bots that infect computers ever conflict with each other. Like Bot1 takes over a PC, then Bot2 comes along, and maybe they fight over that PC or its resources?
The topic is about abuses of the PATRIOT Act. The parent suggested Gitmo as an example of that. The next poster countered (correctly) that Gitmo would not be an example of an abuse via the PATRIOT Act. The next poster countered *that* point, in a somewhat inflammatory way, by suggesting that (I'm paraphrasing) it was "great" that the US could commit civil rights violations in another way. I responded by pointing out that since the issue is the PATRIOT Act, that his point is not a counter point to the point that Gitmo does not qualify as an abuse by way of the PATRIOT Act. Is it an abuse in general? Maybe. And if he had presented it as a tangential issue, rather than as a counter point to the post above him, it would have fit logically. The problem is that he presented it as a point to counter the point that Gitmo is not an example of a PATRIOT abuse. Of course, your post is just as illogical. Even if Gitmo is an abuse of the morals/values that are justice system should be based on, and while it may be interesting to abstract from the original point to talk about abuses in general, it cannot be demonstrated as an abuse under the PATRIOT Act. So don't present it as such.
To demonstrate, let's assume we are talking about the NCAA tournament bracket. And pretend I made the argument that "Notre Dame was robbed, they should be in the tournament because...". Then you came back and said, as a defense to the Notre Dame basketball team not being picked for the NCAA tournament, "Well, Auburn was shut out of the NCAA Football championship game so it's fair that Notre Dame was left out of the basketball tournament.". That would just be stupid, as a defense for why Notre Dame basketball was left out of the tournament. On the other hand, if you had abstracted to demonstrate some overall incompentance of the NCAA organization at large, and used the football championship process as an example of incompetance, it would be a more valid argument. It's all in the presentation I think.
The topic is about the PATRIOT act. Maybe we should talk about how conversation should have a topic, and that people must be on the same topic to have a conversation...
I suspect another reason for this trend, is a tendency for people to want to make themselves and their careers seem more important than they really are. If they can invent more diseases, they become more important.
Just did some googling (since I couldn't find my DM/Players guide right now), the last rule set I played with (and own the books for) was AD&D 2nd edition, I've been saying 3rd ed., but that was incorrect
Also read up more, and I guess we were playing with the D&D books after the split occured where you had Basic and Expert, as opposed to the AD&D set. I guess I've just gotten that confused with the word "advanced", thinking that "advanced" was another of those books in the Basic/Expert series.
It's been a while. The last I played was the AD&D 3rd edition. I had no idea they reverted the name back to plain old D&D.
Wasn't there, in one of the earlier rule sets of D&D, a series of rule books like "Basic", "Medium", "Advanced"? I seem to remember the first one was Basic, and I also seem to remember the advanced book, there may have been more than one in between.
In any case, I thought that the way D&D was set up a while back, was that there was a series of rule books, each book covering the character development rules for a set of levels, like "Basic" might have been for levels 1-6 or 1-10, something like that, then after that level you used a different book in the series to define the character development/progress.
Maybe I'm just making that up...but I'm pretty sure I remember it being set up something like that when I started playing in the med to late 80's.
This book addresses that issue, to some degree anyway. One of the things I recall (it's been a while since I read it) is about support. Let's say you develop some Open Source software that becomes popular. As I recall, Eric Raymond argues that you can essentially make money from support related to that software. For example, assume you had developed Apache. You could advertise that no one else is as capable as you at implementing somethng which uses Apache, since you (presumably) know it better than anyone else.
Didn't know that, thanks. It's been a while for me, but I remember when "Advanced D&D" was just another book in the D&D rules set. Then D&D was dropped, and it was all called AD&D (2nd edition?). I haven't played since the change you mention happened.
Um...no. Dungeons and Dragons is the direct precursor to AD&D. It was played with pencil/paper just like AD&D, except with simpler rules, but basically the same. Further, most gamers generically say "D&D", even when really referring to "AD&D".
Your statement that the only difference between governmental involvement and private enterprise being that some corporations got involved...
I meant that in reference to *how* things were run. In other words, government was still heavily involved (at least in the case of the California "deregulation" and apparently in the case of the Bolivia water issue, at least from the link you posted originally), therfore, it wasn't really "deregulation". I don't disagree (and didn't intend to imply otherwise) that the overall water situation got worse.
The blackouts in California was certainly caused by the thing people (politicians) called deregulation. However, my argument is that in fact it was not degregulation or privatization. The state remained heavily involved in the distribution of energy even after it was supposedly deregulated. Now, I'm not trying to start an argument on how involved government should be in the distribution of resources, or when (should they be directly involved in the distribution of water? cars? twinkies? all resources...), rather, my only point is that people like to point at situations like the California energy crisis as proof that electricity can't be distributed by private, profit-driven companies effectively. In fact, that cannot be used as such proof, when the industry was never really run in a private manner.
