Its quite simple really, people who wish to do something they're not supposed to, ie download music illegally, do not want you to think of it as stealing or theft because then they're theives
That's because they aren't thieves. They're in violation of copyright. Copyright violation and theft have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Perhaps the people violating copyright are a bit more clued into this distinction than you are.
The theft of valve code was an actual theft, not a copyright violation. The people in question hacked the system (or rather, idiots at Valve pretty much hacked it for them), then stole the code before the owners themselves had released it for publication. Legally, this isn't any different than bashing in a window at Valve Central, sneaking in, and stealing a disk with the code on it.
You might want to check to see if you know shit about the laws in question before spouting off on the topic.
And then there are those of us who do both things: use our computers for work *and* as a source of amusement.
Any decent setup these days can do pretty much anything you want, and very efficiently, whether you're working from the command line, a stripped-down gui, or from a fully-featured gui like KDE or Gnome. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few things that would work markedly better outside of one of the mainstream guis, and all of those are scientific number-crunching apps that would strain any pc regardless of what else it is (or isn't) doing.
For just about everything else, the cpu is going to be idle most of the time. Adding the minor overhead of a gui to working on text, spreadsheets, presentations, statistical analyses, programming, etc. isn't going to mean dick to a modern system. There's nothing 'leet' about using a command line anymore, nor does it distinguish the 'real' users from the people just farting around.
If I can program and be entertained by my background changing every ten minutes from beautiful woman to the next, while listening to music through xmms and occasionally wasting time on slashdot via my browser, then why the hell not?
What bullshit. The internet would've come about with or without Gore, just as the automobile would've flourished whether or not Ford decided to go into the business. Gore's contribution was an accident of timing and position, nothing else. If it hadn't been Gore, it would've been some other little asshole making the same stupid claims.
Inventions happen. Useful inventions tend to happen even when other people try to put a stop to them. Individual efforts can speed things along, or slow them down, but they rarely, if ever, change the progress of technology. The 'Great Man' theory of history has pretty much been discredited, except by those who wish to think of themselves as 'great men' - or who have a hard-on for worshipping those they consider 'great men'.
According to the Supreme Court, there can be no such thing as truly free speech without the ability to be anonymous. But I suppose you know better than they do, being the morally superior sort that you are.
That is what the right to privacy entails, that you can't be monitored in your home.
Nor can you be monitored in public without sufficient cause or immediate, reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing. Because of that free speech thingie and the need for anonymity, wouldn't you know.
At least, that was true until the courts started to allow random stops for drunk driving checks. A complete, willful violation of the Constitution, but hey, if it saves a life...for the chiiiiillddreeennn!, after all.
The Constitution is already dead. We're arguing over a moment that came and went years ago.
our software allowed all the police officers in Utah
Ah, the state where it's illegal for an unmarried man and woman to live together, spitting on the very idea of individual rights. Good choice that, using Utah as an example of benevolent government.
You're relying on government to destroy data on private citizens? The same government that was ordererd by the Supreme Court to destroy surveillance data on '60's war protesters, yet still has that data in FBI archives today?
The only data that government actually destroys is that which might incriminate government employees in illegal activity. Everything else is kept as a possible source of dirt against citizens who might try to buck the system.
Well, let's be fair here though. If he finds a very large boat stuck on top of a mountain, there are very few possibilities as to which boat it might be.
There is no 'confusion' over the issuess here. Most linux coders and users don't give a flying fuck if Linux 'competes' away desktop users from Windows. Whether or not this occurs Linux will still exist and in the form they want it to exist in, doing the things they want it to do. Windows has zip to do with this.
The confusion is over what the crusaders wish to gain. So far as I can tell current users and coders of Linux don't stand to benefit in any way by competing with Microsoft or attracting more users to the desktop. That tiny minority who press for this competition have motivations that have nothing to do with improving the OS for the benefit of those who're using it. Motivations which I suspect are no better than 'sticking it' to Microsoft, or perhaps trying to expand the size of their pond so they can imagine themselves to be bigger fish than they are. Or, as I previously mentioned, because in some twisted way they think they'll bring down some Dark Jedi, when in fact the Dark Jedi are laughing at them from some beautiful beach in the South Pacific.
