So, this is yet another area in which we can enjoy our superiority to average non-geeks. While they "pay per play" on their new HDTV sets and are forced to pay for content, we can sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. We've worked hard for this right, and there's nothing "they" can do to take it away from us. We deserve it.
Until they start to cripple the computer hardware that your tools run on. Encrypt the BIOS, only allow DRM enabled OS's to access hardware, legislate open and free alternatives away as "enabling" devices that cost producers their IP. Forget fair use, that is already history. Welcome to the future, where you either work for a corporation or you're part of the problem. Get used to it!
Is it just me or is now a really good time to start buying uncrippled hardware? I've noticed that the current generation of devices (PVR, MP3 Players, DVD+RW, CD-RW, Hard Drives etc.) do not have DRM technology included. I've also noticed that the next generation of hardware will have this technology included, possibly at gunpoint by the content providers. I will be buying lot's of tech soon to avoid the DRM cripples that are due in all our hardware. I will also be closely monitoring the computer situation to buy my next machine just before they encrypt the BIOS and only allow DRM enabled operating systems to run on these systems. If you don't think this will happen, you have learned nothing from 100 years of corporate behaviour. If they can, they will. Usually just because they can.
Sure, Microsoft might control a majority of the systems, but I don't think they could ever achieve something like absolute control simply because the Microsoft solution isn't for everybody.
Unless of course, the RIAA, MPAA, US Govt. et al. legislate Microsoft as the only trusted entity able to control content and keep the "pirates" from stealing it. This is the real danger. Everyone knows after all that Linux users are all "pirate" and thieves. Why else would they be using "free" software?
As a Christian, I stopped doing Christmas many years ago when it became evident (Christmas lights on the local Sikh temple) that Christmas had nothing to do with Christ and everything to do with $$$. As a non-conforming consumer, I find it simple to resist the annual guilting that comes from my non-Christian family and friends. I buy them gifts unexpectedly during the year and give of my time to them whenever they need me.
I've worked many Christmas days in the past, but this year I actually have it off as a paid holiday. I'm enjoying the time off, examing the life of Christ in the scriptures and celebrating his death, the part of his life that has meaning for all of us. Why celebrate his birth, a time when none of us, including Christ, have achieved anything worth celebrating.
Nowhere in the bible does Christ ask we celebrate his birth. He does ask that we remember his death though.
1 Corinthians 11:20
23 For I received from the Lord that which I also handed on to YOU, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was going to be handed over took a loaf 24 and, after giving thanks, he broke it and said: "This means my body which is in YOUR behalf. Keep doing this in remembrance of me." 25 He did likewise respecting the cup also, after he had the evening meal, saying: "This cup means the new covenant by virtue of my blood. Keep doing this, as often as YOU drink it, in remembrance of me." 26 For as often as YOU eat this loaf and drink this cup, YOU keep proclaiming the death of the Lord, until he arrives.
Again, Christmas does not now and never has had anything to do with true Christianity. We can thank the Roman's and the pagan druids for our current holiday, which combines tree worship- (Germany), winter solstice (druids) and the Roman Saturnalia into a bastardized holiday that has been co-opted by corporate American interests starting in the late 19th century (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan et al.)
So, have a happy Walmart day and enjoy your plastic products. See you in the new year.
I still say they should simply move or sell thier service to a company in some other country where the DMCAA or the RIAA have no legal handholds on the way music is distributed. Then what would they do, cry and complain that they should conform to the way north america and europe handle these situations.
No, the RIAA would simply do what big oil has done for years. Hire the US Marines (via Presidential, Senate and Congressional campaign contributions) to go in and smoke the country. During the rebuilding process, make sure you install a RIAA friendly government and voila, problem solved.
So much for the moral superiority of the mighty U.S.A.
http://vector.cshl.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.ht ml
The original "Final Solution" was started in Indiana 33 years before NAZI Germany. How far will we go to cleanse these low-functioning human beings from the gene pool?
this offends me. the united states gives more to the world peace than any other nation. we act like the world police force. we help people in need, we do everything in our power to assist other nations. We try to help every way we know how, and this is the thanks we get
"We the people" believe a lot of different stuff. Trying to put religion in schools, AND keep any signifigant fraction of us happy, would be a neat trick. We don't need to put religion in schools. We just need to teach things like morality, ethics, the difference between right and wrong, love thy neighbor, treat others as you would be treated etc. And then we need to teach fear. Fear that if you don't do these things, the government will get you. (Can't use fear of God after all) This NEEDS to be taught in public school because MOST (not all) parents are too uninformed/lazy/apathetic to teach it to their kids.
