You've clearly missed my point. I distinguished between anonymous strangers on Slashdot and the people that knew him and his family: If you want grief, let it be the grief from those who can grieve, the people that knew him. Not random, anonymous strangers on Slashdot.
If my best friend died, you can be sure that I'll be out talking to his family. On the other hand, I'm not going to go through the motions of grief on Slashdot because someone is so wrapped up in tradition that they fail to realize the purpose of that tradition, and how ridiculous it is to expect everyone on Slashdot to drop other concerns and grieve.
You are placing human life above everything else, assigning infinite value to human life (and not even human life, but the direct life that you can see being lost). You don't know how many lives solar power would *save*. More lives have been lost over oil wars in the last *year*, and more men have died working on undersea oil rigs than will probably ever die working on solar power.
What are you doing right now? Posting on Slashdot. If you really, truly believed in what you were saying, that human life comes above all else, you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot. You'd be out volunteering to help consel suicidal people on a hotline. Or any number of other things that might save a life. But you know what? You aren't -- you're placing a bit of your short-term *enjoyment* (not even an advancement of human knowledge) over someone else's life. I'll bet you speed too, to get where you want to go five minutes faster by gambling with other people's lives. By your standards, you are one sick fuck. Instead, you are quite comfortable criticizing *other* people because they didn't place human lifes (including *their own*) above all else. Yes, they had to try out new designs. Yes, probably they will make a mistake or learn that something doesn't work when they were sure that it did. You are probably sitting in an air-conditioned house with all the food you want handy. It was shipped to you on trucks, which countless lives were lost in perfecting, running internal combustion engines, the development of which cost more lives. Your AC is powered by electrical power produced (if you live in the United States) almost entirely by coal. Do you have the remotest concept of how many people have been killed in coal mines?
But instead, you jab at anyone who is pushing the envelope, every time something goes wrong. It's comfortable for you to attack them. "Safety first". Christ. There is research going on. The people that blazed trails across America, Madam Curie inducing radiation burns on herself, the men that built bridges (and died doing so, as better techniques were learned), they didn't have soft rubberized surfaces and rounded-off corners. People *died*, you ass. But you can ignore them now, because they're in the past and you can just enjoy the fruits of their labor. You can sit supreme in your self-superiority ("If *I* was running that project, not only would nobody die, but we'd get just as much research done"). You don't have any idea what you're talking about. You haven't worked on any of the systems, or have the faintest grounds to talk about the risk factors involved. If you think that this guy's fellow researchers didn't give a damn about him and sacrificed him because they just didn't care about safety, you're a complete idiot. It's armchair quarterbacking of the worst kind, the kind that damages our advancement of knowledge to make you feel a little more warm and fuzzy inside.
The fact that Bluesky is having an accident every year, to me, indicates that these people are perhaps being pushed a little too hard, and perhaps the cars are not being designed with the driver's safety in mind (and I'm not just talking about the durability of the vehical but also such things as the driver's visibilty of the road and reliability of his control systems).
One of the Wright brothers died in an airplane crash.
Astronauts have been killed.
Those who push forward humanity's knowledge for the rest of us often assume greater-than-normal risks willingly.
Should the team now be crippled, forced to use regular-car safty regulations? Should we slow research for the sake of a few potential lives?
I realize that you're not proposing anything so extreme, but things like the grounding of the shuttle because of the insulation problems (come *on* -- astronauts have flown many times without insulation killing them, and have had many more risks) is ridiculous. People skydive, cliff dive, street race. They know what they're doing. We send soldiers, many younger than the young man that died, to Iraq to die and kill others. Surely this man died in the most noble pursuit imaginable -- forwarding the cause of humanity? The percentage of scientists that die in the line of duty is certainly smaller than the percentage of soldiers that die in the line of duty. Why is it that we demand that science now take no risks? I would not want people to ever be forced to take risks that they don't want to take or lied to about known risks, but none of the Bluesky people were likely to be unaware of the earlier mechanical problems, which I'm sure they had worked on fixing.
Instead, it would not surprise me if the university cancels the program -- they are a business that has to sell their services to many parents of students.
