Really? I say she is 25. My buddy says she is 180 (after all she is a cartoon character). You say she is 12. Of course you expect your (backed by a friendly to your opinion mob) choice to prevail and for us to be "punished" for not kowtowing to your arbitrary (as there is no objective determination possible with a cartoon) choice. Naturally.
So in no way could the production of pornography be linked to any harm.
No more (and in actuality far less so) then making of, say, Nike shoes, complete with "factories" full of 12-year olds with iron bars in the windows and padlocks and armed thugs at every exit, forced confinement to "workers dorms" etc and so on.
But when contrasted with inanimate things like cartoon characters, whose creation involved no live subjects of any kind, any inane blabbering about "harm" truly becomes a hallmark of utter, rabid lunacy.
The idea is that cartoon pornography is still pornography the same as a cartoon drama is still a drama. Same same but different na? Because the word "pornography" describes the content not the medium.
Since pornographic imagery in itself causes no harm (and I dare you to present objective, scientific evidence otherwise) your rant is quite pointless and only illustrates the depths of your indoctrination.
But then again I live in a nation where a naked breast does not cause national outcry. In fact they are quite common. AQIS will not arrest you for having porn, they don't have that power only the AFP (Australian Federal Police) agents (not the AQIS agent) can arrest you and you have to be charged for that to happen where you have rights under Australian law to a trial and representation. Unlike the US you cant be thrown into a room just for having Thailand and Philippines stamps on your passport.
And now onto another area of brainwashing: misguided "national pride". US is overrun by insane, hypocritical, power-mad Puritans even more then Australia. But whining that "we are not as bad as those other idiots! (although we are catching up, heehee)" does not really serve your arguments much.
I'm really sorry if you're having trouble with this concept, and that it upsets you so much but please, get your facts straight and do not project your fears onto other people.
What concept? That the insane cretins that are slowly overtaking the industrialized world with their bigotry and ever more draconian organized witch-hunts are growing ever more powerful and all voices of reason opposing them are being muzzled? That an age of hysterical neo-puritan oppression is dawning upon us? If so, I will always be having trouble with these kinds of developments. As should anyone who values liberty more then mega-corporate fast food.
in Australia, no distinction is made between a cartoon or a photograph (because they are both "depictions").
And for your next trick, Mr. Rabid Foaming At The Snout "Think Of The Children" Puritan, you will no doubt explain how one determines the "age" of the "actress" in a cartoon, without using words like "it seems to me" or "anyone can tell" or "cause I or my buddy judge just say so!". Any minute now.
But then again all "porn" laws have nothing whatsoever to do with reason, logic, justice or "protection" of "sexual victims" (or victims of "witches" or "heretics" or "satanic cults" or whatever other bogeyman seems convenient at the moment). They have on the other hand everything to do with dim-witted would be tyrants looking for means to create some kind of imbecilic "moral panic" amongst those who abhor thought, on the back of which they can ride to power and wealth, or just derive petty satisfaction in their pitiful minds that they are controlling what others can do and can "punish" anyone who disagrees.
The price of gold is set by the quantity of gold available and the demand for it, as is everything else. Since the total quantity of available gold isn't related at all to the production in any other industry, that's a really poor measure of the economic status of any one nation.
Sure total quantity of gold (or silver or uranium or whatever other natural resource) is not related to anything in any economy on the globle, but all of these materials are divisible in any arbitrary manner. You can get a "gold dollar" that weighs 1 gram and you can have a "gold micro-cent" that weights 1 milligram. These designations are arbitrary, but once a reference point is set, they simply operate on a simple decimal scale. So as economies grow, prices of items in them simply change (and usually go down) to ever smaller measures of the "reference" resource, be it gold or silver or whatever.
Sure it causes the dreaded "deflation", i.e. things actually getting cheaper due to advancement of economies and increase of supply of material goods, a scary thought that would imply that increased workers' productivity would end up benefiting the workers concerned as opposed to Wall Street speculators and therefore it must never come to pass...
Natural resources are however not ideal currencies only because their total quantities can be increased by mining. An ideal currency would be one that is material based (so it is divisible) and can be owned by simply storing it physically (so the banksters do not get to run the whole show) but total amount of which could not be arbitrarily increased at all by any government or private individual. This would remove the control of "value" of a currency from the hands of people who can simply spew more of "money" at their whim, thus essentially manipulating (and in effect enslaving) the rest of the idiot worker ants who labour under the delusion of receiving something of "value" for their labours, while in fact that "value" is entirely under control of governments and their attendant banksters.
Case in point, the US government could declare that as an "emergency measure" they are going to pay every last penny of their debt with newly minted money. And there is nothing that could stop them from doing so if the politicos were hysterical enough about it. There are multiple historical precedents in other nations for this, just look up the term "hyperinflation".
I won't bother addressing any of your other points, given that you are prone to whoopers such as this one.
You're still not getting it. Syncing is not the same thing. Sending the actual files is not what the patent does.
Oh for Pete's sake, how do you suppose the "syncing" occurs? By telepathy? Or perhaps "actual files" are sent from the rsync server to the rsync client?
The patent covers, sending a list of versions of files to a server, the server goes through it's archive and determines which files are out of date. Then it sends a list of those files, including summaries of what the files are, etc.. to the client so that this list can be displayed to the user, then that user can decide if he wants install any given update.
And keep telling you that this is a subset of a functionality of any rsync type utility. rsync client sends a list of versions of files to the server, the server compares the version to its archive and determines which are "out of date" (or simply different, depending on options). Then it sends the list of those files to the client and the user (if he chose that option at invocation) gets to decide if he wants to install the "updates", then the client downloads them and "installs" them. Of course rsync, unlike the Microsoft screwball hack, can do far more then just that.
