You don't need to believe in god and waste all the time worrying about it, and the afterlife, and following some teachings to be a good person. I believe I am a good person, but that's because that is how I want to lead my life, not because a god told me to. Definitely not because a god promised me a good afterlife.
Then you understand nothing about Christianity. A "good afterline" is promised to everyone when they walk in the door! It has nothing to do with what you "do". Christians are good people only because they respect God, they think He created the Universe, and He deserves some props. Now I'm not saying you are an evil person or anything. However, I would suggest that you may be short-changing yourself, because the promises of God are specifically to help you become a better person. Galatians 5:15-26 summarizes this well:
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law. The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
These "fruits of the spirit" are what every good person looks for. The promises of Christ are to help people seek these fruits, and to expunge hatread, discord, etc. What hangs a lot of people up is that they are willing to be "good", but not if someone else is telling them to be do so. The central message of Christianity is not God saying "Be good or go to Hell", but rather "Let's see how good you can be, and by the way don't worry about Hell, I already took care of that for you". It's a distinction that is hard to see when your mind is already made up
Regardless, I don't consider Jesus to be a particularly outstanding or original moral teacher. Name me one moral idea of his that was original, or even articulated better than previous thinkers.
Let me pull up what I think summarizes the "ideas" of Jesus the best, Matt 22:34-40:
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Jesus himself admits these ideas aren't "new" - they go back all the way to Genesis if you look. These laws are merely a summary of the OT laws (and "Law", the Pentateuch), with "your neighbor" now meaning "all people" as opposed to simply Isreal. Let's face it, given how selfish people are, if everyone "loved their neighbor as yourself", there would be world peace! World peace in five words. So how was this idea better articulated by someone else?
What ultimately matters is that the canon was established by men by a combination of formal and informal negotiations that lasted over centuries. Is it really so hard to see that the end result represents "a change", and that the process was subject to the pressures of special interest groups?
There is an inherent paradox in the notion of "Canon" - Christians should believe that God is the highest authority. But how can this be, when the books that are supposedly authoritative have been "established" by a council of men? Doesn't that men that, in the end, the men are really the ultimate authorities? The theological answer is that Christians *don't* believe they were established by men - they were established by God. Chapter 1, Sec. 4 of the Westminster Confession of Faith talks about this:
The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.
The essential paradox remains no matter how it was decided - if it was a world-wide democratic vote, or one guy in is basement, you still have this problem. Therefore, the only way to believe in both God and canon is to believe that God establised it, we obey it because God established it, and that the natural consequence is that the we know the canon is "correct" because He is sovereign and supervised the process. For example, the book of Hebrews was probably included because they thought it was written by Paul. Nowadays, Heberews is attributed to an anonymous author, but it's role in the lives of Christians is invaluable.
This is one of those issues where outsiders scratch their heads and go "huh?". But if you were God, what would you do? Dropping a book out of the sky really isn't the way to go - that breeds far more skepticism than the process used in the current NT canon. Besides, the NT is a message, not a rulebook (OT is different story). It seems like the method chosen of finding the most accurate gospels and pulling the best of Paul's letters was a good way to go, IMO.
Notice in passing how convenient it is for a government to send soldiers to their deaths and then assure the public that they have a secure spot in Heaven (as if the politicians would know!), or to shrug off "collateral damage" when everyone 'knows' that God won't let the innocent suffer in the afterlife.
It is true that religion can be used to manipulate masses of people - however this speaks nothing as to whether any particular religion is "true" or not. I can use a rope to tie people up, but it doesn't mean that the rope doesn't exist. It is impossible to construct that "control" is the reason a religion like Christianity exists, given the lives of the earliest Christians - obviously they weren't trying to manipulate large masses of people, and were opposed to the government.
A person can use God as a reference point for "truth" in this universe.
Yes, but that's not a belief arrived at by rational means - it's arrived at by faith. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion of such things with someone who doesn't share that faith. The "agreed-upon facts" I mentioned are not present, in that case.
