Meanwhile the rest of the planet will treat an unenforcable court order from this judge about as seriously as they would a court order from the judge in this case.
But that's a remarkably good and just decision, actually. Fuck someone else's goat and you have to pay for it, after which the goat is yours and you are free to continue. And it also has an element of absurd humor in it:).
Your theory intrigues me. I've wondered why wealthy, intelligent people have fewer children. One would think that they would want to spread their good genes around more.
Why would they ? They get no benefit from it, quite on contrary: they need to devote time and effort into rising children. And they tend to be wealthy because they have the habit of taking the course of action that benefits them.
Oh, and a good social position does not imply that one has good genes. See Just-world phenomenon.
I can only imagine, that this test was way deeper than gamma can penetrate back up through the soil. I don't have numbers, but I'd bet probably no more than 15 feet of dense earth would stop gamma.
I don't have numbers either, but I'm pretty sure that a nuke that can't blast 15 feet of dense earth away from below isn't going to be much of a threat to anyone.
I know, half my extended family abuses the system (with some having been on welfare for more than 20 years). Not just welfare, but SSI, Food Shelves, and a large number of other programs as well. They work very hard at gaming the system, and they have a network of people they are in regular contact with that discuss ways to find loopholes and exploit things. Not illegally, mind you, but it should be.
Ah, American enterpreneur spirit at its finest:). Seriously, isn't this what various business leaders do - only they do it through a corporation, instead of just getting food for themselves ?
What the fuck? The man has all the choice in the world about whether to have sex with a woman in the first place.
And the woman has the choice about whether or not to have sex with the man. Don't try to push the decision to have sex to the mans shoulders alone.
If you don't want to pay for the consequences of your actions, perhaps you should act more carefully.
I couldn't agree more. If you don't want to risk becoming a single mother, don't sleep around. And if you do, and get pregnant, don't try to blame the man for it - it was your own decision to risk it.
Alternatively, we could simply consider women to not be legal adults, and therefore not fully responsible for their actions, but for some reason they didn't seem to be happy with this arrangement when it was in place.
"Not giving it away" smacks of an outdated paradigm that hasn't worked for decades, if not longer.
Apparently it isn't as outdated as you seem to think, since giving it up has caused the very problem the paradigm was supposedly created to prevent - single mothers without the ability to raise children and make a living simultaneously.
What happens to third party, open source disk drivers like TrueCrypt?
The aquaphobic communist hippies are no longer allowed to unfairly deprive Microsoft its rightful profits for its innovative and patent-protected Rot-13 -based proprietary disk encryption.
I'm an optimist by nature, so I'll say it'll take hackers 3 months to crack the kernel DRM.
I'm hoping for a year. That gives Vista enough time to spread to make it impossible to make large-scale re-engineering, and will also give people enough time to learn what DRM actually means for them. Let the people suffer enough that they'll hate DRM and view the DRM-breaking hackers as heroes.
Sony were just trying to protect their business assets from piracy - albeit is a rather misguided manner. Whereas most of the users of sites like rootkit.com are black hat hackers looking for something to put in their next spambot trojan.
But aren't most spambot trojans business assets ? After all, spam makes money - that's why spammers bother - so rootkits are business assets for blackhat hackers, even more so than they are for Sony.
No, these poor hackers are simply trying to protect their right to profit - just like Sony. And if that means taking the control of the computer away from its owner, well, surely you agree that that's a small price to pay to ensure that those damn users aren't depriving them of those profits, right ? Sony certainly seems to...
Even YLE(the Finnish national broadcast company, about the same as BBC is in UK) is looking into Youtube and unauhorized use of its content. They haven't excluded the idea of suing Youtube through USA courts.
Why ? YLE has been hellbent on pushing digital broadcasting - to the point where analogical ones end in less than a year, despite this putting hospitals and other such institutions to an impossible situation, as well as making television a useless communication medium in an emergency if there's any interference - and unlike the "digi-tv", downloading movie files from the Internet actually works and works well.
Oh well. In a year's time I'll either get to download the MPEG-2 packed programs from the Internet, or quit television entirely. I've spent 80 euros on the stupid nonfunctional digital shit, I'm not spending any more. It shouldn't matter to YLE how I get the bytes, but then again, copyright laws have never made sense...
