the exact moment I fell in love was at the end of the first episode, when Mal kicked the bad-guy into the engines
Right there with you. And amazingly, that hasn't been the high point of the show so far. Every week the bar gets bumped just a little bit higher. I'm still laughing about, "I'll learn as I go. (cut) So now I'm learning about carrying." Heh.
the VFX are exquisite
Man, yeah. I don't know anything about how they do things over there, but the 3D tracking can't be beat. Handheld background plates with CGI effects composited in, and the effects are positive bolted down. Really outstanding stuff.
Where the show really shines, though, is in the sets. They built the whole set for the Serenity, spent a fortune on it. It's like being there. Just amazing.
I'm constantly delighted and surprised by every episode and have yet to see one I haven't enjoyed
Yeah, the whole not-doing-too-well-in-the-ratings thing is kind of a letdown. Fox has been as supportive as anybody could ask so far, but it's tough going into the holidays not knowing what's going to happen. After he wrapped "War Stories," Joss said something like, "If we never make another one, I'm satisfied." Which is saying a whole heck of a lot, coming from him.
And for the drooling-needs-sex-badly-"boobies!" set there was a great woman-woman kissing scene last night.
"Our Mrs. Reynolds" actually had a much hotter girl-girl scene, although nothing happened. It was all steamy eye-contact and double entendres and whatnot. Hot as fire, though.
The western theme is a serious negative for me, though.
Matter of taste, I suppose. Personally I love it. Such a refreshing change from the aseptic Star Treks and the wormholes-and-wacky-aliens Farscape.
I guess it all comes down to bullets for me. Although I didn't plan it this way, I've found that I will watch any sci-fi show where they use bullets instead of laser guns or whatever. "Firefly" and "Stargate SG-1" are my two big ones these days.
I particularly liked Zoe's little side-comment to Simon last night, as she handed him a revolver. "Six shots, the drop it. Just move on."
Yep, ICANN deliberatly made it cumbersome and difficult to register for voting, precisely because they didn't want the public involved.
Isn't it much easier to assume that it's difficult to make a system simple to use? "Never attribute to malice what can best be explained by stupidity." Oh, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
all that the low-vote count proves is that ICANN is corrupt
The vote count proves no such thing. It may or may not be true, but the voter turnout does not prove it.
When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a renewed sense of national security. God Bless America.
Please change your signature. It is deeply offensive.
First of all, you talk too much. Spend a little less time in front of the keyboard, and a little more with your friends or family, if any.
The FSF and the OSI define what requirements a license must meet to be free (for the most part, they are the same, though the OSI is a little more lax). If a license meets those requirements, it is defined as free.
I do not recognize the authority of the FSF to define what "free" means. Their definition of the word "free" is as close to the opposite of "free" as I can think of. When the FSF calls a license "free," what they really mean is, "most highly restrictive," and that bugs me.
In that immediate sense, yes it is less free than the BSD license. But over the long haul, it will create a world with more freedoms, as developers won't be able to restrict the freedoms others may use (if they base their code off of GPL'ed code).
Ah. Finally, we get to the point. But a world in which developers aren't free to use "free" software in whatever way they see fit doesn't sound like "a world with more freedoms" to me. Sounds like doublethink, instead.
I've said this many times before: if RMS and his cadre of fanatics would stop using the word "free," I wouldn't have a problem with them. There's nothing free about the FSF's software; it's covered by a license that's just a restrictive as any other, and moreso than some.
(Most everything else you wrote I didn't even bother to read. Boring as all hell, your writing, and so repetitive. I just skipped to the end.)
Somehow, I doubt that if we took a poll, many/.ers would agree with you. Not that that means anything -- the opinion of the masses is irrelevant to whether or not something is true/right/good.
You know, I've been toying with a theory about you for a while now, and I think I'm just about done with it. You believe that you know what's right and what's wrong. You believe that you know what should and should not be allowed. And the opinions of people who disagree with you are irrelevant-- as you say here-- because you are right.
Usually you get this kind of fervor and absolute certainty from people who believe they've heard the word of God. But you are an atheist, and in fact you take every opportunity to mock the beliefs of religious people. So... where do you get your certainty from?
I haven't figured that one out yet, entirely. The only thing I can guess is that you believe you are smarter than everybody else-- or at least smarter than those irrelevant masses you so quickly disregard-- and that you, therefore, are capable of figuring out right and wrong from first principles. This should be allowed, that should not be allowed, and so on; you've got it all planned out in your head. And you honestly believe that the world would be a better place if everybody just did what you say.
That doesn't make you a philosopher, friend. That makes you a sociopath.
I just wish you would recognize your own limitations. I wish you would accept that other people have just as much authority to decide whether-- for example-- prostitution is right or wrong as you have. Instead, though, you yell "logical fallacy!" at every turn in an attempt to demonstrate that you are right because your reasoning is more sound. The world, though, is of course not a debating classroom, and your cries of fallacy, even if they were all right on, mean nothing at all. Some things-- again, let's just prostitution as an example-- are wrong for purely moral reasons, and as such are not subject to the rules of your logical debating game. "Why is prostitution wrong?" you ask. "Because it's bad," the world replies. This drives you nuts, because you can't argue against it. So you just cry "fallacy!" instead, as if that meant something in this context.
You can try to rationalize it all you want, friend. The truth, however, remains that you are not as smart as you think you are, and that most of the world disagrees with your ideas. You are, therefore, irrelevant.
See, it's going to go down something like this. You're going to stand up in front of the world and proclaim-- for example-- that prostitution is a victimless crime, and that it should be "de-illegalized" or some such. The world is going to say, "That's nice, dear, but we disagree," and they're going to walk away. This will, no doubt, send you into fits of apoplexy. At which point I will laugh, and then go make myself a sandwich or something.
Actually, no, anarchy is not a form of government. Anarchy is the absence of any government.
You're one of those people who argues that white is not a color because white is the absence of any color, aren't you?
Here on planet Earth, anarchy and freedom are incompatable. Why? Because given free reign to do what they will, people will invariably rape, murder, steal from, torture, assault, etc. their neighbors, thus depriving their neighbors of freedom.
You're invoking Wilson's logic here: the idea that there's such a thing as "freedom from." Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from assault, that sort of thing. That is, of course, nothing more or less than semantic gymnastics. Freedom in the transitive sense-- that is, freedom to-- and freedom in the intransitive sense-- freedom from-- are totally different ideas. The idea of freedom as security-- that is, intransitive freedom-- can't really be called freedom at all, without diluting the word to the point where it's meaningless.
RMS, incidentally, has no problem with this. He twists the word "freedom" every way from Sunday and sees nothing wrong with it. You should know better, but I suppose the fact that you don't is par for the course.
