He has to pick because, as Blaise Pascal pointed out, his life depends on it. According to many religious people, the nature of my relationship with God is what determines the course of my afterlife. Salvation for the righteous, damnation for the wicked. According to many atheistic people, a lifetime devoted to creating such a relationship with God is a life wasted.
There are indeed things in my reprobate, infidel life that I take on faith. I have faith that when I get up from this computer and go out to my car, it will start for me. I'm not completely certain that my faith is justified, but I'm as certain as I need to be, because the only consequence of misplaced faith here is that I'll be taking the bus home tonight. Therefore, I live my life as though my car starting was a certainty.
I also take it on faith that the universe is about 13 billion years old. I don't want to develop the expertise necessary to repeat the calculations, and the consequences of a readjustment of the figure are minimal (unless they whack it down to 6000 years).
When I live as though I know something is true, even though I'm not really sure, it's because the consequences of being wrong aren't sufficient to warrant deeper investigation. Sure, there may be a God out there who is going to send me to Hell for not believing in Him. There was a time when I considered that a serious possibility, and I kept studying until I was as sure as I felt I needed to be.
Backing way up the thread: You mentioned the study that said Mormons were more likely to be active in the Church as they became more educated. You seem to use this as evidence that the religious worldview and science are fundamentally compatable, but I don't think it's good evidence.
First, Mormon leaders always encouraged us to get education. It was a rather strong theme in my upbringing. So the more devoted a young Mormon is to the Church, the more he or she will take that message to heart.
Next, the study seems to ignore the self-selection process. People who gain education (especially in the sciences) tend to be less religiously active, and I don't believe Mormons are immune from that trend. Instead, it's likely that those who lose faith as a result of education are more likely to stop identifying themselves as Mormons, and hence remove themselves from the population being studied. Those who stop being active due to losing intellectual faith are probably more likely to stop self-identifying as Mormons than those who become inactive for other reasons.
Finally, I did see a correlation between success in material pursuits and success in the Church. As a young person, I always chalked it up to God's willingness to pour out blessings on the righteous. After I lost faith, I reinterpreted Church membership as more like membership in a social club. People are generally more comfortable with people like themselves, so the most powerful and successful people in the Church tend to choose other people who have had the same sort of succcess. They believe that it's God directing them to do the choosing, but I've noticed that prayers have a strong tendency to confirm what people already believe and already want.
While the subject of the study is pseudoscientific, the study itself is probably methodologically sound.
What you're basically saying is that, if I'm asked to participate in such a study, then my chances of survival are greatly diminished. Because the prayers of all my friends and family, praying for my swift recovery, are going to be for nothing because of the scientifically documented prayers of some old lady in Florida. What if God needs me to miraculously survive so I can do something later on? Without the study, God could simply grant me a speedy recovery, confident that there would always be plausible deniability.
But because the damned study is actually keeping track of recovery rates, God can't save me without killing off somebody else in the study who would have otherwise survived. If He doesn't kill somebody else off to keep the results in balance, then the gig is up.
Ultimately, this means we can control God simply by running sufficiently large studies. Which speaks for the silliness of the idea of an Almighty being who plays hide and seek with His creation.
Everyone with a modicum of secular education (monks included) knew that the world was round by 1492. The impracticality stemmed from their belief that the world was too big. Which it was. Those who were encouraging Columbus were basing that encouragement on a misguided belief that the world was about 10,000 fewer miles around than it actually was.
But the popular conception at the time, the one held by the uneducated--in 1492, pretty much everyone--was that the Bible taught that the world was flat, and therefore the world was flat. Had Columbus been requesting aid from a democracy, the public outcry probably would have scuttled the mission.
So, because the person did a study that fails to demonstrate any efficacy from prayer, then he must have intended to bash God and religion?
First, what does that say about the faithful, if nobody with faith would be willing to conduct such a study?
Second, how does this notion of his anti-religious bigotry square with the fact (mentioned in the friggin' *summary*) that the same researcher did an earlier study that actually found a small statistical effect from prayer? Did God shoot his dog in the interim?
You don't like the message, so you're shooting the messenger.
