That includes, IMHO, conservatives who are looking to neuro to justify their worldview - selfishness, selfishness, selfishness.
So it's "selfish" if I vote to keep more of what I earn, but it's not selfish if I vote for money to be taken from others and handed to me. Gotcha.
Sorry to incinerate your strawman but most conservatives support safety nets for the truly needy, although we reject welfare for the middle class and the wealthy. For example, there is no good reason to confiscate 15% of the wages of burger flippers so that retired millionaires can receive bigger Social Security checks.
On an even happier note, game theory continues to undercut the "rational economic actor" that underlies the precious free-marketeering so many slashdotters jerk their knees to
And another strawman. Arguments for free markets do not require perfectly rational actors, any more than arguments for democracy require perfectly rational voters.
Someone needs to sit a few people from Novell down at some point and explain to them that a desire to ensure that businesses suffer harm was arguably one of the main motivations behind the GPL having been written at all.
Tell that to the thousands of companies saving billions of dollars by using GPL software.
For once, I wish someone could actually give me a reasoned rebuttal on why they believe that I'm wrong in believing that (at least the intention behind) the GPL is largely anticapitalist
The GPL is neither capitalist nor socialist. Capitalism and socialism are systems for allocating scarce resources. Free software attempts to bypass that issue by removing scarcity altogether, specifically the artificial scarcity imposed by copyright.
Since when has 'only causes a unmeasurably small number of cancer deaths' been a reason to drink something?
Because it tastes good, and we're not all monks dedicated to forgoing pleasure. This "all processed foods are evil" thing is just the granola version of abstinence-only education.
Creationism isn't a theory, it doesn't even come close.
Actually Biblical creationism is a theory. It makes specific claims, such as that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that speciation does not occur. There's overwhelming evidence against these claims, so we can say that creationism is a *false* theory with extremely high probability, just like geocentrism and spontaneous generation.
On the other hand, intelligent design tries to avoid that pesky evidence problem by *not* being a theory. It says only that an undefined designer took one or more undefined actions at one or more unspecified times. It makes no testable predictions and can't be falsified, so it's not even wrong.
Fry's does strange things with HDMI cables. In the computer section, the Belkin 6' cables are around $40. In the TV section they have the $80+ Monster ripoffs. Then in the "impulse buy" checkout aisle, they have no-name cables for $20. I can understand using price discrimination to get more money from audiophiles who are unaware that 1s and 0s are 1s and 0s, but I was surprised that they put the cheap and functionally identical versions in such an obvious place.
Of course, this is far better than Best Buy where the cheapest is $50.
Bust into his house and take the cure by force, reverse engineer it.
That will work exactly once, and unfortunately there's more than one disease that we need a cure for. I don't necessarily object to government making the cure available to all, but the inventor should be well compensated. That's actually the economically efficient way to deal with intellectual property; pay for the scarce act of creation, rather than the non-scarce act of duplication.
Please run for something so I can vote for you. It would be a refreshing change from voting against the more odious candidate.
Most of the Federal Government, exercising powers not clearly enumerated, violates the 9th and 10th Amendments. Note that almost any of the various rogue agencies COULD be legal by amending the Constitution. I'm not saying we should not HAVE a Dept of Education, what I assert is that it should be evident to any literate sentient being that the current Constituition & Bill of Rights does not permit one.
Don't forget the tortured non-logic used to justify everything the federal government does under the interstate commerce clause. Per Raich, growing and consuming your own marijuana affects interstate commerce and thus can be prohibited. By that standard it's hard to come up with anything the federal government can't regulate or ban.
Absolutely. Specifically, tax the negative externalities of energy use, such as pollution and traffic congestion. A fundamental law of economics is that when you tax something, you get less of it. Currently most of our taxes are on good things like labor, investment, and profit. Shifting those taxes to bad things should be a no-brainer.
Even though the code for firefox on PC and firefox for mac may be similar (I haven't looked, sorry), they still have slightly different rendering practices. Just to name one, a file upload input box with a size attribute set to 50 will be much longer and take up more screen than on a PC. So you have to do a platform check in javascript to set the size differently on a mac or a PC so the screen looks the same.
