Of course citizens of both countries are going to maintain that their country's position is obviously right.
Probably. I look at it from the point of view of, which of these is a natural right that exists with or without the State ("negative rights") vs. which of these requires some sort of State intervention to exist ("positive rights"). Positive rights are more properly "entitlements" than rights.
The whole concept of public education can only exist with massive State intervention into people's lives---infringing upon one's property rights to fund it, infringing upon one's privacy to force one's children into it, &c..
Additionally, the concept of children's "rights" is an even more severe distortion of the term than the positive/negative rights conflation; much of what people call "rights" of children would properly be called "protections" and/or "responsibilities" (of the parents, the State, society, whatever). It's merely annoying that some people have taken to refer to government-granted entitlements as "rights." But it's downright Orwellian that people refer to, for example, laws forbidding people under 16 or 18 from doing all sorts of things (living on one's own, working, engaging in consensual relationships, &c.) as protecting the "rights of children."
That law popped into existence in 1872. That was before Hitler was even born.
The amendments the Nazis made to the law were not repealed until 1994. The law preëxisted the Nazis, but what the Nazis did to it remained in effect long after they were overthrown.
Can you even name the last fscking party that was actually banned in Germany? I'll help you, that was over half a century ago. Can you name the total number of parties that were banned in West Germany, ever? I'll help you, too: It's a very, very small number.
Nope. It literally means "someone who's affiliated with a certain state".
I don't know that much about German, but Babelfish is giving me "belonging" as the translation of angehörige alone. So Staatsangehörige literally means "belonging to the State," I take it? Does angehörige when used alone have the connotation of belonging as in mere membership, or belonging as in subjection/ownership by that to which one belongs? (And the link you sent me is translating Angehöriger to mean a variety of familial/kinship relationships---one of which is "a dependent." So it sounds like the word has a nuanced connotation of subjection to it, unlike "citizen" which implies a free and independent person.)
Guess why they wanted to throw out anything that made Germans think they'd have a "Reich" (empire) or something.
Yeah, I thought of that when I was writing the comment. I was going to post that the older pre-Nazi word for a German citizen is merely Bürger (which is of course cognate with bourgeois, which originally meant a free inhabitant of a city), but the Wikipedia article was using Reichsbürger throughout, so I left it as Wikipedia used. I had a feeling the Nazis had added the Reichs- part.
Perhaps you could fix the Wikipedia article with your knowledge of this word.
The so-called U.N. Declaration of Human Rights also demands that member states compel children to be educated (Art. 26(1)).
Sorry, but the U.N. and their documents are the last place I'm going to look to protect my rights. To begin with, the U.N. is a membership organization for nation-states, and isn't at all based on concepts of individual freedom. (The U.S. Constitution really isn't, either, but at least it's a lot closer to being so.) It's full of so-called "positive" rights that cannot actually exist, in practice, without infringing upon the rights of others (Arts. 22-29). Article 29(1) purports that "everyone has duties to the community." More compulsion.
Art. 29(2) codifies loopholes and exceptions for States to abrogate any rights that this document claims to protect. At least with the U.S. Constitution, the document is clear and unequivocal: "Congress shall make no law..." (Amendment I), "... shall not be infringed" (Amendment II), and so on. Yes, the Supreme Court has shredded most of this, but that's all through case law, which could be reversed without needing to actually change the text of the Constitution.
Wikipedia has a good summary of all of these criticisms.
A great retort I heard once about whether or not homeschool children learn proper social interaction: "If I want to beat up my kid and steal his lunch money I can do that at home."
Gotta love secularists for whom their philosophy is almost as much of a One True Way as religion is for fundamentalists, don't you? (I'm a secularist---outright atheist, actually. But I'm not into demanding everyone believe things my way.)
We don't need "separation of church and state" in this country. What we need is separation of state from any sort of "my way is the only way, damnit!" philosophy.
There's a lot more to the history of compulsory education in Germany than that. There is a very detailed and well-researched book by John Taylor Gatto which you can read online about the history of public schooling. (Gatto is a former public school teacher.)