To answer your "rhetorical" question: Because once the participants in the study know the people they're praying for, it becomes impossible to distinguish between effects stemming from the actual prayers, and the effects stemming from other involvements. For example, if you're praying daily for your neighbor Bob, you might also be more likely to visit him, take him a casserole, send flowers, or whatever. There's no anti-religious bias here; only anti-screwing-up bias.
Dude! From an evolutionary fitness perspective, cockroaches are the crowning achievement of biology. Big animals just chew their cud and wait for the next big die-off. Except us. If we can ever manage to get ourselves off this rock, we might have a chance of beating the roaches at their own game.
People who find the idea of evolution dehumanizing are simply ignoring the fact that evolutionary fitness is a statement of fact, and has nothing to do with what we should value as a species. Except to the extent that evolutionary drives are what cause us to particularly value Jessica Alba.
If evolution says we ought to be selfish (it doesn't), then we can still be generous. If evolution says we should try to have as many children as possible, we can still choose not to procreate. Evolution got us here. Evolution was critical into shaping us into who we are. But evolution doesn't say who we should become.
Remind me again why we keep calling each other 'dude'?
Dude, we are sex-hungry animals. Why do you think Michaelangelo rendered David without any clothes? Maybe he was gay, but more likely the element of controversy helped him score chicks. Doesn't matter. The point is, you look at any major human accomplishment, from the Pyramids to the Space Shuttle, and you'll find that its motivation was a bunch of guys trying to climb the social heirarchy, so that they could score the best and hottest women possible. Unless those accomplishments were made by women, in which case they were done for nobler purposes, since women are not motivated by their sex drives. Except Margaret Thatcher, but as a silicon-based lifeform from the planet Yktr'kil, we have to be wary of her reasons for wanting to mate with human males.
There is nothing wrong with having a fulfilling sex life, so long as you have other pursuits (specifically NASCAR), and work hard to avoid hurting yourself and other people in the pursuit of that fulfillment. Unless you're bondage fetishists, in which case please don't do anything that will leave more than a bruise for more than a week.
Your anger against Darwin has a real "shoot the messenger" feeling to it.
Re:You cannot replace anything with nothing...
on
Pr0n's Effect On Society
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Depending on your circumstances, a Jesus addiction can be more destructive to your life than a porn addiction.
Anyhow, most people who claim to have been addicted to porn strike me as excessively religious types. It seems that those who consider porn "forbidden fruit" get a bigger thrill out of it, have an impossible time talking to others about their activities, and therefore lose all perspective. In short, most people who are addicted are that way because of religion. Take away the religious injunctions against it, and you take away much of its power.
So, your definition of "spam" is "any e-mail I wasn't expecting to get?" I won't belabor the ridiculousness of that argument, but lots of people get lots of valuable, "unexpected" mail all the time.
But I will belabor the wastefulness of trying to use a phone as a substitute for e-mail. Say my organization wants to announce an event. Instead of using e-mail (and ignoring cases where I have an e-mail address but not a phone number), I have to spend days calling people up, determining whether they're interested, waiting while they run and get a pen, dictating all the information that they need to get to the event, etc. That is time and energy my preferred non-profits shouldn't have to waste. They could just write up the info, choose a good heading that lets me decide within two seconds whether I'm interested, and send it to everyone.
There are organizations I'd like to hear from, who will have a great deal of trouble using e-mail to reach me if this goes into effect.
Who shouted bloody murder when the anti-sodomy laws were struck down as "unconstitutional?" Who was screaming about "activist judges" subverting the will of the people? The Republicans. If anti-sodomy laws are such an archaic notion, why did Republicans make it a centerpiece of their culture war?
It's unfair to say "some" Republicans are pro-life. My impression is that it's one of the defining features of the Republican party, unifying a group of people who otherwise have almost nothing in common. Pro-choice Republicans are something of a rarity, and the party isn't a comfortable place for them. Anyhow, the abortion debate is precisely about where to strike the balance between a woman's right to decide what happens to her body and a fetus' right to exist. Saying "it's not about a woman's body" is facile.
Then you rewrite history by claiming that Republicans held the moral high ground on the slavery issue. The fact is, Lincoln's objection to slavery says less about his being a Republican, and more about his being a Northerner. Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats were basically two separate parties. Anyhow, the Republican party today would be unrecognizable to Republicans fifty years ago, much less one hundred and fifty years ago. Claiming their moral superiority as your own is like taking credit for your great great grandfather's part in the American Revolution.
