RTF has been in office for years and it is an open, portable standard readable on many platforms and with many programs.
Obviously you haven't tried it. RTF has gotten more complaints from users than raw word Docs does!
Replace "RTF" with "HTML" and you've got a winner, though.
The problem is that Microsoft chooses to retain their obfuscated binary format as the default save type for documents.
It's not "obfuscated" so much as it's "optimized." The whole idea seems to be for Word to save as quickly as possible--which the doc file is best at for Word for some reason, probably becuase it's derived from how the program structures documents, and not how some document spec says documents should be handled.
If the XML files office produce are not made the default save types or if the XML merely encapsulates large portions of binary code, it will not matter one lick that office can save these xml documents because the majority of people will be stuck on the default, unreadable formats.
1: It's HIGHLY unlikely that MS's XML implementation will be unnecessary binary code. They have a doc-to-HTML converter allready, and the XML converter will probably just be an update of that.
2: You CAN change the default Office save format to RTF, HTML, old_doc_version, or just about any random 'save as' converter you have! (The only major feature I saw missing was the MHTML format.)
Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?
Of course it could. But so could any bit of news about MS on/. in the past twenty years, from EULA alterations to Palladium.
But "could" and "is" are differnent things. I suspect MS will decide that closing XML will render it useless, and make it at least as open and useable as their MS-HTML files.
So, at the worst, we'll have a new "save as" option that's bit sloppy--but since MS won't have to extend XML to get their office functionality, they probably won't do it just to spite a few OSS coders who'll figure it out in a year anyway.
DRM is NOT necessary. There was no such thing as ANALOG rights management, and there's no impetus other than corporate lust for control behind DIGITAL rights management features.
There is a clear impetus.
Most Analog equipment has generation-degredation. Run a signal through a recording device enough times, and you'll see static.
Do the same thing with an ALL-DIGITAL recording device, and you'll lose nothing.
They consider contracts you sign when you get a job valid? Oh my!! Next thing you know they will say all those software EULA we all click past are valid contracts!!!
You can walk away from an employment contract if you don't like it.
Your EULA, on the other hand, is almost impossible to walk away from once you've already bought it--which could void it as a contract in some places, leaving it protected only under copyright law.
The people who read slashdot like a certain kind of movie, which we consider "Good." If we stop watching, the market for that kind of movie will drop--which, if it's a niche enough movie, could mean the difference between a go/nogo on the film.
There are other kinds of movies that other people consider "good"--for example, some people no doubt thought that "Soldier" was a good movie.
A boycott would hurt more than it helps. All that the elimination of the slashdot market would do is make us a market not worth pursuing--and so we'd have a return to the days when all movies sucked, instead of having a good one every few (6-36) months.
A better idea would be for us to find RIAA/MPAA a business model adapted to the digial age--one that's more effective than the "Street Performer's Protocol" and more flexible than the current "pay per copy."
(Of course I have an idea. I'll write a journal about it, and y'all can see it there!)
Glorifying the victim is actually a technique used in some kinds of (post-victory) propaganda. Roman writers made Cleopatra out to be far more than she probably was, mainly in order to make Augustus look better for having vanquished her.
I thought I dealt with that. It couldn't be the case, as Saruon wasn't defeated by Aragorn. Heck, he wasn't even defeated by Frodo!
LotR makes Sauron out to be an evil, implacable force that could not be stopped by any means--and was only undone by chance and the unseen hand of providence.
Proper propaganda makes the current ruler look like more than the recipient of a lucky break.
He makes a very valid point that history is written by the victors, and I believe that there is a valid interpretation that LOTR is propoganda and marketing hype produced by the victors of the War of the Rings. Lastly, it just goes to show that LOTR is so interesting, because it has social commentary and allows us to forcast into the future, at very levels
The LOTR is a fantasy story, fictional and made-up. For what it is, it happened the way it happened because there was no historical event to propagandize about.
Now, IF it was a propaganda book written by the victors, don't you think that they would have written it more dynamically? Instead of Frodo being an anyonymous bearer of poison bait for the Dark Lord, he'd have been a brave commoner-hero who lost companion after companion to villanous foes while trekking to the forboding land--and then he would have killed Sauron himself.
LotR isn't propaganda; it glorifies the villian far too much for any element of propaganda. While this could aid in securing Aragorn's rule, it fails because _it has Sauron killed by an insane mistake._
And what would those fundamental truths be, oh wise one?
