Outing honest people whose only so-called "crime" is wanting to avoid the theft of their hard and presumably legitimately-earned dollars is completely and totally wrong, and negates much if not all of the good Wikileaks has done in exposing actual government and corporate wrongdoing. It also makes Wikileaks, directly or indirectly, an accomplice to the very real crimes of the state that it has spent so much of its time trying to expose.
What sense does it make to out those crimes, but also at the same time sign what might as well be the death sentence for many, many honest people who were heroic and brave enough to, at great personal risk, try their best to avoid funding those crimes?
I might go even further, and say that the problem is not just with the part of the system we call "government" or even "corporations": it is a disconnect between our desire for our own rights to be respected, and our willingness to respect the rights of others. Everyone wishes a voice in the affairs of others; everyone wishes for those sufficiently unlike him or her to be regulated and taxed and perhaps arrested or killed; VERY FEW of us are willing to behave as though we understood that in order for our own rights to be secure, the rights of others, even those we don't like or agree with, MUST be respected as well.
You have the right to do anything that is not injurious to the rights of others. That right does not come from any government, but from God. Supposedly, governments are instituted to protect human rights, but they rarely do, and, over time, they always become the biggest threats to those rights. At that point, they need to be altered or (preferably in my view) abolished. No one has a right to rule over another without the latter's informed and voluntary consent.
BASIC today is much more than VBA or VBScript. Even these have their uses. I've done VB 4/5/6 and VB.NET for a living, and yes, the language has its frustrations, but it is possible to write clean, maintainable code in any of these if you know what you're doing and are willing to be confined to the Windows platform (or Mono).
Having said this, I would usually choose Python over BASIC anytime I could. I realize a lot of people are turned off by the whitespace-as-syntax, but just some of the things you get in return more than compensate for that in my opinion; things like "batteries included," the multi-paradigm nature, human-readable pseudocode, and the fact that while it is an incredibly powerful language, you don't have to learn the whole thing to get useful work done, or even to read and maintain another moderately experienced programmer's code. For real-world applications you do also need other skills (HTML, SQL, COM, data and object modeling, etc.) but for teaching I think Python is sufficiently self-contained and self-documenting that most of the elementary-age kids I know could learn a large and useful subset of their own with minimal guidance.
There are morally, ethically and legally sound ways to protest Amazon's actions if you feel as I do that they were unacceptable. Committing crimes against it, and its customers, is not one of those ways. It is not morally acceptable, and it takes away any moral high ground one might otherwise have had. FYI, I believe Amazon was coerced to some unknown but probably large degree by the government. There is no way to be sure, but I believe that it was, and I have tempered my own response accordingly. I have canceled plans to move some hosting to Amazon in 2011, both to protests its actions and also because it has demonstrated an unwillingness to host material of a potentially controversial nature. However I continue to do business with it as a retailer, since as far as I'm aware Amazon's retail business has behaved in a morally, ethically and legally sound fashion.
Actually, in a free society, there would be no involuntary unemployment, because there would be no wage floor (aka minimum wage) to prevent the labor markets from clearing. Some people would be unemployed because they are unwilling to take jobs that are available. But no one would be forced to. Everyone could be employed. It's just a question of whether one would be willing to work for what he or she is worth (i.e., what others are willing to pay for their time and/or abilities).
Same here. I had been considering Amazon as a hosting provider. I'm not now. I respect their right to stop hosting Wikileaks, since in a free society all relationships including business relationships are voluntary, not forced. However, their (Amazon's) actions fall under the very large class of things that are legal but at the same time stupid and irresponsible as well. They may have the right to do it, but likewise you, I and everyone else have the right to choose not to do business with them. Not to mention that I almost certainly host things that some would consider offensive, perhaps more so than the stuff on Wikileaks. If Amazon insists on its right to be offended, then it really leaves the rest of us no choice but to not do business with them, at least as a hosting provider.
The human rights violations committed by the governments Russia, China, Syria and possibly Iran are indefensible, but they in no way excuse or justify those being committed by the government of the United States. Furthermore, many of the people of the United States are less than fully aware of these violations. I am not anti-American; I am an American, but I do not approve of these actions, in large part because unlike many other Americans I am aware of at least some of them. If more of us were, there would be at least some political pressure to scale down or abandon these violations of international as well as natural law. I don't think it is anti-American to point this out, or to help educate Americans about what is being done to people all over the world, including here, by their "government."