So, I'm looking through the about.com link you gave. From that, following the link titled, "California's Deregulation Disaster", there are some interesting tidbits, pointing out at the very least that the energy market was never really privatized. For example, the article mentions the involvement of the California Public Utility Commission, which as far as I can tell, is a public (government) office. If the market was deregulated, why were they involved? Also, this line:
So they proposed the following: Regulation of distribution lines will stay intact. Ok, so the author at least flat out points out a major part of the market will remain "regulated". More evidence: During the time it would take to pay back those bad investments, retail prices would be frozen.. The only way rates are ever frozen, is through government regulation.
It should be noted, the attitude of the author (as he points out at the beggining of the article) is that private corporations were completely at fault, so it's not like this is some anti-government guy writing this article. You kind of have to read between the lines to get more information than is normally communicated in the media.
At the bottom of the second page: Governor Davis is soaking taxpayers to buy power to resell to SoCalEd and PG&E to save them from bankruptcy because their rates are frozen. Now, I don't own a business, but if I did, I would be ecstatic if all of you were to buy my supplies for me (or buy them and sell to me at a discounted rate). Doesn't sound very "private" does it?
Incidentally, I think it's funny how the guy writing this article tries to make Grey Davis out to be some hero (despite the line above, he does elsewhere in the article), but fails to point out the money he took from Enron, as is pointed out in the original about.com page.
My overall impression of the California situation, is that some companies took advantage something you point out at the end of your post, "..ownership of government officials." They made money for sure, and at the expense of taxpayers, and consumers held hostage, but they certainly didn't do so in a "free market", as so many would like to believe.
A minor point, but if you are going to bash private enterprise, and condone public ownership of goods, then the examples you give to demonstrate the failure of private enterprise should at least be examples of private enterprise.
Having a national government gun down people who refuse to buy water is certainly not private enterprise. Both of your examples suck.
In the first link, Greg Palast says: Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market... which isn't even accurate. When California supposedly "deregulated" the energy market, there were tons of regulations surrounding that (too many to go into), including pricing (yes, the State of California set pricing). The only difference between what they had before and after "deregulation" is that some corporations got involved.
I am a german, but I am not a nazi. I belive in a democracy and don't want to change that.
For those who believe Hitler couldn't have "happened" in a democratic state...it's worth noting that he was elected, and was widely popular among many Germans at the time.
By that standard, the Justice Department (or almost any other part of government you want to use as an example) is a "special interest" body, and not a political organization.
True story, I know a girl, that was teaching at a summer camp for kids. (She was in school at the time, and is now a regular teacher...).
These were young kids...maybe 10ish I think...maybe a little older, I don't remember. Anyway, they were teaching them how to use email. She told them to type in hotmail.com in their browsers. Sure enough, one of the kids typed "male" instead of "mail"...needless to say, she freaked out and was very careful about what she told them to do after that.
Kind of an aside, but this statement/sentiment: one OS or one browser is evil, one digital library (especially in one langage/culture) is evil too bothers me. Let's assume we decided to do no evil. Let's also assume we thought it would be a good idea to digitize books, and make them available to large numbers of people. Final assumption: no one has done this yet.
Result: We can't proceed with the project, because of the first premise, do no evil. Since no one has ever done this, and since we all agree to do no evil, if your statement is true, then no one would ever create a digital library first.
Kinda ridiculous isn't it?
How about this: Doing good things (making a digital library) is good, doing more good things (making a digital library with works from other languages/cultures than the first library) is more good.
Or if you prefer: Making a free browser is good. Making a second free browser, with more/less/different options is doing more good.
Generally, for me, it has to do with probably a couple of things. In place of "immoral", how about "immoral and just not good". On one hand, I believe the body is a temple, and in general, recreational drug use is at least unhealthy/directly damaging to your body. Of course, so are twinkies...so I guess in that respect I'm a hypocrite.
As for the "not good" part, drugs frequently (maybe not always) cause problems within families and other relationships. They tend to make people act irrationally, in extreme ways. They also tend to alter a persons personality in a negative way.
Now, I don't necessarily make any of these claims based on hard scientific facts. Mostly it's based on my own experience. I grew up with an addict for a step-father. I've known people to use recreational drugs, and it has never had a good affect, and usually has a negative affect (usually proportional to the amount of use). I'm sure some of my ideas/opinions would be supported by currently existing research, others may be neither supported nor rejected from, and still others might even be rejected based on said research(I kind of doubt that last possibility). They are just my opinions. And as I said before, since I don't feel the need to force my opnion on others, I also don't feel the need to necessarily base my position on this issue on hard data.