Well, I tried to post a video for a friend, under his account, that he had the right to distribute - it was a television broadcast of his own performance.
Haven't you heard ? Television channels own the copyright to the signal they send. Therefore, your friend is a criminal who was trying to shaft them out of their rightful profits.
I'm starting to think that the only solution is to abolish copyright completely - any copyright model, no matter how reasonably seeming, will inevitably creep towards draconic. "Just say no to copyright" - you may quote me on that.
It is also read-only, once committed to memory^w posterity.
I think that the historians of various dictatorships would be very surprised to find that out, altought they'd be experienced enough to hide that surprise.
Or does it mean that, since Slashdotters never find a spouse, that they don't suffer the frustrations of marriage and so are less likely to be murderers?
That depends. Does deleting hentai pics count as murdering your lover ?-)
Some murderers might be "rehabilitated" according to the justice system, but the fact remains that the flaw exists in their personality that once drove them to kill someone. If you were angry enough to actually kill someone (not out of self defense), I'm sorry, but that's a major flaw in your mental makeup.
The problem is that this flaw is shared by nearly every living being on this planet. Nearly everyone is willing to kill, given the suitable incentive - it may be anger, it may be patriotism, it may be defending your political rights (which is not the same as self-defense, which means defending your person from an immediate threat), it may be religion, it may be hatred of religion, it may be the desire to conform ("I was just following orders")... to each their excuse. But it's there.
Banality of evil is a nasty thing to accept, since it means that evil things aren't done just by evil maniacs, but can be done by anyone in the right circumstances. All it takes is a refusal to consider someone quite human - a bit like you're doing right now, I might add - after which that presumed inhumanity can be used to justify inhuman treatment. Everyone is a potential murderer, no one is immune to the lure of evil; some people are simply better at resisting it than others, and of course not everyone faces the same temptations.
So yeah, a murderer is a flawed individual. But so are you. I bet it is possible to hurt you bad enough that you want revenge. That doesn't mean that you are a murderer, of course, but it means that you could become, given the right circumstances. The potential - the seed of evil, if you want to put it that way - is there. And it doesn't mean that murderers shouldn't be locked up and punished, but it does mean that classifying them as less than fully human - which this entire "they can't be rehabilitated, they have a flawed personality" thing comes down to - means starting down the same road they once walked. After all, the first step of becoming a murderer is, after all, telling yourself that your victim deserves to die or at least be hurt.
And it isn't the flaw in their personality that drove them to kill, it simply allowed them to act on their violent impulses.
So making every last day of their life for 20+ years a living hell is somehow better than an execution?
Imprisonment doesn't make anyone's life a living hell, at least here in the civilized world where prisons are staffed and controlled adequately to prevent abuses by the other inmates or the staff. Dunno about how it is in the US: the prison system there is certainly infamous for its abuses and inability to control the inmates - prison rapes being prime examples of that - but it is hard to say how much of that is based on fact and not fiction.
Besides, the fact that most prisoners don't end up killing themselves certainly seems to indicate that life in prison is better than none whatsoever, even in America.
To summarize the summary, this is wildly irresponsible. I can't believe people smart enough to write this software are dumb enough to think they can contain it. Absolute morons, I'd call them.
On the contrary, they are pure genius... marketers, that is. "This program is so efficient we can't let it fall into wrong hands. It's strictly for government." It's the same trick makers of Z-class horror movies used to use - demand that everyone going to the cinema takes a life insurance in case they'll be scared to death.
Just look at this, all of us taking clearly untrue marketing claims ("firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software.") as truths and repeating them to each other. Shame on you, Slashdot.
With competition in the market place the best way to describe it, in biological terms, would be to say it's like individuals competing against each other in a society, which is, in fact, what it is. You end up saying social interaction is social interaction, which is pretty much a pointless exercise.
Individuals carry moral responsibility for their actions. The whole idea of a corporation is to remove that responsibility by letting the imaginary "corporation" entity take it.
That people make up BS analogies in order to justify unethical actions in business or society goes back to the early social Darwinists, and the arguments are just as flawed now as they were then.
Why on Earth do you think that any of this justifies any kind of behavior ? I'm pointing out that corporations can indeed give birth to new corporations. Others have pointed out that Microsoft is largely comparable to a swarm of locusts. That doesn't justify their behavior, it simply attempts to examine it.
