Your example of downloading a 10-meg file from an NFS server is also incorrect. For a download of that size, a throbber isn't appropriate; you need a full-fledges dialog for something that big, or at least a progress bar. Something so you know how long it's going to take. Throbbers work well for very small files, but not for large or even moderately-sized ones.
I do find this trend of converging every possible function into a single app to be most disconcerting. It happened with Win98 and KFM, it's happenning to Konqueror, and even Mozilla is getting in on the act (in a few different ways, but it's just as guilty as the others). Gnome's Nautilus seems to be slightly different (each aspect being a Bonobo component, and thus a separate module) but the end result seems to be the same, so I'll roll it in here too.
A Web browser is a Web browser. A file manager is a file manager. A media player is a media player. Trying to combine these into one massive app is just a bad idea, no matter the platform or widget set or whatever. Rolling FTP into the original KFM was different; that's still managing files (on a remote machine, perhaps, but same basic idea). Not at all like Web browsing, where the goal is to view files rather than manage them.
So why bring them together into one massive app that's nightmarish to debug when you can simply make several smaller apps, each of which does its job more efficiently and is still much easier to program and maintain? You also don't have the overhead of interface components which might make sense in, say, a Web browser but not a file manager (do file managers really need a throbber? And what use is the "delete" function on a Web browser where 99.99% of the time you wouldn't even have permission to delete files anyway?)
Nothing against KDE; I prefer Gnome myself but use both on a regular basis since the Solaris boxen here only have KDE. But I'm not so sure that making Konqueror into The App That Does Everything (tm) is such a good idea.
OK, I'm sick of/.ers assuming that everyone who reads/. must be some kind of American, white, male Linux user without a life.
True. However, if you think that the Open-Source community is composed entirely of while male Linux users without lives, you're as prejudiced as you claim other Slashdotters are.
I do not represent the open source community. I do not run Linux. In fact, I was curious about it before I came here, but a year's worth of zealotry and bigoted postings have pretty much put me off of ever running Linux at all. Why should I associate myself with such a narrow-minded group of people? Trust me, zealots do nothing but put people off. Linux could do without them, and/. certainly could.
A question: what do you run? I'm sure I could find zealots for any OS you could possibly be running, even Windows. You're right, they don't do any good for a community. But they exist in all communities.
In fact, I'm sick of every single "open source" project getting a whole story here with every release, even when it's 2.999a 0.6pre3 or some other incomprehensible version number.
No need to be overdramatic. A quick look at Freshmeat will tell you that what you said simply is not the case; where was Slashdot when the Bubbling Load Monitor 1.0 was released?
The fact is, Slashdot tries to cover releases of the most important software to the Open-Source community (Linux, *BSD, Apache, etc). And occasionally if a piece of software looks interesting they'll throw that one in too, to get the word out. What's the matter with that?
And I'm sick of every third article being about graphics cards. So what about YAGCB (Yet Another Graphics Card Benchmark)? This isn't a hardware site is it?
Not entirely, but hardware is a part of it. As is software. As are most other aspects of computing. And graphics cards are in fact important to the Slashdot community; a community is best served by its journals if they contain things which are important to the community at large. Most Slashdotters run some kind of "alternative" OS, whatever that OS may be, and we've never had good graphics card support in any of these. So it's important to know what's going on.
In short,/. is not just for Linux, and people should try and remember that otherwise they will just alienate a large proportion of their user base, and *gasp* lose advertising money. And that's what'll hurt them.
You're correct. However, Linux is a part of Slashdot, and a rather large and important one. Perhaps you don't like it, but that's what the article filters are for. Use them if you don't like what Slashdot has to say.
Consider, first and foremost, web pages have been ruled "publications" under the law. This means that some of the liability laws which apply to more traditional forms of publication also apply to WWW publishing.
I'm not so sure that works. Think about it. Let's say you find an libelous article in the newspaper about you one day. Who do you charge with libel? Do you sue the company that made the paper the news was printed on? No; you sue the people who made the content. Likewise, you shouldn't be holding the ones who simply provide the medium; you have to go to the ones who created the content. And that is not, by and large, the ISP's.
If the newspaper publishes information, it is obligated to either publish a retraction upon a libel or slander challenge or back the columnist. If they choose to back the columnist, they usually become party to the lawsuit for publishing the information.
A newspaper does, not the company that provides the periodical with paper.
Likewise, if an ISP receives information about a hosted site that is considered libelous or slandering, they have to make a choice whether or not to continue "publishing" the site, or removing it from circulation, i.e. blocking access or removing it from the server(s).
This may be the law, but it's simply wrong. An ISP cannot reasonably be expected to control Internet users (AOL is different because its proprietary system is self-contained, but even its Internet portions cannot reasonably be expected to be controlled). There are simply too many random variables. A paper company cannot choose what is printed on its products, so why should an ISP have to try and choose what is "printed" on its media? All an ISP does does is provide the means to publish; the publishing is still done more or less entirely by the user owning the Website. So only the Website owner should be liable, not the ISP.
Honestly, this is a great first step. The decision should have been made ten years ago, but at least it's happenning.
Now the courts need to learn that this ought to apply to Websites too. The E-mail decision will hopefully make that easier to accomplish. It's a shame that this is coming so late in the Net's history (and yes, I know the Net is still in its infancy; this should have been done just as the Net was coming into popularity). But, as I said, it's still getting done, and that's good anyway.
The problem is that RIAA was afraid of digital music when it first gained popularity. They had the opportunity to take the bull by the horns, grab control of the industry, and made even more money.
Unfortunately, they didn't do that. They scoffed at MP3, and the result was only too predictable. They left it to the pirates, so the pirates jumped on it.
Music piracy is hardly a new thing. It's been around for decades. Prople were taping records, radio, and later CD's long before MP3 arrived on the scene, amd moreover people still do this (probably as much as if not more than MP3; the format does take a small amount of technological savvy after all). RIAA acts as though stopping MP3 will stop piracy for good; it won't. Other means will arise, and unless RIAA works within these new systems they'll lose big time.
For one, RIAA shouldn't be so averse to selling MP3's. There's no need to worry about SDMI and all that; while piracy will still exist, of course, there's lots of money to be made. Need I remind the music industry Bill Gates and Larry Ellison both sell software, and together they are worth more than the entire music industry? So clearly piracy may be a problem, but it's not a real barrier to making a whole planeload of cash.