In many respects Linux is a 40 year old design, and surely it is not without its warts. Yet, its success in the form of Android speaks to its unrivaled flexibility and adaptability. True, many things that didn't really work well as files ended up modeled as streams instead (think of streaming a video rather than downloading it). Others ended up relying on OOP and/or relational models. Still others required concurrent and/or massively parallel processing or storage models. Linux and the free software ecosystem have adapted beautifully to all of these. Perfect they are not, but what's out there that's better? Windows is popular on the desktop, but we're rapidly approaching the day when your phone can do everything your desktop can, and better. Microsoft has known and feared this day for many years, decades even, and it's only a matter of time before they are forced to either change or become irrelevant. Apple has niches in various markets that probably won't disappear anytime soon, and the Oracle/Google/IBM showdown may well cause changes in various parts of the software and infrastructure landscape. But my prediction is that Linux will remain well-used and well-loved for at least as long as I expect to be around (I'm 43 now). It's more than reached the critical mass of users, developers, and other interested parties that will be needed to ensure its continuing health, vitality and usefulness. To beat it, something new would have to come along that was not only at least as good as Linux, but also at least as open and at least as popular. There are other players that are arguably better and more open than Linux, and certainly those that are more popular in certain niches, but to beat it in all three areas seems far beyond the reach of anything I can see on the horizon.
I considered that (LFS) as well and would love to try it sometime. What I like about Gentoo is that, for the most part, I can keep the system up to date with relatively little effort, while still retaining most of the advantages of compiling from source. It's kind of like an automated LFS.
Only 3 years? How can you call that a fair chance? It's not even enough time to compile KDE!!:)
(disclaimer: mostly happy Gentoo user here, but yes, like many other worthwhile things, it can come at a cost, mainly in hopefully unattended compile time, and occasionally, if you want the latest stuff, some user/administrator time as well trying to figure out what the ebuild maintainers were smoking when they did certain things.)
No doubt that any sugar in large amounts is bad. HFCS is believed by many, including me, to be significantly worse because: (a) there's much more of it in American diets, for purely political reasons (corn subsidies + sugar tariffs); (b) it's often contaminated by heavy metals; (c) it's contaminated by enzymes which alter metabolism in harmful ways; (d) fructose is metabolized differently than glucose or sucrose, and in a way that suppresses production of leptin and other hormones that regulate and control metabolism and appetite.
Shellac is also used to coat many vegetables to keep them looking more fresh than they actually are, meaning, ironically, that many vegetables are not vegan.:( (I am a vegan, or, to be brutally honest, *attempt* to be a vegan. Sometimes there's really no way to know what's in the crap we consume, or no way to avoid it even if we do.)
Strangely, both the Bible and most cosmological models indicate that time itself, at least as we know it, did not exist before Creation and/or the Big Bang respectively. So it is not correct to say that nothing existed a week before then. The question itself is invalid, because there was no "week before then" to begin with.
Is it possible that the purpose of this whole action was to attack the concept of software patents itself? I realize that Oracle is evil by any reasonable definition, but could it realize that even an evil business could still prosper far more in a world without software patents than one with them? It chose an apparently very weak attack against a very powerful foe. It really doesn't make sense to me unless I'm missing something big.
I believe resistance is necessary and justified now. But violence is not, except, possibly, in self defense. There are peaceful ways to resist, and if there were enough people doing so, that resistance would be both effective and bloodless. If not enough do, however, they can come after us, or our families or other people or things that we hold dear. That is why numbers do matter, as does organization, unity, wisdom, and both understanding of, and devotion to, the principles of liberty.
To show a bit of my own ignorance . . . many years ago, when I first saw the Star Trek:TNG episode Descent where Data was hanging out in the holodeck with re-creations of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, I remember thinking to myself that that was the worst impression of Hawking I could possibly imagine.. I assumed it was some other schmoe playing Dr. Hawking. Turns out, he was playing himself. Boy did I feel like a heel!
