ahh...but "College student Bob" does not need all the tools and tricks contained in MS Office. Star or OpenOffice will serve him just as well.
And what does that have to do with whether corporate purchases of Office subsidize Bob's pirating of a copy of it? I didn't ask for your opinion of hypothetical Bob's needs.
Office was just an example. I could have chosen a package for which there was no lower-end, or free, equivalent. Pretend that I said "Integral Systems EPOCH 2000 Satellite Ground System package."
Let's say that I'm an author. I decide to copy Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and put my name on it and sell it. Hemingway isn't losing any money neither[sic].
The person or group who owns the copyright to Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" makes money from the sale of that book. If someone buys your book rather than the "legal" copy, you have deprived the rightful copyright owner of income.
Your analogy is also flawed in that you are referring to piracy to resell rather than piracy for private use (as I was in the example of the impoverished college student who pirates Office).
The issue is what gives you the right to use someone else's work.
"The issue" of my post is whatever I deem it to be. And, as I said in the original post (which you apparently did not read): You can argue the ethics, legality, and morality of Bob's actions until you are blue in the face, but claiming that someone has to "subsidize" his piracy of Microsoft Office is based on fallacious reasoning.
I was not debating the ethics of software piracy. I was debating the use of the term "subsidize" when applied to software piracy.
Let's say I publish software package X which has a shelf price of $1000.
* You purchase it.
* Bob, who has a net worth of $7, pirates it.
* Tom, who has a net worth of $500,000 pirates it in lieu of buying it.
* No Aboriginal Tribesmen purchase it or pirate it.
Your purchase is subsidizing Tom's piracy because he could have afforded it and would have bought it.
Your purchase is not subsidizing Bob's piracy, because Bob could not have purchased it.
Your purchase is not subsidizing Aboriginal Tribesmen because they were not potential customers.
I didn't say that anyone has to subsidize Bob's use of pirated Office, I'm simply saying that they are, if he does. A subsidy (by the accepted general use, not the government-based definition) is the covering of costs by one group (the enterprises' massive license costs) for another (the pirates).
Microsoft incurs no cost when someone who could not afford it pirates copy of Office. Microsoft has no fewer copies of the product. Their bank balances are unchanged. My point is that there is a large percentage of pirates who could not, or would not, otherwise be paying customers. If Bob could not be a Microsoft Office customer because of his financial situation, his piracy of Office is not being subsidized by corporate purchases of it. Let's look at it another way: If you walk buy a street musician and drop a dollar in his donation jar, are you "subsidizing" all of the people that heard the music but had no interest in donating?
Large companies with thousands of users and software audits have to pay for their licenses, and thus, subsidize the pirates. This is not to say piracy is OK, but it is expected and accounted for.
That statement contains such a logical flaw that I can't let it pass unnoticed.
College student Bob, who can only afford to eat macaroni and cheese for dinner, cannot afford to pay $300 for MS Office. He is not a potential customer. No matter what choice he makes, he has cost Microsoft nothing. So, suppose he pirates MS Office. He has not cost Microsoft a sale or otherwise deprived them of revenue they would have had. If Bob pirates MS Office, Microsoft has no fewer copies than they did prior to Bob pirating a copy.
You can argue the ethics, legality, and morality of Bob's actions until you are blue in the face, but claiming that someone has to "subsidize" his piracy of Microsoft Office is based on fallacious reasoning.
If they were aware of beliefs held by others, then they might have.
If so, doesn't that suggest that the holding of others' views as foolish is, in and of itself, foolish?
I don't see that. At any given time in history, most practitioners of any given religion think that those of other, older, faiths are misguided, if not foolish. Suppose the ancient Romans viewed the Egyptian beliefs as foolish. Would they have been wrong? No.
We do not, as a rule, view now-disproven scientific theories to have been "foolish." Why? Because those theories were based on logic and reasoning. Sure, they were wrong, but that is usually because of limitations in technology, measurements, and the knowledge available at the time.
The point to all of this is that any belief system based on faith, rather than reasoning and logic, eventually falls into ridicule. In 5,000 years, will Christian beliefs be considered laughable? I don't know, but if history is any indicator of how well religions fare over time, they will be.
About the only thing they have in common is that they're all dead.
The thing that they all had in common was an absolute belief that their religious beliefs, though wildly different than yours, were absolutely true. I thought that was pretty clear.
As if you will be there. In 5000 years time, what? People will be more like you? Just look at what happened to the Mesapotamians I suppose. See how much sense that makes?
You missed the entire point (how, I don't know), so I'll simplify it:
Each of the peoples named had religious beliefs that they were certain were true. We now look on them as foolish.
Do you have any compelling reason to believe the scientists who make this claim, even though you can't follow any but their most basic arguments?
I believe in science because it is peer-reviewed. If a scientist publishes a theory, his peers carefully review his work and either accept it as valid or dismiss it if they discover errors.
