Great. So, we'll find out about the tainted product. And all those people who died, became very sick, or became addicted (what better way to hook people onto your product)? Well, they had it coming, as clearly it's the responsibility of the buyer to ask questions about every possible contingency. And even then if the peddler of the product lies and you buy it? Well, at least you can get them on fraud charges.
I might be under no delusion that regulation is working, but this idea that communication will magically solve the snake oil problems is clearly false. Look no further than the current financial crisis, bonded in an independent, private credit rating agency which overrated what were toxic assets. Regulation didn't help and short-sighted businesses were perfectly willing to create a bubble that would obviously cripple or crush them in the long-term.
To me, a major question is more, why is it that libertarians so often treat fraud and force as separate when long-term fraud can have the effect of force (poisoning, economic-induced starvation, etc)? At some level, turning a blind eye to the willful negligence of others is a cripple part of the libertarian ethos. The free market might solve the problem, but clearly the libertarian free market is a fantasy where fraud doesn't occur; once you step outside that fantasy and try to work out how to practically implement a free market-like environment, it becomes very clear that negligence can be as devastating as fraud or force if enough actors are negligent. After all, isn't that the basic complaint against big government (they all do at most what policy demands* but are negligent about anything not specifically assigned; ie, they're rigidity to a doctrine too small to encompass the real world causes gap where bad things happen).
*Yea, they fail here as well, and that's one reason why nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance in government should be actively punished with impeachment or jail terms, as appropriate; but, then, for that to actually work would require a population more interested in punishing based upon the letter of the law and not upon the current popular whim and a strong willingness to change the law, even quite radically, quite regularly.
The only difference between then and now is that these days, the government pretends to be working to keep us safe, and the people expect that fantasy to be maintained for them. People who remain calm and think for a few moments see right through most of it, but most of the population does not bother to think and just go on assuming that when their government says "this will keep you safe" it will really keep them safe.
So, if I read you right, you're saying "the government will keep you safe from terrorists with Obamacare" would have gotten full Republican and significant domestic support behind Obama's health care reform?
Wanting others to have to pay more so you can get free stuff is not altruism. It is greed.
Wanting others to pay more so others can become better off is altruism.
I think you might want to look up the definition of altruism. You helping the group, perhaps to your own personal detriment, is altruism. Forcing somebody else to help the group out for you is stretching that definition beyond recognition.
Of course, being altruistic doesn't necessarily equate to correct or moral.
"altruism - Regard for others, both natural and moral; devotion to the interests of others; brotherly kindness; -- opposed to egoism or selfishness." Beyond that, neither I nor the post I responded to said "force". The word used was "want".
Even accepting your expanded definition, I could go out and axe-murder anyone with over a million bucks and give all their stuff to the poor and be altruistic without being moral or even "good". I could also go out and shoot everyone with a mental illness or physical disability that renders them unproductive - this could arguably benefit the overall group prosperity. Probably wouldn't be all that morally correct though.
Nor would it be altruistic. There isn't very much regard in axe-murdering millionaires; Robin Hood stole, not murdered. As for shooting the mentally or physically ill, such people are just as much brothers of mankind as those who are mentally or physically fit. Ie, there is just as much reason to show them brotherly kindness, and there's nothing kind about shooting them.
Conversely, I could selfishly go out and build a business so that I can become rich beyond your wildest imagination. In the process I create a product that enhances the lives of millions and my company employs hundreds of workers who are able to feed their families because of these jobs. I have done nothing altruistic at all, but I have accomplished the result of "helping others" with a much higher degree of success than if I had simply given my money to a charitable organization or government to redistribute.
Which says nothing against taking your new found wealth and giving it to charities. It is not an either/or to choose capitalism and charity.
The New Deal, Welfare, etc has not changed the need for charity any more than the poor houses in England did, so obsession over taxes are not as relevant as the actual total spending towards society.
Actually, I'd disagree with you on this. I'd say that the evidence is pretty solid that the new deal programs have had a much greater impact on the need for charity than the poor houses in England ever did. Remember the "permanent underclass" discussions of the 80's-90's? The perverse incentives of the welfare society increase the probability that someone will need aid for extended periods of time (because it is available). The equally perverse "justice" of the poor house definitely carries incentives that discourage long term dependence (although in a manner that defies all common sense and human decency). So post New Deal we have a much greater need for charity (due to the successes of the new deal), although the individual charitable needs are much less acute than in days gone by (also due in large part to the successes of the new deal).
That's precisely the point. Poor houses failed because they chose to punish the poor. The New Deal has failed, in part, because it simply supports the poor. Because both England of old and modern America are capitalistic societies, governments are not the solution to the long-term prosperity of the poor; they don't make the jobs, after all. That void can be best filled by charity. This doesn't mean the charity of feeding the mouth (the New Deal fixed that, mostly). It does mean the charity organization and business that prov
I think you have some comprehension problems. A duty to pay what the law demands is not the same as "nobody owes anybody anything".
Granted. The law sets a minimum of what everyone owes society.
Paying up under threat of imprisonment is not sharing, nor is it "sacrificing for others". It is not charity nor is it community service.
True enough. Scrooge paid his prison and poor house taxes, yet clearly he was miserly because despite his great wealth he chose to shun others in his pursuit of greed. The possession of money became an end.
Wanting others to have to pay more so you can get free stuff is not altruism. It is greed.
Wanting others to pay more so others can become better off is altruism. Rallying against the abuse of tax law (ie, to use language loopholes to violate the intent of law) instead of fixing the tax law or to rally against the lobby for the introduction of new loopholes is not greed. It is a argument for the consideration of fairness of tax law. Of course, tax law should not be the end because, as noted, tax law is meant as a minimum of what people owe society. The bigger complaint, then, should not be that people or organizations have such low taxes but that they spend so little on charity. The New Deal, Welfare, etc has not changed the need for charity any more than the poor houses in England did, so obsession over taxes are not as relevant as the actual total spending towards society.
before its invention the number of deaths in war was steadily increasing into the multi-millions of deaths per war. after the invention of nuclear weapons war deaths have dropped dramatically and do not go into the millions let alone multi-millions like they once did. for the most part they stay pretty local and don't escalate into the blood baths of old.
