Agree with everything... Though, who actually checks system requirements these days unless you know your machine is so marginal that it isn't even funny. I'll grant maybe I'm not the average, maybe I'm blinded by my own experiences and resources, but unless you're wanting to play Crysis at won't most people's normal machines handle the vast vast majority of games without even blinking?
Because clearly the solution to this problem, like all problems, is ever more government intrusion. Big Brother must be allowed to protect us morons from ourselves. Someone has to do it, no?
Even the strongest libertarians believe that preventing fraud is a legitimate roll for government. Of course if you aren't a libertarian then I guess that won't mean all that much to you.
I'm not totally sure that's the case though. I'm sure many would see the necessary powers to do that as a gross intrusion. One may not like it but the freedom to succeed includes the freedom to fail. The freedom to spend your money as you see fit includes the freedom to possibly be defrauded out of it. That sucks, but the alternative is that government monitor and approve directly or otherwise every single transaction or at least the conditions under which those transactions take place. I have a hard time imagining a libertarian granting government the power to do that, no?
The point of the Interstate Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution was to cut through regulations and to prevent states from prohibiting commercial activity between states. It was there to stop things like the tariff wars that happened between New York & New Jersey that nearly started the U.S. Civil War a few decades earlier with the fighting across the Hudson River instead of the Mason & Dixon line. How something designed to prevent a shooting war ends up regulating somebody trying to make a YouTube movie is utterly stupid.
Agreed. It is an excellent example of the true nature of government. It grows and gobbles up power unless something comes along to stop it. Once SCOTUS ruled that the ICC was pretty much the blank check you mentioned there was nothing left to limit Congress from doing whatever the hell it wanted as long as it could some how or another tie it to either commerce or the market in general.
This is all about small time investors and the attitude that somebody with a spare hundred dollars is incapable of being able to make an informed decision about a potential investment opportunity.
This is about making sure that somebody with a spare hundred dollars has the bare minimum information available to make an informed decision. It is analogous to standardized labeling requirements on groceries.
Because clearly the solution to this problem, like all problems, is ever more government intrusion. Big Brother must be allowed to protect us morons from ourselves. Someone has to do it, no?
> no understanding of the importances of "just works"
That's not their part of the job.
Various entities can label something as user-friendly. FSF is pretty much the only entity that can label stuff as free.
This is one laptop. Hopefully next year there'll be twenty, and then someone can take on the job of announcing which is the most user-friendly of the twenty free laptops.
I'd take issue with them nominating themselves as the one true source, but that's neither here nor there. The real question is whether people will be willing to pay exorbant prices for relatively ancient hardware on the grounds that it very slightly increases the amount of "freedom" they have. Given that 99.95% of people will have no idea what this is about and further wouldn't care if they did (as we're talking about an increase that is difficult if not impossible to measure and arguably doesn't exist) I wouldn't hold your breath on this becoming anything more than an isolated instance.
In short, unless one can prove that even a tiny percentage of computer BIOSes and the like are phoning home or contacting the NSA with daily activity reports exactly no one, on the grand scale, will care. It reminds me of all the efforts to create a "free" CPUs or graphics cards in the past. Sure, you could do it and have them as long as you're okay with 10 or 15 year old technology that is incapable of doing anything that is currently useful. But it's Free!:D
"You already live in that world. The only question left is if every sane and law abiding citizen should also be able to get a gun to protect themselves."
Maybe you do.
If you live in so much fear you feel the need to protect yourself with a gun you may want to consider moving to a more civilized part of the world.
To many people guns are things you see on television, or occasionally carried by specially trained armed response police.
Sorry, you live in that world. The fact that violence hasn't entered your life as yet does not change the nature of the world or alter reality in the slightest. Some people see the world for what it is and reasonably take precautions. Others deny the nature of the world and hide behind "specially trained armed response police". I would never want to deny people their right to self delusion but I draw the line at when they wish to push their delusions on others.