As for the use vs. abuse thing, I do differentiate, at least with regard to alcohol. The thing to me about most other drugs, even something mild like weed, is that if you are using it, it seems to me you are pretty much abusing it (barring cases like medical uses and such). Alcohol on the other hand, can be consumed (and enjoyed) in such a quantity as to not cause inebriation. I don't really see that being possible with anything else. I mean, sure I guess you could smoke such a small amount of weed as to not alter your state of mind...but then what would be the point?
I'm not really sure how someone managed to turn this into an illegal drug conversation. Nothing in the article mentions a drug habit as the guy's motivation for theft, but since we are there...
Generally speaking, when things are made illegal (drugs, alcohol, prostitution) those markets tend to become violent rather than just go away. Look at prohibition as an example. You rarely see modern beer companies doing drive-bys, but it used to be somewhat common during prohibition as it is now regarding the modern drug trade. Prostitution is another example. Women that work in brothels in Nevada (to my knowledge) aren't commonly beaten by their employers, contrast that to a NYC hooker and her pimp. Blackmarkets attract unsavory people. Legalizing drugs would tend to make the product safer, probably cheaper, and remove much or all of the violence that surrounds that market.
As a matter of a disclaimer of sort, I don't think drugs are "ok". I consider recreational drug use to be immoral, but I also happen to be one of the few people in the world who thinks it's not ok to push my morality onto other people.
...fire off a letter explaining the injunction will be swiftly removed once the violator steps into line.
As if anything done by government is EVER "swiftly" undone. This would just lead to even more problems. Don't know what they would be yet, but I would bet almost anything on it.
Slashdot Mirror
bots that infect computers ever conflict with each other. Like Bot1 takes over a PC, then Bot2 comes along, and maybe they fight over that PC or its resources?
The topic is about abuses of the PATRIOT Act. The parent suggested Gitmo as an example of that. The next poster countered (correctly) that Gitmo would not be an example of an abuse via the PATRIOT Act. The next poster countered *that* point, in a somewhat inflammatory way, by suggesting that (I'm paraphrasing) it was "great" that the US could commit civil rights violations in another way. I responded by pointing out that since the issue is the PATRIOT Act, that his point is not a counter point to the point that Gitmo does not qualify as an abuse by way of the PATRIOT Act. Is it an abuse in general? Maybe. And if he had presented it as a tangential issue, rather than as a counter point to the post above him, it would have fit logically. The problem is that he presented it as a point to counter the point that Gitmo is not an example of a PATRIOT abuse. Of course, your post is just as illogical. Even if Gitmo is an abuse of the morals/values that are justice system should be based on, and while it may be interesting to abstract from the original point to talk about abuses in general, it cannot be demonstrated as an abuse under the PATRIOT Act. So don't present it as such.
...". Then you came back and said, as a defense to the Notre Dame basketball team not being picked for the NCAA tournament, "Well, Auburn was shut out of the NCAA Football championship game so it's fair that Notre Dame was left out of the basketball tournament.". That would just be stupid, as a defense for why Notre Dame basketball was left out of the tournament. On the other hand, if you had abstracted to demonstrate some overall incompentance of the NCAA organization at large, and used the football championship process as an example of incompetance, it would be a more valid argument. It's all in the presentation I think.
To demonstrate, let's assume we are talking about the NCAA tournament bracket. And pretend I made the argument that "Notre Dame was robbed, they should be in the tournament because
The topic is about the PATRIOT act. Maybe we should talk about how conversation should have a topic, and that people must be on the same topic to have a conversation...
I suspect another reason for this trend, is a tendency for people to want to make themselves and their careers seem more important than they really are. If they can invent more diseases, they become more important.
Just did some googling (since I couldn't find my DM/Players guide right now), the last rule set I played with (and own the books for) was AD&D 2nd edition, I've been saying 3rd ed., but that was incorrect
l
Also read up more, and I guess we were playing with the D&D books after the split occured where you had Basic and Expert, as opposed to the AD&D set. I guess I've just gotten that confused with the word "advanced", thinking that "advanced" was another of those books in the Basic/Expert series.
http://www.lyberty.com/encyc/articles/d_and_d.htm
It's been a while. The last I played was the AD&D 3rd edition. I had no idea they reverted the name back to plain old D&D.
Wasn't there, in one of the earlier rule sets of D&D, a series of rule books like "Basic", "Medium", "Advanced"? I seem to remember the first one was Basic, and I also seem to remember the advanced book, there may have been more than one in between.
