Democracy was also invented in Europe (by Greeks and Celts, later adopted by the Romans), does that mean the US can't be a democracy?? Oh wait..
Anyway, at present the biggest part of the internet is outside the US so control by the US government would be ridiculous.
Another bad property of the US is that it has too much political power in the world, and is thus hated passionately by some, and is untrustworthy at best to many other countries. This should be enough of an argument in itself to keep the US government from controlling the global internet.
Individual governments? They just all create their own great firewall around them, eliminating the current free exchange of information. There are always a few bad apples. There was kiddie and beastie porn before the web, and it'll probably be there if the web goes away.
The internet is the first medium that allows users to publish information themselves outside the control of the government, and without the need for enormous capital investment. This is threatening for many governments an corps, but will in the long term only benefit the world as a whole. Keep the internet free!
Even with binary-only drivers it's still possible to patch them. There are literally countless keygens and crack-patches out there for commercial software. Hacking a binary driver in this way should be similar, whether it's legal is not the point here. Unless of course the binary is encrypted in some clever way at the hardware level, degrading performance even more and making patching difficult. Oh wait.. isn't that what Trusted Computing is all about? *shudders*
There doesn't have to be any 'before' since time doesn't pass without space. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the big bang was the culmination of a previous collapse of loads of matter into a single point. God doesn't have to necessarily be in this picture.. it's hard enough to do science without religion interfering.
Re:Cairo, hmm, that has been a Windows codename
on
Xr Renamed to Cairo
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· Score: 1
Not Win9x, rather Win2K/NT5. Win95 was called Chicago (the beta had a 'welcome to Chicago' bootsplash), with WinXP/Longhorn they started moving from cities to mountains. XP was called Whistler, Longhorn (if I'm nog mistaken) is Blackcomb.
Re:sourceforge links and doom trivia
on
Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
This same feeling springs to mind when I fire up Exult on my FreeBSD box. It's a new engine to run the old but wonderful Ultima VII games. I'm ever so happy I actually bought Ultima IX back then, which included the whole series. I ditched IX itself pretty quickly, but spent literally months on the classics IV, V, VI and VII parts 1 and 2. Even built a 'new' old PC for them, a 486SX-33 with a Soundblaster 1.5 in it.
The Ariane V crashed not due to the rocket itself being unreliable but due to human error. The Ariane V accidentally got guidance software from its predecessor uploaded into its systems which caused the rocket overcorrect its trajectory, steering it too much off its course too quickly. The resulting forces of a blazing engine pushing against an overtilted rocket did the rest: it ruptured and exploded. Had the Ariane V's construction been at fault, it would have momst likely exploded much sooner. The accident happened approx 30 seconds after ignition. I'm not an expert, but my gut feeling tells me that if a rocket survives its first 30 seconds, its construction is solid. The software error was easily corrected, so now the Ariane 5 should have no problems as a reliable launch vehicle. If the Ariane IV is anything to go by, NASA will be hard pushed to find a better alternative.
Most mainboard RAID controllers offload their work to the CPU anyway, which offers no performance gain over vinum. Vinum, however, is a lot more flexible than most onboard RAID controllers I've seen. It performs MUCH better than the FastTrack100 on my slightly aging Asus A7V266. I don't have the exact hard numbers ready to back this claim up, but I did benchmark it and it proved to be much faster.
Vinum isn't a bad system at all, and most fileservers are overpowered in the CPU department anyway. An Athlon XP can easily do RAID calculations as fast as an average hardware controller. (Note, I'm not talking about top-end SCSI RAID systems here, just the low to mid end IDE-RAID controllers).
Ah great, put a G5 on a 33MHz. PCI bus.. that'll give just great performance! I'd rather reverse it and have one of those two G5's emulate x86 to run XP stuff in a window.. probably much faster than the G5 pci card. However, everything I need is available natively for OSX so I'm getting ready to finally switch and use those G5's properly! XP is a major dog in my eXPerience anyway, I won't miss it!
pictures could be about 40kb on average each, and it's easy to get 1000's of those. 500MB+ is great for DivX movies, which also come in the pr0n variety.
