Getting a bigger, more productive Patent Office which thousands of new analysts who know their stuff would do a lot to fixing some of the problems in the economy. By putting many people on the payroll who know what bad patents are, the government can ethically protect businesses from the real pirates: the ones who use IP law to control the productive capabilities of American industry.
Reform should not stop here though. The Bush Administration should make it a priority to strip the FDA of most of its discressionary powers to block drugs it thinks "don't do enough" and to give it more resources to expedite the processing of drug safety tests so that drug companies can profit more easily (thus they don't have to charge as much).
When they ruled against Maryland saying that a state cannot tax a federal agency because..... (and it applys to everything) "the power to tax is the power to destroy."
and help coordinate fund raising with it so it can stand a chance against the Republicrats. The easiest way for the EFF to effect longterm change would be to work with the Libertarian or Constitution Parties to help them get elected at the local and state levels where a lot of really stupid IT decisions are made. Think about it.
Libertarian candidates tend to be highly educated compared to their Republicrat counterparts. If you have a LP majority on your schoolboard, you have a much better chance that Little Johnny won't get kicked out for being a "hacker" for using the Windows Messenger Service to send a "hello" message around the network. Why? Because you'll have a well-educated, more rational schoolboard who is passionate about civil liberties. Members of the LP tend to embody the old saying "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Another thing to consider: a libertarian wouldn't pull either a Bush or Gore on IT and science. Bush wants people to back up his preconceived moral notions on biotech research and Gore wanted yes-men who would just confirm what was in his little world, his great and powerful intellect (in reality most of the last occupants of the whitehouse as P or VP had similar IQs). Harry Browne as I recall said that he'd have worked to repeal the DMCA if he were elected. Try hearing that from a Republicrat. They always want to just "fix something" rather than get rid of it.
Lastly consider this. In Eldred versus Ashcroft the geeks got a taste for what social conservatives decry as an out of control activist judiciary. That judiciary is reinforced by the Republicrats. If we were to work together to remove people like Tom Daschle and Trent Lott and replace them with members of the LP or CP we'd have a judiciary more on our side.
You won't find one because Islam is a horribly repressive religion. You want to talk women's rights in Islam? Talk about the **absence** of them. Being forced to dress head to toe in a rag because a man might get horny seeing their face is common in many countries. Honor killings of women who have been raped. Polygamy. Whatever freedom an Islamic society extends to men it doesn't to women. Not even basic rights like being able to choose what they want to wear in many countries.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried by saying that culture doesn't determine whether freedom can be present. Cultural attitudes directly affect how one sees oneself in relation to one's fellow citizens.
It is time that the post-modernist critique of morality come to an end. This ridiculous idea that there can be any real morality in a world where there is absolutely no accepted notion of universal right and wrong can be blamed for a lot of the world's problems today. Let's take a look.
As secularists succeed in attempting to decouple capitalism from its original protestant moral underpinning you get Enrons and Tycos, companies with no sense of duty and obligation to anyone except whoever is currently trying to pillage them. Many years ago, business executives took pride in their companies and you'd have been hard pressed to find them doing that.
This idea that there is no universal right and wrong is precisely why we have things like "genocide" in this world. While most "genocides" are nothing more than mass killings, not wholesale exterminations, they can happen with impunity because when countries intervene they care about "cultural sensitivies" rather than seeking genuine justice from a standard of transcendant morality.
Another problem with the "everybody's morality is equal because it's an opinion and nothing more" argument is that from that point you cannot condemn what you think is evil. Want to condemn someone as a NAZI, guess what you (typically leftist) fuck? You can't because whether anything you say is morally wrong is just your opinion. In mine, it can be the holiest of holy things to "be a NAZI" by your definition of NAZI (ironically most don't even know what NAZIs actually believed; never read one sentence of the Munich Manifesto).
You can draw your transcendant morality from a secular source or a religion. However if you continue to not insist that there is a universal standard you are part of the problem. When a group pulls another Rwanda with the backing of a major nation (like France did in 1994) what would be your retort to them saying "it's our culture, don't get involved?" If you believe no morality is universal than you're a hypocrite if you don't concede their point.
More money in a wasteful, incompetent bureacracy doesn't fix anything. My university pays a business professor I had when I took a business elective almost $86,000/year to teach CIS and she made claims like Microsoft invented OO languages and that OO means using GUI elements. Fortunately I am a computer science major and none of my profs are even remotely that bad. However she is living proof of the argument that more money = better education system.
So here's a novel idea. Cut back the government budget, prosecute people for being wasteful and abusive, fire incompetent employees and give bonuses to those who come up with creative solutions to fixing public problems.
When they also show me in the text of the Constitution where it says they have a right to violate private property to advertise. Last I checked there is this often abused amendment, number ten to be specific, which reserves all property rights powers to the people and states.....
I swear to God, if there was a gene for this kind of legalistic stupidity I would violate my principles as a voting libertarian and constitution party supporter and call for a nation-wide eugenics program.
I caught this story on OSNews yesterday and posted a rebuttal on my blog. This sort of thing probably doesn't carry a lot of weight with most of the defense types because the military is the very definition of mission critical, no pun intended. Peoples lives are at risk on a daily business in most jobs in the military these days. There is almost no price too high to pay for the freedom to design to specification that Linux provides.