Though I disagree with his solutions, I agree completely with his analysis of the nature of man in the natural state of anarchy.
Then how can you be a Libertarian? Again, you should know better!
That implies that free software should be a right.
Have you learned nothing from our conversations? A "right" is nothing more or less than a prohibition backed by the threat of force. The Bill of Rights grants you a "right" to keep and bear arms only in the sense that it prohibits Congress from making a law limiting your ability to do so. Because the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, and the judiciary is empowered to act with authority to enforce the limits set down in the Constitution, this prohibition is backed by the threat of (legal) force. As long as everybody respects that, the prohibition stands, and your "right" is protected.
Of course, as soon as the majority decides that they no longer believe you should be armed, your "right" will evaporate.
Do you have a "right" to access to source code? In order to answer that question, we have to translate it. A right is a prohibition. Is there a prohibition on the ability to restrict your access to source code? In other words, is there anything stopping me from keeping source code that I write away from your greedy, prying eyes? No. Should there be? Absolutely not.
And here we are again, back where we began. The GPL makes it impossible-- legally-- for a person to do certain things with source code. One cannot modify the source code and then distribute objects built from that source code without also distributing the revised source code, for example. The GPL is a prohibition. (Six pages of prohibitions, actually.) A prohibition limits the freedom of the people to which it applies; it takes away options that you otherwise would have had in the absence of that prohibition.
The GPL, then, leaves the people who subscribe to it with fewer freedoms than they would have had. The GPL is, in a sense, "anti-freedom:" it sucks the freedom out of those who use it.
Calling software licensed under the GPL "free," then, is an abomination.
I will e-mail the FSF and put the question to him directly and post it in a reply.
Don't bother. I don't really care what RMS or any of his followers has to say about "rights." I already know that their ideas are not compatible with reality, so there's no point in even posing the question. Fortunately, the FSF is as irrelevant as they are fringe, so it doesn't really matter in any sense but the purely academic.
All of my positions derive from one premise: that we should have the right to do whatever we want, so long as we don't violate other's rights; that we should be free to do as we will so long as we don't prevent others from doing the same.
I have already demolished this idea in another thread. I see no reason for you to bring it up again here. Allow me to summarize: the world does not, and never will, work in the way that you describe, and it would be very bad if it did.
Some things -- such as life-forms, business models, and biopirated information taken from Indigenous cultures for example -- should not be patentable period.
Wait. "Biopirated?" What you are describing-- the taking of ideas from one person or group by another by force-- is the textbook definition of piracy, and yet you advocate it across the board. And then you have the audacity to declare the taking of knowledge from one particular sort of group-- primitive societies-- to be "biopiracy?" I'm barely able to stand up under the weight of all this irony.
Some things should not be allowed to be trademarked [...] Copyright scope should also be reduced
Wrong and wrong. Fortunately, you aren't making the laws.
You're the one trolling around/. responding with irrelevant tangent-issues to everything I post.
Actually, I'm doing my best to make sure that your insane ideas do not go unrebutted. I consider it a public service. Besides, from the looks of things, it appears that you have a number of ACs-- or maybe just one very persistent one-- on your tail. If what I'm doing is "trolling," I hesitate to even wonder what you'd call that particular fan club of yours.
Freedom does not mean the power to do whatever you will. That's anarchy.
Freedom is a state of being. Anarchy is a system of governance. They two are not mutually incompatible. In fact, anarchy would be the system of governance-- that is, none at all-- that offers the most freedom to its citizens.
So yeah, freedom does mean being able to do whatever you will.
The FSF thinks that free software should be a right
No, they don't. This is a misrepresentation of the FSF's ideas. The FSF has some pretty crazy ideas about intellectual property, but they're not going so far as to say that software is a right. What was that you said about something being absurd?
Once again we see an example of this user, dh003i, picking something arbitrary and senseless and calling it his right. So far we've seen drug abuse, prostitution, deviant sexual practices, and now access to software source code.
When do I get to call not having to listen to your claptrap my right?
Your figures are also substantially off. You're talking about lofting nuclear waste to orbit. That doesn't help anybody. In order to get rid of the problem, you'd have to send it clear out of the Earth's gravity well, which requires substantially more energy.
Looks like it's back to the drawing board for you.
So, in other words, Hoisington, Kansas is virtually indistinguishable from Christchurch, New Zealand?
From orbit? Yes.
That laundry list of things that you think make you fundamentally different from other Americans is laughable at best. It only goes to show that your worldview is far, far too small.
I don't think any of the Bostonians I've known would understand the life or diet of a Louisianan at all (or vice versa). Language, food, and recreation are certainly all VASTLY different between those two locales.
No, no. Language? People from Boston and New Orleans speak the exact same language, modulo a few regional idioms or pronunciation differences. When the national evening news comes on in both cities, nobody has trouble understanding Peter Jennings. More importantly, people from both cities read and write the same language with the same alphabet. Hell, people from New Orleans and Boston can even read one another's handwriting.
Food? No noticeable differences. People in Boston get their food from a market, probably a regional or national supermarket chain, just like people in New Orleans. Neither group grows their own food, except for the occasional herb or salad garden, and notwithstanding commercial farmers in and around either region. Both groups eat the same basic foods: fruits, vegetables, and grains indigenous to North America, and some from more distant locales; beef, pork, and lamb, and to a lesser extent venison, rabbit, and other game meats; chicken, turkey, goose, and duck; fish and crustaceans from fresh, brackish, and salt waters. Also noteworthy are the omissions that both groups share. Neither group eats much mutton, horse, or goat, and while both drink milk, it is almost universally the milk of a cow, not milk from a goat or a sheep. Both groups prepare their foods in essentially the same way: meat, fowl, and fish are cooked, while vegetables are either cooked or eaten raw, and fruits are usually eaten raw. Grains are almost universally boiled. Particular styles of cuisine vary from region to region, but not as much as you might thing; one can find a pot of baked beans in New Orleans as easily as a pot of crawfish etouffee in Boston.
Recreation? The New England Patriots and the New Orleans Saints. Both groups see the same movies, play the same sports and games. Weather sometimes dictates different forms of outdoor fun, but there are about the same number of recreational boats on the Gulf and the Mississippi River as there are on Boston Harbor.
Indians (who I am singling out somewhat unfairly as being, from a middle-American perspective, pretty much the exotic end of the English-speaking world)
You are aware, are you not, that India is not technically part of the English-speaking world? While English is a very important language in India, the national language is Hindu. There are 14 other official languages, including Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, and a bunch more. None of these languages uses the Roman alphabet, or anything like it.
