I may get spam in one of my e-mail accounts (EarthLink's software does a remarkable job on the rest of my accounts), but I never get Latin American teenagers looking to practice their English skills on a hapless American like I do on ICQ.
My God man! My self-description in ICQ boils down to "Go the fuck away" and still they come! That by itself will be the death of instant messaging long before the death of e-mail!
"Sounds like something a rich man would say to someone who propositions a money-less society."
Actually, it sounds like something Frank Herbert would come up with to explain the widespread use of melange among the Navigators, the Bene Geserit (sp?) and the Mentats (among others). But judging from your response, these Dune references also went whizzing over your head.
"The Solution to preventing an asteroidal impact, assuming time is scarce, is a nuclear rocket."
I think it would be easier still to take a few hundred of our thousands of nuclear warheads, send them at the asteroid, and use them to establish a sort of Orion drive to nudge it away. You can't get more off-the-shelf than that.
"and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else."
I Can't Believe You Said That.
That, or I could make a Wizards & Warriors reference, but that would be a little too obscure...
If I were a Sims player (which I'm not), I'd be protesting McDonald's for the God-awful product placement crap EA is pulling, not for the reasons mentioned.
Of course, I'd probably just end up not playing any more, which is probably why I'm not a Sims player to begin with.:)
"Their do NOT completely understand the consequences of their actions. Taking genetic sequences from a horse and inserting it into a dog is not analogus to cross-breeding a german shepard with a cocker spaniel."
Dude, have you fucking looked at german shepards and cocker spaniels? Poodles? Chihuauas? Dachsunds? They're all the same species, and they're all descended from ferral wolves. And you're trying to tell me that the way we've totally fucked up that one species is somehow "better" or "more right" than tinkering with genes directly?
""Harmless" nuclear tests in the Nevada desert are now estimated to have caused 70,000 cancer deaths."
But then we have people like you, who swing the other way. Because the government lied about weapons tests and dosages two generations ago, we now have a public that is anti-nuclear to a fault. They'd rather have the airborne carcinogens of a coal plant than the pure steam of a nuclear plant. They worry about terrorists hitting a nuclear plant without considering that oil and natural gas plants fund terrorism (not to mention how viciously a fossil fuel plant can explode). If anything, your argument is for a cool, rationed judgement and not the knee-jerk reaction you're demonstrating.
"Maybe bioengineered products should get a good, hard look in open tests before being let loose on the world."
But you and so many other people have obviously already made up their mind (not to be confused with "minds"), deciding that no look will ever be good enough. After all, what kind of information research have you done before concluding that "Their do NOT completely understand the consequences of their actions"? Hell, your use of the phrase "let loose on the world" points out your bias.
"I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."
I'd guess the games you're having problems with are DOS-based games (I haven't run into any issues with any pre-XP 9x-native games on XP, and if I did I do know how to turn on the 9x emulation in XP). The reason you're having issues with DOS games is because, unlike 9x, there is no DOS (only Zuul).
So what makes you think that things are going to be so much better on Linux? DOSemu is itself just a DOS emulator (like XP's CLI) with the disadvantage of the coders not having access to the original MS-DOS sourcecode. There's FreeDOS that tries very hard to be MS-DOS with some success, but it's still not MS-DOS. If you're trying to run, say, the original Warcraft II, I'd say you'd have more problems trying to run it under Linux, not less. And you'd also be then emulating Windows software as well as DOS. DOSemu and WINE work best when they have "real" DOS and Windows installations to work with, so you'll still probably end up having at least two OSes on your HDD. You'd probably be better off just dual-booting between XP and some flavor of DOS (98, Me... hell, I think IBM still sells PC-DOS 7.0/2000).
If you want to switch your kids over to Linux because you're a GPL zealot (Microsoft BAD, beer GOOD), just admit it to yourself and the rest of the world. Don't try to dig for complaints that are baseless, they just give you and the rest of the GPL crowd a bad name.
"(User #10379 Info | http://slashdot.org/)... Will it be a cheap "Hanna-Barbera/Toei"-style flat animation, a good-quality "Looney-Tunes"-quality with Carl-Stalling-quality music flat animation"
What, can't you read? Even by just glancing at the article description, I can tell you that it will be neo-HB Tartakovsky animation ala Dexter/Powerpuff/Jack. Duh!