If I could conduct an project that, if successful, would give mankind the ability to build things with nanites, but if failed, would kill me, and my chances of death were 15% (and the alternative, slower, safer methods would delay this knowledge by another 50 years), I'd take it in an instant. Why is it that people in the United States would likely consider this unacceptable, but once *forced* young men to die in the jungles of Vietnam? Where are our priorities?
I doubt this will have real long-term negative impact on Solar Power development. It's not like this out of control vehicle also took out a sideline of spectator Nuns.
Frankly, the fact that taking out a bunch of nuns when a steering mechanism failed would probably have a long-term impact on solar power is extremely depressing.
Look, it very much sucks that he died. However, the goal that he was working for -- solar powered automobiles -- probably has more potential impact on humanity than his direct living.
To get a slightly more extreme example: If a doctor announced that he had discovered a cure for influenza or a way to purify water cheaply without engergy requirements, and then was promptly killed be a mugger, I'm sure that everyone would feel bad about his death, but I think that it's more than excusable to place as a higher priority finding out what happened to his work than making noises to make his family feel good. They *know* that his dying sucked already. And, honestly, I've never met or heard of the guy. If every person in the world was told "this guy died", should they all be obligated to lay down their tools and bow their heads for a moment? Of course not. The cost would be phenomenal.
If you want grief, let it be the grief from those who can grieve, the people that knew him. Not random, anonymous strangers on Slashdot.
As another example, every day CNN prints up stories about Iraqis dying. Should I stop and express a list of sympathetic things for an hour? No. People die. The fact that this guy had his name printed instead of just being a statistic, increasing a fatality count by one somewhere does not change that fact.
The whole thing -- both Microsoft coming up with bogus TCO and Linux people coming up with bogus TCO -- is ridiculous. You can't say "X is the TCO of operating system Y". It depends overwhelmingly on your particularly circumstances. If you:
* Have a set of people that already know Windows well
* Use a set of Windows-only custom apps that would have to be run in WINE or rewritten for Linux
* Have high turnover and want to take advantage of the larger number of people that know how to use Windows and Windows-based apps.
* Have a network that is entirely seperated from the Internet, so security is less of an issue, and stuff like Microsoft's RPC/filesharing mechanism being on isn't a problem.
All these things could easily push TCO in favor of Windows. If you:
* Run open-source software already
* Have employees familiar with programming or scripting that can benefit from having an environment oriented towards easily scripting or programming
* Have existing Linux/UNIX expertise
* Run apps that run on Linux or UNIX
* Want to use thin clients
TCO may be tilted in favor of Linux.
It's so ridiculous to try to come out with bogus claims. The reason people don't *like* Microsoft is because they have lied to and burned their customers for many years. Trying to just do the same to "compete" with them is idiotic. Let them make whatever TCO claims they want, and then point out how absurd it is to make non-application-specific TCO claims, instead of just making equally ridiculous TCO claims.
He might not be doing this on purpose. It could be that some Sun guy spent time talking about how "reliable" Sun hardware is and how "risky" x86 hardware is (reliability FUD is the *favorite* tactic of overpriced vendors -- Oracle, Sun, Apple for a while, so forth). It used to be used against Microsoft by Sun, now Microsoft uses it against Linux. It's very hard to come up with a good set of hard numbers to disprove a claim -- of course, it's also hard to prove such a claim, but usually people make a claim from authority ("I'm experienced in this area, and...")
Since employees usually get punished for a system screwing up and not rewarded much (heck, maybe their budget gets *cut*) for saving the company money, the very *thought* of unreliability, no matter how unfounded, will drive them away from a system.
Because of the employee evaluation structure, reliability claims are one of the primary ways that you can drive a wedge between the interests of an employee and a company. Salesmen know this. This would not be the first guy to be suckered by Sun or a similar vendor.
Again, it seems to me that you spent around $30k more than you needed to spend by going Sun instead of x86 Linux. You can do thin clients just as well with stock x86 hardware hosting Linux, and you won't be paying an arm and a leg for the server.
I'm also at a loss as to why you'd spend $1.1k/monitor on brand-name Sun monitors.
