The New York Times has an article running with erie similarities to this conversational thread. It shows where such Left leaning thoughts can lead
Please don't say "left leaning" when you mean "authoritarian". The left (labor) / right (capital) axis is orthogonal to the libertarian / authoritarian one.
Then on top of that, there's the added benefits of job security, stocks, insurance, retirement, etc.
There is no longer job security in a salaried position; I learned this the hard way after losing two full-time "permanent" positions to corporate restructuring in less than a year. And I can buy my own insurance, save for my own retirement, and make my own investments and still come out ahead.
(Unless, that is, one hits on a really sweet options deal on a good company that's about to go public, but despite the hype this is rare. I was lucky enough to get some of that action when Trusted Information Systems went public (and as part of the restructuring surrounding that, shut down the project I was working on), then got bought out by Network Associates. I made a few thousand off of stock options there, but unless my shares of NETA go through the roof someday I'm not tremendoulsy far ahead of where I'd be if I'd been pulling down the bigger regular money as a contractor.)
For me, the biggest advantage of contract/hourly versus full-time/permanent is unlimited vacation time. I am a lazy bastard who likes to have several weeks off a year, and contracting gives me more opportunity to choose my own balance of income versus leisure time. I don't have to accumulate vacation time - it's "If there's nothing critical, I won't be here such-and-such dates."
Either we're talking about different events, or you're full of bullshit. The protesters were chained together and were not - indeed, could not be - acting in an agressive manner. The use of pepper spray to stop a beligerant may be justified on some occsions, but the direct application of chemicals to the eyes, via a cotton swab, indicates by its very possibility that the victim is in no position to be aggressive.
I'd love to have your address, because I'm sure you're doing something that I want to protest about. Now I know I can come into your house, bust everything up, and you'll defend me from the police. Thanks.
I'm in the book, and my resume (with address) can be found at my web site. If you dig around there enough, there's even a map with directions.
If you were to break into my house, you would be met with force, but only with appropriate force. If you are a threat to me, my housemate, or my dogs, I may use lethal force. If you are damaging my property, I will use sufficient force to stop you - but no more. If you are chained to my front door, I may have to hold you down while they cut your chains (or I might just leave you there and use the back door until hunger weakens you enough to deal with), but there's no way I would be justified in using chemical torture, or beating you, or electric shock, or anything similar. Yes, I will use reasonable force to defend myself or others; but I will not torture, nor will I sanction the use of torture, but will oppose it by any means necessary.
Apollo 13 as a top 10 hack? Given the state of the technology at the time, getting there was amazing. Getting back when things went sour was incredible.
Abso-fraggin-lutely. I remember seeing the scene in the Apollo 13 movie where the engineers are trying to assemble a C02 scrubber from the spare parts that would be available on the ship, and thinking to myself "I know these guys!
Includes disturbing video footage of the police actually rubbing pepper spray into protestors eyes. Ouch.
The Nazi bastards should have been tried and locked up for torture.
I remember seeing this on tape. You're nicer than I am - I think the pigs in question should have been shot right there on the spot. (And, if the rat bastard survives, then tried and imprisoned for life, no parole.)
That is not an exageration. If I saw one person torturing another, and I was armed, the torturer would cease immediately or would be shot. I think most of us would agree that this would be a justified use of force to defend another; the fact that the torturer was wearing a badge should not affect this.
One more thing - according to the article, the ACLU is considering a lawsuit against the FBI over this. So they are on the ball, and my membership money is well spent.
I could, very realistically, refuse to put your page up for no reason. Because I own it means I have the right to do that to you. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that I have to provide to you the means to display your messages.
However, my understanding (IANAL) is that if you do start picking and choosing what pages you will or won't put up, you lose your "common carrier" status and have editorial responsibility for everything on your site. You are then a target for libel/slander or other suits regarding that content.
This is the crux of the issue. Whatever rights we DON'T grant to the government, WE retain. But you certainly wouldn't know that from the way the government acts.
Agreed, and this is clearly spelled out in Amendments IX and X. But I suspect things would be much worse without the enumerated rights.
Which makes me wonder, the ACLU hasn't been real swift to take up these issues, I've noticed.
Excuse me?
The ACLU Cyberliberties page shows what the ACLU is doing about net censorship, encryption regulations, and digital wiretapping. The ACLU has been in the forefront of the fight against net censorship.
A plastic sleeve which you put in your pocket to hold pens and pencils. It protects your pocket from leaking ink. I think they were mostly used by draftsmen and designers who, back before CAD, would have to use several different pens and pencils to draw up plans.