There's one of your problems. You can't ever guarantee that pages will look exactly the same on different systems. Even ignoring differences in browser rendering, users can have different font and size settings, and even use custom CSS. As others have wisely noted, HTML is not PDF.
There have occasionally been studies done on men and women that suggest things like "women are more social, men more analytical" which are then parrotted endlessly by the media because they fit very nicely into the stereotypes we have about men and women. When these studies are refuted in peer-reviewed journals, as they to date always have been, the media, not surprisingly, never reports on it.
Could you point me to some of these studies which refute all statistical differences in male and female personalities? It would be astonishing if millions of years of evolution and radically different levels of hormones had no impact on human psychology.
The easiest way to see this is to note, for example, that in China, the number of women studying CS and Engineering is much closer to 50% of the total number of students.
And how do you know that China isn't specifically pushing women into those fields, resulting in a higher percentage than would "naturally" occur?
This whole thing reminds me of a tagline I saw recently: Conservatives: believe in biology but not evolution Liberals: believe in evolution but not biology
In other words for capitalism to realize its true potential, human nature must change or be changed to accomodate it. That's what the communists say about their system, too.
True as far as it goes, but failure modes matter. When capitalism fails, you get unfair fees and corporate-written laws like the DMCA. When communism fails, you get starvation, gulags and mass executions.
Also, I do not understand about this hoopla about american jobs lost!! Where is the data to show that?
Just review the latest unemployment data at the DOL's Bureau of Labor Statistics at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea30.txt . The unemployment rate for professionals is just 1.7% (!).
The unemployment rates for professionals when broken down by industry are equally dramatic: Computer and math occupations - 2.0% Architecture and engineering occupations - 1.7%
Just quoting at +2 so others can see some actual numbers instead of the rantings of Chicken Littles, who 100 years ago would be predicting imminent doom because farming jobs were disappearing.
they refuse to raise wages, they increase their prices, then either import h1b's or offshore their labor force to quash any thought of requiring a respectable salary.
And yet, employee compensation continues to increase. Sure, companies would like us to work for 42 cents an hour. On the other hand, I'd like to be paid $17 million a year for 20 hours of work. Somewhere in the middle an equilibrium is reached. You are not a helpless slave to the all-powerful corporate overlords.
at this point you have to be upper middle class to simply maintain what used to be lower middle class standards of living
Sorry, that's just silly. How many "lower middle class" people 15 years ago had DVD players or cell phones or any form of Internet access? It's easy to take for granted the many ways our lives have improved, and then invent specious reasons why things are so terrible today.
the price of current video game consoles makes anyone without a money tree do a doubletake.
Case in point; if that's your major complaint, we can't be doing that bad. (And compare the price of the Wii to the original NES).
The whole "gambling crackdown" is about the integrity of an economy with a fixed money supply, and gambling sites do suck up money and money pools there under the guise of people hoping to get rich
As opposed to state-run lotteries? Gambling is no more wasteful than any other form of entertainment. At best, that's an argument for allowing and regulating domestic gambling sites. And some games like poker shouldn't even be called "gambling", because over a sufficient time period results are determined more by skill than luck, and if you play well you can have a positive expectation.
So I checked it out. The CHEAPEST HDMI cable they had in the store was $85. I couldn't fraking believe it.
Impressive. On a related note, I was in Fry's the other day actually to buy an HDMI cable. The ones in the computer cable aisle were $40 to $80, and in the TV section they were $60 to $125. Then in the *checkout* aisle they have them for $20. I can understand using price discrimination to get more money from clueless videophiles, but wouldn't you want to put the cheap ones in a less visible place?
These actions would have been illegal were I come from
I don't know where you're from, but I'd bet it has a higher unemployment rate than the US. If businesses can't fire employees, they're going to be very reluctant to hire anybody in the first place.
Exactly how long should a company be obligated to provide charity to workers that are producing less value than they cost in wages and benefits?
