Your one person. He meant everyone.... Let me give you an example. I used to work on a coworkers computer in my spare time for a little extra money. She only liked Mozilla (and later firefox). Her husband only liked Opera 6. (literally one version) He would not switch off opera or let me upgrade it. He complained that anything other than the browser he knew was too hard.
So you're making generalised comments, and criticising a reply based on only being one person - yet your arguments are based on anecdotal evidence of one user? It sounds like you're annoyed by this experience, and taking it out on the program/users in general. (Btw, I've got Firefox installed too, but I prefer Opera. I was using Opera long before Firefox was around and it became "trendy" to switch from IE.)
Yes. Now I realize that is the charm of opera for some, but the masses hate it. Its similar to Mac OS X that way.
The masses use Internet Explorer, so I'm not sure how that means anything.
And it's interesting you compare to Mac OS X - I would say the exact opposite. Mac OS X is more like Firefox, in that despite being in a niche, it's still worshipped here on Slashdot, and if anyone says anything critical, it's guaranteed to get modded down. Yet bizarrely this doesn't apply to other niche OSs/software - whenever these are mentioned, it's "Why should I use this?" or "This is crap", and you're guaranteed +5 insightful. Opera is not comparable to Mac OS X at all.
Yeah, fuck thirty years of HCI research. Who the fuck wants consistency? I want programs that look like pools of slime and oranges and have eyes everywhere!
With comments like "pools of slime", I appear to not be using the same Opera as you.
Care to provide some examples? By all means there may be valid criticisms, but you need to specify what the problems are. Vague comments like the OP made, if made about Firefox or other software, would get modded trolling, not +5 insightful.
A phone is easily lost, since people carry them around, they can fall out of a pocket.
If a phone is lost, then you might say it's reasonable. But the fact that some people are careless idiots does not stop it being an invasion of privacy when someone has to forceably take my phone.
Before you can say your privacy is invaded, you had to have an expectation of privacy in the first place. If you take your phone to school, and you know it may be taken by the staff there, then any reasonable expectaction of privacy that you could have may be rather minimal.
You're confusing two completely different meanings of the word expect - see http://www.answers.com/expect&r=67 , you are confusing "To consider likely or certain" with "To consider reasonable or due".
When people talk about expectations of privacy (e.g., expectation of privacy with respect to CCTVs in public places), it is the latter meaning. You are talking about the former meaning. And as the other poster replying points out, it is ludicrous to suggest that something is no longer an invasion of privacy, just because you know it might happen.
By your logic, mandatory strip-searches by school or workplaces, the Government reading everyone's email, and yes, rummaging through your house, would not be invasions of privacy.
One issue however: if a password isn't required to access the information, then it may not be that private anyway -- a stranger could just as easily access the information, if the owner lost the phone, and this might be part of an effort to return the phone to its rightful owner.
I don't agree with this - assuming we're not talking about a case where the phone is left lying around in public.
A stranger cannot easily access the information - he has to steal the phone first. If I read through your personal diary, or went into your house and rummaged through your belongings, are you saying that isn't an invasion of privacy because they weren't "password protected"? Of course not. There's nothing magic about passwords - the concept of privacy existed long before we could password protect things.
And there was me thinking that macro virus is a type of virus. And that's not me being pedantic - your distinction is not one shared by the common usage, where things like macro viruses are commonly referred to as viruses.
Furthermore, by this logic, the plague of viruses which affect Windows users over email are not "Windows viruses" but "Outlook viruses". Yet Mac fans don't seem to note this distinction everytime a big "virus" hits Windows users via email.
Untrue. This also helps greatly in cases where a trojan horse is masquerading as a.jpg or smileys. or text attachment. It gives a user a chance to say "Hey, that's not my Aunt Clara's new car--I don't want to do that!"
But that's nothing to do with typing in passwords. Windows will also let a user know if it isn't really a.jpg, and ask the user if they really want to open an attachment, so they have a chance to say "Hey, that's not my Aunt Clara's new car--I don't want to do that!" This isn't changed whether you have to type a password, or click a "Yes I really want to open this" button.
