what's the difference between this and having a stack of CD and connect a very powerful AMP to all the speakers in the company?
No difference. It is illegal to play music over a company's speakers without a license. All you can do is play music over your personal system, and be pretty darn careful about that if you are the company's owner.
Or we simply wouldn't be hated enough for others to wish this kind of retribution on us.
You have not supported this assertion. I do not believe we can maintain a Swiss-like neutrality in the world. England tried to follow the course of neutrality and appeasement in the 1930s, and the result was worldwide horror. The Men of Munich were clearly wrong, although they were men of high principle and took what they thought was the best course of action. The results were nearly fatal to Europe.
We are a superpower, like it out not, and we cannot absent ourselves from world affairs. Any choice we make, including the choice to sit on our hands and do nothing, has the potential to anger those who feel mistreated by civilization.
You've done absolutely nothing to rebutt (sic) my arguments.
It is amazingly sad that you think your soi-disant criticisms of American policy in WWII require rebuttal. The US wasn't perfect, and was terribly wrong on occasion, but the Allies were overwhelmingly in the right. To attempt to remove the slightest blackness of the blot of evil that is civilian terror by attempting a comparison of Allied actions in WWII says far more about you than it says about anything else. There is a time and place for self-criticism, but mixing introspection about historical motives of two generations past with fingerpointing about current events isn't productive. Everyone's emotions are too raw to permit rational, considered discourse along this vein.
I will tell you this, Americans don't set out to kill innocent children, and Americans don't rejoice in the horrible death of innocent civilians. To insinuate that we deserve this, that it is simply payback for our wicked ways, is outrageous.
who will act irrationally and violently
I haven't called for violence to anyone but those responsible for planning this mass murder, and those who give sanctuary to them. This is not an irrational course of action.
Who delude themselves into thinking that the acts committed by the US government are somehow justifiable...
Learn to read. You blew right past my contention that the US was wrong to bomb Hiroshima, despite the argument that it would save lives. A military target should have been selected, and it appears that is exactly what Truman ordered. Ends alone aren't sufficient to justify the means. This applies to the terrorists, too.
At least the US has the figleaf of ending a long, bloody war that would have consumed many on both sides if continued. It wasn't unmixed evil to want to end WWII as quickly as possible. Tell me what moral principle or life saving argument applies to the WTC attack?
You obviously don't want to think about it, you simply want blood like so many other Americans.
Get you head out of your, errr, backside. The vast majority of people in this country are agreed that we shouldn't strike out in blind fury, but that we should find those responsible for planning, executing, and enabling this attack, and punishing them. And we will do so.
Had Americans simply wanted blood, we would have had it by now. But that isn't what is happening.
I hope you'll be happy with the consequences of our actions as a country.
I hope so too. If we find and punish the guilty, and protect the innocent, and do it with the support of the rest of the world, then we will have done the Right Thing.
Well, that says everything. Our worldviews are totally different, and there really is no point in continuing this conversation. I am grateful that your views are those of a very small minority, otherwise, we would be living beneath the boot of the barbarians.
These were not just random humans either. They were targeting US citizens.
Civilians, children included, not simply citizens.
Because we considered it acceptable rather than lose our own troops in a military assault.
You state only part of the reasoning. Plenty of Japanese citizens, military and civilian, would have died in any conventional invasion of Japan. The Allies island-hopping prelude to the expected invasion was convincing proof that obtaining a Japanese surrender, via invasion, would have been a protracted, costly affair for all sides.
These people HAVE declared war on us.
First, you don't know who "these people" are, so how can you claim this? Second, there has been no formal declaration of war, unless you know something no one else knows.
They are using the same logic we did in nuking Japan.
This is wrong. A declared state of war existed between Japan and the US. Truman's diary explicitly records he ordered an attack on a purely military objective: I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. (Truman quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) pp. 55-56.) Truman called Hiroshima a 'military base' in a radio address to the nation, so either he's lying through his teeth or he really was misinformed aout the nature of the target when he gave approval.
In fact, we did not use the bomb on a purely military target, and in that, we were wrong. But to catagorize the decision to use nuclear weapons in a declared war as equivalent to the terrorists decision to ram civilian airliners into skyscrapers without warning is disingenuous at best.
Perhaps we should consider that when we're sending military aid all over the place...