That Evil gets people to help it through lies, and hurts folk indiscriminitly. (This is more definitive than observative.)
The only way for "good" to oppose this is to forgo fear and prejudice and work together. No matter how bleak things get, you need to keep going--even if it means your death.
Don't give into temptation--it will bring badness to you.
No, the world doesn't always work like this. That's because it's "complex" and not "simple", like a fantasy world is.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
That's an argument for a formal system of succession, probably administered through the common church. Or a free choice of heir for the sitting monarch. Or ordering every noble in the realm in line of succession, down to the lowliest squire...
One tyrant is bad--the Magna carta's a direct result of a tyrant's rule--but a succession of tyrants doing what their fathers did will mean MORE misery than a relatively short war of succession.
I didn't deny it. But it's an exception to the design of the jury system, not a redefinition of it. A judge can take certain things (undisputed allegations) as fact, and the jury has to agree to that as much as the judge has to agree to the jury's decision.
One of the links on FIJA.org puts it very succinctly with a story about a man who stole a pig. The Jury didn't _change the law_, they simply decided not to enforce it, and there's no law saying that they have to.
I know you are the lawyer and I'm not, but can you back up your statement? I'd find it very interesting if you could. where in the body of US laws does it specifically state that the jury CANNOT interpret and judge the laws if they so choose to?
The jury can go right ahead and do just about whatever they want to. But it's the judge who issues court orders, including the ones that let the sitting jury leave... and AFAIK, judges can and do declare mistrials when juries decide that they're suddenly a direct democracy with the full rule of law in front of them.
The purpose of the jury is to have common citizens, who have no stake in the outcome of a case in any manner whatsoever, be the ones deciding facts. Once those facts are done, it's the judiciary's job to interpret how the law applies to the facts.
Sure, there's a whole bunch of overlap, but this is the basic distinction.
Whoa!! Why would the government need to know if I bought a gun?
Two reasons.
1: So they can call out the militia. ("the government" is a nebulous a phrase as "intellectual property." Even if the feds went bonkers, you'd still want to work through the structure of your local town hall.)
2: So they can make sure you don't need to have the milita called out on you.
They do not need to know of anything of any legal product I purchase legally. I am not guilty until proven innocent in the country (yet), and I wish people like you would not be so willing to give it away.
I don't know about you old fart, but I'm required by law to sign up and register for the milita whose existance justifies your ownership of those weapons. (I have my doubts that a man who has only owned three guns in his lifetime uses them for substenance hunting.) I think you can bear to do no less to your DEADLY WEAPON than I do to my health and freedom.
The legislative and exeuctive bodies of the various American governmental levels have established before the relatively impartial judiciary that they have a need to know when certain types of legal purchases are made.
If you buy a car, even for a dollar from a random stranger, your state has to know about it. A car is a potentially deadly weapon that can be and has been used in commission of all kinds of crimes that hurt and kill our fellow citizens; the only real objections to tracking of car purchases are privacy and laziness--both of which are outweighed by the probability that a "secret car" will be used for an illegal purpose.
In every concieveable situation dealing with people where you having a gun is an advantage, your advantage is increased if the other party knows that you have a gun. If you sell or dispose of your weapons, the government should know--both so they know that you'll need to be re-armed when you show up for the hypothetical milita duty, and so that there's a clear time when illegal acts using your (former) weapon are not your responsibility.
Although we do have domestic [terrorists], the main threat is from foreign terrorists. If they want to track foreign nationals, then go right ahead, but, don't put the gov. eye on US citizens.
America was founded on immigration, cayenne. If we brand "foreigners" as the enemy, we'll backslide to the reactionism of the second world war--or worse, if possible.
The terrorists of 9/11 trained in America, had family in America, and were based in America nearly indisginguishable to the ordinary citizen from americans up until very very late on September 10, 2001. The last two attacks before that were ALSO based in America--and one of those was carried out by an American citizen.
There are wolves within our midst, and though we must arm the sheep to protect them, we must not stop looking for the wolves just because some sheep can't stop bleating.
``There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.''
Obviously, you've never heard of marketing. Innocent Men are and have been ruled since the dawn of time.
Sure, "rulership" as the word for governance has fallen out of favor, but it's still the same verb.