Just because the wolf hasn't come to pound on your door yet doesn't mean he doesn't exist. Count your blessings and be thankful for that, but do not think that simply because it hasn't happened yet that it cannot happen to you.
The entire thing is an overly complicated way to say something which is fairly simple: 6 - 5 = ??. The number of ways to present that are numerous but the simplest would likely have been: You have 6 Apples, you eat 5. How many are left?
Assuming you just don't want to go with: 6 - 5 = ??. Odd that we could teach it the simple equation way for the last.. oh.. forever?
That's ridiculous. I used to install pipelines and wells beneath roads in southern California. That's a much slower and messier process than laying underground cables (I know because we did that too). Believe me, the residents did stand for it. To them it's just more road work. It would be easy for a company to lay new subterranean cable, and it would be even easier to place it above ground.
Not only that but they'd likely say something along the lines of: "This will cut your Internet bill in half and double your speeds" to which the people in the area would reply "Right, do that then."
Prices are high because government causes un-natural monopolies and shields their pet companies from competition via exclusive contracts for areas. End this practice and watch prices fall and quality rise.
Well, considering the ATF - in its infinite malice - has banned solid copper and brass hunting projectiles as "armor piercing" even though they work EXTREMELY well as hunting bullets
Except they didn't do that. They banned brass pistol ammo, which is very rarely used in hunting.
The attack on lead ammo is about gun control, not lead abatement. Period.
Except the bill in question (AB711) places no restrictions on the sale, use or possession of lead ammo, as long as you don't hunt with it.
Given the history of such proponents and of such laws there is exactly zero reason to believe that if this law isn't fought and defeated that these same people won't be back next year wanting to ban lead, also known as 'affordable', ammo entirely.
The history of gun control is one of dishonesty, misdirection and incrementalism. It is also unlikely, though possible, that this is really about serious concerns about the relatively tiny amounts of lead and more likely just a way to try and ban ammo in a politically acceptable manner.
They want bans, they should provide incontrovertible evidence that this is not only a serious problem with direct and provable harm but that the only reasonable solution is this ban. Otherwise, it should be voted down immediately.
When you say "both" you appear to be suffering under the misaprehension that you have two political parties and a functioning democracy. Do don't. You have one party with two brands, and they all are given their marching orders by their funders. There is no more freedom in the United States than in China. The only difference is the mechanism by which the people are controlled. Tomorrow I protest against the corrupting influence of the United States in my own country.
The US has problems to be sure but if you think this is an accurate statement then you clearly have no idea at all what you're talking about and likely have never been to either place.
If you have then you're wearing such heavily colored glasses that you cannot see the reality of the situation.
Actually, I would argue that the other issue is range.
The baseball bat and sword are as effective as a pistol at close range--say, within 3 feet or so. However, a pistol is effective at a much further range--figure 20-30 feet. It is much more difficult to get out of range of a pistol than it is to get out of range of a baseball bat or sword.
That's actually the logic of why if you're already that close to the gun and its wielder the recommended course of action is to attack vice trying to get out of range. You're right you're not going to be able to get out of range but on the other hand the lethal point, that point in which the gun can cause damage, is actually really really small. If you keep it off you the gun can do no harm.
My point wrt the Civil Rights Movement was not anything to do with skin colour. It was that a growing group of people decided not to simply subscribe to the rules and customs of the community around them and started increasingly taking a stand against it.
I'm surprised people didn't connect the dots.
Whether or not I agree with Sarah isn't the point. It's that she's able to stand up for what she believes in, going against the community as a whole, and (at least a little bit) forcing a few people to temporarily re-evaluate the idea of what the group norms are. I'm glad she's trying.
I've nothing wrong with her trying and I didn't think what you said had anything to do with color. I'm not sure what the color of all those involved are anyway and it wouldn't matter either way.
She can try all she wants. However, in the end either she has to accept the results or leave the community. The community is under no obligation to change itself to fit her whims/desires, no?
