Who owns the blood that courses through your veins?
I think your question is based on a false assumption that every bit of matter must have an owner.
My relationship with my body is not one of property. I do not own my body, I am my body. (Or rather, "I" am what my body does.)
Do not be mislead by language. I speak of "my body", but I also speak of "my father" or "my girlfriend". Possessive pronouns do not imply possession.
Human beings are not ownable. My right to control my own body is fundamental.
If I remove that blood from my body, it becomes a product of my labor; provided that I made it with materials and tools that I own, it is then my property. But if I made it with stolen goods -- say I raided the local pharmacy and stole some erythropoietin so I could produce a couple pints of my (hypothetically) rare blood type for sale -- then I no more own that blood than I own I statue I carved out of stolen wood.
I am assuming that we are in agreement that I do not legitimately own something I make with stolen materials. (If I do own things make with stolen materials, I've got a great get-rich-quick scheme involving melting down gold...)
Even if I don't use drugs, I have to eat to make blood. (Of course I have to eat to do any work, but it's much more direct here, like the cattle feed required to make milk.) If I raid your pantry for sustenance for my blood-selling scheme (it's hungry work, and your iron-rich beets really helped), the blood is made from stolen materials, and again cannot be regarded as my property.
Food comes from the land. Land is made property by governments. So, yes, blood-as-a-product would ultimately rely on government action to be property. Blood-in-my-body is not property, even if I stole drugs or food.
Ownership is an inductive property. I legitimately own the widget if:
I make it myself with materials and tools that I legitimately own, or
I hire someone (trade them my labor or something I legitimately own) to make it with materials and tools that they and I legitimately own, or
you legitimately own the widget and I trade you:
my labor, or
something I legitimately own
But an inductive argument needs a base case. The base case for ownership is government action.
when people realize the difference between a fundamental right, such as the right to physical property, as opposed to a state-created privilege, that as a copyright is.
Hate to break it to you, but physical property is also created by the state.
Chase the chain of custody back on any physical object, and you'll see it comes from raw materials extracted from some bit of land. Ownership of that bit of land derives from a deed issued by a government -- usually based on the "right" of conquest or the "divine right" of kings
Property is not a fundamental right. It is a tool -- a very useful and important tool -- used to secure and enable fundamental rights. After all, if there's no private property, there are no private choices. But if we take property as primary and forget that it exists to secure our rights, it can be (and is) used in ways that restrict rather than enhance freedom.
Any change to the layout engine can turn your perfectly arranged document into a messy POS...Do we really have any gaurantee that openoffice's layout engine will have consistant behaviour for the next few decades either?
ODF is a freely available standard. If changes to a layout engine change how the document is presented, than one of either the old or new renderings was not according to spec -- either the layout engine was broken, or is broken in the new version.
If a future version of ODF breaks backward compatibility with current ODF documents, anyone who cares to (and who has the skillz) can build a translator to spec.
"Support our troops" means respect that they signed up to do a patriotic duty to fight (sometimes to the death) the position and desires of our government
Ah, the unintentional typo reveals the truth -- the patriot is often the one fighting (metaphorically, generally) the position of our government, not the one doing its bidding.
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men--serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.
It also means RESPECT THEM WHEN THEY GET HOME!!!
I respect those who served honorably them for their courage and their desire to serve a higher cause. I pity them for their lack of judgment in choosing to serve the stupid and brutal foreign policy of the U.S. government.
The correct message to most of our troops is not "Thank you", but "Sorry you got defrauded and ripped off." (For the handful who participated in war crimes, of course, the correct message is, "This way to your jail cell".)
No. You're an order of magnitude off. Global consumption of electric power is about 1.6-1.8TW (same source as above).
According to the researchers behind the 72TW figure, if we could catch 20% of the wind power at the good locations, "it could satisfy 100% of the world's energy demand for all purposes (6995-10177 Mtoe) and over seven times the world's electricity needs".
The idea that windmills even get mentioned is embarrassing.
The idea that you'd spread such FUD about wind power is embarrassing.
If americans lived in Holland, rather than California, Texas, or Florida, then they wouldn't need A/C for 90% of the year.
