Maybe you're lucky and left handed, but my arrow keys are in the right side of the keyboard, the same side as my mouse. To use them with my left hand (hours and hours a day...) would be very, very uncomfortable.
Actually, while I'm right handed I moused left for several years to help balance out the stress on my hands. Mouse left, operate arrow keys with right.
I hurt my left wrist a few months ago so I'm mousing right for a while to give Lefty a break.(Actually, not mousing but trackballing - Logitech marble mouse, best ambidextrous solution I could find. Large ball worked with fingers, not thumn, four buttons, no scroll wheel.)
You just want people to die from diseases that could be cured pharmacytically, don't you?
Go take your medication (ah, irony), and reread what I wrote, mmkay?
I'll explain it again, a little slower this time.
Some people claim to be again any government interference in drug prices. However, they are for drug patents. Drug patents are a form of government interference in drug prices (in that in granting an artificial monopoly they act to push up drug prices). Therefore, being against government interference in drug prices while favoring patents is a self-contradictory position.
There are two ways out of the contradiction. We could eliminate all government interference in drug prices, including patents; as you point out, this would largely end profit-driven drug development (which some would argue should be replaced by public funding of medical research). Or, we could adjust the government interference (by shortening patent times, by price controls on patented drugs, or by exempting certain classes of drugs from patents) in a way that does more to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" and less to make drug companies rich.
Communism and fascism are equivalent. They are both diametrically opposed to capitalism.
Fascism is corporate capitalism taken to its logical extreme. Why do you think that shining example of capitalism, Henry Ford, was an admirer of Adolph Hitler? Why do you think German corporations supported the Nazis?
Nothing he is putting out there is really embraced outside of the far left.
He's raised a hell of a lot of money for a fringe candidate with no support.
Dean, Kerry, and Clark are the only ones with a shot at beating Bush. (American elect three type of people as President - former Vice-Presidents, governors, and war heroes; we can count out all other candidates.) Kerry screwed up on Iraq and his campaign is floundering; he'll probably be out of it by March.
That leaves Dean and Clark. Trying to paint Clark as a war hero is a fair stretch; his only strength is being a Friend of Bill. If he were smart, he'd take Dean's offer of the VP slot, and together they'd walk all over Bush and Cheney.
Or, the Democrats may form their usual circular firing squad and leave no one standing to oppose Dubbya. (In which case I'm seriously considering four years of travel and study abroad.)
The flap about the Confederate flag remark only shows that the Democratic leadership continues to deserve the label Hunter S. Thompson stuck on them years ago - "The New Dumb".
What, the Democrats don't want guys who have a Confederate flag on their pickup to vote Democratic?!?!?!
If the Republicans can have a big enough tent to hold both libertarian capitalists and the religious right, the Democrats better find one big enough for both guys who have a Confederate flag on their pickup and urban blacks.
Just to be clear, for those that don't know: a SYN flood is a very different attack than a ping flood. Ping floods send ICMP ping packets, SYN floods send TCP SYN packets.
Oh I murdered a gas station attentend while robbing the store... so what I guess.
So there are strong ethical reasons to refrain from killing. Or would you go ahead and kill if you had a surefire legal loophole? No? Then it's not the legal status of killing that's guiding your actions, is it? (If law is the only thing keeping you from killing, please seek professional psychiatric help.)
We sell our software and the customer pays for one copy. It seems to be working quite fine for both us the producer and them the consumer.
Since software consumers now have to worry about BSA audits (carried out with Federal paramilitary LEOs), to say it "works" for consumers is a stretch.
Eliminating copyright would stifle innovation. If all we could enforce were royaltyrights we'd go out of business and stop innovating.
Maybe you would. Others are smart and flexible enough to adapt to changing times. Both the recorded music and the software business are still in their infancy, only a few decades old. No one involved in either should make assumptions that past conditions will hold in the future.
At a former employer, a very small company, we had one resume for a sysadmin position come in that (in violation of good ethics and probably a law or two) was so funny we passed it around for everyone to see. The guy had listed every single bit of hardware he'd ever touched.