The original poster had it cold though. In this predominantly Christian nation, taking these items out of public education and replacing them with an "everything you want to do including torturing puupies is okay because you had a rotten childhood" attitude is not the answer. I don't pretend to know what the answer might be, but to simply let things go on the way they are...
Well, if the free-market is so great, why the hell is a crap engine like MSN getting 6 times the searches as Google?
Same reason the lemmings are all using Windows 9x and not OS/2. Marketing, hype and FUD.
People don't go to what's best, they go to what corporations lead them to because it makes them money.
Beta, VHS etc. etc. Everyone says, stop crying that the better stuff lost, it couldn't survive in the marketplace. As if this was the objective. Product development is all about LCD. Joe Sixpack rules and since he don't spell so good and he don't think so good, our products damn well better not be too good. We might alienate him.
You should look realistically at your free-market mantra and see it for what's its worth: a load of crap. The free market is free only to those who have the power to control it.
Eventually, we'll end up with a world of thirds. One third will be the ruthless, greedy ones who foist off inferior products on one of the other thirds, the clueless consumers. The last third will be the ones who make the world work. The techs, the engineers, the thinkers and tinkers. Which third do you want to be in? Right now it appears that the first third is in charge. The second third could care less as long as the ball games on the tube and the beer is cold. I guess that leaves progress up to the last third.
But I still have not seen anything that comes close to matching the functionality of PM on Linux.
I'll say. Back in 94 (Warp 3.0) before Windows 95 came out, I was convinced that IBM had a great product that would beat Win95 into the ground. Technically, it beat it all to hell. Flat memory model, true multitasking etc. etc. etc. The biggest thing was usability. I installed it into an office full of technophobe bookkeepers and they loved it. The true strength of OS/2 has always been the WPS. Object based, not oriented, moving targets automatically updated links (shortcuts for the MS challenged) and many other great usability features. Legendary stability (ask any Canadian bank what they run at the teller and inside the ATM) and yet... it wasn't enough. As soon as Mick and the boys "Started Up" it became apparent that a shoddy, poorly concieved, bug riddled piece of rabbit dung was going to win. Some say good MS marketing, bad IBM marketing, I say it was a case of an entire industry being bought and paid for with FUD and promises of a better world.
I still use OS/2, mainly for dabbling in REXX and playing with. It's still the coolest OS out there.
Yours was not the only one, i noticed SEVERAL posts that were modded down when they shouldn't have been. It looks to me that some moderator was simply on crack or something and marked a lot of posts as offtopic when they weren't, redundant when it was only one, and other unfairly moded posts. Thankfully there are a lot of moderators to conteract the idoit ones.
I think what must happen (probably alot) is that someone will recieve moderator access, not understand what it is and end up clicking the nifty boxes to see what will happen. Other times, I'm sure people get bored with moderating and simply burn the points of to no good purpose.
The last American citizen was arrested and placed in jail today. His constitutional rights were waived (no one to read them to him) and he voluntarily gave himself up to prison authorities (loneliness). This brings to a close the era of freedom and democracy in the United States.
Prison officials place the numbers like this: 38% of the population have been convicted of posession of small quantities of marijuana. 42% have been convicted of circumventing the DMCA. 12% were convicted of violent crimes and 8% are lawyers. Since we are now all felons (including the President and Congress), no one is able to serve in office, enter law enforcement or even vote. Word from the Chinese Government has just come in...
Microsoft creates seamonkeys.microsoft.com advertises to all my customers and offers prices so low I can't compete. I lose.
No way. Microsoft is a software company for starters and their high principles would never let them do something like this. Why if they were capable of this, they might go on to develop a hardware platform to run their software on, selling it for a ridiculously low price and putting all the computer makers out of business. That would never happ... oh wait.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
Look at the situation of our planet in relation to our species. Single point of failure and when you try to expand the safety net, all you get is bitching about how wasteful NASA is and why can't we have more cotton candy please. That's why private users (and corps) will fall for it. The alternative (personal responsibility, forward and unselfish thinking) is simply too difficult.
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because.Net or Passport are down?
It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
Hmmm... And what good would it do these students? How many entry level jobs say "KOffice Experience Required"? Keep in mind that the computers are used by more than just the geeks at school anymore.
