It would be not that hard: All Apple had to do was stop purposely crippling their low-end machines. That means it should have PCI and AGP-slots and a goddamn VGA-port.
Your wish is my command! And, for the record, because the Mac has an AGP slot, you can use whatever goddamn graphics card you goddamn want: goddamn VGA, goddamn ADC, goddamn DVI, goddamn whatever. Goddamn.
And they should sell the CPUs and motherboards seperately.
"And as long as I'm wishing, I'd like a pony."
Even the most crappy 300$ PC is more reliable than a $2000 Mac. Why? Because when something breaks I can get a replacement within half an hour...
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that Macs very rarely break. Since the mid-1990's I've owned two CRT iMacs, an original iBook, a dual-USB iBook, a PowerBook G4, and two Power Mac G4's. Some of those machines I had for years, some for a year or less. I have had zero hardware problems with any of them. No power supply failures, no fan failures, no CPU failures, nothing. No problems at all. Hell, for the longest time I was wishing that my computer would die, just so I could replace it!
I purchased my iMac (15") on eBay from a reseller for about 1300 less than retail...
What unit of currency are you talking about? Because a really expensive 15" iMac will run you about $1,500. If you managed to get one for $1,300 less than list price, you're one lucky son of a bitch.
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You miss the point of incorporating. Its to sheild the owner of the buisness from financial harm.
That's not the only point.
Your arguement is obsurd.
I'm not making an argument. I'm telling you what the facts are. As far as the law is concerned, a corporation is a person, and it does have rights.
There are two important differences between the PowerBook and the Sony laptop that you didn't mention. First, the Sony laptop only includes what they call "i.Link" ports, which are 4-pin FireWire ports. These ports don't carry power on them, which makes it impossible to use things like bus-powered external hard drives and such. That's a serious drawback in my opinion; what's the point of having a laptop if you have to find a wall socket every time you want to use your external drive?
The other thing is that the Sony laptop apparently doesn't have built-in wireless networking. They offer an 802.11 PC card option, but that isn't nearly as slick as the PowerBook's built in AirPort card and antenna.
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A coroperation is not a person. They do not have rights.
A corporation's legal status is granted explicitly by the laws governing incorporation in your jurisdiction. A corporation can enter into contracts, for example, or sue or be sued. In other words, a corporation is empowered to carry out all the functions necessary for operating a business.
Because a corporation is subject to the legal responsibilities of a person-- a corporation can be brought before a criminal court, or compelled (in the person of its representatives) to testify before a court or Congress; a corporation has to pay taxes; a corporation can be sued in civil court and assessed punitive damage-- it would be unreasonable not to grant it the legal protections enjoyed by a person.
In other words, a corporation is a person, and a corporation does have rights.
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In a free society, you must take responsibility for your own actions.
No. The thing that differentiates a free society from a police state is that in a police state the central authority (or authorities) make every effort possible to prevent bad things from happening. (Their definition of "bad" may differ from yours.) In a free society, on the other hand, we accept that bad things are going to happen sometimes right at the outset, and agree that it's better to suffer the consequences of them than to live under stricter control.
Also, being in a free society does not mean i can do pretty much whatever i like; it means i can do what i like as long as i don't infringe upon another's rights.
That's a common misconception. In a free society, you're allowed to do whatever you like as long as you don't violate the law. You can violate another person's "rights"* all you want as long as you don't break any laws.
* There's really no such thing as a "right." In political discourse, "right" usually means one of three things. It can mean a freedom that is universally agreed to be inherent or divinely endowed. In the USA, it is universally agreed that people have inherent rights to life, liberty, and property; these ideas are laid down in our defining documents, and we accept them as axioms. But they're just a consensual hallucination. "Right" can also mean any freedom that is expressly granted or expressly protected by law. The Constitution says that Congress is not allowed to make a law abridging free speech; most people interpret that as meaning that everybody in the USA has a "right" to free speech, even though that's not even remotely true. Finally, and this meaning is most important, a lot of people use the word "right" to mean anything that they think should be universally agreed to be inherent, or expressly protected by law. When you hear somebody say (for example), "I have a right to determine how I treat my own body!" what he really means is, "I think everybody should agree that I can determine how I treat my own body, or barring that, I think that my freedom to decide how I treat my own body should be protected by law." This can get confusing because the other two definitions of "right" are based either on universal assent, or the force of law. Those kinds of rights are basically fixed in stone by the customs or laws of the society in which one lives. So when somebody says, "I have a right!" it's easy to be fooled into thinking that he's speaking literally, that whatever he's referring to is either inherent or protected by law. That puts people in an awkward position when they want to argue the point. But if you keep in mind that "I have a right!" can also mean "I want this thing to be accepted or protected by law," it makes the argument a lot more clear.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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Thanks to the provisions of the DMCA, they didn't have to get involved for censorship to occur. This is what is meant by the term, "Chilling Effect."
