What I don't understand is why christians in general would get so upset when we want to take one line out to include all.
To some, that one line is the only thing that justifies the pledge. The word "god" has many meanings - unlike Bhudda, Yaweh or Allah. Taking it out does nothing to include anyone. I believe there is a very practical reason to keep it in the pledge: it keeps religous fundamentalism in check. Look at it this way: if you don't believe in God, it's nothing but a silly anarchrosm being used to keep the undereducated superstitous yokels from revolting. There are actually still people that believe that moral athourity originates from the creator. That would be people like me who believe that a country that is so arrogant to fail to acknoledge God is one that will surely fail.
America has always walked the line well: do not sponsor or support religion, but acknowledge that it exists.
In a democracy (or "republican form of government") it is silly to think that religion can be washed out of government completely - especially if the people are largely religous.
Surely, pledging allegiance to any kind of inanimate object - flag of the USA, or otherwise - is a breach of one of those commandments?
Interesting idea, but this idea will only sell to fundamentalists. Governments and Gods are very different. When they get confused about these roles is when their seems to be problems:)
Still not convinced? From the Treaty of Tripoli: "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion
No kidding, no surprise here. Our country has no state religion and was not started by a religous organization. That does nothing to dilute the point that other posters are making:
* America was founded by Christian people. * Our nation was influenced by Christian thought - our morality and values were and are very much Christian (we sometimes forget the foregiveness and humility stuff). * Freedom of religion is intended to allow a citizen to worship as he or she believes or does not believe.
There is another reason terms like "Under God", "so help me God", "endowed by its Creator", and "in God we trust" are necessary. Religous people place God's athourity above that of the Government. This reassures the religous masses that government knows it's limits. To fail to acknowledge this would set the government on a collision course with religion - when government becomes too oppressive and revolution occurs, religous tyranny is common.
By the way - attendence to church or participation in a formal religion has little to do with an individual's faith. It is possible - indeed common for people who are very religous to not darken the door of a church.
The state can't say one way or another about god (much in the way that Science should remain agnostic barring distinct evidence one way or another) unless it's in discussing religion in a neutral context. This doesn't mean that teachers can't pray, be religious, nor students; rather, you can't use public property or act on behalf of the government in a coercive way when doing it.
The implementation of this concept has left a lot to be desired. Mentioning your faith at work and get fired is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. This is what civil servants and educations have to deal with. Frankly, the pendulum swung too far against religion in the last 20 years, now it's swinging back.
Actually, this was not copy protection. Nothing was done to protect anything. It was a malicious virus designed to make my computer fail to function the way it was designed to.
Nice try Sunncomm. Get a new business plan/technology scam.
I've sold over 80 helpdesk systems in the past five years. I am reading a ton of misconceptions and misunderstandings. The first one is:
Software will solve the problem. Most often broken promises and forgotten requests are due to lack of attention to detail, procrastination and poor attitude. If your team views the user as stupid or as the enemy, you probably won't get far with a ticket tracker. Your software will tell you that you have service problems... it just won't fix them.
Reports, alerts and business rules rule. Before you even sit down and evaluate a package, figure out what reports you'll need, who and when people need to be notified and what automated "business rules" you'll need. A business rule is kind of like "if this is an executive and the ticket has sat for four hours, update the priority feild to urgent". If you can't get the report, alert or automation you need move to the next package.
HIRE A @#$@ing CONSULTANT There are people that have implemented trackers in many, many companies and have made their mistakes already. Implementing a ticket tracker will change the way your IT department functions. A good consultant can make that easy.
Join the Help Desk Institute If you are in a major us city, you may have a chapter near you. HDI is a great way to get to see how other companies in your area deal with problem management (that's the formal name for ticket tracking).
Recommendation: as a former VAR and user, I would steer clear of GoldMine. It's buggy and inflexible. That said it is well documented and uses dbase files.
Our company would make $3-$5 in reactive support for every $1 in software with GoldMine.
It will be like the old ATT case, where the court determined that the plaintiff did not have a valid copyright interest in the code in question, and the case ended there.