Not to nitpick, but what's stopping you from running multiple apps while you're palying games on a Mac running windows under bootcamp? IT"S F@#KING Normal WINDOWS XP !! You could do whatever you wanted, the same as your normal Windows box. Geez for all I care you can run windows all day long on it
Why yes, you could run games and applications on Windows, and not bother at all with dual booting into an OS that's not up to the job... that was my point.
but then when the opportunity to do some real work does come up, you have choice whether to work in OS X or Windows. Where's the downside to that? Especially considering for comparable hardware, it would cost you the same.
Using some applications some of the time, and other applications on another OS has its own set of problems - for example, email and other data being stored in different formats, or logs being split across two programs. Not to mention if I'm doing something more serious, in terms of expense (buying two sets of applications), and time and hassle spent learning two sets of applications. And with things like software development, that's a lot less likely to be an option at all.
And you still revert back to the problem here - even if I'm doing some "real work", I might want to take a quick 5 minute breather doing something else, and I do not expect to have to shut everything, reboot, then later reboot again, and have to reopen everything. That is unacceptable.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with dual booting for novelty value or for rare occasions when you might need to use another OS. What gets me is people who seem to think that continually rebooting into another OS as part of your necessary day-to-day usage is seen as an acceptable solution. It's not.
I know the hassles with multi-booting because I've done it before. E.g., I once had Windows, BeOS and Linux installed, but I wouldn't advocate this by saying things like "Look, BeOS lets you run Windows and Linux applications too!"
And I want global peace, everyone to be a millionaire, and every child to have a pony. Michrech, let me be the first to tell you that you have to make some choices in this world. You can't have it all.
But that's just it - you can have it. If you run an OS that supports the programs you wish to run, rather than requiring dual booting.
And as for your "60 seconds" comment above, it's more than that when you include the time to shutdown and reopen all my applications. Also, those 60 seconds add up if I want to pause my game to check something in an application (e.g., a webpage, email, someone wants to chat with me).
Furthermore, there is no way to run my applications at the same time as games (it's useful to have email checking, chat programs, or music programs running).
Back in the 80s and early 90s it was common for games to not be able to be run at the same time as applications, and you had to reboot between games. The only reason it was bearable then was because people weren't online, and tended not to use their computer for more than one thing at a time.
I don't see why Boot Camp has suddenly made skipping back 15 years of progress so trendy.
Re:Ummm, I think they forgot to mention someone...
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The Man Behind MySpace
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· Score: 1
I don't know if Friendster was the first SN site, but I think it deserves credit for launching the phenomenon.
I'd say that SixDegrees didn't have the same success because the social networking aspect was all there was to it - you could say you knew other users, and that was that. Okay, there were forums, but there seemed no point using those over email or whatever else we used. LiveJournal and other similar sites took off because they combined the social networking aspect with a journal, and a convenient way of reading other journals. The "social networking" was just a secondary aspect of getting this to work.
I don't know why MySpace became so much more popular - possibly because of the ultra-customisation allowed on the pages.
Indeed, by the logic that people apply to Macs, Opera is the most secure browser because hardly anyone uses it, and everyone should switch to using that.
except, on a Mac, before it does anything vicious you have to give your login password to the sudo command window.
And how will that help? If a user is willing to click to run untrusted programs, he is willing to type a password to do so. This will only help in cases where a user does not have the priviledge to install programs (which the OP explicitly discounted by saying "and has the right to install programs").
i have to disagree with you here, i recently (as in days ago) installed ubuntu (dapper) and win2k on my computer, and ubuntu was much easier to install, and after it did install, i was pretty much done. When I installed windows, i had to go through the pain of trying to download video card drivers at 800x600 (or was it even that?) and 8-bit color.