The general rule of guns vs knives is that it is best to run from a knife but attack a gun. This is mainly at relative close quarters but the logic is that a gun is really only deadly at one point extending out of the barrel and that point is actually pretty small. If you can keep it off of you then the gun is harmless. A knife on the other hand can do damage more easily, again in closeish quarters, and as such it is best to retreat and attempt to counter-attack from range. You are correct that the best way to deal with the bat would be to move in very close and if possible flatten the attacker. Interestingly, as I stated that's the same idea with the gun if you're already within range for such a move.
I'm going to counter your example by saying that yes you're right most rapes are committed by people known by the person raped. However, if you think a person who has a gun at hand isn't going to shoot someone they know who is in the process of trying to rape them you're smoking crack.
I realize that the plural of anecdote isn't data, however those I have personally known seriously regrets not having a gun at hand to shoot their rapist.
As to your second point that isn't logical. Responsibility for an external act does not transfer simply because someone didn't take a theoretical step to protect against that act.
One could argue that if hit in a car and I'm not wearing a safety belt that some responsibility for the extent of my injuries may be mine, but that does not transfer nor impact the responsibility of who caused the accident.
I believe he's asking you to assume that a gun is an inanimate object incapable of independent action and that it is the person wielding it that ultimately makes it dangerous or rather uses it in a dangerous manner.
Can it be used more effectively than the other items listed? Sure. Does that negate the point? It does not. You want to imbue it with special powers beyond those of the person holding it as it seems what you really want to do is blame the thing and ignore the user.
A baseball bat in the hands of a mad man is most certainly a deadly weapon and without adequate resistance can easily kill a goodly number of people in a relatively short period of time. Longer than a gun perhaps but that really depends on the targets and environment.
A sword would be even more effective and again absent adequate resistance would be extremely deadly even in the hands of the untrained mad man.
While you're mentioning the evil uses of the canceling properties it seems highly disingenuous not to mention the practically infinitely more common instances: The 90 pound woman defending herself against a rapist. The gay man defending against the mob intent on beating him senseless. The old and the infirm defending against the young and strong
Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.
It's not a community, it's a software development project. OK, one can talk about a developer "community", but as soon as that "community" starts having rules and customs not directly linked to the development of the software in question, it becomes something else, especially if the rules and customs can be perceived as antithetical to the development process. The Linux kernel development team are not a masonic lodge!
A community is a group of individuals banding together for common purpose with agreed upon customs and norms, spoken or unspoken. Any software development project with almost any degree of openness quickly forms into a community as a natural consequence of human behavior.
The norms of that community are well established and nothing you've said changes my points.:)
Yours is not a fair statement. She’s been contributing to the Linux kernel for (as far as I can tell after a quick Google) 5 years or more. She’s not ‘attempting to join [the] community’; she’s already part of the community.
And she’s attempting to change it from within. Nothing, ipso facto, wrong with that.
Okay, in that case she's been a part of it for a while now and has (so far as I know) suddenly decided she doesn't like the way things are. That's fine. Asking for change and such is fine to a point. However, this is also closely related to the ridiculous idea that people have a right not to be offended or to hear things they don't like. No such right exists.
If they are unwilling to change, and I unsurprisingly tend to agree with Linus's stance on the fakery involved in being "professional", then she can either deal with it or leave. The people on that list were the way they were long before she got there even if she has been involved with it for the last few years.
What is insightful about this? It isn't the same thing at all.
What you're referring to is a group already part of a society campaigning for equality within the society. One could argue that they could have simply left but those who were doing the campaigning didn't have that option nor was it necessarily the appropriate option. They also were not attempting to force society to adopt their standards and beliefs but to force society to apply its own standards and beliefs to them and treat them equally.
If this person on the LKML was saying that she wanted to be allowed to curse and such because she had been told women shouldn't do such things then your point would be valid, or at least more so. Instead she's demanding that everyone else change to accommodate her desires and world view.
If Sarah cannot stand the heat, she should go back to the kitchen.
See - now that is political incorrectness.
Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.
