where every third post is a complaint about the tyranny of copyright and payment for the use of intellectual property?
RAW's situation is exactly proof that copyright is a lousy way to see that authors can make a living, and what we have here is an attempt to invoke an alternate model where fans act as patrons.
I have a couple of RAWs books. The royalties he received from those purchases probably is an order of magnitude less than the money I just sent.
How about some of us who havent read his books consider buying a copy?
Buying books is fine, but by the time he gets the tiny royalty from that he'll be dead. And the tiny royalty from a book purchase doesnt't reflect the value received from reading a mind-altering work like Cosmic Trigger.
Basically, we don't really trust the government to not screw it up.
Yeah, so instead we let a bunch of corporations (which are creations of the government) screw it up.
The free market works well when buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and all costs accounted for in the transaction. These assumptions do not apply to basic medical care: there is a tremendous power and knowledge differential, and if my neighbor can't get treatment for his bird flu or TB (or even for some chronic condition that makes him more at risk to contract bird flu or TB) that puts me at risk.
Bill Clinton said last Sunday night or whenever it was that He "left a anti-terror strategy." I guess that turned out to be a lie if Rice was being pressured to set one herself.
Non sequitor. It's entirely possible (indeed seems likely) that Clinton's people left a strategy (which may or may not have been comprehensive or effective), which Bush's people never adopted. If I leave you a cookbook and you never open it, it can be true both that I left you my fablous peanut butter/chocolate pie recipe, and that someone is pressuring you to come up with a dessert recipe.
Why are the only political stories on Slashdot left-wing propaganda?
Over the past few decades, the right wing has consistently aligned itself with ignorance: creationism, junk science, bad international intelligence. Take the religious right, stir in neocon ambitions for an American empire, sprinkle in corporate greed, and watch as any respect for truth rapidly evaporates from the mix.
The/. readership is more educated than the average American, and so places a higher value on acurate information and critical thinking. In contempory America, this puts them at odds with the leaders of the Republican party.
Given the attitude of most people pre-9/11, I don't think that there was the popular will to do what would have been needed to stop the attacks.
All that was needed to stop the attack was secure cockpit doors. I think popular will for such a simple new anti-hijacking technique could have been rallied.
The Oklahoma City bombing (remember that?) had already taught us that there were wackos out there willing and able to kill hundreds with a single act. And the the threat of terrorists using a hijacked plane as a missle was already well-known:
in 1994 Algerians hijacked an Air France airliner with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. (They were tricked by French officials into landing in Marseilles to refuel, where they were overpowered.) In 1995, police in the Philippines uncovered an al-Qaida plot to fly a plane into CIA headquarters. (One of the plotters: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) A year later, al-Qaida had the idea of flying a plane from outside the United States and crashing it into the White House. Two years later, al-Qaida planned to fly a plane from outside the United States and crash it into the World Trade Center. And so on.
Condi Rice is both black and female...If she were a male American of Japanese ancestry, she would have been fired on the spot.
While Rove, et. al, might see some political advantage to having a black female Secretary of State, Rice's station is secure mostly because she worships Bush. He prefers to surround himself with sychophants and yes-men (and yes-women).
It's not the color of her skin, it's the color of her nose, that makes for her job security.
Moving heavy patients? Was someone having a contest to see who could come up with the most boring use of super-human strength?
It may sound boring to you. Sounds like a really good idea to me...my mother, formerly a nurse, suffered a career-ending neck injury when she had to move a patient by herself in an understaffed nursing home. (The patient suffered from senile dementia, became combative, and she fell with the patient on top.)
After fifteen years, two surgeries, and various physical therapies, she still has significant pain and disability.
Sure, I want to trade in my Subaru for a mecha as much as any geek. But anything that prevents other nurses - the people who have the most impact on keeping you alive when you're hospitalized - from suffering a similar fate, sounds like a damn good idea to me.
Elect who? I don't vote for a simple reason... I can't find anyone to vote for... I could vote for myself... But somehow I don't think that would work...
