To call anyone evil is to mollify the term evil. For every thing, there exists something worse and something better. Domain tasting is less evil than Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is less evil than Hitler, Hitler is less evil than Super Robo Hitler. To say something is evil is to draw some sort of sharp line in the continuous scale of evilness and lump them in with Super Robo Hitler.
Music is just bits. Life is just bits. Experience is nothing more than inputting data and how our meat-brains respond to this data. Of course, there's more ways to input data than waves of air lapping at one's eardrums, (I think that something ceases to be music when it ceases to be a purely auditory experience, but that's being kind of pedantic so whatever) but to devote time and resources just to be able to say to yourself (and others) "Hey, I devoted lots of time and resources to showing that I have this preference. I must be a pretty cool guy!" is kind of stupid. If that's how you get off that's fine, but it's nothing to be proud of.
The analogy between physical momentum and voting momentum should not be taken too literally. Momentum does not mean the tendency of the rate of change to remain constant, (although that's probably something worthy of interest in its own right) but rather the tendency for a win in one primary to lead to wins in other primaries. It's more of a feedback loop than a conservation law. This link describes momentum well, I think.
And any actual fan would know that fansubs are copyright violations anyway and that unfavorable reactions should be unsuprising and you should support the creators ANYWAY instead of bitching when they get annoyed with your running roughshod over their rights.
That's not what being a fan is. A fan is merely someone who consumes a certain good and likes it quite a bit. It does not mean that you feel any obligation to help the creators, any more than a gourmand should feel an obligation to support the agriculture industry. Fans are people who draw rape-porn of childrens' tv show characters. Fans are people who mail death threats to the creator for killing off characters. Fans are people who HAN SHOT FIRST, DAMN IT!
This is not entirely a bad thing. Of course, creators should not be fucked over completely (in that if they were completely screwed over, either there would be nothing to enjoy in the first place, or they would be slaves) but there is a give and take. The sycophantic attitude of "true fans" is pointlessly self-destructive. Why should you let people control your life just because they produce something you like? Information wants to be free, creators would rather it not be, they both make good points.
"Time out" and "standing in the corner" are the same thing. You have some amount of time where you are forced to not doing anything and calm down.
And I don't understand how you can say that isn't a punishment. Time out takes away the very things that make life living! Life is about fun. Toys or whatever give you pleasure, without toys, life is just an endless series of meaningless events: you sleep, you go to school, you eat, repeat until you die. To say that a person for some amount of time can't have fun and merely needs to sit and calm down is to take away all that makes life worthwhile, if only for a brief period. I know that whenever I was put on time out (and my parents were thoroughly "time out" parents) I was desperately in fear that my parents would decide to take away my videogames for long term or whatever, and then what the hell would I do? My time-outs were spent desperately trying to think of how I could explain my case to my parents and hope like hell that my life would remain meaningful.
The idea, I suppose, is that the moon is beautiful, with all of the various ridges and craters covering it, and if you had to strip mine it for Hydrogen 3, it would lose some of that "natural beauty." Which is still retarded, but less so, since there's definitely an argument to be made that we shouldn't ugly up the universe just so we can have some cheap energy source. Although the way I see it, not only does energy needs trump beauty in this case, (as long as we don't say, mine the entire surface of the Moon so that the man in the moon becomes a big smooth ball; that would be a tad excessive) but the distinction between "natural beauty" and "artificial beauty" is a bit spurious. Why should the pock-marked moon be considered inherently more beautiful than say, an abandoned smelting plant or water draining down a driveway and into a drain? The thing about nature is that it's everywhere, the presence of human beings doesn't make nature suddenly shoo away and refuse to make things beautiful.
Big government is a fair price to pay for the freedom to not know your neighbors.
In order for people to really thrive, people need to be able to choose their social relationships. The existance of community takes away from this. In an idealistic "old timey small town," everybody knows everybody, and if you don't want to be known, then too bad. Furthermore, communities mold people's values. Rather than people having their value system to be created by choice and rationality, there is this big mob of groupthink, where you do things simply because that's what is done within your community.
