Why on this Earth would Google want an OS?? They already have it - it is called "The Browser". That's what they use to make money. They may want to extend its usage, but I doubt that Google will ever want to deal with the "desktop" in the same way as Microsoft, Apple or Linux community.
Google is about control. They want to control your information for their own profit. They show it again and again. That's how they make money. The more targeted the ads, the more money they can make. The only competitor I think they may have here is Amazon, but that only deals with your book preferences. Google wants your wants so they can sell something from one of their customers.
Thus it is NOT in the interest of Google to make a desktop. They are not in the business of making software like MS or Apple or GNU or even IBM. They are in business to manage information about you and me. Their "free" solutions are just there so you can give them more info about yourself.
And of course it's all disposable, I cannot possibly be using software written in 1995 on my Vista box. Unpossible!
You can't if it was written for Win 3.1 and is 16-bit and you are running Vista 64 bit.
Sure, you could try an emulator. But that's not exactly running in your 64-bit Vista box.
Everything in Unix, you mean. Which saw the light of day thanks to corporations and universities.
Unix was developed by Bell Labs, AFAIK. As well as the C compiler. Universities developed BSD, again, AFAIK. Then Sun,HP,IBM,SGI,etc.. used all of that and make their own flavours of UNIX. Then RMS came along and made a bunch of tools for POSIX systems under a GNU banner, like UNIX. They tried a kernel, but that didn't work so well (see HURD). Then Linus came along with Linux. It was combined with GNU tools, and voila! Linux/GNU system was born.
Who brought it to the masses? I'd say RMS effort with GNU and Linus effort with the kernel. I don't think free UNIX would exist otherwise. (eg. BSD people had a problem with getting a good, free compiler before GCC). And UNIX costing $5000 per CPU probably would not see light of day anyway! It would get locked up in some research institution's mainframe and that's it.
Does your country that banned guns have a police force? An army? Isn't a much more realistic example of banning guns to ban private ownership of guns?? There, problems solved.
I would disagree. The error check is right at the beginning of the function. You get it out of the way first and remove the indent. Indents are what makes code unreadable - they are branches... That's why it was Linus (I think) that said that if your function is more than 3 levels nested, you are fucked anyway - use a new function.
is A LOT less readable than void foo() {
if( !blah )
return;
[... 200 lines...] }
It tells me instantly that blah has to be true or the function doesn't run. It is A LOT easier to see when the next block is executed than suddenly finding yourself on like 160 in first example not knowing if you forgot to close the block or something. The first example is only correct if you have very few LOC (less than a page) or use a seperate function for the true condition as in
I personally have no problem with copyright. I support copyright in its original US form and the original duration (14 years plus a possible 14 year extension in the US I believe). I do not support copyright in it's current ridiculous form. Copyright in most parts of the world now defaults to 50 or 70 years after the author/artist's death. That's outrageous. Before that's up, someone will have lobbied for yet another extension as they have in the past, and repeat ad nauseum leading to truly eternal copyright, which is not at all what copyright was intended for.
Finally, something to agree on.:)
You probably know the reason for the extensions but I'll say it anyway. The children that inherit the estate, inherit the profits from the copyrights. But they just want to mooch off of it for infinity instead of a few years. That's the reason. Money sways politicians (or corrupts?) and hence the extensions. 50 years is still bearable, but 80 doesn't make sense (eg. widow(er) where spouse has copyright works, dies young - spouse may benefit). Extending it more is truly insane.
There are other countries that nationalized stuff. Whether you get paid 20% or 5% compensation on your investment or none doesn't matter that much. It matters more that businesses and the country in question lose in the long term. There are many examples of countries, socialist or otherwise that do this. For example,
* Zimbabwe - when Mugabe essentially nationalized all the "white farmer's land" and gave it to the black peasants. Zimbabwe is not communist. The idea was nationalistic. Now Zimbabwe has the highest inflation in the world. People can't even afford food anymore. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zimbabwe
* Colombia - Chavez nationalizing stuff. Bad. Little compensation. Inflation is up to 20% last time I checked.