Religion is put to no such test. Everyone of a given faith simply agrees to believe the same things without question or evidence.
It seems like your knowledge of religion came from the same comic book your knowledge of science did.
What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking.
Untrue. I can have a code of ethics (or "morals") because I do not want to cause emotional distress and hardship for other human beings. That does not imply or require a belief in a diety.
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. --Albert Einstein
1. Where do we come from? 2. What are we doing here on earth? (What's our purpose of living?) 3. Where are we going after death?
An inability to answer a question is not proof, or even evidence, of the existence of a deity. We can answer questions now that would have been unfathomable to earlier generations. We can see things with electron microscopes and telescopes that were unthinkable in centuries past. Does the answering of each question make the existence of God less likely?
These questions are legitimate "scientific" questions,
The first one might, vaguely be described as scientific (despite its generality and the lack of clarity with which it was phrased). I think evolution does a pretty good job of answering that one.
on top of that, these ones actually matters, these are the ones that give you meaning, security, and hope to keep on living. Are you going to say that *your* life doesn't matter to you?
Your questions give a very strong indication of why you (and so many others) have a deep-seated psychological need for religious beliefs. What if there is no divine "purpose" to our existence? What if we don't "go" anywhere after death? What if we simply cease to live, both physically and intellectually, as evidence would suggest?
Have you ever heard of the scientific method? It doesn't involve choosing to believe in comforting explanations for things that make you uneasy (e.g, your own mortality).
Just like the rest of us, athiests go where God sends them.
Quit trying to pass of your religious beliefs as factual. Yes, I know that you are CERTAIN that your religious beliefs are correct. The ancient Romans, Vikings, Aztecs, Mayans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians were just as certain about their religious beliefs.
Let's stick to science on Slashdot rather than wandering off into occult beliefs about people rising from the dead, or being magically turned into pillers of salt, or living inside of whales, or fitting two of each animal on Earth into a boat, or women being impregnated by invisible, all-powerful beings.
In 5,000 years, your religious beliefs will get the same level of respect as we give the ancient Chinese belief that eclipses were caused by dragons eating the sun.
While I may not necessarily agree with the rest of the list, I do agree with Bladerunner ranking at the top. Bladerunner is a movie that is artistic and visionary, conscious of both style and substance. It is a dark movie with a dark ending that is uncharacteristic for Hollywood (ignoring the happily-ever-after driving scene that was mercifully removed from the director's cut). It is neither a post-nuclear apocolypse like The Road Warrior nor is it the sterilized world of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's an urban setting that's winding down and decaying. It's the Sprawl from William Gibson's Neuromancer brought to the screen.
I have watched Bladerunner many times, and while part of me wishes for a sequel, another part of me knows that the story is complete and would only be tarnished by a sequel. And, knowing Hollywood, any sequel would be complete with marketing tie-ins so that McDonalds could include Bladerunner II action figures in each Happy Meal).
What is there to be so proud about? Mensa membership means that you have a relatively high IQ. Nothing more. It's like boasting that you are tall or have high cheekbones -- also things that are determined largely by genetics.
Those cards don't mean that you have accomplished anything with your life. There are plenty of people that are Mensa members that are boorish, rude, and utterly lacking in morals. There are Mensa members who are drug abusers, wife beaters, thieves, etc.
If you want to be proud of something, do something to be proud of.
P.S. Before you launch into the usual Mensa ad-hominem accusation of "sour grapes", be aware that I was invited to join Mensa by a member, attended one of the meetings, and scored well above the minimum necessary for membership on several tests. I chose not to join and came away with a clearer understanding of the difference between a high-IQ and actual intelligence.
Anyone who thinks it's stupid to put in more than 40 hours of work a week deserves to live in an efficiency. All those rich eevill guys you mentioned got wealthy because they put in more than 40 hours a week. I'd love to see people like you move to France and stay there.
I have a six figure income and probably average about 35 hours per week, so don't lecture me about how the road to success means constantly working long hours. Most people working long hours do so for mediocre to poor pay, will never get wealthy for their efforts, and are not living the American dream.
You've bought into the whole corporate line about how long hours equals productivity. The only beneficiary of long hours is to employers. When an employer can hire two people to do the work of three, they save money. Even if the people are paid hourly, then the employer saves on benefits, office space, workstations, software licenses, etc. If they are salaried, it's even better for the company.
Most Europeans get at least twice as many annual vacation days as U.S. workers and their work weeks are shorter. That's true for all of the European countries, including Germany and other countries that are doing well financially.
Our elected leaders rarely do anything but vote new programs into existence.
Then vote new leaders into place. If your fellow voters don't share your views, they will reject your choice of candidate. If that happens, then get over it, pay your taxes, and stop whining.
Watching FICA take away all that money I could have saved so that some senator can bring more pork back to his home state is irritating enough. Get a clue.
I have a clue. I recognize that FICA pays for Social Security, something that you clearly don't know.
