- that laws will put everyone on equal footing. This simply won't happen. The rich and powerful always get special treatment; new laws only serve to put more and more of the burden on the powerless.
- that you'll get to watch the rich and powerful. You won't; they don't hang out with you now, they don't frequent the same places, they don't engage in the same activities. They sure as hell don't mingle with the dirty prolls.
And they won't in this future world of yours either. In fact, they'll be all the more inclined to set up 'gated communities', 'gated country clubs', and 'gated parks' to keep you and your goddamned cameras away from them. Again, only the powerless are affected by all those cameras and all those nosy little shithead citizens who refuse to keep out of your business.
Like I said in a previous post, Brin is naive and so are the people who buy into his silliness. He implies that a loss of privacy ensures egalitarianism when in fact it does exactly the opposite: exposing the poor and powerless to reprisals by stripping them of anonymity while not touching the rich and powerful at all.
A world without privacy would be a world that a rich oligarchy would love to no end. Privilege would be more precious than ever before.
....is that so many people are going out of their way to blast guy and argue *in favor* of BT. What, you all suddenly convert to corporate whoredom overnight? Or is it the idea that an old guy invented something you think belongs to a younger generation?
Oh please, PETA-troll, whine about your unadopted animals someplace else. I say go ahead and clone the pet and no activist yammering on about how "unethical" it is has any business butting into what anyone does in this matter.
If you're so fired up about unadopted animals then go adopt some and leave the pet-cloners the hell alone. Resolve not to do it yourself and *stay out of concerns that aren't your business*.
- that the rich and powerful will hang out in the same places that you and I do, making themselves available for snooping. Doesn't happen now, won't happen then; and
- that the rich and powerful won't get legislation passed which will, in some way, insulate them from snooping while at the same time exposing us.
Brin is naive. Incredibly naive, given his age. He should know better than to think that the rules will apply across the board, or that technology will 'free' the masses. Yeah, good call there Brin, it's done a wonderful job so far.
My life is not open source. Just because some sick motherfucker on slashdot decides that Brin's argument is a good tool to wield in his quest to butt into my life doesn't make it one I have to put up with.
And ultimately, it's my choice. I may not be able to do a great deal about the government spying upon me - although I'll continue to try - but if you, some schmuck with a camera and self-righteous attitude insists on following me around a public park I'll punch you in the nose. And guess what? Most Americans would call what you do 'harrassment', and a broken nose a small price to pay for being a stupid twit.
You don't have any right whatsoever to sift through my life. None. Nothing in the Constitution grants you that right, but even more fundamentally there is no 'natural right' to such activity either. My business is just that and your curiosity doesn't count for dick as a justification for getting into it.
I don't care how many laws are passed, or how many pathetic losers with no lives campaign for privacy loss so they can vicariously steal the lives of others, I'll *still* punch you in the nose if you follow me around with that camera.
And perhaps, just perhaps, enough of use nose-punchers will get together and set up shop elsewhere away from your nasty little prying eyes and your sad lives, leaving you to spy on the dull, boring, vapid existence you lead when you no longer have the opportunity to live parasitically off the more interesting.
Because, in reality, that's what it all boils down to, doesn't it, for those of you opposed to privacy? The fact that you yourselves are so utterly boring and pathetic that you'd probably slit your own throat if you couldn't spy on your neighbors and mess with their affairs? Yeah, sure, bleat in objection like the sheep you are, but *we* know the truth, don't we? Sure we do.
The good thing is that this should end up applying to government officials, corporate officers, etc. as much or more than to other people.
On what do you base that assumption? Those richer and more powerful than us have never been subject to the same laws or conditions as the ordinary person; why would this be any different in your world? Simply because technological doodads are involved?
This isn't true. Crimes of stalking and kidnap are far more likely to be targeted against the 'common' citizen than they are against the rich and powerful. It's just that when they occur to the rich and powerful they make the news; when they occur to you and me nobody cares.
The rich and powerful suffer from a disproportionately low incidence of violent crimes. So in truth they are far *less* likely to be targeted even if the information is available.