The term "chilling effect" is bogus, and here's why. Verio has an AUP for their service that says, "The following practices are not allowed." Even without invoking the DMCA, Dow could have gone to Verio and said, "Such-and-such a web site, which is fed by your Internet connection, is violating your AUP. We think you should cut them off." Verio, looking at what's happening on that web site, would have had no reasonable choice but to agree, and to pull the plug.
So the exact same result would have occurred without even so much as a mention of the DMCA. So the so-called "chilling effect" is, in this case, neither chilling nor an effect.
In fact, the DMCA was just one of three separate and unrelated laws cited in Dow's complaint to Verio, not counting the AUP citation. So for that reason as well, to say that the DMCA has a "chilling effect" here is completely wrong.
As for defamation, printing negative information is not libel if it is true, no matter how negative.
The web site and associated press release said (paraphrasing), "The president of Dow Chemical said, 'Something something.'" The person cited is not now the president of Dow Chemical, but rather a past president, and he never said anything like what he was quoted as saying on the web site. That's pretty untrue, making the claim that it can't be libel look cheap at best.
A biting satire of the company that (irrelevant stuff) is a valid exercise in free speech in my opinion.
Fortunately your opinion does not hold sway in this instance. You can't make up lies about somebody-- even in the name of satire-- just because you don't like them. If you want to create a web site that's critical of Dow, knock yourself out. But intentionally trying to mislead members of the press and the public is going way too far.
Dow deserves to have the screws put to them.
Nobody deserves to be the victim of illegal misrepresentation and defamation. That's why it's illegal.
Now, more people than ever before are learning that Dow is Union Carbide, and people are still dying every day because of their irresponsibility.
No offense, but blah blah blah blah. Bhopal was a bad thing. But that doesn't give anybody the excuse to break the law in retaliation without suffering the consequences.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
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However, the Yes Men do have a right to say whatever they want to say, unless a court decides that they can't.
Two things. First, no, they don't. As we've been repeating over and over in this discussion, there are lots of types of speech that are not lawful. Intentionally misrepresenting yourself to be something or someone that you are not for the purpose of defaming a third party is not lawful. They don't have the right to do that under any circumstance.
Second, even if they did have a right to say what they said, nobody shut them up. What happened in this case is that Dow called on Verio to exercise their AUP to pull Thing.net's connection. Verio agreed that that was the right thing to do. Nobody went to Yes Men or Thing.net and said, "You can't say that." Rather, Verio went to them and said, "You can't say that using our connection because it's against our clearly defined AUP." There's nothing stopping any of these guys from getting their message out through another medium, until such time as Dow sues them for every last dime they have. Speech-- free or otherwise-- has not been impacted here at all.
The entire DMCA is a 1st Amendment violation because it allows certain entities (copyright holders) to bar someone elses speech without a court trial.
By that reasoning, libel laws are violations of the 1st amendment, because threatening a newspaper with a libel action can be enough to convince them to pull a reporter's story without a court trial. Your reasoning just doesn't hold up. Trademark and copyright violations are not lawful, even under the guise of free speech. The DMCA (now Title 17) provided remedies for people who are injured by a trademark or copyright violation. That's all.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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Do you really believe that anyone would have been taken in and believed this website was really Dow's corporate website?
Absolutely. We've seen plenty of evidence of it right here, among a population that is arguably brighter (or at least more skeptical) than average.
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What are the false facts that have been published?
These guys issued a press release claiming to be released by Dow Chemical. The press release was also featured on the web page. It contained quotes attributed to an apparently fictitious person and also falsified quotes attributed to a past president of Dow Chemical. How's that for false facts?
To be fraud, they must be attempting to get something of value.
Or deprive the rightful owners of something of value, namely their reputation.
Asking a court to restrict someone's right or penalize someone for their speech is an infringment of the first amendment.