Excepting the elderly and the inform, air conditioning is not a "need" for most people in the U.S, either. Humanity survived for millennia -- even in California, Texas, and Florida -- without it.
Wear shorts, get a window fan and a attic ventilator, plant some shade trees.
And of course, folks in Holland need more power for heat -- and, I'd expect, for lighting -- than those in Florida.
Object-oriented modeling tacitly assumes an ontology where the world is made out of objects...Relational modeling assumes an ontology where the world is made out of facts
The properties of an object are facts about that object.
There is no more an "impedance mismatch" between OOD and RDBMSes than there is between OOD and the abstractions of file systems provided by operating systems.
It's a natural right, much like your right to not be murdered. I don't have to derive it from anything, it is.
No, it is not. There is no "natural right" to profit from anything, much less from authoring creative works.
Nor is there a natural right to prevent others from making copies of a work you have authored. It is strictly an artificial right created by the government.
Is it a good thing if authors of good artistic works profit? Sure. Is a good way to achieve that to have the state point guns at people to prevent them from making copies? No.
So why should we get rid of the bits of law that says some of those files belong to someone else, and not the bits that say your computer belongs to you?
Information can be copied without depriving anyone else of its use. My computer cannot be duplicated.
It's very simple: a person has the right to profit from their work if they choose.
Oh really? I choose to profit from this post. If that's my right, who owes me the check? I guess as reader, you do...you can pay me here, kthx.
Tell me, from what principle do you derive this "right" to profit?
It's very, very easy to copy an artist's work nowadays, so the only way to preserve their rights is through the legal construct of copyright.
No. The ease of making copies makes a government-created monopoly on doing so a piss-poor way of achieving the goal of getting artists paid.
I'll repeat the same recommendation I've been making for year now: eliminate copyright. Replace it with a royalty right modeled on songwriter performance royalties.
I can sing "All Along the Watchtower" in the shower, or at a party, and not owe Bob Dylan a cent. I can share the son without limit. But when I play it on stage at the local bar, Bob gets his nickel of royalties -- when we're selling it (you're paying for the music with the beer), the author of the work gets a cut.
Where do I have a right to point a gun at you to prevent you from copying a song or poem that I wrote? Representing it as your own work would be fraud, which might justify a forcible response, but the idea that I ought to be able to threaten you with violence (through my proxy, the state) if you make a copy of a work I created and share it with a friend, is ridiculous.
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay...
So you're opposed to book lending and public libraries? You're against the right to read?
Authors ought to get paid. A state-created artificial monopoly on making copies is a lousy way to bring that about.
When I come home though and want to write, create music, make photo galleries for my family, I want to do just those things. The last thing I want to do is tweak my computer.
Me too. That's why I use a GNU/Linux system at home.
When I write, I use Emacs; if I want to fancify it up I can import the text into OpenOffice Writer or Abiword. When I make music I've got Rosegarden and Audacity. When I want to work with photos I've got GIMP. No tweaking required (after installation, but you'll get install-time pangs with any OS) -- but tweaking is possible. That's freedom.
...as soon as you get old OSes and browsers off the net. Read the article to which you link, the scheme doesn't work with Win XP running IE 6 or 7.
So even if you were silly enough to run experimental code in your server, a large percentage of your clients can't use the extension anyway.
The GP is correct: regular SSL requires a dedicated IP address for each certificate. The fact that an experimental extension to SSL gets around this requirement does not alter that fact.
Read up on what he thinks of people who have families, you dope.
Every person has a family, you dope. We have ancestors and collaterals, even if we don't all have descendants.
Yes, RMS is not impressed by people's ability to breed, and thinks we need to stop overcrowding the planet. Though he expresses his point with his usual lack of tact or appreciation of ambiguity or compromise, there's nothing in the least "distasteful" about those ideas. (If you think merely having a baby is some sort of miracle, let me recommend Bill Hicks on the subject, though of course he's even less tactful. But funny.)
What does "sophistication" have to do with the underlying crime?
If one considers that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to rehabilitate (where possible) people who have shown that they are a threat to the rights of others, then certainly the question of whether their actions are casual "crimes of passion", momentary lapses, or if they are part of a planned and long-prepared pattern, would be relevant.