Discussion overheard in HR department or Megacorp Inc. in 2015:
Director: We need 500 new office drones to further our agenda of global domination. Find them.
HR Guy: Sorry boss, no one knows exactly how or why, but we can't find anyone who knows anything about the new.NET XP Global Domination software from MS that cost us gazillions of dollars.
Director: (wringing hands) The board will crucify me... what can be done??
HR Guy: Well, I can get 500 people who know everything about free software that will achieve the same goals. They are well educated, creative thinkers that would be an asset to our corp.
Director: Get IT on the phone. I want our platforms changed over now. People our our greatest asset and if wee don't respond to their needs, our competition will.
Promoting the Free Software agenda should not be done at the expense of others. Schools have a responsibility to give students some real world skills that they can use, not to enlighten or indoctrinate. I believe there is room for free software in schools, but certainly not that they should ignore the software that is in 90% of the desktops out there.
Oh, I guess we should continue with our corporate indoctrination programs as well by allowing advertising (prevalent in our society), murder (prevalent in our society), guns (prevalent in our society), selfishness (prevalent in our society), gluttony (prevalent in our society) into the schools as well.
I am a scientist, and people mistake the issues here constantly. The problem is not that the earth is warming. The problem is that we have too many people; we are dangerously close to the carrying capacity of the Earth, and any change in the temperature, warmer or colder, could be disasterous.
Wrongo. We have really shortsighted and ridiculous distribution problems. If mankinds primary objective was the highest possible quality of life for everyone, we could all live comfortable lives. As long as people continue to be as selfish as they are, you end up with situations like we have now. In one country, people are unable to secure sufficient food to survive, (Sub-saharan Africa) while in another country, the second leading cause of preventable death is too many calories (the USA). Enlightened self interest? No, just greed.
It is true that the earth goes through natural cycles. But just because they are natural, doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about them. This is something to be terribly, terribly worried about; it's far more scary than the prospect of, say, giant meteorite impacts. There is evidence that at points in the past, the entire planet was covered in ice. Think our civilization could survive that?
In the long view, we should be terribly worried. Unfortunately, most people are not very concerned with the long view. People who continually dump on NASA for wasting money that could be better spent on providing their children with better Pokemon breakfast cereal come to mind.
The earth's climate is a delicate system, and we don't know what controls it. If you don't know how your life-support system works, it's probably a bad idea to start messing with it. Right now, we are dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. We don't know what it will do in the long term. This is a dumb thing to do.
Well, I recently spent some time on the Darwin Award's website. Your comment immediately brought to my mind that the USA has a Darwin candidate running the country. Does that extend the award to the entire population that allowed this to happen, or only to those who die due to his short sighted and selfish actions?
I'll get flamed for it, but I'll say this, too: Open Source software.... Free Software... means platform independence. It doesn't mean Linux. It doesn't mean BSD. It means that I get to choose.
And that really is the bottom line. Back in 93-94 I managed to convince 3 or 4 people at work to try out OS/2. One still uses it, one is on Linux and the other two fell to the "dark side". We all had a choice. Microsofts vision is a world with no choice but Microsoft. Why people cannot see the inherent evil in this, I just don't understand.
Didn't the lad from Nazareth mention something about "the road less traveled"?
Here's an idea. Disband NASA. Turn space projects over to the private sector.
Unfortunately, we'd just end up in even worse shape. The private sector would quickly figure out that no one was buying and would rededicate their efforts into selling another 2 billion dollars worth of Pokemon to the masses. That's what the private sector is good for. Government is for doing all of the unpopular but needful things.
3. Under the Kansas Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Act, the seizing authority is not required to prove that the money seized was a result of conduct which gave rise to the forfeiture.
This quote was found here: http://www.kscourts.org/kscases/ctapp/2000/2000072 8/83662.htm
Once you get through some of this material, you'll see where this is going.
this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
No, you missed the point. This is all about a proscecutor for the State of Georgia justifying 18 months of his time and his waste of State resources. He must recoup these costs for the State or else it's his carreer and life that will be on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
So, this is yet another area in which we can enjoy our superiority to average non-geeks. While they "pay per play" on their new HDTV sets and are forced to pay for content, we can sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. We've worked hard for this right, and there's nothing "they" can do to take it away from us. We deserve it.
Until they start to cripple the computer hardware that your tools run on. Encrypt the BIOS, only allow DRM enabled OS's to access hardware, legislate open and free alternatives away as "enabling" devices that cost producers their IP. Forget fair use, that is already history. Welcome to the future, where you either work for a corporation or you're part of the problem. Get used to it!