Max
Re:I had a discussion...
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 5, Funny
My girlfriend immediately said, "oh my god, i'm dating a nerd."
...and found it to be less than enlightening. The first part reads as a self-serving defense against Cringely's (rather obvious, I thought) observation that *you can't play catch-up against Microsoft, because you will lose*. This painfully evident observation applies to everyone; if MS makes the rules, MS will always be at the forefront of whatever it is that it gets to define, and no one playing tag-along will ever be able to catch up with them. Miguel and his efforts are no exception to this, despite what he seems to think. He makes the mistake of assuming that he's different - just like all the other companies which thought the same thing, and were driven out of their markets (or nearly so) by Microsoft.
Cringely was right. Miguel is wrong.
The second part is based on a faulty assumption, i.e., that most Linux users care if about taking the battle to Microsoft and 'getting Linux on the desktop'. Fact is, most Linux users could give a shit one way or another, and aren't interested in seeing their OS used as a vehicle to launch a crusade against the evil empire. Never have been, never will be; this 'crusade' mentality belongs to a tiny, but very obnoxious and very loud, minority. One which I heartily wish would shut the hell up, move on to the next Big Thing(TM), and leave those of us who actually code for and use the OS for our own satisfaction the hell alone.
It's just as Cringely said. The best thing to do for Linux is to simply ignore MS altogether and continue coding what we want to code, when we want to code at, in the way we want to code it. If more than that tiny minority of us actually begin to take this crusade bullshit seriously, all we'll end up with is a second-rate Windows clone that whores itself out to whatever blithering idiots scream the loudest and whine the longest.
And in any event, what do these crusaders think they're going to accomplish, anyway? Even if they manage to drive MS out of business (not in this lifetime, pal) Bill Gates will still be one of the richest men in the world - richer than any of the crusaders, and laughing all the way to the bank. So will his cronies, and so will the smart investors. The only people who'll 'lose' the war are a bunch of average-Joe schmucks who work for Microsoft, or who invested in Microsoft and didn't manage to pull out until it was too late.
The folks who created the 'evil empire' have already made their money, and nothing the crusaders do to the company will change that fact. Those folks will always be richer than the crusaders, and will always be laughing at their trite vitriolic dialogue - no doubt while sitting on a beach in Tahiti surrounded by beautiful (if purchased) women. To them the crusaders are nothing more than sad little fools worthy of little more than contempt.
Miguel knows we need to reach interoperability to have a meaningful competition in the first place.
This assumes that any of the rest of us care to have a 'competition', which most of us don't. Most Linux users, and nearly all Linux coders, don't have an interest whatsoever in 'competing' with Microsoft or 'winning' whatever the hell it is The Cause(TM) people keep whining about here on Slashdot.
Microsoft may very well be the 'evil empire'. But Linux is not the Force, and none of you are Jedi. Time to put away the plastic light sabers and try to find a girl to occupy your time with (a real one, not the blow-up kind).
It hasn't. Somebody fucked up. In any event, it can't be done with GNU/Linux has Linus already holds the rights to the word 'Linux' itself. GNU/Linux would be an infringement.
My guess is that some clueless Stallman-worshipper wrote the blurb. "There is but one OS, and Stallman is it's prophet!" Y'know, *that* kind of Stallman fanatic.
it's still better to have it under organized control than have a group of crazed vigilantes blocking entire countries.
No, it isn't. Government has proven to be entirely ineffectual at doing anything to stop, slow down, or even reduce spam by one teeny tiny little bit. Government efforts are, in this context, laughable at best.
The 'crazed vigilantes' stand a much better chance of getting some action than any government law has in the past. Fact is, I think this is a good thing; it shows that while governments may be oppressing us more and more in the real world, as yet they have little, if any, power in the virtual one. Citizen groups, for better or worse, are mightier than the nasty fuckers that control most government bodies today in at least one way.
And until there's a one-world government - which only happen over my cold, dead body - this situation is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.
We have real life IDs that are difficult to forge and even if you can forge them, you'd get hit by hefty penalties for doing it.
This is a silly argument. Criminals will forge i.d.'s regardless of the law *because - duh! - they're criminals. It's what they do*.