"Yeah look what good Ewoks & Droids did for the SW universe;)"
I suspect that some of the people who worked on the plot and storylines for both episodes 1 and 2 were some of the very same people who wrote for those two shows.
"The homeland security people are fighting the last war, not the next one."
Not even. They're not even dealing with Pearl Harbor very well.
They want to fingerprint tourists. They want to issue manditory national ID. They want machines to collect your e-mail. They want to monitor the use of your library card...
Ignoring what these do to civil liberties for the moment, what do they intend to do with all this gathered information? Just like they've been doing since before the organization of the CIA, all this information will be locked away in some filing cabinet in the basement of some federal building somewhere.
Pearl Harbor and 9/11 both came about because of the focus on information gathering instead of information interpretation. And ideas like this are set to make the same mistakes over and over again well into this new century.
Information may be ammunition, ammo is pretty useless if you don't have a gun.
I'm still pissed off/annoyed that I have to use runas and play the game through an account with administrative privileges. And all I have to do for that is hold down shift and right-click (I give it another week or so before I give up and just change the shortcut, but I'll still have to keep typing in the password).
Now, do you really think I have the patience to get a game to run on a non-native operating system?
Alright, so maybe Windows isn't the most stable operating system in the world. But, after too many years of using a Microsoft operating system of one form or another, I know how to fix 95% of the problems that come up.
And while it's not exactly MacOS, things have a tendancy to work on Windows. Half the times I've tried Linux I found myself sifting through half a dozen HOWTOs when all I want to do is set up a freakin' dial-up internet account. Which pretty much won't work anyway because almost nobody uses modems with on-board controllers any more.
As I saw someone else mention one time, I need an operating system, not a hobby. Mandrake is nice and all, but setting up my hardware still requires a lot more than just sticking in the driver CD and installing it. I'm not going to bug the one or two friends I have who know Linux because I know how annoyed I get when people expect me to fix their Windows problems for them ("Fdisk, format, reinstall and leave me the Q@$#^ alone!"). And I can't be bothered to try to learn how to write my own drivers when all I want to do is play Warcraft III, advocacy be damned.
"Why do some atheists feel they have to run around being jack-asses just like those they hate?"
I'm not atheist, though. I have issues with people, not religions.
"Sure, there is the occasional fanatic monotheist who runs around yacking at people. If you don't believe what they have to say, ignore them."
Except that, in the past millenia or so, monotheist extremists have shown themselves able and willing to do some extremely not-nice things to people who don't share their beliefs. From the blood-letting of the Protestant Reformation to 9/11.
Besides, this is right up their alley. Ever heard of the Library of Alexandria?
"This law is about forbidding the spread of ideas from this bad guy 'Adolf Hitler'. That's the background. That's all background. period."
I don't see Germany tearing up the old Autobahn, though. Don't want Hitler's idea for a straight, high-speed highway to get around.
Oh, and then there's that evil idea of his of a "people's car." Better outlaw Volkswagon.
Better lock up all the vegetarians while you're at it as well. Lord knows all the horror that one can cause...
People are evil. Ideas are just ideas. They're only good or bad when people pass judgement on them as such. And you're limiting the people's right to decide for themselves.
"You guys in the US did not have such a time,"
Cherokees, Apaches and other native groups may disagree with you on that one.
"maybe therefore there is a couple of guys in your country who celebrate Hitler, celebrate Nazi's"
And they're morons. Anybody who glorifies a facist regime and then flies the flag of a confederate government is a complete moron in my book. But they have a right to be morons so long as they're not actively hurting anybody else.
"I think that here in Europe we have a different understanding of freedom, it is not less freedom nor is it more freedom than in the US. It's just different."
What I was trying to say is that your view is flawed. The European view of rights is that they somehow don't belong to individuals but to "society." That view ignores the fact that society is a human construct.
"My isp provider does not even log when I am online, does not log my dynamic address, so whatever page I visit, government cannot find out those web pages, even if they want.
