House: Warning, you currently appear to be a state of diminished mental capacity. You are about to trip over your coffee table.
You (drunk): Shuddup yer stupid piece of jun.. *THUD* Aargh! My leg! House, call me an ambulance!
House: Affirmative, your hot bath will be ready in approximately 3 minutes.
I don't have mod points, so consider this my +1 insightful. I agree with your position, healthcare should be a public institution, a proper public institution with all aspects controlled by the public sector, not just a few delapidated hospitals providing a perfunctory sub-par service and the really important stuff controlled by profit seeking corporations.
Fortunately, we do have a choice, we go a bit further, and buy Ivomec from a store a hundred miles away, at the original price.
Now if only Africans who were dying for lack of Asprin could say the same thing
No, I disproved your point, you just didn't see it. Look at the living conditions of the people in Asia, and then look at those of the people in North America. There are "farmgate" producers here (North America) too, however, they aren't doing much better as anyone else. You can't keep comparing our industrialized agriculture, with that of the un-developed world. The EU, Australia, Russia, and North America produce the largest part of the world's food. There is NO WAY we can produce enough to feed everyone in doing things by hand. We farm thousands of acres, versus three or four. Those farmers do not pay $350 / year / 160 acres(1 quarter) of taxes. They do not pay a few thousand in check-offs, and royalties. We're not happy about it, but if we quit farming, people like you will die of starvation.
Me? I know enough bushcraft to be able to survive. Probably not enough to survive comfortably, but I'm no urban punk, I grew up in the country with the bugs and creepy things. Yes, there are limits to the applicability of economic principles between the first and third world. The original point in the whole discussion was that middlemen take far more than what they should fairly be entitled to. The music industry was what we were talking about, and really, it should be clear that that is the case there.
If he's watching Star Trek, why on earth is he in #distrib-support, on IRC? No one said anything about bugging people on their off-time.
I don't know about your experience, but I've had far more than adequate help from IRC, and I've had to learn Linux server admin, PostgreSQL database admin, PHP programming and web server maintenance all from scratch. I've had no tutor or even a physical book. I learned it all from online tutorials and IRC. When I started I had what business users would call "Advanced MS Office skills", in other words I was a newbie to anything you couldn't click on. In 3 years I have learned these skills, designed, deployed and now maintain a complex business management app for my chain with >150 users in 20 locations. I owe this primarily to help I got on IRC. I won't accept that IRC lurkers are not helpful, I will concede only that they don't take well to being asked to do things for you.
Which geeks are we talking about here? I'm talking about the 15 to 25 year olds who live in their parents basements (literally), watch porn all day, and call normal people "stupid", while everyone is taking pitty on their short-sightedness, in other words, a large part of the people who make up Slashdot commenters...
Unlike you I don't have geeks neatly subdivided into groups. You need to learn about society, and how people are a bit more variable and individual, defying neat categorization the way you seem to do it. Perhaps you need to *ahem* get out more:P ? Geeks are, by definition, quite smart. Smart people think the majority of the rest of society is stupid, and for the most part, they're right. Now I know there is a stereotype of a geek who lives at home and watches porn all day, but it's not actually accurate. Porn needs broadband, broadband costs money, so they must at least have a job. Geeks are only different from non-geeks in that they use a computer instead of a television for hours upon hours, which really is a step up in my books, as a computer at least is interactive. Unless you consider SMSing in your vote for American Idiot "interaction". How is spending all your spare time in front of a PC any worse than spending your spare time watching unholy trash like that?
From your post, it appears that you are firmly rooted in Socialism. Yes, it would be nice if they wouldn't need money, heck, if we wouldn't need money. Unfortunately, life isn't like that. You pay for cloths, you pay for food, you pay for housing, you pay for phone, internet, and anything else you want. In the classical ages, things were not based purely on money as they are now, but, one of the rules of the universe is that Chaos is always increasing.
Amazing. So the cause of income inequality is entropy. Utterly. Fucking. Amazing. What "job" are do the superstars of Hollywood do? Do they produce anything of value that can be used by anyone? Do they provide a service that helps another person perform a task? I'm not a socialist, but its the true cry of the idiot conservative to respond to any call for compassion with phrases like "life isn't like that" and to point fingers shouting "socialist!". I have no problem paying a market price for a Big Mac, a pair of jeans, a car with power mirrors and aircon. I have no problem with charging market price for the cell phones I retail in my shop. I have a big problem with Pfizer charging $40 per tablet for anti-biotics to third world countries where average daily wage is about $3 because they say that's market price. Don't start with the "well they need return on their research" BS. They'd get adequate return on their expenses if they didn't waste vast sums on marketing. Go get the latest financial reports of Pfizer from their web site, the ratio between research spending and marketing spending is astonishing.
