Got some bad news for ya there, Hoser. Canada's descent into soft authoritarianism predated Stephen Harper or the new right wing TV network that's coming to Canada. See your infamous Human Rights Commission. People in your government decided long ago that they simply weren't going to put up with the messiness that is American-style freedom, and things were going to be nice and ordered, for the greater Canadian good.
I'm not sure how he thinks a virus is going to convince the super patriotic Luddites who support the war that their beliefs are totally wrong.
Luddites? It's an email worm, not a "newspaper virus". You're insulting these people by calling them something they're not because you don't agree with their politics.This is transmitted using the Internet. Luddites? Really?
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
You're completely right that Rackspace can do whatever it likes in this case. But I'm wondering if you'd still applaud if they did the same thing to people that wanted to burn Bibles, or host sites with blasphemous photos.
Since when does free (hate) speech outweigh freedom of religion. To be free from persecution. Burning the Koran/Quran is a form of intimidation, much like burning crosses in peoples front yards.
And if he was burning Korans on some Muslim's front yard, you'd have a point about the intimidation. But he's doing this at his Church's own property.
Tell me, how is book burning representative for that quote popularly attributed to Voltaire now again?
You people out there making a difference between "protected speech" and "hate speech" (which in your arguments should be banned) need to at least be consistent. If burning a flag is considered "speech", then why isn't burning a Koran? Either a demonstrative act is speech or it isn't.
BTW, just to puncture the hypocrisy of the whole "hate speech isn't free speech" meme that's popping up on the web, I'm pretty sure that Luther's 99 Theses, Tom Paine's Common Sense, and even the Declaration of Independence were considered hate speech by their opponents. And I don't want to hear the "fire in a crowded theater" argument either, because in this case, it's stupid and wrong. If you can ban this jerk from burning his Korans over the issue of "public safety" (because of all the people in Bezerkistan that are threatening to kill Americans now), then go ahead and apologize for protecting Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. After all, he incensed a lot of people too. Again, at least be consistent.
Given that the monthly income is roughly $50, I doubt a lack of broadband is what keeps them up at night.
Thank you. You've got people saying things like "We've got to get broadband to the third world so they can catch up!". Broadband? Many of these people don't even have clean water supplies, or a house that isn't made of trash or mud. Just how much is a freakin' broadband connection going to help them?
"I agree, but why not just stop subsidizing corn, instead of taxing HFCS based products?"
Why not cease subsidizing all foods? I'm sure these subsidy programs started with the best of intentions, but the obesity epidemic is yet another example of the path to hell being paved by good intentions. Not to mention the sheer insanity of paying a farmer not to grow food. Your boss would never say "Hey, you're coding too much. I'll pay you to code less". Our whole subsidized agriculture policy is pure Kafka-esque madness.
The distinction is both important and meaningless. File sharing itself is not illegal, but the term is usually applied to what the protocols are used for: copyright infringement. It's a much less loaded term than "piracy" when used in a formal sense.
You can make the argument that piracy is too harsh a word for individual copyright infringment, but you could also make the argument that "file sharing" in the context of infringement is basically a way of legitimizing something illegal... a kind of PR. Calling it file sharing is a bit like calling illegal aliens "undocumented workers". It's a kind of spin.
Well the Beatles and Rolling Stones made hundreds of millions more than the Grateful Dead by not making their music free.
They might not had made hundreds of millions of dollars if not for insane copyright law.
Sure they would have. Because copyright law was largely irrelevant as far as pirating music back then. Tape recorders were crude, and there was no way to make quality reproductions of songs for the average listener. If you wanted the record, you had to buy it from the store. Even into the 80's and early 90's, your best option was recording an album from cassette to cassette, and even with some higher end tape decks, you still didn't get sound quality as good as the original. Computer technology is what changed things, not copyright law. Now, suddenly any schmuck can make a perfect copy of a CD and distribute it to millions of his closest friends on the Internet.
Yet another country that realizes you can make more money if the music is free. Didn't the Grateful Dead already figure this out?