(etc.)"
I never said anything about the US being "more free" than Europe. I was trying to point out the flaw of "1+1=3" I was pointing out that the US Constitution is all but unique in the world for considering the fact that all rights rest with the individual and the free exercise of those rights are surrendered to the government. European laws like this come from the idea that rights originate with the government to be passed down to the individual.
Hell, at this point I'd go so far as to say that the concept of inherent rights originating with the individual is a demonstrable scientific theory.
Oh, by the way, different states and even different local governments have different laws. Don't assume that every law in the US is a national one. Everything you just listed is legal in at least one state.
"We all are not allowed to have sex with children."
See my previous paragraph. Different states define statutory rape at different ages, along with the minimum age for marriage licenses.
"So, keep in mind freedom is not to be allowed to say anything; this is anarchy."
No, freedom is the ability to exercise the rights you were born with, the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Government is there just to make sure that nobody steps on anybody else's rights when they do what they will. Anarchy is what happens when there is nobody around but yourself to ensure that you are still able to freely exercise your rights.
"Freedom is to be allowed to think different, to talk different, to have different opinions."
Then, by your own definition, the anti-speech law eliminates freedom.
"This so called censorship applies to Nazi pages, applies to celebrating Hitler, applies to sentences like 'The Holocaust never happened'. That's the reason. ANd those pages are as bad as having sex with little children."
The concept behind statutory rape laws is that children are too young to decide for themselves. If you're equating statutory rape laws to censorship laws, then you must believe that most people are less able to make a correct decision than you are. Which happens to be one of Hitler's core philosophies.
If anything, it's censorship that is the same as statutory rape. Both involve making up somebody else's mind, and both involve forcing your opinions on others who have no choice.
"For instance, the continued existence of evil proves that an omnipotent and perfectly good God (as we understand those concepts) cannot exist."
Omnipresence means just that. Your statement works on the assumption that God would be on one side but not the other. But you can't be more in one place than another and still be omnipresent.
"The Australian government is planning to block websites used to organize violent protests, as part of a larger effort to prevent crime from being planned on the 'net."
If they're inciting a riot, then charge them as such and let them defend themselves in a court of law. It looks like this law is designed to let the government decide by itself whether a website is planning a crime and lets them block it all by themselves without first charging the owners with a crime.
"I don't believe in a concept of creation that grants you any rights. It's the society around you that does. This society came up with those rules based on its own history, to prevent bad things that happened to them in the past from happening again and to attempt to promote "good" things."
Society is another human construct. If humans as individuals don't have the ability to exercise these rights to begin with, where does society as a whole get the ability to do so?
" where do you draw the line of where your rights end and another persons rights begin."
At exactly the point where it starts to infringe on somebody else's ability to exercise their rights.
"the government took away that right because that would seriously "hamper" the other persons right to live."
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed(.)
Government is there to make sure that people don't exercise their rights in such a way that infringes on somebody else's ability to do so.
However, to say that the government "took away that right" suggests that it was within the government's power to grant the right to begin with.
"at this point, it's society (and its representatives, the government) that decides where your rights end and another persons rights begin."
But how can society be greater than the sum of its parts?
"If He does not exist at all, there's no reason that couldn't be proven"
The only way you can prove or disprove the existence of something is to look for one place where it exists and one place where it is absent. Since part of the concept of God revolves around omnipresence, you couldn't find two points in the universe that have different amounts of God.
"(though it's hard to say what would constitute evidence)"
There can be no evidence because there is literally nothing else in the universe you could compare and contrast it to.
"Most of the founders of the US were Deists"
Only the Deists themselves claim that. Do you have proof?
Slashdot Mirror
"Did RMS tell them they couldn't use GNU/Linux, or is this more Microsoft propaganda at work?"
Maybe India just noticed how Bill doesn't get bent out of shape when you don't refer to it as Microsoft/Windows.
I may get spam in one of my e-mail accounts (EarthLink's software does a remarkable job on the rest of my accounts), but I never get Latin American teenagers looking to practice their English skills on a hapless American like I do on ICQ.