Well said. I would only add as a preemptive response to the doomsayers that yes, it's true that some people can do everything right and still end up in bad shape through no fault of their own. But we're talking odds here; you have a far better chance of success by working hard than by looking for handouts, even though some productive people get cancer and some deadbeats win the lottery.
When you have a machine do the job of a human, you take away somethng from the human.
So the pinnacle of humanity was when we were living in caves? From the printing press to industrial robots, machines have eliminated countless jobs that humans used to do. And yet, the human race survives.
They don't like the fact that Novell and Microsoft are working together
Um, no. They (and I) don't like the fact that Novell has blatantly violated the spirit of GPL2 by trying to create a situation where anyone other than them who distributes Linux is threatened with lawsuits. If this situation had been foreseen 15 years ago, you can bet GPL2 would have tried to prevent it.
Instead of kicking and crying when Novell and Microsoft started working together, why didn't the FSF realize that it was a move to legitimize Linux and work with it to bring Linux to the people.
If this is a troll, good job. It's just barely coherent enough to make me think you might be serious.
v3 is attempting to restrict deployment of apps via the web such that someone can take a GPLed piece of software and make changes then allow users to use it from their browser without distributing the changes. Since the people putting it on their website are the users in this case, it sure sounds like someone wants to control how users use the software.
My understanding is that there's an optional clause of GPL3 that says if you take a GPL3 webapp and modify it, if the original version had functionality allowing "remote users" to download the source, then your changes must also be downloadable via that method. It doesn't restrict use of the original code in any way. It does place restrictions on how you can modify it, but that's still an improvement over the default copyright where you can't modify at all.
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That includes, IMHO, conservatives who are looking to neuro to justify their worldview - selfishness, selfishness, selfishness.
So it's "selfish" if I vote to keep more of what I earn, but it's not selfish if I vote for money to be taken from others and handed to me. Gotcha.
Sorry to incinerate your strawman but most conservatives support safety nets for the truly needy, although we reject welfare for the middle class and the wealthy. For example, there is no good reason to confiscate 15% of the wages of burger flippers so that retired millionaires can receive bigger Social Security checks.
On an even happier note, game theory continues to undercut the "rational economic actor" that underlies the precious free-marketeering so many slashdotters jerk their knees to
And another strawman. Arguments for free markets do not require perfectly rational actors, any more than arguments for democracy require perfectly rational voters.
Someone needs to sit a few people from Novell down at some point and explain to them that a desire to ensure that businesses suffer harm was arguably one of the main motivations behind the GPL having been written at all.
Tell that to the thousands of companies saving billions of dollars by using GPL software.
For once, I wish someone could actually give me a reasoned rebuttal on why they believe that I'm wrong in believing that (at least the intention behind) the GPL is largely anticapitalist
The GPL is neither capitalist nor socialist. Capitalism and socialism are systems for allocating scarce resources. Free software attempts to bypass that issue by removing scarcity altogether, specifically the artificial scarcity imposed by copyright.
Since when has 'only causes a unmeasurably small number of cancer deaths' been a reason to drink something?
Because it tastes good, and we're not all monks dedicated to forgoing pleasure. This "all processed foods are evil" thing is just the granola version of abstinence-only education.
Creationism isn't a theory, it doesn't even come close.
Actually Biblical creationism is a theory. It makes specific claims, such as that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that speciation does not occur. There's overwhelming evidence against these claims, so we can say that creationism is a *false* theory with extremely high probability, just like geocentrism and spontaneous generation.
On the other hand, intelligent design tries to avoid that pesky evidence problem by *not* being a theory. It says only that an undefined designer took one or more undefined actions at one or more unspecified times. It makes no testable predictions and can't be falsified, so it's not even wrong.
Fry's does strange things with HDMI cables. In the computer section, the Belkin 6' cables are around $40. In the TV section they have the $80+ Monster ripoffs. Then in the "impulse buy" checkout aisle, they have no-name cables for $20. I can understand using price discrimination to get more money from audiophiles who are unaware that 1s and 0s are 1s and 0s, but I was surprised that they put the cheap and functionally identical versions in such an obvious place.
