Suppose I recieve a DVD that I honestly believe is legit. And - due to my error, or someone else's error or someone else's falsehood - it is not.
Huh? This isn't reporting you when you put a black-market DVD into your hardware; it's allowing a mechanism for investigation when you put a movie or show this hardware rips up on BitTorrent or YouTube.
Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise; it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted. It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.
Much soft science fiction might as well be fantasy -- but you're sorely misrepresenting the genre to claim that all of it is such. The short stories (interspersed between the non-fiction essays whose concepts they illustrate) in Robert Forward's Indistinguishable from Magic comprise solid examples, but they're exceedingly far from alone.
I think the Mote in God's Eye is a pretty good read. I'm not really convinced that it's a good treatment of xenobiology or xenosociology - but I would say it's the best I have seen yet.
While Vinge breaks from hard sci-fi here and there, both A Deepness In The Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep have a fair bit to be said for them along those lines. (If you haven't read them, start with the former).
Valid for most sci-fi maybe, but depends on the subgenre; Dragon's Egg, for instance, is nothing like Dune -- and is focused around the science, rather than the society.
I disagree -- some SF was written as science first and fiction later. Robert Forward has described one of his novels [sorry, not sure which] as a textbook on neutron star physics written with a story to make things more interesting -- and it manages to be a damned good yarn.
As for your guess that I'm unmarried and have no family, you've guessed incorrectly.
As for "government standard hours", I don't care whether folks switch to them or not -- it's a way get the folks who want the government's help to twiddle working hours around (because they for whatever reason can't do it themselves) to feel more comfortable so that they leave my bloody clocks alone. [After all, what is DST other than a way to move working and school hours around a bit?]. And when I speak of "clocks", I'm not talking about the walk-around-the-house-and-shift-the-time variety; I'm responsible for servers located in my employers' customers' offices which need to be able to correctly integrate with whatever 3rd-party scheduling system the customer has. Some of these 3rd-party scheduling systems are pretty hinky, and I could see things being badly confused if our server has a correct idea of what a new timezone is and their does not, or visa-versa. Changing DST also means installing a whole new JVM, as the Java virtual machine includes its own timezone logic separate from the OS, not to mention updating the 6 different operating systems we use in-house, and is otherwise a big bloody PITA.
As far as I'm concerned, it's Y2K all over again -- but this time just so some politicians can tell their constituents they're trying to do something good for the environment.
Why don't they just pass a law stating that for purposes of the government, standard work hours are shifted +1/-1hr within a given time period, and encourage private industry to do the same? That way you get your ability to drive home in daylight, and I don't have anyone screwing with my clocks.
(For that matter, if it's that big of a difference, why doesn't private industry decide to change business hours independently? Personally, I don't see it as a big enough change to be worth bothering -- but then, I exercise in the mornings rather than afternoons, and have an employer who allows me to shift my hours at will).
Oh, c'mon -- why ruin the running joke by trying to take it seriously?
I'm a married geek. Most of my friends are married or committed geeks, and most of the women in that set are damn fine. Obviously, geeks can get laid -- but that's no reason to avoid using the contrary stereotype to make a joke; it's only defeatist if in a context where there's reason to take it seriously.
I would like to see more analysis of the reasoning for the "paid" contributions from the mindset of the underwriters themselves. No doubt it would be fascinating and might prod a thought or two in the gray matter of those disparaging CTO and CIOs.
Indeed -- it would be interesting, for that matter, to know how far up the management chain the decision to release such contributions typically extends. In OSS-centric businesses (my aforementioned prior employer was MontaVista) this is unquestionably well-known to all; in other places, however, I've seen decisions to contribute made closer to the ground floor as a matter of practicality (avoiding the need to spend future man-hours to port an internally-developed bugfix or extension to future 3rd-party releases -- or hoping for 3rd-party extensions to a piece of internally-developed infrastructure unrelated to a company's core focus). That said, my employment history tends towards smaller, younger, software-oriented businesses; others may differ (perhaps in having policies requiring closer oversight by Legal?).