My God man! My self-description in ICQ boils down to "Go the fuck away" and still they come! That by itself will be the death of instant messaging long before the death of e-mail!
"Sounds like something a rich man would say to someone who propositions a money-less society."
Actually, it sounds like something Frank Herbert would come up with to explain the widespread use of melange among the Navigators, the Bene Geserit (sp?) and the Mentats (among others). But judging from your response, these Dune references also went whizzing over your head.
"The Solution to preventing an asteroidal impact, assuming time is scarce, is a nuclear rocket."
I think it would be easier still to take a few hundred of our thousands of nuclear warheads, send them at the asteroid, and use them to establish a sort of Orion drive to nudge it away. You can't get more off-the-shelf than that.
"and if they want to ruin it by giving points for hitting yourself on the head with a duck, well, either get a duck or spend your gaming budget somewhere else."
I Can't Believe You Said That.
That, or I could make a Wizards & Warriors reference, but that would be a little too obscure...
If I were a Sims player (which I'm not), I'd be protesting McDonald's for the God-awful product placement crap EA is pulling, not for the reasons mentioned.
:)
Of course, I'd probably just end up not playing any more, which is probably why I'm not a Sims player to begin with.
"Please stop the FUD man."
Hypocrite.
"Their do NOT completely understand the consequences of their actions. Taking genetic sequences from a horse and inserting it into a dog is not analogus to cross-breeding a german shepard with a cocker spaniel."
Dude, have you fucking looked at german shepards and cocker spaniels? Poodles? Chihuauas? Dachsunds? They're all the same species, and they're all descended from ferral wolves. And you're trying to tell me that the way we've totally fucked up that one species is somehow "better" or "more right" than tinkering with genes directly?
""Harmless" nuclear tests in the Nevada desert are now estimated to have caused 70,000 cancer deaths."
But then we have people like you, who swing the other way. Because the government lied about weapons tests and dosages two generations ago, we now have a public that is anti-nuclear to a fault. They'd rather have the airborne carcinogens of a coal plant than the pure steam of a nuclear plant. They worry about terrorists hitting a nuclear plant without considering that oil and natural gas plants fund terrorism (not to mention how viciously a fossil fuel plant can explode). If anything, your argument is for a cool, rationed judgement and not the knee-jerk reaction you're demonstrating.
"Maybe bioengineered products should get a good, hard look in open tests before being let loose on the world."
But you and so many other people have obviously already made up their mind (not to be confused with "minds"), deciding that no look will ever be good enough. After all, what kind of information research have you done before concluding that "Their do NOT completely understand the consequences of their actions"? Hell, your use of the phrase "let loose on the world" points out your bias.
"What happens when you get a call? Even if you don't answer it the phone still sends the ring signal."
Ah, but I have a quantum phone. If nobody is there to hear it, it both does and does not ring.
... make sure you do it right.
"I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."
I'd guess the games you're having problems with are DOS-based games (I haven't run into any issues with any pre-XP 9x-native games on XP, and if I did I do know how to turn on the 9x emulation in XP). The reason you're having issues with DOS games is because, unlike 9x, there is no DOS (only Zuul).
So what makes you think that things are going to be so much better on Linux? DOSemu is itself just a DOS emulator (like XP's CLI) with the disadvantage of the coders not having access to the original MS-DOS sourcecode. There's FreeDOS that tries very hard to be MS-DOS with some success, but it's still not MS-DOS. If you're trying to run, say, the original Warcraft II, I'd say you'd have more problems trying to run it under Linux, not less. And you'd also be then emulating Windows software as well as DOS. DOSemu and WINE work best when they have "real" DOS and Windows installations to work with, so you'll still probably end up having at least two OSes on your HDD. You'd probably be better off just dual-booting between XP and some flavor of DOS (98, Me... hell, I think IBM still sells PC-DOS 7.0/2000).
If you want to switch your kids over to Linux because you're a GPL zealot (Microsoft BAD, beer GOOD), just admit it to yourself and the rest of the world. Don't try to dig for complaints that are baseless, they just give you and the rest of the GPL crowd a bad name.
"If they make a Star Wars cartoon, they can make a whole new range of merchandise to keep em going until Ep3 comes out..",
Spaceballs the Toilet Paper!