And this is where you are wrong - is is quite possible to construct a rational argument for the existance of God (and through that absolute truth) through "agreed-upon facts and logic". In fact, there are entire disciplines designed to do exactly this - apologetics. The entire point of apologetics is to use "rational" discussions in order to persuade people who do not share the faith - so please don't tell me faith is not rational. Of course, this kind of discussion requires that the other person admit that the faith might *possibly* be true - you seem to have presupposed that no faith is right, which of course makes debate rather useless. This makes a lot of sense - if you are convinced that 2+2=4, then debating someone who says that 2+2=5 is a waste of time. However, the case for faith is considerably more complex, and I really doubt that you have managed to solve it. Open your mind to the possibility that a faith could be correct, and you may be surprised how far your "rationality" takes you.
The subject under discussion was not why people practice religion. It was how knowledge of absolute truth is arrived at. If you can provide a "stack of hard, concrete reasons" for arriving at such knowledge, a lot of people would be very interested.
The link was brought up between "truth" and religion. A person can use God as a reference point for "truth" in this universe. A person can then advance a purely evidential arguement (using "cold hard facts") or a presuppositional argument (the universe makes more sense with God involved). My only point is that it is quite possible to discuss religion and "truth" in a perfectly rational manner.
First, you've avoided my question - what you think absolute truth is, and how we can know it. The reason this is important, is because if your notion of absolute truth is based on religious faith, then it's pointless discussing this with you, because such beliefs are not arrived at by rational means.
Why do you think this? There are plenty of "rational" people who practice religion who can give you a stack of hard, concrete reasons why they do so.
Granted, it can make a difference, but you and many others seem to want to compare this to a physical abuse crime.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there is a big difference between someone who steals your stereo and someone who rapes a child. They are quite frankly, not even close in comparison, if you think so, maybe you should be institutionalized.
I said nothing of the sort - I merely pointed that it is ridiculous to think that just because someone "does time", they become completely trustworthy members of society who should be treated exactly the same as other people who never did anything. In other words, I'm not going to feel bad about not hiring the convicted child molester to basbysit for me simply because of his crimial record of child molestation. Also, I never equated child molestation with theft. However, I would probably not hire someone who steals stereos to house sit for me. It's all basic common sense, folks.
He's not a criminal any more, he's a member of society just like the rest of us.
Mr. Painter seems to be...painting...anyone who has ever committed a crime as a lifelong criminal. Good work rejecting the entire philosophical foundation of our criminal justice system, dipshit.
Ok so if some guy is a convicted pedophile, that should not be a factor in hiring him as a babysitter?
For a while, modem speed (like everything else) kept getting faster and faster. But it seems to have topped out at 56K for the last few years. Have we just reached some physical limit?
I wonder what happens if you follow all "unsubscribe" or "remove" instructions that are attched to some spam. People say you shouldn't do it because it lets spammers know that the advertisement is getting noticed, and thus they will hit you even more. However, this seems like speculation to me. Hard evidence that this is the case would be useful.
One reason I liked M.U.L.E. was because the goal of the game was ambiguous. You could be a nice guy and sell food and energy at reasonable prices, or you could a ruthless jerk, screwing everyone by hoarding smitore and buying M.U.L.E.'s to just let them go. It was awesome!
Also if anyone is interested, see this text preservation of the M.U.L.E. Manual, particularly the text on the back cover, and see the cover art here. Hilarious!
As I've already pointed out, listener driven sampling is inherently more trustworthy and completely legal.
Lets just flush out the consequences of this definition of "legal listener driven sampling". So under your interpretation of "legal sampling", should I be allowed to rip tracks off my CD collection and post them to a world-readable, search engine indexed web site for people to "sample" (with big blinky text saying THIS IS FOR SAMPLING ONLY, of course)? If your answer is 'yes it is legal', then this entire discussion is moot since we're not even talking about large file-sharing networks anymore. If your answer is 'no it is not legal', then my follow-up question is: how is using Kazaa to search and download really any different than using Mozilla to google and download? After all, the Internet is just a big p2p network anyway.
It doesn't matter whether there's evidence that deceit is currently practiced or not.
Of course it matters! If you are saying that file sharing is the only solution to getting around producer deceit, you really need to offer evidence that this "deception" is happening. Otherwise, I will say that legal sampling is a perfectly adequate for nearly all popular music albums, and you have no possible response.
The Audio Home Recording Act explicitly makes it legal for anyone to make a sampler compilation for a friend as long as there's no commercial motive. Non-commercial listener driven sampling is legal.
