Nope. "Acceptance" is equal to "accepted." It's not moral for someone to lie. It's not moral for someone to have an affair. It's hardly moral for someone to have been divorced. But they're all accepted in modern society--the releveation that a private citizen has done these things will not hinder their ability to live their life.
I absolutely believe in an absolute right and wrong that can be measured objectively. I also challenge what my parents or my church has told me, and I only accept it if I can find reasons to back it up.
I'd prefer to live in a way that *I* believe to be "right", irrespective of what others might think
I prefer to live in a way that IS "right", though I use the term "good" or "moral." My objective goal is "If this thing were to be done by everyone, would the world be a better place?"
Living by how you "feel" with that as the only goal is selfishness and decadence, and hardly deserving of the word "right". (Not that I necessarily think you live that way, just expressing my reaction to your wording.)
When was the last time a cop shot an innocent person and went to jail for it? I can't think of any... seems they do that once a month here in Seattle and are never brought up on charges, let alone serve time.
Police officers are not part of the general populace when they've got their badge on, and are held to a different standard of accountability, not unlike the code that soliders have to follow.
Here in NY state, there was a spark a while back about a black man named Diallo who got shot down by officers. After a trial (that got moved upstate to right here in Albany), the officers were absolved of their charges--the jury found that they really did think that this was their man, and they really did think that he was pulling a gun.
'course, they all probably got written up internally for "excessive use of force," and each and every one of those cops has to live with the knowledge that they killed an innocent... I would be surprised if none of the officers took some psychiatric aid, and if they're all still working at NYPD.
(A google search, btw, lists over 54k results for "Cop goes to jail".)
For the most part, police officers who go to trial go quietly, and I suspect that many of them plead guilty--who the hell wants to life with "bad cop" floating around in the general conciousness attached to their face?
Its time to get rid of the police part of the police state-- let private security agencies represent us and defend us-- and make everyone equal under the law. (And no more agents of the state getting first crack at the evidence so they can tamper with it. Completely lacks objectivity that.)
That's wrong on so many levels...
Placing security into "private" hands means security only for the rich. I can barely afford health insurance and keep a car on the road--how the hell am I going to find money to pay for a security service?
There's a cliche about people paying for "security." And it's attached to the mob. It doesn't seem that far a step from "everyone pays someone to protect them" to "everyone pays someone not to beat them up."
What makes you think that private agents would be any *MORE* trustworthy than state agents? Most forensic units are looking for the truth, not a conviction, mostly because reductions in crime make their neighborhoods safer and their jobs easier.
Thanks for listening to my rant. while I was born in the south, I left after I realized just how corrupt the states are.. Florida, LA, Miss, Texas-- hell cops were drowning people in Brayes Bayou and shooting them, while drunk, on the freeway when I left Texas (and of course, no charges are filed.)
So, you're a witness to police getting drunk and murdering someone? Call the local DA right now--there's no statute of limiations on murder. Oh, that DA's corrupt? Then call them first, and then the FBI. Oh, you didn't see it firsthand? Then have your friend who did call.
Oh, wait--you mean you didn't actually see it, and you don't know anyone who did? Then it's heresay, gossip, and not enough to build any kind of case whatsoever. It probably didn't happen, or if it did it was resolved internally and no one bothered to tell you because it's none of your damn business.
Sorry about the counter-rant; knee-jerk antiestablishmentism irks me greatly, especially coming from people who don't get out and do anything about it.
That was a rational reaction being compared to stalin or a disease don't you think?
I don't know, MS's assertions, although voiced in horribly combative analogies, are valid.
Look at the GPL: Use a little bit of GPL'd code in your program (get some cancerous cells in a tissue) and it takes over (likewise) and then can never be take out of public domain (cancer cells never "naturally" die.)
Users and Proponents of the GPL, as a whole, act like everyone should have equal access to software (all citizens should have access to the fruit of industry) and no one should have a right to take software for themselves (your labor belongs to the people, not to you.)
If these analogies upset you, I suggest simply responding in kind. Compare Window's licening to mental illness (errattic behavior, takes a lot of work to get to behave, causes irrational views of the world) and the company itself to facists (everything should have a central control, and everyone should be forced to use the standard.)
'course, unlike facism, Windows actually does do some things well... like get the @!#$ out of my way and let me get to work. (Saving my pennies for a mac so I can get rid of MS.)
Also, Gore did lose the election, based on your electoral system.
Gore lost the election because Congress failed to do its duty. When the course of an election is unclear, CONGRESS is to debate the validity of the votes and, if necessary, put aisde the electoral votes and vote for the next president.
Al Gore might have been president if even one Senator had agreed that it should be debated in Congress. I have a vivid memory of watching Al Gore preside over the senate, and refuse to hear the issue about whether he should be president.
I can't see Bush doing the same.
Finally, even with the recount done by the newspapers in florida (which was far from "official"), Bush would have won anyway, albeit by the slimmest of margins.