In any case, I thought that the way D&D was set up a while back, was that there was a series of rule books, each book covering the character development rules for a set of levels, like "Basic" might have been for levels 1-6 or 1-10, something like that, then after that level you used a different book in the series to define the character development/progress.
Maybe I'm just making that up...but I'm pretty sure I remember it being set up something like that when I started playing in the med to late 80's.
This book addresses that issue, to some degree anyway. One of the things I recall (it's been a while since I read it) is about support. Let's say you develop some Open Source software that becomes popular. As I recall, Eric Raymond argues that you can essentially make money from support related to that software. For example, assume you had developed Apache. You could advertise that no one else is as capable as you at implementing somethng which uses Apache, since you (presumably) know it better than anyone else.
Didn't know that, thanks. It's been a while for me, but I remember when "Advanced D&D" was just another book in the D&D rules set. Then D&D was dropped, and it was all called AD&D (2nd edition?). I haven't played since the change you mention happened.
Um...no. Dungeons and Dragons is the direct precursor to AD&D. It was played with pencil/paper just like AD&D, except with simpler rules, but basically the same. Further, most gamers generically say "D&D", even when really referring to "AD&D".
heh...actually I was trying to follow the rule posted a bit earlier about "bleeping" the vowels to make a naughty word acceptable.
The ssh reference was accidental.
Me too. I live in Arkansas. I can't even get alcohol without driving almost an hour.
If I knew of a place that was actually free socially, and didn't have to pay 80% of my salary in taxes (free fiscally), I would move there.
Because:
Those of us who have children are smarter than you.
Those of us with children know what's best for everyone.
Those of us with children can't and shouldn't actually be held responsible for raising said children.
Its for the children. Anyone who disagrees with that is just an *ssh*l*
Your statement that the only difference between governmental involvement and private enterprise being that some corporations got involved...
I meant that in reference to *how* things were run. In other words, government was still heavily involved (at least in the case of the California "deregulation" and apparently in the case of the Bolivia water issue, at least from the link you posted originally), therfore, it wasn't really "deregulation". I don't disagree (and didn't intend to imply otherwise) that the overall water situation got worse.
The blackouts in California was certainly caused by the thing people (politicians) called deregulation. However, my argument is that in fact it was not degregulation or privatization. The state remained heavily involved in the distribution of energy even after it was supposedly deregulated. Now, I'm not trying to start an argument on how involved government should be in the distribution of resources, or when (should they be directly involved in the distribution of water? cars? twinkies? all resources...), rather, my only point is that people like to point at situations like the California energy crisis as proof that electricity can't be distributed by private, profit-driven companies effectively. In fact, that cannot be used as such proof, when the industry was never really run in a private manner.
So, I'm looking through the about.com link you gave. From that, following the link titled, "California's Deregulation Disaster", there are some interesting tidbits, pointing out at the very least that the energy market was never really privatized. For example, the article mentions the involvement of the California Public Utility Commission, which as far as I can tell, is a public (government) office. If the market was deregulated, why were they involved? Also, this line:
So they proposed the following: Regulation of distribution lines will stay intact. Ok, so the author at least flat out points out a major part of the market will remain "regulated". More evidence: During the time it would take to pay back those bad investments, retail prices would be frozen.. The only way rates are ever frozen, is through government regulation.
It should be noted, the attitude of the author (as he points out at the beggining of the article) is that private corporations were completely at fault, so it's not like this is some anti-government guy writing this article. You kind of have to read between the lines to get more information than is normally communicated in the media.
At the bottom of the second page: Governor Davis is soaking taxpayers to buy power to resell to SoCalEd and PG&E to save them from bankruptcy because their rates are frozen. Now, I don't own a business, but if I did, I would be ecstatic if all of you were to buy my supplies for me (or buy them and sell to me at a discounted rate). Doesn't sound very "private" does it?
Incidentally, I think it's funny how the guy writing this article tries to make Grey Davis out to be some hero (despite the line above, he does elsewhere in the article), but fails to point out the money he took from Enron, as is pointed out in the original about.com page.
My overall impression of the California situation, is that some companies took advantage something you point out at the end of your post, "..ownership of government officials." They made money for sure, and at the expense of taxpayers, and consumers held hostage, but they certainly didn't do so in a "free market", as so many would like to believe.
A minor point, but if you are going to bash private enterprise, and condone public ownership of goods, then the examples you give to demonstrate the failure of private enterprise should at least be examples of private enterprise.
Having a national government gun down people who refuse to buy water is certainly not private enterprise. Both of your examples suck.
