Yep. You hit the nail very much on the head. With intellectual property it is not Property that's sacred, but disclosure and releasing things to the public domain instead of taking your secrets with you to the grave. You get temporary "property" or "nasty monopoly" rights as an incentive, as bait, but you should only get as much as will make you disclose your stuff, or make you create new things. Lobbying by Disney that succeeded in extending copyright on Mickey mouse from 70 to 90 years, in the Holy Name of Almighty Property, does not fit well in this "temporary intellectual property" picture, because, extended property terms are too an extra incentive to create, but come on, you think Walt Disney would not have created Mickey Mouse with or without that extra 20 years, or would have created even better stuff? When an artist creates, he gives it his all. Then he'd like some recognition, rewards, but I don't think extra 20 years so far into the future makes a difference in the creative process. Those extra 20 years are not a fair exchange. And to think that the Founding Father's Copyright was 14 years, in an age when news travelled slowly, books took a long time to print and ship.
A case in point for the problems patents were supposed to mend is the story of the solution of the general cubic equation back in renaissance Italy. "Scientific family secrets passed on for generation" like that should not happen, the public should know. Family secret cooking recipes are one thing, but the solution to the general cubic, well, the world desperately needs to know that. Still, you don't get to own something released to the public forever, because, first of all someone else might have come up with the same invention a few years later, and it's not right to squat things forever. Otherwise we'll end up in a world where we take people to jail for thinking something, let alone uttering something, simply because they tresspass on intellectual property rights. All you need to do is logically deduce his line of thought, where there is reasonable certainity and no reasonable doubt that he didn't think certain thoughts. Freedom of speech? How about forget freedom of speech, worry about your freedom of thought! You know, for now, at least everyone has freedom of thought, even in oppressed dictatorial countries, even if they don't have freedom of speech.
I know whatchu thinkin! You were thinkin it! You know you were thinkin it! I caugth you! You friggin thought-tresspasser, how dare you invade my sacred property, that's mine and only mine!
Socialist is the new buzzword? You're not the first one to try to hang it on me. I don't prescribe to movements and ideologies, but evaluate everything at face value for myself. If you wanna label me, call me a Scientist and a Consitutionalist, because I really like that stuff I see in the US Constitution, even if a lot of it is just smoke and mirrors, but some of it bites, some of it does actualize in real life. The nice part of the Constituion is that you can keep adding Amendments to it, it's open to change, just like science is. But there are some fundamental beliefs in science, such as the conservation of energy, that we believe in so deeply, and when faced with something that seemingly violates it, we start looking at all the other excuses first. Fermi "discovered" the neutrino, his brainchild humbug, by laying his faith into this principle. 20 some years later it was verified by experiment, and thus far we have yet to encounter an event, an experiment that disproves its validity. I feel the same with the amendments of the Constitution, they are open to change, but we better encounter something really surprising before we start picking at this faith.
We're full of safety nets - bankruptcy, social security, etc. Elect Howard Dean, and he'll go - hiyyyaaa.. Social Security - down.. hiyyyaaa.. bankruptcy - eliminated.. hiyyyaa.. Getting off the ship? Go ahead, but don't try to get to be the captain and try to run it toward the iceberg. Answer me, what would you do about the 95 year old lady stuck in the wheelchair? While you might vote that the only reasonable way to get things done is for everyone to pitch in, and agree with the principle, when it's time to live up to that vote, when the time comes to act on mandatory donations, such as taxing, church donations, or paying into the research funds by business units, everyone gets a gutwrenching feeling - we're all human beings, and setting the bar of expectations too high doesn't work in the real world. Everyone - well, most everyone - needs a little nudge, and is needs to be ushered and reinforced into keeping up that behaviour by their peers and the social fiber - be this fiber the IRS, the other people's eyes in the church, and who knows what inside a company. With taxing, and selflessness, without the surrouding social fiber, the maxim is: don't tax me, don't tax my buddy here, tax that guy over there, hiding behind that tree. Just ask Bush how he feels about it, how his buddies at Enron and Halliburton feel about it.
People caring for themselves is a good idea, but hardly anyone lives completely alone, and instead people live in something called a society, and cooperate. Because of this dealing with issues together, you also get the sophisticated complications of who gets what. Though there is a way to get a lot by contributing a lot, there is a significant driving force to get things by unfair means, to subvert and scheme the system. The land of lawlessness and safety-net-less wild west is still a system, a system that can be subverted, and a gang or a maffia dictating terms to everybody else, because there is cooperation going on. Only in a world where there is zero cooperation, nobody dealing with each other, but everyone living in the woods or on a farm independently sustaining themselves from the rest, can you accomplish your utopia, of no government at all, and people taking care of all their problems, by themselves, as they happen. But look at what happened to the Greeks and their decide-your-own fate by yourself city states? They got invaded by the Persians, and they had to reevaluate too much independence. Counterinvading the Persians - an eye for an eye - was probably not the proper answer. In a utopia with the rule of everyone for themselves independently, 0 taxes, 0 government, you set yourself up for chaos, either for outside invasion, or inside invasion by a gang. In a small society where everyone knows everyone, reputation is often more important than cold cash. In a massive society where reputation doesn't work that much, religion
Don't you know it's not the brainmass that counts, but the interconnectedness of neurons? A kitty-cat has a pretty small brain compared to a cow, but you can't say it's proportionally more stupid. It's similar with people, CPU's, etc.. the visible macroscopic size is not what counts, but the microscopic stuff inside that makes it tick.
As far as genetic fitness goes, it's amazing just how much doesn't depend on genetics, but it's learned, educated. See feral children.
Yeah but the choice is not always between a neanderthal or human, but between a neanderthal and sheep. And rumor is, sheep do get humped - but I don't know anything specific about that kind of stuff.
They might not have got pregnant from having sex with cro magnon, but there surely was sex. If some people will get laid with sheep, a purty neanderthal lady with a few teeth is quite a turnon, comparatively! I still wonder, if horses and asses can interbreed to have mules, why couldn't two kinds of people do the same? Perhaps we only have a few skulls and very little evidence, but I bet you, there were at least some neanderthal-cromagnon mules, even if they were sterile like mules are. But I'm guessing they weren't even sterile. Sex is such a wonderful thing, because it's one thing that no matter how different a culture you go to, people can agree on and appreciate.
To make their job easier, we'll soon illegalize me taking notes or writing anything down for myself in a grammatically incorrect way, or with my hard to read handwriting, because it's hard for them to read. Handwriting should be banned, everybody friggin learn how to type, please, even when you write stuff down for yourself! How about we punish the Maya or Egyptians somehow for giving us such a hard time deciphering their writing? That stuff should be illegal! But how to punish the dead, hmmm...
they'd include a clause that any Word documents which couldn't be read via the current Word technology 5-10 years in the future would require Microsoft to pay a fine of, say, $100 per document
Currently the future doesn't matter. Incorporation means that funds paid to employees is safe, it's not at risk. Basically the Corporation pays out all its value it accumulates in the next 5 years in dividends and payroll, then it goes belly up, and any injunction against them is unrecoverable. Then the money the dividend recievers got will let them to start up a new corporation, and go at it all over again. It's the same entity, different name, different face. Anything relevant to the future is so easy to avoid. Allowing incorporating is the price we pay for free enterprise, to promote risk-taking, but sometimes we pay dearly for it with our future, because of lack of accountability.