Are you a Sun employee, Sun vendor, or have you consulted extensively with Sun products in the past?
I was wondering what Sun's increasingly idle salesmen were doing these days. Slashdot, is it?
For 40 Dells (with required antivirus and Ghost):$76,307.28 (with small business discount)
Now, why is it exactly that you would choose to not just use the *Dells* as thin clients with Linux? At, say, $1k a machine, you can get a decent new machine to use as a thin client -- and who cares whether the box is two or six inches thick?
You think personal firewalls are a good idea from a security standpoint?
[shakes head] Wow, we sure are on different wavelengths.
I'll give you maybe antivirus software, avoid executing code (note: the number of things that can be "executable" is large, as you pointed out), and keeping your machine up to date. I'd also suggest use of AdAware or similar spyware remover.
Not that it's easier for the average user to know in the unix world, where they have to "ls -l" to see if the executable bit is set.
The ls -l and the file extensions do not serve the same purpose. If they *did*, *IX would be a lot easier, as you'd just have to teach them one command "ls -l" instead of every executable extension.
If you're the guy that wrote diet libc, I'd like to thank you. I learned nice lightweight coding tidbits by reading documentation and source from diet libc.
Actually, given their use of fear, they are a lot closer to terrorists than criminals that have been classified as terrorists to allow the use of new laws.
That's not what it sounded like to me. They were just saying if you are caught stealing something, not only should you go to jail, but you should also give it back.
Hmm. Could be. I wish their summary had hyperlinks.
It sounds to me more like they are saying that juries should use the right of jury nullification that they already have more than they do now. Jury nullification basicly means that the jury thinks that the law shouldn't apply in this particular case, so they vote innocent despite the evidence.
The problem is that when you *combine* encouragement to use jury nullification with (and this is crucial) volunteer juries ("yeah, *I'm* a member of the KKK, and I'd *love* to be on a jury!"), you now have a platform for activists. It tends to deemphasize the influence of moderates.
I don't have a problem with more community involvement in legislation. The problem is that the legislature exists for a reason -- it's somewhere that a point can come up, arguments for each side can be produced, and high visibility can be given to things that will affect people. There is accountability to constitutients.
While the jury nullification mechanism *is* a safety door, and a very useful one, it's not intended to replace the legislature, and attempting to do so can have some real problems.
You must have missed the part about strict liability. If they pollute on your property you will be able to sue them; If they can manage to limit the pollution to their own property somehow, then its their problem.
Ah, but the problem is that members of the world don't have complete knowledge of their environment. Secret polluting has happened before -- should it be necessary for people to constantly check to see whether someone is dumping pollutants into their drainage system, or should the EPA work backwards from their own testing sites? What if there is something that we have a concern about, but aren't yet certain of damage? I can't sue during such an evaluation phase. What about dumping into international waters, or putting diffuse air pollutants into the upper atmosphere? What if it's hard to track back sources -- who should be sued for the hole in the ozone layer? What if a land owner wants to use his land for the storage of radioactive waste? Perhaps he has sealed containers, but what about the risk *if* there's, say, a fire? He cannot be sued until he actually causes damages. I just don't think that lawsuits are sufficient to solve public good problems, to solve problems deriving from the fact that we have incomplete knowledge, and so forth. When the United States granted land rights, it did not do so with stipulations as to use -- what if we now realize that we can kill off a species permanently, removing a potential animal from the utility of everyone in the world, and the person that owns the land that that animal lives on has no interest in allowing it to live? How would you address this with a lawsuit.
Their policy on annexation isn't that bad. It just says that you can claim stuff that nobody else has(which is just about nothing these days). How do you think people originally obtained property?
Until two different people claim things for their country and a dispute starts. And what metric to you use to determine whether someone "has" something? Christopher Columbus claimed the Americas. What about a chunk of sea in an international shipping lane? What about an island that two countries both have claimed, but is unoccupied? What if I claim the Moon -- is it "mine"?
And if it's such a minor point, why is it a fundamental plank in the platform?