In the first link, Greg Palast says: Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market... which isn't even accurate. When California supposedly "deregulated" the energy market, there were tons of regulations surrounding that (too many to go into), including pricing (yes, the State of California set pricing). The only difference between what they had before and after "deregulation" is that some corporations got involved.
I am a german, but I am not a nazi. I belive in a democracy and don't want to change that.
For those who believe Hitler couldn't have "happened" in a democratic state...it's worth noting that he was elected, and was widely popular among many Germans at the time.
Well then, by THAT standard, there is no such thing as a political organization at all.
By that standard, the Justice Department (or almost any other part of government you want to use as an example) is a "special interest" body, and not a political organization.
True story, I know a girl, that was teaching at a summer camp for kids. (She was in school at the time, and is now a regular teacher...). These were young kids...maybe 10ish I think...maybe a little older, I don't remember. Anyway, they were teaching them how to use email. She told them to type in hotmail.com in their browsers. Sure enough, one of the kids typed "male" instead of "mail"...needless to say, she freaked out and was very careful about what she told them to do after that.
Kind of an aside, but this statement/sentiment: one OS or one browser is evil, one digital library (especially in one langage/culture) is evil too bothers me. Let's assume we decided to do no evil. Let's also assume we thought it would be a good idea to digitize books, and make them available to large numbers of people. Final assumption: no one has done this yet.
Result: We can't proceed with the project, because of the first premise, do no evil. Since no one has ever done this, and since we all agree to do no evil, if your statement is true, then no one would ever create a digital library first.
Kinda ridiculous isn't it?
How about this: Doing good things (making a digital library) is good, doing more good things (making a digital library with works from other languages/cultures than the first library) is more good.
Or if you prefer: Making a free browser is good. Making a second free browser, with more/less/different options is doing more good.
That seems more reasonable to me.
Straw is typically baled with baling twine, not chicken wire. The pictures on the linked site don't show chicken wire being used either.
He likes being surrounded by mold?
Seriously, I wonder if the straw is treated for such first.
Generally, for me, it has to do with probably a couple of things. In place of "immoral", how about "immoral and just not good". On one hand, I believe the body is a temple, and in general, recreational drug use is at least unhealthy/directly damaging to your body. Of course, so are twinkies...so I guess in that respect I'm a hypocrite.
As for the "not good" part, drugs frequently (maybe not always) cause problems within families and other relationships. They tend to make people act irrationally, in extreme ways. They also tend to alter a persons personality in a negative way.
Now, I don't necessarily make any of these claims based on hard scientific facts. Mostly it's based on my own experience. I grew up with an addict for a step-father. I've known people to use recreational drugs, and it has never had a good affect, and usually has a negative affect (usually proportional to the amount of use). I'm sure some of my ideas/opinions would be supported by currently existing research, others may be neither supported nor rejected from, and still others might even be rejected based on said research(I kind of doubt that last possibility). They are just my opinions. And as I said before, since I don't feel the need to force my opnion on others, I also don't feel the need to necessarily base my position on this issue on hard data.
As for the use vs. abuse thing, I do differentiate, at least with regard to alcohol. The thing to me about most other drugs, even something mild like weed, is that if you are using it, it seems to me you are pretty much abusing it (barring cases like medical uses and such). Alcohol on the other hand, can be consumed (and enjoyed) in such a quantity as to not cause inebriation. I don't really see that being possible with anything else. I mean, sure I guess you could smoke such a small amount of weed as to not alter your state of mind...but then what would be the point?
Just my $.02
What's a "chav"?
I'm not really sure how someone managed to turn this into an illegal drug conversation. Nothing in the article mentions a drug habit as the guy's motivation for theft, but since we are there...
Generally speaking, when things are made illegal (drugs, alcohol, prostitution) those markets tend to become violent rather than just go away. Look at prohibition as an example. You rarely see modern beer companies doing drive-bys, but it used to be somewhat common during prohibition as it is now regarding the modern drug trade. Prostitution is another example. Women that work in brothels in Nevada (to my knowledge) aren't commonly beaten by their employers, contrast that to a NYC hooker and her pimp. Blackmarkets attract unsavory people. Legalizing drugs would tend to make the product safer, probably cheaper, and remove much or all of the violence that surrounds that market.
As a matter of a disclaimer of sort, I don't think drugs are "ok". I consider recreational drug use to be immoral, but I also happen to be one of the few people in the world who thinks it's not ok to push my morality onto other people.
...fire off a letter explaining the injunction will be swiftly removed once the violator steps into line.
As if anything done by government is EVER "swiftly" undone. This would just lead to even more problems. Don't know what they would be yet, but I would bet almost anything on it.