And if you enjoy fighting games or racing games or other console-friendly genres, that's fine. But when was the last time anyone made an RTS or RPG for a console that didn't have a dumbed-down control system? Some of the most interesting user interfaces in console gaming in recent years seem to be the ones that don't use the standard controllers at all.
To me this is the worst result of consoles being the primary development target. Dumbed down games. Overly simple console compatible control interfaces, overly simple game play, being shackled to what the current generation console is capable of while PCs race ahead in power.
Result: Piles of same old same old games with occasional kinda sorta bursts of something that resembles innovation. Mostly railshooters and sports games out the ass with occasional exceptions. Hell, what's the greatest thing about the new Call of Duty game? The dog and it is very pretty. Otherwise, it will likely be waist high walls as far as the eye can see between cut scenes. Because console.
While the idea, amend vice ignore, is good their proposed amendment is deeply flawed. The language used would not only prohibit corporate speech, thus killing any right to advertise or promote their products unless granted permission by government, it would have the effect of eliminating all rights from any corporation. Including rights of property and many others.
Clearly it was put forth by someone who really just hates corporations for no logical reason while failing to remember that the vast majority of corporations are small affairs who would be destroyed by such a thing just as much as the megaliths they presumably are against.
It is also amusing to me, and has been since the ruling, that no one was up in arms over Unions (frequently corporations themselves) were buying elections and it only became a problem when organizations that were not unions got into the act.
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots. Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
The dichotomy is not false, it just simply hasn't come to fruition yet. If we look to history when you have large numbers of people from different ethnic or cultural values coming together one of two things must happen. They all blend to form a new people or, in the best case, they live together with mutual tension and the occasional flare up and/or war.
It is not possible to be both one people and many. You can have a country made up of many different peoples. You cannot have a Nation made up of such.
The American model is not a loss of all distinctiveness. It is a subsuming of their past beneath their current home. They come here and become American, the shared ideal we all in theory hold. If other places can't mange that maybe that says more about them than it does about the US, no?
Our founding fathers were not perfect. Neither are the documents they wrote. The Constitution endorsed slavery. Many will argue it was a necessary evil in order to get a compromise and have all colonies endorse the document. If that's the case, then there is no reason to believe there are other compromises in the document and it isn't flawed in other aspects.
Then it is a good thing that they included provisions for modifying it, isn't it? The problem is that many people want to just pick and choose the parts they like and interpret the others in ways that make no logical sense when taken as a whole and accounting for the intentions of those who wrote it.
If one does not like it, one should campaign to amend it and not merely ignore or interpret away the parts one does not like.
Hell, the State of California practically does that now.
Practically? In some parts of S. California I could walk outside my front door and not be able to read the commercial signs. You'd never know the official langauge of the country was English.
Point of order... that's because the US has no official language. It is generally held that such would be a violation of the First Amendment.:)
Some States, California among them, have passed official language laws but as far as I know they all lack enforcement clauses.
The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy. Yes, it's only in that inconvenient real world that it happens. In case you've forgotten, wages in the USA started stagnating in the 70s and the divide between wealthy and poor grows larger each year. Moreover, the real world examples of unregulated capitalism (e.g. Pakistan, Somalia, Mexico, the USA, China) show exactly what happens when the government "gets out of the way." This is solely due to changes in government taxation regulation changes on high income earners and high income corporations, and the demise of checks on finance (i.e. Glass-steagall).
The divide between the wealthy and poor means exactly jack shit unless you can demonstrate that the poor are becoming more poor relative to themselves. It doesn't matter a bit if the rich are getting richer unless you can prove that they are getting that way by directly harming the poor.
You also fail at life for saying that China is an example of the government getting out of the way and trying to compare the US to any of the places you listed. Yet clearly the solution to all our problems is more government regulation and ever higher taxes and penalties. Surely that will jump start the economy!
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with everything... Though, who actually checks system requirements these days unless you know your machine is so marginal that it isn't even funny. I'll grant maybe I'm not the average, maybe I'm blinded by my own experiences and resources, but unless you're wanting to play Crysis at won't most people's normal machines handle the vast vast majority of games without even blinking?
