Mankind predates kings. Land ownership predates kings. Do you somehow thing that mankind sprang out in full-blown fuedalism?
You're right that under feudalism (since the leaders weren't all called kings) land ownership in more developed areas became much more organized, recorded and in many ways respected, but it's a bit extreme to say that until the first king, no one claimed ownership of any land!
Are you familiar with the concept of popular sovereignty?
In re: Joseph McCarthy, read "Treason", just out by Ann Coulter, as it dispells many of the myths about that time period.
See, I could spend months repeating all the extensive arguments and facts against some of the B.S. found here, but really don't have the time nor interest. I figure that if I at least give a reference to factual material widely available in book form that covers the topic, then anyone who actually wants to find out the truth will bother to read at least part of it (even if it's just from a library, or from a free public domain copy online, as in the case of the Hayek books), while I won't have wasted my time on those who really don't care anyway, at least not enough to do any actual research about the topic.
BTW, you can be excused for not having read Coulter's book, after all, it's brand new, even if it is a current #1 best seller in the U.S., but if you haven't read Hayek then you are woefully ignorant of Communism and Socialism vs. Freedom and Capitalism, his works being one of the major foundations of Austrian economics and some of the most influential books on economics ever published.
For more information, try the DMOZ/google category devoted to sites about Hayek as a good start, then hit Von Mises for good measure.
First, I never mentioned any kind of "state of nature" in my comment.
Second, people have always made land theirs by investing their time and effort into it, in the same way that someone can take a piece of wood and carve it into a tool that they own, or plant crops and turn them into their crops.
To say that land ownership doesn't exist naturally is to say that ownership itself doesn't exist naturally, but the reality is that mankind has always owned things.
Your democracy is what, four wolves and two sheep voting to see who gets eaten for dinner?
I never signed a social contract wherein I agreed to support the "majority" simply because I have stuff they want. The point of our Constitutional Republic is to protect people's rights (including the right to the _pursuit_ of happiness), not to redistribute wealth to try and make everyone's outcome "fair".
Google's policy is that after getting a DMCA complaint like this, they contact the owner of the site in question with a copy of the complaint and a time limit.
The site in question can ignore it, in which case Google does like in this case, removing the entry and providing a link to the details of the complaint.
However, if they site responds that they aren't infringing, Google will ignore the complaint and leave the site in search results, leaving it up to the two parties to duke it out with lawyers.
In other words, Google stays "neutral" in the whole thing if it's disputed, but a site has to at least respond to the complaint in order for them to bother to refuse to delist them.
"First, don't confuse communism with a totalitarian dictatorship. One does not necessarily means another"
Read F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". It demonstrates quite convincingly that communism (by it's very nature) inevitably means totalitarian dictatorship (actually, more oligarchy than strict dictatorship, but that's splitting hairs).
The same type of people who "get ahead" under Communism also turn out to be the same type of people who set themselves up as totalitarian's.
Hasn't anyone told you fellas yet that Communism didn't work and that Socialism isn't far behind on it's way to the trash heap of history?
In the United States, people don't get their right to own things from the government. Instead, the government gets all of it's power and authority delegated to it from the people.
You are confusing how government today appears to function with the reality of how it was supposed to work. It's attitudes like this that lead to people thinking that being allowed to keep some of their own property (lower taxes) is somehow a "gift" from the government.
"The gap between the rich and poor is much wider today..."
This is simply not true. The problem with statements like this is that the people who usually make them (and then have them repeated by others) never specify who the "rich" and the "poor" are and at what point in their lives they are in.
If you use the "government" definition of the top and bottom 20% of income levels to define "rich" and "poor", you end up with "poor" who are richer than the "rich" of 50 years ago, so how come they are "poor" now? Using income is a horrible measurement anyway. There are lots of people with wealth who don't have as much income as other people who make 100K, then spend more than 100K in a year, ending up with no wealth to show for it.