And if you think it's difficult to forge a driver's license or a passport, from *any* country, you've been swallowing too much government bullshit. For $500-$1000 you can get a completely new, legal identity that'll check out if the government investigates it, because it was purchased directly from the folks who control the system that issues i.d.'s in the first place. I could, in 48 hours, get a perfectly valid (and new) SSN, drivers license, and birth record entry which will hold up under government scrutiny *because the folks who control the system will sell them to me, and they aren't forged*. I can get decent forgeries for just a few hundred bucks, if I don't need to pass a serious security check.
Internet i.d.'s will be no different, and no harder to forge. Or to buy, from the right people.
I use a white-list at home. If you aren't on the list I don't know you and 99.9% of the time I'm pretty sure I don't want to talk to you, either. The other 0.1% of the time isn't worth the spam. And in any event there are a number of ways to exchange email addresses to compensate for that other 0.1%, if I'm actually interested in doing so.
I've always wondered what Europeans see in the European Union. All they have to do is look to America to see what sort of power an enormous centralized government can wield against its own people; you'd think with our example they'd be arguing for *smaller* nations and *smaller* governments, closer to the people who voted them in, and not the other way around.
From my point of view the EU seems to be nothing more than a vehicle to create a U.S. Federal government clone - only worse. From some of the proposed legislation, and the high-handed totalitarian tactics of some of your EU representatives (who remind me more and more of Stalin these days) I can't help but wonder if the EU will become nothing more than a pseudo-socialist dictatorship masquerading as a 'free' association of nations. 'Free' like the fifty states in America are free to buck the federal government when they disagree with it, just like they did in 1860....
...they're doing it in a venue that children are *legally obligated* to attend. Worse, this venue is supported by *taxes I pay*, and I don't remember giving the district permission to teach my child this shit during school hours. In fact, I don't even remember being asked whether I thought this was an appropriate use of school facilities or time.
Just another example of government whoring itself out to corporate America regardless of the will of the people. 'Representative democracy', my ass.
but it leads me to believe in carbon emissions as a culprit for global warming over some sort of vague logical positivist argument that since we don't have enough evidence, it's probably a natural process.
The 'emissions' folks are just as vague, and their models just as primitive. And that's my point: neither side has made a convincing argument either way. As a dyed-in-the-wool moderate I'm not swayed by arguments backed only by personal opinion, often colored by a political agenda.
Right-wingers assert it's natural because they don't want to implement the radical emissions changes required to do anything to slow down the process (assuming it can be slowed down, or that this would be an effective way of doing it - since nobody knows). Left-wingers assert it's all our fault, every bit of it, because it allows them to take the moral high ground and (as usual) blame someone else for something that's gone wrong.
The truth, as in almost all things, probably lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps someday we'll know what that truth is, but right now we don't have a damned clue. Just guesses, and conflicting ones at that.
then you have to admit that we're making HUGE changes.
I have to admit no such thing. What I'd like to see is some empirical evidence in favor of human intervention over naturally changing conditions. So far no such evidence exists.
The Earth has warmed up and cooled down many times in our geological past. Some of these changes have been gradual, others have been rather dramatic. It could very well be that humans are at least partially responsible for the current changes, but as yet this is merely speculation and nothing more. The yahoos who keep going on about the 'evils' of industrial society are grossly oversimplifying the complexity of the problem (and the equally complex task of determining responsbility) in favor of their own black hat/white hat world-view.
In any event, the changes have been made and there's no reasonable way to reverse them. Regardless of the cause what we should be looking at is how we adapt to the new conditions, not futile attempts to maintain stasis or turn back the clock. Either of these options is far beyond current technology in any event, as any attempt to 'reverse' the trend is just as likely to cause some other disaster our primitive understanding of the situation couldn't foresee.
We can wail, and gnash our teeth, and feel morally superior to everyone else because we just *know* that it's The Evils of Technology and Greed(TM) that's the root of the problem, but this doesn't help the situation and ultimately just makes the finger-pointers look like idiots. Or we can prepare for the worst and try our best to ride out the storm, without wasting energy trying to decide who's to blame - if anyone is to blame.
it seems almost perverse to argue that humans arent creating a pretty solid upward pressure on temps.