I've long wondered exactly how, let's say, "complete" the abolition of the Nazi government was after WWII.
The Nazi anti-homosexuality law was kept on the books in West Germany until 1994, as but one example. (East Germany got rid of it in 1950.) And Germany nowadays still unpopular bans political parties, movements, and speech as zealously as the Nazis did.
And one of the most interesting things is that the modern German term for a "citizen" is Staatsangehörige, which literally means "subject of the State" and not "citizen." This term was invented by the Nazis to be applied to non-citizens, whereas the term Reichsbürger had been used to refer to an actual citizen. At the end of the Nazi regime, guess which term went away? Not Staatsangehörige, but Reichsbürger. Everyone in Germany is a Staatsangehörige now. (Source.)
The Nazis may have been overthrown, and their most visible and vile policies were done away with, but a lot of the totalitarian legal and cultural artifices of Nazism seem to have survived.
Indeed. "Everyone must be educated by State-approved teachers!" Way to sound like a religious nut expounding the One True Way that everything must be done, BumbaCLot.
The fundamental right in question would be that of the parent to raise their own children, as opposed to the State doing so.
This is unfortunately one of those rights that never got expressly enumerated in the Constitution (although in New Hampshire we're trying to fix this) most likely because, much like a right to privacy, the idea of violating it was so beyond the pale in 1789 that no one thought it needed to be written down. What was put into the Bill of Rights were eight articles specifically in reaction to abuses committed by the British government, followed by two catch-all articles clarifying that the powers of the Federal Government are expressly enumerated (Article X), but the rights of the people are not (Article IX). Unfortunately this hasn't worked out too well in practice...
Specifically, the Firefox user-agent when compiled on Gentoo will look like this: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux $ARCH; $LANG; rv:$REVISION) Gecko/$YYYYMMDDHH Gentoo Firefox/$VERSION
I noticed this years ago, when I noticed that compiling Firefox puts the exact date and time in your user-agent. The user-agent also contains the usual things like the OS, architecture, &c.. So how likely is it that someone else with the exact same system configuration and compiled the exact same version of Firefox at the same time? Probably zero.
After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.
This is probably the longest circumlocution that I've ever seen for a much simpler phrase: "Death throes." Nice job though, Times. Can't remember the last time I cared that an article came from the New York Times as opposed to some other paper. Bye.
I'm completely opposed to the RIAA and think copyright should be outright abolished, but... "It seems the RIAA is unclear on the concept of the Fourth Amendment"? The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply at all to what a private party can do to monitor another private party using their service. Provided it's in your contract with your ISP, which it most certainly is, they can monitor you for illegal activities (or any other activities they consider violations of said contract) and shut you down if they want.
Go look up "private property" and stop thinking it's the government's damn job to protect you against anything you don't like. (Same goes for "network neutrality," but that's beyond the scope of this post.)
What needs to be understood is that a large number of people calling themselves libertarians are more accurately described as capitalists: They support both the free-market and anti--free-market aspects of capitalism, but since capitalism likes to frame itself as all about the "free market," they think they're libertarians. (Ayn Rand is largely to blaim for the conflation of these two terms; in the nineteenth century capitalism described what we'd call corporatism (or perhaps "economic fascism") today.
Free software is obviously 100% compatible with libertarianism, but it's a threat to capitalism. Free software is just another choice people can make, and libertarianism is, at its core, about holding a person's right to choose as inviolable.
That said, "network neutrality"---restrictions placed on how bandwidth providers can charge, and what for---is nothing more than protectionist government regulation, and not compatible with a free market or libertarianism. It restricts bandwidth providers' right to choose how to run their networks (their private property) however they want, and it's thus a restriction on the free market. Just because it protects consumers instead of producers (e.g., like "intellectual property laws" do) doesn't make it a good thing, and doesn't make it a non-restriction.
The solution to all of this crap seems pretty simple. Modify your local DNS server, the libc resolver, &c., to return NXDOMAIN if the upstream server returns the IP address of one of these ad servers. Perhaps the list could be stored locally, or an up-to-date blacklist of known spam IPs could be published somewhere, similar to the various RBLs out there.