You are, with all due respect, a moron. Society changes, we didn't have computers, we didn't have cars, planes, Capitalism, or Communism in the middle-ages. But we do now, and things won't go back. You have to realise that you're a minority, that anyone can crush at any point. In the modern world, numbers speak louder than voices, and nerds, geeks, or whatever you want to call them, don't have the numbers to speak loudly, to anyone, but others like themselves.
Tell that to Darl McBride. Tell that to Eason Jordan. They'll tell you that you will dismiss geeks at your peril. By the way. Up until now I have used referred to geeks with "we" just to bait you. I'm not a geek, I don't have anywhere near the skill level to qualify. You should have picked up on the fact that I travel a lot as a hint. Oh, and whether or not you agree with me, I think you can concede that my points are not those that would be made by a moron.
Oh, goody, you're in a third-world country. Do you know how much it costs them to produce food, and how much it costs us? There's a small difference. The food you eat there is produced mostly by hand, the food produced in the industrialized world is completely mechanical. Farms (and as I said before, I am a commercial farmer) are worth millions of dollars. The equipment we use to produce what you eat costs more than your house, your car, your RV, and all your furniture, combined. Every year, we spend close to $460 / acre to produce wheat, and we get $520 out of selling it, from that we have to live, and make payments on our equipment, etc. If you know nothing of how food is produced, then don't talk about it.
Umm, you just proved my point. To sell to middlemen you need to sell much higher quantities, requiring much higher capital investments and sell at far lower margins. You say it costs you $460/acre? Guess what? The guy I just bought some chopped fruit from works 3 or 4 acres total and makes enough to live off. You on the other hand work however many acres you work and still, according to you, struggle. My friend works less land with less equipment, but his margins are so high that it doesn't matter. The price I paid for the fruit, at $1 a serve, probably equates to thousands of dollars a year per acre. You my friend are a victim of middlemen. Stop being so happy about it and wake up. The biggest problem with fundamentalist ca
According to your thought-train, that would mean that I should screw rules, and do as I please. But... That would mean you would get poisoned from your food.
You may argue this is a stupid comparison, but the world has rules and certain established conventions.
Damn straight it's stupid. Somewhere between enjoying enjoying Pink Floyd and not having DDT added to my milk and cookies there is a line. It's not particularly hard to find. Rules and regulations for safety are fine, but rules and regulations that exist for no other purpose but to provide an artificial way to channel return on product to people not involved in production are socially wasteful. Incidentally, artists were never paid until recently in history. Some were good enough that they could earn a living performing, but most had other jobs and lives as well, lives which served to provide creative inspiration for new art. Perhaps the inane trivial lifestyles of modern pop artists today explains the inane trivial nature of modern pop music. Personally, I feel that the 9 figure bank balances of pop artists are just effing stupid, and I don't effing care how good their music is. People are dying from a lack of a bag of rice, and Puff Daddy sings a few songs and gets paid the GDP of half of Africa? No sir, I refuse to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yes, people in the middle take most of the money, but it is always that way, in everything! Get the point!
No, that's not always the way and I will NOT get the point. This point in history is unique in that for the first time society has allowed creativity to be commoditised. Until recently knowledge and art flowed freely between societies and people, with few notable exceptions such as military techniques and technologies. Men like Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and Leonardo Da Vinci shared what they learned freely, and society is the better for it. Only with the spread of Militant Fundamentalist Capitalism and the resulting private sector heavily armed with lawyers has the idea that people have to be able to profit from thinking before they will think become ingrained. That is not to say that one should not be able to profit from one's invention. I am arguing that one should not be able to exploit the rest of society by unfairly excluding some from it's use. I point to pharmaceutical companies as the main invoker of my wrath on this point. Yes, a very broad paragraph, but your assertion that "it's always the way" was, no offense, broadly stupid.
In food, that bag of flour you buy in the store costs around $22 / bushel. We, the producers get $5.00 / bushel, and it costs about $2.00 / bushel to turn it into flour. Who do you think gets all that money? Do you think it's better to just go steal your food from the store, because you hate the middle-men?