What is going to be interesting is when the slander and libel lawsuits start. Should the court find no infringement... that means the last 90 days of venom have been tortous. Every one of us in the Linux community has been damaged.
Why don't you join me in taking your Lexmark crap-printer out back, beating it to death with a baseball bat a la office space fax machine and then boxing it up and sending it to the attention of Mr. Paul Curlander (CEO) with a brief letter enclosed:
Mr. Curlander:
I am completely and totally dissatisfied with your printer. I am completely and totally disgusted with your ink and toner pricing and restrictions. I will not:
* Buy another Lexmark product * Recommend another Lexmark product (I am ________ in a company of __________, and control purchasing of over _____ printers).
You will find the remains of the _____ printer I purchased ____ months ago. It was cheaper to buy a new printer than purchase more ink. The printer wasn't printing well before the incident that destroyed it: it jammed often and was generally fuzzy. The printer was destroyed by me in a fit of rage after it used the last of the cyan ink in a cleaning cycle -- which you have to run if the #@$$ printer has't printed in the last two hours!
RTFM is not a valid complaint. Windows software installs without a manual
With the exception of late 80s and early 90s games that required the third word on third line of the fifth paragraph on the 13th page to install, I have NEVER seen a piece of software, open or closed source that required a manual in order to install.
There simply isnt a way to:
if Manual != Present fuxor installation else roxor
Of course, the installer has to know what to do to make the install go...
Anyways, I've now said EVERY SINGLE THING every partisan in this argument has ever said and will ever say, so you can all just STFU.
Because of what the implecations of the actions 5000 years ago that let to the current state of injustice, future attrocities 9 and 11 will be committed in anticipation of attrocity 8. And the other side will preemptivly perform attrocity 13 to prevent numbers 9 and 10, but in doing so will actually guarantee that numbers 9 and 10 occur.
Seriously: these people would do well to accept reality as it is, and start building their lives. Get rid of the leaders on both sides that are so hell bent on holding thier breath the longest. Exhale and get on with your lives. You only have so many years on earth, so why spend the rest of it fighting over things you have NO CONTROL OVER, DID NOT START AND REALISTICALLY CANNOT FINISH WITHOUT IT ENDING IN YET ANOTHER POMGROM? Neither side has the will or ability to kill off the other, and the world will not let that happen right now.
The "law" is no longer about the "truth", but who can spin the best "half-truths"
Actually, you are somewhat on to something. In a civil lawsuit in order to prevail on the facts, you have to have a "preponderance of evidence". It's almost like 51% wins. Jurries and judges decide who has better proven their case.
Regardless, that everyone who uses Gnutella looks guilty would likely render a large ammount of evidence gathered by RIAA useless and thus make it even harder to prove that someone did in fact harm RIAA (the harm question is another good one).
This is where I like Bush: any bill to create a broad new tax is likely to get vetoed. Bush is still haunted by his dad's "read my lips no new taxes" comment.
Be very concerned if you are an online retailer, or make your money from ecommerce development if Bush looses in 2004. Most democrats wouldn't hesitate to tax the snot out of us.
For those of you unfamiliar with the world of special interest groups, read "Thank You for Smoking" by Christopher Buckley. Special interest groups like the one challenging open source have a very "unique" intrepetation of the truth and literally will say anything to advocate their point. The also smear and attack their opponents on a very personal level.
I refuse to believe there are only 838 stupid people on the internet.
If you count up their aol screen names (8) and other idents (120), you'll find these 838 stupid people represent 107,264 internet users, which i'd say is about the same response you get when you send out say four million spams for wincash or the latest get rich quick scam.
WRONGFree markets seek to equalize supply and demand. In a free market, competition slims profits and lowers costs to the least possible price the market will pay. Monopolies and other barriers to free trade allow producers to hold prices artificially high while costs are reduced. Entry barriers reduce the number of competitors, thus preventing more and better competition.
The issue in the energy market is two fold:
A) Producers of Oil and Natural Gas hold regional monopolies OR are part of a cartel (a kind of monopoly)
B) Transmission/transportation is filled with regional monopolies - pipelines and powerlines are owned by market players.
