Metallica didn't even care about Napster until their unfinished work started showing up. The same thing was what got Dr. Dre, Madonna, and every other artist who cared to come out against Napster.
Oh, and Al Gore never said he invented the internet, Geroge W. Bush isn't an idiot, a good slice of Rush Limbaugh's audience are democrats, and sometimes Microsoft is better than Linux.
No. All the mistakes you'd expect from human beings cavorting in the dead of night.
AFAIK, there are hundreds of crop circles a year. People have come foward claiming that they have made crop circles, and I there is no reason at all to doubt that at least some of them are made by these public hoaxers.
But there ARE near-perfect complex crop circles (which implies an intelligence--maybe mutant gophers, maybe civilian genius pranksters, maybe military folks having fun, maybe Something Else.)
I'm hardly in awe of crop circles--I have God if I really want to be awed. But I have no reason to doubt the information that there are crop circles that have truly complex characteristics, which--at the least--require more than a 2x4 and some rope.
As it is, the worst thing that can happen if you share is that you get told to stop - if there was a substantial chance that sharing files meant a $100 ticket, they would dry out pretty fast.
See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
Even if we make the system so efficient that the RIAA only needs to spend one hour of lawyer time per offender to get an injunction, and all that they ask for is an injunction and legal fees, the costs of a civil suit could easily exceed $100.
If you're file sharing, the ONLY things keeping you from a rather nasty civil suit are your obscurity and the time the RIAA would have to spend to take you down if they found you.
Signatures from MS are irrelevent. What matters is that the signature stored on the chip matches the boot sector. MS doesn't have to sign it; you do. Of course, this might prevent you from dual-booting Linux and MS, since MS might make their system refuse to install unless you put their signature into the chip, but I have an easy solution to that. I just install Linux, and don't run anything from MS.:)
Funny... IIRC, MS's settlement agreement specifically said that they have to fix their bootloader...
I wonder when people will realize you can make these things with a 2x4 and a piece of rope? I'm from Nebraska, we've got a lot of corn there... So, well, its just fun, ya know? -Bill
Of course you can. And they can, too. But there are a few more phenomina to it than just pressing down crops.
Nearly-perfect geometic shapes
small (measured in micron) iron spheres scattered throughout the crop circle
Slightly elevated radition / "cooked" effect to pushed-down corn
and, finally, odd performance from aircraft around crop circles
The last one its the one that threw me. On the "TV mentury" that documented a few graduate engineers faking a "genuine" crop circle, their helicopter suffered an loss of power over the darn thing. Odd--not the stuff of religious revelations, but odd.
Crop circles may be an as-yet undocumented natural phenomina, a higher-order of technology (Military or "UFO"), or just a really, really, REALLY clever prank. I don't know, I've never seen one.
But they are more than you can do with "just a 2x4 and a piece of rope."
Re:Well though out response..
on
SOHO Strikes Back
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The fringes will never be convinced, but responses like this and Phil Plait's BadAtromy.com will help to explain to the inquiring minds who's scientific literacy isn't what it should be.
It's "whose", not "who's." You didn't mean to say "who is."
Anyway--what does it matter what someone's "scientific literacy" is? If someone wants to spend their lives on the fringes of science, knowing that their only hope of peer acceptance is extraordinary proof to back up their extraordinary claims, let them.
As for the site you horribly mis-quoted--it's as fringe as the UFO freaks. "the fields of science, skepticism, and Rational Thinking" are the kinds of words that a zealous atheist uses when they try and mix their religion and science.
It's a useful site, to be sure, but it's hardly peer-reivewed science. (For example, differences of terminology such as "Incidentally, the name of the constellation of the scorpion is Scorpius, not Scorpio. Also, the goat is Capricornus, not Capricorn. So there." really shouldn't bother anyone...)
When was the last time you heard more regular laws being changed without there being a clear change in government?
Quite often, actually. Civil Rights, Women's Lib, the repeal of Prohibition, etc.
The problem with IP laws is that they aren't a clear "remove the law and get more freedom" issue. All three kinds of IP law are a balance between The People and The IP Holders, but The People generally don't care for the contract negotations.
And in some measure it *is* the CTEA (aka the Sony Bono act) and its predecessors that keep Elvis off the PD slate, since they revized how long "basic copyright law" keeps works away from the public.
2003 - 1977 = 26 years ago.
I'm not up on the history of law, but I think it's been more than a century since copyrights were _that_ short.