I am currently travelling in Thailand. There are food vendors who will sell me a full multi-course meal for about $4 and then beam like it's Christmas when I give them the equivalent of $6 and tell them to keep the change. He produces goods and retails them, leading to high margins for him and rock bottom prices for me. Lovely situation isn't it? There is lots of poverty here. I don't see how creating a class of people who charge a 500% markup to take the food from the guy before he gets into town at wholesale prices, reducing his profit to a fraction of what it was, and then gives it to me at retail, multiplying the price I pay many times over. I much prefer the farmer who wheels his cart into town every morning. Plus I get to have a fascinating chat to him in broken English about his wife, kids and farm. Try doing that at your local restaurant. Middlemen are, at least in many cases, little more than parasites who have managed to fabricate a commodity by creating artificial scarcity in an area through various questionable means such as financial pressure, political lobbying or even abuse of military power. I point to the diamond trade
Only on/. can uninformed political bickering be considered more interesting that GIANT FUCKING RABBITS! For God's sake people are you all insane? There's 23 pound rabbits on the loose and you're arguing over whether refugee would prefer to go to Europe or America? I want to hear about the rabbits and all I get in the comments are references to communism, a lecture on the life and times of Marx, nookular missiles and such trivial things. Seriously guys think of the rabbits!
I hate images and gaudy marketing rubbish! Down with HTML email! Text only! Hold on a moment, perhaps bold, italics and underlines would be useful for emphasis and occasionally even required for grammatical correctness. Let's leave them in there. But take out everything else! Oh one moment, I occasionally need to send some tabular information to an associate. Ok, well lets have tables, but nothing more! Hang on, what about bulleted lists? Yea I use them, so we'll let them, and only them in. But tomorrow I have to send that guy who wants to buy my car a photo. So then lets bring in images.
*stands back* See, the problem is that there *are* legitimately not annoying-as-bamboo-under-the-fingernails uses for rich formatting and objects in email. While there are ways to accomplish these things differently, rich formatting gives email functionality it otherwise would not have for the 95% of users who think "MIME type" refers to different styles of street performance and don't know how to save files in a reasonably quick and efficient manner, let alone have good file storage, naming and retrieval habits. For these users, embedding images in email is far better than saving them to disk and referring to them there.
Not only that, formatting with numbered lists, tables and justification allow a richer communication tool, able to convey a broader spectrum of information. Plain text struggles when a user would like to emphasize a point or communicate something in addition to the raw data he is sending.
I hate issues where I agree with both sides. I prefer talking about proven things like how Mac users are all hippies. *ducks*
And who put a gun to your head and told you to open that *.doc ? Your boss? Get another job. Your college lecturer? Go to another college. Your spouse? Divorce them.
Just because someone has an option doesn't mean they weren't coerced if all the other options were extremely uncomfortable. Fine, throw in the anti-anti-DRM point if you feel that way, but please, don't be brain dead about it.
The reason us "blow hard" geeks fight DRM is not because there is an objection with the idea that an artist should be able to profit from their work, but because there is an objection that a middleman should be able to give us a narrow list of ways in which we are allowed to enjoy that art. It would be like going down to your local grocery store, buying a tomato and being told you were only allowed to have it in a salad or you'd be fined. Kinda screws you if you have a hankering for spaghetti bolognaise. So well done on completely missing the point.
I struggle to see why some self-professed "pseudo geeks" think they can get riled up about "hard core geeks" and throw all kinds of stereotypes. Throwing stereos is dangerous. Here's one for you: Could the reason you are so riled up about "hard core geeks" be due to the fact that you yourself are a typical failed or failing small business operator unable to make your IT guy work well on the meager pittance you can afford to pay him?
Social conservative hey? That explains your rediculous spelling and grammar. Oh, and no theory says the Earth is 2 billion years old. It's a few thousand or about 4.5 billion. Us "blow hard" geeks tend to like to do 2 to 3 minutes of research before jumping onto our soap boxes. Perhaps you could learn a thing or two from us, so allow me to formally invite you to my cosy little basement. My Mum will bring you some warm milk and freshly baked cookies.
Agreed, and I'd mod you up if I had points.
This is true of just about anything. Highly skilled professionals like doctors aside, just about any field can be learned with a degree of proficiency sufficient to be usable as long as the person first realizes that there is nothing mystical or magical about a field they know nothing about. It never ceases to amaze me how people look on simple jobs like unblocking a drain or changing a fuse as though it requires some mystical magical skill that only The Enlightened possess. The same goes for things like graphic design and programming.
