The only thing we can really do to them is stop buying their shit
My guess is that if this occurred, they'd just pass a law giving themselves a cut of our tax money to make up for all of that business-destroying 'piracy' - which could be the only explanation for their falling revenues.
Here's where your argument falls apart. Your mind can't be 'relocated'; if you think so, please explain how your mind is mystically transported from your brain to some other receptacle.
Perhaps you think when computers move information they actually move it? They don't; they copy the information to some other location and DELETE THE ORIGINAL COPY. You can't 'move' anything digitally, nor can you 'move' a mind. You may be able to copy it, but a copy is not the original. It never has been, isn't, and never will be, by definition.
ou're only a copy of the person you were seven years ago. Does that bother the person you used to be?
You've obviously swallowed the whole 'every cell is replaced every seven years' line. Try doing a bit of research and see how this DOESN'T apply to neural tissue.
As in, those that don't have an agenda and don't promote either the left or right wing? I can't stand most blogs because in the end they're just the blatherings of some ignorant fuckwit screaming about how great his group of fanatics are while harping on the evils of some other, opposing group of fanatics.
I'd like blogs that that spit on both the left and right, but as yet haven't been able to find one without a bias that also manages to get its facts straight on a semi-regular basis.
It's painfully easy to fix the system. Just restrict the random moderation points so that moderators can only mod *up* with those points and not down. If you want to mod down, then for every point you spend a point is also deduced from *your own* karma.
This would blast the mod-trolls right out of the water since I'm willing to bet that 95% of them have no karma whatsoever, or if they did, they value it so highly they'd never spend it to mod someone else down. Only those who really felt strongly about something would burn karma to mod someone else down; the losers, freaks, and morons wouldn't have the points or the balls or both.
One little change and karma-bombing and vendetta modding would become a thing of the past. Only those of us who regularly get maxed-out karma would be able to mod folks down more than once in a blue moon, and somehow I doubt most of us high-karma types really give a shit to take the time or trouble to do so.
Especially by marketing hacks. "Repurposed"? Jesus.
Whats the difference between manslaughter and murder? Semantics.
Damn good thing you aren't a lawyer. Legally murder is the *deliberate* killing of another human being; manslaughter is the *accidental* killing of another human being. Of course, the fact that you're unable to distinguish between the two is driven home by your completely irrelevent strawman argument.
Yes, theft does not mean someone was deprived of something.
The legal definition of theft means that you actually have to deprive someone of something. And no, you aren't important enough in the grand scheme of things to redefine words as you please and force your definitions on the rest of us. So either you accept *our* definitions or we get to laugh at you for being a solipsistic, arrogant little prick.
There's a difference between theft and copyright violation. But I don't suspect you'll be able to tell the difference, since you can't even see the difference between murder and manslaughter.
Commie hippy fuckwad. I'm posting this as an AC because the truth does not like to be heard on slashdot
No, you're posting this AC because you're a fucking coward who's desperately afraid that he might lose some bogus karma points if he posts under his handle. A spineless, whining, two-bit guttersnipe without the balls to stand behind his words and take what comes.
Open source is the sales-enabling tool which allows other non-open stuff to be sold. I think this goes completely against most people's feelings about open source.
Then you'd be wrong. While the free software folks are irritatingly loud, they're clearly outnumbered by the open source folks. Open source does NOT mean free, and vice versa. All open source means is that you have access to the source code, so that you can review it and even change it on your machine to suit your specific needs.
Don't confuse the two, as Stallman et. al. deliberately do in their propaganda.
Jesus H., lay off the coke Mr. Maladjusted. That's just about one of the most off-topic posts I've ever read.
It'll be interesting to see what your argument will be when medical technology advances to the point to provide us with real immortality. My guess is that you'll either be one of the loons screaming about how it goes 'against Gods laws', or one of the whiners demanding it as a 'right'.
What we need is enlightened leadership, which acts in the interest of the people.
The problem here is that what you think is "in the interest of the people" is almost certainly different that what I think is in the interest of the people. The very fact that you used that line pretty much convinces me that we'd be diametrically opposed on most issues.
And I don't want you using the government guns to force me to act (or not act) in a certain way to fulfill your ideas of what 'should' be done any more than I want the DemoRepublicans to do it. The only solution that doesn't involve one of us seizing control of the government and using it against the other is to make the government so weak that no matter who has control it can't be used to stomp all over the rights of everyone else.
For example, around the time of the revolution 1% of the USA population owned 10% of all wealth, today that 1% owns over 40% of all wealth.
You've just argued that the current political-economic system in the United States is utterly, completely ineffective at preventing this transfer of wealth, and that a radical solution is required.
Sounds like you have more in common with the libertarians than with either of the mainstream parties after all.