If anecdotal evidence of six year old operating systems is the standard: when I tried installing Red Hat at that time, the supplied video drivers were broken for my graphics card (would only run in 320x200!) I also tried Suse which at least offered me staggeringly huge resolutions such as 800x600, but random pixels would flicker. This isn't "the OS supplied drivers are unoptimised or lacking features" but "the OS supplied drivers are fundamentally broken". Windows 2000 meanwhile, and even Windows 98, worked out of the box.
Of course, I realise that anecdotal evidence isn't necessarily typical of everyone's situation, and I'm willing to accept that things may have improved in six years.
(And as an aside, the only OS I've seen handle installing drivers on PCs quickly and without having to keep accessing the OS disc everytime you change a bit of hardware was BeOS.)
Kind of a silly argument, don't you think? I certainly didn't have a choice where I went to school, nor did I actually force you to pay for my education. The state made you pay for it, not me.
You didn't choose to have a fire service, police service, army, road system or whatever else the state forces you to pay for, yet with all these things, including education, you benefit. Yes, you end up paying for things you might not choose to want - that's true of taxation and the concept of a state in general.
FWIW, I spent 7 years in a private school for which my parents paid. I then spent 5 years in college for which my family and I paid.
And people who have private health insurance still pay national insurance, and so on.
So both of your arguments apply to taxation in general.
Yes, there's an argument for saying you should only have to pay for things you both (a) benefit from and (b) chose to have, but that basically means you're doing away with the state altogether.
The remaining years (grade 8 - 12) my parents paid property tax, so really they were paying for my education there as well
Yes but in your system, they'd have to have paid far more for your education.
By the way, are you happy to receive no pension or any other help from the state when you retire, whilst people who have children do receive them? After all, it will be thanks to their children and the education they paid for that there'll be a workforce paying tax, and I don't see why you should benefit from that, when you wanted no part in that.
(I don't have children, nor do I intend to have them, by the way - but I see the benefits both that people have children, and that they are educated.)
If I make $10,000 in a year and I spend all I have, I put $10,000 into the economy, that's the minimum and maximum I can put in.
On the other hand lets say I make $10 million, and I spend meagerly. I only spend $1 mil on stuff, mere 10% of my income on stuff. Hardly miss it. I've still put $1 million into the economy, paying 100 of the first guy's salaries.
I think the point he was making was: If that $10 million was shared amongst 1,000 people who made $10,000 each, and they spent all they had, the amount put into the economy is 10 times greater.
Workers can work in the absence of capital. Capital is nothing in the absence of workers
But if you have a system where workers build the factory and make everything from scratch, that's still capitalism, it's just that the workers are also the investors. You are free to do such a thing in a capitalist society.
But in practice, even though ultimately everything comes from workers, it's not the same workers. Unless you are suggesting every worker must make everything from scratch, you need a way to transfer the results of their production.
So when workers make capital, are you saying they can't invest that capital, or if they do, they shouldn't be able to ask for anything in return for it? If some workers make a robot, where is the incentive for them to give it to some workers who want to use it in a factory?
The flaw in these criticisms of capitalism is in assuming there are two entirely separate classes of people: workers and capitalists - but workers may be capitalists, and capitalists will usually have been workers. The only unfairness is that some people may be born rich, and they can then be capitalists without working. But then rich people don't have to work even if they're not capitalists. This is a problem due to inheriting wealth, not capitalism.
A pure communism is moral and not capitalist since there is no self-interest (selfishness) nor any need for it. There's no need to rip anyone off or take advantage of anyone.
No self-interest? How is that achieved? The only way you could do this was to provide everyone with everything they wanted - but no economic system can do that. As you say, we need Star Trek replicators. It's not communism which gets rid of the self-interest - it's the replicators. In a society with unlimited resources, economics doesn't really have much meaning anymore.
There is no need for contracts that bind the consumer to the advantage of the vendor.
Well, just as people often confuse communism with communist states, don't confuse capitalism with the corporatism we see in the US. Contracts like this are state intervention, and not something inherent in capitalism.
I might as well propose another system: Moral capitalism. It works just like capitalism, but everyone is nice to each other.
See, it's easy to come up with moral systems when you can assume how people behave...
