At issue however is precisely this point. With the DMCA, even if you can do it, it is not legal to do it.
Additionally, with VCR's being a common device in well over 50% of USian homes, I don't think that the US public will agree that things don't have to be easy.
if you're recording the analog out, it's not going to be as good. However, it would seem the correct thing to do is rip the track into a wav with horrible clicks, than pass a filter over it with logic similar to cd players to look for obviously erroneous data and to interpolate the correct data in that situation. Heck, once the algorithm is out, I'm sure lame and other ripping tools will easily incorporate it so that it's not even an additional step for the user.
ripping in analog mode? Ugh, the audio input of most commodity sound cards is card. Might as well encode mp3's at 80kbs.
As for just copying the entire CD if one wants a copy, that is not why I rip CD's. I don't have a cd player, so any music I play is coming out of my machine. Now, I can either encode them all as mp3 and never have to worry about changing cd's every 35-72min, or I encode them all at decent (IMHO) quality, and have a few gigs of music to listen to. Plus, how many of your cd's have no songs that you ever want to skip? Perhaps 5% of my cd's do. those songs just don't get ripped, and I don't have to worry about skipping them. Also, for those who might have cd players, a lot of time it's good to make a mix-cd. you can suddenly get ~70 minutes of music instead of the more common 35-40 so one doesn't have to change as much, and you can get exactly the combo you want. a bit to bit copy of a cd is generally not what I'm after.
As for whether one could make a rip from the duplicate of the CD, I'm not sure on just what this copy protection is, but I'm guessing that if you dup the CD the "protection" will still be there (I.E. it's not dependant upon bad sectors of a floppy).
I agree with your hiring tactics, and won't get into the nit-picking that a lot of people seem to be going for. As a 'nix admin, I have a few stock questions to apply to potential juniors (why do you not use 'rm -r.*' to get rid of the.directories and etc... these things aren't really hard, they are just looking for minimum competency.
However, part of the reason why you might be having such trouble finding competant programmers is because there are so many people out there without a clue (heck, I haven't done much programming in 2 years or so but could still answer the "reverse a string" "reverse a linked list" and etc easy questions). They clog the system, and lie a lot on their resumes, so HR will pull in the liars and waste your time interviewing them, meanwhile the competant people are getting passed over because they are honest, and don't overstock their resume.
Perhaps you might want to have a talk with your HR droid and let hir know that if you are only looking for someone who knows C, that's the only thing they should be looking for on the resumes, and in fact if someone has a *large* string of known languages (possibly starting with VB or visual foxpro) that the odds are quite likely that very little about each language, and VB might possibly be all they know (for some reason it seems like a lot of VB programmers seem to think they can quickly pick up C or C++, without bothering to even learn a little before an interview). Heck, you might want to go on dice or monster yourself and try to find someone... heck, your company might even give you some money for the referral. If they list a number have some quick questions to ask over the phone. that or else you might want to think up some minimum questions to have HR ask, but make sure they are right/wrong answers, as HR doesn't have the ability to evaluate grey areas about coding. Rather either ask them to write down the answers, or tape it.
You only see 2-3 out of 10 people with any knowledge. Well, that alone makes it seem bad; but consider just how many HR are weeding out before you even get to them.
But on the note of HR, I wonder how often they inappropriately weed out people who actually have honest resumes in favor of someone who blatently lies "to get my foot in the door." Bah, I interviewed someone to potentially be my junior admin, and his "extensive background in UNIX" turned out to be that he used 'pine' to read his email an a university solaris server. "But I just said that to get my foot in the door, give me a chance, and I can learn." Sorry, while junior is an entry level position, someone must no *something* or they will be far worse than useless. I asked him if he had a computer, he said he did. I then asked why he couldn't have put linux or freebsd on his home machine and try to learn on his own, and he didn't really answer. I explained that I wasn't going to gamble on someone with no knowledge and no apparent inclination to learn, and I certainly do not want to deal with people who try to say what they think I want to hear, and went to get the next interviewer, with 25 minutes of my 30 unused. Sadly after I told HR my opinions, the insisted on wasting other people's time interviewing him, as they might find some other position for him. Bah, HR didn't even seem to be upset that he lied about the primary requisite for the job... "everyone lies a little." "I didn't" "Yes, and we would have passed you over if you hadn't come from such a good school."... WTF, the school I come from doesn't mean shit about what I know. I know many people who graduated from my suposedly good school who primarily passed by taking as many classes as were offered which had group projects. Bah, there's gotta be a better system to find people. I hate to say this, but perhaps a centralized system which actually did fact checking is the answer. Sure, in theory this is what head hunters are supposed to be, but they only factcheck by hounding one's references, and you can easily get friends to lie for you as references, just pick people with old-sounding voices.
