Sorry, but most of your actions (everyone's actions) are knee jerk responses. Sometimes, we all (some more than others) stop and rethink our actions. But most of the time responses to situations are emotions, i.e. knee-jerk. Rational is a human skill -- it is not a human natural state. We can train ourselves to try to think rationally most of the time, but again, approaching a situation rationally has to be a trained response to the type of situation that is being presented at hand. That being said, emotional responses are trained. And adopting a certain philosophy allows to train your emotional responses for the future situations that you may encounter. Your philosophy need not be someone else's. Your decision to act in a certain maner in response to certain situations may be entirely your own. But if you want to be able to emotionally respond to situations that you have not encountered before or do not encounter often, you need to familirize yourself with what type of emotional states you may enounter (some are very complicated -- this is what you observe in drama) and then decide on how you'd act in those states. The best solutions are often creative. You may often lack creativity to come up with the solutions that you yourself would find best if you knew them. That's why people study different philosphies of personal behavior. To understand the variety of available emotional responses in order to have a choice of responses to adapt.
First, education in a top school is VERY different from education in a
recently opened school with no reputation. I know because I teach in a public university. Our classes are dumbed down because the students
won't get it otherwise. Most of the classes that I took in junior and
senior level in my undergrad can never be taught here.
Second, education is only a small part of the value of university. Creating life-long contacts with people who will be in your field and those who are already successful in your field is almost as (if not a bigger) part.
Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.
And lastly, since I am compareing China to my American experience, they
can't "just" open a university. It takes more than a guy with money willing to build a building. A university degree there is an official governtment document. So all programs must come with official government approval and certification.
Sorry, but the fact that you don't issue a warranty does not mean that the government cannot pass a law regulating how much you are responsible when you sell something. So the repackagers (i.e. distributions) can be made liable. But the government cannot make you responsible for what you give away for free, especially not free "ideas". It has the power to regulate commerce -- not to regulate exchange of ideas or usefulness of gifts.
But then again, ianal.
This brilliant!!!! Maybe even Brilliant! This could be made into an argument that the 1st ammendment guarantees the right not to have ANY government taxes on phones. Or, at least, no more taxes on phones than we have on newspapers. Taxing communications = taxing speech = taxing expression. I am surpriced noone tried to make this argument before.
The "terra governments" (i.e. nations) are just trying to stay relevant in a world that will soon not need them. They formed in the first place because of consolidation of power at the time when power came from land ownership. But as the world moves away from power through land ownership and towards power through idea ownership (not through ownership by law but through ownership by being competenet enough to utilize and develop new ideas) the terra governments will see their power and influence diminish. It is already happening and these governments are fighting for relevance based on almost-religious the belief that their formation and presense is the last step in the development of civilization. They are constantly trying to diminish the ever-growing power of the knowledge elite.
A better idea is to have a 5% tax on sponsoring all interactions with publicly elected officials. Took a congressman to dinner -- pay 5% of the price of the dinner to umm... help schools. Taxing an activity is a way to supress it... so why not supress bribery... I mean lobbying, of course.
Actually, big companies did exist. They were called governments. People were not as nationalistic and did not identify themselves with their "nationhood" as much as they did with their "god" (i.e. protestant vs. catholic, lutheran vs. calvinist, etc). Governments were even sophisticated enough corporations at the time that they borrowed money for speculative ventures, issued stocks, etc. Most of the American Colonies were stock territories. The "Founding Fatheres" rebeled because they didn't want to pay the proceeds of their work to the corporate owner (= the king) of their subventures (= colonies).
>They're certainly entitled to want stuff without any strings
>attached, but we aren't obligated to give it to them just
>because they want it.
Funny, how you take on a completely different attitude when it comes to holders of other intellectual property rights. Somehow Google has to get books from the libraries without strings attahced, but the same is not true for the users of GPL -copyrighted materials.
I read a sig on Slashdot a while ago that said something to the effect that Slashdot readers think that all information must be free (as in speech), but they get up in arms whenever someone violates the precious GPL license. At the time I thought the guy was just being paranoid. But you prove him to be right on point.