I will admit, with some regret, that in that situation I might find myself very happy that the person who harmed my family (a FAR worse offense than anything anyone could do to me directly) was dead, and perhaps even that he suffered. But even then I cannot see myself generalizing to, "this guy was black/white/Hispanic/Asian/whatever, so I wanna go kill some blacks/whites/Hispanics/Asians/whatever." Even if I could not get the original perpetrator. And, again with regret, I will admit to sometimes making generalizations, mainly assumptions, about people based on externally visible characteristics. A group of young people wearing gang attire makes me quite a bit more nervous than that an otherwise similar group wearing business suits would have. But I would not go on a rampage against all gang members, or all businesspeople, just because one of their number harmed me, or even my family. I would seek out those directly responsible.
Which is why I would have had no problem with military strikes against bin Laden or others who admitted (or boasted) of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, but I have a VERY big problem with similar strikes against innocent Afghanis who just happen to be in the area, or Iraqis who, in addition to having suffered far more than enough during 30 years first of US-instigated war with Iran, then Saddam's approved-in-the-USA brutality against Kurds and Shi'ites, then Desert Storm, then genocidal sanctions, and then more war including use of depleted uranium weapons that will kill its victims' grandchildren's grandchildren, had absolutely NOTHING to do with 9/11.
I believe our ability to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, including those who may resemble the guilty without actually BEING the guilty, is a key marker of civilization, and in fact a key prerequisite for civilization. Because there are always people who will commit wrongs and injustices, and if we allow those people to create a larger conflict eventually involving every one of us, then frankly we're fucked. Whereas if we try to isolate and punish those known beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, while protecting the innocent (and even those who may not be innocent, but have not been proven otherwise), then we have at least a chance for peace and sanity. Not a guarantee, even then, but at least a chance.
Both, I would think. The framers certainly feared the latter, but they also recommended a foreign policy based on friendship and trade with all nations insofar as possible but "entangling alliances" with none. Whether out of self-interest, fairness, or some combination of both, the framers recommended foreign policy that would have made standing armies quite unnecessary throughout at least the better part of U.S. history. As a side benefit of that policy, we also would have been safe from being abused by said standing armies.
My understanding was that an em space (a space the width of the lowercase letter m) was the usual typographical approach, but that this could conveniently be approximated by two spaces.
Slashdot Mirror
Porn for mitochondria. Who would have guessed??
Outing honest people whose only so-called "crime" is wanting to avoid the theft of their hard and presumably legitimately-earned dollars is completely and totally wrong, and negates much if not all of the good Wikileaks has done in exposing actual government and corporate wrongdoing. It also makes Wikileaks, directly or indirectly, an accomplice to the very real crimes of the state that it has spent so much of its time trying to expose.
What sense does it make to out those crimes, but also at the same time sign what might as well be the death sentence for many, many honest people who were heroic and brave enough to, at great personal risk, try their best to avoid funding those crimes?
I might go even further, and say that the problem is not just with the part of the system we call "government" or even "corporations": it is a disconnect between our desire for our own rights to be respected, and our willingness to respect the rights of others. Everyone wishes a voice in the affairs of others; everyone wishes for those sufficiently unlike him or her to be regulated and taxed and perhaps arrested or killed; VERY FEW of us are willing to behave as though we understood that in order for our own rights to be secure, the rights of others, even those we don't like or agree with, MUST be respected as well.
You have the right to do anything that is not injurious to the rights of others. That right does not come from any government, but from God. Supposedly, governments are instituted to protect human rights, but they rarely do, and, over time, they always become the biggest threats to those rights. At that point, they need to be altered or (preferably in my view) abolished. No one has a right to rule over another without the latter's informed and voluntary consent.
BASIC today is much more than VBA or VBScript. Even these have their uses. I've done VB 4/5/6 and VB.NET for a living, and yes, the language has its frustrations, but it is possible to write clean, maintainable code in any of these if you know what you're doing and are willing to be confined to the Windows platform (or Mono).
Having said this, I would usually choose Python over BASIC anytime I could. I realize a lot of people are turned off by the whitespace-as-syntax, but just some of the things you get in return more than compensate for that in my opinion; things like "batteries included," the multi-paradigm nature, human-readable pseudocode, and the fact that while it is an incredibly powerful language, you don't have to learn the whole thing to get useful work done, or even to read and maintain another moderately experienced programmer's code. For real-world applications you do also need other skills (HTML, SQL, COM, data and object modeling, etc.) but for teaching I think Python is sufficiently self-contained and self-documenting that most of the elementary-age kids I know could learn a large and useful subset of their own with minimal guidance.