I mean, he listed a twenty different brands and models of monitors. I think he even listed different keyboard manufacturers.
I think you do have a legal right if they do it in public. No different than a cover bar/band paying ASCAP royalties...
The bar band is making money for the bar in the process. Mere public performance - for example, me playing a Beatles cover at a friends' party - doesn't require royalties. (Not that such could be enforced anyway.)
And just because I speed and get away with it does it mean I never committed the crime at all?
No, but it means that rational people will yawn and say "So what?" when you argue that because X is currently illegal, you shouldn't do X. Law has long lost any moral authority as a guide to what one should or should not do; it's just a guide as to what to not get caught doing.
The ease of violating musical copyrights is still not a valid reason to change copyright laws.
When a law is both unenforceable and widely broken, an intelligent society will change it. Failure to do so only breeds contempt for the law, and erosion of justice as more extreme attempts at enforcement are brought into play. (Like the "War on (some) Drugs"? Look for the "War on Copying", coming soon. Former ATF stormtroopers coming to the RIAA could be just the first step.)
In the case of copyright, the whole idea of "pay-per-copy" is dying if not dead. It's long past time to start developing alternative ways for authors and musicians to get paid.
Copying a CD is now about as easy as learning to sing a song. I suggest putting copying music under the same sort of structure as performance royalties - copy all you want, but if you sell or otherwise profit from copies (including profiting from downloads), you owe a royalty. Eliminate copyright, create a royaltyright.
As an semi-professional musician (I've actually gotten paid a few times, so I guess I've lost my amateur status) I want people to share my music. I don't have moral or legal authority to demand a nickel if someone hums a song I wrote, and the same should apply if someone makes a copy to give away. (Hell, I should pay them a nickel.) But if anyone's making a buck off it, I think I deserve a cut.
No they dont lose anything when a copyrighted work is simply copied, however when the copy is distributed or given away they do lose.
No, they don't. If I burn a copy of "Highway 61 Revisited", Bob Dylan's bank balance does not go down, nor does so much as an old used guitar string disappear from his possession. He loses nothing, there is no theft.
Put another way: if I work for my boss, but my boss doesn't write me my paycheck, theft has not been committed - breach of contract has. Similarly, if I burn a copy of a Dylan CD, theft has not been committed - violation of copyright may have.
(A large and significant differences being that I had a agreement with my boss, but none with Dylan.)
Okay, so we'll all agree that copyright infringement is neither theft nor piracy. It is however still illegal.
When the copyright claim is valid, yes. (Copyright law often reaches far beyond Congress's legitimate power under Article I Section 8.) So what? So many things are illegal that few Americans get through a week without some violation, at least of a traffic or a tax law.
But just because it has now become childs play to participate in copyright violations does not mean we have to change copyright laws.
If you want copyright law to fulfill the goal of promoting "the progress of science and useful arts", yes, you do.
Like the grandparent stated, the OSS community holds dear the rights outlined in the OS licenses like the GPL, but seem to ignore and blatantly disregard other peoples choice of more restrictive licenses.
You paint with a mighty broad brush there, bucko. Members of the Open Source and Free Software communities hold a range of opinions on copyright.
could it be the artist, the producer, the publisher or maybe the distrubitor?
No, it couldn't, because the artist, producer, publisher, and distrubitor do not lose anything when a CD is copied.
Copying is not theft. It may (or may not) be a copyright violation, but copyright violation is not theft. (Since, under the U.S. constitution, Congress is authorized to issue copyrights only "for limited times to authors and inventors", many claims are inherently bogus.)
Apparently you don't, since you keep confusing it with theft. It's not.
See, I WORK for a living (writing software) and I understand economics. The fact that what I create isn't a physical artifact doesn't change my lost business when it is stolen.
First, copying is not stealing, it's copyright violation. Second, technology is changing the way business models need to work - a pay-per-copy scheme simply isn't viable any more. When conditions change, you can't depend on the government to prop up outdated business models - that's basic economics.
And BTW, I also work for a living creating software. I also create music, poetry, and stories, though I've yet to be paid a significant amount - and like most musicians and authors, probably never will - for those things.
