My favourite movie of all time is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and it's low budget. Can you get a film of similar quality made for me, that can be distributed for free?
I loved Brazil also. And you are right, without copyright laws that movie would probably not have been made. But that does not imply copyright laws are just, only that they have positive consequences.
So the question becomes what's more important, freedom or entertainment? My, we've come a long way from "give me liberty or give me death".
Audiophiles have plenty of other excuses for not buying iPods, most of them, as near as I can tell, made up out of thin air.
For those that don't know, thin air is a huge problem if you are trying to faithfully reproduce a sound. Thicker air carries and holds sound much better, with less distortion (especially in the upper ranges).
iPods, like most other advanced electronics are manfactured in what is called a "cleanroom environment", where normal air is stripped of all it's suspended particulates. This thinned out air is then included in the iPods when they are shipped are are one of the reasons it tends to attenuate the upper frequencies, leading to muffled highs.
Selection bias. The Iraqis that don't want you or any other foreign military presence in their country will not walk up to you and tell you that. You might shoot them.
I could claim the same with the news media, and if you were thinking on this objectively you'd have figured that out yourself.
I never claimed the American news media was capable of accurately accessing the situation. My point was not "It's all gone to hell, I saw it on Fox News and you can't tell me otherwise." My point was you can't tell me one way or another because a person in your position will never know. The same is true of the journalists stationed there.
I'm a Marine who got back from Iraq not long ago. The folks we met were nice and seemed very thankful we were there, the kids especially.
Selection bias. The Iraqis that don't want you or any other foreign military presence in their country will not walk up to you and tell you that. You might shoot them.
Which is worse. . . a public policy that most people are ambivalent about but has the benefit of being the status quo. . . or a public policy that is despised by a small group with the wrath of Almighty and requires much change.
It's very hard to make a policy change when the only people who care about it are vehemently against it.
Thier original power was to interpret the laws. Determining the Constitutionality of them was a power the Supreme Court took for itself after the fact.
The Constitution is law. In fact it is the "supreme law of the land" (Article VI, Clause 2). So when the courts interpret the Law, they have to take the Constitution into account. And the Constitution says that Congress can only pass laws to do certain things. If the law does something not allowed (like fine people who call phone numbers on a certain list), it is unconstitutional, and thus null and void.
Ok, class. One more time. There is no such thing as international law.
law A rule of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority.
The UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and the Koyoto protocol are all international rules of conduct established by agreement, and as thus are all international law.
no country has surrendered it's sovreignty to the UN
Not entirely, but many have agreed to be bound by the UN Charter. Similarly, Texas has not completely surrendered it's soveriengty to the US, but it has agreed to be bound by the US Contitution.
Of course you may point out that the US can and/or does renege on that agreement, and with no one to stop them, does so with impunity. But just because a law can be broken by some with impunity doesn't mean that it's not a law. The eighteenth amendment was still law despite the fact that it was broken by many with no consequences.
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people.
Also incorrect.
The purpose of the US Federal government is "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".
If the purpose was the exercise the collective will of the people, we wouldn't need a constitution limiting the powers of government. We would also have the "mob rule" situation that critics of democracy so frequently talk about.
I do agree that it's more important to advance the state of humanity, rather than the state of American citizens. However, while the latter is the duty of the US government, the former is not. So if you want to relieve famine in Nigeria, end genocide in the Sudan, and establish democracy in Iraq, I salute you and support you. But please leave the federal government out of it, it is not chartered for that sort of thing.
Thing is, electors are not representatives. They are not elected. Their only purpose in the system is to carry news of the way their state (or district, in those states that do it that way) voted in the popular election.
Not true.
According to Article II of the Constitution, the state legislature gets to decide how the electors are chosen. The electors then meet in their state and vote for the president and vice president, the result of which is then sent to the President of the Senate.
They have complete freedom of choice with their vote, and there is nothing in the Constitution that indicates otherwise. Nor is there anything that indicates they should be the ones to deliver the outcome to the Senate. Their sole duty, the reason they are chosen (elected) is to vote for a President and Vice-President.
So fiat money is paper currency that has no intrinsic value because it is simply representative of something of value.
"Fiat money or fiat currency (usually paper money) is a type of currency whose only value is that a government made a fiat (i.e. decreed) that the money is a legal method of exchange." Fiat Money
The word fiat, IIRC, comes from the Italian word for "in faith."
You're taking it on faith that the $20 bill you slap into a stripper's t-back, for example, is actually worth $20, even though you will never see the gold that backs up that $20 bill.
"Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything." US Treasury Currancy FAQ
A Hobbesian choice is one in which no choice is actually offered. You can have any color Ford you want, so long as it's black.