Many here will remember the day they first did a "Hello World!" program, and went on to acquire programming skills without formal instruction. I know that was the case with me. There is another post here on/. about learning electronics from scratch on your own, this idea applies there too.
Whenever I discuss education with people, I try to get them to understand that one does not need to pay large sums of money for the privilege of sitting in a room with hundreds of other students to have a lecturer read to you out of a book. Just buy the book and read it yourself. So you don't have the paper proving you read it, but if the skill is for your own use in your own business or endeavor then what does it matter? Just learn as much as you need for the purpose you need it for, and if the level of skill required for your job is too high then find someone who has that level of skill.
So learn how to make your 3d buttons, drop shadows and glossy headers but if you need complex animated widgets and a nice logo from scratch then perhaps hiring a professional graphics designer with lots of experience me be appropriate. Guage your needs with the time investment needed to bring yourself up to that level.
There may not be a chasm between *your* behavior and that of a bowerbird, but that's your individual problem. Most humans are vastly different from bowerbirds.
No, in order for Sid Meier to roll in his grave he would have to be able to read that sentence, be dead and roll over simultaneously. Were he only able to do the first two, he'd just be reading that sentence while dead. No mean feat, to be sure, but rolling over while doing them would really raise some eyebrows.
it does not follow that responsible management of the Earth's resources excludes killing animals for food.
Hello class, welcome to the third grade. Today we will be learning about reading comprehension. Please point to the place in the referred text that the idea that animals should not be killed for food is stated.
I suggest you spend a week in the Canadian wilderness where the grizzly bears live with no firearm. Then you'll find out just where in the food chain you belong.
I have never even met an animal rights activist, and I can easily see that you are about as clued in on this topic as a turnip.
The animals' rights movement is based on the idea that humans, having greater intelligence than all other species as well as the intangible quality we call "sentience", has a responsibilty for the welfare of the world, and its contents. All animals only seek resources that are needed for survival. Our desire for things over and above this, such as widescreen TVs and a bigger SUV than our neighbour, indicates that there is a fundamental difference between humans and other species.
Based on the greater burden each human places on the Earth relative to individuals of other species, human civilisation has recognised a need to act responsibly. Monkeys do not create modifications to their trees capable of polluting the entire forest into a desert, and whales don't create oil slicks. Our ability to affect far more than just our immediate surroundings and co-opt the forces of chemistry, physics and biology to our own endsis what gives rise to this moral responsibility. The fact that we can understand the very concept of "morality" is what gives us the moral responsibility to use it.
"Management" you say? So I can transport and kill them in the most economically efficient manner I please despite causing them great physical pain? The idea that a dumb animal does not need to be treated with respect because it is incapable of vocalising the concept is laughably stupid. I humbly suggest you refrain from using terms like "intellectually bankrupt". *walks away mumbling something about a pot and a kettle*
Me: Computer, write me a slashdot post on this topic. Computer: Affirmative. Post written: "Sharks with friggin' laser beams are welcoming you to Soviet Russia" AI Moderators: "Joke detected." +5 Funny
Doesn't sound as pithy when being yelled back at your neanderthal hockey coach after being reprimanded for trying to be a hero and not passing the ball. Oh wait, this is/. the closest anyone here gets to a "coach" is sitting on a "couch".:P
Slashdot Mirror
House: Warning, you currently appear to be a state of diminished mental capacity. You are about to trip over your coffee table. You (drunk): Shuddup yer stupid piece of jun.. *THUD* Aargh! My leg! House, call me an ambulance! House: Affirmative, your hot bath will be ready in approximately 3 minutes.
I don't have mod points, so consider this my +1 insightful. I agree with your position, healthcare should be a public institution, a proper public institution with all aspects controlled by the public sector, not just a few delapidated hospitals providing a perfunctory sub-par service and the really important stuff controlled by profit seeking corporations.
I hark thee, friend :)
Now if only Africans who were dying for lack of Asprin could say the same thing
Me? I know enough bushcraft to be able to survive. Probably not enough to survive comfortably, but I'm no urban punk, I grew up in the country with the bugs and creepy things. Yes, there are limits to the applicability of economic principles between the first and third world. The original point in the whole discussion was that middlemen take far more than what they should fairly be entitled to. The music industry was what we were talking about, and really, it should be clear that that is the case there.