You ought to at least go to the the polls to vote on bond issues and ballot questions, and on the off chance there might be a decent candidate in some race. Write in yourself or friends for other offices if there's no one you like.
so the leaders of the american Libertarian party, the Reform party, the American Communist party, and others have been locked up for intending to alter the government? Wow, and I missed it.
You need to read up on the Red Scare. A large number of socialists were jail or deportated. The 1918 Sedition Act made it illegal to speak out against the government. The Post Office was allowed to deny mail to those labeled dissenters. Socialist Party presidental candidate Eugene Debs ran from prison in 1920, jailed for making an anti-war speech.
Don't think it can't happen here. It already has. These actions decades ago pretty much destroyed the Left in the U.S., leaving us with the two right-wing parties we have today.
Our taxes always end up subsidizing broken business models
for air, train and even bus travel.
Taxes also subsidize automobile travel - you don't pay at the pump for
oil wars to keep gas cheap. Roads are paid for partly by property taxes.
And we just externalize the costs of environmental devastation.
Habeas Corpus is not a protection against unreasonable restraint or seizure as the poster is claiming.
Methinks you misinterpret the poster, who was pointing out the the idea behind habeas corpus - restraint on the state's power to lock people up - is the root of restraints on searches, etcetera, and if that root is destroyed, we can look forward to the branches and leaves of other rights we (used to) hold dear, dying quickly.
[Habeas Corpus] is the tenet that requires physical evidence of the crime be presentable before a judge before charges can be brought and has nothing to do with what the poster is claiming.
[Latin for] "you have the body"...A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody. A habeas corpus petition is a petition filed with a court by a person who objects to his own or another's detention or imprisonment. The petition must show that the court ordering the detention or imprisonment made a legal or factual error....
The writ of habeas corpus serves as an important check on the manner in which state courts pay respect to federal constitutional rights. The writ is "the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action." Harris v. Nelson, 394 U.S. 286, 290-91 (1969).
The point is that Al Qaeda, Hezbollah...and a great many more Muslims do not love their own children.
And what leads you to this belief?
Al Qaeda wants the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, preserving their "holy land" for future generations; Hezbollah opposes Israel, trying to in back stolen land for future generations; Iraqi insurgents are fighting against American forces whose bombs have killed thousands of Iraqi children. If you asked them, or the other groups you mention, why they fight, they might very well give you answers about making a "better" - for their defintion of better - world for their children.
Yes, they may encourage their children to go and fight and die for these causes. So does the U.S., and pretty much every other nation. Do you assert that Americans do not love their children, on the basis of the presence of military recruiters in high schools?
(And I'm not sure why you mention North Korea; Islam is not a significant force there.)
It's too bad this doesn't seem to apply to certain Islamofascist movements.
First, there's no such thing as "Islamofascism". The invention of the word is a propaganda exercise, and a bad one at that. Fascism is a nationalist movement; Al Qaeda is not nationalist. Fascism is corporatist; Al Qaeda, definitely not.
Seconds, and I'm sure that there are Al Qaeda members who love their children and believe that fighting the U.S. by any means necessary is in the best interests of those children (especially after U.S. bombs killed thousands of children in Iraq).
It's not enough that Al Qaeda members love their children, or that Russians love their children, or that Americans love their children. Only if and when we love each other's children - even each other's grown up children - will we have a chance at peace, and long-term survivial for the human race.
The war between the U.S. and Japan was a straight-up fight between
expansionist imperial powers. Consider just how a U.S. naval base came to
be located at Pearl Harbor in the first place.
The popular image that the U.S. was innocently minding its own business
when out of nowhere the Japanese attacked, is pure mythology. Tensions were
building for years, as the U.S. provided assistance to the Chinese
Nationalists (whom the Japanese were fighting), and also instituted
crippling embargoes against Japan.
(This doesn't mean that U.S. imperialism wasn't a lighter shade of grey
than Japanese imperialism. The coup in Hawaii, the Spanish-American War,
and other U.S. aggression in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was definitely
less evil than Japanese actions such as the rape of Nanking or the horrible
experiments committed by Unit 731. A lesser evil is
still, however, an evil.)
and when forced they tried to end it peacefully -
unconditional surrender by the Japanese was the only way.