* Russia - Shell properties on the east cost of Russia (near Japan) got essentially nationalized for pennies on the dollar of the actual value of the properties. Russia has done this many times before. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos for example.
* Bolivia with recent changes that are nationalizing oil and gas and possibly mining.
* Many more....
None of these countries are communist, yet, they are nationalizing and essentially stealing (or taking away what they rented?). Fidel (not Fido:) did the same thing except his error was to side with USSR and allow missiles to be put on the island. That is why the embargo is in place. For spite. Not for nationalizing anything. Otherwise we would definately see sanctions against Russia, or Colombia (US is being as much oil as before), or Zimbabwe. But no. Only Cuba.
The official reason is now "terrorist support" or something retarded as such. It is just political.
Anyway, going back to my original point about GoDaddy, GoDaddy cannot DO BUSINESS or PROFIT with Cuba. It doesn't mean it has to *censor* Internet from Cubans! Even if most Cubans don't have access to the Internet, I don't think that is the spirit of embargo (see Radio America for an example). And I don't think that is even what the intelligence agencies want that are still working on ways to get rid of Fidel.
Well, so? A normal computer can be a hardware firewall, or a software firewall. Depends on usage. The point is that the hardware firewall is a separate device that allows one to *physically* separate the outside from the inside. If all you do is a software firewall like iptables on the client or the windows firewall, then a virus can alter or disable said firewall. But a hardware or separate physical filtering device that has wires going in and out can't be altered even if a virus exists inside the firewall.
The story is clearly about a software solution, even if the filtering is run on a separate device. The firewall's "driver" can be altered to by-pass it.
Er, no. It is easy to transfer. And also they don't deal with commie countries like Cuba. I'd say GoDaddy is more of a company that lapdances for the US foreign policy. (see GoDaddy terms of service)
Aside: If GoDaddy.com wanted to help Cubans, they would want them to have as much access to the Internet as possible instead of filtering Cuban ips from resolving DNS for domains hosted at GoDaddy.
Aside 2: And if Cuba is so bad that US has a trade embargo against it, why not have a similar one against China? Oh, wait, it's about the money stupid!
It is just another type of a software firewall. A hardware firewall has at least one input and one output jack (unless it is some weird VLAN firewall). The firewall then checks the packets *before* they get to the hardware that processes them.
Here we have a software layers shunting packets for filtering to another "device" and then they are probably reinjected. The software layer that does this shunting and re-injecting of packets makes this not a hardware firewall.
Or are we saying that iptables is a hardware firewall as well?
Third, it has been shown many times in many ways that copyright infringement can actually help the author/artist by spreading his work and making it far more popular than if the copyright infringement had never occurred
That is not YOUR choice. It is the AUTHOR'S choice to make THEIR WORK available such that you can copy it everywhere. Do you understand the difference??
Secondly,
Please! Get your head out of your ass. You are the type of people (and apparently MPAA uses the *same* logic as you) that think that if the work is *impossible* to copy, then there can't by copyright infringement then no "potential" loss of sales. So they come up with BS like encrypted movies that cannot be read anywhere except licensed players, etc.. I mean, assuming you can't steal their information, then your only recourse is either to buy, not to buy or use the "Theft".
Thank you. You are the type of person that makes MPAA and RIAA say "See! We need stronger protection from these thieves! More DRM! Otherwise we invest $100k in an artist and the thieves just take one copy of music and make their own copies for free". And the sane judges and politicians agree...
Linux is free and for-free but protected by copyright. And yet how many companies have been caught stealing that intellectual property? How many GPL projects are suddenly being hijacked and closed *against the wishes of its creators* (aka copyright)? (eg PearOS). And then there is people like you for whom things like GPL mean squat. Stealing the work of all Linux or GCC contributors is OK for you since you are not even depriving anyone of any earnings.
First, are you out of your mind? Speaking of bad logic... even comparing actual Theft (let alone copyright infringement) with murder and rape is outrageous. Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored.
You are the one that made this retarded comparison - "Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored". WTF are you talking about??? Do you have any idea what the Law is even about?
