> It has been said that "You can't legislate morality." But that is a falacy because what else is legislation for?
It is true that you cannot legislate morality. Morality involves a choice. Legislating away a perceived incorrect choice does not make one more moral. Laws should only be enacted which offer the protection of citizens from violating each others basic civil liberties and go no further to restrict freedoms. This would include things like criminalizing rape and murder. Note this is not the way the U.S. Congress legislates. They routinely trample freedoms in pursuit of forcing their idea of morality, patriotism or even religion down our throats. The War on Drugs is a perfect example where they basically regulate what one can put in their body while in the privacy of their own home. There are many other examples of this such as the Flag Desecration Amendment, the CDA, Defense of Marriage Act, etc., etc. How do you think the Bill of Rights would fare these days if it were up to being passed by our present day Congress? I would bet it would be very different and be much more antifreedom in its content. What was given to us by giants is being slowly nibbled away by midgets all in the name of legislating morality, patriotism and religion.
I just thought it was funny, given the context of his comment. Anyway, as a douchebag, I get inserted into a lot of vaginas. I came out of the womb and ever since I've been trying to get back into it. So it is only appropriate that I be a douchebag. Maybe you should try it sometime.
> I apologize for correcting spelling and punctuation in the questions submitted by the readers. Blame the writer in me. Besides, Slashdot has enough mispelt words as it is.
mispelt? Is that a joke? It is not a word. I am no English major, but I don't think this is correct.
>Since when does a woman have 4 arms, 4 legs, 2 hearts, and 2 brains?
A zygote has none of these. I do agree with you that late term abortions should be very rare as I think it is absoutely the worst form of birth control. Perhaps abortion would be even more rare if we had real sex education classes like they do in some more enlightened European countries. Their abortion rates/teen pregnancy rates are far lower than ours.
This is what always puzzled me. So-called conservatives say they want the Gov't out of your life, but then they try and implement the most invasive laws and constitutional amendments. They want to regulate what I put in my body, what I can do with my body (if I were female, that is), who I can and cannot marry, what materials/pictures/movies/etc. I can view and/or posses and I am sure more than a few would like to tell me which god to worship. I guess you can have all the freedom you want as long as it is economic and any amendment from the Bill of Rights that you want as long as it is the 2nd one.
Just today little Bushy was spewing more propaganda about how we need to pursue the War on Drugs which is really a euphemism for the War on our Civil Liberties. Just what the uS needs is more irrationalism...It is so depressing.
What was unbelievably bad actually was the fact that I had used my wife's account and it had been a while since she used it so they made us fill out many pages of personal info to update her account. There were at least 3 or 4 of these things. I did manage to download it this morning, so I am now happy. Thanks to all who replied.
My dad just got a new G4 with OSX on it. He wanted to network it with his Win2K box so I thought I'd just build Samba on it. After I figured out how to get root on it, I discovered the most basic UNIX tools were not there (e.g., Make, gcc, etc.). There was nothing on the disks that shipped with it, so I went to apple.com and what they put you through to download the GNU tools is unbelievably bad. I like OSX, but it seems to me if they want people to develop for it they would want to make it easy to get the tools to do it. I had to fill out form after form after form and at the end there was still no obvious link to download the GNU tools. It was late and maybe I was just tired, so if anyone knows an easy way to get these let me know.
Copy the win98 directory on the CD to your hard drive, and you'll no longer have this problem. Putting on 2nd partition is an even better idea so that when win98 shits itself, reformatting and reinstalling is easy.
Who decides which opinions are worthy of being denied? This is more murky than you might suppose. The way you fight these opinions are not with censorship but with more speech. In fact these bad opinions should be allowed for all to judge their value. Perhaps former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said it best: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
As an example, when the Nazis (or was it the KKK?) wanted to march in Washington D.C. recently, the counter demonstration was so huge that they canceled the march and ran out of D.C. with their tails between their legs. This is how one fights opinions that are evil. Not with censorship.
Almost none of these are Linux. Linux is just a kernel. For a more realistic comparison why not compare the security records of Apache against IIS. I think that is about all you need to do to illustrate that MS seems to have never heard of input validation or something.
1) First off, prohibition of drugs has an opposite effect. During the prohibition of alcohol, consumption increased. Also when a substance is illegal, its potency tends to increase. In fact, Holland has lower drug usage rates among teens than the U.S. depite their tolerant attitude. The war on drugs is an abysmal failure and only serves to curtail civil liberties. It is a war on the American People.