Am I wrong here?
Because clearly the solution to this problem, like all problems, is ever more government intrusion. Big Brother must be allowed to protect us morons from ourselves. Someone has to do it, no?
Even the strongest libertarians believe that preventing fraud is a legitimate roll for government. Of course if you aren't a libertarian then I guess that won't mean all that much to you.
I'm not totally sure that's the case though. I'm sure many would see the necessary powers to do that as a gross intrusion. One may not like it but the freedom to succeed includes the freedom to fail. The freedom to spend your money as you see fit includes the freedom to possibly be defrauded out of it. That sucks, but the alternative is that government monitor and approve directly or otherwise every single transaction or at least the conditions under which those transactions take place. I have a hard time imagining a libertarian granting government the power to do that, no?
The point of the Interstate Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution was to cut through regulations and to prevent states from prohibiting commercial activity between states. It was there to stop things like the tariff wars that happened between New York & New Jersey that nearly started the U.S. Civil War a few decades earlier with the fighting across the Hudson River instead of the Mason & Dixon line. How something designed to prevent a shooting war ends up regulating somebody trying to make a YouTube movie is utterly stupid.
Agreed. It is an excellent example of the true nature of government. It grows and gobbles up power unless something comes along to stop it. Once SCOTUS ruled that the ICC was pretty much the blank check you mentioned there was nothing left to limit Congress from doing whatever the hell it wanted as long as it could some how or another tie it to either commerce or the market in general.
This is all about small time investors and the attitude that somebody with a spare hundred dollars is incapable of being able to make an informed decision about a potential investment opportunity.
This is about making sure that somebody with a spare hundred dollars has the bare minimum information available to make an informed decision. It is analogous to standardized labeling requirements on groceries.
Because clearly the solution to this problem, like all problems, is ever more government intrusion. Big Brother must be allowed to protect us morons from ourselves. Someone has to do it, no?
> no understanding of the importances of "just works"
That's not their part of the job.
Various entities can label something as user-friendly. FSF is pretty much the only entity that can label stuff as free.
This is one laptop. Hopefully next year there'll be twenty, and then someone can take on the job of announcing which is the most user-friendly of the twenty free laptops.
I'd take issue with them nominating themselves as the one true source, but that's neither here nor there. The real question is whether people will be willing to pay exorbant prices for relatively ancient hardware on the grounds that it very slightly increases the amount of "freedom" they have. Given that 99.95% of people will have no idea what this is about and further wouldn't care if they did (as we're talking about an increase that is difficult if not impossible to measure and arguably doesn't exist) I wouldn't hold your breath on this becoming anything more than an isolated instance.
In short, unless one can prove that even a tiny percentage of computer BIOSes and the like are phoning home or contacting the NSA with daily activity reports exactly no one, on the grand scale, will care. It reminds me of all the efforts to create a "free" CPUs or graphics cards in the past. Sure, you could do it and have them as long as you're okay with 10 or 15 year old technology that is incapable of doing anything that is currently useful. But it's Free! :D
"You already live in that world. The only question left is if every sane and law abiding citizen should also be able to get a gun to protect themselves."
Maybe you do.
If you live in so much fear you feel the need to protect yourself with a gun you may want to consider moving to a more civilized part of the world.
To many people guns are things you see on television, or occasionally carried by specially trained armed response police.
Sorry, you live in that world. The fact that violence hasn't entered your life as yet does not change the nature of the world or alter reality in the slightest. Some people see the world for what it is and reasonably take precautions. Others deny the nature of the world and hide behind "specially trained armed response police". I would never want to deny people their right to self delusion but I draw the line at when they wish to push their delusions on others.
Just because the wolf hasn't come to pound on your door yet doesn't mean he doesn't exist. Count your blessings and be thankful for that, but do not think that simply because it hasn't happened yet that it cannot happen to you.
