Just always remember this little ditty by Douglas Adams "I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg."
Your metaphor is interesting, but somewhat flawed: If Oscar Meier were immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to food poisoning, they'll cut all sorts of corners and poison people through negligence, but they have nothing to gain from putting strychnine in the sausage. By contrast, if I'm Apple, and I'm immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to privacy breaches, and I monitor a user's preferences and habits, I can sell that information off to other organizations that want to know what my users are doing (advertisers, MPAA, FBI, etc).
In addition, there's a question of how you delegate responsibility. For instance, with stuff distributed by the FSF, I'm reasonably certain that it's safe to use not because I've carefully examined every line of code, but because enough other people have that any obvious problems and even most of the subtle ones would be caught (and I've contributed occasionally to that effort by reading through the code of a GNU package). So I'm delegating responsibility to the population of anybody who cares enough to check. Whereas with proprietary code, I'm delegating all my responsibility to a company that is motivated to act against my best interest.
For food safety, most people have collectively delegated that responsibility to the government. That's not an uncommon, if somewhat imperfect, solution to the problem.
I'm also surprised that the current model still requires remote-control input from the therapist, though they say that will be sorted out in the next version.
Except the remote control aspect could be a serious problem: It's The Wrong Trousers, Gromit, and they've gone wrong!
Stallman is a nutjob in enough ways that it seriously calls into question his entire process of judgment.
So? He might still be right. If a guy in an insane asylum believes that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is approximately equal to 3.14159..., the fact that he's in the insane asylum doesn't make him wrong. If you have a young drug-using new-agey hippie from a broken home who comes to you saying he's got a way of making computers that are much better than anything all the established competitors have, and you refuse to work with him because he's a young drug-using new-agey hippie, you may have just missed your chance to make a great investment in Apple.
The worst possible consequence of RMS being wrong is that we'll have freely available software that's not as effective as proprietary software and thus is a bit of a waste of time and money to create. The best possible consequence of RMS being right is that we'll have freely available software that's high quality and allows users to do a lot of stuff with it (so long as they don't take the freely available stuff and try to steal it).
Disagreeing with Keynes because you have evidence that his theories were flawed is not the same thing as disagreeing with Keynes because he was possibly a bit anti-Semitic when he was a teenager. That line of argument is "Keynes says X implies Y, X happened and Y didn't happen, so Keynes was wrong to say X implies Y". That's different from the ad hominem line of argument I was criticizing, which is more along the lines of "Keynes says X implies Y, Keynes is a bigot, so X doesn't imply Y".
Also, if you read the statements coming from the Obama administration around the time of the passage of the NDAA, the reason he dislikes the detention rules in it is not that it gives the president the power to ignore the Fifth and Sixth Amendments whenever it suits him, but because it suggests that Congress has to give him permission to ignore those amendments. Glenn Greenwald (among others) has been analyzing this pretty closely.
Now, in theory, the Supreme Court could give this the obvious constitutional smackdown it deserves, but this court doesn't seem all that inclined to do so.
That's not an argument from authority, that's the definition of an ad hominem argument. Instead of attacking the message, you attack the messenger.
For another relatively contemporary example, there are people right now claiming that we should ignore all the economic advice of John Maynard Keynes because he wrote something that might conceivably be construed as anti-Semitic when he was 17.
You can think RMS is a nutjob, but it's quite possible that RMS is a nutjob and also right about the importance of Free Software.
"My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives." -Alexander Lukashenko
"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." - George W Bush
I'm not suggesting Lukashenko is a great guy, just that politicians in developed nations aren't demonstrably different than their counterparts in former Eastern Bloc countries.
Ohio was once a major location of oil drilling, including the original home of a little company called Standard Oil. According to the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, they currently are pumping out something like 14,000 barrels a day.
Another key point: If you stop fracking, and are wrong about it being a problem, it's relatively easy to start it up again. If you don't stop fracking, and are wrong about it not being a problem, the effect could be turning large areas of northeast Ohio into a disaster area (cue the jokes about how it already is one).
