I'd wager that if terrorism is killing feelings then those 1.6bn terrorised folk are terrorising the remaining 5bn+ people on the planet with this sort of bullshit.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that those 5bn+ people don't really object to censorship itself, just to the specific topics being censored. So this whole "free speech" thing could very well just be an anomaly in human history before we return back to censorship as usual (as we're already doing). Controlling the flow of information is simply a too effective tool for any regime to pass.
as long as economic exploitation is a problem, people are going to have a problem with prostitution since it can very easily be an egregious form of exploitation
As long as economic exploitation is a problem, banning prostitution will make life even worse for people who ended in prostitution because of it, because now theyre either criminals or at the very least forced to deal with them.
so you better find a way to make the exploitation is minimized.
I did (welfare state). Did you actually read the post you're answering to?
I think the real problem is that people care enough about exploitation that it makes them slightly uncomfortable, but not enough to be willing to actually pay the cost required to end it. Thus, they enact a feel-good law, ignore its actual consequences and call it a day. And there's probably quite a bit of active malice mixed in there too - for example, religious types who want to make sinners suffer.
if you can't, or you just want to find a reason to rationalize why you shouldn't try, you're not going to find many takers.
...And so you ignore everything I say to debate with a strawman. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, this being a political debate and all.
Oh well, I leave you to fight shadows, then.
not many people are this callous when it comes to society's policies
Most people are comfortable with simply banning prostitution and calling it a day, ignoring the fact that those who did it out of economic necessity still have that necessity, and are thus worse off than they were. Whether that's callousness or simple stupidity is anyone's guess.
europe has legal prostitution. now ask europe about it's human trafficking problems.
Europe is right next to poorer areas, which results in economic immigration. Human trafficking is based on criminals taking advantage of would-be immigrants, and has nothing to do with either legal or illegal prostitution.
Or do you think a slave-trader cares whether the forced occupation of their slaves would be legal were they not slaves and not forced?
the problem with selling sex is that it is not just sexually adventurous carefree libertines. it often and easily turns into a particularly vile form of economic exploitation. so if prostitution would ever be made legal, it would have to be regulated heavily
So how would regulating prostitution prevent economic exploitation? If someone is in desperate enough economic circumstances to be vulnerable to exploitation, they don't become any less vulnerable if you make prostitution illegal or regulated. If anything, their situation gets even worse since they presumably were taking the best option available to them, and now either resort to worse ones, put up with the criminal types who flock to illegal fields, or starve.
You can't stop economic exploitation by forbidding desperate people making a living in a way that exploits them. The only way to do it is to make sure no one is in a desperate economic situation to begin with, which in practice means a welfare state. So either build one, or accept that people are going to get exploited when they don't fare so well. Doing neither means you end up punishing the worst-off members of your society for having to do things you can afford not to.
Then again, that seems to be a desirable goal to plenty of people.
But then I could imagine some kind of 2D beacon grid buried with, say, the aforementioned 5 feet interval, and you could build any arbitrary navigation scheme on top of that. Power might be a problem - using wires to supply all those things might be a headache and require constant maintenance (but perhaps not, I really don't know much about that), but there are other ideas to consider, like magnetic induction...
If you're going to the trouble of burying wires and beacons, why not bury pipes and stationary sprinklers instead? Then you don't need drivable spraying equipment at all, just harvesters.
If NVIDIA started only offering its binary driver on BSD, windows and OSX, I think it's more likely that Linux users (particularly commercial ones) would switch to another OS, than switch to another graphics card manufacturer.
Or they would simply switch to noveuau, which according to yourself is good enough to get a picture on the screen. Because of all the reasons a commercial entity might use Linux, "fast 3D graphics" is the very last.
And in any case, switching graphic cards would likely be far easier than switching the OS and possibly rebuilding your entire software infrastructure, especially since continuing to use NVIDIA blob would leave you vulnerable to the whole thing happening again. And that's yet another reason to use open drivers: they protect you against forced obsolescence.