Would you have them take 33% of the income of a widow that's barely making ends meet just so that she's paying the same percentage as Bill Gates?
Why should tax rates be even close to 33% in the first place?
That's not the point of the question. I'll rephrase it:
Why would you tax a widow, who is barely making ends meet, at the same rate as Bill Gates, taking away her ability to pay for food, clothing, and shelter?
That leaves the bottom 50% paying less than 8% of the income tax. Real equal, huh?
I don't know where you got the idea that taxes should be "equal." If it takes $X per year to adequately support a family and someone earns $X + 10%, they can't afford to pay out 40% of their income in taxes. Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, and Michael Eisner can afford to pay that much and more without it impacting their quality of life in any way, shape, or form. It makes no sense to expect someone who's barely scraping by on a low-wage job, living in the cheapest efficiency they can find, and eating macaroni and cheese every night to pay the same percentage in taxes that millionaires like Goerge W. Bush and Dick Cheney do.
Some people work 60 hours a week, some work 40. Would you suggest that those working 60 should earn less money per hour than those working 40?
No, I'd suggest getting the government to step in and protect workers from excessive hours -- even if some workers are dumb enough that they want to work that many. In France, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours per week. Since we put in more hours, on average, per week than workers in any other industrialized country, maybe it is time to pass some legislation, like the French did, to improve our quality of life.
Suppose we earn the same amount of money. If I invest/save my money, and you buy a car with yours five years from now who has more wealth?
I do. Because we both have a 60+ mile round trip commute and you lost your job because your old clunker car would not get you to work reliably. You kept taking time off to fix your car rather than buying a new one that was more reliable and appropriate for someone of your income. Management was embarassed when customers showed up and parked next to your rusty, orange 1978 AMC Matador. Your coworkers were uncomfortable going to lunch with you when you insisted on driving. People complained about the smoke and smell from the exhaust of your car. And, while my VW Golf TDI averaged 45MPG on diesel, your Matador got 11MPG on premium fuel, which more than ate up anything you made by investing your $17K.
In the course of the five years, I got promoted and got good raises. You were seen as a flake who did not have his life together. You were always taking Mondays off because you'd start a car repair on the weekend, need parts on Sunday, and have to buy them on Monday to finish the repair. Management was convinced you had a drug or alcohol problem because of your absenteeism and the fact that you were obviously having to spend that money on something like drugs or alcohol -- otherwise, you'd have replaced that car.
That's quite different than "equality" consisting of robbing Paul to pay Peter.
No one is "robbing" anyone. The government needs a certain amount of money to run the programs that have been voted into existence by our elected leaders. Would you have them take 33% of the income of a widow that's barely making ends meet just so that she's paying the same percentage as Bill Gates? Would you have her unable to feed, clothe, and house herself just so that you could even out the percentages? Would you have someone from a poor family who is working their way through college drop out so that you could take a higher percentage of their income?
Both of them are for the desires of the most wealthy.01% of the population who pay for their campaigns. Witness the track record if you don't believe me! We should have finished paying down the debt so that this burden won't fall to the next generation. What did we do? We gave big tax breaks, largely to the weahtly. Both republicans and democrats voted for this!
The Democrats fought Boy George on this issue and did everything they could to moderate the extreme tax cut bill that Bush signed. Most Democrats voted against it and it passed on party lines. The Republicans, unfortunately, controlled both houses of Congress at that time, filling the halls with such mental giants as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.
It is the Democrats who have worked hard to keep from gutting the welfare programs. They are the ones that have fought for graduated taxes so that those that could afford to pay more taxes did and those who were less able did not. It was under Reagan that the gap between the CEO's salary and that of the workers widened to a chasm.
As to paying down the debt, that was going along quite nicely under Clinton. At the time, the Republican Congress tried to take credit for balancing the budget, but as soon as we had a Republican President and a Republican Congress, we saw the Republican cut-taxes-and-increase-spending take over.
Why is anyone surprised by this? The Republican party is much more interested in the desires of big business than they are in protecting the citizens.
Businesses want to be able to sell information that they collect about you. They want to sell your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to other businesses so that you will be inundated with spam e-mail, junk mail, and telemarketing calls while you try to eat dinner or watch a DVD.
The Republicans in Congress think it's fine for drug stores to sell information about what prescription medications you take. They are the same ones that have fought for insurance companies, even ones you don't do business with, to have access to all of your medical records. So they are not going to have a lot of concern about Yahoo selling your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to some "business partner."
When it comes to issues of privacy and consumer rights, the Democrats are, by and large, far better.
If you want to buy products out of a sense of charity then go ahead. But you're going to have to get used to the fact that most people won't.
It's not a sense of charity. It's the ability to see past the individual purchase. Do I want to have competition or not? Do I want Microsoft to simply be the only major commercial software vendor left in ten years?