The major problem with your argument is that it only holds until nuclear bombs start being used. Saving multi-millions in the short term to in the long term kill billions isn't a good investment. The one key argument that has been made about weapons technology as it has progressed has always seemed to be that no one would be crazy enough to use it. Yet, in the end, to start a war in which you know the opponent has mass killing equipment strongly hints that your opponent is crazy and you must use your own mass killing equipment for your protection. With nuclear weapons, self-preservation has translated that into proxy, local wars, so the opponent is never directly a nuclear power. The biggest mistake made so far in this cold war was giving a proxy, Cuba, nuclear weapons and having it in direct conflict with the opponent.
look at how the American press freaked out when the death toll hit 3000 in the Iraq war YEARS after the war started. granted that was politically motivated by their hatred of all things Bush,
No, this was motivated by "if it bleeds, it leads", a very American-centric view of the death count (a lot more than 3000 people died), and a general desire by most humans to not fight in wars for years.
but still the initial planning expected 10,000 death just to take Baghdad.
"initial planning" also considered the threat of chemical weapons. In short, initial planning had a very unrealistic idea of what Iraq had to offer militarily and chose to act when there was still a significant asymmetrical advantage.
major battles in the pacific during WWII could easily lose 3000 in hours. the Iraq war death total has a lot to do with asymmetrical warfare and not the threat of nukes. however, look at the korean war where there were two near equal opponents with LARGE armies and almost identical battlefield capabilities. that was kept in check by the threat of nukes.
At one level, you're right, in that both sides chose to fight a proxy war. But, if they had chosen differently, do you really think we'd still be here today? Every single conflict that arises now that involves directly or indirectly a nuclear power could be the end of most of humanity. If you were a billionaire, would you risk nearly all of your fortune to play a single throw of craps? Would you feel proud or happy to have repeatedly played and never lost but not really gained either?
Perhaps I will judge things differently when a nuclear weapon is finally used on a major city. Only if a nuclear war doesn't start then will I really consider nuclear weapons as humanity's bogeyman, not their self-created downfall.
The CPU was soldered straight into the board much like the memory was. If you wanted to upgrade the processor, they provided a SECOND CPU socket that shipped empty. You want to upgrade you had to plug a new CPU into the replacement socket and then use a jumper to tell the board to use that socket instead of the built in CPU.
Well, the 486SX lacked an FPU (a functioning one, at least). The second socket on most 486SX boards was for the "i487", which was really a 486DX with an extra pin. Later, "Overdrive" processors could be used in the same slot because, as you note, it was just really just a special CPU socket. Since you had to use a jumper to use the second socket, I wonder if an i487 would have actually worked in the socket without the jumper and the jumper thing was just a hack by Packard Bell so you could upgrade using probably cheaper 486DX processors.
Nobody is stopping you from saving books.
Go buy a pile of books right now and stick 'em under your bed.
If you take some basic measures to preserve them, they'll still be in great shape when the copyright expires and they'll still be yours.
So, what you're saying is, if you wish for copyrighted works to survive*, you should hoard them like money or gold? Btw, there are two main problem with your plan. One is that no matter what you do books will degrade over time (especially if there keeps being copyright extensions) and making a duplicate might very well destroy the book (Google's scanning process is rather badly known for this); the latter wouldn't be a problem if duplication techniques were perfect (even devoted monks, entrusted to the cause of Christianity, on many occasions mis-copied parts of the Bible; OCRs and copy machines might be better, but there still quite a ways off). The other thing is, a fire or any other sort of natural disaster can trivially destroy one's collection; again, given enough time, this seems almost invariable in destroying large collections of copyrighted works (consider the Library of Alexandria).
*I find it ironic that the long-term preservation of intellectual works under long-term copyright is the same as under no copyright. That is, few people are willing to distribute their work (either for lack of attribution or fear of the one possessed copy being accidentally destroyed) and a major part of copyright (and patent) was precisely to encourage the distribution of intellectual works for wide spread availability. It's a shame the Supreme Court seems unwilling to recognize that creating an artificial scarcity of a thing to a degree might be a good thing but a significant artificial scarcity of a thing is almost certainly bound to simply cause that thing to be effectively abandoned because of the complexity of ownership over time and the cost of litigation. Of course, with real property, laws were eventually created in most locales for abandoned property, but given how virtual and international copyright is, even with supporting legislation I'm not really should how one would ever establish abandonment of a copyrighted work without the expensive litigation.
The bankers steal it because they have had laws written that allow them to create money out of thin air and lend it with interest. What happens when money is created out of nothing is a little bit is stolen from everyone holding that currency by inflation. So they can become famously rich without doing anything of value.
Not quite. The major problem in the current situation is because bankers have started including investing houses. Banking is supposed to provide reliable, low-interest, low-return loans as a stable basis for inflation. Inflation is supposed to encourage investment and debasing of the currency of the rich over time, especially for those who would sit on money instead of investing; ie, inflation is intended to encourage economy growth instead of risking periods of economic stagnation.
And of course they gamble that money they created at 30 to 1 leverage which makes them even richer. And when the whole gamble fails to pay off they just run to their lawyer friends in DC and get bailed out claiming that if they go down so will the country.
And that's the problem. Banks becoming investment houses has resulted in the mixing of safe and wildly unsafe loans. The result is that to support the general population through common bank loans, it was necessary to subsidize wildly unsafe loans. The main problem now is that with the emergency over, there should be immediate efforts to dissect the bank into investment and banking operations. This really should have started as soon as December last year.
Well I call BS. If they were allowed to fail we would have a serious deflation with all of their fake money getting destroyed. As long as minimum wage laws were repealed all prices would drop and those that were thrifty and saved money would do much better because those dollars would be worth more.
Deflation is more or less the worst case scenario. Instead of investing, people would simply save their money. Those with outstanding loans (ie, most small businesses) would have to sell at lower prices, resulting in even greater difficulty in paying back their loans, and making it harder to buy the same size stock of items, let alone any sort of expansion. Adding on repealing minimum wage laws would make it worse, by removing the masses regular spending money. Such would merely accelerate the deflation.
Would people with savings be better off? Sure, I guess. But, that's a relative term. If 50% of the farms go out of business because so few people have any money to spend, you'll be the one of the few people with enough money to buy a steak. But, being the one eyed king in the land of the blind isn't really a great place to be in, overall.
But of course we can't have that so the Federal Reserve creates even more money (stealing it through inflation) to give to their buddies.
