Someone just busted the windows out of a neighbor's car parked in the street. Three or four swats with the cane...would be the right thing to do, morally and ethically.
You believe that torture is an ethically justified response to vandalism?
Caning is not a matter of a few "swats". It is a whipping that often breaks the skin, administered by specially trained torturers. It is a violation of Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
(For some inexplicable reason, a lot of the news coverage around the time of the Fay case had video of rattan shinai (kendo swords), which have nothing to do with the 4-foot-long whips made of water-soaked rattan which are used for this torture.)
Government-administered beatings are not a solution to any problem.
"Jury nullification"...is not so much a legal doctrine...
It's explictly mentioned in the state constitutions of Maryland and Indiana. It was discussed by the likes of Supreme Court Justice John Jay, by Tom Paine, by Judge Learned Hand. Sounds like a genuine "doctrine" to me.
...other people note that jury nullification was basically how the practice of lynching was legitimized in the South.
It also protected people who assisted escaping slaves under the fugitive slave law and who broke Jim Crow laws. It helped end alcohol prohibition and is protecting many people accused of non-violent crimes of drug possession today.
A juror who's fucked enough in the head to think that lynching is good clean fun is also fucked in the head enough to have no problem in breaking the law to accquit. It's the good citizen who want to respect the law, but finds this particular law not capable of respect, who finds himself in the bind that a Fully Informed Jury Act could resolve.
Africa was being used/abused by european powers long before the US was the US.
True enough, but that doesn't justify the US getting into the game in modern history. Neo-colonialism sucks every bit as much as the original version.
Now I have no problem with the pratice of colonization, it opened up the world through it's exploration and moved modern (I.E. western) civilazation to the hights it now enjoys.
...at the price of fucking over most of the rest of the planet.
What they found is first there were too many of them fighting over the small market that would abandon the ILEC.
I don't understand that. Are the masses really that happy with their local phone service? I've hated Verizon since it was Bell Atlantic. I'd be first in line if there were a practical alternative.
Please, please, please, let Covad not have to follow Rhythms into oblivion and leave me with Verizon as my only DSL alternative...
Re:Dissecting PDF to fix it is ILLEGAL! Ask Dimitr
on
PDF Virus Spotted
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· Score: 2
How do you justify blaming M$ for a worm that exploits a vulnerability that was publicized and patched more than a month before said worm came into being?
Let's say that the XYZ Automobile Corporation knowingly uses cheap, sub-standard components in their brakes. A bunch of people die. XYZ issues a recall. Before you manage to fit a trip to the XYZ dealer to handle the recall (the 12th since you bought the car) into your busy schedule, your brakes lock up and you die a horrible fiery death.
Is XYZ Automobile Corporation responsbile? Can your grieving survivors sue their corporate asses off? I should hope so. The determining factor is not the recall, it's that they knowingly used sub-standard components.
M$ has some smart developers working for them. The fact that they continually turn out insecure crap is not due to ignorance or inability on their part; it's a conscious business decision to attempt to maximize their profits by fucking over the end user.
How is this different from walking down the street, and having a police officer misidentify you as some who is wanted?
If Officer Friendly misidentifies me as a wanted felon, if the case proceeds to trial I'll get to examine him on the witnes stand and test his powers of face-matching.
Who do I subpoena when Amalgamated Profits, Inc.'s latest Eyewitless XP software flags me as being a bad guy? Can I have design docs and test records introduced into evidence? Can I make the prosecution track down every developer and engineer and bring them to the stand?
It's bad enough when cops with no understanding of physics are given radar guns and the ability to hand out tickets. (Did you know that radar waves won't reflect from a stationary metal surface, only a moving one? That was the testimony of a Baltimore County cop who ticketed me last year.) Now cops with no understanding of software failability are being given buggy software and the ability to drag people off at gunpoint based on its output. The fun's just getting started.
existentialism is a philosophical approach that places focus upon the individual, not an ethical theory
Yes, but there is an ethical component to it. My memory is not cooperating and my notes are at home, boxed up in the attic...but I can recall spending several days on existentialism as an ethical theory, back in a class on contempory ethical issues. Something about the value of "heroic defiance"...?