When the private market can't handle the situation, governement can be a great steward (i.e. highways and waterways). Unfortunately, government is innefficient.
do anything legal to disrupt their Mobile FUD Factory.
I suggest a better way than calling at 3AM and making a complete ass out of yourself and anyone else who likes penguins and Linux software: make sure their event has very few visitors.
* Simply make sure that there is something more important to do than go to the SCO roadshow. Take your boss to lunch, have a meeting, invite HR in to brief your department on Sexual Harassment or for that matter, have that departmental trip to a strip club.
* If you know someone who is going, find something more fun and invite them to go do it. That's not hard considering that attending IT seminars rank slightly above watching paint dry and/or getting your hair cut.
Remember that SCO is not the government and Ghandi was effective in getting the government to change, but remarkably ineffective against the corporation and the market.
It is just that knowing whether someone is deeply religious or not is an important aspect in understanding his motivations.
Most often, you begin to understand how hypocritical the person is when you try to jive their actions with their religion. Americans tend to understand this pretty well. Just because someone is from a particular faith does not mean their actions can be predicted based on that church's teaching.
Darl's actions and his faith are likely not in alignment. They are typical of someone who is greedy. Darl is attempting to steal Linux from it's rightful authors. He is attempting to extort money from people who have legally purchased or otherwise acquired their Linux software. So he's no different than any other person who goes to church and aspires to a "godly" standard of behavior and ethics - he is human and fails miserably.
That he is a Mormon is remarkably uninteresting to most of us.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why christians in general would get so upset when we want to take one line out to include all.
To some, that one line is the only thing that justifies the pledge. The word "god" has many meanings - unlike Bhudda, Yaweh or Allah. Taking it out does nothing to include anyone. I believe there is a very practical reason to keep it in the pledge: it keeps religous fundamentalism in check. Look at it this way: if you don't believe in God, it's nothing but a silly anarchrosm being used to keep the undereducated superstitous yokels from revolting. There are actually still people that believe that moral athourity originates from the creator. That would be people like me who believe that a country that is so arrogant to fail to acknoledge God is one that will surely fail.
America has always walked the line well: do not sponsor or support religion, but acknowledge that it exists.
In a democracy (or "republican form of government") it is silly to think that religion can be washed out of government completely - especially if the people are largely religous.
Surely, pledging allegiance to any kind of inanimate object - flag of the USA, or otherwise - is a breach of one of those commandments?
:)
Interesting idea, but this idea will only sell to fundamentalists. Governments and Gods are very different. When they get confused about these roles is when their seems to be problems
Still not convinced? From the Treaty of Tripoli: "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion
No kidding, no surprise here. Our country has no state religion and was not started by a religous organization. That does nothing to dilute the point that other posters are making:
* America was founded by Christian people.
* Our nation was influenced by Christian thought - our morality and values were and are very much Christian (we sometimes forget the foregiveness and humility stuff).
* Freedom of religion is intended to allow a citizen to worship as he or she believes or does not believe.
There is another reason terms like "Under God", "so help me God", "endowed by its Creator", and "in God we trust" are necessary. Religous people place God's athourity above that of the Government. This reassures the religous masses that government knows it's limits. To fail to acknowledge this would set the government on a collision course with religion - when government becomes too oppressive and revolution occurs, religous tyranny is common.
By the way - attendence to church or participation in a formal religion has little to do with an individual's faith. It is possible - indeed common for people who are very religous to not darken the door of a church.
The state can't say one way or another about god (much in the way that Science should remain agnostic barring distinct evidence one way or another) unless it's in discussing religion in a neutral context. This doesn't mean that teachers can't pray, be religious, nor students; rather, you can't use public property or act on behalf of the government in a coercive way when doing it.
The implementation of this concept has left a lot to be desired. Mentioning your faith at work and get fired is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. This is what civil servants and educations have to deal with. Frankly, the pendulum swung too far against religion in the last 20 years, now it's swinging back.
LOLx2. Educating children is the last thing that most schools spend money on. From what I've seen the top costs in a school are usually:
Teachers come third...