Vacuum tubes and Beta systems are still being made and used. The funny thing is: they're in high end devices these days. Joe Shmoe uses transistors, audiophiles use amps with tubes. Joe Shmoe uses VHS, broadcasting agencies use BetaCam (if they haven't transitioned to full digital yet). Joe Shmoe uses Windows XP, 1337 H4x0rz and middle aged men with foot-long beards use Linux..;o)
Last time I checked here in the Netherlands (15,500,000 inhabitants) there were over 20,000 wiretaps conducted per year on average. I may be slightly off since the number comes from my own foggy memory, but 1350 for a country with at least an order of magnitude more citizens.. and a paranoid administration? I don't think so.
Explosions are rapid combustions. They require heat, fuel and oxygen. Our atmosphere has oxygen, the moon doesn't even have an atmosphere. With oxygen missing, the bomb will simply drop and lie still forever and the mission will fail."Houston, we made a boo boo"
Whatever happened to the brilliant people who put the Pioneer probes into space? Now THOSE were feats of engineering!
Does a smartcard actually run a Java VM? I've always been under the impression that smartcards contain only data, and that applications run on the machines you plug your card into. Java-based smartcards sound like marketing speak to me really.
We just need a mod for Windows that turns your cursor into a rocket launcher. How's that for feeling powerful when you blast an offending PID out the back of your screen.. Also, the satisfying sound of an explosion and a dying scream on the part of the dying PID would be nice in 5.1 surround.
Of course rights are alienable. Want proof? There's a really sweet prison camp somewhere in Cuba where a big democratic state stashes people for arbitrary lengths of time without charging them of any crime and without prospect toward a swift trial.
It's very easy to alienate these human rights if they're not enforced. Human rights are not some kind of natural constant that gets enforced by the laws of physics. Humans conceived these rights, so humans should take the effort to enforce them. If that doesn't happen, those same humans could take the rights away just as easily as they were formulated.
I commented on my points in quite a few replies on this thread already. If you care for discussion on this subject I suggest you read those replies as well.
(just to throw another slightly out-of-whack example: what if aliens took over here? Where would you think our 'human rights' would suddenly go? In quite a similar way the most propsperous democracies of the present day used to trade slaves legally.)
Fundamental rights are being taken away or at least being altered in a negative way in the most archetypical democratic state this world currently has: the US. We debate about it a lot here on slashdot. I'm hinting at freedom of speech versus copyrights and things like the Patriot Act.
I think your analogy of rights and the principles of engineering/physics is somewhat flawed. Physics are beyond our control. We can't for instance change the value of the gravitational constant because think it sucks how we have to put so much fuel into our space rockets. What we can change however, is how a society deals with free speech of its citizens, or the citizens' right to bear arms or any other right.
Some of these rights are so fundamental to a democracy that it would be very counterproductive to remove them. For instance, remove free press and the building of any democracy comes down. Remove the right to bear arms, as long as there is no violent military coup (you'd have to weigh probability of such a coup against society's tolerance of violent crime). What I mean to illustrate is that these rights are in place to uphold the system of government. Anarchy is a nasty condition, so we collectively do the wisest thing for now and keep democracy in place and stable by not touching these rights.
Just the fact that we don't tamper with them doesn't mean that they're absolute. We created them, and therefore we can un-create them. Not so with physics since we didn't create physics.
Now I'm not denouncing democracy or the concept of justice and morals as they stand. They function, and we fare reasonably well following their principles. It took us centuries to recover democracy from its origin (the Celts, not Greeks as is popularly believed). Communism tried to challenge it and failed because it smothers creativity and innovation (I explicitly do NOT mean stalinist/maoist dictatorships!). There simply is no better system.. yet.. But once a better system than democracy crops up -and there's no telling if or when that will happen- it will probably have its very own set of ground rules that differs from what we're used to now. I'll stick with democracy for now, but it's not sacred. It actually strikes me as funny how this whole subject seems like some sort af taboo.. I never get this many replies to my posts.;o)
Your points are valid and I agree with them, but morals don't substitute rights. Humans indeed have a natural aversion against killing eachother. This only means they are less likely to do it than if they didn't have this set of morals, or collective survival instinct.
My point was about inalienable rights, which in my view you don't have since they come from governments. Governments are transient, even though we may not believe it when it concerns our own present day government. This also means that the rights they grant their citizens are transient. Currently I'd agree that democracy is the best system of government available and the rights associated with it make very good sense in the context of a democracy. But who knows, maybe in two or three centuries some clever person shouts out with a radically new idea that revolutionises goverment as we know it (a bit like communism, but this time something that actually does work). It's very likely that basic rights from current democratic constitutions need to change at least somewhat in such a case. Communism (just hypothetically assuming it would work) needs a different set of ground rules from a democracy.. and so will probably any future 'revolution'.