Me, I go with the Zen guys on this one: "If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind." -- Seng-Ts'an
No. Ethics is that branch on philosophy that deals with the question, "How shall we live our lives?" There are supernaturalistic theories of ethics (i.e., we should live our lives according to the dictates of some supernatural being), but there are also plenty of theories without a whit of religious belief - utilitarianism, existentialism, Kantian rationalism, and others.
Applying these theories to the case of an anti-virus virus is left as an exercise for the reader.
...[plasma] also seems to be unaffected by gravity.
I know that/.ers have a rep for staying out of the sunlight, but really...step outside during daylight hours sometime. See that big bright round thing in the sky? Gravity not only holds it together, but induces the fusion that powers all life on this planet.
I'm not exactly sure what the open source extremists want from the big guys.
This isn't an open source issue, this is (apparently...Dolby's letter is vague) a software patent issue.
While most if not all open source and free software advocates are opposed to software patents, even some who aren't bullish on open source agree that software patents are stupid, evil, unconstitutional, nasty, brutish, and short.
There can be no such thing as 'pure capitalism' if by that you mean a truly free market.
"Capitalism" and "free markets" are not the same thing.
The opposite of capitalism - in which a minority of people (the capitalists), backed by state force[1], control "the means of production" - is socialism, in which "the workers" or "the people" control the means of production.
The opposite of a free market system (where production is determined by market forces) is a command economy (where production is determined by government fiat).
There can be capitalist command economies (the US during the Depression and WWII would be close to this) and socialist free markets (don't know of any national examples, but co-ops, collectives, employee-owned corporations, and similar institutions can function quite well in our market economy).
([1] which is why "anarcho-capitalism" or "libertarian capitalism" is ultimately self-defeating; keeping property concentrated into the hand of the few requires a strong state.)
Some days, I feel just like Batman....I call it my Utility Belt when I am all decked out.
Yeah, me too. I put everything in or on my Jansport belt bag. (Sorry, "fanny pack" is just to stupid a name...anyway, I wear it on my hip, not my butt.)
Agenda PDA and a bunch on mundane stuff (wallet, Zippo, ear plugs, cut-down mechanical pencil (very useful), and an emergency cache of allergy pills) goes in the bag, multitool and cellphone hang on the belt (with phone headset tucked into the cellphone holder), LED flashlight is clipped to the zipper pull.
Funny thing is, my non-technogeek housemate does events work - theatre tech type of stuff, but for corporate clients. He uses the same type of bag to cart his stuff around, to the point where we occasionally pick up each other's bags by mistake.
...probably one of the most underrated shows is The Invisible Man...
I avoided this one for a while, but I've seen it a few times lately and have been very pleasantly surprised. If you haven't seen it, check it out.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The product that succeeds in the marketplace is by definition the best product.
Bullshit.
Take a look at the Billboard Hot 100. Would you seriously argue that this represents the best music available? Or even the best music being made today?
Do you think that best-selling books, or highest-rated TV shows, represent the best work in these media? You beleive that "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" is the best television show airing in the USA today, and that the lastest Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins efforts are amoung the best works of the written word?
Quality and popularity are completely independent variables.
Microsoft got where they are by riding IBM's coat-tails, by clever business tricks, and industrial strength marketing. They've managed to make the quality of their product almost as irrelevant as the quality of a pair of Nike's is to a well-branded teenager.
Am I correct in believing that Code Red probes are the cause of lines like "GET/default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN..." in my (Apache, of course) referer log?
Yep. Which is why RMS's short-short story "The Right to Read" projects a world where operating systems and development software are tightly controlled by the state, only available to licenced and bonded programmers.
When I first saw that story a few years ago, I though that was a crazy, way-out idea. Now, it's a clear extrapolation of present trends.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
...all these people in "sweat shops" in "poor countries" are all there by choice, which is to say, it's a lot better than sitting in a hut out in the desert somewhere. Their choice, they lift themselves. Get out of the way. They don't need your "help".
If after decades of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate exploitation, the only choices they have are sweatshop vs. "sitting in a hut out in the desert somewhere", that's a very strong clue that the system is in need of radical change.
It's very difficult to "lift yourself" when most of the value you produce is funneled to parasitic investors in a far-off country.