Re:Civ4 wasnt too good
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Quake is 10
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I played a little civ4, and i didnt like it much. The religion idea was interesting. It also was 3D... ??WHY?? wtf does it have to be 3d for??
But does being 3D detract from it? I haven't played Civ 4, but there are reasons for doing games in 3D even if the game doesn't need it from a user point of view - for example, generating graphics may be easier, if you don't have to store millions of frames in different orientations (I don't know if this applies to Civ 4).
Re:Next you'll be telling kids to get off your law
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Quake is 10
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Civ4 may not be the best example: the last two games haven't approached the production values of Alpha Centauri, which was crammed full of jaw-dropping cutscenes, eerie music, intelligent quotes (some fictional, some historical) for every building and tech, and an actual story.
Although not everyone likes that sort of thing. It's fine in something like an adventure or roleplay game, but I like Civilization as a strategy game which I can play over and over again - I don't want to see the same animations again and again, or even just the once.
I've yet to try Civ 4, though I do find Civ 3 to be a great improvement in gameplay over the previous versions.
They don't have a right to enter an open shop without a presumption of welcome, and without complying with the rules of the site. If the sign says: "no entrance unless wearing a tie", and you wear a tie, you're not allowed in, and you're tresspassing. It's their property; you have to obey their rules, or stay the hell off of it.
Was there a sign? He asked for access to the network, and was let straight in.
I'd be curious to know if anyone has ever been prosecuted for trespassing based on a sign. Stopped by a bouncer? Fair enough. Arrested for trespassing because you didn't notice a sign, when everyone else was allowed to walk in? Well, if that case has happened, I'd argue against that too.
Given how vast amounts of land, including that required to access certain places (like not just shops, but entire shopping malls) are turning private, it worries me how happy some people are to live in a world where you constantly have to check signs and TOS every street and bit of ground you walk down, even though it's full of other people, due to the risk that you individually might not be allowed.
The article specifically says that he was asked to leave but came back anyway. It was only then that he was arrested.
I saw that, but was he given a chance to leave the second time? There's a difference between refusing to leave, and coming back at a later point.
I'm not saying the guy's not being an idiot - but if a shop refused me service and asked me to leave, I would find it worrying if I can be arrested the moment I step back into the shop several months later, say.
That's just the kind of attitude that this generation of Stallman/Lessig influenced, wannabe hippee-communists has developed.
Before this degenerates into a communist-bashing argument, I should point out that I'm pro-capitalist and think communism would be a bad system. It should also be noted that there is nothing inherent in capitalism that says such things should be illegal.
So many people think that everything ought to be free and open that they forget to actually be free and open themselves. Look at it like this, am I free to just walk into your house just because you left the door unlocked? No, that's tresspass.
Similarly, though several magnitudes less, using a coffeee shop's open wireless network, or anyone's for that matter, just isn't right.
So, they are going to prosecute all of the people who entered the shop and used their wireless?
Although both private property, there is a big difference between a shop and a private home. Are you free to just walk into a shop just because they left the door open? Oh wait, you are. It's only trespass when they tell you to leave and you refuse.
The idea of providing an open AP is to encourage you to scratch the back of the coffee shop, not just abuse the service that they provide. When a business provides free access to some service there is an IMPLICIT understanding that one ought to throw some cheddar to th business for providing the service. This shouldn't be a question of law
We agree it shouldn't be a question of law. But I'm not even sure it's a moral issue. If someone hands out freebies in order to tempt people along, it's fair game that people might take the freebies without becoming a customer. Maybe it's nice to occasionally buy something if you really like it, but I don't think it's morally wrong to not do so (and do we know that this person never ever bought something from the shop?)
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Your one person. He meant everyone. ... Let me give you an example. I used to work on a coworkers computer in my spare time for a little extra money. She only liked Mozilla (and later firefox). Her husband only liked Opera 6. (literally one version) He would not switch off opera or let me upgrade it. He complained that anything other than the browser he knew was too hard.
