Riiight... because liberals secretly just love big government. They giggle gleefully when they get to pay more taxes, or get to deal with more red tape, or have to fill out extra forms.
I don't think *anybody* wants big government, but liberals are willing to accept that as a consequence of helping "the little guy".
Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that things will just work themselves out. They think that in a world without government, community groups would band together to fix potholes, rather than just letting streets fall into disrepair. They think that if people were paying $200 a month less in taxes, that they'd give that same $200 a month to charities, rather than doing something more selfish with that $200.
I hate it when people talk about raising kids, saying things like "Just substitute raisins for M&Ms and stuff like that".
First of all, did you know that dentists have found that the sugar levels in apples have been raised so high that apples are now rotting kids' teeth? Just because something is presumably "natural" doesn't mean it is necessarily good for you anymore.
Secondly, kids above 6 or 7 know that candy is bad for them, and that is one of the reasons they want it. I remember sneaking off school property to get to a corner store and buy some candy when I was a kid. Kids aren't so dumb that they'll believe that sweet fruit is the same sort of a treat as chocolate.
Thirdly, people have different tastes. I hate raisins, and don't like most berries, but I love chocolate, even the unsweetened bitter stuff. You're not giving the kids enough credit if you think that they'll blindly eat anything sweet.
As for basic ingredients, it's not always that easy. Many kids (as well as adults) have food allergies. Aside from that, there's the matter of what is healthy. Apparently fat in fish is a good thing, but fatty red meat is bad. Now both of these are probably much better than a McBurger, but it's not like it's completely obvious how to make a very healthy yet still appetizing and digestible meal.
As for the exercise, I agree that's important for everybody, but the more my parents pushed me to "get some exercise" the more I resisted. I think the reason is that: 1) they set a bad example, never exercising themselves, and 2) they would never explain why, they'd just order me to "go play outside". Playing outside also generally require someone to play with, whereas TV/computer/nintendo, whatever doesn't.
Raising a kid is hard, and not everybody is cut out to do it. Sure, a lot of parents can do better than they're doing, but it's not like the whole process is simple, and treating your kids as objects doesn't help.
As a designer, is this game fun for people with human reflexes?
I liked the other Tony Hawk games, don't get me wrong. They were fun, but frustrating. Doing more than say two tricks in the air seemed to require coordination and reflexes that nobody I knew had. And if you wanted to get anywhere in the game, you had to be able to do more than 2 tricks in a row.
I suppose I probably could have learned to do these types of tricks if I played the game for months on end, but what's the fun in that? It was fun for the first few days, but I didn't want to go into full "training" mode for a week just so I could unlock the next park.
If you're going to convince me the game is worth buying, and worth spending time with, you'll have to convince me that the gameplay doesn't require reflexes and coordination that I (and most people I know) don't have.
From my experience, the point of "sigs" in business communication is "a place to stick the disclaimer". I have friends who work in banking, and they have 50+ line sigs which are disclaimers saying things about how you're supposed to delete the email if it wasn't intended for you, how all communication is privileged, how the employee doesn't speak for the company....
As if this sort of sig wasn't annoying enough, some of these friends insist on sending me 2 or 3 line emails. When your sig is 10x the size of your email content, don't bother!
Yeah, because it really is that simple, isn't it? If we feel something is wrong, we should mobilize the army. Who cares if there isn't any proof of our claims, who cares if the rest of the world disagrees, who cares if the US invading an arab, muslim country will convince hundreds more people to become terrorists. In the end, all that really matters is liberating ultra-oppressed people.
Btw, in case you missed it yourself, that was sarcasm too.
Btw, these "liberated" people you're talking about? They live under a curfew now, they didn't before. Their government was run by a local dictator before, now it's run by a country on the other side of the planet. The old textbooks glorified the former leader, the new ones most likely glorify their "liberator".
Eventually, I agree that Iraq's people will be better off not having Saddam Hussein in charge... but this has got to be one of the worst ways for them to get rid of him.
Even if you believe that the ends justify the means, you've got to admit that some means are better than others.