It's all supply and demand
Supply and demand only produces efficient solutions when parties meet with equal power. Citizens of naitons that spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries being fucked over by rich Western nations do not have equal power with mega-corps from those nations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
What, exactly, is your problem with a private redistribution of wealth from rich westerners to poor third-worlders?
Globalizing corporate rule does not "redistribute" wealth to poor nations. It lets rich Western investors redistribute wealth produced by poor "third world" workers into the investors own pockets.
It is not progress for poor people living on table scraps from the tables of the rich when the rich get richer and leave more scraps.
If you want to use trade to truly increase the flow of wealth to these nations, you have to do so in a "fair trade" manner.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
...but insofar as it reduces the likelihood and ease of something happening, it works.
No, it doesn't, because people misunderstand what it is that they want to prevent from happening.
Prohibitionist thinking runs something like this: "Alcohol abuse is bad. If we ban drinking, there will be less drinking. Therefore there will be less alcohol abuse." True, true, and false.
For all x, prohibition of x just about eliminates responsible use of x - and the social structures that support that responsible use - and does jack shit to prevent abuse of x - and leads to economic and social structures that support that abuse. (For example, we're still dealing with the social after-effects of the way Prohibition brought alcohol use home.)
Then, outside of the effects of x abuse, come the violent effects of the black market in x, and the abuse of police power in the effort to stomp out that black market.
It takes a very twisted defintion to consider these results as "working".
(Hint - is one more likely to be killed by a drunk driver or one on crack?
Considering the duration of a crack high vs. that of a good drunk, as well as their completely different effects on the central nervous system, you're comparing pharmacological apples and oranges.
A more relevant question is: is one more likely to be shot in a gun battle between crack dealers or liquor store owners?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
The truly sad part about this discussion is that the majority of people informed on technological issues view the government that way. As some entity, totally separate from themselves, which they have no control over.
Yes, that's pretty much the case. Any candidate that I would care to vote for is weeded out of the system by the monied interests long before I go to the polls. Someone else in this thread already provided the appropriate Bill Hicks quote.
Sometimes I wonder if the only "control" I'll end up with over the government is to decide whether to shoot it out and try and take as many mindless stormtroopers as I can with me when they come to drag me away for my various crimes against cultural conformity and corporate profits, or go for non-violent resistance and slowly starve myself in a hunger strike as I rot away in a jail cell somewhere. I hope it doesn't come to that...but I wouldn't bet against it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Legislation and regulations will be passed, eventually, to serve their needs, not yours.
And a black market will spring up, and people will probably get killed in gun battles over picture of nekkid people. Yee-haw.
Prohibition doesn't work - be it drugs, guns, gambling, prostitution, unapproved religious beliefs and practices (or abstention from same), information, "dirty" pictures, whatever. It always causes more problems then it solves.
And those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Adobe wants the programmer brought to justice for this theft of its intellectual property, and you all find something wrong with this?
Copying is not theft, and reverse engineering that removes impediments to fair use is not even copying. Figuring out how something works and telling other people is not theft!
You mean that if I copy all the content from Slashdot's website and create a new site called 5145d0t and get paid by companies
to advertise on my site, I wouldn't be stealing from Slashdot?
While your example has nothing to do with the case at hand, you are correct. You might be violating copyright, but you would no be stealing. Theft means that I deprive you of something. If I copy something, you've still got yours - no theft.
Everyone who's against intellectual property rights, please post your URL so I can take your stuff.
You can't "take" stuff from a web site (unless you crack in and delete files or something), you can only copy from it.
You're welcome to copy any of my poetry (though I doubt you'd want to) from http://infamous.net/poems ; I assert rights to authorship credit and to royalties on commercial use, but otherwise feel free to share and enjoy.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Slashdot Mirror
You believe that torture is an ethically justified response to vandalism?
Caning is not a matter of a few "swats". It is a whipping that often breaks the skin, administered by specially trained torturers. It is a violation of Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
(For some inexplicable reason, a lot of the news coverage around the time of the Fay case had video of rattan shinai (kendo swords), which have nothing to do with the 4-foot-long whips made of water-soaked rattan which are used for this torture.)
Government-administered beatings are not a solution to any problem.
It also protected people who assisted escaping slaves under the fugitive slave law and who broke Jim Crow laws. It helped end alcohol prohibition and is protecting many people accused of non-violent crimes of drug possession today.