So, rather than syncing files, it actually says "Blah.dll" was updated in service pack 3, therefore to update that file you need to download and install service pack 3.
And the end result is what exactly? The file "blah.dll" ends up "synced" to the Microsoft update server, does it not? Or are you trying to insinuate that doing such trivial and obvious things like dividing the rsync server archive into sub-directories (and calling each a "service pack" or "hot fix" or what not) is somehow a cosmic break-through that requires 70 year patent protection? Not to mention that rsync would actually save on bandwidth by only syncing files that are different within each "service pack" as opposed to the mental retardation of the Microsoft "method" that requires complete downloads for each "hot fix".
This is not the same thing. Inarguably, rsync does a lot more, it just doesn't do what the patent we're referring to does, and no matter how you wish to twist it, it's not the same thing.
No two software applications, barring actual bit-for-bit copies are "the same thing". The point however is that the bullshit patent covers a sub-set of functionality of utilities made long before Microsoft ever heard of "online updates".
And as to wishful thinking, it is the Microsoft lawyers and lobbyists who wish that their childish "innovations" somehow entitle them to "ownership" of obvious ideas.
It's like claiming that a semi truck is the same thing as a Jaguar XK8 because they can both get you from point a to b.
Bullshit. Its like claiming that a semi-trailer truck is a super-set of a 3-wheeled motorbike "truck" conversion made by a bunch of incompetent mechanics whose daddy lawyers then run to the patent office and file patents that cover all trucks, including all models and makes of the aforementioned semi-trailer types.
rsync does all that and more. In one of its modes, it takes a list of files and compares it against another on a server and then sends down "updated" (i.e. "newer versions") of files down to the client. The files can be programs and the versions can be simply dates of change or MD5 hashes or what not. The precise version tracking mechanism (of which there are literally an infinite number) is irrelevant.
Microsoft's update uses a small portion of that functionality, with a specific version tracking method. Rsync is far more universal and extensible (nearly any conceivable versioning method can be added to it in addition to the powerful built in ones) and thus a super-set of the Microsoft's "innovation".
On top of that rsync uses a sophisticated comparison mechanism designed to deal with hundreds of thousands of files, in contrast to the pitiful, horrendously inefficient and slow Microsoft update method that has hard times with a few hundreds of Windows DLLs, not to mention that rsync is capable of many modes of operation, such as bi-directional and on local file-systems.
There are of course other schemes, such as the RedHat Package Management or Debian's "apt-get/dpkg" systems which are designed to provide different (and far superior to the Microsoft's kludge "invention") functionality specifically designed to provide database functionality to program management (i.e. keeping track of each individual file in the system and a multitude of interdependencies of programs and their libraries) but they go far, far beyond the scope of the mundane, innovation repellent intellectual mediocrity that is Microsoft "update".
Actually, I can't think of a single software vendor that was doing what Windows Update did in 1995. Can you?
rsync, a UNIX utility that can perform this task not just on software but any file, "updating" both client and server side (if asked to). Developed in 1996 but based on the idea of "rdist" from 4.3 BSD released in 1986, which in turn was based on earlier such ideas going all the way back to 1960s.
In short the insanity that are software patents is quite handsomely illustrated here: most software is simply a variation on previous ideas, each iteration adding some quite obvious to any skilled programmer, but labour intensive improvements. There are very, very few true "innovations" worthy of consideration for the (highly flawed to begin with) idea of a "patent" in the software world and most of them were thought of in the heyday of computing pioneers in 1950s-1970s, where pretty much every worthwhile idea from a "file system" to "virtualization" was cooked up, with some like the concept of a Turing tape machine - which most modern computers are a variation of - even older then that, dating to 1940s.
What personal bias? The fact that I see obvious parallels between ancient Rome - one of the most vile empires ever - and the USA? In that vain any observation of this sort will constitute "personal bias" as would my pointing out that his musings about which Centurions are to get what swords made by whose sword-smiths and thus which Senator gets to get his snout in the troff first for it are somewhat slightly missing the larger picture.
As much as I tend towards isolationism, it's still hard not to respond that over the past century, at least a couple of "empire(s) based on non-American culture and values" have been proposed and imposed, with somewhat less than positive results.
That is because the problem lies in concepts such as "empire" and "impose", rather then "culture". Thus it is quite possible to have truly vicious crap going down that has nothing whatsoever to do with America or its culture.
At the same time however this does not excuse the USA in the slightest for falling for the lure of the Empire and all of its trappings anymore that it excused Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, whole slew of British royalty, Hirohito and his flunkies, Hitler, Stalin and many, many others.
I think a far more comprehensive and cost effective, albeit most unlikely, method is to simply revise your Imperial doctrine of 'Pax Americana' before it leads you inevitably down the same path as the Roman Empire before you.
US spends over twice as much on "defense" as all of the other nations of the world combined, maintains a network of "forward bases" in 135 counties (as of 2008) out of 194 that the US foreign department recognizes (that's over 69%) and wages wars of naked aggression whenever it pleases against whomever it pleases.
And so, as military spending was always a primary method of maintenance of all empires past, whining about how the Imperial Elite is getting rich off the very thing they've worked so hard to create in order to get power and riches is rather pathetically hypocritical on the part of an "upstanding" Imperial Citizen, like yourself. But then again, moaning about military expenditures, whilst watching the "games" in the Coliseum was also a favourite past-time of your Roman predecessors.
That can be a really tricky question for an awful lot of illegal activities
Being unable who the victim is makes for a very definition of an illegitimate "law" which makes such an activity arbitrarily (out of some frothing at the snout demagoguery, usually religious, desire to control and rule people or just plain bone-headed stupidity) "illegal".