Look at Mandrake's business model: "Give us money if you like our product." That's the whole idea behind shareware (real shareware, not the crippleware that poses as shareware now). I register programs like Trillian, UltraEdit, and Opera because I think that its fair. It's not because I can't find a crack for them or, in the case of programs like Trillian, use them for free. I recognize that paying for software keeps the industry healthy and helps insure competition. That's more important than whether I could save $40 here and there.
Re:Proprietary vs Open source, Episode MVXXI
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So you are suggesting we make a donation to Sun Microsystems?
Not at all. I am suggesting that undermining their business by encouraging people to use free alternatives is just playing into Microsoft's hands.
I already did that, I bought some of their %^%## stock.
That's not how stocks work. When Sun initially sold the stock, they were selling off partial ownership of their company. If you bought the stock from Sun, you paid to own a percentage of their company. If you bought the stock from another investor, Sun got nothing from you.
It really doesn't sound like you should be investing on your own. You might want to hire a financial advisor if you have a sizeable sum to invest and protect.
No Slashdot reader would even think of trying to find a way to avoid buying (paying for) Microsoft products!
Microsoft has a stranglehold on the PC offce suite market. Whether Slashdot readers buy their product or not has little bearing on their overall success. Sun, while a formidable company, has no significant presence in the office suite marketplace. Whether Sun succeeds with StarOffice depends to a much greater extent on initial sales to the tech geek crowd.
Might I reiterate that you're a moron? It's middle managers like you who are resistant to change and innovation, leading us all into this damn recession.
First, let's get the insults out of the way: If you could get laid, you'd be a fucking idiot. As it is, you're only batting.500.
Secondly, I'm not a "middle manager." I am a software engineer with 20+ years of professional experience. I like getting paid for my work and I believe in paying others who do similar work.
Well any fucktard who's willing to pay for something when he can have the exact same thing for free, does deserve to get berated and made fun of.
I'm not as short-sighted as you. I recognize that monopolies are bad and that if you don't support competition, there won't be any competition.
You can't get competition for free. You have to pay for it.
Because this is the Internet. If you said the weather was "nice and sunny", someone would reply "I guess you think skin cancer is nice!"
The argument would probably grow into something involving several other people. Eventually all but two of the participants would move on. The remaining two would end up making hollow legal threats like "I'll have my attorney subpeona your ISP to find out who you are and then I'll sue you for slander" or, alternatively, one of the participants could compare the other to Adolf Hitler, at which point both could feign disgust with the other and refuse to continue the argument.
You really need to pay more attention to the world around you.;-)
And you don't need a PhD in linguistics to understand that "free" has two independant meanings in English and you (and the person you are responding to) are using the shallow one.
When someone says "Why should I pay $39.00 for something that can be obtained for free?", it would be pretty f****** stupid for me to respond as if he had used the word "free" in the context of "freedom", now wouldn't it?
And neither meaning is more "shallow" than the other. They are just different.
For plenty of us, it's not just about the $0 price tag.
But for plenty it is, as demonstrated by the question regarding whether the enhancements were worth $75. He didn't ask about giving up freedoms for features, he asked about giving up $75.
It's about having software that we are free to share with friends and colleagues. It's about having the ability to put it into a standard system image that's installed over the network to every machine in the department without any licensing hassles. It's about having access to the source code and the right to modify and build it.
No, it's about making it financially viable for a company to release a product that competes with Microsoft. Skipping around and flinging CD-ROMs to friends, family, and colleagues does nothing to make that happen. And how much need is there to modify a browser or office suite? Get real.
If you don't care about those fundamental freedoms, then by all means buy StarOffice from Sun.
And if you don't care about Microsoft having any competition in office suite software, then by all means download OpenOffice in lieu of buying StarOffice.
Here we go again...
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Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
Sadly, you are probably right. Slashdot readers sit around bemoaning Microsoft's virtual ownership of the PC software market. But when some other company introduces a supported, professional, competing product, much of the discussion on Slashdot centers around:
1. Encouraging people to download free software instead of buying the new product. 2. Creating open source projects to replace the package being discussed. 3. Getting the package without paying for it.
Today was just another great example on Slashdot. First the announcement of Opera 6 for Linux. I lost count of the number of times that people suggested the use of Mozilla or some other free browser to avoid paying for Opera. At least one person posted registration codes. Others posted ways to disable the ads that pay the bills for the ad-supported version.
Now we have the announcement that StarOffice 6 will be sold for a mere $75. Are Slashdot readers celebrating the fact that Sun is going up against Microsoft in the office arena? Nope. The discussion centers around using, and extending, OpenOffice instead of purchasing StarOffice from Sun.
Microsoft management is probably thrilled by what they see here. A major competitor announces a compatible office suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It's priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. And what do readers on Slashdot, a group that should be a prime audience for the new package, do? Look for ways to avoid buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
ahh...but "College student Bob" does not need all the tools and tricks contained in MS Office. Star or OpenOffice will serve him just as well.
And what does that have to do with whether corporate purchases of Office subsidize Bob's pirating of a copy of it? I didn't ask for your opinion of hypothetical Bob's needs.