Just to clarify you on what Law is, it is NOT about things you can "restore". It deals with the *actions* and their *consequences*.
To clarify that with an example for the brainless,
You seal a truckload of Gummy Bears (candy). The law punishes you for *theft*, not because you can't "restore" the truckload of Gummy Bears! It is the *action* that is the crime!!
It is the *action* of murder, rape, theft (real or intellectual property) that is the crime. It is NOT that you deprive anything from anyone that can't be replaced.
For Pete's sake, you don't even understand the basis of what the law is!!!
So, you are saying that someone that made music should not deserve to be paid for it? Or someone that created a good story (aka. book) doesn't deserve to be paid for it? After all, this is all just information and it should be free?
Or are you saying that work of a construction worker building a house is more valuable than that of an architect? The construction worker makes the building from plans that were conjured up by the architect. So since information must be free and copyright is unnatural, the construction worker can just copy the plans and make as many copies of the said building without any royalties to the architect that created the plans in the first place? But then why didn't the construction worker come up with their own plans???
Are you so stupid to realize that intellectual property is the same as physical property (ie. effort to create), except there is no effort involved in copying it?
I mean, if someone makes free software like Linux, why can't a company like Microsoft, take bits from the source code here and there and just insert them into theirs? OH!! It is called COPYRIGHT! Linux is *protected* by it. If it wasn't, it would just be another BSD. Now think very carefully, why oh why companies chose to put resources in Linux and not in BSD? (Hint: think competition)
Free doesn't mean for-free. Learn the difference or look it up on gnu.org.
PS. Murder and rape are not unnatural states for humans. That's how things were decided for millenia before the thing called Law showed up. And we still do it and it is even encouraged by some in what is called "war". Even in non-war eras, this is how things are decided (see Pakistan, or in India where $10,000 allows you to get away with murder, or Iran, or Rwanda, or Saudi Arabia, or; should I go on?). US still has institutional murder called the "Death Penalty" - or is it that when you murder someone that murdered others, somehow cancel each other in your head?
Most people just *choose* not to use these methods for the "errs of others".
Stop trolling, troll. You know, people had setellites in space using misterious things called "SOLAR PANEL"s for their power production for a few decades now. And guess what? The EM flux from the sun didn't change, yet, global warming!
So humanity is releasing, oh, 30-50 TIMES the amount of CO2 by volcanoes during the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME., well, back in 2003.
This also means that current natural system is balanced at volcanic emissions of CO2, not 50 times that, hence CO2 is rising and not being tanked.
Also, if 3000 billion tons of CO2 is 380ppm, then 7.3 (from fossil fuels in 2003) is only 1ppm.. So, that doesn't even account for the total increase of CO2 now hence the number is too low (additional release of CO2 from burning forests probably accounts for the rest, but who weights forests??). CO2 is going up at a current rate of 2 ppm per year and accelerating.
Anyway, what you say is bullshit as seen above. Volcanoes do not account for even a fraction of what is happening in CO2.
Just wait a little bit and "mother nature" will help us increase the CO2 rate much, much faster than even currently. When the Siberian and Canadian bogs defrost and warm up, the Atlantic (aka. Bermuda Triangle) and Black Sea releases their methane (it just needs to warm a little bit more), well, then we'll see global warming. CO2 will be over 1000ppm by end of the century and then, well, you or your kids may just see what happens then.
It has gone up because,
1. people don't die of infections so often (antibiotics)
2. people don't die of war
3. people don't starve
4. people don't die due to childbirth (mother or child)
#4 is very important because childbirth was the *leading* cause of female death in the past. For males, it was probably #2. As one king once said "you paid good money to raise an army - better use it" (costing too much to maintain and disbanding it wouldn't even provide entertainment). And then in war you get infections if maimed so...
No, natural is not the most deadly. Bubonic plague is *nothing* compared to what humans have created as part of biowarfare (eg. combining Ebola like virus with small pox and encasing it in plastic to maximize delivery and lethality). True, it wasn't used (yet), but when it will be, bubonic plague will look like mild case of hemorrhoids in comparison.