I have no confidence in the possibility of ever figuring out who "really" won Florida. There's too many examples of inappropriate behavior and ambiguous responses. The darn thing should have been called off, and decided in congress like the constitution calls for.
The goverment keeps tab on its people for a simple reason: it does not trust them to pay their taxes and it knows that the people does not trust it either. Government without trust is bound to fail in the end. This includes democratic governments. Heck, the very tenet of democracy is that we cannot trust anybody. Hence checks and balances, etc...
Actually, the feds take a 10-year census for a much more pratical reason for that. We assign seats in the house (and electoral votes for president) via population. All the rest of the data is just a nice side effect, but it is used to target social programs, like giving money away to poor communities that need help.
King David didn't have a reason to take a census, so God smote him. Remember: this is the same God who flooded the entire world because some humans got decadent, and who killed uncounted egyptians to free the Jews (When he could have just showed up and said "let them go.")
That is not the point of government control. The point of government control is to make sure its taxes are paid.
Exactly. The government cares about protecting its citizens, collecting taxes, and enforcing laws, generally in that order.
As I have said previously, the only problem with such a setup is imperfection. If the system were perfect, it would be excellent. But if it is imperfect, and beleived to be "reliable," then it shouldn't be in use.
Or at the very least, it should be treason for anyone but a sitting judge by writ to divulge the secrets of the database.
To silence this person, they will have the ability to make any embarrassing information public (none of which may even have been illegal).
You should always live your life such that, if your darkest secrets were to be known by all, you could keep on living your life.
I don't care if "everyone" does it. Either a thing is accepted and you can go ahead and do it, or a thing is wrong and you desrve any ridicule you get for doing it.
Remember folks, the only reason we don't live in an Orwellian nightmare world is actually because it isn't technologically feasible.
Actually, just take out "technologically." Replace it with "politically", "economically", or "sociologically" as you see fit.
The people in power are *not* interested in taking away your rights. They never have been. They're interested in protecting your own. The best defense against "an Orwellian nightmare", is to simply show the people in power that you are NOT a threat to their rights.
On the other hand, if you think that all mankind is vile and despicable and not to be trusted, then we should live in "an orwellian nightmare", and stop deluing ourselves that things like free trade, democracy, or "civil rights" will be anything but threats our out basic nature. I don't think that we are, but you might disagree with me.
Hmm, Citizen #95235345 just bought a DVD-R unit and downloaded a copy of DeCSS. Set his Awareness Level to 15%, and send a copy of his Dossier to Media Control for further study. Excellent, we might yet meet our Enforcement quota this week!
Two nitpicks:
1:) If the government was going to track everyone by number (they'd probably use names instead, for morale reasons of the officers) they'd use Social Security Numbers. XXX-XX-XXXX.
2:) Quotas, where they exist, only exist to match the statistics of crimes with the statistics of lawbreakers. If there are an average of 10 thefts a day in a city, the city probably WANTS to see an average of 10 arrests for theft a day, and can require 3-5. If there's continuous tracking of all citizens, this won't be a problem.
The nightmarish prosects of a system like this are imperfection and abuse. If the system were to work perfectly and sufficient checks were in place to make the operators of the system above reproach, this could work and be a utopia, not a nightmare.
Common Wisdom may say that all Utopias fail, but common wisdom said the same thing about democracies three hundred yeras ago.
Could Congress make a law that allows me (me, not them) to beat the tar out of you because you're a Christian?
Yes. They could render a law wherein anyone proselytizing (trying to convert the unconverted) uninvited can be assumed to be tresspassing as if they had circumvented the most avaliable security measures even if said measures are not in place.
If you invade my home past my barbed wire, motion detector, and "no tresspassing" signs, I can certainly beat the tar out of you.
This hypothetical law, if it passed, would quickly kill door-to-door prostletyizing, which most people wouldn't worry about. It'd probably be brought to the SC by the Mormons, who do it as a matter of religion, and from there it could go etiher way--they might be told "the law's out," or they might be told "use direct mailings or shout from the public streets."
If you want to get rid of the DMCA, first take a good, long look at the community that it was created in response to. The 'net has grown to a level where it's integral to our functioning as a nation, which means that there has to be some way to police it. Either we give up anonymnity (so the copyright holders can just sue anyone who makes an illicit copy), or we make it illegal to create the tools that allow "hackers" and "file sharers" to wreak the havoc that they currently can.
If you want a rant on why copyright is a good thing, I'll be happy to supply one--but that'd be awfully off-topic.
The founders of the United States held that certain rights are God given or "natural", i.e. they cannot be abridged by anyone or anything -- unless you voluntarily enter into an agreement.
Are you referring to the following?:
We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inaliable rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
It's from the declaration of indipendance, which is nothing more than a nastygram sent to the King of England explaining why we were going to war. It is *NOT* a legal document, and aside from being an example of the proper mindset, it's hardly binding.