Office was just an example. I could have chosen a package for which there was no lower-end, or free, equivalent. Pretend that I said "Integral Systems EPOCH 2000 Satellite Ground System package."
Let's say that I'm an author. I decide to copy Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and put my name on it and sell it. Hemingway isn't losing any money neither[sic].
The person or group who owns the copyright to Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" makes money from the sale of that book. If someone buys your book rather than the "legal" copy, you have deprived the rightful copyright owner of income.
Your analogy is also flawed in that you are referring to piracy to resell rather than piracy for private use (as I was in the example of the impoverished college student who pirates Office).
The issue is what gives you the right to use someone else's work.
"The issue" of my post is whatever I deem it to be. And, as I said in the original post (which you apparently did not read): You can argue the ethics, legality, and morality of Bob's actions until you are blue in the face, but claiming that someone has to "subsidize" his piracy of Microsoft Office is based on fallacious reasoning.
I was not debating the ethics of software piracy. I was debating the use of the term "subsidize" when applied to software piracy.
Let's say I publish software package X which has a shelf price of $1000.
* You purchase it.
* Bob, who has a net worth of $7, pirates it.
* Tom, who has a net worth of $500,000 pirates it in lieu of buying it.
* No Aboriginal Tribesmen purchase it or pirate it.
Your purchase is subsidizing Tom's piracy because he could have afforded it and would have bought it.
Your purchase is not subsidizing Bob's piracy, because Bob could not have purchased it.
Your purchase is not subsidizing Aboriginal Tribesmen because they were not potential customers.
I didn't say that anyone has to subsidize Bob's use of pirated Office, I'm simply saying that they are, if he does. A subsidy (by the accepted general use, not the government-based definition) is the covering of costs by one group (the enterprises' massive license costs) for another (the pirates).
Microsoft incurs no cost when someone who could not afford it pirates copy of Office. Microsoft has no fewer copies of the product. Their bank balances are unchanged. My point is that there is a large percentage of pirates who could not, or would not, otherwise be paying customers. If Bob could not be a Microsoft Office customer because of his financial situation, his piracy of Office is not being subsidized by corporate purchases of it. Let's look at it another way: If you walk buy a street musician and drop a dollar in his donation jar, are you "subsidizing" all of the people that heard the music but had no interest in donating?
Large companies with thousands of users and software audits have to pay for their licenses, and thus, subsidize the pirates. This is not to say piracy is OK, but it is expected and accounted for.
That statement contains such a logical flaw that I can't let it pass unnoticed.
College student Bob, who can only afford to eat macaroni and cheese for dinner, cannot afford to pay $300 for MS Office. He is not a potential customer. No matter what choice he makes, he has cost Microsoft nothing. So, suppose he pirates MS Office. He has not cost Microsoft a sale or otherwise deprived them of revenue they would have had. If Bob pirates MS Office, Microsoft has no fewer copies than they did prior to Bob pirating a copy.
You can argue the ethics, legality, and morality of Bob's actions until you are blue in the face, but claiming that someone has to "subsidize" his piracy of Microsoft Office is based on fallacious reasoning.
Hmm, didn't they look on others as foolish, too?
If they were aware of beliefs held by others, then they might have.
If so, doesn't that suggest that the holding of others' views as foolish is, in and of itself, foolish?
I don't see that. At any given time in history, most practitioners of any given religion think that those of other, older, faiths are misguided, if not foolish. Suppose the ancient Romans viewed the Egyptian beliefs as foolish. Would they have been wrong? No.
We do not, as a rule, view now-disproven scientific theories to have been "foolish." Why? Because those theories were based on logic and reasoning. Sure, they were wrong, but that is usually because of limitations in technology, measurements, and the knowledge available at the time.
The point to all of this is that any belief system based on faith, rather than reasoning and logic, eventually falls into ridicule. In 5,000 years, will Christian beliefs be considered laughable? I don't know, but if history is any indicator of how well religions fare over time, they will be.
What an utterly disparate list of peoples.
Yes, that's part of the point.
About the only thing they have in common is that they're all dead.
The thing that they all had in common was an absolute belief that their religious beliefs, though wildly different than yours, were absolutely true. I thought that was pretty clear.
As if you will be there. In 5000 years time, what? People will be more like you? Just look at what happened to the Mesapotamians I suppose. See how much sense that makes?
You missed the entire point (how, I don't know), so I'll simplify it:
Each of the peoples named had religious beliefs that they were certain were true. We now look on them as foolish.
Do you have any compelling reason to believe the scientists who make this claim, even though you can't follow any but their most basic arguments?
I believe in science because it is peer-reviewed. If a scientist publishes a theory, his peers carefully review his work and either accept it as valid or dismiss it if they discover errors.
Religion is put to no such test. Everyone of a given faith simply agrees to believe the same things without question or evidence.
It seems like your knowledge of religion came from the same comic book your knowledge of science did.