Of course you have these rights (if you're a US-citizen), they are granted to you by your government. What I tried to say is that the whole concept of a 'right' was invented by people, meaning that people(=the government in this case) eventually will define what your 'rights' are. In this case you're quoting the US constitution and declaration of independance. Those rights apply to citizens of the US. Elsewhere in the world governments are based on similar documents but their contents deviate from the ones you quote. This means citizens of the United Kingdom have slightly different rights. Here in Holland for instance we have a democracy, but not the right to bear arms. However when these governments disappear, and they will because nothing is infinite, so will the rights they granted. We shouldn't be under the illusion that we're the pinnacle of civilisation and there is none higher. We just haven't thought of a better system yet and 'absolute rights' change as history goes on.
These happen to be the rights that come from the US constitution if I'm not mistaken. I don't mean to flame the US or anything, but these 'rights' were all invented by people. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. Your government has to grant you this right, and if you're lucky you live in a place where the people elect this government so you can have _some_ influence on the rights you get. Whoever thinks they somehow have a _right_ to live, is wrong. It's just that under most present day governments people are denied the right to kill you by a mechanism called law and there's a sanction to keep them from violating this law. There's a difference there.
Legislature is all man-made, and thus imperfect. Personally, being an atheist, I'm happy to be here and make the best of things while I'm here.. and I try to play nice with my neighbors. But I'm not under the illusion that I have any absolute rights. There is only law that keeps people from doing things that are counterproductive to the big picture or threaten the government that imposes these laws.
So in short you don't have a right to live, you have a right to not be killed deliberately by another person.
You can find information about that with CEDAR, the groups of people that actualy does the collecting of these 'taxes'. It has information about Stichting Thuiskopie and is established at:
Slashdot Mirror
Democracy was also invented in Europe (by Greeks and Celts, later adopted by the Romans), does that mean the US can't be a democracy?? Oh wait..
Anyway, at present the biggest part of the internet is outside the US so control by the US government would be ridiculous.
Another bad property of the US is that it has too much political power in the world, and is thus hated passionately by some, and is untrustworthy at best to many other countries. This should be enough of an argument in itself to keep the US government from controlling the global internet.
Individual governments? They just all create their own great firewall around them, eliminating the current free exchange of information. There are always a few bad apples. There was kiddie and beastie porn before the web, and it'll probably be there if the web goes away.
The internet is the first medium that allows users to publish information themselves outside the control of the government, and without the need for enormous capital investment. This is threatening for many governments an corps, but will in the long term only benefit the world as a whole. Keep the internet free!
Even with binary-only drivers it's still possible to patch them. There are literally countless keygens and crack-patches out there for commercial software. Hacking a binary driver in this way should be similar, whether it's legal is not the point here. Unless of course the binary is encrypted in some clever way at the hardware level, degrading performance even more and making patching difficult. Oh wait.. isn't that what Trusted Computing is all about? *shudders*
There doesn't have to be any 'before' since time doesn't pass without space. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the big bang was the culmination of a previous collapse of loads of matter into a single point. God doesn't have to necessarily be in this picture.. it's hard enough to do science without religion interfering.
Not Win9x, rather Win2K/NT5. Win95 was called Chicago (the beta had a 'welcome to Chicago' bootsplash), with WinXP/Longhorn they started moving from cities to mountains. XP was called Whistler, Longhorn (if I'm nog mistaken) is Blackcomb.
This same feeling springs to mind when I fire up Exult on my FreeBSD box. It's a new engine to run the old but wonderful Ultima VII games. I'm ever so happy I actually bought Ultima IX back then, which included the whole series. I ditched IX itself pretty quickly, but spent literally months on the classics IV, V, VI and VII parts 1 and 2. Even built a 'new' old PC for them, a 486SX-33 with a Soundblaster 1.5 in it.
No problem, they just change their name to iKea and become a Certified Apple Solution Provider.