It is precisely because "laws" like this exist that some of us find the entire "justice" system (and the elaborate charade that is the so-called "democracy") lacking any respectability whatsoever. Its simply the strong ruling the weak, the 21st century, PR-friendly version. "Justice" has nothing whatsoever to do with any of it, and one of the key characteristic of a "successful" individual in these "advanced" societies is how well is one able to shield himself/herself from that "law", which leads to cynical (and very true) observations that a completely different set of "laws" exists for the "in-crowd" as opposed to the "little people".
a FUCKING SATURN V ROCKET is comparable to a THREE WHEELER
Ok, since willful blindness seem to have no limit (we Canadians apparently receive our Health Care in mud-pits from shamans - since that would be the minimum disparity in "complexity" to make your comparison between a Saturn V and a three-wheeler even remotely valid) so lets forget about the Health Care "Reform" bill. Pick any other. Any fucking even semi-important legislation out of Senate or the House in, say, last 20 years. I dare you to explain the "unavoidable complexities" in every one of them that makes them exceed hundreds of pages at a minimum. Then come back complaining how the simpletons in Canada just don't get the awesome difficulties of greasing so many palms and stuffing so many pockets each hungrier then the other...
And claiming the Saturn V Rocket IS AS COMPLEX AS IT IS because of some elaborate CONSPIRACY by a CABAL of ENGINEERS.
If the specifications called for a government program to design an affordable to parents vehicle to transport a toddler around his play-pen, a Saturn V would be indeed a multi billion conspiracy between engineers, vendors and bureaucrats. The Canadian (and British, German, New Zealand... and pretty much any other less lawyer infested country out there) Health Care bills show that it is quite possible. The Swiss Federal Health Insurance Act of 1994, which is ideologically closest to the US effort runs less then 50 pages - and its a monster when compared to some others!
Is it pisspoor and utterly stupid? Why yes, it is! But that's not because the reforms are "too complex" and "designed to keep lawyers in jobs", it's because they're fucking retarded, put together by a bunch of ideologically hampered cretins who put right-wing ideology ahead of practicality and who were supported by sell-out wonks who wouldn't know practical if it slapped them around the head with a shark.
While it is true that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, it is rather apparent that the critters in Congress and Senate are anything but incompetent when it comes to their own and their friends' personal advancement. Thus I find your assertion of their utter incompetence somewhat baseless. Also an incompetent Congress-critter is likely to offload his work onto a... lawyer or two, aided by a friendly lawyer-cum-lobbyist or two. Which returns the problem right back to its source.
And what does it have to do with the argument that all lawyers suck?
Lawyers "suck" because they fulfill no useful role in society and their sole reason for being is of their own making. A definition of a social parasite. This encompasses the entire profession irrespective of their access to governance. Their penetration into the power structures of the USA (which parallels many other developed nations) is a mere example of a method by which they control the society to their own advantage. In absence of bizarre laws written by some lawyers, laws that are purposefully made incomprehensible to citizens, a judicial system run by some lawyers so byzantine that it prevents a vast majority of citizens from accessing it directly, no other lawyers would ever find employment, never you mind vastly lucrative employment, not to mention that in many cases they wield the power of life-and-death over "regular" citizens.
It's like saying all Catholic priests are pedophiles because a significant chunk of them are.
No, it is like saying that all Catholic priests are useless parasites using a self-contradictory, make-believe, psychotic book about an invisible man-in-the-sky to fool the weak minded into letting them control their lives and to enrich themselves and their cult in the process. Although they are on the decline, in times past they were responsible for vast massacres, ruled entire kingdoms and pretty much single handedly held back progress of humanity for centuries. Oh and a significant chunk of them are pedophiles.
A wee bit different from your straw-man there.
It makes you feel better, but its not true, and doesn't advance the conversation.
A conversation? With the likes of you? You let your hopes up too much. Talking down to is all you will ever be good for.
See, there you go: Keep trying to portray them as some homogenous group, and I'll keep laughing at you.
Oh they are laughing all right, all the way to the bank, given that all of them are as useful to society as that hole through your head is to you. But then again in your case, since you are brainless, it surely avoids any essential organs and it may even provide additional ventilation for that mass of bone to which that mindlessly wagging tongue is attached.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with reason or sanity. In some times, given enough media hysteria, US senate would vote to hunt and burn witches. The fact that some group or other of corrupt politicos is willing to vote or not to vote on something has no bearing on logical reasoning. Given enough money, corporate media control and time, one could buy enough senators to put through a bill declaring sky as red. Which is incidentally a side point to the one I was making, that laws long since have ceased to have anything to do with justice or reason.
Would you prefer that The President simply plunk down a hopefully benevolent bill and get a rubber stamp? That's fine if you happen to agree with the President (this time). Is it a "reasonable and sane" explanation? Probably not. Sorry.
The president himself is largely a bit player in this. The entire US system of governance is simply irreversibly compromised. Given this, no outcome is likely to have anything to do with reason and is likely to only benefit the castes running the show: i.e. lawyers and their associates in big business. It is no coincidence that the wealth disparity between the top 1% and the remainder of the US population is exploding exponentially, now having exceeded the pre-1929 crash levels.
All of which only contributes to the point I was making.
It's not a viable alternative because something like it would never have passed
Again, that is not a criterion for sanity. A terrorist-witch-hunt-and-corporate-mercenaries-windfall-law, aka the Patriot Act, had no trouble passing. That does not make it sane.
Not because a mysterious cabal of lawyers refused to let them, but because enough law makers simply don't trust the government to run a Health Care system.
