I thought this was blindingly obvious based on the fact that the author of TFA is clearly a pseudonym, there's a very low hit counter at the bottom, and the web design looks like it's from six years ago. Slashdot editors must be out to lunch on this one.
The difference, of course, being that when the original authors (or the maintainers of the original metaserver) go to the dark side, it's not hard for a nonprofit benevolent geek to open up her own server, and allow users to migrate their data over to the new server and remain on the same network, keeping all their connections intact. At that point you're basically moving your website (your social network "node") to a new host (another Diaspora server), while remaining on the same network!
Right now, if you're fed up with how Facebook is handling your data, you have to quit Facebook. With Diaspora, if you're fed up with how your Diaspora server is handling your data, you switch servers, or even start your own.
Furthermore, the whole thing is going to be free software, so in the event of the original authors trying to slip nasty stuff into the code, a) we can know about it and b) it won't be hard to fork the project into a compatible non-evil project.
This is radically different from Facebook's philosophy of "we own all your data and you're stuck with us." My only hope is that the Diaspora guys can make their stuff easy to use.
Coming from a Catholic tradition, we don't believe that all of the Bible is literal truth, but rather all of it is spiritual truth. Of course there are contradictions and inaccuracies - it's a compendium of books written by dozens of authors over the course of centuries. The goal in reading it is not to merely read the words - it's to seek a deeper spiritual truth through meditation and prayer.
I won't speak for other spiritual texts, but you can't read the Bible in the same way as you do a textbook.
And killing off Arrested Development, Futurama, and back-when-it-was-funny-Family-Guy aren't further proofs of Fox's incompetence as a network? Cancelling Firefly may be their biggest sin, but it's far from their only one.
Sure, some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
Something tells me your attitude would be a lot less casual if it was you or your loved ones who were wrongfully detained, indefinitely, without warrant and without trial, in the name of "security."
The real naivete is assuming that only the bad guys are the victims of misuse of power.
Ban jailbreakers from the app store. Then you don't get the 30% cut of the apps they would be legitimately buying anymore, and instead they'll just be forced to learn how to pirate the apps they want.
If there's consensus about what the Founders meant when they said something, there should not be difficulty in amending the constitution if its language is thought to be ambiguous. If there's no consensus, then it must be assumed that the Constitution means what it says. So yes, nuclear weapons are "arms." If you want to amend the constitution to forbid citizens from owning nukes, it should not be difficult to do so, since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.
I don't know how a religion is of any value unless it has opinions about how society should be. I don't know how you can express opinion about how society should be without saying how society should govern itself.
Saying "religions should not express views about political matters" is tantamount to saying "religions should not inspire their followers to do anything," and that's certainly prohibitive of the free exercise of religion.
If the Founders had meant that the militia had the right to keep and bear arms, why didn't they say "the right of the militia to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"?
Google gets hit by a hacker attack, and for that reason decides they're not going to do business inside an entire country anymore? This sounds extremely fishy. One of the richest tech companies in the world should have the money and know-how to establish peerlessly good electronic security...
...unless the people going after them are the Chinese government itself, in which case it would be reasonable for Google to believe that they will never have a safe haven for conducting operations in China without risking compromises to their security.
Who else but the government of China has the means (plenty of money), the motive (stopping Chinese human rights activists), and the opportunity (Google's conducting of operations within China) to scare Google this badly?
In Diablo II, gold was a worthless commodity. Because the only way to get quality items was from either monster drops or gambling (which would often costs millions of gold to find something salable), the standard unit of economic trade became a unique ring.
This was bad for the economy in general: unlike World of Warcraft's Auction House, it was impossible for players who weren't competitive traders to participate in the economy. In addition, the design of the game in general made trading difficult (having to start a game to initiate a trade, muling, etc.)
What changes are you making to Diablo in order to make the economy of Diablo III more vibrant and accessible?
This practice effectively prohibits the use of alternative DNS roots, such as OpenNIC. In other words, it gives ICANN even stronger dominance over internet naming.
If you buy foo.com then you have a monopoly on that domain name. No one else even has a chance at taking it from you without your permission. As a result, you can fix your price based on how desperate you think they are, which is also a sign that something is badly wrong with the market.