Whats wrong with leaving crap orbiting the earth? It's not big enough to block the view of the sky, and it's not going to fall and hit someone on the head. I don't see how it would harm anyone.
Another public-good problem. Orbit space known not to contain debris is an extremely valuable good. If private space exploration is allowed,
Yes, but the juries are not composed of volunteers. (Also, it's unclear to me whether the Libertarian stance is simply that of nullification, or that of jury *modification* of law through case law.)
The current system makes it very hard for activists to use the courts to promote their views; I view the current role as appropriate.
I have a couple of pretty severe issues with the the Libertarian platform, which I finally got around to reading last night.
First, they oppose "victimless crimes". This means some changes that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Plutonium is a controlled substance in the United States, and an elimination of consentual crimes would make it uncontrolled. I want possession of plutonium to be controlled, frankly.
Second, the libertarian approach toward justice is somewhat different than that I approach. I view justice as a dissuasive mechanism, something that can be used to stabilize situations. Libertarians view it as a restitutive mechanism, a method of restoring the state before the crime was committed. I believe that this approach leaves crime profitable unless law enforcement operates perfectly and 100% of damaging crimes are caught.
Third, I very, very strongly disagree with their proposed changes to jury trials. They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law. This effectively reduces the value of a written code of law, means that laws may basically be retroactively changed after a crime was committed, and means that extremists may use jury trials as a political platform, which I do not think is an appropriate place for rational and open discourse. I can understand how frusterated they are with being a minority party and wanting minority parties to have more political power, but I do not think that this is a good mechanism. I am particularly surprised that vote reform, one of the most valuable changes that would allow minority parties to gain political influence, is not a fundamental part of their platform -- I guess that if they ever get into power, they are unlikely to want to give up power to minority parties. Sigh.
Fourth, their platform on American Indian Rights -- the return of Indian lands to Indians -- is simply ridiculous. It might sound nice, and there might have historically been some nasty games play ed to obtain land ownership, but you can hardly kick people off of land where they now live.
Fifth, I utterly disagree with their "zero regulation" model of business. Their claims that all monpolies arise from government intervention is, frankly, wrong. I can't see how they intend to deal with natural monpolies, unless they expect to simply ignore them. They do not deal with artificial mopolies, which I can't believe the government directly causes in all cases...unless they want to also repeal all forms of IP, which will be, well, overly extreme in my book and almost everyone's.
Sixth, their "no taxes" model makes no sense. It's just ridiculous. We've tried not having *federal* taxes, and that just didn't work. The mind boggles at the thought of local and state taxes being eliminated. How do they expect to have a functioning government? Even they must allow for the operation of certain skeletal structures, like a judicial system, or their own rules will not be enforced.
Seventh, their proposed method for dealing with pollution simply ignores the game-theoretic models that have convinced people that pollution is a public-good problem that requires intervention. Who cares if the children 100 years down the road get screwed over? The person causing the damage will be gone!
Eighth, they propose deregulating the postal service. This would probably mean an end to mail that can reach anywhere in the United States, even if it reduced costs to the other people.
Ninth, I think that their policy on secession is stupid. Sounds very idealistic, but why doesn't, say, GM Seattle secede from the United States, and avoid paying business taxes? Their workers can still *live* in the United States and enjoy the no income taxes that the Libertarian party promotes. I just don't see it working.
Tenth, their policy on annexation is like the Guano Act plus a million. It would produce an unmanagable United States if a
'Although the state's right to take all necessary measures that it deems necessary is recognized, there is fear that these measures will have a negative impact on basic human rights.'"
WTF?
Constitutional Amendment 28:
"The state shall have the right to take all necessary measures that it deems necessary."
Slashdot Mirror
You've clearly missed my point. I distinguished between anonymous strangers on Slashdot and the people that knew him and his family:
If you want grief, let it be the grief from those who can grieve, the people that knew him. Not random, anonymous strangers on Slashdot.
If my best friend died, you can be sure that I'll be out talking to his family. On the other hand, I'm not going to go through the motions of grief on Slashdot because someone is so wrapped up in tradition that they fail to realize the purpose of that tradition, and how ridiculous it is to expect everyone on Slashdot to drop other concerns and grieve.