Religion serves many social functions, and also spiritual/psychological ones. Marriage serves many legal functions. So even if a person rejects that there is some meaningful metaphysical or supernatural component to marriage, they may still be looking for the other perceived benefits of marriage.
Just a few I can think of: * Recognition of couplehood by the community. * An expression of love and devotion. * Tax breaks. * Legal rights not conferred to unmarried couples.
If the legal benefits disappeared, and the metaphysical benefits are dismissed, an atheist couple might still perceive social benefits.
How is it a different statistic? If every year, there are x marriages and x/2 divorces, then the likelihood of any given marriage ending in divorce is 50%. Now, you could argue that the implications of the original phrasing are misleading, but I think the rephrasing carries all the same implications.
"The patch (unless it goes out and deletes the offending files) is only going to patch the installer (which you're probably never going to run again). You're still going to have a cleartext copy of your original admin password sitting on the box in a file with read-other permissions."
I've been +5 wrong a few times. It's always a bit embarrassing. Stupid moderators.:)
The fix does indeed fix the problem file. I applied it this morning, and afterwards the file in question (/var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat) is no longer readable by anyone but root, and no longer contains the offending passwords.
While I agree that he's probably overreacting, and I'd like to think well of Ubuntu as much as the next guy (I'm biased), your advice seems off base to me. Assuming that "I don't have to worry about X, because I have Good Security" seems like the fastest route to Bad Security. Now, in a situation where root is disabled, and only one user has remote access, changing the password should be sufficient.
But there are cases when you want to give unprivileged users remote access, and also cases where you might worry about a local exploit. If he thinks this displays the sort of incompetence that requires a distro switch, I don't think that's evidence that he's a bad sysadmin.
The gp was saying that people can't invoke the fifth when it comes to turning over physical evidence. He's right; that would be absurd. But they still have rights under the fourth amend...
Complete with that big honkin' viewscreen? I can't imagine trying to watch a movie on that thing. I'd spend half the time thinking "Wow, I can see every one of Natalie Portman's pores..."
Speaking of which, it's amazing that Picard could be that cool and collected when negotiating with the eight foot tall floating heads that constantly showed up in front of him. The easiest way to gain an advantage over the captain would be to show up on screen with something stuck between your teeth.
"Your weapons are no match for us, puny humans. Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded."
"Number one, fire all... er, I mean... use our transporters to...., er... My god, is that spinach?"
I looked up the law in question, and I fully agree with it. But your interpretation of it sucks rocks, and your glee at the prospect of using it indicates a rather vicious character.
I say your interpretation sucks, because nobody has threatened to set foot in your residence (which is the only place where the "defense of property" law actually appears to apply). If your opponent was exercising his definition of "reasonable force" to secure his supposed rights to use your software, it would involve downloading a file or copying a CD. It would not involve stealing any physical item you possess or stepping into your physical residence. If you can't scale back your reaction to take that into account, then your actions are those of a vigilante, and are well outside the protection of this or any law.
As to your moral character, let me say this: Just because the law says you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that doing it is morally justified. You make it sound as though anyone who enters your home with criminal (or even unknown) intent automatically deserves to die, which is crap.
According to this law, if an unarmed person enters my house, and I train a gun on that person, the law won't punish me for whatever happens next. It doesn't matter whether I tell that person to leave, shoot that person three times in the chest, or tell the person to leave and then shoot him three times in the back before he gets out my door. The person was in my residence, so the law says that whatever happens, it will assume that I was in fear of my life and let me go free. But warning the intruder away is an act of courage and restraint, shooting the man is somewhat cowardly, and shooting him as he leaves is an act of psychopathic malevolence.
I will grant that even as the intruder stands unarmed before you, he still poses some risk to you. But that risk is tiny, and worth accepting to preserve the intruder's life. To hold your life as more valuable than that of another is just human nature; but to place zero value on another person's life is wrong.
My point was simply that all non-BSDish licenses involve tradeoffs that the licensee may not be able or willing to make. This is true whether or not you're going with the default license or negotiating for special terms. While the amount of money isn't directly an issue, the more money you fork over the more liberty the owner will be likely to allow you.