Filesharing is a very effective method for accomplishing the legal goal of listener driven sampling.
I will meet you half-way on this. If I have a buddy in New York, and he wants to listen to my new Kreb Zepellin album, I think it's fine, and the AHRA might agree. However, massive file sharing networks are not ok. They are not huge "listener driven sample" networks, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. While the AHSA might make allowance for legitimate non-commercial use of your own recordings, I don't think sharing music with 100,000 of your closest anonymous friends is allowed - see the demise of napster.
Neither could I find out whether I wanted the Led Zeppelin "Maximum" album or not, as none of the tracks were available to sample.
I never said every track for every piece of music is available today (but its getting closer and closer, and I'm sure that one day even the obscure zep imports and Ann Reed will be available). At least respond to my original point... why do you think you are entitled to sample every track from every CD you might buy? How is music different from books or movies?
Sampling is diven by the listener, not the performer. When the performer drives sampling, they feed the listener the "best bits" to sell the product. When the listener drives sampling, they listen to more random bits to see if the product is worth buying. Or, they listen to a bunch of bits from a single cd to see if that cd is worth buying.
You're implying that for some reason, performers are trying to hide the "bad" portions of their songs so listeners will somehow be suckered into buying their music. However, you have no real evidence of this. Go to www.samgoody.com - search for Sister Hazel (or whoever), and listen to the 20 second clips. It will give you a *very* good idea if you like the group or not. Now you can't hear every second of course, but what exactly are you looking for? Can you see every minute of a movie before going to it? Can you read every chapter of a book before buying it? What is so special about music that the only way to sample it is to download it and listen to it over and over until you finally conclude its ok to buy it?
The library, file sharing, and friends in the same city are the only sources for real sampling. The library and my local friends have very limited selection. That leaves...
You can always get a better idea if you'll like a CD if you listen to the whole thing. However, people are claiming that file sharing is the ONLY way to sample music, and this is simply not true. Sure it may be the "best" way, but the fact that other legitimate sampling alternatives exist makes it a very poor excuse to justify music downloading.
Have you been using the Internet very long? Other than your monthly ISP fee, 99.9% of the data you get off the Internet, you don't have to pay for. So yes, to most people, downloading free songs is normal and expected.
I highly doubt that most people who pay $39.95 a month honestly believe that comes with unlimited downloading privileges of copyrighted material, especially when you have been conditioned for years and years to pay $15 for a CD. If Americans know anything it's "nothing is free". The first thought when encoutering file sharing is greed - "Great, now I don't have to pay for it!" My point is the the 91% of people who thing it is not wrong know darn well it is "wrong" in the legal sense, but have purposefully redefined "wrong" in the moral sense to justify their behavior, saying to themselves "I'll buy it if I like it" or "they are rich enough anyway".
I have been downloading songs from Sister Hazel for a few months. I was told they were pretty good, so I downloaded and agreed. Yesterday I bought their new album, virtually (heard 2 songs)sound unheard (or whatever the audio equivalent of sight unseen is).
The only reason why I bought their album is because of Kazaa.
If someone told you they were pretty good, you could have borrowed a CD from them. Or gone to CD store and used one of the stations with bar codes to listen to samples from any track. Or gone to amazon.com to listen to sample tracks. Or gone go www.sisterhazel.com to listen to a medley of tracks and watch a couple music videos. In other words, there are plenty of legal ways to sample music you may want to purchase. Now while Kazaa certainly allowed you to sample the music as well, it is by no means the only way people can discern what they want to purchase.
So what is going through the heads of the other 91 percent? That the copyrighted material you normally have to pay for somehow magically teleported to your hard drive?
4) Cables suck. KVMs work, but suck. Multiple keyboards suck. Multiple anything with computers generally suck.
I did the two keyboard thing until I found x2vnc. I just run a vnc server on my windows box, fire up x2vnc on the linux box, and presto - seamless mouse and keyboard interaction over the OS barrier. For novelty reasons alone it's worth checking out.
I'd estimate that 99% of mail I get is from people I am expecting it from. I could easily configure my email client to put this mail in another folder. At the end of the day (or more often), I can look at all the non-whitelisted mail for stuff that wasn't spam-tagged to look for new people to whitelist - takes about a minute. While spam may be a huge infrastructure concern, I really don't see it as a huge productivity concern.