I don't know about your experience, but I've had far more than adequate help from IRC, and I've had to learn Linux server admin, PostgreSQL database admin, PHP programming and web server maintenance all from scratch. I've had no tutor or even a physical book. I learned it all from online tutorials and IRC. When I started I had what business users would call "Advanced MS Office skills", in other words I was a newbie to anything you couldn't click on. In 3 years I have learned these skills, designed, deployed and now maintain a complex business management app for my chain with >150 users in 20 locations. I owe this primarily to help I got on IRC. I won't accept that IRC lurkers are not helpful, I will concede only that they don't take well to being asked to do things for you.
Unlike you I don't have geeks neatly subdivided into groups. You need to learn about society, and how people are a bit more variable and individual, defying neat categorization the way you seem to do it. Perhaps you need to *ahem* get out more :P ? Geeks are, by definition, quite smart. Smart people think the majority of the rest of society is stupid, and for the most part, they're right. Now I know there is a stereotype of a geek who lives at home and watches porn all day, but it's not actually accurate. Porn needs broadband, broadband costs money, so they must at least have a job. Geeks are only different from non-geeks in that they use a computer instead of a television for hours upon hours, which really is a step up in my books, as a computer at least is interactive. Unless you consider SMSing in your vote for American Idiot "interaction". How is spending all your spare time in front of a PC any worse than spending your spare time watching unholy trash like that?
Amazing. So the cause of income inequality is entropy. Utterly. Fucking. Amazing. What "job" are do the superstars of Hollywood do? Do they produce anything of value that can be used by anyone? Do they provide a service that helps another person perform a task? I'm not a socialist, but its the true cry of the idiot conservative to respond to any call for compassion with phrases like "life isn't like that" and to point fingers shouting "socialist!". I have no problem paying a market price for a Big Mac, a pair of jeans, a car with power mirrors and aircon. I have no problem with charging market price for the cell phones I retail in my shop. I have a big problem with Pfizer charging $40 per tablet for anti-biotics to third world countries where average daily wage is about $3 because they say that's market price. Don't start with the "well they need return on their research" BS. They'd get adequate return on their expenses if they didn't waste vast sums on marketing. Go get the latest financial reports of Pfizer from their web site, the ratio between research spending and marketing spending is astonishing.
Tell that to Darl McBride. Tell that to Eason Jordan. They'll tell you that you will dismiss geeks at your peril. By the way. Up until now I have used referred to geeks with "we" just to bait you. I'm not a geek, I don't have anywhere near the skill level to qualify. You should have picked up on the fact that I travel a lot as a hint. Oh, and whether or not you agree with me, I think you can concede that my points are not those that would be made by a moron.
Umm, you just proved my point. To sell to middlemen you need to sell much higher quantities, requiring much higher capital investments and sell at far lower margins. You say it costs you $460/acre? Guess what? The guy I just bought some chopped fruit from works 3 or 4 acres total and makes enough to live off. You on the other hand work however many acres you work and still, according to you, struggle. My friend works less land with less equipment, but his margins are so high that it doesn't matter. The price I paid for the fruit, at $1 a serve, probably equates to thousands of dollars a year per acre. You my friend are a victim of middlemen. Stop being so happy about it and wake up. The biggest problem with fundamentalist ca
Damn straight it's stupid. Somewhere between enjoying enjoying Pink Floyd and not having DDT added to my milk and cookies there is a line. It's not particularly hard to find. Rules and regulations for safety are fine, but rules and regulations that exist for no other purpose but to provide an artificial way to channel return on product to people not involved in production are socially wasteful. Incidentally, artists were never paid until recently in history. Some were good enough that they could earn a living performing, but most had other jobs and lives as well, lives which served to provide creative inspiration for new art. Perhaps the inane trivial lifestyles of modern pop artists today explains the inane trivial nature of modern pop music. Personally, I feel that the 9 figure bank balances of pop artists are just effing stupid, and I don't effing care how good their music is. People are dying from a lack of a bag of rice, and Puff Daddy sings a few songs and gets paid the GDP of half of Africa? No sir, I refuse to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, that's not always the way and I will NOT get the point. This point in history is unique in that for the first time society has allowed creativity to be commoditised. Until recently knowledge and art flowed freely between societies and people, with few notable exceptions such as military techniques and technologies. Men like Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and Leonardo Da Vinci shared what they learned freely, and society is the better for it. Only with the spread of Militant Fundamentalist Capitalism and the resulting private sector heavily armed with lawyers has the idea that people have to be able to profit from thinking before they will think become ingrained. That is not to say that one should not be able to profit from one's invention. I am arguing that one should not be able to exploit the rest of society by unfairly excluding some from it's use. I point to pharmaceutical companies as the main invoker of my wrath on this point. Yes, a very broad paragraph, but your assertion that "it's always the way" was, no offense, broadly stupid.