This is a silly argument on its face, and doesn't square with history. The Grateful Dead made a lot of money off of their model, but they were the exception to the rule, and their major contemporaries made vastly more sums of money than they did. The key to truly big time success is mass media exposure, not word of mouth. Word of mouth can help break an artist out of anonymity, but it's no substitute for being played on radio, TV, and for selling CD's and iTunes downloads. Lots of other artists... some of them already established... have tried the "give it away and charge for concerts" model, and no one since the GD has really made big money off of that model. There's no substitute for having a record company promoting you, and they're not going to do that if no one is paying for the music.
*The New Criterion* is a very contentious magazine - they're very, very conservative. Think of their ideas about core curricula in the humanities as thinking that every computer science student should learn not only assembly, C, and formal language theory, but also learn COBOL and FORTRAN, how to replace a vacuum tube, and the protocols for teletype terminals, rather than all that fancy-schmansy object-oriented and functional programming stuff...
Which might be relevant except that while technology constantly changes, the core literary and philosophical works of a civilization do not. You add to the great works of a civilization, but you don't toss great works away as obsolete. Aristotle is as relevant now as he was in his own time, perhaps more so. COBOL is just a technology that is becoming superseded by other technologies. No one is going to supersede the works of Shakespeare. You're very much comparing apples and oranges here.
As for the New Criterion being a conservative leaning journal... and?
Coincidentally, I read a piece today comparing the core curricula of Columbia vs. that of Harvard over the years. The gist of the piece was that while Harvard has had some interesting experimentation, they've also been prone to basing their course requirements on esoteric themes that no one outside of academia really sees the point in, and that Columbia, by contrast, has been much more committed to the classical means of teaching and curriculum. In short, the article posits that Columbia is more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (and hopefully, some wisdom), while Harvard is much more into being a trendsetter and concentrating on the process of learning. Columbia: it's what you learn. Harvard: it's how you learn. Most people have this mental image of Harvard as being a place where you're enveloped in Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare, and apparently, unless you choose to be, that's not true anymore. There's really not a reading list that all students are required to master anymore. If you want to leave all that dusty stuff behind, hey, fine by the profs. Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. So if you're looking for a classical Ivy League education, ironically Harvard may be the last place you should go.
Wikileaks isn't journalism because they don't do journalism. They have some guys doing opinion pieces, and that's about as close as it comes. They're largely just a repository for leaked documents. Being in possession of a leaked document doesn't make you a professional reporter.
Ah yes, paying for healthcare is stealing, but spending money on military is fine. You guys are really weird sometimes.
In the US Constitution, defense is specifically a duty of the federal government (in Article 1, section 8). Health care is not. Nor does most of the public want it to be.
Isn't that like going to a concert and sleeping with the lead singer and crying rape/molestation?.
So obviously the bitch asked for it, eh? Nice.
The fact is that neither you nor I knows what went on in that bedroom, what kind of activities were agreed to, and whether or not Assange crossed the line. He may be completely innocent. But what I see is the majority of posters on Slashdot doing the same thing they did in the Hans Reiser case... assume that because the accused was "one of them", that it was all a conspiracy against him. There are still people on Slashdot that insist Reiser was innocent even after he confessed.
Why manned? Sending robots on a one-way mission is always going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than sending humans and safely bringing them back home. However, sending humans on a one-way mission may be cheaper still!
I simply don't understand how anyone human can have this attitude. I'm all for doing most exploration via robitic means, but for man never to go to new areas himself? Further, if we don't do it, someone else... China, India, Russia, someone... is going to go. They're certainly not going to ignore the human factor.
Exploration isn't just about science, and never has been. In fact, even with the advent of the scientific revolution, I'd say science has been at best a minor motivation. Simply getting there is part of what makes us human.
Since real manned exploration of Mars is a pipe dream at this point (both technologically and financially), a manned trip to an asteroid is just the ticket if you want to stay in the manned exploration business. The Moon? Been there done that. Mars? Can't do that yet. Asteroids are do-able, and when it comes to manned exploration, fairly cheap. Unless we're going to abandon manned exploration completely, then an asteroid is the next logical "First" for NASA.