Gotta have priorities.
Actually, this was not copy protection. Nothing was done to protect anything. It was a malicious virus designed to make my computer fail to function the way it was designed to.
Nice try Sunncomm. Get a new business plan/technology scam.
None-the-less, I figured I'd query for more info until we complete our transition to the replacement in the hopes that we can easily export our data
There is a tool called Goldbox that can help you out I think Redstone Softbase is the publisher.
I've sold over 80 helpdesk systems in the past five years. I am reading a ton of misconceptions and misunderstandings. The first one is:
Software will solve the problem. Most often broken promises and forgotten requests are due to lack of attention to detail, procrastination and poor attitude. If your team views the user as stupid or as the enemy, you probably won't get far with a ticket tracker. Your software will tell you that you have service problems... it just won't fix them.
Reports, alerts and business rules rule. Before you even sit down and evaluate a package, figure out what reports you'll need, who and when people need to be notified and what automated "business rules" you'll need. A business rule is kind of like "if this is an executive and the ticket has sat for four hours, update the priority feild to urgent". If you can't get the report, alert or automation you need move to the next package.
HIRE A @#$@ing CONSULTANT There are people that have implemented trackers in many, many companies and have made their mistakes already. Implementing a ticket tracker will change the way your IT department functions. A good consultant can make that easy.
Join the Help Desk Institute If you are in a major us city, you may have a chapter near you. HDI is a great way to get to see how other companies in your area deal with problem management (that's the formal name for ticket tracking).
Recommendation: as a former VAR and user, I would steer clear of GoldMine. It's buggy and inflexible. That said it is well documented and uses dbase files.
Our company would make $3-$5 in reactive support for every $1 in software with GoldMine.
I haven't seen many programs work together better than Word and IE.
A better example is excel and word.
It will be like the old ATT case, where the court determined that the plaintiff did not have a valid copyright interest in the code in question, and the case ended there.
What is going to be interesting is when the slander and libel lawsuits start. Should the court find no infringement... that means the last 90 days of venom have been tortous. Every one of us in the Linux community has been damaged.
Let's hope the EU puts an end to it.
LOLx500. Not going to happen.
Why don't you join me in taking your Lexmark crap-printer out back, beating it to death with a baseball bat a la office space fax machine and then boxing it up and sending it to the attention of Mr. Paul Curlander (CEO) with a brief letter enclosed:
Mr. Curlander:
I am completely and totally dissatisfied with your printer. I am completely and totally disgusted with your ink and toner pricing and restrictions. I will not:
* Buy another Lexmark product
* Recommend another Lexmark product (I am ________ in a company of __________, and control purchasing of over _____ printers).
You will find the remains of the _____ printer I purchased ____ months ago. It was cheaper to buy a new printer than purchase more ink. The printer wasn't printing well before the incident that destroyed it: it jammed often and was generally fuzzy. The printer was destroyed by me in a fit of rage after it used the last of the cyan ink in a cleaning cycle -- which you have to run if the #@$$ printer has't printed in the last two hours!
Good riddance to you lousy printer.
RTFM is not a valid complaint. Windows software installs without a manual
With the exception of late 80s and early 90s games that required the third word on third line of the fifth paragraph on the 13th page to install, I have NEVER seen a piece of software, open or closed source that required a manual in order to install.
There simply isnt a way to:
if Manual != Present fuxor installation else roxor
Of course, the installer has to know what to do to make the install go...
Anyways, I've now said EVERY SINGLE THING every partisan in this argument has ever said and will ever say, so you can all just STFU.
Because of what the implecations of the actions 5000 years ago that let to the current state of injustice, future attrocities 9 and 11 will be committed in anticipation of attrocity 8. And the other side will preemptivly perform attrocity 13 to prevent numbers 9 and 10, but in doing so will actually guarantee that numbers 9 and 10 occur.
Seriously: these people would do well to accept reality as it is, and start building their lives. Get rid of the leaders on both sides that are so hell bent on holding thier breath the longest. Exhale and get on with your lives. You only have so many years on earth, so why spend the rest of it fighting over things you have NO CONTROL OVER, DID NOT START AND REALISTICALLY CANNOT FINISH WITHOUT IT ENDING IN YET ANOTHER POMGROM? Neither side has the will or ability to kill off the other, and the world will not let that happen right now.
