Why should the government be involved with deciding what I do with my property
Once you're dead, it's not your property anymore.
be it my body, my house, or my wallet?
Your relationship with your body is much more intimate than "property".
Your house is your property only because of a government deed; those funny green pieces of paper in your wallet are government creations too.
Capitalism requires all sorts to the government involvement; contrary to the concept of "liberatrian capitalism", capitalism is not a ground state that occurs in the absence of state action. That's why anarchy is a form of socialism.
True. But your argument then is that property is important because it suports those other freedoms.
Property is a tool we use to support those other rights, it is not properly a primary right. It can also be misused to undermine those other rights; property is a form of power, of force, and concentration of power into the hands of a few is anathema to freedom. If only a few people have most of the money to contribute to their churches, if only a few people control the media, that's property acting destructively to freedom.
Socialism doesn't mean the elimination of private property; it involves the restriction or elimination of capital - economic resources - as private property. (Yes, there are some theories at the edges that call for all private property to be eliminated, but it's sloppy thinking to attribute that attribute to all varieties of socialism.)
People in poverty? Look at the studies- the average family in poverty has a color tv and other ammenities
People give away used color TVs when they buy a newer, fancier one. Used computers, too, as available as hand-me-downs. The fact that poor people can glean fancy toys that the better-off put out in the trash, doesn't mean that they're not poor.
If only it were as easy to get nutritious food, good medical care, and sound housing.
The poorest people in the U.S. live better than 99% of the people in some countries.
I think living on a steam grate is about the same in any country. (Indeed, I'd rather be homeless in Japan than the U.S., at least I could set up a tarp-tent in a park, or hang out in a train station and not be harasses by cops.)
Anyone in the U.S. can walk into a hospital, and they will be treated.
EMTALA requires hospitals to treat emegency cases; useless for chronic conditions and for preventative care. And they can still bill you and try to squeeze whatever payment they can from you.
Of course "mine" is subjective. The idea that something can be "my" land, "my" idea (copyright, patent, etc.), "mine" by inheritance, and so on, is not an objective truth that's universal across cultures.
Giving people the opportunity to pass on their own wealth to their descendents
Why should wealth be inheritable any more than any other form of power? Unearned wealth from inheritance should be taxed heavily.
Being able to afford to buy from others outside your country without being in their debt
Uh, to buy what? I can buy cheap things and not go into debt or expensive things and go into debt, whether I'm buying from my neighbor or from a guy on the other side of the planet. I don't understand your point here.
Nobody is bribing the soldiers with political money...I believe the majority of the U.S. soldiers didn't check their conscience at the door when they took up their rifles.
So how did they end up serving in an immoral war? Either they did check their consciences, or they got duped.
I'd hold more with the later. My dad's an all right guy, he joined the Air Force after high school (around 1963) on promises that the military would give him training in photograhy and let him be of service to his country. Instead they made him an AP and sent him to walk patrol around an air base in Viet Nam in support of a "police action" based on lies. Fortunately he never had to shoot anyone.
Many Viet Nam vets thought they were serving their country. Many of the fellows who joined up after 9-11 thought they were going to defend the U.S. against terrorists. They made the mistake of believing the government.
Soldiers don't need to be corrupted, it's easier to fool them.
if you are going to start using words that actually mean something, check their definitions first.
Your defintion of terrorism is an interesting one. Where'd you get it from? It's especially interesting to claim that terrorism cannnot be funded or trained by any recognized government or nation; sounds like a defintion of convenience by some government entity to dodge accusations that there's no real difference between terrorism and state action.
If the civilians you speak of avoid killing their fellow civilians at all costs, then they're just a resistance army.
If the difference between "army" and "terroists" is taking strong measures to avoid civilian casualities, than any nation involved in aerial bombardment is a terrorist organization.
I don't disagree with that, just wanted to point it out.
They're becoming more irate and more left and more disdainful of anything short of socialism and secular humanism.
Weakly regulated capitalism as advocated by the Democratic party is no more the same thing as socialism, than slowing down while driving north is the same thing as turning around and driving south.
And secular humanism? Again, I wish the Democratic party would stand up for this idea.
Those inventions were created by people, not by Islam.
The point is merely that these were created by a society in which Islam was the predominant religion. That's historically and sociologically interesting, demonstrating that in the general case Islam is not incompatible with an inventive society, and raising questions like "How the hell did things get so screwed up over there?", "Can the same sort of screwing-up happen to societies where Christianity is the predominant religion?", and "What is the world going to look like if and when the Islamic world gets un-screwed-up?"