So I think you're wrong to claim that you're giving up money but not licensing freedom. Any agreement you have with some other author is going to have terms, conditions, and restrictions, and the question is whether the restrictions of the GPL are a good fit for your situation.
Technically, I don't think any court exists outside Texas that would agree with your definition of "reasonable force". If you shoot a tresspasser, then claim to the court that, while merely brandishing the gun would have been enough to get the tresspasser to leave, you felt justified in increasing your attack to ensure that your victim could never threaten you again, you're going to lose the case.
Also, "Step onto my property, and just see what happens" is the height of Internet lameness. It lost it's novelty about five minutes after Usenet went up, and I'm sure you can do better than this.
Finally, the "you seek to take from others" argument can be easily turned back on you. If you write a song, let others listen to it, and then demand total control over the idea you've put into another person's head, that's every bit as selfish as you claim your opponent is being. You've benefitted in so many ways from the ideas society has put in your head (think how much less you'd be capable of if you'd been dropped on a desert island at the age of three), and yet when it comes to your idea, anyone who fails to provide you fair compensation for it is a greedy Stalinist.
Me, I think that some amount of copyright protection is fair and just. But not this much, fercryinoutloud.
Explain again how you're not "giving up your rights" when you pay an author to modify and redistribute their proprietary work, but you are giving up your rights when you redistribute GPL'ed work. You don't just pay the author, then walk away to do whatever you want with their work (unless you paid a lot). You pay them to grant you a license to do certain things, with all the giving up of rights which that entails.
Basically, what you're saying is that you won't "give up your rights" for free, but you will give them up if you get to pay an arm and a leg for the privilege.
Ebonics has grammar and well-defined structure. In fact, any language children can practice on each other will develop a grammar, even if the parents have no grammar to teach them (read, read).
Ebonics is not just "sloppy English." The only debate that might conceivably exist among linguists revolves around whether it is a dialect or a full-fledged language.
Slashdot Mirror
He has to pick because, as Blaise Pascal pointed out, his life depends on it. According to many religious people, the nature of my relationship with God is what determines the course of my afterlife. Salvation for the righteous, damnation for the wicked. According to many atheistic people, a lifetime devoted to creating such a relationship with God is a life wasted.
There are indeed things in my reprobate, infidel life that I take on faith. I have faith that when I get up from this computer and go out to my car, it will start for me. I'm not completely certain that my faith is justified, but I'm as certain as I need to be, because the only consequence of misplaced faith here is that I'll be taking the bus home tonight. Therefore, I live my life as though my car starting was a certainty.
I also take it on faith that the universe is about 13 billion years old. I don't want to develop the expertise necessary to repeat the calculations, and the consequences of a readjustment of the figure are minimal (unless they whack it down to 6000 years).
When I live as though I know something is true, even though I'm not really sure, it's because the consequences of being wrong aren't sufficient to warrant deeper investigation. Sure, there may be a God out there who is going to send me to Hell for not believing in Him. There was a time when I considered that a serious possibility, and I kept studying until I was as sure as I felt I needed to be.
Backing way up the thread: You mentioned the study that said Mormons were more likely to be active in the Church as they became more educated. You seem to use this as evidence that the religious worldview and science are fundamentally compatable, but I don't think it's good evidence.
First, Mormon leaders always encouraged us to get education. It was a rather strong theme in my upbringing. So the more devoted a young Mormon is to the Church, the more he or she will take that message to heart.
Next, the study seems to ignore the self-selection process. People who gain education (especially in the sciences) tend to be less religiously active, and I don't believe Mormons are immune from that trend. Instead, it's likely that those who lose faith as a result of education are more likely to stop identifying themselves as Mormons, and hence remove themselves from the population being studied. Those who stop being active due to losing intellectual faith are probably more likely to stop self-identifying as Mormons than those who become inactive for other reasons.
Finally, I did see a correlation between success in material pursuits and success in the Church. As a young person, I always chalked it up to God's willingness to pour out blessings on the righteous. After I lost faith, I reinterpreted Church membership as more like membership in a social club. People are generally more comfortable with people like themselves, so the most powerful and successful people in the Church tend to choose other people who have had the same sort of succcess. They believe that it's God directing them to do the choosing, but I've noticed that prayers have a strong tendency to confirm what people already believe and already want.