Again, even if they "trusted" the government to run Health Care (like it does the Army, which apparently creates no concern at all) the bill would still have 2900 pages (or likely much more). The point is that irrespective of the political "wind direction" the lawyers in the Congress and Senate would have ensured their own troff being filled and "unavoidable complexities" would ensue or else "no one would vote for it".
As long as those rules don't contradict an existing law, they have the force of law.
Such "internal" rules then aren't. Canadian bureaucracy is not entitled to doing so with a blanket cop-out of "and they can make up anything they want as-they-go if we forgot something in this here act as long as...", which is what you are suggesting.
Wow. Guilt by association of profession. Fucking nice leap there, moron.
Sure, what percentage of US Senate and House of Representatives is composed of lawyers again? Here is a hint: 45% of House, 60% of Senate and for reference, lawyers constitute national percentage of all workforce to the tune of.... 1%. Some "Fucking leap".
You are a moron indeed.
Yawn. Get a better contract, then. Or, gasp, sue for the breach. Again, it's the game, not the players...
Sure because the "game" would play itself without the players. Funnier yet, in this (like any other) game it is some of those players who set the "rules". For your first mental challenge not involving a bag of hammers, try to play the game without the players and with no rules made by any of the players involved.
But then again your imbecilic head is likely to explode trying.
You point out the Health Care bill in other places, but again fail to make any detailed analysis of how it could actually be simplified. You compare it to a much simpler Canadian version, ignoring the fact that the laws cover completely different things. The Canadian law establishes a bureaucracy to completely run the national health care system. A bureaucracy which no doubt has thousands of pages of internal policies and procedures to help it run itself.
I keep pointing out that the Canadian version effects more radical changes then the US counterpart and yet achieves this with a fraction of the size. Also the "internal policies" are not law. They are not inherently enforceable as such and can be challenged by anyone. The only pertaining law of the land in effect is the act itself.
The US version is a completely different animal. It is making laws and regulation that govern outside entities (insurance companies, state boards of health and welfare, individual people, etc), establishes a smaller and less powerful internal bureaucracy, and creates a fairly complex system of timelines and gates.
And I keep pointing out that it does so purely for the sake of complexity to allow room for lawyers and their "interpretation". There is no other reason whatsoever for "complex system of timelines and gates". The whole point of establishing such a system is its complexity, to allow the entities that are supposedly being "reformed" a room to maneuver and to enable them to take advantage of these provisions to maximize their immunity from this "reform".
A sane form of the reform would be "all provisions of this bill take effect 90 days from the date of enactment". I dare you to explain the rationale for "complex time-lines" in any way involving reason and sanity.
Could it have been simpler? No doubt.
You better believe it.
Your examples and evidence are poor or nonexistent, and you don't present any viable alternatives
Oh for Pete's sake, an actual bill that governs the entire medical establishment of a whole country for the last 30 years is not an example of a "viable alternative" only because you say so! Right.
That's like saying hammers win when you have to take apart that rotten trellis in the backyard. Stupid.
Oh yeah, because everyone knows that hammers get paid for their job at the cost triple of the worth of that trellis, were originally directly responsible for spreading the rot to the trellis and are insisting that you build the new trellis using exclusively them, all the while ensuring that the new trellis is not rot resistant as to ensure further employment in the future rot-infestation-problem they plan for you to have...
Enjoy the silence. I don't think you're going to get an answer here, for obvious reasons.
A bit quick with that "submit" button, no?
And while we are here, what "obvious" reasons? The "health care reform" (more accurately "health insurance and corporate welfare reform") bill is a laughing stock for anyone who has even a modicum of reasoning power. It "reforms" nothing of significance, it uses the power of the state to divert funds from citizens to private corporations, it is purposefully so complex as to allow any of its provisions to be circumvented if needed by the corporations it purports to govern (which was the original point in my first post - I should have known that desperate partisans of Obama would jump in to defend this nonsense, no matter how pathetic it is)... etc and so on.
So, could you elaborate a bit on these "obvious" reasons? While you are at it, could you explain that "silence" bit?
There is no way to "reconcile" utter stupidity. You might pretend, posture and bluster, but the truth is that the bill was written for the explicit purpose of not reforming anything significant and to preserve all the cash flow of the "vested interests" while attempting to create an impression of "change". Its size is the direct result of that effort - it has to be vastly complex to allow for ample insertion of "interpretation" should the need arise, while at the same time allowing the politicians to beat their breasts exclaiming that they've "fought the good fight" and similar nonsense.
What amazes me is that with all of this patently obvious for everyone to see, there is a significant portion of US electorate who are taken in (or more accurately are desperately willing to abandon any pretense of critical thinking in order to be taken in) by these maneuvers. They've invested so much of their personal psyche into some sort of mis-guided hope for "change", supposedly symbolized by Obama, that they are willing to do pretty much anything to avoid facing the facts.
As I pointed out to others, the fact that precision is required and that the problems addressed can be complicated are poor excuses for what the lawyers are up to.
While the problem domain might require a precise algorithm, what the lawyers really want and what they get is the proverbial "spaghetti code". The "law" is orders of magnitude (and growing exponentially) past any sane estimate of "complexity" of any effective rules to govern society.
The very fact that lawyers are needed is a testimony to failure of the "law" as a mechanism to guide behavior of the citizenry as the fundamental principle behind law is that everyone must know all of it lest he/she is at the risk of not following it to the letter and "not knowing the law is no excuse". The idea of anyone, much less everyone, knowing all law is a cruel joke these days, thus leaving pretty much everyone open to attack by vengeful authorities, hostile businesses, litigious lunatics etc. It also allows for the law to be "interpreted" (aided by the other insanity that is "case" law) pretty much arbitrarily.