Fred Myers? Ugh, stuff like that was for highschool, not after. I'd rather go back to living as homeless (I did that for a few months voluntarily... it helped motivate me to work, as being homeless sucks ass, especially if you look like a street punk).
However I agree with having no pity for those who live beyond their means. Granted, I don't have a great influx of income, and am stupid enough to live in a single apartment in the Valley (a bit over 1/3 of my take-home pay goes just towards rent). However, since 10 months ago when I was homeless with ~$500 cash on hand (I wasn't in poverty, just homeless and unemployed... it's amazing, I went for like 6 months on $2k, and had $500 to help with rent (however, without friends to get my foot in the door, I'd likely not have crawled out of that hole)), and now I've got my debts in control, 3K in savings, and an additional $2K in cash stashed away again... that gives me a nice buffer zone where I don't have to fear unemployment. But then I mostly take the bus, and won't pay buku dollars to go into debt for a new car, rather I bought some $800 car which has lasted me 6 months so far, limit the DVD purchases etc...
I don't understand the debt-happy people, and grin in evil smugness at thinking of my old (talentless) manager who had recently just gotten a new mercedes SUV a month before being fired a month before the tech slowdown. I'd like to think of him living in his SUV, always parking someplace new at night afraid of repo-men coming to take it away.
Yes, it's their equipment, but many (most?) companies let you make personal use of the equipment, so long as it's "within reason." Where I work, they understand that not all of life's little details can be performed at times other than normal business hours. Thus, it's ok if I use the phone to make calls (so long as the LD charges don't pile too high), surf the web, and misc. other things (I do not have a land phone, nor broadband, it means that any files I want to move to my home machine first go onto my company laptop, then make it home. Again, I have to be smart with my usage, I.E. I shouldn't go downloading a bunch of porn, but if I'm using this to get kernel patches, or the newest form of xmovie, and similar toys nobody really cares. However, I also keep track of some of my finances (I update my account balance right after I come back from a quick trip to the ATM), and I know of people at other companies I've worked at who do the same thing. Because of the allowing of "reasonable" personal use of our netconnection, I have a fair amount of personal data on my machine. However, despite being the unix admin, rather than leaving the data unprotected, knowing it's only company policy to consider looking at someone's machine if their work is being affected, I keep my data in an encrypted filesystem.
hmmm, the end point is that as a lot of companies have a lot of employees who are salaried, they'd rather have them stay at the company 10 hours and spend an hour doing personal stuff than having someone stay just staying the 8 hours they likely would if they had "to do" items at the front of their mind. Once you allow employees to make some personal use out of company resources, I feel that the company also looses the right to unjustified and/or automated snooping.
what you see with malignant port scans isn't just a knock on the door, it's a knock on the door followed by rattling all the windows
Please explain to me how a port scan will find out if a service you offer is "unlocked" ? A port scan, to use a real-world analogy (which is kinda brain-dead IMHO), would be, as many others have pointed out, standing on the edge of your property and looking at your house, seeing where your windows and doors are, etc. Now, if they attempt to connect to your finger server, that's like coming up and knocking on a door. Then if they try a character buffer overflow, that's like trying to bust the door down. If you don't like people fingering you, close that port down. If you don't like people watching you undress, close your drapes.
The thing which is the main issue of confusion is that few people who are using computers actually understand anything about them beyond that they can put in some text in the URL bar, and suddenly netscape magically paints a slashdot page. Using the standard "Any technology which is indistinguishible from magic is insufficiently advanced," means that for most people computers are plenty advanced. I just wish that lawmakers would not try to legislate magic.
Would you have no problem with someone doing all that?
I think the issue is how different people view their computer. For a lot of people, especially those of us on the net before '95 or so, a computer was kinda like a tree house, you don't really care if anyone comes in, 'cause "we're all friends" or something like that. But since, not only are people likely to be destructive, as opposed to just looking around, or using it benignly; as well businesses are putting themselves on the net. Yes I agree that port scanning is a relatively intrusive look at a machine, and doing the equivalent, if not against the law (I'm unsure), would certainly not be decent. If you came home and saw someone trying to peep in your windows because your drapes were only 99% closed, would you chuckle as say "Gee, I'll be certain they're closed next time, thanks for pointing this out" or would you be pissed off? Most people would be pissed off. But a lot of the slashdot readers are probably a combo of people whose computer is a tree-house, and of those who have well-secured their house, such that while they might not like someone pushing the edge of acceptability, they know they have little to worry about.