The rights included in the First Amendment are NOT aboslute, even in the absence of a contract. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. You cannot sacrafice another human beign no matter what your religion says. If you print slander, you can be held liable in civil court. If you print child pornography, you can be taken to criminal court. In some places, if you discuss how to get past security guards or open someone's car, you can be arrested.
The DMCA is many things, but a clear-cut violation of the first amendment it is not.
This is why the founding fathers were a bit more radical than they are given credit for. They would not have agreed with the statement "If Congress passes a law, then it stands as the law of the land no matter what." If the law attempts to abridge your God given rights, then your rights simply trump the law and you can and probably SHOULD actively disregard/disobey it.
That depends on the law. If people are really harmed, as they were with slavery, then you should stand agaisnt them. If people are merely inconvenienced, as during Prohibition or an unlawful incarceration in a time of war, you should work with the system to change the system, not discard it.
If you're going to try and get the law changed, then you're going to need to be accountable. Stand up, be proud for what you do, and don't hide behind "privacy."
"Those that value personal privacy over general liberty deserve neither."
Criminal reasons: As in, punishment for criminal activities.
"Freedom of Speech" won't get you out of a Conspiracy rap, or let you have complete freedom whent you're in jail.
In any case... the whole point of the first amendment was so that people's ideas could be free--so they could believe what they want, and critizize whomever they want, without being locked up just for thinking differently. Beyond that, any constraint on the government's activities to have you be civil is just gravy on your part.
Evolution is breeding. As in, breeding programs. As in, something that we've done with horses, wolves, and bunny rabbits. And the bunny rabbit breeding can be done at a school relatively easily.
The only real difference is that in breeding the traits that humans like are the ones that are brought out, but in the wild the traits that allow a creature to best survive (eat/mate/breed/notgetkilled) are brought out.
_HISTORICAL_ evolution is the only thing that religion can possibly have a problem with--and by splitting the two, you can ignore the religous debate and focus on learning science.
(A good short rebuttal to "God created the universe, so you're wrong" might be "if the universe was created, it was created looking a lot older than it is, probably so we could learn about how it would act for the next X years.")
Welcome to America kids! If you're lucky, you'll get permission to publish your paper too!
Go back and read the first amendment. Note the subject.
CONGRESS--and by extension, the government--cannot abridge your freedom of speech, aside from military or criminal reasons. And for a lot of things, not even then.
PRIVATE PARTIES, like MIT and Microsoft, can do whatever the hell they please, up to the point where they're a goverment.
If Microsoft owns a town, they can't made a law abridging speech there. They can only let employees live there, and make the employees know that they're fired if they belittle MS (and deal with the PR backlash that does), but they can't make a law.
Think this is bad now? Try living under a real king, who can kill you just on a whim. Corporate politics are a light cold compared to the absolute void that we might find if the government wasn't restrained as it.
Private people--heck, if we make it so no one could tell anyone else to shut up, life would be like an early AOL chatroom that you could never log out of.
"You'll have to forgive me if I slack off a bit; after outlasting my competing coworkers and dealing with an office that alternately hates me and wants to be my best friend, I as a person have earned a little cancer and self-destructiveness."
"Corruption" is nothing more than men that stop doing what they should do and instead do only what they want to do. In other words, it happens only when people get tired of fighting and take a break.
Most of the parent post was the same kind of tired, angry rant that the USA has been hearing since the Revolutionary war. We were an important market for Europe then, and we're the most powerful economy in the world now. The arugment rings hollow.
As for the notion of 'needing something to fight against' as a justification for injustice or corruption
Read it again. It's hardly a justification for it--all I stated was a simple, possible benefit to leaving some corruption in the world.
As for Ralph Nader... He was the only non-joke third-party candidate in the last election, and every vote he got was from the "democratic" half of the election. If he had endorsed Gore, the world would probably be a very different place and he might be in a position to change that legislation, instead of just complaining about it.
I mean, hell, the upper crust just got done pilfering the life savings and retirement of the entire middle class, and yet no signficant reform or change has taken place
Read the news. The Federal Government just made doing what the CEOs of Enron et al did a federal offense, meaning real jail time.
And, just in case you're wondering, when someone commits a crime against you, you can usually sue them and win some fiscal recompensation. So the next time a CEO lies to their stockholders, and thus causes them to lose money, the middle-class stockholders can sue for a portion of their money back.
IANAL, but I do read the news.
It isn't going to be any foreign enemy, or "terrorists" who bring down our country, it is going to be our own inaction in the face of ever wider, ever more flagrant, and ever more destructive corruption. It saddens me greatly to have lived to see such a day.
Are we more corrupt, or less, than we were when we stared a scant 226 years ago?
Labor Unions, Civil Rights, CEO criminal culpability... we've come a long way from when we started, and we've made most of the biggest steps in the last centry or so.
You'll have to forgive us if we slack off a bit; after outlasting communism and dealing with a world that alternatly hates us and wants us to be their best friend, we as a counry have earned a little corruption and selfishness.