Linux is certainly not ready to take over a lot of things yet, but it is good enough for many things that traditional defense contractors are involved with. I wouldn't trust it yet as an OS for our warships or other vehicles, but I would trust it for communication systems and things like that. For situations like that, a RTOS from a company like Green Hills may not provide enough benefit to justify the cost. Linux is free, their product isn't. They can try to get the military hooked for a while, but Linux will always be free and there are plenty of IT workers in the military who could work on existing RTOS Linux forks for military use.
Another thing that has to be kept in mind is that with the push for homeland security, the laissez faire attitude that has been prevalent toward security has to go. The miltiary wants transparency so it knows it's not getting something bugged all to hell by some Jihadi who wormed his way into Microsoft or Sun via the H1-B visa program. The Debian and Fedora teams are great for that very reason. Everything is open to public scrutiny, from the installer to every package so the military gets a chance to audit everything.
Free markets are great, but in this case the military has to perform a more core mission: defend the US from attack. If that means violating free market principles by pouring taxpayer dollars into a free OS for public use, then they should and most likely will do it eventually.
Apple's DRM allows you to burn your tracks to a CD and rip them back to any format you want. Oh, I'm sorry, is that too much of an inconvenience for some of you? Or is it that $0.50 for a CD-R is too much out of your budget?
The RIAA and MPAA use things like this to boost their campaign for more control. You stupid fucks out there supporting these developers are the ones who are making the case for legislation like th CBDTPA and DMCA.
Apple has been working hard to make fair use online distribution possible at a reasonable price then these guys come along and work hard to undo all of that so that they can do.... what exactly? You can already change the AACs to MP3s with a good CD ripper. What do you need this app for, besides sharing the tracks with every friend and family member you have plus on Kazaa?
When the feds mandate Palladium and the CBDTPA, you people will only have yourselves to blame because you're making it hard for companies like Apple to create a market-oriented alternative that protects your rights. Maybe if you dumbasses would get away from your Linux boxen and hacked XBoxes long enough to study politics and causality you'd understand why supporting this is so stupid.
I first started using Linux almost 6 years ago when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore. Most of my friends and I thought it was da shit until OSX came out and then most of us dropped Linux like a bad habit for OSX. There are so many areas that OSX beats Linux for most geeky things that I couldn't even begin to start.
Since so many geeks are fond of comparing computers to cars, think of it like this. A Mac is like a cross between a BMW and a V6 Accord. It's fast, stylish, reliable and expensive, but it definitely looks cool to most people. A PC can be anything from a pinto to a ferrari, but is usually like a typical late 80s, early 90s American car on reliability. It may go faster and turn sometimes better, but it falls apart a lot faster than the more expensive hybrid Honda/BMW (aka, the Mac of cars).
Many of my peers in CS used to not be able to understand why I almost never use PCs anymore. We do a lot of work in Java, some of it in C/C++. They cannot comprehend how the Mac JDK runs faster than a Windows JDK. Or for that matter how convenient it is to have your Swing apps look 99% native. If I demonstrate an app to my prof on my laptop, which is a 1Ghz G4, it usually has more of a wow factor because Apple's Swing defaults to Aqua which is a hell of a lot slicker than anything from KDE or Redmond.
It's all of the little things that make MacOS X worth using over Linux. From the ease of which you can install software to the consistency of the interface to the amount of good software for it as opposed to Linux. Linux is great, but it's not really got much of a place on modern Macs. Between the services that Apple provides like its own version of Apache and Fink, you have most of the software you'd use Linux for.
1) Take care of your appearance, which means go to the gym and make sure that even if you have a gut, that it's at least obvious that you're someone who cares about your health and appearance. People are naturally wary of dating those who don't appear to take any pride in their appearance and health.
2) Don't assume that having a vagina means having no brain. Just because most girls are breeding stock, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of girls who aren't. Some of the ones that seem to be breeding stock may in fact have a lot of intelligence and you can bring it out of them. Been there, done that.
3) Broaden your horizons. Get away from the computer and learn something that you find to be fun and that is accessible to girls who aren't computer geeks. I picked up bass and guitar for fun and found that a lot of college girls will at least give you a shot if you're good. Personally I don't care much, since my gf can beat me on guitar and hold her own on bass.
4) Don't jump right into a relationship. If you have a chance to have a casual sexual relationship with a girl, that's helpful for when you're ready to settle down. Experience is something most guys really need.
and...
5) Look for someone who is your equal, but not in your area of expertise. You don't want to risk a game of one upmanship. I'm wary of dating girls in my major (C.S.) for that reason. My current girlfriend is a musician.
Let's use Iran as an example. The postings that I have read from Iranian activists who are fightin against the Mullahs say that if it were not for the support of the British, French and Russians that the Islamic Republic would be long gone by now. It comes as a shock to many that the U.S. isn't the only country in the world that props up evil governments for its own benefit.
There is evidence coming out of both the Rwandan government and the U.N. to show that the French government all but carried out the Rwandan massacre. Its officers gave the orders and set up the scenario that made it possible. With a country like France knowingly carrying out those kinds of actions, no wonder many countries are having problems.
The Internet only works as well as the ability of the citizenry to defend it against government control. Most countries are ruled by a governing elite that make America's look like statesmen. At least in America, the elite has to give a pretense of caring about the common man's rights. In countries ranging from the U.K. to Iran to China, the elite not only doesn't care, but often openly shows its contempt.
It's a cultural conflict and that's why most geeks and nerds are so poorly equipped to understand it. The average geek/nerd's understanding of politics is basically like CmdrTaco's: "democrats good because they're not religious right, republicans bad because they are." It was sickly ironic that people like CmdrTaco supported Gore, since 2/3 of the things that were wrong with tech policy at the time could be blamed on the Clinton administration. That again illustrates why most geeks just "don't get it."
