There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
Those who take things at face value, and those who think too far into them...I'm in the second category.
Has Slackware turned 00000010, or 00001010?
Firstly, I will state my own position and point of view. I am an American. I am an Army brat. I am proud of both.
blockquoth the poster:
Having War will give Peace
Sometimes war is the only path to peace. Some adversaries are not reasonable or do not negotiate in good faith. Saddam Hussein is one such. Peace can be restored or secured by armed conflict, provided that the enemy is behaving unjustly and that in the aftermath of the war the victors behave justly. WWII is one case in point: a just war followed by a just peace.
Or, to quote Tony Blair:
"...the world has to learn the lesson all over again that weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant is the surest way not to peace but to war."
Cowardice is the refusal to injure thousands of innocent civilians living in Baghdad opposing a major power's whim.
Bravery is the ability to order the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis without wincing or bringing up your Caesar salad.
Firstly, where do you get those casualty estimates, and whom do you think intends to effect those kinds of casualties? If anyone were likely to -deliberately- inflict those kinds of casualities, it would Saddam Hussein.
Secondly, the Iraqi people are not the targets of this war. The Iraqi regime is the target of this war. The United States has not fought a war of attrition and collateral damage since the 1970's.
Finally, coalition forces are -feeding- the POWs. Under the ever-so-loving auspices of Saddam Hussein, they had no such guarantee. Coalition forces are also putting significant effort into securing Umm Qasr, undoubtedly to give troops another place to come ashore, but also so food aid ships can bring in the supplies which the Iraqi people need. It is the only deep water port in Iraq and is the port into which UN food aid has historically come.
Apparently, well-fed young men sitting in millions of dollars' worth of military hardware and dropping bombs from 30,000ft on impoverished people who have already had all their arms taken away are exemplars of 'bravery'.
Not all of our well-fed young men fight from the "safety" of multi-million-dollar tanks or fighter-bombers. Our Marines and Infantry still end up fighting on foot, accompanied by APCs. They still come under enemy fire. They still move -into- enemy fire to rescue wounded comrades. That is part of why so many Congressional Medals of Honor are awarded post-humously. The soldiers who earn them do so by dis-regarding their own safety for the sake of others.
Not even the hardware proofs these soldiers against harm. Every time they go out or take off, they risk not coming back. Even on training missions and exercises, they take that risk, as a few accidents illustrated before the shooting started again. US soldiers have some of the best hardware in the world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't ever break.
Simply put, they are brave. They are risking death to do their jobs - disarming and unseating a tyrant and simply keeping each other alive.
we aren't invading Iraq, or occupying iraq. Even though they are raising american colours over Iraqi cities that have been.. umm.. liberated...
Do you propose, then, that the Iraqi people are free? That they want to live in terror? That they enjoy it that they risking death speaking against the regime? That they voted for Saddam Hussein?
Those Iraqis still in parts of the country controlled by the Hussein regime are prisoners of that regime. The US-UK coalition is invading and liberating Iraq now in the same sense that some of its members invaded and liberated Europe during WWII.
While it's true that lawyers are expensive and that the legislation governing business can be arcane (which necessitates consulting the expensive lawyers), ignorance of the law is no excuse. If a entrerpreneur is going to try to launch a business, it behooves him to know what laws could, would, or might govern his business - whether those laws be food purity laws, IP laws, patent law, or the basics like civil rights and equal opportunity employment.
That sort of basic knowledge can be gained without hiring a lawyer or becoming one. Business law is taught in colleges, universities, and even high schools. One may not keep perfectly abreast of the latest changes to the law, but one can still gain a broad, general view of the laws governing business. However, the rightness and wrongness of some things should be intuitive by now, for any thinking, intelligent entrepreneur. Non-discrimination in employment is one such. Respect for copyright is another. The illegality and impropriety of cooking one's books is a third. These things should be common sense for practitioners and entrepreurs in the respective fields. Sole proprietors are responsible for the above.