Gone is the day that I could offer anonymous ftp with uploading... gone are the days when one can run an open mailer... and gone are the days where a port scan is perfectly acceptable. However, I'm not sure most makes it gone, the fact that there are random destructive people around, or that there are so many "common" people and businesses around. Either way, it sucks, IMHO.
I agree with the original poster in that this is how the RIAA is viewed and how they exist.
And I support the view myself to a limited extent. Sure, there are some artists who play simply to be heard, but 1) not all good music (IMPO) comes from such artists, 2) up until very recently this greatly limited the scope of such artists who didn't sign their potential money away to publishers. I don't live on the east coast, this means I'd have likely never heard of TMBG. heck, I lived in milwaukee wisconsin; how much good music would I have heard in my youth? Not much. 3) even tho someone can reach others, there isn't a "good" system for that yet. If the artist sets up a webpage, they have to pay for badwidth. OK, they can join napster, but who's going to search for them. They have to get their name out somehow (part of what a publisher's job is), or only a few searches will turn them up. And even if they do get a few fans, what I've seen happen with my roommate's band is that they find their song's retitled with credit to smashing pumpkins, TMBG, and a bunch of other bands, which means that few have any clue that they exist.
Now, mp3.com or a similar business could become an electronic publisher, which will be a central (or a few central) place where one can either test music based on popularity, randomness, or maybe just look for the newest bands. Also, with mp3.com a band could put up a certain number of their songs for free sampling, and sell the rest on the CD (or possibly have just a digital download, kinda like emusic (or like my memory says emusic had)). But then suddenly we have a central publisher(s) who's handling everything... hopefully they don't become as greedy as the RIAA did, and I think this model could work, but then when a bunch of P2P sites start popping up, it breaks the business model for them just like it breaks it for the RIAA.
But why should artists get paid? Because they are providing a serivce. Can't tip's just take care of it? It could, but how easy is it to track artists down, and even if everyone knows to go thru fairtunes, will that be "enough"? Frankly, I think that many artists should get enough compensation from their services that they should not have to work full/part time on other tasks to pay for equipment/food/housing.
I have seen the effect that dressing up can have on interactions. The best dressed person gets listened to at meetings.
Don't think that a correlation has anything to do with causation. At my company, managers are expected to dress up a bit (button shits and pants instead of jeans and tshirts), so yes, they do get listened to, but because they are a manager, not because they dress up.
As a punk (long dyed hair, facial piercings, jeans and tshirt), I think that I get a bit more respect than if I'd dress up in a suit because my appearance is so different from the rest. I obviously didn't get hired for looking pretty and kissing ass. People at my place of employment realize that I was hired because I know my shit. While I'm ignored in office small talk by the people who call me kid, when I speak up in meeting, or someone asks my help, they listen when I talk. This works fine with me as I usually avoid small talk, however as I'm a quarter century old I'll admit that I'd not mind never being referred to as "kid" again. While I agree that one is being paid at a job and that there should be a different attitude than one is relaxing, pissing off your employees doesn't help things. Unless someone can demonstrate why I must dress up (I have when going to a customer's site), I will not do so, and will leave any company which implements a dress code while I'm there and similarly would not take any job at a company with a dress code which interferes in my comfort. I'm paid either to write code, or be a unix-sysadmin, I am not paid to sweat, I am not paid to subsidize the suit industry, and I am not paid to be visually pleasing, something I doubt I could be even with lots of plastic surgery and the best suits and stylists in the world.
I want to be free to raise my children without having to have them exposed to drugs.
If I ever had kids, I'd like to be free to raise them without being exposed to xtianity. Heck, I'd personally like to live my life without any further exposure to it. But I realize that I can't. The best that I can do is to educate myself and anyone I care about, about the dangers of the xtian meme, and trust in myself, and others to make informed decisions. But unlike drugs, xtainity is usually forced upon children when they are too young to say no. This is more of a danger to our society than drugs are, IMHO.