Of course it's not. The first amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. I, as a private citizen, can abridge your free speech all I want, if I can get a court to agree that it should be so abridged. In this case, since the culprits were obviously committing fraud and defamation, convincing a court to compel them to stop would be trivial. Fortunately it never had to go to court, though, because Verio accepted responsibility for putting a stop to the most trivial of the offenses-- trademark infringement-- and shut the whole thing down themselves.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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The right to free speech in the U.S. is granted to "persons" by the constitution.
The right to free speech isn't granted at all by the Constitution, to anybody or anything. Rather, restrictions are placed on Congress to prevent, among other things, the abridging of it. So the presumption is clear: that free speech is an inherent right of all persons, groups, entities, what-have-you.
As far as this not being a government action, wasn't the DMCA applied?
Read the law. Title 17 provides for both civil and criminal remedies. Also, title 17 was only one of three laws cited in the complaint.
I'm just trying to point out how easy it is for corporate entities to steamroller the rights of individuals (in this case, the right to due process and possibly the right to free speech).
1. Due process does not apply. This is not a criminal matter. The right to due process is a protection extended explicitly to prevent the government from keeping people in prison without a trial and that sort of thing. It has no application whatsoever in the civil arena.
2. These culprits were not exercising their right to free speech. They were (among other things, but this is the meat of the complaint) using Dow's trademarks without authorization. That is expressly not protected by free speech, in any way.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
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So, since the Onion goes out of its way to make its articles look real (hint: that's why they're funny), the Onion should be sued?
If The Onion called their site The New York Times and went to great lengths to make their site look exactly like the Times's site, even going so far as to using special software to mirror the Times's site in real time... then yeah, they should sure as hell get sued. The issue here is that these morons-- yes, morons-- intentionally falsely represented themselves to be Dow Chemical. Not a parody of Dow Chemical, or a site critical of Dow Chemical, but rather Dow Chemical itself. That's against the rules.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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Isn't that the definition of an Anarchist society?
No. Those two magic words, "pretty much," make all the difference. In an anarchy, everybody can do whatever he wants. In a free society like ours, everybody can do pretty much whatever he wants, subject to the limits imposed by the law.
In all free societies I know of, I always thought one's freedom extended up until you step on my property, or got within an arms length of my person.
A common oversimplification. In fact, nothing like that is true.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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I mean, when did a *corporation* get the right to free speech?
You're asking that question backwards. There's nothing in US law that grants a right to free speech to anybody. The law just assumes that that right exists for all persons, individual and corporate alike.
A better way to ask the question would be, why should corporate persons not enjoy free speech?
Forcing a number of (presumably) individuals with something to say off the web with the stroke of a pen doesn't seem totalitarian to you?
Nope, for two reasons. First, they didn't have the right to say what they said in the first place; false representation and defamation are illegal, and are not protected by free speech. (Parody is, of course, but this work was not a parody. It was fraud.) Second, this activity wasn't a government action at all; the government was never involved. Rather, Dow complained to Verio and asked that they enforce their AUP, and Verio complied. The rules were laid down right from the beginning; Thing.net chose to ignore them, so they lost their service.
As for the question of resources, if these machines cost a half million dollars each, I'm willing to bet that they are nearly as good as what the drug manufacturers use.
Don't forget, though, that drug manufacturers still have human beings sitting there watching every pill go by. The machines do most of the labor, but they have yet to replace human eyeballs for quality control.
Having a robot doing the actual filling would eliminate another source of human error.
Maybe, but it would also remove a source of assurance. Doctors are human, too; sometimes they prescribe in error. Pharmacists are there to double-check prescriptions and dosages.
Electronic prescription systems, incidentally, increase rates of error rather than decreasing them. It's a lot easier to type a "2" instead of a "3" than to write a prescription incorrectly in longhand.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
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There is a line between parody and fraud. It's obvious that the group in question went out of their way to make their site look as much like an official Dow site as possible in order to defame Dow Chemical. That's not parody. That's intentional misrepresentation.
Free speech does not give you the right to say whatever you want and damned be the consequences. It doesn't work that way.
Honestly, what's the worse crime - poisoning a couple thousand people, or impersonating someone who isn't even a person?
Ah, the classic "But they started it!" defense. That always works so well in the courts.
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
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I'm sure they would have. Probably something about how a free society naturally has consequences. Something like that.
Always remember, guys. In a free society, you are allowed to do pretty much whatever you like, and the rest of us take responsibility for picking up the pieces afterwards. In a totalitarian society, you are told what you can and can't do from the outset so nobody has to pick up the pieces afterwards. Whether you would prefer to live in a totalitarian society or a free society is up to you, but be careful never to confuse the two.