Why people use bloated clients that try to combine calendars and other stuff with e-mail and don't get either right, rather than simple but full-featured clients that "do one thing and do it well", is beyond my ken.
I.e., bloat. My mail client should read mail, not impose its idea of workflow on me.
and an easily accessible API.
Anything with a closed proprietary protocol, by definition doesn't have an easily accessible API. (Yes, communications protocols should be considered part of the API.)
Nonsense. Bush's policiss have given more people than ever a motive to commit terrorist acts against the United States - and have made the U.S. government more of a clear and present danger to its own citizens than terrorism.
Last time I check, Congress gave the president the authority to attack Iraq. president clinton, that is. Oh, and by the way, they ALSO voted and gave president Bush the authority.
Which doesn't address the point that no declaration of war was made.
But my "measure of victory" is removing the terrorist and lawless regimes in afghanistan and iraq and replacing them with pro-U.S. democratic governments.
Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was lawless (until we came in and destroyed the governments - sucky governments, true, but functioning ones), and Iraq had little to do with terrorism.
And why just Afghanistan and Iraq, in world full of nasty governments? Could it be...oil?
And if they're democratic governments, don't they get to choose whether or not they're pro-U.S.? Or do we again play the game of toppling democratic regimes that don't do our bidding?
Depends on how one counts, how one defines "win", and how one defines "war".
Is it one war, the "War on Terrorism", fought on two fronts? But terrorism seems to still exist, and Bush's policies have been a terrorist recruitment officer's wet dream. No win there.
Is there a war in Afganistan, and another in Iraq, with the goals of capturing or killing Bin Laden and Hussein? Both are still at large, and Americans are still getting killed in both places. 0 for 2 there.
Is there any war at all, given the lack of a formal declaration of such by Congress? Yes, I know the Constitution doesn't count for much any more, especially when a president gets it into his head to go bomb the fuck out of someone, but weren't Korea and Vietname "police actions" or somesuch rather than "wars" for just that reason?
So, yes, Bush's actions have lead to a lot more dead foriegners than dead U.S. servicepeople. If that's your measure of victory, he's batting 1.000. Of course, by that reconning we won in Vietnam.
The infamous "butterfly ballot" certainly seemed simple enough to me, and to the third graders to whom it was shown, and to the Democratic Party officials who designed and approved it, and nobody seemed to complain when it was published in the newspaper, but I'm sure I'm missing something.
At least four things, actually:
The ballot did not conform to Florida law
You, the third graders, and the Democratic Party officials probably did not see the ballot in situ. Palm Beach voters slipped the card into an angled frame, which created visual (due to the angle) and mechanical (it didn't always get fully seated) problems.
Even if Democratic Party officials had seen the ballot in situ, their failure to act does not deprive voters of the right to equal protection.
Using the instructions given on the ballot, it was impossible to vote for half of the candidates. The ballot told voters to punch the hole to the right of the candidate they choose.
if you take the time to consider your vote, and act carefully to get it right, why should somebody else, who had no idea for whom they voted, have just as much say?
Thing is, with the screwy layout you didn't have to carefully consider your vote if you were voting for the first guy on the list - who happened to be Bush. (No conspiracy about the design meant to be implied, it just worked out that way. Had it worked out with Gore in punch position 1, and a bunch of Bush votes being miscounted, I'm sure Democrats would be pointing fingers at "Republican voters who were too dumb to follow instruction" while Republicans would be crying for accessible voting.)
Democracy is a horrible form of government--it's two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Yes. But it's better than all other alternatives tried so far. (Me, I'm a Zenarchist, but until we're all enlightened we're stuck with democracy as our best bet.)
If we returned to a Republic, and focused on limiting the powers of the government instead of a consistent regime of overtaxation, then I don't think this would be as much of a problem.
Methinks perhaps you do not understand what a republic means. Being a republic has nothing to do with limiting the powers of the government; it just means that we have representatives. (In our democratic republic, they're elected; in the old Roman republic, they were they heads of the most powerful families.) Our republic just means that the two wolves and the sheep vote for a hyena to decide whats for dinner.