I had one when I was a kid back in the 1970s, but I haven't seen one (outside of movies) in about 20 years.
There's a reason you shoot to kill in cases of home invasion. Hard to sue if you're dead, huh?
One does not shoot to kill in a self-defense situation, one shoots to stop. If I was going to shoot to kill, after the bad guy was down and no longer a threat I'd go over and put a round in his head. And if I did so, no only would I be charged with excessive use of force, I would probably be sued vigorously by the intruder's family.
Of course, I may be arrested and/or sued for shooting to stop, but I have a much better legal (and ethical) position when my goal is clearly to stop the threat to my safety.
"Chance" is inconceiveable for that reason: It implies that reality is a series if wildly improbably accidents, which, cumulatively, are so wildly improbably as not to be worth discussing.
I can't speak to what you find conceivable or inconceivable; that's your own limitation. But yes, the reality we observe is the result of many, many, many random branchings of probability. The reality we observe is highly improbable - but all the other probabilities that didn't happen (ignoring for the moment the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics) were also very improbable.
I guess you didn't get the coin-flip example I posted. Let's try another one. Say someone comes up to you and says "I'm going to win the lottery! I can feel it in my bones!" You'd think he was wacky - it would be be a "wildly improbably accident" were he to win. And in fact, before the drawing we could say that about any of the participants.
But yet, if you sum up all those small probabilities, you get unity. Someone will win.
And if you summed up the small probabilities of all the possible courses that Earth could have taken 4.5 billion years ago - the dead and sterile planets, the ones where life never got beyond the blue-green algae, or where the dinosaurs never died out, or where rodents instead of primates got the big brains and opposable thumbs, or where Hilter won WWII, and our own improbable situation...sum them all up, and you get unity. One of them became the reality we observe today. There's no more need to invoke supernatural beings to explain it than to explain the lottery.
According to their own hypotheses, it should have been equally likely for an intelligent race to have "evolved" from squids or birds -- or for no intelligent race to have "evolved" at all. But they conveniently forget this logic when they come to the undeniable fact that we do exist, and we do have our present form. They can't account for that.
The fact that any specific outcome is unlikely beforehand doesn't make the outcome itself spectacular in any way. If I flip a coin 1000 times to generate a binary number, the odds of me getting the number that I get are only about 1 out of, let's see 10 to the 301st power, or: 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. That's pretty damn small.
Does that make my result a miracle? Hardly. I was going to get some result. Same way with the Earth. Given what we know about biochemisty, it was pretty likely that something biological would happen. Four billion years ago, given all the random factors the odds that it would be us were astronomical, but after the fact it's not remarkable (other than for sentimental reasons) that it turned out to be us.
Darwin himself admitted -- in so many words -- that he could not account for the development of the modern vertebrate eye.
Hard as it may be for devout beleivers (who usually want to go backwards in time for their authoritative statements) to understand, we've learned a few things since Chuck Darwin's time. You might try this, for example.
Is there, perchance, a RPN version of xcalc available? (even better, is it already hiding somewhere on my RH 5.2 i386 box)
It's alrady there, hiding inside of xcalc. You want xcalc -rpn. When in doubt, Read The Fine Manual. B-) B-)
-rpn This option indicates that Reverse Polish Notation should be used. In this mode the calculator will look and behave like an HP-10C. Without this flag, it will emulate a TI-30.
his reminds me of a poem from the Spoon River Anthology about all these people seeing a rich man and wishing to be him. Then, the man shoots himslef in the head.
Wheneve Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich--yes, richer than a king, And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Simon and Ganfunkle did a good song of the same title, based on the poem.
Stupid people do not become Gods; despite our technology, we are still mostly very stupid. If you don't believe me try watching the news or reading the paper a bit more. They will provide you with a refreshing reminder that despite all the "progress" made we still edge ever closer to the abyss of extinction.
Which is why we need to use technology to make ourselves smarter.
If we don't do that, it's extinction for us. Maybe some other species will hit upon large brains and opposable digits, and dig up our remains in a few million years.
But if we do make ourselves smarter - not just smarter, but wiser - then the process won't stop until we become gods. We'll hit Vinge's singularity, and after that who knows? (Note: you may want to turn off style sheets when viewing that link, the font is illegible in my Netscape on MacOS.)
So in your world where "evil" things like force and laws don't exist, how do people function? What happens if someone goes around burning down houses, should we just say "tsk, tsk" and let them go about their business?