So by your broad definition of cultural equivalence, there are no significant differences between life in LA, or Boston, or Delhi, or Shanghai?
The checklist in anthropology goes something like this: language, food, family, ritual, religion, recreation. The things that distinguish a culture are typically how they speak and write; what they eat and how they eat it; what their family relationships are like; how they handle events like birth, marriage, and death; how they worship; and what they do for fun.
Between L.A. and Boston, these things are all very similar or identical. For example, the diet of a person in Boston is indistinguishable, in terms of total calorie consumption per day, the nature and variety of foodstuffs, and the ways in which food is acquired, prepared, and eaten, from the diet of a person in L.A, Portland, or Bozeman, Montana. The diet of an Indian or a Chinese, however, is markedly different, just as the Indian and the Chinese are markedly different from each other.
When you look at it from this perspective, life in Boston is very different from life in Nairobi, quite different from life in Hanoi, somewhat different from life in Helsinki, similar to life in Berlin, virtually indistinguishable from life in Sydney, and completely indistinguishable from life in Monroe, Louisiana.
I had a similar idea for a story 3 years ago. Should have copyrighted it.
Wouldn't have helped. Copyright protects works, not ideas. You can't, for example, copyright the idea of a book involving runaway nanotechnology.
Besides, Crichton himself owns the notional "copyright" on this idea, having used it before in The Andromeda Strain.
Re:Timeline to be released in 2003
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I would like to see Andromeda Strain redone as another movie
Only if they could fix the ending somehow to be a little less "reset-button-esque." Sure, the idea that the organism mutates into a harmless form in short order is scientifically sound, but it results in a pretty lame ending to a story.
"Jumping on the bandwagon?" Has there been a rush of fiction books about nanotechnology lately that I'm not aware of? The Diamond Age, by itself, does not a bandwagon make.
Maybe I'm just a dick, or an elitist snob.
No "maybe" about it. People who hold the opinion that that which is popular cannot also be good are wrong as often as they're right.
The states do have National Guard units at their disposal in the event of a millitary emergency.
Yeah, but don't underestimate the power of a well-supplied infantry division of 10,000-20,000 men. The U.S. is planning-- by some accounts-- to use three forward divisions, a force of about 50,000 men, in a hypothetical invasion of Iraq. How well would the Louisiana National Guard handle it if that many men came ashore at New Orleans and started heading northward? They'd put up a fight, sure, but would they win?
Of course, this is all fantasy, because a massed land invasion of the continental U.S. is hard to imagine, unless the black hats conquered or allied with Mexico or Canada first. But it's fun to speculate.
Huh? So people here in Westminster, Maryland act, talk, dress, eat, and think exactly like the people in Los Angeles, Missoula, Gettysburg, and Anchorage? That's a ridiculous statement.
Your world-view is too small. Compare the lifestyle of an average person from Westmister to the lifestyle of a bedouin, or an Australian blackfella, or a Maasai, or a Mongolian yak-herder. Kinda puts it in perspective, doesn't it?
Hell, there are even noticeable cultural differences between Americans and Japanese. On the surface, the lifestyle of a 21st century American and a 21st century Japanese seem pretty similar. But the Japanese have very different ideas of marriage and funeral rituals, of family relationships, and even of what is and what is not edible than Americans. These are anthropologically significant. The differences between a guy from Fort Worth, Texas, and a guy from Seattle, Washington, are not significant.
no wonder they water down the beer in the US, if you lot ever got drunk you'd never be able to tell which not was which.
Yeah, it's not like the giant numbers in the corners would be a clue or anything. Maybe functional literacy is to high a standard for all of y'all to hold to.
We have coloured notes.
'Round here we call that "Monopoly money." And then we vacation in Australia and live like a king on American dollars.
You think they'll detail enough troops into Denver to deal with the Colorado National Guard?
Why not? Drop an infantry division or two into Colorado-- or, more likely, bring them up through the Rio Grande valley and into Colorado from the south-- and you'll have a fight on your hands.
So, there are no Federal Reserve Banks in Denver, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, et cetera?
Sure, just like there are branch offices of the FBI, the ATF, and so on. But if you remove the head, the body dies. Federal Reserve banks can't act autonomously.
We are NOT the same as Easterners.
Do you speak English? Do you read and write with the same letters everybody else uses? Do you marry, and raise children in family units? Do you eat three meals a day, with knives and forks? Do you attend church, mosque, or synagogue-- or not-- depending on your preferences? Do you bury or burn your dead? Do you dance or sing? Do you cut your grass? Do you drink alcohol or smoke tobacco? Do you cook your food before eating it? Do you eat, essentially, the same foods that people from "Los Angeles or Boston" eat?
Sorry, but "we buy groceries six weeks at a time" doesn't qualify as a significant cultural difference. If you had a different language, or different customs, or both, that might mean something. But what kind of car you drive doesn't amount to a hill of beans from an anthropological point of view.
The DMCA must be shown to be a bad law. Scenario: I threaten you with a gun for your money. Even were I to give the money back and say, "Sorry, no hard feelings," I would still go to jail.
Uh... I think your example is broken. Unless you're trying to say that the law against armed robbery is somehow a bad law.
This situation, despite what a shitload of misinformed people seem to think, does not mean the DMCA was a bad law. In fact, quite the opposite; 512(f) makes it against the law to use the DMCA in an unfair or unjust manner. That's not the mark of a bad law; that's the mark of a very good law.
Just because the DMCA makes things you would like to do illegal doesn't mean it is, prima facie, a bad law.
But, when the revolution comes, the state governments will continue even if Washington DC is nuked off the face of the earth.
I'm not sure how you define "function" in this context. If it comes to war-- which is what I assume you're talking about, what with the "nuked off the face of the earth" thing and all-- the several states will be utterly defenseless. An occupying force could march into any state capitol in the country, gun down the legislature, and take control with virtually no organized opposition.
And let's not forget something that's even more critical than defense: the economy. Our economy is managed-- to the extent that it's managed at all-- from a central bank in Washington. That bank issues all U.S. currency, and backs it. If it disappeared... well, chaos.
And finally, just to pick one example of many, one that, as a restaurant owner, is near and dear to my heart, we have the USDA and the FDA. There are essentially no state-scale systems for the inspection, grading, and certification of foodstuffs. If the Federal government were to evaporate, we'd be back in the days of unregulated food production. Could we live with it? Sure. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to.
The Federal government is far from irrelevant.
Oh, and your thing about "a radical difference in behavior, speech, mannerism, dress?" Utter crap. There are essentially no cultural differences between any two points in this country, notwithstanding differences that are based on factors that transcend geography, such as race or ethnicity. You can get on a plane and go from Miami to Houston to Phoenix to San Francisco to Denver to Omaha to Chicago to Detroit to Boston to Richmond to Atlanta and back to Miami and not find any significant differences between any of them.