I would guess that a Canadian business-person wouldn't see the FBI warning at the beginning of every commercial video and DVD he's ever watched, but there's still the Interpol warning. Copyright warnings are everywhere. Even people who will never make a dime off their work copyright things. So the excuse "I didn't know it was illegal to violate someone else's copyright for my own monetary gain" is pure silliness. "I'm a business man who didn't bother to read up on business law," which is what his case seems to imply, is even worse. I have no sympathy for someone who can't be bothered to know what he's doing.
What are you trying to do? Troll? Start a worker's revolution? I suggest that you put 'American Babylon' in perspective. While the synopsis for that documentary put things in a sad light for back-alley Atlanta (A light like that needs to be pointed at our cities, I think), you're on a crack if you think the entire country is that way.
It is true that gangs are proliferating. (If Abilene, Texas has issues with wannabe gangbangers, the problem isn't going away.) However, to assume that every major city or large town has this set of problems is crazy. The larger the city, the more desperate things will get. Perhaps it's a matter of statistics. More people means more hopes, more dreams, more disappointments, more pain, more death, and more darkness. (However, the opposite is also true. More people means more potential for reform if people can bring it about.) I don't honestly know what the crime rate is in our rural communities, but I daresay they have a different set of problems which are more domestic and less societal. Heck, most of them don't have more than a few thousand residents or need than one or two patrol cars.
Finally, it is true that the American Dream is a dream. If it were not a shoot-for-the-sky ambition, it wouldn't be called the American Dream. However, your generalization is untrue. These days, one can get fired at the drop of a hat because of the state of the economy. Can you prove that it was always that way? The nature of the American Dream isn't influenced by where the NYSE closed yesterday. If you lose today, you try again tomorrow. Most entrepreneurs fail at their first couple of ventures before getting something that works.
The American Dream is about self-determination - owning your own place, choosing your career, charting your own course. Unstable employment and bad conditions don't change that, because the Dream describes the course of an entire life - all 50+ years in the adult world - not this quarter or this year. If you don't like the job and don't need it, you can just up and quit. (I've done that.) If you want to do something, go for it. You may not succeed, but you have the freedom to try.
It is a question of the actual society model. You are judging the idea of applying genetic selection based on social criteria by our own rules and that is where your mistake comes from. First, your rules may be correct for your society. They are definitely incorrect for the society described in the book.
Granted. In that society, it might work. I haven't actually read the book, or the David Brin series. How were those societies able to contain the purge effects or set limits on who would and would not be purged?
Again, however, the questions to be raised are "What are the requirements? Who sets them? Who has the right to set them?" Remember that the Nazi purges had societal underpinnings. Those in power wanted a pure race, so they killed or sterilized those who were impure or could introduce impurities to their supposed master race. To a lesser degree, so did the Stalinist purges have societal goals, though those may have had less to do with ideology and desirable citizens than the need to populate the GULag and rapidly industrialize an agrarian socity. The same can be said of the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was trying to achieve a certain kind of society - one made up of Workers. The intelligentsia were an impediment, so they were removed. Millions died in each case.
To me, the idea has no appeal. The work of fiction that kickstarted this discussion is just that - fiction. If one tries to apply those ideas here on Earth, one gets another result entirely. History is already witness to what kinds of things happen when one group decides whether another is worthy to live or not. I don't accept the theory of macroevolution and I certainly don't accept the idea that a government is entitled to dub itself the agent of that evolution.
I disagree for two reasons. You seen to imply that if we purge negative genes from the pool, we cleanse the pool. In other words, kill or sterilize the murders and their kin and we put an end to murder. You seem to propose genocide with no apparent justification.
Firstly, your view presupposes that we act on our genes. While it may be the case that each of us has genetic predispositions, those dispositions are not an absolute predictor of action. Take, for example, a person who is predisposed to alcoholism. He drinks too much and becomes addicted to alcohol but later decides to stop. Succeeding in stopping, he is now acting in opposition to his predisposition, which still encourages him to drink to excess. The same might be said for a depressive person who never kills himself. He may very badly want to do so and may be predisposed to the mental condition which produced that desire, but if he doesn't, he acts independently of his genes.
Secondly, the end result isn't much of a solution. Where is the line drawn between crimes worthy of sterilization and those which need not be purged from the genome? Murder? Rape? Dishonesty? Breach of Contract? Active racism? Passive racism? Conscientious objection? A given disorder or disease?