So you're making generalised comments, and criticising a reply based on only being one person - yet your arguments are based on anecdotal evidence of one user? It sounds like you're annoyed by this experience, and taking it out on the program/users in general. (Btw, I've got Firefox installed too, but I prefer Opera. I was using Opera long before Firefox was around and it became "trendy" to switch from IE.)
Yes. Now I realize that is the charm of opera for some, but the masses hate it. Its similar to Mac OS X that way.
The masses use Internet Explorer, so I'm not sure how that means anything.
And it's interesting you compare to Mac OS X - I would say the exact opposite. Mac OS X is more like Firefox, in that despite being in a niche, it's still worshipped here on Slashdot, and if anyone says anything critical, it's guaranteed to get modded down. Yet bizarrely this doesn't apply to other niche OSs/software - whenever these are mentioned, it's "Why should I use this?" or "This is crap", and you're guaranteed +5 insightful. Opera is not comparable to Mac OS X at all.
Yeah, fuck thirty years of HCI research. Who the fuck wants consistency? I want programs that look like pools of slime and oranges and have eyes everywhere!
With comments like "pools of slime", I appear to not be using the same Opera as you.
Care to provide some examples? By all means there may be valid criticisms, but you need to specify what the problems are. Vague comments like the OP made, if made about Firefox or other software, would get modded trolling, not +5 insightful.
A phone is easily lost, since people carry them around, they can fall out of a pocket.
If a phone is lost, then you might say it's reasonable. But the fact that some people are careless idiots does not stop it being an invasion of privacy when someone has to forceably take my phone.
Before you can say your privacy is invaded, you had to have an expectation of privacy in the first place. If you take your phone to school, and you know it may be taken by the staff there, then any reasonable expectaction of privacy that you could have may be rather minimal.
You're confusing two completely different meanings of the word expect - see http://www.answers.com/expect&r=67 , you are confusing "To consider likely or certain" with "To consider reasonable or due".
When people talk about expectations of privacy (e.g., expectation of privacy with respect to CCTVs in public places), it is the latter meaning. You are talking about the former meaning. And as the other poster replying points out, it is ludicrous to suggest that something is no longer an invasion of privacy, just because you know it might happen.
By your logic, mandatory strip-searches by school or workplaces, the Government reading everyone's email, and yes, rummaging through your house, would not be invasions of privacy.
One issue however: if a password isn't required to access the information, then it may not be that private anyway -- a stranger could just as easily access the information, if the owner lost the phone, and this might be part of an effort to return the phone to its rightful owner.
I don't agree with this - assuming we're not talking about a case where the phone is left lying around in public.
A stranger cannot easily access the information - he has to steal the phone first. If I read through your personal diary, or went into your house and rummaged through your belongings, are you saying that isn't an invasion of privacy because they weren't "password protected"? Of course not. There's nothing magic about passwords - the concept of privacy existed long before we could password protect things.
By virus, we tend to mean virus, not macro-virus.
You have a Word virus. Not a Mac virus.
And there was me thinking that macro virus is a type of virus. And that's not me being pedantic - your distinction is not one shared by the common usage, where things like macro viruses are commonly referred to as viruses.
Furthermore, by this logic, the plague of viruses which affect Windows users over email are not "Windows viruses" but "Outlook viruses". Yet Mac fans don't seem to note this distinction everytime a big "virus" hits Windows users via email.
Untrue. This also helps greatly in cases where a trojan horse is masquerading as a .jpg or smileys. or text attachment. It gives a user a chance to say "Hey, that's not my Aunt Clara's new car--I don't want to do that!"
.jpg, and ask the user if they really want to open an attachment, so they have a chance to say "Hey, that's not my Aunt Clara's new car--I don't want to do that!" This isn't changed whether you have to type a password, or click a "Yes I really want to open this" button.
But that's nothing to do with typing in passwords. Windows will also let a user know if it isn't really a
A good OS gives its operator a second chance.
And Windows offers a second chance too.