The Ariane V crashed not due to the rocket itself being unreliable but due to human error. The Ariane V accidentally got guidance software from its predecessor uploaded into its systems which caused the rocket overcorrect its trajectory, steering it too much off its course too quickly. The resulting forces of a blazing engine pushing against an overtilted rocket did the rest: it ruptured and exploded. Had the Ariane V's construction been at fault, it would have momst likely exploded much sooner. The accident happened approx 30 seconds after ignition. I'm not an expert, but my gut feeling tells me that if a rocket survives its first 30 seconds, its construction is solid.
The software error was easily corrected, so now the Ariane 5 should have no problems as a reliable launch vehicle. If the Ariane IV is anything to go by, NASA will be hard pushed to find a better alternative.
Most mainboard RAID controllers offload their work to the CPU anyway, which offers no performance gain over vinum. Vinum, however, is a lot more flexible than most onboard RAID controllers I've seen. It performs MUCH better than the FastTrack100 on my slightly aging Asus A7V266. I don't have the exact hard numbers ready to back this claim up, but I did benchmark it and it proved to be much faster. Vinum isn't a bad system at all, and most fileservers are overpowered in the CPU department anyway. An Athlon XP can easily do RAID calculations as fast as an average hardware controller. (Note, I'm not talking about top-end SCSI RAID systems here, just the low to mid end IDE-RAID controllers).
Ah great, put a G5 on a 33MHz. PCI bus.. that'll give just great performance! I'd rather reverse it and have one of those two G5's emulate x86 to run XP stuff in a window.. probably much faster than the G5 pci card. However, everything I need is available natively for OSX so I'm getting ready to finally switch and use those G5's properly! XP is a major dog in my eXPerience anyway, I won't miss it!
pictures could be about 40kb on average each, and it's easy to get 1000's of those.
500MB+ is great for DivX movies, which also come in the pr0n variety.
Yes she does, she's called Dusk and is your average gothic-esque-urban type. Check the new demos.
Vacuum tubes and Beta systems are still being made and used. The funny thing is: they're in high end devices these days. Joe Shmoe uses transistors, audiophiles use amps with tubes. Joe Shmoe uses VHS, broadcasting agencies use BetaCam (if they haven't transitioned to full digital yet). Joe Shmoe uses Windows XP, 1337 H4x0rz and middle aged men with foot-long beards use Linux.. ;o)
Last time I checked here in the Netherlands (15,500,000 inhabitants) there were over 20,000 wiretaps conducted per year on average. I may be slightly off since the number comes from my own foggy memory, but 1350 for a country with at least an order of magnitude more citizens.. and a paranoid administration? I don't think so.
Explosions are rapid combustions. They require heat, fuel and oxygen. Our atmosphere has oxygen, the moon doesn't even have an atmosphere. With oxygen missing, the bomb will simply drop and lie still forever and the mission will fail."Houston, we made a boo boo"
Whatever happened to the brilliant people who put the Pioneer probes into space? Now THOSE were feats of engineering!
--insert obligatory BSD-is-dying blurb here with every instance of BSD replaced by 'Terrorism'--
Commodity 64.. did anyone except myself read this as Commodore 64???
Yay for IPv6.. but their methods sound very totalitarian.
Does a smartcard actually run a Java VM? I've always been under the impression that smartcards contain only data, and that applications run on the machines you plug your card into. Java-based smartcards sound like marketing speak to me really.
We just need a mod for Windows that turns your cursor into a rocket launcher. How's that for feeling powerful when you blast an offending PID out the back of your screen.. Also, the satisfying sound of an explosion and a dying scream on the part of the dying PID would be nice in 5.1 surround.
Of course rights are alienable. Want proof? There's a really sweet prison camp somewhere in Cuba where a big democratic state stashes people for arbitrary lengths of time without charging them of any crime and without prospect toward a swift trial.
It's very easy to alienate these human rights if they're not enforced. Human rights are not some kind of natural constant that gets enforced by the laws of physics. Humans conceived these rights, so humans should take the effort to enforce them. If that doesn't happen, those same humans could take the rights away just as easily as they were formulated.
I commented on my points in quite a few replies on this thread already. If you care for discussion on this subject I suggest you read those replies as well.
(just to throw another slightly out-of-whack example: what if aliens took over here? Where would you think our 'human rights' would suddenly go? In quite a similar way the most propsperous democracies of the present day used to trade slaves legally.)
Fundamental rights are being taken away or at least being altered in a negative way in the most archetypical democratic state this world currently has: the US. We debate about it a lot here on slashdot. I'm hinting at freedom of speech versus copyrights and things like the Patriot Act.