Evolution requires differential reproductive success and corporations don't reproduce.
Actually, they do. Corporations sometimes split parts of their business functions into new corporations to "focus on their core competencies" or something like that. Monopolies can also be split by courts. Then there's the model where a number of people working in a corporation leave to find a new one - the existence of the new corporation is a direct result of these people working together in the old corporation, so I'd say that the old corporation has an effect on what the new corporation will be like.
And, of course, the only reason why evolution requires reproduction is that living beings have a hard time of changing their phenotype once their genotype has been deployed; for a corporation it is relatively easy, since it does not really exist except in the imagination of people and is thus not bound by laws of physics.
What do you propose as alternative for low-income, low-computer skill seniors?
State-paid healthcare, which can afford to purchase reliable computers.
However knowingly breaking its functionality should make companies involved at least financially responsible and ideally cause top executives to spend time in federal penitentiary.
There should be peace on Earth and good will amongst men. Oh, and I'd like a girlfriend;(.
If wishes were horses, they'd be shot and stuffed into SPAM-CANs.
So please take it from me, crushing race hate is worth losing some smaller liberties.
Crushing hate is impossible. Force can make hate go underground but it can't remove it. If anything using hard-handed tactics makes hatred grow deeper, since it now has a perceived injustice to back it up.
What's worse, I fear that various megalomaniacal would-be dictators will simply use your attitude to get to power. Remember, one of the tricks Hitler used in his rise to power was fear of and hatred towards communists, not a racial group, using that fear to justify suspending civil liberties further.
So don't let your fear of Nazis be used to pull the same trick on you that they pulled on Germans with fear of communism.
In other news, another 300 cancer patients died today because they couldn't afford the examinations that would have detected their disease earlier, at a preventable stage. Nor could they have afforded the treatment that could have beaten their cancer, even if they'd known about it.
You know, that can be easily changed: vote in social democrats who make healthcare 100% publically funded. Problem solved. Of course it means that you may need to pay more taxes (or may not - it's also possible that the increased public healt gives a positive return of investment in purely financial terms), but you don't need to worry about yourself, your children, friends or anyone else dying because you or they can't afford medicine.
That this has not already been done propably tells something about American society and values. Something quite unflattering.
J-RPGs are RPGs in the sense that your characters gain levels to improve their stats and can also wear/wield equipment to make them fight more effectively.
I think this is a fascinating view of roleplaying, especially since it makes Super Mario 2 a role-playing game - you could find funny mushrooms that gave your character more maximum health points. And with Warp zones, you could change your path considerably. You could even find and carry items around - only one at the time, but still.
Shake in your boots, D&D:).
I agree that J-RPGs tend to be more like "stories on rails" with fixed characters, pre-set dialog, a pre-set story, heavily scripted events, and long non-interactive cutscenes.
This is true of every computer game, because computers aren't capable of inventing story as they go. In fact, based on what few DM books I've read, I'd say that it's true of P&P RPGs as well, since all of those books were full of tips on how to keep people in the predetermined path and nullify all their attempts to leave it.
This does take the "R" out of the traditional RPG.
No it doesn't. An actor playing Romeo is following a premade script. Does that mean that he has no role ?
It's perfectly reasonable to use a standard Dell+Windows PC to run an app that lets you enter your blood sugar/blood pressure/pulse periodically and advises you to see a doctor if your current medication doesn't seam to be working.
No it isn't. If the thing fails, it could keep on telling you that you are fine and the meds are working despite this not being true. This, in turn, could discourage you from seeing a doctor when you start feeling the first symptoms - after all, the computer told you you were fine, so you must be, right ?
A false sense of security is more dangerous than knowing that you have no security, since it discourages you from taking the neccessary steps to get actual security. And anyone putting any version of Windows or any Dell hardware anywhere near vital equipment needs to have their head examined. In a closed ward.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's a remarkably good and just decision, actually. Fuck someone else's goat and you have to pay for it, after which the goat is yours and you are free to continue. And it also has an element of absurd humor in it :).
Seriously, can you think of a better judgement ?
Why would they ? They get no benefit from it, quite on contrary: they need to devote time and effort into rising children. And they tend to be wealthy because they have the habit of taking the course of action that benefits them.
Oh, and a good social position does not imply that one has good genes. See Just-world phenomenon.