The entire thing is an overly complicated way to say something which is fairly simple: 6 - 5 = ??. The number of ways to present that are numerous but the simplest would likely have been: You have 6 Apples, you eat 5. How many are left?
Assuming you just don't want to go with: 6 - 5 = ??. Odd that we could teach it the simple equation way for the last.. oh.. forever?
That's ridiculous. I used to install pipelines and wells beneath roads in southern California. That's a much slower and messier process than laying underground cables (I know because we did that too). Believe me, the residents did stand for it. To them it's just more road work. It would be easy for a company to lay new subterranean cable, and it would be even easier to place it above ground.
Not only that but they'd likely say something along the lines of: "This will cut your Internet bill in half and double your speeds" to which the people in the area would reply "Right, do that then."
Prices are high because government causes un-natural monopolies and shields their pet companies from competition via exclusive contracts for areas. End this practice and watch prices fall and quality rise.
Well, considering the ATF - in its infinite malice - has banned solid copper and brass hunting projectiles as "armor piercing" even though they work EXTREMELY well as hunting bullets
Except they didn't do that. They banned brass pistol ammo, which is very rarely used in hunting.
The attack on lead ammo is about gun control, not lead abatement. Period.
Except the bill in question (AB711) places no restrictions on the sale, use or possession of lead ammo, as long as you don't hunt with it.
Given the history of such proponents and of such laws there is exactly zero reason to believe that if this law isn't fought and defeated that these same people won't be back next year wanting to ban lead, also known as 'affordable', ammo entirely.
The history of gun control is one of dishonesty, misdirection and incrementalism. It is also unlikely, though possible, that this is really about serious concerns about the relatively tiny amounts of lead and more likely just a way to try and ban ammo in a politically acceptable manner.
They want bans, they should provide incontrovertible evidence that this is not only a serious problem with direct and provable harm but that the only reasonable solution is this ban. Otherwise, it should be voted down immediately.
I've been there 10 times in the last year and a half and am married to a Chinese woman. Want to try that again? :)
When you say "both" you appear to be suffering under the misaprehension that you have two political parties and a functioning democracy. Do don't. You have one party with two brands, and they all are given their marching orders by their funders. There is no more freedom in the United States than in China. The only difference is the mechanism by which the people are controlled. Tomorrow I protest against the corrupting influence of the United States in my own country.
The US has problems to be sure but if you think this is an accurate statement then you clearly have no idea at all what you're talking about and likely have never been to either place.
If you have then you're wearing such heavily colored glasses that you cannot see the reality of the situation.
Actually, I would argue that the other issue is range.
The baseball bat and sword are as effective as a pistol at close range--say, within 3 feet or so. However, a pistol is effective at a much further range--figure 20-30 feet. It is much more difficult to get out of range of a pistol than it is to get out of range of a baseball bat or sword.
That's actually the logic of why if you're already that close to the gun and its wielder the recommended course of action is to attack vice trying to get out of range. You're right you're not going to be able to get out of range but on the other hand the lethal point, that point in which the gun can cause damage, is actually really really small. If you keep it off you the gun can do no harm.
My point wrt the Civil Rights Movement was not anything to do with skin colour. It was that a growing group of people decided not to simply subscribe to the rules and customs of the community around them and started increasingly taking a stand against it.
I'm surprised people didn't connect the dots.
Whether or not I agree with Sarah isn't the point. It's that she's able to stand up for what she believes in, going against the community as a whole, and (at least a little bit) forcing a few people to temporarily re-evaluate the idea of what the group norms are. I'm glad she's trying.
I've nothing wrong with her trying and I didn't think what you said had anything to do with color. I'm not sure what the color of all those involved are anyway and it wouldn't matter either way.
She can try all she wants. However, in the end either she has to accept the results or leave the community. The community is under no obligation to change itself to fit her whims/desires, no?