Well, the majority of people just want to be left alone.
Would you care to back that up with some kind of fact or statistic? Or even an anecdote? I don't believe that most people just want to be left alone. I believe that most people are very much supportive of laws that you would deem to be unacceptable.
Which is kind of the point, really. The majority gets to make the laws. You did, of course, fail to describe how you would hope to institute limits on the power of the citizens to make their own laws, so that question remains defiantly open.
In short, every individual does something or has some hobby that the rest of society would want to prevent him or her from doing, but yet that (s)he takes great (and harmless) pleasure/satisfaction from.
That's a very broad generalization, too. What facts or statistics do you have to back this one up? I assert just the opposite: most people don't do anything that the majority of society would object to.
I will continue to criticize you for your logical fallacies.
Bring it on. I, on the other hand, will continue to point out your ignorance, your naivete, and your flawed-- even broken-- reasoning. We'll see who wins.
Weeping Jesus on the cross. Umpty-teen answers, and not one of 'em got the original reference right. "Car drives you?" That's not funny; that's just stupid.
The original joke was about television in the USSR. (The USSR being a totalitarian dictatorship, natch.) "Soviet Union isn't that different from America," the joke goes. "Only difference is, in Soviet Union, TV watches you!"
Now y'all all fight over whether I should be moderated +1 Informative, or +1 Funny.;-)
Open source is of considerable value, or Apple would never have based their OS of the future, OS X, on an open source base (Darwin). Open source web server, Apache, included in OS X, is the major player in the web server market, with over 50% of the market.
Okay, so open-source software has value to software companies, or to people who run web servers. I fail to see how that has any meaning for individuals who just want to surf the web.
And in this case, Mozilla and buddies being based on open source means that people can suggest changes (or gasp, make their own), and get frequent updates and bug fixes.
Last things first: the value of frequent updates is moot if the browser is not of sufficient quality to merit its use. In other words, all the patches in the world won't make up for a poor product. As to the other matter, virtually nobody is going to be interested in making changes to their web browser; users are not programmers. There will undoubtedly continue to be a niche in which users want access to source code, but that niche is so small in comparison to the user base for a web browser as to be statistically insignificant.
I uphold my assertion that "open source" is of no value to just about everybody.
Besides, if IE is oh-so-superior, where are its tabbed windows and ad blocking features?
Tabbed windows are a terrible idea; on those occasions when I use Chimera, I avoid them. With tabbed windows one cannot view two pages side-by-side at the same time. That's the only reason I ever have more than one browser window open at once, so tabbed windows are of no use to me.
Ad blocking, on the other hand, is a good thing. It's one of my main reasons for using OmniWeb.
Closed source (and $30) iCab has been in "preview" versions for how long now?
There is just as much crappy closed-source commercial software as there is open-source software. I generally find that this is less good open-source software than closed-source software, however.
I don't want to just see features compared on what IE has (the ones Microsoft decides we need to further its world domination).
Uh... okay, first of all, your opinion of Microsoft is clear, and irrelevant to the conversation. Can we keep the MS-bashing out of this, please?
Let's say you built a web browser that also included a little window with a picture of a bouncing ball. A feature, no question about it, but is it a useful or important one? In reading a review of web browsers, I would prefer that the discussion be limited to features that actually mean something in the context of a web browser. Features like Mozilla's misguided and unwelcome "sidebar" and the mail and news readers don't belong in any serious comparison of web browsers, not because IE doesn't have them, but rather because no web browser needs them.
No, text leading in OmniWeb looks good by default, whereas with Chimera it looks way too tight by default. Neither program has an adjustment that I know of, but OmniWeb gets it right and Chimera gets it wrong.
So... rather than a democracy, then, what system of government would you propose? I know you said you would support the idea of direct democracy, but you also keep harping on the idea that the power of the people must be strictly limited by these things that you call "rights."
Your idea is that we should live in a society where the people make the rules, but where they're not allowed to make rules that abridge what you call "rights." Right? Limited power, that's the key.
How do you limit the power of the citizenry? There are only two ways it can be done: through an external source of power, or through the actions of the citizenry themselves. For example, a king or ruling court or some such could veto laws that the citizens pass that infringe on these "rights" of yours... but at that point it's hardly a direct democracy. On the other hand, the citizenry itself could agree to limit its own power... but that would never work, because the majority clearly disagrees with your idea of what "rights" exist, so the first chance they get, they're going to change the rules and make laws that infringe on one or another of your notional and mythical "rights."
So what are you hoping for, here? To be declared king or something? Because otherwise your whacked-out, insane ideas of "rights" will never make it into law. Too many people disagree with you, and in a democracy, that means you get ignored.
Look at it this way: is Slashdot were a democracy, I'll bet I could get together enough votes to take away your posting privileges. Would that be a violation of your "rights?" Definitely. Would I be able to do it anyway? Definitely. Would anybody be able to stop me? If Slashdot were a direct democracy, there would only be one way: if you got together more supporters than I have and defeated my proposition in an election.
(Oh, by the way, your cries of "logical fallacy" continue to crack me up. Keep 'em coming.)
We might find pornography offensive, but that's no justification for violating freedom of speech.
The freedom of speech is not, and should not be, absolute. Different degrees of freedom are available in different contexts. This is how things are now, in America, and it is also how they should be.
Community-- and, in this case, national-- standards of decency apply. If 51% of the community believes that pornography should not be available, then it will not be available. And if 51% of the community believes that boiled lobsters are offensive and should not be seen, then they won't be. If you, as a citizen, object to this standard, go convince enough of your friends to change their opinions until you have the support of 51% of the community. Until then, live by the rules.
In a truly free society-- which, of course, China is not-- the majority is free to make rules that govern the behavior of all. The fact that these rules were imposed on the Chinese citizens by their leadership is unjust, but it's hardly a crime against humanity. Worse things have been done by totalitarian regimes than this.
But if these same rules had been imposed by the Chinese people upon themselves, by the majority, they would have been completely justified in doing so. The cry of "You're violating free speech!" is ultimately meaningless.
Since the official religion of China is none at all (atheist) according to the government, they shouldn't care about this anyways.
It's not a religious issue. It's an issue of tradition. In this case, the two are closely related, yet distinct.
