I am saying the gov't should spend my money as I see fit. Or, even better, that I should spend my money as I see fit. taxation is theft. To steal my money and then spend it on what I do not support is even worse.
No, I'm not an anarchist; it's obvious that some amount of gov't is needed, and that taxes are needed as well. Taxation is like the killing an attacker: necessary but unfortunate. We should keep them to a minimum.
As far as parks, if people won't pay for them then they shouldn't exist. Same iwth anything, really. If you wish to preserve something, then do it. get a bunch of people together and do it. Form a massive world-spanning organisation and do it. But don't make me.
Notice I say make me. I contribute a large amount of money to causes great and small. I only object when my contribution is stolen from me at gunpoint--i.e., by Uncle Sam.
Re:Isn't it just like a library cardex? Guess what
on
A Pair of Google Bits
·
· Score: 2
Why make it governmental? Why force every one of us to pay for it? Why make the poor as well as the rich fund it? Why not let private parties fund it, through the medium of ads? It sure seems to be working so far--Google's great.
Your mouse doesn't need to handle grit, dust, sand, shell fillings, water, sweat, urine, blood, hair, flesh, clothing fragments &c. A mouse used in a tank or on a ship would. Think about it.
This doesnt spell out very fun for us... if it turns out the traits that create civilizations of our type lead to pretty much assured
self-annhilation.
I suppose here is as good a place as any to wrte this. I have become quite fed-up with this notion that war will somehow lead to the end of our species. Really, I find it quite ridiculous.
War is a rotten thing with a lot of bad effects--it's very rarely worth the expense. But there's always at least one winner left at the end. What about nuclear war, in which two sides could conceivably destroy each other utterly? It won't happen. Nuclear weapons will not be used on a large-scale basis until mankind is spread across several planets. And when that happens nuking one planet will do nothing at all to that other planet.
Nukes may be used on a small scale here, but I doubt it. Too much stigma in every nation. Pity, too--some of the clean weapons are, quite frankly, amazing. FAEs are still cheaper, though--and they don't give the nuts as much of a scare.
The reason that we care about drug companies--and any other company performing research--is that we, as a society, need said drugs. So we give the companies an incentive to create them, but then we take them over some years later.
Why don't we fund research publicly? Really, it's much the same thing--taking from others (right to one's earning's rather than right to mix chemicals) to give to another. But, as anyone who's taken a decent economics course cna tell you, private research generally yields much better results than public research. It's profit-oriented. And profit is an indicator of utility. There's a huge market for viagra--a lot of people want it. The market for a drug to make one impotent is somewhat smaller. Gov't is notoriously bad at prioritising--what if some ivory-tower scientist figures that impotence-causing drugs are much more itneresting physiologically? Never mind that ten years and millions of dollars later society has not benefited one bit.
Disney wil perpetually have rights to the Mickey mouse character as a trademark. Look at Bass Ale: they've had the red triangle for centuries. What was up to expire was the copyright on some of the first Mickey Mouse films--Steamboat Willie, that sort of thing. Wouldn't hurt Disney a bit--a pinprick on a giant. But it pained them in their minds to know that they might possibly lose a right they should never have had.
Copyright should be 20 yrs.--long enough to make money, long enough for a work to no longer be current (and thus valuable), but short enough that it may actually do some good.
It's not caring about someone making money off of one's software--that's a given under any OS license. What GPL-types worry about is someone taking that code base, then closing it off--thus getting all that development work for free. If, say, M$ took a BSD'd Linux and slapped M$ Linux on a thousans store-shelves with a few proprietary incompatibility extensions, it might very well kill off the real 'BSD-Linux.'
BSD advocates believe, I think, that given a choice between X for free and X' for a price, X' will cost only what the added value of the ' is worth. I would like to agree, and in a perfect market I would agree. But there is no perfect market in the world today. People, being morons, are quite happy to pay $x for X', where $x is the total value of X', not simply the added value, even though economically it would be smarter to use X for free, getting all the functionality of X' save ', but saving an amount of money equal to functionality(X)+'.
People are the problem.