2) By trade, I am a physicist. I know many atmospheric scientists and global warming, I assure you, is not imaginary. The science here is sound. Even Bush had to admit it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/ ne wsid_1375000/1375089.stm
3) Yes, corporations *are* legally considered persons:
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/Coperson.htm
4) I've never heard of Nader wanting to censor anything. References please. As far as media monopolies go, what do call AOL/Time/Warner? MSNBC? They may not be a monopoly *yet*, but I don't think you can say it is not headed in this direction. There used to be a time when there seemed to be a law against one person owning so many radio stations, newspapers, etc. especially when they were in the same location. There have already been stories that were altered or squelched due to the conflict of interest of corporate masters.
5) On this point, we are in agreement. I think Ralph does need to do something with his portfolio. But hey, who's perfect anyway? Certainly not any of the other candidates.
Without going into it too much, as I said before, there are things that I care about more than money or taxes. My most pressing issues when selecting a candidate are civil liberties and the environment. I like the fact that Nader is against this idiotic "War on Drugs", would take global warming seriously, would end corporate personhood, abolish the death penalty, support a free, diverse and uncensored media in part by using antitrust actions to break up these emerging media monopolies (I find all these media mergers particularly disturbing), etc. There is a lot more I like about his stances that I will not go into. There are things I don't like too, like requiring the breakup of any firm with more than 10% market share unless it makes a compelling case every five years in a public regulatory proceeding. I don't think this would fly, but you can't have it all.
The same could be said for our Idiot in Chief. Otherwise the right *should* have nominated McCain or Keyes and the left *should* have just dumped Gore and went with Nader. That would have been a much more interesting election. I would especially love to see a debate between Keyes and Nader. Both those men are brilliant and it would have been much more exciting than "Lockbox" and "Fuzzy Math." Some of us voters care more about other issues besides money and taxes. These were barely addressed.
You can yell "Fire!" in a theater all you want even if there is no fire and you will be perfectly permitted to do so unless you cause an immediate breach of the peace, such as a riot. If everyone just tells you to sit down and shut up, you've broken no laws. You can also pretty much slander anyone you want as well. Slander is *very* difficult to prosecute, since it is inherently spoken. Libel is written, but still it has a high threshold to be able to be successfully prosecuted, especially if the plantiff is a public figure. Then you can pretty much forget about it. How do think The Enquirer and The Star survive? Most of what they do is libel. BTW, it does not need to be a lie to be slander or libel. If I was your next door neighbor and just happened to be the editor of the Washington Post and I was pissed because you let your grass grow too high or something and the I wrote a truthful but malicious Op Ed piece about your personal sex life that did you great measurable damage than you could successfully sue my ass...as long as you aren't a public figure.
Anyway, I think the way to combat terrorism is with more speech and not less. Terrorists are generally born in fertile beds of poverty and ignorance. The sooner the 1st world wakes up and realizes that as long as we have terribly skewed distributions of wealth and the accoutrements of such, we will have this problem. This administration in the US claims that they are not "nation builders." If they don't become such very soon, then prepare for more of the same. This is the same mistake we made a decade ago in Afganistan as well as with Germany after WWI, etc. Look at what good the Marshall plan did for Europe and Japan for an example.
As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, even I agree that some restrictions of civil liberties may be neccessary in time of war, but these should be made temporary and be kept to a minimum. The Bush administration has gone way over the top in my opinion on several fronts. I think this is another one. What will they be restricting next? Perhaps scientific journals in "dangerous" fields? Certainly you could make the same arguements...
If you have a large number of servers/clients to patch, one can use apt-get or rpm with a cron job with no user interaction. How is this achieved using windowsupdate?
My external RAID-5 unit has 3 75GB 75GXP drives (and we bought a fourth as backup) where one failed 3 months after receiving it. Another drive seemed to have failed a couple weeks ago and after taking it out and reinstalling it, the RAID unit stopped complaining about that particular drive but it did have to rebuild it. The company I bought the RAID from replaced it but never said anything. I even emailed IBM about it, and their reply was this:
"I would suspect this is not a drive issue and is caused by interference
on the bus. Faster ATA RAID configs are very susceptible to noise and
require good shielding and 80 conductor cables."
This is seemingly a very well built RAID unit and seems to have very high quality cabling. I had my suspicions about this and now I am even more so...