We also have statute of limitations, but at least there is no statute of limitations on murder.
Basically, don't read too much into any sentence that contains accountability and responsibility 5 or 10 years later.
There are still versions of powerarchiver you can find on the net, from before it went shareware, when it still claimed to be freeware forever, that can deal with tar.gz and even bz2 files on windows, if I recall correctly.
Unless you want to denounce the practice of hurting animals by not relying on the knowledge accumulated through them. There was a Startrek episode on this, where the medical information gathered by torture was purged from the database, by the holographic doctor.
When I catch a fly, I try to throw it outside the window. There is a neat technique where you whoosh your hand above them, 2 inches, because that's how far up they jump by the time you whoosh your hand - and they end up tickling your palm while you walk to the window. Flies live like 1 day - so it's gonna die anyway, but I didn't kill it. That's a big difference.
Sometimes I get annoyed and slap my forehead or my body, unconsciously, smearing a fly in the process. I kill bugs and flies while walking, but if I look down, and see a snail, a bug, I won't intentionally step on it. I also unconsciously kill flies and mosquitoes while driving - the windshield gets very ugly, yet I feel no remorse.
On the other hand, I eat chicken, even if I wouldn't personally kill one. I can't look the chicken in the eye, and say, look, buddy, you're lunch, but once it's dead, on my plate, I have no problem eating it. Yummi. As long as somebody else gets to kill it. Am I a hypocrite? I still very much prefer eating chicken that lived happily all its life, because happy chicken tastes better, or it should.
Extreme piercing like a sword through your stomach, just for fun, cuz, ehh, it'll grow back. How about rendering the guillotine ineffective - lost your head, there it rolls? No worries, it'll grow back, and perhaps you'll have a prettier face this time!
Directional antennas focus the energy in one direction, instead of being omnidirectional, and this creates efficiency, when you have a fixed target, because you don't send energy where it doesn't need to go.
But I don't get the point of bundling up 3 or more directional antennas, to cover a circular pattern, because you get a perfect circle if you just used a signle antenna that radiates in all directions, as long as you make the amplitude on the large single omnidirectional antenna 3x as large as on each of the 3 directional ones. There is the conservation of energy law that applies with minute accuracy here.
Perhaps the directional antennas, with multiple poles, provide a less sudden impedance change from the impedance of the antenna to the impedance of the 477 ohm free space, and therefore less wave reflection, less surface-skin-effect current necessary that heats the antenna as an energy waste. Care to explain the intricacies here, if there are any?
monopolies are usually a product of government intervention
I don't agree with that. Without government, there is a natural tendency toward monopoly. You seem to idillicize the wild west, but what do wild west towns look like without a good sheriff? Some kind of gov't is necessary for people to live a happy life, otherwise a select few bandits get to subdue the rest, at gunpoint. Remember the days of maffia? Before the days of FBI? Is the FBI, the police of police, such a bad thing, just more bureaucracy, instead of a good solution? What's more monopolistic than the maffia? You could say that monopolies meddle in the affairs of gov't and there are a lot of structures erected that help them - it's our job as citizens to point out and speak up against such things. Remember, it's supposed to be a government by the people, OUR gov't, against which, according to the 2nd amendment we have a right to excersize our Donald Trump rights.
You don't have a right to extract money from me to provide it.
People and their private property are sacred. You have a right to property, to your home, to your own domain. Every man's house is his castle, that, no matter how modest, even the King of England may not enter without his permission.
"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail -- its roof may shake -- the wind may blow through it -- the storm may enter, the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter -- all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
However, don't forget taxes - they've been with us ever since the founding fathers. Taxes are not optional, but mandatory, forced on you by the gov't, or more like the majority that votes in agreement with such practices. Because without taking some of your property, things wouldn't function - it would be back to the wild west days.
Also note that in this taking your property, we punish the success at the 'survival of the fittest' game, we don't have flat taxation in a sense that everyone must pay, say, 5000 a year, nor do we even have a flat percentage rate, such as everyone must pay 30%. What we have is a highly highly skewed tax system, that punishes those on top the most, and doesn't even take from those on the bottom, but gives to them. Everyone can go at it, because if you fail, and fall through the bottom, there is a safety net that's supposed to catch you. Dont' you think this is a socialist construct? Take from one guy give to the other, on a large scale?
This kind of skewed taxation system is less agressive and violent than revolutions, "nationalizing" your property away, or even turning you into a gulag, because you succeeded too much. If you succeed too much, you get to bear a larger tax burden, and that's how it is right now, even if those who "succeed" are always at it, trying to change the system, not knowing they are asking for a revolution, for nationalizing, or for being turned into a gulag in this process. Maybe when the guns get so good, the mechanisms of control and keeping tabs on everyone via computers get so efficient, that no revolutions are possible, because there is no peasantry being able to grab their scythes and run head on against all the cannon fire, maybe when that day comes, those on top need not fear being 'punished for too much success.' Maybe that day is very near.
Let me keep using that word balance, again, like you keep using the word socialist. Oh I recognize all too well the bullshit and inefficiency that bureaucracy causes, and I'm always vocal against it, to cut through the crap and artificially erected rules that make no sense, and the unnecessary bureacracy, unnecessary gov't. Still, ever since this country was founded, there was bureaucracy, there was gov't, and there were taxes which are forced, mandatory donations, and a mechanism to take from one, to pay another, be it military, police, or hurricane victims. You may be able to run a small family or a small boat
The days of individualist technical inventions are gone, my friend. These days you cannot be an Edison, or a Tesla, or a Heroult-Hall, because these days it takes a few millions to even get started on scientific endeavours. To simply play with a fusion device, it's hard to get together the billons. Liquid helium, superconducting magnets and 10 billion kelvin degrees just aint gonna happen in a garage, then get commercialized, simply because it's so costly to play with superconducting liquid helium cooled $50,000 instrument monitored hacked together things at home. The magnesium diboride superconductor invention didn't come from a garage. These days inventions happen in massively funded corporate and government labs, together with the administrative waste and bureaucracy that goes with it. It's called teamwork and cooperation on a global scale, to which Chinese, Japanese, Americans and Germans all pitch in, even if the units of work are done by individuals labouring away in some lab somewhere, or maybe discussing topics 2 or 3 person at a time. The distilled results still get published, released for public consumption.
Even in the days of rampant individualism you speak of, it was the collective who really earned the credit, because Tesla and Edison wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Gauss, Faraday and Maxwell. Nobody born into this world goes at things completely alone, but instead everyone absorbs what the collective provides them with, improve it here and there before they fade away into oblivion, and someone else comes and picks it up where they left off.
It is this rampant individualism in fact that caused our technological decline. The days you speak of, 100 years ago, were the days of extreme poverty yet these were the days public education was introduced, 100 years too late after the founding fathers. They were also the days of labor unions and socialist type movements that you speak of. Perhaps we were so good at technological advancements, because education, libraries and sowing the seeds for the next generation was taken much more seriously, than what this rampant individualism driven by extreme selfishness only caring about this quarters bottom line, produces. Let's hire the guy who can squeeze an extra dime and improve the quarterly bottom line by consuming the seeds that were meant to be sown next year. The Chinese don't do that, perhaps that's their secret. Perhaps they don't only care about the very self only, even if extreme selfishness is inborn into any human being, but with proper upbringing and education, or culturing, you can attain something called 'culture.'