The GPL is a nuisance, I agree. If this were a sufficiently more perfect world then I would most definitely use BSD. But it's not, and thus I don't. The BSD license allows more freedom--that's a good thing. But the GPL protects freedom. The one is like three acres of apples, exposed to the birds and the beasts. The latter is like an acra of apples, with farmhands to scare away the animals. At the end of the day, the tended land has more apples. Thus with the GPL.
Look, it's called common courtesy. They don't mind people using their name--they just want to introduce some distinction. Not using the pink-meat symbol and lowercasing the word are easy and, in the case case, much more attractive.
I challenge you to show me a site you've created that will look equally well in a 320x240 screen
*and* a 1600x1200 screen, without a fundamental change in how it appears.
Slashdot in text mode. My own site. Any site which uses text, the proper method of literate communication. Pictures are for three-year-olds.
I'm not against such a regulation. I'm for it. But what I am against is the sloppy use of the word 'right.' If one has a right to unfettered cable access, than no-one can charge you for it; indeed, all the rest of us would have to ante up to send it into Appalachia &c. The point I've tried to make is that rights are a particular philosophical concept. One has a right to life, liberty and property--there is no right to access.
I agree that in the absence of true competition (not oligopoly, which the megacorps like to claim is competition), the State must step in and remedy things. With true competition it would not really matter if each line provider were tied to an net provider--we could pick-and-choose. But we do not have true competition. I'm not certain that such a thing is really possible--I have a nasty feeling that utilities are a natural monopoly and that nothing can really be done to change that. Thus they fall under the purview of the government, unfortunately.
Now, take the $1 million you're putting into your house and hire 20 people back at $50K/year. Or whatever proportion you'd like.
Why? Those who are laid off are not returning value worth their salaries. The money put into the house, though, is. And that money isn't buried in a pit--it goes to pay for servants, for engineers, for architects, for cable-spinners, for miners, for truckers ad infinitum.
Or don't build something into your house that's going to consume all the power in California. Or how about that asshole who has a 300
gallon/minute shower. Nice concern for the environment there.
He's paying for the water, you know. After we're kids and we get out of our parents' homes, water is no longer free. The cost of water more than covers the expense of extracting, purifying and delivering it. Various taxes are also tacked on, I believe, with the intention of limiting use.
What should not be ignored is the things you set aside: æsthetic desirability, tasteful design: beauty. Why is it that we, the most powerful, most resourceful, most materially blessed of all generations, cannot come up with some attractive buildings? Give me an Edwardian home, in wood, leather, more wood, stone, wood and wood over any nasty piece of modern so-called design. Give me an overstuffed wingback over some Bauhaus pain-in-the-rump. Give me beauty over horror anyday.
They're in the business of selling bandwidth. Once I've bought that bandwidth, it's mine to do with as I please. That's why I disagree with these ridiculous AUPs from ISPs. If they didn't want me sending and receiving packets, they should not have sold that privilege to me. If I sell you my car you don't cry that you have no transportation.
My objection to calling connectivity a right is that rights are things which others and the state are duty-bound to guarantee. A right cannot be something which costs anybody else--else it is theft. It hurts no-one if I speak freely, worship the God I choose, carry a gun, smoke a cigar, smoke a joint, enjoy the free use of my property, dress how I wish, use Linux or do any other such thing. It hurts us all plenty if net access is a right--we'll have to pay the bill. It's less a right than those other two non-existent rights, food and clothing.
Why not charge everyone the same rate for his usage, i.e. what it costs to produce. That's like saying that apples are 50c, unless you buy them by the bushel, in which case they're 75c. Socialist.
There isn't a right to those things. Ask someone who lives in the country about it sometime. You generally have to pay for a well to be dug, or pipes to be run, or wires to be strung &c. There are some exceptions--I believe the phone company must provide local service, while you pay for only the line to your home from some regional office,--but my point stands.
And this is only right. The only right you have is to do as you please 'til you harm another. There's no such thing as a right to food, water, electricity, plumbing, healthcare, a job or Internet access.
OTOH you do have a right to do whatever you want with the bandwidth you buy. This nonsense of disallowing servers must be stopped. @Home delenda est.
I started sending my relatives
mp3s of me talking to them already rather than a typee letter. Sure they are larger, but it si almost like a one sided phone call.