The interesting aspect of starting in smaller states is that in order to win in smaller states, candidates generally have to do more face-to-face politicking. That means the candidates have to talk more, and the money talks less, than in other places. That makes it easier to find and vote against the real dopes. Which is why George W Bush had his butt handed to him back in 2000 by John McCain in NH.
As far as caucuses versus primaries, caucuses definitely take longer, but also tend to differ in their results because ideologically similar candidates don't cancel each other out as much. For instance, if most of the Bachman voters would be pretty happy with Rick Santorum, that helps Santorum in a caucus but not in a primary.
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
For five years now, you've worked your ass off at Initech, hoping for a promotion or some kind of profit sharing or something. Five years of your mid-20s now, gone. And you're gonna go in tomorrow and they're gonna throw you out into the street. You know why? So Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a point.
It's stupid to do these kind of layoffs if your goal is to maximize company profitability by having top-notch service. If your goal is to maximize personal wealth, which is often about short-term 'flips', then you may announce a layoff like that because you can get a stock bump, sell off at the high point and pick up a nice bonus. It's bad business, it's completely immoral, but it can be profitable.
However, it's not necessarily a bad move. One semi-legit reason that companies will do an X% layoff is to allow managers to get rid of people they've decided are bad for the business but can't fire for legal reasons. For instance, at my company a round of layoffs allowed the company to shed somebody who was plainly incompetent at her job, but would otherwise be able to win a wrongful termination case because she was pregnant at the time (and yes, they kept the competent people who were pregnant).
I'd expect that to have come from someone like Andrew Jackson, by far one of the biggest badasses ever to serve as President of the US. Case in point: Some guy tries to shoot him (twice) in the US Capitol rotunda, so Jackson grabs his cane and beats the would-be assassin over the head until his aides restrain him.
Or maybe even George Washington, who was, after all, in the middle of more than a few battles.
In that though you should be a big supporter of those Tea Party Republicans who will vote down any tax raises. They are standing by their guns and sticking to their promises even though they are obviously bad for the United States.
You mean how they just voted to reject extending the payroll tax break? After that move, you can't credit those guys with being consistent.
Also, I have these photos you sent to someone you thought was a hot 19-year-old blond that you found on Craigslist. I mean, the jokes practically write themselves, right, Dick Johnson?
Unless you are gay or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, it doesn't affect your life in the slightest if those things are legal...
Actually, it does, because odds are that you know somebody who's gay or had an unwanted pregnancy. You may not think you do, because there's still risks to announcing either of those, but it almost definitely affects you even if somewhat indirectly.
What you're right about is that "(Christian) God, guns, and gays" is how many Republicans convince people to vote against their economic self-interest. And then once in office, they just help out their pals who are making large campaign donations.
The only difference between then and now is that back then there were a few agreed-upon forms of conditioning that few individuals were able to question.
There still are a few:
* How many ran out and bought at least 1 tchotchke for each of your family members and a few of your friends over the last month? Something that would probably not be used too much, but felt necessary to give?
* How many sat down and watched a TV show they didn't really like so they'd be in on the conversations about it at work?
* How many believe that food comes from fast food restaurants, and have no idea how it's made?
* How many get their musical tastes from a ClearChannel radio station?
Most of this conditioning is related to convincing you to buy stuff you don't need.
didn't handle the Beirut problem that well, leading to Reagan winning the 1980 election.
Were you referring to the hostage situation in Tehran? You know, the one where then-candidate Reagan wasn't aware that his aides had made a deal with the Iranians about selling them nifty weapons to use against Iraq in exchange for not freeing the hostages until he was inaugurated. Because I could have sworn that was the really big issue in the 1979 election.
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Just always remember this little ditty by Douglas Adams "I teleported home one night with Ron and Sid and Meg. Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg."