There are other reasons too, but let's not forget that Bush comes from big oil.
Let's not forget that Sadam has been a thorn in our side for eleven years, broke the peace treaty we signed with him--oh, and attempted to kill one of our Presidents, who just happened to be the current one's Dad.
Big Oil has little if anything to do with the USA's hatred of Iraq. It's all politics: part national pride, part humanitarian outrage.
We are now looking for Oil in africa [gortbusters.org], despite the poor governments that exist there.
Oil in Africa belongs to those governments. If we find it, than we'll have a vested interest in helping them, and our aid will go up--and since they'll have a viable exploitable resource, they'll get the unusual chance to have what we want to buy from them.
Before the Middle Eastern oil was discovered, the place was a backwater with religious zealots. Now it's a rich "second world" backwater with religious zealots and enough money to feed everyone.
Actually, copyrights run out after 50 or so years, it's why you can download elvis without worry now.
Have you even been paying attention?
Lessig just lost a claim in the Supreme Court that retroactively extended every extant copyright in the past seventy years for 95 years if a corporation or 90 years after the artist dies.
You _cannot_ download elvis without infriging on the copyright of whomever owns the rights to the King--either a music industry tycoon or his daughter.
Same goes for J.R.R. Tolkien, the warner bros. wartime propaganda (from WWII), and big band music.
Let's assume that Elvis, rich as he was, never sold his copyrights on both his lyrics and his performance. He died in 1977. Assuming that there's no more extensions to copyright again (which is entirely possible, given the recent outcry), Elvis won't enter the Public Domain until 2067--so you've got sixty four _more_ years to wait.
Oh, and it's not the friggin' DMCA, the Sony Bono act, the PATRIOT act, or anything else that keeps Elivs off the PD slate. It's basic copyright law.
Let's not forget that they were SUSPECTED terrorists. We just didn't bother with things like capture and trials. Remote control execution now makes these pesky details less of a problem. If we (the USA) think we don't like you, we kill you. No questions asked.
Behold, the peril of being a citizen of a foreign power that feels it can irk a much more powerful and beligerant nation.
The peoples of Yemen are welcome to apply to be a US State, or at least a territory, at which point they would all become citizens and be the folks the military is protecting, rather than the folks that the military is protecting against.
Until then, as far as I care we support their rights when convenient and trample them at will--if they want to be protected, they can pay taxes and set up a government like the rest of us.;)
the US has signed treaties to prevent such research cause if someone believed that they can indeed survive a MAD scenario they may actually push the button.
And if someone wants to end it all, or is willing to die to take out the other guy, they may push the button as well.
The smaller a country gets with WMD, the less MAD makes sense.
Well, sure, but Nazi Germany's government was VERY efficient. Shit, they built the Autobahn in less than 10 years.
Yep. And if they weren't genocidal, irrational, and bent on the destruction of everyone else, they'd still be around and maybe even be our "most favored nation" right now.
The evils of the Nazis were great, but "efficency" wasn't one of them.
Privacy is a very important part of free speech. People who have view points opposed to the government (or other powerful group) often need the cloak of anonymity to prevent unjust persecution.
In situations where this is true, a legal bar against anonymnity will not stop the speaking.
Every cause in America today has, or should have, a public front, which can safetly pass along the anonymous messages of its supporters, and these supporters should be able to be identified as such.
That is why you can expect a phone call to be private, but the police can get a court order to breech your privacy.
And the CIA can do it just for fun--and at work, my employer can do it at whim, and at home my spouse can do it at whim.
There are checks on phone taps not to protect my privacy, but to curtail police abuse.
The evil DMCA has tipped the balance away from fairness and allows your right to privacy to be broken too easily.
What section deals with breaching privacy, again?
The DMCA makes classic hacking a crime, and since the hackers didn't get engaged in its process of creation, it's banaced towards the IP-holders who were being hacked.
BTW--this does not, in any way, shape, or form, qualify as "evil." Maybe "wrong", "reviled", "unfair", "unbalanced", or even "unconstitutional", but not "evil."
It is not a malicious act that unjustly and without cause harms anyone. It does not unfairly force a shift of cost or expense from the issuing party to others. All it does is make something that was previously dubious (or even legal) illegal--and the worst that can happen is some prison time & a police investigation & a civil trial for something that you knowingly did after it was passed.
First of all these two things are not even remotely close.
Yes, there is. They're both abuses of privacy's side effect, anonymnity, to break the law and not get caught.
