Now there is no copyright on free downloads such as Windows update, Sun's Java and songs downloaded during Napster trial - or for that matter any trial/update software.
Good plan, but MS will be chocked by antitrust lawsuits, especially in European Union where they are already getting in trouble for small things like an integrated media player. Trying to kill the only realistic competitor doesn't look good. If Linux didn't exist, Microsoft would have to create it:-)
With family money of course, as defined by marriage laws. And these days they don't force you into those pesky "we will share everything" marriage vows with a shotgun. If you want, you can stay single and only be responsible for your share of child support.
DRM can be used during an election to make sure that poll workers can tally up the votes but can not change them. Even guns have legitimate uses like hunting or resisting an invasion. Neither belong in consumer homes.
You have bigger problem than DRM if you are filtering your wife's Internet access. Technically smart or not, she has as much right to shop on whatever sites she wants as you. Talk about unreasonable restrictions...
How will the change the rules AFTER you have burned your songs onto a CD? You are, of course, free not to by any more songs from them if they change the rules in future?
Society should take care of disabled people, but such charity should be limited to some small percentage of our resources. It would be reasonable to require Target to spend, say, 3% of their profit making its facilities accessible. Granted, this would probably accomplish much more than adding ALT tags to target.com. BUT, as a small or unprofitable website developer, I would be able to focus on staying afloat rather than adding an alternative interface. If my website (or say, a family restaurant) goes under, who will serve those disabled people now, or pay taxes for their medical benefits? Alternatively, government can decide that target.com is a key site for disabled people, and issue a grant to make and keep it accessible.
Otherwise I am going to sue owners of answering systems with voice recognition and operators of offshore call centers for not understanding my accent.
A dozen or so big corporations can not come up with a PC, sold now, that will be adequately functional/exciting with the operating system sold next year. Apple never (in recent history) had this problem - the same hardware runs at least 3 revisions of OS, and in fact keeps running successive versions faster. Neither does the next upgrade of Ubuntu break systems sold a couple of years ago. Governments/people should recognize the problem and take measures to restore real competition that meets market opportunities. Breaking up Microsoft into an OS and an application companies as originally planed would go a long way.
Few people write their own C compilers, libc, math libraries, HTTP protocol handlers and so on. If other/bigger components are available, of course they will be reused.
This kind of stories will end with really stiff laws and high-profile enforcement. Hacking also used to be a harmless pastime of C.Sci students until a bunch of assholes caused real damage. Spammers should just stick with their p3n1s 3nlargm3nt creams and continue to enjoy their status as a pests, but not real villains.
Like it or not, a man with normal levels of testosterone will get into conflicts, make sexual advances and will not be especially interested in house work. I am not suggesting that murder or rape should be tolerated, but neither should the other extreme of expecting guys to be domesticated and docile. Besides causing health problems and impotence, low level of testosterone means our society will lack risk takers who are necessary for progress and defending the rest of the population against psychos. A case in point is NASA abandoning moon missions and all but stopping shuttle flights because of a single accident - an unavoidable occurrence for something inherently dangerous like space flights. Russian space agency has no such issues.
By the way, I am not an anthropologist, but I would guess in the olden days most people met at work, because they were like working on the farm all the time. Either that, or the society had arranged marriage and said fathers and brothers were most probably not looking for males with low testosterone levels. And notice that a shotgun marriage doesn't stop you from having an offspring unlike birth control/abortion.
It enables women to have affairs with wild men they find attractive and then marry and have children with spineless men which are currently considered ideal in our culture. If you have 20 children it's likely that at least 4 survive and you had at least twice more influence on genetics of the next generation of humans than a father of 2.
and leaving aside the fact that evolution doesn't work over the incredibly small timescale of 3 generations anyway
Then why do doctors drill me about family history of heart disease, diabetes and cancer during a health check up? We may not spawn off new species quite so fast, but degeneration certainly can happen fast when breeding individuals with the same defects.