Heck, if nothing else, it'll give our next generation something to rebel against. (For an example of what happens when rebels don't have a cause, look up "Whiskey Rebellion.")
I want someone to seriously come and tell me that I can't rip a page out of a book I've bought.
Of course you can. You can also "edit" a videotape that you bought. You just can't *COPY* or *RESELL* it.
I heard of a court case (Supreme Court, I think) where someone was sued for cutting the art from inside a book, framing it, and selling it. IIRC, the someone was even barred from taking books brought to them and framing them for their customers.
The ideas above are my personal opinion and I thought them up as I was typing along. If I can think of these arguments up in such a short time then think that the CLI folk should do the same before they flame GUI advocates. I think they should respond less emotionally when the subject of CLI vs GUI comes up.
I've never understood pure CLI advocates, myself. Just a few days ago I was over at a friend's house, & opened up his laptop, which was running Linux and had lost its IP address. He tried *three* different commands before giving up; were this windows, one simple command would have sufficed, and if one didn't work, trying it a different way wouldn't have helped.
Litte bits like this make it harder and harder to justify the work to repartition my HDD and "try out" Linux. *sigh*
I don't want to run "windows programs" stabiliy. I want to run the best software on my pc--and much of the time, that's software that only works on windows.
Face it; Linux has a piddly market penetration, so bad that it's well nigh impossible to make money supporting it all. A small company (or just a well-run, tight margins, efficient company) that only has the time to develop for one platform will choose windows; unless they're serious hardware or a custom solution, they'd be foolish not to.
By letting Linux run windows apps, Linux makes all those developers that are windows only potential allies, instead of the definite enemies that are now. If your reveune model depends on windows being on the desktop, you're not going to take kindly to efforts to replace it with something else that won't run your program. If this something else *will* run your program, as well as windows will and on the same hardware, then you've nothing to worry about.
If MS goes belly up, WinDOS will likely go with it
Hardly. MS has enough market saturation that, if the Feds decided to fine them 100 billion dollars (and thus bankrput them), their trademarks & code would be bought by someone (maybe Apple, or Ted Turner) within a quarter, and back on the market within a quarter after that.
The only way "WinDOS" & Office are going anywhere is if alternatives to them achieve enough market saturation to render them irrelevant--like what happened to the pre-MS Office market leaders.
If MS inc. goes bankrupt, expect "Ted Turner Windows" and "Ted Turner Office" to come out shortly.
The difference between a CLI and a GUI are, really, baggage from a prior generation of systems that should be discarded.
A future interface will be graphical because that allows for more immediate and intuitive use of information. I can know, at a fraction of a glance, that I have Groupwise, Mozilla, and Winamp loaded as "user applications," as well as a working iFolder, netshield, & a couple of other background apps.
The biggest improvement for this will be keyboard integration. I want to push a button (windows key or equivalent) and have a "command area" pop up, which is designed to work with the GUI.
Take the Windows setup and add anything & everything that the Linux CLIs have that it doesn't. Then rework the entire thing from the ground up, remembering that the CLI will work *always* with the GUI, and a user should be able to do everything with the CLI.
A generation after this, and we can replace the command area with voice recognition. The voice subsystem will just feed commands into where the CLI goes, and it'll work exactly as we imagined it would as kids.
I don't think that that assertion has ever been tested. And I'm not at all certain that it's valid. I'm pretty sure that some distributions distribute both commercial and GPL software on the same CD, so I rather suspect that your statement is over-broad, depending on what you mean by package. If you mean box, then it's certainly over-broad. If you mean rpm, or tarball, then I still think it's probably too broad, but I'm not anywhere near as certain.
Quark XPress 5 has at least one GPL'd library, but the program itself isn't GPL'd. If you care to try and claim it is, I suspect that Quark has plenty of money saved from (re) writing their few GPL'd libraries that they can spend on their lawyers.
*sigh* And the difference between a simple and clear "library usage" and a program that's little more than a frontend for a bunch of GPL'd apps is, AFAIK, something guaranteed to get you into court.:( The world would be so much simpler if the GPL actually contained a definition of "program" or "derivitive."
This puts us closer to handheld DNA analysis from a PDA. How soon till police in the field can check one's identity with a palm or pocketpc? (assuming you won't tell them).
If a police officer has a reason to talk to you (you're speeding, tresspassing, staring at everyone around you...), then you need to identify yourself. If you *don't* tell them who you are, they can just haul you in on suspicion...
Our check against abuse of this is (judging from State Troopers having tri-copy speeding tickets, while METER MAIDS have automatic printers) making them fill out paperwork.
Same people, same issues and the same two political parties fighting it out.
You've obviously never been to New York, or California, Nevada, Texas, or Florida.
Some of the states are *very* different than their neighbors. Different tax levels, different levels of government, different *laws*... in some ways, moving from one state to another can be as different as moving from one country to the next.
Makes me curious, are there any neighboring states which don't get along very well? Any states that fight over water or any other natural resources?