Try to stop being a dick.
What I find amusing is an atheist calling something "immoral," thereby adopting tenets of theism without thinking.
Untrue. I can have a code of ethics (or "morals") because I do not want to cause emotional distress and hardship for other human beings. That does not imply or require a belief in a diety.
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. --Albert Einstein
You wanna be scientific? ok, answer this:
1. Where do we come from?
2. What are we doing here on earth? (What's our purpose of living?)
3. Where are we going after death?
An inability to answer a question is not proof, or even evidence, of the existence of a deity. We can answer questions now that would have been unfathomable to earlier generations. We can see things with electron microscopes and telescopes that were unthinkable in centuries past. Does the answering of each question make the existence of God less likely?
These questions are legitimate "scientific" questions,
The first one might, vaguely be described as scientific (despite its generality and the lack of clarity with which it was phrased). I think evolution does a pretty good job of answering that one.
on top of that, these ones actually matters, these are the ones that give you meaning, security, and hope to keep on living. Are you going to say that *your* life doesn't matter to you?
Your questions give a very strong indication of why you (and so many others) have a deep-seated psychological need for religious beliefs. What if there is no divine "purpose" to our existence? What if we don't "go" anywhere after death? What if we simply cease to live, both physically and intellectually, as evidence would suggest?
Have you ever heard of the scientific method? It doesn't involve choosing to believe in comforting explanations for things that make you uneasy (e.g, your own mortality).
Just like the rest of us, athiests go where God sends them.
Quit trying to pass of your religious beliefs as factual. Yes, I know that you are CERTAIN that your religious beliefs are correct. The ancient Romans, Vikings, Aztecs, Mayans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, and Egyptians were just as certain about their religious beliefs.
Let's stick to science on Slashdot rather than wandering off into occult beliefs about people rising from the dead, or being magically turned into pillers of salt, or living inside of whales, or fitting two of each animal on Earth into a boat, or women being impregnated by invisible, all-powerful beings.
In 5,000 years, your religious beliefs will get the same level of respect as we give the ancient Chinese belief that eclipses were caused by dragons eating the sun.
While I may not necessarily agree with the rest of the list, I do agree with Bladerunner ranking at the top. Bladerunner is a movie that is artistic and visionary, conscious of both style and substance. It is a dark movie with a dark ending that is uncharacteristic for Hollywood (ignoring the happily-ever-after driving scene that was mercifully removed from the director's cut). It is neither a post-nuclear apocolypse like The Road Warrior nor is it the sterilized world of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's an urban setting that's winding down and decaying. It's the Sprawl from William Gibson's Neuromancer brought to the screen.
I have watched Bladerunner many times, and while part of me wishes for a sequel, another part of me knows that the story is complete and would only be tarnished by a sequel. And, knowing Hollywood, any sequel would be complete with marketing tie-ins so that McDonalds could include Bladerunner II action figures in each Happy Meal).
I'm a proud owner of a Mensa membership card.
What is there to be so proud about? Mensa membership means that you have a relatively high IQ. Nothing more. It's like boasting that you are tall or have high cheekbones -- also things that are determined largely by genetics.
Those cards don't mean that you have accomplished anything with your life. There are plenty of people that are Mensa members that are boorish, rude, and utterly lacking in morals. There are Mensa members who are drug abusers, wife beaters, thieves, etc.
If you want to be proud of something, do something to be proud of.
P.S. Before you launch into the usual Mensa ad-hominem accusation of "sour grapes", be aware that I was invited to join Mensa by a member, attended one of the meetings, and scored well above the minimum necessary for membership on several tests. I chose not to join and came away with a clearer understanding of the difference between a high-IQ and actual intelligence.
Anyone who thinks it's stupid to put in more than 40 hours of work a week deserves to live in an efficiency. All those rich eevill guys you mentioned got wealthy because they put in more than 40 hours a week. I'd love to see people like you move to France and stay there.
I have a six figure income and probably average about 35 hours per week, so don't lecture me about how the road to success means constantly working long hours. Most people working long hours do so for mediocre to poor pay, will never get wealthy for their efforts, and are not living the American dream.
You've bought into the whole corporate line about how long hours equals productivity. The only beneficiary of long hours is to employers. When an employer can hire two people to do the work of three, they save money. Even if the people are paid hourly, then the employer saves on benefits, office space, workstations, software licenses, etc. If they are salaried, it's even better for the company.
Most Europeans get at least twice as many annual vacation days as U.S. workers and their work weeks are shorter. That's true for all of the European countries, including Germany and other countries that are doing well financially.
Our elected leaders rarely do anything but vote new programs into existence.
Then vote new leaders into place. If your fellow voters don't share your views, they will reject your choice of candidate. If that happens, then get over it, pay your taxes, and stop whining.
Watching FICA take away all that money I could have saved so that some senator can bring more pork back to his home state is irritating enough. Get a clue.