What limits the powers of government (at least in theory) is that we have a constitutional democratic republic.
They've already shown that they can't be trusted in free society, why should they be trusted with the vote?
Why should they not? They've done their time, their debt is repaid. If we trust them enough to release them from prison, surely we can let them have a vote. Hell, a felon can still run for office and be elected. It's unjust to bar someone for life from full participation in the democratic process because of a past crime.
There's nothing in the constitution that says "equal protection - unless you have a felony conviction"; the constitutionality of the process is highly suspect.
It also makes it hard to change a bad law - if you make everyone who gets caught doing X a felon and take away their vote, there are a lot fewer voters to vote for legalizing X (where X can be use of certain drugs, gambling, prostitution, etcetera).
If this seems to be unfair to black people, how is it anything but their own fault?
Because selective enforcement and prosecution is easy and common.
And because the law can be - and is - structured such that two crimes that are in every reasonable way equivalent, but one is more often commited by blacks and one by white, are treated differently. (Power cocaine will get you a misdemeaor (hell, you can even be president), crack will get you a felony.)
Here are some stats on the issue wrt drug laws.
Of coruse, you can do what the Republicans did in Florida in 2000, and simply falsely label people felons.
Slashdot Mirror
...who doesn't have a region-free DVD player, or one capable of being set that way?
Actually, while I'm right handed I moused left for several years to help balance out the stress on my hands. Mouse left, operate arrow keys with right.
I hurt my left wrist a few months ago so I'm mousing right for a while to give Lefty a break.(Actually, not mousing but trackballing - Logitech marble mouse, best ambidextrous solution I could find. Large ball worked with fingers, not thumn, four buttons, no scroll wheel.)
Go take your medication (ah, irony), and reread what I wrote, mmkay?
I'll explain it again, a little slower this time.
Some people claim to be again any government interference in drug prices. However, they are for drug patents. Drug patents are a form of government interference in drug prices (in that in granting an artificial monopoly they act to push up drug prices). Therefore, being against government interference in drug prices while favoring patents is a self-contradictory position.
There are two ways out of the contradiction. We could eliminate all government interference in drug prices, including patents; as you point out, this would largely end profit-driven drug development (which some would argue should be replaced by public funding of medical research). Or, we could adjust the government interference (by shortening patent times, by price controls on patented drugs, or by exempting certain classes of drugs from patents) in a way that does more to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" and less to make drug companies rich.
Drug companies spend twice as much on marketing as on R & D. And they're making enourmous profits at it.
Wanna do away with government interference in drug prices? Fine - start by ceasing the issuance of patents.
No? Then let's admit that the industry needs government interference in drug prices to survive, and make that interference more equitable.
Fascism is corporate capitalism taken to its logical extreme. Why do you think that shining example of capitalism, Henry Ford, was an admirer of Adolph Hitler? Why do you think German corporations supported the Nazis?
He's raised a hell of a lot of money for a fringe candidate with no support.
Dean, Kerry, and Clark are the only ones with a shot at beating Bush. (American elect three type of people as President - former Vice-Presidents, governors, and war heroes; we can count out all other candidates.) Kerry screwed up on Iraq and his campaign is floundering; he'll probably be out of it by March.
That leaves Dean and Clark. Trying to paint Clark as a war hero is a fair stretch; his only strength is being a Friend of Bill. If he were smart, he'd take Dean's offer of the VP slot, and together they'd walk all over Bush and Cheney.
Or, the Democrats may form their usual circular firing squad and leave no one standing to oppose Dubbya. (In which case I'm seriously considering four years of travel and study abroad.)
The flap about the Confederate flag remark only shows that the Democratic leadership continues to deserve the label Hunter S. Thompson stuck on them years ago - "The New Dumb".
What, the Democrats don't want guys who have a Confederate flag on their pickup to vote Democratic?!?!?!
If the Republicans can have a big enough tent to hold both libertarian capitalists and the religious right, the Democrats better find one big enough for both guys who have a Confederate flag on their pickup and urban blacks.