So, given that NVIDIA's choice is to give up a competitive edge or to intentionally implement its feature set in an obstructionist manner, how is the GPL "good" in this case?
Because it increases the cost of keeping the drivers closed, thus making it more likely that they'll be open-sourced fully. This, in turn, is good for the end user because bugs can be spotted and fixed in a timely manner, older devices are supported ad infinitum, and there's no suspicious binary blobs with ring 0 access to the system anymore. It's good for developers since they get to see all the code running on the system, making bug hunt and optimization easier. And its good for distros since the graphics driver gets updated along with the rest of kernel via the normal update mechanism.
It's not good for NVIDIA, of course, any more than any other limitation on their behaviour is. But that's of no concern to anyone but NVIDIA shareholders, which the vast majority of Linux users, developers and other stakeholders aren't. Which makes the GPL good for them.
No matter how much you try to turn and twist it around, freedom never comes with a "but".
Freedom always comes with a "but", because otherwise the biggest bully will simply take it away.
The only people with absolute freedom to do whatever they want were old-style absolute monarchs, and even their freedom had practical limitations (push too hard and you get a rebellion).
When are we going to get the converse? If you don't use the service, you don't have to pay for the service?
It was known as the era of Robber Barons, and they're so called because they could offer the services of private armies while the average citizen could not. So, hopefully never again.
A classic phase of a lot of dead empires is the squandering phase where an elite, which profits off of taxation by the empire, gets too greedy and kills the golden goose by raising taxes too much and using too little of those funds to reinvest in the empire.
So force to, in other words, tax the rich and spend the money on public works.
Err, given Ballmer's performance when compared to other CEOs of that level?
Think of it this way: CEOs are to pointy-haired bosses what pointy-haired bosses are to you. So, as long as Balmer sticks to throwing chairs instead of poo, he's already in the upper half.
The objective is mainly to lock away minerals to prevent mining and other economic use of land, and partly to consolidate more power. The more land the Federal government owns, the more they can inject themselves into everyones' business.
The Federal Government can invoke eminent domain on any land it pleases, thus it effectively owns all of it already. Thus your conspiracy theory is silly, or at the very least implying that the Feds is a very honorable and responsible conspiracy that plays nice, thinks long-term and avoids abusing its power. Does that sound like the Federal Government to you?
Besides, owning land basically means that the government has a record of you being its owner. You can't own land - or, really, anything - without it being the government's business, since it's them who you're going to call for backup the second someone bigger than you disputes that ownership. And it gets even more thorny if they aren't directly stealing from you but, say, buying a centimeter-thick area of land that completely surround your hourse, then blackmailing you by refusing you the right to cross unless you agree to some unconscionable terms - at that point simple ownership records are no longer sufficient to resolve the situation fairly.
Any aim that provides him with reasonable head lighting can place you in the focus of his headlights given the right road conditions. If his headlights are too intense you won't be able to see a thing after the encounter.
How about switching to red headlights? They wouldn't interfere with your night vision nearly as much, and would also scatter less in fog.
Or a high-tech solution: an LCD windshield that tracks the position of your eyes, calculates the positions where the line between them and bright light sources crosses the shield, and dims itself at those exact locations. Perhaps with some kind of failsafe that keeps larger than, say, 10% of the glass from being darkened any one time (make the power supply inadequate for anything larger), to avoid unfortunate malfunctions.
If economics is a science, it is a 'science' of hindsight.
Ask economists what caused the Great Depression, and some will say "too much regulation", and some "too little regulation". Ask whether government spending helped recovery, and some will say yes and some no. So no, economics is not a science of hindsight. It gets the rare disctinction of having just as bad hindsight as it does foresight. Which is a pretty impressive in itself.