Honest political analysis and insight takes a lot of time and effort. The geek mind can deal with it on an intellectual level quite well. The problem though is that society isn't ready for many of the changes. And by society I am speaking more in a liberal cosmopolitan sense.
Most of the human race is nowhere near as liberal as the average American. That is why most geeks and self-proclaimed intellectuals fail when they try to apply American standards to developing countries. It's not that our cultures are completely equal because no culture is better than another, it's that the spread of liberalism takes time.
If you want to protect the Internet, work on spreading liberalism around the world. Give money to the Reason foundation, to the Minaret Foundation if you're a Muslim. Buy copies of Reason magazine, Liberty and other liberal (ie neither conservative nor socialist) publications.
The Internet represents the liberal "end of history" for communication systems. It cannot in the long run work in a world that is largely conservative or socialist.
Disclaimer: I have for a long time been a harsh critic of the foreign policy establishment in America because of their tendency to betray our founders. Our founders would be horrified to see how illiberal America's foreign policy is today, so do not take me to be some wild-eyed zealot. I may be an American patriot, but i'm also a southern nationalist. For those from South America, remember that we Southerners too are at least semi-victims of "Yanqui Imperialism."
For a while I have been arguing that the debate should not be framed in the "innovator versus freeloader" view but in a "constitutional rights and individual property rights versus expansive intellectual property" view.
Most Americans do not accept the idea that you have a right to give away a copy of a song to anyone who wants it. While we hear constantly about those numbers that "40% of internet users said they saw nothing wrong with pirating music" we cannot go by that. Americans are just like any other people; when we think we can get away with something that doesn't seem to directly hurt someone we do it. Downloading bootlegs doesn't seem to hurt anyone, but it can.
If I had bootlegged the entire new Android Lust album instead of buying it on iTunes I would have not sent the chick behind AL any money. iTunes allowed me to send her maybe $2 for the album which I paid $10, probably a good $5 less than what I would have paid for a CD copy.
We need to stress to the government that iTunes, not more legislation, is the key to getting the system working. We need to show them that bands like Metallica refuse to do their part because they want an all or nothing. Buy 20-30 songs on iTunes and you give Apple more ammo to counter the claims that piracy has no solution. They can just shrug in front of Congress and say "it's not our side, the legal downloading side, that has dropped the ball. They refuse to let people buy their tracks one by one because they want them to buy them all or nothing."
There will always be politicians who will rail against piracy and ignore iTunes and other legal services, but many politicians will just look at these industries and say "the mechanisms are in place, why aren't you being a team player, why are you coming to us for help when there are companies dying to make the market work for you?" Politicans tend to be lazy, just look at how many Senate votes that John Kerry has missed in the past 12 years. Something like 1000 or more a year according to Fox News.
We can appeal to the public by pointing out the supremacy of the 1st amendment over Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. The first amendment was ratified later so it supercedes everything in the original constitution, just as all parts of the constitution must be read in the context of the Bill of Rights.
We should also point out how anti-backup provisions and attitudes like Jack Valenti's "if you want a backup, buy another copy" are against common sense, American tradition and capitalist principles. I have yet to read of a prominent capitalist theorist who would support the DMCA. Rand, Ricardo, Hayek and Smith are probably spinning in their graves over the DMCA and similar "seller protection legislation."
The hollywood position is built on pure, unprincipled greed. Defeating it only means that we need to be consistant and show the public where the law is going to start biting them in the ass if they don't care now.
It's too bad that the teams had been only joking about joining forces. If the teams had worked together to create a conceptual clone of.NET wherein Python and PERL could be used interchangeably in the same runtime, the OSS developer base would be very well off right now.
Think about the possibility. First port PyQT and wxPython to parrot. You write your GUI code with Python and byte compile it to a neutral Parrot format. You need to do complex substring matching so you write some good reusable functions that take advantage of PERL's string handling capabilities and then byte compile them. Load them into the event handling code and you've got a great hybrid.
What would be really cool would be to see Java and a form of OO BASIC ported to Parrot.
Mono is making good progress with its VM and core libraries. It is getting very functional on Win32 and Linux, and the PPC/OSX version is slowly, but surely, becoming useable.
What IBM should do is offer Microsoft the ability to integrate any of IBM's contributions to Mono in exchange from litigation immunity for Mono on patents. Hell, even go so far as to help Microsoft get J# J2SE 1.4/1.5 compatable or something.
IBM would be better off working on an existing open source VM and slowly moving Java-the-language to another VM that is not controlled by a rival. Hell, maybe even parrot.
Hip hop "artists" are notorious for copying others' ideas. Jay Z is particularly bad. His latest album is called "The Black Album." Oh so original. If only those pirating bastards in Metallica hadn't released a "black album" (unofficial title of course) years before.
There's also the issue of hip hop "artists" copying each others' samples. It's not like most of what gets put out by their labels even resembles music. I wrote a MIDI generator in Java for a class that created music from patterns based on character data from files type-casted to integer notes that sounded eerily similar.
Not to knock electronic music or anything, but most rap is nothing more than bullshit, 2/3 illiterate rubbish rhythmically spoken over badly looped techno. I have seen more complicated bass lines in a beginner's guide to electric bass guitar than most rap.