Further, once one has decided whom to purge, has one eliminated our negative tendencies? I say the answer is no. One has just seen to some of them. As Ghandi put it, an eye for an eye would leave the world blind. Remember also that ideas have inertia. Once one starts purging, the purge may stop only because there is no one left to be purged. Eventually, that line of thought - purge from the gene pool the capacity for [insert crime here] - would drive the race to extinction. We would all be dead or sterile. Then we would all be dead. Or, in pseudo-XML:
Remember "We Have the Way Out?" This isn't a new occurence for an MS affiliate. The MS attempt to draw people away from Unix (including instructions on how to wipe a Linux system and install an MS OS) ran on a *BSD box, if I recall rightly, and was running Apache. It's really ironic that things like this happen.
I would point out that most of those involved in the Linux, Open Source, and Free Software communities are programmers of one stripe or another. It takes a hacker, or at least a decent programmer, to make use of the nimbleness that the Unices offer. By alienating entire sectors of the IT community (by attacking them or their brainchildren or by persisting in practices which run counter to their mores, folkways, beliefs, and culture) Redmond forfeits the chance to draw on that (potentially enormous) talent pool. Is it possible that Redmond produces flawed products and nasty code because they can't find good coders or the right approach? Because the best coders would never consider working for Redmond? If they made themselves more palatable, would they be able to draw in more first-rank hackers?
It would seem to me that the question regards fair use not precision replication. If I photocopy a chapter from a book to use for a research paper, I have made an (inexact) copy but I'm within rights because I'm not distributing it. Anything that is copied for personal use would seem to automatically fall within fair usage, whereas anything that is copied for distribution is pirated. Whether you've typed a book out by hand to avoid the author getting his royalties or ripped the DVD of, say, Akira, to post on a website, you've gotten around the legal distributor and their revenue stream, which is piracy. What you do for yourself, however, is "fair use." The exactitude of the replication would seem to be beside the point.
I have one word: Enron. They broke the rules and lots of innocent people got hurt.
Codes of ethics are interesting phenomena. If there are none applicable, one would seem to get anarchy as a result. But if one has too much of a code, one gets legalism (i.e., the breach of the spirit of law while existing within the letter of said law). Either extreme can be hazardous.
Funny thing is, we appear already to have a partial code, as suggested/documented by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In short, plagiarism
is bad and harmful (thus we have mores about forking and proper maintainance of history files). Knowledge has inherent value, so it should be shared. Remember also that, in general, we hold warez d00dz, script kiddies, and malicious crackers, etc, in derision. That adverse value judgement implies the existence of a Code. The question is, do we flesh it out? How? How compulsory should it be? My answers, for what they're worth, follow.
In reverse order: No, the Code should not be compulsory. Consistent with freedom of belief, no one should be compelled to take the Oath. Further, it would end up either ancillary or ineffective. To my mind, any Code adopted is an expression of the values held by the one taking the Oath. In a sense, it's almost beside the point. The Oathtaker would abide by his Oath anyway. Binding himself to a certain way of doing business is just a formalization of his already existing approach to his profession. Conversely, an Oath taken insincerely probably won't last, unless one should develop more scruples or backbone after the Oathtaking. An Oath taken that way would be ineffective.
Should we flesh out the Code? Yes and no. Some have pointed out that Codes already exist. To the extent that they apply to us, we needn't spend effort re-hashing them. To the extent that they don't cover our various situations, they should be fleshed out to do so. Inherent in that statement is the idea that we as (assumedly adult or mature) professionals have varying personal codes which should be mirrored.
On a side note, what we may need is not to be compelled to a Code but to be clear on the Code. My citation of the hacker ethic as described by ESR is admittedly incomplete. We as a community should know how we as a community do business, and why. Why is OSD usually superior and preferrable? Where is the line found between property and proprietary? Et cetera.
In the end, though, Codes are roadmaps, not cure-alls. Some of us will act on unspoken, perhaps even unwritten or unconscious codes of conduct. Some of us will not. Each should have the freedom to choose and not be penalized for said choice. So, I conclude that a clear, known Code would be a good thing to have around, but not to have enforced on all and sundry.