Every legal freedom we have needs to stand up to an extreme case. Fer example: Everyone has free speach, even Nazi Skinheads and racist rappers. Everyone has the right to a lawyer, even rapists and terrorists. Everyone has the right to a trial by jury and a burden of "beyond a reasonable doubt" in felony murder cases--even when it's "obvious" that He Did It.
There should be the right to remain anonymous until you do something wrong.
You are mortal. You have done something wrong. If not, please found a new religion and show us the way, oh holy one.
Being able to identify our neighbors is a fundamental element of every society--and the internet just makes us a more closely-knit society, where you and I are neighbors although I suspect you live nowhere near Albany.
But for God sakes - not all things that are "wrong" are the same. Pirating overpriced music from a fucked up monopolistic greedy industry (however illegal) is no where in the same solar system as kiddie porn.
That's right. That's why they have different sentences and different budget ammounts on the DA's list of priorities. But it's not an excuse to break the hands of the police and the justice system.
RIAA will fall or succeed on its own merits and the merits of the market--while we need to be vigilant to ensure that they do not abuse the market (*cough*MS*cough*), we don't need to try and hasten their fall by stealing from them.
Advertisers can adjust their messages just for me. I can just imagine listening to the billboards ask the woman next to me on the subway if she needs more herpes medicine or how she's feeling after the divorce
Shelves your sarcasm and think about that.
A simple market survey should show that breaching someone's privacy in an nondelicate manner would likely reduce sales of their product. And, thus, we're unlikely to have it happen more than a few times.
OTOH, personalization of some purchases (like, for example, the waitress at a random Denny's I go to knowing what I've had before and being able to ask if I want the same thing or something new) is a good thing. Especially if it gets phased in via a "would you like us to remember your preferences?" model.
Big Brother was bad because he lied. The check on that is open exchange of information--not lines of privacy and control which allow for lies and disinformation.
Why is this? Because people from the US, for the most part, identify their origin by their state. It's something steeped in American tradition from when we were under the Articles of Confederation and had an extremely weak federal government uniting the otherwise independent states.
No, not really. It's because we're so friggin' huge.
If Russia was divided up into fifty provinces that had about equal population, you can be sure that they'd refer to themselves by province.
Canada's not a good example of a "foreign country", anyway. If you wanted an example of how USA citizens refer to themselves in a foreign country, try Great Britain or a country with a foreign language.
Now, why is this important for the sake of the "National ID card" debate? Because, most of us, because we identify ourselves by states, fear even further encroachment of the federal government on what is currently the responsibility of the state.
Hardly. We just have paranoid privacy zealots who fear making government efficient.
Technically, we don't have _any_ government ID card, and so we use the state driver's license in its place.;)
It appears that, in general, South Africa has leapt way ahead of the US in a large number of policy areas, not just Open Source.
I think the answer to this is that "ahead" is not necessarily "better."
for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality
Leaving the moral argument aside (Yes, there is a moral argument against homosexuality--not that I believe it per-se, but I can concieve of it and I'm an amataeur), I certainly want to be able to discriminate based on percieved sexuality--if nothing else, I want to live in a world where homosexuals can identify and seperate themselves from the heterosexuals when it comes to finding a date.;)
domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works
Huh? Can you elaborate on that?
Now, to be fair, I haven't been back in SA since the '94 elections, so I don't know how much of the new government's legislation has made it into actual practice, but it does seem odd that SA is apparently overtaking the US in terms of the general "cluefulness" of the administration.
The USA has a long history of going our own way regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. That's why we're the most religous "modern" country, and why we've come to dominate politics in recent years--and our two-term limit presidency (among other things) means that we keep switching policy and pissing off the folks we should be helping.
So, in other words: Yeah, SA probably is further along than the USA. Half the countries in the world are probably further along than we are in one thing or another. If they weren't, and we _were_ the cream of the crop, we wouldn't have much to aspire to, now would we?;)
I'm sorry, but I think it's the control owners of said proprietary software have over them that has prevented more open discussion/acceptance of open source software...
Get OpenOffice to spell-check around em-dashes and placement of bookmarks in PDFs, and you'll do more to help OSS and harm MS than any number of irate/. comments could ever do.
Then again, I just downloaded OoO 1.0.2... maybe it works now... (yeah, right...)
A nuclear weapon can level a city. No people, no bodies, just a few square miles of wasteland--and outside that, death and destruction that would be "biological warfare" if it was contagious and not just fallout.
