That specifically is my point which you appear to have missed.
Libertarian policies may be the vaccines to the diseases the market suffers from today, but they are not the cures. The market is already sick, it is far too late to begin vaccinating and Libertarians don't seem to believe in action which might result in a cure.
If we switched wholesale to a Libertarian system, monopolies that are in power now would remain in power without check.
This is almost funny if it wasn't so twisted.
I argue in favor of labeling McVeigh as a terrorist and you go off the deep end about the military.
I don't particularly believe our military is doing right either but they have some very different situations.
They are being given orders by significant authority figures, just for starters. They are also trained and conditioned to do the things they do and to take such authority for granted. They aren't there to think, they're there because the brains behind the lines need certain jobs to get done and are for one reason or another too valuable for them to risk doing it themselves. You can hardly blame the soldiers for being the products of such conditioning.
My specific beef has to do more with the "soldier" versus the "warrior" mentality. A warrior is fighting for a cause and a soldier is fighting because they were told to fight. This frees the soldier from any personal responsibility for the things they do and I really think that if you're going to kill someone, *anyone* you need to really get in, get your hands dirty and hold yourself accountable for the things you do. The conditioning of our soldiers is set up to produce precisely the opposite effect. They aren't supposed to have a conscience when following orders. I think the conditioning itself is a terrible thing to do to a person, to reduce them to that mechanical unquestioning robotic mindset and the things they do while brainwashed in such a way are equally terrible.
But none of this has *anything* whatsoever to do with McVeigh. He set out with the expressed purpose of killing civilians. Not just of killing "targets" who may or may not be civilians but specifically with the purpose of attacking civilians. This is what sets him apart from the soldiers you deride.
The most frustrating and scary part of the Libertarian party and/or people claiming to belong to it is their uncompromising stance on the hallowed "Free Market".
A handy example is the belief that, left to its own devices, Microsoft wouldn't choose to crush the life out of any and all competition by fair play or foul.
The fact that, at least publicly, the Libertarians admit to *no* exceptions either in theory or in practice is impossible to comprehend. The free market is a great theory but reality doesn't allow any theory to flourish unchanged.
The idea that *all* problems stem from interference by government rather than from greed leaves me wary.
Investigation after the fact suggests that McVeigh intended the attack in Oklahoma City to be the opening of a new revolutionary war.
You might believe him a patriot if you agreed with his cause but from almost any other perspective the fact that he chose to attack civilians with a large bomb in order to accomplish some (even *any*) end earns him the label of "terrorist".
I wouldn't take anything for granted. *Portions* of the act have sunset clauses on them but not all of it.
Such as it is, I don't think we should even attempt to revise it. It should be stuck down entirely and if there is any legitimate need for something like it, something new and better should be drafted to completely replace it.
Being too timid to burn out the deadwood is only going to bring down the entire forest later.
Smith himself has said he wouldn't touch the Star Wars franchise with a ten foot pole. After seeing the uproar over Episode 1 & 2 he refuses to be accused of "raping someone's childhood".
Wouldn't it be more effective and useful to encode the birthdate on the device? The age can always be calculated that way and then you don't have to replace it every year.
Most people don't know how to turn off images in their browsers much less why they would want to do so.
Re:Who protects us from MS's patents?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Then isn't the patent itself contradictory and at the very least should be rewritten to either specify the tab key or to eliminate the reference to the tab key?
Between them, specifying the tab key sounds less vague and maybe patentable but the vague "use a key to do something" doesn't sound defensible.
Re:You hate it because you cant effectively argue
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Infact, I beleive the number of remotely exploitable defects in the various linux distros are similar or even higher than the remotely exploitable defects in windows server 2003 (you could use ballmers argument against MS if you could concede giving it merit, as i think linux installations might be leading Server2003 installations:)
That's not exactly a one for one comparison, is it? A Linux distribution containing xxx number of independent software packages vs. the Windows Server 2003 distribution? It's a commonly broken comparison but it's still broken.
A fair comparison would be a Linux server with all of the equivalent services installed in their most secure forms. Choose the most secure httpd, ssh, etc. and make the comparison. While any individual Linux distribution may not fit the bill it certainly isn't beyond us to consider that a Linux admin might choose to install such services. You can cherry pick your Windows packages too if you really want that.
Further maybe you want to compare the mean time between discovery of a problem and the resolution of that problem.