And for the worst flaw in the definitions of "rich" and "poor" of all implied by this statement is that most of the actual people who would have been defined as "poor" years ago are now defined as "rich", but implied to have somehow gotten poorer. See, most of the "poor" at any given time are the young, not very established, while most of the "rich" are the older _been in the workforce and maybe now retired_ types. 80% of the people in the poorest 20% of income levels switch places and join the top 20% of income levels within 20 years (by getting on with their life in the natural progression of things). Conversely, most of the top 20% in income (the "rich") aren't anymore after 20 years because they've retired.
In short, statements like the above in italics are complete B.S. that require only a bit of common sense and some government economic data to disprove. I highly suggest a good book on economics, with Thomas Sowell being one of my favorites with excellant research.
I was a building/wiring guy for a while and plenty of building codes require using conduits of the right type, but I've never heard of one that required you NOT to use any conduit at all. Codes vary in details widely around the country (and even the same state), but if you want to use a conduit you might want to make a phone call to the local inspection office or even an electrical company and ask them about the relevent local building codes.
It's not exactly unknown for a builder to BS a customer and after all, it's going to be your house, not theirs.
A good secure method for mail voting, combined with Internet verification (your ballot has a serial number, you verify online after it's counted that the numbered ballot matches how you voted) can be found at the process being used by the Free State Project voting process.
It seems like large parts of the process could be adapted to have a repeatable and perfectly secure vote.
Faster startup times? Maybe M$ will steal the code and the world will save millions of man hours. Think of the benefits to the world economy!
(Note: This is a joke. This is only a joke. If you didn't like the joke, then please just move on and leave me to enjoy it by myself. Thank you for your participation in this joke advisory.)
I agree that AOL can accept or not accept whatever network traffic they want. I think where these guys may have a point is that AOL then proceeded to tell their customers that their company was was a spammer. If AOL can prove that, then AOL is in the clear with a truth defense. If AOL can't prove it, then these guys probably have a case.
Their search and indexing schemes for this don't matter. What really matters is that all my sites rank at the top of all the results.
If they can accomplish that, I'll be happy with the search results!
(Remove tongue from cheek) Sadly, this will probably be the attitude of most webmasters, leading open source search to be either totally bulletproof, or shamelessly exploited. Somehow I suspect it'll be the latter.
Not sure how anyone mistook the original marketing material referred to as a "study" anyway. All you'd have to do is read it to see that it wasn't a real study in the first place.
The line item veto was passed years ago, then found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. (See Cato for more details.)
Most politicians are simply responding to what gets them the most power and influence, just like most other people. The big difference is that in their case, they also drag a lot of the rest of us into the results of their bad decisions. There are a very few (like Ron Paul, see RLC) politicians that will put the interests of the country above their own, but most will keep voting to approve government programs that take away freedom and actually hurt their supposed beneficiaries because the programs are popular with the media and those who support them.
I know it's hard to believe within the Slashdot crowd, but I have three kids under 6 years old that I don't trust around my computer, even after asking them not to play with it, especially the youngest two. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person in the world with someone who I'm living with, but don't want messing with my computer.
Not everyone lives only with responsible adults. I can also think of college roomate situations where people can't even be trusted with a shared telephone, let alone physical access to a computer.
Please note that I didn't say anything about services running by default. Users do set peer-to-peer or "server" stuff up on a "user-friendly" computer without taking basic precautions like requiring a password on their account.
How many people do you know that had windows 9X and the first thing they did once on a network was to turn on file sharing if it wasn't already on? There are lots of people who know just enough to be dangerous.
OS's should have security on by default. That includes your "no network services", but also includes the assumption of being a multi-user environment where the default setup isn't one account with no password that also doubles as the full administrative account. Even if no one else could possibly access a machine, it's still a good idea to have an administrative only account that forces you to think and type a password before switching from "user" mode to "can do anything" mode.
Why would a home user need a login password for his computer?
Because every once in a while a home user will connect that computer up to this thing called the Internet that then allows anyone to access it without a password. Sometimes they are even sharing their home with someone that they don't want to give full access to look at or destroy anything on their computer.
When you raise the prices of something artificially by passing a law, what happens is that less of that thing is purchased.
The end result in the case of minimum wage laws is that unemployment goes up as people who are only worth less than the minimum wage to an employer can no longer get a job. This mostly negatively affects people new to the work force, teenagers and the working poor.