Actually, I argued no such thing, but asking for reading comprehension on the part of the typical Slashdotter is, I admit, a silly thing to do.
What I said was that there's no evidence that humans are responsible for global changes in temperature. Right now it's speculation, nothing more, as any decent scientist will tell you. Empirically no one has proven anything.
This is a far cry from asserting that humans *aren't* responsible, which I never did. If you think otherwise, I suggest you try actually reading the post this time.
Actually, many people know this. And they have earth and space-based detectors that can measure this with great precision. If this is happening, I doubt some slashdot poster is the one to crack the case wide open.
The point was that there's no way to tell what the solar output was prior to the invention of these detectors, and tiny changes will result in large climactic shifts over long periods of time.
Maybe the scientists do know, and this is just a case of bad reporting...
It's a case of bad reporting. The loss of ice in both the poles and Greenland is well-documented and goes back more than two decades, with some pretty spectacular and sudden melts or glacier break-aways occuring within the last half-dozen years.
However, as a number of people have pointed out, there's absolutely zero evidence that this is due to human activity. It could very well be natural, as was the case in human history for both the 'little ice age' and period of abnormal warming during the previous millennium which allowed the Norse to colonize the southern tip of Greenland. Both of these changes were more extreme than the changes we're currently seeing.
Hell, it could just be due to a tiny increase in our sun's thermal output. Most people don't know that our sun is a VARIABLE star, which means that it's energy output changes on an irregular, unpredictable basis. If the solar output were to increase by less than 1/10th of 1 percent over a sustained period of time, you'd get much the same thing we're seeing today - and since the alteration itself would've happened a couple of centuries back (it takes awhile for minute changes to broad impacts) we wouldn't know about it today, since two centuries ago there was no reliable way to accurately measure solar energy output.
You act like this place is full of Microsoft "apologists," when the majority of the readers are rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth radicals who think everything should be free.
In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is full of 'foaming-at-the-mouth' loons from both sides of the aisle. The difference between the two groups is minor, even trivial; they both want everyone else to think the same lock-step, ask-no-questions, vomit-the-party-line way that they do, and view any opposition to their blather as heresy. The actual argument is irrelevant when it comes to fanatics; they're all the same animal, all looking to impose their morally/intellectually superior view on everyone else.
Fanatics are the bane of civilized society. Fanatics oppose freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action. Fanatics are little would-be tin-pot dictators whose most cherished goal is to gain power over everyone else around them. The actual point of contention is is just a means to achieve this; it's the fanaticism itself, and the imposition of it on everyone else, that's the real goal.
So we have groups like this:
- MS is evil. Down with Satan! - I worship Bill Gates! I dream of blowing him!
And like this:
- Open source = communism! Communists suck! - Open source is divine writ!
Not to mention this:
- monopoly capitalism and corporate oligarchy are they greatest economic systems on the planet! I know, 'cuz I'm so smart and cool I'm going to be in the inner circle someday - I just know it!
- socialism is the only way to go! For the 'greater good'. Which is defined by my own morally superior self, of course. Bow down before me, you ignorant, capitalist swine!
And like this:
- Free software is anti-capitalist! - All software should be free! Kill the capitalist pigs!
And, of course, this:
- The RIAA/MPAA are the Holy Church! Kill the piratical, thieving infidels! Oh, and ignore the fact that copyright violation is neither piracy nor theft, we'll be sure to buy enough Congressmen to change that soon enough!
- information wants to be freeeeee! Unless it's my credit card number, and social security number, and my email password, and, um, forget that, at least it wants to be free when I'm downloading music that I'm going to keep and have no intention of ever buying!
Fanatics, one and all. Filthy little vermin who take great joy in trying to make the vast majority of us moderates miserable - because how else can you tell whether or not you have power over someone, unless you make them miserable?
Would that we could sterilize them all at birth. Or at least conduct some post-natal abortions.
Slashdot Mirror
Its quite simple really, people who wish to do something they're not supposed to, ie download music illegally, do not want you to think of it as stealing or theft because then they're theives
That's because they aren't thieves. They're in violation of copyright. Copyright violation and theft have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Perhaps the people violating copyright are a bit more clued into this distinction than you are.