The general rule of guns vs knives is that it is best to run from a knife but attack a gun. This is mainly at relative close quarters but the logic is that a gun is really only deadly at one point extending out of the barrel and that point is actually pretty small. If you can keep it off of you then the gun is harmless. A knife on the other hand can do damage more easily, again in closeish quarters, and as such it is best to retreat and attempt to counter-attack from range. You are correct that the best way to deal with the bat would be to move in very close and if possible flatten the attacker. Interestingly, as I stated that's the same idea with the gun if you're already within range for such a move.
I'm going to counter your example by saying that yes you're right most rapes are committed by people known by the person raped. However, if you think a person who has a gun at hand isn't going to shoot someone they know who is in the process of trying to rape them you're smoking crack.
I realize that the plural of anecdote isn't data, however those I have personally known seriously regrets not having a gun at hand to shoot their rapist.
As to your second point that isn't logical. Responsibility for an external act does not transfer simply because someone didn't take a theoretical step to protect against that act.
One could argue that if hit in a car and I'm not wearing a safety belt that some responsibility for the extent of my injuries may be mine, but that does not transfer nor impact the responsibility of who caused the accident.
I believe he's asking you to assume that a gun is an inanimate object incapable of independent action and that it is the person wielding it that ultimately makes it dangerous or rather uses it in a dangerous manner.
Can it be used more effectively than the other items listed? Sure. Does that negate the point? It does not. You want to imbue it with special powers beyond those of the person holding it as it seems what you really want to do is blame the thing and ignore the user.
A baseball bat in the hands of a mad man is most certainly a deadly weapon and without adequate resistance can easily kill a goodly number of people in a relatively short period of time. Longer than a gun perhaps but that really depends on the targets and environment.
A sword would be even more effective and again absent adequate resistance would be extremely deadly even in the hands of the untrained mad man.
While you're mentioning the evil uses of the canceling properties it seems highly disingenuous not to mention the practically infinitely more common instances:
The 90 pound woman defending herself against a rapist.
The gay man defending against the mob intent on beating him senseless.
The old and the infirm defending against the young and strong
And so on.
Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.
It's not a community, it's a software development project. OK, one can talk about a developer "community", but as soon as that "community" starts having rules and customs not directly linked to the development of the software in question, it becomes something else, especially if the rules and customs can be perceived as antithetical to the development process. The Linux kernel development team are not a masonic lodge!
A community is a group of individuals banding together for common purpose with agreed upon customs and norms, spoken or unspoken. Any software development project with almost any degree of openness quickly forms into a community as a natural consequence of human behavior.
The norms of that community are well established and nothing you've said changes my points. :)
Yours is not a fair statement. She’s been contributing to the Linux kernel for (as far as I can tell after a quick Google) 5 years or more. She’s not ‘attempting to join [the] community’; she’s already part of the community.
And she’s attempting to change it from within. Nothing, ipso facto, wrong with that.
30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Sarah Sharp <<-- describes her involvement with kernel in 2007.
Okay, in that case she's been a part of it for a while now and has (so far as I know) suddenly decided she doesn't like the way things are. That's fine. Asking for change and such is fine to a point. However, this is also closely related to the ridiculous idea that people have a right not to be offended or to hear things they don't like. No such right exists.
If they are unwilling to change, and I unsurprisingly tend to agree with Linus's stance on the fakery involved in being "professional", then she can either deal with it or leave. The people on that list were the way they were long before she got there even if she has been involved with it for the last few years.
American Civil Rights Movement.
Done, done.
What is insightful about this? It isn't the same thing at all.
What you're referring to is a group already part of a society campaigning for equality within the society. One could argue that they could have simply left but those who were doing the campaigning didn't have that option nor was it necessarily the appropriate option. They also were not attempting to force society to adopt their standards and beliefs but to force society to apply its own standards and beliefs to them and treat them equally.
If this person on the LKML was saying that she wanted to be allowed to curse and such because she had been told women shouldn't do such things then your point would be valid, or at least more so. Instead she's demanding that everyone else change to accommodate her desires and world view.
If Sarah cannot stand the heat, she should go back to the kitchen.