Windows source code, OTOH, is almost nothing more than a chance to attack an insecure system--secure systems don't bare windows to the world, generally--and they're attacked anyway by reverse-engingeering crackers.
First off, there is no such thing as "instantly." Two events occur simultaneously only to a particular frame of reference.
Secondly, according to special relativity, if you were able to travel faster than light, when you got to clock B it would still say 8:58. As far as you would be concerned, you just travelled backwards in time.
Bullocks. If you were to travel "instantly" (that is, in reality with an infinite ammount of speed), you'd get there when the clock said 9:02 and not an instant earlier. You'd "pop" foward four minutes, not back two.
But if you were to drop out of reality and appear at B, you'd see it saying 9:00.
Special and General relativity deal with what is possible and observed. Time dilates, movement is relative, and the only constant is c. But were you able to do the impossible and move faster than c, you would not travel backwards in time. (You'd probably be tossed outside of the universe and die, but we're talking drunken-physicist hypothetical here, anyway.)
Physics is all about our ability to measure and interact with the rest of the universe. Special relativity assures us that any and all scientific, physical evidence for the sun's existence is still there on the earth. Therefore, for literally all intents and purposes, the sun is still there.
Yes. And up and until you tell a widow that her husband is dead, for all intents and purposes he is still alive for her--but he still really died.
you're getting hung up on the term "perception." As far as physics and pretty much all science is concerned, perception is reality.
Evidence is scientific reality. Perception is a fallible human trait.
No information can travel faster than c. However, it's foolish to conjecutre that just because we don't know about it yet, it _hasn't happened_.
Time travels in one direction; special and general realativity can made time vary its speed, but it's rather quacky science to assume that they make reverse time-travel possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummmm. Ever hear of Metallica?
Metallica didn't even care about Napster until their unfinished work started showing up. The same thing was what got Dr. Dre, Madonna, and every other artist who cared to come out against Napster.
Oh, and Al Gore never said he invented the internet, Geroge W. Bush isn't an idiot, a good slice of Rush Limbaugh's audience are democrats, and sometimes Microsoft is better than Linux.
*sigh*
Odd performance by one helicopter on one flight means absolutely nothing.
Of course it does. It means just as much as getting struck by lightning on the same day your girlfriend of five years dumps you.
It doesn't PROVE any grand corellation, but it does, at the least, prove that odd coincidences happen.
Nothing means nothing; everything means something. It's just that it takes a lot of something meanings to PROVE anything.
No. All the mistakes you'd expect from human beings cavorting in the dead of night.
AFAIK, there are hundreds of crop circles a year. People have come foward claiming that they have made crop circles, and I there is no reason at all to doubt that at least some of them are made by these public hoaxers.
But there ARE near-perfect complex crop circles (which implies an intelligence--maybe mutant gophers, maybe civilian genius pranksters, maybe military folks having fun, maybe Something Else.)
I'm hardly in awe of crop circles--I have God if I really want to be awed. But I have no reason to doubt the information that there are crop circles that have truly complex characteristics, which--at the least--require more than a 2x4 and some rope.
As it is, the worst thing that can happen if you share is that you get told to stop - if there was a substantial chance that sharing files meant a $100 ticket, they would dry out pretty fast.
See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
Even if we make the system so efficient that the RIAA only needs to spend one hour of lawyer time per offender to get an injunction, and all that they ask for is an injunction and legal fees, the costs of a civil suit could easily exceed $100.
If you're file sharing, the ONLY things keeping you from a rather nasty civil suit are your obscurity and the time the RIAA would have to spend to take you down if they found you.
Signatures from MS are irrelevent. What matters is that the signature stored on the chip matches the boot sector. MS doesn't have to sign it; you do. Of course, this might prevent you from dual-booting Linux and MS, since MS might make their system refuse to install unless you put their signature into the chip, but I have an easy solution to that. I just install Linux, and don't run anything from MS. :)
Funny... IIRC, MS's settlement agreement specifically said that they have to fix their bootloader...
Of course you can. And they can, too. But there are a few more phenomina to it than just pressing down crops.
Nearly-perfect geometic shapes
small (measured in micron) iron spheres scattered throughout the crop circle
Slightly elevated radition / "cooked" effect to pushed-down corn
and, finally, odd performance from aircraft around crop circles
The last one its the one that threw me. On the "TV mentury" that documented a few graduate engineers faking a "genuine" crop circle, their helicopter suffered an loss of power over the darn thing. Odd--not the stuff of religious revelations, but odd.