On many Sony televisions, you access the maintenance menu by turning the TV off, pressing "Display" "5" "Volume +," and turning the TV back on. So yeah, there's a long tradition of hiding service and maintenance features behind obscure keystroke combinations.
Before you try it, though, be aware that you can seriously fuck up your TV if you change a setting by mistake.
Depends on how you define "platform". Java is a language.
Not exactly. Java is also a runtime environment, a just-in-time compiler, a virtual machine, and a set of class libraries. That's why it's a platform rather than just a language.
Yet still, I don't think the desire to fashion a better world (at least in terms of software systems) is a function of politics.
Two things. First, it is absolutely a function of politics. Second, the FSF's idea of a better world is unbelievably wrong-headed.
A few years ago I was working as a field service engineer for a major computer company that y'all all like to make fun of because their CPU's don't run at 4 GHz. Manufacturing packed spare parts in those packing pellets that are made from rice.
One day I was trying to get some paperwork finished so I could leave early, so I skipped lunch. About 2:00, I got kinda hungry. So I pulled a power supply out of a box by my desk and started munching down on the packing pellets. They're good; they taste kinda like rice cakes. Probably not the cleanest things in the world, but neither is that burger you got from McDoonald's for lunch.
One of the secretaries came into the cubicle farm looking for somebody, and she saw me sitting at my desk, typing away, calmly eating packing pellets. The poor woman was so nice, she thought I was having a nervous breakdown.
I'm no GTK expert, but to me it looks like you left out the part where clicking the button causes the program to exit. If I'm reading your program right, all you did was draw a window with a button in it; the button itself doesn't seem to do anything.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with Objective C. It compiles, so it requires no special run-time environment. It's trivial; there are about five extensions to standard C to learn. Because it's just C with some extras, I can use any C-language code or library with no extra effort. And it's just as easy (easier, even!) to write first-class Aqua UI applications as it would be with Python or Ruby or whatever else.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be not that hard: All Apple had to do was stop purposely crippling their low-end machines. That means it should have PCI and AGP-slots and a goddamn VGA-port.
Your wish is my command! And, for the record, because the Mac has an AGP slot, you can use whatever goddamn graphics card you goddamn want: goddamn VGA, goddamn ADC, goddamn DVI, goddamn whatever. Goddamn.
And they should sell the CPUs and motherboards seperately.
"And as long as I'm wishing, I'd like a pony."
Even the most crappy 300$ PC is more reliable than a $2000 Mac. Why? Because when something breaks I can get a replacement within half an hour...
That would be true if it weren't for the fact that Macs very rarely break. Since the mid-1990's I've owned two CRT iMacs, an original iBook, a dual-USB iBook, a PowerBook G4, and two Power Mac G4's. Some of those machines I had for years, some for a year or less. I have had zero hardware problems with any of them. No power supply failures, no fan failures, no CPU failures, nothing. No problems at all. Hell, for the longest time I was wishing that my computer would die, just so I could replace it!
I purchased my iMac (15") on eBay from a reseller for about 1300 less than retail...
What unit of currency are you talking about? Because a really expensive 15" iMac will run you about $1,500. If you managed to get one for $1,300 less than list price, you're one lucky son of a bitch.
You miss the point of incorporating. Its to sheild the owner of the buisness from financial harm.
That's not the only point.
Your arguement is obsurd.
I'm not making an argument. I'm telling you what the facts are. As far as the law is concerned, a corporation is a person, and it does have rights.
DVD-R drive
For the record, I believe the SuperDrive is a DVD-RW, not just a DVD-R. That's the case with the SuperDrive in my Power Mac G4, anyway.
There are two important differences between the PowerBook and the Sony laptop that you didn't mention. First, the Sony laptop only includes what they call "i.Link" ports, which are 4-pin FireWire ports. These ports don't carry power on them, which makes it impossible to use things like bus-powered external hard drives and such. That's a serious drawback in my opinion; what's the point of having a laptop if you have to find a wall socket every time you want to use your external drive?
The other thing is that the Sony laptop apparently doesn't have built-in wireless networking. They offer an 802.11 PC card option, but that isn't nearly as slick as the PowerBook's built in AirPort card and antenna.
A coroperation is not a person. They do not have rights.