The reason is obvious, of course: economists work for banks and other financial institutions which have lots of money riding on what economic policies the society adapts. So their job is not to figure out how economics work, it's to come up with convincing justification for whatever their employee wants to do. So economists are basically combinations of lawyers and politicians, thus making them perhaps not the most trustworthy individuals on planet.
Could it be that the reason so many people point this out is because it's true?
No, the reason why so many people point out "correlation is not causation" is because it's a convenient way to dismiss inconvenient correlations. In other words, it's a way to play stupid while pretending to be scientific and logical. Which is what's causing the backlash, too.
Special Relativity was immediately testable. In fact, one of the tests for its predictions turns out to be the Michelsonâ"Morley experiment, which was first performed in 1887 before Special Relativity was even a gleam in Einstein's eye. The M-M experiment was refined repeatedly during the period that Special Relativity was first discussed (1905-06) to focus on testing one of SR's basic predictions, so a test of at least one of special relativity's predictions existed by publication date.
Which means that it wasn't a prediction, any more than predicting that a ship like Titanic will likely sink if it hits an iceberg would be a prediction today. It's easy to come up with a theory that "predicts" what is already known; in the extreme case, just list all your "predictions" (postdictions?). So while SR certainly got credence by neatly explaining M-M experiment's results, it's wrong to say that it predicted it - because otherwise, every astrologer who "predicts" a famous figure's death after the fact could claim their horoscopes science.
No, actually, the *desktop* PC must pass, if simply because we will have better wearable/integrated computers in the future.
But every advance these wearable/integrated computers get will get rolled back to my desktop PC, which, because it is connected to both mains power and to wired network and has a decent keyboard and display, will forever remain more powerful than the battery/wireless/size-limited wearable/integrated computer.
Your argument is as silly as claiming that the era of artillery will pass just because we have better pistols now, and for the same reason.
If the map really is prior art, the patent can be invalidated (through courts or through the patent office). What first-to-file solves is having two inventors almost simultaneously filling for a patent.
/blockquoteA>
If two inventors simultanously apply for the same patent, shouldn't it be denied of the basis of obviousness?
And we can reinforce the point by sending anyone--particularly, but not exclusively, any judge or politician--who claims that corporations are people to labor camps in some American version of Siberia, say North Dakota, where they will be clothed in rags, housed in huts, fed on gruel, and worked to the edge of death. When their sentences are up, we can ask them if they understand the difference between corporations and people yet.
So basically, you're saying that anyone who thinks that corporations are (legal) persons should be sent to concentration camps?
Do you get paid by corporations? Because you certainly sound like a discredit shill. You, and all like you - whether you're paid or just plain evil - are part of the problem. The problem being that humans are willing to do bad things to other humans in the name of profits, ideology, religion, or whatever. And when they do, you? You're right there, waving cheerfully as the newest bunch of victims is shipped off. Fuck you.
Sooner or later, even if we find primitive life, we should start thinking about what can be done with the planet, even if it takes 1000 years to get something to live there.
It wouldn't. The main problem is the lack of liquid water, the second problem is the low atmospheric pressure, and the third is the low level of sunlight. A couple of ice asteroids would take care of the lack of water and atmosphere at the same time; after that, the question is how to prevent the newfound water from being stripped away by solar wind. While it would take millenias to happen, you can't exactly keep on asteroid bombing an inhabited planet and expect it to remain inhabited. So, Mars is habitable in a reasonable short time; but for long-term habitability, we would need some way to restart its core and magnetic field.
That's too bad, because if there's one plugin that deserves to be disabled whenever possible - it's Flash.
So what do you propose as a replacement? SVG? Inkscape still doesn't support animation and scripting, so how would one develop those little vector-based games that Flash is currently used for (and mere video tag can't replace)?
Raising prices means that people who don't really need a drive right now wait for prices to drop, so the users who are willing to pay the higher prices to fulfill real needs can still buy theirs. Rationing means that a company which needs drives today in order to grow its business can't buy them because they're being sold below market price to Joe Sixpack who wants a bigger drive to store more downloaded pr0n.
