treatment. (If an atheist scientist says "there is definitly no God", he should be as ridiculed as if a Christian Scientist says "God is proven to exist.")
As for Gays and Lesbians: I'm all for government setting up a strucutre where two persons (or, heck, more than two persons) can bind their legal personage together for medical, legal, and tax purposes. The church doesn't have to let them come, regonize their union, or even treat them as human if it doesn't want to. But the agnostic government sure as heck should.
Plus, atheism/major religions and gay rights/legislated morality are two very differnet things. You don't see homosexuals saying "marriage is a myth", and you don't see atheists just wanting the right to get together and talk about how there is no god.
What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
What do you mean?
Should we withhold government money from groups that happen to be religious--despite that they serve the same purpose as non religious groups?
Should we ban speaking about religion in schools-- but allow speaking against it?
Should you be able to tell everyone who wants to prostleytize you to go away--why, sure we should, but only as much as you can tell someone who wants to sell you something to go away.
Atheism is a religion, in every practical and objective measurement of what "a religion" is. Getting into specifics such as rejection of deities is a religious argument, just as if we Christians were to say "Hinduism isn't a religion because they don't worship God."
A religion is what you believe is "out there". If you believe that nothing is out there, you're an atheist and you have a positive belief in nothing. (If you _don't know_ what's out there, either by not being sure of your beliefs or being sure that you "can't know", your're agnostic, not atheist.)
When it comes down to it: Atheists allready have all of the special rights that anyone who belongs to a minority religion (like satanism or wicca) allready enjoys, and the "rights" that come with the majority religions are a reflection of numbers, and the government has litte right to interfere with that kind of thing.
To others, "computer security" means restricted hardware that filters the data it will read and write, so IP owners can exert more control.
:)
No, that's "Trusted Computing."
A computer is "Secure" when it does what it was designed to, as instructed by its owner and only those the owner permits to use it.
A computer is apparantly "Trusted" when a third party can be sure that their software working with their files won't be corrupted by the owner of the machine who it happens to be running on.
If you don't want your PC to be "trusted", or to run "trusted" apps, then don't.
The beautiful thing about Columbia was not that it was an American venture, but that it contained the hopes and dreams of many nations.
Excuse me?
Columbia was an American venture, first and foremost. Any aid we may have had from the rest of the world was just that--aid.
Sure there is recognition in being first, but the glory is not that, but that this country, the USA, contributed to mankind's greater glory. Remember, "One giant step for mankind"?
You're right. But the glory is still American--the Columbia was a chiefly American loss, followed by Israel and then (distantly) by India and then the rest of the world.
It's like the friggin' Sept. 11 bombing--it wasn't an attack on "the free world" or "the west" or even "the opporessors." It was a bare-balls attack on America.
I love my country, I love my planet, and I love my species--but we're a LONG ways from doing away with nations and politics, and until we are no good comes from poaching and prending that we aren't something that we are.
Pramatically, it'd be great if the UN took up the space exploration gig, and China, Russia, the USA, & India & all the rest got together to colonize mars, harvest the moon, and expand out of our little planet. But we're not there yet, and pretending that we are won't make it come any sooner.
Atheism is no more a religion that baldness is a hair colour.
You're exactly right. Atheists had been persecuted throughout history when, almost universally, they were identical to those that persecuted them save for one aspect.
But today, we cannot allow this previous persecution to give special benefits to atheists. They should be treated, in the law and in business, just as anyone else.
No one should ever say "We're all bald, and that's the truth, and your hair is nothing more than dead cells that isn't even part of you!" (which, btw, is almost but not entirely true--my hair is very much a part of who I am.)
Also, the Geneva convention, AFAIK, only applies to wars between signatories. Also, in case you haven't noticed, only the losers of a war get tried for war crimes.
Actually, the apparant exemption is "only folks with nukes and UN veto powers" don't get tried for war crimes--though the court should (theoretically) change that.
The US doesn't lose Wars. (Anymore. yeah, yeah, Canadains burned DC almost two centuries ago....)
1: It wasn't the Canadians, it was the army of the British Empire.