A corporation's legal status is granted explicitly by the laws governing incorporation in your jurisdiction. A corporation can enter into contracts, for example, or sue or be sued. In other words, a corporation is empowered to carry out all the functions necessary for operating a business.
Because a corporation is subject to the legal responsibilities of a person-- a corporation can be brought before a criminal court, or compelled (in the person of its representatives) to testify before a court or Congress; a corporation has to pay taxes; a corporation can be sued in civil court and assessed punitive damage-- it would be unreasonable not to grant it the legal protections enjoyed by a person.
In other words, a corporation is a person, and a corporation does have rights.
In a free society, you must take responsibility for your own actions.
No. The thing that differentiates a free society from a police state is that in a police state the central authority (or authorities) make every effort possible to prevent bad things from happening. (Their definition of "bad" may differ from yours.) In a free society, on the other hand, we accept that bad things are going to happen sometimes right at the outset, and agree that it's better to suffer the consequences of them than to live under stricter control.
Also, being in a free society does not mean i can do pretty much whatever i like; it means i can do what i like as long as i don't infringe upon another's rights.
That's a common misconception. In a free society, you're allowed to do whatever you like as long as you don't violate the law. You can violate another person's "rights"* all you want as long as you don't break any laws.
* There's really no such thing as a "right." In political discourse, "right" usually means one of three things. It can mean a freedom that is universally agreed to be inherent or divinely endowed. In the USA, it is universally agreed that people have inherent rights to life, liberty, and property; these ideas are laid down in our defining documents, and we accept them as axioms. But they're just a consensual hallucination. "Right" can also mean any freedom that is expressly granted or expressly protected by law. The Constitution says that Congress is not allowed to make a law abridging free speech; most people interpret that as meaning that everybody in the USA has a "right" to free speech, even though that's not even remotely true. Finally, and this meaning is most important, a lot of people use the word "right" to mean anything that they think should be universally agreed to be inherent, or expressly protected by law. When you hear somebody say (for example), "I have a right to determine how I treat my own body!" what he really means is, "I think everybody should agree that I can determine how I treat my own body, or barring that, I think that my freedom to decide how I treat my own body should be protected by law." This can get confusing because the other two definitions of "right" are based either on universal assent, or the force of law. Those kinds of rights are basically fixed in stone by the customs or laws of the society in which one lives. So when somebody says, "I have a right!" it's easy to be fooled into thinking that he's speaking literally, that whatever he's referring to is either inherent or protected by law. That puts people in an awkward position when they want to argue the point. But if you keep in mind that "I have a right!" can also mean "I want this thing to be accepted or protected by law," it makes the argument a lot more clear.
Thanks to the provisions of the DMCA, they didn't have to get involved for censorship to occur. This is what is meant by the term, "Chilling Effect."
The term "chilling effect" is bogus, and here's why. Verio has an AUP for their service that says, "The following practices are not allowed." Even without invoking the DMCA, Dow could have gone to Verio and said, "Such-and-such a web site, which is fed by your Internet connection, is violating your AUP. We think you should cut them off." Verio, looking at what's happening on that web site, would have had no reasonable choice but to agree, and to pull the plug.
So the exact same result would have occurred without even so much as a mention of the DMCA. So the so-called "chilling effect" is, in this case, neither chilling nor an effect.
In fact, the DMCA was just one of three separate and unrelated laws cited in Dow's complaint to Verio, not counting the AUP citation. So for that reason as well, to say that the DMCA has a "chilling effect" here is completely wrong.
As for defamation, printing negative information is not libel if it is true, no matter how negative.
The web site and associated press release said (paraphrasing), "The president of Dow Chemical said, 'Something something.'" The person cited is not now the president of Dow Chemical, but rather a past president, and he never said anything like what he was quoted as saying on the web site. That's pretty untrue, making the claim that it can't be libel look cheap at best.
A biting satire of the company that (irrelevant stuff) is a valid exercise in free speech in my opinion.
Fortunately your opinion does not hold sway in this instance. You can't make up lies about somebody-- even in the name of satire-- just because you don't like them. If you want to create a web site that's critical of Dow, knock yourself out. But intentionally trying to mislead members of the press and the public is going way too far.
Dow deserves to have the screws put to them.
Nobody deserves to be the victim of illegal misrepresentation and defamation. That's why it's illegal.
Now, more people than ever before are learning that Dow is Union Carbide, and people are still dying every day because of their irresponsibility.