Do you have a copy of your parents' breeding license prominently displayed or do you merely inject oppressive language about others into random statements?
The implication is that they could and should, and that the inavailability of such a program is unfortunate. See, I can deal with folks whose opinions I disagree with, should they be willing to express those opinions in a reasonable and civil manner. Providing an opinion in such a way as to be generally disrespectful to one's readership base without providing argument or evidence, on the other hand, is indeed indicative of a level of general incivility which, at large, can reasonably be attributed to deficiencies within the valueset largely provided in childhood. In any event, disparaging individuals who engage in antisocial behavior can serve the societally useful goal of making it clear that behaving in such a manner is not acceptable within a community's norms.
My wife and I are doing the paperwork to begin the process of providing a foster home. My interest in the undertaking is largely predicated on receiving the training and experience necessary for quality parenting while having an escape mechanism available. There are plenty of people in the world; raising more should only be done if one has a substantial certainty as to one's ability to do a substantially better-than-average job.
Getting back towards the topic -- a substantial component of my job is doing open source work; in previous employment, it's been 100%. I know a nontrivial number of paid folks who do OSS work (far more than I know in person who work purely uncompensated... actually, I can't think of any of those IRL who could be classified as serious), and have long been surprised with the widespread perception that it's primarily an amateur activity. From my perspective, then, these findings are in no way a surprise.
EVERY SINGLE POLITICIAN IN THIS COUNTRY does shitty things to gain power.
Then tell me what shitty things Obama has done. He's got quite a bit of legislative record behind him -- in the Indiana senate before the US senate. Or Ron Paul. It's easy to say "it's okay, everybody does it" -- but for that to be a valid excuse, it needs to hold true.
As for the bias against Hillary -- damned if I know. I don't like her personality; I think she's divisive at a time when what we need most is to a recovery from excessive division. I do think the "take away my GTA" thing, like her position in favor of the flag-burning ban, is more serious than you make them out to be; these positions reflect on her larger view of the legitimate role of the State in people's lives.
I'm looking at the candidate, not the group. There are Democrats and Republicans who've done shitty things -- but then, it would hardly be reasonable to tar Ron Paul with the same brush George Bush is rightfully painted with.
Hell, I dislike all of them and wouldn't vote for any of them anyway. I would say that Obama is the most articulate & well spoken of the Dem field. However, I have been reliably informed that saying such a thing about a black candidate makes you racist.
It's strong evidence you are. Chris Rock had a good standup routine that explains why. Go rent the DVD.
I think the context here is different.
Generally, "articulate & well spoken" is in the context of "compared to what I expect him/her to be" -- so yes, it certainly can evidence thinking influenced by racism/stereotypes/whatever. On the other hand, there's the context of "compared to what recent high-profile politicians have lead us to expect"; in that case, the comparison is more benign. I've read Obama's 2004 DNC keynote, and I'm moved -- not by the wordsmithing, but by the promise of an America less divided. Being able to instill hope in others, to bridge divisions -- if there's one thing we need more right now, it doesn't come to mind.
I'll be honest, though: I can't claim that my thought process isn't tainted. I grew up in a tiny little oil town where the sign warning folks whose skin wasn't pale to be gone by sundown had just disappeared just recently, and where the sight of someone neither Caucasian or Hispanic was next to unheard of -- and after growing up on a steady diet of US history and talking heads discussing apartheid, the Rodney King riots and compensation for the descendants of slaves, I first left that town and went to college expecting to meet a set of people who rightfully hated me for what my people had done; my vision of America was a country split into factions, hateful and discourteous. I was very pleasently surprised to find that generally untrue. It's become much more true since, but along entirely different lines.