Of course, this is far better than Best Buy where the cheapest is $50.
I don't know about in 16 years but I bet within 10 we're talking about the first petabyte drives.
Moore's Law has been pretty accurate for drive capacities, so factor of 1000=10 doublings=15 years. I'd expect "only" 100TB drives in 10 years.
Bust into his house and take the cure by force, reverse engineer it.
That will work exactly once, and unfortunately there's more than one disease that we need a cure for. I don't necessarily object to government making the cure available to all, but the inventor should be well compensated. That's actually the economically efficient way to deal with intellectual property; pay for the scarce act of creation, rather than the non-scarce act of duplication.
Please run for something so I can vote for you. It would be a refreshing change from voting against the more odious candidate.
Most of the Federal Government, exercising powers not clearly enumerated, violates the 9th and 10th Amendments. Note that almost any of the various rogue agencies COULD be legal by amending the Constitution. I'm not saying we should not HAVE a Dept of Education, what I assert is that it should be evident to any literate sentient being that the current Constituition & Bill of Rights does not permit one.
Don't forget the tortured non-logic used to justify everything the federal government does under the interstate commerce clause. Per Raich, growing and consuming your own marijuana affects interstate commerce and thus can be prohibited. By that standard it's hard to come up with anything the federal government can't regulate or ban.
So go on and support your free, open-source software done by people in their spare time. Kill off careers in software development.
Yeah. Look at how Apache, gcc, and MySQL have decimated programming jobs.
If you're just misinformed and not a troll, you may want to read up on the broken window and lump of labor fallacies.
Absolutely. Specifically, tax the negative externalities of energy use, such as pollution and traffic congestion. A fundamental law of economics is that when you tax something, you get less of it. Currently most of our taxes are on good things like labor, investment, and profit. Shifting those taxes to bad things should be a no-brainer.
Why do so many people refuse to entertain the possibility that they might be deterministic?
Well, it's not like they have a choice.
Even though the code for firefox on PC and firefox for mac may be similar (I haven't looked, sorry), they still have slightly different rendering practices. Just to name one, a file upload input box with a size attribute set to 50 will be much longer and take up more screen than on a PC. So you have to do a platform check in javascript to set the size differently on a mac or a PC so the screen looks the same.
There's one of your problems. You can't ever guarantee that pages will look exactly the same on different systems. Even ignoring differences in browser rendering, users can have different font and size settings, and even use custom CSS. As others have wisely noted, HTML is not PDF.
"because Linux and free software are hacker tools"
So two wrongs do make a right...
There have occasionally been studies done on men and women that suggest things like "women are more social, men more analytical" which are then parrotted endlessly by the media because they fit very nicely into the stereotypes we have about men and women. When these studies are refuted in peer-reviewed journals, as they to date always have been, the media, not surprisingly, never reports on it.
Could you point me to some of these studies which refute all statistical differences in male and female personalities? It would be astonishing if millions of years of evolution and radically different levels of hormones had no impact on human psychology.
The easiest way to see this is to note, for example, that in China, the number of women studying CS and Engineering is much closer to 50% of the total number of students.
And how do you know that China isn't specifically pushing women into those fields, resulting in a higher percentage than would "naturally" occur?
This whole thing reminds me of a tagline I saw recently:
Conservatives: believe in biology but not evolution
Liberals: believe in evolution but not biology
In other words for capitalism to realize its true potential, human nature must change or be changed to accomodate it. That's what the communists say about their system, too.
True as far as it goes, but failure modes matter. When capitalism fails, you get unfair fees and corporate-written laws like the DMCA. When communism fails, you get starvation, gulags and mass executions.
Also, I do not understand about this hoopla about american jobs lost!! Where is the data to show that?
Just review the latest unemployment data at the DOL's Bureau of Labor Statistics at ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea30.txt . The unemployment rate for professionals is just 1.7% (!).