Your work is only worth what you can convince someone else to pay for it. If it isn't worth "minimum wage", then you shouldn't be paid "minimum wage".
Employers don't continue to operate businesses that aren't profitable. If a minimum wage law is why its no longer profitable, then the employees still don't have jobs.
Conversely, if say, a fast food joint or a grocery store raises its prices in order to make enough to cover its new employee costs, guess who pays for that? How many "minimum wage" style workers shop at a grocery store or fast food joint, as opposed to someone who is rich and shopping at someplace nice enough that they don't pay anyone "minimum wage"?
They don't create wealth out of nothing for people by passing a "minimum wage" law. All they do is keep people who aren't worth the "minimum wage" from being able to get a job anymore, while causing a little inflation for the lower end of economic spectrum.
Unions are fine as long as any employee is free to join or leave them, but they are simply another form of government enforced coercion when the laws are setup to require you to be a member in order to be able to work.
Personally, I prefer freedom to the government or a union running my life.
Just goes to show that it's hard to get or keep a monopoly without getting the government involved.
Maybe now some pressure will develop for Congress to allow the Republican majority on the FCC commission to scrap some of these stupid restrictions on new stations.
Now if we could get the Supremes to stop "re-inventing" the Constitution and just limit Congress to it's enumerated powers, unbalanced laws and regulations like this might actually go away someday. Until then, it'll continue to be a case of "money and influence" wielding the power the government has taken for itself from the People.
You've left off the rest "...become used for random access in the way the disks are used today". It's the use patterns for the random access, things that are used on disk today, like directory trees and files,not the fact that it's random. Try to learn to read more than the first part of a sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
Mankind predates kings. Land ownership predates kings. Do you somehow thing that mankind sprang out in full-blown fuedalism?
You're right that under feudalism (since the leaders weren't all called kings) land ownership in more developed areas became much more organized, recorded and in many ways respected, but it's a bit extreme to say that until the first king, no one claimed ownership of any land!
Are you familiar with the concept of popular sovereignty?
In re: Joseph McCarthy, read "Treason", just out by Ann Coulter, as it dispells many of the myths about that time period.
See, I could spend months repeating all the extensive arguments and facts against some of the B.S. found here, but really don't have the time nor interest. I figure that if I at least give a reference to factual material widely available in book form that covers the topic, then anyone who actually wants to find out the truth will bother to read at least part of it (even if it's just from a library, or from a free public domain copy online, as in the case of the Hayek books), while I won't have wasted my time on those who really don't care anyway, at least not enough to do any actual research about the topic.
BTW, you can be excused for not having read Coulter's book, after all, it's brand new, even if it is a current #1 best seller in the U.S., but if you haven't read Hayek then you are woefully ignorant of Communism and Socialism vs. Freedom and Capitalism, his works being one of the major foundations of Austrian economics and some of the most influential books on economics ever published.
For more information, try the DMOZ/google category devoted to sites about Hayek as a good start, then hit Von Mises for good measure.
First, I never mentioned any kind of "state of nature" in my comment.
Second, people have always made land theirs by investing their time and effort into it, in the same way that someone can take a piece of wood and carve it into a tool that they own, or plant crops and turn them into their crops.
To say that land ownership doesn't exist naturally is to say that ownership itself doesn't exist naturally, but the reality is that mankind has always owned things.
Your democracy is what, four wolves and two sheep voting to see who gets eaten for dinner?
I never signed a social contract wherein I agreed to support the "majority" simply because I have stuff they want. The point of our Constitutional Republic is to protect people's rights (including the right to the _pursuit_ of happiness), not to redistribute wealth to try and make everyone's outcome "fair".
Google's policy is that after getting a DMCA complaint like this, they contact the owner of the site in question with a copy of the complaint and a time limit.
The site in question can ignore it, in which case Google does like in this case, removing the entry and providing a link to the details of the complaint.
However, if they site responds that they aren't infringing, Google will ignore the complaint and leave the site in search results, leaving it up to the two parties to duke it out with lawyers.
In other words, Google stays "neutral" in the whole thing if it's disputed, but a site has to at least respond to the complaint in order for them to bother to refuse to delist them.