But, I accept that my opinion is not necessarily what is "right"... who knows what is right or not? The best thing, I think, is to try and just mind my own business. I'll make my own choices, and so long as xtians don't burn or stone (with rocks) me they can do what they want. Similarly, so long as a drug user or abuser (there is a difference) isn't robbing me to get money to get a fix (caused mainly be inflated prices brought by the war on drugs) why should I care what they choose in life.
Just because *you* weren't driven to become a killer doesn't mean that others aren't. And yes, there are likely a multitude of factors, and a supportive family possibly counteracts what will lead one to try a killing others or oneself.
But I hate when people think a single data point is valid almost as much I hate that many think that correlation implies causation.
One of the reason why the average urban citazen still needs a gun these days is for the potential to protect ourselves from the government. Look at the curtailment of freedoms which are going on in the United States. It is currently possible in all states except Oregon (to my knowledge) for cops to seize your property without even having to accuse you of a crime (essentially the property is accused of a crime, and is presumed guilty, the owner must fight to get said property back) thanks to overly restrictive drug laws.
Additionally in this country, we used to select our leader by having a mass of uneducated peasant vote for who they wanted. This doesn't result in the best answers, but it's how we do things. Last election, that was stopped, the election was exposed as the sham it is, and a corrupt few appointed the president instead of the ignorant masses ellecting them. The government is becomming more brazen in its abuses of power, and soon it will be time to remove them from power.
That or else I'll be moving to Canada which has slightly saner laws on freedom to my understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, with VCR's being a common device in well over 50% of USian homes, I don't think that the US public will agree that things don't have to be easy.
if you're recording the analog out, it's not going to be as good. However, it would seem the correct thing to do is rip the track into a wav with horrible clicks, than pass a filter over it with logic similar to cd players to look for obviously erroneous data and to interpolate the correct data in that situation. Heck, once the algorithm is out, I'm sure lame and other ripping tools will easily incorporate it so that it's not even an additional step for the user.
As for just copying the entire CD if one wants a copy, that is not why I rip CD's. I don't have a cd player, so any music I play is coming out of my machine. Now, I can either encode them all as mp3 and never have to worry about changing cd's every 35-72min, or I encode them all at decent (IMHO) quality, and have a few gigs of music to listen to. Plus, how many of your cd's have no songs that you ever want to skip? Perhaps 5% of my cd's do. those songs just don't get ripped, and I don't have to worry about skipping them. Also, for those who might have cd players, a lot of time it's good to make a mix-cd. you can suddenly get ~70 minutes of music instead of the more common 35-40 so one doesn't have to change as much, and you can get exactly the combo you want. a bit to bit copy of a cd is generally not what I'm after.
As for whether one could make a rip from the duplicate of the CD, I'm not sure on just what this copy protection is, but I'm guessing that if you dup the CD the "protection" will still be there (I.E. it's not dependant upon bad sectors of a floppy).
However, part of the reason why you might be having such trouble finding competant programmers is because there are so many people out there without a clue (heck, I haven't done much programming in 2 years or so but could still answer the "reverse a string" "reverse a linked list" and etc easy questions). They clog the system, and lie a lot on their resumes, so HR will pull in the liars and waste your time interviewing them, meanwhile the competant people are getting passed over because they are honest, and don't overstock their resume.
Perhaps you might want to have a talk with your HR droid and let hir know that if you are only looking for someone who knows C, that's the only thing they should be looking for on the resumes, and in fact if someone has a *large* string of known languages (possibly starting with VB or visual foxpro) that the odds are quite likely that very little about each language, and VB might possibly be all they know (for some reason it seems like a lot of VB programmers seem to think they can quickly pick up C or C++, without bothering to even learn a little before an interview). Heck, you might want to go on dice or monster yourself and try to find someone... heck, your company might even give you some money for the referral. If they list a number have some quick questions to ask over the phone. that or else you might want to think up some minimum questions to have HR ask, but make sure they are right/wrong answers, as HR doesn't have the ability to evaluate grey areas about coding. Rather either ask them to write down the answers, or tape it.