I read the EFF document. To me, it seemed like an effective explanation of the evils of the DCMA. Honestly, though, the "DMCA is evil" case seems more strongly made by the "science and innovation are being stifled" angle. One may argue in circles about who owns or may use a movie, but since when are science, the progression of knowledge, etc., either private property or less important than the means in which they are used? Since when has a better firewall or less vulnerable web browser been a bad thing?
Anyway, what is past is prologue. As I was reading, I came across some unfortunate news. I knew about the embed case, etc. I had hoped Blizzard hadn't wielded the Great Mace of DCMA, but it appears my hopes were in vain. So...which companies haven't done this sort of thing? Will we have to choose between the best games in a genre and opposition to the DCMA?
Slashdot Mirror
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who take things at face value, and those who think too far into them...I'm in the second category. Has Slackware turned 00000010, or 00001010?
blockquoth the poster:
Sometimes war is the only path to peace. Some adversaries are not reasonable or do not negotiate in good faith. Saddam Hussein is one such. Peace can be restored or secured by armed conflict, provided that the enemy is behaving unjustly and that in the aftermath of the war the victors behave justly. WWII is one case in point: a just war followed by a just peace.Or, to quote Tony Blair: "...the world has to learn the lesson all over again that weakness in the face of a threat from a tyrant is the surest way not to peace but to war."
Firstly, where do you get those casualty estimates, and whom do you think intends to effect those kinds of casualties? If anyone were likely to -deliberately- inflict those kinds of casualities, it would Saddam Hussein.Secondly, the Iraqi people are not the targets of this war. The Iraqi regime is the target of this war. The United States has not fought a war of attrition and collateral damage since the 1970's.
Finally, coalition forces are -feeding- the POWs. Under the ever-so-loving auspices of Saddam Hussein, they had no such guarantee. Coalition forces are also putting significant effort into securing Umm Qasr, undoubtedly to give troops another place to come ashore, but also so food aid ships can bring in the supplies which the Iraqi people need. It is the only deep water port in Iraq and is the port into which UN food aid has historically come.
Not all of our well-fed young men fight from the "safety" of multi-million-dollar tanks or fighter-bombers. Our Marines and Infantry still end up fighting on foot, accompanied by APCs. They still come under enemy fire. They still move -into- enemy fire to rescue wounded comrades. That is part of why so many Congressional Medals of Honor are awarded post-humously. The soldiers who earn them do so by dis-regarding their own safety for the sake of others.Not even the hardware proofs these soldiers against harm. Every time they go out or take off, they risk not coming back. Even on training missions and exercises, they take that risk, as a few accidents illustrated before the shooting started again. US soldiers have some of the best hardware in the world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't ever break.
Simply put, they are brave. They are risking death to do their jobs - disarming and unseating a tyrant and simply keeping each other alive.
Do you propose, then, that the Iraqi people are free? That they want to live in terror? That they enjoy it that they risking death speaking against the regime? That they voted for Saddam Hussein?Those Iraqis still in parts of the country controlled by the Hussein regime are prisoners of that regime. The US-UK coalition is invading and liberating Iraq now in the same sense that some of its members invaded and liberated Europe during WWII.
Caveat: IANAMacUser Maybe it was the sugary interface which attracted them?
*deliberately misunderstands, joking* How does one do anything quickly with a Primary Domain Controller, and since when is it fun?
That sort of basic knowledge can be gained without hiring a lawyer or becoming one. Business law is taught in colleges, universities, and even high schools. One may not keep perfectly abreast of the latest changes to the law, but one can still gain a broad, general view of the laws governing business. However, the rightness and wrongness of some things should be intuitive by now, for any thinking, intelligent entrepreneur. Non-discrimination in employment is one such. Respect for copyright is another. The illegality and impropriety of cooking one's books is a third. These things should be common sense for practitioners and entrepreurs in the respective fields. Sole proprietors are responsible for the above.