Being able to outbid Joe does not mean that you need the hard drive more than him, it just means that you can outbid him. I could almost certainly outbid someone from a famine zone for a piece of bread, but would I need it more? And you likely realize that too, because of your attempt to belittle Joe's needs with your reference to porn. Why should he suffer for the sake of your profits; is he going to get a share of them? No? Well then, maybe this teaches you to keep an adequate supply of needed resources on-site.
To put it even blunter, you and Joe both want a limited resource, so you get an even slice of it. Make do with it or go tits-up. Just because you have or want to make money doesn't mean you deserve a larger slice.
It does not benefit us as individuals to assign a moral motive to the actions of a company. Whatever they do, it's for a business purpose. If it seems like one company is the good guy, it's just that that's what they think will help them return value to the owners. We must realize that they are all "selfish bastards" by the very nature of the capitalist system and not be fooled into personifying them.
This would be true if companies were manned by robots, but they aren't. A company is just a lot of human beings cooperating, so each and every decision of the company is actually made by a human. That, in turn, means that someone has to make the decision between price gouging and rationing, and their personal morals will inevitably play some role in that.
Furthermore, one should understand that morality is an evolved trait. That is, being moral gives a survival advantage. To be more specific, being a ruthless bastard is a good way of ending up lynched, or at the very least destroying your own market. This is true for companies too: if a seller price gouges, the buyers will not only go elsewhere, but will almost certainly bear a grudge for a long time afterwards.
So, not only do companies have moral motives - because the people who make them up have them - but it certainly benefits us to assign their actions moral motives and reward or punish them accordingly. After all, rewarding a company for rationing rather than price gouging will increase the chances that it and its competitors will do the same thing the next time too; punishing (for example, by holding a grudge) companies that price gouge will make that a less attractive option, thus decreasing the chance that they'll do that the next time around. Note that this does not rely on companies actually having morality, it's just basic negative/positive reinforcement learning.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm becoming more and more convinced that those 5bn+ people don't really object to censorship itself, just to the specific topics being censored. So this whole "free speech" thing could very well just be an anomaly in human history before we return back to censorship as usual (as we're already doing). Controlling the flow of information is simply a too effective tool for any regime to pass.
So atheism is basically faith envy ?-)
As long as economic exploitation is a problem, banning prostitution will make life even worse for people who ended in prostitution because of it, because now theyre either criminals or at the very least forced to deal with them.
I did (welfare state). Did you actually read the post you're answering to?
I think the real problem is that people care enough about exploitation that it makes them slightly uncomfortable, but not enough to be willing to actually pay the cost required to end it. Thus, they enact a feel-good law, ignore its actual consequences and call it a day. And there's probably quite a bit of active malice mixed in there too - for example, religious types who want to make sinners suffer.
...And so you ignore everything I say to debate with a strawman. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, this being a political debate and all.
Oh well, I leave you to fight shadows, then.
Most people are comfortable with simply banning prostitution and calling it a day, ignoring the fact that those who did it out of economic necessity still have that necessity, and are thus worse off than they were. Whether that's callousness or simple stupidity is anyone's guess.
Europe is right next to poorer areas, which results in economic immigration. Human trafficking is based on criminals taking advantage of would-be immigrants, and has nothing to do with either legal or illegal prostitution.
Or do you think a slave-trader cares whether the forced occupation of their slaves would be legal were they not slaves and not forced?
So how would regulating prostitution prevent economic exploitation? If someone is in desperate enough economic circumstances to be vulnerable to exploitation, they don't become any less vulnerable if you make prostitution illegal or regulated. If anything, their situation gets even worse since they presumably were taking the best option available to them, and now either resort to worse ones, put up with the criminal types who flock to illegal fields, or starve.