. their stock price will bump up and that's about it.
WTF? You terminate one of your most lucrative relationship in business and your stock goes up?
The "law" is no longer about the "truth", but who can spin the best "half-truths"
Actually, you are somewhat on to something. In a civil lawsuit in order to prevail on the facts, you have to have a "preponderance of evidence". It's almost like 51% wins. Jurries and judges decide who has better proven their case.
Regardless, that everyone who uses Gnutella looks guilty would likely render a large ammount of evidence gathered by RIAA useless and thus make it even harder to prove that someone did in fact harm
RIAA (the harm question is another good one).
This is where I like Bush: any bill to create a broad new tax is likely to get vetoed. Bush is still haunted by his dad's "read my lips no new taxes" comment.
Be very concerned if you are an online retailer, or make your money from ecommerce development if Bush looses in 2004. Most democrats wouldn't hesitate to tax the snot out of us.
For those of you unfamiliar with the world of special interest groups, read "Thank You for Smoking" by Christopher Buckley. Special interest groups like the one challenging open source have a very "unique" intrepetation of the truth and literally will say anything to advocate their point. The also smear and attack their opponents on a very personal level.
As a matter of fact, when the Clinton Administration moved into the White House, their audit team discovered that things were far worse than they knew
Fortunately, after two years of Clinton cluelessness, the people elected a Republican congress that had a clue.
Things were going VERY BADLY years one and two for Clinton. The voters bailed him out by poviding a legislative ballance to him.
and a three fingered salute to your invention.
I refuse to believe there are only 838 stupid people on the internet.
If you count up their aol screen names (8) and other idents (120), you'll find these 838 stupid people represent 107,264 internet users, which i'd say is about the same response you get when you send out say four million spams for wincash or the latest get rich quick scam.
Free markets cause power blackouts?
Of course. Free markets seek to maximize profits.
WRONGFree markets seek to equalize supply and demand. In a free market, competition slims profits and lowers costs to the least possible price the market will pay. Monopolies and other barriers to free trade allow producers to hold prices artificially high while costs are reduced. Entry barriers reduce the number of competitors, thus preventing more and better competition.
The issue in the energy market is two fold:
A) Producers of Oil and Natural Gas hold regional monopolies OR are part of a cartel (a kind of monopoly)
B) Transmission/transportation is filled with regional monopolies - pipelines and powerlines are owned by market players.
When the private market can't handle the situation, governement can be a great steward (i.e. highways and waterways). Unfortunately, government is innefficient.
do anything legal to disrupt their Mobile FUD Factory.
I suggest a better way than calling at 3AM and making a complete ass out of yourself and anyone else who likes penguins and Linux software: make sure their event has very few visitors.
* Simply make sure that there is something more important to do than go to the SCO roadshow. Take your boss to lunch, have a meeting, invite HR in to brief your department on Sexual Harassment or for that matter, have that departmental trip to a strip club.
* If you know someone who is going, find something more fun and invite them to go do it. That's not hard considering that attending IT seminars rank slightly above watching paint dry and/or getting your hair cut.
Remember that SCO is not the government and Ghandi was effective in getting the government to change, but remarkably ineffective against the corporation and the market.
It is just that knowing whether someone is deeply religious or not is an important aspect in understanding his motivations.
Most often, you begin to understand how hypocritical the person is when you try to jive their actions with their religion. Americans tend to understand this pretty well. Just because someone is from a particular faith does not mean their actions can be predicted based on that church's teaching.
Darl's actions and his faith are likely not in alignment. They are typical of someone who is greedy. Darl is attempting to steal Linux from it's rightful authors. He is attempting to extort money from people who have legally purchased or otherwise acquired their Linux software. So he's no different than any other person who goes to church and aspires to a "godly" standard of behavior and ethics - he is human and fails miserably.
That he is a Mormon is remarkably uninteresting to most of us.