Max
this argument is already over with
on
The Crime of Sharing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Start talking about filesharing technology and the folks obsessed with yesterdays news start ripping into each other over whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
Fact is, folks, this argument is already over with, and file sharing won. It won a long time ago. You can whine all you like, throw a tantrum, scream "illegal!" or "theft!" and it doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference. Your opinion on a done deal is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Dying media giants will continue to pass, and succeed at passing, laws trying to bolster their 20th century monopoly, but it's rather clear that these laws don't mean jack to most of the folks inclined to copy. And nobody - nobody - can convince me that the 45 million or so people in the U.S. *alone* who occasionally copy music are all evil, morally-bereft pirates. If you honestly think that's the case you need to get off your moral high ground and have your head examined. Only a loon could make a claim like that and actually believe it.
Copying is here to stay. That's just the way it is, laws or no laws, slashdot whiners or no slashdot whiners. So rather than trying to roll things back to the 20th century - an effort utterly doomed to failure - perhaps you might think of ways that the artists could still be compensated while copying continues.
The old system is creaking along on failing legs, and anyone with half a brain can see that it's about to collapse; no amount of handwringing, no stack of useless laws, is going to change this fact. So, if those of you who worry about the 'poor artist' are serious about your concerns, rather than just mouthing meaningless platitudes to support your inane position, perhaps you could come up with an alternative system for artist compensation that might survive the early years of the 21st century. That is, do something constructive for once.
Oh, and I did say 'artist compensation', not 'RIAA compensation'. The RIAA are part of the dinosaur and fated to die, thank the gods. Supporters of the RIAA would be worthy only of pity, if they weren't so deserving of contempt.
It has nothing to do with obscurity. Unless you can grab root access you can't do anything at all interesting. A fundamental difference in architecture.
Your only hope with Linux is that the operator is an idiot. In Windows the operator is likely to be an idiot, but if not the OS will happily make him look like one.
I think you're being deliberately misleading - he agreed that AA's MM has reached the point where it is useable and that it was Linus' right to choose to use it, but he still didn't agree with the original decision.
No, you are. Alan Cox has flat out said that Linus made the right decision and that the new memory manager is better than the old. A quote direct from his diary (http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/):
The great VM dispute really isn't. It went something along the lines of "Putting a new vm in 2.4.10 is crzy", "Probably it was but its done so lets make it work" and at 2.4.14pre8 "See it works" "Yep".
Alan later elaborated on this in an interview backing Linus in both the decision to make the abrupt change and that the new manager worked better than the old.
Now, if you going to contradict Alan himself on what he said, please - invite him to the conversion. I want to see him rip you a new asshole.
Because the old memory manager was crippling in a supposedly stable kernel. Linus did the uncharacteristic thing replacing it to address a rather huge fault in the 2.4 series.
Heinlein was hardly original in the concept. Aside from which, if you've read the book you'll see that his system and mine, while similar, are not the same (i.e., I value military service more than civil service, and I think people should be able to choose one over the other).
Attempting to discredit my views by attributing them to another is a juvenile thing to do.
Release it on the internet so we can *all* see what's been running inside the black box. After a few weeks I'm willing to bet a number of interested professionals would be sending the judge large volumes of material concerning which part of the code does what.
Hell, I bet IBM would spend considerable resources interpreting the source just to see if MS could be nailed for incorporating those 'mystery' APIs we always here about.
But you are being quite ridiculous if you say curtailing our rights somewhat does nothing to fight terror. Of course it does.
Please provide some small scrap of empirical evidence to prove your point. Otherwise this, and everything that follows, is nothing more than blowing hot air out your ass.
Is a complete repeal of universal suffrage. No doubt there'll be a great deal of knee-jerk shock and outrage to such a suggestion, but I stand by it: universal suffrage is a crock.
What would I replace it with? *Earning* the right to vote. That is, upon turning 18 (or any time thereafter) you get all the rights afforded to you by the Constitution *except* the right to vote. If you want that right you have to either:
a) spend four years in the civil service doing jobs you're assigned - you don't get to pick; or
b) spend two years in military service in the position you're assigned - you don't get to pick.
