Bottled water. Just what kind of talent does that take? I rest my case. The grandparent was comparing open air to free software development. Could you elaborate why you think that bottled water is comparable to free (or commercial) software development? I am quite confused, to be honest.
But if people are willing and able to give them away for free, do we really need an industry to be created to give out smiles? The author of Tetris didn't give it away for free. But I mostly agree with your other examples. My problem was not the idea you were putting forward, but rather the faulty analogy used to support it. Having said that, I think the guy's biggest gripe is not the loss of the market for software as much as the loss of job opportunities for programmers. From the summary it seems that he is not necessarily arguing for software being free (as in speech) being a bad thing. He seems to be arguing that the software which is free (as in beer) doesn't let software developers buy quite as much beer. It's a long debate. This is slashdot. We all know pros and cons of both positions. We don't need to rehash them.
Prove to me you're not stealing my air. You are making an accusation (of theft). The burden of proof is on you. Of course, if you are making the accusation without any supporting evidence, the author of grandparent might consider it a defamation.
The ONLY REASON to keep IP exclusive, is for monitary gain, isn't it? Not at all. You must not be familiar with Howard Roark's dilemma. Search YouTube for Roark's speech if you want to see an eloquent explanation.
can't we just stop making fun of each other to live in peace? The premise of this question is wrong. Making fun of each other is not a violation of peace. Violence is a violation of peace. Mockery is bad manners -- not violence. A civil society must tolerate bad manners. If nothing else, they are a form of descent against the opinions of those towards whom good manners are not observed. Europe also tolerates descent against Christianity. So your assertion of this behavior being a cowardly attempt to take pot shots at those outside of their reach is misplaced.
Well, look at it this way: it seems the Democrats (and the major media, et al) are pretty much assured that the Democrat candidate will win this fall, and quite handily. This means that you have a few extra votes to burn! So pick your "ideal" candidate - Nader, McKinney, etc. You could even engage in some write-ins, like Hugo Chavez or Raul Castro. Heck, you might even get Fidel out of retirement with a few votes. Cute, very cute. I guess this was a crack at my calling McCain granpa monster (a phrase I must admit I didn't invent). Well, I am a registered Republican, so go figure. Of course, the 100-year-war man is not necesserily the proper Republican candidate. I am sure teh party leadership would be more comfortable with someone more orthodox. Since you suggest democrats would be better suited writting in Castros, may I suggest you write in King Saud of Saudi Arabia?
That's a non sequitur. I said the government has responsibility A. You said the government assumes responsibility B, so it must not be just assuming a responsibility A. The original discussion was about whether or not the government does, in fact, have a responsibility A. The fact that the government assumed responsibility B does not in any way help to determine whether or not the government has a responsibility A.
It might a bit ironic that I would be the one to say that pride is still a deadly sin and that Islam still consider Jesus a profit of God (ie, his saying that pride is a deadly sin makes it God's word). Having said that "offenses to religion" are nothing but wounded pride.
What do you mean "too late"? The main campaign hasn't started, yet. We are still not done with the primaries. Of course, if Ralph gets any votes it will be from Democrats. So if he is successful, it will be president grandpa monster McCain.
Everyone here doing what they are supposed to. This lawsuit (and its kind) were expected as soon as yahoo rejected the offer. But the pension plan is doing what they are supposed to as well. When someone offers them $10 for a $6 property, they are supposed to take it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be fulfilling their obligationgs to the pensioneers. The lawsuit will fail if the judge understands that the fact that Yahoo traded at a certain price, doesn't mean that it can be purchased in large amounts at that price. But so far, this is hardly newsworthy.
You talk about bugging your kid's room and installing keyloggers on his PC, and then dare to use that quote as your.sig? How can you not see the painful irony of that - I bet you'd be among the first to complain if your ISP started packet filtering your traffic. The quote in question was:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben The point of Ben's quote is pretty much that adults should not be treated as children. So the gp doesn't need much daring. Adults are responsible for children's safety. So for that purpose they do have to restrict their freedom.