Nice black-or-white argument you've got going here. Government good, corporations evil, and the simplistic paradigm you've constructed is the only one that will ever exist.
Here's a newflash: government is often evil. Government regularly sucks the cock of corporations. Even when government does good deeds, it often does so in a ruinously inefficient manner.
In a libertarian state you'd have lawsuits where investors and board directors can't hide behind laws exempting them from liability, *enforced by the very government that's supposed to be protecting YOU*. In a libertarian state non-profits and citizen groups wouldn't be hamstrung by a government constantly trying to muzzle them with rules, regulations, and laws designed to make information retrieval and private monitoring of corporate entities damned near impossible.
In a libertarian state investors and board members could find all of their property seized for deliberately releasing a drug with deadly side-effects to the public in pursuit of short-term profit. In a truly libertarian state the people who knew about these side effects and did nothing to sound the alarm would go on trial for murder.
Your ignorance would be astounding if it weren't so common.
Except that you can't tell these two horses apart. The only point in voting for Kerry that I can see is that it might have some small chance of deadlocking the government and preventing it from doing any more harm to my civil liberties over the next four years.
Bush is just as bad as Kerry, but since he's playing for the same team as the majority of Congress it's much less likely that the deadlock will occur, and that atrocities like the INDUCE act will pass.
This is the general problem with third party candidates. They tend to offer amenable political views, but no solid evidence of leadership
On the other hand, our current career politicians have made it quite clear to us that most of them lack any leadership skills whatsoever. Including both candidates for the presidency.
Often the case is that the market defines what the customer wants, then convinces the customer that the 'want' in question was their own idea in the first place.
"I'm currently jacking off to porn in my cubicle. Once I'm done I'll waste some time on slashdot, write up something ignorant, and hope that people even dumber than I am mod me up as 'insightful'."
If you can reliably simulate the operation of a human mind, and easily transfer the contents from a brain to that simulator, you don't even need that.
True, because YOU will be dead. A copy of you might live on, but you will still be dead. A copy of the original is not the original, and you can prove this quite easily with just about any piece of paper and a xerox machine.
May it be sooner rather than later...and hopefully before you breed.
I don't care how cavalier you are concerning your own well-being, but a nut-house view like this applied to my family will get you a bullet in the brain. And no doubt the approval of many of my neighbors, who also don't like the idea of some douchebag going on about 'God cleaning house' with some nasty little plague.
There are endless techniques that we can integrate into new homes, many of which should be REQUIRED
Where the hell do all you wannabe tin-pot dictators come from? Here you are, advocating the use of force to inflict your personal views on the rest of the nation, without any regard whatsoever of the concept of freedom and personal choice. You do it without a second thought.
If you want to live in that sort of country, there are plenty of dictatorships all over the world. Choose one and move there.
But if you want your ideas to catch on, you'll have to convince people that they're good ones. Ones that they'll CHOOSE to employ and not be FORCED to employ. That's part and parcel of a free country - suck it up and deal with.
I think the problem is overconsumption, especially by Americans, and that is the issue addressed by the original article.
The idea of overconsumption is facetious. There is no 'overconsumption', just 'consumption'. The fact that Americans are considerably more wealthy than most of the rest of the world doesn't mean that they're 'overconsuming' anything.
People who scream about American use of resources are operating on jealousy, and nothing more. Their envy is translated into ridiculous arguments about 'American greed' and how we should somehow be punished because we have more wealth than any other nation around. That coming to our country and looting the wealth we've built in order to distribute it to others is somehow more 'fair' if the thieves chant "for the greater good" while they're making off with property that doesn't belong to them.
And it's damned amusing, when you think about it. The people who would force us to give up most of our wealth (if they had the military might to do so) are the very same people who berate us for interfering in the sovereignty of other nations. The hypocrisy of these conflicting views never seems to dawn on their tiny minds....
Force people to install security updates or sell the PCs with them all pre installed and make windows update automaticly run once a month.
Yet another grand solution involving more laws and less freedom. That's the ticket: use FORCE to compel everyone to do what you want them to because, of course, it's for 'the greater good'. Fuck the fact that they may not like your solution, especially the automatic updates to THEIR property that they can't opt out of - making their property YOUR property in the process.
Welcome to the Socialist States of America! Papers, please.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing we can really do to them is stop buying their shit
My guess is that if this occurred, they'd just pass a law giving themselves a cut of our tax money to make up for all of that business-destroying 'piracy' - which could be the only explanation for their falling revenues.
Max
relocates your living mind
Here's where your argument falls apart. Your mind can't be 'relocated'; if you think so, please explain how your mind is mystically transported from your brain to some other receptacle.