That said. If they ripped his sample off and God forbid it is actually his (probably half or more isn't) then they should pay a small penalty. It's just a fucking sample. Of course only in the world of rap can a single sound be turned into the basis for a whole song I suppose.
Maybe this will teach the big companies to look more to rock bands, a genre which is far more likely to have the attitude "OMFG THEY WANT TO PLAY OUR SONG GIVE IT TO THEM QUICK DO IT BEFORE THEY GET ANOTHER BAND TO DO IT!!!!!" There are so many rock and metal bands that should damn near go into gladiator combat to get that kind of free publicity that there is no point in taking the risk.
Let's face it. The average big rapper takes their work far too seriously. I doubt even real rock musicians like Tool, Incubus and A Perfect Circle take their music nearly as seriously as Jay Z, Eminem, etc. Oh wait. We're comparing musicians and "artists" so that explains why. Musicianship is a way of life, "artistry" is a term applied to people who can sell an image.
There is nothing preventing the U.S. Government's workers from modifying it to make it a security hardened version. The NSA's SELinux didn't have to be released back to the public. The NSA could have forked an entire distribution and gotten it really rock solid on security. The only reason they didn't was the value in our country of the government needing to return to the public what it creates with our tax dollars.
That said, the best setup for the government is to use 3-4 platforms in each agency. MacOS X on the average desktop. Linux on the many of the servers. Windows on some print and file servers. Maybe some Sun boxes for intense science work. How many times does it have to be said that a heterogenous network is harder to take down before people stop writing this shit?
As for the argument that Windows only gets hits more because of popularity... I want to wring the neck of every person I hear saying that. It's a disgusting display of post-modernist logic to computers. It's the IT variation of the post-modern attitude that there are no absolutes on morals, only relative standards that vary by cultural and personal views. It's a complete rejection of the concept that two systems can be designed such that one is inherently insecure because of its archetecture and that one is very secure by its design.
Iraq doesn't have a stable government, economy or military and it is caught between Islamist/Islamofascist guerrillas and an international occupation force. Iraq needs political and economic stability more than anything else. We need to educate them on the benefits of non-violent and non-coercive political debate and discourse, not open source software. We need to educate them how to become a modern industrial country with an economy that isn't dependent on one industry. We need to train an army that is loyal to the country's constitution, not leaders.
Israel's economy has been hit hard by Palestinian terrorists. The jihadis have forced the Israeli socialist system to reform itself. They're beginning to privatize their state-owned businesses which is a very positive step for Israel. Becoming a capitalist country will only help Israel gain more security as the efficiency of the marketplace kicks in and the government's resources are freed up to bolster their national defense.
Switching to OO is a good move because it'll give the Israeli more government to build up their security apparatus. Many slashdotters will disagree that that is a good thing because many of them think the Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israelis. The simple truth is that blowing up a starbucks as an isolated, intentional target is not a military counter attack. It is mass murder, and the Israelis are right for retaliating.
Then again, it's not like one goes to slashdot for insightful political commentary. For God's sake it's run by editors who largely consider the Clinton administration and Gore to be civil libertarians compared to Bush. Now watch the reactionaries mod me down so far down that my laptop's character set switches to Chinese....
work on creating a community site where bands can pay $5-$10 a business quarter to be listed with samples that can be streamed, that connects the bands to venues for say..... 5% of the proceeds and that lets users post comments about the band and rate their music? Then said label gets out of the old business of being a content producer and a service company for musicians providing them everything from merchandising to recording studios to instruments to music software? Basically become a service/product Walmart for musicians and fans as opposed to the current model of milking bands for records.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Combine that with the Socialist provisions of the UDHR, Articles 21-29, and you get a position wherein freedom of speech cannot be used as a basis for arguing against Socialist entitlements. The UN's standard would outlaw free speech used to argue that certain classes are unfit to vote because they lack the requisite impartiality to wield political power of any kind. What constitutes using a right to deny others rights is very broad. God help us as a race if the UN becomes a global governing body. Dissidents will be all but put to the sword for daring to question anything in the political or social realms.
I do not want a UN run Internet. The UN is the same body that puts the Sudan on a human rights comission. The FUCKING SUDAN!!!! A country where the slave trade is alive and well and non-Muslims are routinely executed en masse for their beliefs. The Sudan not only violates almost the entire UDHR, but it is a part of part of the human rights commission!!
Only fools and crackpot leftists take the UN seriously. It is a den of dictators, murders, theives and their apologists. Yes, I for the most part opposed the War in Iraq. I also think the UN opposed us not out of principle, but because it is too elitist to see that drawing an equivocation between the United States Government and the Ba'athist regime is absurd. Hell, the modern PRC is more human than the Ba'athists.
You want an Internet that only at best maintains a pretense of being free and open, hand it over to the UN. You'll have the global elites not giving a flying fuck about your rights. If you think American courts are corrupt, try the UN. The so-called ICC makes a mockery out of due process of law. Secret witnesses, evidence, no right to trial by jury. Why is it that the more "enlightened" our "betters" get the more they try to make our government(s) and courts resemble their 15th century European equivolents?
Why don't they just go ahead and have a clean, reimplementation of Windows started while they work on Longhorn? By the time they have Longhorn out a clean reimplementation could be at least ready as an Alpha or maybe a Beta.
Slashdot Mirror
Cuban security director: "ma'am, Cuba loves its children."
Woman: "Cuba only loves its children until they grow up."