Not to nitpick, but what's stopping you from running multiple apps while you're palying games on a Mac running windows under bootcamp? IT"S F@#KING Normal WINDOWS XP !! You could do whatever you wanted, the same as your normal Windows box.
Geez for all I care you can run windows all day long on it
Why yes, you could run games and applications on Windows, and not bother at all with dual booting into an OS that's not up to the job... that was my point.
but then when the opportunity to do some real work does come up, you have choice whether to work in OS X or Windows. Where's the downside to that? Especially considering for comparable hardware, it would cost you the same.
Using some applications some of the time, and other applications on another OS has its own set of problems - for example, email and other data being stored in different formats, or logs being split across two programs. Not to mention if I'm doing something more serious, in terms of expense (buying two sets of applications), and time and hassle spent learning two sets of applications. And with things like software development, that's a lot less likely to be an option at all.
And you still revert back to the problem here - even if I'm doing some "real work", I might want to take a quick 5 minute breather doing something else, and I do not expect to have to shut everything, reboot, then later reboot again, and have to reopen everything. That is unacceptable.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with dual booting for novelty value or for rare occasions when you might need to use another OS. What gets me is people who seem to think that continually rebooting into another OS as part of your necessary day-to-day usage is seen as an acceptable solution. It's not.
I know the hassles with multi-booting because I've done it before. E.g., I once had Windows, BeOS and Linux installed, but I wouldn't advocate this by saying things like "Look, BeOS lets you run Windows and Linux applications too!"
But they haven't, not for Windows. Because Microsoft hasn't shipped anything in the last five years.
We said six, not five. He compared to a version of Windows released before the one released in 2001.
And I want global peace, everyone to be a millionaire, and every child to have a pony. Michrech, let me be the first to tell you that you have to make some choices in this world. You can't have it all.
But that's just it - you can have it. If you run an OS that supports the programs you wish to run, rather than requiring dual booting.
And as for your "60 seconds" comment above, it's more than that when you include the time to shutdown and reopen all my applications. Also, those 60 seconds add up if I want to pause my game to check something in an application (e.g., a webpage, email, someone wants to chat with me).
Furthermore, there is no way to run my applications at the same time as games (it's useful to have email checking, chat programs, or music programs running).
Back in the 80s and early 90s it was common for games to not be able to be run at the same time as applications, and you had to reboot between games. The only reason it was bearable then was because people weren't online, and tended not to use their computer for more than one thing at a time.
I don't see why Boot Camp has suddenly made skipping back 15 years of progress so trendy.
I don't know if Friendster was the first SN site, but I think it deserves credit for launching the phenomenon.
Starting in 2002, it wasn't even close. LiveJournal began in 1999. The earliest I know of was SixDegrees.com, in 1997, though it no longer exists.
I'd say that SixDegrees didn't have the same success because the social networking aspect was all there was to it - you could say you knew other users, and that was that. Okay, there were forums, but there seemed no point using those over email or whatever else we used. LiveJournal and other similar sites took off because they combined the social networking aspect with a journal, and a convenient way of reading other journals. The "social networking" was just a secondary aspect of getting this to work.
I don't know why MySpace became so much more popular - possibly because of the ultra-customisation allowed on the pages.
Indeed, by the logic that people apply to Macs, Opera is the most secure browser because hardly anyone uses it, and everyone should switch to using that.
except, on a Mac, before it does anything vicious you have to give your login password to the sudo command window.
And how will that help? If a user is willing to click to run untrusted programs, he is willing to type a password to do so. This will only help in cases where a user does not have the priviledge to install programs (which the OP explicitly discounted by saying "and has the right to install programs").
i have to disagree with you here, i recently (as in days ago) installed ubuntu (dapper) and win2k on my computer, and ubuntu was much easier to install, and after it did install, i was pretty much done. When I installed windows, i had to go through the pain of trying to download video card drivers at 800x600 (or was it even that?) and 8-bit color.