9th amendment page has a link to natural rights, which looky look! Lists education as a right. Perhaps you'd like to go ahead and edit it, because wikipedia is free for everyone to toss a word in. But without you pointing the 9th amendment out, it would have just gone over my head if I read through it.
The US is a democracy too, but also a republic. Democracy means things are decided by majority-preference. I was bitching about the majority oppressing the minority, as a key imperfection, or more exactly, the nondemocratic monetary power minority opressing everyone else. You could say our Republic functions via a Democractic decision making process, or at least that's what they say it does, by majority vote, and not by the few access to power tweaking the majority and dazzling them like snakecharmers with bullshit.
Well I'd like to live in a utopian society in which I can educate my children without the interference of government and without having to support schools they don't attend.
I'd like to think you're not only responsible for yourself alone, or your limited circle of family, or your greater flock that you call yours, that you call "us", and nobody else outside that. Why should we send aid to Africa? Don't you think you bear some responsibility for every person in the world, even if to a lesser degree than you are responsible for say, your children, or very near people? Doesn't your "us" include everyone in the world, to some degree? Or you'd rather prefer the "us" vs. "the enemy" stance. The term "enemy" has quite a brainwashing power, look at how it captured Nixon and his gang. At least back in those days there was still some conscience in the American public, and no, they were not 'siding with the enemy' no matter how hard you looked, but were speaking their own conscience against human indifference. Then came sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, to snakecharm that freedom loving and conscious bunch too, and all you have now is brainwashed zombies that feed on what's 'cool', feed on any hype you toss to them. Welcome back days of whitchhunting.
"The playing field is level. But, as I've said, it's a logical impossibility to level the playing field in more than rights, in those actions which are granted to all of us equally by our creator, and which do not by definition cause harm to others by their exercise. In going beyond this, you must take from one person to give to another. This is not a level playing field, no matter its outcome. This is theft, pure and simple.
Yeah, a level playing field dominated by a single monopoly. Like that's not theft, like extortion isn't pretty much equivalent to theft? It's just getting screwed in more subtle ways. Monopolies don't have the right not to be interfered with, even if you would like to have it differently. In a sense, you must take from one to give to another, you must take from a monopoly what it acquired through usual practices, and punish too much success in such a 'survival of the fittest' competition, because the fittest gets to be the single dominant power, and everyone else gets to suffer. In a sense, the freedom of the monopoly is checked by how much that freedom affects others. You are never completely free, other than in your inner world, but in the external world, your actions affect others, and it's a cooperative process that gets people anywhere, as a whole. The US does have antitrust laws, and they go against the very grain of noninterference you speak about. Is it a socialist thing? Why do we have social security? Is that a socialist thing? I guess with people like you rattling the cage we won't have it much longer. Because a world without an absolutely safe safety net, where there is a 95 year old woman, who just ran out of her lifesavings, because some idiot on the phone was clever to scheme her out of
A computer will fully master language, when it has equal intelligence to those speaking the language. Language is a conveyor of thoughts and meaning, and unless you know how to pick an interpret meaning, you can't fully translate, especially the nuances. A human that can't understand the meaning of what he's told can be just as much an idiot when it comes to translations as a computer.
In the meantime we'll keep having dictionaries and crude grammatical programs.
You are right I haven't read the Constitution from beginning to end, it's the spirit that counts, and without the proper background of why something is in there, empty words can be taken way out of context. Almost every word in it has a history, it's meant to counterbalance something. Perhaps you'd like to point out which amendment contains the right to oxygen? By the way, every text is subject to misinterpretation, and while I may not be able to recite the Constitution, I feel that I fully know the spirit of it, and I'm not misinterpreting it, and take offense to being told otherwise.
Education existed before government. Lots of things exist without government, without being mandatory. There is no balancing point necessary because you're arguing from a faulty premise.
Society existed before government - it's hard to imagine a person fully cultured, in all his shine, without some culture in him, without seeing other people expressing themselves in him, be they parents, neighbours, teachers, books. Nobody goes alone at it in this world, and if they do, like the feral children, they suffer tremenduously. Even Newton said he saw further because he was standing on shoulders of giants. Whenever you speak, 90% of what you say comes from the socail fiber you're part of, and maybe 1% is something you add to this collective, 9% is just noise. Being part of a society, being part of a culture is a need for every human, even if we grant him all the rights to freely choose which culture he wants to be part of. Education should not be mandatory to accept, however it should be mandatory to offer and provide, at least I'd like to live in a utopian society like that. Government is a form of social expression, it's our choice as a group, how we want to be.
The Constitution is the absolute law of the land. We don't need you to balance it with any of your ideas of what should happen.
You have to know that even the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land is not something absolute, it's not something given a priori, but it's a creation of man, a collective choice made by people in how they want to live out their earthly lives. And in that, at least this land's Constitution, strives to grant as much freedom as humanly possible, it forces a choice on people that leaves the most choice intact.
And in that, in how we want to live our lives, everyone has a voice, a right to voice his opinion - even I do, even if you don't like listening to it or disagree with me.
Unfortunately a prime fault of democracy is that majority oppresses minority, or more exactly, those holding power oppress those who don't hold much, whatever shape that power may be, and even if those who hold it are in minority. This opression naturally happens even while there is a Constitution as a counterbalance protecting the power of the powerless. The Constitution is not perfect, and in this protection of the powerless, what could be more effective than leveling the playing field, and enabling everyone, empowering everyone. Education is a key thing in that. Clothes don't make a person, money doesn't or shouldn't make a person. You could say that even education doesn't make a person who he is, it's not a measure of his worth as a human being, and you'd be right. Still, in the comparative sense, education and culture "makes" a person a lot more, than his material belongings or monetary power do. Culture, knowledge and education is something that's very hard to take away once it's given, though not impossible.
I'm fed up with this crusade to introduce a knowledge economy without level playing field, jacking education prices through the roof, where knowledge is so locked down and controlled, that only those who got rich daddys are allowed to "own" any knowledge. You can't "own" human knowledge, it's everybody's, you have a right to know. We do use intellectual property laws as means to provide incentives for crativity, but those in power would like to squat the system even more, and introduce a world
"That's true. I think you're misinterpreting what a "right" is. Of course you have a right to an education; but having a right doesn't mean the government (or anyone) has to provide it to you. Free education provided by the government is rather a priviledge. And the US government doesn't even have a mandate to provide that priviledge."
Let's take this topic to the other extreme, to shed better light on the balance point. The case of no education whatsoever, because it's not mandatory to provide:
I think no education whatsoever can be the equivalent of child abuse, and not simply because 'a mind is a terrible thing to waste', there is a lot more, deeper upsetting thing to it. There is a term called the forbidden experiment, and it's called so because no people of moral conscience would willingly subject children to such a psychological malnourishment, that naturally occurs with feral children.
So coming back from this other extreme, to the balance point, just how much mental malnourishment is acceptable? Food is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but when it comes to lack of food, to children being malnourished by their parents or their community, we get pretty aroused morally. Why don't we do the same when it comes to psychological malnourishment, because after all, a child, after his stomach is filled, is just as curious and hungry for an education as he was hungry for food.