I don't have numbers either, but I'm pretty sure that a nuke that can't blast 15 feet of dense earth away from below isn't going to be much of a threat to anyone.
Yeah, since stating that you'd rather die than see religion a significant part of society sure won't give any hints of that opinion ;).
Ah, American enterpreneur spirit at its finest :). Seriously, isn't this what various business leaders do - only they do it through a corporation, instead of just getting food for themselves ?
And the woman has the choice about whether or not to have sex with the man. Don't try to push the decision to have sex to the mans shoulders alone.
I couldn't agree more. If you don't want to risk becoming a single mother, don't sleep around. And if you do, and get pregnant, don't try to blame the man for it - it was your own decision to risk it.
Alternatively, we could simply consider women to not be legal adults, and therefore not fully responsible for their actions, but for some reason they didn't seem to be happy with this arrangement when it was in place.
Apparently it isn't as outdated as you seem to think, since giving it up has caused the very problem the paradigm was supposedly created to prevent - single mothers without the ability to raise children and make a living simultaneously.
The aquaphobic communist hippies are no longer allowed to unfairly deprive Microsoft its rightful profits for its innovative and patent-protected Rot-13 -based proprietary disk encryption.
I'm hoping for a year. That gives Vista enough time to spread to make it impossible to make large-scale re-engineering, and will also give people enough time to learn what DRM actually means for them. Let the people suffer enough that they'll hate DRM and view the DRM-breaking hackers as heroes.
But aren't most spambot trojans business assets ? After all, spam makes money - that's why spammers bother - so rootkits are business assets for blackhat hackers, even more so than they are for Sony.
No, these poor hackers are simply trying to protect their right to profit - just like Sony. And if that means taking the control of the computer away from its owner, well, surely you agree that that's a small price to pay to ensure that those damn users aren't depriving them of those profits, right ? Sony certainly seems to...
Why ? YLE has been hellbent on pushing digital broadcasting - to the point where analogical ones end in less than a year, despite this putting hospitals and other such institutions to an impossible situation, as well as making television a useless communication medium in an emergency if there's any interference - and unlike the "digi-tv", downloading movie files from the Internet actually works and works well.
Oh well. In a year's time I'll either get to download the MPEG-2 packed programs from the Internet, or quit television entirely. I've spent 80 euros on the stupid nonfunctional digital shit, I'm not spending any more. It shouldn't matter to YLE how I get the bytes, but then again, copyright laws have never made sense...
Haven't you heard ? Television channels own the copyright to the signal they send. Therefore, your friend is a criminal who was trying to shaft them out of their rightful profits.
I'm starting to think that the only solution is to abolish copyright completely - any copyright model, no matter how reasonably seeming, will inevitably creep towards draconic. "Just say no to copyright" - you may quote me on that.
I think that the historians of various dictatorships would be very surprised to find that out, altought they'd be experienced enough to hide that surprise.
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia
or
In Soviet Russia, history commits you !
That depends. Does deleting hentai pics count as murdering your lover ?-)
The problem is that this flaw is shared by nearly every living being on this planet. Nearly everyone is willing to kill, given the suitable incentive - it may be anger, it may be patriotism, it may be defending your political rights (which is not the same as self-defense, which means defending your person from an immediate threat), it may be religion, it may be hatred of religion, it may be the desire to conform ("I was just following orders")... to each their excuse. But it's there.
Banality of evil is a nasty thing to accept, since it means that evil things aren't done just by evil maniacs, but can be done by anyone in the right circumstances. All it takes is a refusal to consider someone quite human - a bit like you're doing right now, I might add - after which that presumed inhumanity can be used to justify inhuman treatment. Everyone is a potential murderer, no one is immune to the lure of evil; some people are simply better at resisting it than others, and of course not everyone faces the same temptations.
So yeah, a murderer is a flawed individual. But so are you. I bet it is possible to hurt you bad enough that you want revenge. That doesn't mean that you are a murderer, of course, but it means that you could become, given the right circumstances. The potential - the seed of evil, if you want to put it that way - is there. And it doesn't mean that murderers shouldn't be locked up and punished, but it does mean that classifying them as less than fully human - which this entire "they can't be rehabilitated, they have a flawed personality" thing comes down to - means starting down the same road they once walked. After all, the first step of becoming a murderer is, after all, telling yourself that your victim deserves to die or at least be hurt.