Your metaphor is interesting, but somewhat flawed: If Oscar Meier were immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to food poisoning, they'll cut all sorts of corners and poison people through negligence, but they have nothing to gain from putting strychnine in the sausage. By contrast, if I'm Apple, and I'm immune from lawsuits or criminal penalties due to privacy breaches, and I monitor a user's preferences and habits, I can sell that information off to other organizations that want to know what my users are doing (advertisers, MPAA, FBI, etc).
In addition, there's a question of how you delegate responsibility. For instance, with stuff distributed by the FSF, I'm reasonably certain that it's safe to use not because I've carefully examined every line of code, but because enough other people have that any obvious problems and even most of the subtle ones would be caught (and I've contributed occasionally to that effort by reading through the code of a GNU package). So I'm delegating responsibility to the population of anybody who cares enough to check. Whereas with proprietary code, I'm delegating all my responsibility to a company that is motivated to act against my best interest.
For food safety, most people have collectively delegated that responsibility to the government. That's not an uncommon, if somewhat imperfect, solution to the problem.
I'm also surprised that the current model still requires remote-control input from the therapist, though they say that will be sorted out in the next version.
Except the remote control aspect could be a serious problem: It's The Wrong Trousers, Gromit, and they've gone wrong!
Stallman is a nutjob in enough ways that it seriously calls into question his entire process of judgment.
So? He might still be right. If a guy in an insane asylum believes that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is approximately equal to 3.14159..., the fact that he's in the insane asylum doesn't make him wrong. If you have a young drug-using new-agey hippie from a broken home who comes to you saying he's got a way of making computers that are much better than anything all the established competitors have, and you refuse to work with him because he's a young drug-using new-agey hippie, you may have just missed your chance to make a great investment in Apple.
The worst possible consequence of RMS being wrong is that we'll have freely available software that's not as effective as proprietary software and thus is a bit of a waste of time and money to create. The best possible consequence of RMS being right is that we'll have freely available software that's high quality and allows users to do a lot of stuff with it (so long as they don't take the freely available stuff and try to steal it).
Disagreeing with Keynes because you have evidence that his theories were flawed is not the same thing as disagreeing with Keynes because he was possibly a bit anti-Semitic when he was a teenager. That line of argument is "Keynes says X implies Y, X happened and Y didn't happen, so Keynes was wrong to say X implies Y". That's different from the ad hominem line of argument I was criticizing, which is more along the lines of "Keynes says X implies Y, Keynes is a bigot, so X doesn't imply Y".
Also, if you read the statements coming from the Obama administration around the time of the passage of the NDAA, the reason he dislikes the detention rules in it is not that it gives the president the power to ignore the Fifth and Sixth Amendments whenever it suits him, but because it suggests that Congress has to give him permission to ignore those amendments. Glenn Greenwald (among others) has been analyzing this pretty closely.
Now, in theory, the Supreme Court could give this the obvious constitutional smackdown it deserves, but this court doesn't seem all that inclined to do so.
That's not an argument from authority, that's the definition of an ad hominem argument. Instead of attacking the message, you attack the messenger.
For another relatively contemporary example, there are people right now claiming that we should ignore all the economic advice of John Maynard Keynes because he wrote something that might conceivably be construed as anti-Semitic when he was 17.
You can think RMS is a nutjob, but it's quite possible that RMS is a nutjob and also right about the importance of Free Software.
"My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator, but an authoritarian style of rule is characteristic of me, and I have always admitted it. You need to control the country, and the main thing is not to ruin people's lives." -Alexander Lukashenko
"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." - George W Bush
I'm not suggesting Lukashenko is a great guy, just that politicians in developed nations aren't demonstrably different than their counterparts in former Eastern Bloc countries.
whoosh
Ohio was once a major location of oil drilling, including the original home of a little company called Standard Oil. According to the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, they currently are pumping out something like 14,000 barrels a day.
Another key point: If you stop fracking, and are wrong about it being a problem, it's relatively easy to start it up again. If you don't stop fracking, and are wrong about it not being a problem, the effect could be turning large areas of northeast Ohio into a disaster area (cue the jokes about how it already is one).
It might as well. As John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we're all dead."