That this is even an event, let alone a bloody news story, demonstrates the sorry state of science knowledge and education in this country nowadays.
You know what urine is? Water with a few impurities in it.
You know what sweat is? Water with a few impurities in it.
You know what you get when you remove these impurities?
Anyone?
Water.
H2O is H2O. Big damned deal that it came from urine or sweat.
Has anyone actually bothered to read the bill in question? All it's doing is making sure the city-owned ISP isn't---or doesn't in the future---engage in the kind of abuses I just posted about. It's specifically to make sure they can't lower their rates by subsidizing themselves with tax dollars, exempt themselves from paying telco taxes, and similar. Here are the relevant pieces:---
(1) Comply with all local, State, and federal laws, regulations, or other requirements that would apply to the communications services if provided by a private communications service provider.
(2) Establish a separate enterprise fund for communications service and shall use this fund to separately account for revenues, expenses, property, and source of investment dollars associated with the provision of communications service.
(3) Shall not subsidize the cost of providing communications service with funds from any other noncommunications service, operation, or other revenue source, including any funds or revenue generated from electric, gas, water, sewer, or garbage services. In complying with this requirement, a city owned communications service provider shall not price any communications service below the cost of providing the service.
(4) Shall, in calculating the cost incurred and in the rates to be charged for the provision of communications services, impute: (i) the cost of the capital component that is equivalent to the cost of capital available to private communications service providers in the same locality; and (ii) an amount equal to all taxes, including property taxes, licenses, fees, and other assessments that would apply to a private communications service provider including federal, state, and local taxes; rightsofway, franchise, consent, or administrative fees; and pole attachment fees.
(5) Shall annually remit to the general fund of the city an amount equivalent to all taxes or fees a private communications service provider would be required to pay the city or county in which the city is located, including any applicable tax refunds received by the city owned communications service provider because of its government status and a sum equal to the amount of property tax that would have been due if the city owned communications service provider were a private communications service provider.
(6) Shall prepare and publish an independent annual audit in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles that reflect the fully allocated cost of providing the communications service, including all direct and indirect costs. The indirect costs shall include amounts for rightsofway, franchise, consent, or administrative fees, regulatory fees, occupation taxes, pole attachment fees, and ad valorem taxes. The annual accounting shall reflect any direct or indirect subsidies received by the city owned communications service provider, and any buildings, equipment, vehicles, and personnel that are jointly used with other city departments shall be fully allocated to the city owned communications service. The North Carolina Utilities Commission may adopt rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the provisions of this subdivision, and all records demonstrating compliance shall be filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission and made available for public inspection and copying.
Anyone opposing this is basically saying, "I want cheap Internets by making you pay for it."
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Correct. They're not the State's, or society's, property either.
Define "proper." And then explain to me why your definition trumps someone else's, with respect to their children.
Right. So we all get to fight over what should be the One True Way to educate and raise "our" children.
Probably. I look at it from the point of view of, which of these is a natural right that exists with or without the State ("negative rights") vs. which of these requires some sort of State intervention to exist ("positive rights"). Positive rights are more properly "entitlements" than rights.
The whole concept of public education can only exist with massive State intervention into people's lives---infringing upon one's property rights to fund it, infringing upon one's privacy to force one's children into it, &c..
Additionally, the concept of children's "rights" is an even more severe distortion of the term than the positive/negative rights conflation; much of what people call "rights" of children would properly be called "protections" and/or "responsibilities" (of the parents, the State, society, whatever). It's merely annoying that some people have taken to refer to government-granted entitlements as "rights." But it's downright Orwellian that people refer to, for example, laws forbidding people under 16 or 18 from doing all sorts of things (living on one's own, working, engaging in consensual relationships, &c.) as protecting the "rights of children."
The amendments the Nazis made to the law were not repealed until 1994. The law preëxisted the Nazis, but what the Nazis did to it remained in effect long after they were overthrown.
An attempt was made seven years ago.