Piracy is a problem, of course. But it's never going to go away; you simply cannot eradicate it. The best you can hope for is to minimize it. Sell MP3's over the Web for a dollar apiece (this being roughly proportional to the retail cost of a CD, which is higher than the price the industry itself gets for every disc). You'd be surprised how many fans will pay a buck apiece for music, particularly in places where you can't use Napster. The first company to actually try this (assuming they can get a decent-sized fanbase) will prove the model's validity.
It's a different way of doing things, yes. And of course it's scary; moving away from a model that was known to be lucrative in the past but is now losing out to technology is always a risk. But technology is evolving, and unless the music industry is ready to face that and work within it, they're going to be left behind.
Re:Take another look at *the* picture
on
Sim Plague
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· Score: 1
Why stop there? Why not make the capton "Federal rescue team saves child from potential molesters"?
Because there's no evidence to that. But that the relatives were kidnappers is quite clear; thanks to the media the entire nation witnessed it.
I can't believe so many people are defending a gross abuse of power, committed with a neglect of the courts.
While I do agree that they did go a bit extreme, I'm not sure this was an abuse of power. The child was, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped. He was being held hostage, and negotiations were not working. Was sending in armed agents a bad thing? Yes. But did they have any other choice? I'm not so sure they did. And when you run out of options, you do what you have to do.
I'm not surprised that Reno ordered it, though, as she has a long history of such acts.
Agreed. But for once I think she may well have been right. In the past she's been more than a little trigger-happy, and many people died senselessly as a result. But this time she showed a great deal of restraint, actually waiting until there was no other option.
Going into a house, in the way those agents did, was just asking for somebody to be killed.
Quite true. But no one was killed; that is what's important. Going into a building with guns to rescue hostages is also just asking for someone to be killed, and that's more or less what this was. The relatives managed to pull a rather inane political-ideology bit to manipulate a lot of people and hide the truth of their actions, but they did what they did.
If people suddenly find that agents have broken into a house, and are pointing automatic weapons at them, people will often react defensively.
They'll react defensively if anyone breaks into a house with automatic weapons. They'll also react defensively if their children have been kidnapped.
We *do* still have a right to keep arms in our house, and bear them to defend ourselves.
Yes, that's true. From all reports, there were guns in the house; that is why the agents were sent in armed. It would have been stupid to send in unarmed agents which could have been mowed down in front of the child, making this even more of a tragedy than it would have been.
If the agents had a warrant, and it very much looks like they did, then they did nothing wrong. If they didn't have one that's another matter, but the vast majority of reports seems to show that they had one. Displays of force are Bad Things, and should only be used in very rare cases when there is no other option. However, this seems to have been exactly such a case.
One: none of it's copyrighted. You can't copyright a device; that is what patents are for.
Two: Yes, it's proprietary, and a good chunk of it is patented.
However, there's a nice little thing called fair use, which allows one to do this sort of thing with a protected work for personal, educational/research use, or to achieve compatibility. This falls under the "educational use" part of the fair use doctrine. Because there is a very complete workks cited list, our friend here has nothing to worry about. It all appears to be quite legitimate.
You confuse script and language. You could use the Latin script with Asian languages too (eg Vietnamese). Latin letters are known nearly everywhere, so you would just have to learn the language.
Very true. However, there are still two problems with this approach:
You have to come up with a single standard romanization system. Currently for most languages out there, you have several competing standards, each with its own merits and flaws.
You still haven't tackled the problem that while Mandarin has the most speakers, it's nowhere near the most widely-spoken language (I don't know the exact number of speakers, but assuming 1.1 billion people in China, even if you have 1.5 billion total Chinese speakers then over 73% of them live in a single nation). If you're going to choose a language, it needs to already be spoken pretty widely, to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Esperanto actually has a rather wide speaker base, despite the relatively small number of speakers. English still holds the title of most widely-spoken; it doesn't have the sheer number of speakers that Mandarin does but chances are you can find someone who speaks English almost anywhere you go. Spanish is also rising in terms of breadth of speaker base; in a few years it might knock English from that slot.
Mandarin Chinese has more speakers than any other language in the world. However, the distribution of speakers is somewhat narrow, and a keyboard with the full Mandarin character set would be truly nightmarish to learn and/or use (you could use an abbreviated set, but this limits what you can do to some degree, and that isn't a Good Thing). Similar problems result from Japanese and many other Asian languages. There's also the problem of space-efficiency. Mandarin is very space-efficient because there's one character per word and 16 bytes per character (the only two English words which can actually be stored more efficiently than any Chinese word are a and I). Japanese, which uses one character per syllable, is about as efficient as English; the 16-byte encoding of Japanese tends to negate the shorter word length. For example, "Slashdot" takes 8 bytes in English but 10 bytes in Japanese (Su-ra-shu-do-tu being the closest transliteration I can come up with). Note that Unicode will negate English's potential advantage here, since English will then also be a two-byte language (as well as all the others).
English is extremely widely-spoken, despite the fact that it doesn't have as many speakers worldwide as, say, Mandarin. Its character set is also relatively small, making keyboards manageable. However, because of its heavy reliance on inflection and context to supply meaning, it's actually not that well-suited to the Net. Also, when spoken it's not exactly beautiful (the only three which sound worse, of course IMHO, are German, English with a Brooklyn accent, and anything else with a Brooklyn accent. ^_^ And as someone who has several people with Brooklyn accents in the family, I've had much time to ponder this). However, if there's one thing English has going for it, it's flexibility; it can incorporate words from almost any other language with little or no change in the way it sounds. This is paid for quite dearly (just look at our consistent spelling rules, or perhaps better to point you to the seeming lack thereof), but it is an advantage that shouldn't be overlooked.
Hawaiian has a very simple character set (12 letters). However, it's not widely spoken and is known for long words, which makes the language harder to learn.
Latin's character set is smaller than English. It also seems to have a good deal of precision, and is the root of many other lnguages (giving many speakers, st least in the West, at least some familiarity with it). However, learning it is no easy task.
Esperanto... I don't know. Seems simple enough to learn, and its character set is fairly small (slightly bigger than English). The major barrier is getting people to learn it. I actually still need to do this one; I'm rather intrigued by it. Can anyone think of any dis-advantages to Esperanto, but counting number of users?
Logban... no. While the idea behind it is intruguing, it operates on the basic fallacy that all human thought is logical (which it not only isn't, but shouldn't be; the human mind's greatest strength is that it doesn't always have to follow the constraints of logic). Because human thought isn't always logical, it can't be completely described by logic, which is a big part of the reason we're having so much trouble with true AI. Besides which, there seems to be no art to the language; literary constructs such as the double entendre are impossible by the language's very definition. This is a huge loss, and not one that I believe can be ignored or afforded.