If anecdotal evidence of six year old operating systems is the standard: when I tried installing Red Hat at that time, the supplied video drivers were broken for my graphics card (would only run in 320x200!) I also tried Suse which at least offered me staggeringly huge resolutions such as 800x600, but random pixels would flicker. This isn't "the OS supplied drivers are unoptimised or lacking features" but "the OS supplied drivers are fundamentally broken". Windows 2000 meanwhile, and even Windows 98, worked out of the box.
Of course, I realise that anecdotal evidence isn't necessarily typical of everyone's situation, and I'm willing to accept that things may have improved in six years.
(And as an aside, the only OS I've seen handle installing drivers on PCs quickly and without having to keep accessing the OS disc everytime you change a bit of hardware was BeOS.)
Having fire, police, army and roads around DO benefit me directly though.
Your education benefitted you directly too, I would hope.
Kind of a silly argument, don't you think? I certainly didn't have a choice where I went to school, nor did I actually force you to pay for my education. The state made you pay for it, not me.
You didn't choose to have a fire service, police service, army, road system or whatever else the state forces you to pay for, yet with all these things, including education, you benefit. Yes, you end up paying for things you might not choose to want - that's true of taxation and the concept of a state in general.
FWIW, I spent 7 years in a private school for which my parents paid. I then spent 5 years in college for which my family and I paid.
And people who have private health insurance still pay national insurance, and so on.
So both of your arguments apply to taxation in general.
Yes, there's an argument for saying you should only have to pay for things you both (a) benefit from and (b) chose to have, but that basically means you're doing away with the state altogether.
The remaining years (grade 8 - 12) my parents paid property tax, so really they were paying for my education there as well
Yes but in your system, they'd have to have paid far more for your education.
By the way, are you happy to receive no pension or any other help from the state when you retire, whilst people who have children do receive them? After all, it will be thanks to their children and the education they paid for that there'll be a workforce paying tax, and I don't see why you should benefit from that, when you wanted no part in that.
(I don't have children, nor do I intend to have them, by the way - but I see the benefits both that people have children, and that they are educated.)
They could for instance, disable access to MSN messenger from anyone located within the EU.
It would cripple the European economy overnight!
If I make $10,000 in a year and I spend all I have, I put $10,000 into the economy, that's the minimum and maximum I can put in.
On the other hand lets say I make $10 million, and I spend meagerly. I only spend $1 mil on stuff, mere 10% of my income on stuff. Hardly miss it. I've still put $1 million into the economy, paying 100 of the first guy's salaries.
I think the point he was making was: If that $10 million was shared amongst 1,000 people who made $10,000 each, and they spent all they had, the amount put into the economy is 10 times greater.
Consider this, on the "magic factory fairy":
Workers built the factory.
Workers can work in the absence of capital.
Capital is nothing in the absence of workers
But if you have a system where workers build the factory and make everything from scratch, that's still capitalism, it's just that the workers are also the investors. You are free to do such a thing in a capitalist society.
But in practice, even though ultimately everything comes from workers, it's not the same workers. Unless you are suggesting every worker must make everything from scratch, you need a way to transfer the results of their production.
So when workers make capital, are you saying they can't invest that capital, or if they do, they shouldn't be able to ask for anything in return for it? If some workers make a robot, where is the incentive for them to give it to some workers who want to use it in a factory?
The flaw in these criticisms of capitalism is in assuming there are two entirely separate classes of people: workers and capitalists - but workers may be capitalists, and capitalists will usually have been workers. The only unfairness is that some people may be born rich, and they can then be capitalists without working. But then rich people don't have to work even if they're not capitalists. This is a problem due to inheriting wealth, not capitalism.
I did Read The Fucking Article. Read The Fucking Comments before saying something that's already been discussed ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189204&cid=155 83219 ).
A pure communism is moral and not capitalist since there is no self-interest (selfishness) nor any need for it. There's no need to rip anyone off or take advantage of anyone.
No self-interest? How is that achieved? The only way you could do this was to provide everyone with everything they wanted - but no economic system can do that. As you say, we need Star Trek replicators. It's not communism which gets rid of the self-interest - it's the replicators. In a society with unlimited resources, economics doesn't really have much meaning anymore.