2: The War of 1812 was one of the wars that we shouldn't have started, and so, not surprising, we didn't win.
3: We lost the Vietnam War--er, the "rebellion of French Indochina, wherein the French lost any hope of redemption in the American conciousness."
This theory is of course difficult if not impossible to test, but it begs the question - is it possible to interrupt that connection?
Of course it is. Any blunt object inserted into a person's grey matter will assuredly disrupt that connection.
The _real_ question is, can this connection be altered or controlled to influence someone--or transmitted, reconnected, et cetera?
People really need to learn math. Are you saying that your chances are 100% right now.
Yes. If you are using P2P, your chances of getting caught are 100% of your chance of getting caught right now.
Probability, of course, is a worse lie than statistics, and I'm not qualified to compute the exact lie--but I do know that, given that there is a statute of limitations, the clock starts running the instant that a person stops, and runs until they're unprosecutable.
For example, if you didn't file your income taxes in 1993, you might as well not bother now, as the statue has long run out.
So in essence, theres no reason for me to stop, now that I've already started.
No, there is. IIRC, there's a three year statute of limiations on copyright violations, criminal or civl. (IANAL, duh)
Stop _right now_, and the chances of you getting smacked for P2P start decreasing by 0.09% every day.
Welcome to the doublespeak future.
If you perform an activity and recieve for it something that you would normally pay money for, you can (and sometimes have to) consider your pay for that activity the cost of the object that you've given.
Doublespeak would be equating "financial gain" with "giving money away"--for example, if a webradio station decided to give away paid-for licenses to listen to MP3s, the station is, by no stretch of the imagination, gaining financially.
Two bits (IANAL,GWFY).
Firstly, the definition of "financial gain" only applies to Title 17. There are a whole bunch of notes that seem to exempt "financial gain" from exemptions. (yes, that's a double excemption. See why we need lawyers?)
Secondly, trading books with your mom isn't a violation of copyright, as you didn't make a copy. (duh.)
And after a few days, the files won't play at all unless you pay more to extend your license.
Unless they said so in the original deal (or had a "we can amend this at any time" line), they'd get dragged into court for that.
When the service comes out, let's look it over--and if it's good, we use it, and if not, we let them know why we won't use it.
Microsoft only has the chance to do evil things because it is a monopoly, and anyway it's not like they are unduly worried about what the US govt says or thinks. They've been told to stop being evil many times, and so far haven't shown many signs of slowing down.
MS has been doing evil things for a long, long time. The monopoly only keeps those who dislike their evil from finding an equally viable alternative (though Openoffice is, praise be to the coders, just about what I want. Developer build 643 fixed the last major bug, and once it rolls into 1.1 I can learn to live without Word's Outline View.)
Other than the fact that $25 is still $25 higher than Windows (and many, many people get windows "for free"), I think that'd do jack all to stop Linux.
I didn't say stop Linux, I said stop Windows piracy. $100 for the right to install Windows on a second PC is too much. $25 is just about right.
Huh? How does that work? If anything that description would apply to Apple which is firmly under Microsofts thumb, and couldn't get high market share anyway due to not using commodity hardware.
The benefits of competition for anyone are a drive to improve their product--and in the case of noncopyrightable nonpatentable ideas, a way to get new ideas and yet another source of feedback on the UI.
OpenOffice has some elements of it that are simply better than Word--I haven't used it extensively, and I can tell that. The UI folks at MS are probably looking over every new Word Processor, to see what the "scratch and itch" coders of Linux think should be done differently (and how well their changes work.)
A monopoly is about the most valuable thing you can have.
No, it isn't. Monopolies bring regulation and obstruction and resentment. The most valuable business line is a product that is capitalistically better than anything else in the market--but isn't a monopoly.
Anyway, if they weren't interested in wiping it out why all the anti-GPL rhetoric earlier? Why have they been going around telling people Linux might open them up to patent lawsuits?
Because the GPL works against them--and it isn't a core part of Linux. If MS got the GPL outlawed, it'd take all of a month for Linux to be re-released under a new license.