Why do you need to get to that destination? Could you get there by walking, or taking a mountain bike? Sure, someone who buys a hummer but never leaves the pavement is an ass. But that doesn't automatically mean that someone who does leave the pavement needs a Hummer... or that they even need to leave the pavement at all.
Blah, blah, blah. The rant of the Anti-TV person. TV is the reason for today's decaying morals. TV is the source of the nation's woes.
Give me a break. It's not because of TV that people don't volunteer, it's because it takes effort and people are lazy. It's not because of TV that people aren't "raising their children" -- TV is what they use to get a few moments peace from the little brats. If they didn't have TV they might just go down to the local bar and drink... would that improve the lives of the kids?
What you're suggesting is just as absurd as saying that people should eat more fast food. "Think of all the minutes people waste preparing and then eating food! If they stopped doing this they could spend the time they're saving calling up their politicians and protesting X!"
A lot of what's on TV is junk. The Bachelor, Survivor N+1, game shows, generic sitcoms, blah blah blah. But there is also the discovery channel, the history channel, political discussion shows, and even decent drama. Sure, the medium influences the message. The depth of coverage you get in a 1 hour "talking heads" political talk show is a lot less than the level of detail you can get from reading a newspaper. But then again, in a newspaper column can you watch Donald Rumsfeld squirm when a reporter asks him a tough question? That body language carries important information too.
TV isn't all bad, just like books aren't all good. Would anybody honestly say that a trashy romance novel is more useful to read than say ABC's nightline? Even if a lot of stuff on TV is junk, it doesn't mean that in the absence of TV life would be great. It isn't TV that is preventing people from doing all sorts of wonderful things, it's simply their lack of interest in doing those things.
The first thing I noticed was that when they describe the license, they talk about how Free it is, but don't mention the crucial difference between the GPL and BSD licenses: your option to not release the source when you include the code in another programs.
The next comment that caught my eye was "The installer is fairly intuitive and informative, and everything works perfectly as far as I can tell -- I've installed FreeBSD about a dozen times." If you've installed FreeBSD that many times, of course it will seem intuitive and informative. I've heard the install process is much more Debian-like than say RedHat like. More information on that would really have been helpful.
When he talked about the boot process he said: "The FreeBSD bootloader, while simple and unable to be manually configured, is one of the best I've seen." He makes a good point that this means that no reconfiguration is needed when a new bootable partition is added... but "unable to be manually configured"? Does this mean you can't set a default OS to load? You can't set a default timeout? Seems odd to me, and needs more explanation for that comment.
The potshots at Debian, Gentoo and RedHat's respective package management systems are not backed up at all, and don't match my experience in the slightest.
Finally, at the end, there's the bit about 'ee' beint better than 'vi', but no discussion about what 'ee' is or why it is better than a very standard editor that's on every Unix in the world. (I'm an emacs guy myself but I happily fall back to vi when appropriate). He also says a lot of other FreeBSD tools are better than their Linux equivalents, but without so much as a single reason why.
I'd love to hear an article on a BSD saying what the differences really are, why the author prefers one version to another, etc. This one seems, at times, to be a review, but it isn't a review from someone who seems to have given both Linux and FreeBSD a chance.
At least it was enough for me to decide that FreeBSD isn't for me. I'm lazy, I admit it. I do certain things often enough that I want them to be simple. I prefer 'make xconfig' over manually editing a file to customize my kernel. I prefer a one-step package management command to a multi-step one. Sure, I'm familliar with CVS, and it's nice to know that's what you're doing with the BSDs, but I install and remove packages often enough that if I can save a few keystrokes every time, that will add up. FreeBSD sounds like it might make a better choice for an ultra-stable server which only ever has to be upgraded. If you're doing the maintenance over SSH anyway, configuring by editing files rather than a GUI is the way to go. But for a desktop system, Linux seems to be the better choice for me.
This guy gets the silly idea that seagoing pirates were not bad guys by doing something called "research". If you'll even read the review it says that Captain Kidd was hired to hunt pirates but due to some political maneuvering and backstabbing he was declared to be a pirate and got in real trouble as a result.