Really? Spectators? If nothing else, most people here are users of open source products. Which does make them part of the community. If nothing else than as perpetual testers of the software that others are kind enough to produce. Plus, as you know, with open source the line between users and modifiers is kind of grey. Added with the fact the actual contributors of oss must occasionally read Slashdot for their news, I think it's a good bet to say that Slashdot is the central place for the meeting of the members of the open software community, whoever they are.
Are they making news announcements in the hopes that anyone with any sense at all is already shorting their stock and that there some suckers out there who believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity and who start buying up SCO stock just in the hopes that being unscrupulous will pay off for SCO?
I think you mised the point there, buddy. I was mocking the idea that video games are more conducive to the spread of violence than guns used that are used to commit the violence. I think both should be legal. But when it comes to deciding what is responsible for MORE violence -- video games or guns, you'd have to go with guns since it is possible to have a shotout without a video game but is is not possible to have a shootout without a firearm. And as long as guns are legal (which, again, I think they should be for essentially the reasons you outlined -- people should have the right to protect themselves) it is illogical to ban any use or ownership of video games.
But it does seem hypocrical to ban the games which might have precipitated the shooting and to allow semi-automatic weapons that definately assisted in the shooting. How can you ban games that let people shoot in fantasy but not the weapons that let people shoot in reality?
Wow, this is wrong on so many levels. Communism fails because people do it right -- not despite of it. Planned economies cannot work because those doing the planning are less invested in the success of their plan than those performing the work. And those performing the work naturally dull their ingenuity because they feel disenfranchised from power. The ingenuity is not gone completely, but it is dulled.
Plus innovation comes out of planning -- a process that more often than not involves weighing the possibilities of what is already possible. In a true capitalist economy progress comes out competing -- which is looking for yet not possible in order to get ahead of the competition. Obviously, this creates a much stronger impetus for progress.
This is why Monopolies and "public" companies are inherently inefficient as well. The monopolies are essentially planned economies and public companies separate the owners from the responsibilities of running their companies and thus there is very little fear of failure left in those companies. The guys at the top are too sure that they can always get a new job somewhere else or just retire on all those huge salaries they were making. If they had a sense of ownership of their companies, they be afraid to loose them and would be fighting dirty to inovate and stay ahead.
And the current success of China is due to the state taking hands off the planning. It's a madhouse in the business environment there. Enterprices have to completely fend for themselves. This creates impetus to move quickly to conquer new markets to make more money. Government taking its hands off is what drives the new Chinese economy.
As for power abuse, it is the natural function of power to be abused by the people who have it. The more "professional" politicians are, the more they are likely to abuse it. It makes sense because anyone who spends his entire life trying to get into the position of power wants to maximize his return-on-investment -- in this case the investment being his life-time of work trying to get into power. I am not saying that these people have not ends in mind other than personal power-grab, I am just outlying a natural tendency here.
Checks and balances are not a natural property of a capitalist society. They are a natural property of a democratic society. Hitler's Germany was a capitalist society. So is modern Iran. So is modern Russian (which is by no means democratic).
Just gave them a ring. Thanks. I asked for $5 refund (quarter of the $20 monthly fee) since I didn't have any movies for one week. If everyone did this, I think they might abandon this policy pretty soon. They don't even have to delay shipping to you... They can just ship from Hawaii to NY and vice versa to make sure it goes slower. I, personally, will call and complain about every movie that is late now. Looks like they just got slashdoted.
How's that going to effect all pedophilia blogs comming from the US? Does that mean that MS will now host blogs that promote pedophilia in the contries where it has not been outlawed?
Modern electoral politics is all about leverging centralized media influence on people who are too lazy to find their own sources of info. Bloggin is just the opposite -- it allows people to seek the opinions of strangers rather than just passively receive them. It won't work for the mass-distribution of the lies whose sole intent is to empower corruption that has become modern political process.