There's a common unspoken belief that somehow Christian-dominant Eurpoean/North American culture has "won" history and "ended up" on top and therefore proven superior. But if you asked a guy in Persia five or six centuries ago, he might have told you how Islam-dominant Arabic/Persian culture had "won" history. In five or six centuries you might have to ask that question in Chinese.
Islam is merely a religion, and hence useless and incapable of anything at except stroking peoples emotions (for good or bad).
A proper religion is a means of enhancing our relationships with ourselves and with the universe. In all the mess of dogma, superstition, political corruption, and worthless metaphysics, there remain a few threads of actual wisdom teachings; worthwhile inspiration can be found in some forms of Buddhism, Sufism, Quakerism, Hinduism, the more philosophical strains of Judaism and Taoism, in some of the various "primitive" or "ahistorical" nature religions, and in some parts of the Neopagan revivial. Yes, you have to sift a lot of crap to find the diamonds.
Jonathan Zuck is founder and president of the Association for Competitive Technology. ACT is regarded by many as a Microsoft mouthpiece.
Of course they'd love to drive a wedge between the Free Software and Open Source camps. It's no surpise that this piece insults RMS's Fee Software philosophy by dimissing it as religious, and claims that it has never produced anything (that's why RMS is insistant on the "GNU/Linux" label, to help prevent anti-Free Software FUD like this.)
Nothing can be unreadable like Perl. Except maybe the output of/dev/random.:-)
All of them, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby have their
disadvantages. Why is PHP so sucessfull while there are fully operational
frameworks (like Catalyst) when PHP has unfinished Zend Framework or
Seagull 0.x.x.
PHP is a good tool for the job - it was created for web applications. Perl can be a good tool for different jobs, but it wasn't designed for web work. Nor was Python nor Ruby, which were originally envisioned as
object-oriented scripting languages.
PHP just gets the job done, taking a practical approach.
I still fail to see the fascination with "frameworks", looks like the
YABOTW (Yet Another Buzzword Of The Month) to me. Perhaps they are useful
add-on for languages not originally meant for web use, but they would seem
to add little to PHP.
none of those things have ANYTHING to do with my defence of financial inspections in this case which cost the supposed "victim" nothing
Some of us value privacy, and believe that having agents of the state pouring over our records is, in and of itself, a harm and a cost.
There's a reason voyeurism is a crime, even though by your arguement it costs the supposed "victim" nothing
did not involve an unrestricted warrant on his property
The Fourth Amendment guards not only our property but our papers. That those papers are held by our agent - a financial institution - makes no difference.
Recently, courts have punished drugs manufacturers with incredibly high damage awards. Take for instance the COX-2 inhibitors Vioxx.
Merck got a slap on the wrist compared to the corporate death penalty that they earned. The way that they hid information about the dangers of Vioxx call for criminal, not merely civil, sanctions (I know the feds began a criminal investiation at one point but don't know the status on that).
Why should we quit smoking, lose weight, stop drinking,... and generally "live better" (in your words) if we don't have to?
You don't "have" to, but if you take crap care of yourself you lose all right to complain when you get sick, and have no right to expect a doctor or other health care provider to "fix" you. (I see it even as a bodywork therapist, people want me to "fix" their aching bodies but won't even try to change postural or movement habits...I'm tempted to keep some sort of gelding apparatus around for the next such "fix me!" request...)
I'm all in favor of drugs that let us do whatever the hell we want, as long as they work and are cheap (which they eventually will be).
I'm all in favor of free magic fairy dust too. But until it comes along, you've got to deal with reality-as-it-is, which is that that drugs (as great as they can be when properly applied) make a piss-poor substitute for healthy living.
Even if you assume that they only release the energy of the least powerful nuclear bomb, which is 9 megatons, that would put the energy released by all the world's nuclear weapons at around 261,000 megatons.
I don't know where they got their numbers from either, but the least powerful atomic weapons are in the kiloton, not megaton, range - "Little Boy" was 15 kt, and I would presume "tactical nukes" are much lower.
Moveon.org and the rest...would actually have to sink resources (gee a whole 1/100 of what a paper mailing costs) into spamming me. This is a bad thing?