You can't stop economic exploitation by forbidding desperate people making a living in a way that exploits them. The only way to do it is to make sure no one is in a desperate economic situation to begin with, which in practice means a welfare state. So either build one, or accept that people are going to get exploited when they don't fare so well. Doing neither means you end up punishing the worst-off members of your society for having to do things you can afford not to.
Then again, that seems to be a desirable goal to plenty of people.
Which is odd, since the Lidless Eye is located in London.
If you're going to the trouble of burying wires and beacons, why not bury pipes and stationary sprinklers instead? Then you don't need drivable spraying equipment at all, just harvesters.
Or they would simply switch to noveuau, which according to yourself is good enough to get a picture on the screen. Because of all the reasons a commercial entity might use Linux, "fast 3D graphics" is the very last.
And in any case, switching graphic cards would likely be far easier than switching the OS and possibly rebuilding your entire software infrastructure, especially since continuing to use NVIDIA blob would leave you vulnerable to the whole thing happening again. And that's yet another reason to use open drivers: they protect you against forced obsolescence.
Because it increases the cost of keeping the drivers closed, thus making it more likely that they'll be open-sourced fully. This, in turn, is good for the end user because bugs can be spotted and fixed in a timely manner, older devices are supported ad infinitum, and there's no suspicious binary blobs with ring 0 access to the system anymore. It's good for developers since they get to see all the code running on the system, making bug hunt and optimization easier. And its good for distros since the graphics driver gets updated along with the rest of kernel via the normal update mechanism.
It's not good for NVIDIA, of course, any more than any other limitation on their behaviour is. But that's of no concern to anyone but NVIDIA shareholders, which the vast majority of Linux users, developers and other stakeholders aren't. Which makes the GPL good for them.
Freedom always comes with a "but", because otherwise the biggest bully will simply take it away.
The only people with absolute freedom to do whatever they want were old-style absolute monarchs, and even their freedom had practical limitations (push too hard and you get a rebellion).
It was known as the era of Robber Barons, and they're so called because they could offer the services of private armies while the average citizen could not. So, hopefully never again.
So force to, in other words, tax the rich and spend the money on public works.
As opposed to random people on the Internet.
Think of it this way: CEOs are to pointy-haired bosses what pointy-haired bosses are to you. So, as long as Balmer sticks to throwing chairs instead of poo, he's already in the upper half.
The Federal Government can invoke eminent domain on any land it pleases, thus it effectively owns all of it already. Thus your conspiracy theory is silly, or at the very least implying that the Feds is a very honorable and responsible conspiracy that plays nice, thinks long-term and avoids abusing its power. Does that sound like the Federal Government to you?
Besides, owning land basically means that the government has a record of you being its owner. You can't own land - or, really, anything - without it being the government's business, since it's them who you're going to call for backup the second someone bigger than you disputes that ownership. And it gets even more thorny if they aren't directly stealing from you but, say, buying a centimeter-thick area of land that completely surround your hourse, then blackmailing you by refusing you the right to cross unless you agree to some unconscionable terms - at that point simple ownership records are no longer sufficient to resolve the situation fairly.
How about switching to red headlights? They wouldn't interfere with your night vision nearly as much, and would also scatter less in fog.
Or a high-tech solution: an LCD windshield that tracks the position of your eyes, calculates the positions where the line between them and bright light sources crosses the shield, and dims itself at those exact locations. Perhaps with some kind of failsafe that keeps larger than, say, 10% of the glass from being darkened any one time (make the power supply inadequate for anything larger), to avoid unfortunate malfunctions.
Ask economists what caused the Great Depression, and some will say "too much regulation", and some "too little regulation". Ask whether government spending helped recovery, and some will say yes and some no. So no, economics is not a science of hindsight. It gets the rare disctinction of having just as bad hindsight as it does foresight. Which is a pretty impressive in itself.