And it isn't the flaw in their personality that drove them to kill, it simply allowed them to act on their violent impulses.
Imprisonment doesn't make anyone's life a living hell, at least here in the civilized world where prisons are staffed and controlled adequately to prevent abuses by the other inmates or the staff. Dunno about how it is in the US: the prison system there is certainly infamous for its abuses and inability to control the inmates - prison rapes being prime examples of that - but it is hard to say how much of that is based on fact and not fiction.
Besides, the fact that most prisoners don't end up killing themselves certainly seems to indicate that life in prison is better than none whatsoever, even in America.
On the contrary, they are pure genius... marketers, that is. "This program is so efficient we can't let it fall into wrong hands. It's strictly for government." It's the same trick makers of Z-class horror movies used to use - demand that everyone going to the cinema takes a life insurance in case they'll be scared to death.
Just look at this, all of us taking clearly untrue marketing claims ("firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software.") as truths and repeating them to each other. Shame on you, Slashdot.
Individuals carry moral responsibility for their actions. The whole idea of a corporation is to remove that responsibility by letting the imaginary "corporation" entity take it.
Why on Earth do you think that any of this justifies any kind of behavior ? I'm pointing out that corporations can indeed give birth to new corporations. Others have pointed out that Microsoft is largely comparable to a swarm of locusts. That doesn't justify their behavior, it simply attempts to examine it.
Actually, they do. Corporations sometimes split parts of their business functions into new corporations to "focus on their core competencies" or something like that. Monopolies can also be split by courts. Then there's the model where a number of people working in a corporation leave to find a new one - the existence of the new corporation is a direct result of these people working together in the old corporation, so I'd say that the old corporation has an effect on what the new corporation will be like.
And, of course, the only reason why evolution requires reproduction is that living beings have a hard time of changing their phenotype once their genotype has been deployed; for a corporation it is relatively easy, since it does not really exist except in the imagination of people and is thus not bound by laws of physics.
State-paid healthcare, which can afford to purchase reliable computers.
There should be peace on Earth and good will amongst men. Oh, and I'd like a girlfriend ;(.
If wishes were horses, they'd be shot and stuffed into SPAM-CANs.
Crushing hate is impossible. Force can make hate go underground but it can't remove it. If anything using hard-handed tactics makes hatred grow deeper, since it now has a perceived injustice to back it up.
What's worse, I fear that various megalomaniacal would-be dictators will simply use your attitude to get to power. Remember, one of the tricks Hitler used in his rise to power was fear of and hatred towards communists, not a racial group, using that fear to justify suspending civil liberties further.
So don't let your fear of Nazis be used to pull the same trick on you that they pulled on Germans with fear of communism.
Now that's a mental image I could had done without...
You know, that can be easily changed: vote in social democrats who make healthcare 100% publically funded. Problem solved. Of course it means that you may need to pay more taxes (or may not - it's also possible that the increased public healt gives a positive return of investment in purely financial terms), but you don't need to worry about yourself, your children, friends or anyone else dying because you or they can't afford medicine.
That this has not already been done propably tells something about American society and values. Something quite unflattering.
I think this is a fascinating view of roleplaying, especially since it makes Super Mario 2 a role-playing game - you could find funny mushrooms that gave your character more maximum health points. And with Warp zones, you could change your path considerably. You could even find and carry items around - only one at the time, but still.
Shake in your boots, D&D :).
This is true of every computer game, because computers aren't capable of inventing story as they go. In fact, based on what few DM books I've read, I'd say that it's true of P&P RPGs as well, since all of those books were full of tips on how to keep people in the predetermined path and nullify all their attempts to leave it.
No it doesn't. An actor playing Romeo is following a premade script. Does that mean that he has no role ?
No it isn't. If the thing fails, it could keep on telling you that you are fine and the meds are working despite this not being true. This, in turn, could discourage you from seeing a doctor when you start feeling the first symptoms - after all, the computer told you you were fine, so you must be, right ?
A false sense of security is more dangerous than knowing that you have no security, since it discourages you from taking the neccessary steps to get actual security. And anyone putting any version of Windows or any Dell hardware anywhere near vital equipment needs to have their head examined. In a closed ward.