ICANN is doing the right thing by making domains affordable; a net presence shouldn't cost very much at all. The system is broken, though - namely, they need better defenses against abusers like yourself.
a) there's only one store you can buy domains from (an ICANN registrar)
b) domains are unique. Some domains are inherently worthless, e.g. wqrjqiofmnioqfmacwqx.com (who's going to want to remember that?), and some domains are worth far, far more to the people who would be interested in them
c) domains are cheap enough that buying them by the thousands for investment purposes is feasible
If any one of these were not the case, the system wouldn't be as open to gaming as it is now. We need an alternative to the monopoly-prone single DNS system that encourages this crap. The purpose of DNS is to make resources easy to find, not to provide a market for profiteering.
The first-come-first-served isn't the problem, it's the cheapness issue. Because (tld's aside) each domain is unique, it is ridiculously, absurdly cheap for you to obtain a monopoly over that resource. People don't care about buying, selling, and commoditizing rare things (baseball cards, pieces of land, etc.) because those are extremely expensive. But domains are sold from the registrars at such a cheap rate that you can buy something unique and potentially extremely valuable at a low price.
Plain and simple, you shouldn't be allowed to sell domains for more than you paid from the registrar. Otherwise the Internet belongs to the highest bidder, and despite being a libertarian I see that as destructive for a global shared information resource.
Also, I'm marking you as a foe, because the Internet would be better off without squatters.
Let's not forget that the primary objective of members of the government, moreso than any individual item on their agendas, is the preservation of their own jobs. This means keeping around the two-party system that gets them elected.
Between the fear of the GOP that the Democrats spread and the fear of the Democrats that the GOP spreads, there's enough fear going around to keep the majority of the country locked into the two-party system.
In the last three elections, all of which have been very close, the majority of people who voted for the loser said they did so not because they liked their candidate, but in order to prevent the other guy from winning. Those strike me as "wasted votes," far moreso than votes for third party candidates.
If you want to break the cycle and change the system, it's simple: have the courage to vote for the candidate you like the most, regardless of his popularity.
If the game were specifically about the death of that woman's husband, or specifically included that soldier's name and likeness, then I could understand your complaint. However, the game is about an event in history. Recent history, but still history. History is owned by no one.
Slashdot Mirror
Billions of dollars spent annually on charities, schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, and relief efforts isn't good enough for you?
I thought this was blindingly obvious based on the fact that the author of TFA is clearly a pseudonym, there's a very low hit counter at the bottom, and the web design looks like it's from six years ago. Slashdot editors must be out to lunch on this one.
The difference, of course, being that when the original authors (or the maintainers of the original metaserver) go to the dark side, it's not hard for a nonprofit benevolent geek to open up her own server, and allow users to migrate their data over to the new server and remain on the same network, keeping all their connections intact. At that point you're basically moving your website (your social network "node") to a new host (another Diaspora server), while remaining on the same network!
Right now, if you're fed up with how Facebook is handling your data, you have to quit Facebook. With Diaspora, if you're fed up with how your Diaspora server is handling your data, you switch servers, or even start your own.
Furthermore, the whole thing is going to be free software, so in the event of the original authors trying to slip nasty stuff into the code, a) we can know about it and b) it won't be hard to fork the project into a compatible non-evil project.
This is radically different from Facebook's philosophy of "we own all your data and you're stuck with us." My only hope is that the Diaspora guys can make their stuff easy to use.
Coming from a Catholic tradition, we don't believe that all of the Bible is literal truth, but rather all of it is spiritual truth. Of course there are contradictions and inaccuracies - it's a compendium of books written by dozens of authors over the course of centuries. The goal in reading it is not to merely read the words - it's to seek a deeper spiritual truth through meditation and prayer.
I won't speak for other spiritual texts, but you can't read the Bible in the same way as you do a textbook.
And killing off Arrested Development, Futurama, and back-when-it-was-funny-Family-Guy aren't further proofs of Fox's incompetence as a network? Cancelling Firefly may be their biggest sin, but it's far from their only one.
It's naivete in the extreme, bordering on intolerance, to lump everyone on earth into "Christians" and "reasonable people."
Sure, some people in agencies will abuse their power occasionally, thats human nature.
Something tells me your attitude would be a lot less casual if it was you or your loved ones who were wrongfully detained, indefinitely, without warrant and without trial, in the name of "security."
The real naivete is assuming that only the bad guys are the victims of misuse of power.
Ban jailbreakers from the app store. Then you don't get the 30% cut of the apps they would be legitimately buying anymore, and instead they'll just be forced to learn how to pirate the apps they want.
If there's consensus about what the Founders meant when they said something, there should not be difficulty in amending the constitution if its language is thought to be ambiguous. If there's no consensus, then it must be assumed that the Constitution means what it says. So yes, nuclear weapons are "arms." If you want to amend the constitution to forbid citizens from owning nukes, it should not be difficult to do so, since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.