This would give you a reasonable and fair comparison. Just pulling stuff out of your butt based on "Randomly Chosen and Configured Linux Distribution + All Software That May Or May Not Be Installed" vs. Windows 2003 Server with no ups or extras doesn't really cut it. For your fantasy Linux distribution to be fairly compared you'd also have to install every single piece of Windows software and compare the security.
Re:Who protects us from MS's patents?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 3, Funny
So... if I scratch off the "Tab" label and make it the "Selection-Relocator" button I can still use it without violating the patent, right?
They're either patenting the use of a button to do the job or they're not patenting anything enforceable.
It might spawn a side business of re-labelled Linux keycaps.
And does the double click patent apply to my trackball or only to mice? And what if I press the button instead of click it?
What in the hell was that? He's screaming angrily at the crowd "Give it up for me!"
Was that a shareholders' meeting? A company meeting?
He looks like Ed Asner after having a nap interrupted by an injection of PCP. Yeesh.
Re:Balmer doesn't let us research it ourselves!
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you could get a license to look at the Windows code it would probably include a clause specifically forbidding you from doing this kind of audit.
I think you miss the point of both the game and the fairytales. They were caricatures of real life, not necessarily depictions of actual events.
The fact that this game doesn't choose to depict a perfectly realistic world but instead chooses to draw upon a fairytale like mythos deepens the fictional world it depicts. It isn't supposed to be confused with real life.
As the title "Fable" suggests, the contrasts of good and bad, light and dark are all going to be exaggerated and if it's written well maybe it'll actually have a "moral" at the end to be drawn from this world of sharper contrast than our own.
I wasn't citing that as a reason JibJab won, I was citing that as a reason the case was even brought to court.
Parody is fair use. Satire is not. If the song in question hadn't been public domain, a parody would *still* have been legal but JibJab was ruled as not being a parody for the reasons I cited.
It's the JibJab argument about the definition of parody in a copyright sense.
A parody is a derivative work which pokes fun at the original work. If this was making fun of MST3k then it is a parody. Since it is only imitating MST3k rather than parodying it, they have grounds on which to sue.
If there is a parallel I'd say it's the CLI vs. GUI stuff. It's taken a relatively long time for the Open Source community to start producing really good GUI interfaces and programs. It's not that they haven't been producing very good software all along. It's that they focused very tightly on producing the very effective, tried and true CLI apps. The game development process is arguably similar.
In Open Source gaming we are now recreating the tried and true games and building a certain skillset and developer base. When these people are sufficiently proficient or even bored with re-creating is when they can and will move on to pushing the envelope. They will scratch their own itches the way CLI development did and eventually get around to scratching other peoples' the way GUI development did.
In the end, games aren't fun only based on novelty. Recreating some very good games of the past is a worthy end unto itself. There are plenty of "out of print" but incredible games out there which are lost in the scramble for the "Next Big Thing" in commercial game development.
There was another city that tried to build their own infrastructure for internet connectivity and they got sued.
Apparently the local Telcos and Cable companies decided that their government mandated monopolies were being infringed upon when this particular municipality did for themselves with their own money what the companies found unprofitable and refused to offer.
Arguably Philadelphia might have more clout than "just some town" but still aren't they pushing the same buttons and expecting a different outcome?
Recall that if the supply of something rises, the price must fall. This is just as true for currency as it is for anything else that has cost associated with it.
This is just patently untrue. The price should fall but witness the current price of gasoline in the US.
There is less demand so the companies raise the price to make the same revenue from less volume. By all accounts they have a glut on the supply side right now due to decreased consumer spending but the price continues to climb.
This isn't a Free Market and in this particular case it isn't government interference which has it out of whack. It's greed and what is effectively an oil trust fixing prices.
Say we laid off 20% of 100 people in 2001. Now we have 80 people doing the same job 100 people did. Again in 2003 when business didn't recover as quickly or as fully as some had banked on we laid off 11% of the remaining 80 people or about 8 people. Now we have 72 people doing the work that 100 people did 3 years previously.
Unless some of that original 20% had been rehired between the first poll and the second then we're still ultimately down about 28%, not apparently including any numbers from 2002.
Are we seeing businesses being more stable because they're doing better or because they've come to rest at the bottom of a falling tide?
I guess the bottom line is: Were we 28% overstaffed in 2001 or are we 28% understaffed after the layoffs? Or do we know?