No one is arguing that complexities and exceptions do not exist. What I am pointing out is that while the problem domain requires a, say, 20 line of code, the lawyers are insisting on 4000.
They are using the "complexity" as an excuse to expand the law far beyond any sanity and to create complexity where none have existed, for the sake of that complexity, as it enables them to control the "interpretation" of that law and to insert loopholes etc.
In fact their whole livelihood depends on creating that complexity.
Why in the world do you think laws are written in convoluted archaic "law-speak", very much like religious scripts are?
You are a perfect example why lawyers are likely to be the end of Western civilization. You are willing to abandon any pretense of "law" as a system to govern society justly for all for temporary "pragmatic" political expediency to "save jobs". The law-monkeys must be truly laughing all the way to the bank at the thought of the likes of you...
Actually, yes. You are supposed to memorize the whole law, otherwise you will be unable to follow it to the letter.
The fact that this is in practice impossible leaves you (and every other "citizen") wide open to abuse by authorities, moneyed interests and just plain litigious wackos down the street. There are endless examples of this, many of the discussed here on Slashdot over the years.
Also your example with a dictionary is a straw-man, since unlike with the law you are not going to be penalized for not remembering some obscure definition of a word, but "no officer, I did not remember I am not supposed to do that" is not going to get you out of trouble. The amount of laws and by-laws that are in operation at any given place in the US is so staggering that you are very likely to be breaking some of them daily, all in blissful ignorance (until some "authority figure" with a grudge decides to enforce one of them).
You gotta be kidding. There is no sane justification in any sort of "complexity" that could expand upon the (already sub-optimal language wise) Canadian version to make it grow 400-fold! Other then lawyer-talk for "loophole" and "we are going to make a killing on this!".
I already pointed other poster here for an example of a law that was not written for lawyers. It covers more then the US equivalent (i.e. it not only reforms Health Care but it also institutes a national single-payer system) and yet it is somewhat short of 1100 pages - a product of times and a place where lawyers did not yet run the show completely. If attempted today, the same bill would probably resemble the US monster quite handsomely.
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Really? I say she is 25. My buddy says she is 180 (after all she is a cartoon character). You say she is 12. Of course you expect your (backed by a friendly to your opinion mob) choice to prevail and for us to be "punished" for not kowtowing to your arbitrary (as there is no objective determination possible with a cartoon) choice. Naturally.
No more (and in actuality far less so) then making of, say, Nike shoes, complete with "factories" full of 12-year olds with iron bars in the windows and padlocks and armed thugs at every exit, forced confinement to "workers dorms" etc and so on.
But when contrasted with inanimate things like cartoon characters, whose creation involved no live subjects of any kind, any inane blabbering about "harm" truly becomes a hallmark of utter, rabid lunacy.
Since pornographic imagery in itself causes no harm (and I dare you to present objective, scientific evidence otherwise) your rant is quite pointless and only illustrates the depths of your indoctrination.
And now onto another area of brainwashing: misguided "national pride". US is overrun by insane, hypocritical, power-mad Puritans even more then Australia. But whining that "we are not as bad as those other idiots! (although we are catching up, heehee)" does not really serve your arguments much.
What concept? That the insane cretins that are slowly overtaking the industrialized world with their bigotry and ever more draconian organized witch-hunts are growing ever more powerful and all voices of reason opposing them are being muzzled? That an age of hysterical neo-puritan oppression is dawning upon us? If so, I will always be having trouble with these kinds of developments. As should anyone who values liberty more then mega-corporate fast food.
And for your next trick, Mr. Rabid Foaming At The Snout "Think Of The Children" Puritan, you will no doubt explain how one determines the "age" of the "actress" in a cartoon, without using words like "it seems to me" or "anyone can tell" or "cause I or my buddy judge just say so!". Any minute now.
But then again all "porn" laws have nothing whatsoever to do with reason, logic, justice or "protection" of "sexual victims" (or victims of "witches" or "heretics" or "satanic cults" or whatever other bogeyman seems convenient at the moment). They have on the other hand everything to do with dim-witted would be tyrants looking for means to create some kind of imbecilic "moral panic" amongst those who abhor thought, on the back of which they can ride to power and wealth, or just derive petty satisfaction in their pitiful minds that they are controlling what others can do and can "punish" anyone who disagrees.
Sure total quantity of gold (or silver or uranium or whatever other natural resource) is not related to anything in any economy on the globle, but all of these materials are divisible in any arbitrary manner. You can get a "gold dollar" that weighs 1 gram and you can have a "gold micro-cent" that weights 1 milligram. These designations are arbitrary, but once a reference point is set, they simply operate on a simple decimal scale. So as economies grow, prices of items in them simply change (and usually go down) to ever smaller measures of the "reference" resource, be it gold or silver or whatever.
Sure it causes the dreaded "deflation", i.e. things actually getting cheaper due to advancement of economies and increase of supply of material goods, a scary thought that would imply that increased workers' productivity would end up benefiting the workers concerned as opposed to Wall Street speculators and therefore it must never come to pass...
Natural resources are however not ideal currencies only because their total quantities can be increased by mining. An ideal currency would be one that is material based (so it is divisible) and can be owned by simply storing it physically (so the banksters do not get to run the whole show) but total amount of which could not be arbitrarily increased at all by any government or private individual. This would remove the control of "value" of a currency from the hands of people who can simply spew more of "money" at their whim, thus essentially manipulating (and in effect enslaving) the rest of the idiot worker ants who labour under the delusion of receiving something of "value" for their labours, while in fact that "value" is entirely under control of governments and their attendant banksters.