You are right, we do have a choice. We get to choose between midnight black and jet black.
Of course it's all a matter of opinion. For the next three months millions dollars will be spent trying to convince us there is a difference between the two candidates. They will largely fail and about half the eligible voters won't bother to choose one over the other.
Perhaps there are differences between the Bush and Kerry, but they aren't on the issues that matter to me. I'll be requesting the neon green Model T, though it's unlikely I'll get it
When I hear "maintainable" code, what I'm really hearing is that just anybody can do the job. Surely there is some work out there difficult enough that it requires expertise.
Maintainable code is easy to understand, and easy to modify. That does not imply that it only solves easy problems, or that it was easy to write. Quite the opposite in fact, the it takes genius to make things simple.
And second, no one person, organization, or group makes the decisions about what stories end up on the front page of your hometown newspaper or at the top of the hour on the evening news. There can be no censorship because there's no single point of control.
It doesn't take a single point of control to homogenize the news.
"Did you hear that [insert even slightly sensational story]?"
"Wow! Really?"
"Yeah, it was on Network A Super Monkey Death Car News last night."
"Network B Responsible News did even mention it. What else am I missing by watching them instead of Network A?"
It's every network's nightmare to be Network B in this senario, which is why if any network covers a story people may talk about the next day, all the other networks have to cover the same story. It's not censorship, but the results can be just as bad as indepth reporting of anything is push out by as many reports as possible of anything that might catch somebody's interest.
Too bad porno movies soundtracks are so bad, otherwise the porno industry would probably have the online music distribution down pat in a short time
While searching for books on tape in numerous truck stops across the continent, a friend of my pointed out that most truck stop carry erotic material on audio cassette. There is little demand for audio-only porno, but where the demand exists, they were there to satisfy.
I don't see how you could buy clothing without trying it on.
It's not hard. As a matter of fact, it is actually easier than trying the clothes on before buying
How many times have you run into clothes that are either mislabeled, or cut too small?
Never. I have bought the wrong size through sheer carelessness on more than one occasion. And I remember being very surprised when a weight changes caused me to need a different size, but I've never bought clothes that were not the labeled size.
I've learned the hard way that it's always better to spend the 10 minutes trying stuff on in the store, rather than spend an hour on a return trip.
Well, first off, you shop too far away. But lets do the math. Assume you buy 6 items during each shopping trip, it takes 10 minutes to try each item on, adding an hour to your trip. If you get the wrong size less than 16% or the time, you spend more time on average trying clothes on then you would returning the clothes that don't fit.
"Innocent" doesn't mean "didn't harm anybody"; it means "didn't break the law".
innocent: Uncorrupted by evil, malice, or wrongdoing -- American Heritage Dictionary
Both marijuana users and copyright violators are innocent using the most common definitions.
Marijuana users and copyright violators have unquestionably broken the law.
Lawbreakers are not the only victums of the law. In the case of marijuana, the resulting violence affects many more than the law breakers. The cost affects all tax payers. In the case of copyright, it has affected Linux users, programmers, and the wrongly accused for starters.
You feel that getting Something for Nothing is not immoral?
If the something costs nothing to provide, how much do you think I should pay for it?
Personally, I don't see what's wrong with vote selling in the first place
That's more or less how it works now anyway. Only instead of getting paid directly for your vote, you get paid through tax cuts, subsidies, bail-outs, tariffs, or other acts of government that you can profit from. The biggest downsides of the system is the lack of transparency and the fact that we (the other tax payers) have to to foot the bill.
It's called a tyranny of the majority, BTW, and it has been of concern since the very beginning.
To continue your thought, a representative system is not the solution to the tyranny of the majority. It only transforms it to a tyranny of the representatives.
The solution is a strictly and severly limited government. The US government was designed along these lines during the constitutional convention, but doesn't even approach those ideals currently.
Originally it was called the C-on which is kind of an inside jab at Microsoft's supposedly multiplatform C#. Sometimes when it didn't work it was called the C-off, but C-on was the name that stuck until late in the stages of debugging the fab process. At that point every reference the engineers made to it was as the F-in' C-on. Marketing, in a spell of creativitylessness, took that and ran. And thus the Efficeon was born.
You don't need requirements before you start coding. For godsake that is a friggin DILBERT cartoon.
Dilbert is only funny because it's true.
You are never going to get complete (and correct) requirements. To compensate, you need to need to be able to work from partial requirements, and iterate on the product as you go along.
A not-entirely-side benefit of this is that your product is well designed and flexible, well suited to adapt to different enviroments, gain more capabilities, and live happily through a long and healthy maintenance stage, not die young, another victim of add-hoc additions, to be replaced by an expensive and unproven rewrite.