That's the limit of the Federal Reserve's actual power (well, and changing the interest rate, but that mechanism was already screwed by Greenspan and Bernanke's unwilling to raise the interest rate during relatively economically prosperous times*). While it can be argued that the current and previous chairman of the Federal Reserve encouraged the deregulation and merging of investment houses with banks (which is a good basis to fire Ben Bernanke), invariable it is the Congress who actually passed the deregulation laws, ignored warnings about derivatives, and has still failed to act to further the separation of investment houses with banks. Congress, and generally deregulation minded individuals, have turned banking from a stable, progressive debasing of the currency into a rapid expansion of the economy coupled with catastrophic economic circumstances when over-leveraging can not be handled by the built-in mechanisms that were created for low-risk, low-fail-rate loans.
In short, rallying against the Federal Reserve on its principle function is lu
Oligopolies are perfectly capable of being formed in a free market economy. A free market refers to the lack of governmental intervention except in cases of force or fraud.
Generally true. However, in the Adam Smith free market, monopolies and oligopolies should be fought, removed, etc. Meanwhile, in the Laissez-Faire free market, monopolies and oligopolies are good, wholesome constructions of inherent rights.
Many people who champion a free market don't realize that monopolies and oligopolies could be constructed in a free market because many Laissez-Faire supporting individuals are quick to downplay their inevitable existence with speak of competition and the invisible hand. The end result is people like the GP who are misinformed about what a real free market (as opposed to an idealized free market) entails.
Why are you giving Netflix your birthdate and gender in the first place? (emphasis mine)
Yes, blame the victim.
I wasn't blaming the victim and I never mentioned the victim.
Your use of "in the first place" was being used to imply blame. Compare to "Why are you giving Netflix your birthday and gender?" The form you use is pejorative to the actions as committed versus what actions should have been committed. Similarly, the form is used in declarative statements to imply support of one's previous choices in comparison to what is being possibly suggested. For example, "We relied, in the first place, on Netflix's privacy policy."
You appear to be correct, but the OSI's effective definition of open source seems to be a bit buggy.
Consider something I'll call a Reciprocal Self-Terminating License. It'll be basically identical to the GPLv2 except with a few changes. Specifically, all GPLv2 references will be replaced with RSTL#. RSTL# will be, at the header of the license, "Real Self-Termination License" with a whole decimal number. If that number is greater than one, any redistribution will decrement that number by one and release under the new numbered license (ie, if you have RSTL2, you'd redistribute as RSTL1). Merger of two or more RSTL# licensed code will result in licensed code having the lowest license number of the group. At RSTL0, you can only redistribute under non-commercial terms and the license will be stuck at RSTL0. This definition is probably incomplete, but I think you get the idea.
A similar effect could be had if, for example, a company were to take source code, release it under a BSD license to a subsidiary or partner company, and that subsidiary/partner company would only ever released the code under a non-commercial BSD-like license.
From what I understand from the open source definition, in both the RSTL1 and the partner company situation, the code would be considered open source.
Without the litigation, you lose the purpose of the GPL, though.
We don't want people embracing open source if by "embrace" they mean "take this free code, create my own product, and sell it".
Major correction. We do want people embracing open source if by "embrace" they mean "take this free code, create my own product, and sell it". If it happens to be free software as well, they just need to release the source code to their new product as well. If it's BSD or some other open source license, the conditions might be different (attribution in advertising, possibly). Very few open source licenses forbid the commercialization of code.
Sadly you are doubtless going to be modded troll, but really, what's wrong with this? If you want to live out in the rural sticks then you should be prepared to pay the cost of doing so.
Nearly 90% of the US, by population density, is "rural sticks". By your logic, no where but the east and west coast should have access electricity, telephone service, etc except by industry alone choosing to provide service.
It will cost you more money in taxes, more money for running water (pump and septic system upkeep), your roads will be less maintained, you may not have access to cable and will have to rely on satellite, you'll pay more for energy (having oil or propane delivered vs. natural gas out of a permanent connection), more in gas money to get places, blah, blah, blah.
Funny, but most rural areas do have municipalities which provide water services, septic services, and trash collection. As well, there tends to exist cable, natural gas, electricity, and telephone services; the latter two tend to exist everyone, although the former tend to be restricted to within or near city limits. The latter is a byproduct of municipalities being able to lure in industry under monopolistic positions. Without the effective subsidy of a monopoly, many industries would simply refuse to service such areas because of the risk involved (and the inherent poverty of rural life*).
This notion of subsidizing lifestyles is really annoying. If you want cheap fast broadband move to civilization.
Is it any wonder that the east and west coast are considered elitist with that attitude?
If you want clean air and open spaces move to the country.
The former should, for the most part, be a requirement wherever you live. You shouldn't have to live in the country to avoid cancerous clouds from industry or river fires; living in the country doesn't really protect you from this, anyways. Perhaps you'd have more perspective on this if you think about China's effective lack of regulation of pollution? As for open spaces, while for the most part this is a simple factor of what defines country (ie, population density), many cities, like New York City and many European countries, have recognized the value of having open, pedestrian areas and not endless crowded concrete. Sure, it's definitely not the same as the country, but it's hardly unreasonable to want a space for people to experience life both outside of their homes and outside of their cars.
*As pointed out by others further down the thread, and you, there's increases costs of living in a rural area. This is increased with the existence of monopolies. Further than that, rural areas inherently have greater difficulty providing high paying jobs (hence the suggest to "outsource to rural America"). Much like urban city poverty, many are in a position where it's unclear exactly how they can escape this poverty (being low skilled labor, rural poor seems likely to, if in large number, to move to an urban area to become urban poor).
This isn't to say cities don't give greater advantage and there aren't many people who would benefit from moving. But, clearly, nearly everyone moving to the east and west coast wouldn't magically solve the socioeconomic problems of people. Now, whether this justifies subsidies rural people is another thing, but one can't simply dismiss the situation with the false belief that rural life is some grand choice by people who have a reasonable expectation of a better life in a city. After all, if there was such a reasonable expectation, then people in a rural setting must either be irrational or value open spaces very highly. I am quite certain the latter isn't true.
Users computers are causing code to be executed on websites with SOAP and WS-* APIs! How DARE the website expose an API that's non-free.
Not "how DARE" they, but "it'd be a good idea to standardize on a way to let people know if they wish to know". After all, what RMS suggests is a design with whitelist, not blacklist, properties.
There should be standards for that sort of thing! Why, browsers should detect and warn the user that they are viewing a website designed with a non-free API for user operations.