He asked for one instance, not a list. There is only one way to order a list with one element.
But if you have more, I'm sure I'd be interested in any examples, in whatever order you prefer.
Me, I'm drawing a blank.
While the subject of the study is pseudoscientific, the study itself is probably methodologically sound.
What you're basically saying is that, if I'm asked to participate in such a study, then my chances of survival are greatly diminished. Because the prayers of all my friends and family, praying for my swift recovery, are going to be for nothing because of the scientifically documented prayers of some old lady in Florida. What if God needs me to miraculously survive so I can do something later on? Without the study, God could simply grant me a speedy recovery, confident that there would always be plausible deniability.
But because the damned study is actually keeping track of recovery rates, God can't save me without killing off somebody else in the study who would have otherwise survived. If He doesn't kill somebody else off to keep the results in balance, then the gig is up.
Ultimately, this means we can control God simply by running sufficiently large studies. Which speaks for the silliness of the idea of an Almighty being who plays hide and seek with His creation.
Everyone with a modicum of secular education (monks included) knew that the world was round by 1492. The impracticality stemmed from their belief that the world was too big. Which it was. Those who were encouraging Columbus were basing that encouragement on a misguided belief that the world was about 10,000 fewer miles around than it actually was.
But the popular conception at the time, the one held by the uneducated--in 1492, pretty much everyone--was that the Bible taught that the world was flat, and therefore the world was flat. Had Columbus been requesting aid from a democracy, the public outcry probably would have scuttled the mission.
Interesting.
So, because the person did a study that fails to demonstrate any efficacy from prayer, then he must have intended to bash God and religion?
First, what does that say about the faithful, if nobody with faith would be willing to conduct such a study?
Second, how does this notion of his anti-religious bigotry square with the fact (mentioned in the friggin' *summary*) that the same researcher did an earlier study that actually found a small statistical effect from prayer? Did God shoot his dog in the interim?
You don't like the message, so you're shooting the messenger.
To answer your "rhetorical" question: Because once the participants in the study know the people they're praying for, it becomes impossible to distinguish between effects stemming from the actual prayers, and the effects stemming from other involvements. For example, if you're praying daily for your neighbor Bob, you might also be more likely to visit him, take him a casserole, send flowers, or whatever. There's no anti-religious bias here; only anti-screwing-up bias.
Dude! From an evolutionary fitness perspective, cockroaches are the crowning achievement of biology. Big animals just chew their cud and wait for the next big die-off. Except us. If we can ever manage to get ourselves off this rock, we might have a chance of beating the roaches at their own game.
People who find the idea of evolution dehumanizing are simply ignoring the fact that evolutionary fitness is a statement of fact, and has nothing to do with what we should value as a species. Except to the extent that evolutionary drives are what cause us to particularly value Jessica Alba.
If evolution says we ought to be selfish (it doesn't), then we can still be generous. If evolution says we should try to have as many children as possible, we can still choose not to procreate. Evolution got us here. Evolution was critical into shaping us into who we are. But evolution doesn't say who we should become.
Remind me again why we keep calling each other 'dude'?
Dude, we are sex-hungry animals. Why do you think Michaelangelo rendered David without any clothes? Maybe he was gay, but more likely the element of controversy helped him score chicks. Doesn't matter. The point is, you look at any major human accomplishment, from the Pyramids to the Space Shuttle, and you'll find that its motivation was a bunch of guys trying to climb the social heirarchy, so that they could score the best and hottest women possible. Unless those accomplishments were made by women, in which case they were done for nobler purposes, since women are not motivated by their sex drives. Except Margaret Thatcher, but as a silicon-based lifeform from the planet Yktr'kil, we have to be wary of her reasons for wanting to mate with human males.
There is nothing wrong with having a fulfilling sex life, so long as you have other pursuits (specifically NASCAR), and work hard to avoid hurting yourself and other people in the pursuit of that fulfillment. Unless you're bondage fetishists, in which case please don't do anything that will leave more than a bruise for more than a week.
Your anger against Darwin has a real "shoot the messenger" feeling to it.
Depending on your circumstances, a Jesus addiction can be more destructive to your life than a porn addiction.