He also says that certain pirates were just people fed up with the English colonial system, so they decided to live outside its laws. If people who live outside the laws are bad, then what of the people who started the American revolution?
The guy's whole point is that pirates were neither jolly people with parrots on their shoulders who lived a carefree life, nor were they evil people who raped and murdered just for the fun of it. They were somewhere in the middle, living brutal lives, but they were also trying to escape the oppressive British (or French or Dutch) rule, and were caught up in the politics of their time.
Last time when Verisign sprung this on Internet users, for the most part, people worked around them. The changes to BIND were not exclusive to Verisign, they just tried to address what they considered to be a flaw exposed by Verisign. This time is different. ICANN has told them not to do it, and they're still going to do it. This time, it's time for a punitive reaction.
Here's what I propose. If you write software that interacts with DNS keep track of how often Verisign hijacks a non-existant DNS entry. Each time they do that, increment a counter. Then, the next time someone asks for a valid Verisign address use that counter to decide whether to return NXDOMAIN or not.
If Verisign insists on pretending that they own the net, instead they'll discover they've disappeared off the net.
Now sure, there will be casualties from this. It will even hit people who are trying to remove their domains from Verisign's authority, but what's the alternative? When someone does something this outrageous, it isn't enough to work around them. They have to be punished too.
Of course I would. Which would you rather have, a lawyer who sued who you told her to sue, or a lawyer who used her own judgement on who was worth sueing. You want a lawyer who follows orders. In fact, I'd rather have a lawyer who won a case against a 12-year-old than one who lost it because that's probably a damn good lawyer.
And, afterall, the English did invent, or at least originate English, so their version is probably the most "correct" one. But I will agree with you on the pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet. Aside from "double-u" there are no other letters in English that are pronounced as "distinct-consonant-sound -> distinct-vowel-sound -> distinct-consonant-sound". The "zee" pronunciation (while sounding somewhat french) sounds much more like other letters "bee", "see", "dee". As the pulp fiction characters so aptly put it, zed's dead man. Zed's dead.
It isn't like they were blocking it because the sitefinder page contained naughty words. They were censoring it because the damn service broke the Internet.
If I live next to a busy highway and decide to shine a mega-bright spotlight into oncoming traffic, that would completely mess up traffic and possibly kill a few people. If the cops come in and "censor" my spotlight, that's a good thing, right?
Censorship is removing objectionable, or unsuitable content. Preventing someone from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre isn't censorship because it isn't that the words are objectionable, it's that the result of shouting them will cause chaos and damage. Likewise, Verisign's wildcard caused damage and so it was blocked.
Uh, no. Copyright violation may take away the ability of the copyright holder to make money from the work. It also may enhance that ability. It all depends on the circumstances. If you're a small non-tech-savvy band in a dreary little town in nowheresville, you may never be discovered. A geek shows up at a show, likes it, buys a CD and violates your copyright by distributing it all over the world. Suddenly thousands of people are listening to it and ordering it over the web.
You know, what? That's a pretty unlikely scenario... but it could happen. That's what makes copyright violation different from theft. If someone comes and steals my computer, I no longer have use of the computer. Period.
I would guess that copyright violation is a distinct net loss for people^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompanies like the record company that makes money off Britney Spears. For lesser-known artists, it is probably a net loss, but who knows? For completely unknown artists/singers/moviemakers/wannabe-jedi-knights any publicity might help, even if it means giving their stuff away for free. You know the famous expression "The only bad publicity is no publicity"? Well maybe the same holds true for distribution of copyrighted stuff. The trouble is that we'll never know.
Who is this noone fellow, and why was he speaking for an atrocious speller like you?
Oh, you mean "no-one", two words, hyphenated. The statement "there was nune(phonetic spelling) left to speak out for me" sure loses its dramatic power don't you think? It actually becomes kind-of comical. If you'd rather be powerful than comical, try to spell better.