No offense, but blah blah blah blah. Bhopal was a bad thing. But that doesn't give anybody the excuse to break the law in retaliation without suffering the consequences.
However, the Yes Men do have a right to say whatever they want to say, unless a court decides that they can't.
Two things. First, no, they don't. As we've been repeating over and over in this discussion, there are lots of types of speech that are not lawful. Intentionally misrepresenting yourself to be something or someone that you are not for the purpose of defaming a third party is not lawful. They don't have the right to do that under any circumstance.
Second, even if they did have a right to say what they said, nobody shut them up. What happened in this case is that Dow called on Verio to exercise their AUP to pull Thing.net's connection. Verio agreed that that was the right thing to do. Nobody went to Yes Men or Thing.net and said, "You can't say that." Rather, Verio went to them and said, "You can't say that using our connection because it's against our clearly defined AUP." There's nothing stopping any of these guys from getting their message out through another medium, until such time as Dow sues them for every last dime they have. Speech-- free or otherwise-- has not been impacted here at all.
The entire DMCA is a 1st Amendment violation because it allows certain entities (copyright holders) to bar someone elses speech without a court trial.
By that reasoning, libel laws are violations of the 1st amendment, because threatening a newspaper with a libel action can be enough to convince them to pull a reporter's story without a court trial. Your reasoning just doesn't hold up. Trademark and copyright violations are not lawful, even under the guise of free speech. The DMCA (now Title 17) provided remedies for people who are injured by a trademark or copyright violation. That's all.
Do you really believe that anyone would have been taken in and believed this website was really Dow's corporate website?
Absolutely. We've seen plenty of evidence of it right here, among a population that is arguably brighter (or at least more skeptical) than average.
What are the false facts that have been published?
These guys issued a press release claiming to be released by Dow Chemical. The press release was also featured on the web page. It contained quotes attributed to an apparently fictitious person and also falsified quotes attributed to a past president of Dow Chemical. How's that for false facts?
To be fraud, they must be attempting to get something of value.
Or deprive the rightful owners of something of value, namely their reputation.
Asking a court to restrict someone's right or penalize someone for their speech is an infringment of the first amendment.
Of course it's not. The first amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. I, as a private citizen, can abridge your free speech all I want, if I can get a court to agree that it should be so abridged. In this case, since the culprits were obviously committing fraud and defamation, convincing a court to compel them to stop would be trivial. Fortunately it never had to go to court, though, because Verio accepted responsibility for putting a stop to the most trivial of the offenses-- trademark infringement-- and shut the whole thing down themselves.
The right to free speech in the U.S. is granted to "persons" by the constitution.
The right to free speech isn't granted at all by the Constitution, to anybody or anything. Rather, restrictions are placed on Congress to prevent, among other things, the abridging of it. So the presumption is clear: that free speech is an inherent right of all persons, groups, entities, what-have-you.
As far as this not being a government action, wasn't the DMCA applied?
Read the law. Title 17 provides for both civil and criminal remedies. Also, title 17 was only one of three laws cited in the complaint.
I'm just trying to point out how easy it is for corporate entities to steamroller the rights of individuals (in this case, the right to due process and possibly the right to free speech).
1. Due process does not apply. This is not a criminal matter. The right to due process is a protection extended explicitly to prevent the government from keeping people in prison without a trial and that sort of thing. It has no application whatsoever in the civil arena.
2. These culprits were not exercising their right to free speech. They were (among other things, but this is the meat of the complaint) using Dow's trademarks without authorization. That is expressly not protected by free speech, in any way.
So, since the Onion goes out of its way to make its articles look real (hint: that's why they're funny), the Onion should be sued?
If The Onion called their site The New York Times and went to great lengths to make their site look exactly like the Times's site, even going so far as to using special software to mirror the Times's site in real time... then yeah, they should sure as hell get sued. The issue here is that these morons-- yes, morons-- intentionally falsely represented themselves to be Dow Chemical. Not a parody of Dow Chemical, or a site critical of Dow Chemical, but rather Dow Chemical itself. That's against the rules.
Isn't that the definition of an Anarchist society?
No. Those two magic words, "pretty much," make all the difference. In an anarchy, everybody can do whatever he wants. In a free society like ours, everybody can do pretty much whatever he wants, subject to the limits imposed by the law.
In all free societies I know of, I always thought one's freedom extended up until you step on my property, or got within an arms length of my person.
A common oversimplification. In fact, nothing like that is true.