-- Ferris to Rearden in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Wasn't that the book that encouraged the cop in South Park to never read again?
Sheesh. This is/., not a literary discussion. Can't you try and attack my argument with your own words, instead of a quote from a pop culture book?
Re:Free FrontPage, that'll cure the world's ills.
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FrontPage is not lowcost in my book, apart from the fact that most people already have Office
FP isn't low-cost in my book, either. But OSS is, and I'd love to dump FP and use the OSS equivalent--but there isn't one.
This is all offtopic anyway. Why was the parent modded up?
it wasn't. I was responding to a post that was higher than 1, so I didn't click "no +1 bonus" like I did for this reply.
You've taken my original statement ("A and B are equivalent") and interpretted it as "A cannot exist without B." That doesn't follow logically.
It's a grammatical problem. "B influences A" and "B is a subset of A", when uttered as profound statements, are easily inferred as "A does not exist without B."
I understand what you're saying. I just don't think most peole who blurr Zen and QM do.
Nothing, in a lot of cases. The classic example is trying to measure the temperature of a thimbleful of water with a thermometer -- by putting the thermometer in the thimble, you change the water's temperature. But Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, until I (the observer) look in the box. Are you saying that isn't counterintuitive? Or are you saying Schrodinger was wrong?
I think Schrodinger was wrong. Or rather, incomplete.
"Until we open the box and Learn if the cat is alive or dead, we must act & plan as if it were both alive and dead."
The cat is either alive or dead. However, until we determine which is which, we need to have a box to bury the cat in & enough food to feed the cat.
Re:Free FrontPage, that'll cure the world's ills.
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Funny, I can put together a pretty nice-looking website with any of several Windows text-editors. And there are free/low-cost WYSIWYG packages out there (some are old, but still usable).
Can you name me a free/low cost WYSIWYG editor that does the site management that Frontpage does?
It's not just about making web pages--any fool with a text editor or a document converter can do that. The important thing is being able to add a document to a web, and have it show up in FP's navigation system.
Point me to one, and you'll see two to three websites that move over to it within the month.
Yeah, don't you hate that? I especially hate it when I'm reading histories of the Second World War and they always defeat the big bad guy so soon and we have to wade through the final defeat of the minor bad guy.
WWII was a real event. The Lord of the Rings was a fantasy epic. It's not a fair comparison.
Now, when taken as a whole LotR has the climax in about the right place--but it's almost never taken that way.
I suppose you could say that, in the same way you could say that the climax of a book that peaks with the slaying of the bad guy "was done via the predestined actions of the hero's sword."
The predestined part isn't all that bad--it's part and parcel of the tradition. But the problem is that the biggest problem of the entire world is solved by a madman accidently jumping into a volcano...
I think the only consistent reading of that sentence is that you don't care for the book at all, if you can believe that both that
(1) the author crafted the "really good parts" of the book
deliberately ("Tolkien decided") and (2) the book is "badly written".
Well, that's the problem. Tolkien DIDN'T write the "really good parts"--he merely suggested them.
And I DID care for the books--until I finished them. It feels like Tolkien started the fantasy tradition of having your trilogy get worse with each volume. *sigh*
Like the Frodo's character development, in its entirety? It seems to me that Jackson missed the fact that, although Frodo retained the appearance of a hobbit just out of his tweens, he was, in fact, fifty years old. I can just imagine what he's done to Sam's character development in this installment.
Hobbit years are not human years--and even if they were, most hobbits-as-written don't grow up very much at all.
As far as movies go, Frodo & Sam have gobs and gobs of character development.
Does Arwen make another of her appearances, this time in Cirith Ungol?
Ah, you'd prefer it if Jackson faithfuly reproduced Tolkien's sexism?
Lord of the Rings, the movie trilogy by Peter Jackson, is a retelling of the story by Tolkien. The basic story is the same, while the parts that don't matter are either dropped or changed.
The promotion of the strong female lead to an active role won't get anyone's hackles up but the same kind of fan that bitches that Tom Bombadil didn't show up.
AFAIK, Arwen DOES show up. I have a suspicion that she brings the Narsil to Aragorn; FotR was unclear as to if he's got it or not. It'd be very believeable that the elves don't take the time to reforge the broken sword before the Fellowship sets off, and if so Arwen bringing the sword would help fill out TT.