Now why would I advocate such a thing? Because anyone who wanted to become a voting citizen would have to prove that they actually care enough about that vote to sacrifice some portion of their lives obtaining it. I have no evidence that these folks would be any *wiser* in their voting patterns than people are today under universal suffrage, but my guess is that at least they'd care more about it and be more likely to research what the hell it is they're voting on.
You could always pass and remain a non-voting citizen if you wanted. Up to you. If you don't care to spend the time earning the vote then that's fine by me.
Note: before anyone starts ranting on how this would bloat the size of government, you could use these folks to *replace* quite a few current beaurocrats and military short-timers, at a lower pay scale. Most government positions don't require a great deal of skill or training, nor do many of the positions held by privates or the equivalent rank (generically known as "cannon fodder") in the armed forces.
I use SuSe 7.3. Installed it many times on many machines. It has always installed easier and faster than Win of any version, without the begging for driver disks and the countless reboots. The autoconfiguration in 7.3 is amazingly better than that of previous versions, and kicks RH all over the playing field in this regard.
For all those people who keep muttering the MS-inspired mantra "Linux isn't ready for the desktop":
Anecdotal Evidence #1: My wife insists on using Linux. She hates Windows. Can't stand it crashing, can't abide the inability to configure it beyond a certain point, claims that Linux is *easier* to tweak than Windows, not harder. I agree with her and my experience at this point includes thousands of machines, not just some fools home system which he seems to think makes him an expert on the subject.
Anecdotal Evidence #2: I've taught middle school students and one thing that was apparent immediately - kids don't give a rats ass about the OS. Windows or Linux, they'll learn either just as easily including tricks that would never occur to the average adult. Furthermore, I've noticed that kids who worked/played on Linux boxes for several months and then were moved back to Windows boxes were disappointed that they couldn't mess with the OS as much as they could with Linux. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how enamored you are of order versus learning.
You see, kids aren't sitting around proclaiming that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. As far as they're concerned it's just another way to make the computer do what they want it to do. They have no brand loyalty and haven't yet gotten to the point where they'll go out of their way to avoid learning anything new. So quite obviously Linux might not be ready for *your* desktop, but that little fact has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with *you*.
Now, there will be some who say "so what? secretary x won't be able to do that" and I say:
a) bullshit. I've set up linux configs for secretaries before and they haven't had any more problems than they do learning a new version of Word. The critical element is "who does the setup and configuration?". If your secretaries are installing and configuring Win2000 on your office computers then the IT team needs to be fired. Same with Linux. A good configuration is a simple configuration, providing the necessary tools without giving the computer-impaired any confusing choices. In Linux this is damned easy to do. Hell, you can not only turn off or restrict elements the secretary shouldn't be messing with but remove them altogether!
b) even if your business employs people so brain-dead that a) isn't possible, you can easily teach kids to use Linux instead of Windows and then guess what? In ten years your secretaries will be using whatever the hell they're most comfortable with - Linux!
The whole desktop argument is a crock. It might apply to individuals but not to the OS itself, or the GUI's that ride it. And that squarely assigns the problem to the individual doing the complaining.
Tens of thousands of lives? Where did you get this figure?
According to the FBI, an organization that collects death statistics, approximately 1500 people were killed by guns last year, including 500 by home accident and 200 by hunting accident. More than 90% of all murders were committed using 'weapons of opportunity', like blunt objects and knives, *even when a gun was available*.
In comparison, about 5,000 died from drowning and more than 12,000 in falls. So according to the FBI, you're more likely to drown in your own pool or break your neck falling off a ladder than to get shot. If you're murdered, more than 9 times out of 10 it'll be with a blunt object, through choking (bare hands), or with a kitchen knife, on the spur of the moment.
On the other hand, in 1995 the FBI published a report stating that somewhere around 800,000 violent crimes are *prevented* each year when the would-be criminal suddenly found out that the victim was armed. In only one-tenth of one percent of these instances was the weapon actually discharged. This is a hard fact that gun control freaks simply refuse to accept - that self defense *works*.