"(User #10379 Info | http://slashdot.org/) ... Will it be a cheap "Hanna-Barbera/Toei"-style flat animation, a good-quality "Looney-Tunes"-quality with Carl-Stalling-quality music flat animation"
What, can't you read? Even by just glancing at the article description, I can tell you that it will be neo-HB Tartakovsky animation ala Dexter/Powerpuff/Jack. Duh!
"Yeah look what good Ewoks & Droids did for the SW universe ;)"
I suspect that some of the people who worked on the plot and storylines for both episodes 1 and 2 were some of the very same people who wrote for those two shows.
"How long until computing powerful enough to render the probability thought patterns of a manager? That's what I want to know.."
Good luck. Last I checked, that one falls under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem.
"The homeland security people are fighting the last war, not the next one."
Not even. They're not even dealing with Pearl Harbor very well.
They want to fingerprint tourists. They want to issue manditory national ID. They want machines to collect your e-mail. They want to monitor the use of your library card...
Ignoring what these do to civil liberties for the moment, what do they intend to do with all this gathered information? Just like they've been doing since before the organization of the CIA, all this information will be locked away in some filing cabinet in the basement of some federal building somewhere.
Pearl Harbor and 9/11 both came about because of the focus on information gathering instead of information interpretation. And ideas like this are set to make the same mistakes over and over again well into this new century.
Information may be ammunition, ammo is pretty useless if you don't have a gun.
"Warcraft III works fine on Linux."
I'm still pissed off/annoyed that I have to use runas and play the game through an account with administrative privileges. And all I have to do for that is hold down shift and right-click (I give it another week or so before I give up and just change the shortcut, but I'll still have to keep typing in the password).
Now, do you really think I have the patience to get a game to run on a non-native operating system?
Alright, so maybe Windows isn't the most stable operating system in the world. But, after too many years of using a Microsoft operating system of one form or another, I know how to fix 95% of the problems that come up.
And while it's not exactly MacOS, things have a tendancy to work on Windows. Half the times I've tried Linux I found myself sifting through half a dozen HOWTOs when all I want to do is set up a freakin' dial-up internet account. Which pretty much won't work anyway because almost nobody uses modems with on-board controllers any more.
As I saw someone else mention one time, I need an operating system, not a hobby. Mandrake is nice and all, but setting up my hardware still requires a lot more than just sticking in the driver CD and installing it. I'm not going to bug the one or two friends I have who know Linux because I know how annoyed I get when people expect me to fix their Windows problems for them ("Fdisk, format, reinstall and leave me the Q@$#^ alone!"). And I can't be bothered to try to learn how to write my own drivers when all I want to do is play Warcraft III, advocacy be damned.
"Why do some atheists feel they have to run around being jack-asses just like those they hate?"
I'm not atheist, though. I have issues with people, not religions.
"Sure, there is the occasional fanatic monotheist who runs around yacking at people. If you don't believe what they have to say, ignore them."
Except that, in the past millenia or so, monotheist extremists have shown themselves able and willing to do some extremely not-nice things to people who don't share their beliefs. From the blood-letting of the Protestant Reformation to 9/11.
Besides, this is right up their alley. Ever heard of the Library of Alexandria?
Because, unlike Harlequin books or King's works, Newton's Principa finally came out of copyright last month or so.
That, or it was taken by a bunch of fanatic monotheists (take your pick) to burn as blasphemy.
What if Indian computer scientists in their effort to get the Hell out of India?
"This law is about forbidding the spread of ideas from this bad guy 'Adolf Hitler'. That's the background. That's all background. period."
I don't see Germany tearing up the old Autobahn, though. Don't want Hitler's idea for a straight, high-speed highway to get around.
Oh, and then there's that evil idea of his of a "people's car." Better outlaw Volkswagon.
Better lock up all the vegetarians while you're at it as well. Lord knows all the horror that one can cause...
People are evil. Ideas are just ideas. They're only good or bad when people pass judgement on them as such. And you're limiting the people's right to decide for themselves.