(Side note: There's a difference between not liking something and knowing that it's badly written. The structure, pacing, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is ancient and abyssmal--it's dated a scant century after its original publication.)
I like DBZ, oddly enough, for one of the things I also like about Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Deep Space 9--and one of the major reasons why I don't really like Dragonlance anymore.
DBZ is a series of long stores of indefinite length; only rarely are the episodes self-contained, and the characters have a tendency to change, alter alliegences, and have some real development.
Sure, it's slanted towards the main hero (Goku always saves the day--even when he's dead) and the "fighting" has gotten to an unbelievable level, but it's got a far better episode-to-episode story than any other cartoon on the American airwaves.
Hell, do one better: Don't buy the CD with the stupid privacy idiocy on it, wait a day, and download the songs you want from P2P networks. The sooner the major music publishers go under, the sooner one of them will be forced to figure out a workable economic model that doesn't rely on legal strongarming and gives customers what they want instead of what the major labels think they SHOULD want.
Hey, we're the smart crowd. Why don't WE think up a good model, and sell it to them?
My idea is a rights-based model, where we buy a lifetime right to own a copy of a Copyrighted Work (for a bit less than the current going rate) and we're more or less left to our own devices to get that copy. If we want to brave P2P, great. If we want to pay the CD-press $5 for the CD, even better.
Sure, it's a potential loss of privacy--but I think we, as humans, can stand for a business to know who its customers are.
The major problem people are having with QM, the reason this "Zen" thing keeps coming up, is that QM says something incredibly strange about the world: the results of any experiment or measurement are inextricably tied up with the very act of measurement. QM seems to shatter the idea that an objective universe exists independently of the observer.
I don't believe that it does. The universe got along quite well without us--there isn't, AFAIK, a standing theory that requires life for the universe to exist, like the Zen "it's all imaginary" line does.
The objective universe exists. But once we get to a fine enough scale, it's simply impossible to measure something without changing it. What's so counterintuitive about that?
What QM is trying to tell us is that there is no way to actually draw a line between observer and observed. That's why people always bring up Zen (or Buddhism in general), since one of its major philosophical principles is that the separation between self and universe is an illusion.
I think it's blowing a few simple artifacts of the creation of knowledge a bit out of proportion.
Pick up a book on the Kabbalah, if you want a religious parallell to QM that doesn't rely on personal revelation for the transmission of knowledge.
This really muddies the waters further, not less, by blurring the distinction between Open and pseudo-open source.
Actually, it puts up walls and nicely cuts the muddy water from the clean water from the caustic clear acid.
Not EVERYONE wants a sticky copyleft free-as-in-fanatical license. The moral argument for such licenses should be made on its merits, not through doubletalk and rote intimidation.
Creative Commons could do a bit better if it linked to licenses that each selection was compatible with--and a bit better if it had a reverse lookup, where you could list the license of the source you want to use and you see your options for other licenses.
What we are suffering from today is a perversion of copyright; the notion of intellectual property, which has been regarded (legally) as actual property, and so we come to the absurd situation where someone can be considered to have 'stolen' intellectual property (and thus harmed the owner) without:
* depriving the owner of the property
* profiting from the property
How little profit do you need to get before it counts? $1000? $5? $.01? If you photocopy a book from a friend & read and keep it, thus getting complete enjoyment from it, and haven't paid for it, you've profited from your illegal action.
The problem, IMNSHO, is that our old copy-based model is getting beaten up by the ease of modern copying.
A better model would be a rights-based system, where you pay a nominal fee (what the going rate for a book or album today is) and get a lifetime right to have a copy of that work. You might get one copy included with the purchase of your right, or you could forgo the physical copy & save yourself some money.
If you lose your copy, or just want another one, you can get it through any means you want, and you never have to pay the author another dime--unless, of course, you're buying a physical copy from the author.
The _only_ real problem with this is verification... but I'm sure the same technology that created the inital problem can solve this secondary one...
(The bonus benefit, of course, would be that the RIAA and the MPAA would have a new model that is squarely in line with the "information age", which/. has been begging them to do forever...)
Slashdot Mirror
RTF has been in office for years and it is an open, portable standard readable on many platforms and with many programs.
Obviously you haven't tried it. RTF has gotten more complaints from users than raw word Docs does!
Replace "RTF" with "HTML" and you've got a winner, though.