The theft of valve code was an actual theft, not a copyright violation. The people in question hacked the system (or rather, idiots at Valve pretty much hacked it for them), then stole the code before the owners themselves had released it for publication. Legally, this isn't any different than bashing in a window at Valve Central, sneaking in, and stealing a disk with the code on it.
You might want to check to see if you know shit about the laws in question before spouting off on the topic.
Max
And then there are those of us who do both things: use our computers for work *and* as a source of amusement.
Any decent setup these days can do pretty much anything you want, and very efficiently, whether you're working from the command line, a stripped-down gui, or from a fully-featured gui like KDE or Gnome. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few things that would work markedly better outside of one of the mainstream guis, and all of those are scientific number-crunching apps that would strain any pc regardless of what else it is (or isn't) doing.
For just about everything else, the cpu is going to be idle most of the time. Adding the minor overhead of a gui to working on text, spreadsheets, presentations, statistical analyses, programming, etc. isn't going to mean dick to a modern system. There's nothing 'leet' about using a command line anymore, nor does it distinguish the 'real' users from the people just farting around.
If I can program and be entertained by my background changing every ten minutes from beautiful woman to the next, while listening to music through xmms and occasionally wasting time on slashdot via my browser, then why the hell not?
Max
What bullshit. The internet would've come about with or without Gore, just as the automobile would've flourished whether or not Ford decided to go into the business. Gore's contribution was an accident of timing and position, nothing else. If it hadn't been Gore, it would've been some other little asshole making the same stupid claims.
Inventions happen. Useful inventions tend to happen even when other people try to put a stop to them. Individual efforts can speed things along, or slow them down, but they rarely, if ever, change the progress of technology. The 'Great Man' theory of history has pretty much been discredited, except by those who wish to think of themselves as 'great men' - or who have a hard-on for worshipping those they consider 'great men'.
Max
A right to privacy isn't a right to ba anonymous.
According to the Supreme Court, there can be no such thing as truly free speech without the ability to be anonymous. But I suppose you know better than they do, being the morally superior sort that you are.
That is what the right to privacy entails, that you can't be monitored in your home.
Nor can you be monitored in public without sufficient cause or immediate, reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing. Because of that free speech thingie and the need for anonymity, wouldn't you know.
At least, that was true until the courts started to allow random stops for drunk driving checks. A complete, willful violation of the Constitution, but hey, if it saves a life...for the chiiiiillddreeennn!, after all.
The Constitution is already dead. We're arguing over a moment that came and went years ago.
Max
our software allowed all the police officers in Utah
Ah, the state where it's illegal for an unmarried man and woman to live together, spitting on the very idea of individual rights. Good choice that, using Utah as an example of benevolent government.
Max
You're relying on government to destroy data on private citizens? The same government that was ordererd by the Supreme Court to destroy surveillance data on '60's war protesters, yet still has that data in FBI archives today?
The only data that government actually destroys is that which might incriminate government employees in illegal activity. Everything else is kept as a possible source of dirt against citizens who might try to buck the system.
Max
Well, let's be fair here though. If he finds a very large boat stuck on top of a mountain, there are very few possibilities as to which boat it might be.
A 10th-century B.C. version of a practical joke?
Max
There is no 'confusion' over the issuess here. Most linux coders and users don't give a flying fuck if Linux 'competes' away desktop users from Windows. Whether or not this occurs Linux will still exist and in the form they want it to exist in, doing the things they want it to do. Windows has zip to do with this.
The confusion is over what the crusaders wish to gain. So far as I can tell current users and coders of Linux don't stand to benefit in any way by competing with Microsoft or attracting more users to the desktop. That tiny minority who press for this competition have motivations that have nothing to do with improving the OS for the benefit of those who're using it. Motivations which I suspect are no better than 'sticking it' to Microsoft, or perhaps trying to expand the size of their pond so they can imagine themselves to be bigger fish than they are. Or, as I previously mentioned, because in some twisted way they think they'll bring down some Dark Jedi, when in fact the Dark Jedi are laughing at them from some beautiful beach in the South Pacific.
Max
My girlfriend immediately said, "oh my god, i'm dating a nerd."
I didn't know they made talking RealDolls.