Case in point, the US government could declare that as an "emergency measure" they are going to pay every last penny of their debt with newly minted money. And there is nothing that could stop them from doing so if the politicos were hysterical enough about it. There are multiple historical precedents in other nations for this, just look up the term "hyperinflation".
I won't bother addressing any of your other points, given that you are prone to whoopers such as this one.
Oh for Pete's sake, how do you suppose the "syncing" occurs? By telepathy? Or perhaps "actual files" are sent from the rsync server to the rsync client?
And keep telling you that this is a subset of a functionality of any rsync type utility. rsync client sends a list of versions of files to the server, the server compares the version to its archive and determines which are "out of date" (or simply different, depending on options). Then it sends the list of those files to the client and the user (if he chose that option at invocation) gets to decide if he wants to install the "updates", then the client downloads them and "installs" them. Of course rsync, unlike the Microsoft screwball hack, can do far more then just that.
And the end result is what exactly? The file "blah.dll" ends up "synced" to the Microsoft update server, does it not? Or are you trying to insinuate that doing such trivial and obvious things like dividing the rsync server archive into sub-directories (and calling each a "service pack" or "hot fix" or what not) is somehow a cosmic break-through that requires 70 year patent protection? Not to mention that rsync would actually save on bandwidth by only syncing files that are different within each "service pack" as opposed to the mental retardation of the Microsoft "method" that requires complete downloads for each "hot fix".
No two software applications, barring actual bit-for-bit copies are "the same thing". The point however is that the bullshit patent covers a sub-set of functionality of utilities made long before Microsoft ever heard of "online updates".
And as to wishful thinking, it is the Microsoft lawyers and lobbyists who wish that their childish "innovations" somehow entitle them to "ownership" of obvious ideas.
Bullshit. Its like claiming that a semi-trailer truck is a super-set of a 3-wheeled motorbike "truck" conversion made by a bunch of incompetent mechanics whose daddy lawyers then run to the patent office and file patents that cover all trucks, including all models and makes of the aforementioned semi-trailer types.
rsync does all that and more. In one of its modes, it takes a list of files and compares it against another on a server and then sends down "updated" (i.e. "newer versions") of files down to the client. The files can be programs and the versions can be simply dates of change or MD5 hashes or what not. The precise version tracking mechanism (of which there are literally an infinite number) is irrelevant.
Microsoft's update uses a small portion of that functionality, with a specific version tracking method. Rsync is far more universal and extensible (nearly any conceivable versioning method can be added to it in addition to the powerful built in ones) and thus a super-set of the Microsoft's "innovation".
On top of that rsync uses a sophisticated comparison mechanism designed to deal with hundreds of thousands of files, in contrast to the pitiful, horrendously inefficient and slow Microsoft update method that has hard times with a few hundreds of Windows DLLs, not to mention that rsync is capable of many modes of operation, such as bi-directional and on local file-systems.
There are of course other schemes, such as the RedHat Package Management or Debian's "apt-get/dpkg" systems which are designed to provide different (and far superior to the Microsoft's kludge "invention") functionality specifically designed to provide database functionality to program management (i.e. keeping track of each individual file in the system and a multitude of interdependencies of programs and their libraries) but they go far, far beyond the scope of the mundane, innovation repellent intellectual mediocrity that is Microsoft "update".
rsync, a UNIX utility that can perform this task not just on software but any file, "updating" both client and server side (if asked to). Developed in 1996 but based on the idea of "rdist" from 4.3 BSD released in 1986, which in turn was based on earlier such ideas going all the way back to 1960s.
In short the insanity that are software patents is quite handsomely illustrated here: most software is simply a variation on previous ideas, each iteration adding some quite obvious to any skilled programmer, but labour intensive improvements. There are very, very few true "innovations" worthy of consideration for the (highly flawed to begin with) idea of a "patent" in the software world and most of them were thought of in the heyday of computing pioneers in 1950s-1970s, where pretty much every worthwhile idea from a "file system" to "virtualization" was cooked up, with some like the concept of a Turing tape machine - which most modern computers are a variation of - even older then that, dating to 1940s.
What personal bias? The fact that I see obvious parallels between ancient Rome - one of the most vile empires ever - and the USA? In that vain any observation of this sort will constitute "personal bias" as would my pointing out that his musings about which Centurions are to get what swords made by whose sword-smiths and thus which Senator gets to get his snout in the troff first for it are somewhat slightly missing the larger picture.
That is because the problem lies in concepts such as "empire" and "impose", rather then "culture". Thus it is quite possible to have truly vicious crap going down that has nothing whatsoever to do with America or its culture.
At the same time however this does not excuse the USA in the slightest for falling for the lure of the Empire and all of its trappings anymore that it excused Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, whole slew of British royalty, Hirohito and his flunkies, Hitler, Stalin and many, many others.
I think a far more comprehensive and cost effective, albeit most unlikely, method is to simply revise your Imperial doctrine of 'Pax Americana' before it leads you inevitably down the same path as the Roman Empire before you.
US spends over twice as much on "defense" as all of the other nations of the world combined, maintains a network of "forward bases" in 135 counties (as of 2008) out of 194 that the US foreign department recognizes (that's over 69%) and wages wars of naked aggression whenever it pleases against whomever it pleases.
And so, as military spending was always a primary method of maintenance of all empires past, whining about how the Imperial Elite is getting rich off the very thing they've worked so hard to create in order to get power and riches is rather pathetically hypocritical on the part of an "upstanding" Imperial Citizen, like yourself. But then again, moaning about military expenditures, whilst watching the "games" in the Coliseum was also a favourite past-time of your Roman predecessors.
Firefox somehow ate the "to tell" from that sentence when I hit post...