You are right that natural doesn't imply safe. Although natural doesn't mean the enigma that human-made is.
Also, you write about "responsibility of the government towards people". That's an oxymoron. Government's only responsibility is to further itself. Since it is a democratically elected government, they do things that gets them reelected. That's their "responsibility". Thus if enough people demand that there should be a morality police, there will be that. Of course, there is already morality police - you can't walk naked in public, for example.
Any dictatorship's only difference is that there is no feedback in elections, but it is about the same. The goal is *exactly* the same.
When a camera monitors and records all my actions all the time when in public, I have no privacy left.
The state knows,
1. who I talked to and when,
2. did I pass any information to the other person,
3. what I talked about in public, even if conversation is private
4. the patterns of my movements,
They know *everything* about you unless you live in your parent's basement and never leave for anything. But then they know you do that too because they can't find you on their cameras.
It would invade privacy *less* if they stick the cameras in people's houses. Are you so blind to not see that your privacy is everything you do, your relationships, your conversations? (most of private conversations occur in public places) Privacy is about the number of moles on your ass!
Yes, it is a mess. It is a mess because it was designed not for power production or even safe processing. You can see similar examples of these messes in former Soviet Union. One incident by the enriching plant was that they dumped pure uranium on a pile. The pile got so big that the middle went critical. It actually *melted* inside and no one noticed for a while. Then the Uranium leaked into a lake and they noticed the leak when the lake started to get surrounded by radioactive flies. They traced it back to the centrally-melted Uranium stash.
Current Uranium handling techniques are not comparable to what happened in the "cowboy" days. Hanford would never happen in US, Canada or Europe. I'm not so certain about other countries though, like Iran or Pakistan or India or even China.
Anyway, nuclear power will not harm humanity. I think we will kill ourselves faster over water than through any civilian nuclear accident.
You cannot do a whois lookups often. Registries only allow limited number of lookups per day to prevent spammers from getting email addresses and also so these servers are not overloaded. Some sell this service though.
I guess good news for people living in Easter Europe that got a nice dose of strontium-90 for entire life. And I guess then moving and living on clay soils with all the extra uranium may help too.:)
But this is very interesting observation. Do they have any idea why cancer rates are down in higher radiation?
I like this much better than the entire CCTV surveillance. The camera just sees what the officer sees. So no blatant invasion of privacy as we see with the CCTV system.
Now if only they removed CCTV and use the cameras like this on every officer we should probably have less misconducts and brutality.
Actually the fuel waste is difficult to deal with because no one can come close to it during reprocessing. You have to have virtually all the work mechanized. And everything has to be in stainless steel because all substances are very corrosive. Repairs to equipment have to be remote (ie. broken pipe or similar) which causes problem.
The decommissioned plants are relatively easy to deal with because it is just irradiated *light* materials like steel and concrete. These substances are only radioactive for short period of time (100 years or so) and since a reactor is active for at least 50 years, the decommissioning time is very acceptable IMHO. One could build new reactors on site so the decommissioned reactor buildings do not incur much additional costs (ie. security, etc).
The modern alternative to nuclear is to burn coal (no other energy source abundant enough and cheap enough). That releases huge amounts of mercury and other toxins including Uranium into the air. Virtually all of the ocean contamination in mercury (ie. can't eat too much tuna - hopefully this will save tune from extinction, but you never know) is generated from the coal plants. True, you could add precipitators to remove most of this stuff from the smoke, but then you end up with the CO2 problem. So you have to sequester that. The end cost is even more than a nuclear plant and in a nuclear plant at least one deals with the entire fuel cycle and not dump the waste into the air (remember, radiation contamination will affect humans A LOT MORE than animals as animals don't really care about short term (1 or 2 generations until they adapt) birth defects).
Hey, what is the worst that can happen? We could have nature reserves where people dare not enter! (hence I cannot believe why the environmental crowd is not 1000% behind nuclear technology) Also, France has something like 90% of their power from nuclear plants. It also has one of the best (if not the best) air quality of any industrialized country.