Max
...and found it to be less than enlightening. The first part reads as a self-serving defense against Cringely's (rather obvious, I thought) observation that *you can't play catch-up against Microsoft, because you will lose*. This painfully evident observation applies to everyone; if MS makes the rules, MS will always be at the forefront of whatever it is that it gets to define, and no one playing tag-along will ever be able to catch up with them. Miguel and his efforts are no exception to this, despite what he seems to think. He makes the mistake of assuming that he's different - just like all the other companies which thought the same thing, and were driven out of their markets (or nearly so) by Microsoft.
Cringely was right. Miguel is wrong.
The second part is based on a faulty assumption, i.e., that most Linux users care if about taking the battle to Microsoft and 'getting Linux on the desktop'. Fact is, most Linux users could give a shit one way or another, and aren't interested in seeing their OS used as a vehicle to launch a crusade against the evil empire. Never have been, never will be; this 'crusade' mentality belongs to a tiny, but very obnoxious and very loud, minority. One which I heartily wish would shut the hell up, move on to the next Big Thing(TM), and leave those of us who actually code for and use the OS for our own satisfaction the hell alone.
It's just as Cringely said. The best thing to do for Linux is to simply ignore MS altogether and continue coding what we want to code, when we want to code at, in the way we want to code it. If more than that tiny minority of us actually begin to take this crusade bullshit seriously, all we'll end up with is a second-rate Windows clone that whores itself out to whatever blithering idiots scream the loudest and whine the longest.
And in any event, what do these crusaders think they're going to accomplish, anyway? Even if they manage to drive MS out of business (not in this lifetime, pal) Bill Gates will still be one of the richest men in the world - richer than any of the crusaders, and laughing all the way to the bank. So will his cronies, and so will the smart investors. The only people who'll 'lose' the war are a bunch of average-Joe schmucks who work for Microsoft, or who invested in Microsoft and didn't manage to pull out until it was too late.
The folks who created the 'evil empire' have already made their money, and nothing the crusaders do to the company will change that fact. Those folks will always be richer than the crusaders, and will always be laughing at their trite vitriolic dialogue - no doubt while sitting on a beach in Tahiti surrounded by beautiful (if purchased) women. To them the crusaders are nothing more than sad little fools worthy of little more than contempt.
And they're right.
Max
Miguel knows we need to reach interoperability to have a meaningful competition in the first place.
This assumes that any of the rest of us care to have a 'competition', which most of us don't. Most Linux users, and nearly all Linux coders, don't have an interest whatsoever in 'competing' with Microsoft or 'winning' whatever the hell it is The Cause(TM) people keep whining about here on Slashdot.
Microsoft may very well be the 'evil empire'. But Linux is not the Force, and none of you are Jedi. Time to put away the plastic light sabers and try to find a girl to occupy your time with (a real one, not the blow-up kind).
Max
when has GNU/Linux become an ®
It hasn't. Somebody fucked up. In any event, it can't be done with GNU/Linux has Linus already holds the rights to the word 'Linux' itself. GNU/Linux would be an infringement.
My guess is that some clueless Stallman-worshipper wrote the blurb. "There is but one OS, and Stallman is it's prophet!" Y'know, *that* kind of Stallman fanatic.
Max
it's still better to have it under organized control than have a group of crazed vigilantes blocking entire countries.
No, it isn't. Government has proven to be entirely ineffectual at doing anything to stop, slow down, or even reduce spam by one teeny tiny little bit. Government efforts are, in this context, laughable at best.
The 'crazed vigilantes' stand a much better chance of getting some action than any government law has in the past. Fact is, I think this is a good thing; it shows that while governments may be oppressing us more and more in the real world, as yet they have little, if any, power in the virtual one. Citizen groups, for better or worse, are mightier than the nasty fuckers that control most government bodies today in at least one way.
And until there's a one-world government - which only happen over my cold, dead body - this situation is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.
Max
We have real life IDs that are difficult to forge and even if you can forge them, you'd get hit by hefty penalties for doing it.
This is a silly argument. Criminals will forge i.d.'s regardless of the law *because - duh! - they're criminals. It's what they do*.