And what will you say when we are terrorized for not sending military aid to a particular group? We can't sit in splendid isolation within our borders. We'll anger groups regardless of the decisions (excellent, average, poor) we make as a country interacting with the rest of the globe. We'll be damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
The civilized world needs to demand an end to terror against noncombatants. This demand must be backed up with effective action, up to and including military retaliation, for active or passive support of terrorist organizations by governments. If we don't demand this, every disaffected group nursing a supposed wrong will feel justified in imposing their demands, right or wrong, upon the world by the cold-blooded, calculating slaughter of children and other innocents.
These people are doing what most any other people would do in their situation. They're fighting back the only way they can.
You are insane, or evil, or both if you think for one instant that this is the way most people would act. Most people would not kill tens of thousands of random humans in cold-blooded calculation just for some nebulous 'revenge.' Tell me, what practical effect will this mass murder have for the downtrodden of the world? Will it make their lives easier? To ask it is to know the answer.
Your pathetic attempt at justifying the frightful slaughter of innocent civilians is sickening.
War is not dying for your contry, it is getting the other side to die for theirs. You stop people who are willing to die for their cause by granting their wish and wiping them out.
Sometimes, civilization has to eradicate the beastly savages who prey on the innocent. We've succeeded in the past, and I am confident we will succeed this time as well.
If medical research was primarily (or entirely) funded by society as a whole as opposed to by the proceeds of research then, in theory, we wouldn't have this problem.
Right you are, Don Pardo. Everyone remembers the tremendous contributions that the Soviet medical and pharmaceutical industries made to the world, without the damning restrictions of capitalism.
You do remember them, right?
Call me when you have any actual *theory* on adult-level language skills...
There is always Steven Pinker and others who have taken a serious look at language and its acquisition by children. Pinker says "[...] it is virtually impossible to show how children could learn a language unless you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start."[1]
This differs substantially from what the article reports as the basis for Hal's language skills...
"When Hal was "born," he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one."
Additionally, the idea that children learn laguage because of rewards or praise is, apparently, inconsistent with studies of human language acquisition. The CNN article says...
"The idea is to educate Hal gradually, the way a child learns, through trial-and-error and rewards when he performs well."
This is not how children acquire language, according to some really smart people. Back to Pinker. "A key factor is the role of negative evidence, or information about which strings of words are not sentences in the language to be acquired. Human children might get such information by being corrected every time they speak ungrammatically. If they aren't -- and as we shall see, they probably aren't -- the acquisition problem is all the harder."
Is the Israeli work interesting? Yes. Are they mimicing the way a child acquires language? Not if the CNN article is even halfway accurate.
[1] Steven Pinker, MIT, "Language Acquisition", at
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py1 04/pinker.langacq.html
The Economist this week has an excellent article on the moral ground, or rather lack-there-of, for intellectual property. Unfortunately, it's on the pay section of their website.
How very amusing. An article, arguing the lack of moral grounds for protecting IP, on a pay-for-access website. You don't suppose the hypocr... errr, editors at The Economist would mind if we just copied this article in its entirety for the
gentle readers of/., eh?
>A. what business do the french, or any other
>government have telling foreign businesses how
>to run things?
If you want to do business in France, the French government has every right to tell a business what to do.
>B. why is it yahoo's responsibility to enforce
>the rules of the French government?
Yahoo is offering a service available in France.
If you were shipping widgets to France, you would be obligated to obey the laws of France with respect to your French customers.
>C. what happens when the next country in line
>doesnt like something on yahoo auctions?
Comply with the laws, or don't do business in country X.
If you can buy the patents, you can more than afford to buy the people to develop "X" which will be beneficial to humanity. Why don't you invest the proposed global fund money in basic and applied research, and Open Source the results?
Slashdot Mirror
It is clear that the anthrax attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists,
No, this is not at all clear, unless you know something no one else does.
and that the main suspect is still at large
There is no main suspect.
and is a US government employee.
0 for three.
what's the difference between this and having a stack of CD and connect a very powerful AMP to all the speakers in the company?
No difference. It is illegal to play music over a company's speakers without a license. All you can do is play music over your personal system, and be pretty darn careful about that if you are the company's owner.
This is why the Arabs have NEVER attacked any Israeli religious targets.