A vital function of government is to make it possible for people to be antisocial. If life was just one big happy family, we wouldn't even need government. People would live in these little anarchist communes, and when conflict arose within the community it would be dealt with. Government allows people to say "you guys suck, I'm gonna do my own thing" without being banished from society.
Yeah, and it isn't communication via passenger pigeon either. What's so special about face to face communication? Face to face communication isn't the pinnacle of interpersonal communication. You can't multitask to much of a degree without the person you are communicating with knowing, which is annoying and a breech of privacy, you are limited to communicating with whatever numbers you can physically be near, it is not possible to easily filter out undesirable communication, and so on.
Of course, face to face communication does have its plusses too (hell, the things I just listed could be viewed as positives in their own way). But the thing is that face to face communication is a fixed target: there's only so much that you can modify "two people flapping their meat at each other," but the Internet can be improved indefinitely.
Burgle is a back-formation. The word burglar came first. In fact, looking at the OED (not freely available, but I'm a college student so I have access to their website) "burgle" didn't come into being until the 19th century, where it was somewhat self-consciously silly sounding at least initially.
Worcester is taken from a city in England, and thus is due to the rather insane things that happened in the English language over the thosuands of years that the Midlands Worcester has been around for. Worcester doesn't seem so odd, though. It's just... slowly mashing the syllables together. War-cest-er, wah-cest-ah, wah-c'st-ah, wuhsta. (Although the rhotic "wuster" is catching on because the Boston accent is dying out.) When you combine city-names taken from England with city-names taken from Native American words, you get a fun hybrid of insanity.
To hijack a phrase which was coined to mean something completely different, supply creates its own demand. If you create some new technology, people will eventually figure out what to do with it. Simply giving people more options even if they don't especially want more options leads to good things. Plus, there's always a sort of catch-22 with these sort of things. People don't create technology that requires superfast broadband to work because most people don't have superfast broadband, and people don't get superfast broadband because there's not much to do with it. You need something to be able to break through that problem. Sometimes it's a killer app that manages to be just so awesome people have to have it, but just making stuff available also works.
That, and the amount of light radiated into space is not the same as the degree to which the sky is obscured. There's obviously a fairly tight relationship between the two, but measuring the latter directly is always nice.
My god, you've opened my eyes! I was a fool to think that just because a person says "There is only one reason anyone would want to change the internet: Control" that they are saying that the only reason why a person would want to change the Internet is control! Alas, I missed the subtle nuance of this statement, which is clearly merely making a criticism of these particular proposals and not claiming that all attempts to change the Internet are inherently evil! What a fool I have been!
My god, you have opened my eyes! I never realized that IPv6 was an intricate fascist conspiracy to take over the world, but now it's so clear. I must be ever vigilant against commie-fascist "upgrades" to the Internet when, as we all know, IPv4 is the most perfect telecommunications protocol ever devised!
Well sure, if you're a violent vengeful son of bitch, then you're gonna wanna kick some ass. But revenge is an irrational emotion that people should try to discourage. To gain pleasure from causing other people suffering is "immoral," and the need to gain pleasure from causing other people is ultimately not worth it, since ultimately the satisfaction of getting revenge minus the cost of getting revenge is still less than the vague satisfaction of "Eh, whaddaya gonna do? Sometimes you get robbed at gunpoint. Oh well, life's a bitch. At least I had insurance."
I feel it should be pointed out that there are Boomers and then there are Boomers. Many of the most influential Baby Boomers for personal computers were born more or less in the mid fifties. They were barely teenagers when Woodstock happened and they became eligible for the draft just around the time America left Vietnam. To call them Baby Boomers isn't exactly wrong, (some demographers call them Generation Jones, but it's all bullshit anyway) but to lump them in with those "damned self-important idealists" as some of the other posters are doing is unfair, since by the time these guys came of age, the idealism had already begun to go the other way.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a kid I broke my Gameboy after a few years of having it by dropping a book on it and cracking the screen.
To call anyone evil is to mollify the term evil. For every thing, there exists something worse and something better. Domain tasting is less evil than Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart is less evil than Hitler, Hitler is less evil than Super Robo Hitler. To say something is evil is to draw some sort of sharp line in the continuous scale of evilness and lump them in with Super Robo Hitler.