"44% of office romances lead to marriage"
That may be, but only in cases a guy actually dares to ask someone out. Given the risks, he is likely to be more determined than when asking a girl out elsewhere....where aggression is the only way to success...
A society needs some healthy-aggressive individuals to initiate change and oppose evil-agressive individuals....Libertarianism is the One True Way...
I think Libertarianism is stupid, because today's society is too complex to function without some regulation. My freedom to start a burger joint is gone if McDonald/Burger King/etc have an oligarchy and I can not get comparable prices on raw components.
P.S. sorry for the flames but your post just really got under my skin off for some reason. I don't know if it was the ignorance, cynicism, or something else, but we're both pseudonymous Slashdot posters so I figure it's cool to just respond like I did...
Well, I consider expressing your opinion strongly an integral part of masculinity and overzealous flamebait moderations a sign of dropping testosterone among slashdot readership:-)
I think that over the last 1000 years Western Society has moved away from the model of "women as property of the most violent male" and "rape to procreate", and that these extremes are best left behind.
Agreed, so is the other extreme. A society should acknowledge that it's natural for a healthy young man to approach women for sex, even at work, in a political institution or for a fee. Agreed, a woman should always have a right of refusal and there should be some gentleman code to avoid stalking.
Additionally, men with normally ineligible genetic material can still procreate via IVF and other assisted conception procedures. In unaltered evolution, aggressive potent men would continue to dominate the genepool, but that's not what is happening, and so it is unsurprising that these traits are becoming irrelevant.
Why would anyone willingly pass defective genes to their children? There is always an option of using donor egg or sperm, genetic therapy and of course adoption.
In 200 years unassisted procreation will be rare, which will help people build the kind of society that Aldous Huxley and others wrote about.
Yeah, and we can also start a nuclear war and make living outside a fallout shelter rare. Should we strive towards either outcome?
If you fight you are put in jail, if you ask someone out at work you are fired and sued, if you are perceived to be an insensitive clod who wants to sit in a bar rather than wash dishes, you are unlikely to get married or have an offspring - thanks also to birth control/abortion. The evolution is selecting against "manly men". Maybe it's time for the society to wake up and move away from extremes.
Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.
Hardly. Phone conversations are not encrypted and can be/are intercepted, yet phone commerce is commonplace. Even in-person credit card purchases are hardly secure and there are a number of websites that do e-commerce without encryption. Without public key cryptography, more attention would be paid to security of the path between your ISP and the vendor. Websites could also have you set up username and password over a more secure channel and then use plain symmetrical encryption for the actual purchase.
The purpose of HTML is to be able to enter a small amount of text from a text editor or a script and have a good idea about both how it will look like and what it will do - on every screen. Separating content and presentation into two documents or enforcing redundant syntax is not going to help with that. In fact, reliance on CSS with its absolute font, size and color specifications breaks compatibility with different screen resolutions, browsers, mobile devices and accessibility features.
The purpose of HTML is NOT to write a full-featured, interactive application like an online word processor. If people are in love with XML+CSS+Javascript for that purpose, so be it. But personally I fail to see the wisdom of having a toy programming language as the only option, dealing with random page load failures or sending text to the client when it can be easily converted into an equivalent, compact binary format.
Why should there be repercussions for me simply showing a part of my body? As a society, are we considering human body in general shameful or ugly? If I was threatening anyone, it would be a different matter.
Every possible choice you make limits your subsequent freedom. Don't want automated cameras? Prepare to be coerced into paying more taxes for life police. Don't want to pay taxes either? Prepare to protect yourself against crime. I think there are still a plenty of areas in US where both cameras and effective police force are non-existant. East Palo Alto and New Orleans come to mind. Of course, other places in the world may have a less violent culture, so you don't need as much police/cameras. But that's not because of any "power elite".
Slashdot Mirror
state-organized executions in North Korea
Not saying that's a wonderful place to live, but shouldn't we focus on state-organized executions in Texas first?
Now there is no copyright on free downloads such as Windows update, Sun's Java and songs downloaded during Napster trial - or for that matter any trial/update software.