"First, don't confuse communism with a totalitarian dictatorship. One does not necessarily means another"
Read F.A. Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom". It demonstrates quite convincingly that communism (by it's very nature) inevitably means totalitarian dictatorship (actually, more oligarchy than strict dictatorship, but that's splitting hairs).
The same type of people who "get ahead" under Communism also turn out to be the same type of people who set themselves up as totalitarian's.
Hasn't anyone told you fellas yet that Communism didn't work and that Socialism isn't far behind on it's way to the trash heap of history?
"Ahh, but the problem is that not everyone is manager, researcher or technician material."
So? Most current managers aren't manager material either?
In the United States, people don't get their right to own things from the government. Instead, the government gets all of it's power and authority delegated to it from the people.
You are confusing how government today appears to function with the reality of how it was supposed to work. It's attitudes like this that lead to people thinking that being allowed to keep some of their own property (lower taxes) is somehow a "gift" from the government.
"The gap between the rich and poor is much wider today..."
This is simply not true. The problem with statements like this is that the people who usually make them (and then have them repeated by others) never specify who the "rich" and the "poor" are and at what point in their lives they are in.
If you use the "government" definition of the top and bottom 20% of income levels to define "rich" and "poor", you end up with "poor" who are richer than the "rich" of 50 years ago, so how come they are "poor" now? Using income is a horrible measurement anyway. There are lots of people with wealth who don't have as much income as other people who make 100K, then spend more than 100K in a year, ending up with no wealth to show for it.
And for the worst flaw in the definitions of "rich" and "poor" of all implied by this statement is that most of the actual people who would have been defined as "poor" years ago are now defined as "rich", but implied to have somehow gotten poorer. See, most of the "poor" at any given time are the young, not very established, while most of the "rich" are the older _been in the workforce and maybe now retired_ types. 80% of the people in the poorest 20% of income levels switch places and join the top 20% of income levels within 20 years (by getting on with their life in the natural progression of things). Conversely, most of the top 20% in income (the "rich") aren't anymore after 20 years because they've retired.
In short, statements like the above in italics are complete B.S. that require only a bit of common sense and some government economic data to disprove. I highly suggest a good book on economics, with Thomas Sowell being one of my favorites with excellant research.
"..and intoxicated persons..."
Perfect! All we need now are a bunch of Slashdot users that insist on getting drunk before installing any software...
I was a building/wiring guy for a while and plenty of building codes require using conduits of the right type, but I've never heard of one that required you NOT to use any conduit at all. Codes vary in details widely around the country (and even the same state), but if you want to use a conduit you might want to make a phone call to the local inspection office or even an electrical company and ask them about the relevent local building codes.
It's not exactly unknown for a builder to BS a customer and after all, it's going to be your house, not theirs.
Sounds practical, alright.
Now if I could only find a good off-shore haven...
A good secure method for mail voting, combined with Internet verification (your ballot has a serial number, you verify online after it's counted that the numbered ballot matches how you voted) can be found at the process being used by the Free State Project voting process.
It seems like large parts of the process could be adapted to have a repeatable and perfectly secure vote.
Faster startup times? Maybe M$ will steal the code and the world will save millions of man hours. Think of the benefits to the world economy!
(Note: This is a joke. This is only a joke. If you didn't like the joke, then please just move on and leave me to enjoy it by myself. Thank you for your participation in this joke advisory.)
I agree that AOL can accept or not accept whatever network traffic they want. I think where these guys may have a point is that AOL then proceeded to tell their customers that their company was was a spammer. If AOL can prove that, then AOL is in the clear with a truth defense. If AOL can't prove it, then these guys probably have a case.
Assuming this thing only has a few logic gates at most, how many diamonds will it take to combine them into an x86?
Even with artificial diamonds, somehow I think this isn't going to be cheaper than a cluster of current technology to get the same total speed.
(No, I didn't RTFA and my opinions aren't based on anything but pure speculation, what do you take me for, a non-slashdot user?)
Their search and indexing schemes for this don't matter. What really matters is that all my sites rank at the top of all the results.
If they can accomplish that, I'll be happy with the search results!