If the user wants to be warned, why shouldn't the browser inform the user?
And what about the server? If they publish the PHP, the ASP.NET, the Ruby, the whatever, you can't run it without the server and its configuration!
Indeed, why not?
And the database! *coughing, out of breath wheezing* The stored procedures and queries that are invariably executed as a result of the external API are non-free as well! And they perform actions defined by the site's owner, not the user, against their will or better judgement!
Not quite. Providing more information to the user allows them to make a "better judgment". And certainly, choosing whether to visit a site or not is up to the user.
And some of these queries even rely on data in the database themselves!
And? If the data isn't code, it doesn't really apply to the FSF cause.
Why, I'm going to take this information to my bank right now and demand their internal database and the source code for all of the interfaces between me and it!
Feel free to. And if you can't find a bank willing to provide such information, you must decide whether you want to do business with banks or not given those constraints.
Or at the very least my browser should tell me that I might, I just might be doing something, somewhere, that relies on non-free code!
Sure, why not. Are you against your browser warning you about your bank having an invalid Certificate? Does your bank using an invalid Certificate and your browser warning you stop you from using your bank? Is the inconvenience of being informed once (or possibly never, since the setting to inform could easily default to off or be turned off) so horrible a thing?
Really, if Mozilla and other open source browsers want to add a feature for real die hard GPL fans, I don't see a problem with it inherently. In all likely, only a very small minority of sites will qualify, and those people can feel content knowing all the code is GPLed. It doesn't sound like RMS's suggest is particularly hard or bulky to implement. The only real argument I see against it really is that if RMS wants it, he probably should devote himself to doing the actual work to implement and maintain the feature or find someone willing to do such. But, there's no other real reason I can think of to be opposed to it.
Yep, Star Trek is an example of "magical pixie dust that violates the laws of physics to allow ultra energy cheap escape velocity" along with ultra energy cheap intergalactic travel. Even then, Star Trek really only works as a concept because there's thousands of M-class worlds, allowing for an expansionist society (not unlike how the US's west was conquered; such is appropriate given Roddenberry's "wagon-train to the stars" concept).
Nowhere in the Constitution does it give the power to scientists to tax citizens and spend the money on their behalf.
No where in the Constitution does it give the power to Congress, the Executive, or the Judiciary to regulate pollution except where disputes between states occur. Since pollution is effectively littering, I'd imagine that most states on the east coast would have ample basis to block coal plants from releasing CO2 to the west of them.
If the dissenters are morons who don't understand it, what does that make the believers? Blind-faith followers?
No, they're morons who don't understand it, too*. The difference is, believers are willing to admit that fact, while dissenters like to pretend they know better and should be the ones dictating reality.
*This obviously excludes the PhDs who are qualified.
And I don't think repeated practice with 40 year old chemical rocket technology is going to lead to that leap.
The big question is, what will? It's reasonably arguable that the only reason we ever made it to the moon was a drive to push the limits of existing technology. To, as the GP points out, sit on our hands will, if anything, retard the interest and drive to develop those new technologies.
Besides, the next leap is unlikely to push us particularly farther than we can go now and things don't become much more than an interesting "joy ride" through space really until we can actual travel to other solar systems. Even then, one could argue that really at no point does it ever being more than a "joy ride" since the amount of energy required is so massive that it's incredibly unlikely that anything could be discovered to make it worthwhile from a purely utilitarian perspective.
In short, if one can't accept today that the things done by astronauts in space are more than a "joy ride", then I don't see how you could see any action by astronauts in space as more than a "joy ride"--not without some magical pixie dust that violates the laws of physics to allow ultra energy cheap escape velocity.
His tantrum basically boils down to "you can't present proprietary software as legitimate". Which is BS.
It's his opinion that closed software is morally wrong and open software (eg Free Software) is morally right. It is your opinion that that is BS. Since both are opinions, I can only presume that you consider your opinion a tantrum as well.
Your own decision on how to do things is your decision, you can NOT tell others that their way of doing things is not legitimate. If companies want to do things the proprietary way, that's their decision.
Quite right. And since GNOME is part of GNU, GNOME has already apparently chosen. Hence, Richard Stallman offered his opinion on how the discussion of proprietary software.
If your approach is better, then time will prove that.
Considering that you can't prove a moral imperative, that's a non-sequitur.
Theo De Raadt did this. He's also an arrogant prick, but when he decided that everyone else's way was inferior to his, he fork offed. Which, in his case, was the best thing he could do, because he was able to deliver the ideals he believed in, giving the world OpenSSH and OpenBSD, both of which are shining examples of "fine I'll do it my way and show you".
In this situation, the "arrogant prick" would be Philip Van Hoof. After all, it is he who is trying to fork away from the GNU Project under a non-GNU philosophy.
Stallman needs to STFU. He's ruining free software by trying to make it exist in some kind of walled garden where nobody who uses it can interact with anyone or anything else.
Hardly. Using proprietary software is not in itself morally wrong, especially when it's to clone functionality for free software. GNU, after all, started out as a clone of UNIX. But, clearly, if one thinks highly enough of the functionality of a proprietary program, the goal should be to clone that functionality in a free software alternative, not to herd people into using the proprietary program. And if a free software alternative already exists, not even mentioning it is rather ludicrous.
Bull. Shit. He has as much to worry about taking a bullet "every single time he has an interaction with someone" as I do. There are *some* interactions that are riskier than others, but it's absurd to state he has to fear every encounter.
Really? Wasn't there just a news story the other day about four police officers being gunned down while drinking coffee?
People in general have been gunned down in stores, malls, their home, in alleys, street corners, etc. The four police officers being gunned down recently is the aberration of multiple victim public shootings that have been reported for years. In short, those four police officers, if anything, merely cause a statistically inflation of police officer occupational deaths for one year.
We've got to quit treating the police like gods
I didn't say that we should treat them as Gods. All I suggested was that they have a dangerous job and are entitled to some consideration because of that. I also suggested that discretion is the better part of valor.
Would you feel the same way if firefighters, in seeing a school burning down, would refuse to rush in to rescue trapped children? Or would you acknowledge that firefighters (and police officers) chose their profession with the intent to, if necessary, lay down their life to save others?
Besides, discretion is about "cautious discernment" not "excessive force". You seem to view police officers as if they are weapons, with their only choices being to shoot/beat or not. Instead, police officers are people, with the ability to question, order, detain, and/or arrest. None of this translates into a need for reckless abuse of people.