Of course unconditional surrender was not the only way to peace. The
Japanese were beginning preparations to sure for peace before the U.S.
used nuclear weapons.
The American use of the new weapons of mass destruction had more to do
with intimidating the Soviet Union than with ending the war with Japan.
If you go for a sensitive position, they will do a background check and you can kiss getting a security clearance goodbye with half of what often gets put on these sites. Yes, just write off your ability to possibly get anything above a confidential clearance.
Which shows that the government is stupid - the people who are security risks are those who have something to hide. The very fact that I am open about things means that I am less of a security risk. I can't be blackmailed by someone threatening to divulge that information about me, I've already done it myself.
Having demonstrated that the government is stupid, it follows that I certainly don't want to work for them on anything that's going to allow them to kill people more effectively, and thus don't need a high security clearance.
Similarly, any potential employer who's going to decline to hire me based on information about my politics, philosophy, sex life, whatever, that I've divulged online, is not going to be someone I'd be able to enjoy (or even tolerate) working for anyway.
John von Neumann supposedly once said, "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." I'd say the casino just had to pay out the wages of their sin.
Here people are trying to paint this guy as a hero for
getting information out, while at the same time we've had a multi-year snow
job over a CIA "leak"
When it's governments versus individuals, I'm in favor of the
individuals, excepting when those individuals have been proven to be very
bad.
Tomlinson's is a case of one person revealing inconvenient truths about
how his government operates. By default, I'm in favor of that.
Joseph
Wilson also revealed inconvenient truths about his government, showing
that the Bush administration was either lying or incompetent. (Not an
exclusive or, of course.) In response to this, political operatives of that
administration ruined his wife's career. I'm in favor of exposing
government lies and incompetence, and opposed to political dirty tricks.
Meanwhile, the original poster set out to communicate an idea to the readers - damn near all of us understood it, if you didn't, perhaps you should reconsider who you call the "stupid people."
He did indeed communicate the idea he set out to communicate. He could
have communicated it more effectively and clearly had he used not used the
phrase "begs the question" improperly. (Where "proper" is determined by
usage of well-educated native speakers with an interest in language.)
He also - inadvertently - communicated that his command of written
English has gaps. (As, certainly, does mine.) On/., that doesn't matter
much, other than that we then get to go off on tangents about language. In
other contexts, it does matter, and proper use of the "prestige dialect" can be
useful.
No. Socialism is an economic system based on the "means of production" being controled by workers rather than by a state-backed minority group of owners.
Government "social" programs such as tax-funded tuition can exist in either capitalist or socialist economies. A free tutition program bear more on the "free market"/"command economy" axis than on the capitalism/socialism one.
You can graduate as an engineer and get paid less than general labor building homes. So what happens is a lot of people graduate, but end up doing something else.
Uh, this can occur in a capitalist system also. In fact, it happens fairly frequently in the U.S. now. (Met a fellow tending bar at a coffee house last week who has a C.S. degree. Of course, he said he got the degree mostly to get his parents off his back about going to college.)
Slashdot Mirror
RAW's situation is exactly proof that copyright is a lousy way to see that authors can make a living, and what we have here is an attempt to invoke an alternate model where fans act as patrons.
I have a couple of RAWs books. The royalties he received from those purchases probably is an order of magnitude less than the money I just sent.
Buying books is fine, but by the time he gets the tiny royalty from that he'll be dead. And the tiny royalty from a book purchase doesnt't reflect the value received from reading a mind-altering work like Cosmic Trigger.
So send money now. Buy books later.
Yeah, so instead we let a bunch of corporations (which are creations of the government) screw it up.
The free market works well when buyers and sellers meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and all costs accounted for in the transaction. These assumptions do not apply to basic medical care: there is a tremendous power and knowledge differential, and if my neighbor can't get treatment for his bird flu or TB (or even for some chronic condition that makes him more at risk to contract bird flu or TB) that puts me at risk.