Are you accusing Moveon.org of spamming? AFAIK you have you sign up to receive their e-mail.
This is a bad thing?
Yes. E-mail has allowed activist groups (on many sides; Gun Owners of America is upset with this too) to communicate very effectively. Adding monetary costs to political communiction means only those with money get to communicate - and that's bad for politics.
Well, as I read the GPL, if said government agency creates a GPLed tool and distributes it internally, then they must also make the source available internally; I see no exceptions allowing you to not provide source to employees on demand.
I'd be willing to bet that there are a LOT more OSS products
out there with no company behind them any more...so the only option is to
hire a team of engineers to fix/upgrade it anyway, if need be. I can't
imagine this being feasible or practical, except for Fortune 500
companies.
FUD or trolling?
Many Free Software projects never had any "company" behind them. They
are developed by communities or by a single person.
Proprietary software gives you no options for maintenance if the
original supplier goes belly-up.
The cost of hiring others to maintain the code depends on the size and
complexity of the code and how much you want to change it; hiring one good
hacker for a few days to make a fix to a small to medium sized codebase is
within the budget of all but the tiniest companies. Even a large codebase
can be handled by one coder if the desired changes are small.
If there's a large project you want to significantly change,
you can get together with other companies that depend on it to hire a code
maintenance crew.
(If there's a large project that you depend on and no one else cares
about, you made a bad business decision - similar to if you bought
off-brand proprietary software and the maker went belly-up. Sorry.)
And the worst and most bigoted religous are the atheists.
Hmmm...have any atheist politicians ever suggested that religious people should nor be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots, because this is (as provided for in its founding documents) a secular nation? Not to my knowledge.
Have any religious politicians ever suggested that atheists should nor be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots, because this (according to a mythology deliberately planted in the mid 20th century) is "one nation under god"? Yes.
Most the functions work one way, but there are just enough that reverse target parameters that you can never be quite sure you got it right.
You can look it up, you know. Very easy way to be sure. I usually have a browser tab open to TFM. Quite handy.
PHP inherits functions from a rich variety of sources. Those sources often have differing parameter orders. No big deal. (But then I'm a C guy from back in the day, got used to having to look up things like memcpy vs bcopy.)
In the late 1970's, an FBI author of a book on the Rosenburg incident, for example, was angered by what he believed to be censorship regarding important information on the case. After going through the motions to allow him to print that part what he wanted, he found the reason - the information he wanted to print came from a source who, after more than 30 years, was still reporting from the USSR. Putting it in his book would have, without doubt, led to his death.
The fact that the government wants to preserve its "national security" does not make silencing authors or removing information from their works not censorship. It still is. And under Amendment I, it's still unconstitutional - there's no "national security exception" to free speech in the Bill of Rights. And there's no power to declare information as "classified" in the enumerated powers of the federal government.
The government may be able to make soldiers and other employees swear to secrecy, but if a civilian gets ahold of information there is no legitimate state power to prevent them from speaking or writing about it. (That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wise or ethical for said civilian to do so, of course.) If as a result, spies occasionally die to preserve free speech, well, isn't that what they're supposed to be defending?
(Unless, of course, it's a crock and they're really defending the imperial interests of the ruling class, and not freedom after all.)
Of course, as a practical matter, the state has the guns, and those who say things the state doesn't want said may well be forced into cages at gunpoint or shot outright. Doesn't make it legal or right, though.
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No, it's no one's property after you die. It becomes your family's property only through government action.
Once you're dead, it's not your property anymore.
Your relationship with your body is much more intimate than "property".
Your house is your property only because of a government deed; those funny green pieces of paper in your wallet are government creations too.
Capitalism requires all sorts to the government involvement; contrary to the concept of "liberatrian capitalism", capitalism is not a ground state that occurs in the absence of state action. That's why anarchy is a form of socialism.
True. But your argument then is that property is important because it suports those other freedoms.
Property is a tool we use to support those other rights, it is not properly a primary right. It can also be misused to undermine those other rights; property is a form of power, of force, and concentration of power into the hands of a few is anathema to freedom. If only a few people have most of the money to contribute to their churches, if only a few people control the media, that's property acting destructively to freedom.
Socialism doesn't mean the elimination of private property; it involves the restriction or elimination of capital - economic resources - as private property. (Yes, there are some theories at the edges that call for all private property to be eliminated, but it's sloppy thinking to attribute that attribute to all varieties of socialism.)