A juror who's fucked enough in the head to think that lynching is good clean fun is also fucked in the head enough to have no problem in breaking the law to accquit. It's the good citizen who want to respect the law, but finds this particular law not capable of respect, who finds himself in the bind that a Fully Informed Jury Act could resolve.
True enough, but that doesn't justify the US getting into the game in modern history. Neo-colonialism sucks every bit as much as the original version.
I don't understand that. Are the masses really that happy with their local phone service? I've hated Verizon since it was Bell Atlantic. I'd be first in line if there were a practical alternative.
Please, please, please, let Covad not have to follow Rhythms into oblivion and leave me with Verizon as my only DSL alternative...
Let's say that the XYZ Automobile Corporation knowingly uses cheap, sub-standard components in their brakes. A bunch of people die. XYZ issues a recall. Before you manage to fit a trip to the XYZ dealer to handle the recall (the 12th since you bought the car) into your busy schedule, your brakes lock up and you die a horrible fiery death.
Is XYZ Automobile Corporation responsbile? Can your grieving survivors sue their corporate asses off? I should hope so. The determining factor is not the recall, it's that they knowingly used sub-standard components.
M$ has some smart developers working for them. The fact that they continually turn out insecure crap is not due to ignorance or inability on their part; it's a conscious business decision to attempt to maximize their profits by fucking over the end user.
If Officer Friendly misidentifies me as a wanted felon, if the case proceeds to trial I'll get to examine him on the witnes stand and test his powers of face-matching.
Who do I subpoena when Amalgamated Profits, Inc.'s latest Eyewitless XP software flags me as being a bad guy? Can I have design docs and test records introduced into evidence? Can I make the prosecution track down every developer and engineer and bring them to the stand?
It's bad enough when cops with no understanding of physics are given radar guns and the ability to hand out tickets. (Did you know that radar waves won't reflect from a stationary metal surface, only a moving one? That was the testimony of a Baltimore County cop who ticketed me last year.) Now cops with no understanding of software failability are being given buggy software and the ability to drag people off at gunpoint based on its output. The fun's just getting started.
Yes, but there is an ethical component to it. My memory is not cooperating and my notes are at home, boxed up in the attic...but I can recall spending several days on existentialism as an ethical theory, back in a class on contempory ethical issues. Something about the value of "heroic defiance"...?
Me, I go with the Zen guys on this one: "If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind." -- Seng-Ts'an
No. Ethics is that branch on philosophy that deals with the question, "How shall we live our lives?" There are supernaturalistic theories of ethics (i.e., we should live our lives according to the dictates of some supernatural being), but there are also plenty of theories without a whit of religious belief - utilitarianism, existentialism, Kantian rationalism, and others.
Applying these theories to the case of an anti-virus virus is left as an exercise for the reader.
This isn't an open source issue, this is (apparently...Dolby's letter is vague) a software patent issue.
While most if not all open source and free software advocates are opposed to software patents, even some who aren't bullish on open source agree that software patents are stupid, evil, unconstitutional, nasty, brutish, and short.
"Capitalism" and "free markets" are not the same thing.
The opposite of capitalism - in which a minority of people (the capitalists), backed by state force[1], control "the means of production" - is socialism, in which "the workers" or "the people" control the means of production.
The opposite of a free market system (where production is determined by market forces) is a command economy (where production is determined by government fiat).
There can be capitalist command economies (the US during the Depression and WWII would be close to this) and socialist free markets (don't know of any national examples, but co-ops, collectives, employee-owned corporations, and similar institutions can function quite well in our market economy).
([1] which is why "anarcho-capitalism" or "libertarian capitalism" is ultimately self-defeating; keeping property concentrated into the hand of the few requires a strong state.)
Yeah, me too. I put everything in or on my Jansport belt bag. (Sorry, "fanny pack" is just to stupid a name...anyway, I wear it on my hip, not my butt.)
Agenda PDA and a bunch on mundane stuff (wallet, Zippo, ear plugs, cut-down mechanical pencil (very useful), and an emergency cache of allergy pills) goes in the bag, multitool and cellphone hang on the belt (with phone headset tucked into the cellphone holder), LED flashlight is clipped to the zipper pull.