Did anyone else think of the other TCPA when they read this article?
You, sir, are a fucking idiot.
You are placing human life above everything else, assigning infinite value to human life (and not even human life, but the direct life that you can see being lost). You don't know how many lives solar power would *save*. More lives have been lost over oil wars in the last *year*, and more men have died working on undersea oil rigs than will probably ever die working on solar power.
What are you doing right now? Posting on Slashdot. If you really, truly believed in what you were saying, that human life comes above all else, you wouldn't be posting on Slashdot. You'd be out volunteering to help consel suicidal people on a hotline. Or any number of other things that might save a life. But you know what? You aren't -- you're placing a bit of your short-term *enjoyment* (not even an advancement of human knowledge) over someone else's life. I'll bet you speed too, to get where you want to go five minutes faster by gambling with other people's lives. By your standards, you are one sick fuck. Instead, you are quite comfortable criticizing *other* people because they didn't place human lifes (including *their own*) above all else. Yes, they had to try out new designs. Yes, probably they will make a mistake or learn that something doesn't work when they were sure that it did. You are probably sitting in an air-conditioned house with all the food you want handy. It was shipped to you on trucks, which countless lives were lost in perfecting, running internal combustion engines, the development of which cost more lives. Your AC is powered by electrical power produced (if you live in the United States) almost entirely by coal. Do you have the remotest concept of how many people have been killed in coal mines?
But instead, you jab at anyone who is pushing the envelope, every time something goes wrong. It's comfortable for you to attack them. "Safety first". Christ. There is research going on. The people that blazed trails across America, Madam Curie inducing radiation burns on herself, the men that built bridges (and died doing so, as better techniques were learned), they didn't have soft rubberized surfaces and rounded-off corners. People *died*, you ass. But you can ignore them now, because they're in the past and you can just enjoy the fruits of their labor. You can sit supreme in your self-superiority ("If *I* was running that project, not only would nobody die, but we'd get just as much research done"). You don't have any idea what you're talking about. You haven't worked on any of the systems, or have the faintest grounds to talk about the risk factors involved. If you think that this guy's fellow researchers didn't give a damn about him and sacrificed him because they just didn't care about safety, you're a complete idiot. It's armchair quarterbacking of the worst kind, the kind that damages our advancement of knowledge to make you feel a little more warm and fuzzy inside.
The fact that Bluesky is having an accident every year, to me, indicates that these people are perhaps being pushed a little too hard, and perhaps the cars are not being designed with the driver's safety in mind (and I'm not just talking about the durability of the vehical but also such things as the driver's visibilty of the road and reliability of his control systems).
One of the Wright brothers died in an airplane crash.
Astronauts have been killed.
Those who push forward humanity's knowledge for the rest of us often assume greater-than-normal risks willingly.
Should the team now be crippled, forced to use regular-car safty regulations? Should we slow research for the sake of a few potential lives?
I realize that you're not proposing anything so extreme, but things like the grounding of the shuttle because of the insulation problems (come *on* -- astronauts have flown many times without insulation killing them, and have had many more risks) is ridiculous. People skydive, cliff dive, street race. They know what they're doing. We send soldiers, many younger than the young man that died, to Iraq to die and kill others. Surely this man died in the most noble pursuit imaginable -- forwarding the cause of humanity? The percentage of scientists that die in the line of duty is certainly smaller than the percentage of soldiers that die in the line of duty. Why is it that we demand that science now take no risks? I would not want people to ever be forced to take risks that they don't want to take or lied to about known risks, but none of the Bluesky people were likely to be unaware of the earlier mechanical problems, which I'm sure they had worked on fixing.
Instead, it would not surprise me if the university cancels the program -- they are a business that has to sell their services to many parents of students.
If I could conduct an project that, if successful, would give mankind the ability to build things with nanites, but if failed, would kill me, and my chances of death were 15% (and the alternative, slower, safer methods would delay this knowledge by another 50 years), I'd take it in an instant. Why is it that people in the United States would likely consider this unacceptable, but once *forced* young men to die in the jungles of Vietnam? Where are our priorities?