As the Chinese Prime Minister would say it, a chinese farmer, even before getting his full breadth of human rights and freedoms, he'd much rather have a decent education first. The Constitution guarantees you your freedom and your rights, without guaranteeing your education, but even there, just how much of one thing do you want, while accepting none of the other, how much freedom and rights are you not willing to budge from while accepting zero education and culture?
Where is the optimum balance point? You could say not everyone has the right to being provided and education into a brain surgeon or an opera singer, but there is that set of things we call "basic education", a set of absolutely necessary things in order to function well in a democracy, that I feel everyone should have the right to, just like they have the right to learn language, and if that right is not guaranteed to them by the Consitution, it should be.
Some things are just so obvious, that the founding fathers left it out of the Constitution. Perhaps we should add a 0'th amendment, the right to oxygen, the right to air to breathe, together with the right to learn a spoken language.
Circumcision is important from a cultural point of view. Culture comes in many shapes - some people pierce their earlobes and insert jewels to look prettier, others circumsize themselves to show devotion. In this cultural sense circumcision is a respectable thing. But then when circumcision becomes a trouble, because it's a marker, then going around forcing it on everyone, so it's no longer a marker shouldn't be a solution, because it's cultural aggression.
If you don't want to be marked then don't get marked. Or get marked and live with it, even if people's first reaction to radical cultural traits is ridicule, such as when faced with some jungle tribes stretching their lips to a foot long by inserting ceramic disks or punching bones through their noses. Some hindu females wear a dot on their forehead, as a marker, but what kind of solution would be demaning that everyone mark their forehead, to force everyone to accept an arbitray 'do something instead of do nothing' cultural standard?
How about we mandate that everyone get a navel and tongue piercing and a tattoo, or stretch their lips? If you wanna be marked in any way, that's your business. You should be able to be either circumsized or uncircumsized freely in a society, however you wish it, without opression in either way, or artificial scientific reasoning behind it. You should be able to wear tatoos or not, get piercings or not, even if you get to listen to people saying, with some degree or ridicule - I need to wear at least 5 piercings to be comfortable, that's what gives a person some jazz, pizzas, or kick, or others saying I disagree with any kind of unnecessary piercing or invasion into my body. You should be able to live side by side by either cultural choice, because some cultural choices are that, just random aspects and flares without true bearing or significant effect on how you live your life. Getting a dot on the forehead is not what makes a hindu a hindu, at least it shouldn't, there is so much more to a culture or to a person than that.
Next story - tongue piercings enhance your body's immune system, because they provide a constant inflow of bacteria, just like an immunization would provide, so your immune system can constantly train itself.
How dare you criticize 'Intelligent Design' and why things were put where they were put? Your feeble mind cannot even hope to guess the intents and ways of the "Intelligent Designer."
Well, you could be just anyone taking credit for work that you didn't actually do - technically anyone can go around claiming they did all that cool stuff out there - such as the ET 2.60 release, but at least your very first link says banimod, and your slashdot ID is bani, so that's a nice coincidence, or at least enough effort to sustain a deception compared to spouting off a 1 liner post on slashdot goes. Once could always go download and look at the banimod stuff, to see if it's anything of substance, but there is a line to how much one should care. So you get the kudos points for now, that you claim you deserve.
Which is why anonymity is the moderating effect on what's being said. Take everything you hear and see with a grain of salt.
I'd rather read the "unfounded and unbacked" information from anonymous sources, like Deep Throat, because, you never know, it may be true. It's a source of ideas, but you have to look beyond what's being said, and be able to reject anything you hear or see. If you can't do that, if you can't look beyond even the facts that seemingly make sense, and practice caution, and always evaluate things for yourself, take no earthly authority for granted, you have a problem.
Now when TV says it, a Newspaper, or even an internet thing, say the CNN website, or whitehouse.gov, that's a whole another story. It should be a whole another story. Tell me, just how much does TV's, Newspapers, CNN live up to not spreading FUD taking orders from the Whitehouse, to truly show all sides of the story, to be true journalists and go into the heat of the battle, and show a mature public what's really going on, instead of assuming the public doesn't need to know and treat them like children. Especially that we put so much trust into the press, comparatively speaking, compared to something said by an Anonymous Coward somewhere on the Internet. How about when Dan Rather gets forced out for being a journalist?
Free speech is sacred, that's why it's the very 1st amendment of the Constitution, instead of the 2nd amendment, and it's especially important in the press. But I guess once it's been surpressed in the press, it's time to go after the Internet Anonymous Cowards, suppress their freedom of speech too. It shows just how sad the state of affairs is these days.
It's one thing when your ex employer slanders you about drug abuse or kiddie porn, it's another thing if it comes from an Anonymous Coward. Your ex employer can really affect your life, the press can really affect your life, but if some Anonymous Coward goes around calling you crazy to your face, well, the 1st amendment of the Constituion guarantees you your freedom of expression, but it does not guarantee you your freedom of not being offended. There are two sides to every story, and to every unbounded freedom there should be a limit, a moderation and check, inasmuch as it affects others. But when it comes to freedom of expression, this right has be trampled and abused so much in the past, that we'd rather draw that line of balance on the getting very offended side of things, just to be on the safe side. Those on power will always go after this freedom first, because it provides mind control.
In all this offending the measure of power is what moderates how much scrutiny one is allowed to get. Just like with taxes, we don't have flat taxes, but ones that counter the natural law of strong get stronger, weak get weaker, because we don't want to live in a world where the captain jumps ship first, because he's the strongest, then goes around touting how he'd jumped so many sinking ships, while the women and children who couldn't make it in the 'free market place' of power, didn't, because they were weaker than him. If you're very high up the chain, if you're an Enron executive, a CEO, or the President of the United States, or a big company or even a Hollywood actor, be prepared for scrutiny and slander, it's the only way to have a meaningful society, it's something that should provide a counterbalance to power. Slander and scrutiny of those in power, in power to affect the lives of others, comes with the territory, or at least it should come with the territory. A captain of a ship should be held to a much higher moral standard and scrutiny than the rest of the crew, because so much has been entrusted into him. A homeless person running with a chicken he stole, or food he stole, because he's hungry, well, that's a fact or life. He's given welfare, but he still steals - so what? A priest, a policeman, a judge, or an Enron executive stealing the same chicken, now you should get really furious. That's somethin
I said according to the spirit of the founding fathers, and not according to a quotation by them.
How can you have a society of equals then? Equal opportunity to every child? Not according to those who currently hold more opportunity, and want to mold the system in their favor even more, a system that rewards without merit. Welcome back totalitarian, rule by iron fist, those who can get on top, will, like in ancient Rome, and murdered by backstabbing, and so on. Also, way to lose out on a lot of talent, that should benefit everyone. How about Faraday never getting a chance, because he wasn't born 'noble?' A mind is a terrible thing to waste. The founding fathers never believed in nobility, and never believed in privilege rights by birth. Can you say equal opportunity to every child, in this society, no matter what his birth was?
Please don't take any offense to this, but for whatever reason I get reminded of this story I heard on hard rock radio:
It's 7 am, and the doorbell rings. I walk in by bathrobe, slippers and hot coffe mug to the door, to see who it is. It's a Jehovah's witness, asking me to accept the Lord as my Saviour. I scratch my head, and smile, and say, "No, not right now, but look, brother, it's quite early in the morning for this, would you like to come in and get a hot cup of coffee?"
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. You hit the nail very much on the head. With intellectual property it is not Property that's sacred, but disclosure and releasing things to the public domain instead of taking your secrets with you to the grave.