The short answer is yes, the slashdot crowd is anti-morality. But this is a subset of a quite larger issue, that people in general are anti-authority. In other words, the most people have no problem with a concept such as "honesty", but they want it only on their own terms. This manifests itself in the average comment in a RIAA discussion:
"Yes I download music, its too expensive. But if I like it, I go ahead and buy it! Heck, I've probably spent more money than I would have otherwise!"
Thus the poster is willing to be honest, but not before blame shifting, outright theft and a little bit of justification at the end. This kind of "honesty" is not morality at all, but a subtle form of exerting control over someone/something else.
The fact is that people don't want to be controlled, either by God or anyone. Thus the very thought that someone might be placing some kind of absolute moral constraint on anything is abhorrent! People would rather cling to a stubborn independence, which in the end is simply vanity. People fail to realize that Jesus said that all morality is derived from just two things - loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. How wonderful would the world be if everyone took this to heart! But alas, this is not so. People don't love their neighbor. I am deeply ashamed of this entire slashdot discussion over the amount of abuse heaped on people who are simply trying as hard as they can to love other people as much as possible.
I ask this if anyone wishes to respond this, please do so with kindness and an open mind. The opposite viewpoint is already quite well repsented on this board.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you understand nothing about Christianity. A "good afterline" is promised to everyone when they walk in the door! It has nothing to do with what you "do". Christians are good people only because they respect God, they think He created the Universe, and He deserves some props. Now I'm not saying you are an evil person or anything. However, I would suggest that you may be short-changing yourself, because the promises of God are specifically to help you become a better person. Galatians 5:15-26 summarizes this well:
These "fruits of the spirit" are what every good person looks for. The promises of Christ are to help people seek these fruits, and to expunge hatread, discord, etc. What hangs a lot of people up is that they are willing to be "good", but not if someone else is telling them to be do so. The central message of Christianity is not God saying "Be good or go to Hell", but rather "Let's see how good you can be, and by the way don't worry about Hell, I already took care of that for you". It's a distinction that is hard to see when your mind is already made upLet me pull up what I think summarizes the "ideas" of Jesus the best, Matt 22:34-40:
Jesus himself admits these ideas aren't "new" - they go back all the way to Genesis if you look. These laws are merely a summary of the OT laws (and "Law", the Pentateuch), with "your neighbor" now meaning "all people" as opposed to simply Isreal. Let's face it, given how selfish people are, if everyone "loved their neighbor as yourself", there would be world peace! World peace in five words. So how was this idea better articulated by someone else?
There is an inherent paradox in the notion of "Canon" - Christians should believe that God is the highest authority. But how can this be, when the books that are supposedly authoritative have been "established" by a council of men? Doesn't that men that, in the end, the men are really the ultimate authorities? The theological answer is that Christians *don't* believe they were established by men - they were established by God. Chapter 1, Sec. 4 of the Westminster Confession of Faith talks about this:
The essential paradox remains no matter how it was decided - if it was a world-wide democratic vote, or one guy in is basement, you still have this problem. Therefore, the only way to believe in both God and canon is to believe that God establised it, we obey it because God established it, and that the natural consequence is that the we know the canon is "correct" because He is sovereign and supervised the process. For example, the book of Hebrews was probably included because they thought it was written by Paul. Nowadays, Heberews is attributed to an anonymous author, but it's role in the lives of Christians is invaluable.
This is one of those issues where outsiders scratch their heads and go "huh?". But if you were God, what would you do? Dropping a book out of the sky really isn't the way to go - that breeds far more skepticism than the process used in the current NT canon. Besides, the NT is a message, not a rulebook (OT is different story). It seems like the method chosen of finding the most accurate gospels and pulling the best of Paul's letters was a good way to go, IMO.
It is true that religion can be used to manipulate masses of people - however this speaks nothing as to whether any particular religion is "true" or not. I can use a rope to tie people up, but it doesn't mean that the rope doesn't exist. It is impossible to construct that "control" is the reason a religion like Christianity exists, given the lives of the earliest Christians - obviously they weren't trying to manipulate large masses of people, and were opposed to the government.
The Inline module should erase complaints about the difficulties of extending Perl with C (or C++ or Python or Befunge or ...)