I doubt this will have real long-term negative impact on Solar Power development. It's not like this out of control vehicle also took out a sideline of spectator Nuns.
Frankly, the fact that taking out a bunch of nuns when a steering mechanism failed would probably have a long-term impact on solar power is extremely depressing.
Look, it very much sucks that he died. However, the goal that he was working for -- solar powered automobiles -- probably has more potential impact on humanity than his direct living.
To get a slightly more extreme example: If a doctor announced that he had discovered a cure for influenza or a way to purify water cheaply without engergy requirements, and then was promptly killed be a mugger, I'm sure that everyone would feel bad about his death, but I think that it's more than excusable to place as a higher priority finding out what happened to his work than making noises to make his family feel good. They *know* that his dying sucked already. And, honestly, I've never met or heard of the guy. If every person in the world was told "this guy died", should they all be obligated to lay down their tools and bow their heads for a moment? Of course not. The cost would be phenomenal.
If you want grief, let it be the grief from those who can grieve, the people that knew him. Not random, anonymous strangers on Slashdot.
As another example, every day CNN prints up stories about Iraqis dying. Should I stop and express a list of sympathetic things for an hour? No. People die. The fact that this guy had his name printed instead of just being a statistic, increasing a fatality count by one somewhere does not change that fact.
The whole thing -- both Microsoft coming up with bogus TCO and Linux people coming up with bogus TCO -- is ridiculous. You can't say "X is the TCO of operating system Y". It depends overwhelmingly on your particularly circumstances. If you:
* Have a set of people that already know Windows well
* Use a set of Windows-only custom apps that would have to be run in WINE or rewritten for Linux
* Have high turnover and want to take advantage of the larger number of people that know how to use Windows and Windows-based apps.
* Have a network that is entirely seperated from the Internet, so security is less of an issue, and stuff like Microsoft's RPC/filesharing mechanism being on isn't a problem.
All these things could easily push TCO in favor of Windows. If you:
* Run open-source software already
* Have employees familiar with programming or scripting that can benefit from having an environment oriented towards easily scripting or programming
* Have existing Linux/UNIX expertise
* Run apps that run on Linux or UNIX
* Want to use thin clients
TCO may be tilted in favor of Linux.
It's so ridiculous to try to come out with bogus claims. The reason people don't *like* Microsoft is because they have lied to and burned their customers for many years. Trying to just do the same to "compete" with them is idiotic. Let them make whatever TCO claims they want, and then point out how absurd it is to make non-application-specific TCO claims, instead of just making equally ridiculous TCO claims.
He might not be doing this on purpose. It could be that some Sun guy spent time talking about how "reliable" Sun hardware is and how "risky" x86 hardware is (reliability FUD is the *favorite* tactic of overpriced vendors -- Oracle, Sun, Apple for a while, so forth). It used to be used against Microsoft by Sun, now Microsoft uses it against Linux. It's very hard to come up with a good set of hard numbers to disprove a claim -- of course, it's also hard to prove such a claim, but usually people make a claim from authority ("I'm experienced in this area, and...")
Since employees usually get punished for a system screwing up and not rewarded much (heck, maybe their budget gets *cut*) for saving the company money, the very *thought* of unreliability, no matter how unfounded, will drive them away from a system.
Because of the employee evaluation structure, reliability claims are one of the primary ways that you can drive a wedge between the interests of an employee and a company. Salesmen know this. This would not be the first guy to be suckered by Sun or a similar vendor.
[shrug] Maybe. There are a lot of companies that will happily provide support for a bunch of LTSP machines. Not exactly rocket science.
It always makes me happy to see the vigorous, driving bribery behind politics. :-(
The Sun computers look very sharp, are very small and are all accompanied by a LCD display. They run some sort of Linux-Unix like OS.
;-)
I'm waiting for that guy posting all the pro-Sun stuff to see this and gag.
Again, it seems to me that you spent around $30k more than you needed to spend by going Sun instead of x86 Linux. You can do thin clients just as well with stock x86 hardware hosting Linux, and you won't be paying an arm and a leg for the server.