Anyhow, most people who claim to have been addicted to porn strike me as excessively religious types. It seems that those who consider porn "forbidden fruit" get a bigger thrill out of it, have an impossible time talking to others about their activities, and therefore lose all perspective. In short, most people who are addicted are that way because of religion. Take away the religious injunctions against it, and you take away much of its power.
So, your definition of "spam" is "any e-mail I wasn't expecting to get?" I won't belabor the ridiculousness of that argument, but lots of people get lots of valuable, "unexpected" mail all the time.
But I will belabor the wastefulness of trying to use a phone as a substitute for e-mail. Say my organization wants to announce an event. Instead of using e-mail (and ignoring cases where I have an e-mail address but not a phone number), I have to spend days calling people up, determining whether they're interested, waiting while they run and get a pen, dictating all the information that they need to get to the event, etc. That is time and energy my preferred non-profits shouldn't have to waste. They could just write up the info, choose a good heading that lets me decide within two seconds whether I'm interested, and send it to everyone.
There are organizations I'd like to hear from, who will have a great deal of trouble using e-mail to reach me if this goes into effect.
You're right. We should all follow Microsoft Marketing Strategies. They make everything clear.
Who shouted bloody murder when the anti-sodomy laws were struck down as "unconstitutional?" Who was screaming about "activist judges" subverting the will of the people? The Republicans. If anti-sodomy laws are such an archaic notion, why did Republicans make it a centerpiece of their culture war?
It's unfair to say "some" Republicans are pro-life. My impression is that it's one of the defining features of the Republican party, unifying a group of people who otherwise have almost nothing in common. Pro-choice Republicans are something of a rarity, and the party isn't a comfortable place for them. Anyhow, the abortion debate is precisely about where to strike the balance between a woman's right to decide what happens to her body and a fetus' right to exist. Saying "it's not about a woman's body" is facile.
Then you rewrite history by claiming that Republicans held the moral high ground on the slavery issue. The fact is, Lincoln's objection to slavery says less about his being a Republican, and more about his being a Northerner. Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats were basically two separate parties. Anyhow, the Republican party today would be unrecognizable to Republicans fifty years ago, much less one hundred and fifty years ago. Claiming their moral superiority as your own is like taking credit for your great great grandfather's part in the American Revolution.
As an atheist, I think I can comment.
Religion serves many social functions, and also spiritual/psychological ones. Marriage serves many legal functions. So even if a person rejects that there is some meaningful metaphysical or supernatural component to marriage, they may still be looking for the other perceived benefits of marriage.
Just a few I can think of:
* Recognition of couplehood by the community.
* An expression of love and devotion.
* Tax breaks.
* Legal rights not conferred to unmarried couples.
If the legal benefits disappeared, and the metaphysical benefits are dismissed, an atheist couple might still perceive social benefits.
How is it a different statistic? If every year, there are x marriages and x/2 divorces, then the likelihood of any given marriage ending in divorce is 50%. Now, you could argue that the implications of the original phrasing are misleading, but I think the rephrasing carries all the same implications.
Help?
I've been +5 wrong a few times. It's always a bit embarrassing. Stupid moderators.
The fix does indeed fix the problem file. I applied it this morning, and afterwards the file in question (/var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
I didn't know they even had a server edition. They need to advertise it better, I think.
I'm having trouble finding the major selling points for it. Aside from the lack of a GUI, what are the differences between it and regular Ubuntu?
While I agree that he's probably overreacting, and I'd like to think well of Ubuntu as much as the next guy (I'm biased), your advice seems off base to me. Assuming that "I don't have to worry about X, because I have Good Security" seems like the fastest route to Bad Security. Now, in a situation where root is disabled, and only one user has remote access, changing the password should be sufficient.
But there are cases when you want to give unprivileged users remote access, and also cases where you might worry about a local exploit. If he thinks this displays the sort of incompetence that requires a distro switch, I don't think that's evidence that he's a bad sysadmin.
The gp was saying that people can't invoke the fifth when it comes to turning over physical evidence. He's right; that would be absurd. But they still have rights under the fourth amend...
Sorry, that's pre-September 11 talk, isn't it?