The problem is that Microsoft chooses to retain their obfuscated binary format as the default save type for documents.
It's not "obfuscated" so much as it's "optimized." The whole idea seems to be for Word to save as quickly as possible--which the doc file is best at for Word for some reason, probably becuase it's derived from how the program structures documents, and not how some document spec says documents should be handled.
If the XML files office produce are not made the default save types or if the XML merely encapsulates large portions of binary code, it will not matter one lick that office can save these xml documents because the majority of people will be stuck on the default, unreadable formats.
1: It's HIGHLY unlikely that MS's XML implementation will be unnecessary binary code. They have a doc-to-HTML converter allready, and the XML converter will probably just be an update of that.
2: You CAN change the default Office save format to RTF, HTML, old_doc_version, or just about any random 'save as' converter you have! (The only major feature I saw missing was the MHTML format.)
Could this be grounds for another anti-trust suit against Microsoft?
/. in the past twenty years, from EULA alterations to Palladium.
Of course it could. But so could any bit of news about MS on
But "could" and "is" are differnent things. I suspect MS will decide that closing XML will render it useless, and make it at least as open and useable as their MS-HTML files.
So, at the worst, we'll have a new "save as" option that's bit sloppy--but since MS won't have to extend XML to get their office functionality, they probably won't do it just to spite a few OSS coders who'll figure it out in a year anyway.
DRM is NOT necessary. There was no such thing as ANALOG rights management, and there's no impetus other than corporate lust for control behind DIGITAL rights management features.
There is a clear impetus.
Most Analog equipment has generation-degredation. Run a signal through a recording device enough times, and you'll see static.
Do the same thing with an ALL-DIGITAL recording device, and you'll lose nothing.
They consider contracts you sign when you get a job valid? Oh my!! Next thing you know they will say all those software EULA we all click past are valid contracts!!!
You can walk away from an employment contract if you don't like it.
Your EULA, on the other hand, is almost impossible to walk away from once you've already bought it--which could void it as a contract in some places, leaving it protected only under copyright law.
Those mom and pop stores are merely selling plastic and aluminium disks...They are not selling/ the rights to play those disks in a CD player.
They are selling a copy of the album. Once you purchase a copy of a copyrighted work, you have the legal right to use that copy.
Software is an exception that really shouldn't be copywritten anyway...
The people who read slashdot like a certain kind of movie, which we consider "Good." If we stop watching, the market for that kind of movie will drop--which, if it's a niche enough movie, could mean the difference between a go/nogo on the film.
There are other kinds of movies that other people consider "good"--for example, some people no doubt thought that "Soldier" was a good movie.
A boycott would hurt more than it helps. All that the elimination of the slashdot market would do is make us a market not worth pursuing--and so we'd have a return to the days when all movies sucked, instead of having a good one every few (6-36) months.
A better idea would be for us to find RIAA/MPAA a business model adapted to the digial age--one that's more effective than the "Street Performer's Protocol" and more flexible than the current "pay per copy."
(Of course I have an idea. I'll write a journal about it, and y'all can see it there!)
Glorifying the victim is actually a technique used in some kinds of (post-victory) propaganda. Roman writers made Cleopatra out to be far more than she probably was, mainly in order to make Augustus look better for having vanquished her.
I thought I dealt with that. It couldn't be the case, as Saruon wasn't defeated by Aragorn. Heck, he wasn't even defeated by Frodo!
LotR makes Sauron out to be an evil, implacable force that could not be stopped by any means--and was only undone by chance and the unseen hand of providence.
Proper propaganda makes the current ruler look like more than the recipient of a lucky break.
By the same principle that American anti-drug laws can apply to someone in a different country shipping drugs to the US.
He makes a very valid point that history is written by the victors, and I believe that there is a valid interpretation that LOTR is propoganda and marketing hype produced by the victors of the War of the Rings. Lastly, it just goes to show that LOTR is so interesting, because it has social commentary and allows us to forcast into the future, at very levels
The LOTR is a fantasy story, fictional and made-up. For what it is, it happened the way it happened because there was no historical event to propagandize about.
Now, IF it was a propaganda book written by the victors, don't you think that they would have written it more dynamically? Instead of Frodo being an anyonymous bearer of poison bait for the Dark Lord, he'd have been a brave commoner-hero who lost companion after companion to villanous foes while trekking to the forboding land--and then he would have killed Sauron himself.