Even so, I can't meet someone without my initial expectations being set by how they look and how they talk. Initial expectations only -- chat with someone for a while and they're defined by who they are -- but it's still a character flaw I recognize within myself, and I'd like to do what I can to mend it. As for what I can do, I'm not really sure -- except for trying to be sure that my children don't grow up with the expectations I did.
History of jumping on the "thinkofthechildren" bandwagon (ie. sponsoring legislation for banning violent computer games; photo ops with Jack Valenti; etc)
Admittedly, an analysis of her legislative history could go a lot deeper -- but a history of trying to capitalize on fear and disregarding freedom of speech is more than enough for me.
I agree that Motorola's HS850 (is that it? the smaller/more expensive of the ones Cingular's storefronts sell) is crap. Personally, the best Bluetooth earpiece I've used is the Bluespoon AX2. It took a week or so until it didn't hurt my ear -- but once I got used to it, it was great. IIRC, I paid $35.
What is wrong with Cingular? I've always been with Sprint...been happy with them, but, I've been asking friends that have Cingular, and they've been quite happy with it. So far, most all I've asked only use it for voice...I use my Sprint phone as a modem for occasional laptop usage...or for sending pics, picture mail/txt (free vs pay for SMS), or some web browsing when bored in the bar waiting for friends...and the internet connectivity is great. But, I've not met anyone that is sour on Cingular...can you or anyone else tell me what is worst on their system than say..SprintPCS?
Well, there's their pricing.
Compared to a provider with a sub-$50 all-you-can-eat no-lockin month-to-month plan such as Cricket or MetroPCS, Cricket's pricing is bloody awful: The risk of breaching a usage cap and needing to pay per text message is enough to stop me from using the feature altogether. A similar deal goes for data plans, and Cingular's unlimited data plans are considerably more expensive than Sprint's.
Also, this multi-year contract BS is... well, BS. Forcing people to sign onto a long-term contract to buy a phone locked to the vendor's service (or extend said contract in order to change plan options) is absolutely not condusive to consumer choice. That said, I think many of my criticisms (save the data plan pricing) probably apply to Sprint as well.
RSA? That old dog has still got some life in it yet. Their specific implementation of RSA and how it interfaces with the mechanism for actually throwing the kill switch? Maybe. Depends on whether the crypto validation happens in software or in hardware; in the latter case, they could actually do the crypto in hardware (low-performance RSA hardware implementations are dirt cheap) and not provide any other mechanism to trigger the kill switch -- thus, in this situation there would exist no possibility for the software to be hacked to bypass that check.
This isn't like software-based DRM, where the decrypted bits need to be fed back into a fully programmable mechanism somewhere. This is a security device built into a dedicated hardware system; if done right, it need not have any of the vulnerabilities 'yall around here are accustomed to.
Hacking the HQ is easy to avoid -- just like with any important key, you don't keep the system online; when you need to do work on it, you move your data on and off via static media (my employer uses a USB key for moving CSRs onto and certificates off of our fully disconnected CA). The HQ being ransacked is a slightly different matter, but given that it's located in a 1st-world country with an effective police force, that kind of thing doesn't happen so often.
If it's $0.00, I give the merchandise back -- if they took it to small claims, they'd win, because any reasonable person would know they were making a mistake, and without me giving them some amount of compensation there's no valid purchase contract.
If it's $5.00 for something that usually costs $30.00, and that merchant is known for having discounts they don't always publicize, I'd refuse -- I could have reasonably believed that the discount was intentional at the time of purchase, and all the elements necessary for a binding contract were met. Also, I don't like Best Buy much; Costco (for instance) I'd probably give some deference to because they've gone out of their way for me on occasion, and it would hurt if they decided to terminate our relationship.
So -- rather key here is the distinction between being charged $0.00, being charged some amount that is nonzero but which is small enough that a reasonable consumer would believe there to be an error, and being charged some amount where the consumer can reasonably believe that the sale at that price was intentional. In the first case, the consumer is clearly in the wrong. In the last case, the merchant is clearly in the wrong. In the middle ground... who knows?
his tapes have been deemed by the court to contain footage of evidentiary value
Huh? The court refused to review the tapes to determine their evidentiary value, and thus has made no informed determination.