You get temporary "property" or "nasty monopoly" rights as an incentive, as bait, but you should only get as much as will make you disclose your stuff, or make you create new things. Lobbying by Disney that succeeded in extending copyright on Mickey mouse from 70 to 90 years, in the Holy Name of Almighty Property, does not fit well in this "temporary intellectual property" picture, because, extended property terms are too an extra incentive to create, but come on, you think Walt Disney would not have created Mickey Mouse with or without that extra 20 years, or would have created even better stuff? When an artist creates, he gives it his all. Then he'd like some recognition, rewards, but I don't think extra 20 years so far into the future makes a difference in the creative process. Those extra 20 years are not a fair exchange. And to think that the Founding Father's Copyright was 14 years, in an age when news travelled slowly, books took a long time to print and ship.
A case in point for the problems patents were supposed to mend is the story of the solution of the general cubic equation back in renaissance Italy. "Scientific family secrets passed on for generation" like that should not happen, the public should know. Family secret cooking recipes are one thing, but the solution to the general cubic, well, the world desperately needs to know that. Still, you don't get to own something released to the public forever, because, first of all someone else might have come up with the same invention a few years later, and it's not right to squat things forever. Otherwise we'll end up in a world where we take people to jail for thinking something, let alone uttering something, simply because they tresspass on intellectual property rights. All you need to do is logically deduce his line of thought, where there is reasonable certainity and no reasonable doubt that he didn't think certain thoughts. Freedom of speech? How about forget freedom of speech, worry about your freedom of thought! You know, for now, at least everyone has freedom of thought, even in oppressed dictatorial countries, even if they don't have freedom of speech.
I know whatchu thinkin! You were thinkin it! You know you were thinkin it! I caugth you! You friggin thought-tresspasser, how dare you invade my sacred property, that's mine and only mine!
Socialist is the new buzzword? You're not the first one to try to hang it on me. I don't prescribe to movements and ideologies, but evaluate everything at face value for myself. If you wanna label me, call me a Scientist and a Consitutionalist, because I really like that stuff I see in the US Constitution, even if a lot of it is just smoke and mirrors, but some of it bites, some of it does actualize in real life.
The nice part of the Constituion is that you can keep adding Amendments to it, it's open to change, just like science is. But there are some fundamental beliefs in science, such as the conservation of energy, that we believe in so deeply, and when faced with something that seemingly violates it, we start looking at all the other excuses first. Fermi "discovered" the neutrino, his brainchild humbug, by laying his faith into this principle. 20 some years later it was verified by experiment, and thus far we have yet to encounter an event, an experiment that disproves its validity. I feel the same with the amendments of the Constitution, they are open to change, but we better encounter something really surprising before we start picking at this faith.
We're full of safety nets - bankruptcy, social security, etc. Elect Howard Dean, and he'll go - hiyyyaaa.. Social Security - down.. hiyyyaaa.. bankruptcy - eliminated.. hiyyyaa.. Getting off the ship? Go ahead, but don't try to get to be the captain and try to run it toward the iceberg. Answer me, what would you do about the 95 year old lady stuck in the wheelchair? While you might vote that the only reasonable way to get things done is for everyone to pitch in, and agree with the principle, when it's time to live up to that vote, when the time comes to act on mandatory donations, such as taxing, church donations, or paying into the research funds by business units, everyone gets a gutwrenching feeling - we're all human beings, and setting the bar of expectations too high doesn't work in the real world. Everyone - well, most everyone - needs a little nudge, and is needs to be ushered and reinforced into keeping up that behaviour by their peers and the social fiber - be this fiber the IRS, the other people's eyes in the church, and who knows what inside a company. With taxing, and selflessness, without the surrouding social fiber, the maxim is: don't tax me, don't tax my buddy here, tax that guy over there, hiding behind that tree. Just ask Bush how he feels about it, how his buddies at Enron and Halliburton feel about it.
People caring for themselves is a good idea, but hardly anyone lives completely alone, and instead people live in something called a society, and cooperate. Because of this dealing with issues together, you also get the sophisticated complications of who gets what. Though there is a way to get a lot by contributing a lot, there is a significant driving force to get things by unfair means, to subvert and scheme the system. The land of lawlessness and safety-net-less wild west is still a system, a system that can be subverted, and a gang or a maffia dictating terms to everybody else, because there is cooperation going on. Only in a world where there is zero cooperation, nobody dealing with each other, but everyone living in the woods or on a farm independently sustaining themselves from the rest, can you accomplish your utopia, of no government at all, and people taking care of all their problems, by themselves, as they happen. But look at what happened to the Greeks and their decide-your-own fate by yourself city states? They got invaded by the Persians, and they had to reevaluate too much independence. Counterinvading the Persians - an eye for an eye - was probably not the proper answer. In a utopia with the rule of everyone for themselves independently, 0 taxes, 0 government, you set yourself up for chaos, either for outside invasion, or inside invasion by a gang. In a small society where everyone knows everyone, reputation is often more important than cold cash. In a massive society where reputation doesn't work that much, religion
Don't you know it's not the brainmass that counts, but the interconnectedness of neurons? A kitty-cat has a pretty small brain compared to a cow, but you can't say it's proportionally more stupid. It's similar with people, CPU's, etc.. the visible macroscopic size is not what counts, but the microscopic stuff inside that makes it tick. As far as genetic fitness goes, it's amazing just how much doesn't depend on genetics, but it's learned, educated. See feral children.
Yeah but the choice is not always between a neanderthal or human, but between a neanderthal and sheep. And rumor is, sheep do get humped - but I don't know anything specific about that kind of stuff.
They might not have got pregnant from having sex with cro magnon, but there surely was sex. If some people will get laid with sheep, a purty neanderthal lady with a few teeth is quite a turnon, comparatively! I still wonder, if horses and asses can interbreed to have mules, why couldn't two kinds of people do the same? Perhaps we only have a few skulls and very little evidence, but I bet you, there were at least some neanderthal-cromagnon mules, even if they were sterile like mules are. But I'm guessing they weren't even sterile. Sex is such a wonderful thing, because it's one thing that no matter how different a culture you go to, people can agree on and appreciate.
To make their job easier, we'll soon illegalize me taking notes or writing anything down for myself in a grammatically incorrect way, or with my hard to read handwriting, because it's hard for them to read. Handwriting should be banned, everybody friggin learn how to type, please, even when you write stuff down for yourself! How about we punish the Maya or Egyptians somehow for giving us such a hard time deciphering their writing? That stuff should be illegal! But how to punish the dead, hmmm...
they'd include a clause that any Word documents which couldn't be read via the current Word technology 5-10 years in the future would require Microsoft to pay a fine of, say, $100 per document
Currently the future doesn't matter. Incorporation means that funds paid to employees is safe, it's not at risk. Basically the Corporation pays out all its value it accumulates in the next 5 years in dividends and payroll, then it goes belly up, and any injunction against them is unrecoverable. Then the money the dividend recievers got will let them to start up a new corporation, and go at it all over again. It's the same entity, different name, different face. Anything relevant to the future is so easy to avoid. Allowing incorporating is the price we pay for free enterprise, to promote risk-taking, but sometimes we pay dearly for it with our future, because of lack of accountability.
We also have statute of limitations, but at least there is no statute of limitations on murder.