Tens of thousands of people die in the U.S every year. But not from guns.
These folks may not by the dictionary definition be liberal, but that's what they call themselves and that's what it's come to mean. Liberals are associated with control through legislation, just like conservatives are; both want to make you do things you don't want to do, just through a different veneer of what is called the 'common good'.
'Liberals', for example, are almost universally opposed to the 2nd Amendment and would be joyously happy if everybody were disarmed. The reasons for this are publicly claimed to be the safety and welfare of the common man, but what it really boils down to is that they don't want *you* getting uppity and being backed by a firearm when you do so. God forbid that you might actually have the means to defend yourself!
This is *not* a liberal concept in the true sense of the word, but Liberal = gun control is a truism in the U.S. The difference between this sort of 'liberal' and what is commonly called a 'conservative' is quite minor when stripped of the PR; both want power over you to make you do what they tell you to do. Only the propaganda is different.
So when I say that liberals and conservatives are both the same kind of scumbag with just different stripes, I don't of course mean dictionary liberals and dictionary conservatives. I mean the power-mad malicious little shits that define themselves as 'liberal' and 'conservative' when both might properly be called 'fascist'.
A 'liberal' in the United States is about as dictionary-liberal as the USSR was dictionary-communist.
Slashdot Mirror
You make two fundamental errors:
- that laws will put everyone on equal footing. This simply won't happen. The rich and powerful always get special treatment; new laws only serve to put more and more of the burden on the powerless.
- that you'll get to watch the rich and powerful. You won't; they don't hang out with you now, they don't frequent the same places, they don't engage in the same activities. They sure as hell don't mingle with the dirty prolls.
And they won't in this future world of yours either. In fact, they'll be all the more inclined to set up 'gated communities', 'gated country clubs', and 'gated parks' to keep you and your goddamned cameras away from them. Again, only the powerless are affected by all those cameras and all those nosy little shithead citizens who refuse to keep out of your business.
Like I said in a previous post, Brin is naive and so are the people who buy into his silliness. He implies that a loss of privacy ensures egalitarianism when in fact it does exactly the opposite: exposing the poor and powerless to reprisals by stripping them of anonymity while not touching the rich and powerful at all.
A world without privacy would be a world that a rich oligarchy would love to no end. Privilege would be more precious than ever before.
Max
Not if making these laws 'more equitable' means diminishing privacy in any way, shape, or form. Then no, there's no agreement.
I think Brin is a damned fool, and his world is my idea of Hell.
Max
....is that so many people are going out of their way to blast guy and argue *in favor* of BT. What, you all suddenly convert to corporate whoredom overnight? Or is it the idea that an old guy invented something you think belongs to a younger generation?
Max
Oh please, PETA-troll, whine about your unadopted animals someplace else. I say go ahead and clone the pet and no activist yammering on about how "unethical" it is has any business butting into what anyone does in this matter.
If you're so fired up about unadopted animals then go adopt some and leave the pet-cloners the hell alone. Resolve not to do it yourself and *stay out of concerns that aren't your business*.
Max
And you're assuming two things:
- that the rich and powerful will hang out in the same places that you and I do, making themselves available for snooping. Doesn't happen now, won't happen then; and
- that the rich and powerful won't get legislation passed which will, in some way, insulate them from snooping while at the same time exposing us.
Brin is naive. Incredibly naive, given his age. He should know better than to think that the rules will apply across the board, or that technology will 'free' the masses. Yeah, good call there Brin, it's done a wonderful job so far.
Max
My life is not open source. Just because some sick motherfucker on slashdot decides that Brin's argument is a good tool to wield in his quest to butt into my life doesn't make it one I have to put up with.
And ultimately, it's my choice. I may not be able to do a great deal about the government spying upon me - although I'll continue to try - but if you, some schmuck with a camera and self-righteous attitude insists on following me around a public park I'll punch you in the nose. And guess what? Most Americans would call what you do 'harrassment', and a broken nose a small price to pay for being a stupid twit.