I further find it difficult, in a free society where individuals are innocent until proven guilty, to tar every individual who attends a protest as a vandal.
Who says it's evidence? The prosecutor. He's offered to let the judge decide if it really is evidence, but the judge has refused.
His position is that tape does not show the crimes in question and that the prosecutor wants them for other reasons. If the prosecutor were up front and honest he would let the judge look at the tapes, determine whether the tapes genuinely do contain evidence relating to the crime, and hand over to the prosecutor only any parts which appear to in fact be evidence.
Instead of accepting this offer, the judge has thrown him in jail. What's the reason behind that?
I disagree. People will not look past race and gender. Why? Because people are uneducated and unaccepting.
Let me reiterate a bit:
[1] - Call me naive if you like -- but I find that my quality of life is significantly better if I avoid cynicism.
So -- whether or not there is evidence to support the application of that premise to "people" as a whole (and until I see it blasted in my face, I'm going to assume that there isn't), I'm a happier, kinder and all-round better person if I disbelieve it. Which, consequently, I do.
Frankly, I think that if we all expected better of humankind in general, that would help in providing higher standards for our own behavior and that of those we directly influence -- and thus assist in improving the accuracy of said generally optimistic assumptions.
(Which is a damned strange statement coming from me, as it's not unheard of for me to take social-darwinist positions on occasion. Ahh, the joys of introspection. *shrug*.)
There is no material difference to Microsoft between one pirate user and one non-user.
You're forgetting about network effects.
More userbase (either paying or otherwise) means more documents created in Microsoft formats, more potential employees who are highly familiar with Microsoft software, etc. All these factors increase the incentive to use Microsoft software in the future, when piracy may no longer be an option -- as well as the incentive for other parties for whom piracy is not an option to use Microsoft software in the present.
No, I think Bush is far-Right overboard. You're right, though, that Hillary has some positions which are far-Right-overboard (anti-flag-burning), and the things I detest her for (thinkofthechildren) aren't so much far-Left as they are just plain fearmongering. I retract my characterization.
Have you been actually following the issues? They may both be democrats, but Hillary and Obama are night and day on their historical stances on issues. Obama was against the Iraq was from the start; Hillary just got on the bandwagon when it looked politically safe. Hillary sponsors bills that help protect people against some real or imagined danger; Obama sponsors bills that support some useful function. Etc.
My inclination to believe that people are generally reasonable beings[1] compels me to believe that folks are going to look past race and gender on this election -- actually, to the extent that there is a black voting block, it's largely composed of folks who are inclined to vote for Hillary because they were so happy with Bill. I think this is unfortunate, and hope positions will change as we get closer to the election -- I liked Bill for the most part myself, but Hillary != Bill.
[1] - Call me naive if you like -- but I find that my quality of life is significantly better if I avoid cynicism.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? This isn't reporting you when you put a black-market DVD into your hardware; it's allowing a mechanism for investigation when you put a movie or show this hardware rips up on BitTorrent or YouTube.
Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise; it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted. It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.
Much soft science fiction might as well be fantasy -- but you're sorely misrepresenting the genre to claim that all of it is such. The short stories (interspersed between the non-fiction essays whose concepts they illustrate) in Robert Forward's Indistinguishable from Magic comprise solid examples, but they're exceedingly far from alone.
Valid for most sci-fi maybe, but depends on the subgenre; Dragon's Egg, for instance, is nothing like Dune -- and is focused around the science, rather than the society.
I disagree -- some SF was written as science first and fiction later. Robert Forward has described one of his novels [sorry, not sure which] as a textbook on neutron star physics written with a story to make things more interesting -- and it manages to be a damned good yarn.
As for your guess that I'm unmarried and have no family, you've guessed incorrectly.