Physically speaking, a 13 year old is only a few months from being a biological adult. I am not a doctor, but even I know that this is wildly untrue. Their brains work very differently. You might be thinking of their reproductive organs being fully developed, but they are certainly different from adults'. Their hormonal system (and I am not talking just about the sex hormones) produces very different levels of hormones. They are still very much children. Their bodies might start developing some of the features of adults at that age. But that's just that -- a start. The process doesn't finish for a number of years.
Well, isn't that the question that's asked at the next stage? First, question "what's going on" (aka "what is it") asked. And then the question "what makes it come to be" is asked. I am not a physicist, so I have to ask are we done with "what's going on", yet? Otherwise, "why is it going on" is probably premature.
I would agree with that one. Parents of a clinically depressed 13-year-old who let her roam Internet unsupervised must be deemed what they, in fact, were -- recklessly irresponsible.
No, filters are not perfect. As a matter of fact, I would say they are dangerous in themselves. They provide a false sense of safety while, at the same time, often limiting for very dubious reasons (thereby, acting as sensors of often important information). But logs are (for all intents and purposes) perfect. They do give parents a perfect ability to see what websites their children visited. More sophisticated logs would allow parents to even see the full content of all Internet interactions that children engaged in. No, it's not an "invasion" of privacy. Children don't have an expectation of privacy -- they are under full control of the parents. You can't take away a privacy which doesn't exist.
Letting children "do their thing" and then expecting that the government would restrict what type of interactions adults engaged in (towards other adults) just so that your children can be protected when they act recklessly is not only reckless in itself, it is just plain obnoxious. It victimizes ALL adults by taking away their rights for the purpose of allowing you to be less engaged in the process of raising your own children. How much more obnoxious a standard can you establish? Cyber bullying must be addressed by parents in much the same way as all other bullying -- by talking to their kids about it.
As for you examples of wondering the streets at 3am, if we extend the analogy from the Internet to the real life, then you are proposing that adults should not be legally allowed to walk drunk on the streets at night because there might be children who sneaked out walking down the same streets and they might get cursed out by such adults. You may be tempted to say, "good, I like the idea of not having drunk people wandering at nights", but this is not a position a government of a free country may adopt. The government can take measures ensuring that the proverbial fist stops at a proverbial nose. It may not go further and say that anyone who as much as raises their proverbial fist above shoulder level will be deemed a criminal.
And lastly, the reason parents don't watch their children is because they are not held responsible for their behavior. You are confusing cause and effect. If parents were legally responsible for what their children do, all employers wouldn't have a choice but to be accomodating of that fact because that's what the market pressure (the labor market in this case) would pressure them to do.
Civil society exists only because institutions have been created to fight violence on behalf of most people. Protecting oneself against a violent act is a measure of last resort. Being protected from it is why we surrender freedoms to a government established (among other things) for the purposes of "insuring domestic Tranquility" and "providing for the common defence". So no, the assumption is not that most people will deal with violent outbursts on their own. The assumption is that the government will take steps to protect them. Of course, the 2nd ammendment insures that people can still protect themselves when that fails. If you don't think we need a government at all and wish to descend into anarchy, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. I know that the idea of anarchy being a better system than a system of states has been floating on the Internet lately. I don't know if that's where you are comming from. If it is, I don't care to regurgatate these debates (ragardless of the pros and cons of both positions). If it's not, then I'll insist that civility can only come from a government body preventing most violent acts.
It would and quite easily. The degree of control that website operators and ISP have over who uses the connection and what they can do with it is actually much greater than that of phone companies. It just so happens that most website operators and ISP don't bother to excercise the full potential of their control because they don't see the need for it. But requiring them to do so by law (while it would have chilling effects on free speech) would make it almost immediately so. The wild west was only wild because noone was there to make it otherwise. And the Internet is free and anonymous because those who can have not yet chosen to make it otherwise. If the opposite choice is ever made, it will be made restricted, controlled and regulated almost at a whim. Such control will be easily automated, so there will be no getting around it for most people (ie, all people but the ones who dedicate their lives to circumventing such control). My point is that, I would not dismiss this law with such swagger. Of course, the politicians don't care about a few children comitting suicides. Statistically that will happen anyway and all politicians know it. What this gives them is a proof-of-concept infrastructure to regulate expression on the Internet. And anyone who spends their life trying to acquire power can be assumed to want more power.