Of course, our criminal justice system as constituted has fsck-all to do with rehabilitation, so that argument is irrelevant; and of course using a proxy is no more a "sophisticated" method of committing a crime than is, say, declining to leave your phone number scrawled over the scene.
...geostationary orbit is at about 36,000 km above sea level. If above the equator...
Geostationary orbit is, by definition and by physics, above the equator. That's why satellite TV dishes always point south. (Not due south, generally, but southerly enough to be the urban equivalent of moss on trees. Outside the Northern hemisphere, YMMV.)
A genetic basis for homosexuality probably wouldn't fair so well against evolution...
Only if you don't understand evolution. It's not about individuals, it's about populations.
A population with a percentage of non-breeders has advantages: more adults per children to act as caregivers, and lower population pressures on the environment. It's sort of like the grandmother hypothesis.
The federal government isn't supposed to be the supreme government of the land
The federal Constitution is the supreme law of the land. That makes the federal government the supreme government.
a collections of states that united the states (read state as individual countries)
Absolutely not. The original States yielded their sovereignty to the federal government when the Constitution was ratified: they cannot "enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility," nor can they "lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports" or "lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War", without Congressional approval.
The US government is supposed to be a government of the states, not the people
No. "We the People of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Not "We the States..."
Has the original balance of power shifted from State to Federal government? Sure. Some of that is due to changes in the Constitution; some of it is extraconstitutional or downright unconstitutional.
You think a party representing 4% of a nation's people should have the last say in who becomes Prime Minister?
There's no functional difference between that and the "swing states" or "swing voters" we have here in the U.S. There's nothing "fair" about the way that the vote of someone in Ohio or Florida counts more than that of someone from Maryland or Texas.
Except that having more that two parties allows more opinions to be heard.
The Efficient part does the work, but every country needs a Dignified pare. This includes flags, soldiers in archaic uniforms, lots of saluting, bugle calls and running around.
No, actually, that's exactly what countries need to get rid of, all that nationalist, dominance-hierarchy bullshit.
Dictionaries are descriptivist, meaning they record HOW a word is (ab)used... not what the word actually means.
But a word means, exactly and only, what it is used to mean by educated native speakers of the language. There is no higher authority that determines that a word "actually" means. (Or, for that matter, what grammatical constructions are "proper".)
What other source would you suggest? The meaning of a word cannot be gleaned from etymology. If, to take your example, "decimate" must only be used to mean "reduce by one-tenth" because it comes from a root meaning "ten", then by the same argument "tragedy" ought to only mean a play written for a competition where a goat is awarded as a prize, since it comes from roots meaning goat song.
Anyway, how do you think those Latin and Greek root words got their meaning? By usage.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your question is based on a false assumption that every bit of matter must have an owner.
My relationship with my body is not one of property. I do not own my body, I am my body. (Or rather, "I" am what my body does.)
Do not be mislead by language. I speak of "my body", but I also speak of "my father" or "my girlfriend". Possessive pronouns do not imply possession.
Human beings are not ownable. My right to control my own body is fundamental.
If I remove that blood from my body, it becomes a product of my labor; provided that I made it with materials and tools that I own, it is then my property. But if I made it with stolen goods -- say I raided the local pharmacy and stole some erythropoietin so I could produce a couple pints of my (hypothetically) rare blood type for sale -- then I no more own that blood than I own I statue I carved out of stolen wood.
I am assuming that we are in agreement that I do not legitimately own something I make with stolen materials. (If I do own things make with stolen materials, I've got a great get-rich-quick scheme involving melting down gold...)
Even if I don't use drugs, I have to eat to make blood. (Of course I have to eat to do any work, but it's much more direct here, like the cattle feed required to make milk.) If I raid your pantry for sustenance for my blood-selling scheme (it's hungry work, and your iron-rich beets really helped), the blood is made from stolen materials, and again cannot be regarded as my property.
Food comes from the land. Land is made property by governments. So, yes, blood-as-a-product would ultimately rely on government action to be property. Blood-in-my-body is not property, even if I stole drugs or food.