Getting a bigger, more productive Patent Office which thousands of new analysts who know their stuff would do a lot to fixing some of the problems in the economy. By putting many people on the payroll who know what bad patents are, the government can ethically protect businesses from the real pirates: the ones who use IP law to control the productive capabilities of American industry.
Reform should not stop here though. The Bush Administration should make it a priority to strip the FDA of most of its discressionary powers to block drugs it thinks "don't do enough" and to give it more resources to expedite the processing of drug safety tests so that drug companies can profit more easily (thus they don't have to charge as much).
When they ruled against Maryland saying that a state cannot tax a federal agency because..... (and it applys to everything) "the power to tax is the power to destroy."
and help coordinate fund raising with it so it can stand a chance against the Republicrats. The easiest way for the EFF to effect longterm change would be to work with the Libertarian or Constitution Parties to help them get elected at the local and state levels where a lot of really stupid IT decisions are made. Think about it.
Libertarian candidates tend to be highly educated compared to their Republicrat counterparts. If you have a LP majority on your schoolboard, you have a much better chance that Little Johnny won't get kicked out for being a "hacker" for using the Windows Messenger Service to send a "hello" message around the network. Why? Because you'll have a well-educated, more rational schoolboard who is passionate about civil liberties. Members of the LP tend to embody the old saying "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
Another thing to consider: a libertarian wouldn't pull either a Bush or Gore on IT and science. Bush wants people to back up his preconceived moral notions on biotech research and Gore wanted yes-men who would just confirm what was in his little world, his great and powerful intellect (in reality most of the last occupants of the whitehouse as P or VP had similar IQs). Harry Browne as I recall said that he'd have worked to repeal the DMCA if he were elected. Try hearing that from a Republicrat. They always want to just "fix something" rather than get rid of it.
Lastly consider this. In Eldred versus Ashcroft the geeks got a taste for what social conservatives decry as an out of control activist judiciary. That judiciary is reinforced by the Republicrats. If we were to work together to remove people like Tom Daschle and Trent Lott and replace them with members of the LP or CP we'd have a judiciary more on our side.
You won't find one because Islam is a horribly repressive religion. You want to talk women's rights in Islam? Talk about the **absence** of them. Being forced to dress head to toe in a rag because a man might get horny seeing their face is common in many countries. Honor killings of women who have been raped. Polygamy. Whatever freedom an Islamic society extends to men it doesn't to women. Not even basic rights like being able to choose what they want to wear in many countries.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried by saying that culture doesn't determine whether freedom can be present. Cultural attitudes directly affect how one sees oneself in relation to one's fellow citizens.
It is time that the post-modernist critique of morality come to an end. This ridiculous idea that there can be any real morality in a world where there is absolutely no accepted notion of universal right and wrong can be blamed for a lot of the world's problems today. Let's take a look.
As secularists succeed in attempting to decouple capitalism from its original protestant moral underpinning you get Enrons and Tycos, companies with no sense of duty and obligation to anyone except whoever is currently trying to pillage them. Many years ago, business executives took pride in their companies and you'd have been hard pressed to find them doing that.
This idea that there is no universal right and wrong is precisely why we have things like "genocide" in this world. While most "genocides" are nothing more than mass killings, not wholesale exterminations, they can happen with impunity because when countries intervene they care about "cultural sensitivies" rather than seeking genuine justice from a standard of transcendant morality.
Another problem with the "everybody's morality is equal because it's an opinion and nothing more" argument is that from that point you cannot condemn what you think is evil. Want to condemn someone as a NAZI, guess what you (typically leftist) fuck? You can't because whether anything you say is morally wrong is just your opinion. In mine, it can be the holiest of holy things to "be a NAZI" by your definition of NAZI (ironically most don't even know what NAZIs actually believed; never read one sentence of the Munich Manifesto).
You can draw your transcendant morality from a secular source or a religion. However if you continue to not insist that there is a universal standard you are part of the problem. When a group pulls another Rwanda with the backing of a major nation (like France did in 1994) what would be your retort to them saying "it's our culture, don't get involved?" If you believe no morality is universal than you're a hypocrite if you don't concede their point.
More money in a wasteful, incompetent bureacracy doesn't fix anything. My university pays a business professor I had when I took a business elective almost $86,000/year to teach CIS and she made claims like Microsoft invented OO languages and that OO means using GUI elements. Fortunately I am a computer science major and none of my profs are even remotely that bad. However she is living proof of the argument that more money = better education system.
So here's a novel idea. Cut back the government budget, prosecute people for being wasteful and abusive, fire incompetent employees and give bonuses to those who come up with creative solutions to fixing public problems.
When they also show me in the text of the Constitution where it says they have a right to violate private property to advertise. Last I checked there is this often abused amendment, number ten to be specific, which reserves all property rights powers to the people and states.....
I swear to God, if there was a gene for this kind of legalistic stupidity I would violate my principles as a voting libertarian and constitution party supporter and call for a nation-wide eugenics program.
I caught this story on OSNews yesterday and posted a rebuttal on my blog. This sort of thing probably doesn't carry a lot of weight with most of the defense types because the military is the very definition of mission critical, no pun intended. Peoples lives are at risk on a daily business in most jobs in the military these days. There is almost no price too high to pay for the freedom to design to specification that Linux provides.
Linux is certainly not ready to take over a lot of things yet, but it is good enough for many things that traditional defense contractors are involved with. I wouldn't trust it yet as an OS for our warships or other vehicles, but I would trust it for communication systems and things like that. For situations like that, a RTOS from a company like Green Hills may not provide enough benefit to justify the cost. Linux is free, their product isn't. They can try to get the military hooked for a while, but Linux will always be free and there are plenty of IT workers in the military who could work on existing RTOS Linux forks for military use.