I didn't say force, or laws, were evil. I didn't say they were good, either. I'd say at this stage of the game, they're just things we're stuck with. If all vestiges of law and government disappeared overnight, people would either get together and select new leaders and create and enforce new laws (quite possibly even more oppressive than the ones we have now), or some strongman would take over and rule by brute force. Government isn't a necessary evil, it's inevitable. So it goes.
Do we need law to deal with the arsonist? Not really; we can imagine a group of concerned vigilantes taking care of the problem. What we do instead is hire others to handle the problem. If the laws are good, our hired vigilantes (the government) follow a code (the laws) that results in them doing a more effective, efficient, ethical, and fair job than if we did it ourselves. I don't think that's the case today; law and law enforcement is monsterously unfair (look at the racial composition of our prisons, or the sentencing guidelines for drug crimes), largely unethical (we continue to imprison people for acts that harm no one, while the white-collar criminals who do the most harm get off), and often ineffective.
Are you suggesting bad laws would be better if police were unarmed?
How would those bad laws - or any laws - be enforced without, well, force? Cop says "The Village Committe has branded you Unmutal! You're under arrest!" I say "Yeah, right," and go about my business. If he can't pull a gun, or physically overpower me, his "arrest" means nothing.
Without backing by force, laws become mere suggestions.
People obey laws all the time for reasons having nothing to do with firearms.
Note that acting in concert with the law is not the same as obeying it. The reason that I don't go around killing people is not that it is illegal; it's because I just don't want to. But if your decision to do X is predicated on the fact that "X is the law!" then either you're naive enough to believe that the legistature knows best, or you want to avoid the state's penalties - all of which ultimately rely on its armed agents taking your stuff, locking you in a cage, or killing you.
Imagine that the professor had a copyright/patent on something he was discussing. Now does the student own what he's writing on the notes?
The professor has a copyright on the expression of the ideas in the form of his lecture. (Actually, I think copyright requires the expression in a fixed medium, not just speech, but we can pretend he wrote his lecture down ahead of time.) That doesn't prevent me from preparing new work (my notes) which expresses the same ideas in a different form.
That's assuming that I'm not just acting as a stenographer and writing down a verbatim transscript - a very poor learning strategy.
If my professor describes, in detail, the RSA algorithm, I don't suddenly own it just because I wrote it into my notes -- It still belongs to RSA.
Actually, the algorithm doesn't belong to RSA; what RSA has is the limited legal right to prevent others from using it. I can still write all about the algorithm.
So if I take a class on C programming, I can't use what I learned in that class to write and sell a book on C programming? Same thing, isn't it? (Of course, to write a decent book I might want to take more than one class.)
Copyright may protect the text of a lecture itself, but no way does it prevent a student from expressing the content of a lecture in his or her own way. And I don't see how a restriction that class notes are not to be used for profit can possibly be upheld - after all, I might be taking that class so I can get a profitable job using what I learned...and I might just refer back to those class notes.
Bullshit. You see, the way the world works is, I do something. You give me something equal to the value/effort/work I put into the doing.
No, the world doesn't work that way. Unless you and I had some agreement beforehand, I don't owe you anything.
Let's say I write a song; unless I wrote it for hire, I have no right to force someone to give me something equal to the effort I put into it. Now, if they like my songs, and want me to keep writing, they'd better find some way to reward me; but I have no natural right to demand payment from someone who goes around humming a melody of mine.
A shitty anology for you. I come over to your house and kick the fuck out of you. Over the next two weeks you heal. No lasting harm.
(Feeling a bit hostile, are you? Wow, it's been a long time since someone talked about kicking the fuck out of me. Sit back, chill, relax, and have a beer instead. It's much safer.)
Yes, an extremely shitty analogy. We've gone from comparing copying to theft to comparing copying with assault; this is just getting sillier.
Your beating inflicts pain and suffering upon me; even if the physical wounds heal, that trauma is a lasting harm. You also deprive me of the full use of my body while I'm healing. That's why self-defense is a basic natural right - it doesn't take the state to create special laws for people to recognize it.
On the other hand, if I copy software you wrote, no one suffers any truama, and no one is deprived of the use of the software. Now, if everyone copys and no one pays, you're not going to write any more software, so if we want you to keep writing we need to find a way to reward you.
Making people pay for copies by having the state punish unauthorized copiers is morally problematic, but worked reasonably well until recently. It doesn't work any more. Let's drop it and find a new way to make sure you and I get paid to keep creating software.
Government doesn't like people with sensitive information doing drugs, because it turns out that (this way, not the reverse) people involved in espionage have a very high propensity, statistically, towards being involved in drugs.