Being unable who the victim is makes for a very definition of an illegitimate "law" which makes such an activity arbitrarily (out of some frothing at the snout demagoguery, usually religious, desire to control and rule people or just plain bone-headed stupidity) "illegal".
It is precisely because "laws" like this exist that some of us find the entire "justice" system (and the elaborate charade that is the so-called "democracy") lacking any respectability whatsoever. Its simply the strong ruling the weak, the 21st century, PR-friendly version. "Justice" has nothing whatsoever to do with any of it, and one of the key characteristic of a "successful" individual in these "advanced" societies is how well is one able to shield himself/herself from that "law", which leads to cynical (and very true) observations that a completely different set of "laws" exists for the "in-crowd" as opposed to the "little people".
Ok, since willful blindness seem to have no limit (we Canadians apparently receive our Health Care in mud-pits from shamans - since that would be the minimum disparity in "complexity" to make your comparison between a Saturn V and a three-wheeler even remotely valid) so lets forget about the Health Care "Reform" bill. Pick any other. Any fucking even semi-important legislation out of Senate or the House in, say, last 20 years. I dare you to explain the "unavoidable complexities" in every one of them that makes them exceed hundreds of pages at a minimum. Then come back complaining how the simpletons in Canada just don't get the awesome difficulties of greasing so many palms and stuffing so many pockets each hungrier then the other ...
If the specifications called for a government program to design an affordable to parents vehicle to transport a toddler around his play-pen, a Saturn V would be indeed a multi billion conspiracy between engineers, vendors and bureaucrats. The Canadian (and British, German, New Zealand ... and pretty much any other less lawyer infested country out there) Health Care bills show that it is quite possible. The Swiss Federal Health Insurance Act of 1994, which is ideologically closest to the US effort runs less then 50 pages - and its a monster when compared to some others!
While it is true that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, it is rather apparent that the critters in Congress and Senate are anything but incompetent when it comes to their own and their friends' personal advancement. Thus I find your assertion of their utter incompetence somewhat baseless. Also an incompetent Congress-critter is likely to offload his work onto a ... lawyer or two, aided by a friendly lawyer-cum-lobbyist or two. Which returns the problem right back to its source.
Lawyers "suck" because they fulfill no useful role in society and their sole reason for being is of their own making. A definition of a social parasite. This encompasses the entire profession irrespective of their access to governance. Their penetration into the power structures of the USA (which parallels many other developed nations) is a mere example of a method by which they control the society to their own advantage. In absence of bizarre laws written by some lawyers, laws that are purposefully made incomprehensible to citizens, a judicial system run by some lawyers so byzantine that it prevents a vast majority of citizens from accessing it directly, no other lawyers would ever find employment, never you mind vastly lucrative employment, not to mention that in many cases they wield the power of life-and-death over "regular" citizens.
No, it is like saying that all Catholic priests are useless parasites using a self-contradictory, make-believe, psychotic book about an invisible man-in-the-sky to fool the weak minded into letting them control their lives and to enrich themselves and their cult in the process. Although they are on the decline, in times past they were responsible for vast massacres, ruled entire kingdoms and pretty much single handedly held back progress of humanity for centuries. Oh and a significant chunk of them are pedophiles.
A wee bit different from your straw-man there.
A conversation? With the likes of you? You let your hopes up too much. Talking down to is all you will ever be good for.
Oh they are laughing all right, all the way to the bank, given that all of them are as useful to society as that hole through your head is to you. But then again in your case, since you are brainless, it surely avoids any essential organs and it may even provide additional ventilation for that mass of bone to which that mindlessly wagging tongue is attached.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with reason or sanity. In some times, given enough media hysteria, US senate would vote to hunt and burn witches. The fact that some group or other of corrupt politicos is willing to vote or not to vote on something has no bearing on logical reasoning. Given enough money, corporate media control and time, one could buy enough senators to put through a bill declaring sky as red. Which is incidentally a side point to the one I was making, that laws long since have ceased to have anything to do with justice or reason.
The president himself is largely a bit player in this. The entire US system of governance is simply irreversibly compromised. Given this, no outcome is likely to have anything to do with reason and is likely to only benefit the castes running the show: i.e. lawyers and their associates in big business. It is no coincidence that the wealth disparity between the top 1% and the remainder of the US population is exploding exponentially, now having exceeded the pre-1929 crash levels.
All of which only contributes to the point I was making.
Again, that is not a criterion for sanity. A terrorist-witch-hunt-and-corporate-mercenaries-windfall-law, aka the Patriot Act, had no trouble passing. That does not make it sane.
Again, even if they "trusted" the government to run Health Care (like it does the Army, which apparently creates no concern at all) the bill would still have 2900 pages (or likely much more). The point is that irrespective of the political "wind direction" the lawyers in the Congress and Senate would have ensured their own troff being filled and "unavoidable complexities" would ensue or else "no one would vote for it".
Such "internal" rules then aren't. Canadian bureaucracy is not entitled to doing so with a blanket cop-out of "and they can make up anything they want as-they-go if we forgot something in this here act as long as ...", which is what you are suggesting.
Sure, what percentage of US Senate and House of Representatives is composed of lawyers again? Here is a hint: 45% of House, 60% of Senate and for reference, lawyers constitute national percentage of all workforce to the tune of .... 1%. Some "Fucking leap".
You are a moron indeed.
Sure because the "game" would play itself without the players. Funnier yet, in this (like any other) game it is some of those players who set the "rules". For your first mental challenge not involving a bag of hammers, try to play the game without the players and with no rules made by any of the players involved.
But then again your imbecilic head is likely to explode trying.
Next.