As for "government standard hours", I don't care whether folks switch to them or not -- it's a way get the folks who want the government's help to twiddle working hours around (because they for whatever reason can't do it themselves) to feel more comfortable so that they leave my bloody clocks alone. [After all, what is DST other than a way to move working and school hours around a bit?]. And when I speak of "clocks", I'm not talking about the walk-around-the-house-and-shift-the-time variety; I'm responsible for servers located in my employers' customers' offices which need to be able to correctly integrate with whatever 3rd-party scheduling system the customer has. Some of these 3rd-party scheduling systems are pretty hinky, and I could see things being badly confused if our server has a correct idea of what a new timezone is and their does not, or visa-versa. Changing DST also means installing a whole new JVM, as the Java virtual machine includes its own timezone logic separate from the OS, not to mention updating the 6 different operating systems we use in-house, and is otherwise a big bloody PITA.
As far as I'm concerned, it's Y2K all over again -- but this time just so some politicians can tell their constituents they're trying to do something good for the environment.
Why don't they just pass a law stating that for purposes of the government, standard work hours are shifted +1/-1hr within a given time period, and encourage private industry to do the same? That way you get your ability to drive home in daylight, and I don't have anyone screwing with my clocks.
(For that matter, if it's that big of a difference, why doesn't private industry decide to change business hours independently? Personally, I don't see it as a big enough change to be worth bothering -- but then, I exercise in the mornings rather than afternoons, and have an employer who allows me to shift my hours at will).
Oh, c'mon -- why ruin the running joke by trying to take it seriously?
I'm a married geek. Most of my friends are married or committed geeks, and most of the women in that set are damn fine. Obviously, geeks can get laid -- but that's no reason to avoid using the contrary stereotype to make a joke; it's only defeatist if in a context where there's reason to take it seriously.
Indeed -- it would be interesting, for that matter, to know how far up the management chain the decision to release such contributions typically extends. In OSS-centric businesses (my aforementioned prior employer was MontaVista) this is unquestionably well-known to all; in other places, however, I've seen decisions to contribute made closer to the ground floor as a matter of practicality (avoiding the need to spend future man-hours to port an internally-developed bugfix or extension to future 3rd-party releases -- or hoping for 3rd-party extensions to a piece of internally-developed infrastructure unrelated to a company's core focus). That said, my employment history tends towards smaller, younger, software-oriented businesses; others may differ (perhaps in having policies requiring closer oversight by Legal?).
The implication is that they could and should, and that the inavailability of such a program is unfortunate. See, I can deal with folks whose opinions I disagree with, should they be willing to express those opinions in a reasonable and civil manner. Providing an opinion in such a way as to be generally disrespectful to one's readership base without providing argument or evidence, on the other hand, is indeed indicative of a level of general incivility which, at large, can reasonably be attributed to deficiencies within the valueset largely provided in childhood. In any event, disparaging individuals who engage in antisocial behavior can serve the societally useful goal of making it clear that behaving in such a manner is not acceptable within a community's norms.
My wife and I are doing the paperwork to begin the process of providing a foster home. My interest in the undertaking is largely predicated on receiving the training and experience necessary for quality parenting while having an escape mechanism available. There are plenty of people in the world; raising more should only be done if one has a substantial certainty as to one's ability to do a substantially better-than-average job.
Getting back towards the topic -- a substantial component of my job is doing open source work; in previous employment, it's been 100%. I know a nontrivial number of paid folks who do OSS work (far more than I know in person who work purely uncompensated... actually, I can't think of any of those IRL who could be classified as serious), and have long been surprised with the widespread perception that it's primarily an amateur activity. From my perspective, then, these findings are in no way a surprise.
Then tell me what shitty things Obama has done. He's got quite a bit of legislative record behind him -- in the Indiana senate before the US senate. Or Ron Paul. It's easy to say "it's okay, everybody does it" -- but for that to be a valid excuse, it needs to hold true.