Slashdot Mirror
the exact moment I fell in love was at the end of the first episode, when Mal kicked the bad-guy into the engines
Right there with you. And amazingly, that hasn't been the high point of the show so far. Every week the bar gets bumped just a little bit higher. I'm still laughing about, "I'll learn as I go. (cut) So now I'm learning about carrying." Heh.
the VFX are exquisite
Man, yeah. I don't know anything about how they do things over there, but the 3D tracking can't be beat. Handheld background plates with CGI effects composited in, and the effects are positive bolted down. Really outstanding stuff.
Where the show really shines, though, is in the sets. They built the whole set for the Serenity, spent a fortune on it. It's like being there. Just amazing.
I'm constantly delighted and surprised by every episode and have yet to see one I haven't enjoyed
Yeah, the whole not-doing-too-well-in-the-ratings thing is kind of a letdown. Fox has been as supportive as anybody could ask so far, but it's tough going into the holidays not knowing what's going to happen. After he wrapped "War Stories," Joss said something like, "If we never make another one, I'm satisfied." Which is saying a whole heck of a lot, coming from him.
And for the drooling-needs-sex-badly-"boobies!" set there was a great woman-woman kissing scene last night.
"Our Mrs. Reynolds" actually had a much hotter girl-girl scene, although nothing happened. It was all steamy eye-contact and double entendres and whatnot. Hot as fire, though.
The western theme is a serious negative for me, though.
Matter of taste, I suppose. Personally I love it. Such a refreshing change from the aseptic Star Treks and the wormholes-and-wacky-aliens Farscape.
I guess it all comes down to bullets for me. Although I didn't plan it this way, I've found that I will watch any sci-fi show where they use bullets instead of laser guns or whatever. "Firefly" and "Stargate SG-1" are my two big ones these days.
I particularly liked Zoe's little side-comment to Simon last night, as she handed him a revolver. "Six shots, the drop it. Just move on."
The last two or three episodes have become interesting.
Interesting? Is that the best you can do? Did you even watch "War Stories?"
Zoe: Hold it, Jayne. This is something the captain's gotta do for himself.
Mal: (fighting, muffled) No, it's not!
Zoe: Oh. (everybody opens fire)
Yep, ICANN deliberatly made it cumbersome and difficult to register for voting, precisely because they didn't want the public involved.
Isn't it much easier to assume that it's difficult to make a system simple to use? "Never attribute to malice what can best be explained by stupidity." Oh, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
all that the low-vote count proves is that ICANN is corrupt
The vote count proves no such thing. It may or may not be true, but the voter turnout does not prove it.
When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a renewed sense of national security. God Bless America.
Please change your signature. It is deeply offensive.
First of all, you talk too much. Spend a little less time in front of the keyboard, and a little more with your friends or family, if any.
/.ers would agree with you. Not that that means anything -- the opinion of the masses is irrelevant to whether or not something is true/right/good.
The FSF and the OSI define what requirements a license must meet to be free (for the most part, they are the same, though the OSI is a little more lax). If a license meets those requirements, it is defined as free.
I do not recognize the authority of the FSF to define what "free" means. Their definition of the word "free" is as close to the opposite of "free" as I can think of. When the FSF calls a license "free," what they really mean is, "most highly restrictive," and that bugs me.
In that immediate sense, yes it is less free than the BSD license. But over the long haul, it will create a world with more freedoms, as developers won't be able to restrict the freedoms others may use (if they base their code off of GPL'ed code).
Ah. Finally, we get to the point. But a world in which developers aren't free to use "free" software in whatever way they see fit doesn't sound like "a world with more freedoms" to me. Sounds like doublethink, instead.
I've said this many times before: if RMS and his cadre of fanatics would stop using the word "free," I wouldn't have a problem with them. There's nothing free about the FSF's software; it's covered by a license that's just a restrictive as any other, and moreso than some.
(Most everything else you wrote I didn't even bother to read. Boring as all hell, your writing, and so repetitive. I just skipped to the end.)
Somehow, I doubt that if we took a poll, many
You know, I've been toying with a theory about you for a while now, and I think I'm just about done with it. You believe that you know what's right and what's wrong. You believe that you know what should and should not be allowed. And the opinions of people who disagree with you are irrelevant-- as you say here-- because you are right.
Usually you get this kind of fervor and absolute certainty from people who believe they've heard the word of God. But you are an atheist, and in fact you take every opportunity to mock the beliefs of religious people. So... where do you get your certainty from?
I haven't figured that one out yet, entirely. The only thing I can guess is that you believe you are smarter than everybody else-- or at least smarter than those irrelevant masses you so quickly disregard-- and that you, therefore, are capable of figuring out right and wrong from first principles. This should be allowed, that should not be allowed, and so on; you've got it all planned out in your head. And you honestly believe that the world would be a better place if everybody just did what you say.
That doesn't make you a philosopher, friend. That makes you a sociopath.
I just wish you would recognize your own limitations. I wish you would accept that other people have just as much authority to decide whether-- for example-- prostitution is right or wrong as you have. Instead, though, you yell "logical fallacy!" at every turn in an attempt to demonstrate that you are right because your reasoning is more sound. The world, though, is of course not a debating classroom, and your cries of fallacy, even if they were all right on, mean nothing at all. Some things-- again, let's just prostitution as an example-- are wrong for purely moral reasons, and as such are not subject to the rules of your logical debating game. "Why is prostitution wrong?" you ask. "Because it's bad," the world replies. This drives you nuts, because you can't argue against it. So you just cry "fallacy!" instead, as if that meant something in this context.
You can try to rationalize it all you want, friend. The truth, however, remains that you are not as smart as you think you are, and that most of the world disagrees with your ideas. You are, therefore, irrelevant.
See, it's going to go down something like this. You're going to stand up in front of the world and proclaim-- for example-- that prostitution is a victimless crime, and that it should be "de-illegalized" or some such. The world is going to say, "That's nice, dear, but we disagree," and they're going to walk away. This will, no doubt, send you into fits of apoplexy. At which point I will laugh, and then go make myself a sandwich or something.
Actually, no, anarchy is not a form of government. Anarchy is the absence of any government.
/. responding with irrelevant tangent-issues to everything I post.
You're one of those people who argues that white is not a color because white is the absence of any color, aren't you?
Here on planet Earth, anarchy and freedom are incompatable. Why? Because given free reign to do what they will, people will invariably rape, murder, steal from, torture, assault, etc. their neighbors, thus depriving their neighbors of freedom.
You're invoking Wilson's logic here: the idea that there's such a thing as "freedom from." Freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from assault, that sort of thing. That is, of course, nothing more or less than semantic gymnastics. Freedom in the transitive sense-- that is, freedom to-- and freedom in the intransitive sense-- freedom from-- are totally different ideas. The idea of freedom as security-- that is, intransitive freedom-- can't really be called freedom at all, without diluting the word to the point where it's meaningless.