The interesting aspect of starting in smaller states is that in order to win in smaller states, candidates generally have to do more face-to-face politicking. That means the candidates have to talk more, and the money talks less, than in other places. That makes it easier to find and vote against the real dopes. Which is why George W Bush had his butt handed to him back in 2000 by John McCain in NH.
As far as caucuses versus primaries, caucuses definitely take longer, but also tend to differ in their results because ideologically similar candidates don't cancel each other out as much. For instance, if most of the Bachman voters would be pretty happy with Rick Santorum, that helps Santorum in a caucus but not in a primary.
What has happened to /. ? I had to scroll way past a lot of serious and informed comments to get a Star Trek IV reference.
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
This seems highly relevant:
For five years now, you've worked your ass off at Initech, hoping for a promotion or some kind of profit sharing or something. Five years of your mid-20s now, gone. And you're gonna go in tomorrow and they're gonna throw you out into the street. You know why? So Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a point.
It's stupid to do these kind of layoffs if your goal is to maximize company profitability by having top-notch service. If your goal is to maximize personal wealth, which is often about short-term 'flips', then you may announce a layoff like that because you can get a stock bump, sell off at the high point and pick up a nice bonus. It's bad business, it's completely immoral, but it can be profitable.
However, it's not necessarily a bad move. One semi-legit reason that companies will do an X% layoff is to allow managers to get rid of people they've decided are bad for the business but can't fire for legal reasons. For instance, at my company a round of layoffs allowed the company to shed somebody who was plainly incompetent at her job, but would otherwise be able to win a wrongful termination case because she was pregnant at the time (and yes, they kept the competent people who were pregnant).
I'd expect that to have come from someone like Andrew Jackson, by far one of the biggest badasses ever to serve as President of the US. Case in point: Some guy tries to shoot him (twice) in the US Capitol rotunda, so Jackson grabs his cane and beats the would-be assassin over the head until his aides restrain him.
Or maybe even George Washington, who was, after all, in the middle of more than a few battles.
In that though you should be a big supporter of those Tea Party Republicans who will vote down any tax raises. They are standing by their guns and sticking to their promises even though they are obviously bad for the United States.
You mean how they just voted to reject extending the payroll tax break? After that move, you can't credit those guys with being consistent.
“Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors”
Keanu Reeves, when asked for a response, said "Whoa!"
This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.
Also, I have these photos you sent to someone you thought was a hot 19-year-old blond that you found on Craigslist. I mean, the jokes practically write themselves, right, Dick Johnson?
Unless you are gay or a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, it doesn't affect your life in the slightest if those things are legal ...
Actually, it does, because odds are that you know somebody who's gay or had an unwanted pregnancy. You may not think you do, because there's still risks to announcing either of those, but it almost definitely affects you even if somewhat indirectly.
What you're right about is that "(Christian) God, guns, and gays" is how many Republicans convince people to vote against their economic self-interest. And then once in office, they just help out their pals who are making large campaign donations.
The only difference between then and now is that back then there were a few agreed-upon forms of conditioning that few individuals were able to question.
There still are a few:
* How many ran out and bought at least 1 tchotchke for each of your family members and a few of your friends over the last month? Something that would probably not be used too much, but felt necessary to give?
* How many sat down and watched a TV show they didn't really like so they'd be in on the conversations about it at work?
* How many believe that food comes from fast food restaurants, and have no idea how it's made?
* How many get their musical tastes from a ClearChannel radio station?
Most of this conditioning is related to convincing you to buy stuff you don't need.
What, you mean like this? Or this? Or this? Or this? (And yes, those are many different passages, just the same domain)
didn't handle the Beirut problem that well, leading to Reagan winning the 1980 election.
Were you referring to the hostage situation in Tehran? You know, the one where then-candidate Reagan wasn't aware that his aides had made a deal with the Iranians about selling them nifty weapons to use against Iraq in exchange for not freeing the hostages until he was inaugurated. Because I could have sworn that was the really big issue in the 1979 election.