What about if "Dad" takes care of food, lodging, education and health care, that's it. I don't think that systems where poor people are blindly given cash are the answer, but I think it just makes sense to take care of everybody's basic needs. If what you provide is difficult to turn into money, then the incentive to be a lazy bum is gone, but those who truly have trouble making ends meet are not forced to either cut out health care (and risk passing on disease to others), or turn to crime because it's all they know.
Well said... and I might add, I wasn't saying that the government should be Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and blindly giving to the poor. I think the poor should be given things that are hard to exchange for money: Free basic healthcare, free basic education, free basic food, etc. That would remove the incentive to just be lazy and take money, but would keep people healthy and educated. I'm not saying that most poor people are lazy, far from it, but I do know people who are lazy and have taken advantage of programs meant to help people who really need it.
Taking care of everybody, rich and poor is just good common sense. Even if you're a cold-hearted bastard who couldn't care less about poor people dying of disease, you should note that if poor people are catching the plague, unless you completely cut yourself off from them, you'll probably catch it too.
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
Um, the media I see is in English, not in Hebrew (normally used as a noun to describe the language, not the people, who are typically called Jews). And just to set the record straight, there are many Americans who aren't racist or anti-jewish, even in private.
On the other hand, I do happen to agree with the "bunch of frat boys running business". Their skin-color isn't an issue, but their fratboyness is.
As for McBride's religion, considering how religious most of the US is, it's not a big deal. The
US Attorney General is a devout pentecostalist. Pentecostalists apparently believe that one should not engage in drinking, dancing, or going to the theatre.
Aside from him, Bush regularly uses religious messages in all his speeches. In a recent case there was a huge uproar over removing the protestant version of the 10 commandments from a Supreme Court building in Alabama.
For those of us who aren't religious, the rest of the country seems to bathe in religious kookery at times... so finding out that McBride is a moron... er... mormon is no big deal.
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Riiight... because liberals secretly just love big government. They giggle gleefully when they get to pay more taxes, or get to deal with more red tape, or have to fill out extra forms.
I don't think *anybody* wants big government, but liberals are willing to accept that as a consequence of helping "the little guy".
Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that things will just work themselves out. They think that in a world without government, community groups would band together to fix potholes, rather than just letting streets fall into disrepair. They think that if people were paying $200 a month less in taxes, that they'd give that same $200 a month to charities, rather than doing something more selfish with that $200.
I hate it when people talk about raising kids, saying things like "Just substitute raisins for M&Ms and stuff like that".
First of all, did you know that dentists have found that the sugar levels in apples have been raised so high that apples are now rotting kids' teeth? Just because something is presumably "natural" doesn't mean it is necessarily good for you anymore.
Secondly, kids above 6 or 7 know that candy is bad for them, and that is one of the reasons they want it. I remember sneaking off school property to get to a corner store and buy some candy when I was a kid. Kids aren't so dumb that they'll believe that sweet fruit is the same sort of a treat as chocolate.
Thirdly, people have different tastes. I hate raisins, and don't like most berries, but I love chocolate, even the unsweetened bitter stuff. You're not giving the kids enough credit if you think that they'll blindly eat anything sweet.
As for basic ingredients, it's not always that easy. Many kids (as well as adults) have food allergies. Aside from that, there's the matter of what is healthy. Apparently fat in fish is a good thing, but fatty red meat is bad. Now both of these are probably much better than a McBurger, but it's not like it's completely obvious how to make a very healthy yet still appetizing and digestible meal.
As for the exercise, I agree that's important for everybody, but the more my parents pushed me to "get some exercise" the more I resisted. I think the reason is that: 1) they set a bad example, never exercising themselves, and 2) they would never explain why, they'd just order me to "go play outside". Playing outside also generally require someone to play with, whereas TV/computer/nintendo, whatever doesn't.
Raising a kid is hard, and not everybody is cut out to do it. Sure, a lot of parents can do better than they're doing, but it's not like the whole process is simple, and treating your kids as objects doesn't help.
And only if the only dangly thing I have to see is that preposition.
As a designer, is this game fun for people with human reflexes?