Usury is about interest rates, not about "percent of income". IF you have good credit, loans of up to 600% of income are common in the United States at high interest rates. Loans of 300% of income are easy to find for under 10% interest....
So you'd rather leave them in slavery than create laws that fit the responsibility level of the general population? Guess we know which side you're on.
I stand corrected. It makes sense then, but I think that there are already laws about charging exuberant interest rates. I think they are capped at something like 60% or similar. This is still extremely high and very bad.
The problem with capping rates at anything has more to do with inflation than "creating slavery". I am on the side of freedom so I believe that anyone should be able to charge any interest they want provided it is legal. It does take *both* parties to agree on such rates. What I really loath are the contracts where there are additional fees not included in the normal interest rate and this is what is even more alarming than people having a perpetual CC debt at 20% or 30%.
Anyway, what happens when inflation jumps to 10% or 15%? Interest rates on loans have to be *at least* that to just break even, but normally are at least 5% higher. Capping interest rates artificially would stop lending after inflation got high enough. That probably could stop inflation too, except we are now in the global economy era so inflation is usually imported as we are currently seeing (China/India used to export deflation so inflation was pulled very low, but now the wages in China are going up, yuan is going up and base metal and oil prices are 3X-5X higher than a few years ago, so inflation HAS TO happen worldwide. Interest rate increases will not stop it that easy, but I digress)
Maybe the only possible solution is to flag people with debt problems so they can no longer get any loans. But that maybe seen as draconian as well.
In conclusion, I think people should be more responsible themselves as if they get into these debt problems it is usually their own doing.
PS. But if you are talking about the "payday loans" businesses, I really think they should be shut down. These prey on the uninformed or otherwise and I do not think there is ANY reason for their existence. If one cannot get a loan from a normal bank (ie. a line of credit) or does not have a CC because of current debt load, then they should not get more debt. Sadly these "payday loan" sharks are allowed to exist. Very sad.
That would absolutely KILL the current housing market. It would put *millions* in the street because they could no longer get credit or find an affordable apartment. I think the country would go bankrupt in short order as 70% (or more?) of the economy is consumer spending.
Furthermore, very few people use cash anymore. All transactions are done on credit cards or similar. If you limit the credit limit to 10% of income, then suddenly credit cards become useless. Remember that in the early 80s almost no one used credit cards.
Removing these laws allowed more freedom for the consumer. It is sad that they have used this freedom to enslave themselves. Maybe it was a mistake to get away with these laws in the 80s. Maybe people in general are not as responsible as some thought:)
Slashdot Mirror
Why on this Earth would Google want an OS?? They already have it - it is called "The Browser". That's what they use to make money. They may want to extend its usage, but I doubt that Google will ever want to deal with the "desktop" in the same way as Microsoft, Apple or Linux community.
Google is about control. They want to control your information for their own profit. They show it again and again. That's how they make money. The more targeted the ads, the more money they can make. The only competitor I think they may have here is Amazon, but that only deals with your book preferences. Google wants your wants so they can sell something from one of their customers.
Thus it is NOT in the interest of Google to make a desktop. They are not in the business of making software like MS or Apple or GNU or even IBM. They are in business to manage information about you and me. Their "free" solutions are just there so you can give them more info about yourself.
Hope that is clear enough.
Well, at least close :)
And of course it's all disposable, I cannot possibly be using software written in 1995 on my Vista box. Unpossible!
You can't if it was written for Win 3.1 and is 16-bit and you are running Vista 64 bit.
Sure, you could try an emulator. But that's not exactly running in your 64-bit Vista box.
Everything in Unix, you mean. Which saw the light of day thanks to corporations and universities.
Unix was developed by Bell Labs, AFAIK. As well as the C compiler. Universities developed BSD, again, AFAIK. Then Sun,HP,IBM,SGI,etc.. used all of that and make their own flavours of UNIX. Then RMS came along and made a bunch of tools for POSIX systems under a GNU banner, like UNIX. They tried a kernel, but that didn't work so well (see HURD). Then Linus came along with Linux. It was combined with GNU tools, and voila! Linux/GNU system was born.