French, the old lingua franca before English took over. We could go back to that. Pretty small character set, beautiful sound... However, it should be noted that there are estimated to be more BASIC-programmers than French-speakers, and while it's not as hard to learn as English it's still no easy task to learn it. If we're going to pick a common language it needs to be something that can make the transition as smooth as possible.
And since I brought it up, what if we were all to speak BASIC? I'll let you off so you can go laugh hysterically at that idea for a few minutes.
You're back? OK. Well, then, the question is interesting. Currently, English seems to be more or less the lingua franca of the Net. It has problems, of course, as with any other language. What if a modified version were to be created, with these problems removed or at least minimized (particularly spelling troubles)? The concept would be somewhat like the language Stark from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. It's a thought, anyway.
According to everything I've heard, Area 51 has been abandoned. You still can't actually get inside the thing, but you can get as far as the doors; even the guards are gone.
Do did they ever have anything interesting there? Probably. Do they now? I doubt it; simply too much publicity.
I would love to know just how what MP3.com did was illegal. They were providing a service to their users, that is, encoding their CD's into MP3 (and this is quite legal). Similar services have existed in the physical world for a long time; why not the digital?
Yes, this service could theoretically be abused. MP3.com took all of the technologically possible precautions to ensure that this did not happen. Simply put, there is no technologically feasible way to verify ownership of these songs, short of (perhaps) having people actually mail in the CD to be converted, which would then be sent back along with the MP3's on a Zip disk or something similar. That would have been simply disastrous.
Simply put, RIAA fears digital distribution because it means switching business models. No more would people have to pay for permission to listen to music. They would have to resort to a new business model, but one which is still quite lucrative (honestly, if every MP3 on the Net were legalized right now, I don't think the situation would change at all).
Musicians made money from their work long before RIAA existed. Long before CD's, tapes, or even records, it was still more than possible to make good money in music (of course, you had to actually have talent to do so; this immediately rules out the half of today's artists who are chosen merely for their looks). This is why RIAA fears MP3's because deep down, RIAA knows it's superfluous. RIAA and every company associated with it could disappear from the face of the planet right now and, although a lot of artists would have to get tech-savvy, in the end nothing would have to change.
And if you don't believe independent artists can make money, I point you to George Lucas (yes, he is an indie; probably the most successful one out there). It's not easy; it takes a lot of work and you have to be damn good at what you do, just as in any business where you go freelance. But it can be done, it is done, and isn't it all supposed to be about people working hard to advance their art anyway?
Napster is a program created for the express purpose of the legal exchange of legal music.
Many people use Napster instead for the illegal trade of copyrighted music without the consent of the copyright holder.
Napster does have something of a responsibility to prevent the misuse of its network.
There's not a damn thing Napster can do to control what its users share. Nothing with even a hope of feasibility anyway...
Checking all file transfers by filename is not feasible, as filenames are trivially easy to change.
Analyzing the music is not feasible for three reasons
Simply decoding and re-encoding the music introduces digital noise, not enough to be heard by the human ear but enough to trip up anything which could analyze the file and compare.
Simply analyzing the entire volume of Napster's network would take an amount of computing power that would make the NSA jealous.
Even if you could analyze the whole volume of traffic, you have to have a database to compare the music too, which must contain, naturally, every copyrighted work out there. That would require more storage space than exists on the entire Napster network.
The only thing Napster can really do is warn users about copyrights. It already does this (the official client does, at any rate; many clones do not). After that, however, it is entirely up to the user.
Other products, such as Hotline, Gnutella, Freenet, and MP3 search engines, also facilitate the spread of illegal copyrighted music, but no one is suing these (even MP3.com isn't being sued for its search engine; it's being sued for other reasons). This is a double-standard.
U.S. law holds that an internet service provider, and Napster could be considered one of these, is not responsible for its users' content. In other countries this can be a different story, however since all parties involved are in the U.S. this is not relevant to the case.
Ergo, RIAA's claim against Napster are legally groundless.
I dislike music piracy myself. I admit to having a few MP3's, mainly because I cannot buy the CD's they come from (I can find no one who sells them, though I do have every intention of buying the CD's if I ever run across copies of them). I didn't use Napster to get them, either; stopping Napster won't stop the spread of MP3. RIAA just wants a scapegoat on which to blame the losses they can't even prove they're having (doubtless they are suffering some losses, but I'd be surprised if their "public" estimates are not at least twenty times greater than the actual losses incurred).
Now, this said, I don't see how RIAA's attack on Napster is an attack on Open-Source. Napster isn't Open-Source; in fact Napster himself has rather viciously attacked Open-Source Napster-alikes in the past (mainly because he relied on security through obscurity in his protocol, so he had a little embarrassment when it was revealed just how shoddy it was security-wise).
Last I checked, the CoS jealously guards its E-meters (and anything else that might allow any form of insight into them to an outsider, for that matter). I'll leave the question as to why they might do that up to you; I have my own ideas (hint: they reflect very poorly on the CoS).
But either way, since the CoS is normally so secretive about these things, it's probably relatively safe to assume that any E-meters which found their way to Ebay were stolen (or at least could have been considered stolen by the CoS). It's not IP theft by any means, but if the CoS says they're stolen, then Ebay does have to stop the auctions, just as if the item in question had been a stolen car.
By the way, any word on when the patents on these things expire? I can't wait to see some non-Scientologist (ex-Scientologist, perhaps?) start building them and selling them; then not even the CoS could pull something like this.
...I even said it should be modded down. I just said I didn't have the heart to do it. The post is funny, after all. This is neither the proper time nor place for it, but I couldn't help but laugh, and I'm willing to bet that even you laughed once or twice (assuming you actually read it all). It's certainly better than that loser who writes long porn stories and posts them here.
This isn't the place for screaming at JonKatz. If you want to make your petty little rants, take the matter up with him personally (his e-mail address is public, after all).
And you know what? I think I'm going to counter-rant. If only because maybe I just might be able to convince you just how inappropriate this troll is.
Yes, it's true that the comments are owned by the posters. But by putting them here, we've made them public (Slashdot should consider clarifying this). Rather like the BSD license, in a way; we own the comments, but anyone can see and use them so long as proper credit is maintained. Katz had the right to do what he did, both with the e-mails he recieved (as letters written to him, he does own them) and the posts. Depending on your point of view, he may have had the responsibility to do what he did, and I believe he sees it this way. And if he does make some money off of it, so what? Considering the good this book has the potential to do, he deserves a reward for it.