Is it just me or is now a really good time to start buying uncrippled hardware? I've noticed that the current generation of devices (PVR, MP3 Players, DVD+RW, CD-RW, Hard Drives etc.) do not have DRM technology included. I've also noticed that the next generation of hardware will have this technology included, possibly at gunpoint by the content providers. I will be buying lot's of tech soon to avoid the DRM cripples that are due in all our hardware. I will also be closely monitoring the computer situation to buy my next machine just before they encrypt the BIOS and only allow DRM enabled operating systems to run on these systems. If you don't think this will happen, you have learned nothing from 100 years of corporate behaviour. If they can, they will. Usually just because they can.
Sure, Microsoft might control a majority of the systems, but I don't think they could ever achieve something like absolute control simply because the Microsoft solution isn't for everybody.
Unless of course, the RIAA, MPAA, US Govt. et al. legislate Microsoft as the only trusted entity able to control content and keep the "pirates" from stealing it. This is the real danger. Everyone knows after all that Linux users are all "pirate" and thieves. Why else would they be using "free" software?
If you beleive that... doesn't that mean you're religious??
7 50 458
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25327&cid=2
As a Christian, I stopped doing Christmas many years ago when it became evident (Christmas lights on the local Sikh temple) that Christmas had nothing to do with Christ and everything to do with $$$. As a non-conforming consumer, I find it simple to resist the annual guilting that comes from my non-Christian family and friends. I buy them gifts unexpectedly during the year and give of my time to them whenever they need me.
I've worked many Christmas days in the past, but this year I actually have it off as a paid holiday. I'm enjoying the time off, examing the life of Christ in the scriptures and celebrating his death, the part of his life that has meaning for all of us. Why celebrate his birth, a time when none of us, including Christ, have achieved anything worth celebrating.
Nowhere in the bible does Christ ask we celebrate his birth. He does ask that we remember his death though.
1 Corinthians 11:20
23 For I received from the Lord that which I also handed on to YOU, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was going to be handed over took a loaf 24 and, after giving thanks, he broke it and said: "This means my body which is in YOUR behalf. Keep doing this in remembrance of me." 25 He did likewise respecting the cup also, after he had the evening meal, saying: "This cup means the new covenant by virtue of my blood. Keep doing this, as often as YOU drink it, in remembrance of me." 26 For as often as YOU eat this loaf and drink this cup, YOU keep proclaiming the death of the Lord, until he arrives.
Again, Christmas does not now and never has had anything to do with true Christianity. We can thank the Roman's and the pagan druids for our current holiday, which combines tree worship- (Germany), winter solstice (druids) and the Roman Saturnalia into a bastardized holiday that has been co-opted by corporate American interests starting in the late 19th century (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan et al.)
So, have a happy Walmart day and enjoy your plastic products. See you in the new year.
I still say they should simply move or sell thier service to a company in some other country where the DMCAA or the RIAA have no legal handholds on the way music is distributed. Then what would they do, cry and complain that they should conform to the way north america and europe handle these situations.
No, the RIAA would simply do what big oil has done for years. Hire the US Marines (via Presidential, Senate and Congressional campaign contributions) to go in and smoke the country. During the rebuilding process, make sure you install a RIAA friendly government and voila, problem solved.
So much for the moral superiority of the mighty U.S.A.t ml
http://vector.cshl.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.h
The original "Final Solution" was started in Indiana 33 years before NAZI Germany. How far will we go to cleanse these low-functioning human beings from the gene pool?
this offends me. the united states gives more to the world peace than any other nation. we act like the world police force. we help people in need, we do everything in our power to assist other nations. We try to help every way we know how, and this is the thanks we get
Except pay your U.N. bills.
"We the people" believe a lot of different stuff. Trying to put religion in schools, AND keep any signifigant fraction of us happy, would be a neat trick.
We don't need to put religion in schools. We just need to teach things like morality, ethics, the difference between right and wrong, love thy neighbor, treat others as you would be treated etc. And then we need to teach fear. Fear that if you don't do these things, the government will get you. (Can't use fear of God after all) This NEEDS to be taught in public school because MOST (not all) parents are too uninformed/lazy/apathetic to teach it to their kids.
The original poster had it cold though. In this predominantly Christian nation, taking these items out of public education and replacing them with an "everything you want to do including torturing puupies is okay because you had a rotten childhood" attitude is not the answer. I don't pretend to know what the answer might be, but to simply let things go on the way they are...