PS - If you believe that the danger of a job should be a factor in what consideration we give to people of a profession, how do you feel about farmers being able to beat and arrest people? Farmers, IIRC, have a higher fatal occupation injury rate than police.
The problem is most of the time it doesn't work that well, and it hurts.
That's a major part of the point. People are more likely to empathize with an injustice if someone is hurt.
If you want to get your voice out, there are other ways to do it that work a lot better and don't hurt as much. A well organized ad campaign, for example, will be much more effective than trying to get in a confrontation with police officers.
One, a well organized ad campaign can be more effective, but people are easily desensitized to marketing, especially since one's opponents can fund a well organized counter campaign. Having an actual instance of injustice is harder to squash through a counter campaign. This is why, btw, news focus so much on personal stories.
Two, the point isn't "to get in a confrontation with police officers". It is to, when a confrontation occurs, do the otherwise reasonable thing and show how unjust the police respond. To spark a confrontation only hurts your campaign, as that fact can be used in an organized counter campaign. It is for this reason that the people who are most useful to a campaign against injustice are the ones who are most normal, who are simply sick of playing the game of being obedient to the unreasonable expectations of a situation, and who "snap" and start trying the situation as any other situation.
In short, when the emperor's clothes are removed by the most innocent and most common, people are much more inclined to acknowledge it than when a few people with a lot of money and a cause want to reshape society, no matter how logically right they can be proven to be.
ISO-9660 doesn't support Unicode. Believe it or not, some languages use characters that aren't part of ASCII.
That probably has something to do with ISO-9660 being started as High Sierra in 1985 and the first published standard appearing in 1988 while Unicode was first started in 1987 and the first published standard appearing in 1991.
ISO-9660 doesn't support lower case letters, spaces and multiple dots in file/directory names.
You know, those limitations sound remarkable like MS-DOS limitations. Oh, right, to provide compatibility between different OSs (Unix, Windows, and Macs), ISO-9660 was designed around a few lowest common denominators, like short limited character filenames.
There's nothing wrong with naming a directory "Family Photos 25.12.2009." - if Joliet didn't exist, we'd have to burn that to CD as "FAMILYPHOTOS25122009".
If Microsoft had chosen a more sensible scheme for FAT filenames in the first place, ISO-9660 would almost certainly have had support for spaces, multiple periods, and perhaps even lowercase letters. This leads to the GP's point: Microsoft striving to patent solutions to problems it created and then actually collecting royalties on those solutions. But, yes, yippie that we have Joliet.
The fact that [copyright/trademarks] are being extended for well beyond their original intended life span is what's wrong with the system. I blame Disney.
Personally, I blame Mark Twain*.
*In short, Mark Twain in having a successful authorship since a relatively young age, didn't like how his earlier works were going public domain and publishers stopped paying him royalties. The fact that publishers now have even more power over copyrighted works, generally, just shows what happens when a great motivational speaker is horrible with economics**.
**Mark Twain had to do motivational speaking/lecturing because he wanted to live extravagantly outside of his means. More to the point, publishers are near immortal (if nothing else, when one publisher does fail another one will buy out the rights of any copyrighted works they control worth controlling), and given the prospected of potentially paying an author for many years more due to a copyright extension, publishers will bargain down yearly royalty rates under the excuse that royalties become a sort of de facto pension.
I took the extra large web image and decided to draw some lines to connect large (12 pixel or more), bright (50% luminous) objects together. The point was to try to find large regions of relatively dark sky in the image. Why? The original deep field images were taken upon "black" sky to see what really long exposures could find. Now with the ultra deep field images, it's plenty clear that most "black" sky has lots of galaxies visible. So, in the future, it'd probably be a good idea to take an ultra deep field image of a "black" part of the ultra deep field image just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Great. So, we'll find out about the tainted product. And all those people who died, became very sick, or became addicted (what better way to hook people onto your product)? Well, they had it coming, as clearly it's the responsibility of the buyer to ask questions about every possible contingency. And even then if the peddler of the product lies and you buy it? Well, at least you can get them on fraud charges.
I might be under no delusion that regulation is working, but this idea that communication will magically solve the snake oil problems is clearly false. Look no further than the current financial crisis, bonded in an independent, private credit rating agency which overrated what were toxic assets. Regulation didn't help and short-sighted businesses were perfectly willing to create a bubble that would obviously cripple or crush them in the long-term.
To me, a major question is more, why is it that libertarians so often treat fraud and force as separate when long-term fraud can have the effect of force (poisoning, economic-induced starvation, etc)? At some level, turning a blind eye to the willful negligence of others is a cripple part of the libertarian ethos. The free market might solve the problem, but clearly the libertarian free market is a fantasy where fraud doesn't occur; once you step outside that fantasy and try to work out how to practically implement a free market-like environment, it becomes very clear that negligence can be as devastating as fraud or force if enough actors are negligent. After all, isn't that the basic complaint against big government (they all do at most what policy demands* but are negligent about anything not specifically assigned; ie, they're rigidity to a doctrine too small to encompass the real world causes gap where bad things happen).
*Yea, they fail here as well, and that's one reason why nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance in government should be actively punished with impeachment or jail terms, as appropriate; but, then, for that to actually work would require a population more interested in punishing based upon the letter of the law and not upon the current popular whim and a strong willingness to change the law, even quite radically, quite regularly.
So, if I read you right, you're saying "the government will keep you safe from terrorists with Obamacare" would have gotten full Republican and significant domestic support behind Obama's health care reform?
Gur erny dhrfgvba vf guvf cbfg n QZPN ivbyngvba ("ge 'N-Mn-m' 'A-MN-Za-mn-z'" gb fpenzoyr/qrfpenzoyr) be qbrf rapelcgvat vg cebgrpg vg?
"altruism - Regard for others, both natural and moral; devotion to the interests of others; brotherly kindness; -- opposed to egoism or selfishness." Beyond that, neither I nor the post I responded to said "force". The word used was "want".
Nor would it be altruistic. There isn't very much regard in axe-murdering millionaires; Robin Hood stole, not murdered. As for shooting the mentally or physically ill, such people are just as much brothers of mankind as those who are mentally or physically fit. Ie, there is just as much reason to show them brotherly kindness, and there's nothing kind about shooting them.