Who brought it to the masses? I'd say RMS effort with GNU and Linus effort with the kernel. I don't think free UNIX would exist otherwise. (eg. BSD people had a problem with getting a good, free compiler before GCC). And UNIX costing $5000 per CPU probably would not see light of day anyway! It would get locked up in some research institution's mainframe and that's it.
Nice hyperbole.
Does your country that banned guns have a police force? An army? Isn't a much more realistic example of banning guns to ban private ownership of guns?? There, problems solved.
FYI, the flaimbait mods are from Emacs users.
I would disagree. The error check is right at the beginning of the function. You get it out of the way first and remove the indent. Indents are what makes code unreadable - they are branches... That's why it was Linus (I think) that said that if your function is more than 3 levels nested, you are fucked anyway - use a new function.
...]
...]
...]
Code like
void foo()
{
if( blah ){
[... 200 lines
}
}
is A LOT less readable than
void foo()
{
if( !blah )
return;
[... 200 lines
}
It tells me instantly that blah has to be true or the function doesn't run. It is A LOT easier to see when the next block is executed than suddenly finding yourself on like 160 in first example not knowing if you forgot to close the block or something. The first example is only correct if you have very few LOC (less than a page) or use a seperate function for the true condition as in
static void foo_gooder()
{
[... 200 LOC
}
void foo()
{
if( blah )
foo_gooder();
}
I personally have no problem with copyright. I support copyright in its original US form and the original duration (14 years plus a possible 14 year extension in the US I believe). I do not support copyright in it's current ridiculous form. Copyright in most parts of the world now defaults to 50 or 70 years after the author/artist's death. That's outrageous. Before that's up, someone will have lobbied for yet another extension as they have in the past, and repeat ad nauseum leading to truly eternal copyright, which is not at all what copyright was intended for.
:)
Finally, something to agree on.
You probably know the reason for the extensions but I'll say it anyway. The children that inherit the estate, inherit the profits from the copyrights. But they just want to mooch off of it for infinity instead of a few years. That's the reason. Money sways politicians (or corrupts?) and hence the extensions. 50 years is still bearable, but 80 doesn't make sense (eg. widow(er) where spouse has copyright works, dies young - spouse may benefit). Extending it more is truly insane.
There are other countries that nationalized stuff. Whether you get paid 20% or 5% compensation on your investment or none doesn't matter that much. It matters more that businesses and the country in question lose in the long term. There are many examples of countries, socialist or otherwise that do this. For example,
:) did the same thing except his error was to side with USSR and allow missiles to be put on the island. That is why the embargo is in place. For spite. Not for nationalizing anything. Otherwise we would definately see sanctions against Russia, or Colombia (US is being as much oil as before), or Zimbabwe. But no. Only Cuba.
* Zimbabwe - when Mugabe essentially nationalized all the "white farmer's land" and gave it to the black peasants. Zimbabwe is not communist. The idea was nationalistic. Now Zimbabwe has the highest inflation in the world. People can't even afford food anymore. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Zimbabwe
* Colombia - Chavez nationalizing stuff. Bad. Little compensation. Inflation is up to 20% last time I checked.
* Russia - Shell properties on the east cost of Russia (near Japan) got essentially nationalized for pennies on the dollar of the actual value of the properties. Russia has done this many times before. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos for example.
* Bolivia with recent changes that are nationalizing oil and gas and possibly mining.
* Many more....
None of these countries are communist, yet, they are nationalizing and essentially stealing (or taking away what they rented?). Fidel (not Fido
The official reason is now "terrorist support" or something retarded as such. It is just political.
Anyway, going back to my original point about GoDaddy, GoDaddy cannot DO BUSINESS or PROFIT with Cuba. It doesn't mean it has to *censor* Internet from Cubans! Even if most Cubans don't have access to the Internet, I don't think that is the spirit of embargo (see Radio America for an example). And I don't think that is even what the intelligence agencies want that are still working on ways to get rid of Fidel.