Crop circles may be an as-yet undocumented natural phenomina, a higher-order of technology (Military or "UFO"), or just a really, really, REALLY clever prank. I don't know, I've never seen one.
But they are more than you can do with "just a 2x4 and a piece of rope."
The fringes will never be convinced, but responses like this and Phil Plait's BadAtromy.com will help to explain to the inquiring minds who's scientific literacy isn't what it should be.
It's "whose", not "who's." You didn't mean to say "who is."
Anyway--what does it matter what someone's "scientific literacy" is? If someone wants to spend their lives on the fringes of science, knowing that their only hope of peer acceptance is extraordinary proof to back up their extraordinary claims, let them.
As for the site you horribly mis-quoted--it's as fringe as the UFO freaks. "the fields of science, skepticism, and Rational Thinking" are the kinds of words that a zealous atheist uses when they try and mix their religion and science.
It's a useful site, to be sure, but it's hardly peer-reivewed science. (For example, differences of terminology such as "Incidentally, the name of the constellation of the scorpion is Scorpius, not Scorpio. Also, the goat is Capricornus, not Capricorn. So there." really shouldn't bother anyone...)
Incidentally, why does the Food & Drug Administration make regulations about pacemakers and medical X-rays?
Because they're medical devices (duh.)
When was the last time you heard more regular laws being changed without there being a clear change in government?
Quite often, actually. Civil Rights, Women's Lib, the repeal of Prohibition, etc.
The problem with IP laws is that they aren't a clear "remove the law and get more freedom" issue. All three kinds of IP law are a balance between The People and The IP Holders, but The People generally don't care for the contract negotations.
And in some measure it *is* the CTEA (aka the Sony Bono act) and its predecessors that keep Elvis off the PD slate, since they revized how long "basic copyright law" keeps works away from the public.
2003 - 1977 = 26 years ago.
I'm not up on the history of law, but I think it's been more than a century since copyrights were _that_ short.
There are other reasons too, but let's not forget that Bush comes from big oil.
Let's not forget that Sadam has been a thorn in our side for eleven years, broke the peace treaty we signed with him--oh, and attempted to kill one of our Presidents, who just happened to be the current one's Dad.
Big Oil has little if anything to do with the USA's hatred of Iraq. It's all politics: part national pride, part humanitarian outrage.
We are now looking for Oil in africa [gortbusters.org], despite the poor governments that exist there.
Oil in Africa belongs to those governments. If we find it, than we'll have a vested interest in helping them, and our aid will go up--and since they'll have a viable exploitable resource, they'll get the unusual chance to have what we want to buy from them.
Before the Middle Eastern oil was discovered, the place was a backwater with religious zealots. Now it's a rich "second world" backwater with religious zealots and enough money to feed everyone.
Actually, copyrights run out after 50 or so years, it's why you can download elvis without worry now.
Have you even been paying attention?
Lessig just lost a claim in the Supreme Court that retroactively extended every extant copyright in the past seventy years for 95 years if a corporation or 90 years after the artist dies.
You _cannot_ download elvis without infriging on the copyright of whomever owns the rights to the King--either a music industry tycoon or his daughter.
Same goes for J.R.R. Tolkien, the warner bros. wartime propaganda (from WWII), and big band music.
Let's assume that Elvis, rich as he was, never sold his copyrights on both his lyrics and his performance. He died in 1977. Assuming that there's no more extensions to copyright again (which is entirely possible, given the recent outcry), Elvis won't enter the Public Domain until 2067--so you've got sixty four _more_ years to wait.
Oh, and it's not the friggin' DMCA, the Sony Bono act, the PATRIOT act, or anything else that keeps Elivs off the PD slate. It's basic copyright law.
Let's not forget that they were SUSPECTED terrorists. We just didn't bother with things like capture and trials. Remote control execution now makes these pesky details less of a problem. If we (the USA) think we don't like you, we kill you. No questions asked.
;)
Behold, the peril of being a citizen of a foreign power that feels it can irk a much more powerful and beligerant nation.
The peoples of Yemen are welcome to apply to be a US State, or at least a territory, at which point they would all become citizens and be the folks the military is protecting, rather than the folks that the military is protecting against.
Until then, as far as I care we support their rights when convenient and trample them at will--if they want to be protected, they can pay taxes and set up a government like the rest of us.