Not true. Palestinian Arabs attacked Joseph's Tomb in Nablus over a year ago. This is a recognized holy place, in addition to being a yeshiva.
Such elementary blunders discredit the analysis.
Or we simply wouldn't be hated enough for others to wish this kind of retribution on us.
You have not supported this assertion. I do not believe we can maintain a Swiss-like neutrality in the world. England tried to follow the course of neutrality and appeasement in the 1930s, and the result was worldwide horror. The Men of Munich were clearly wrong, although they were men of high principle and took what they thought was the best course of action. The results were nearly fatal to Europe.
We are a superpower, like it out not, and we cannot absent ourselves from world affairs. Any choice we make, including the choice to sit on our hands and do nothing, has the potential to anger those who feel mistreated by civilization.
You've done absolutely nothing to rebutt (sic) my arguments.
It is amazingly sad that you think your soi-disant criticisms of American policy in WWII require rebuttal. The US wasn't perfect, and was terribly wrong on occasion, but the Allies were overwhelmingly in the right. To attempt to remove the slightest blackness of the blot of evil that is civilian terror by attempting a comparison of Allied actions in WWII says far more about you than it says about anything else. There is a time and place for self-criticism, but mixing introspection about historical motives of two generations past with fingerpointing about current events isn't productive. Everyone's emotions are too raw to permit rational, considered discourse along this vein.
I will tell you this, Americans don't set out to kill innocent children, and Americans don't rejoice in the horrible death of innocent civilians. To insinuate that we deserve this, that it is simply payback for our wicked ways, is outrageous.
who will act irrationally and violently
I haven't called for violence to anyone but those responsible for planning this mass murder, and those who give sanctuary to them. This is not an irrational course of action.
Who delude themselves into thinking that the acts committed by the US government are somehow justifiable...
Learn to read. You blew right past my contention that the US was wrong to bomb Hiroshima, despite the argument that it would save lives. A military target should have been selected, and it appears that is exactly what Truman ordered. Ends alone aren't sufficient to justify the means. This applies to the terrorists, too.
At least the US has the figleaf of ending a long, bloody war that would have consumed many on both sides if continued. It wasn't unmixed evil to want to end WWII as quickly as possible. Tell me what moral principle or life saving argument applies to the WTC attack?
You obviously don't want to think about it, you simply want blood like so many other Americans.
Get you head out of your, errr, backside. The vast majority of people in this country are agreed that we shouldn't strike out in blind fury, but that we should find those responsible for planning, executing, and enabling this attack, and punishing them. And we will do so.
Had Americans simply wanted blood, we would have had it by now. But that isn't what is happening.
I hope you'll be happy with the consequences of our actions as a country.
I hope so too. If we find and punish the guilty, and protect the innocent, and do it with the support of the rest of the world, then we will have done the Right Thing.
I really don't believe that that's any different.
Well, that says everything. Our worldviews are totally different, and there really is no point in continuing this conversation. I am grateful that your views are those of a very small minority, otherwise, we would be living beneath the boot of the barbarians.
These were not just random humans either. They were targeting US citizens.
Civilians, children included, not simply citizens.
Because we considered it acceptable rather than lose our own troops in a military assault.
You state only part of the reasoning. Plenty of Japanese citizens, military and civilian, would have died in any conventional invasion of Japan. The Allies island-hopping prelude to the expected invasion was convincing proof that obtaining a Japanese surrender, via invasion, would have been a protracted, costly affair for all sides.
These people HAVE declared war on us.
First, you don't know who "these people" are, so how can you claim this? Second, there has been no formal declaration of war, unless you know something no one else knows.
They are using the same logic we did in nuking Japan.
This is wrong. A declared state of war existed between Japan and the US. Truman's diary explicitly records he ordered an attack on a purely military objective: I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. (Truman quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) pp. 55-56.) Truman called Hiroshima a 'military base' in a radio address to the nation, so either he's lying through his teeth or he really was misinformed aout the nature of the target when he gave approval.
In fact, we did not use the bomb on a purely military target, and in that, we were wrong. But to catagorize the decision to use nuclear weapons in a declared war as equivalent to the terrorists decision to ram civilian airliners into skyscrapers without warning is disingenuous at best.
Perhaps we should consider that when we're sending military aid all over the place...