Perhaps you think when computers move information they actually move it? They don't; they copy the information to some other location and DELETE THE ORIGINAL COPY. You can't 'move' anything digitally, nor can you 'move' a mind. You may be able to copy it, but a copy is not the original. It never has been, isn't, and never will be, by definition.
Max
ou're only a copy of the person you were seven years ago. Does that bother the person you used to be?
You've obviously swallowed the whole 'every cell is replaced every seven years' line. Try doing a bit of research and see how this DOESN'T apply to neural tissue.
Max
As in, those that don't have an agenda and don't promote either the left or right wing? I can't stand most blogs because in the end they're just the blatherings of some ignorant fuckwit screaming about how great his group of fanatics are while harping on the evils of some other, opposing group of fanatics.
I'd like blogs that that spit on both the left and right, but as yet haven't been able to find one without a bias that also manages to get its facts straight on a semi-regular basis.
Max
It's painfully easy to fix the system. Just restrict the random moderation points so that moderators can only mod *up* with those points and not down. If you want to mod down, then for every point you spend a point is also deduced from *your own* karma.
This would blast the mod-trolls right out of the water since I'm willing to bet that 95% of them have no karma whatsoever, or if they did, they value it so highly they'd never spend it to mod someone else down. Only those who really felt strongly about something would burn karma to mod someone else down; the losers, freaks, and morons wouldn't have the points or the balls or both.
One little change and karma-bombing and vendetta modding would become a thing of the past. Only those of us who regularly get maxed-out karma would be able to mod folks down more than once in a blue moon, and somehow I doubt most of us high-karma types really give a shit to take the time or trouble to do so.
Max
Words are repurposed every day.
Especially by marketing hacks. "Repurposed"? Jesus.
Whats the difference between manslaughter and murder? Semantics.
Damn good thing you aren't a lawyer. Legally murder is the *deliberate* killing of another human being; manslaughter is the *accidental* killing of another human being. Of course, the fact that you're unable to distinguish between the two is driven home by your completely irrelevent strawman argument.
Yes, theft does not mean someone was deprived of something.
The legal definition of theft means that you actually have to deprive someone of something. And no, you aren't important enough in the grand scheme of things to redefine words as you please and force your definitions on the rest of us. So either you accept *our* definitions or we get to laugh at you for being a solipsistic, arrogant little prick.
There's a difference between theft and copyright violation. But I don't suspect you'll be able to tell the difference, since you can't even see the difference between murder and manslaughter.
Commie hippy fuckwad. I'm posting this as an AC because the truth does not like to be heard on slashdot
No, you're posting this AC because you're a fucking coward who's desperately afraid that he might lose some bogus karma points if he posts under his handle. A spineless, whining, two-bit guttersnipe without the balls to stand behind his words and take what comes.
I laugh at you, little weasel.
Max
Open source is the sales-enabling tool which allows other non-open stuff to be sold. I think this goes completely against most people's feelings about open source.
Then you'd be wrong. While the free software folks are irritatingly loud, they're clearly outnumbered by the open source folks. Open source does NOT mean free, and vice versa. All open source means is that you have access to the source code, so that you can review it and even change it on your machine to suit your specific needs.
Don't confuse the two, as Stallman et. al. deliberately do in their propaganda.
Max
Jesus H., lay off the coke Mr. Maladjusted. That's just about one of the most off-topic posts I've ever read.
It'll be interesting to see what your argument will be when medical technology advances to the point to provide us with real immortality. My guess is that you'll either be one of the loons screaming about how it goes 'against Gods laws', or one of the whiners demanding it as a 'right'.
Max
What we need is enlightened leadership, which acts in the interest of the people.
The problem here is that what you think is "in the interest of the people" is almost certainly different that what I think is in the interest of the people. The very fact that you used that line pretty much convinces me that we'd be diametrically opposed on most issues.
And I don't want you using the government guns to force me to act (or not act) in a certain way to fulfill your ideas of what 'should' be done any more than I want the DemoRepublicans to do it. The only solution that doesn't involve one of us seizing control of the government and using it against the other is to make the government so weak that no matter who has control it can't be used to stomp all over the rights of everyone else.
Max
For example, around the time of the revolution 1% of the USA population owned 10% of all wealth, today that 1% owns over 40% of all wealth.
You've just argued that the current political-economic system in the United States is utterly, completely ineffective at preventing this transfer of wealth, and that a radical solution is required.
Sounds like you have more in common with the libertarians than with either of the mainstream parties after all.
Max
Nice black-or-white argument you've got going here. Government good, corporations evil, and the simplistic paradigm you've constructed is the only one that will ever exist.
Here's a newflash: government is often evil. Government regularly sucks the cock of corporations. Even when government does good deeds, it often does so in a ruinously inefficient manner.