There are morally, ethically and legally sound ways to protest Amazon's actions if you feel as I do that they were unacceptable. Committing crimes against it, and its customers, is not one of those ways. It is not morally acceptable, and it takes away any moral high ground one might otherwise have had. FYI, I believe Amazon was coerced to some unknown but probably large degree by the government. There is no way to be sure, but I believe that it was, and I have tempered my own response accordingly. I have canceled plans to move some hosting to Amazon in 2011, both to protests its actions and also because it has demonstrated an unwillingness to host material of a potentially controversial nature. However I continue to do business with it as a retailer, since as far as I'm aware Amazon's retail business has behaved in a morally, ethically and legally sound fashion.
Actually, in a free society, there would be no involuntary unemployment, because there would be no wage floor (aka minimum wage) to prevent the labor markets from clearing. Some people would be unemployed because they are unwilling to take jobs that are available. But no one would be forced to. Everyone could be employed. It's just a question of whether one would be willing to work for what he or she is worth (i.e., what others are willing to pay for their time and/or abilities).
Same here. I had been considering Amazon as a hosting provider. I'm not now. I respect their right to stop hosting Wikileaks, since in a free society all relationships including business relationships are voluntary, not forced. However, their (Amazon's) actions fall under the very large class of things that are legal but at the same time stupid and irresponsible as well. They may have the right to do it, but likewise you, I and everyone else have the right to choose not to do business with them. Not to mention that I almost certainly host things that some would consider offensive, perhaps more so than the stuff on Wikileaks. If Amazon insists on its right to be offended, then it really leaves the rest of us no choice but to not do business with them, at least as a hosting provider.
The human rights violations committed by the governments Russia, China, Syria and possibly Iran are indefensible, but they in no way excuse or justify those being committed by the government of the United States. Furthermore, many of the people of the United States are less than fully aware of these violations. I am not anti-American; I am an American, but I do not approve of these actions, in large part because unlike many other Americans I am aware of at least some of them. If more of us were, there would be at least some political pressure to scale down or abandon these violations of international as well as natural law. I don't think it is anti-American to point this out, or to help educate Americans about what is being done to people all over the world, including here, by their "government."
In many respects Linux is a 40 year old design, and surely it is not without its warts. Yet, its success in the form of Android speaks to its unrivaled flexibility and adaptability. True, many things that didn't really work well as files ended up modeled as streams instead (think of streaming a video rather than downloading it). Others ended up relying on OOP and/or relational models. Still others required concurrent and/or massively parallel processing or storage models. Linux and the free software ecosystem have adapted beautifully to all of these. Perfect they are not, but what's out there that's better? Windows is popular on the desktop, but we're rapidly approaching the day when your phone can do everything your desktop can, and better. Microsoft has known and feared this day for many years, decades even, and it's only a matter of time before they are forced to either change or become irrelevant. Apple has niches in various markets that probably won't disappear anytime soon, and the Oracle/Google/IBM showdown may well cause changes in various parts of the software and infrastructure landscape. But my prediction is that Linux will remain well-used and well-loved for at least as long as I expect to be around (I'm 43 now). It's more than reached the critical mass of users, developers, and other interested parties that will be needed to ensure its continuing health, vitality and usefulness. To beat it, something new would have to come along that was not only at least as good as Linux, but also at least as open and at least as popular. There are other players that are arguably better and more open than Linux, and certainly those that are more popular in certain niches, but to beat it in all three areas seems far beyond the reach of anything I can see on the horizon.
I considered that (LFS) as well and would love to try it sometime. What I like about Gentoo is that, for the most part, I can keep the system up to date with relatively little effort, while still retaining most of the advantages of compiling from source. It's kind of like an automated LFS.
Only 3 years? How can you call that a fair chance? It's not even enough time to compile KDE!! :)
(disclaimer: mostly happy Gentoo user here, but yes, like many other worthwhile things, it can come at a cost, mainly in hopefully unattended compile time, and occasionally, if you want the latest stuff, some user/administrator time as well trying to figure out what the ebuild maintainers were smoking when they did certain things.)
No doubt that any sugar in large amounts is bad. HFCS is believed by many, including me, to be significantly worse because: (a) there's much more of it in American diets, for purely political reasons (corn subsidies + sugar tariffs); (b) it's often contaminated by heavy metals; (c) it's contaminated by enzymes which alter metabolism in harmful ways; (d) fructose is metabolized differently than glucose or sucrose, and in a way that suppresses production of leptin and other hormones that regulate and control metabolism and appetite.