I don't know how a religion is of any value unless it has opinions about how society should be. I don't know how you can express opinion about how society should be without saying how society should govern itself.
Saying "religions should not express views about political matters" is tantamount to saying "religions should not inspire their followers to do anything," and that's certainly prohibitive of the free exercise of religion.
If the Founders had meant that the militia had the right to keep and bear arms, why didn't they say "the right of the militia to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"?
As a native, I can say with authority that a $30K/year pay cut isn't the worst part about living in Cincinnati.
Google gets hit by a hacker attack, and for that reason decides they're not going to do business inside an entire country anymore? This sounds extremely fishy. One of the richest tech companies in the world should have the money and know-how to establish peerlessly good electronic security...
...unless the people going after them are the Chinese government itself, in which case it would be reasonable for Google to believe that they will never have a safe haven for conducting operations in China without risking compromises to their security.
Who else but the government of China has the means (plenty of money), the motive (stopping Chinese human rights activists), and the opportunity (Google's conducting of operations within China) to scare Google this badly?
In Diablo II, gold was a worthless commodity. Because the only way to get quality items was from either monster drops or gambling (which would often costs millions of gold to find something salable), the standard unit of economic trade became a unique ring.
This was bad for the economy in general: unlike World of Warcraft's Auction House, it was impossible for players who weren't competitive traders to participate in the economy. In addition, the design of the game in general made trading difficult (having to start a game to initiate a trade, muling, etc.)
What changes are you making to Diablo in order to make the economy of Diablo III more vibrant and accessible?
Lessons learned:
Thinking like this is what saved Dollhouse.
This practice effectively prohibits the use of alternative DNS roots, such as OpenNIC. In other words, it gives ICANN even stronger dominance over internet naming.
If you buy foo.com then you have a monopoly on that domain name. No one else even has a chance at taking it from you without your permission. As a result, you can fix your price based on how desperate you think they are, which is also a sign that something is badly wrong with the market.
ICANN is doing the right thing by making domains affordable; a net presence shouldn't cost very much at all. The system is broken, though - namely, they need better defenses against abusers like yourself.
It bothers me that:
a) there's only one store you can buy domains from (an ICANN registrar)
b) domains are unique. Some domains are inherently worthless, e.g. wqrjqiofmnioqfmacwqx.com (who's going to want to remember that?), and some domains are worth far, far more to the people who would be interested in them
c) domains are cheap enough that buying them by the thousands for investment purposes is feasible
If any one of these were not the case, the system wouldn't be as open to gaming as it is now. We need an alternative to the monopoly-prone single DNS system that encourages this crap. The purpose of DNS is to make resources easy to find, not to provide a market for profiteering.
The first-come-first-served isn't the problem, it's the cheapness issue. Because (tld's aside) each domain is unique, it is ridiculously, absurdly cheap for you to obtain a monopoly over that resource. People don't care about buying, selling, and commoditizing rare things (baseball cards, pieces of land, etc.) because those are extremely expensive. But domains are sold from the registrars at such a cheap rate that you can buy something unique and potentially extremely valuable at a low price.
Plain and simple, you shouldn't be allowed to sell domains for more than you paid from the registrar. Otherwise the Internet belongs to the highest bidder, and despite being a libertarian I see that as destructive for a global shared information resource.
Also, I'm marking you as a foe, because the Internet would be better off without squatters.
Just because you hate what happened doesn't make it a hate crime.
Is the language named after Axum, Ethiopia and its famous obelisks?
the 3rd party picks were nothing but novelty candidates.
By which you mean they aren't going to win? Yes, everyone knows that, and they never will win if people don't vote for them in spite of the odds.
Let's not forget that the primary objective of members of the government, moreso than any individual item on their agendas, is the preservation of their own jobs. This means keeping around the two-party system that gets them elected.
Between the fear of the GOP that the Democrats spread and the fear of the Democrats that the GOP spreads, there's enough fear going around to keep the majority of the country locked into the two-party system.
In the last three elections, all of which have been very close, the majority of people who voted for the loser said they did so not because they liked their candidate, but in order to prevent the other guy from winning. Those strike me as "wasted votes," far moreso than votes for third party candidates.
If you want to break the cycle and change the system, it's simple: have the courage to vote for the candidate you like the most, regardless of his popularity.
If the game were specifically about the death of that woman's husband, or specifically included that soldier's name and likeness, then I could understand your complaint. However, the game is about an event in history. Recent history, but still history. History is owned by no one.
Implicit statements of parent:
And, because I have karma to burn...