But on the note of HR, I wonder how often they inappropriately weed out people who actually have honest resumes in favor of someone who blatently lies "to get my foot in the door." Bah, I interviewed someone to potentially be my junior admin, and his "extensive background in UNIX" turned out to be that he used 'pine' to read his email an a university solaris server. "But I just said that to get my foot in the door, give me a chance, and I can learn." Sorry, while junior is an entry level position, someone must no *something* or they will be far worse than useless. I asked him if he had a computer, he said he did. I then asked why he couldn't have put linux or freebsd on his home machine and try to learn on his own, and he didn't really answer. I explained that I wasn't going to gamble on someone with no knowledge and no apparent inclination to learn, and I certainly do not want to deal with people who try to say what they think I want to hear, and went to get the next interviewer, with 25 minutes of my 30 unused. Sadly after I told HR my opinions, the insisted on wasting other people's time interviewing him, as they might find some other position for him. Bah, HR didn't even seem to be upset that he lied about the primary requisite for the job... "everyone lies a little." "I didn't" "Yes, and we would have passed you over if you hadn't come from such a good school." ... WTF, the school I come from doesn't mean shit about what I know. I know many people who graduated from my suposedly good school who primarily passed by taking as many classes as were offered which had group projects. Bah, there's gotta be a better system to find people. I hate to say this, but perhaps a centralized system which actually did fact checking is the answer. Sure, in theory this is what head hunters are supposed to be, but they only factcheck by hounding one's references, and you can easily get friends to lie for you as references, just pick people with old-sounding voices.
However I agree with having no pity for those who live beyond their means. Granted, I don't have a great influx of income, and am stupid enough to live in a single apartment in the Valley (a bit over 1/3 of my take-home pay goes just towards rent). However, since 10 months ago when I was homeless with ~$500 cash on hand (I wasn't in poverty, just homeless and unemployed... it's amazing, I went for like 6 months on $2k, and had $500 to help with rent (however, without friends to get my foot in the door, I'd likely not have crawled out of that hole)), and now I've got my debts in control, 3K in savings, and an additional $2K in cash stashed away again... that gives me a nice buffer zone where I don't have to fear unemployment. But then I mostly take the bus, and won't pay buku dollars to go into debt for a new car, rather I bought some $800 car which has lasted me 6 months so far, limit the DVD purchases etc...
I don't understand the debt-happy people, and grin in evil smugness at thinking of my old (talentless) manager who had recently just gotten a new mercedes SUV a month before being fired a month before the tech slowdown. I'd like to think of him living in his SUV, always parking someplace new at night afraid of repo-men coming to take it away.
hmmm, the end point is that as a lot of companies have a lot of employees who are salaried, they'd rather have them stay at the company 10 hours and spend an hour doing personal stuff than having someone stay just staying the 8 hours they likely would if they had "to do" items at the front of their mind. Once you allow employees to make some personal use out of company resources, I feel that the company also looses the right to unjustified and/or automated snooping.
Please explain to me how a port scan will find out if a service you offer is "unlocked" ? A port scan, to use a real-world analogy (which is kinda brain-dead IMHO), would be, as many others have pointed out, standing on the edge of your property and looking at your house, seeing where your windows and doors are, etc. Now, if they attempt to connect to your finger server, that's like coming up and knocking on a door. Then if they try a character buffer overflow, that's like trying to bust the door down. If you don't like people fingering you, close that port down. If you don't like people watching you undress, close your drapes.
The thing which is the main issue of confusion is that few people who are using computers actually understand anything about them beyond that they can put in some text in the URL bar, and suddenly netscape magically paints a slashdot page. Using the standard "Any technology which is indistinguishible from magic is insufficiently advanced," means that for most people computers are plenty advanced. I just wish that lawmakers would not try to legislate magic.
I think the issue is how different people view their computer. For a lot of people, especially those of us on the net before '95 or so, a computer was kinda like a tree house, you don't really care if anyone comes in, 'cause "we're all friends" or something like that. But since, not only are people likely to be destructive, as opposed to just looking around, or using it benignly; as well businesses are putting themselves on the net. Yes I agree that port scanning is a relatively intrusive look at a machine, and doing the equivalent, if not against the law (I'm unsure), would certainly not be decent. If you came home and saw someone trying to peep in your windows because your drapes were only 99% closed, would you chuckle as say "Gee, I'll be certain they're closed next time, thanks for pointing this out" or would you be pissed off? Most people would be pissed off. But a lot of the slashdot readers are probably a combo of people whose computer is a tree-house, and of those who have well-secured their house, such that while they might not like someone pushing the edge of acceptability, they know they have little to worry about.
Gone is the day that I could offer anonymous ftp with uploading... gone are the days when one can run an open mailer... and gone are the days where a port scan is perfectly acceptable. However, I'm not sure most makes it gone, the fact that there are random destructive people around, or that there are so many "common" people and businesses around. Either way, it sucks, IMHO.