I liked the other Tony Hawk games, don't get me wrong. They were fun, but frustrating. Doing more than say two tricks in the air seemed to require coordination and reflexes that nobody I knew had. And if you wanted to get anywhere in the game, you had to be able to do more than 2 tricks in a row.
I suppose I probably could have learned to do these types of tricks if I played the game for months on end, but what's the fun in that? It was fun for the first few days, but I didn't want to go into full "training" mode for a week just so I could unlock the next park.
If you're going to convince me the game is worth buying, and worth spending time with, you'll have to convince me that the gameplay doesn't require reflexes and coordination that I (and most people I know) don't have.
From my experience, the point of "sigs" in business communication is "a place to stick the disclaimer". I have friends who work in banking, and they have 50+ line sigs which are disclaimers saying things about how you're supposed to delete the email if it wasn't intended for you, how all communication is privileged, how the employee doesn't speak for the company....
As if this sort of sig wasn't annoying enough, some of these friends insist on sending me 2 or 3 line emails. When your sig is 10x the size of your email content, don't bother!
Yeah, because it really is that simple, isn't it? If we feel something is wrong, we should mobilize the army. Who cares if there isn't any proof of our claims, who cares if the rest of the world disagrees, who cares if the US invading an arab, muslim country will convince hundreds more people to become terrorists. In the end, all that really matters is liberating ultra-oppressed people.
Btw, in case you missed it yourself, that was sarcasm too.
Btw, these "liberated" people you're talking about? They live under a curfew now, they didn't before. Their government was run by a local dictator before, now it's run by a country on the other side of the planet. The old textbooks glorified the former leader, the new ones most likely glorify their "liberator".
Eventually, I agree that Iraq's people will be better off not having Saddam Hussein in charge... but this has got to be one of the worst ways for them to get rid of him.
Even if you believe that the ends justify the means, you've got to admit that some means are better than others.
Why do you need to get to that destination? Could you get there by walking, or taking a mountain bike? Sure, someone who buys a hummer but never leaves the pavement is an ass. But that doesn't automatically mean that someone who does leave the pavement needs a Hummer... or that they even need to leave the pavement at all.
Blah, blah, blah. The rant of the Anti-TV person. TV is the reason for today's decaying morals. TV is the source of the nation's woes.
Give me a break. It's not because of TV that people don't volunteer, it's because it takes effort and people are lazy. It's not because of TV that people aren't "raising their children" -- TV is what they use to get a few moments peace from the little brats. If they didn't have TV they might just go down to the local bar and drink... would that improve the lives of the kids?
What you're suggesting is just as absurd as saying that people should eat more fast food. "Think of all the minutes people waste preparing and then eating food! If they stopped doing this they could spend the time they're saving calling up their politicians and protesting X!"
A lot of what's on TV is junk. The Bachelor, Survivor N+1, game shows, generic sitcoms, blah blah blah. But there is also the discovery channel, the history channel, political discussion shows, and even decent drama. Sure, the medium influences the message. The depth of coverage you get in a 1 hour "talking heads" political talk show is a lot less than the level of detail you can get from reading a newspaper. But then again, in a newspaper column can you watch Donald Rumsfeld squirm when a reporter asks him a tough question? That body language carries important information too.
TV isn't all bad, just like books aren't all good. Would anybody honestly say that a trashy romance novel is more useful to read than say ABC's nightline? Even if a lot of stuff on TV is junk, it doesn't mean that in the absence of TV life would be great. It isn't TV that is preventing people from doing all sorts of wonderful things, it's simply their lack of interest in doing those things.
Sure, If you head towards Earth from Remulak 7, the Space Station is the last "stop" before you enter the atmosphere.
The first thing I noticed was that when they describe the license, they talk about how Free it is, but don't mention the crucial difference between the GPL and BSD licenses: your option to not release the source when you include the code in another programs.
The next comment that caught my eye was "The installer is fairly intuitive and informative, and everything works perfectly as far as I can tell -- I've installed FreeBSD about a dozen times." If you've installed FreeBSD that many times, of course it will seem intuitive and informative. I've heard the install process is much more Debian-like than say RedHat like. More information on that would really have been helpful.