(Remove tongue from cheek)
Sadly, this will probably be the attitude of most webmasters, leading open source search to be either totally bulletproof, or shamelessly exploited. Somehow I suspect it'll be the latter.
Not sure how anyone mistook the original marketing material referred to as a "study" anyway. All you'd have to do is read it to see that it wasn't a real study in the first place.
In a related story, they're now claiming that owning Playboy gets you laid and that Blondes really do have more fun!
They'll be releasing a study soon about how much happier people are who spend their time doing things they like.
The line item veto was passed years ago, then found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
(See Cato for more details.)
Most politicians are simply responding to what gets them the most power and influence, just like most other people. The big difference is that in their case, they also drag a lot of the rest of us into the results of their bad decisions. There are a very few (like Ron Paul, see RLC) politicians that will put the interests of the country above their own, but most will keep voting to approve government programs that take away freedom and actually hurt their supposed beneficiaries because the programs are popular with the media and those who support them.
I know it's hard to believe within the Slashdot crowd, but I have three kids under 6 years old that I don't trust around my computer, even after asking them not to play with it, especially the youngest two. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person in the world with someone who I'm living with, but don't want messing with my computer.
Not everyone lives only with responsible adults. I can also think of college roomate situations where people can't even be trusted with a shared telephone, let alone physical access to a computer.
Please note that I didn't say anything about services running by default. Users do set peer-to-peer or "server" stuff up on a "user-friendly" computer without taking basic precautions like requiring a password on their account.
How many people do you know that had windows 9X and the first thing they did once on a network was to turn on file sharing if it wasn't already on? There are lots of people who know just enough to be dangerous.
OS's should have security on by default. That includes your "no network services", but also includes the assumption of being a multi-user environment where the default setup isn't one account with no password that also doubles as the full administrative account. Even if no one else could possibly access a machine, it's still a good idea to have an administrative only account that forces you to think and type a password before switching from "user" mode to "can do anything" mode.
Why would a home user need a login password for his computer?
Because every once in a while a home user will connect that computer up to this thing called the Internet that then allows anyone to access it without a password. Sometimes they are even sharing their home with someone that they don't want to give full access to look at or destroy anything on their computer.
You may want to consider investing in a good book on basic economics, such as Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
When you raise the prices of something artificially by passing a law, what happens is that less of that thing is purchased.
The end result in the case of minimum wage laws is that unemployment goes up as people who are only worth less than the minimum wage to an employer can no longer get a job. This mostly negatively affects people new to the work force, teenagers and the working poor.
Your work is only worth what you can convince someone else to pay for it. If it isn't worth "minimum wage", then you shouldn't be paid "minimum wage".
Employers don't continue to operate businesses that aren't profitable. If a minimum wage law is why its no longer profitable, then the employees still don't have jobs.
Conversely, if say, a fast food joint or a grocery store raises its prices in order to make enough to cover its new employee costs, guess who pays for that? How many "minimum wage" style workers shop at a grocery store or fast food joint, as opposed to someone who is rich and shopping at someplace nice enough that they don't pay anyone "minimum wage"?
They don't create wealth out of nothing for people by passing a "minimum wage" law. All they do is keep people who aren't worth the "minimum wage" from being able to get a job anymore, while causing a little inflation for the lower end of economic spectrum.
Unions are fine as long as any employee is free to join or leave them, but they are simply another form of government enforced coercion when the laws are setup to require you to be a member in order to be able to work.
Personally, I prefer freedom to the government or a union running my life.
Just goes to show that it's hard to get or keep a monopoly without getting the government involved.
Maybe now some pressure will develop for Congress to allow the Republican majority on the FCC commission to scrap some of these stupid restrictions on new stations.
Now if we could get the Supremes to stop "re-inventing" the Constitution and just limit Congress to it's enumerated powers, unbalanced laws and regulations like this might actually go away someday. Until then, it'll continue to be a case of "money and influence" wielding the power the government has taken for itself from the People.
You've left off the rest "...become used for random access in the way the disks are used today". It's the use patterns for the random access, things that are used on disk today, like directory trees and files,not the fact that it's random. Try to learn to read more than the first part of a sentence.