That's the current definition of "concervative" in the US. Most of his viewers probably define themselves this way.
OK, prove your assertion. Specifically what makes Beck... or conservatives for that matter... racist? What makes him a nutjob? Be specific. You're making the accusations. The onus is on you to prove them.
If you don't agree with conservatism or don't like Beck, fine. But if you're going to accuse them of these things, man up and prove it. I see you've been modded informative when the only thing you've informed us is that you've made a bunch of accusations... some of them serious...without any citations.
The Metro is a communist conspiracy. Real Americans drive everywhere and don't notice that the road are government-funded as well.
Real Americans think your "Real Americans" joke isn't a Communist conspiracy, but is worn out nearly as badly as "in Soviet Russia" or "Netcraft confirms it". If you're going to insult said Real Americans, at least try to come up with something interesting in the future.
between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.
However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy that sell at any gas station or book store.
"Telling the difference" isn't the problem. Finding it is if you've never been there before. And I imagine that many of the people going have never even been to DC before.
"The fact of the matter is that racism is endemic within the Tea Party, and if it's not, then its clearly tolerated."
The fact of the matter is that you haven't proven any facts... just made an assertion of your opinion being gospel, and you've failed to back it up with anything other than more opinion.
This is reminiscent of the whole "they called John Lewis a nigger!" accusation, and after months of pouring over video and audio of the rally where it supposedly happened, not one shred of evidence has been found. Even the New York Times finally published a correction stating that no evidence of the accusation has been found.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: "Fox North."
-FL
Got some bad news for ya there, Hoser. Canada's descent into soft authoritarianism predated Stephen Harper or the new right wing TV network that's coming to Canada. See your infamous Human Rights Commission. People in your government decided long ago that they simply weren't going to put up with the messiness that is American-style freedom, and things were going to be nice and ordered, for the greater Canadian good.
That's a loaded and subjective statement - care to back it up?
"Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." - Dean Steacy, Canadian Human Rights Commission
I'm not sure how he thinks a virus is going to convince the super patriotic Luddites who support the war that their beliefs are totally wrong.
Luddites? It's an email worm, not a "newspaper virus". You're insulting these people by calling them something they're not because you don't agree with their politics.This is transmitted using the Internet. Luddites? Really?
awesome, it's nice to see a company with a bit of a spine, freedom of speech is one thing, but no-one has to provide a stage.
You're completely right that Rackspace can do whatever it likes in this case. But I'm wondering if you'd still applaud if they did the same thing to people that wanted to burn Bibles, or host sites with blasphemous photos.
Since when does free (hate) speech outweigh freedom of religion. To be free from persecution. Burning the Koran/Quran is a form of intimidation, much like burning crosses in peoples front yards.
And if he was burning Korans on some Muslim's front yard, you'd have a point about the intimidation. But he's doing this at his Church's own property.
Tell me, how is book burning representative for that quote popularly attributed to Voltaire now again?
You people out there making a difference between "protected speech" and "hate speech" (which in your arguments should be banned) need to at least be consistent. If burning a flag is considered "speech", then why isn't burning a Koran? Either a demonstrative act is speech or it isn't.
BTW, just to puncture the hypocrisy of the whole "hate speech isn't free speech" meme that's popping up on the web, I'm pretty sure that Luther's 99 Theses, Tom Paine's Common Sense, and even the Declaration of Independence were considered hate speech by their opponents. And I don't want to hear the "fire in a crowded theater" argument either, because in this case, it's stupid and wrong. If you can ban this jerk from burning his Korans over the issue of "public safety" (because of all the people in Bezerkistan that are threatening to kill Americans now), then go ahead and apologize for protecting Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. After all, he incensed a lot of people too. Again, at least be consistent.
3891% of the average monthly income
Given that the monthly income is roughly $50, I doubt a lack of broadband is what keeps them up at night.
Thank you. You've got people saying things like "We've got to get broadband to the third world so they can catch up!". Broadband? Many of these people don't even have clean water supplies, or a house that isn't made of trash or mud. Just how much is a freakin' broadband connection going to help them?