I'm also at a loss as to why you'd spend $1.1k/monitor on brand-name Sun monitors.
Are you a Sun employee, Sun vendor, or have you consulted extensively with Sun products in the past?
I was wondering what Sun's increasingly idle salesmen were doing these days. Slashdot, is it?
For 40 Dells (with required antivirus and Ghost):$76,307.28 (with small business discount)
Now, why is it exactly that you would choose to not just use the *Dells* as thin clients with Linux? At, say, $1k a machine, you can get a decent new machine to use as a thin client -- and who cares whether the box is two or six inches thick?
You think personal firewalls are a good idea from a security standpoint?
[shakes head] Wow, we sure are on different wavelengths.
I'll give you maybe antivirus software, avoid executing code (note: the number of things that can be "executable" is large, as you pointed out), and keeping your machine up to date. I'd also suggest use of AdAware or similar spyware remover.
Not that it's easier for the average user to know in the unix world, where they have to "ls -l" to see if the executable bit is set.
The ls -l and the file extensions do not serve the same purpose. If they *did*, *IX would be a lot easier, as you'd just have to teach them one command "ls -l" instead of every executable extension.
If you're the guy that wrote diet libc, I'd like to thank you. I learned nice lightweight coding tidbits by reading documentation and source from diet libc.
I didn't have a clue what it was, either. I was wondering why my wireless access point was dead, too...
Actually, given their use of fear, they are a lot closer to terrorists than criminals that have been classified as terrorists to allow the use of new laws.
Linux: Chubby, randy penguin. A rather inoffensive critter.
BSA: A maniacally-grinning weasel.
I wanna see all the logos that will be sure to come up involving Python and everybody's least-favorite weasel.
How about "Stoolie the Pigeon"?
"Dead Meat", the DRM-enforcing weasel!
That's not what it sounded like to me. They were just saying if you are caught stealing something, not only should you go to jail, but you should also give it back.
Hmm. Could be. I wish their summary had hyperlinks.
It sounds to me more like they are saying that juries should use the right of jury nullification that they already have more than they do now. Jury nullification basicly means that the jury thinks that the law shouldn't apply in this particular case, so they vote innocent despite the evidence.
The problem is that when you *combine* encouragement to use jury nullification with (and this is crucial) volunteer juries ("yeah, *I'm* a member of the KKK, and I'd *love* to be on a jury!"), you now have a platform for activists. It tends to deemphasize the influence of moderates.
I don't have a problem with more community involvement in legislation. The problem is that the legislature exists for a reason -- it's somewhere that a point can come up, arguments for each side can be produced, and high visibility can be given to things that will affect people. There is accountability to constitutients.
While the jury nullification mechanism *is* a safety door, and a very useful one, it's not intended to replace the legislature, and attempting to do so can have some real problems.
You must have missed the part about strict liability. If they pollute on your property you will be able to sue them; If they can manage to limit the pollution to their own property somehow, then its their problem.
Ah, but the problem is that members of the world don't have complete knowledge of their environment. Secret polluting has happened before -- should it be necessary for people to constantly check to see whether someone is dumping pollutants into their drainage system, or should the EPA work backwards from their own testing sites? What if there is something that we have a concern about, but aren't yet certain of damage? I can't sue during such an evaluation phase. What about dumping into international waters, or putting diffuse air pollutants into the upper atmosphere? What if it's hard to track back sources -- who should be sued for the hole in the ozone layer? What if a land owner wants to use his land for the storage of radioactive waste? Perhaps he has sealed containers, but what about the risk *if* there's, say, a fire? He cannot be sued until he actually causes damages. I just don't think that lawsuits are sufficient to solve public good problems, to solve problems deriving from the fact that we have incomplete knowledge, and so forth. When the United States granted land rights, it did not do so with stipulations as to use -- what if we now realize that we can kill off a species permanently, removing a potential animal from the utility of everyone in the world, and the person that owns the land that that animal lives on has no interest in allowing it to live? How would you address this with a lawsuit.
Their policy on annexation isn't that bad. It just says that you can claim stuff that nobody else has(which is just about nothing these days). How do you think people originally obtained property?