Non sequitor. It's entirely possible (indeed seems likely) that Clinton's people left a strategy (which may or may not have been comprehensive or effective), which Bush's people never adopted. If I leave you a cookbook and you never open it, it can be true both that I left you my fablous peanut butter/chocolate pie recipe, and that someone is pressuring you to come up with a dessert recipe.
What, are you saying that reality has a liberal bias?
Over the past few decades, the right wing has consistently aligned itself with ignorance: creationism, junk science, bad international intelligence. Take the religious right, stir in neocon ambitions for an American empire, sprinkle in corporate greed, and watch as any respect for truth rapidly evaporates from the mix.
The /. readership is more educated than the average American, and so places a higher value on acurate information and critical thinking. In contempory America, this puts them at odds with the leaders of the Republican party.
All that was needed to stop the attack was secure cockpit doors. I think popular will for such a simple new anti-hijacking technique could have been rallied.
The Oklahoma City bombing (remember that?) had already taught us that there were wackos out there willing and able to kill hundreds with a single act. And the the threat of terrorists using a hijacked plane as a missle was already well-known:
Standing up to political assassins masquerading as journalists now qualifies as "going ballistic"?
While Rove, et. al, might see some political advantage to having a black female Secretary of State, Rice's station is secure mostly because she worships Bush. He prefers to surround himself with sychophants and yes-men (and yes-women).
It's not the color of her skin, it's the color of her nose, that makes for her job security.
Damn. I'm sorry to hear that. For however little it's worth, you have my sympathies.
Well, somebody's gotta take care of those retired sumotori...
This is from Japan. Their militaristic ambitions are still low (though perhaps on the rebound), while they have an aging popultion.
It may sound boring to you. Sounds like a really good idea to me...my mother, formerly a nurse, suffered a career-ending neck injury when she had to move a patient by herself in an understaffed nursing home. (The patient suffered from senile dementia, became combative, and she fell with the patient on top.)
After fifteen years, two surgeries, and various physical therapies, she still has significant pain and disability.
Sure, I want to trade in my Subaru for a mecha as much as any geek. But anything that prevents other nurses - the people who have the most impact on keeping you alive when you're hospitalized - from suffering a similar fate, sounds like a damn good idea to me.
Tanks and missles and figher planes are not very useful in fighting a geographically distributed insurgency.
Consider the American experience in Viet Nam, or the recent Israeli experience in Lebanon.
You ought to at least go to the the polls to vote on bond issues and ballot questions, and on the off chance there might be a decent candidate in some race. Write in yourself or friends for other offices if there's no one you like.
Maybe, maybe not.
You need to read up on the Red Scare. A large number of socialists were jail or deportated. The 1918 Sedition Act made it illegal to speak out against the government. The Post Office was allowed to deny mail to those labeled dissenters. Socialist Party presidental candidate Eugene Debs ran from prison in 1920, jailed for making an anti-war speech.
Don't think it can't happen here. It already has. These actions decades ago pretty much destroyed the Left in the U.S., leaving us with the two right-wing parties we have today.
Taxes also subsidize automobile travel - you don't pay at the pump for oil wars to keep gas cheap. Roads are paid for partly by property taxes. And we just externalize the costs of environmental devastation.
Methinks you misinterpret the poster, who was pointing out the the idea behind habeas corpus - restraint on the state's power to lock people up - is the root of restraints on searches, etcetera, and if that root is destroyed, we can look forward to the branches and leaves of other rights we (used to) hold dear, dying quickly.
Not quite. From LectLaw.com:
And what leads you to this belief?
Al Qaeda wants the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, preserving their "holy land" for future generations; Hezbollah opposes Israel, trying to in back stolen land for future generations; Iraqi insurgents are fighting against American forces whose bombs have killed thousands of Iraqi children. If you asked them, or the other groups you mention, why they fight, they might very well give you answers about making a "better" - for their defintion of better - world for their children.
Yes, they may encourage their children to go and fight and die for these causes. So does the U.S., and pretty much every other nation. Do you assert that Americans do not love their children, on the basis of the presence of military recruiters in high schools?