I mean, when did a *corporation* get the right to free speech?
You're asking that question backwards. There's nothing in US law that grants a right to free speech to anybody. The law just assumes that that right exists for all persons, individual and corporate alike.
A better way to ask the question would be, why should corporate persons not enjoy free speech?
Forcing a number of (presumably) individuals with something to say off the web with the stroke of a pen doesn't seem totalitarian to you?
Nope, for two reasons. First, they didn't have the right to say what they said in the first place; false representation and defamation are illegal, and are not protected by free speech. (Parody is, of course, but this work was not a parody. It was fraud.) Second, this activity wasn't a government action at all; the government was never involved. Rather, Dow complained to Verio and asked that they enforce their AUP, and Verio complied. The rules were laid down right from the beginning; Thing.net chose to ignore them, so they lost their service.
As for the question of resources, if these machines cost a half million dollars each, I'm willing to bet that they are nearly as good as what the drug manufacturers use.
Don't forget, though, that drug manufacturers still have human beings sitting there watching every pill go by. The machines do most of the labor, but they have yet to replace human eyeballs for quality control.
Having a robot doing the actual filling would eliminate another source of human error.
Maybe, but it would also remove a source of assurance. Doctors are human, too; sometimes they prescribe in error. Pharmacists are there to double-check prescriptions and dosages.
Electronic prescription systems, incidentally, increase rates of error rather than decreasing them. It's a lot easier to type a "2" instead of a "3" than to write a prescription incorrectly in longhand.
There is a line between parody and fraud. It's obvious that the group in question went out of their way to make their site look as much like an official Dow site as possible in order to defame Dow Chemical. That's not parody. That's intentional misrepresentation.
Free speech does not give you the right to say whatever you want and damned be the consequences. It doesn't work that way.
Honestly, what's the worse crime - poisoning a couple thousand people, or impersonating someone who isn't even a person?
Ah, the classic "But they started it!" defense. That always works so well in the courts.
I'm sure they would have. Probably something about how a free society naturally has consequences. Something like that.
Always remember, guys. In a free society, you are allowed to do pretty much whatever you like, and the rest of us take responsibility for picking up the pieces afterwards. In a totalitarian society, you are told what you can and can't do from the outset so nobody has to pick up the pieces afterwards. Whether you would prefer to live in a totalitarian society or a free society is up to you, but be careful never to confuse the two.
On many Sony televisions, you access the maintenance menu by turning the TV off, pressing "Display" "5" "Volume +," and turning the TV back on. So yeah, there's a long tradition of hiding service and maintenance features behind obscure keystroke combinations.
Before you try it, though, be aware that you can seriously fuck up your TV if you change a setting by mistake.
Depends on how you define "platform". Java is a language.
Not exactly. Java is also a runtime environment, a just-in-time compiler, a virtual machine, and a set of class libraries. That's why it's a platform rather than just a language.
Yet still, I don't think the desire to fashion a better world (at least in terms of software systems) is a function of politics.
Two things. First, it is absolutely a function of politics. Second, the FSF's idea of a better world is unbelievably wrong-headed.
But worst of has to be the /. audience spelling mistakes.
I can live with the spelling mistakes. It's the damn omitted words that drive me insane!
A few years ago I was working as a field service engineer for a major computer company that y'all all like to make fun of because their CPU's don't run at 4 GHz. Manufacturing packed spare parts in those packing pellets that are made from rice.
One day I was trying to get some paperwork finished so I could leave early, so I skipped lunch. About 2:00, I got kinda hungry. So I pulled a power supply out of a box by my desk and started munching down on the packing pellets. They're good; they taste kinda like rice cakes. Probably not the cleanest things in the world, but neither is that burger you got from McDoonald's for lunch.
One of the secretaries came into the cubicle farm looking for somebody, and she saw me sitting at my desk, typing away, calmly eating packing pellets. The poor woman was so nice, she thought I was having a nervous breakdown.
I'm no GTK expert, but to me it looks like you left out the part where clicking the button causes the program to exit. If I'm reading your program right, all you did was draw a window with a button in it; the button itself doesn't seem to do anything.
Right?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with Objective C. It compiles, so it requires no special run-time environment. It's trivial; there are about five extensions to standard C to learn. Because it's just C with some extras, I can use any C-language code or library with no extra effort. And it's just as easy (easier, even!) to write first-class Aqua UI applications as it would be with Python or Ruby or whatever else.