Jon Katz used us. He is a thief, but worse than Abit, because we trusted him. We took an outsider into our group of outsiders, and he defiled us.
Really? Explain what was so defiling about what he did. What, did you post something you didn't want made public? That's just stupid; never post something on a public forum that you wouldn't mind every pair of eyes on the face of the planet reading.
You just couldn't stand not getting all the credit for yourself, could you?
But he doesn't. He doesn't take the credit for a single one of those postings. He doesn't give names, but that's for a damn good reason (and one which is quite common practice in this type of journalism; it's called "protecting the innocent.") But he doesn't attribute the letters to himself at all.
You soaked up the blood of those bullet riddled corpses with the pages of that book.
Really? Books aren't that absorbent, you know. Columbine was a terrible tragedy, yes. But there is a greater tragedy going on, one of which Columbine is only a sign. This tragedy is what the book seeks to bring to light, so that even in something as horrible as Columbine, there may be some good.
You stole the cries of all maligned geeks in this world.
One: I hardly think every single geek in the world posted on Slashdot, and certainly they didn't all get into the book. Two: He did not steal them. We posted those cries to Slashdot so that they may be heard. Katz is trying to make them heard even more far and wide than is possible with Slashdot alone. Is this so terrible?
Jon Katz, raper and pillager of the very souls he claims to defend.
Raper and pillager? Hmmm; I wonder what would happen if I asked a group of rape victims what they thought of this situation. Or even victims of armed robbery. I get the very strong feeling that you'd be rebuffed, probably quite angrily.
You are a monster.
A question for you. A group of oppressed people cries out for help. Who is the monster? Is it the person who makes those cries heard, even though he may recieve some reward for it? Or the one who would keep those cries shut off from the world, locked away where only other oppressed peoples can hear it, thus ensuring that the help they so desperately need will never come?
And if Katz is a monster, then so am I. I did a speech on this very subject last week, using several of the letters sent to Katz in the Hellmouth series (and concluding with Eric Harris' suicide note). I got an A- (highest in the class), and a very long question-and-answer session afterward. I got a reward, just as Katz will; am I so bad? I like to think I might have been able to raise awareness, even if in only one person (or perhaps more; I'll never know for certain). One person who may well teach his children to respect those who are different. One person whose children may then teach their own children to respect those who are different. And I think I touched more than one heart that day. Does a monster do this?
No. A monster would keep the cries of the geeks shut out to all but other geeks (since, let's face it, who else reads this site? We're all geeks, and we're all damn proud of that fact). We can help each other, but together with non-geeks, we could make true progress. This "geek separatism" you seem to proclaim would make you the monster, not me, and not JonKatz.
You're right. In the physical world, we do have these elaborate "registries" as you call them. But there's a difference between that and strong digital identity. With physical identity, we can always choose not to "flash the badge." With digital identity, you can't do that because you have no control whatsoever over what of your identity people see (you don't have much control in the physical world either, but you can still take precautions to completely hide your identity).
Now, if this "identity" could be stored on my machine and only my machine, and I could at my own discretion choose to hide it or not, that would be one thing. Perhaps CPU ID's would make a starting point, though MAC addresses would be better (they're cross-platform). But that's not how it works now, and businesses will never allow that (since then they have no control, and in business it's all about who controls what).
By the way, I notice people here saying MAC addresses are totally private. Not strictly true. Every Ethernet packet you send out is tagged with both your MAC and the MAC of the machine you're sending to; it's part of the Ethernet protocol. Now, these are both stripped out as soon as the packet passes through a non-Ethernet device (cable modem, DSL modem, T1, etc). But as long as there's only Ethernet between you and The Bad Guy (tm), he can still track that part of where you're going. Guess it's a Good Thing that the Net isn't Ethernet-only...
Now, it is somewhat more clueful to go after Napster users than Napster itself. Napster is not committing any crime. It provides a venue for users to trade legal music. It can be used to trade illegal music, but this is not the purpose of Napster, and Napster itself takes every precaution it can feasibly take in order to ensure that people act in a lawful manner on its site. By contrast, the users who trade music illegally over Napster are committing a crime (no flames, please; whether or not it should be a crime is not the issue; the sad fact is that, currently, it's a crime). They can control their actions.
However, as a practical matter, Dr. Dre is not going to be able to sue all of the Napster users who trade his music. There are simply too many of them, and the exorbitant amount which Dre is legally allowed to ask (several thousand per violation) is more than he'll ever get from the users. This is a losing venture for him; he will lose far more money than he will gain.
And while I never did much like his music, Dre and Metallica have assured themselves the loss of this potential customer, even if I do by some unexplainable phenomenon acquire a taste for it.
But this is rediculous. I mean, if there was a bill banning technical debates online, it would warrant a story, as it would effect us. But if you ran it constantly, it is dumb, because there is NO room for discussion.
But censorware DOES affect us. As soon as even one voice is silenced, all others are jeopardized. Besides which, I wonder how many censorware products block us because of our discussions...
We ALL know everybody's view of censorware
No, you don't, or you'd realize just how important this is. We on Slashdot are not in the majority by being against censorware. This sort of thing is hugely popular not just with the Reactionary Religious Right and the Lunatic Liberal Left, but with all of The Unthinking Masses. The people who would rather than do their jobs as parents, entrust their kids' (and their own) minds to a piece of mindless, heartless software. This is something wqe have to fight, and none of us can do it alone. There is strength in numbers, and all we can do is discuss these matters. The spread of knowledge -the very thing censorware seeks to curb- is our only weapon. And that is why these are important.
How about the splash screen for every browser simply says;
PARENTAL GUIDANCE RECOMMENDED!
Or maybe that should be stamped on every kid's forehead in ink that takes 18 years to come off...
You know, the hell of it is, your post actually makes a bit of sense. What with today's lazy parents who want to rely on mindless, heartless software rather than doing their jobs as parents, it almost seems as though you have to stamp this warning on every kid's forehead just to remind parents that kids are a responsibility too, and not only that but the single most important responsibility any adult can possibly have.
Sometimes I wonder if requiring a license to have a kid isn't such a bad idea after all. Make the parents take responsibility in a way that can be legally enforced. Make sure they're not going to be abusive or neglectful. Make sure they at least know the very basics of child care.
I quickly come to my senses, of course; such a scheme would only create more problems than it would solve. But it's awfully tempting. Surely some way to ensure that any potential parent understands the responsibility and has the basic necessary skills must exist that doesn't trample human rights. I just wish I knew the answer.