Yes, but that's not a belief arrived at by rational means - it's arrived at by faith. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion of such things with someone who doesn't share that faith. The "agreed-upon facts" I mentioned are not present, in that case.
And this is where you are wrong - is is quite possible to construct a rational argument for the existance of God (and through that absolute truth) through "agreed-upon facts and logic". In fact, there are entire disciplines designed to do exactly this - apologetics. The entire point of apologetics is to use "rational" discussions in order to persuade people who do not share the faith - so please don't tell me faith is not rational. Of course, this kind of discussion requires that the other person admit that the faith might *possibly* be true - you seem to have presupposed that no faith is right, which of course makes debate rather useless. This makes a lot of sense - if you are convinced that 2+2=4, then debating someone who says that 2+2=5 is a waste of time. However, the case for faith is considerably more complex, and I really doubt that you have managed to solve it. Open your mind to the possibility that a faith could be correct, and you may be surprised how far your "rationality" takes you.
The link was brought up between "truth" and religion. A person can use God as a reference point for "truth" in this universe. A person can then advance a purely evidential arguement (using "cold hard facts") or a presuppositional argument (the universe makes more sense with God involved). My only point is that it is quite possible to discuss religion and "truth" in a perfectly rational manner.
Why do you think this? There are plenty of "rational" people who practice religion who can give you a stack of hard, concrete reasons why they do so.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there is a big difference between someone who steals your stereo and someone who rapes a child. They are quite frankly, not even close in comparison, if you think so, maybe you should be institutionalized.
I said nothing of the sort - I merely pointed that it is ridiculous to think that just because someone "does time", they become completely trustworthy members of society who should be treated exactly the same as other people who never did anything. In other words, I'm not going to feel bad about not hiring the convicted child molester to basbysit for me simply because of his crimial record of child molestation. Also, I never equated child molestation with theft. However, I would probably not hire someone who steals stereos to house sit for me. It's all basic common sense, folks.
Mr. Painter seems to be...painting...anyone who has ever committed a crime as a lifelong criminal. Good work rejecting the entire philosophical foundation of our criminal justice system, dipshit.
Ok so if some guy is a convicted pedophile, that should not be a factor in hiring him as a babysitter?
It's 1/10 second precision that get synced daily to an atomic clock - a pendulum clock with "atomic precision" doesn't even pass the sniff test
This technology will finally enable us to create "gun-style" laser weapons that can be ducked, dodged, and deflected with light sabres.
For a while, modem speed (like everything else) kept getting faster and faster. But it seems to have topped out at 56K for the last few years. Have we just reached some physical limit?
The data access rates are very nice - I can get 25 k/sec from bandwidth test sites. Almost sounds too good to be true...!
I wonder what happens if you follow all "unsubscribe" or "remove" instructions that are attched to some spam. People say you shouldn't do it because it lets spammers know that the advertisement is getting noticed, and thus they will hit you even more. However, this seems like speculation to me. Hard evidence that this is the case would be useful.
Also if anyone is interested, see this text preservation of the M.U.L.E. Manual, particularly the text on the back cover, and see the cover art here. Hilarious!
Lets just flush out the consequences of this definition of "legal listener driven sampling". So under your interpretation of "legal sampling", should I be allowed to rip tracks off my CD collection and post them to a world-readable, search engine indexed web site for people to "sample" (with big blinky text saying THIS IS FOR SAMPLING ONLY, of course)? If your answer is 'yes it is legal', then this entire discussion is moot since we're not even talking about large file-sharing networks anymore. If your answer is 'no it is not legal', then my follow-up question is: how is using Kazaa to search and download really any different than using Mozilla to google and download? After all, the Internet is just a big p2p network anyway.
Of course it matters! If you are saying that file sharing is the only solution to getting around producer deceit, you really need to offer evidence that this "deception" is happening. Otherwise, I will say that legal sampling is a perfectly adequate for nearly all popular music albums, and you have no possible response.
The Audio Home Recording Act explicitly makes it legal for anyone to make a sampler compilation for a friend as long as there's no commercial motive. Non-commercial listener driven sampling is legal.
Filesharing is a very effective method for accomplishing the legal goal of listener driven sampling.