I have a clue. I recognize that FICA pays for Social Security, something that you clearly don't know.
Would you have them take 33% of the income of a widow that's barely making ends meet just so that she's paying the same percentage as Bill Gates?
Why should tax rates be even close to 33% in the first place?
That's not the point of the question. I'll rephrase it:
Why would you tax a widow, who is barely making ends meet, at the same rate as Bill Gates, taking away her ability to pay for food, clothing, and shelter?
That leaves the bottom 50% paying less than 8% of the income tax. Real equal, huh?
I don't know where you got the idea that taxes should be "equal." If it takes $X per year to adequately support a family and someone earns $X + 10%, they can't afford to pay out 40% of their income in taxes. Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, and Michael Eisner can afford to pay that much and more without it impacting their quality of life in any way, shape, or form. It makes no sense to expect someone who's barely scraping by on a low-wage job, living in the cheapest efficiency they can find, and eating macaroni and cheese every night to pay the same percentage in taxes that millionaires like Goerge W. Bush and Dick Cheney do.
Some people work 60 hours a week, some work 40. Would you suggest that those working 60 should earn less money per hour than those working 40?
No, I'd suggest getting the government to step in and protect workers from excessive hours -- even if some workers are dumb enough that they want to work that many. In France, it is illegal to work more than 35 hours per week. Since we put in more hours, on average, per week than workers in any other industrialized country, maybe it is time to pass some legislation, like the French did, to improve our quality of life.
Suppose we earn the same amount of money. If I invest/save my money, and you buy a car with yours five years from now who has more wealth?
I do. Because we both have a 60+ mile round trip commute and you lost your job because your old clunker car would not get you to work reliably. You kept taking time off to fix your car rather than buying a new one that was more reliable and appropriate for someone of your income. Management was embarassed when customers showed up and parked next to your rusty, orange 1978 AMC Matador. Your coworkers were uncomfortable going to lunch with you when you insisted on driving. People complained about the smoke and smell from the exhaust of your car. And, while my VW Golf TDI averaged 45MPG on diesel, your Matador got 11MPG on premium fuel, which more than ate up anything you made by investing your $17K.
In the course of the five years, I got promoted and got good raises. You were seen as a flake who did not have his life together. You were always taking Mondays off because you'd start a car repair on the weekend, need parts on Sunday, and have to buy them on Monday to finish the repair. Management was convinced you had a drug or alcohol problem because of your absenteeism and the fact that you were obviously having to spend that money on something like drugs or alcohol -- otherwise, you'd have replaced that car.
That's quite different than "equality" consisting of robbing Paul to pay Peter.
No one is "robbing" anyone. The government needs a certain amount of money to run the programs that have been voted into existence by our elected leaders. Would you have them take 33% of the income of a widow that's barely making ends meet just so that she's paying the same percentage as Bill Gates? Would you have her unable to feed, clothe, and house herself just so that you could even out the percentages? Would you have someone from a poor family who is working their way through college drop out so that you could take a higher percentage of their income?
Both of them are for the desires of the most wealthy .01% of the population who pay for their campaigns. Witness the track record if you don't believe me! We should have finished paying down the debt so that this burden won't fall to the next generation. What did we do? We gave big tax breaks, largely to the weahtly. Both republicans and democrats voted for this!
The Democrats fought Boy George on this issue and did everything they could to moderate the extreme tax cut bill that Bush signed. Most Democrats voted against it and it passed on party lines. The Republicans, unfortunately, controlled both houses of Congress at that time, filling the halls with such mental giants as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.
It is the Democrats who have worked hard to keep from gutting the welfare programs. They are the ones that have fought for graduated taxes so that those that could afford to pay more taxes did and those who were less able did not. It was under Reagan that the gap between the CEO's salary and that of the workers widened to a chasm.
As to paying down the debt, that was going along quite nicely under Clinton. At the time, the Republican Congress tried to take credit for balancing the budget, but as soon as we had a Republican President and a Republican Congress, we saw the Republican cut-taxes-and-increase-spending take over.
Why is anyone surprised by this? The Republican party is much more interested in the desires of big business than they are in protecting the citizens.
Businesses want to be able to sell information that they collect about you. They want to sell your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to other businesses so that you will be inundated with spam e-mail, junk mail, and telemarketing calls while you try to eat dinner or watch a DVD.
The Republicans in Congress think it's fine for drug stores to sell information about what prescription medications you take. They are the same ones that have fought for insurance companies, even ones you don't do business with, to have access to all of your medical records. So they are not going to have a lot of concern about Yahoo selling your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address to some "business partner."
When it comes to issues of privacy and consumer rights, the Democrats are, by and large, far better.
If you want to buy products out of a sense of charity then go ahead. But you're going to have to get used to the fact that most people won't.
It's not a sense of charity. It's the ability to see past the individual purchase. Do I want to have competition or not? Do I want Microsoft to simply be the only major commercial software vendor left in ten years?