And a thousand thousand secretaries found their god...
What a senseless waste of bandwidth. And to think we once took issue with a 10K uudecoded files.
Not to mention that voice recognition is stupid for the current phase of computer. Sure, it would work great someday with an AI to speak with. But given the current state of our art, can you really imagine what a voice interface would be like. 'computer, remove all files ending in.o' Whoops, it heard 'remove all files.' Not to mention that it's ever so much quicker to type rm *.o...
Imagine the cacophony of a voice-run office. `Jim, can you quiet down--I'm getting bleedover from you.' `What's that? I can't hear a thing in here.'
A computer is a tool. We don't talk to our hammers, nor to our cars. We talk to carpenters and mechanics. Until a computer is as intelligent as a man, or even a dog, really, what's the point of voice recognition?
Many of you (esp. those in Europe) don't realise how primitive some parts of the US actually are. There are still folks in Louisiana and Appalachia without electricity (true, it's by choice these days), and running water is not even everywhere. In many rural areas landowners have wells and septic fields/tanks. In drier areas (such as in the mountains here in Colorado) water is precious enough in some remote parts that toilets are still of the wooden-outhouse variety. I still remember a souvenir shop near Buena Vista which had naught but an outhouse. 'Twas most amusing.
so yes, even parts of the US might find a similar idea attractive.
As to its efficacy, I'm not so certain. It seems like it won't exactly be doing much for these people. We're not talking about the US, where 'puters are cheap and money is relatively easy to come by. I daresay that a lot of the third world has more important things on its mind than running networks between villages. But perhaps I'm wrong.
I am completely confident that the
work we have done could not have been accomplished with 4 times the resources using any other programming environment that is
available today, let alone 5 years ago when we started.
So you're saying that you could not have completed the project in 20 years' time? In that time we've gone from MS-DOS to Linux under Enlightenment under GNOME. Java might be great, but it ain't that great.
Good luck on your release. You're right, though--I'll be shying away from it because I distrust Java. Es tut mir leid.
More was not a bishop, but a politician. He had at least one kid, a daughter IIRC. He is a catholic saint, due to his martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII, but He was never a bishop.
Well, part of the American-Canadian issue is that the American Tories fled to Canada after our rebellion--so there is a visceral feeling that Canadians are American traitors. One of the reasons, no doubt, for the War of 1812.
We also tend to think of Canada and Mexico as satellite, client or buffer states of the USA. Their presence has protected us from South American and Russian petulance, while at the same time our presence has given them a measure of security and stability. Canada even uses a like-named unit of currency, and the Mexican peso uses the same symbol--the two countries even feel a lot like home when you visit them.
I like Canada. It's clean. People are polite. They have a store called The Beer Store. I don't like their gun laws, their socialism or their metric system, but then I don't live there, so it doesn't affect me. Canada's a neat place, that's for certain.
Canadian Bacon made fun of Americans more than Canadians. IIRC most of the cast were Canadian. I loved it.
I'm all for those who don't wish to have children. It means less competition for me and mine. One thousand years from now, they will not only have no legacy: their very names will be forgotten to history. My descendants, OTOH, will be a mighty number, as will those of every one of us who has them.
A man may be remembered in two ways: his work or his posterity. His work will pass away and fade, and soon he will be nevermore recalled. His posterity wil honour him forever by its very existence.
Those who wish their lines to end with their deaths are free to do so. For what purpose did their ancestors live, though? Indeed, for what purpose do they live? Millions of years of evolution leading to a dead end: a selfish, miserable, pewling wretch. More power to him.
My congratulations to Linus. I wish him and his wife the very best. His children are certain to excel. He must be a very proud father.
You (and anyone else) can argue until you're blue in the face that it doesn't make sense, just like 'could care less' doesn't make sense.
THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. It's an expression, and expressions do not have to make sense.
Well, you can just fribble my frog. After all, if the sink's not attached to the giraffe, how can the car start? Friglar strapfan nibble scot, sud bugger nut prit-prang fitang.