Another thing that has to be kept in mind is that with the push for homeland security, the laissez faire attitude that has been prevalent toward security has to go. The miltiary wants transparency so it knows it's not getting something bugged all to hell by some Jihadi who wormed his way into Microsoft or Sun via the H1-B visa program. The Debian and Fedora teams are great for that very reason. Everything is open to public scrutiny, from the installer to every package so the military gets a chance to audit everything.
Free markets are great, but in this case the military has to perform a more core mission: defend the US from attack. If that means violating free market principles by pouring taxpayer dollars into a free OS for public use, then they should and most likely will do it eventually.
Apple's DRM allows you to burn your tracks to a CD and rip them back to any format you want. Oh, I'm sorry, is that too much of an inconvenience for some of you? Or is it that $0.50 for a CD-R is too much out of your budget?
The RIAA and MPAA use things like this to boost their campaign for more control. You stupid fucks out there supporting these developers are the ones who are making the case for legislation like th CBDTPA and DMCA.
Apple has been working hard to make fair use online distribution possible at a reasonable price then these guys come along and work hard to undo all of that so that they can do.... what exactly? You can already change the AACs to MP3s with a good CD ripper. What do you need this app for, besides sharing the tracks with every friend and family member you have plus on Kazaa?
When the feds mandate Palladium and the CBDTPA, you people will only have yourselves to blame because you're making it hard for companies like Apple to create a market-oriented alternative that protects your rights. Maybe if you dumbasses would get away from your Linux boxen and hacked XBoxes long enough to study politics and causality you'd understand why supporting this is so stupid.
I say good riddance to this project.
I first started using Linux almost 6 years ago when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore. Most of my friends and I thought it was da shit until OSX came out and then most of us dropped Linux like a bad habit for OSX. There are so many areas that OSX beats Linux for most geeky things that I couldn't even begin to start.
Since so many geeks are fond of comparing computers to cars, think of it like this. A Mac is like a cross between a BMW and a V6 Accord. It's fast, stylish, reliable and expensive, but it definitely looks cool to most people. A PC can be anything from a pinto to a ferrari, but is usually like a typical late 80s, early 90s American car on reliability. It may go faster and turn sometimes better, but it falls apart a lot faster than the more expensive hybrid Honda/BMW (aka, the Mac of cars).
Many of my peers in CS used to not be able to understand why I almost never use PCs anymore. We do a lot of work in Java, some of it in C/C++. They cannot comprehend how the Mac JDK runs faster than a Windows JDK. Or for that matter how convenient it is to have your Swing apps look 99% native. If I demonstrate an app to my prof on my laptop, which is a 1Ghz G4, it usually has more of a wow factor because Apple's Swing defaults to Aqua which is a hell of a lot slicker than anything from KDE or Redmond.
It's all of the little things that make MacOS X worth using over Linux. From the ease of which you can install software to the consistency of the interface to the amount of good software for it as opposed to Linux. Linux is great, but it's not really got much of a place on modern Macs. Between the services that Apple provides like its own version of Apache and Fink, you have most of the software you'd use Linux for.
1) Have they referred this kind of waste to the Office of the Inspector General and if not, why not?
2) Are they looking into how Google stores its information, and if not then what is the reason for that?
1) Take care of your appearance, which means go to the gym and make sure that even if you have a gut, that it's at least obvious that you're someone who cares about your health and appearance. People are naturally wary of dating those who don't appear to take any pride in their appearance and health.
2) Don't assume that having a vagina means having no brain. Just because most girls are breeding stock, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of girls who aren't. Some of the ones that seem to be breeding stock may in fact have a lot of intelligence and you can bring it out of them. Been there, done that.
3) Broaden your horizons. Get away from the computer and learn something that you find to be fun and that is accessible to girls who aren't computer geeks. I picked up bass and guitar for fun and found that a lot of college girls will at least give you a shot if you're good. Personally I don't care much, since my gf can beat me on guitar and hold her own on bass.
4) Don't jump right into a relationship. If you have a chance to have a casual sexual relationship with a girl, that's helpful for when you're ready to settle down. Experience is something most guys really need.
and...
5) Look for someone who is your equal, but not in your area of expertise. You don't want to risk a game of one upmanship. I'm wary of dating girls in my major (C.S.) for that reason. My current girlfriend is a musician.
Let's use Iran as an example. The postings that I have read from Iranian activists who are fightin against the Mullahs say that if it were not for the support of the British, French and Russians that the Islamic Republic would be long gone by now. It comes as a shock to many that the U.S. isn't the only country in the world that props up evil governments for its own benefit.
There is evidence coming out of both the Rwandan government and the U.N. to show that the French government all but carried out the Rwandan massacre. Its officers gave the orders and set up the scenario that made it possible. With a country like France knowingly carrying out those kinds of actions, no wonder many countries are having problems.
The Internet only works as well as the ability of the citizenry to defend it against government control. Most countries are ruled by a governing elite that make America's look like statesmen. At least in America, the elite has to give a pretense of caring about the common man's rights. In countries ranging from the U.K. to Iran to China, the elite not only doesn't care, but often openly shows its contempt.