When he talked about the boot process he said: "The FreeBSD bootloader, while simple and unable to be manually configured, is one of the best I've seen." He makes a good point that this means that no reconfiguration is needed when a new bootable partition is added... but "unable to be manually configured"? Does this mean you can't set a default OS to load? You can't set a default timeout? Seems odd to me, and needs more explanation for that comment.
The potshots at Debian, Gentoo and RedHat's respective package management systems are not backed up at all, and don't match my experience in the slightest.
Finally, at the end, there's the bit about 'ee' beint better than 'vi', but no discussion about what 'ee' is or why it is better than a very standard editor that's on every Unix in the world. (I'm an emacs guy myself but I happily fall back to vi when appropriate). He also says a lot of other FreeBSD tools are better than their Linux equivalents, but without so much as a single reason why.
I'd love to hear an article on a BSD saying what the differences really are, why the author prefers one version to another, etc. This one seems, at times, to be a review, but it isn't a review from someone who seems to have given both Linux and FreeBSD a chance.
At least it was enough for me to decide that FreeBSD isn't for me. I'm lazy, I admit it. I do certain things often enough that I want them to be simple. I prefer 'make xconfig' over manually editing a file to customize my kernel. I prefer a one-step package management command to a multi-step one. Sure, I'm familliar with CVS, and it's nice to know that's what you're doing with the BSDs, but I install and remove packages often enough that if I can save a few keystrokes every time, that will add up. FreeBSD sounds like it might make a better choice for an ultra-stable server which only ever has to be upgraded. If you're doing the maintenance over SSH anyway, configuring by editing files rather than a GUI is the way to go. But for a desktop system, Linux seems to be the better choice for me.
This guy gets the silly idea that seagoing pirates were not bad guys by doing something called "research". If you'll even read the review it says that Captain Kidd was hired to hunt pirates but due to some political maneuvering and backstabbing he was declared to be a pirate and got in real trouble as a result.
He also says that certain pirates were just people fed up with the English colonial system, so they decided to live outside its laws. If people who live outside the laws are bad, then what of the people who started the American revolution?
The guy's whole point is that pirates were neither jolly people with parrots on their shoulders who lived a carefree life, nor were they evil people who raped and murdered just for the fun of it. They were somewhere in the middle, living brutal lives, but they were also trying to escape the oppressive British (or French or Dutch) rule, and were caught up in the politics of their time.
Last time when Verisign sprung this on Internet users, for the most part, people worked around them. The changes to BIND were not exclusive to Verisign, they just tried to address what they considered to be a flaw exposed by Verisign. This time is different. ICANN has told them not to do it, and they're still going to do it. This time, it's time for a punitive reaction.
Here's what I propose. If you write software that interacts with DNS keep track of how often Verisign hijacks a non-existant DNS entry. Each time they do that, increment a counter. Then, the next time someone asks for a valid Verisign address use that counter to decide whether to return NXDOMAIN or not.
If Verisign insists on pretending that they own the net, instead they'll discover they've disappeared off the net.
Now sure, there will be casualties from this. It will even hit people who are trying to remove their domains from Verisign's authority, but what's the alternative? When someone does something this outrageous, it isn't enough to work around them. They have to be punished too.
Actually... song.mp3 is gone. Luckily, you copied it and songcopy.mp3 is still around. I think you meant to cp song.mp3 /mnt/floppy.
Besides it is much easier just to cp song.mp3 /mnt/floppy/songcopy.mp3. It saves a step. :)
Of course I would. Which would you rather have, a lawyer who sued who you told her to sue, or a lawyer who used her own judgement on who was worth sueing. You want a lawyer who follows orders. In fact, I'd rather have a lawyer who won a case against a 12-year-old than one who lost it because that's probably a damn good lawyer.
And, afterall, the English did invent, or at least originate English, so their version is probably the most "correct" one. But I will agree with you on the pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet. Aside from "double-u" there are no other letters in English that are pronounced as "distinct-consonant-sound -> distinct-vowel-sound -> distinct-consonant-sound". The "zee" pronunciation (while sounding somewhat french) sounds much more like other letters "bee", "see", "dee". As the pulp fiction characters so aptly put it, zed's dead man. Zed's dead.