RMS, incidentally, has no problem with this. He twists the word "freedom" every way from Sunday and sees nothing wrong with it. You should know better, but I suppose the fact that you don't is par for the course.
Though I disagree with his solutions, I agree completely with his analysis of the nature of man in the natural state of anarchy.
Then how can you be a Libertarian? Again, you should know better!
That implies that free software should be a right.
Have you learned nothing from our conversations? A "right" is nothing more or less than a prohibition backed by the threat of force. The Bill of Rights grants you a "right" to keep and bear arms only in the sense that it prohibits Congress from making a law limiting your ability to do so. Because the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, and the judiciary is empowered to act with authority to enforce the limits set down in the Constitution, this prohibition is backed by the threat of (legal) force. As long as everybody respects that, the prohibition stands, and your "right" is protected.
Of course, as soon as the majority decides that they no longer believe you should be armed, your "right" will evaporate.
Do you have a "right" to access to source code? In order to answer that question, we have to translate it. A right is a prohibition. Is there a prohibition on the ability to restrict your access to source code? In other words, is there anything stopping me from keeping source code that I write away from your greedy, prying eyes? No. Should there be? Absolutely not.
And here we are again, back where we began. The GPL makes it impossible-- legally-- for a person to do certain things with source code. One cannot modify the source code and then distribute objects built from that source code without also distributing the revised source code, for example. The GPL is a prohibition. (Six pages of prohibitions, actually.) A prohibition limits the freedom of the people to which it applies; it takes away options that you otherwise would have had in the absence of that prohibition.
The GPL, then, leaves the people who subscribe to it with fewer freedoms than they would have had. The GPL is, in a sense, "anti-freedom:" it sucks the freedom out of those who use it.
Calling software licensed under the GPL "free," then, is an abomination.
I will e-mail the FSF and put the question to him directly and post it in a reply.
Don't bother. I don't really care what RMS or any of his followers has to say about "rights." I already know that their ideas are not compatible with reality, so there's no point in even posing the question. Fortunately, the FSF is as irrelevant as they are fringe, so it doesn't really matter in any sense but the purely academic.
All of my positions derive from one premise: that we should have the right to do whatever we want, so long as we don't violate other's rights; that we should be free to do as we will so long as we don't prevent others from doing the same.
I have already demolished this idea in another thread. I see no reason for you to bring it up again here. Allow me to summarize: the world does not, and never will, work in the way that you describe, and it would be very bad if it did.
Some things -- such as life-forms, business models, and biopirated information taken from Indigenous cultures for example -- should not be patentable period.
Wait. "Biopirated?" What you are describing-- the taking of ideas from one person or group by another by force-- is the textbook definition of piracy, and yet you advocate it across the board. And then you have the audacity to declare the taking of knowledge from one particular sort of group-- primitive societies-- to be "biopiracy?" I'm barely able to stand up under the weight of all this irony.
Some things should not be allowed to be trademarked [...] Copyright scope should also be reduced
Wrong and wrong. Fortunately, you aren't making the laws.
You're the one trolling around
Actually, I'm doing my best to make sure that your insane ideas do not go unrebutted. I consider it a public service. Besides, from the looks of things, it appears that you have a number of ACs-- or maybe just one very persistent one-- on your tail. If what I'm doing is "trolling," I hesitate to even wonder what you'd call that particular fan club of yours.
Freedom does not mean the power to do whatever you will. That's anarchy.
Freedom is a state of being. Anarchy is a system of governance. They two are not mutually incompatible. In fact, anarchy would be the system of governance-- that is, none at all-- that offers the most freedom to its citizens.
So yeah, freedom does mean being able to do whatever you will.
The FSF thinks that free software should be a right
No, they don't. This is a misrepresentation of the FSF's ideas. The FSF has some pretty crazy ideas about intellectual property, but they're not going so far as to say that software is a right. What was that you said about something being absurd?
Once again we see an example of this user, dh003i, picking something arbitrary and senseless and calling it his right. So far we've seen drug abuse, prostitution, deviant sexual practices, and now access to software source code.
When do I get to call not having to listen to your claptrap my right?
You wasted way too much time on this.
Your figures are also substantially off. You're talking about lofting nuclear waste to orbit. That doesn't help anybody. In order to get rid of the problem, you'd have to send it clear out of the Earth's gravity well, which requires substantially more energy.
Looks like it's back to the drawing board for you.
So, in other words, Hoisington, Kansas is virtually indistinguishable from Christchurch, New Zealand?
From orbit? Yes.
That laundry list of things that you think make you fundamentally different from other Americans is laughable at best. It only goes to show that your worldview is far, far too small.
I don't think any of the Bostonians I've known would understand the life or diet of a Louisianan at all (or vice versa). Language, food, and recreation are certainly all VASTLY different between those two locales.
No, no. Language? People from Boston and New Orleans speak the exact same language, modulo a few regional idioms or pronunciation differences. When the national evening news comes on in both cities, nobody has trouble understanding Peter Jennings. More importantly, people from both cities read and write the same language with the same alphabet. Hell, people from New Orleans and Boston can even read one another's handwriting.
Food? No noticeable differences. People in Boston get their food from a market, probably a regional or national supermarket chain, just like people in New Orleans. Neither group grows their own food, except for the occasional herb or salad garden, and notwithstanding commercial farmers in and around either region. Both groups eat the same basic foods: fruits, vegetables, and grains indigenous to North America, and some from more distant locales; beef, pork, and lamb, and to a lesser extent venison, rabbit, and other game meats; chicken, turkey, goose, and duck; fish and crustaceans from fresh, brackish, and salt waters. Also noteworthy are the omissions that both groups share. Neither group eats much mutton, horse, or goat, and while both drink milk, it is almost universally the milk of a cow, not milk from a goat or a sheep. Both groups prepare their foods in essentially the same way: meat, fowl, and fish are cooked, while vegetables are either cooked or eaten raw, and fruits are usually eaten raw. Grains are almost universally boiled. Particular styles of cuisine vary from region to region, but not as much as you might thing; one can find a pot of baked beans in New Orleans as easily as a pot of crawfish etouffee in Boston.
Recreation? The New England Patriots and the New Orleans Saints. Both groups see the same movies, play the same sports and games. Weather sometimes dictates different forms of outdoor fun, but there are about the same number of recreational boats on the Gulf and the Mississippi River as there are on Boston Harbor.
Indians (who I am singling out somewhat unfairly as being, from a middle-American perspective, pretty much the exotic end of the English-speaking world)
You are aware, are you not, that India is not technically part of the English-speaking world? While English is a very important language in India, the national language is Hindu. There are 14 other official languages, including Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, and a bunch more. None of these languages uses the Roman alphabet, or anything like it.