And I support the view myself to a limited extent. Sure, there are some artists who play simply to be heard, but 1) not all good music (IMPO) comes from such artists, 2) up until very recently this greatly limited the scope of such artists who didn't sign their potential money away to publishers. I don't live on the east coast, this means I'd have likely never heard of TMBG. heck, I lived in milwaukee wisconsin; how much good music would I have heard in my youth? Not much. 3) even tho someone can reach others, there isn't a "good" system for that yet. If the artist sets up a webpage, they have to pay for badwidth. OK, they can join napster, but who's going to search for them. They have to get their name out somehow (part of what a publisher's job is), or only a few searches will turn them up. And even if they do get a few fans, what I've seen happen with my roommate's band is that they find their song's retitled with credit to smashing pumpkins, TMBG, and a bunch of other bands, which means that few have any clue that they exist.
Now, mp3.com or a similar business could become an electronic publisher, which will be a central (or a few central) place where one can either test music based on popularity, randomness, or maybe just look for the newest bands. Also, with mp3.com a band could put up a certain number of their songs for free sampling, and sell the rest on the CD (or possibly have just a digital download, kinda like emusic (or like my memory says emusic had)). But then suddenly we have a central publisher(s) who's handling everything... hopefully they don't become as greedy as the RIAA did, and I think this model could work, but then when a bunch of P2P sites start popping up, it breaks the business model for them just like it breaks it for the RIAA.
But why should artists get paid? Because they are providing a serivce. Can't tip's just take care of it? It could, but how easy is it to track artists down, and even if everyone knows to go thru fairtunes, will that be "enough"? Frankly, I think that many artists should get enough compensation from their services that they should not have to work full/part time on other tasks to pay for equipment/food/housing.
Don't think that a correlation has anything to do with causation. At my company, managers are expected to dress up a bit (button shits and pants instead of jeans and tshirts), so yes, they do get listened to, but because they are a manager, not because they dress up.
As a punk (long dyed hair, facial piercings, jeans and tshirt), I think that I get a bit more respect than if I'd dress up in a suit because my appearance is so different from the rest. I obviously didn't get hired for looking pretty and kissing ass. People at my place of employment realize that I was hired because I know my shit. While I'm ignored in office small talk by the people who call me kid, when I speak up in meeting, or someone asks my help, they listen when I talk. This works fine with me as I usually avoid small talk, however as I'm a quarter century old I'll admit that I'd not mind never being referred to as "kid" again. While I agree that one is being paid at a job and that there should be a different attitude than one is relaxing, pissing off your employees doesn't help things. Unless someone can demonstrate why I must dress up (I have when going to a customer's site), I will not do so, and will leave any company which implements a dress code while I'm there and similarly would not take any job at a company with a dress code which interferes in my comfort. I'm paid either to write code, or be a unix-sysadmin, I am not paid to sweat, I am not paid to subsidize the suit industry, and I am not paid to be visually pleasing, something I doubt I could be even with lots of plastic surgery and the best suits and stylists in the world.
If I ever had kids, I'd like to be free to raise them without being exposed to xtianity. Heck, I'd personally like to live my life without any further exposure to it. But I realize that I can't. The best that I can do is to educate myself and anyone I care about, about the dangers of the xtian meme, and trust in myself, and others to make informed decisions. But unlike drugs, xtainity is usually forced upon children when they are too young to say no. This is more of a danger to our society than drugs are, IMHO.
But, I accept that my opinion is not necessarily what is "right" ... who knows what is right or not? The best thing, I think, is to try and just mind my own business. I'll make my own choices, and so long as xtians don't burn or stone (with rocks) me they can do what they want. Similarly, so long as a drug user or abuser (there is a difference) isn't robbing me to get money to get a fix (caused mainly be inflated prices brought by the war on drugs) why should I care what they choose in life.
But I hate when people think a single data point is valid almost as much I hate that many think that correlation implies causation.
Additionally in this country, we used to select our leader by having a mass of uneducated peasant vote for who they wanted. This doesn't result in the best answers, but it's how we do things. Last election, that was stopped, the election was exposed as the sham it is, and a corrupt few appointed the president instead of the ignorant masses ellecting them. The government is becomming more brazen in its abuses of power, and soon it will be time to remove them from power.
That or else I'll be moving to Canada which has slightly saner laws on freedom to my understanding.
All the machines I request for purchase at work are intel. All the machines at home which I've paid more than $10 for are AMD.