'Could care less' is wrong--and dumb. The correct statement is 'couldn't care less.' Words means things. The full expression under argument is: `You think <erroneous expr.>; well, you've another think coming!' `You've another thing coming' makes no sense--it does not parse. Only a mind with a tenuous grasp on reality--one for which the world is not a real thing, but merely a series of ethereal perceptions, would say such a thing. The mind which is used to the concept of the real, the concrete, the abstract, the philosophical, says what it means and means what it says.
If a thousand thousand slimy things cannot speak their own language, they're still wrong.
But this is all hopelessly off-topic. The original post was quite correct--the Exchange/Outlook combination is full of problems. It has some nice capabilities, but it is troublesome and buggy. Does anyone know of open-source clients for Exchange, or open-source servers for Outlook?
Why not use neural nets? They're deisgned for pattern recognition: this is exactly the case here. We can all tell that a picture in an anatomy text is not pornography, but one of a someone masturbating is. Simply put together a nice large net, assemble a bunch of testers and a large number of images, and go to it. It ought to be fairly simple to automate a lot of this, too: sites with pronography are fairly common; simply match every image within certain parameters as such, while a site like Slashdot or Yahoo could be scanned with the assumption that no images would be pornographic.
This is, after all, what a neural network is for. Sure, writing heuristics for defining what genitalia look like from various angles is hard; so is writing heuristics for defining what faces look like. But neural nets do this well, very well. It's simple pattern recognition; this is why we cannot define porn, but `know it when we see it.'
It'd take a bit of time to train, but I daresay a lot of the training could be concurrent--the testers would simply have their input queued up and the thing would automatically run through it 24/7. And once it was trained its state could simply be frozen and copied.
So, who wants to start work on such a project?
It's be great to open-source this; people could even submit URLs and ratings online. The only problem would be that it might be taken over my morons on either side of the aisle who'd want it not to work; I think that it'd be best to work with a small and trusted group.
Everyone knows the electoral college is an outdated affectation that no longer represents the views of the people.
It never did represent the views of the people. It was never meant to. The Founders knew what they were doing; we're a federal republic, not a democratic nation. If you want to live in a democratic nation, there are many countries offering such. for all its horrible faults, though, I'll stick with the USA, which sucks least.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm not an anarchist; it's obvious that some amount of gov't is needed, and that taxes are needed as well. Taxation is like the killing an attacker: necessary but unfortunate. We should keep them to a minimum.
As far as parks, if people won't pay for them then they shouldn't exist. Same iwth anything, really. If you wish to preserve something, then do it. get a bunch of people together and do it. Form a massive world-spanning organisation and do it. But don't make me.
Notice I say make me. I contribute a large amount of money to causes great and small. I only object when my contribution is stolen from me at gunpoint--i.e., by Uncle Sam.
Why make it governmental? Why force every one of us to pay for it? Why make the poor as well as the rich fund it? Why not let private parties fund it, through the medium of ads? It sure seems to be working so far--Google's great.
Your mouse doesn't need to handle grit, dust, sand, shell fillings, water, sweat, urine, blood, hair, flesh, clothing fragments &c. A mouse used in a tank or on a ship would. Think about it.
I suppose here is as good a place as any to wrte this. I have become quite fed-up with this notion that war will somehow lead to the end of our species. Really, I find it quite ridiculous.
War is a rotten thing with a lot of bad effects--it's very rarely worth the expense. But there's always at least one winner left at the end. What about nuclear war, in which two sides could conceivably destroy each other utterly? It won't happen. Nuclear weapons will not be used on a large-scale basis until mankind is spread across several planets. And when that happens nuking one planet will do nothing at all to that other planet.
Nukes may be used on a small scale here, but I doubt it. Too much stigma in every nation. Pity, too--some of the clean weapons are, quite frankly, amazing. FAEs are still cheaper, though--and they don't give the nuts as much of a scare.
Why don't we fund research publicly? Really, it's much the same thing--taking from others (right to one's earning's rather than right to mix chemicals) to give to another. But, as anyone who's taken a decent economics course cna tell you, private research generally yields much better results than public research. It's profit-oriented. And profit is an indicator of utility. There's a huge market for viagra--a lot of people want it. The market for a drug to make one impotent is somewhat smaller. Gov't is notoriously bad at prioritising--what if some ivory-tower scientist figures that impotence-causing drugs are much more itneresting physiologically? Never mind that ten years and millions of dollars later society has not benefited one bit.