I imagine that there are. But since we've got the Feds, they fight with lawyers and not their respective "National Guards" or State Police.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so "acceptance" is equal to "moral"? I see.
Nope. "Acceptance" is equal to "accepted." It's not moral for someone to lie. It's not moral for someone to have an affair. It's hardly moral for someone to have been divorced. But they're all accepted in modern society--the releveation that a private citizen has done these things will not hinder their ability to live their life.
I absolutely believe in an absolute right and wrong that can be measured objectively. I also challenge what my parents or my church has told me, and I only accept it if I can find reasons to back it up.
I'd prefer to live in a way that *I* believe to be "right", irrespective of what others might think
I prefer to live in a way that IS "right", though I use the term "good" or "moral." My objective goal is "If this thing were to be done by everyone, would the world be a better place?"
Living by how you "feel" with that as the only goal is selfishness and decadence, and hardly deserving of the word "right". (Not that I necessarily think you live that way, just expressing my reaction to your wording.)
Police officers are not part of the general populace when they've got their badge on, and are held to a different standard of accountability, not unlike the code that soliders have to follow.
Here in NY state, there was a spark a while back about a black man named Diallo who got shot down by officers. After a trial (that got moved upstate to right here in Albany), the officers were absolved of their charges--the jury found that they really did think that this was their man, and they really did think that he was pulling a gun.
'course, they all probably got written up internally for "excessive use of force," and each and every one of those cops has to live with the knowledge that they killed an innocent... I would be surprised if none of the officers took some psychiatric aid, and if they're all still working at NYPD.
(A google search, btw, lists over 54k results for "Cop goes to jail".)
For the most part, police officers who go to trial go quietly, and I suspect that many of them plead guilty--who the hell wants to life with "bad cop" floating around in the general conciousness attached to their face?
Its time to get rid of the police part of the police state-- let private security agencies represent us and defend us-- and make everyone equal under the law. (And no more agents of the state getting first crack at the evidence so they can tamper with it. Completely lacks objectivity that.)
That's wrong on so many levels...
Thanks for listening to my rant. while I was born in the south, I left after I realized just how corrupt the states are.. Florida, LA, Miss, Texas-- hell cops were drowning people in Brayes Bayou and shooting them, while drunk, on the freeway when I left Texas (and of course, no charges are filed.)
So, you're a witness to police getting drunk and murdering someone? Call the local DA right now--there's no statute of limiations on murder. Oh, that DA's corrupt? Then call them first, and then the FBI. Oh, you didn't see it firsthand? Then have your friend who did call.
Oh, wait--you mean you didn't actually see it, and you don't know anyone who did? Then it's heresay, gossip, and not enough to build any kind of case whatsoever. It probably didn't happen, or if it did it was resolved internally and no one bothered to tell you because it's none of your damn business.
Sorry about the counter-rant; knee-jerk antiestablishmentism irks me greatly, especially coming from people who don't get out and do anything about it.
That was a rational reaction being compared to stalin or a disease don't you think?
I don't know, MS's assertions, although voiced in horribly combative analogies, are valid.
Look at the GPL: Use a little bit of GPL'd code in your program (get some cancerous cells in a tissue) and it takes over (likewise) and then can never be take out of public domain (cancer cells never "naturally" die.)
Users and Proponents of the GPL, as a whole, act like everyone should have equal access to software (all citizens should have access to the fruit of industry) and no one should have a right to take software for themselves (your labor belongs to the people, not to you.)
If these analogies upset you, I suggest simply responding in kind. Compare Window's licening to mental illness (errattic behavior, takes a lot of work to get to behave, causes irrational views of the world) and the company itself to facists (everything should have a central control, and everyone should be forced to use the standard.)
'course, unlike facism, Windows actually does do some things well... like get the @!#$ out of my way and let me get to work. (Saving my pennies for a mac so I can get rid of MS.)
Also, Gore did lose the election, based on your electoral system.
Gore lost the election because Congress failed to do its duty. When the course of an election is unclear, CONGRESS is to debate the validity of the votes and, if necessary, put aisde the electoral votes and vote for the next president.
Al Gore might have been president if even one Senator had agreed that it should be debated in Congress. I have a vivid memory of watching Al Gore preside over the senate, and refuse to hear the issue about whether he should be president.
I can't see Bush doing the same.
Finally, even with the recount done by the newspapers in florida (which was far from "official"), Bush would have won anyway, albeit by the slimmest of margins.
I have no confidence in the possibility of ever figuring out who "really" won Florida. There's too many examples of inappropriate behavior and ambiguous responses. The darn thing should have been called off, and decided in congress like the constitution calls for.
The goverment keeps tab on its people for a simple reason: it does not trust them to pay their taxes and it knows that the people does not trust it either. Government without trust is bound to fail in the end. This includes democratic governments. Heck, the very tenet of democracy is that we cannot trust anybody. Hence checks and balances, etc...