I consider myself an environmentalist and I could not agree more. Nuclear has gotten an underservedly bad wrap. The way I see it is you have a choice between two evils: greenhouse gases and nuclear waste. In my opinion, the greenhouse gases are the bigger threat. Anyway, this is a good way to go until fusion works. BTW, I was thinking maybe the best way to do solar is to have every house with those solar shingles. This would not totally supplant the current electrical service, but it would reduce consumption. I don't know if the technology is there yet though. Another nice thing would be superconducting transmission lines, but I think we are nowhere near that goal yet.
I think their goal may be practical to quantum computing. I could explain this here, but I already did it
here.
Basically, you need to be able to create a quantum copier to create a quantum computer. Building a quantum copier is difficult because, due to the no-cloning theorem, arbitrary quantum states cannot be copied perfectly every time. You can either clone a subset of quantum states perfectly or you can copy arbitrary states with a certain probability of failure.
Of course you are correct. What's wrong with just being a narrow interest-group kind of thing? At least we would be a narrow interest-group for mostly all the right reasons. I think there are already plenty of interest-groups for these broader issues. I think there is a vacuum though for exactly the types of things I stated in my last post. At least there is a vacuum on the "against" side. I am pretty sure big corps. have the "for" side covered at least for the DMCA and UCITA. We are (for the most part, I am betting) the "against" side, but we are not organized.
when Apache is free and has none of the security bugs of IIS. Even if you are running winNT/2k, I don't see why anyone who had the choice would choose IIS. On my machines at home and at school, one of the first things I do is rip out wu-ftpd and replace it with NcFTPd for the same reason I'd rip out IIS and install Apache.
Why can't these virus writers code their shit such that it checks the type of webserver running on the victim before making 16 or so more connections? It would spare my poor little/var partition a lot of space.
Slashdot Mirror
> It has been said that "You can't legislate morality." But that is a falacy because what else is legislation for?
It is true that you cannot legislate morality. Morality involves a choice. Legislating away a perceived incorrect choice does not make one more moral. Laws should only be enacted which offer the protection of citizens from violating each others basic civil liberties and go no further to restrict freedoms. This would include things like criminalizing rape and murder. Note this is not the way the U.S. Congress legislates. They routinely trample freedoms in pursuit of forcing their idea of morality, patriotism or even religion down our throats. The War on Drugs is a perfect example where they basically regulate what one can put in their body while in the privacy of their own home. There are many other examples of this such as the Flag Desecration Amendment, the CDA, Defense of Marriage Act, etc., etc. How do you think the Bill of Rights would fare these days if it were up to being passed by our present day Congress? I would bet it would be very different and be much more antifreedom in its content. What was given to us by giants is being slowly nibbled away by midgets all in the name of legislating morality, patriotism and religion.
I just thought it was funny, given the context of his comment. Anyway, as a douchebag, I get inserted into a lot of vaginas. I came out of the womb and ever since I've been trying to get back into it. So it is only appropriate that I be a douchebag. Maybe you should try it sometime.
> I apologize for correcting spelling and punctuation in the questions submitted by the readers. Blame the writer in me. Besides, Slashdot has enough mispelt words as it is.
mispelt? Is that a joke? It is not a word. I am no English major, but I don't think this is correct.
>Since when does a woman have 4 arms, 4 legs, 2 hearts, and 2 brains?
A zygote has none of these. I do agree with you that late term abortions should be very rare as I think it is absoutely the worst form of birth control. Perhaps abortion would be even more rare if we had real sex education classes like they do in some more enlightened European countries. Their abortion rates/teen pregnancy rates are far lower than ours.
http://my.webmd.com/content/article/1728.55272
This is what always puzzled me. So-called conservatives say they want the Gov't out of your life, but then they try and implement the most invasive laws and constitutional amendments. They want to regulate what I put in my body, what I can do with my body (if I were female, that is), who I can and cannot marry, what materials/pictures/movies/etc. I can view and/or posses and I am sure more than a few would like to tell me which god to worship. I guess you can have all the freedom you want as long as it is economic and any amendment from the Bill of Rights that you want as long as it is the 2nd one.
Just today little Bushy was spewing more propaganda about how we need to pursue the War on Drugs which is really a euphemism for the War on our Civil Liberties. Just what the uS needs is more irrationalism...It is so depressing.