I am pretty sure, that the current standing is that we (as a society) do not allow minors to make all decisions about their lives and do subscribe to the idea that they deserve a higher degree of protection than adults do. Perhaps a more approriate measure would be not to punish adults acting as adults on the Internet, but holding parents responsible for their children's Internet habits. Surely we would hold a parent who gets cocaine for their child to be more than just a drug dealer. Why should we not adopt the position that (at least monitoring) what children view on the Internet is their parents responsibility? Why shouldn't we say that letting children use Internet unsupervised is plain reckless?
Fair point, duly noted. All these geeks must have come from somewhere though..! They do. It's called survival of the fittest. Unfortunately efficiency brought about by successful geekdom allows for wasteful use of resources that temporarily suspends the need for cultural worship of the most useful. This is corrected by eventual overpopulation which leads to another level of strain on resources as well as by the overconsumption that is caused by the overpopulation of inefficient and untalented. Please, don't try to put any slurs or sterotypes that you think I am trying to euphemise here. These trends occur essentially in all societies that ever discover the benefits of geeks. Umm... I've outlined it all in http://science.slashdot.org/~superwiz/journal/169837, but the first 2 paragraphs are a bit dated (they was written on the hills of the Virginia Tech massacre).
The interesting part about this test is not the fact that a satelite was shut down. It is that (if everything was as claimed) they shut down a moving target with a missle which was only designed to hit targets moving at half the speed. Well, maybe "designed" was not exactly accurate. Maybe "tested" would be more accurate. But I only got bits and pieces from the MSM, so I don't know which one it is.
why it hasn't happened, yet. I'll explain it with one quote from West Wing: "trade stops war". Superpower are not shooting each others' satelites out of orbit because they need to exchange goods and information. Long live greed -- the only way to asure cooperation between individuals and nations.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, so you throw away the return value of a function? Doesn't seem very clean. I think you meant
(void)printf(("Hello World!\n"));Didn't realize that free air is made by an intense effort of people applying their talents.
That's a non sequitur. I said the government has responsibility A. You said the government assumes responsibility B, so it must not be just assuming a responsibility A. The original discussion was about whether or not the government does, in fact, have a responsibility A. The fact that the government assumed responsibility B does not in any way help to determine whether or not the government has a responsibility A.
It might a bit ironic that I would be the one to say that pride is still a deadly sin and that Islam still consider Jesus a profit of God (ie, his saying that pride is a deadly sin makes it God's word). Having said that "offenses to religion" are nothing but wounded pride.
What do you mean "too late"? The main campaign hasn't started, yet. We are still not done with the primaries. Of course, if Ralph gets any votes it will be from Democrats. So if he is successful, it will be president grandpa monster McCain.
Everyone here doing what they are supposed to. This lawsuit (and its kind) were expected as soon as yahoo rejected the offer. But the pension plan is doing what they are supposed to as well. When someone offers them $10 for a $6 property, they are supposed to take it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be fulfilling their obligationgs to the pensioneers. The lawsuit will fail if the judge understands that the fact that Yahoo traded at a certain price, doesn't mean that it can be purchased in large amounts at that price. But so far, this is hardly newsworthy.
You use Tor to post on slashdot, do you?
Well, isn't that the question that's asked at the next stage? First, question "what's going on" (aka "what is it") asked. And then the question "what makes it come to be" is asked. I am not a physicist, so I have to ask are we done with "what's going on", yet? Otherwise, "why is it going on" is probably premature.
I would agree with that one. Parents of a clinically depressed 13-year-old who let her roam Internet unsupervised must be deemed what they, in fact, were -- recklessly irresponsible.
No, filters are not perfect. As a matter of fact, I would say they are dangerous in themselves. They provide a false sense of safety while, at the same time, often limiting for very dubious reasons (thereby, acting as sensors of often important information). But logs are (for all intents and purposes) perfect. They do give parents a perfect ability to see what websites their children visited. More sophisticated logs would allow parents to even see the full content of all Internet interactions that children engaged in. No, it's not an "invasion" of privacy. Children don't have an expectation of privacy -- they are under full control of the parents. You can't take away a privacy which doesn't exist.