In a libertarian state you'd have lawsuits where investors and board directors can't hide behind laws exempting them from liability, *enforced by the very government that's supposed to be protecting YOU*. In a libertarian state non-profits and citizen groups wouldn't be hamstrung by a government constantly trying to muzzle them with rules, regulations, and laws designed to make information retrieval and private monitoring of corporate entities damned near impossible.
In a libertarian state investors and board members could find all of their property seized for deliberately releasing a drug with deadly side-effects to the public in pursuit of short-term profit. In a truly libertarian state the people who knew about these side effects and did nothing to sound the alarm would go on trial for murder.
Your ignorance would be astounding if it weren't so common.
Max
Except that you can't tell these two horses apart. The only point in voting for Kerry that I can see is that it might have some small chance of deadlocking the government and preventing it from doing any more harm to my civil liberties over the next four years.
Bush is just as bad as Kerry, but since he's playing for the same team as the majority of Congress it's much less likely that the deadlock will occur, and that atrocities like the INDUCE act will pass.
Max
Oh yes, our government has been so very effective at preventing all of these things. Here's a quarter, buy yourself a clue.
Max
This is the general problem with third party candidates. They tend to offer amenable political views, but no solid evidence of leadership
On the other hand, our current career politicians have made it quite clear to us that most of them lack any leadership skills whatsoever. Including both candidates for the presidency.
Max
What's your mission?
To have sex with as many young, nubile women as I can before I die. Would this count a mission critical software?
Max
The market delivers what customers want.
Often the case is that the market defines what the customer wants, then convinces the customer that the 'want' in question was their own idea in the first place.
It's the only way I can explain prime-time TV.
Max
Funny, I translated this as:
"I'm currently jacking off to porn in my cubicle. Once I'm done I'll waste some time on slashdot, write up something ignorant, and hope that people even dumber than I am mod me up as 'insightful'."
Max
If you can reliably simulate the operation of a human mind, and easily transfer the contents from a brain to that simulator, you don't even need that.
True, because YOU will be dead. A copy of you might live on, but you will still be dead. A copy of the original is not the original, and you can prove this quite easily with just about any piece of paper and a xerox machine.
Max
Evolution will overcome all those safeguards.
And science will overcome evolution.
Max
and if it's my time to go, I'm fine with that
May it be sooner rather than later...and hopefully before you breed.
I don't care how cavalier you are concerning your own well-being, but a nut-house view like this applied to my family will get you a bullet in the brain. And no doubt the approval of many of my neighbors, who also don't like the idea of some douchebag going on about 'God cleaning house' with some nasty little plague.
Max
Please, folks, separate the man from the business.
A person is what he does. Good deeds do not wipe out nor make up for bad ones.
Max
The question is, why is energy so cheap in the US?
Because there is no shortage of coal, the primary source of electrical power in the U.S.
Max
There are endless techniques that we can integrate into new homes, many of which should be REQUIRED
Where the hell do all you wannabe tin-pot dictators come from? Here you are, advocating the use of force to inflict your personal views on the rest of the nation, without any regard whatsoever of the concept of freedom and personal choice. You do it without a second thought.
If you want to live in that sort of country, there are plenty of dictatorships all over the world. Choose one and move there.
But if you want your ideas to catch on, you'll have to convince people that they're good ones. Ones that they'll CHOOSE to employ and not be FORCED to employ. That's part and parcel of a free country - suck it up and deal with.
Max
I think the problem is overconsumption, especially by Americans, and that is the issue addressed by the original article.
The idea of overconsumption is facetious. There is no 'overconsumption', just 'consumption'. The fact that Americans are considerably more wealthy than most of the rest of the world doesn't mean that they're 'overconsuming' anything.
People who scream about American use of resources are operating on jealousy, and nothing more. Their envy is translated into ridiculous arguments about 'American greed' and how we should somehow be punished because we have more wealth than any other nation around. That coming to our country and looting the wealth we've built in order to distribute it to others is somehow more 'fair' if the thieves chant "for the greater good" while they're making off with property that doesn't belong to them.
And it's damned amusing, when you think about it. The people who would force us to give up most of our wealth (if they had the military might to do so) are the very same people who berate us for interfering in the sovereignty of other nations. The hypocrisy of these conflicting views never seems to dawn on their tiny minds....
Max
Force people to install security updates or sell the PCs with them all pre installed and make windows update automaticly run once a month.
Yet another grand solution involving more laws and less freedom. That's the ticket: use FORCE to compel everyone to do what you want them to because, of course, it's for 'the greater good'. Fuck the fact that they may not like your solution, especially the automatic updates to THEIR property that they can't opt out of - making their property YOUR property in the process.
Welcome to the Socialist States of America! Papers, please.
Max