Well, so? A normal computer can be a hardware firewall, or a software firewall. Depends on usage. The point is that the hardware firewall is a separate device that allows one to *physically* separate the outside from the inside. If all you do is a software firewall like iptables on the client or the windows firewall, then a virus can alter or disable said firewall. But a hardware or separate physical filtering device that has wires going in and out can't be altered even if a virus exists inside the firewall.
The story is clearly about a software solution, even if the filtering is run on a separate device. The firewall's "driver" can be altered to by-pass it.
Er, no. It is easy to transfer. And also they don't deal with commie countries like Cuba. I'd say GoDaddy is more of a company that lapdances for the US foreign policy. (see GoDaddy terms of service)
Aside: If GoDaddy.com wanted to help Cubans, they would want them to have as much access to the Internet as possible instead of filtering Cuban ips from resolving DNS for domains hosted at GoDaddy.
Aside 2: And if Cuba is so bad that US has a trade embargo against it, why not have a similar one against China? Oh, wait, it's about the money stupid!
It is just another type of a software firewall. A hardware firewall has at least one input and one output jack (unless it is some weird VLAN firewall). The firewall then checks the packets *before* they get to the hardware that processes them.
Here we have a software layers shunting packets for filtering to another "device" and then they are probably reinjected. The software layer that does this shunting and re-injecting of packets makes this not a hardware firewall.
Or are we saying that iptables is a hardware firewall as well?
Third, it has been shown many times in many ways that copyright infringement can actually help the author/artist by spreading his work and making it far more popular than if the copyright infringement had never occurred
That is not YOUR choice. It is the AUTHOR'S choice to make THEIR WORK available such that you can copy it everywhere. Do you understand the difference??
Secondly,
Please! Get your head out of your ass. You are the type of people (and apparently MPAA uses the *same* logic as you) that think that if the work is *impossible* to copy, then there can't by copyright infringement then no "potential" loss of sales. So they come up with BS like encrypted movies that cannot be read anywhere except licensed players, etc.. I mean, assuming you can't steal their information, then your only recourse is either to buy, not to buy or use the "Theft".
Thank you. You are the type of person that makes MPAA and RIAA say "See! We need stronger protection from these thieves! More DRM! Otherwise we invest $100k in an artist and the thieves just take one copy of music and make their own copies for free". And the sane judges and politicians agree...
Linux is free and for-free but protected by copyright. And yet how many companies have been caught stealing that intellectual property? How many GPL projects are suddenly being hijacked and closed *against the wishes of its creators* (aka copyright)? (eg PearOS). And then there is people like you for whom things like GPL mean squat. Stealing the work of all Linux or GCC contributors is OK for you since you are not even depriving anyone of any earnings.
First, are you out of your mind? Speaking of bad logic... even comparing actual Theft (let alone copyright infringement) with murder and rape is outrageous. Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored.
You are the one that made this retarded comparison - "Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored". WTF are you talking about??? Do you have any idea what the Law is even about?
Just to clarify you on what Law is, it is NOT about things you can "restore". It deals with the *actions* and their *consequences*.
To clarify that with an example for the brainless,
You seal a truckload of Gummy Bears (candy). The law punishes you for *theft*, not because you can't "restore" the truckload of Gummy Bears! It is the *action* that is the crime!!
It is the *action* of murder, rape, theft (real or intellectual property) that is the crime. It is NOT that you deprive anything from anyone that can't be replaced.
For Pete's sake, you don't even understand the basis of what the law is!!!
So, you are saying that someone that made music should not deserve to be paid for it? Or someone that created a good story (aka. book) doesn't deserve to be paid for it? After all, this is all just information and it should be free?
Or are you saying that work of a construction worker building a house is more valuable than that of an architect? The construction worker makes the building from plans that were conjured up by the architect. So since information must be free and copyright is unnatural, the construction worker can just copy the plans and make as many copies of the said building without any royalties to the architect that created the plans in the first place? But then why didn't the construction worker come up with their own plans???
Are you so stupid to realize that intellectual property is the same as physical property (ie. effort to create), except there is no effort involved in copying it?