OS/2 2.0 command line is still used in a lot of ATM's. Reason: Stability. No blue screens.
Well, if the free-market is so great, why the hell is a crap engine like MSN getting 6 times the searches as Google?
Same reason the lemmings are all using Windows 9x and not OS/2. Marketing, hype and FUD.
People don't go to what's best, they go to what corporations lead them to because it makes them money.
Beta, VHS etc. etc. Everyone says, stop crying that the better stuff lost, it couldn't survive in the marketplace. As if this was the objective. Product development is all about LCD. Joe Sixpack rules and since he don't spell so good and he don't think so good, our products damn well better not be too good. We might alienate him.
You should look realistically at your free-market mantra and see it for what's its worth: a load of crap. The free market is free only to those who have the power to control it.
Eventually, we'll end up with a world of thirds. One third will be the ruthless, greedy ones who foist off inferior products on one of the other thirds, the clueless consumers. The last third will be the ones who make the world work. The techs, the engineers, the thinkers and tinkers. Which third do you want to be in? Right now it appears that the first third is in charge. The second third could care less as long as the ball games on the tube and the beer is cold. I guess that leaves progress up to the last third.
But I still have not seen anything that comes close to matching the functionality of PM on Linux.
I'll say. Back in 94 (Warp 3.0) before Windows 95 came out, I was convinced that IBM had a great product that would beat Win95 into the ground. Technically, it beat it all to hell. Flat memory model, true multitasking etc. etc. etc. The biggest thing was usability. I installed it into an office full of technophobe bookkeepers and they loved it. The true strength of OS/2 has always been the WPS. Object based, not oriented, moving targets automatically updated links (shortcuts for the MS challenged) and many other great usability features. Legendary stability (ask any Canadian bank what they run at the teller and inside the ATM) and yet... it wasn't enough. As soon as Mick and the boys "Started Up" it became apparent that a shoddy, poorly concieved, bug riddled piece of rabbit dung was going to win. Some say good MS marketing, bad IBM marketing, I say it was a case of an entire industry being bought and paid for with FUD and promises of a better world.
I still use OS/2, mainly for dabbling in REXX and playing with. It's still the coolest OS out there.
Yours was not the only one, i noticed SEVERAL posts that were modded down when they shouldn't have been. It looks to me that some moderator was simply on crack or something and marked a lot of posts as offtopic when they weren't, redundant when it was only one, and other unfairly moded posts. Thankfully there are a lot of moderators to conteract the idoit ones.
I think what must happen (probably alot) is that someone will recieve moderator access, not understand what it is and end up clicking the nifty boxes to see what will happen. Other times, I'm sure people get bored with moderating and simply burn the points of to no good purpose.
Washington, April 2017
The last American citizen was arrested and placed in jail today. His constitutional rights were waived (no one to read them to him) and he voluntarily gave himself up to prison authorities (loneliness). This brings to a close the era of freedom and democracy in the United States.
Prison officials place the numbers like this: 38% of the population have been convicted of posession of small quantities of marijuana. 42% have been convicted of circumventing the DMCA. 12% were convicted of violent crimes and 8% are lawyers. Since we are now all felons (including the President and Congress), no one is able to serve in office, enter law enforcement or even vote. Word from the Chinese Government has just come in...
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Reminds me of a movie I once saw... And Justice For All$$$$$$$$$
"just in case one of our bank tellers is drunk, we accept no responsibility for lost or misplaced payments" you'd laugh and find a new bank.
Which is why MS wants to be the only "bank" in town.
Microsoft creates seamonkeys.microsoft.com advertises to all my customers and offers prices so low I can't compete. I lose.
No way. Microsoft is a software company for starters and their high principles would never let them do something like this. Why if they were capable of this, they might go on to develop a hardware platform to run their software on, selling it for a ridiculously low price and putting all the computer makers out of business. That would never happ... oh wait.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
.Net or Passport are down?
Look at the situation of our planet in relation to our species. Single point of failure and when you try to expand the safety net, all you get is bitching about how wasteful NASA is and why can't we have more cotton candy please. That's why private users (and corps) will fall for it. The alternative (personal responsibility, forward and unselfish thinking) is simply too difficult.
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because
It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
Hmmm... And what good would it do these students? How many entry level jobs say "KOffice Experience Required"? Keep in mind that the computers are used by more than just the geeks at school anymore.