Basically, don't read too much into any sentence that contains accountability and responsibility 5 or 10 years later.
There are still versions of powerarchiver you can find on the net, from before it went shareware, when it still claimed to be freeware forever, that can deal with tar.gz and even bz2 files on windows, if I recall correctly.
Unless you want to denounce the practice of hurting animals by not relying on the knowledge accumulated through them. There was a Startrek episode on this, where the medical information gathered by torture was purged from the database, by the holographic doctor.
When I catch a fly, I try to throw it outside the window. There is a neat technique where you whoosh your hand above them, 2 inches, because that's how far up they jump by the time you whoosh your hand - and they end up tickling your palm while you walk to the window. Flies live like 1 day - so it's gonna die anyway, but I didn't kill it. That's a big difference.
Sometimes I get annoyed and slap my forehead or my body, unconsciously, smearing a fly in the process. I kill bugs and flies while walking, but if I look down, and see a snail, a bug, I won't intentionally step on it. I also unconsciously kill flies and mosquitoes while driving - the windshield gets very ugly, yet I feel no remorse.
On the other hand, I eat chicken, even if I wouldn't personally kill one. I can't look the chicken in the eye, and say, look, buddy, you're lunch, but once it's dead, on my plate, I have no problem eating it. Yummi. As long as somebody else gets to kill it. Am I a hypocrite? I still very much prefer eating chicken that lived happily all its life, because happy chicken tastes better, or it should.
Extreme piercing like a sword through your stomach, just for fun, cuz, ehh, it'll grow back. How about rendering the guillotine ineffective - lost your head, there it rolls? No worries, it'll grow back, and perhaps you'll have a prettier face this time!
Directional antennas focus the energy in one direction, instead of being omnidirectional, and this creates efficiency, when you have a fixed target, because you don't send energy where it doesn't need to go.
But I don't get the point of bundling up 3 or more directional antennas, to cover a circular pattern, because you get a perfect circle if you just used a signle antenna that radiates in all directions, as long as you make the amplitude on the large single omnidirectional antenna 3x as large as on each of the 3 directional ones. There is the conservation of energy law that applies with minute accuracy here.
Perhaps the directional antennas, with multiple poles, provide a less sudden impedance change from the impedance of the antenna to the impedance of the 477 ohm free space, and therefore less wave reflection, less surface-skin-effect current necessary that heats the antenna as an energy waste. Care to explain the intricacies here, if there are any?
monopolies are usually a product of government intervention
I don't agree with that. Without government, there is a natural tendency toward monopoly. You seem to idillicize the wild west, but what do wild west towns look like without a good sheriff? Some kind of gov't is necessary for people to live a happy life, otherwise a select few bandits get to subdue the rest, at gunpoint. Remember the days of maffia? Before the days of FBI? Is the FBI, the police of police, such a bad thing, just more bureaucracy, instead of a good solution? What's more monopolistic than the maffia? You could say that monopolies meddle in the affairs of gov't and there are a lot of structures erected that help them - it's our job as citizens to point out and speak up against such things. Remember, it's supposed to be a government by the people, OUR gov't, against which, according to the 2nd amendment we have a right to excersize our Donald Trump rights.
You don't have a right to extract money from me to provide it.
People and their private property are sacred. You have a right to property, to your home, to your own domain. Every man's house is his castle, that, no matter how modest, even the King of England may not enter without his permission.
"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail -- its roof may shake -- the wind may blow through it -- the storm may enter, the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter -- all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"
However, don't forget taxes - they've been with us ever since the founding fathers. Taxes are not optional, but mandatory, forced on you by the gov't, or more like the majority that votes in agreement with such practices. Because without taking some of your property, things wouldn't function - it would be back to the wild west days.
Also note that in this taking your property, we punish the success at the 'survival of the fittest' game, we don't have flat taxation in a sense that everyone must pay, say, 5000 a year, nor do we even have a flat percentage rate, such as everyone must pay 30%. What we have is a highly highly skewed tax system, that punishes those on top the most, and doesn't even take from those on the bottom, but gives to them. Everyone can go at it, because if you fail, and fall through the bottom, there is a safety net that's supposed to catch you. Dont' you think this is a socialist construct? Take from one guy give to the other, on a large scale? This kind of skewed taxation system is less agressive and violent than revolutions, "nationalizing" your property away, or even turning you into a gulag, because you succeeded too much. If you succeed too much, you get to bear a larger tax burden, and that's how it is right now, even if those who "succeed" are always at it, trying to change the system, not knowing they are asking for a revolution, for nationalizing, or for being turned into a gulag in this process. Maybe when the guns get so good, the mechanisms of control and keeping tabs on everyone via computers get so efficient, that no revolutions are possible, because there is no peasantry being able to grab their scythes and run head on against all the cannon fire, maybe when that day comes, those on top need not fear being 'punished for too much success.' Maybe that day is very near.
Let me keep using that word balance, again, like you keep using the word socialist. Oh I recognize all too well the bullshit and inefficiency that bureaucracy causes, and I'm always vocal against it, to cut through the crap and artificially erected rules that make no sense, and the unnecessary bureacracy, unnecessary gov't. Still, ever since this country was founded, there was bureaucracy, there was gov't, and there were taxes which are forced, mandatory donations, and a mechanism to take from one, to pay another, be it military, police, or hurricane victims. You may be able to run a small family or a small boat
The days of individualist technical inventions are gone, my friend. These days you cannot be an Edison, or a Tesla, or a Heroult-Hall, because these days it takes a few millions to even get started on scientific endeavours. To simply play with a fusion device, it's hard to get together the billons. Liquid helium, superconducting magnets and 10 billion kelvin degrees just aint gonna happen in a garage, then get commercialized, simply because it's so costly to play with superconducting liquid helium cooled $50,000 instrument monitored hacked together things at home. The magnesium diboride superconductor invention didn't come from a garage. These days inventions happen in massively funded corporate and government labs, together with the administrative waste and bureaucracy that goes with it. It's called teamwork and cooperation on a global scale, to which Chinese, Japanese, Americans and Germans all pitch in, even if the units of work are done by individuals labouring away in some lab somewhere, or maybe discussing topics 2 or 3 person at a time. The distilled results still get published, released for public consumption.
Even in the days of rampant individualism you speak of, it was the collective who really earned the credit, because Tesla and Edison wouldn't have gotten anywhere without Gauss, Faraday and Maxwell. Nobody born into this world goes at things completely alone, but instead everyone absorbs what the collective provides them with, improve it here and there before they fade away into oblivion, and someone else comes and picks it up where they left off.
It is this rampant individualism in fact that caused our technological decline. The days you speak of, 100 years ago, were the days of extreme poverty yet these were the days public education was introduced, 100 years too late after the founding fathers. They were also the days of labor unions and socialist type movements that you speak of. Perhaps we were so good at technological advancements, because education, libraries and sowing the seeds for the next generation was taken much more seriously, than what this rampant individualism driven by extreme selfishness only caring about this quarters bottom line, produces. Let's hire the guy who can squeeze an extra dime and improve the quarterly bottom line by consuming the seeds that were meant to be sown next year. The Chinese don't do that, perhaps that's their secret. Perhaps they don't only care about the very self only, even if extreme selfishness is inborn into any human being, but with proper upbringing and education, or culturing, you can attain something called 'culture.'