Which says nothing against taking your new found wealth and giving it to charities. It is not an either/or to choose capitalism and charity.
That's precisely the point. Poor houses failed because they chose to punish the poor. The New Deal has failed, in part, because it simply supports the poor. Because both England of old and modern America are capitalistic societies, governments are not the solution to the long-term prosperity of the poor; they don't make the jobs, after all. That void can be best filled by charity. This doesn't mean the charity of feeding the mouth (the New Deal fixed that, mostly). It does mean the charity organization and business that prov
Granted. The law sets a minimum of what everyone owes society.
True enough. Scrooge paid his prison and poor house taxes, yet clearly he was miserly because despite his great wealth he chose to shun others in his pursuit of greed. The possession of money became an end.
Wanting others to pay more so others can become better off is altruism. Rallying against the abuse of tax law (ie, to use language loopholes to violate the intent of law) instead of fixing the tax law or to rally against the lobby for the introduction of new loopholes is not greed. It is a argument for the consideration of fairness of tax law. Of course, tax law should not be the end because, as noted, tax law is meant as a minimum of what people owe society. The bigger complaint, then, should not be that people or organizations have such low taxes but that they spend so little on charity. The New Deal, Welfare, etc has not changed the need for charity any more than the poor houses in England did, so obsession over taxes are not as relevant as the actual total spending towards society.
The major problem with your argument is that it only holds until nuclear bombs start being used. Saving multi-millions in the short term to in the long term kill billions isn't a good investment. The one key argument that has been made about weapons technology as it has progressed has always seemed to be that no one would be crazy enough to use it. Yet, in the end, to start a war in which you know the opponent has mass killing equipment strongly hints that your opponent is crazy and you must use your own mass killing equipment for your protection. With nuclear weapons, self-preservation has translated that into proxy, local wars, so the opponent is never directly a nuclear power. The biggest mistake made so far in this cold war was giving a proxy, Cuba, nuclear weapons and having it in direct conflict with the opponent.
No, this was motivated by "if it bleeds, it leads", a very American-centric view of the death count (a lot more than 3000 people died), and a general desire by most humans to not fight in wars for years.
"initial planning" also considered the threat of chemical weapons. In short, initial planning had a very unrealistic idea of what Iraq had to offer militarily and chose to act when there was still a significant asymmetrical advantage.
At one level, you're right, in that both sides chose to fight a proxy war. But, if they had chosen differently, do you really think we'd still be here today? Every single conflict that arises now that involves directly or indirectly a nuclear power could be the end of most of humanity. If you were a billionaire, would you risk nearly all of your fortune to play a single throw of craps? Would you feel proud or happy to have repeatedly played and never lost but not really gained either?
Perhaps I will judge things differently when a nuclear weapon is finally used on a major city. Only if a nuclear war doesn't start then will I really consider nuclear weapons as humanity's bogeyman, not their self-created downfall.
Well, the 486SX lacked an FPU (a functioning one, at least). The second socket on most 486SX boards was for the "i487", which was really a 486DX with an extra pin. Later, "Overdrive" processors could be used in the same slot because, as you note, it was just really just a special CPU socket. Since you had to use a jumper to use the second socket, I wonder if an i487 would have actually worked in the socket without the jumper and the jumper thing was just a hack by Packard Bell so you could upgrade using probably cheaper 486DX processors.
So, what you're saying is, if you wish for copyrighted works to survive*, you should hoard them like money or gold? Btw, there are two main problem with your plan. One is that no matter what you do books will degrade over time (especially if there keeps being copyright extensions) and making a duplicate might very well destroy the book (Google's scanning process is rather badly known for this); the latter wouldn't be a problem if duplication techniques were perfect (even devoted monks, entrusted to the cause of Christianity, on many occasions mis-copied parts of the Bible; OCRs and copy machines might be better, but there still quite a ways off). The other thing is, a fire or any other sort of natural disaster can trivially destroy one's collection; again, given enough time, this seems almost invariable in destroying large collections of copyrighted works (consider the Library of Alexandria).
*I find it ironic that the long-term preservation of intellectual works under long-term copyright is the same as under no copyright. That is, few people are willing to distribute their work (either for lack of attribution or fear of the one possessed copy being accidentally destroyed) and a major part of copyright (and patent) was precisely to encourage the distribution of intellectual works for wide spread availability. It's a shame the Supreme Court seems unwilling to recognize that creating an artificial scarcity of a thing to a degree might be a good thing but a significant artificial scarcity of a thing is almost certainly bound to simply cause that thing to be effectively abandoned because of the complexity of ownership over time and the cost of litigation. Of course, with real property, laws were eventually created in most locales for abandoned property, but given how virtual and international copyright is, even with supporting legislation I'm not really should how one would ever establish abandonment of a copyrighted work without the expensive litigation.
Not quite. The major problem in the current situation is because bankers have started including investing houses. Banking is supposed to provide reliable, low-interest, low-return loans as a stable basis for inflation. Inflation is supposed to encourage investment and debasing of the currency of the rich over time, especially for those who would sit on money instead of investing; ie, inflation is intended to encourage economy growth instead of risking periods of economic stagnation.
And that's the problem. Banks becoming investment houses has resulted in the mixing of safe and wildly unsafe loans. The result is that to support the general population through common bank loans, it was necessary to subsidize wildly unsafe loans. The main problem now is that with the emergency over, there should be immediate efforts to dissect the bank into investment and banking operations. This really should have started as soon as December last year.
Deflation is more or less the worst case scenario. Instead of investing, people would simply save their money. Those with outstanding loans (ie, most small businesses) would have to sell at lower prices, resulting in even greater difficulty in paying back their loans, and making it harder to buy the same size stock of items, let alone any sort of expansion. Adding on repealing minimum wage laws would make it worse, by removing the masses regular spending money. Such would merely accelerate the deflation.
Would people with savings be better off? Sure, I guess. But, that's a relative term. If 50% of the farms go out of business because so few people have any money to spend, you'll be the one of the few people with enough money to buy a steak. But, being the one eyed king in the land of the blind isn't really a great place to be in, overall.