Discussion overheard in HR department or Megacorp Inc. in 2015:
Director: We need 500 new office drones to further our agenda of global domination. Find them.
HR Guy: Sorry boss, no one knows exactly how or why, but we can't find anyone who knows anything about the new
Director: (wringing hands) The board will crucify me... what can be done??
HR Guy: Well, I can get 500 people who know everything about free software that will achieve the same goals. They are well educated, creative thinkers that would be an asset to our corp.
Director: Get IT on the phone. I want our platforms changed over now. People our our greatest asset and if wee don't respond to their needs, our competition will.
Promoting the Free Software agenda should not be done at the expense of others. Schools have a responsibility to give students some real world skills that they can use, not to enlighten or indoctrinate. I believe there is room for free software in schools, but certainly not that they should ignore the software that is in 90% of the desktops out there.
Oh, I guess we should continue with our corporate indoctrination programs as well by allowing advertising (prevalent in our society), murder (prevalent in our society), guns (prevalent in our society), selfishness (prevalent in our society), gluttony (prevalent in our society) into the schools as well.
I am a scientist, and people mistake the issues here constantly. The problem is not that the earth is warming. The problem is that we have too many people; we are dangerously close to the carrying capacity of the Earth, and any change in the temperature, warmer or colder, could be disasterous.
Wrongo. We have really shortsighted and ridiculous distribution problems. If mankinds primary objective was the highest possible quality of life for everyone, we could all live comfortable lives. As long as people continue to be as selfish as they are, you end up with situations like we have now. In one country, people are unable to secure sufficient food to survive, (Sub-saharan Africa) while in another country, the second leading cause of preventable death is too many calories (the USA). Enlightened self interest? No, just greed.
It is true that the earth goes through natural cycles. But just because they are natural, doesn't mean you shouldn't worry about them. This is something to be terribly, terribly worried about; it's far more scary than the prospect of, say, giant meteorite impacts. There is evidence that at points in the past, the entire planet was covered in ice. Think our civilization could survive that?
In the long view, we should be terribly worried. Unfortunately, most people are not very concerned with the long view. People who continually dump on NASA for wasting money that could be better spent on providing their children with better Pokemon breakfast cereal come to mind.
The earth's climate is a delicate system, and we don't know what controls it. If you don't know how your life-support system works, it's probably a bad idea to start messing with it. Right now, we are dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. We don't know what it will do in the long term. This is a dumb thing to do.
Well, I recently spent some time on the Darwin Award's website. Your comment immediately brought to my mind that the USA has a Darwin candidate running the country. Does that extend the award to the entire population that allowed this to happen, or only to those who die due to his short sighted and selfish actions?
Nope (or at least, if he did, nobody wrote it down.) Robert Frost said something a little like it, though :)
Ahhh... sorry. The path to him is narrow and the road to damnation is broad. That's the thought I was looking for.
I'll get flamed for it, but I'll say this, too: Open Source software.... Free Software... means platform independence. It doesn't mean Linux. It doesn't mean BSD. It means that I get to choose.
And that really is the bottom line. Back in 93-94 I managed to convince 3 or 4 people at work to try out OS/2. One still uses it, one is on Linux and the other two fell to the "dark side". We all had a choice. Microsofts vision is a world with no choice but Microsoft. Why people cannot see the inherent evil in this, I just don't understand.
Didn't the lad from Nazareth mention something about "the road less traveled"?
Here's an idea. Disband NASA. Turn space projects over to the private sector.
Unfortunately, we'd just end up in even worse shape. The private sector would quickly figure out that no one was buying and would rededicate their efforts into selling another 2 billion dollars worth of Pokemon to the masses. That's what the private sector is good for. Government is for doing all of the unpopular but needful things.
Otherwise law enforcement turns into a for-profit business where the goal isn't to deter crime or protect society.
Welcome to the new world.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/lawful-arrest/
http://www.aclunc.org/opinion/001027-seizure.ht
http://www.libertarianworld.com/Property-Seizur
3. Under the Kansas Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Act, the seizing authority is not required to prove that the money seized was a result of conduct which gave rise to the forfeiture.
This quote was found here: http://www.kscourts.org/kscases/ctapp/2000/200007
Once you get through some of this material, you'll see where this is going.
this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
No, you missed the point. This is all about a proscecutor for the State of Georgia justifying 18 months of his time and his waste of State resources. He must recoup these costs for the State or else it's his carreer and life that will be on the line.