It's a myth that "poor people need cars". The rich are not rich because they have a big number written somewhere indicating their wealth. They are rich because they can use that number to make poor people work for them. That being said, if poor people could not work anymore, the rich people would not be rich anymore. So the public transportation would right away become in everyone's interest. The people who are against public transportation are the car manufacturers and their cronies. The public transportation system in the US was systematically destroyed by car manufacturers. As one business historian put it to me... first they buy the tire manufacturers. This gives them the ability to squeeze the bus companies. Then they took over an reduced to a mininum the bus service and then it was only a matter of time before the light rail service in places like California disappeared. California at some point used to have the best light rail service in the country. Now it is all cars. If cars begain disappearing the public service would naturally and almost magically appear to fulfill the economic need.
Really? Most people know Switzerland for their reputation for precision and independence. Switzerland is the country in the middle of Europe. Sweden is... well where the vikings came from -- in the Scandinavian peninsula.
The lower courts ruling was that they Blackberry is infringing on US patents because it operates in the US. If the bandwidth was owned by a dummy corporaton, they would not be operating in the US -- the dummy corporation would be. Granted this dummy corporation would be doing business with a known patent violator... but they themselves would not violate any patents. Blackberry would become completely extra-territorial.
What I don't understand is why they don't just license the bandwidth they use from some dummy corporation in the US and stop accepting payments in US dollars. Accept all payment in Swiss Franks. Done. Right away they become untouchable -- the corporation that leases them their bandwidth in the US is not infringing on any patents and their funds become extra-territorial to the US. Oh, and anyone with a credit card can still pay them in Swiss Franks. Their attempted supreme court argument was that the US patent system has become outdated. This way they would also in one whole swoop prove that the US legal system has become outdated as well.
The European Union managed to roll out a search engine in just under a week of development time. Leaders of the nations of the EU self-congratulated for 2 hours while announcing to the world that America has lost its lead in technological superiority. Some of the technology used in the search engine was licensed from companies held by non-EU entities.
One week later. In a surpricing turn of events the European Union's search engine has stopped functioning after the American company Google has blocked the IPs of Quaero's servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but most of your actions (everyone's actions) are knee jerk responses. Sometimes, we all (some more than others) stop and rethink our actions. But most of the time responses to situations are emotions, i.e. knee-jerk. Rational is a human skill -- it is not a human natural state. We can train ourselves to try to think rationally most of the time, but again, approaching a situation rationally has to be a trained response to the type of situation that is being presented at hand. That being said, emotional responses are trained. And adopting a certain philosophy allows to train your emotional responses for the future situations that you may encounter. Your philosophy need not be someone else's. Your decision to act in a certain maner in response to certain situations may be entirely your own. But if you want to be able to emotionally respond to situations that you have not encountered before or do not encounter often, you need to familirize yourself with what type of emotional states you may enounter (some are very complicated -- this is what you observe in drama) and then decide on how you'd act in those states. The best solutions are often creative. You may often lack creativity to come up with the solutions that you yourself would find best if you knew them. That's why people study different philosphies of personal behavior. To understand the variety of available emotional responses in order to have a choice of responses to adapt.
First, education in a top school is VERY different from education in a recently opened school with no reputation. I know because I teach in a public university. Our classes are dumbed down because the students won't get it otherwise. Most of the classes that I took in junior and senior level in my undergrad can never be taught here.
Second, education is only a small part of the value of university. Creating life-long contacts with people who will be in your field and those who are already successful in your field is almost as (if not a bigger) part.
Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.
And lastly, since I am compareing China to my American experience, they can't "just" open a university. It takes more than a guy with money willing to build a building. A university degree there is an official governtment document. So all programs must come with official government approval and certification.
Sorry, but the fact that you don't issue a warranty does not mean that the government cannot pass a law regulating how much you are responsible when you sell something. So the repackagers (i.e. distributions) can be made liable. But the government cannot make you responsible for what you give away for free, especially not free "ideas". It has the power to regulate commerce -- not to regulate exchange of ideas or usefulness of gifts. But then again, ianal.
This brilliant!!!! Maybe even Brilliant! This could be made into an argument that the 1st ammendment guarantees the right not to have ANY government taxes on phones. Or, at least, no more taxes on phones than we have on newspapers. Taxing communications = taxing speech = taxing expression. I am surpriced noone tried to make this argument before.
get jobs as respectable mobsters? I mean, if this kind of extortion is not covered by RICO, why anything be?