9th amendment page has a link to natural rights, which looky look! Lists education as a right. Perhaps you'd like to go ahead and edit it, because wikipedia is free for everyone to toss a word in. But without you pointing the 9th amendment out, it would have just gone over my head if I read through it.
The US is a democracy too, but also a republic. Democracy means things are decided by majority-preference. I was bitching about the majority oppressing the minority, as a key imperfection, or more exactly, the nondemocratic monetary power minority opressing everyone else. You could say our Republic functions via a Democractic decision making process, or at least that's what they say it does, by majority vote, and not by the few access to power tweaking the majority and dazzling them like snakecharmers with bullshit.
Well I'd like to live in a utopian society in which I can educate my children without the interference of government and without having to support schools they don't attend.
I'd like to think you're not only responsible for yourself alone, or your limited circle of family, or your greater flock that you call yours, that you call "us", and nobody else outside that. Why should we send aid to Africa? Don't you think you bear some responsibility for every person in the world, even if to a lesser degree than you are responsible for say, your children, or very near people? Doesn't your "us" include everyone in the world, to some degree? Or you'd rather prefer the "us" vs. "the enemy" stance. The term "enemy" has quite a brainwashing power, look at how it captured Nixon and his gang. At least back in those days there was still some conscience in the American public, and no, they were not 'siding with the enemy' no matter how hard you looked, but were speaking their own conscience against human indifference. Then came sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, to snakecharm that freedom loving and conscious bunch too, and all you have now is brainwashed zombies that feed on what's 'cool', feed on any hype you toss to them. Welcome back days of whitchhunting.
"The playing field is level. But, as I've said, it's a logical impossibility to level the playing field in more than rights, in those actions which are granted to all of us equally by our creator, and which do not by definition cause harm to others by their exercise. In going beyond this, you must take from one person to give to another. This is not a level playing field, no matter its outcome. This is theft, pure and simple.
Yeah, a level playing field dominated by a single monopoly. Like that's not theft, like extortion isn't pretty much equivalent to theft? It's just getting screwed in more subtle ways. Monopolies don't have the right not to be interfered with, even if you would like to have it differently. In a sense, you must take from one to give to another, you must take from a monopoly what it acquired through usual practices, and punish too much success in such a 'survival of the fittest' competition, because the fittest gets to be the single dominant power, and everyone else gets to suffer. In a sense, the freedom of the monopoly is checked by how much that freedom affects others. You are never completely free, other than in your inner world, but in the external world, your actions affect others, and it's a cooperative process that gets people anywhere, as a whole. The US does have antitrust laws, and they go against the very grain of noninterference you speak about. Is it a socialist thing? Why do we have social security? Is that a socialist thing? I guess with people like you rattling the cage we won't have it much longer. Because a world without an absolutely safe safety net, where there is a 95 year old woman, who just ran out of her lifesavings, because some idiot on the phone was clever to scheme her out of
A computer will fully master language, when it has equal intelligence to those speaking the language. Language is a conveyor of thoughts and meaning, and unless you know how to pick an interpret meaning, you can't fully translate, especially the nuances. A human that can't understand the meaning of what he's told can be just as much an idiot when it comes to translations as a computer.
In the meantime we'll keep having dictionaries and crude grammatical programs.
You are right I haven't read the Constitution from beginning to end, it's the spirit that counts, and without the proper background of why something is in there, empty words can be taken way out of context. Almost every word in it has a history, it's meant to counterbalance something. Perhaps you'd like to point out which amendment contains the right to oxygen? By the way, every text is subject to misinterpretation, and while I may not be able to recite the Constitution, I feel that I fully know the spirit of it, and I'm not misinterpreting it, and take offense to being told otherwise.
Education existed before government. Lots of things exist without government, without being mandatory. There is no balancing point necessary because you're arguing from a faulty premise.
Society existed before government - it's hard to imagine a person fully cultured, in all his shine, without some culture in him, without seeing other people expressing themselves in him, be they parents, neighbours, teachers, books. Nobody goes alone at it in this world, and if they do, like the feral children, they suffer tremenduously. Even Newton said he saw further because he was standing on shoulders of giants. Whenever you speak, 90% of what you say comes from the socail fiber you're part of, and maybe 1% is something you add to this collective, 9% is just noise. Being part of a society, being part of a culture is a need for every human, even if we grant him all the rights to freely choose which culture he wants to be part of. Education should not be mandatory to accept, however it should be mandatory to offer and provide, at least I'd like to live in a utopian society like that. Government is a form of social expression, it's our choice as a group, how we want to be.
The Constitution is the absolute law of the land. We don't need you to balance it with any of your ideas of what should happen.
You have to know that even the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land is not something absolute, it's not something given a priori, but it's a creation of man, a collective choice made by people in how they want to live out their earthly lives. And in that, at least this land's Constitution, strives to grant as much freedom as humanly possible, it forces a choice on people that leaves the most choice intact. And in that, in how we want to live our lives, everyone has a voice, a right to voice his opinion - even I do, even if you don't like listening to it or disagree with me.
Unfortunately a prime fault of democracy is that majority oppresses minority, or more exactly, those holding power oppress those who don't hold much, whatever shape that power may be, and even if those who hold it are in minority. This opression naturally happens even while there is a Constitution as a counterbalance protecting the power of the powerless. The Constitution is not perfect, and in this protection of the powerless, what could be more effective than leveling the playing field, and enabling everyone, empowering everyone. Education is a key thing in that. Clothes don't make a person, money doesn't or shouldn't make a person. You could say that even education doesn't make a person who he is, it's not a measure of his worth as a human being, and you'd be right. Still, in the comparative sense, education and culture "makes" a person a lot more, than his material belongings or monetary power do. Culture, knowledge and education is something that's very hard to take away once it's given, though not impossible.
I'm fed up with this crusade to introduce a knowledge economy without level playing field, jacking education prices through the roof, where knowledge is so locked down and controlled, that only those who got rich daddys are allowed to "own" any knowledge. You can't "own" human knowledge, it's everybody's, you have a right to know. We do use intellectual property laws as means to provide incentives for crativity, but those in power would like to squat the system even more, and introduce a world
That's alright. As I said, kudos to you for all that stuff!
"That's true. I think you're misinterpreting what a "right" is. Of course you have a right to an education; but having a right doesn't mean the government (or anyone) has to provide it to you. Free education provided by the government is rather a priviledge. And the US government doesn't even have a mandate to provide that priviledge."
Let's take this topic to the other extreme, to shed better light on the balance point. The case of no education whatsoever, because it's not mandatory to provide:
I think no education whatsoever can be the equivalent of child abuse, and not simply because 'a mind is a terrible thing to waste', there is a lot more, deeper upsetting thing to it. There is a term called the forbidden experiment, and it's called so because no people of moral conscience would willingly subject children to such a psychological malnourishment, that naturally occurs with feral children.
So coming back from this other extreme, to the balance point, just how much mental malnourishment is acceptable? Food is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but when it comes to lack of food, to children being malnourished by their parents or their community, we get pretty aroused morally. Why don't we do the same when it comes to psychological malnourishment, because after all, a child, after his stomach is filled, is just as curious and hungry for an education as he was hungry for food.