I am currently travelling in Thailand. There are food vendors who will sell me a full multi-course meal for about $4 and then beam like it's Christmas when I give them the equivalent of $6 and tell them to keep the change. He produces goods and retails them, leading to high margins for him and rock bottom prices for me. Lovely situation isn't it? There is lots of poverty here. I don't see how creating a class of people who charge a 500% markup to take the food from the guy before he gets into town at wholesale prices, reducing his profit to a fraction of what it was, and then gives it to me at retail, multiplying the price I pay many times over. I much prefer the farmer who wheels his cart into town every morning. Plus I get to have a fascinating chat to him in broken English about his wife, kids and farm. Try doing that at your local restaurant. Middlemen are, at least in many cases, little more than parasites who have managed to fabricate a commodity by creating artificial scarcity in an area through various questionable means such as financial pressure, political lobbying or even abuse of military power. I point to the diamond trade
Who the hell modded Troll on this? Since when do the De Beers overlords read Slashdot?
Only on /. can uninformed political bickering be considered more interesting that GIANT FUCKING RABBITS! For God's sake people are you all insane? There's 23 pound rabbits on the loose and you're arguing over whether refugee would prefer to go to Europe or America? I want to hear about the rabbits and all I get in the comments are references to communism, a lecture on the life and times of Marx, nookular missiles and such trivial things. Seriously guys think of the rabbits!
I agree wholeheartedly.
I hate images and gaudy marketing rubbish! Down with HTML email! Text only! Hold on a moment, perhaps bold, italics and underlines would be useful for emphasis and occasionally even required for grammatical correctness. Let's leave them in there. But take out everything else! Oh one moment, I occasionally need to send some tabular information to an associate. Ok, well lets have tables, but nothing more! Hang on, what about bulleted lists? Yea I use them, so we'll let them, and only them in. But tomorrow I have to send that guy who wants to buy my car a photo. So then lets bring in images.
*stands back* See, the problem is that there *are* legitimately not annoying-as-bamboo-under-the-fingernails uses for rich formatting and objects in email. While there are ways to accomplish these things differently, rich formatting gives email functionality it otherwise would not have for the 95% of users who think "MIME type" refers to different styles of street performance and don't know how to save files in a reasonably quick and efficient manner, let alone have good file storage, naming and retrieval habits. For these users, embedding images in email is far better than saving them to disk and referring to them there.
Not only that, formatting with numbered lists, tables and justification allow a richer communication tool, able to convey a broader spectrum of information. Plain text struggles when a user would like to emphasize a point or communicate something in addition to the raw data he is sending.
I hate issues where I agree with both sides. I prefer talking about proven things like how Mac users are all hippies. *ducks*
Yea, it's a joint venture with Motorola, they call it the iRazr.
And who put a gun to your head and told you to open that *.doc ? Your boss? Get another job. Your college lecturer? Go to another college. Your spouse? Divorce them.
Just because someone has an option doesn't mean they weren't coerced if all the other options were extremely uncomfortable. Fine, throw in the anti-anti-DRM point if you feel that way, but please, don't be brain dead about it.
The reason us "blow hard" geeks fight DRM is not because there is an objection with the idea that an artist should be able to profit from their work, but because there is an objection that a middleman should be able to give us a narrow list of ways in which we are allowed to enjoy that art. It would be like going down to your local grocery store, buying a tomato and being told you were only allowed to have it in a salad or you'd be fined. Kinda screws you if you have a hankering for spaghetti bolognaise. So well done on completely missing the point.
I struggle to see why some self-professed "pseudo geeks" think they can get riled up about "hard core geeks" and throw all kinds of stereotypes. Throwing stereos is dangerous. Here's one for you: Could the reason you are so riled up about "hard core geeks" be due to the fact that you yourself are a typical failed or failing small business operator unable to make your IT guy work well on the meager pittance you can afford to pay him?