Not exactly. Linux and Unix determine file type by magic number. Try renaming a postscript file (or whatever) as foo and type
file foo
and you'll see that it still returns the correct file type.
What was unbelievably bad actually was the fact that I had used my wife's account and it had been a while since she used it so they made us fill out many pages of personal info to update her account. There were at least 3 or 4 of these things. I did manage to download it this morning, so I am now happy. Thanks to all who replied.
My dad just got a new G4 with OSX on it. He wanted to network it with his Win2K box so I thought I'd just build Samba on it. After I figured out how to get root on it, I discovered the most basic UNIX tools were not there (e.g., Make, gcc, etc.). There was nothing on the disks that shipped with it, so I went to apple.com and what they put you through to download the GNU tools is unbelievably bad. I like OSX, but it seems to me if they want people to develop for it they would want to make it easy to get the tools to do it. I had to fill out form after form after form and at the end there was still no obvious link to download the GNU tools. It was late and maybe I was just tired, so if anyone knows an easy way to get these let me know.
Copy the win98 directory on the CD to your hard drive, and you'll no longer have this problem. Putting on 2nd partition is an even better idea so that when win98 shits itself, reformatting and reinstalling is easy.
> Most of the population from south of the
> mason-dixon line
Perhaps you should be more specific. Maybe a better way to state it is all the actual or potential Jerry Springer guests?
Who decides which opinions are worthy of being denied? This is more murky than you might suppose. The way you fight these opinions are not with censorship but with more speech. In fact these bad opinions should be allowed for all to judge their value. Perhaps former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said it best: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."
As an example, when the Nazis (or was it the KKK?) wanted to march in Washington D.C. recently, the counter demonstration was so huge that they canceled the march and ran out of D.C. with their tails between their legs. This is how one fights opinions that are evil. Not with censorship.
Almost none of these are Linux. Linux is just a kernel. For a more realistic comparison why not compare the security records of Apache against IIS. I think that is about all you need to do to illustrate that MS seems to have never heard of input validation or something.
1) First off, prohibition of drugs has an opposite effect. During the prohibition of alcohol, consumption increased. Also when a substance is illegal, its potency tends to increase. In fact, Holland has lower drug usage rates among teens than the U.S. depite their tolerant attitude. The war on drugs is an abysmal failure and only serves to curtail civil liberties. It is a war on the American People.
/ ne wsid_1375000/1375089.stm
2) By trade, I am a physicist. I know many atmospheric scientists and global warming, I assure you, is not imaginary. The science here is sound. Even Bush had to admit it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas
3) Yes, corporations *are* legally considered persons:
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/Coperson.htm
4) I've never heard of Nader wanting to censor anything. References please. As far as media monopolies go, what do call AOL/Time/Warner? MSNBC? They may not be a monopoly *yet*, but I don't think you can say it is not headed in this direction. There used to be a time when there seemed to be a law against one person owning so many radio stations, newspapers, etc. especially when they were in the same location. There have already been stories that were altered or squelched due to the conflict of interest of corporate masters.
5) On this point, we are in agreement. I think Ralph does need to do something with his portfolio. But hey, who's perfect anyway? Certainly not any of the other candidates.
Without going into it too much, as I said before, there are things that I care about more than money or taxes. My most pressing issues when selecting a candidate are civil liberties and the environment. I like the fact that Nader is against this idiotic "War on Drugs", would take global warming seriously, would end corporate personhood, abolish the death penalty, support a free, diverse and uncensored media in part by using antitrust actions to break up these emerging media monopolies (I find all these media mergers particularly disturbing), etc. There is a lot more I like about his stances that I will not go into. There are things I don't like too, like requiring the breakup of any firm with more than 10% market share unless it makes a compelling case every five years in a public regulatory proceeding. I don't think this would fly, but you can't have it all.
The same could be said for our Idiot in Chief. Otherwise the right *should* have nominated McCain or Keyes and the left *should* have just dumped Gore and went with Nader. That would have been a much more interesting election. I would especially love to see a debate between Keyes and Nader. Both those men are brilliant and it would have been much more exciting than "Lockbox" and "Fuzzy Math." Some of us voters care more about other issues besides money and taxes. These were barely addressed.