As for the bias against Hillary -- damned if I know. I don't like her personality; I think she's divisive at a time when what we need most is to a recovery from excessive division. I do think the "take away my GTA" thing, like her position in favor of the flag-burning ban, is more serious than you make them out to be; these positions reflect on her larger view of the legitimate role of the State in people's lives.
I'm looking at the candidate, not the group. There are Democrats and Republicans who've done shitty things -- but then, it would hardly be reasonable to tar Ron Paul with the same brush George Bush is rightfully painted with.
I think the context here is different.
Generally, "articulate & well spoken" is in the context of "compared to what I expect him/her to be" -- so yes, it certainly can evidence thinking influenced by racism/stereotypes/whatever. On the other hand, there's the context of "compared to what recent high-profile politicians have lead us to expect"; in that case, the comparison is more benign. I've read Obama's 2004 DNC keynote, and I'm moved -- not by the wordsmithing, but by the promise of an America less divided. Being able to instill hope in others, to bridge divisions -- if there's one thing we need more right now, it doesn't come to mind.
I'll be honest, though: I can't claim that my thought process isn't tainted. I grew up in a tiny little oil town where the sign warning folks whose skin wasn't pale to be gone by sundown had just disappeared just recently, and where the sight of someone neither Caucasian or Hispanic was next to unheard of -- and after growing up on a steady diet of US history and talking heads discussing apartheid, the Rodney King riots and compensation for the descendants of slaves, I first left that town and went to college expecting to meet a set of people who rightfully hated me for what my people had done; my vision of America was a country split into factions, hateful and discourteous. I was very pleasently surprised to find that generally untrue. It's become much more true since, but along entirely different lines.
Even so, I can't meet someone without my initial expectations being set by how they look and how they talk. Initial expectations only -- chat with someone for a while and they're defined by who they are -- but it's still a character flaw I recognize within myself, and I'd like to do what I can to mend it. As for what I can do, I'm not really sure -- except for trying to be sure that my children don't grow up with the expectations I did.
Oooh, let's talk about that!
Admittedly, an analysis of her legislative history could go a lot deeper -- but a history of trying to capitalize on fear and disregarding freedom of speech is more than enough for me.
I agree that Motorola's HS850 (is that it? the smaller/more expensive of the ones Cingular's storefronts sell) is crap. Personally, the best Bluetooth earpiece I've used is the Bluespoon AX2. It took a week or so until it didn't hurt my ear -- but once I got used to it, it was great. IIRC, I paid $35.
Well, there's their pricing.
Compared to a provider with a sub-$50 all-you-can-eat no-lockin month-to-month plan such as Cricket or MetroPCS, Cricket's pricing is bloody awful: The risk of breaching a usage cap and needing to pay per text message is enough to stop me from using the feature altogether. A similar deal goes for data plans, and Cingular's unlimited data plans are considerably more expensive than Sprint's.
Also, this multi-year contract BS is... well, BS. Forcing people to sign onto a long-term contract to buy a phone locked to the vendor's service (or extend said contract in order to change plan options) is absolutely not condusive to consumer choice. That said, I think many of my criticisms (save the data plan pricing) probably apply to Sprint as well.
Until what is hacked?
RSA? That old dog has still got some life in it yet. Their specific implementation of RSA and how it interfaces with the mechanism for actually throwing the kill switch? Maybe. Depends on whether the crypto validation happens in software or in hardware; in the latter case, they could actually do the crypto in hardware (low-performance RSA hardware implementations are dirt cheap) and not provide any other mechanism to trigger the kill switch -- thus, in this situation there would exist no possibility for the software to be hacked to bypass that check.
This isn't like software-based DRM, where the decrypted bits need to be fed back into a fully programmable mechanism somewhere. This is a security device built into a dedicated hardware system; if done right, it need not have any of the vulnerabilities 'yall around here are accustomed to.