Hmm, first time I've heard that excuse. But seems like that would only apply to those who need security clearances. Clearances are a whole nother issue; even if I was willing to pee in the cup (and so long as I have any alternative at all, I'm not) and submit to all the other investigations, I doubt the feds would trust me any more than I trust them. (No, I wouldn't sell secrets; but if I had important information that was being hidden from the American public I would be compelled to spill the beans.)
For all other purposes, though, chemical drug testing (urinalysis, hair tests, and so on) is just stupid. Impairment testing is the only sensible option.
There's no fundamental right to owning software That's right. And it includes the author of the software (or any other string of bits), too. there are laws against theft...*stealing* a license... Making copies is not stealing. When I steal something from you, you no longer have the use of it. When I copy a program, we both have the use of it. "Ownership" of information - i.e., copyrights - is an artifical invention of the state meant to promote creativity. It worked reasonably well before the digital age, but it's dead now. Finished, over, dead, done, gone, kaput, this is an ex-parrot. Let's pull the plug, bury it, and move on to finding a new method of supporting the creation of programs, stories, and songs.
Language is definitely a problem at this time; we can hope that 1) as the rest of the world gets online there will be more resources in other languages (if South Korea gets online, there wil be stuff for the North Korean peasant to read), and 2) automatic translation will improve.
As for useful information for peasants, a few minutes with Google produces:
Slashdot Mirror
(Unless, that is, one hits on a really sweet options deal on a good company that's about to go public, but despite the hype this is rare. I was lucky enough to get some of that action when Trusted Information Systems went public (and as part of the restructuring surrounding that, shut down the project I was working on), then got bought out by Network Associates. I made a few thousand off of stock options there, but unless my shares of NETA go through the roof someday I'm not tremendoulsy far ahead of where I'd be if I'd been pulling down the bigger regular money as a contractor.)
For me, the biggest advantage of contract/hourly versus full-time/permanent is unlimited vacation time. I am a lazy bastard who likes to have several weeks off a year, and contracting gives me more opportunity to choose my own balance of income versus leisure time. I don't have to accumulate vacation time - it's "If there's nothing critical, I won't be here such-and-such dates."
If you were to break into my house, you would be met with force, but only with appropriate force. If you are a threat to me, my housemate, or my dogs, I may use lethal force. If you are damaging my property, I will use sufficient force to stop you - but no more. If you are chained to my front door, I may have to hold you down while they cut your chains (or I might just leave you there and use the back door until hunger weakens you enough to deal with), but there's no way I would be justified in using chemical torture, or beating you, or electric shock, or anything similar. Yes, I will use reasonable force to defend myself or others; but I will not torture, nor will I sanction the use of torture, but will oppose it by any means necessary.
That is not an exageration. If I saw one person torturing another, and I was armed, the torturer would cease immediately or would be shot. I think most of us would agree that this would be a justified use of force to defend another; the fact that the torturer was wearing a badge should not affect this.
One more thing - according to the article, the ACLU is considering a lawsuit against the FBI over this. So they are on the ball, and my membership money is well spent.
The ACLU Cyberliberties page shows what the ACLU is doing about net censorship, encryption regulations, and digital wiretapping. The ACLU has been in the forefront of the fight against net censorship.
I had one when I was a kid back in the 1970s, but I haven't seen one (outside of movies) in about 20 years.
Of course, I may be arrested and/or sued for shooting to stop, but I have a much better legal (and ethical) position when my goal is clearly to stop the threat to my safety.
I guess you didn't get the coin-flip example I posted. Let's try another one. Say someone comes up to you and says "I'm going to win the lottery! I can feel it in my bones!" You'd think he was wacky - it would be be a "wildly improbably accident" were he to win. And in fact, before the drawing we could say that about any of the participants.
But yet, if you sum up all those small probabilities, you get unity. Someone will win.
And if you summed up the small probabilities of all the possible courses that Earth could have taken 4.5 billion years ago - the dead and sterile planets, the ones where life never got beyond the blue-green algae, or where the dinosaurs never died out, or where rodents instead of primates got the big brains and opposable thumbs, or where Hilter won WWII, and our own improbable situation...sum them all up, and you get unity. One of them became the reality we observe today. There's no more need to invoke supernatural beings to explain it than to explain the lottery.
Does that make my result a miracle? Hardly. I was going to get some result. Same way with the Earth. Given what we know about biochemisty, it was pretty likely that something biological would happen. Four billion years ago, given all the random factors the odds that it would be us were astronomical, but after the fact it's not remarkable (other than for sentimental reasons) that it turned out to be us.