Actually, the feds take a 10-year census for a much more pratical reason for that. We assign seats in the house (and electoral votes for president) via population. All the rest of the data is just a nice side effect, but it is used to target social programs, like giving money away to poor communities that need help.
King David didn't have a reason to take a census, so God smote him. Remember: this is the same God who flooded the entire world because some humans got decadent, and who killed uncounted egyptians to free the Jews (When he could have just showed up and said "let them go.")
That is not the point of government control. The point of government control is to make sure its taxes are paid.
Exactly. The government cares about protecting its citizens, collecting taxes, and enforcing laws, generally in that order.
As I have said previously, the only problem with such a setup is imperfection. If the system were perfect, it would be excellent. But if it is imperfect, and beleived to be "reliable," then it shouldn't be in use.
Or at the very least, it should be treason for anyone but a sitting judge by writ to divulge the secrets of the database.
To silence this person, they will have the ability to make any embarrassing information public (none of which may even have been illegal).
You should always live your life such that, if your darkest secrets were to be known by all, you could keep on living your life.
I don't care if "everyone" does it. Either a thing is accepted and you can go ahead and do it, or a thing is wrong and you desrve any ridicule you get for doing it.
Remember folks, the only reason we don't live in an Orwellian nightmare world is actually because it isn't technologically feasible.
Actually, just take out "technologically." Replace it with "politically", "economically", or "sociologically" as you see fit.
The people in power are *not* interested in taking away your rights. They never have been. They're interested in protecting your own. The best defense against "an Orwellian nightmare", is to simply show the people in power that you are NOT a threat to their rights.
On the other hand, if you think that all mankind is vile and despicable and not to be trusted, then we should live in "an orwellian nightmare", and stop deluing ourselves that things like free trade, democracy, or "civil rights" will be anything but threats our out basic nature. I don't think that we are, but you might disagree with me.
Hmm, Citizen #95235345 just bought a DVD-R unit and downloaded a copy of DeCSS. Set his Awareness Level to 15%, and send a copy of his Dossier to Media Control for further study. Excellent, we might yet meet our Enforcement quota this week!
Two nitpicks:
1:) If the government was going to track everyone by number (they'd probably use names instead, for morale reasons of the officers) they'd use Social Security Numbers. XXX-XX-XXXX.
2:) Quotas, where they exist, only exist to match the statistics of crimes with the statistics of lawbreakers. If there are an average of 10 thefts a day in a city, the city probably WANTS to see an average of 10 arrests for theft a day, and can require 3-5. If there's continuous tracking of all citizens, this won't be a problem.
The nightmarish prosects of a system like this are imperfection and abuse. If the system were to work perfectly and sufficient checks were in place to make the operators of the system above reproach, this could work and be a utopia, not a nightmare.
Common Wisdom may say that all Utopias fail, but common wisdom said the same thing about democracies three hundred yeras ago.
Could Congress make a law that allows me (me, not them) to beat the tar out of you because you're a Christian?
Yes. They could render a law wherein anyone proselytizing (trying to convert the unconverted) uninvited can be assumed to be tresspassing as if they had circumvented the most avaliable security measures even if said measures are not in place.
If you invade my home past my barbed wire, motion detector, and "no tresspassing" signs, I can certainly beat the tar out of you.
This hypothetical law, if it passed, would quickly kill door-to-door prostletyizing, which most people wouldn't worry about. It'd probably be brought to the SC by the Mormons, who do it as a matter of religion, and from there it could go etiher way--they might be told "the law's out," or they might be told "use direct mailings or shout from the public streets."
If you want to get rid of the DMCA, first take a good, long look at the community that it was created in response to. The 'net has grown to a level where it's integral to our functioning as a nation, which means that there has to be some way to police it. Either we give up anonymnity (so the copyright holders can just sue anyone who makes an illicit copy), or we make it illegal to create the tools that allow "hackers" and "file sharers" to wreak the havoc that they currently can.
If you want a rant on why copyright is a good thing, I'll be happy to supply one--but that'd be awfully off-topic.
Are you referring to the following?:
It's from the declaration of indipendance, which is nothing more than a nastygram sent to the King of England explaining why we were going to war. It is *NOT* a legal document, and aside from being an example of the proper mindset, it's hardly binding.
The rights included in the First Amendment are NOT aboslute, even in the absence of a contract. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. You cannot sacrafice another human beign no matter what your religion says. If you print slander, you can be held liable in civil court. If you print child pornography, you can be taken to criminal court. In some places, if you discuss how to get past security guards or open someone's car, you can be arrested.
The DMCA is many things, but a clear-cut violation of the first amendment it is not.
This is why the founding fathers were a bit more radical than they are given credit for. They would not have agreed with the statement "If Congress passes a law, then it stands as the law of the land no matter what." If the law attempts to abridge your God given rights, then your rights simply trump the law and you can and probably SHOULD actively disregard/disobey it.