LotR isn't propaganda; it glorifies the villian far too much for any element of propaganda. While this could aid in securing Aragorn's rule, it fails because _it has Sauron killed by an insane mistake._
And what would those fundamental truths be, oh wise one?
That Evil gets people to help it through lies, and hurts folk indiscriminitly. (This is more definitive than observative.)
The only way for "good" to oppose this is to forgo fear and prejudice and work together. No matter how bleak things get, you need to keep going--even if it means your death.
Don't give into temptation--it will bring badness to you.
No, the world doesn't always work like this. That's because it's "complex" and not "simple", like a fantasy world is.
In a medieval society, the absolute worst tyrant on the throne was still better for the common people than a war of succession. If you put the King's son on the throne, there's at least a reasonable chance of stability, but if the line of succession is unclear, you often end up with a long, bloody war.
That's an argument for a formal system of succession, probably administered through the common church. Or a free choice of heir for the sitting monarch. Or ordering every noble in the realm in line of succession, down to the lowliest squire...
One tyrant is bad--the Magna carta's a direct result of a tyrant's rule--but a succession of tyrants doing what their fathers did will mean MORE misery than a relatively short war of succession.
I didn't deny it. But it's an exception to the design of the jury system, not a redefinition of it. A judge can take certain things (undisputed allegations) as fact, and the jury has to agree to that as much as the judge has to agree to the jury's decision.
One of the links on FIJA.org puts it very succinctly with a story about a man who stole a pig. The Jury didn't _change the law_, they simply decided not to enforce it, and there's no law saying that they have to.
IAANAL...
I know you are the lawyer and I'm not, but can you back up your statement? I'd find it very interesting if you could. where in the body of US laws does it specifically state that the jury CANNOT interpret and judge the laws if they so choose to?
The jury can go right ahead and do just about whatever they want to. But it's the judge who issues court orders, including the ones that let the sitting jury leave... and AFAIK, judges can and do declare mistrials when juries decide that they're suddenly a direct democracy with the full rule of law in front of them.
The purpose of the jury is to have common citizens, who have no stake in the outcome of a case in any manner whatsoever, be the ones deciding facts. Once those facts are done, it's the judiciary's job to interpret how the law applies to the facts.
Sure, there's a whole bunch of overlap, but this is the basic distinction.
Whoa!! Why would the government need to know if I bought a gun?
Two reasons.
1: So they can call out the militia. ("the government" is a nebulous a phrase as "intellectual property." Even if the feds went bonkers, you'd still want to work through the structure of your local town hall.)
2: So they can make sure you don't need to have the milita called out on you.
They do not need to know of anything of any legal product I purchase legally. I am not guilty until proven innocent in the country (yet), and I wish people like you would not be so willing to give it away.
I don't know about you old fart, but I'm required by law to sign up and register for the milita whose existance justifies your ownership of those weapons. (I have my doubts that a man who has only owned three guns in his lifetime uses them for substenance hunting.) I think you can bear to do no less to your DEADLY WEAPON than I do to my health and freedom.
The legislative and exeuctive bodies of the various American governmental levels have established before the relatively impartial judiciary that they have a need to know when certain types of legal purchases are made.
If you buy a car, even for a dollar from a random stranger, your state has to know about it. A car is a potentially deadly weapon that can be and has been used in commission of all kinds of crimes that hurt and kill our fellow citizens; the only real objections to tracking of car purchases are privacy and laziness--both of which are outweighed by the probability that a "secret car" will be used for an illegal purpose.
In every concieveable situation dealing with people where you having a gun is an advantage, your advantage is increased if the other party knows that you have a gun. If you sell or dispose of your weapons, the government should know--both so they know that you'll need to be re-armed when you show up for the hypothetical milita duty, and so that there's a clear time when illegal acts using your (former) weapon are not your responsibility.
Although we do have domestic [terrorists], the main threat is from foreign terrorists. If they want to track foreign nationals, then go right ahead, but, don't put the gov. eye on US citizens.
America was founded on immigration, cayenne. If we brand "foreigners" as the enemy, we'll backslide to the reactionism of the second world war--or worse, if possible.
The terrorists of 9/11 trained in America, had family in America, and were based in America nearly indisginguishable to the ordinary citizen from americans up until very very late on September 10, 2001. The last two attacks before that were ALSO based in America--and one of those was carried out by an American citizen.