Every politician running against an incumbent frames their stand by contrast with the current officeholder.
I'd love to see that, and the Greens replace the Democrats.
Just to be clear, for those that don't know: a SYN flood is a very different attack than a ping flood. Ping floods send ICMP ping packets, SYN floods send TCP SYN packets.
So there are strong ethical reasons to refrain from killing. Or would you go ahead and kill if you had a surefire legal loophole? No? Then it's not the legal status of killing that's guiding your actions, is it? (If law is the only thing keeping you from killing, please seek professional psychiatric help.)
Since software consumers now have to worry about BSA audits (carried out with Federal paramilitary LEOs), to say it "works" for consumers is a stretch.
Maybe you would. Others are smart and flexible enough to adapt to changing times. Both the recorded music and the software business are still in their infancy, only a few decades old. No one involved in either should make assumptions that past conditions will hold in the future.
At a former employer, a very small company, we had one resume for a sysadmin position come in that (in violation of good ethics and probably a law or two) was so funny we passed it around for everyone to see. The guy had listed every single bit of hardware he'd ever touched.
I mean, he listed a twenty different brands and models of monitors. I think he even listed different keyboard manufacturers.
IIRC the whole thing was like seven pages long.
The bar band is making money for the bar in the process. Mere public performance - for example, me playing a Beatles cover at a friends' party - doesn't require royalties. (Not that such could be enforced anyway.)
No, but it means that rational people will yawn and say "So what?" when you argue that because X is currently illegal, you shouldn't do X. Law has long lost any moral authority as a guide to what one should or should not do; it's just a guide as to what to not get caught doing.
When a law is both unenforceable and widely broken, an intelligent society will change it. Failure to do so only breeds contempt for the law, and erosion of justice as more extreme attempts at enforcement are brought into play. (Like the "War on (some) Drugs"? Look for the "War on Copying", coming soon. Former ATF stormtroopers coming to the RIAA could be just the first step.)
In the case of copyright, the whole idea of "pay-per-copy" is dying if not dead. It's long past time to start developing alternative ways for authors and musicians to get paid.
Copying a CD is now about as easy as learning to sing a song. I suggest putting copying music under the same sort of structure as performance royalties - copy all you want, but if you sell or otherwise profit from copies (including profiting from downloads), you owe a royalty. Eliminate copyright, create a royaltyright.
As an semi-professional musician (I've actually gotten paid a few times, so I guess I've lost my amateur status) I want people to share my music. I don't have moral or legal authority to demand a nickel if someone hums a song I wrote, and the same should apply if someone makes a copy to give away. (Hell, I should pay them a nickel.) But if anyone's making a buck off it, I think I deserve a cut.
No, they don't. If I burn a copy of "Highway 61 Revisited", Bob Dylan's bank balance does not go down, nor does so much as an old used guitar string disappear from his possession. He loses nothing, there is no theft.
Put another way: if I work for my boss, but my boss doesn't write me my paycheck, theft has not been committed - breach of contract has. Similarly, if I burn a copy of a Dylan CD, theft has not been committed - violation of copyright may have.
(A large and significant differences being that I had a agreement with my boss, but none with Dylan.)
When the copyright claim is valid, yes. (Copyright law often reaches far beyond Congress's legitimate power under Article I Section 8.) So what? So many things are illegal that few Americans get through a week without some violation, at least of a traffic or a tax law.
If you want copyright law to fulfill the goal of promoting "the progress of science and useful arts", yes, you do.
You paint with a mighty broad brush there, bucko. Members of the Open Source and Free Software communities hold a range of opinions on copyright.
No, it couldn't, because the artist, producer, publisher, and distrubitor do not lose anything when a CD is copied.
Copying is not theft. It may (or may not) be a copyright violation, but copyright violation is not theft. (Since, under the U.S. constitution, Congress is authorized to issue copyrights only "for limited times to authors and inventors", many claims are inherently bogus.)
Apparently you don't, since you keep confusing it with theft. It's not.