I will meet you half-way on this. If I have a buddy in New York, and he wants to listen to my new Kreb Zepellin album, I think it's fine, and the AHRA might agree. However, massive file sharing networks are not ok. They are not huge "listener driven sample" networks, and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. While the AHSA might make allowance for legitimate non-commercial use of your own recordings, I don't think sharing music with 100,000 of your closest anonymous friends is allowed - see the demise of napster.
Neither could I find out whether I wanted the Led Zeppelin "Maximum" album or not, as none of the tracks were available to sample.
I never said every track for every piece of music is available today (but its getting closer and closer, and I'm sure that one day even the obscure zep imports and Ann Reed will be available). At least respond to my original point... why do you think you are entitled to sample every track from every CD you might buy? How is music different from books or movies?
You're implying that for some reason, performers are trying to hide the "bad" portions of their songs so listeners will somehow be suckered into buying their music. However, you have no real evidence of this. Go to www.samgoody.com - search for Sister Hazel (or whoever), and listen to the 20 second clips. It will give you a *very* good idea if you like the group or not. Now you can't hear every second of course, but what exactly are you looking for? Can you see every minute of a movie before going to it? Can you read every chapter of a book before buying it? What is so special about music that the only way to sample it is to download it and listen to it over and over until you finally conclude its ok to buy it?
The library, file sharing, and friends in the same city are the only sources for real sampling. The library and my local friends have very limited selection. That leaves...
You can always get a better idea if you'll like a CD if you listen to the whole thing. However, people are claiming that file sharing is the ONLY way to sample music, and this is simply not true. Sure it may be the "best" way, but the fact that other legitimate sampling alternatives exist makes it a very poor excuse to justify music downloading.
I highly doubt that most people who pay $39.95 a month honestly believe that comes with unlimited downloading privileges of copyrighted material, especially when you have been conditioned for years and years to pay $15 for a CD. If Americans know anything it's "nothing is free". The first thought when encoutering file sharing is greed - "Great, now I don't have to pay for it!" My point is the the 91% of people who thing it is not wrong know darn well it is "wrong" in the legal sense, but have purposefully redefined "wrong" in the moral sense to justify their behavior, saying to themselves "I'll buy it if I like it" or "they are rich enough anyway".
The only reason why I bought their album is because of Kazaa.
If someone told you they were pretty good, you could have borrowed a CD from them. Or gone to CD store and used one of the stations with bar codes to listen to samples from any track. Or gone to amazon.com to listen to sample tracks. Or gone go www.sisterhazel.com to listen to a medley of tracks and watch a couple music videos. In other words, there are plenty of legal ways to sample music you may want to purchase. Now while Kazaa certainly allowed you to sample the music as well, it is by no means the only way people can discern what they want to purchase.
So what is going through the heads of the other 91 percent? That the copyrighted material you normally have to pay for somehow magically teleported to your hard drive?
I did the two keyboard thing until I found x2vnc. I just run a vnc server on my windows box, fire up x2vnc on the linux box, and presto - seamless mouse and keyboard interaction over the OS barrier. For novelty reasons alone it's worth checking out.
I'd estimate that 99% of mail I get is from people I am expecting it from. I could easily configure my email client to put this mail in another folder. At the end of the day (or more often), I can look at all the non-whitelisted mail for stuff that wasn't spam-tagged to look for new people to whitelist - takes about a minute. While spam may be a huge infrastructure concern, I really don't see it as a huge productivity concern.
"Yes I download music, its too expensive. But if I like it, I go ahead and buy it! Heck, I've probably spent more money than I would have otherwise!"
Thus the poster is willing to be honest, but not before blame shifting, outright theft and a little bit of justification at the end. This kind of "honesty" is not morality at all, but a subtle form of exerting control over someone/something else.
The fact is that people don't want to be controlled, either by God or anyone. Thus the very thought that someone might be placing some kind of absolute moral constraint on anything is abhorrent! People would rather cling to a stubborn independence, which in the end is simply vanity. People fail to realize that Jesus said that all morality is derived from just two things - loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. How wonderful would the world be if everyone took this to heart! But alas, this is not so. People don't love their neighbor. I am deeply ashamed of this entire slashdot discussion over the amount of abuse heaped on people who are simply trying as hard as they can to love other people as much as possible.
I ask this if anyone wishes to respond this, please do so with kindness and an open mind. The opposite viewpoint is already quite well repsented on this board.