People give away used color TVs when they buy a newer, fancier one. Used computers, too, as available as hand-me-downs. The fact that poor people can glean fancy toys that the better-off put out in the trash, doesn't mean that they're not poor.
If only it were as easy to get nutritious food, good medical care, and sound housing.
I think living on a steam grate is about the same in any country. (Indeed, I'd rather be homeless in Japan than the U.S., at least I could set up a tarp-tent in a park, or hang out in a train station and not be harasses by cops.)
EMTALA requires hospitals to treat emegency cases; useless for chronic conditions and for preventative care. And they can still bill you and try to squeeze whatever payment they can from you.
Of course "mine" is subjective. The idea that something can be "my" land, "my" idea (copyright, patent, etc.), "mine" by inheritance, and so on, is not an objective truth that's universal across cultures.
That would be nice.
Why should wealth be inheritable any more than any other form of power? Unearned wealth from inheritance should be taxed heavily.
Uh, to buy what? I can buy cheap things and not go into debt or expensive things and go into debt, whether I'm buying from my neighbor or from a guy on the other side of the planet. I don't understand your point here.
So how did they end up serving in an immoral war? Either they did check their consciences, or they got duped.
I'd hold more with the later. My dad's an all right guy, he joined the Air Force after high school (around 1963) on promises that the military would give him training in photograhy and let him be of service to his country. Instead they made him an AP and sent him to walk patrol around an air base in Viet Nam in support of a "police action" based on lies. Fortunately he never had to shoot anyone.
Many Viet Nam vets thought they were serving their country. Many of the fellows who joined up after 9-11 thought they were going to defend the U.S. against terrorists. They made the mistake of believing the government.
Soldiers don't need to be corrupted, it's easier to fool them.
Your defintion of terrorism is an interesting one. Where'd you get it from? It's especially interesting to claim that terrorism cannnot be funded or trained by any recognized government or nation; sounds like a defintion of convenience by some government entity to dodge accusations that there's no real difference between terrorism and state action.
There is no internationally agreed-upon definition of terrorism. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, from the American Revolution to the Zionist movement.
If the difference between "army" and "terroists" is taking strong measures to avoid civilian casualities, than any nation involved in aerial bombardment is a terrorist organization.
I don't disagree with that, just wanted to point it out.
Weakly regulated capitalism as advocated by the Democratic party is no more the same thing as socialism, than slowing down while driving north is the same thing as turning around and driving south.
And secular humanism? Again, I wish the Democratic party would stand up for this idea.
The point is merely that these were created by a society in which Islam was the predominant religion. That's historically and sociologically interesting, demonstrating that in the general case Islam is not incompatible with an inventive society, and raising questions like "How the hell did things get so screwed up over there?", "Can the same sort of screwing-up happen to societies where Christianity is the predominant religion?", and "What is the world going to look like if and when the Islamic world gets un-screwed-up?"
There's a common unspoken belief that somehow Christian-dominant Eurpoean/North American culture has "won" history and "ended up" on top and therefore proven superior. But if you asked a guy in Persia five or six centuries ago, he might have told you how Islam-dominant Arabic/Persian culture had "won" history. In five or six centuries you might have to ask that question in Chinese.
A proper religion is a means of enhancing our relationships with ourselves and with the universe. In all the mess of dogma, superstition, political corruption, and worthless metaphysics, there remain a few threads of actual wisdom teachings; worthwhile inspiration can be found in some forms of Buddhism, Sufism, Quakerism, Hinduism, the more philosophical strains of Judaism and Taoism, in some of the various "primitive" or "ahistorical" nature religions, and in some parts of the Neopagan revivial. Yes, you have to sift a lot of crap to find the diamonds.
Sure. Who says buildings have to be quadrilateral? I'd love to work in a dodecagonal prism.
Jonathan Zuck is founder and president of the Association for Competitive Technology. ACT is regarded by many as a Microsoft mouthpiece.
Of course they'd love to drive a wedge between the Free Software and Open Source camps. It's no surpise that this piece insults RMS's Fee Software philosophy by dimissing it as religious, and claims that it has never produced anything (that's why RMS is insistant on the "GNU/Linux" label, to help prevent anti-Free Software FUD like this.)
It's a crock.
PHP is a good tool for the job - it was created for web applications. Perl can be a good tool for different jobs, but it wasn't designed for web work. Nor was Python nor Ruby, which were originally envisioned as object-oriented scripting languages.