There are wolves within our midst, and though we must arm the sheep to protect them, we must not stop looking for the wolves just because some sheep can't stop bleating.
``There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.''
/., not a literary discussion. Can't you try and attack my argument with your own words, instead of a quote from a pop culture book?
Obviously, you've never heard of marketing. Innocent Men are and have been ruled since the dawn of time.
Sure, "rulership" as the word for governance has fallen out of favor, but it's still the same verb.
-- Ferris to Rearden in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
Wasn't that the book that encouraged the cop in South Park to never read again?
Sheesh. This is
FrontPage is not lowcost in my book, apart from the fact that most people already have Office
FP isn't low-cost in my book, either. But OSS is, and I'd love to dump FP and use the OSS equivalent--but there isn't one.
This is all offtopic anyway. Why was the parent modded up?
it wasn't. I was responding to a post that was higher than 1, so I didn't click "no +1 bonus" like I did for this reply.
You've taken my original statement ("A and B are equivalent") and interpretted it as "A cannot exist without B." That doesn't follow logically.
It's a grammatical problem. "B influences A" and "B is a subset of A", when uttered as profound statements, are easily inferred as "A does not exist without B."
I understand what you're saying. I just don't think most peole who blurr Zen and QM do.
Nothing, in a lot of cases. The classic example is trying to measure the temperature of a thimbleful of water with a thermometer -- by putting the thermometer in the thimble, you change the water's temperature. But Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, until I (the observer) look in the box. Are you saying that isn't counterintuitive? Or are you saying Schrodinger was wrong?
I think Schrodinger was wrong. Or rather, incomplete.
"Until we open the box and Learn if the cat is alive or dead, we must act & plan as if it were both alive and dead."
The cat is either alive or dead. However, until we determine which is which, we need to have a box to bury the cat in & enough food to feed the cat.
Funny, I can put together a pretty nice-looking website with any of several Windows text-editors. And there are free/low-cost WYSIWYG packages out there (some are old, but still usable).
Can you name me a free/low cost WYSIWYG editor that does the site management that Frontpage does?
It's not just about making web pages--any fool with a text editor or a document converter can do that. The important thing is being able to add a document to a web, and have it show up in FP's navigation system.
Point me to one, and you'll see two to three websites that move over to it within the month.
Yeah, don't you hate that? I especially hate it when I'm reading histories of the Second World War and they always defeat the big bad guy so soon and we have to wade through the final defeat of the minor bad guy.
WWII was a real event. The Lord of the Rings was a fantasy epic. It's not a fair comparison.
Now, when taken as a whole LotR has the climax in about the right place--but it's almost never taken that way.
I suppose you could say that, in the same way you could say that the climax of a book that peaks with the slaying of the bad guy "was done via the predestined actions of the hero's sword."
The predestined part isn't all that bad--it's part and parcel of the tradition. But the problem is that the biggest problem of the entire world is solved by a madman accidently jumping into a volcano...
I think the only consistent reading of that sentence is that you don't care for the book at all, if you can believe that both that
(1) the author crafted the "really good parts" of the book
deliberately ("Tolkien decided") and
(2) the book is "badly written".
Well, that's the problem. Tolkien DIDN'T write the "really good parts"--he merely suggested them.
And I DID care for the books--until I finished them. It feels like Tolkien started the fantasy tradition of having your trilogy get worse with each volume. *sigh*
Like the Frodo's character development, in its entirety? It seems to me that Jackson missed the fact that, although Frodo retained the appearance of a hobbit just out of his tweens, he was, in fact, fifty years old. I can just imagine what he's done to Sam's character development in this installment.
Hobbit years are not human years--and even if they were, most hobbits-as-written don't grow up very much at all.
As far as movies go, Frodo & Sam have gobs and gobs of character development.
Does Arwen make another of her appearances, this time in Cirith Ungol?
Ah, you'd prefer it if Jackson faithfuly reproduced Tolkien's sexism?
Lord of the Rings, the movie trilogy by Peter Jackson, is a retelling of the story by Tolkien. The basic story is the same, while the parts that don't matter are either dropped or changed.
The promotion of the strong female lead to an active role won't get anyone's hackles up but the same kind of fan that bitches that Tom Bombadil didn't show up.