There is no need for contracts that bind the consumer to the advantage of the vendor.
Well, just as people often confuse communism with communist states, don't confuse capitalism with the corporatism we see in the US. Contracts like this are state intervention, and not something inherent in capitalism.
I might as well propose another system: Moral capitalism. It works just like capitalism, but everyone is nice to each other.
See, it's easy to come up with moral systems when you can assume how people behave...
I played a little civ4, and i didnt like it much. The religion idea was interesting. It also was 3D... ??WHY?? wtf does it have to be 3d for??
But does being 3D detract from it? I haven't played Civ 4, but there are reasons for doing games in 3D even if the game doesn't need it from a user point of view - for example, generating graphics may be easier, if you don't have to store millions of frames in different orientations (I don't know if this applies to Civ 4).
Civ4 may not be the best example: the last two games haven't approached the production values of Alpha Centauri, which was crammed full of jaw-dropping cutscenes, eerie music, intelligent quotes (some fictional, some historical) for every building and tech, and an actual story.
Although not everyone likes that sort of thing. It's fine in something like an adventure or roleplay game, but I like Civilization as a strategy game which I can play over and over again - I don't want to see the same animations again and again, or even just the once.
I've yet to try Civ 4, though I do find Civ 3 to be a great improvement in gameplay over the previous versions.
They don't have a right to enter an open shop without a presumption of welcome, and without complying with the rules of the site. If the sign says: "no entrance unless wearing a tie", and you wear a tie, you're not allowed in, and you're tresspassing. It's their property; you have to obey their rules, or stay the hell off of it.
Was there a sign? He asked for access to the network, and was let straight in.
I'd be curious to know if anyone has ever been prosecuted for trespassing based on a sign. Stopped by a bouncer? Fair enough. Arrested for trespassing because you didn't notice a sign, when everyone else was allowed to walk in? Well, if that case has happened, I'd argue against that too.
Given how vast amounts of land, including that required to access certain places (like not just shops, but entire shopping malls) are turning private, it worries me how happy some people are to live in a world where you constantly have to check signs and TOS every street and bit of ground you walk down, even though it's full of other people, due to the risk that you individually might not be allowed.
The article specifically says that he was asked to leave but came back anyway. It was only then that he was arrested.
I saw that, but was he given a chance to leave the second time? There's a difference between refusing to leave, and coming back at a later point.
I'm not saying the guy's not being an idiot - but if a shop refused me service and asked me to leave, I would find it worrying if I can be arrested the moment I step back into the shop several months later, say.
That's just the kind of attitude that this generation of Stallman/Lessig influenced, wannabe hippee-communists has developed.
Before this degenerates into a communist-bashing argument, I should point out that I'm pro-capitalist and think communism would be a bad system. It should also be noted that there is nothing inherent in capitalism that says such things should be illegal.
So many people think that everything ought to be free and open that they forget to actually be free and open themselves. Look at it like this, am I free to just walk into your house just because you left the door unlocked? No, that's tresspass.
Similarly, though several magnitudes less, using a coffeee shop's open wireless network, or anyone's for that matter, just isn't right.
So, they are going to prosecute all of the people who entered the shop and used their wireless?
Although both private property, there is a big difference between a shop and a private home. Are you free to just walk into a shop just because they left the door open? Oh wait, you are. It's only trespass when they tell you to leave and you refuse.
The idea of providing an open AP is to encourage you to scratch the back of the coffee shop, not just abuse the service that they provide. When a business provides free access to some service there is an IMPLICIT understanding that one ought to throw some cheddar to th business for providing the service. This shouldn't be a question of law
We agree it shouldn't be a question of law. But I'm not even sure it's a moral issue. If someone hands out freebies in order to tempt people along, it's fair game that people might take the freebies without becoming a customer. Maybe it's nice to occasionally buy something if you really like it, but I don't think it's morally wrong to not do so (and do we know that this person never ever bought something from the shop?)