And here's an artical[sic] on poor spelling and its links to unemployment.
It isn't like they were blocking it because the sitefinder page contained naughty words. They were censoring it because the damn service broke the Internet.
If I live next to a busy highway and decide to shine a mega-bright spotlight into oncoming traffic, that would completely mess up traffic and possibly kill a few people. If the cops come in and "censor" my spotlight, that's a good thing, right?
Censorship is removing objectionable, or unsuitable content. Preventing someone from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre isn't censorship because it isn't that the words are objectionable, it's that the result of shouting them will cause chaos and damage. Likewise, Verisign's wildcard caused damage and so it was blocked.
Uh, no. Copyright violation may take away the ability of the copyright holder to make money from the work. It also may enhance that ability. It all depends on the circumstances. If you're a small non-tech-savvy band in a dreary little town in nowheresville, you may never be discovered. A geek shows up at a show, likes it, buys a CD and violates your copyright by distributing it all over the world. Suddenly thousands of people are listening to it and ordering it over the web.
You know, what? That's a pretty unlikely scenario... but it could happen. That's what makes copyright violation different from theft. If someone comes and steals my computer, I no longer have use of the computer. Period.
I would guess that copyright violation is a distinct net loss for people^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompanies like the record company that makes money off Britney Spears. For lesser-known artists, it is probably a net loss, but who knows? For completely unknown artists/singers/moviemakers/wannabe-jedi-knights any publicity might help, even if it means giving their stuff away for free. You know the famous expression "The only bad publicity is no publicity"? Well maybe the same holds true for distribution of copyrighted stuff. The trouble is that we'll never know.
Who is this noone fellow, and why was he speaking for an atrocious speller like you?
Oh, you mean "no-one", two words, hyphenated. The statement "there was nune (phonetic spelling) left to speak out for me" sure loses its dramatic power don't you think? It actually becomes kind-of comical. If you'd rather be powerful than comical, try to spell better.
What about if "Dad" takes care of food, lodging, education and health care, that's it. I don't think that systems where poor people are blindly given cash are the answer, but I think it just makes sense to take care of everybody's basic needs. If what you provide is difficult to turn into money, then the incentive to be a lazy bum is gone, but those who truly have trouble making ends meet are not forced to either cut out health care (and risk passing on disease to others), or turn to crime because it's all they know.
Well said... and I might add, I wasn't saying that the government should be Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and blindly giving to the poor. I think the poor should be given things that are hard to exchange for money: Free basic healthcare, free basic education, free basic food, etc. That would remove the incentive to just be lazy and take money, but would keep people healthy and educated. I'm not saying that most poor people are lazy, far from it, but I do know people who are lazy and have taken advantage of programs meant to help people who really need it.
Taking care of everybody, rich and poor is just good common sense. Even if you're a cold-hearted bastard who couldn't care less about poor people dying of disease, you should note that if poor people are catching the plague, unless you completely cut yourself off from them, you'll probably catch it too.
I happen to use the vulcan nerve pinch (right ctrl-alt, standard delete.
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
Um, the media I see is in English, not in Hebrew (normally used as a noun to describe the language, not the people, who are typically called Jews). And just to set the record straight, there are many Americans who aren't racist or anti-jewish, even in private.
On the other hand, I do happen to agree with the "bunch of frat boys running business". Their skin-color isn't an issue, but their fratboyness is.
As for McBride's religion, considering how religious most of the US is, it's not a big deal. The US Attorney General is a devout pentecostalist. Pentecostalists apparently believe that one should not engage in drinking, dancing, or going to the theatre.
Aside from him, Bush regularly uses religious messages in all his speeches. In a recent case there was a huge uproar over removing the protestant version of the 10 commandments from a Supreme Court building in Alabama.
For those of us who aren't religious, the rest of the country seems to bathe in religious kookery at times... so finding out that McBride is a moron... er... mormon is no big deal.