Complete with that big honkin' viewscreen? I can't imagine trying to watch a movie on that thing. I'd spend half the time thinking "Wow, I can see every one of Natalie Portman's pores..."
Speaking of which, it's amazing that Picard could be that cool and collected when negotiating with the eight foot tall floating heads that constantly showed up in front of him. The easiest way to gain an advantage over the captain would be to show up on screen with something stuck between your teeth.
"Your weapons are no match for us, puny humans. Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded."
"Number one, fire all... er, I mean... use our transporters to...., er... My god, is that spinach?"
I looked up the law in question, and I fully agree with it. But your interpretation of it sucks rocks, and your glee at the prospect of using it indicates a rather vicious character.
I say your interpretation sucks, because nobody has threatened to set foot in your residence (which is the only place where the "defense of property" law actually appears to apply). If your opponent was exercising his definition of "reasonable force" to secure his supposed rights to use your software, it would involve downloading a file or copying a CD. It would not involve stealing any physical item you possess or stepping into your physical residence. If you can't scale back your reaction to take that into account, then your actions are those of a vigilante, and are well outside the protection of this or any law.
As to your moral character, let me say this: Just because the law says you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that doing it is morally justified. You make it sound as though anyone who enters your home with criminal (or even unknown) intent automatically deserves to die, which is crap.
According to this law, if an unarmed person enters my house, and I train a gun on that person, the law won't punish me for whatever happens next. It doesn't matter whether I tell that person to leave, shoot that person three times in the chest, or tell the person to leave and then shoot him three times in the back before he gets out my door. The person was in my residence, so the law says that whatever happens, it will assume that I was in fear of my life and let me go free. But warning the intruder away is an act of courage and restraint, shooting the man is somewhat cowardly, and shooting him as he leaves is an act of psychopathic malevolence.
I will grant that even as the intruder stands unarmed before you, he still poses some risk to you. But that risk is tiny, and worth accepting to preserve the intruder's life. To hold your life as more valuable than that of another is just human nature; but to place zero value on another person's life is wrong.
My point was simply that all non-BSDish licenses involve tradeoffs that the licensee may not be able or willing to make. This is true whether or not you're going with the default license or negotiating for special terms. While the amount of money isn't directly an issue, the more money you fork over the more liberty the owner will be likely to allow you.
So I think you're wrong to claim that you're giving up money but not licensing freedom. Any agreement you have with some other author is going to have terms, conditions, and restrictions, and the question is whether the restrictions of the GPL are a good fit for your situation.
wiki link plz thx
Technically, I don't think any court exists outside Texas that would agree with your definition of "reasonable force". If you shoot a tresspasser, then claim to the court that, while merely brandishing the gun would have been enough to get the tresspasser to leave, you felt justified in increasing your attack to ensure that your victim could never threaten you again, you're going to lose the case.
Also, "Step onto my property, and just see what happens" is the height of Internet lameness. It lost it's novelty about five minutes after Usenet went up, and I'm sure you can do better than this.
Finally, the "you seek to take from others" argument can be easily turned back on you. If you write a song, let others listen to it, and then demand total control over the idea you've put into another person's head, that's every bit as selfish as you claim your opponent is being. You've benefitted in so many ways from the ideas society has put in your head (think how much less you'd be capable of if you'd been dropped on a desert island at the age of three), and yet when it comes to your idea, anyone who fails to provide you fair compensation for it is a greedy Stalinist.
Me, I think that some amount of copyright protection is fair and just. But not this much, fercryinoutloud.
Explain again how you're not "giving up your rights" when you pay an author to modify and redistribute their proprietary work, but you are giving up your rights when you redistribute GPL'ed work. You don't just pay the author, then walk away to do whatever you want with their work (unless you paid a lot). You pay them to grant you a license to do certain things, with all the giving up of rights which that entails.
Basically, what you're saying is that you won't "give up your rights" for free, but you will give them up if you get to pay an arm and a leg for the privilege.
Ebonics has grammar and well-defined structure. In fact, any language children can practice on each other will develop a grammar, even if the parents have no grammar to teach them (read, read).
Ebonics is not just "sloppy English." The only debate that might conceivably exist among linguists revolves around whether it is a dialect or a full-fledged language.
Grr... the last 'end' is supposed to be a '}'. My bad.