;o)
I think your analogy of rights and the principles of engineering/physics is somewhat flawed. Physics are beyond our control. We can't for instance change the value of the gravitational constant because think it sucks how we have to put so much fuel into our space rockets. What we can change however, is how a society deals with free speech of its citizens, or the citizens' right to bear arms or any other right.
Some of these rights are so fundamental to a democracy that it would be very counterproductive to remove them. For instance, remove free press and the building of any democracy comes down. Remove the right to bear arms, as long as there is no violent military coup (you'd have to weigh probability of such a coup against society's tolerance of violent crime). What I mean to illustrate is that these rights are in place to uphold the system of government. Anarchy is a nasty condition, so we collectively do the wisest thing for now and keep democracy in place and stable by not touching these rights.
Just the fact that we don't tamper with them doesn't mean that they're absolute. We created them, and therefore we can un-create them. Not so with physics since we didn't create physics.
Now I'm not denouncing democracy or the concept of justice and morals as they stand. They function, and we fare reasonably well following their principles. It took us centuries to recover democracy from its origin (the Celts, not Greeks as is popularly believed). Communism tried to challenge it and failed because it smothers creativity and innovation (I explicitly do NOT mean stalinist/maoist dictatorships!). There simply is no better system.. yet.. But once a better system than democracy crops up -and there's no telling if or when that will happen- it will probably have its very own set of ground rules that differs from what we're used to now. I'll stick with democracy for now, but it's not sacred. It actually strikes me as funny how this whole subject seems like some sort af taboo.. I never get this many replies to my posts.
Your points are valid and I agree with them, but morals don't substitute rights. Humans indeed have a natural aversion against killing eachother. This only means they are less likely to do it than if they didn't have this set of morals, or collective survival instinct.
My point was about inalienable rights, which in my view you don't have since they come from governments. Governments are transient, even though we may not believe it when it concerns our own present day government. This also means that the rights they grant their citizens are transient. Currently I'd agree that democracy is the best system of government available and the rights associated with it make very good sense in the context of a democracy. But who knows, maybe in two or three centuries some clever person shouts out with a radically new idea that revolutionises goverment as we know it (a bit like communism, but this time something that actually does work). It's very likely that basic rights from current democratic constitutions need to change at least somewhat in such a case. Communism (just hypothetically assuming it would work) needs a different set of ground rules from a democracy.. and so will probably any future 'revolution'.
Of course you have these rights (if you're a US-citizen), they are granted to you by your government. What I tried to say is that the whole concept of a 'right' was invented by people, meaning that people(=the government in this case) eventually will define what your 'rights' are. In this case you're quoting the US constitution and declaration of independance. Those rights apply to citizens of the US. Elsewhere in the world governments are based on similar documents but their contents deviate from the ones you quote. This means citizens of the United Kingdom have slightly different rights. Here in Holland for instance we have a democracy, but not the right to bear arms. However when these governments disappear, and they will because nothing is infinite, so will the rights they granted. We shouldn't be under the illusion that we're the pinnacle of civilisation and there is none higher. We just haven't thought of a better system yet and 'absolute rights' change as history goes on.
These happen to be the rights that come from the US constitution if I'm not mistaken. I don't mean to flame the US or anything, but these 'rights' were all invented by people. There is no such thing as an inalienable right. Your government has to grant you this right, and if you're lucky you live in a place where the people elect this government so you can have _some_ influence on the rights you get. Whoever thinks they somehow have a _right_ to live, is wrong. It's just that under most present day governments people are denied the right to kill you by a mechanism called law and there's a sanction to keep them from violating this law. There's a difference there.
Legislature is all man-made, and thus imperfect. Personally, being an atheist, I'm happy to be here and make the best of things while I'm here.. and I try to play nice with my neighbors. But I'm not under the illusion that I have any absolute rights. There is only law that keeps people from doing things that are counterproductive to the big picture or threaten the government that imposes these laws.
So in short you don't have a right to live, you have a right to not be killed deliberately by another person.
You can find information about that with CEDAR, the groups of people that actualy does the collecting of these 'taxes'. It has information about Stichting Thuiskopie and is established at:
Siriusdreef 22-28
2130KB Hoofddorp
Good luck getting your 0,14 back though..