Also, MS is trying to marginalize / minimize Linux--but that's not equal to wiping it from the face of the Earth.
No, I'm sure any MS rep would tell you Windows 2000 would make a far better server platform
And when the client says "I run two webservers and your OS license is too much", they'll likely say something like "well, if you really want to run the risk of X, X, and X, we'll help you by doing Y."
But what sales reps say and what the company knows are two entirely different things.
Commmercial skipping algorithms have already been developed for VCRs.
Those work only because the TV broadcast leaves room for the commercial-skipping algorithims to catch. Edit out the blackspace on you digital TV download, and you've got yourself a much more difficult problem.
Plus, TV can always go back the old model of interweaving advertisments with the show. Either a "thank the sponsors" segment, or a direct promotion--both of which are likely to be left in even by commerical-clippers.
Let's not forget the facts though, Microsoft is literally trying to wipe linux from the face of the earth.(I'd like to see someone argue with that fact)
OK.
Linux, in its current form, is MS's best way to solve its two biggest problems.
Firstly, if a significant share of the "wintel" market goes to Linux, MS will no longer be a monopoly--and can go back to doing whatever cuthroat things it wants to for another twenty years, without the government having cause to intervene and tell it to stop being evil.
Secondly, the presence of a free Linux gives it an escape vector to channel software pirates to. If MS _really_ wanted to wipe Linux from the world, they could simply cut the prices on their OS distributions for home users to $25 a pop, which would effectively kill of piracy of windows.
The really nice bit is that Linux / OpenOffice / KOffice provide MS with all of the beneifts of serious competition without any of the real competition. (When was the last time that you saw a Linux flyer in the mail?) There are all sorts of innovative ideas that Linux software comes up with, and MS can steal and benefit from them as much as they benefit from MS.
In short: MS benefits from Linux as much as Intel benefits from AMD, and wiping it out is far, far more trouble than it's worth. MS just wants to marginalize Linux so it can maximize its profit margin, and let Linux & Apple fill in the rest.
Plus, MS knows that Linux is better in some situations, and supports it. Heck, my webpage runs on Frontpage under Linux!
Ok, so rather than assign blame to whomever leaked their unfinished content to Napster these artists chose to blame the medium that the culprit used. Am I missing something here? (Honest question, no sarcasm intended.)
Anyone with half a brain realized twenty years ago that the bootleg/file-sharing network essentially relied on being under the artists's collective radar for existance.
Napster created a medium that encouraged sharing of _any_ MP3 file, and had no checks whatsoever--not even bad ones--on catching songs that would likely get RIAA angry.
Unless I'm missing some important details, your logic would have me persecuting the various telcos and makers of fax machines if someone were to steal my industrial trade secrets and fax them to a member of the press.
Napster was less like a fax machine company and more like a broadcast network or a "file swapper's convention." If the former stepped out of line, they would directly be sued. If the later stepped out of line and had a big enough audience, they would be sued.
Advocates of P2P (who, IMO [IANAL,duh], are legally on the same footing as advocates of automatic assault weapons being used for hunting) realized that Napster got sued because they were a central authority, and all follow-ups to Napster have relied on convoluted schemes to avoid this.
But file-sharing is a legal problem, and just as there shouldn't be a technology-based answer to a legal problem, neither should there be a technology-based loophole. RIAA _should_ be able to stop anyone from trading their songs for any reason--which will hasten their (much needed) demise.
A company is sometimes better than a unixlike monolithic kernel? Right. I to disagree about that, if the company happens to be Microsoft, anyway.
;)
Why, yes. I tried asking the Linux kernel for support, and it didn't respond at all! At least MS gave me the pleasure of lying to me and letting me be ignored by real live idiots...
I found it interesting that some outfit called 'Swords and Sorcery Studios' has partnered with Blizzard to put out the Dungeons & Dragons WarCraft RPG too. I'm sure there's a couple of geeks who still get off on spinning 20 sided dice for kicks.
SSS is a great company. They're a subsidiary of another company you may have heard of: White Wolf, makers of the Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/Hunter storyteller games.
SSS also did the pen & Paper Everquest game.