Good quote from Ayn Rand, I don't agree with it entirely but she certainly has accurately characterized today's legal/political system fairly well.
How did you get from that to The most useful kinds of rules are the ones that everyone violates, and that are therefore unworkable. How does this make them useful? It seems to make them excess burdens. And if anything, just because everyone exceeds the speed limit, doesn't mean I'm exempt from punishment.
The real question here is what does Rand mean by "innocent"? Is there some objective standard for innocence, some way to compare, and if there isn't then you either have anarchy or require some rules to operate and define what normative "innocence" is.
Atlas Shrugged is a good read though and I applaud you for dropping some philosophy into the mix.
The enforcement and creation of the IP laws is a commtiment China made in order to join the WTO. What these laws do is essentially stop Chinese companies from wholesale copying other company's IP and then manufacturing it in large quantities. The Secretary is speaking about U.S. business interests because we have a large stake in the WTO and because HE IS THE U.S SECRETARY OF COMMERCE! What is he supposed to talk about, French business interests?
The only people it helps are the shareholders and lawyers who prosecute and defend.
Wrong. The people who also benefit are the people who actually buy the resulting IP. Because, in many cases, they actually want was produced and if there wasn't a pretty good gaurantee that the shareholders would get a return on it, then they woudln't have invested in the R&D in the first place.
IP laws aren't perfect, but to say we should dump them all because they don't benefit anyone but the rich filthy capatilist uber-rich is ignorant and factually and logically wrong.
Ignorant dolt. China isn't doing any of this to please the U.S., let alone Dubya. China agreed to put laws in place to protect IP in order to join the WTO. The Secretary is simply saying the laws may not have gone far enough to truly protect the IP, or may not be enforced. He's going to investigate and the findings can be used by the U.S. for future WTO negotiations.
This is important because the Chinese (and all of the other big IP infringing shops) are basically getting a free ride on all of the American (and non-American) companies R&D expenditures. This translates into lost revenue for those companies, higher costs of recouping thier R&D, and either higher prices for Americans (or other citizens of countries that respect IP) or reduced investment in R&D and reduced innovation.
This isn't about filesharing or software patents per-se either. This is about a Chinese company taking a U.S. patent on brake pads or some prescription drug, the results of millions of dollars of invetments, and manufacturing it wholesale.
This is only a story on Slashdot because of the flamebait title of the article.
of counsiling anyone who has to look at these pictures and realize how ugly we all are? Who hear goes to the post office dressed for success? Who? Tell me? I see that hand in the back row, thank you sir. The horror. The horror.
Does anyone have a scan of the actual ad, but with coffee stains, donut crumbs, and a few cigarette ashes on the page? I want to make it feel New York authentic.
The next ad they intend to run is based on STD awareness advertising from the 1980s. A women, w/ dark lighting, will be horrified to realize that her computer is infected with another virus because she chose to use an unprotected browser.
Lighten up. At least they didn't generate the whole thing with a perl script, write in 133t sp34k, call them 10 million d00ds, mention GNU, RMS, FOSS, BSD, or the fact that it runs really really well on a fully tricked out liquid cooled beowulf cluster w/ all of the servers running a hand-crafted version of Gentoo. All in all they showed remarkable constraint considering the source:)
Advertising "Free" seems like a gimmic and my turn some people off. The advertisement stirs people's interest in the product so they talk about it, go to the website, ask a friend about it, etc. When they learn it's free, from a friend or the website, they're now more inclined to try it out because they've already expressed some interest in the product.
This comment made me vomit into my mouth. If this slogan, fire up the fox, catches any sort of support in the community it will single handedly destroy all the work the Firefox team has done to date.
Microsoft has purchased the New York Times Company (NYT) and as a celebration of their new found synergies has decided to cancel today's printing. Bill Gates, reached via telephone, remarked "Oh, did we buy them... I didn't notice. I hope Steve [Balmer] remembered to use by Diner's Club Card for that acquisition."