I don't know that much about German, but Babelfish is giving me "belonging" as the translation of angehörige alone. So Staatsangehörige literally means "belonging to the State," I take it? Does angehörige when used alone have the connotation of belonging as in mere membership, or belonging as in subjection/ownership by that to which one belongs? (And the link you sent me is translating Angehöriger to mean a variety of familial/kinship relationships---one of which is "a dependent." So it sounds like the word has a nuanced connotation of subjection to it, unlike "citizen" which implies a free and independent person.)
Yeah, I thought of that when I was writing the comment. I was going to post that the older pre-Nazi word for a German citizen is merely Bürger (which is of course cognate with bourgeois, which originally meant a free inhabitant of a city), but the Wikipedia article was using Reichsbürger throughout, so I left it as Wikipedia used. I had a feeling the Nazis had added the Reichs- part.
Perhaps you could fix the Wikipedia article with your knowledge of this word.
The State is virtually never responsible for anything it does. Sovereign immunity. Ain't government grand?
At least if some people think it isn't, they're not forced under threat of fines or prison to go to the hospital. (Yet, at least.)
The so-called U.N. Declaration of Human Rights also demands that member states compel children to be educated (Art. 26(1)).
Sorry, but the U.N. and their documents are the last place I'm going to look to protect my rights. To begin with, the U.N. is a membership organization for nation-states, and isn't at all based on concepts of individual freedom. (The U.S. Constitution really isn't, either, but at least it's a lot closer to being so.) It's full of so-called "positive" rights that cannot actually exist, in practice, without infringing upon the rights of others (Arts. 22-29). Article 29(1) purports that "everyone has duties to the community." More compulsion.
Art. 29(2) codifies loopholes and exceptions for States to abrogate any rights that this document claims to protect. At least with the U.S. Constitution, the document is clear and unequivocal: "Congress shall make no law ..." (Amendment I), "... shall not be infringed" (Amendment II), and so on. Yes, the Supreme Court has shredded most of this, but that's all through case law, which could be reversed without needing to actually change the text of the Constitution.
Wikipedia has a good summary of all of these criticisms.
A great retort I heard once about whether or not homeschool children learn proper social interaction: "If I want to beat up my kid and steal his lunch money I can do that at home."
Gotta love secularists for whom their philosophy is almost as much of a One True Way as religion is for fundamentalists, don't you? (I'm a secularist---outright atheist, actually. But I'm not into demanding everyone believe things my way.)
We don't need "separation of church and state" in this country. What we need is separation of state from any sort of "my way is the only way, damnit!" philosophy.
There's a lot more to the history of compulsory education in Germany than that. There is a very detailed and well-researched book by John Taylor Gatto which you can read online about the history of public schooling. (Gatto is a former public school teacher.)
I've long wondered exactly how, let's say, "complete" the abolition of the Nazi government was after WWII.
The Nazi anti-homosexuality law was kept on the books in West Germany until 1994, as but one example. (East Germany got rid of it in 1950.) And Germany nowadays still unpopular bans political parties, movements, and speech as zealously as the Nazis did.
And one of the most interesting things is that the modern German term for a "citizen" is Staatsangehörige, which literally means "subject of the State" and not "citizen." This term was invented by the Nazis to be applied to non-citizens, whereas the term Reichsbürger had been used to refer to an actual citizen. At the end of the Nazi regime, guess which term went away? Not Staatsangehörige, but Reichsbürger. Everyone in Germany is a Staatsangehörige now. (Source.)
The Nazis may have been overthrown, and their most visible and vile policies were done away with, but a lot of the totalitarian legal and cultural artifices of Nazism seem to have survived.
Indeed. "Everyone must be educated by State-approved teachers!" Way to sound like a religious nut expounding the One True Way that everything must be done, BumbaCLot.
(I'm an atheist, by the way.)
The fundamental right in question would be that of the parent to raise their own children, as opposed to the State doing so.
This is unfortunately one of those rights that never got expressly enumerated in the Constitution (although in New Hampshire we're trying to fix this) most likely because, much like a right to privacy, the idea of violating it was so beyond the pale in 1789 that no one thought it needed to be written down. What was put into the Bill of Rights were eight articles specifically in reaction to abuses committed by the British government, followed by two catch-all articles clarifying that the powers of the Federal Government are expressly enumerated (Article X), but the rights of the people are not (Article IX). Unfortunately this hasn't worked out too well in practice...