You don't have any right whatsoever to sift through my life. None. Nothing in the Constitution grants you that right, but even more fundamentally there is no 'natural right' to such activity either. My business is just that and your curiosity doesn't count for dick as a justification for getting into it.
I don't care how many laws are passed, or how many pathetic losers with no lives campaign for privacy loss so they can vicariously steal the lives of others, I'll *still* punch you in the nose if you follow me around with that camera.
And perhaps, just perhaps, enough of use nose-punchers will get together and set up shop elsewhere away from your nasty little prying eyes and your sad lives, leaving you to spy on the dull, boring, vapid existence you lead when you no longer have the opportunity to live parasitically off the more interesting.
Because, in reality, that's what it all boils down to, doesn't it, for those of you opposed to privacy? The fact that you yourselves are so utterly boring and pathetic that you'd probably slit your own throat if you couldn't spy on your neighbors and mess with their affairs? Yeah, sure, bleat in objection like the sheep you are, but *we* know the truth, don't we? Sure we do.
Max
The good thing is that this should end up applying to government officials, corporate officers, etc. as much or more than to other people.
On what do you base that assumption? Those richer and more powerful than us have never been subject to the same laws or conditions as the ordinary person; why would this be any different in your world? Simply because technological doodads are involved?
Max
This isn't true. Crimes of stalking and kidnap are far more likely to be targeted against the 'common' citizen than they are against the rich and powerful. It's just that when they occur to the rich and powerful they make the news; when they occur to you and me nobody cares.
The rich and powerful suffer from a disproportionately low incidence of violent crimes. So in truth they are far *less* likely to be targeted even if the information is available.
Max
Start talking about filesharing technology and the folks obsessed with yesterdays news start ripping into each other over whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.
Fact is, folks, this argument is already over with, and file sharing won. It won a long time ago. You can whine all you like, throw a tantrum, scream "illegal!" or "theft!" and it doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference. Your opinion on a done deal is completely and utterly irrelevant.
Dying media giants will continue to pass, and succeed at passing, laws trying to bolster their 20th century monopoly, but it's rather clear that these laws don't mean jack to most of the folks inclined to copy. And nobody - nobody - can convince me that the 45 million or so people in the U.S. *alone* who occasionally copy music are all evil, morally-bereft pirates. If you honestly think that's the case you need to get off your moral high ground and have your head examined. Only a loon could make a claim like that and actually believe it.
Copying is here to stay. That's just the way it is, laws or no laws, slashdot whiners or no slashdot whiners. So rather than trying to roll things back to the 20th century - an effort utterly doomed to failure - perhaps you might think of ways that the artists could still be compensated while copying continues.
The old system is creaking along on failing legs, and anyone with half a brain can see that it's about to collapse; no amount of handwringing, no stack of useless laws, is going to change this fact. So, if those of you who worry about the 'poor artist' are serious about your concerns, rather than just mouthing meaningless platitudes to support your inane position, perhaps you could come up with an alternative system for artist compensation that might survive the early years of the 21st century. That is, do something constructive for once.
Oh, and I did say 'artist compensation', not 'RIAA compensation'. The RIAA are part of the dinosaur and fated to die, thank the gods. Supporters of the RIAA would be worthy only of pity, if they weren't so deserving of contempt.
Max
This is *not* theft. It's copyright violation. The two are completely different articles legally.
Copyright violation is *not* theft.
Max
It has nothing to do with obscurity. Unless you can grab root access you can't do anything at all interesting. A fundamental difference in architecture.
Your only hope with Linux is that the operator is an idiot. In Windows the operator is likely to be an idiot, but if not the OS will happily make him look like one.
Max
I think you're being deliberately misleading - he agreed that AA's MM has reached the point where it is useable and that it was Linus' right to choose to use it, but he still didn't agree with the original decision.