Copyright should be 20 yrs.--long enough to make money, long enough for a work to no longer be current (and thus valuable), but short enough that it may actually do some good.
BSD advocates believe, I think, that given a choice between X for free and X' for a price, X' will cost only what the added value of the ' is worth. I would like to agree, and in a perfect market I would agree. But there is no perfect market in the world today. People, being morons, are quite happy to pay $x for X', where $x is the total value of X', not simply the added value, even though economically it would be smarter to use X for free, getting all the functionality of X' save ', but saving an amount of money equal to functionality(X)+'.
People are the problem.
The GPL is a nuisance, I agree. If this were a sufficiently more perfect world then I would most definitely use BSD. But it's not, and thus I don't. The BSD license allows more freedom--that's a good thing. But the GPL protects freedom. The one is like three acres of apples, exposed to the birds and the beasts. The latter is like an acra of apples, with farmhands to scare away the animals. At the end of the day, the tended land has more apples. Thus with the GPL.
Sheesh, cannot people be polite anymore?
Slashdot in text mode. My own site. Any site which uses text, the proper method of literate communication. Pictures are for three-year-olds.
I agree that in the absence of true competition (not oligopoly, which the megacorps like to claim is competition), the State must step in and remedy things. With true competition it would not really matter if each line provider were tied to an net provider--we could pick-and-choose. But we do not have true competition. I'm not certain that such a thing is really possible--I have a nasty feeling that utilities are a natural monopoly and that nothing can really be done to change that. Thus they fall under the purview of the government, unfortunately.
Why? Those who are laid off are not returning value worth their salaries. The money put into the house, though, is. And that money isn't buried in a pit--it goes to pay for servants, for engineers, for architects, for cable-spinners, for miners, for truckers ad infinitum.
Or don't build something into your house that's going to consume all the power in California. Or how about that asshole who has a 300 gallon/minute shower. Nice concern for the environment there.
He's paying for the water, you know. After we're kids and we get out of our parents' homes, water is no longer free. The cost of water more than covers the expense of extracting, purifying and delivering it. Various taxes are also tacked on, I believe, with the intention of limiting use.
What should not be ignored is the things you set aside: æsthetic desirability, tasteful design: beauty. Why is it that we, the most powerful, most resourceful, most materially blessed of all generations, cannot come up with some attractive buildings? Give me an Edwardian home, in wood, leather, more wood, stone, wood and wood over any nasty piece of modern so-called design. Give me an overstuffed wingback over some Bauhaus pain-in-the-rump. Give me beauty over horror anyday.
My objection to calling connectivity a right is that rights are things which others and the state are duty-bound to guarantee. A right cannot be something which costs anybody else--else it is theft. It hurts no-one if I speak freely, worship the God I choose, carry a gun, smoke a cigar, smoke a joint, enjoy the free use of my property, dress how I wish, use Linux or do any other such thing. It hurts us all plenty if net access is a right--we'll have to pay the bill. It's less a right than those other two non-existent rights, food and clothing.
Why not charge everyone the same rate for his usage, i.e. what it costs to produce. That's like saying that apples are 50c, unless you buy them by the bushel, in which case they're 75c. Socialist.
And this is only right. The only right you have is to do as you please 'til you harm another. There's no such thing as a right to food, water, electricity, plumbing, healthcare, a job or Internet access.
OTOH you do have a right to do whatever you want with the bandwidth you buy. This nonsense of disallowing servers must be stopped. @Home delenda est.
I started sending my relatives mp3s of me talking to them already rather than a typee letter. Sure they are larger, but it si almost like a one sided phone call.
And a thousand thousand secretaries found their god...
What a senseless waste of bandwidth. And to think we once took issue with a 10K uudecoded files.
Not to mention that voice recognition is stupid for the current phase of computer. Sure, it would work great someday with an AI to speak with. But given the current state of our art, can you really imagine what a voice interface would be like. 'computer, remove all files ending in .o' Whoops, it heard 'remove all files.' Not to mention that it's ever so much quicker to type rm *.o...