That's the limit of the Federal Reserve's actual power (well, and changing the interest rate, but that mechanism was already screwed by Greenspan and Bernanke's unwilling to raise the interest rate during relatively economically prosperous times*). While it can be argued that the current and previous chairman of the Federal Reserve encouraged the deregulation and merging of investment houses with banks (which is a good basis to fire Ben Bernanke), invariable it is the Congress who actually passed the deregulation laws, ignored warnings about derivatives, and has still failed to act to further the separation of investment houses with banks. Congress, and generally deregulation minded individuals, have turned banking from a stable, progressive debasing of the currency into a rapid expansion of the economy coupled with catastrophic economic circumstances when over-leveraging can not be handled by the built-in mechanisms that were created for low-risk, low-fail-rate loans.
In short, rallying against the Federal Reserve on its principle function is lu
Generally true. However, in the Adam Smith free market, monopolies and oligopolies should be fought, removed, etc. Meanwhile, in the Laissez-Faire free market, monopolies and oligopolies are good, wholesome constructions of inherent rights.
Many people who champion a free market don't realize that monopolies and oligopolies could be constructed in a free market because many Laissez-Faire supporting individuals are quick to downplay their inevitable existence with speak of competition and the invisible hand. The end result is people like the GP who are misinformed about what a real free market (as opposed to an idealized free market) entails.
Your use of "in the first place" was being used to imply blame. Compare to "Why are you giving Netflix your birthday and gender?" The form you use is pejorative to the actions as committed versus what actions should have been committed. Similarly, the form is used in declarative statements to imply support of one's previous choices in comparison to what is being possibly suggested. For example, "We relied, in the first place, on Netflix's privacy policy."
You appear to be correct, but the OSI's effective definition of open source seems to be a bit buggy.
Consider something I'll call a Reciprocal Self-Terminating License. It'll be basically identical to the GPLv2 except with a few changes. Specifically, all GPLv2 references will be replaced with RSTL#. RSTL# will be, at the header of the license, "Real Self-Termination License" with a whole decimal number. If that number is greater than one, any redistribution will decrement that number by one and release under the new numbered license (ie, if you have RSTL2, you'd redistribute as RSTL1). Merger of two or more RSTL# licensed code will result in licensed code having the lowest license number of the group. At RSTL0, you can only redistribute under non-commercial terms and the license will be stuck at RSTL0. This definition is probably incomplete, but I think you get the idea.
A similar effect could be had if, for example, a company were to take source code, release it under a BSD license to a subsidiary or partner company, and that subsidiary/partner company would only ever released the code under a non-commercial BSD-like license.
From what I understand from the open source definition, in both the RSTL1 and the partner company situation, the code would be considered open source.
Major correction. We do want people embracing open source if by "embrace" they mean "take this free code, create my own product, and sell it". If it happens to be free software as well, they just need to release the source code to their new product as well. If it's BSD or some other open source license, the conditions might be different (attribution in advertising, possibly). Very few open source licenses forbid the commercialization of code.
Nearly 90% of the US, by population density, is "rural sticks". By your logic, no where but the east and west coast should have access electricity, telephone service, etc except by industry alone choosing to provide service.
Funny, but most rural areas do have municipalities which provide water services, septic services, and trash collection. As well, there tends to exist cable, natural gas, electricity, and telephone services; the latter two tend to exist everyone, although the former tend to be restricted to within or near city limits. The latter is a byproduct of municipalities being able to lure in industry under monopolistic positions. Without the effective subsidy of a monopoly, many industries would simply refuse to service such areas because of the risk involved (and the inherent poverty of rural life*).
Is it any wonder that the east and west coast are considered elitist with that attitude?
The former should, for the most part, be a requirement wherever you live. You shouldn't have to live in the country to avoid cancerous clouds from industry or river fires; living in the country doesn't really protect you from this, anyways. Perhaps you'd have more perspective on this if you think about China's effective lack of regulation of pollution? As for open spaces, while for the most part this is a simple factor of what defines country (ie, population density), many cities, like New York City and many European countries, have recognized the value of having open, pedestrian areas and not endless crowded concrete. Sure, it's definitely not the same as the country, but it's hardly unreasonable to want a space for people to experience life both outside of their homes and outside of their cars.
*As pointed out by others further down the thread, and you, there's increases costs of living in a rural area. This is increased with the existence of monopolies. Further than that, rural areas inherently have greater difficulty providing high paying jobs (hence the suggest to "outsource to rural America"). Much like urban city poverty, many are in a position where it's unclear exactly how they can escape this poverty (being low skilled labor, rural poor seems likely to, if in large number, to move to an urban area to become urban poor).
This isn't to say cities don't give greater advantage and there aren't many people who would benefit from moving. But, clearly, nearly everyone moving to the east and west coast wouldn't magically solve the socioeconomic problems of people. Now, whether this justifies subsidies rural people is another thing, but one can't simply dismiss the situation with the false belief that rural life is some grand choice by people who have a reasonable expectation of a better life in a city. After all, if there was such a reasonable expectation, then people in a rural setting must either be irrational or value open spaces very highly. I am quite certain the latter isn't true.
Indeed, why stop at Javascript?
Not "how DARE" they, but "it'd be a good idea to standardize on a way to let people know if they wish to know". After all, what RMS suggests is a design with whitelist, not blacklist, properties.
If the user wants to be warned, why shouldn't the browser inform the user?
Indeed, why not?
Not quite. Providing more information to the user allows them to make a "better judgment". And certainly, choosing whether to visit a site or not is up to the user.
And? If the data isn't code, it doesn't really apply to the FSF cause.
Feel free to. And if you can't find a bank willing to provide such information, you must decide whether you want to do business with banks or not given those constraints.
Sure, why not. Are you against your browser warning you about your bank having an invalid Certificate? Does your bank using an invalid Certificate and your browser warning you stop you from using your bank? Is the inconvenience of being informed once (or possibly never, since the setting to inform could easily default to off or be turned off) so horrible a thing?
Really, if Mozilla and other open source browsers want to add a feature for real die hard GPL fans, I don't see a problem with it inherently. In all likely, only a very small minority of sites will qualify, and those people can feel content knowing all the code is GPLed. It doesn't sound like RMS's suggest is particularly hard or bulky to implement. The only real argument I see against it really is that if RMS wants it, he probably should devote himself to doing the actual work to implement and maintain the feature or find someone willing to do such. But, there's no other real reason I can think of to be opposed to it.
Yep, Star Trek is an example of "magical pixie dust that violates the laws of physics to allow ultra energy cheap escape velocity" along with ultra energy cheap intergalactic travel. Even then, Star Trek really only works as a concept because there's thousands of M-class worlds, allowing for an expansionist society (not unlike how the US's west was conquered; such is appropriate given Roddenberry's "wagon-train to the stars" concept).