Specifically, the Firefox user-agent when compiled on Gentoo will look like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux $ARCH; $LANG; rv:$REVISION) Gecko/$YYYYMMDDHH Gentoo Firefox/$VERSION
I noticed this years ago, when I noticed that compiling Firefox puts the exact date and time in your user-agent. The user-agent also contains the usual things like the OS, architecture, &c.. So how likely is it that someone else with the exact same system configuration and compiled the exact same version of Firefox at the same time? Probably zero.
This is probably the longest circumlocution that I've ever seen for a much simpler phrase: "Death throes." Nice job though, Times. Can't remember the last time I cared that an article came from the New York Times as opposed to some other paper. Bye.
I'm completely opposed to the RIAA and think copyright should be outright abolished, but... "It seems the RIAA is unclear on the concept of the Fourth Amendment"? The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply at all to what a private party can do to monitor another private party using their service. Provided it's in your contract with your ISP, which it most certainly is, they can monitor you for illegal activities (or any other activities they consider violations of said contract) and shut you down if they want.
Go look up "private property" and stop thinking it's the government's damn job to protect you against anything you don't like. (Same goes for "network neutrality," but that's beyond the scope of this post.)
What needs to be understood is that a large number of people calling themselves libertarians are more accurately described as capitalists: They support both the free-market and anti--free-market aspects of capitalism, but since capitalism likes to frame itself as all about the "free market," they think they're libertarians. (Ayn Rand is largely to blaim for the conflation of these two terms; in the nineteenth century capitalism described what we'd call corporatism (or perhaps "economic fascism") today.
Free software is obviously 100% compatible with libertarianism, but it's a threat to capitalism. Free software is just another choice people can make, and libertarianism is, at its core, about holding a person's right to choose as inviolable.
That said, "network neutrality"---restrictions placed on how bandwidth providers can charge, and what for---is nothing more than protectionist government regulation, and not compatible with a free market or libertarianism. It restricts bandwidth providers' right to choose how to run their networks (their private property) however they want, and it's thus a restriction on the free market. Just because it protects consumers instead of producers (e.g., like "intellectual property laws" do) doesn't make it a good thing, and doesn't make it a non-restriction.
Yup. And I'd bet when that law was passed, people who cried "slippery slope" were dismissed as whackos. Now look where we are.
Thanks.
Interestingly, if I try to just browse to http://208.68.139.38/, it redirects me to http://search2.comcast.com/?cat=dnsr&con=ds&url=208.68.139.38. (I'm not on Comcast; that looks like how to get to their search engine from the outside.)
On that note, does anyone have the IP for these servers? I'm going to nullroute them right now in the various servers I maintain.
The solution to all of this crap seems pretty simple. Modify your local DNS server, the libc resolver, &c., to return NXDOMAIN if the upstream server returns the IP address of one of these ad servers. Perhaps the list could be stored locally, or an up-to-date blacklist of known spam IPs could be published somewhere, similar to the various RBLs out there.
Has anyone written a patch to do just this yet?
If you're backing up your data "in the cloud," all manner of people probably have access to it already.
That this is even an event, let alone a bloody news story, demonstrates the sorry state of science knowledge and education in this country nowadays.
You know what urine is? Water with a few impurities in it.
You know what sweat is? Water with a few impurities in it.
You know what you get when you remove these impurities?
Anyone?
Water.
H2O is H2O. Big damned deal that it came from urine or sweat.
If the government would stop monopolizing those services through force, I would.
Has anyone actually bothered to read the bill in question? All it's doing is making sure the city-owned ISP isn't---or doesn't in the future---engage in the kind of abuses I just posted about. It's specifically to make sure they can't lower their rates by subsidizing themselves with tax dollars, exempt themselves from paying telco taxes, and similar. Here are the relevant pieces:---
Anyone opposing this is basically saying, "I want cheap Internets by making you pay for it."