Shellac is also used to coat many vegetables to keep them looking more fresh than they actually are, meaning, ironically, that many vegetables are not vegan. :( (I am a vegan, or, to be brutally honest, *attempt* to be a vegan. Sometimes there's really no way to know what's in the crap we consume, or no way to avoid it even if we do.)
Strangely, both the Bible and most cosmological models indicate that time itself, at least as we know it, did not exist before Creation and/or the Big Bang respectively. So it is not correct to say that nothing existed a week before then. The question itself is invalid, because there was no "week before then" to begin with.
What would you consider to be a "better and easier static" alternative to, say, Python?
Is it possible that the purpose of this whole action was to attack the concept of software patents itself? I realize that Oracle is evil by any reasonable definition, but could it realize that even an evil business could still prosper far more in a world without software patents than one with them? It chose an apparently very weak attack against a very powerful foe. It really doesn't make sense to me unless I'm missing something big.
I am sorry for your loss, and pray that time will bring at least some measure of peace for you and the others your daughter left behind.
I believe resistance is necessary and justified now. But violence is not, except, possibly, in self defense. There are peaceful ways to resist, and if there were enough people doing so, that resistance would be both effective and bloodless. If not enough do, however, they can come after us, or our families or other people or things that we hold dear. That is why numbers do matter, as does organization, unity, wisdom, and both understanding of, and devotion to, the principles of liberty.
To show a bit of my own ignorance . . . many years ago, when I first saw the Star Trek:TNG episode Descent where Data was hanging out in the holodeck with re-creations of Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, I remember thinking to myself that that was the worst impression of Hawking I could possibly imagine .. I assumed it was some other schmoe playing Dr. Hawking. Turns out, he was playing himself. Boy did I feel like a heel!
I will admit, with some regret, that in that situation I might find myself very happy that the person who harmed my family (a FAR worse offense than anything anyone could do to me directly) was dead, and perhaps even that he suffered. But even then I cannot see myself generalizing to, "this guy was black/white/Hispanic/Asian/whatever, so I wanna go kill some blacks/whites/Hispanics/Asians/whatever." Even if I could not get the original perpetrator. And, again with regret, I will admit to sometimes making generalizations, mainly assumptions, about people based on externally visible characteristics. A group of young people wearing gang attire makes me quite a bit more nervous than that an otherwise similar group wearing business suits would have. But I would not go on a rampage against all gang members, or all businesspeople, just because one of their number harmed me, or even my family. I would seek out those directly responsible.
Which is why I would have had no problem with military strikes against bin Laden or others who admitted (or boasted) of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, but I have a VERY big problem with similar strikes against innocent Afghanis who just happen to be in the area, or Iraqis who, in addition to having suffered far more than enough during 30 years first of US-instigated war with Iran, then Saddam's approved-in-the-USA brutality against Kurds and Shi'ites, then Desert Storm, then genocidal sanctions, and then more war including use of depleted uranium weapons that will kill its victims' grandchildren's grandchildren, had absolutely NOTHING to do with 9/11.
I believe our ability to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, including those who may resemble the guilty without actually BEING the guilty, is a key marker of civilization, and in fact a key prerequisite for civilization. Because there are always people who will commit wrongs and injustices, and if we allow those people to create a larger conflict eventually involving every one of us, then frankly we're fucked. Whereas if we try to isolate and punish those known beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty, while protecting the innocent (and even those who may not be innocent, but have not been proven otherwise), then we have at least a chance for peace and sanity. Not a guarantee, even then, but at least a chance.
Both, I would think. The framers certainly feared the latter, but they also recommended a foreign policy based on friendship and trade with all nations insofar as possible but "entangling alliances" with none. Whether out of self-interest, fairness, or some combination of both, the framers recommended foreign policy that would have made standing armies quite unnecessary throughout at least the better part of U.S. history. As a side benefit of that policy, we also would have been safe from being abused by said standing armies.
My understanding was that an em space (a space the width of the lowercase letter m) was the usual typographical approach, but that this could conveniently be approximated by two spaces.
I'm quite willing to kill my enemies if they force me to, but, given a choice, I would much prefer to make peace with them if possible.
The opening battle sequence in Saving Private Ryan was said by many veterans to be relatively realistic, at least by Hollywood standards.