Tsar Bomba is same thing: a militarily useless ridiculously oversized weapon intended only as a gesture.
Militarily, yes--Politically, no.
Two backyard bombs in the hands of Moscow & Washington are all the world needs for MAD. Good way to keep proliferation in check.
the US has signed treaties to prevent such research cause if someone believed that they can indeed survive a MAD scenario they may actually push the button.
And if someone wants to end it all, or is willing to die to take out the other guy, they may push the button as well.
The smaller a country gets with WMD, the less MAD makes sense.
Well, sure, but Nazi Germany's government was VERY efficient. Shit, they built the Autobahn in less than 10 years.
Yep. And if they weren't genocidal, irrational, and bent on the destruction of everyone else, they'd still be around and maybe even be our "most favored nation" right now.
The evils of the Nazis were great, but "efficency" wasn't one of them.
Privacy is a very important part of free speech. People who have view points opposed to the government (or other powerful group) often need the cloak of anonymity to prevent unjust persecution.
In situations where this is true, a legal bar against anonymnity will not stop the speaking.
Every cause in America today has, or should have, a public front, which can safetly pass along the anonymous messages of its supporters, and these supporters should be able to be identified as such.
That is why you can expect a phone call to be private, but the police can get a court order to breech your privacy.
And the CIA can do it just for fun--and at work, my employer can do it at whim, and at home my spouse can do it at whim.
There are checks on phone taps not to protect my privacy, but to curtail police abuse.
The evil DMCA has tipped the balance away from fairness and allows your right to privacy to be broken too easily.
What section deals with breaching privacy, again?
The DMCA makes classic hacking a crime, and since the hackers didn't get engaged in its process of creation, it's banaced towards the IP-holders who were being hacked.
BTW--this does not, in any way, shape, or form, qualify as "evil." Maybe "wrong", "reviled", "unfair", "unbalanced", or even "unconstitutional", but not "evil."
It is not a malicious act that unjustly and without cause harms anyone. It does not unfairly force a shift of cost or expense from the issuing party to others. All it does is make something that was previously dubious (or even legal) illegal--and the worst that can happen is some prison time & a police investigation & a civil trial for something that you knowingly did after it was passed.
Privacy violation is already real and there is nothing delicate about it. When the information is available, it will be abused.
Exactly. But the cure for this is not to remove the information -- it is to make the abuse nearly impossible to conceal.
You (and I and everyone else) should live your life such that, if all your secrets became known, you could keep on living your life.
First of all these two things are not even remotely close.
Yes, there is. They're both abuses of privacy's side effect, anonymnity, to break the law and not get caught.
Every legal freedom we have needs to stand up to an extreme case. Fer example: Everyone has free speach, even Nazi Skinheads and racist rappers. Everyone has the right to a lawyer, even rapists and terrorists. Everyone has the right to a trial by jury and a burden of "beyond a reasonable doubt" in felony murder cases--even when it's "obvious" that He Did It.
There should be the right to remain anonymous until you do something wrong.
You are mortal. You have done something wrong. If not, please found a new religion and show us the way, oh holy one.
Being able to identify our neighbors is a fundamental element of every society--and the internet just makes us a more closely-knit society, where you and I are neighbors although I suspect you live nowhere near Albany.
But for God sakes - not all things that are "wrong" are the same. Pirating overpriced music from a fucked up monopolistic greedy industry (however illegal) is no where in the same solar system as kiddie porn.
That's right. That's why they have different sentences and different budget ammounts on the DA's list of priorities. But it's not an excuse to break the hands of the police and the justice system.
RIAA will fall or succeed on its own merits and the merits of the market--while we need to be vigilant to ensure that they do not abuse the market (*cough*MS*cough*), we don't need to try and hasten their fall by stealing from them.
Advertisers can adjust their messages just for me. I can just imagine listening to the billboards ask the woman next to me on the subway if she needs more herpes medicine or how she's feeling after the divorce
Shelves your sarcasm and think about that.
A simple market survey should show that breaching someone's privacy in an nondelicate manner would likely reduce sales of their product. And, thus, we're unlikely to have it happen more than a few times.
OTOH, personalization of some purchases (like, for example, the waitress at a random Denny's I go to knowing what I've had before and being able to ask if I want the same thing or something new) is a good thing. Especially if it gets phased in via a "would you like us to remember your preferences?" model.