The unemployment rates for professionals when broken down by industry are equally dramatic:
Computer and math occupations - 2.0%
Architecture and engineering occupations - 1.7%
Just quoting at +2 so others can see some actual numbers instead of the rantings of Chicken Littles, who 100 years ago would be predicting imminent doom because farming jobs were disappearing.
they refuse to raise wages, they increase their prices, then either import h1b's or offshore their labor force to quash any thought of requiring a respectable salary.
And yet, employee compensation continues to increase. Sure, companies would like us to work for 42 cents an hour. On the other hand, I'd like to be paid $17 million a year for 20 hours of work. Somewhere in the middle an equilibrium is reached. You are not a helpless slave to the all-powerful corporate overlords.
at this point you have to be upper middle class to simply maintain what used to be lower middle class standards of living
Sorry, that's just silly. How many "lower middle class" people 15 years ago had DVD players or cell phones or any form of Internet access? It's easy to take for granted the many ways our lives have improved, and then invent specious reasons why things are so terrible today.
the price of current video game consoles makes anyone without a money tree do a doubletake.
Case in point; if that's your major complaint, we can't be doing that bad. (And compare the price of the Wii to the original NES).
The whole "gambling crackdown" is about the integrity of an economy with a fixed money supply, and gambling sites do suck up money and money pools there under the guise of people hoping to get rich
As opposed to state-run lotteries? Gambling is no more wasteful than any other form of entertainment. At best, that's an argument for allowing and regulating domestic gambling sites. And some games like poker shouldn't even be called "gambling", because over a sufficient time period results are determined more by skill than luck, and if you play well you can have a positive expectation.
So I checked it out. The CHEAPEST HDMI cable they had in the store was $85. I couldn't fraking believe it.
Impressive. On a related note, I was in Fry's the other day actually to buy an HDMI cable. The ones in the computer cable aisle were $40 to $80, and in the TV section they were $60 to $125. Then in the *checkout* aisle they have them for $20. I can understand using price discrimination to get more money from clueless videophiles, but wouldn't you want to put the cheap ones in a less visible place?
These actions would have been illegal were I come from
I don't know where you're from, but I'd bet it has a higher unemployment rate than the US. If businesses can't fire employees, they're going to be very reluctant to hire anybody in the first place.
Exactly how long should a company be obligated to provide charity to workers that are producing less value than they cost in wages and benefits?
Well said. I would only add as a preemptive response to the doomsayers that yes, it's true that some people can do everything right and still end up in bad shape through no fault of their own. But we're talking odds here; you have a far better chance of success by working hard than by looking for handouts, even though some productive people get cancer and some deadbeats win the lottery.
The American dream is becoming just that - a dream. Best way to end up rich? Be born that way.
Most Americans are quite wealthy compared to the average American 50 years ago.
When you have a machine do the job of a human, you take away somethng from the human.
So the pinnacle of humanity was when we were living in caves? From the printing press to industrial robots, machines have eliminated countless jobs that humans used to do. And yet, the human race survives.
They don't like the fact that Novell and Microsoft are working together
Um, no. They (and I) don't like the fact that Novell has blatantly violated the spirit of GPL2 by trying to create a situation where anyone other than them who distributes Linux is threatened with lawsuits. If this situation had been foreseen 15 years ago, you can bet GPL2 would have tried to prevent it.
Instead of kicking and crying when Novell and Microsoft started working together, why didn't the FSF realize that it was a move to legitimize Linux and work with it to bring Linux to the people.
If this is a troll, good job. It's just barely coherent enough to make me think you might be serious.
v3 is attempting to restrict deployment of apps via the web such that someone can take a GPLed piece of software and make changes then allow users to use it from their browser without distributing the changes. Since the people putting it on their website are the users in this case, it sure sounds like someone wants to control how users use the software.
My understanding is that there's an optional clause of GPL3 that says if you take a GPL3 webapp and modify it, if the original version had functionality allowing "remote users" to download the source, then your changes must also be downloadable via that method. It doesn't restrict use of the original code in any way. It does place restrictions on how you can modify it, but that's still an improvement over the default copyright where you can't modify at all.