So by your broad definition of cultural equivalence, there are no significant differences between life in LA, or Boston, or Delhi, or Shanghai?
The checklist in anthropology goes something like this: language, food, family, ritual, religion, recreation. The things that distinguish a culture are typically how they speak and write; what they eat and how they eat it; what their family relationships are like; how they handle events like birth, marriage, and death; how they worship; and what they do for fun.
Between L.A. and Boston, these things are all very similar or identical. For example, the diet of a person in Boston is indistinguishable, in terms of total calorie consumption per day, the nature and variety of foodstuffs, and the ways in which food is acquired, prepared, and eaten, from the diet of a person in L.A, Portland, or Bozeman, Montana. The diet of an Indian or a Chinese, however, is markedly different, just as the Indian and the Chinese are markedly different from each other.
When you look at it from this perspective, life in Boston is very different from life in Nairobi, quite different from life in Hanoi, somewhat different from life in Helsinki, similar to life in Berlin, virtually indistinguishable from life in Sydney, and completely indistinguishable from life in Monroe, Louisiana.
I had a similar idea for a story 3 years ago. Should have copyrighted it.
Wouldn't have helped. Copyright protects works, not ideas. You can't, for example, copyright the idea of a book involving runaway nanotechnology.
Besides, Crichton himself owns the notional "copyright" on this idea, having used it before in The Andromeda Strain.
I would like to see Andromeda Strain redone as another movie
Only if they could fix the ending somehow to be a little less "reset-button-esque." Sure, the idea that the organism mutates into a harmless form in short order is scientifically sound, but it results in a pretty lame ending to a story.
MC is just jumping on the bandwagon
"Jumping on the bandwagon?" Has there been a rush of fiction books about nanotechnology lately that I'm not aware of? The Diamond Age, by itself, does not a bandwagon make.
Maybe I'm just a dick, or an elitist snob.
No "maybe" about it. People who hold the opinion that that which is popular cannot also be good are wrong as often as they're right.
The states do have National Guard units at their disposal in the event of a millitary emergency.
Yeah, but don't underestimate the power of a well-supplied infantry division of 10,000-20,000 men. The U.S. is planning-- by some accounts-- to use three forward divisions, a force of about 50,000 men, in a hypothetical invasion of Iraq. How well would the Louisiana National Guard handle it if that many men came ashore at New Orleans and started heading northward? They'd put up a fight, sure, but would they win?
Of course, this is all fantasy, because a massed land invasion of the continental U.S. is hard to imagine, unless the black hats conquered or allied with Mexico or Canada first. But it's fun to speculate.
Huh? So people here in Westminster, Maryland act, talk, dress, eat, and think exactly like the people in Los Angeles, Missoula, Gettysburg, and Anchorage? That's a ridiculous statement.
Your world-view is too small. Compare the lifestyle of an average person from Westmister to the lifestyle of a bedouin, or an Australian blackfella, or a Maasai, or a Mongolian yak-herder. Kinda puts it in perspective, doesn't it?
Hell, there are even noticeable cultural differences between Americans and Japanese. On the surface, the lifestyle of a 21st century American and a 21st century Japanese seem pretty similar. But the Japanese have very different ideas of marriage and funeral rituals, of family relationships, and even of what is and what is not edible than Americans. These are anthropologically significant. The differences between a guy from Fort Worth, Texas, and a guy from Seattle, Washington, are not significant.
no wonder they water down the beer in the US, if you lot ever got drunk you'd never be able to tell which not was which.
Yeah, it's not like the giant numbers in the corners would be a clue or anything. Maybe functional literacy is to high a standard for all of y'all to hold to.
We have coloured notes.
'Round here we call that "Monopoly money." And then we vacation in Australia and live like a king on American dollars.
You think they'll detail enough troops into Denver to deal with the Colorado National Guard?
Why not? Drop an infantry division or two into Colorado-- or, more likely, bring them up through the Rio Grande valley and into Colorado from the south-- and you'll have a fight on your hands.
So, there are no Federal Reserve Banks in Denver, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, et cetera?
Sure, just like there are branch offices of the FBI, the ATF, and so on. But if you remove the head, the body dies. Federal Reserve banks can't act autonomously.
We are NOT the same as Easterners.
Do you speak English? Do you read and write with the same letters everybody else uses? Do you marry, and raise children in family units? Do you eat three meals a day, with knives and forks? Do you attend church, mosque, or synagogue-- or not-- depending on your preferences? Do you bury or burn your dead? Do you dance or sing? Do you cut your grass? Do you drink alcohol or smoke tobacco? Do you cook your food before eating it? Do you eat, essentially, the same foods that people from "Los Angeles or Boston" eat?
Sorry, but "we buy groceries six weeks at a time" doesn't qualify as a significant cultural difference. If you had a different language, or different customs, or both, that might mean something. But what kind of car you drive doesn't amount to a hill of beans from an anthropological point of view.
The DMCA must be shown to be a bad law. Scenario: I threaten you with a gun for your money. Even were I to give the money back and say, "Sorry, no hard feelings," I would still go to jail.
Uh... I think your example is broken. Unless you're trying to say that the law against armed robbery is somehow a bad law.
This situation, despite what a shitload of misinformed people seem to think, does not mean the DMCA was a bad law. In fact, quite the opposite; 512(f) makes it against the law to use the DMCA in an unfair or unjust manner. That's not the mark of a bad law; that's the mark of a very good law.
Just because the DMCA makes things you would like to do illegal doesn't mean it is, prima facie, a bad law.
Fuck Wal*Mart and fuck the DMCA.
And fuck you, too.
But, when the revolution comes, the state governments will continue even if Washington DC is nuked off the face of the earth.
I'm not sure how you define "function" in this context. If it comes to war-- which is what I assume you're talking about, what with the "nuked off the face of the earth" thing and all-- the several states will be utterly defenseless. An occupying force could march into any state capitol in the country, gun down the legislature, and take control with virtually no organized opposition.
And let's not forget something that's even more critical than defense: the economy. Our economy is managed-- to the extent that it's managed at all-- from a central bank in Washington. That bank issues all U.S. currency, and backs it. If it disappeared... well, chaos.
And finally, just to pick one example of many, one that, as a restaurant owner, is near and dear to my heart, we have the USDA and the FDA. There are essentially no state-scale systems for the inspection, grading, and certification of foodstuffs. If the Federal government were to evaporate, we'd be back in the days of unregulated food production. Could we live with it? Sure. But I sure as hell wouldn't want to.
The Federal government is far from irrelevant.