Hacking the HQ is easy to avoid -- just like with any important key, you don't keep the system online; when you need to do work on it, you move your data on and off via static media (my employer uses a USB key for moving CSRs onto and certificates off of our fully disconnected CA). The HQ being ransacked is a slightly different matter, but given that it's located in a 1st-world country with an effective police force, that kind of thing doesn't happen so often.
The command has to be RSA-signed, and the OLPC project folks aren't giving out the private key used to provide the signature.
So no, we aren't going to see forged kill requests.
If it's $0.00, I give the merchandise back -- if they took it to small claims, they'd win, because any reasonable person would know they were making a mistake, and without me giving them some amount of compensation there's no valid purchase contract.
If it's $5.00 for something that usually costs $30.00, and that merchant is known for having discounts they don't always publicize, I'd refuse -- I could have reasonably believed that the discount was intentional at the time of purchase, and all the elements necessary for a binding contract were met. Also, I don't like Best Buy much; Costco (for instance) I'd probably give some deference to because they've gone out of their way for me on occasion, and it would hurt if they decided to terminate our relationship.
So -- rather key here is the distinction between being charged $0.00, being charged some amount that is nonzero but which is small enough that a reasonable consumer would believe there to be an error, and being charged some amount where the consumer can reasonably believe that the sale at that price was intentional. In the first case, the consumer is clearly in the wrong. In the last case, the merchant is clearly in the wrong. In the middle ground... who knows?
Huh? The court refused to review the tapes to determine their evidentiary value, and thus has made no informed determination.
I further find it difficult, in a free society where individuals are innocent until proven guilty, to tar every individual who attends a protest as a vandal.
Who says it's evidence? The prosecutor. He's offered to let the judge decide if it really is evidence, but the judge has refused.
His position is that tape does not show the crimes in question and that the prosecutor wants them for other reasons. If the prosecutor were up front and honest he would let the judge look at the tapes, determine whether the tapes genuinely do contain evidence relating to the crime, and hand over to the prosecutor only any parts which appear to in fact be evidence.
Instead of accepting this offer, the judge has thrown him in jail. What's the reason behind that?
So -- whether or not there is evidence to support the application of that premise to "people" as a whole (and until I see it blasted in my face, I'm going to assume that there isn't), I'm a happier, kinder and all-round better person if I disbelieve it. Which, consequently, I do.
Frankly, I think that if we all expected better of humankind in general, that would help in providing higher standards for our own behavior and that of those we directly influence -- and thus assist in improving the accuracy of said generally optimistic assumptions.
(Which is a damned strange statement coming from me, as it's not unheard of for me to take social-darwinist positions on occasion. Ahh, the joys of introspection. *shrug*.)
You're forgetting about network effects.
More userbase (either paying or otherwise) means more documents created in Microsoft formats, more potential employees who are highly familiar with Microsoft software, etc. All these factors increase the incentive to use Microsoft software in the future, when piracy may no longer be an option -- as well as the incentive for other parties for whom piracy is not an option to use Microsoft software in the present.
No, I think Bush is far-Right overboard. You're right, though, that Hillary has some positions which are far-Right-overboard (anti-flag-burning), and the things I detest her for (thinkofthechildren) aren't so much far-Left as they are just plain fearmongering. I retract my characterization.
Have you been actually following the issues? They may both be democrats, but Hillary and Obama are night and day on their historical stances on issues. Obama was against the Iraq was from the start; Hillary just got on the bandwagon when it looked politically safe. Hillary sponsors bills that help protect people against some real or imagined danger; Obama sponsors bills that support some useful function. Etc.
My inclination to believe that people are generally reasonable beings[1] compels me to believe that folks are going to look past race and gender on this election -- actually, to the extent that there is a black voting block, it's largely composed of folks who are inclined to vote for Hillary because they were so happy with Bill. I think this is unfortunate, and hope positions will change as we get closer to the election -- I liked Bill for the most part myself, but Hillary != Bill.
[1] - Call me naive if you like -- but I find that my quality of life is significantly better if I avoid cynicism.