Ownership is an inductive property. I legitimately own the widget if:
But an inductive argument needs a base case. The base case for ownership is government action.
Hate to break it to you, but physical property is also created by the state.
Chase the chain of custody back on any physical object, and you'll see it comes from raw materials extracted from some bit of land. Ownership of that bit of land derives from a deed issued by a government -- usually based on the "right" of conquest or the "divine right" of kings
Property is not a fundamental right. It is a tool -- a very useful and important tool -- used to secure and enable fundamental rights. After all, if there's no private property, there are no private choices. But if we take property as primary and forget that it exists to secure our rights, it can be (and is) used in ways that restrict rather than enhance freedom.
ODF is a freely available standard. If changes to a layout engine change how the document is presented, than one of either the old or new renderings was not according to spec -- either the layout engine was broken, or is broken in the new version.
If a future version of ODF breaks backward compatibility with current ODF documents, anyone who cares to (and who has the skillz) can build a translator to spec.
The same is not true of proprietary software.
Ah, the unintentional typo reveals the truth -- the patriot is often the one fighting (metaphorically, generally) the position of our government, not the one doing its bidding.
As Thoreau put it,
I respect those who served honorably them for their courage and their desire to serve a higher cause. I pity them for their lack of judgment in choosing to serve the stupid and brutal foreign policy of the U.S. government.
The correct message to most of our troops is not "Thank you", but "Sorry you got defrauded and ripped off." (For the handful who participated in war crimes, of course, the correct message is, "This way to your jail cell".)
No. The 72 TW figure represents only "global wind power generated at locations with mean annual wind speeds 6.9 m/s at 80 m [altitude]".
No. You're an order of magnitude off. Global consumption of electric power is about 1.6-1.8TW (same source as above).
According to the researchers behind the 72TW figure, if we could catch 20% of the wind power at the good locations, "it could satisfy 100% of the world's energy demand for all purposes (6995-10177 Mtoe) and over seven times the world's electricity needs".
The idea that you'd spread such FUD about wind power is embarrassing.
Excepting the elderly and the inform, air conditioning is not a "need" for most people in the U.S, either. Humanity survived for millennia -- even in California, Texas, and Florida -- without it.
Wear shorts, get a window fan and a attic ventilator, plant some shade trees.
And of course, folks in Holland need more power for heat -- and, I'd expect, for lighting -- than those in Florida.
The properties of an object are facts about that object.
There is no more an "impedance mismatch" between OOD and RDBMSes than there is between OOD and the abstractions of file systems provided by operating systems.
No, it is not. There is no "natural right" to profit from anything, much less from authoring creative works.
Nor is there a natural right to prevent others from making copies of a work you have authored. It is strictly an artificial right created by the government.
Is it a good thing if authors of good artistic works profit? Sure. Is a good way to achieve that to have the state point guns at people to prevent them from making copies? No.
Information can be copied without depriving anyone else of its use. My computer cannot be duplicated.
Copying is not theft. Copyright is not property.
Oh really? I choose to profit from this post. If that's my right, who owes me the check? I guess as reader, you do...you can pay me here, kthx.
Tell me, from what principle do you derive this "right" to profit?
No. The ease of making copies makes a government-created monopoly on doing so a piss-poor way of achieving the goal of getting artists paid.
I'll repeat the same recommendation I've been making for year now: eliminate copyright. Replace it with a royalty right modeled on songwriter performance royalties.
I can sing "All Along the Watchtower" in the shower, or at a party, and not owe Bob Dylan a cent. I can share the son without limit. But when I play it on stage at the local bar, Bob gets his nickel of royalties -- when we're selling it (you're paying for the music with the beer), the author of the work gets a cut.
Where do I have a right to point a gun at you to prevent you from copying a song or poem that I wrote? Representing it as your own work would be fraud, which might justify a forcible response, but the idea that I ought to be able to threaten you with violence (through my proxy, the state) if you make a copy of a work I created and share it with a friend, is ridiculous.
So you're opposed to book lending and public libraries? You're against the right to read?
Authors ought to get paid. A state-created artificial monopoly on making copies is a lousy way to bring that about.