That depends on the law. If people are really harmed, as they were with slavery, then you should stand agaisnt them. If people are merely inconvenienced, as during Prohibition or an unlawful incarceration in a time of war, you should work with the system to change the system, not discard it.
If you're going to try and get the law changed, then you're going to need to be accountable. Stand up, be proud for what you do, and don't hide behind "privacy."
"Those that value personal privacy over general liberty deserve neither."
Criminal reasons: As in, punishment for criminal activities.
"Freedom of Speech" won't get you out of a Conspiracy rap, or let you have complete freedom whent you're in jail.
In any case... the whole point of the first amendment was so that people's ideas could be free--so they could believe what they want, and critizize whomever they want, without being locked up just for thinking differently. Beyond that, any constraint on the government's activities to have you be civil is just gravy on your part.
A suggestion:
Evolution is breeding. As in, breeding programs. As in, something that we've done with horses, wolves, and bunny rabbits. And the bunny rabbit breeding can be done at a school relatively easily.
The only real difference is that in breeding the traits that humans like are the ones that are brought out, but in the wild the traits that allow a creature to best survive (eat/mate/breed/notgetkilled) are brought out.
_HISTORICAL_ evolution is the only thing that religion can possibly have a problem with--and by splitting the two, you can ignore the religous debate and focus on learning science.
(A good short rebuttal to "God created the universe, so you're wrong" might be "if the universe was created, it was created looking a lot older than it is, probably so we could learn about how it would act for the next X years.")
Welcome to America kids! If you're lucky, you'll get permission to publish your paper too!
Go back and read the first amendment. Note the subject.
CONGRESS--and by extension, the government--cannot abridge your freedom of speech, aside from military or criminal reasons. And for a lot of things, not even then.
PRIVATE PARTIES, like MIT and Microsoft, can do whatever the hell they please, up to the point where they're a goverment.
If Microsoft owns a town, they can't made a law abridging speech there. They can only let employees live there, and make the employees know that they're fired if they belittle MS (and deal with the PR backlash that does), but they can't make a law.
Think this is bad now? Try living under a real king, who can kill you just on a whim. Corporate politics are a light cold compared to the absolute void that we might find if the government wasn't restrained as it.
Private people--heck, if we make it so no one could tell anyone else to shut up, life would be like an early AOL chatroom that you could never log out of.
"You'll have to forgive me if I slack off a bit; after outlasting my competing coworkers and dealing with an office that alternately hates me and wants to be my best friend, I as a person have earned a little cancer and self-destructiveness."
"Corruption" is nothing more than men that stop doing what they should do and instead do only what they want to do. In other words, it happens only when people get tired of fighting and take a break.
Most of the parent post was the same kind of tired, angry rant that the USA has been hearing since the Revolutionary war. We were an important market for Europe then, and we're the most powerful economy in the world now. The arugment rings hollow.
As for the notion of 'needing something to fight against' as a justification for injustice or corruption
Read it again. It's hardly a justification for it--all I stated was a simple, possible benefit to leaving some corruption in the world.
As for Ralph Nader... He was the only non-joke third-party candidate in the last election, and every vote he got was from the "democratic" half of the election. If he had endorsed Gore, the world would probably be a very different place and he might be in a position to change that legislation, instead of just complaining about it.
As far as I can tell, having Windows support for OS/2 didn't help it much.
Of course not. OS/2 was more expensive, worked differently, and wasn't marketed as agressively.
Running windows software perfectly shouldn't be Linux's main effort--but it sure as hell will help in removing "reasons to stay with windows."
MS can easily kill Red Hat. But they can't kill Linux--that's the whole point of the GPL
I mean, hell, the upper crust just got done pilfering the life savings and retirement of the entire middle class, and yet no signficant reform or change has taken place
Read the news. The Federal Government just made doing what the CEOs of Enron et al did a federal offense, meaning real jail time.
And, just in case you're wondering, when someone commits a crime against you, you can usually sue them and win some fiscal recompensation. So the next time a CEO lies to their stockholders, and thus causes them to lose money, the middle-class stockholders can sue for a portion of their money back.
IANAL, but I do read the news.
It isn't going to be any foreign enemy, or "terrorists" who bring down our country, it is going to be our own inaction in the face of ever wider, ever more flagrant, and ever more destructive corruption. It saddens me greatly to have lived to see such a day.
Are we more corrupt, or less, than we were when we stared a scant 226 years ago?
Labor Unions, Civil Rights, CEO criminal culpability... we've come a long way from when we started, and we've made most of the biggest steps in the last centry or so.
You'll have to forgive us if we slack off a bit; after outlasting communism and dealing with a world that alternatly hates us and wants us to be their best friend, we as a counry have earned a little corruption and selfishness.
Heck, if nothing else, it'll give our next generation something to rebel against. (For an example of what happens when rebels don't have a cause, look up "Whiskey Rebellion.")
I want someone to seriously come and tell me that I can't rip a page out of a book I've bought.