Good plan, but MS will be chocked by antitrust lawsuits, especially in European Union where they are already getting in trouble for small things like an integrated media player. Trying to kill the only realistic competitor doesn't look good. If Linux didn't exist, Microsoft would have to create it :-)
Wow, I am feeling smarter already :-)
With family money of course, as defined by marriage laws. And these days they don't force you into those pesky "we will share everything" marriage vows with a shotgun. If you want, you can stay single and only be responsible for your share of child support.
DRM can be used during an election to make sure that poll workers can tally up the votes but can not change them. Even guns have legitimate uses like hunting or resisting an invasion. Neither belong in consumer homes.
You have bigger problem than DRM if you are filtering your wife's Internet access. Technically smart or not, she has as much right to shop on whatever sites she wants as you. Talk about unreasonable restrictions...
How will the change the rules AFTER you have burned your songs onto a CD? You are, of course, free not to by any more songs from them if they change the rules in future?
Society should take care of disabled people, but such charity should be limited to some small percentage of our resources. It would be reasonable to require Target to spend, say, 3% of their profit making its facilities accessible. Granted, this would probably accomplish much more than adding ALT tags to target.com. BUT, as a small or unprofitable website developer, I would be able to focus on staying afloat rather than adding an alternative interface. If my website (or say, a family restaurant) goes under, who will serve those disabled people now, or pay taxes for their medical benefits? Alternatively, government can decide that target.com is a key site for disabled people, and issue a grant to make and keep it accessible.
Otherwise I am going to sue owners of answering systems with voice recognition and operators of offshore call centers for not understanding my accent.
Except that holiday shoppers don't want an $25 PC from a thrift shop. They want an $500 new PC that will run snappy Aero and play HD movies.
You are not a big corporation. Dell was still selling Intel integrated graphics consumer PCs with 256MB RAM in February.
A dozen or so big corporations can not come up with a PC, sold now, that will be adequately functional/exciting with the operating system sold next year. Apple never (in recent history) had this problem - the same hardware runs at least 3 revisions of OS, and in fact keeps running successive versions faster. Neither does the next upgrade of Ubuntu break systems sold a couple of years ago. Governments/people should recognize the problem and take measures to restore real competition that meets market opportunities. Breaking up Microsoft into an OS and an application companies as originally planed would go a long way.
Few people write their own C compilers, libc, math libraries, HTTP protocol handlers and so on. If other/bigger components are available, of course they will be reused.
This kind of stories will end with really stiff laws and high-profile enforcement. Hacking also used to be a harmless pastime of C.Sci students until a bunch of assholes caused real damage. Spammers should just stick with their p3n1s 3nlargm3nt creams and continue to enjoy their status as a pests, but not real villains.
I repeat, there are no American companies filtering Internet in China!
Do you honestly think a society can thrive when populated exclusively with bureaucrats?
Like it or not, a man with normal levels of testosterone will get into conflicts, make sexual advances and will not be especially interested in house work. I am not suggesting that murder or rape should be tolerated, but neither should the other extreme of expecting guys to be domesticated and docile. Besides causing health problems and impotence, low level of testosterone means our society will lack risk takers who are necessary for progress and defending the rest of the population against psychos. A case in point is NASA abandoning moon missions and all but stopping shuttle flights because of a single accident - an unavoidable occurrence for something inherently dangerous like space flights. Russian space agency has no such issues.
By the way, I am not an anthropologist, but I would guess in the olden days most people met at work, because they were like working on the farm all the time. Either that, or the society had arranged marriage and said fathers and brothers were most probably not looking for males with low testosterone levels. And notice that a shotgun marriage doesn't stop you from having an offspring unlike birth control/abortion.
It enables women to have affairs with wild men they find attractive and then marry and have children with spineless men which are currently considered ideal in our culture. If you have 20 children it's likely that at least 4 survive and you had at least twice more influence on genetics of the next generation of humans than a father of 2.
and leaving aside the fact that evolution doesn't work over the incredibly small timescale of 3 generations anyway
...where aggression is the only way to success...