Funny thing is, my non-technogeek housemate does events work - theatre tech type of stuff, but for corporate clients. He uses the same type of bag to cart his stuff around, to the point where we occasionally pick up each other's bags by mistake.
Bullshit.
Take a look at the Billboard Hot 100. Would you seriously argue that this represents the best music available? Or even the best music being made today?
Do you think that best-selling books, or highest-rated TV shows, represent the best work in these media? You beleive that "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" is the best television show airing in the USA today, and that the lastest Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins efforts are amoung the best works of the written word?
Quality and popularity are completely independent variables.
Microsoft got where they are by riding IBM's coat-tails, by clever business tricks, and industrial strength marketing. They've managed to make the quality of their product almost as irrelevant as the quality of a pair of Nike's is to a well-branded teenager.
It may well be that we'll never be able to design such software.
However, we could evolve it. Using genetic algoriothms and other "evolutionary" programming approaches seems to me the most promising approach.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Am I correct in believing that Code Red probes are the cause of lines like "GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN..." in my (Apache, of course) referer log?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yep. Which is why RMS's short-short story "The Right to Read" projects a world where operating systems and development software are tightly controlled by the state, only available to licenced and bonded programmers.
When I first saw that story a few years ago, I though that was a crazy, way-out idea. Now, it's a clear extrapolation of present trends.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
If after decades of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate exploitation, the only choices they have are sweatshop vs. "sitting in a hut out in the desert somewhere", that's a very strong clue that the system is in need of radical change.
It's very difficult to "lift yourself" when most of the value you produce is funneled to parasitic investors in a far-off country.
Supply and demand only produces efficient solutions when parties meet with equal power. Citizens of naitons that spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries being fucked over by rich Western nations do not have equal power with mega-corps from those nations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Globalizing corporate rule does not "redistribute" wealth to poor nations. It lets rich Western investors redistribute wealth produced by poor "third world" workers into the investors own pockets.
It is not progress for poor people living on table scraps from the tables of the rich when the rich get richer and leave more scraps.
If you want to use trade to truly increase the flow of wealth to these nations, you have to do so in a "fair trade" manner.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
No, it doesn't, because people misunderstand what it is that they want to prevent from happening.
Prohibitionist thinking runs something like this: "Alcohol abuse is bad. If we ban drinking, there will be less drinking. Therefore there will be less alcohol abuse." True, true, and false.
For all x, prohibition of x just about eliminates responsible use of x - and the social structures that support that responsible use - and does jack shit to prevent abuse of x - and leads to economic and social structures that support that abuse. (For example, we're still dealing with the social after-effects of the way Prohibition brought alcohol use home.)
Then, outside of the effects of x abuse, come the violent effects of the black market in x, and the abuse of police power in the effort to stomp out that black market.
It takes a very twisted defintion to consider these results as "working".
Considering the duration of a crack high vs. that of a good drunk, as well as their completely different effects on the central nervous system, you're comparing pharmacological apples and oranges.
A more relevant question is: is one more likely to be shot in a gun battle between crack dealers or liquor store owners?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Yes, that's pretty much the case. Any candidate that I would care to vote for is weeded out of the system by the monied interests long before I go to the polls. Someone else in this thread already provided the appropriate Bill Hicks quote.
Sometimes I wonder if the only "control" I'll end up with over the government is to decide whether to shoot it out and try and take as many mindless stormtroopers as I can with me when they come to drag me away for my various crimes against cultural conformity and corporate profits, or go for non-violent resistance and slowly starve myself in a hunger strike as I rot away in a jail cell somewhere. I hope it doesn't come to that...but I wouldn't bet against it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
And a black market will spring up, and people will probably get killed in gun battles over picture of nekkid people. Yee-haw.
Prohibition doesn't work - be it drugs, guns, gambling, prostitution, unapproved religious beliefs and practices (or abstention from same), information, "dirty" pictures, whatever. It always causes more problems then it solves.
And those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
You can't "take" stuff from a web site (unless you crack in and delete files or something), you can only copy from it.
You're welcome to copy any of my poetry (though I doubt you'd want to) from http://infamous.net/poems ; I assert rights to authorship credit and to royalties on commercial use, but otherwise feel free to share and enjoy.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/