This is a just a plan folks. It's like posting an article stating that the government has a plan to shoot down commercial airliners that have been hijacked and are heading for large population centers, and the responses here would be "What is the government going to randomly shoot down airplanes now? I hate the government. Don't they know that foreigners fly on those planes, that could be an act of war? Air travel is a major commercial enterprise, is anyone thinking about how this could criple the economy? Sometimes they transport organs for transplant on those planes, just think about the people who would die? I love those little jet trails in the sky, why does the government want to take them away from me? Has anyone thought about the children? The children!" Stop overreacting, RTFA, and realize IT IS JUST A PLAN. This is what government bureaucracies do... they create massive amounts of paper.
For those of you who didn't RTFA, here are some key points from it. - President Bush has ordered plans - Any shutdown of the network inside the United States. Use GLONASS if you like. - Any government-ordered shutdown or jamming of the GPS satellites would be done in ways to limit disruptions to navigation and related systems outside the affected area, the White House said. -...shutdown of the network inside the United States would come under only the most remarkable circumstances
There have been some good question and points raised (like HOW will this work), but those are barely audible over the Bush-bashing trolls and the general knee-jerk hysteria.
Because it's one less thing for geeks to be elitist about. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry can use the latest free tools like Firebird, OpenOffice, and The Gimp, and they are actually proficient at using the tools, what are the geeks going to boost their egos with. I guess they'll have to port Gentoo's portage to Windows so they can start tweaking out their latest copy of cygwin, you know, for maximum performance d00d.
Slashdot Mirror
Good quote from Ayn Rand, I don't agree with it entirely but she certainly has accurately characterized today's legal/political system fairly well.
How did you get from that to The most useful kinds of rules are the ones that everyone violates, and that are therefore unworkable. How does this make them useful? It seems to make them excess burdens. And if anything, just because everyone exceeds the speed limit, doesn't mean I'm exempt from punishment.
The real question here is what does Rand mean by "innocent"? Is there some objective standard for innocence, some way to compare, and if there isn't then you either have anarchy or require some rules to operate and define what normative "innocence" is.
Atlas Shrugged is a good read though and I applaud you for dropping some philosophy into the mix.
The enforcement and creation of the IP laws is a commtiment China made in order to join the WTO. What these laws do is essentially stop Chinese companies from wholesale copying other company's IP and then manufacturing it in large quantities. The Secretary is speaking about U.S. business interests because we have a large stake in the WTO and because HE IS THE U.S SECRETARY OF COMMERCE! What is he supposed to talk about, French business interests?
The only people it helps are the shareholders and lawyers who prosecute and defend.
Wrong. The people who also benefit are the people who actually buy the resulting IP. Because, in many cases, they actually want was produced and if there wasn't a pretty good gaurantee that the shareholders would get a return on it, then they woudln't have invested in the R&D in the first place.
IP laws aren't perfect, but to say we should dump them all because they don't benefit anyone but the rich filthy capatilist uber-rich is ignorant and factually and logically wrong.
Ignorant dolt. China isn't doing any of this to please the U.S., let alone Dubya. China agreed to put laws in place to protect IP in order to join the WTO. The Secretary is simply saying the laws may not have gone far enough to truly protect the IP, or may not be enforced. He's going to investigate and the findings can be used by the U.S. for future WTO negotiations.
This is important because the Chinese (and all of the other big IP infringing shops) are basically getting a free ride on all of the American (and non-American) companies R&D expenditures. This translates into lost revenue for those companies, higher costs of recouping thier R&D, and either higher prices for Americans (or other citizens of countries that respect IP) or reduced investment in R&D and reduced innovation.
This isn't about filesharing or software patents per-se either. This is about a Chinese company taking a U.S. patent on brake pads or some prescription drug, the results of millions of dollars of invetments, and manufacturing it wholesale.
This is only a story on Slashdot because of the flamebait title of the article.
Now we can fill up CHINESE jails with even more people who are as dangerous as marijuana smokers...
Can you imagine it?!
The Dinosaurs didn't fund their NASA, and look what happened to them.
Do you have any facts or data to back up your suggestion that the dinosaur's fully funded NASA did not fail in their attempts to stop the asteroid?