It's a cultural conflict and that's why most geeks and nerds are so poorly equipped to understand it. The average geek/nerd's understanding of politics is basically like CmdrTaco's: "democrats good because they're not religious right, republicans bad because they are." It was sickly ironic that people like CmdrTaco supported Gore, since 2/3 of the things that were wrong with tech policy at the time could be blamed on the Clinton administration. That again illustrates why most geeks just "don't get it."
Honest political analysis and insight takes a lot of time and effort. The geek mind can deal with it on an intellectual level quite well. The problem though is that society isn't ready for many of the changes. And by society I am speaking more in a liberal cosmopolitan sense.
Most of the human race is nowhere near as liberal as the average American. That is why most geeks and self-proclaimed intellectuals fail when they try to apply American standards to developing countries. It's not that our cultures are completely equal because no culture is better than another, it's that the spread of liberalism takes time.
If you want to protect the Internet, work on spreading liberalism around the world. Give money to the Reason foundation, to the Minaret Foundation if you're a Muslim. Buy copies of Reason magazine, Liberty and other liberal (ie neither conservative nor socialist) publications.
The Internet represents the liberal "end of history" for communication systems. It cannot in the long run work in a world that is largely conservative or socialist.
Disclaimer: I have for a long time been a harsh critic of the foreign policy establishment in America because of their tendency to betray our founders. Our founders would be horrified to see how illiberal America's foreign policy is today, so do not take me to be some wild-eyed zealot. I may be an American patriot, but i'm also a southern nationalist. For those from South America, remember that we Southerners too are at least semi-victims of "Yanqui Imperialism."
For a while I have been arguing that the debate should not be framed in the "innovator versus freeloader" view but in a "constitutional rights and individual property rights versus expansive intellectual property" view.
Most Americans do not accept the idea that you have a right to give away a copy of a song to anyone who wants it. While we hear constantly about those numbers that "40% of internet users said they saw nothing wrong with pirating music" we cannot go by that. Americans are just like any other people; when we think we can get away with something that doesn't seem to directly hurt someone we do it. Downloading bootlegs doesn't seem to hurt anyone, but it can.
If I had bootlegged the entire new Android Lust album instead of buying it on iTunes I would have not sent the chick behind AL any money. iTunes allowed me to send her maybe $2 for the album which I paid $10, probably a good $5 less than what I would have paid for a CD copy.
We need to stress to the government that iTunes, not more legislation, is the key to getting the system working. We need to show them that bands like Metallica refuse to do their part because they want an all or nothing. Buy 20-30 songs on iTunes and you give Apple more ammo to counter the claims that piracy has no solution. They can just shrug in front of Congress and say "it's not our side, the legal downloading side, that has dropped the ball. They refuse to let people buy their tracks one by one because they want them to buy them all or nothing."
There will always be politicians who will rail against piracy and ignore iTunes and other legal services, but many politicians will just look at these industries and say "the mechanisms are in place, why aren't you being a team player, why are you coming to us for help when there are companies dying to make the market work for you?" Politicans tend to be lazy, just look at how many Senate votes that John Kerry has missed in the past 12 years. Something like 1000 or more a year according to Fox News.
We can appeal to the public by pointing out the supremacy of the 1st amendment over Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. The first amendment was ratified later so it supercedes everything in the original constitution, just as all parts of the constitution must be read in the context of the Bill of Rights.
We should also point out how anti-backup provisions and attitudes like Jack Valenti's "if you want a backup, buy another copy" are against common sense, American tradition and capitalist principles. I have yet to read of a prominent capitalist theorist who would support the DMCA. Rand, Ricardo, Hayek and Smith are probably spinning in their graves over the DMCA and similar "seller protection legislation."
The hollywood position is built on pure, unprincipled greed. Defeating it only means that we need to be consistant and show the public where the law is going to start biting them in the ass if they don't care now.
It's too bad that the teams had been only joking about joining forces. If the teams had worked together to create a conceptual clone of .NET wherein Python and PERL could be used interchangeably in the same runtime, the OSS developer base would be very well off right now.
Think about the possibility. First port PyQT and wxPython to parrot. You write your GUI code with Python and byte compile it to a neutral Parrot format. You need to do complex substring matching so you write some good reusable functions that take advantage of PERL's string handling capabilities and then byte compile them. Load them into the event handling code and you've got a great hybrid.
What would be really cool would be to see Java and a form of OO BASIC ported to Parrot.
Mono is making good progress with its VM and core libraries. It is getting very functional on Win32 and Linux, and the PPC/OSX version is slowly, but surely, becoming useable.
What IBM should do is offer Microsoft the ability to integrate any of IBM's contributions to Mono in exchange from litigation immunity for Mono on patents. Hell, even go so far as to help Microsoft get J# J2SE 1.4/1.5 compatable or something.
IBM would be better off working on an existing open source VM and slowly moving Java-the-language to another VM that is not controlled by a rival. Hell, maybe even parrot.
Hip hop "artists" are notorious for copying others' ideas. Jay Z is particularly bad. His latest album is called "The Black Album." Oh so original. If only those pirating bastards in Metallica hadn't released a "black album" (unofficial title of course) years before.
There's also the issue of hip hop "artists" copying each others' samples. It's not like most of what gets put out by their labels even resembles music. I wrote a MIDI generator in Java for a class that created music from patterns based on character data from files type-casted to integer notes that sounded eerily similar.
Not to knock electronic music or anything, but most rap is nothing more than bullshit, 2/3 illiterate rubbish rhythmically spoken over badly looped techno. I have seen more complicated bass lines in a beginner's guide to electric bass guitar than most rap.