Until two different people claim things for their country and a dispute starts. And what metric to you use to determine whether someone "has" something? Christopher Columbus claimed the Americas. What about a chunk of sea in an international shipping lane? What about an island that two countries both have claimed, but is unoccupied? What if I claim the Moon -- is it "mine"?
And if it's such a minor point, why is it a fundamental plank in the platform?
Whats wrong with leaving crap orbiting the earth? It's not big enough to block the view of the sky, and it's not going to fall and hit someone on the head. I don't see how it would harm anyone.
Another public-good problem. Orbit space known not to contain debris is an extremely valuable good. If private space exploration is allowed,
Yes, but the juries are not composed of volunteers. (Also, it's unclear to me whether the Libertarian stance is simply that of nullification, or that of jury *modification* of law through case law.)
The current system makes it very hard for activists to use the courts to promote their views; I view the current role as appropriate.
I have a couple of pretty severe issues with the the Libertarian platform, which I finally got around to reading last night.
First, they oppose "victimless crimes". This means some changes that I'm not entirely comfortable with. Plutonium is a controlled substance in the United States, and an elimination of consentual crimes would make it uncontrolled. I want possession of plutonium to be controlled, frankly.
Second, the libertarian approach toward justice is somewhat different than that I approach. I view justice as a dissuasive mechanism, something that can be used to stabilize situations. Libertarians view it as a restitutive mechanism, a method of restoring the state before the crime was committed. I believe that this approach leaves crime profitable unless law enforcement operates perfectly and 100% of damaging crimes are caught.
Third, I very, very strongly disagree with their proposed changes to jury trials. They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law. This effectively reduces the value of a written code of law, means that laws may basically be retroactively changed after a crime was committed, and means that extremists may use jury trials as a political platform, which I do not think is an appropriate place for rational and open discourse. I can understand how frusterated they are with being a minority party and wanting minority parties to have more political power, but I do not think that this is a good mechanism. I am particularly surprised that vote reform, one of the most valuable changes that would allow minority parties to gain political influence, is not a fundamental part of their platform -- I guess that if they ever get into power, they are unlikely to want to give up power to minority parties. Sigh.
Fourth, their platform on American Indian Rights -- the return of Indian lands to Indians -- is simply ridiculous. It might sound nice, and there might have historically been some nasty games play ed to obtain land ownership, but you can hardly kick people off of land where they now live.
Fifth, I utterly disagree with their "zero regulation" model of business. Their claims that all monpolies arise from government intervention is, frankly, wrong. I can't see how they intend to deal with natural monpolies, unless they expect to simply ignore them. They do not deal with artificial mopolies, which I can't believe the government directly causes in all cases...unless they want to also repeal all forms of IP, which will be, well, overly extreme in my book and almost everyone's.
Sixth, their "no taxes" model makes no sense. It's just ridiculous. We've tried not having *federal* taxes, and that just didn't work. The mind boggles at the thought of local and state taxes being eliminated. How do they expect to have a functioning government? Even they must allow for the operation of certain skeletal structures, like a judicial system, or their own rules will not be enforced.
Seventh, their proposed method for dealing with pollution simply ignores the game-theoretic models that have convinced people that pollution is a public-good problem that requires intervention. Who cares if the children 100 years down the road get screwed over? The person causing the damage will be gone!
Eighth, they propose deregulating the postal service. This would probably mean an end to mail that can reach anywhere in the United States, even if it reduced costs to the other people.
Ninth, I think that their policy on secession is stupid. Sounds very idealistic, but why doesn't, say, GM Seattle secede from the United States, and avoid paying business taxes? Their workers can still *live* in the United States and enjoy the no income taxes that the Libertarian party promotes. I just don't see it working.
Tenth, their policy on annexation is like the Guano Act plus a million. It would produce an unmanagable United States if a
Ah, thanks.
I was still thinking of the DNC cameras...
'Although the state's right to take all necessary measures that it deems necessary is recognized, there is fear that these measures will have a negative impact on basic human rights.'"
WTF?
Constitutional Amendment 28:
"The state shall have the right to take all necessary measures that it deems necessary."