While volunteering in Ghana, I was actually told "You are American? You have Obama! He will buy a TV for all Americans!"
Why were you surprised at this? You've got Americans thinking he'll pay their bills for them too.
"I agree, but why not just stop subsidizing corn, instead of taxing HFCS based products?"
Why not cease subsidizing all foods? I'm sure these subsidy programs started with the best of intentions, but the obesity epidemic is yet another example of the path to hell being paved by good intentions. Not to mention the sheer insanity of paying a farmer not to grow food. Your boss would never say "Hey, you're coding too much. I'll pay you to code less". Our whole subsidized agriculture policy is pure Kafka-esque madness.
The distinction is both important and meaningless. File sharing itself is not illegal, but the term is usually applied to what the protocols are used for: copyright infringement. It's a much less loaded term than "piracy" when used in a formal sense.
You can make the argument that piracy is too harsh a word for individual copyright infringment, but you could also make the argument that "file sharing" in the context of infringement is basically a way of legitimizing something illegal... a kind of PR. Calling it file sharing is a bit like calling illegal aliens "undocumented workers". It's a kind of spin.
Well the Beatles and Rolling Stones made hundreds of millions more than the Grateful Dead by not making their music free.
They might not had made hundreds of millions of dollars if not for insane copyright law.
Sure they would have. Because copyright law was largely irrelevant as far as pirating music back then. Tape recorders were crude, and there was no way to make quality reproductions of songs for the average listener. If you wanted the record, you had to buy it from the store. Even into the 80's and early 90's, your best option was recording an album from cassette to cassette, and even with some higher end tape decks, you still didn't get sound quality as good as the original. Computer technology is what changed things, not copyright law. Now, suddenly any schmuck can make a perfect copy of a CD and distribute it to millions of his closest friends on the Internet.
Yet another country that realizes you can make more money if the music is free. Didn't the Grateful Dead already figure this out?
This is a silly argument on its face, and doesn't square with history. The Grateful Dead made a lot of money off of their model, but they were the exception to the rule, and their major contemporaries made vastly more sums of money than they did. The key to truly big time success is mass media exposure, not word of mouth. Word of mouth can help break an artist out of anonymity, but it's no substitute for being played on radio, TV, and for selling CD's and iTunes downloads. Lots of other artists... some of them already established... have tried the "give it away and charge for concerts" model, and no one since the GD has really made big money off of that model. There's no substitute for having a record company promoting you, and they're not going to do that if no one is paying for the music.
*The New Criterion* is a very contentious magazine - they're very, very conservative. Think of their ideas about core curricula in the humanities as thinking that every computer science student should learn not only assembly, C, and formal language theory, but also learn COBOL and FORTRAN, how to replace a vacuum tube, and the protocols for teletype terminals, rather than all that fancy-schmansy object-oriented and functional programming stuff...
Which might be relevant except that while technology constantly changes, the core literary and philosophical works of a civilization do not. You add to the great works of a civilization, but you don't toss great works away as obsolete. Aristotle is as relevant now as he was in his own time, perhaps more so. COBOL is just a technology that is becoming superseded by other technologies. No one is going to supersede the works of Shakespeare. You're very much comparing apples and oranges here.
As for the New Criterion being a conservative leaning journal... and?
Coincidentally, I read a piece today comparing the core curricula of Columbia vs. that of Harvard over the years. The gist of the piece was that while Harvard has had some interesting experimentation, they've also been prone to basing their course requirements on esoteric themes that no one outside of academia really sees the point in, and that Columbia, by contrast, has been much more committed to the classical means of teaching and curriculum. In short, the article posits that Columbia is more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge (and hopefully, some wisdom), while Harvard is much more into being a trendsetter and concentrating on the process of learning. Columbia: it's what you learn. Harvard: it's how you learn. Most people have this mental image of Harvard as being a place where you're enveloped in Plato, Milton, and Shakespeare, and apparently, unless you choose to be, that's not true anymore. There's really not a reading list that all students are required to master anymore. If you want to leave all that dusty stuff behind, hey, fine by the profs. Columbia requires all students to study the important books of the western cannon. So if you're looking for a classical Ivy League education, ironically Harvard may be the last place you should go.