Letting children "do their thing" and then expecting that the government would restrict what type of interactions adults engaged in (towards other adults) just so that your children can be protected when they act recklessly is not only reckless in itself, it is just plain obnoxious. It victimizes ALL adults by taking away their rights for the purpose of allowing you to be less engaged in the process of raising your own children. How much more obnoxious a standard can you establish? Cyber bullying must be addressed by parents in much the same way as all other bullying -- by talking to their kids about it.
As for you examples of wondering the streets at 3am, if we extend the analogy from the Internet to the real life, then you are proposing that adults should not be legally allowed to walk drunk on the streets at night because there might be children who sneaked out walking down the same streets and they might get cursed out by such adults. You may be tempted to say, "good, I like the idea of not having drunk people wandering at nights", but this is not a position a government of a free country may adopt. The government can take measures ensuring that the proverbial fist stops at a proverbial nose. It may not go further and say that anyone who as much as raises their proverbial fist above shoulder level will be deemed a criminal.
And lastly, the reason parents don't watch their children is because they are not held responsible for their behavior. You are confusing cause and effect. If parents were legally responsible for what their children do, all employers wouldn't have a choice but to be accomodating of that fact because that's what the market pressure (the labor market in this case) would pressure them to do.
Civil society exists only because institutions have been created to fight violence on behalf of most people. Protecting oneself against a violent act is a measure of last resort. Being protected from it is why we surrender freedoms to a government established (among other things) for the purposes of "insuring domestic Tranquility" and "providing for the common defence". So no, the assumption is not that most people will deal with violent outbursts on their own. The assumption is that the government will take steps to protect them. Of course, the 2nd ammendment insures that people can still protect themselves when that fails. If you don't think we need a government at all and wish to descend into anarchy, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. I know that the idea of anarchy being a better system than a system of states has been floating on the Internet lately. I don't know if that's where you are comming from. If it is, I don't care to regurgatate these debates (ragardless of the pros and cons of both positions). If it's not, then I'll insist that civility can only come from a government body preventing most violent acts.
Hrm. You'd be outlawing trolling?
As if that would ever work.
It would and quite easily. The degree of control that website operators and ISP have over who uses the connection and what they can do with it is actually much greater than that of phone companies. It just so happens that most website operators and ISP don't bother to excercise the full potential of their control because they don't see the need for it. But requiring them to do so by law (while it would have chilling effects on free speech) would make it almost immediately so. The wild west was only wild because noone was there to make it otherwise. And the Internet is free and anonymous because those who can have not yet chosen to make it otherwise. If the opposite choice is ever made, it will be made restricted, controlled and regulated almost at a whim. Such control will be easily automated, so there will be no getting around it for most people (ie, all people but the ones who dedicate their lives to circumventing such control). My point is that, I would not dismiss this law with such swagger. Of course, the politicians don't care about a few children comitting suicides. Statistically that will happen anyway and all politicians know it. What this gives them is a proof-of-concept infrastructure to regulate expression on the Internet. And anyone who spends their life trying to acquire power can be assumed to want more power.Actually, that's precisely what laws are for -- to protect the weak. The strong don't need protection. That's what the word "strong" means.
I am pretty sure, that the current standing is that we (as a society) do not allow minors to make all decisions about their lives and do subscribe to the idea that they deserve a higher degree of protection than adults do. Perhaps a more approriate measure would be not to punish adults acting as adults on the Internet, but holding parents responsible for their children's Internet habits. Surely we would hold a parent who gets cocaine for their child to be more than just a drug dealer. Why should we not adopt the position that (at least monitoring) what children view on the Internet is their parents responsibility? Why shouldn't we say that letting children use Internet unsupervised is plain reckless?
The interesting part about this test is not the fact that a satelite was shut down. It is that (if everything was as claimed) they shut down a moving target with a missle which was only designed to hit targets moving at half the speed. Well, maybe "designed" was not exactly accurate. Maybe "tested" would be more accurate. But I only got bits and pieces from the MSM, so I don't know which one it is.
why it hasn't happened, yet. I'll explain it with one quote from West Wing: "trade stops war". Superpower are not shooting each others' satelites out of orbit because they need to exchange goods and information. Long live greed -- the only way to asure cooperation between individuals and nations.