There's only so much room on packaging, so the FDA can only realistically force labeling for things that are actually unhealthy or whatever.
Music is just bits. Life is just bits. Experience is nothing more than inputting data and how our meat-brains respond to this data. Of course, there's more ways to input data than waves of air lapping at one's eardrums, (I think that something ceases to be music when it ceases to be a purely auditory experience, but that's being kind of pedantic so whatever) but to devote time and resources just to be able to say to yourself (and others) "Hey, I devoted lots of time and resources to showing that I have this preference. I must be a pretty cool guy!" is kind of stupid. If that's how you get off that's fine, but it's nothing to be proud of.
The analogy between physical momentum and voting momentum should not be taken too literally. Momentum does not mean the tendency of the rate of change to remain constant, (although that's probably something worthy of interest in its own right) but rather the tendency for a win in one primary to lead to wins in other primaries. It's more of a feedback loop than a conservation law. This link describes momentum well, I think.
Good thing we're introducing lighter than air travel, then.
Those abolitionists are just kids, and kids are stupid and naive. One day their livelihood may rely on slavery and their attitude will change.
And any actual fan would know that fansubs are copyright violations anyway and that unfavorable reactions should be unsuprising and you should support the creators ANYWAY instead of bitching when they get annoyed with your running roughshod over their rights.
That's not what being a fan is. A fan is merely someone who consumes a certain good and likes it quite a bit. It does not mean that you feel any obligation to help the creators, any more than a gourmand should feel an obligation to support the agriculture industry. Fans are people who draw rape-porn of childrens' tv show characters. Fans are people who mail death threats to the creator for killing off characters. Fans are people who HAN SHOT FIRST, DAMN IT!
This is not entirely a bad thing. Of course, creators should not be fucked over completely (in that if they were completely screwed over, either there would be nothing to enjoy in the first place, or they would be slaves) but there is a give and take. The sycophantic attitude of "true fans" is pointlessly self-destructive. Why should you let people control your life just because they produce something you like? Information wants to be free, creators would rather it not be, they both make good points.
"Time out" and "standing in the corner" are the same thing. You have some amount of time where you are forced to not doing anything and calm down.
And I don't understand how you can say that isn't a punishment. Time out takes away the very things that make life living! Life is about fun. Toys or whatever give you pleasure, without toys, life is just an endless series of meaningless events: you sleep, you go to school, you eat, repeat until you die. To say that a person for some amount of time can't have fun and merely needs to sit and calm down is to take away all that makes life worthwhile, if only for a brief period. I know that whenever I was put on time out (and my parents were thoroughly "time out" parents) I was desperately in fear that my parents would decide to take away my videogames for long term or whatever, and then what the hell would I do? My time-outs were spent desperately trying to think of how I could explain my case to my parents and hope like hell that my life would remain meaningful.
Well, the name Unix is a pun on Multics. Puns count as genetic, right?
Surely, a misquote is a sort of quote, isn't it?
The idea, I suppose, is that the moon is beautiful, with all of the various ridges and craters covering it, and if you had to strip mine it for Hydrogen 3, it would lose some of that "natural beauty." Which is still retarded, but less so, since there's definitely an argument to be made that we shouldn't ugly up the universe just so we can have some cheap energy source. Although the way I see it, not only does energy needs trump beauty in this case, (as long as we don't say, mine the entire surface of the Moon so that the man in the moon becomes a big smooth ball; that would be a tad excessive) but the distinction between "natural beauty" and "artificial beauty" is a bit spurious. Why should the pock-marked moon be considered inherently more beautiful than say, an abandoned smelting plant or water draining down a driveway and into a drain? The thing about nature is that it's everywhere, the presence of human beings doesn't make nature suddenly shoo away and refuse to make things beautiful.
Big government is a fair price to pay for the freedom to not know your neighbors.
In order for people to really thrive, people need to be able to choose their social relationships. The existance of community takes away from this. In an idealistic "old timey small town," everybody knows everybody, and if you don't want to be known, then too bad. Furthermore, communities mold people's values. Rather than people having their value system to be created by choice and rationality, there is this big mob of groupthink, where you do things simply because that's what is done within your community.