That said. If they ripped his sample off and God forbid it is actually his (probably half or more isn't) then they should pay a small penalty. It's just a fucking sample. Of course only in the world of rap can a single sound be turned into the basis for a whole song I suppose.
Maybe this will teach the big companies to look more to rock bands, a genre which is far more likely to have the attitude "OMFG THEY WANT TO PLAY OUR SONG GIVE IT TO THEM QUICK DO IT BEFORE THEY GET ANOTHER BAND TO DO IT!!!!!" There are so many rock and metal bands that should damn near go into gladiator combat to get that kind of free publicity that there is no point in taking the risk.
Let's face it. The average big rapper takes their work far too seriously. I doubt even real rock musicians like Tool, Incubus and A Perfect Circle take their music nearly as seriously as Jay Z, Eminem, etc. Oh wait. We're comparing musicians and "artists" so that explains why. Musicianship is a way of life, "artistry" is a term applied to people who can sell an image.
There is nothing preventing the U.S. Government's workers from modifying it to make it a security hardened version. The NSA's SELinux didn't have to be released back to the public. The NSA could have forked an entire distribution and gotten it really rock solid on security. The only reason they didn't was the value in our country of the government needing to return to the public what it creates with our tax dollars.
That said, the best setup for the government is to use 3-4 platforms in each agency. MacOS X on the average desktop. Linux on the many of the servers. Windows on some print and file servers. Maybe some Sun boxes for intense science work. How many times does it have to be said that a heterogenous network is harder to take down before people stop writing this shit?
As for the argument that Windows only gets hits more because of popularity... I want to wring the neck of every person I hear saying that. It's a disgusting display of post-modernist logic to computers. It's the IT variation of the post-modern attitude that there are no absolutes on morals, only relative standards that vary by cultural and personal views. It's a complete rejection of the concept that two systems can be designed such that one is inherently insecure because of its archetecture and that one is very secure by its design.
Iraq doesn't have a stable government, economy or military and it is caught between Islamist/Islamofascist guerrillas and an international occupation force. Iraq needs political and economic stability more than anything else. We need to educate them on the benefits of non-violent and non-coercive political debate and discourse, not open source software. We need to educate them how to become a modern industrial country with an economy that isn't dependent on one industry. We need to train an army that is loyal to the country's constitution, not leaders.
Israel's economy has been hit hard by Palestinian terrorists. The jihadis have forced the Israeli socialist system to reform itself. They're beginning to privatize their state-owned businesses which is a very positive step for Israel. Becoming a capitalist country will only help Israel gain more security as the efficiency of the marketplace kicks in and the government's resources are freed up to bolster their national defense.
Switching to OO is a good move because it'll give the Israeli more government to build up their security apparatus. Many slashdotters will disagree that that is a good thing because many of them think the Palestinians are being oppressed by the Israelis. The simple truth is that blowing up a starbucks as an isolated, intentional target is not a military counter attack. It is mass murder, and the Israelis are right for retaliating.
Then again, it's not like one goes to slashdot for insightful political commentary. For God's sake it's run by editors who largely consider the Clinton administration and Gore to be civil libertarians compared to Bush. Now watch the reactionaries mod me down so far down that my laptop's character set switches to Chinese....
Since the administration he works for has made a mockery out of the highest law of the land, the United States Constitution.
work on creating a community site where bands can pay $5-$10 a business quarter to be listed with samples that can be streamed, that connects the bands to venues for say..... 5% of the proceeds and that lets users post comments about the band and rate their music? Then said label gets out of the old business of being a content producer and a service company for musicians providing them everything from merchandising to recording studios to instruments to music software? Basically become a service/product Walmart for musicians and fans as opposed to the current model of milking bands for records.
Article 30. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Combine that with the Socialist provisions of the UDHR, Articles 21-29, and you get a position wherein freedom of speech cannot be used as a basis for arguing against Socialist entitlements. The UN's standard would outlaw free speech used to argue that certain classes are unfit to vote because they lack the requisite impartiality to wield political power of any kind. What constitutes using a right to deny others rights is very broad. God help us as a race if the UN becomes a global governing body. Dissidents will be all but put to the sword for daring to question anything in the political or social realms.
I do not want a UN run Internet. The UN is the same body that puts the Sudan on a human rights comission. The FUCKING SUDAN!!!! A country where the slave trade is alive and well and non-Muslims are routinely executed en masse for their beliefs. The Sudan not only violates almost the entire UDHR, but it is a part of part of the human rights commission!!
Only fools and crackpot leftists take the UN seriously. It is a den of dictators, murders, theives and their apologists. Yes, I for the most part opposed the War in Iraq. I also think the UN opposed us not out of principle, but because it is too elitist to see that drawing an equivocation between the United States Government and the Ba'athist regime is absurd. Hell, the modern PRC is more human than the Ba'athists.
You want an Internet that only at best maintains a pretense of being free and open, hand it over to the UN. You'll have the global elites not giving a flying fuck about your rights. If you think American courts are corrupt, try the UN. The so-called ICC makes a mockery out of due process of law. Secret witnesses, evidence, no right to trial by jury. Why is it that the more "enlightened" our "betters" get the more they try to make our government(s) and courts resemble their 15th century European equivolents?
Why don't they just go ahead and have a clean, reimplementation of Windows started while they work on Longhorn? By the time they have Longhorn out a clean reimplementation could be at least ready as an Alpha or maybe a Beta.