You can yell "Fire!" in a theater all you want even if there is no fire and you will be perfectly permitted to do so unless you cause an immediate breach of the peace, such as a riot. If everyone just tells you to sit down and shut up, you've broken no laws. You can also pretty much slander anyone you want as well. Slander is *very* difficult to prosecute, since it is inherently spoken. Libel is written, but still it has a high threshold to be able to be successfully prosecuted, especially if the plantiff is a public figure. Then you can pretty much forget about it. How do think The Enquirer and The Star survive? Most of what they do is libel. BTW, it does not need to be a lie to be slander or libel. If I was your next door neighbor and just happened to be the editor of the Washington Post and I was pissed because you let your grass grow too high or something and the I wrote a truthful but malicious Op Ed piece about your personal sex life that did you great measurable damage than you could successfully sue my ass...as long as you aren't a public figure.
Anyway, I think the way to combat terrorism is with more speech and not less. Terrorists are generally born in fertile beds of poverty and ignorance. The sooner the 1st world wakes up and realizes that as long as we have terribly skewed distributions of wealth and the accoutrements of such, we will have this problem. This administration in the US claims that they are not "nation builders." If they don't become such very soon, then prepare for more of the same. This is the same mistake we made a decade ago in Afganistan as well as with Germany after WWI, etc. Look at what good the Marshall plan did for Europe and Japan for an example.
As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, even I agree that some restrictions of civil liberties may be neccessary in time of war, but these should be made temporary and be kept to a minimum. The Bush administration has gone way over the top in my opinion on several fronts. I think this is another one. What will they be restricting next? Perhaps scientific journals in "dangerous" fields? Certainly you could make the same arguements...
If you have a large number of servers/clients to patch, one can use apt-get or rpm with a cron job with no user interaction. How is this achieved using windowsupdate?
My external RAID-5 unit has 3 75GB 75GXP drives (and we bought a fourth as backup) where one failed 3 months after receiving it. Another drive seemed to have failed a couple weeks ago and after taking it out and reinstalling it, the RAID unit stopped complaining about that particular drive but it did have to rebuild it. The company I bought the RAID from replaced it but never said anything. I even emailed IBM about it, and their reply was this:
"I would suspect this is not a drive issue and is caused by interference
on the bus. Faster ATA RAID configs are very susceptible to noise and
require good shielding and 80 conductor cables."
This is seemingly a very well built RAID unit and seems to have very high quality cabling. I had my suspicions about this and now I am even more so...
I consider myself an environmentalist and I could not agree more. Nuclear has gotten an underservedly bad wrap. The way I see it is you have a choice between two evils: greenhouse gases and nuclear waste. In my opinion, the greenhouse gases are the bigger threat. Anyway, this is a good way to go until fusion works. BTW, I was thinking maybe the best way to do solar is to have every house with those solar shingles. This would not totally supplant the current electrical service, but it would reduce consumption. I don't know if the technology is there yet though. Another nice thing would be superconducting transmission lines, but I think we are nowhere near that goal yet.
I think their goal may be practical to quantum computing. I could explain this here, but I already did it here. Basically, you need to be able to create a quantum copier to create a quantum computer. Building a quantum copier is difficult because, due to the no-cloning theorem, arbitrary quantum states cannot be copied perfectly every time. You can either clone a subset of quantum states perfectly or you can copy arbitrary states with a certain probability of failure.
Of course you are correct. What's wrong with just being a narrow interest-group kind of thing? At least we would be a narrow interest-group for mostly all the right reasons. I think there are already plenty of interest-groups for these broader issues. I think there is a vacuum though for exactly the types of things I stated in my last post. At least there is a vacuum on the "against" side. I am pretty sure big corps. have the "for" side covered at least for the DMCA and UCITA. We are (for the most part, I am betting) the "against" side, but we are not organized.
Ok, Let's take a quick vote:
Who thinks the DMCA, UCITA, and/or the CDA are great pieces of legislation and should be supported?
My votes are no, no and no.
Better yet, maybe Bill Gates should be prosecuted for releasing his IIS and LookOut! DDoS tools. I think those two are the worst ones ever conceived.
when Apache is free and has none of the security bugs of IIS. Even if you are running winNT/2k, I don't see why anyone who had the choice would choose IIS. On my machines at home and at school, one of the first things I do is rip out wu-ftpd and replace it with NcFTPd for the same reason I'd rip out IIS and install Apache.
Why can't these virus writers code their shit such that it checks the type of webserver running on the victim before making 16 or so more connections? It would spare my poor little /var partition a lot of space.