Oh, and your thing about "a radical difference in behavior, speech, mannerism, dress?" Utter crap. There are essentially no cultural differences between any two points in this country, notwithstanding differences that are based on factors that transcend geography, such as race or ethnicity. You can get on a plane and go from Miami to Houston to Phoenix to San Francisco to Denver to Omaha to Chicago to Detroit to Boston to Richmond to Atlanta and back to Miami and not find any significant differences between any of them.
Well, the majority of people just want to be left alone.
Would you care to back that up with some kind of fact or statistic? Or even an anecdote? I don't believe that most people just want to be left alone. I believe that most people are very much supportive of laws that you would deem to be unacceptable.
Which is kind of the point, really. The majority gets to make the laws. You did, of course, fail to describe how you would hope to institute limits on the power of the citizens to make their own laws, so that question remains defiantly open.
In short, every individual does something or has some hobby that the rest of society would want to prevent him or her from doing, but yet that (s)he takes great (and harmless) pleasure/satisfaction from.
That's a very broad generalization, too. What facts or statistics do you have to back this one up? I assert just the opposite: most people don't do anything that the majority of society would object to.
I will continue to criticize you for your logical fallacies.
Bring it on. I, on the other hand, will continue to point out your ignorance, your naivete, and your flawed-- even broken-- reasoning. We'll see who wins.
Weeping Jesus on the cross. Umpty-teen answers, and not one of 'em got the original reference right. "Car drives you?" That's not funny; that's just stupid.
;-)
The original joke was about television in the USSR. (The USSR being a totalitarian dictatorship, natch.) "Soviet Union isn't that different from America," the joke goes. "Only difference is, in Soviet Union, TV watches you!"
Now y'all all fight over whether I should be moderated +1 Informative, or +1 Funny.
Open source is of considerable value, or Apple would never have based their OS of the future, OS X, on an open source base (Darwin). Open source web server, Apache, included in OS X, is the major player in the web server market, with over 50% of the market.
Okay, so open-source software has value to software companies, or to people who run web servers. I fail to see how that has any meaning for individuals who just want to surf the web.
And in this case, Mozilla and buddies being based on open source means that people can suggest changes (or gasp, make their own), and get frequent updates and bug fixes.
Last things first: the value of frequent updates is moot if the browser is not of sufficient quality to merit its use. In other words, all the patches in the world won't make up for a poor product. As to the other matter, virtually nobody is going to be interested in making changes to their web browser; users are not programmers. There will undoubtedly continue to be a niche in which users want access to source code, but that niche is so small in comparison to the user base for a web browser as to be statistically insignificant.
I uphold my assertion that "open source" is of no value to just about everybody.
Besides, if IE is oh-so-superior, where are its tabbed windows and ad blocking features?
Tabbed windows are a terrible idea; on those occasions when I use Chimera, I avoid them. With tabbed windows one cannot view two pages side-by-side at the same time. That's the only reason I ever have more than one browser window open at once, so tabbed windows are of no use to me.
Ad blocking, on the other hand, is a good thing. It's one of my main reasons for using OmniWeb.
Closed source (and $30) iCab has been in "preview" versions for how long now?
There is just as much crappy closed-source commercial software as there is open-source software. I generally find that this is less good open-source software than closed-source software, however.
I don't want to just see features compared on what IE has (the ones Microsoft decides we need to further its world domination).
Uh... okay, first of all, your opinion of Microsoft is clear, and irrelevant to the conversation. Can we keep the MS-bashing out of this, please?
Let's say you built a web browser that also included a little window with a picture of a bouncing ball. A feature, no question about it, but is it a useful or important one? In reading a review of web browsers, I would prefer that the discussion be limited to features that actually mean something in the context of a web browser. Features like Mozilla's misguided and unwelcome "sidebar" and the mail and news readers don't belong in any serious comparison of web browsers, not because IE doesn't have them, but rather because no web browser needs them.
OW lets you adjust the leading?
No, text leading in OmniWeb looks good by default, whereas with Chimera it looks way too tight by default. Neither program has an adjustment that I know of, but OmniWeb gets it right and Chimera gets it wrong.
So... rather than a democracy, then, what system of government would you propose? I know you said you would support the idea of direct democracy, but you also keep harping on the idea that the power of the people must be strictly limited by these things that you call "rights."
Your idea is that we should live in a society where the people make the rules, but where they're not allowed to make rules that abridge what you call "rights." Right? Limited power, that's the key.
How do you limit the power of the citizenry? There are only two ways it can be done: through an external source of power, or through the actions of the citizenry themselves. For example, a king or ruling court or some such could veto laws that the citizens pass that infringe on these "rights" of yours... but at that point it's hardly a direct democracy. On the other hand, the citizenry itself could agree to limit its own power... but that would never work, because the majority clearly disagrees with your idea of what "rights" exist, so the first chance they get, they're going to change the rules and make laws that infringe on one or another of your notional and mythical "rights."
So what are you hoping for, here? To be declared king or something? Because otherwise your whacked-out, insane ideas of "rights" will never make it into law. Too many people disagree with you, and in a democracy, that means you get ignored.
Look at it this way: is Slashdot were a democracy, I'll bet I could get together enough votes to take away your posting privileges. Would that be a violation of your "rights?" Definitely. Would I be able to do it anyway? Definitely. Would anybody be able to stop me? If Slashdot were a direct democracy, there would only be one way: if you got together more supporters than I have and defeated my proposition in an election.
(Oh, by the way, your cries of "logical fallacy" continue to crack me up. Keep 'em coming.)
We might find pornography offensive, but that's no justification for violating freedom of speech.
The freedom of speech is not, and should not be, absolute. Different degrees of freedom are available in different contexts. This is how things are now, in America, and it is also how they should be.
Community-- and, in this case, national-- standards of decency apply. If 51% of the community believes that pornography should not be available, then it will not be available. And if 51% of the community believes that boiled lobsters are offensive and should not be seen, then they won't be. If you, as a citizen, object to this standard, go convince enough of your friends to change their opinions until you have the support of 51% of the community. Until then, live by the rules.
In a truly free society-- which, of course, China is not-- the majority is free to make rules that govern the behavior of all. The fact that these rules were imposed on the Chinese citizens by their leadership is unjust, but it's hardly a crime against humanity. Worse things have been done by totalitarian regimes than this.
But if these same rules had been imposed by the Chinese people upon themselves, by the majority, they would have been completely justified in doing so. The cry of "You're violating free speech!" is ultimately meaningless.
Since the official religion of China is none at all (atheist) according to the government, they shouldn't care about this anyways.
It's not a religious issue. It's an issue of tradition. In this case, the two are closely related, yet distinct.