Imagine the cacophony of a voice-run office. `Jim, can you quiet down--I'm getting bleedover from you.' `What's that? I can't hear a thing in here.'
A computer is a tool. We don't talk to our hammers, nor to our cars. We talk to carpenters and mechanics. Until a computer is as intelligent as a man, or even a dog, really, what's the point of voice recognition?
so yes, even parts of the US might find a similar idea attractive.
As to its efficacy, I'm not so certain. It seems like it won't exactly be doing much for these people. We're not talking about the US, where 'puters are cheap and money is relatively easy to come by. I daresay that a lot of the third world has more important things on its mind than running networks between villages. But perhaps I'm wrong.
Or even P. Two-and-twenty points to whomever gets that reference first:-)
So you're saying that you could not have completed the project in 20 years' time? In that time we've gone from MS-DOS to Linux under Enlightenment under GNOME. Java might be great, but it ain't that great.
Good luck on your release. You're right, though--I'll be shying away from it because I distrust Java. Es tut mir leid.
More was not a bishop, but a politician. He had at least one kid, a daughter IIRC. He is a catholic saint, due to his martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII, but He was never a bishop.
We also tend to think of Canada and Mexico as satellite, client or buffer states of the USA. Their presence has protected us from South American and Russian petulance, while at the same time our presence has given them a measure of security and stability. Canada even uses a like-named unit of currency, and the Mexican peso uses the same symbol--the two countries even feel a lot like home when you visit them.
I like Canada. It's clean. People are polite. They have a store called The Beer Store. I don't like their gun laws, their socialism or their metric system, but then I don't live there, so it doesn't affect me. Canada's a neat place, that's for certain.
Canadian Bacon made fun of Americans more than Canadians. IIRC most of the cast were Canadian. I loved it.
A man may be remembered in two ways: his work or his posterity. His work will pass away and fade, and soon he will be nevermore recalled. His posterity wil honour him forever by its very existence.
Those who wish their lines to end with their deaths are free to do so. For what purpose did their ancestors live, though? Indeed, for what purpose do they live? Millions of years of evolution leading to a dead end: a selfish, miserable, pewling wretch. More power to him.
My congratulations to Linus. I wish him and his wife the very best. His children are certain to excel. He must be a very proud father.
Well, you can just fribble my frog. After all, if the sink's not attached to the giraffe, how can the car start? Friglar strapfan nibble scot, sud bugger nut prit-prang fitang.
'Could care less' is wrong--and dumb. The correct statement is 'couldn't care less.' Words means things. The full expression under argument is: `You think <erroneous expr.>; well, you've another think coming!' `You've another thing coming' makes no sense--it does not parse. Only a mind with a tenuous grasp on reality--one for which the world is not a real thing, but merely a series of ethereal perceptions, would say such a thing. The mind which is used to the concept of the real, the concrete, the abstract, the philosophical, says what it means and means what it says.
If a thousand thousand slimy things cannot speak their own language, they're still wrong.
But this is all hopelessly off-topic. The original post was quite correct--the Exchange/Outlook combination is full of problems. It has some nice capabilities, but it is troublesome and buggy. Does anyone know of open-source clients for Exchange, or open-source servers for Outlook?
This is, after all, what a neural network is for. Sure, writing heuristics for defining what genitalia look like from various angles is hard; so is writing heuristics for defining what faces look like. But neural nets do this well, very well. It's simple pattern recognition; this is why we cannot define porn, but `know it when we see it.'
It'd take a bit of time to train, but I daresay a lot of the training could be concurrent--the testers would simply have their input queued up and the thing would automatically run through it 24/7. And once it was trained its state could simply be frozen and copied.
So, who wants to start work on such a project?
It's be great to open-source this; people could even submit URLs and ratings online. The only problem would be that it might be taken over my morons on either side of the aisle who'd want it not to work; I think that it'd be best to work with a small and trusted group.
And people claim Perl is hard to read!
:-)
It never did represent the views of the people. It was never meant to. The Founders knew what they were doing; we're a federal republic, not a democratic nation. If you want to live in a democratic nation, there are many countries offering such. for all its horrible faults, though, I'll stick with the USA, which sucks least.