You should try ConsoleClassix. It's an online emulator service. All the classic games are free to try.
Cool I found it. The game is Star Wars: X-Wing Trilogy. Now I just have to find a new copy for less than $20.00
Those games were excellent... I wish they'd reissue them and update them to work on today's OSes or console systems.
Good point. Because lord knows regular folks can't distinguish one dirty hippy from another. ;)
Oh, it's time to stop, I'm saying mean things.
of counsiling anyone who has to look at these pictures and realize how ugly we all are? Who hear goes to the post office dressed for success? Who? Tell me? I see that hand in the back row, thank you sir. The horror. The horror.
The stamps were printed with my portrait on them.
Does anyone have a scan of the actual ad, but with coffee stains, donut crumbs, and a few cigarette ashes on the page? I want to make it feel New York authentic.
The next ad they intend to run is based on STD awareness advertising from the 1980s. A women, w/ dark lighting, will be horrified to realize that her computer is infected with another virus because she chose to use an unprotected browser.
Lighten up. At least they didn't generate the whole thing with a perl script, write in 133t sp34k, call them 10 million d00ds, mention GNU, RMS, FOSS, BSD, or the fact that it runs really really well on a fully tricked out liquid cooled beowulf cluster w/ all of the servers running a hand-crafted version of Gentoo. All in all they showed remarkable constraint considering the source :)
Never under estimate the power of a thousand dirty hippies. :)
Or the stench.
Advertising "Free" seems like a gimmic and my turn some people off. The advertisement stirs people's interest in the product so they talk about it, go to the website, ask a friend about it, etc. When they learn it's free, from a friend or the website, they're now more inclined to try it out because they've already expressed some interest in the product.
so NYT readers could fire up the fox?
This comment made me vomit into my mouth. If this slogan, fire up the fox, catches any sort of support in the community it will single handedly destroy all the work the Firefox team has done to date.
Microsoft has purchased the New York Times Company (NYT) and as a celebration of their new found synergies has decided to cancel today's printing. Bill Gates, reached via telephone, remarked "Oh, did we buy them... I didn't notice. I hope Steve [Balmer] remembered to use by Diner's Club Card for that acquisition."
This is a just a plan folks. It's like posting an article stating that the government has a plan to shoot down commercial airliners that have been hijacked and are heading for large population centers, and the responses here would be "What is the government going to randomly shoot down airplanes now? I hate the government. Don't they know that foreigners fly on those planes, that could be an act of war? Air travel is a major commercial enterprise, is anyone thinking about how this could criple the economy? Sometimes they transport organs for transplant on those planes, just think about the people who would die? I love those little jet trails in the sky, why does the government want to take them away from me? Has anyone thought about the children? The children!" Stop overreacting, RTFA, and realize IT IS JUST A PLAN. This is what government bureaucracies do... they create massive amounts of paper.
...shutdown of the network inside the United States would come under only the most remarkable circumstances
For those of you who didn't RTFA, here are some key points from it.
- President Bush has ordered plans
- Any shutdown of the network inside the United States. Use GLONASS if you like.
- Any government-ordered shutdown or jamming of the GPS satellites would be done in ways to limit disruptions to navigation and related systems outside the affected area, the White House said.
-
There have been some good question and points raised (like HOW will this work), but those are barely audible over the Bush-bashing trolls and the general knee-jerk hysteria.
Long live the paranoid.
D00d, I've already imagined a liquid cooled beowulf cluster of these and it was SWEET!
By karma, it was nice to know you.
The graphic you were looking at did not download completely before the server went AWOL. The complete graphic looked like this.
Linux ===============
BSD ========(died)
He was, but his Linux box just took so long to boot it wasn't worth the effort.
Because it's one less thing for geeks to be elitist about. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry can use the latest free tools like Firebird, OpenOffice, and The Gimp, and they are actually proficient at using the tools, what are the geeks going to boost their egos with. I guess they'll have to port Gentoo's portage to Windows so they can start tweaking out their latest copy of cygwin, you know, for maximum performance d00d.