I would guess that a Canadian business-person wouldn't see the FBI warning at the beginning of every commercial video and DVD he's ever watched, but there's still the Interpol warning. Copyright warnings are everywhere. Even people who will never make a dime off their work copyright things. So the excuse "I didn't know it was illegal to violate someone else's copyright for my own monetary gain" is pure silliness. "I'm a business man who didn't bother to read up on business law," which is what his case seems to imply, is even worse. I have no sympathy for someone who can't be bothered to know what he's doing.
It is true that gangs are proliferating. (If Abilene, Texas has issues with wannabe gangbangers, the problem isn't going away.) However, to assume that every major city or large town has this set of problems is crazy. The larger the city, the more desperate things will get. Perhaps it's a matter of statistics. More people means more hopes, more dreams, more disappointments, more pain, more death, and more darkness. (However, the opposite is also true. More people means more potential for reform if people can bring it about.) I don't honestly know what the crime rate is in our rural communities, but I daresay they have a different set of problems which are more domestic and less societal. Heck, most of them don't have more than a few thousand residents or need than one or two patrol cars.
Finally, it is true that the American Dream is a dream. If it were not a shoot-for-the-sky ambition, it wouldn't be called the American Dream. However, your generalization is untrue. These days, one can get fired at the drop of a hat because of the state of the economy. Can you prove that it was always that way? The nature of the American Dream isn't influenced by where the NYSE closed yesterday. If you lose today, you try again tomorrow. Most entrepreneurs fail at their first couple of ventures before getting something that works.
The American Dream is about self-determination - owning your own place, choosing your career, charting your own course. Unstable employment and bad conditions don't change that, because the Dream describes the course of an entire life - all 50+ years in the adult world - not this quarter or this year. If you don't like the job and don't need it, you can just up and quit. (I've done that.) If you want to do something, go for it. You may not succeed, but you have the freedom to try.
Granted. In that society, it might work. I haven't actually read the book, or the David Brin series. How were those societies able to contain the purge effects or set limits on who would and would not be purged?
Again, however, the questions to be raised are "What are the requirements? Who sets them? Who has the right to set them?" Remember that the Nazi purges had societal underpinnings. Those in power wanted a pure race, so they killed or sterilized those who were impure or could introduce impurities to their supposed master race. To a lesser degree, so did the Stalinist purges have societal goals, though those may have had less to do with ideology and desirable citizens than the need to populate the GULag and rapidly industrialize an agrarian socity. The same can be said of the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was trying to achieve a certain kind of society - one made up of Workers. The intelligentsia were an impediment, so they were removed. Millions died in each case.
To me, the idea has no appeal. The work of fiction that kickstarted this discussion is just that - fiction. If one tries to apply those ideas here on Earth, one gets another result entirely. History is already witness to what kinds of things happen when one group decides whether another is worthy to live or not. I don't accept the theory of macroevolution and I certainly don't accept the idea that a government is entitled to dub itself the agent of that evolution.
Firstly, your view presupposes that we act on our genes. While it may be the case that each of us has genetic predispositions, those dispositions are not an absolute predictor of action. Take, for example, a person who is predisposed to alcoholism. He drinks too much and becomes addicted to alcohol but later decides to stop. Succeeding in stopping, he is now acting in opposition to his predisposition, which still encourages him to drink to excess. The same might be said for a depressive person who never kills himself. He may very badly want to do so and may be predisposed to the mental condition which produced that desire, but if he doesn't, he acts independently of his genes.
Secondly, the end result isn't much of a solution. Where is the line drawn between crimes worthy of sterilization and those which need not be purged from the genome? Murder? Rape? Dishonesty? Breach of Contract? Active racism? Passive racism? Conscientious objection? A given disorder or disease?
Further, once one has decided whom to purge, has one eliminated our negative tendencies? I say the answer is no. One has just seen to some of them. As Ghandi put it, an eye for an eye would leave the world blind. Remember also that ideas have inertia. Once one starts purging, the purge may stop only because there is no one left to be purged. Eventually, that line of thought - purge from the gene pool the capacity for [insert crime here] - would drive the race to extinction. We would all be dead or sterile. Then we would all be dead. Or, in pseudo-XML:
Remember "We Have the Way Out?" This isn't a new occurence for an MS affiliate. The MS attempt to draw people away from Unix (including instructions on how to wipe a Linux system and install an MS OS) ran on a *BSD box, if I recall rightly, and was running Apache. It's really ironic that things like this happen.