Social conservative hey? That explains your rediculous spelling and grammar. Oh, and no theory says the Earth is 2 billion years old. It's a few thousand or about 4.5 billion. Us "blow hard" geeks tend to like to do 2 to 3 minutes of research before jumping onto our soap boxes. Perhaps you could learn a thing or two from us, so allow me to formally invite you to my cosy little basement. My Mum will bring you some warm milk and freshly baked cookies.
I refuse to believe this trash! *Puts hands on ears and starts singing Paranoia by Green Day*
Copying a CD from a public library in your country is legal? What country do you live in?
Agreed, and I'd mod you up if I had points. This is true of just about anything. Highly skilled professionals like doctors aside, just about any field can be learned with a degree of proficiency sufficient to be usable as long as the person first realizes that there is nothing mystical or magical about a field they know nothing about. It never ceases to amaze me how people look on simple jobs like unblocking a drain or changing a fuse as though it requires some mystical magical skill that only The Enlightened possess. The same goes for things like graphic design and programming. Many here will remember the day they first did a "Hello World!" program, and went on to acquire programming skills without formal instruction. I know that was the case with me. There is another post here on /. about learning electronics from scratch on your own, this idea applies there too.
Whenever I discuss education with people, I try to get them to understand that one does not need to pay large sums of money for the privilege of sitting in a room with hundreds of other students to have a lecturer read to you out of a book. Just buy the book and read it yourself. So you don't have the paper proving you read it, but if the skill is for your own use in your own business or endeavor then what does it matter? Just learn as much as you need for the purpose you need it for, and if the level of skill required for your job is too high then find someone who has that level of skill.
So learn how to make your 3d buttons, drop shadows and glossy headers but if you need complex animated widgets and a nice logo from scratch then perhaps hiring a professional graphics designer with lots of experience me be appropriate. Guage your needs with the time investment needed to bring yourself up to that level.
There may not be a chasm between *your* behavior and that of a bowerbird, but that's your individual problem. Most humans are vastly different from bowerbirds.
Buddy, if you can't see a difference between yourself and a dumb animal, I advise you to not advertise that fact on a widely read forum like Slashdot.
No, in order for Sid Meier to roll in his grave he would have to be able to read that sentence, be dead and roll over simultaneously. Were he only able to do the first two, he'd just be reading that sentence while dead. No mean feat, to be sure, but rolling over while doing them would really raise some eyebrows.
Hello class, welcome to the third grade. Today we will be learning about reading comprehension. Please point to the place in the referred text that the idea that animals should not be killed for food is stated.
I suggest you spend a week in the Canadian wilderness where the grizzly bears live with no firearm. Then you'll find out just where in the food chain you belong.
I have never even met an animal rights activist, and I can easily see that you are about as clued in on this topic as a turnip.
The animals' rights movement is based on the idea that humans, having greater intelligence than all other species as well as the intangible quality we call "sentience", has a responsibilty for the welfare of the world, and its contents. All animals only seek resources that are needed for survival. Our desire for things over and above this, such as widescreen TVs and a bigger SUV than our neighbour, indicates that there is a fundamental difference between humans and other species.
Based on the greater burden each human places on the Earth relative to individuals of other species, human civilisation has recognised a need to act responsibly. Monkeys do not create modifications to their trees capable of polluting the entire forest into a desert, and whales don't create oil slicks. Our ability to affect far more than just our immediate surroundings and co-opt the forces of chemistry, physics and biology to our own endsis what gives rise to this moral responsibility. The fact that we can understand the very concept of "morality" is what gives us the moral responsibility to use it.
"Management" you say? So I can transport and kill them in the most economically efficient manner I please despite causing them great physical pain? The idea that a dumb animal does not need to be treated with respect because it is incapable of vocalising the concept is laughably stupid. I humbly suggest you refrain from using terms like "intellectually bankrupt". *walks away mumbling something about a pot and a kettle*
Me: Computer, write me a slashdot post on this topic.
Computer: Affirmative. Post written: "Sharks with friggin' laser beams are welcoming you to Soviet Russia"
AI Moderators: "Joke detected." +5 Funny
Look up. See that? Stuck to the ceiling? That's his point.
No no no! It's like this: In Soviet Russia, our new joke repeating sharks with friggin' lasers welcome you!
Doesn't sound as pithy when being yelled back at your neanderthal hockey coach after being reprimanded for trying to be a hero and not passing the ball. Oh wait, this is /. the closest anyone here gets to a "coach" is sitting on a "couch". :P