No where in the Constitution does it give the power to Congress, the Executive, or the Judiciary to regulate pollution except where disputes between states occur. Since pollution is effectively littering, I'd imagine that most states on the east coast would have ample basis to block coal plants from releasing CO2 to the west of them.
No, they're morons who don't understand it, too*. The difference is, believers are willing to admit that fact, while dissenters like to pretend they know better and should be the ones dictating reality.
*This obviously excludes the PhDs who are qualified.
The big question is, what will? It's reasonably arguable that the only reason we ever made it to the moon was a drive to push the limits of existing technology. To, as the GP points out, sit on our hands will, if anything, retard the interest and drive to develop those new technologies.
Besides, the next leap is unlikely to push us particularly farther than we can go now and things don't become much more than an interesting "joy ride" through space really until we can actual travel to other solar systems. Even then, one could argue that really at no point does it ever being more than a "joy ride" since the amount of energy required is so massive that it's incredibly unlikely that anything could be discovered to make it worthwhile from a purely utilitarian perspective.
In short, if one can't accept today that the things done by astronauts in space are more than a "joy ride", then I don't see how you could see any action by astronauts in space as more than a "joy ride"--not without some magical pixie dust that violates the laws of physics to allow ultra energy cheap escape velocity.
It's his opinion that closed software is morally wrong and open software (eg Free Software) is morally right. It is your opinion that that is BS. Since both are opinions, I can only presume that you consider your opinion a tantrum as well.
Quite right. And since GNOME is part of GNU, GNOME has already apparently chosen. Hence, Richard Stallman offered his opinion on how the discussion of proprietary software.
Considering that you can't prove a moral imperative, that's a non-sequitur.
In this situation, the "arrogant prick" would be Philip Van Hoof. After all, it is he who is trying to fork away from the GNU Project under a non-GNU philosophy.
Hardly. Using proprietary software is not in itself morally wrong, especially when it's to clone functionality for free software. GNU, after all, started out as a clone of UNIX. But, clearly, if one thinks highly enough of the functionality of a proprietary program, the goal should be to clone that functionality in a free software alternative, not to herd people into using the proprietary program. And if a free software alternative already exists, not even mentioning it is rather ludicrous.
People in general have been gunned down in stores, malls, their home, in alleys, street corners, etc. The four police officers being gunned down recently is the aberration of multiple victim public shootings that have been reported for years. In short, those four police officers, if anything, merely cause a statistically inflation of police officer occupational deaths for one year.
Would you feel the same way if firefighters, in seeing a school burning down, would refuse to rush in to rescue trapped children? Or would you acknowledge that firefighters (and police officers) chose their profession with the intent to, if necessary, lay down their life to save others?
Besides, discretion is about "cautious discernment" not "excessive force". You seem to view police officers as if they are weapons, with their only choices being to shoot/beat or not. Instead, police officers are people, with the ability to question, order, detain, and/or arrest. None of this translates into a need for reckless abuse of people.
PS - If you believe that the danger of a job should be a factor in what consideration we give to people of a profession, how do you feel about farmers being able to beat and arrest people? Farmers, IIRC, have a higher fatal occupation injury rate than police.
That's a major part of the point. People are more likely to empathize with an injustice if someone is hurt.
One, a well organized ad campaign can be more effective, but people are easily desensitized to marketing, especially since one's opponents can fund a well organized counter campaign. Having an actual instance of injustice is harder to squash through a counter campaign. This is why, btw, news focus so much on personal stories.
Two, the point isn't "to get in a confrontation with police officers". It is to, when a confrontation occurs, do the otherwise reasonable thing and show how unjust the police respond. To spark a confrontation only hurts your campaign, as that fact can be used in an organized counter campaign. It is for this reason that the people who are most useful to a campaign against injustice are the ones who are most normal, who are simply sick of playing the game of being obedient to the unreasonable expectations of a situation, and who "snap" and start trying the situation as any other situation.
In short, when the emperor's clothes are removed by the most innocent and most common, people are much more inclined to acknowledge it than when a few people with a lot of money and a cause want to reshape society, no matter how logically right they can be proven to be.
That probably has something to do with ISO-9660 being started as High Sierra in 1985 and the first published standard appearing in 1988 while Unicode was first started in 1987 and the first published standard appearing in 1991.
You know, those limitations sound remarkable like MS-DOS limitations. Oh, right, to provide compatibility between different OSs (Unix, Windows, and Macs), ISO-9660 was designed around a few lowest common denominators, like short limited character filenames.
If Microsoft had chosen a more sensible scheme for FAT filenames in the first place, ISO-9660 would almost certainly have had support for spaces, multiple periods, and perhaps even lowercase letters. This leads to the GP's point: Microsoft striving to patent solutions to problems it created and then actually collecting royalties on those solutions. But, yes, yippie that we have Joliet.
Personally, I blame Mark Twain*.
*In short, Mark Twain in having a successful authorship since a relatively young age, didn't like how his earlier works were going public domain and publishers stopped paying him royalties. The fact that publishers now have even more power over copyrighted works, generally, just shows what happens when a great motivational speaker is horrible with economics**.
**Mark Twain had to do motivational speaking/lecturing because he wanted to live extravagantly outside of his means. More to the point, publishers are near immortal (if nothing else, when one publisher does fail another one will buy out the rights of any copyrighted works they control worth controlling), and given the prospected of potentially paying an author for many years more due to a copyright extension, publishers will bargain down yearly royalty rates under the excuse that royalties become a sort of de facto pension.
I took the extra large web image and decided to draw some lines to connect large (12 pixel or more), bright (50% luminous) objects together. The point was to try to find large regions of relatively dark sky in the image. Why? The original deep field images were taken upon "black" sky to see what really long exposures could find. Now with the ultra deep field images, it's plenty clear that most "black" sky has lots of galaxies visible. So, in the future, it'd probably be a good idea to take an ultra deep field image of a "black" part of the ultra deep field image just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Besides, the images are pretty.
Hubble UDF Infrared with lines connecting large, bright objects
The same as above, but with the large, bright objects colored to better differentiate what counts as "large, bright objects"
PS - I used two slightly different, slowish python scripts to do the actual drawing. I'll post them as well, if anyone is interested.