Wikileaks isn't journalism because they don't do journalism. They have some guys doing opinion pieces, and that's about as close as it comes. They're largely just a repository for leaked documents. Being in possession of a leaked document doesn't make you a professional reporter.
Ah yes, paying for healthcare is stealing, but spending money on military is fine. You guys are really weird sometimes.
In the US Constitution, defense is specifically a duty of the federal government (in Article 1, section 8). Health care is not. Nor does most of the public want it to be.
You seem to be erroneously conflating "socialism" and "authoritarianism"
Historically, they usually go hand in hand.
Isn't that like going to a concert and sleeping with the lead singer and crying rape/molestation? .
So obviously the bitch asked for it, eh? Nice.
The fact is that neither you nor I knows what went on in that bedroom, what kind of activities were agreed to, and whether or not Assange crossed the line. He may be completely innocent. But what I see is the majority of posters on Slashdot doing the same thing they did in the Hans Reiser case... assume that because the accused was "one of them", that it was all a conspiracy against him. There are still people on Slashdot that insist Reiser was innocent even after he confessed.
Why manned? Sending robots on a one-way mission is always going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than sending humans and safely bringing them back home. However, sending humans on a one-way mission may be cheaper still!
I simply don't understand how anyone human can have this attitude. I'm all for doing most exploration via robitic means, but for man never to go to new areas himself? Further, if we don't do it, someone else... China, India, Russia, someone... is going to go. They're certainly not going to ignore the human factor.
Exploration isn't just about science, and never has been. In fact, even with the advent of the scientific revolution, I'd say science has been at best a minor motivation. Simply getting there is part of what makes us human.
Since real manned exploration of Mars is a pipe dream at this point (both technologically and financially), a manned trip to an asteroid is just the ticket if you want to stay in the manned exploration business. The Moon? Been there done that. Mars? Can't do that yet. Asteroids are do-able, and when it comes to manned exploration, fairly cheap. Unless we're going to abandon manned exploration completely, then an asteroid is the next logical "First" for NASA.
That's the current definition of "concervative" in the US. Most of his viewers probably define themselves this way.
OK, prove your assertion. Specifically what makes Beck... or conservatives for that matter... racist? What makes him a nutjob? Be specific. You're making the accusations. The onus is on you to prove them.
If you don't agree with conservatism or don't like Beck, fine. But if you're going to accuse them of these things, man up and prove it. I see you've been modded informative when the only thing you've informed us is that you've made a bunch of accusations... some of them serious...without any citations.
The Metro is a communist conspiracy. Real Americans drive everywhere and don't notice that the road are government-funded as well.
Real Americans think your "Real Americans" joke isn't a Communist conspiracy, but is worn out nearly as badly as "in Soviet Russia" or "Netcraft confirms it". If you're going to insult said Real Americans, at least try to come up with something interesting in the future.
between the Lincoln memorial and the FDR memorial you have no business going to Washington DC.
However if you decide to go anyway, they do have still pre-printed maps checked for accuracy
that sell at any gas station or book store.
"Telling the difference" isn't the problem. Finding it is if you've never been there before. And I imagine that many of the people going have never even been to DC before.
"The fact of the matter is that racism is endemic within the Tea Party, and if it's not, then its clearly tolerated."
The fact of the matter is that you haven't proven any facts... just made an assertion of your opinion being gospel, and you've failed to back it up with anything other than more opinion.
This is reminiscent of the whole "they called John Lewis a nigger!" accusation, and after months of pouring over video and audio of the rally where it supposedly happened, not one shred of evidence has been found. Even the New York Times finally published a correction stating that no evidence of the accusation has been found.
My conjecture: Most of the tea party folks got involved because the president doesn't look like them. And that scared the hell out of them.
Disprove that.
So you accuse your opponents of racism, and then put the burden of proof on them... all while posting AC.
You're anonymous, but you're also truly a coward. Disprove that.