No, you are. Alan Cox has flat out said that Linus made the right decision and that the new memory manager is better than the old. A quote direct from his diary (http://www.linux.org.uk/diary/):
The great VM dispute really isn't. It went something along the lines of "Putting a new vm in 2.4.10 is crzy", "Probably it was but its done so lets make it work" and at 2.4.14pre8 "See it works" "Yep".
Alan later elaborated on this in an interview backing Linus in both the decision to make the abrupt change and that the new manager worked better than the old.
Now, if you going to contradict Alan himself on what he said, please - invite him to the conversion. I want to see him rip you a new asshole.
Max
Given that Alan Cox now agrees with Linus, I'll take the endorsement of these two gents over your own claims any day of the week.
Max
Please point out any single thing that Linus has said that indicates he believes that Linux is "his toy". A single quote will do.
Max
Because the old memory manager was crippling in a supposedly stable kernel. Linus did the uncharacteristic thing replacing it to address a rather huge fault in the 2.4 series.
It turns out his decision was the right one.
Max
Apparently reading isn't your strong point. Try again. Look up the word 'empirical' if you don't know what it means.
Max
Heinlein was hardly original in the concept. Aside from which, if you've read the book you'll see that his system and mine, while similar, are not the same (i.e., I value military service more than civil service, and I think people should be able to choose one over the other).
Attempting to discredit my views by attributing them to another is a juvenile thing to do.
Max
Release it on the internet so we can *all* see what's been running inside the black box. After a few weeks I'm willing to bet a number of interested professionals would be sending the judge large volumes of material concerning which part of the code does what.
Hell, I bet IBM would spend considerable resources interpreting the source just to see if MS could be nailed for incorporating those 'mystery' APIs we always here about.
Max
But you are being quite ridiculous if you say curtailing our rights somewhat does nothing to fight terror. Of course it does.
Please provide some small scrap of empirical evidence to prove your point. Otherwise this, and everything that follows, is nothing more than blowing hot air out your ass.
Max
If you're not doing anything wrong, why get all strung up on the so called invasion of your privacy?
Wrong question. I don't need to justify my privacy; you need to justify your invasion of it. It's that simple.
Max
Is a complete repeal of universal suffrage. No doubt there'll be a great deal of knee-jerk shock and outrage to such a suggestion, but I stand by it: universal suffrage is a crock.
What would I replace it with? *Earning* the right to vote. That is, upon turning 18 (or any time thereafter) you get all the rights afforded to you by the Constitution *except* the right to vote. If you want that right you have to either:
a) spend four years in the civil service doing jobs you're assigned - you don't get to pick; or
b) spend two years in military service in the position you're assigned - you don't get to pick.
Now why would I advocate such a thing? Because anyone who wanted to become a voting citizen would have to prove that they actually care enough about that vote to sacrifice some portion of their lives obtaining it. I have no evidence that these folks would be any *wiser* in their voting patterns than people are today under universal suffrage, but my guess is that at least they'd care more about it and be more likely to research what the hell it is they're voting on.
You could always pass and remain a non-voting citizen if you wanted. Up to you. If you don't care to spend the time earning the vote then that's fine by me.
Note: before anyone starts ranting on how this would bloat the size of government, you could use these folks to *replace* quite a few current beaurocrats and military short-timers, at a lower pay scale. Most government positions don't require a great deal of skill or training, nor do many of the positions held by privates or the equivalent rank (generically known as "cannon fodder") in the armed forces.
Flame away!
Max
I use SuSe 7.3. Installed it many times on many machines. It has always installed easier and faster than Win of any version, without the begging for driver disks and the countless reboots. The autoconfiguration in 7.3 is amazingly better than that of previous versions, and kicks RH all over the playing field in this regard.
For all those people who keep muttering the MS-inspired mantra "Linux isn't ready for the desktop":
Anecdotal Evidence #1: My wife insists on using Linux. She hates Windows. Can't stand it crashing, can't abide the inability to configure it beyond a certain point, claims that Linux is *easier* to tweak than Windows, not harder. I agree with her and my experience at this point includes thousands of machines, not just some fools home system which he seems to think makes him an expert on the subject.