And if you think it's difficult to forge a driver's license or a passport, from *any* country, you've been swallowing too much government bullshit. For $500-$1000 you can get a completely new, legal identity that'll check out if the government investigates it, because it was purchased directly from the folks who control the system that issues i.d.'s in the first place. I could, in 48 hours, get a perfectly valid (and new) SSN, drivers license, and birth record entry which will hold up under government scrutiny *because the folks who control the system will sell them to me, and they aren't forged*. I can get decent forgeries for just a few hundred bucks, if I don't need to pass a serious security check.
Internet i.d.'s will be no different, and no harder to forge. Or to buy, from the right people.
Max
Hell, I don't get any email from Spain either. So tell me again why I should give a shit?
Oh, wait - *I shouldn't*. Silly me.
Max
I use a white-list at home. If you aren't on the list I don't know you and 99.9% of the time I'm pretty sure I don't want to talk to you, either. The other 0.1% of the time isn't worth the spam. And in any event there are a number of ways to exchange email addresses to compensate for that other 0.1%, if I'm actually interested in doing so.
Max
It might operate reliably for a while, then start to get compromize itself slowly...
Much like the U.S. government.
Max
I've always wondered what Europeans see in the European Union. All they have to do is look to America to see what sort of power an enormous centralized government can wield against its own people; you'd think with our example they'd be arguing for *smaller* nations and *smaller* governments, closer to the people who voted them in, and not the other way around.
From my point of view the EU seems to be nothing more than a vehicle to create a U.S. Federal government clone - only worse. From some of the proposed legislation, and the high-handed totalitarian tactics of some of your EU representatives (who remind me more and more of Stalin these days) I can't help but wonder if the EU will become nothing more than a pseudo-socialist dictatorship masquerading as a 'free' association of nations. 'Free' like the fifty states in America are free to buck the federal government when they disagree with it, just like they did in 1860....
Max
...they're doing it in a venue that children are *legally obligated* to attend. Worse, this venue is supported by *taxes I pay*, and I don't remember giving the district permission to teach my child this shit during school hours. In fact, I don't even remember being asked whether I thought this was an appropriate use of school facilities or time.
Just another example of government whoring itself out to corporate America regardless of the will of the people. 'Representative democracy', my ass.
Max
but it leads me to believe in carbon emissions as a culprit for global warming over some sort of vague logical positivist argument that since we don't have enough evidence, it's probably a natural process.
The 'emissions' folks are just as vague, and their models just as primitive. And that's my point: neither side has made a convincing argument either way. As a dyed-in-the-wool moderate I'm not swayed by arguments backed only by personal opinion, often colored by a political agenda.
Right-wingers assert it's natural because they don't want to implement the radical emissions changes required to do anything to slow down the process (assuming it can be slowed down, or that this would be an effective way of doing it - since nobody knows). Left-wingers assert it's all our fault, every bit of it, because it allows them to take the moral high ground and (as usual) blame someone else for something that's gone wrong.
The truth, as in almost all things, probably lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps someday we'll know what that truth is, but right now we don't have a damned clue. Just guesses, and conflicting ones at that.
Max
then you have to admit that we're making HUGE changes.
I have to admit no such thing. What I'd like to see is some empirical evidence in favor of human intervention over naturally changing conditions. So far no such evidence exists.
The Earth has warmed up and cooled down many times in our geological past. Some of these changes have been gradual, others have been rather dramatic. It could very well be that humans are at least partially responsible for the current changes, but as yet this is merely speculation and nothing more. The yahoos who keep going on about the 'evils' of industrial society are grossly oversimplifying the complexity of the problem (and the equally complex task of determining responsbility) in favor of their own black hat/white hat world-view.
In any event, the changes have been made and there's no reasonable way to reverse them. Regardless of the cause what we should be looking at is how we adapt to the new conditions, not futile attempts to maintain stasis or turn back the clock. Either of these options is far beyond current technology in any event, as any attempt to 'reverse' the trend is just as likely to cause some other disaster our primitive understanding of the situation couldn't foresee.
We can wail, and gnash our teeth, and feel morally superior to everyone else because we just *know* that it's The Evils of Technology and Greed(TM) that's the root of the problem, but this doesn't help the situation and ultimately just makes the finger-pointers look like idiots. Or we can prepare for the worst and try our best to ride out the storm, without wasting energy trying to decide who's to blame - if anyone is to blame.