The reason is obvious, of course: economists work for banks and other financial institutions which have lots of money riding on what economic policies the society adapts. So their job is not to figure out how economics work, it's to come up with convincing justification for whatever their employee wants to do. So economists are basically combinations of lawyers and politicians, thus making them perhaps not the most trustworthy individuals on planet.
No, the reason why so many people point out "correlation is not causation" is because it's a convenient way to dismiss inconvenient correlations. In other words, it's a way to play stupid while pretending to be scientific and logical. Which is what's causing the backlash, too.
Which means that it wasn't a prediction, any more than predicting that a ship like Titanic will likely sink if it hits an iceberg would be a prediction today. It's easy to come up with a theory that "predicts" what is already known; in the extreme case, just list all your "predictions" (postdictions?). So while SR certainly got credence by neatly explaining M-M experiment's results, it's wrong to say that it predicted it - because otherwise, every astrologer who "predicts" a famous figure's death after the fact could claim their horoscopes science.
But every advance these wearable/integrated computers get will get rolled back to my desktop PC, which, because it is connected to both mains power and to wired network and has a decent keyboard and display, will forever remain more powerful than the battery/wireless/size-limited wearable/integrated computer.
Your argument is as silly as claiming that the era of artillery will pass just because we have better pistols now, and for the same reason.
So basically, you're saying that anyone who thinks that corporations are (legal) persons should be sent to concentration camps?
Do you get paid by corporations? Because you certainly sound like a discredit shill. You, and all like you - whether you're paid or just plain evil - are part of the problem. The problem being that humans are willing to do bad things to other humans in the name of profits, ideology, religion, or whatever. And when they do, you? You're right there, waving cheerfully as the newest bunch of victims is shipped off. Fuck you.
It wouldn't. The main problem is the lack of liquid water, the second problem is the low atmospheric pressure, and the third is the low level of sunlight. A couple of ice asteroids would take care of the lack of water and atmosphere at the same time; after that, the question is how to prevent the newfound water from being stripped away by solar wind. While it would take millenias to happen, you can't exactly keep on asteroid bombing an inhabited planet and expect it to remain inhabited. So, Mars is habitable in a reasonable short time; but for long-term habitability, we would need some way to restart its core and magnetic field.
So what do you propose as a replacement? SVG? Inkscape still doesn't support animation and scripting, so how would one develop those little vector-based games that Flash is currently used for (and mere video tag can't replace)?
Being able to outbid Joe does not mean that you need the hard drive more than him, it just means that you can outbid him. I could almost certainly outbid someone from a famine zone for a piece of bread, but would I need it more? And you likely realize that too, because of your attempt to belittle Joe's needs with your reference to porn. Why should he suffer for the sake of your profits; is he going to get a share of them? No? Well then, maybe this teaches you to keep an adequate supply of needed resources on-site.
To put it even blunter, you and Joe both want a limited resource, so you get an even slice of it. Make do with it or go tits-up. Just because you have or want to make money doesn't mean you deserve a larger slice.
This would be true if companies were manned by robots, but they aren't. A company is just a lot of human beings cooperating, so each and every decision of the company is actually made by a human. That, in turn, means that someone has to make the decision between price gouging and rationing, and their personal morals will inevitably play some role in that.
Furthermore, one should understand that morality is an evolved trait. That is, being moral gives a survival advantage. To be more specific, being a ruthless bastard is a good way of ending up lynched, or at the very least destroying your own market. This is true for companies too: if a seller price gouges, the buyers will not only go elsewhere, but will almost certainly bear a grudge for a long time afterwards.
So, not only do companies have moral motives - because the people who make them up have them - but it certainly benefits us to assign their actions moral motives and reward or punish them accordingly. After all, rewarding a company for rationing rather than price gouging will increase the chances that it and its competitors will do the same thing the next time too; punishing (for example, by holding a grudge) companies that price gouge will make that a less attractive option, thus decreasing the chance that they'll do that the next time around. Note that this does not rely on companies actually having morality, it's just basic negative/positive reinforcement learning.