PHP just gets the job done, taking a practical approach.
I still fail to see the fascination with "frameworks", looks like the YABOTW (Yet Another Buzzword Of The Month) to me. Perhaps they are useful add-on for languages not originally meant for web use, but they would seem to add little to PHP.
Some of us value privacy, and believe that having agents of the state pouring over our records is, in and of itself, a harm and a cost.
There's a reason voyeurism is a crime, even though by your arguement it costs the supposed "victim" nothing
The Fourth Amendment guards not only our property but our papers. That those papers are held by our agent - a financial institution - makes no difference.
Merck got a slap on the wrist compared to the corporate death penalty that they earned. The way that they hid information about the dangers of Vioxx call for criminal, not merely civil, sanctions (I know the feds began a criminal investiation at one point but don't know the status on that).
You don't "have" to, but if you take crap care of yourself you lose all right to complain when you get sick, and have no right to expect a doctor or other health care provider to "fix" you. (I see it even as a bodywork therapist, people want me to "fix" their aching bodies but won't even try to change postural or movement habits...I'm tempted to keep some sort of gelding apparatus around for the next such "fix me!" request...)
I'm all in favor of free magic fairy dust too. But until it comes along, you've got to deal with reality-as-it-is, which is that that drugs (as great as they can be when properly applied) make a piss-poor substitute for healthy living.
I don't know where they got their numbers from either, but the least powerful atomic weapons are in the kiloton, not megaton, range - "Little Boy" was 15 kt, and I would presume "tactical nukes" are much lower.
Are you accusing Moveon.org of spamming? AFAIK you have you sign up to receive their e-mail.
Yes. E-mail has allowed activist groups (on many sides; Gun Owners of America is upset with this too) to communicate very effectively. Adding monetary costs to political communiction means only those with money get to communicate - and that's bad for politics.
Making and using multiple copies within one organization is not "distribution". The agency counts as a single entity.
FUD or trolling?
Many Free Software projects never had any "company" behind them. They are developed by communities or by a single person.
Proprietary software gives you no options for maintenance if the original supplier goes belly-up.
The cost of hiring others to maintain the code depends on the size and complexity of the code and how much you want to change it; hiring one good hacker for a few days to make a fix to a small to medium sized codebase is within the budget of all but the tiniest companies. Even a large codebase can be handled by one coder if the desired changes are small.
If there's a large project you want to significantly change, you can get together with other companies that depend on it to hire a code maintenance crew.
(If there's a large project that you depend on and no one else cares about, you made a bad business decision - similar to if you bought off-brand proprietary software and the maker went belly-up. Sorry.)
Hmmm...have any atheist politicians ever suggested that religious people should nor be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots, because this is (as provided for in its founding documents) a secular nation? Not to my knowledge.
Have any religious politicians ever suggested that atheists should nor be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots, because this (according to a mythology deliberately planted in the mid 20th century) is "one nation under god"? Yes.
Catholics, Protestants, and Jews have divided the injuctions given in the book of Exodus, chapter 20 into "Commandments" in different ways. I don't think this implies any sort of conspiracy; Moses didn't use a PowerPoint style bulleted list, or even an HTML <ol> tag.
You can look it up, you know. Very easy way to be sure. I usually have a browser tab open to TFM. Quite handy.
PHP inherits functions from a rich variety of sources. Those sources often have differing parameter orders. No big deal. (But then I'm a C guy from back in the day, got used to having to look up things like memcpy vs bcopy.)
The fact that the government wants to preserve its "national security" does not make silencing authors or removing information from their works not censorship. It still is. And under Amendment I, it's still unconstitutional - there's no "national security exception" to free speech in the Bill of Rights. And there's no power to declare information as "classified" in the enumerated powers of the federal government.
The government may be able to make soldiers and other employees swear to secrecy, but if a civilian gets ahold of information there is no legitimate state power to prevent them from speaking or writing about it. (That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wise or ethical for said civilian to do so, of course.) If as a result, spies occasionally die to preserve free speech, well, isn't that what they're supposed to be defending?
(Unless, of course, it's a crock and they're really defending the imperial interests of the ruling class, and not freedom after all.)
Of course, as a practical matter, the state has the guns, and those who say things the state doesn't want said may well be forced into cages at gunpoint or shot outright. Doesn't make it legal or right, though.