I keep pointing out that the Canadian version effects more radical changes then the US counterpart and yet achieves this with a fraction of the size. Also the "internal policies" are not law. They are not inherently enforceable as such and can be challenged by anyone. The only pertaining law of the land in effect is the act itself.
And I keep pointing out that it does so purely for the sake of complexity to allow room for lawyers and their "interpretation". There is no other reason whatsoever for "complex system of timelines and gates". The whole point of establishing such a system is its complexity, to allow the entities that are supposedly being "reformed" a room to maneuver and to enable them to take advantage of these provisions to maximize their immunity from this "reform".
A sane form of the reform would be "all provisions of this bill take effect 90 days from the date of enactment". I dare you to explain the rationale for "complex time-lines" in any way involving reason and sanity.
You better believe it.
Oh for Pete's sake, an actual bill that governs the entire medical establishment of a whole country for the last 30 years is not an example of a "viable alternative" only because you say so! Right.
Oh yeah, because everyone knows that hammers get paid for their job at the cost triple of the worth of that trellis, were originally directly responsible for spreading the rot to the trellis and are insisting that you build the new trellis using exclusively them, all the while ensuring that the new trellis is not rot resistant as to ensure further employment in the future rot-infestation-problem they plan for you to have ...
Stupid indeed.
A bit quick with that "submit" button, no?
And while we are here, what "obvious" reasons? The "health care reform" (more accurately "health insurance and corporate welfare reform") bill is a laughing stock for anyone who has even a modicum of reasoning power. It "reforms" nothing of significance, it uses the power of the state to divert funds from citizens to private corporations, it is purposefully so complex as to allow any of its provisions to be circumvented if needed by the corporations it purports to govern (which was the original point in my first post - I should have known that desperate partisans of Obama would jump in to defend this nonsense, no matter how pathetic it is) ... etc and so on.
So, could you elaborate a bit on these "obvious" reasons? While you are at it, could you explain that "silence" bit?
There is no way to "reconcile" utter stupidity. You might pretend, posture and bluster, but the truth is that the bill was written for the explicit purpose of not reforming anything significant and to preserve all the cash flow of the "vested interests" while attempting to create an impression of "change". Its size is the direct result of that effort - it has to be vastly complex to allow for ample insertion of "interpretation" should the need arise, while at the same time allowing the politicians to beat their breasts exclaiming that they've "fought the good fight" and similar nonsense.
What amazes me is that with all of this patently obvious for everyone to see, there is a significant portion of US electorate who are taken in (or more accurately are desperately willing to abandon any pretense of critical thinking in order to be taken in) by these maneuvers. They've invested so much of their personal psyche into some sort of mis-guided hope for "change", supposedly symbolized by Obama, that they are willing to do pretty much anything to avoid facing the facts.
As I pointed out to others, the fact that precision is required and that the problems addressed can be complicated are poor excuses for what the lawyers are up to.
While the problem domain might require a precise algorithm, what the lawyers really want and what they get is the proverbial "spaghetti code". The "law" is orders of magnitude (and growing exponentially) past any sane estimate of "complexity" of any effective rules to govern society.
The very fact that lawyers are needed is a testimony to failure of the "law" as a mechanism to guide behavior of the citizenry as the fundamental principle behind law is that everyone must know all of it lest he/she is at the risk of not following it to the letter and "not knowing the law is no excuse". The idea of anyone, much less everyone, knowing all law is a cruel joke these days, thus leaving pretty much everyone open to attack by vengeful authorities, hostile businesses, litigious lunatics etc. It also allows for the law to be "interpreted" (aided by the other insanity that is "case" law) pretty much arbitrarily.
No one is arguing that complexities and exceptions do not exist. What I am pointing out is that while the problem domain requires a, say, 20 line of code, the lawyers are insisting on 4000.
They are using the "complexity" as an excuse to expand the law far beyond any sanity and to create complexity where none have existed, for the sake of that complexity, as it enables them to control the "interpretation" of that law and to insert loopholes etc.
In fact their whole livelihood depends on creating that complexity.
Why in the world do you think laws are written in convoluted archaic "law-speak", very much like religious scripts are?
You are a perfect example why lawyers are likely to be the end of Western civilization. You are willing to abandon any pretense of "law" as a system to govern society justly for all for temporary "pragmatic" political expediency to "save jobs". The law-monkeys must be truly laughing all the way to the bank at the thought of the likes of you ...
Actually, yes. You are supposed to memorize the whole law, otherwise you will be unable to follow it to the letter.
The fact that this is in practice impossible leaves you (and every other "citizen") wide open to abuse by authorities, moneyed interests and just plain litigious wackos down the street. There are endless examples of this, many of the discussed here on Slashdot over the years.
Also your example with a dictionary is a straw-man, since unlike with the law you are not going to be penalized for not remembering some obscure definition of a word, but "no officer, I did not remember I am not supposed to do that" is not going to get you out of trouble. The amount of laws and by-laws that are in operation at any given place in the US is so staggering that you are very likely to be breaking some of them daily, all in blissful ignorance (until some "authority figure" with a grudge decides to enforce one of them).
You gotta be kidding. There is no sane justification in any sort of "complexity" that could expand upon the (already sub-optimal language wise) Canadian version to make it grow 400-fold! Other then lawyer-talk for "loophole" and "we are going to make a killing on this!".
I already pointed other poster here for an example of a law that was not written for lawyers. It covers more then the US equivalent (i.e. it not only reforms Health Care but it also institutes a national single-payer system) and yet it is somewhat short of 1100 pages - a product of times and a place where lawyers did not yet run the show completely. If attempted today, the same bill would probably resemble the US monster quite handsomely.