Americans have no monopoly on racism. In some cultures, in fact, the racist element is far more powerful than it is in the US. France is actually an example, where they have entire political parties dedicated solely to driving all non-French people out of France. There's a similar movement in Australia. And let's not even go into Rwanda, what's left of Yugoslavia (it's a shame: it took a totalitarian regime to stop the fighting there, and once the regime was gone the bloodshed started right up again), and others.
It's quite true that the US has a lot of racism in its history. It's equally true that the American people have done some pretty damn bad things in the cause of racism. But don't forget, there are many nations out there who have done things that make what America has done look like something you'd see on an episode of Sesame Street. Sadly, since you were too scared to put a name behind your flame, we can't exactly examine the things that were done in the name of prejudice where you come from. Or did you post anonymously because you can't take the heat? If so, then I suggest you stay out of the kitchen next time.
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Your example of downloading a 10-meg file from an NFS server is also incorrect. For a download of that size, a throbber isn't appropriate; you need a full-fledges dialog for something that big, or at least a progress bar. Something so you know how long it's going to take. Throbbers work well for very small files, but not for large or even moderately-sized ones.
I do find this trend of converging every possible function into a single app to be most disconcerting. It happened with Win98 and KFM, it's happenning to Konqueror, and even Mozilla is getting in on the act (in a few different ways, but it's just as guilty as the others). Gnome's Nautilus seems to be slightly different (each aspect being a Bonobo component, and thus a separate module) but the end result seems to be the same, so I'll roll it in here too.
A Web browser is a Web browser. A file manager is a file manager. A media player is a media player. Trying to combine these into one massive app is just a bad idea, no matter the platform or widget set or whatever. Rolling FTP into the original KFM was different; that's still managing files (on a remote machine, perhaps, but same basic idea). Not at all like Web browsing, where the goal is to view files rather than manage them.
So why bring them together into one massive app that's nightmarish to debug when you can simply make several smaller apps, each of which does its job more efficiently and is still much easier to program and maintain? You also don't have the overhead of interface components which might make sense in, say, a Web browser but not a file manager (do file managers really need a throbber? And what use is the "delete" function on a Web browser where 99.99% of the time you wouldn't even have permission to delete files anyway?)
Nothing against KDE; I prefer Gnome myself but use both on a regular basis since the Solaris boxen here only have KDE. But I'm not so sure that making Konqueror into The App That Does Everything (tm) is such a good idea.
OK, I'm sick of /.ers assuming that everyone who reads /. must be some kind of American, white, male Linux user without a life.
/. certainly could.
/. is not just for Linux, and people should try and remember that otherwise they will just alienate a large proportion of their user base, and *gasp* lose advertising money. And that's what'll hurt them.
True. However, if you think that the Open-Source community is composed entirely of while male Linux users without lives, you're as prejudiced as you claim other Slashdotters are.
I do not represent the open source community. I do not run Linux. In fact, I was curious about it before I came here, but a year's worth of zealotry and bigoted postings have pretty much put me off of ever running Linux at all. Why should I associate myself with such a narrow-minded group of people? Trust me, zealots do nothing but put people off. Linux could do without them, and
A question: what do you run? I'm sure I could find zealots for any OS you could possibly be running, even Windows. You're right, they don't do any good for a community. But they exist in all communities.
In fact, I'm sick of every single "open source" project getting a whole story here with every release, even when it's 2.999a 0.6pre3 or some other incomprehensible version number.
No need to be overdramatic. A quick look at Freshmeat will tell you that what you said simply is not the case; where was Slashdot when the Bubbling Load Monitor 1.0 was released?
The fact is, Slashdot tries to cover releases of the most important software to the Open-Source community (Linux, *BSD, Apache, etc). And occasionally if a piece of software looks interesting they'll throw that one in too, to get the word out. What's the matter with that?
And I'm sick of every third article being about graphics cards. So what about YAGCB (Yet Another Graphics Card Benchmark)? This isn't a hardware site is it?
Not entirely, but hardware is a part of it. As is software. As are most other aspects of computing. And graphics cards are in fact important to the Slashdot community; a community is best served by its journals if they contain things which are important to the community at large. Most Slashdotters run some kind of "alternative" OS, whatever that OS may be, and we've never had good graphics card support in any of these. So it's important to know what's going on.
In short,
You're correct. However, Linux is a part of Slashdot, and a rather large and important one. Perhaps you don't like it, but that's what the article filters are for. Use them if you don't like what Slashdot has to say.
Consider, first and foremost, web pages have been ruled "publications" under the law. This means that some of the liability laws which apply to more traditional forms of publication also apply to WWW publishing.
I'm not so sure that works. Think about it. Let's say you find an libelous article in the newspaper about you one day. Who do you charge with libel? Do you sue the company that made the paper the news was printed on? No; you sue the people who made the content. Likewise, you shouldn't be holding the ones who simply provide the medium; you have to go to the ones who created the content. And that is not, by and large, the ISP's.
If the newspaper publishes information, it is obligated to either publish a retraction upon a libel or slander challenge or back the columnist. If they choose to back the columnist, they usually become party to the lawsuit for publishing the information.
A newspaper does, not the company that provides the periodical with paper.
Likewise, if an ISP receives information about a hosted site that is considered libelous or slandering, they have to make a choice whether or not to continue "publishing" the site, or removing it from circulation, i.e. blocking access or removing it from the server(s).
This may be the law, but it's simply wrong. An ISP cannot reasonably be expected to control Internet users (AOL is different because its proprietary system is self-contained, but even its Internet portions cannot reasonably be expected to be controlled). There are simply too many random variables. A paper company cannot choose what is printed on its products, so why should an ISP have to try and choose what is "printed" on its media? All an ISP does does is provide the means to publish; the publishing is still done more or less entirely by the user owning the Website. So only the Website owner should be liable, not the ISP.
Why, why, and why?
If your religion is any product line, even an Open-Source one, you really have some things to think about.
Honestly, this is a great first step. The decision should have been made ten years ago, but at least it's happenning.
Now the courts need to learn that this ought to apply to Websites too. The E-mail decision will hopefully make that easier to accomplish. It's a shame that this is coming so late in the Net's history (and yes, I know the Net is still in its infancy; this should have been done just as the Net was coming into popularity). But, as I said, it's still getting done, and that's good anyway.
The problem is that RIAA was afraid of digital music when it first gained popularity. They had the opportunity to take the bull by the horns, grab control of the industry, and made even more money.
Unfortunately, they didn't do that. They scoffed at MP3, and the result was only too predictable. They left it to the pirates, so the pirates jumped on it.