As the Chinese Prime Minister would say it, a chinese farmer, even before getting his full breadth of human rights and freedoms, he'd much rather have a decent education first. The Constitution guarantees you your freedom and your rights, without guaranteeing your education, but even there, just how much of one thing do you want, while accepting none of the other, how much freedom and rights are you not willing to budge from while accepting zero education and culture?
Where is the optimum balance point? You could say not everyone has the right to being provided and education into a brain surgeon or an opera singer, but there is that set of things we call "basic education", a set of absolutely necessary things in order to function well in a democracy, that I feel everyone should have the right to, just like they have the right to learn language, and if that right is not guaranteed to them by the Consitution, it should be.
Some things are just so obvious, that the founding fathers left it out of the Constitution. Perhaps we should add a 0'th amendment, the right to oxygen, the right to air to breathe, together with the right to learn a spoken language.
Circumcision is important from a cultural point of view. Culture comes in many shapes - some people pierce their earlobes and insert jewels to look prettier, others circumsize themselves to show devotion. In this cultural sense circumcision is a respectable thing. But then when circumcision becomes a trouble, because it's a marker, then going around forcing it on everyone, so it's no longer a marker shouldn't be a solution, because it's cultural aggression.
If you don't want to be marked then don't get marked. Or get marked and live with it, even if people's first reaction to radical cultural traits is ridicule, such as when faced with some jungle tribes stretching their lips to a foot long by inserting ceramic disks or punching bones through their noses. Some hindu females wear a dot on their forehead, as a marker, but what kind of solution would be demaning that everyone mark their forehead, to force everyone to accept an arbitray 'do something instead of do nothing' cultural standard?
How about we mandate that everyone get a navel and tongue piercing and a tattoo, or stretch their lips? If you wanna be marked in any way, that's your business. You should be able to be either circumsized or uncircumsized freely in a society, however you wish it, without opression in either way, or artificial scientific reasoning behind it. You should be able to wear tatoos or not, get piercings or not, even if you get to listen to people saying, with some degree or ridicule - I need to wear at least 5 piercings to be comfortable, that's what gives a person some jazz, pizzas, or kick, or others saying I disagree with any kind of unnecessary piercing or invasion into my body. You should be able to live side by side by either cultural choice, because some cultural choices are that, just random aspects and flares without true bearing or significant effect on how you live your life. Getting a dot on the forehead is not what makes a hindu a hindu, at least it shouldn't, there is so much more to a culture or to a person than that.
Next story - tongue piercings enhance your body's immune system, because they provide a constant inflow of bacteria, just like an immunization would provide, so your immune system can constantly train itself.
Tonsils can be quite useful when your girlfriend has them. Can you think of a reason? ;)
How dare you criticize 'Intelligent Design' and why things were put where they were put? Your feeble mind cannot even hope to guess the intents and ways of the "Intelligent Designer."
Well, you could be just anyone taking credit for work that you didn't actually do - technically anyone can go around claiming they did all that cool stuff out there - such as the ET 2.60 release, but at least your very first link says banimod, and your slashdot ID is bani, so that's a nice coincidence, or at least enough effort to sustain a deception compared to spouting off a 1 liner post on slashdot goes. Once could always go download and look at the banimod stuff, to see if it's anything of substance, but there is a line to how much one should care. So you get the kudos points for now, that you claim you deserve.
Which is why anonymity is the moderating effect on what's being said. Take everything you hear and see with a grain of salt.
I'd rather read the "unfounded and unbacked" information from anonymous sources, like Deep Throat, because, you never know, it may be true. It's a source of ideas, but you have to look beyond what's being said, and be able to reject anything you hear or see. If you can't do that, if you can't look beyond even the facts that seemingly make sense, and practice caution, and always evaluate things for yourself, take no earthly authority for granted, you have a problem.
Now when TV says it, a Newspaper, or even an internet thing, say the CNN website, or whitehouse.gov, that's a whole another story. It should be a whole another story. Tell me, just how much does TV's, Newspapers, CNN live up to not spreading FUD taking orders from the Whitehouse, to truly show all sides of the story, to be true journalists and go into the heat of the battle, and show a mature public what's really going on, instead of assuming the public doesn't need to know and treat them like children. Especially that we put so much trust into the press, comparatively speaking, compared to something said by an Anonymous Coward somewhere on the Internet. How about when Dan Rather gets forced out for being a journalist?
Free speech is sacred, that's why it's the very 1st amendment of the Constitution, instead of the 2nd amendment, and it's especially important in the press. But I guess once it's been surpressed in the press, it's time to go after the Internet Anonymous Cowards, suppress their freedom of speech too. It shows just how sad the state of affairs is these days.
It's one thing when your ex employer slanders you about drug abuse or kiddie porn, it's another thing if it comes from an Anonymous Coward. Your ex employer can really affect your life, the press can really affect your life, but if some Anonymous Coward goes around calling you crazy to your face, well, the 1st amendment of the Constituion guarantees you your freedom of expression, but it does not guarantee you your freedom of not being offended. There are two sides to every story, and to every unbounded freedom there should be a limit, a moderation and check, inasmuch as it affects others. But when it comes to freedom of expression, this right has be trampled and abused so much in the past, that we'd rather draw that line of balance on the getting very offended side of things, just to be on the safe side. Those on power will always go after this freedom first, because it provides mind control.
In all this offending the measure of power is what moderates how much scrutiny one is allowed to get. Just like with taxes, we don't have flat taxes, but ones that counter the natural law of strong get stronger, weak get weaker, because we don't want to live in a world where the captain jumps ship first, because he's the strongest, then goes around touting how he'd jumped so many sinking ships, while the women and children who couldn't make it in the 'free market place' of power, didn't, because they were weaker than him. If you're very high up the chain, if you're an Enron executive, a CEO, or the President of the United States, or a big company or even a Hollywood actor, be prepared for scrutiny and slander, it's the only way to have a meaningful society, it's something that should provide a counterbalance to power. Slander and scrutiny of those in power, in power to affect the lives of others, comes with the territory, or at least it should come with the territory. A captain of a ship should be held to a much higher moral standard and scrutiny than the rest of the crew, because so much has been entrusted into him. A homeless person running with a chicken he stole, or food he stole, because he's hungry, well, that's a fact or life. He's given welfare, but he still steals - so what? A priest, a policeman, a judge, or an Enron executive stealing the same chicken, now you should get really furious. That's somethin
I said according to the spirit of the founding fathers, and not according to a quotation by them.
How can you have a society of equals then? Equal opportunity to every child? Not according to those who currently hold more opportunity, and want to mold the system in their favor even more, a system that rewards without merit. Welcome back totalitarian, rule by iron fist, those who can get on top, will, like in ancient Rome, and murdered by backstabbing, and so on. Also, way to lose out on a lot of talent, that should benefit everyone. How about Faraday never getting a chance, because he wasn't born 'noble?' A mind is a terrible thing to waste. The founding fathers never believed in nobility, and never believed in privilege rights by birth. Can you say equal opportunity to every child, in this society, no matter what his birth was?
Please don't take any offense to this, but for whatever reason I get reminded of this story I heard on hard rock radio:
It's 7 am, and the doorbell rings. I walk in by bathrobe, slippers and hot coffe mug to the door, to see who it is. It's a Jehovah's witness, asking me to accept the Lord as my Saviour. I scratch my head, and smile, and say, "No, not right now, but look, brother, it's quite early in the morning for this, would you like to come in and get a hot cup of coffee?"