Max
it seems almost perverse to argue that humans arent creating a pretty solid upward pressure on temps.
Actually, I argued no such thing, but asking for reading comprehension on the part of the typical Slashdotter is, I admit, a silly thing to do.
What I said was that there's no evidence that humans are responsible for global changes in temperature. Right now it's speculation, nothing more, as any decent scientist will tell you. Empirically no one has proven anything.
This is a far cry from asserting that humans *aren't* responsible, which I never did. If you think otherwise, I suggest you try actually reading the post this time.
Max
Actually, many people know this. And they have earth and space-based detectors that can measure this with great precision. If this is happening, I doubt some slashdot poster is the one to crack the case wide open.
The point was that there's no way to tell what the solar output was prior to the invention of these detectors, and tiny changes will result in large climactic shifts over long periods of time.
Max
Maybe the scientists do know, and this is just a case of bad reporting...
It's a case of bad reporting. The loss of ice in both the poles and Greenland is well-documented and goes back more than two decades, with some pretty spectacular and sudden melts or glacier break-aways occuring within the last half-dozen years.
However, as a number of people have pointed out, there's absolutely zero evidence that this is due to human activity. It could very well be natural, as was the case in human history for both the 'little ice age' and period of abnormal warming during the previous millennium which allowed the Norse to colonize the southern tip of Greenland. Both of these changes were more extreme than the changes we're currently seeing.
Hell, it could just be due to a tiny increase in our sun's thermal output. Most people don't know that our sun is a VARIABLE star, which means that it's energy output changes on an irregular, unpredictable basis. If the solar output were to increase by less than 1/10th of 1 percent over a sustained period of time, you'd get much the same thing we're seeing today - and since the alteration itself would've happened a couple of centuries back (it takes awhile for minute changes to broad impacts) we wouldn't know about it today, since two centuries ago there was no reliable way to accurately measure solar energy output.
Max
You act like this place is full of Microsoft "apologists," when the majority of the readers are rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth radicals who think everything should be free.
In case you haven't noticed, Slashdot is full of 'foaming-at-the-mouth' loons from both sides of the aisle. The difference between the two groups is minor, even trivial; they both want everyone else to think the same lock-step, ask-no-questions, vomit-the-party-line way that they do, and view any opposition to their blather as heresy. The actual argument is irrelevant when it comes to fanatics; they're all the same animal, all looking to impose their morally/intellectually superior view on everyone else.
Fanatics are the bane of civilized society. Fanatics oppose freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of action. Fanatics are little would-be tin-pot dictators whose most cherished goal is to gain power over everyone else around them. The actual point of contention is is just a means to achieve this; it's the fanaticism itself, and the imposition of it on everyone else, that's the real goal.
So we have groups like this:
- MS is evil. Down with Satan!
- I worship Bill Gates! I dream of blowing him!
And like this:
- Open source = communism! Communists suck!
- Open source is divine writ!
Not to mention this:
- monopoly capitalism and corporate oligarchy are they greatest economic systems on the planet! I know, 'cuz I'm so smart and cool I'm going to be in the inner circle someday - I just know it!
- socialism is the only way to go! For the 'greater good'. Which is defined by my own morally superior self, of course. Bow down before me, you ignorant, capitalist swine!
And like this:
- Free software is anti-capitalist!
- All software should be free! Kill the capitalist pigs!
And, of course, this:
- The RIAA/MPAA are the Holy Church! Kill the piratical, thieving infidels! Oh, and ignore the fact that copyright violation is neither piracy nor theft, we'll be sure to buy enough Congressmen to change that soon enough!
- information wants to be freeeeee! Unless it's my credit card number, and social security number, and my email password, and, um, forget that, at least it wants to be free when I'm downloading music that I'm going to keep and have no intention of ever buying!
Fanatics, one and all. Filthy little vermin who take great joy in trying to make the vast majority of us moderates miserable - because how else can you tell whether or not you have power over someone, unless you make them miserable?
Would that we could sterilize them all at birth. Or at least conduct some post-natal abortions.
Max