Music piracy is hardly a new thing. It's been around for decades. Prople were taping records, radio, and later CD's long before MP3 arrived on the scene, amd moreover people still do this (probably as much as if not more than MP3; the format does take a small amount of technological savvy after all). RIAA acts as though stopping MP3 will stop piracy for good; it won't. Other means will arise, and unless RIAA works within these new systems they'll lose big time.
For one, RIAA shouldn't be so averse to selling MP3's. There's no need to worry about SDMI and all that; while piracy will still exist, of course, there's lots of money to be made. Need I remind the music industry Bill Gates and Larry Ellison both sell software, and together they are worth more than the entire music industry? So clearly piracy may be a problem, but it's not a real barrier to making a whole planeload of cash.
Piracy is a problem, of course. But it's never going to go away; you simply cannot eradicate it. The best you can hope for is to minimize it. Sell MP3's over the Web for a dollar apiece (this being roughly proportional to the retail cost of a CD, which is higher than the price the industry itself gets for every disc). You'd be surprised how many fans will pay a buck apiece for music, particularly in places where you can't use Napster. The first company to actually try this (assuming they can get a decent-sized fanbase) will prove the model's validity.
It's a different way of doing things, yes. And of course it's scary; moving away from a model that was known to be lucrative in the past but is now losing out to technology is always a risk. But technology is evolving, and unless the music industry is ready to face that and work within it, they're going to be left behind.
Why stop there? Why not make the capton "Federal rescue team saves child from potential molesters"?
Because there's no evidence to that. But that the relatives were kidnappers is quite clear; thanks to the media the entire nation witnessed it.
I can't believe so many people are defending a gross abuse of power, committed with a neglect of the courts.
While I do agree that they did go a bit extreme, I'm not sure this was an abuse of power. The child was, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped. He was being held hostage, and negotiations were not working. Was sending in armed agents a bad thing? Yes. But did they have any other choice? I'm not so sure they did. And when you run out of options, you do what you have to do.
I'm not surprised that Reno ordered it, though, as she has a long history of such acts.
Agreed. But for once I think she may well have been right. In the past she's been more than a little trigger-happy, and many people died senselessly as a result. But this time she showed a great deal of restraint, actually waiting until there was no other option.
Going into a house, in the way those agents did, was just asking for somebody to be killed.
Quite true. But no one was killed; that is what's important. Going into a building with guns to rescue hostages is also just asking for someone to be killed, and that's more or less what this was. The relatives managed to pull a rather inane political-ideology bit to manipulate a lot of people and hide the truth of their actions, but they did what they did.
If people suddenly find that agents have broken into a house, and are pointing automatic weapons at them, people will often react defensively.
They'll react defensively if anyone breaks into a house with automatic weapons. They'll also react defensively if their children have been kidnapped.
We *do* still have a right to keep arms in our house, and bear them to defend ourselves.
Yes, that's true. From all reports, there were guns in the house; that is why the agents were sent in armed. It would have been stupid to send in unarmed agents which could have been mowed down in front of the child, making this even more of a tragedy than it would have been.
If the agents had a warrant, and it very much looks like they did, then they did nothing wrong. If they didn't have one that's another matter, but the vast majority of reports seems to show that they had one. Displays of force are Bad Things, and should only be used in very rare cases when there is no other option. However, this seems to have been exactly such a case.
One: none of it's copyrighted. You can't copyright a device; that is what patents are for.
Two: Yes, it's proprietary, and a good chunk of it is patented.
However, there's a nice little thing called fair use, which allows one to do this sort of thing with a protected work for personal, educational/research use, or to achieve compatibility. This falls under the "educational use" part of the fair use doctrine. Because there is a very complete workks cited list, our friend here has nothing to worry about. It all appears to be quite legitimate.
Very true. However, there are still two problems with this approach:
Esperanto actually has a rather wide speaker base, despite the relatively small number of speakers. English still holds the title of most widely-spoken; it doesn't have the sheer number of speakers that Mandarin does but chances are you can find someone who speaks English almost anywhere you go. Spanish is also rising in terms of breadth of speaker base; in a few years it might knock English from that slot.
Ender's Game was written years before The Matrix was even conceived. If one ripped off the other, then it was The Matrix ripping off Ender's Game.
Or are you just one of the new non-anonymous trolls, trying to break Trollmastah's record?
What would make a good language?
Mandarin Chinese has more speakers than any other language in the world. However, the distribution of speakers is somewhat narrow, and a keyboard with the full Mandarin character set would be truly nightmarish to learn and/or use (you could use an abbreviated set, but this limits what you can do to some degree, and that isn't a Good Thing). Similar problems result from Japanese and many other Asian languages. There's also the problem of space-efficiency. Mandarin is very space-efficient because there's one character per word and 16 bytes per character (the only two English words which can actually be stored more efficiently than any Chinese word are a and I). Japanese, which uses one character per syllable, is about as efficient as English; the 16-byte encoding of Japanese tends to negate the shorter word length. For example, "Slashdot" takes 8 bytes in English but 10 bytes in Japanese (Su-ra-shu-do-tu being the closest transliteration I can come up with). Note that Unicode will negate English's potential advantage here, since English will then also be a two-byte language (as well as all the others).
English is extremely widely-spoken, despite the fact that it doesn't have as many speakers worldwide as, say, Mandarin. Its character set is also relatively small, making keyboards manageable. However, because of its heavy reliance on inflection and context to supply meaning, it's actually not that well-suited to the Net. Also, when spoken it's not exactly beautiful (the only three which sound worse, of course IMHO, are German, English with a Brooklyn accent, and anything else with a Brooklyn accent. ^_^ And as someone who has several people with Brooklyn accents in the family, I've had much time to ponder this). However, if there's one thing English has going for it, it's flexibility; it can incorporate words from almost any other language with little or no change in the way it sounds. This is paid for quite dearly (just look at our consistent spelling rules, or perhaps better to point you to the seeming lack thereof), but it is an advantage that shouldn't be overlooked.
Hawaiian has a very simple character set (12 letters). However, it's not widely spoken and is known for long words, which makes the language harder to learn.
Latin's character set is smaller than English. It also seems to have a good deal of precision, and is the root of many other lnguages (giving many speakers, st least in the West, at least some familiarity with it). However, learning it is no easy task.
Esperanto... I don't know. Seems simple enough to learn, and its character set is fairly small (slightly bigger than English). The major barrier is getting people to learn it. I actually still need to do this one; I'm rather intrigued by it. Can anyone think of any dis-advantages to Esperanto, but counting number of users?