Of course you can. You can also "edit" a videotape that you bought. You just can't *COPY* or *RESELL* it.
I heard of a court case (Supreme Court, I think) where someone was sued for cutting the art from inside a book, framing it, and selling it. IIRC, the someone was even barred from taking books brought to them and framing them for their customers.
IANAL, but I read a lot.
The ideas above are my personal opinion and I thought them up as I was typing along. If I can think of these arguments up in such a short time then think that the CLI folk should do the same before they flame GUI advocates. I think they should respond less emotionally when the subject of CLI vs GUI comes up.
I've never understood pure CLI advocates, myself. Just a few days ago I was over at a friend's house, & opened up his laptop, which was running Linux and had lost its IP address. He tried *three* different commands before giving up; were this windows, one simple command would have sufficed, and if one didn't work, trying it a different way wouldn't have helped.
Litte bits like this make it harder and harder to justify the work to repartition my HDD and "try out" Linux. *sigh*
I don't want to run "windows programs" stabiliy. I want to run the best software on my pc--and much of the time, that's software that only works on windows.
Face it; Linux has a piddly market penetration, so bad that it's well nigh impossible to make money supporting it all. A small company (or just a well-run, tight margins, efficient company) that only has the time to develop for one platform will choose windows; unless they're serious hardware or a custom solution, they'd be foolish not to.
By letting Linux run windows apps, Linux makes all those developers that are windows only potential allies, instead of the definite enemies that are now. If your reveune model depends on windows being on the desktop, you're not going to take kindly to efforts to replace it with something else that won't run your program. If this something else *will* run your program, as well as windows will and on the same hardware, then you've nothing to worry about.
If MS goes belly up, WinDOS will likely go with it
Hardly. MS has enough market saturation that, if the Feds decided to fine them 100 billion dollars (and thus bankrput them), their trademarks & code would be bought by someone (maybe Apple, or Ted Turner) within a quarter, and back on the market within a quarter after that.
The only way "WinDOS" & Office are going anywhere is if alternatives to them achieve enough market saturation to render them irrelevant--like what happened to the pre-MS Office market leaders.
If MS inc. goes bankrupt, expect "Ted Turner Windows" and "Ted Turner Office" to come out shortly.
The difference between a CLI and a GUI are, really, baggage from a prior generation of systems that should be discarded.
A future interface will be graphical because that allows for more immediate and intuitive use of information. I can know, at a fraction of a glance, that I have Groupwise, Mozilla, and Winamp loaded as "user applications," as well as a working iFolder, netshield, & a couple of other background apps.
The biggest improvement for this will be keyboard integration. I want to push a button (windows key or equivalent) and have a "command area" pop up, which is designed to work with the GUI.
Take the Windows setup and add anything & everything that the Linux CLIs have that it doesn't. Then rework the entire thing from the ground up, remembering that the CLI will work *always* with the GUI, and a user should be able to do everything with the CLI.
A generation after this, and we can replace the command area with voice recognition. The voice subsystem will just feed commands into where the CLI goes, and it'll work exactly as we imagined it would as kids.
You sure you don't mean an LGPL'd library?
Hold on, let me check...
d'oh!
I don't think that that assertion has ever been tested. And I'm not at all certain that it's valid. I'm pretty sure that some distributions distribute both commercial and GPL software on the same CD, so I rather suspect that your statement is over-broad, depending on what you mean by package. If you mean box, then it's certainly over-broad. If you mean rpm, or tarball, then I still think it's probably too broad, but I'm not anywhere near as certain.
:( The world would be so much simpler if the GPL actually contained a definition of "program" or "derivitive."
Quark XPress 5 has at least one GPL'd library, but the program itself isn't GPL'd. If you care to try and claim it is, I suspect that Quark has plenty of money saved from (re) writing their few GPL'd libraries that they can spend on their lawyers.
*sigh* And the difference between a simple and clear "library usage" and a program that's little more than a frontend for a bunch of GPL'd apps is, AFAIK, something guaranteed to get you into court.
This puts us closer to handheld DNA analysis from a PDA. How soon till police in the field can check one's identity with a palm or pocketpc? (assuming you won't tell them).
If a police officer has a reason to talk to you (you're speeding, tresspassing, staring at everyone around you...), then you need to identify yourself. If you *don't* tell them who you are, they can just haul you in on suspicion...
Our check against abuse of this is (judging from State Troopers having tri-copy speeding tickets, while METER MAIDS have automatic printers) making them fill out paperwork.
Same people, same issues and the same two political parties fighting it out.
You've obviously never been to New York, or California, Nevada, Texas, or Florida.
Some of the states are *very* different than their neighbors. Different tax levels, different levels of government, different *laws*... in some ways, moving from one state to another can be as different as moving from one country to the next.
Makes me curious, are there any neighboring states which don't get along very well? Any states that fight over water or any other natural resources?
I imagine that there are. But since we've got the Feds, they fight with lawyers and not their respective "National Guards" or State Police.