Slashdot Mirror
That specifically is my point which you appear to have missed. Libertarian policies may be the vaccines to the diseases the market suffers from today, but they are not the cures. The market is already sick, it is far too late to begin vaccinating and Libertarians don't seem to believe in action which might result in a cure. If we switched wholesale to a Libertarian system, monopolies that are in power now would remain in power without check.
This is almost funny if it wasn't so twisted. I argue in favor of labeling McVeigh as a terrorist and you go off the deep end about the military. I don't particularly believe our military is doing right either but they have some very different situations. They are being given orders by significant authority figures, just for starters. They are also trained and conditioned to do the things they do and to take such authority for granted. They aren't there to think, they're there because the brains behind the lines need certain jobs to get done and are for one reason or another too valuable for them to risk doing it themselves. You can hardly blame the soldiers for being the products of such conditioning. My specific beef has to do more with the "soldier" versus the "warrior" mentality. A warrior is fighting for a cause and a soldier is fighting because they were told to fight. This frees the soldier from any personal responsibility for the things they do and I really think that if you're going to kill someone, *anyone* you need to really get in, get your hands dirty and hold yourself accountable for the things you do. The conditioning of our soldiers is set up to produce precisely the opposite effect. They aren't supposed to have a conscience when following orders. I think the conditioning itself is a terrible thing to do to a person, to reduce them to that mechanical unquestioning robotic mindset and the things they do while brainwashed in such a way are equally terrible. But none of this has *anything* whatsoever to do with McVeigh. He set out with the expressed purpose of killing civilians. Not just of killing "targets" who may or may not be civilians but specifically with the purpose of attacking civilians. This is what sets him apart from the soldiers you deride.
The most frustrating and scary part of the Libertarian party and/or people claiming to belong to it is their uncompromising stance on the hallowed "Free Market". A handy example is the belief that, left to its own devices, Microsoft wouldn't choose to crush the life out of any and all competition by fair play or foul. The fact that, at least publicly, the Libertarians admit to *no* exceptions either in theory or in practice is impossible to comprehend. The free market is a great theory but reality doesn't allow any theory to flourish unchanged. The idea that *all* problems stem from interference by government rather than from greed leaves me wary.
Investigation after the fact suggests that McVeigh intended the attack in Oklahoma City to be the opening of a new revolutionary war. You might believe him a patriot if you agreed with his cause but from almost any other perspective the fact that he chose to attack civilians with a large bomb in order to accomplish some (even *any*) end earns him the label of "terrorist".
I wouldn't take anything for granted. *Portions* of the act have sunset clauses on them but not all of it.
Such as it is, I don't think we should even attempt to revise it. It should be stuck down entirely and if there is any legitimate need for something like it, something new and better should be drafted to completely replace it.
Being too timid to burn out the deadwood is only going to bring down the entire forest later.
Smith himself has said he wouldn't touch the Star Wars franchise with a ten foot pole. After seeing the uproar over Episode 1 & 2 he refuses to be accused of "raping someone's childhood".
Wouldn't it be more effective and useful to encode the birthdate on the device? The age can always be calculated that way and then you don't have to replace it every year.
Or wrap them around a water heater?
Or maybe inject one as an Ad somewhere?
Most people don't know how to turn off images in their browsers much less why they would want to do so.
Then isn't the patent itself contradictory and at the very least should be rewritten to either specify the tab key or to eliminate the reference to the tab key? Between them, specifying the tab key sounds less vague and maybe patentable but the vague "use a key to do something" doesn't sound defensible.
That's not exactly a one for one comparison, is it? A Linux distribution containing xxx number of independent software packages vs. the Windows Server 2003 distribution? It's a commonly broken comparison but it's still broken.
A fair comparison would be a Linux server with all of the equivalent services installed in their most secure forms. Choose the most secure httpd, ssh, etc. and make the comparison. While any individual Linux distribution may not fit the bill it certainly isn't beyond us to consider that a Linux admin might choose to install such services. You can cherry pick your Windows packages too if you really want that.
Further maybe you want to compare the mean time between discovery of a problem and the resolution of that problem.
This would give you a reasonable and fair comparison. Just pulling stuff out of your butt based on "Randomly Chosen and Configured Linux Distribution + All Software That May Or May Not Be Installed" vs. Windows 2003 Server with no ups or extras doesn't really cut it. For your fantasy Linux distribution to be fairly compared you'd also have to install every single piece of Windows software and compare the security.