(And I'm not sure why you mention North Korea; Islam is not a significant force there.)
First, there's no such thing as "Islamofascism". The invention of the word is a propaganda exercise, and a bad one at that. Fascism is a nationalist movement; Al Qaeda is not nationalist. Fascism is corporatist; Al Qaeda, definitely not.
Seconds, and I'm sure that there are Al Qaeda members who love their children and believe that fighting the U.S. by any means necessary is in the best interests of those children (especially after U.S. bombs killed thousands of children in Iraq).
It's not enough that Al Qaeda members love their children, or that Russians love their children, or that Americans love their children. Only if and when we love each other's children - even each other's grown up children - will we have a chance at peace, and long-term survivial for the human race.
The war between the U.S. and Japan was a straight-up fight between expansionist imperial powers. Consider just how a U.S. naval base came to be located at Pearl Harbor in the first place.
The popular image that the U.S. was innocently minding its own business when out of nowhere the Japanese attacked, is pure mythology. Tensions were building for years, as the U.S. provided assistance to the Chinese Nationalists (whom the Japanese were fighting), and also instituted crippling embargoes against Japan.
(This doesn't mean that U.S. imperialism wasn't a lighter shade of grey than Japanese imperialism. The coup in Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and other U.S. aggression in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was definitely less evil than Japanese actions such as the rape of Nanking or the horrible experiments committed by Unit 731. A lesser evil is still, however, an evil.)
Of course unconditional surrender was not the only way to peace. The Japanese were beginning preparations to sure for peace before the U.S. used nuclear weapons.
The American use of the new weapons of mass destruction had more to do with intimidating the Soviet Union than with ending the war with Japan.
Which shows that the government is stupid - the people who are security risks are those who have something to hide. The very fact that I am open about things means that I am less of a security risk. I can't be blackmailed by someone threatening to divulge that information about me, I've already done it myself.
Having demonstrated that the government is stupid, it follows that I certainly don't want to work for them on anything that's going to allow them to kill people more effectively, and thus don't need a high security clearance.
Similarly, any potential employer who's going to decline to hire me based on information about my politics, philosophy, sex life, whatever, that I've divulged online, is not going to be someone I'd be able to enjoy (or even tolerate) working for anyway.
Gross incompetence on the part of the casino, does not make a winner who takes advantage of it a cheater. Corriveau was paid his winnings - $600,000 - after an investigatio showed no wrong-doing on his part
John von Neumann supposedly once said, "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." I'd say the casino just had to pay out the wages of their sin.
When it's governments versus individuals, I'm in favor of the individuals, excepting when those individuals have been proven to be very bad.
Tomlinson's is a case of one person revealing inconvenient truths about how his government operates. By default, I'm in favor of that.
Joseph Wilson also revealed inconvenient truths about his government, showing that the Bush administration was either lying or incompetent. (Not an exclusive or, of course.) In response to this, political operatives of that administration ruined his wife's career. I'm in favor of exposing government lies and incompetence, and opposed to political dirty tricks.
He did indeed communicate the idea he set out to communicate. He could have communicated it more effectively and clearly had he used not used the phrase "begs the question" improperly. (Where "proper" is determined by usage of well-educated native speakers with an interest in language.)
He also - inadvertently - communicated that his command of written English has gaps. (As, certainly, does mine.) On /., that doesn't matter
much, other than that we then get to go off on tangents about language. In
other contexts, it does matter, and proper use of the "prestige dialect" can be
useful.
No. Socialism is an economic system based on the "means of production" being controled by workers rather than by a state-backed minority group of owners.
Government "social" programs such as tax-funded tuition can exist in either capitalist or socialist economies. A free tutition program bear more on the "free market"/"command economy" axis than on the capitalism/socialism one.
Uh, this can occur in a capitalist system also. In fact, it happens fairly frequently in the U.S. now. (Met a fellow tending bar at a coffee house last week who has a C.S. degree. Of course, he said he got the degree mostly to get his parents off his back about going to college.)