The "terra governments" (i.e. nations) are just trying to stay relevant in a world that will soon not need them. They formed in the first place because of consolidation of power at the time when power came from land ownership. But as the world moves away from power through land ownership and towards power through idea ownership (not through ownership by law but through ownership by being competenet enough to utilize and develop new ideas) the terra governments will see their power and influence diminish. It is already happening and these governments are fighting for relevance based on almost-religious the belief that their formation and presense is the last step in the development of civilization. They are constantly trying to diminish the ever-growing power of the knowledge elite.
A better idea is to have a 5% tax on sponsoring all interactions with publicly elected officials. Took a congressman to dinner -- pay 5% of the price of the dinner to umm... help schools. Taxing an activity is a way to supress it... so why not supress bribery... I mean lobbying, of course.
Actually, big companies did exist. They were called governments. People were not as nationalistic and did not identify themselves with their "nationhood" as much as they did with their "god" (i.e. protestant vs. catholic, lutheran vs. calvinist, etc). Governments were even sophisticated enough corporations at the time that they borrowed money for speculative ventures, issued stocks, etc. Most of the American Colonies were stock territories. The "Founding Fatheres" rebeled because they didn't want to pay the proceeds of their work to the corporate owner (= the king) of their subventures (= colonies).
Why do religious people insist on ruining OTHER people's fun?
>They're certainly entitled to want stuff without any strings >attached, but we aren't obligated to give it to them just >because they want it.
Funny, how you take on a completely different attitude when it comes to holders of other intellectual property rights. Somehow Google has to get books from the libraries without strings attahced, but the same is not true for the users of GPL -copyrighted materials.
I read a sig on Slashdot a while ago that said something to the effect that Slashdot readers think that all information must be free (as in speech), but they get up in arms whenever someone violates the precious GPL license. At the time I thought the guy was just being paranoid. But you prove him to be right on point.
Really? Spectators? If nothing else, most people here are users of open source products. Which does make them part of the community. If nothing else than as perpetual testers of the software that others are kind enough to produce. Plus, as you know, with open source the line between users and modifiers is kind of grey. Added with the fact the actual contributors of oss must occasionally read Slashdot for their news, I think it's a good bet to say that Slashdot is the central place for the meeting of the members of the open software community, whoever they are.
... on Slashdot of all places. That alone should indicate the amount of apathy the open source community has towards this.
Are they making news announcements in the hopes that anyone with any sense at all is already shorting their stock and that there some suckers out there who believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity and who start buying up SCO stock just in the hopes that being unscrupulous will pay off for SCO?
I think you mised the point there, buddy. I was mocking the idea that video games are more conducive to the spread of violence than guns used that are used to commit the violence. I think both should be legal. But when it comes to deciding what is responsible for MORE violence -- video games or guns, you'd have to go with guns since it is possible to have a shotout without a video game but is is not possible to have a shootout without a firearm. And as long as guns are legal (which, again, I think they should be for essentially the reasons you outlined -- people should have the right to protect themselves) it is illogical to ban any use or ownership of video games.
But it does seem hypocrical to ban the games which might have precipitated the shooting and to allow semi-automatic weapons that definately assisted in the shooting. How can you ban games that let people shoot in fantasy but not the weapons that let people shoot in reality?
Wow, this is wrong on so many levels. Communism fails because people do it right -- not despite of it. Planned economies cannot work because those doing the planning are less invested in the success of their plan than those performing the work. And those performing the work naturally dull their ingenuity because they feel disenfranchised from power. The ingenuity is not gone completely, but it is dulled.
Plus innovation comes out of planning -- a process that more often than not involves weighing the possibilities of what is already possible. In a true capitalist economy progress comes out competing -- which is looking for yet not possible in order to get ahead of the competition. Obviously, this creates a much stronger impetus for progress.