...Libertarianism is the One True Way...
:-)
Then why do doctors drill me about family history of heart disease, diabetes and cancer during a health check up? We may not spawn off new species quite so fast, but degeneration certainly can happen fast when breeding individuals with the same defects.
"44% of office romances lead to marriage"
That may be, but only in cases a guy actually dares to ask someone out. Given the risks, he is likely to be more determined than when asking a girl out elsewhere.
A society needs some healthy-aggressive individuals to initiate change and oppose evil-agressive individuals.
I think Libertarianism is stupid, because today's society is too complex to function without some regulation. My freedom to start a burger joint is gone if McDonald/Burger King/etc have an oligarchy and I can not get comparable prices on raw components.
P.S. sorry for the flames but your post just really got under my skin off for some reason. I don't know if it was the ignorance, cynicism, or something else, but we're both pseudonymous Slashdot posters so I figure it's cool to just respond like I did...
Well, I consider expressing your opinion strongly an integral part of masculinity and overzealous flamebait moderations a sign of dropping testosterone among slashdot readership
I think that over the last 1000 years Western Society has moved away from the model of "women as property of the most violent male" and "rape to procreate", and that these extremes are best left behind.
Agreed, so is the other extreme. A society should acknowledge that it's natural for a healthy young man to approach women for sex, even at work, in a political institution or for a fee. Agreed, a woman should always have a right of refusal and there should be some gentleman code to avoid stalking.
Additionally, men with normally ineligible genetic material can still procreate via IVF and other assisted conception procedures. In unaltered evolution, aggressive potent men would continue to dominate the genepool, but that's not what is happening, and so it is unsurprising that these traits are becoming irrelevant.
Why would anyone willingly pass defective genes to their children? There is always an option of using donor egg or sperm, genetic therapy and of course adoption.
In 200 years unassisted procreation will be rare, which will help people build the kind of society that Aldous Huxley and others wrote about.
Yeah, and we can also start a nuclear war and make living outside a fallout shelter rare. Should we strive towards either outcome?
If you fight you are put in jail, if you ask someone out at work you are fired and sued, if you are perceived to be an insensitive clod who wants to sit in a bar rather than wash dishes, you are unlikely to get married or have an offspring - thanks also to birth control/abortion. The evolution is selecting against "manly men". Maybe it's time for the society to wake up and move away from extremes.
Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.
Hardly. Phone conversations are not encrypted and can be/are intercepted, yet phone commerce is commonplace. Even in-person credit card purchases are hardly secure and there are a number of websites that do e-commerce without encryption. Without public key cryptography, more attention would be paid to security of the path between your ISP and the vendor. Websites could also have you set up username and password over a more secure channel and then use plain symmetrical encryption for the actual purchase.
The purpose of HTML is to be able to enter a small amount of text from a text editor or a script and have a good idea about both how it will look like and what it will do - on every screen. Separating content and presentation into two documents or enforcing redundant syntax is not going to help with that. In fact, reliance on CSS with its absolute font, size and color specifications breaks compatibility with different screen resolutions, browsers, mobile devices and accessibility features.
The purpose of HTML is NOT to write a full-featured, interactive application like an online word processor. If people are in love with XML+CSS+Javascript for that purpose, so be it. But personally I fail to see the wisdom of having a toy programming language as the only option, dealing with random page load failures or sending text to the client when it can be easily converted into an equivalent, compact binary format.
Why should there be repercussions for me simply showing a part of my body? As a society, are we considering human body in general shameful or ugly? If I was threatening anyone, it would be a different matter.
Every possible choice you make limits your subsequent freedom. Don't want automated cameras? Prepare to be coerced into paying more taxes for life police. Don't want to pay taxes either? Prepare to protect yourself against crime. I think there are still a plenty of areas in US where both cameras and effective police force are non-existant. East Palo Alto and New Orleans come to mind. Of course, other places in the world may have a less violent culture, so you don't need as much police/cameras. But that's not because of any "power elite".