Me too. That's why I use a GNU/Linux system at home.
When I write, I use Emacs; if I want to fancify it up I can import the text into OpenOffice Writer or Abiword. When I make music I've got Rosegarden and Audacity. When I want to work with photos I've got GIMP. No tweaking required (after installation, but you'll get install-time pangs with any OS) -- but tweaking is possible. That's freedom.
You don't consider IE 6, or 7 on XP, to be "major" browsers? What odd traffic patterns you must get. I see over 30% IE 6 on my personal server.
...as soon as you get old OSes and browsers off the net. Read the article to which you link, the scheme doesn't work with Win XP running IE 6 or 7.
So even if you were silly enough to run experimental code in your server, a large percentage of your clients can't use the extension anyway.
The GP is correct: regular SSL requires a dedicated IP address for each certificate. The fact that an experimental extension to SSL gets around this requirement does not alter that fact.
Every person has a family, you dope. We have ancestors and collaterals, even if we don't all have descendants.
Yes, RMS is not impressed by people's ability to breed, and thinks we need to stop overcrowding the planet. Though he expresses his point with his usual lack of tact or appreciation of ambiguity or compromise, there's nothing in the least "distasteful" about those ideas. (If you think merely having a baby is some sort of miracle, let me recommend Bill Hicks on the subject, though of course he's even less tactful. But funny.)
If one considers that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to rehabilitate (where possible) people who have shown that they are a threat to the rights of others, then certainly the question of whether their actions are casual "crimes of passion", momentary lapses, or if they are part of a planned and long-prepared pattern, would be relevant.
Of course, our criminal justice system as constituted has fsck-all to do with rehabilitation, so that argument is irrelevant; and of course using a proxy is no more a "sophisticated" method of committing a crime than is, say, declining to leave your phone number scrawled over the scene.
Geostationary orbit is, by definition and by physics, above the equator. That's why satellite TV dishes always point south. (Not due south, generally, but southerly enough to be the urban equivalent of moss on trees. Outside the Northern hemisphere, YMMV.)
Only if you don't understand evolution. It's not about individuals, it's about populations.
A population with a percentage of non-breeders has advantages: more adults per children to act as caregivers, and lower population pressures on the environment. It's sort of like the grandmother hypothesis.
So sorry that you don't have a family that's friendly to freedom.
The federal Constitution is the supreme law of the land. That makes the federal government the supreme government.
Absolutely not. The original States yielded their sovereignty to the federal government when the Constitution was ratified: they cannot "enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility," nor can they "lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports" or "lay any duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War", without Congressional approval.
No. "We the People of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Not "We the States..."
Has the original balance of power shifted from State to Federal government? Sure. Some of that is due to changes in the Constitution; some of it is extraconstitutional or downright unconstitutional.
There's no functional difference between that and the "swing states" or "swing voters" we have here in the U.S. There's nothing "fair" about the way that the vote of someone in Ohio or Florida counts more than that of someone from Maryland or Texas.
Except that having more that two parties allows more opinions to be heard.
No, actually, that's exactly what countries need to get rid of, all that nationalist, dominance-hierarchy bullshit.
But a word means, exactly and only, what it is used to mean by educated native speakers of the language. There is no higher authority that determines that a word "actually" means. (Or, for that matter, what grammatical constructions are "proper".)
What other source would you suggest? The meaning of a word cannot be gleaned from etymology. If, to take your example, "decimate" must only be used to mean "reduce by one-tenth" because it comes from a root meaning "ten", then by the same argument "tragedy" ought to only mean a play written for a competition where a goat is awarded as a prize, since it comes from roots meaning goat song.
Anyway, how do you think those Latin and Greek root words got their meaning? By usage.
"Agnostic" comes from roots meaning "not knowing", but its use in the sense of "not having an opinion about" is well-established.
Would it kill you to check a dictionary before trying to go all vocabulary-Nazi on someone? :-)
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Saw a bunch of them at Lowes not two weeks ago.
Seriously, man, let me Google that for you. Either you didn't look very hard, or you're full of FUD.
I can't speak to whether they're reliable or not, but you don't seem to be a reliable source of info about them.