Anecdotal Evidence #2: I've taught middle school students and one thing that was apparent immediately - kids don't give a rats ass about the OS. Windows or Linux, they'll learn either just as easily including tricks that would never occur to the average adult. Furthermore, I've noticed that kids who worked/played on Linux boxes for several months and then were moved back to Windows boxes were disappointed that they couldn't mess with the OS as much as they could with Linux. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how enamored you are of order versus learning.
You see, kids aren't sitting around proclaiming that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. As far as they're concerned it's just another way to make the computer do what they want it to do. They have no brand loyalty and haven't yet gotten to the point where they'll go out of their way to avoid learning anything new. So quite obviously Linux might not be ready for *your* desktop, but that little fact has nothing to do with the OS and everything to do with *you*.
Now, there will be some who say "so what? secretary x won't be able to do that" and I say:
a) bullshit. I've set up linux configs for secretaries before and they haven't had any more problems than they do learning a new version of Word. The critical element is "who does the setup and configuration?". If your secretaries are installing and configuring Win2000 on your office computers then the IT team needs to be fired. Same with Linux. A good configuration is a simple configuration, providing the necessary tools without giving the computer-impaired any confusing choices. In Linux this is damned easy to do. Hell, you can not only turn off or restrict elements the secretary shouldn't be messing with but remove them altogether!
b) even if your business employs people so brain-dead that a) isn't possible, you can easily teach kids to use Linux instead of Windows and then guess what? In ten years your secretaries will be using whatever the hell they're most comfortable with - Linux!
The whole desktop argument is a crock. It might apply to individuals but not to the OS itself, or the GUI's that ride it. And that squarely assigns the problem to the individual doing the complaining.
Max
Tens of thousands of lives? Where did you get this figure?
According to the FBI, an organization that collects death statistics, approximately 1500 people were killed by guns last year, including 500 by home accident and 200 by hunting accident. More than 90% of all murders were committed using 'weapons of opportunity', like blunt objects and knives, *even when a gun was available*.
In comparison, about 5,000 died from drowning and more than 12,000 in falls. So according to the FBI, you're more likely to drown in your own pool or break your neck falling off a ladder than to get shot. If you're murdered, more than 9 times out of 10 it'll be with a blunt object, through choking (bare hands), or with a kitchen knife, on the spur of the moment.
On the other hand, in 1995 the FBI published a report stating that somewhere around 800,000 violent crimes are *prevented* each year when the would-be criminal suddenly found out that the victim was armed. In only one-tenth of one percent of these instances was the weapon actually discharged. This is a hard fact that gun control freaks simply refuse to accept - that self defense *works*.
Tens of thousands of people die in the U.S every year. But not from guns.
Max
No, you provide the facts. Show me empirical evidence that definitely proves that gun control laws result in significantly lower crime rates.
You can't. Typical 'liberal' crap propaganda, knee-jerk fascism at its best.
Max
These folks may not by the dictionary definition be liberal, but that's what they call themselves and that's what it's come to mean. Liberals are associated with control through legislation, just like conservatives are; both want to make you do things you don't want to do, just through a different veneer of what is called the 'common good'.
'Liberals', for example, are almost universally opposed to the 2nd Amendment and would be joyously happy if everybody were disarmed. The reasons for this are publicly claimed to be the safety and welfare of the common man, but what it really boils down to is that they don't want *you* getting uppity and being backed by a firearm when you do so. God forbid that you might actually have the means to defend yourself!
This is *not* a liberal concept in the true sense of the word, but Liberal = gun control is a truism in the U.S. The difference between this sort of 'liberal' and what is commonly called a 'conservative' is quite minor when stripped of the PR; both want power over you to make you do what they tell you to do. Only the propaganda is different.
So when I say that liberals and conservatives are both the same kind of scumbag with just different stripes, I don't of course mean dictionary liberals and dictionary conservatives. I mean the power-mad malicious little shits that define themselves as 'liberal' and 'conservative' when both might properly be called 'fascist'.
A 'liberal' in the United States is about as dictionary-liberal as the USSR was dictionary-communist.
Max