AFAIK, Arwen DOES show up. I have a suspicion that she brings the Narsil to Aragorn; FotR was unclear as to if he's got it or not. It'd be very believeable that the elves don't take the time to reforge the broken sword before the Fellowship sets off, and if so Arwen bringing the sword would help fill out TT.
(Side note: There's a difference between not liking something and knowing that it's badly written. The structure, pacing, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is ancient and abyssmal--it's dated a scant century after its original publication.)
I like DBZ, oddly enough, for one of the things I also like about Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Deep Space 9--and one of the major reasons why I don't really like Dragonlance anymore.
DBZ is a series of long stores of indefinite length; only rarely are the episodes self-contained, and the characters have a tendency to change, alter alliegences, and have some real development.
Sure, it's slanted towards the main hero (Goku always saves the day--even when he's dead) and the "fighting" has gotten to an unbelievable level, but it's got a far better episode-to-episode story than any other cartoon on the American airwaves.
Hell, do one better: Don't buy the CD with the stupid privacy idiocy on it, wait a day, and download the songs you want from P2P networks. The sooner the major music publishers go under, the sooner one of them will be forced to figure out a workable economic model that doesn't rely on legal strongarming and gives customers what they want instead of what the major labels think they SHOULD want.
Hey, we're the smart crowd. Why don't WE think up a good model, and sell it to them?
My idea is a rights-based model, where we buy a lifetime right to own a copy of a Copyrighted Work (for a bit less than the current going rate) and we're more or less left to our own devices to get that copy. If we want to brave P2P, great. If we want to pay the CD-press $5 for the CD, even better.
Sure, it's a potential loss of privacy--but I think we, as humans, can stand for a business to know who its customers are.
The major problem people are having with QM, the reason this "Zen" thing keeps coming up, is that QM says something incredibly strange about the world: the results of any experiment or measurement are inextricably tied up with the very act of measurement. QM seems to shatter the idea that an objective universe exists independently of the observer.
I don't believe that it does. The universe got along quite well without us--there isn't, AFAIK, a standing theory that requires life for the universe to exist, like the Zen "it's all imaginary" line does.
The objective universe exists. But once we get to a fine enough scale, it's simply impossible to measure something without changing it. What's so counterintuitive about that?
What QM is trying to tell us is that there is no way to actually draw a line between observer and observed. That's why people always bring up Zen (or Buddhism in general), since one of its major philosophical principles is that the separation between self and universe is an illusion.
I think it's blowing a few simple artifacts of the creation of knowledge a bit out of proportion.
Pick up a book on the Kabbalah, if you want a religious parallell to QM that doesn't rely on personal revelation for the transmission of knowledge.
This really muddies the waters further, not less, by blurring the distinction between Open and pseudo-open source.
Actually, it puts up walls and nicely cuts the muddy water from the clean water from the caustic clear acid.
Not EVERYONE wants a sticky copyleft free-as-in-fanatical license. The moral argument for such licenses should be made on its merits, not through doubletalk and rote intimidation.
Creative Commons could do a bit better if it linked to licenses that each selection was compatible with--and a bit better if it had a reverse lookup, where you could list the license of the source you want to use and you see your options for other licenses.
What we are suffering from today is a perversion of copyright; the notion of intellectual property, which has been regarded (legally) as actual property, and so we come to the absurd situation where someone can be considered to have 'stolen' intellectual property (and thus harmed the owner) without:
/. has been begging them to do forever...)
* depriving the owner of the property
* profiting from the property
How little profit do you need to get before it counts? $1000? $5? $.01? If you photocopy a book from a friend & read and keep it, thus getting complete enjoyment from it, and haven't paid for it, you've profited from your illegal action.
The problem, IMNSHO, is that our old copy-based model is getting beaten up by the ease of modern copying.
A better model would be a rights-based system, where you pay a nominal fee (what the going rate for a book or album today is) and get a lifetime right to have a copy of that work. You might get one copy included with the purchase of your right, or you could forgo the physical copy & save yourself some money.
If you lose your copy, or just want another one, you can get it through any means you want, and you never have to pay the author another dime--unless, of course, you're buying a physical copy from the author.
The _only_ real problem with this is verification... but I'm sure the same technology that created the inital problem can solve this secondary one...
(The bonus benefit, of course, would be that the RIAA and the MPAA would have a new model that is squarely in line with the "information age", which