This is why Monopolies and "public" companies are inherently inefficient as well. The monopolies are essentially planned economies and public companies separate the owners from the responsibilities of running their companies and thus there is very little fear of failure left in those companies. The guys at the top are too sure that they can always get a new job somewhere else or just retire on all those huge salaries they were making. If they had a sense of ownership of their companies, they be afraid to loose them and would be fighting dirty to inovate and stay ahead.
And the current success of China is due to the state taking hands off the planning. It's a madhouse in the business environment there. Enterprices have to completely fend for themselves. This creates impetus to move quickly to conquer new markets to make more money. Government taking its hands off is what drives the new Chinese economy.
As for power abuse, it is the natural function of power to be abused by the people who have it. The more "professional" politicians are, the more they are likely to abuse it. It makes sense because anyone who spends his entire life trying to get into the position of power wants to maximize his return-on-investment -- in this case the investment being his life-time of work trying to get into power. I am not saying that these people have not ends in mind other than personal power-grab, I am just outlying a natural tendency here.
Checks and balances are not a natural property of a capitalist society. They are a natural property of a democratic society. Hitler's Germany was a capitalist society. So is modern Iran. So is modern Russian (which is by no means democratic).
Just gave them a ring. Thanks. I asked for $5 refund (quarter of the $20 monthly fee) since I didn't have any movies for one week. If everyone did this, I think they might abandon this policy pretty soon. They don't even have to delay shipping to you... They can just ship from Hawaii to NY and vice versa to make sure it goes slower. I, personally, will call and complain about every movie that is late now. Looks like they just got slashdoted.
well, if goin back to school to teach half-wits while geting my PhD instead of having a wall-street job counts, then, yes.
How's that going to effect all pedophilia blogs comming from the US? Does that mean that MS will now host blogs that promote pedophilia in the contries where it has not been outlawed?
Modern electoral politics is all about leverging centralized media influence on people who are too lazy to find their own sources of info. Bloggin is just the opposite -- it allows people to seek the opinions of strangers rather than just passively receive them. It won't work for the mass-distribution of the lies whose sole intent is to empower corruption that has become modern political process.
It's a myth that "poor people need cars". The rich are not rich because they have a big number written somewhere indicating their wealth. They are rich because they can use that number to make poor people work for them. That being said, if poor people could not work anymore, the rich people would not be rich anymore. So the public transportation would right away become in everyone's interest. The people who are against public transportation are the car manufacturers and their cronies. The public transportation system in the US was systematically destroyed by car manufacturers. As one business historian put it to me... first they buy the tire manufacturers. This gives them the ability to squeeze the bus companies. Then they took over an reduced to a mininum the bus service and then it was only a matter of time before the light rail service in places like California disappeared. California at some point used to have the best light rail service in the country. Now it is all cars. If cars begain disappearing the public service would naturally and almost magically appear to fulfill the economic need.
Really? Most people know Switzerland for their reputation for precision and independence. Switzerland is the country in the middle of Europe. Sweden is... well where the vikings came from -- in the Scandinavian peninsula.
The lower courts ruling was that they Blackberry is infringing on US patents because it operates in the US. If the bandwidth was owned by a dummy corporaton, they would not be operating in the US -- the dummy corporation would be. Granted this dummy corporation would be doing business with a known patent violator... but they themselves would not violate any patents. Blackberry would become completely extra-territorial.
What I don't understand is why they don't just license the bandwidth they use from some dummy corporation in the US and stop accepting payments in US dollars. Accept all payment in Swiss Franks. Done. Right away they become untouchable -- the corporation that leases them their bandwidth in the US is not infringing on any patents and their funds become extra-territorial to the US. Oh, and anyone with a credit card can still pay them in Swiss Franks. Their attempted supreme court argument was that the US patent system has become outdated. This way they would also in one whole swoop prove that the US legal system has become outdated as well.
The European Union managed to roll out a search engine in just under a week of development time. Leaders of the nations of the EU self-congratulated for 2 hours while announcing to the world that America has lost its lead in technological superiority. Some of the technology used in the search engine was licensed from companies held by non-EU entities.
One week later. In a surpricing turn of events the European Union's search engine has stopped functioning after the American company Google has blocked the IPs of Quaero's servers.