First, copying is not stealing, it's copyright violation. Second, technology is changing the way business models need to work - a pay-per-copy scheme simply isn't viable any more. When conditions change, you can't depend on the government to prop up outdated business models - that's basic economics.
And BTW, I also work for a living creating software. I also create music, poetry, and stories, though I've yet to be paid a significant amount - and like most musicians and authors, probably never will - for those things.
It has.
Why people use bloated clients that try to combine calendars and other stuff with e-mail and don't get either right, rather than simple but full-featured clients that "do one thing and do it well", is beyond my ken.
Please explain what you mean.
I.e., bloat. My mail client should read mail, not impose its idea of workflow on me.
Anything with a closed proprietary protocol, by definition doesn't have an easily accessible API. (Yes, communications protocols should be considered part of the API.)
Bingo! That's the joy of a war on terrorism - it never has to end. Nothing like endless war to keep the people in line.
Nonsense. Bush's policiss have given more people than ever a motive to commit terrorist acts against the United States - and have made the U.S. government more of a clear and present danger to its own citizens than terrorism.
Which doesn't address the point that no declaration of war was made.
Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was lawless (until we came in and destroyed the governments - sucky governments, true, but functioning ones), and Iraq had little to do with terrorism.
And why just Afghanistan and Iraq, in world full of nasty governments? Could it be...oil?
And if they're democratic governments, don't they get to choose whether or not they're pro-U.S.? Or do we again play the game of toppling democratic regimes that don't do our bidding?
Depends on how one counts, how one defines "win", and how one defines "war".
Is it one war, the "War on Terrorism", fought on two fronts? But terrorism seems to still exist, and Bush's policies have been a terrorist recruitment officer's wet dream. No win there.
Is there a war in Afganistan, and another in Iraq, with the goals of capturing or killing Bin Laden and Hussein? Both are still at large, and Americans are still getting killed in both places. 0 for 2 there.
Is there any war at all, given the lack of a formal declaration of such by Congress? Yes, I know the Constitution doesn't count for much any more, especially when a president gets it into his head to go bomb the fuck out of someone, but weren't Korea and Vietname "police actions" or somesuch rather than "wars" for just that reason?
So, yes, Bush's actions have lead to a lot more dead foriegners than dead U.S. servicepeople. If that's your measure of victory, he's batting 1.000. Of course, by that reconning we won in Vietnam.
At least four things, actually:
Thing is, with the screwy layout you didn't have to carefully consider your vote if you were voting for the first guy on the list - who happened to be Bush. (No conspiracy about the design meant to be implied, it just worked out that way. Had it worked out with Gore in punch position 1, and a bunch of Bush votes being miscounted, I'm sure Democrats would be pointing fingers at "Republican voters who were too dumb to follow instruction" while Republicans would be crying for accessible voting.)
Methinks perhaps you do not understand what a republic means. Being a republic has nothing to do with limiting the powers of the government; it just means that we have representatives. (In our democratic republic, they're elected; in the old Roman republic, they were they heads of the most powerful families.) Our republic just means that the two wolves and the sheep vote for a hyena to decide whats for dinner.
What limits the powers of government (at least in theory) is that we have a constitutional democratic republic.
Why should they not? They've done their time, their debt is repaid. If we trust them enough to release them from prison, surely we can let them have a vote. Hell, a felon can still run for office and be elected. It's unjust to bar someone for life from full participation in the democratic process because of a past crime.
There's nothing in the constitution that says "equal protection - unless you have a felony conviction"; the constitutionality of the process is highly suspect.
It also makes it hard to change a bad law - if you make everyone who gets caught doing X a felon and take away their vote, there are a lot fewer voters to vote for legalizing X (where X can be use of certain drugs, gambling, prostitution, etcetera).
Because selective enforcement and prosecution is easy and common.
And because the law can be - and is - structured such that two crimes that are in every reasonable way equivalent, but one is more often commited by blacks and one by white, are treated differently. (Power cocaine will get you a misdemeaor (hell, you can even be president), crack will get you a felony.) Here are some stats on the issue wrt drug laws.
Of coruse, you can do what the Republicans did in Florida in 2000, and simply falsely label people felons.