A vital function of government is to make it possible for people to be antisocial. If life was just one big happy family, we wouldn't even need government. People would live in these little anarchist communes, and when conflict arose within the community it would be dealt with. Government allows people to say "you guys suck, I'm gonna do my own thing" without being banished from society.
Yeah, one of these days I need to get off my ass and start killing people for real.
Yeah, and it isn't communication via passenger pigeon either. What's so special about face to face communication? Face to face communication isn't the pinnacle of interpersonal communication. You can't multitask to much of a degree without the person you are communicating with knowing, which is annoying and a breech of privacy, you are limited to communicating with whatever numbers you can physically be near, it is not possible to easily filter out undesirable communication, and so on.
Of course, face to face communication does have its plusses too (hell, the things I just listed could be viewed as positives in their own way). But the thing is that face to face communication is a fixed target: there's only so much that you can modify "two people flapping their meat at each other," but the Internet can be improved indefinitely.
Wait, since when did Americans work within a balanced budget?
Burgle is a back-formation. The word burglar came first. In fact, looking at the OED (not freely available, but I'm a college student so I have access to their website) "burgle" didn't come into being until the 19th century, where it was somewhat self-consciously silly sounding at least initially.
Worcester is taken from a city in England, and thus is due to the rather insane things that happened in the English language over the thosuands of years that the Midlands Worcester has been around for. Worcester doesn't seem so odd, though. It's just... slowly mashing the syllables together. War-cest-er, wah-cest-ah, wah-c'st-ah, wuhsta. (Although the rhotic "wuster" is catching on because the Boston accent is dying out.) When you combine city-names taken from England with city-names taken from Native American words, you get a fun hybrid of insanity.
To hijack a phrase which was coined to mean something completely different, supply creates its own demand. If you create some new technology, people will eventually figure out what to do with it. Simply giving people more options even if they don't especially want more options leads to good things. Plus, there's always a sort of catch-22 with these sort of things. People don't create technology that requires superfast broadband to work because most people don't have superfast broadband, and people don't get superfast broadband because there's not much to do with it. You need something to be able to break through that problem. Sometimes it's a killer app that manages to be just so awesome people have to have it, but just making stuff available also works.
That, and the amount of light radiated into space is not the same as the degree to which the sky is obscured. There's obviously a fairly tight relationship between the two, but measuring the latter directly is always nice.
My god, you've opened my eyes! I was a fool to think that just because a person says "There is only one reason anyone would want to change the internet: Control" that they are saying that the only reason why a person would want to change the Internet is control! Alas, I missed the subtle nuance of this statement, which is clearly merely making a criticism of these particular proposals and not claiming that all attempts to change the Internet are inherently evil! What a fool I have been!
My god, you have opened my eyes! I never realized that IPv6 was an intricate fascist conspiracy to take over the world, but now it's so clear. I must be ever vigilant against commie-fascist "upgrades" to the Internet when, as we all know, IPv4 is the most perfect telecommunications protocol ever devised!
Well sure, if you're a violent vengeful son of bitch, then you're gonna wanna kick some ass. But revenge is an irrational emotion that people should try to discourage. To gain pleasure from causing other people suffering is "immoral," and the need to gain pleasure from causing other people is ultimately not worth it, since ultimately the satisfaction of getting revenge minus the cost of getting revenge is still less than the vague satisfaction of "Eh, whaddaya gonna do? Sometimes you get robbed at gunpoint. Oh well, life's a bitch. At least I had insurance."
The BSD license is a smaller file, so it's more efficient?
I feel it should be pointed out that there are Boomers and then there are Boomers. Many of the most influential Baby Boomers for personal computers were born more or less in the mid fifties. They were barely teenagers when Woodstock happened and they became eligible for the draft just around the time America left Vietnam. To call them Baby Boomers isn't exactly wrong, (some demographers call them Generation Jones, but it's all bullshit anyway) but to lump them in with those "damned self-important idealists" as some of the other posters are doing is unfair, since by the time these guys came of age, the idealism had already begun to go the other way.