Logban... no. While the idea behind it is intruguing, it operates on the basic fallacy that all human thought is logical (which it not only isn't, but shouldn't be; the human mind's greatest strength is that it doesn't always have to follow the constraints of logic). Because human thought isn't always logical, it can't be completely described by logic, which is a big part of the reason we're having so much trouble with true AI. Besides which, there seems to be no art to the language; literary constructs such as the double entendre are impossible by the language's very definition. This is a huge loss, and not one that I believe can be ignored or afforded.
French, the old lingua franca before English took over. We could go back to that. Pretty small character set, beautiful sound... However, it should be noted that there are estimated to be more BASIC-programmers than French-speakers, and while it's not as hard to learn as English it's still no easy task to learn it. If we're going to pick a common language it needs to be something that can make the transition as smooth as possible.
And since I brought it up, what if we were all to speak BASIC? I'll let you off so you can go laugh hysterically at that idea for a few minutes.
You're back? OK. Well, then, the question is interesting. Currently, English seems to be more or less the lingua franca of the Net. It has problems, of course, as with any other language. What if a modified version were to be created, with these problems removed or at least minimized (particularly spelling troubles)? The concept would be somewhat like the language Stark from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. It's a thought, anyway.
According to everything I've heard, Area 51 has been abandoned. You still can't actually get inside the thing, but you can get as far as the doors; even the guards are gone.
Do did they ever have anything interesting there? Probably. Do they now? I doubt it; simply too much publicity.
I would love to know just how what MP3.com did was illegal. They were providing a service to their users, that is, encoding their CD's into MP3 (and this is quite legal). Similar services have existed in the physical world for a long time; why not the digital?
Yes, this service could theoretically be abused. MP3.com took all of the technologically possible precautions to ensure that this did not happen. Simply put, there is no technologically feasible way to verify ownership of these songs, short of (perhaps) having people actually mail in the CD to be converted, which would then be sent back along with the MP3's on a Zip disk or something similar. That would have been simply disastrous.
Simply put, RIAA fears digital distribution because it means switching business models. No more would people have to pay for permission to listen to music. They would have to resort to a new business model, but one which is still quite lucrative (honestly, if every MP3 on the Net were legalized right now, I don't think the situation would change at all).
Musicians made money from their work long before RIAA existed. Long before CD's, tapes, or even records, it was still more than possible to make good money in music (of course, you had to actually have talent to do so; this immediately rules out the half of today's artists who are chosen merely for their looks). This is why RIAA fears MP3's because deep down, RIAA knows it's superfluous. RIAA and every company associated with it could disappear from the face of the planet right now and, although a lot of artists would have to get tech-savvy, in the end nothing would have to change.
And if you don't believe independent artists can make money, I point you to George Lucas (yes, he is an indie; probably the most successful one out there). It's not easy; it takes a lot of work and you have to be damn good at what you do, just as in any business where you go freelance. But it can be done, it is done, and isn't it all supposed to be about people working hard to advance their art anyway?
I dislike music piracy myself. I admit to having a few MP3's, mainly because I cannot buy the CD's they come from (I can find no one who sells them, though I do have every intention of buying the CD's if I ever run across copies of them). I didn't use Napster to get them, either; stopping Napster won't stop the spread of MP3. RIAA just wants a scapegoat on which to blame the losses they can't even prove they're having (doubtless they are suffering some losses, but I'd be surprised if their "public" estimates are not at least twenty times greater than the actual losses incurred).
Now, this said, I don't see how RIAA's attack on Napster is an attack on Open-Source. Napster isn't Open-Source; in fact Napster himself has rather viciously attacked Open-Source Napster-alikes in the past (mainly because he relied on security through obscurity in his protocol, so he had a little embarrassment when it was revealed just how shoddy it was security-wise).
Last I checked, the CoS jealously guards its E-meters (and anything else that might allow any form of insight into them to an outsider, for that matter). I'll leave the question as to why they might do that up to you; I have my own ideas (hint: they reflect very poorly on the CoS).
But either way, since the CoS is normally so secretive about these things, it's probably relatively safe to assume that any E-meters which found their way to Ebay were stolen (or at least could have been considered stolen by the CoS). It's not IP theft by any means, but if the CoS says they're stolen, then Ebay does have to stop the auctions, just as if the item in question had been a stolen car.
By the way, any word on when the patents on these things expire? I can't wait to see some non-Scientologist (ex-Scientologist, perhaps?) start building them and selling them; then not even the CoS could pull something like this.
...I even said it should be modded down. I just said I didn't have the heart to do it. The post is funny, after all. This is neither the proper time nor place for it, but I couldn't help but laugh, and I'm willing to bet that even you laughed once or twice (assuming you actually read it all). It's certainly better than that loser who writes long porn stories and posts them here.
This is absolutely tasteless, inaccurate, and downright mean.
It's also so damn funny I just don't have the heart to mod it down. It still should be, as Offtopic, but dammit, I can't do it. Someone else, please?
This isn't the place for screaming at JonKatz. If you want to make your petty little rants, take the matter up with him personally (his e-mail address is public, after all).
And you know what? I think I'm going to counter-rant. If only because maybe I just might be able to convince you just how inappropriate this troll is.
Yes, it's true that the comments are owned by the posters. But by putting them here, we've made them public (Slashdot should consider clarifying this). Rather like the BSD license, in a way; we own the comments, but anyone can see and use them so long as proper credit is maintained. Katz had the right to do what he did, both with the e-mails he recieved (as letters written to him, he does own them) and the posts. Depending on your point of view, he may have had the responsibility to do what he did, and I believe he sees it this way. And if he does make some money off of it, so what? Considering the good this book has the potential to do, he deserves a reward for it.
Jon Katz used us. He is a thief, but worse than Abit, because we trusted him. We took an outsider into our group of outsiders, and he defiled us.
Really? Explain what was so defiling about what he did. What, did you post something you didn't want made public? That's just stupid; never post something on a public forum that you wouldn't mind every pair of eyes on the face of the planet reading.
You just couldn't stand not getting all the credit for yourself, could you?
But he doesn't. He doesn't take the credit for a single one of those postings. He doesn't give names, but that's for a damn good reason (and one which is quite common practice in this type of journalism; it's called "protecting the innocent.") But he doesn't attribute the letters to himself at all.
You soaked up the blood of those bullet riddled corpses with the pages of that book.
Really? Books aren't that absorbent, you know. Columbine was a terrible tragedy, yes. But there is a greater tragedy going on, one of which Columbine is only a sign. This tragedy is what the book seeks to bring to light, so that even in something as horrible as Columbine, there may be some good.