So... if I scratch off the "Tab" label and make it the "Selection-Relocator" button I can still use it without violating the patent, right? They're either patenting the use of a button to do the job or they're not patenting anything enforceable. It might spawn a side business of re-labelled Linux keycaps. And does the double click patent apply to my trackball or only to mice? And what if I press the button instead of click it?
What in the hell was that? He's screaming angrily at the crowd "Give it up for me!" Was that a shareholders' meeting? A company meeting? He looks like Ed Asner after having a nap interrupted by an injection of PCP. Yeesh.
If you could get a license to look at the Windows code it would probably include a clause specifically forbidding you from doing this kind of audit.
I think you miss the point of both the game and the fairytales. They were caricatures of real life, not necessarily depictions of actual events.
The fact that this game doesn't choose to depict a perfectly realistic world but instead chooses to draw upon a fairytale like mythos deepens the fictional world it depicts. It isn't supposed to be confused with real life.
As the title "Fable" suggests, the contrasts of good and bad, light and dark are all going to be exaggerated and if it's written well maybe it'll actually have a "moral" at the end to be drawn from this world of sharper contrast than our own.
Despite your beliefs on the matter, you don't actually have to be gay to have taste.
It is refreshing to see you use the phrase in a positive manner though.
Wasn't it official that Mozilla was going to be unsupported? Like, bugfixes but no new development?
Firefox is their flagship product now. Mozilla in its previous incarnation was a bloated hulk which many of us are trying to forget.
I wasn't citing that as a reason JibJab won, I was citing that as a reason the case was even brought to court.
Parody is fair use. Satire is not. If the song in question hadn't been public domain, a parody would *still* have been legal but JibJab was ruled as not being a parody for the reasons I cited.
It's the JibJab argument about the definition of parody in a copyright sense.
A parody is a derivative work which pokes fun at the original work. If this was making fun of MST3k then it is a parody. Since it is only imitating MST3k rather than parodying it, they have grounds on which to sue.
If there is a parallel I'd say it's the CLI vs. GUI stuff. It's taken a relatively long time for the Open Source community to start producing really good GUI interfaces and programs. It's not that they haven't been producing very good software all along. It's that they focused very tightly on producing the very effective, tried and true CLI apps. The game development process is arguably similar.
In Open Source gaming we are now recreating the tried and true games and building a certain skillset and developer base. When these people are sufficiently proficient or even bored with re-creating is when they can and will move on to pushing the envelope. They will scratch their own itches the way CLI development did and eventually get around to scratching other peoples' the way GUI development did.
In the end, games aren't fun only based on novelty. Recreating some very good games of the past is a worthy end unto itself. There are plenty of "out of print" but incredible games out there which are lost in the scramble for the "Next Big Thing" in commercial game development.
There was another city that tried to build their own infrastructure for internet connectivity and they got sued.
Apparently the local Telcos and Cable companies decided that their government mandated monopolies were being infringed upon when this particular municipality did for themselves with their own money what the companies found unprofitable and refused to offer.
Arguably Philadelphia might have more clout than "just some town" but still aren't they pushing the same buttons and expecting a different outcome?
This is just patently untrue. The price should fall but witness the current price of gasoline in the US.
There is less demand so the companies raise the price to make the same revenue from less volume. By all accounts they have a glut on the supply side right now due to decreased consumer spending but the price continues to climb.
This isn't a Free Market and in this particular case it isn't government interference which has it out of whack. It's greed and what is effectively an oil trust fixing prices.
VPN or VNC?
What good is a warranty on a product with a dead battery? Dead with warranty or working without a warranty, which is the better product?
Say we laid off 20% of 100 people in 2001. Now we have 80 people doing the same job 100 people did. Again in 2003 when business didn't recover as quickly or as fully as some had banked on we laid off 11% of the remaining 80 people or about 8 people. Now we have 72 people doing the work that 100 people did 3 years previously.
Unless some of that original 20% had been rehired between the first poll and the second then we're still ultimately down about 28%, not apparently including any numbers from 2002.
Are we seeing businesses being more stable because they're doing better or because they've come to rest at the bottom of a falling tide?
I guess the bottom line is: Were we 28% overstaffed in 2001 or are we 28% understaffed after the layoffs? Or do we know?