I would point out that most of those involved in the Linux, Open Source, and Free Software communities are programmers of one stripe or another. It takes a hacker, or at least a decent programmer, to make use of the nimbleness that the Unices offer. By alienating entire sectors of the IT community (by attacking them or their brainchildren or by persisting in practices which run counter to their mores, folkways, beliefs, and culture) Redmond forfeits the chance to draw on that (potentially enormous) talent pool. Is it possible that Redmond produces flawed products and nasty code because they can't find good coders or the right approach? Because the best coders would never consider working for Redmond? If they made themselves more palatable, would they be able to draw in more first-rank hackers?
It would seem to me that the question regards fair use not precision replication. If I photocopy a chapter from a book to use for a research paper, I have made an (inexact) copy but I'm within rights because I'm not distributing it. Anything that is copied for personal use would seem to automatically fall within fair usage, whereas anything that is copied for distribution is pirated. Whether you've typed a book out by hand to avoid the author getting his royalties or ripped the DVD of, say, Akira, to post on a website, you've gotten around the legal distributor and their revenue stream, which is piracy. What you do for yourself, however, is "fair use." The exactitude of the replication would seem to be beside the point.
Codes of ethics are interesting phenomena. If there are none applicable, one would seem to get anarchy as a result. But if one has too much of a code, one gets legalism (i.e., the breach of the spirit of law while existing within the letter of said law). Either extreme can be hazardous.
Funny thing is, we appear already to have a partial code, as suggested/documented by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In short, plagiarism is bad and harmful (thus we have mores about forking and proper maintainance of history files). Knowledge has inherent value, so it should be shared. Remember also that, in general, we hold warez d00dz, script kiddies, and malicious crackers, etc, in derision. That adverse value judgement implies the existence of a Code. The question is, do we flesh it out? How? How compulsory should it be? My answers, for what they're worth, follow.
In reverse order: No, the Code should not be compulsory. Consistent with freedom of belief, no one should be compelled to take the Oath. Further, it would end up either ancillary or ineffective. To my mind, any Code adopted is an expression of the values held by the one taking the Oath. In a sense, it's almost beside the point. The Oathtaker would abide by his Oath anyway. Binding himself to a certain way of doing business is just a formalization of his already existing approach to his profession. Conversely, an Oath taken insincerely probably won't last, unless one should develop more scruples or backbone after the Oathtaking. An Oath taken that way would be ineffective.
Should we flesh out the Code? Yes and no. Some have pointed out that Codes already exist. To the extent that they apply to us, we needn't spend effort re-hashing them. To the extent that they don't cover our various situations, they should be fleshed out to do so. Inherent in that statement is the idea that we as (assumedly adult or mature) professionals have varying personal codes which should be mirrored.
On a side note, what we may need is not to be compelled to a Code but to be clear on the Code. My citation of the hacker ethic as described by ESR is admittedly incomplete. We as a community should know how we as a community do business, and why. Why is OSD usually superior and preferrable? Where is the line found between property and proprietary? Et cetera.
In the end, though, Codes are roadmaps, not cure-alls. Some of us will act on unspoken, perhaps even unwritten or unconscious codes of conduct. Some of us will not. Each should have the freedom to choose and not be penalized for said choice. So, I conclude that a clear, known Code would be a good thing to have around, but not to have enforced on all and sundry.
I read the EFF document. To me, it seemed like an effective explanation of the evils of the DCMA. Honestly, though, the "DMCA is evil" case seems more strongly made by the "science and innovation are being stifled" angle. One may argue in circles about who owns or may use a movie, but since when are science, the progression of knowledge, etc., either private property or less important than the means in which they are used? Since when has a better firewall or less vulnerable web browser been a bad thing? Anyway, what is past is prologue. As I was reading, I came across some unfortunate news. I knew about the embed case, etc. I had hoped Blizzard hadn't wielded the Great Mace of DCMA, but it appears my hopes were in vain. So...which companies haven't done this sort of thing? Will we have to choose between the best games in a genre and opposition to the DCMA?