And what will you say when we are terrorized for not sending military aid to a particular group? We can't sit in splendid isolation within our borders. We'll anger groups regardless of the decisions (excellent, average, poor) we make as a country interacting with the rest of the globe. We'll be damned if we do, and damned if we don't.
The civilized world needs to demand an end to terror against noncombatants. This demand must be backed up with effective action, up to and including military retaliation, for active or passive support of terrorist organizations by governments. If we don't demand this, every disaffected group nursing a supposed wrong will feel justified in imposing their demands, right or wrong, upon the world by the cold-blooded, calculating slaughter of children and other innocents.
These people are doing what most any other people would do in their situation. They're fighting back the only way they can.
You are insane, or evil, or both if you think for one instant that this is the way most people would act. Most people would not kill tens of thousands of random humans in cold-blooded calculation just for some nebulous 'revenge.' Tell me, what practical effect will this mass murder have for the downtrodden of the world? Will it make their lives easier? To ask it is to know the answer.
Your pathetic attempt at justifying the frightful slaughter of innocent civilians is sickening.
War is not dying for your contry, it is getting the other side to die for theirs. You stop people who are willing to die for their cause by granting their wish and wiping them out.
Sometimes, civilization has to eradicate the beastly savages who prey on the innocent. We've succeeded in the past, and I am confident we will succeed this time as well.
OK, what disease is the "time and place" for profit? Heart disease? Cancer? No? What about hemophilia?
If medical research was primarily (or entirely) funded by society as a whole as opposed to by the proceeds of research then, in theory, we wouldn't have this problem.
Right you are, Don Pardo. Everyone remembers the tremendous contributions that the Soviet medical and pharmaceutical industries made to the world, without the damning restrictions of capitalism.
You do remember them, right?
Call me when you have any actual *theory* on adult-level language skills...
There is always Steven Pinker and others who have taken a serious look at language and its acquisition by children. Pinker says "[...] it is virtually impossible to show how children could learn a language unless you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start."[1]
This differs substantially from what the article reports as the basis for Hal's language skills...
"When Hal was "born," he was hardwired with nothing more than the letters of the alphabet and a preference for rewards -- a positive outcome -- over punishments -- a negative one."
Additionally, the idea that children learn laguage because of rewards or praise is, apparently, inconsistent with studies of human language acquisition. The CNN article says...
"The idea is to educate Hal gradually, the way a child learns, through trial-and-error and rewards when he performs well."
This is not how children acquire language, according to some really smart people. Back to Pinker. "A key factor is the role of negative evidence, or information about which strings of words are not sentences in the language to be acquired. Human children might get such information by being corrected every time they speak ungrammatically. If they aren't -- and as we shall see, they probably aren't -- the acquisition problem is all the harder."
Is the Israeli work interesting? Yes. Are they mimicing the way a child acquires language? Not if the CNN article is even halfway accurate.
[1] Steven Pinker, MIT, "Language Acquisition", at
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py
So learn to play music yourself. Or listen to music that your friends play. You needn't be a slave to the RIAA.
Movies are crap, I can't help you there. If you need your fix of stupid, inane plots with tarted up video, go bow to the MPAA with your wallet open.
This is an Urban Legend.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
You forgot to add that if you drop them, or sit on them, or the publisher goes bust, books still work.
The Economist this week has an excellent article on the moral ground, or rather lack-there-of, for intellectual property. Unfortunately, it's on the pay section of their website.
How very amusing. An article, arguing the lack of moral grounds for protecting IP, on a pay-for-access website. You don't suppose the hypocr... errr, editors at The Economist would mind if we just copied this article in its entirety for the gentle readers of /., eh?
>A. what business do the french, or any other
>government have telling foreign businesses how
>to run things?
If you want to do business in France, the French government has every right to tell a business what to do.
>B. why is it yahoo's responsibility to enforce
>the rules of the French government?
Yahoo is offering a service available in France.
If you were shipping widgets to France, you would be obligated to obey the laws of France with respect to your French customers.
>C. what happens when the next country in line
>doesnt like something on yahoo auctions?
Comply with the laws, or don't do business in country X.
If you can buy the patents, you can more than afford to buy the people to develop "X" which will be beneficial to humanity. Why don't you invest the proposed global fund money in basic and applied research, and Open Source the results?