Look at Mandrake's business model: "Give us money if you like our product." That's the whole idea behind shareware (real shareware, not the crippleware that poses as shareware now). I register programs like Trillian, UltraEdit, and Opera because I think that its fair. It's not because I can't find a crack for them or, in the case of programs like Trillian, use them for free. I recognize that paying for software keeps the industry healthy and helps insure competition. That's more important than whether I could save $40 here and there.
So you are suggesting we make a donation to Sun Microsystems?
Not at all. I am suggesting that undermining their business by encouraging people to use free alternatives is just playing into Microsoft's hands.
I already did that, I bought some of their %^%## stock.
That's not how stocks work. When Sun initially sold the stock, they were selling off partial ownership of their company. If you bought the stock from Sun, you paid to own a percentage of their company. If you bought the stock from another investor, Sun got nothing from you.
It really doesn't sound like you should be investing on your own. You might want to hire a financial advisor if you have a sizeable sum to invest and protect.
No Slashdot reader would even think of trying to find a way to avoid buying (paying for) Microsoft products!
Microsoft has a stranglehold on the PC offce suite market. Whether Slashdot readers buy their product or not has little bearing on their overall success. Sun, while a formidable company, has no significant presence in the office suite marketplace. Whether Sun succeeds with StarOffice depends to a much greater extent on initial sales to the tech geek crowd.
Might I reiterate that you're a moron? It's middle managers like you who are resistant to change and innovation, leading us all into this damn recession.
.500.
First, let's get the insults out of the way: If you could get laid, you'd be a fucking idiot. As it is, you're only batting
Secondly, I'm not a "middle manager." I am a software engineer with 20+ years of professional experience. I like getting paid for my work and I believe in paying others who do similar work.
Well any fucktard who's willing to pay for something when he can have the exact same thing for free, does deserve to get berated and made fun of.
I'm not as short-sighted as you. I recognize that monopolies are bad and that if you don't support competition, there won't be any competition.
You can't get competition for free. You have to pay for it.
So I don't see why anyone should complain.
;-)
Because this is the Internet. If you said the weather was "nice and sunny", someone would reply "I guess you think skin cancer is nice!"
The argument would probably grow into something involving several other people. Eventually all but two of the participants would move on. The remaining two would end up making hollow legal threats like "I'll have my attorney subpeona your ISP to find out who you are and then I'll sue you for slander" or, alternatively, one of the participants could compare the other to Adolf Hitler, at which point both could feign disgust with the other and refuse to continue the argument.
You really need to pay more attention to the world around you.
And you don't need a PhD in linguistics to understand that "free" has two independant meanings in English and you (and the person you are responding to) are using the shallow one.
When someone says "Why should I pay $39.00 for something that can be obtained for free?", it would be pretty f****** stupid for me to respond as if he had used the word "free" in the context of "freedom", now wouldn't it?
And neither meaning is more "shallow" than the other. They are just different.
For plenty of us, it's not just about the $0 price tag.
But for plenty it is, as demonstrated by the question regarding whether the enhancements were worth $75. He didn't ask about giving up freedoms for features, he asked about giving up $75.
It's about having software that we are free to share with friends and colleagues. It's about having the ability to put it into a standard system image that's installed over the network to every machine in the department without any licensing hassles. It's about having access to the source code and the right to modify and build it.
No, it's about making it financially viable for a company to release a product that competes with Microsoft. Skipping around and flinging CD-ROMs to friends, family, and colleagues does nothing to make that happen. And how much need is there to modify a browser or office suite? Get real.
If you don't care about those fundamental freedoms, then by all means buy StarOffice from Sun.
And if you don't care about Microsoft having any competition in office suite software, then by all means download OpenOffice in lieu of buying StarOffice.
Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
Sadly, you are probably right. Slashdot readers sit around bemoaning Microsoft's virtual ownership of the PC software market. But when some other company introduces a supported, professional, competing product, much of the discussion on Slashdot centers around:
1. Encouraging people to download free software instead of buying the new product.
2. Creating open source projects to replace the package being discussed.
3. Getting the package without paying for it.
Today was just another great example on Slashdot. First the announcement of Opera 6 for Linux. I lost count of the number of times that people suggested the use of Mozilla or some other free browser to avoid paying for Opera. At least one person posted registration codes. Others posted ways to disable the ads that pay the bills for the ad-supported version.
Now we have the announcement that StarOffice 6 will be sold for a mere $75. Are Slashdot readers celebrating the fact that Sun is going up against Microsoft in the office arena? Nope. The discussion centers around using, and extending, OpenOffice instead of purchasing StarOffice from Sun.
Microsoft management is probably thrilled by what they see here. A major competitor announces a compatible office suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It's priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. And what do readers on Slashdot, a group that should be a prime audience for the new package, do? Look for ways to avoid buying it.
*yawn*
Yeah, potentially putting people out of work and damaging an entire industry sure is boring isn't it?
Moron.