See - now that is political incorrectness.
Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.
And if you enjoy fighting games or racing games or other console-friendly genres, that's fine. But when was the last time anyone made an RTS or RPG for a console that didn't have a dumbed-down control system? Some of the most interesting user interfaces in console gaming in recent years seem to be the ones that don't use the standard controllers at all.
To me this is the worst result of consoles being the primary development target. Dumbed down games. Overly simple console compatible control interfaces, overly simple game play, being shackled to what the current generation console is capable of while PCs race ahead in power.
Result: Piles of same old same old games with occasional kinda sorta bursts of something that resembles innovation. Mostly railshooters and sports games out the ass with occasional exceptions. Hell, what's the greatest thing about the new Call of Duty game? The dog and it is very pretty. Otherwise, it will likely be waist high walls as far as the eye can see between cut scenes. Because console.
Looks like a good place to leave this: http://www.movetoamend.org.
While the idea, amend vice ignore, is good their proposed amendment is deeply flawed. The language used would not only prohibit corporate speech, thus killing any right to advertise or promote their products unless granted permission by government, it would have the effect of eliminating all rights from any corporation. Including rights of property and many others.
Clearly it was put forth by someone who really just hates corporations for no logical reason while failing to remember that the vast majority of corporations are small affairs who would be destroyed by such a thing just as much as the megaliths they presumably are against.
It is also amusing to me, and has been since the ruling, that no one was up in arms over Unions (frequently corporations themselves) were buying elections and it only became a problem when organizations that were not unions got into the act.
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots. Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
The dichotomy is not false, it just simply hasn't come to fruition yet. If we look to history when you have large numbers of people from different ethnic or cultural values coming together one of two things must happen. They all blend to form a new people or, in the best case, they live together with mutual tension and the occasional flare up and/or war.
It is not possible to be both one people and many. You can have a country made up of many different peoples. You cannot have a Nation made up of such.
The American model is not a loss of all distinctiveness. It is a subsuming of their past beneath their current home. They come here and become American, the shared ideal we all in theory hold. If other places can't mange that maybe that says more about them than it does about the US, no?
Our founding fathers were not perfect. Neither are the documents they wrote. The Constitution endorsed slavery. Many will argue it was a necessary evil in order to get a compromise and have all colonies endorse the document. If that's the case, then there is no reason to believe there are other compromises in the document and it isn't flawed in other aspects.
Then it is a good thing that they included provisions for modifying it, isn't it? The problem is that many people want to just pick and choose the parts they like and interpret the others in ways that make no logical sense when taken as a whole and accounting for the intentions of those who wrote it.
If one does not like it, one should campaign to amend it and not merely ignore or interpret away the parts one does not like.
Hell, the State of California practically does that now.
Practically? In some parts of S. California I could walk outside my front door and not be able to read the commercial signs. You'd never know the official langauge of the country was English.
Point of order... that's because the US has no official language. It is generally held that such would be a violation of the First Amendment. :)
Some States, California among them, have passed official language laws but as far as I know they all lack enforcement clauses.
The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy.
Yes, it's only in that inconvenient real world that it happens. In case you've forgotten, wages in the USA started stagnating in the 70s and the divide between wealthy and poor grows larger each year. Moreover, the real world examples of unregulated capitalism (e.g. Pakistan, Somalia, Mexico, the USA, China) show exactly what happens when the government "gets out of the way." This is solely due to changes in government taxation regulation changes on high income earners and high income corporations, and the demise of checks on finance (i.e. Glass-steagall).
The divide between the wealthy and poor means exactly jack shit unless you can demonstrate that the poor are becoming more poor relative to themselves. It doesn't matter a bit if the rich are getting richer unless you can prove that they are getting that way by directly harming the poor.
You also fail at life for saying that China is an example of the government getting out of the way and trying to compare the US to any of the places you listed. Yet clearly the solution to all our problems is more government regulation and ever higher taxes and penalties. Surely that will jump start the economy!