"You guys in the US did not have such a time,"
Cherokees, Apaches and other native groups may disagree with you on that one.
"maybe therefore there is a couple of guys in your country who celebrate Hitler, celebrate Nazi's"
And they're morons. Anybody who glorifies a facist regime and then flies the flag of a confederate government is a complete moron in my book. But they have a right to be morons so long as they're not actively hurting anybody else.
"I think that here in Europe we have a different understanding of freedom, it is not less freedom nor is it more freedom than in the US. It's just different."
What I was trying to say is that your view is flawed. The European view of rights is that they somehow don't belong to individuals but to "society." That view ignores the fact that society is a human construct.
"My isp provider does not even log when I am online, does not log my dynamic address, so whatever page I visit, government cannot find out those web pages, even if they want.
(etc.)"
I never said anything about the US being "more free" than Europe. I was trying to point out the flaw of "1+1=3" I was pointing out that the US Constitution is all but unique in the world for considering the fact that all rights rest with the individual and the free exercise of those rights are surrendered to the government. European laws like this come from the idea that rights originate with the government to be passed down to the individual.
Hell, at this point I'd go so far as to say that the concept of inherent rights originating with the individual is a demonstrable scientific theory.
Oh, by the way, different states and even different local governments have different laws. Don't assume that every law in the US is a national one. Everything you just listed is legal in at least one state.
"We all are not allowed to have sex with children."
See my previous paragraph. Different states define statutory rape at different ages, along with the minimum age for marriage licenses.
"So, keep in mind freedom is not to be allowed to say anything; this is anarchy."
No, freedom is the ability to exercise the rights you were born with, the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Government is there just to make sure that nobody steps on anybody else's rights when they do what they will. Anarchy is what happens when there is nobody around but yourself to ensure that you are still able to freely exercise your rights.
"Freedom is to be allowed to think different, to talk different, to have different opinions."
Then, by your own definition, the anti-speech law eliminates freedom.
"This so called censorship applies to Nazi pages, applies to celebrating Hitler, applies to sentences like 'The Holocaust never happened'. That's the reason. ANd those pages are as bad as having sex with little children."
The concept behind statutory rape laws is that children are too young to decide for themselves. If you're equating statutory rape laws to censorship laws, then you must believe that most people are less able to make a correct decision than you are. Which happens to be one of Hitler's core philosophies.
If anything, it's censorship that is the same as statutory rape. Both involve making up somebody else's mind, and both involve forcing your opinions on others who have no choice.
"For instance, the continued existence of evil proves that an omnipotent and perfectly good God (as we understand those concepts) cannot exist."
Omnipresence means just that. Your statement works on the assumption that God would be on one side but not the other. But you can't be more in one place than another and still be omnipresent.
"The Australian government is planning to block websites used to organize violent protests, as part of a larger effort to prevent crime from being planned on the 'net."
If they're inciting a riot, then charge them as such and let them defend themselves in a court of law. It looks like this law is designed to let the government decide by itself whether a website is planning a crime and lets them block it all by themselves without first charging the owners with a crime.
Society is another human construct. If humans as individuals don't have the ability to exercise these rights to begin with, where does society as a whole get the ability to do so?
" where do you draw the line of where your rights end and another persons rights begin."
At exactly the point where it starts to infringe on somebody else's ability to exercise their rights.
"the government took away that right because that would seriously "hamper" the other persons right to live." Government is there to make sure that people don't exercise their rights in such a way that infringes on somebody else's ability to do so.
However, to say that the government "took away that right" suggests that it was within the government's power to grant the right to begin with.
"at this point, it's society (and its representatives, the government) that decides where your rights end and another persons rights begin."
But how can society be greater than the sum of its parts?
"If He does not exist at all, there's no reason that couldn't be proven"
The only way you can prove or disprove the existence of something is to look for one place where it exists and one place where it is absent. Since part of the concept of God revolves around omnipresence, you couldn't find two points in the universe that have different amounts of God.
"(though it's hard to say what would constitute evidence)"
There can be no evidence because there is literally nothing else in the universe you could compare and contrast it to.
"Most of the founders of the US were Deists"
Only the Deists themselves claim that. Do you have proof?