Big Brother was bad because he lied. The check on that is open exchange of information--not lines of privacy and control which allow for lies and disinformation.
Why is this? Because people from the US, for the most part, identify their origin by their state. It's something steeped in American tradition from when we were under the Articles of Confederation and had an extremely weak federal government uniting the otherwise independent states.
;)
No, not really. It's because we're so friggin' huge.
If Russia was divided up into fifty provinces that had about equal population, you can be sure that they'd refer to themselves by province.
Canada's not a good example of a "foreign country", anyway. If you wanted an example of how USA citizens refer to themselves in a foreign country, try Great Britain or a country with a foreign language.
Now, why is this important for the sake of the "National ID card" debate? Because, most of us, because we identify ourselves by states, fear even further encroachment of the federal government on what is currently the responsibility of the state.
Hardly. We just have paranoid privacy zealots who fear making government efficient.
Technically, we don't have _any_ government ID card, and so we use the state driver's license in its place.
It appears that, in general, South Africa has leapt way ahead of the US in a large number of policy areas, not just Open Source.
;)
;)
I think the answer to this is that "ahead" is not necessarily "better."
for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality
Leaving the moral argument aside (Yes, there is a moral argument against homosexuality--not that I believe it per-se, but I can concieve of it and I'm an amataeur), I certainly want to be able to discriminate based on percieved sexuality--if nothing else, I want to live in a world where homosexuals can identify and seperate themselves from the heterosexuals when it comes to finding a date.
domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works
Huh? Can you elaborate on that?
Now, to be fair, I haven't been back in SA since the '94 elections, so I don't know how much of the new government's legislation has made it into actual practice, but it does seem odd that SA is apparently overtaking the US in terms of the general "cluefulness" of the administration.
The USA has a long history of going our own way regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. That's why we're the most religous "modern" country, and why we've come to dominate politics in recent years--and our two-term limit presidency (among other things) means that we keep switching policy and pissing off the folks we should be helping.
So, in other words: Yeah, SA probably is further along than the USA. Half the countries in the world are probably further along than we are in one thing or another. If they weren't, and we _were_ the cream of the crop, we wouldn't have much to aspire to, now would we?
I'm sorry, but I think it's the control owners of said proprietary software have over them that has prevented more open discussion/acceptance of open source software...
/. comments could ever do.
Get OpenOffice to spell-check around em-dashes and placement of bookmarks in PDFs, and you'll do more to help OSS and harm MS than any number of irate
Then again, I just downloaded OoO 1.0.2... maybe it works now... (yeah, right...)
Er...
A nuclear weapon can level a city. No people, no bodies, just a few square miles of wasteland--and outside that, death and destruction that would be "biological warfare" if it was contagious and not just fallout.
Windows source code, OTOH, is almost nothing more than a chance to attack an insecure system--secure systems don't bare windows to the world, generally--and they're attacked anyway by reverse-engingeering crackers.
*sigh*
First off, there is no such thing as "instantly." Two events occur simultaneously only to a particular frame of reference.
Secondly, according to special relativity, if you were able to travel faster than light, when you got to clock B it would still say 8:58. As far as you would be concerned, you just travelled backwards in time.
Bullocks. If you were to travel "instantly" (that is, in reality with an infinite ammount of speed), you'd get there when the clock said 9:02 and not an instant earlier. You'd "pop" foward four minutes, not back two.
But if you were to drop out of reality and appear at B, you'd see it saying 9:00.
Special and General relativity deal with what is possible and observed. Time dilates, movement is relative, and the only constant is c. But were you able to do the impossible and move faster than c, you would not travel backwards in time. (You'd probably be tossed outside of the universe and die, but we're talking drunken-physicist hypothetical here, anyway.)
Physics is all about our ability to measure and interact with the rest of the universe. Special relativity assures us that any and all scientific, physical evidence for the sun's existence is still there on the earth. Therefore, for literally all intents and purposes, the sun is still there.
Yes. And up and until you tell a widow that her husband is dead, for all intents and purposes he is still alive for her--but he still really died.
you're getting hung up on the term "perception." As far as physics and pretty much all science is concerned, perception is reality.
Evidence is scientific reality. Perception is a fallible human trait.
No information can travel faster than c. However, it's foolish to conjecutre that just because we don't know about it yet, it _hasn't happened_.
Time travels in one direction; special and general realativity can made time vary its speed, but it's rather quacky science to assume that they make reverse time-travel possible.