You stole the cries of all maligned geeks in this world.
One: I hardly think every single geek in the world posted on Slashdot, and certainly they didn't all get into the book.
Two: He did not steal them. We posted those cries to Slashdot so that they may be heard. Katz is trying to make them heard even more far and wide than is possible with Slashdot alone. Is this so terrible?
Jon Katz, raper and pillager of the very souls he claims to defend.
Raper and pillager? Hmmm; I wonder what would happen if I asked a group of rape victims what they thought of this situation. Or even victims of armed robbery. I get the very strong feeling that you'd be rebuffed, probably quite angrily.
You are a monster.
A question for you. A group of oppressed people cries out for help. Who is the monster? Is it the person who makes those cries heard, even though he may recieve some reward for it? Or the one who would keep those cries shut off from the world, locked away where only other oppressed peoples can hear it, thus ensuring that the help they so desperately need will never come?
And if Katz is a monster, then so am I. I did a speech on this very subject last week, using several of the letters sent to Katz in the Hellmouth series (and concluding with Eric Harris' suicide note). I got an A- (highest in the class), and a very long question-and-answer session afterward. I got a reward, just as Katz will; am I so bad? I like to think I might have been able to raise awareness, even if in only one person (or perhaps more; I'll never know for certain). One person who may well teach his children to respect those who are different. One person whose children may then teach their own children to respect those who are different. And I think I touched more than one heart that day. Does a monster do this?
No. A monster would keep the cries of the geeks shut out to all but other geeks (since, let's face it, who else reads this site? We're all geeks, and we're all damn proud of that fact). We can help each other, but together with non-geeks, we could make true progress. This "geek separatism" you seem to proclaim would make you the monster, not me, and not JonKatz.
You're right. In the physical world, we do have these elaborate "registries" as you call them. But there's a difference between that and strong digital identity. With physical identity, we can always choose not to "flash the badge." With digital identity, you can't do that because you have no control whatsoever over what of your identity people see (you don't have much control in the physical world either, but you can still take precautions to completely hide your identity).
Now, if this "identity" could be stored on my machine and only my machine, and I could at my own discretion choose to hide it or not, that would be one thing. Perhaps CPU ID's would make a starting point, though MAC addresses would be better (they're cross-platform). But that's not how it works now, and businesses will never allow that (since then they have no control, and in business it's all about who controls what).
By the way, I notice people here saying MAC addresses are totally private. Not strictly true. Every Ethernet packet you send out is tagged with both your MAC and the MAC of the machine you're sending to; it's part of the Ethernet protocol. Now, these are both stripped out as soon as the packet passes through a non-Ethernet device (cable modem, DSL modem, T1, etc). But as long as there's only Ethernet between you and The Bad Guy (tm), he can still track that part of where you're going. Guess it's a Good Thing that the Net isn't Ethernet-only...
OK, I know I'm just sticking my head out here for a good whack with the Clue Stick, but what is console moderation? I haven't heard of this one.
Now, it is somewhat more clueful to go after Napster users than Napster itself. Napster is not committing any crime. It provides a venue for users to trade legal music. It can be used to trade illegal music, but this is not the purpose of Napster, and Napster itself takes every precaution it can feasibly take in order to ensure that people act in a lawful manner on its site. By contrast, the users who trade music illegally over Napster are committing a crime (no flames, please; whether or not it should be a crime is not the issue; the sad fact is that, currently, it's a crime). They can control their actions.
However, as a practical matter, Dr. Dre is not going to be able to sue all of the Napster users who trade his music. There are simply too many of them, and the exorbitant amount which Dre is legally allowed to ask (several thousand per violation) is more than he'll ever get from the users. This is a losing venture for him; he will lose far more money than he will gain.
And while I never did much like his music, Dre and Metallica have assured themselves the loss of this potential customer, even if I do by some unexplainable phenomenon acquire a taste for it.
But this is rediculous. I mean, if there was a bill banning technical debates online, it would warrant a story, as it would effect us. But if you ran it constantly, it is dumb, because there is NO room for discussion.
But censorware DOES affect us. As soon as even one voice is silenced, all others are jeopardized. Besides which, I wonder how many censorware products block us because of our discussions...
We ALL know everybody's view of censorware
No, you don't, or you'd realize just how important this is. We on Slashdot are not in the majority by being against censorware. This sort of thing is hugely popular not just with the Reactionary Religious Right and the Lunatic Liberal Left, but with all of The Unthinking Masses. The people who would rather than do their jobs as parents, entrust their kids' (and their own) minds to a piece of mindless, heartless software. This is something wqe have to fight, and none of us can do it alone. There is strength in numbers, and all we can do is discuss these matters. The spread of knowledge -the very thing censorware seeks to curb- is our only weapon. And that is why these are important.
How about the splash screen for every browser simply says;
PARENTAL GUIDANCE RECOMMENDED!
Or maybe that should be stamped on every kid's forehead in ink that takes 18 years to come off...
You know, the hell of it is, your post actually makes a bit of sense. What with today's lazy parents who want to rely on mindless, heartless software rather than doing their jobs as parents, it almost seems as though you have to stamp this warning on every kid's forehead just to remind parents that kids are a responsibility too, and not only that but the single most important responsibility any adult can possibly have.
Sometimes I wonder if requiring a license to have a kid isn't such a bad idea after all. Make the parents take responsibility in a way that can be legally enforced. Make sure they're not going to be abusive or neglectful. Make sure they at least know the very basics of child care.
I quickly come to my senses, of course; such a scheme would only create more problems than it would solve. But it's awfully tempting. Surely some way to ensure that any potential parent understands the responsibility and has the basic necessary skills must exist that doesn't trample human rights. I just wish I knew the answer.
Americans have no monopoly on racism. In some cultures, in fact, the racist element is far more powerful than it is in the US. France is actually an example, where they have entire political parties dedicated solely to driving all non-French people out of France. There's a similar movement in Australia. And let's not even go into Rwanda, what's left of Yugoslavia (it's a shame: it took a totalitarian regime to stop the fighting there, and once the regime was gone the bloodshed started right up again), and others.
It's quite true that the US has a lot of racism in its history. It's equally true that the American people have done some pretty damn bad things in the cause of racism. But don't forget, there are many nations out there who have done things that make what America has done look like something you'd see on an episode of Sesame Street. Sadly, since you were too scared to put a name behind your flame, we can't exactly examine the things that were done in the name of prejudice where you come from. Or did you post anonymously because you can't take the heat? If so, then I suggest you stay out of the kitchen next time.