Hard as it may be for devout beleivers (who usually want to go backwards in time for their authoritative statements) to understand, we've learned a few things since Chuck Darwin's time. You might try this, for example.Simon and Ganfunkle did a good song of the same title, based on the poem.
If we don't do that, it's extinction for us. Maybe some other species will hit upon large brains and opposable digits, and dig up our remains in a few million years.
But if we do make ourselves smarter - not just smarter, but wiser - then the process won't stop until we become gods. We'll hit Vinge's singularity, and after that who knows? (Note: you may want to turn off style sheets when viewing that link, the font is illegible in my Netscape on MacOS.)
Do we need law to deal with the arsonist? Not really; we can imagine a group of concerned vigilantes taking care of the problem. What we do instead is hire others to handle the problem. If the laws are good, our hired vigilantes (the government) follow a code (the laws) that results in them doing a more effective, efficient, ethical, and fair job than if we did it ourselves. I don't think that's the case today; law and law enforcement is monsterously unfair (look at the racial composition of our prisons, or the sentencing guidelines for drug crimes), largely unethical (we continue to imprison people for acts that harm no one, while the white-collar criminals who do the most harm get off), and often ineffective.
Without backing by force, laws become mere suggestions.
Note that acting in concert with the law is not the same as obeying it. The reason that I don't go around killing people is not that it is illegal; it's because I just don't want to. But if your decision to do X is predicated on the fact that "X is the law!" then either you're naive enough to believe that the legistature knows best, or you want to avoid the state's penalties - all of which ultimately rely on its armed agents taking your stuff, locking you in a cage, or killing you.That's assuming that I'm not just acting as a stenographer and writing down a verbatim transscript - a very poor learning strategy.
Actually, the algorithm doesn't belong to RSA; what RSA has is the limited legal right to prevent others from using it. I can still write all about the algorithm.Copyright may protect the text of a lecture itself, but no way does it prevent a student from expressing the content of a lecture in his or her own way. And I don't see how a restriction that class notes are not to be used for profit can possibly be upheld - after all, I might be taking that class so I can get a profitable job using what I learned...and I might just refer back to those class notes.
Let's say I write a song; unless I wrote it for hire, I have no right to force someone to give me something equal to the effort I put into it. Now, if they like my songs, and want me to keep writing, they'd better find some way to reward me; but I have no natural right to demand payment from someone who goes around humming a melody of mine.
(Feeling a bit hostile, are you? Wow, it's been a long time since someone talked about kicking the fuck out of me. Sit back, chill, relax, and have a beer instead. It's much safer.)Yes, an extremely shitty analogy. We've gone from comparing copying to theft to comparing copying with assault; this is just getting sillier.
Your beating inflicts pain and suffering upon me; even if the physical wounds heal, that trauma is a lasting harm. You also deprive me of the full use of my body while I'm healing. That's why self-defense is a basic natural right - it doesn't take the state to create special laws for people to recognize it.
On the other hand, if I copy software you wrote, no one suffers any truama, and no one is deprived of the use of the software. Now, if everyone copys and no one pays, you're not going to write any more software, so if we want you to keep writing we need to find a way to reward you.
Making people pay for copies by having the state punish unauthorized copiers is morally problematic, but worked reasonably well until recently. It doesn't work any more. Let's drop it and find a new way to make sure you and I get paid to keep creating software.
For all other purposes, though, chemical drug testing (urinalysis, hair tests, and so on) is just stupid. Impairment testing is the only sensible option.
There's no fundamental right to owning software That's right. And it includes the author of the software (or any other string of bits), too. there are laws against theft...*stealing* a license... Making copies is not stealing. When I steal something from you, you no longer have the use of it. When I copy a program, we both have the use of it. "Ownership" of information - i.e., copyrights - is an artifical invention of the state meant to promote creativity. It worked reasonably well before the digital age, but it's dead now. Finished, over, dead, done, gone, kaput, this is an ex-parrot. Let's pull the plug, bury it, and move on to finding a new method of supporting the creation of programs, stories, and songs.
As for useful information for peasants, a few minutes with Google produces:
- Shelter:
- Building a jungle shelter
- The Mad Housers
- Shelters
- Digging wells:
- Hand dug wells for villages in Uganda
- Water for the World
- Medicine:
- Folk and Alternative Medicine
- Internet Sources of Information on Alternative Medicine
- virtual pediatrician
And, if the third world starts going online, you can expect a heck of a lot more discussion on these topics.