If you really have no requirements, you are already done. Otherwise, satisfy the requirements you have, in a way that makes it easy to adapt to the ones you haven't recieved yet. No, it's not easy. No, it's not always successfull. But it works a hell of a lot better than a strict waterfall method for most projects.
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My favourite movie of all time is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and it's low budget. Can you get a film of similar quality made for me, that can be distributed for free?
I loved Brazil also. And you are right, without copyright laws that movie would probably not have been made. But that does not imply copyright laws are just, only that they have positive consequences.
So the question becomes what's more important, freedom or entertainment? My, we've come a long way from "give me liberty or give me death".
Audiophiles have plenty of other excuses for not buying iPods, most of them, as near as I can tell, made up out of thin air.
For those that don't know, thin air is a huge problem if you are trying to faithfully reproduce a sound. Thicker air carries and holds sound much better, with less distortion (especially in the upper ranges).
iPods, like most other advanced electronics are manfactured in what is called a "cleanroom environment", where normal air is stripped of all it's suspended particulates. This thinned out air is then included in the iPods when they are shipped are are one of the reasons it tends to attenuate the upper frequencies, leading to muffled highs.
Hope that clarifes things a bit.
I never claimed the American news media was capable of accurately accessing the situation. My point was not "It's all gone to hell, I saw it on Fox News and you can't tell me otherwise." My point was you can't tell me one way or another because a person in your position will never know. The same is true of the journalists stationed there.
I'm a Marine who got back from Iraq not long ago. The folks we met were nice and seemed very thankful we were there, the kids especially.
Selection bias. The Iraqis that don't want you or any other foreign military presence in their country will not walk up to you and tell you that. You might shoot them.
Which is worse. . . a public policy that most people are ambivalent about but has the benefit of being the status quo. . . or a public policy that is despised by a small group with the wrath of Almighty and requires much change.
It's very hard to make a policy change when the only people who care about it are vehemently against it.
The Constitution is law. In fact it is the "supreme law of the land" (Article VI, Clause 2). So when the courts interpret the Law, they have to take the Constitution into account. And the Constitution says that Congress can only pass laws to do certain things. If the law does something not allowed (like fine people who call phone numbers on a certain list), it is unconstitutional, and thus null and void.
I'm in Texas. If I were to walk into a bank with a note that said "I have a gun" the teller would tell me "So what?"
Ok, class. One more time. There is no such thing as international law.
law A rule of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority.
The UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and the Koyoto protocol are all international rules of conduct established by agreement, and as thus are all international law.
no country has surrendered it's sovreignty to the UN
Not entirely, but many have agreed to be bound by the UN Charter. Similarly, Texas has not completely surrendered it's soveriengty to the US, but it has agreed to be bound by the US Contitution.
Of course you may point out that the US can and/or does renege on that agreement, and with no one to stop them, does so with impunity. But just because a law can be broken by some with impunity doesn't mean that it's not a law. The eighteenth amendment was still law despite the fact that it was broken by many with no consequences.
Also incorrect.
The purpose of the US Federal government is "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".
If the purpose was the exercise the collective will of the people, we wouldn't need a constitution limiting the powers of government. We would also have the "mob rule" situation that critics of democracy so frequently talk about.
I do agree that it's more important to advance the state of humanity, rather than the state of American citizens. However, while the latter is the duty of the US government, the former is not. So if you want to relieve famine in Nigeria, end genocide in the Sudan, and establish democracy in Iraq, I salute you and support you. But please leave the federal government out of it, it is not chartered for that sort of thing.
Thing is, electors are not representatives. They are not elected. Their only purpose in the system is to carry news of the way their state (or district, in those states that do it that way) voted in the popular election.
Not true.
According to Article II of the Constitution, the state legislature gets to decide how the electors are chosen. The electors then meet in their state and vote for the president and vice president, the result of which is then sent to the President of the Senate.
They have complete freedom of choice with their vote, and there is nothing in the Constitution that indicates otherwise. Nor is there anything that indicates they should be the ones to deliver the outcome to the Senate. Their sole duty, the reason they are chosen (elected) is to vote for a President and Vice-President.
-1 Wrong
So fiat money is paper currency that has no intrinsic value because it is simply representative of something of value.
"Fiat money or fiat currency (usually paper money) is a type of currency whose only value is that a government made a fiat (i.e. decreed) that the money is a legal method of exchange." Fiat Money
The word fiat, IIRC, comes from the Italian word for "in faith."
"Medieval Latin, from Latin, let it be done"American Heritage® Dictionary
You're taking it on faith that the $20 bill you slap into a stripper's t-back, for example, is actually worth $20, even though you will never see the gold that backs up that $20 bill.
"Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything." US Treasury Currancy FAQ
or worse, HURD.
I don't understand what you are worried about. All the jobs are going to native North Americans.
You are right, we do have a choice. We get to choose between midnight black and jet black.
Of course it's all a matter of opinion. For the next three months millions dollars will be spent trying to convince us there is a difference between the two candidates. They will largely fail and about half the eligible voters won't bother to choose one over the other.
Perhaps there are differences between the Bush and Kerry, but they aren't on the issues that matter to me. I'll be requesting the neon green Model T, though it's unlikely I'll get it
Maintainable code is easy to understand, and easy to modify. That does not imply that it only solves easy problems, or that it was easy to write. Quite the opposite in fact, the it takes genius to make things simple.
It doesn't take a single point of control to homogenize the news.
"Did you hear that [insert even slightly sensational story]?"
"Wow! Really?"
"Yeah, it was on Network A Super Monkey Death Car News last night."
"Network B Responsible News did even mention it. What else am I missing by watching them instead of Network A?"
It's every network's nightmare to be Network B in this senario, which is why if any network covers a story people may talk about the next day, all the other networks have to cover the same story. It's not censorship, but the results can be just as bad as indepth reporting of anything is push out by as many reports as possible of anything that might catch somebody's interest.
Too bad porno movies soundtracks are so bad, otherwise the porno industry would probably have the online music distribution down pat in a short time
While searching for books on tape in numerous truck stops across the continent, a friend of my pointed out that most truck stop carry erotic material on audio cassette. There is little demand for audio-only porno, but where the demand exists, they were there to satisfy.
I don't see how you could buy clothing without trying it on.
It's not hard. As a matter of fact, it is actually easier than trying the clothes on before buying
How many times have you run into clothes that are either mislabeled, or cut too small?
Never. I have bought the wrong size through sheer carelessness on more than one occasion. And I remember being very surprised when a weight changes caused me to need a different size, but I've never bought clothes that were not the labeled size.
I've learned the hard way that it's always better to spend the 10 minutes trying stuff on in the store, rather than spend an hour on a return trip.
Well, first off, you shop too far away. But lets do the math. Assume you buy 6 items during each shopping trip, it takes 10 minutes to try each item on, adding an hour to your trip. If you get the wrong size less than 16% or the time, you spend more time on average trying clothes on then you would returning the clothes that don't fit.
You always need to try on clothes.
In conclusion, you are wrong.
innocent: Uncorrupted by evil, malice, or wrongdoing -- American Heritage Dictionary
Both marijuana users and copyright violators are innocent using the most common definitions.
Lawbreakers are not the only victums of the law. In the case of marijuana, the resulting violence affects many more than the law breakers. The cost affects all tax payers. In the case of copyright, it has affected Linux users, programmers, and the wrongly accused for starters.
If the something costs nothing to provide, how much do you think I should pay for it?
That's more or less how it works now anyway. Only instead of getting paid directly for your vote, you get paid through tax cuts, subsidies, bail-outs, tariffs, or other acts of government that you can profit from. The biggest downsides of the system is the lack of transparency and the fact that we (the other tax payers) have to to foot the bill.
It's not an urban legend, it's a parable. Check here to verify.
To continue your thought, a representative system is not the solution to the tyranny of the majority. It only transforms it to a tyranny of the representatives.
The solution is a strictly and severly limited government. The US government was designed along these lines during the constitutional convention, but doesn't even approach those ideals currently.
Rational individuals do not act in block.
Originally it was called the C-on which is kind of an inside jab at Microsoft's supposedly multiplatform C#. Sometimes when it didn't work it was called the C-off, but C-on was the name that stuck until late in the stages of debugging the fab process. At that point every reference the engineers made to it was as the F-in' C-on. Marketing, in a spell of creativitylessness, took that and ran. And thus the Efficeon was born.
You don't need requirements before you start coding. For godsake that is a friggin DILBERT cartoon.
Dilbert is only funny because it's true.
You are never going to get complete (and correct) requirements. To compensate, you need to need to be able to work from partial requirements, and iterate on the product as you go along.
A not-entirely-side benefit of this is that your product is well designed and flexible, well suited to adapt to different enviroments, gain more capabilities, and live happily through a long and healthy maintenance stage, not die young, another victim of add-hoc additions, to be replaced by an expensive and unproven rewrite.
If you really have no requirements, you are already done. Otherwise, satisfy the requirements you have, in a way that makes it easy to adapt to the ones you haven't recieved yet. No, it's not easy. No, it's not always successfull. But it works a hell of a lot better than a strict waterfall method for most projects.
No, this is not an endorsement of XP.
-- A Fellow Engineer