I mean, if someone makes free software like Linux, why can't a company like Microsoft, take bits from the source code here and there and just insert them into theirs? OH!! It is called COPYRIGHT! Linux is *protected* by it. If it wasn't, it would just be another BSD. Now think very carefully, why oh why companies chose to put resources in Linux and not in BSD? (Hint: think competition)
Free doesn't mean for-free. Learn the difference or look it up on gnu.org.
PS. Murder and rape are not unnatural states for humans. That's how things were decided for millenia before the thing called Law showed up. And we still do it and it is even encouraged by some in what is called "war". Even in non-war eras, this is how things are decided (see Pakistan, or in India where $10,000 allows you to get away with murder, or Iran, or Rwanda, or Saudi Arabia, or; should I go on?). US still has institutional murder called the "Death Penalty" - or is it that when you murder someone that murdered others, somehow cancel each other in your head?
Most people just *choose* not to use these methods for the "errs of others".
Stop trolling, troll. You know, people had setellites in space using misterious things called "SOLAR PANEL"s for their power production for a few decades now. And guess what? The EM flux from the sun didn't change, yet, global warming!
t ivedata.JPG
e _Earth's_atmosphere, ALL volcanoes release about,
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide
Earth's atmosphere contains about 3 trillion tons of CO2.
Now, let's get some real data about emission,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm
In 2003, 7.303 billion tons of additional CO2 emitted from fossil fuels
See the nice graph they have,
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/cumula
Now if they just add India and China accelerating consumption, we would see a huge spike at the end.
So, we are have an ADDITIONAL 7.3/3000 => 0.24% of CO2 by weight per year to the ecosystem.
Now, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_th
130-230 MILLION tons of CO2.
So humanity is releasing, oh, 30-50 TIMES the amount of CO2 by volcanoes during the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME., well, back in 2003.
This also means that current natural system is balanced at volcanic emissions of CO2, not 50 times that, hence CO2 is rising and not being tanked.
Also, if 3000 billion tons of CO2 is 380ppm, then 7.3 (from fossil fuels in 2003) is only 1ppm.. So, that doesn't even account for the total increase of CO2 now hence the number is too low (additional release of CO2 from burning forests probably accounts for the rest, but who weights forests??). CO2 is going up at a current rate of 2 ppm per year and accelerating.
Anyway, what you say is bullshit as seen above. Volcanoes do not account for even a fraction of what is happening in CO2.
Just wait a little bit and "mother nature" will help us increase the CO2 rate much, much faster than even currently. When the Siberian and Canadian bogs defrost and warm up, the Atlantic (aka. Bermuda Triangle) and Black Sea releases their methane (it just needs to warm a little bit more), well, then we'll see global warming. CO2 will be over 1000ppm by end of the century and then, well, you or your kids may just see what happens then.
It has gone up because,
...
1. people don't die of infections so often (antibiotics)
2. people don't die of war
3. people don't starve
4. people don't die due to childbirth (mother or child)
#4 is very important because childbirth was the *leading* cause of female death in the past. For males, it was probably #2. As one king once said "you paid good money to raise an army - better use it" (costing too much to maintain and disbanding it wouldn't even provide entertainment). And then in war you get infections if maimed so
No, natural is not the most deadly. Bubonic plague is *nothing* compared to what humans have created as part of biowarfare (eg. combining Ebola like virus with small pox and encasing it in plastic to maximize delivery and lethality). True, it wasn't used (yet), but when it will be, bubonic plague will look like mild case of hemorrhoids in comparison.
You are right that natural doesn't imply safe. Although natural doesn't mean the enigma that human-made is.
Define crime.
:)
Also, you write about "responsibility of the government towards people". That's an oxymoron. Government's only responsibility is to further itself. Since it is a democratically elected government, they do things that gets them reelected. That's their "responsibility". Thus if enough people demand that there should be a morality police, there will be that. Of course, there is already morality police - you can't walk naked in public, for example.
Any dictatorship's only difference is that there is no feedback in elections, but it is about the same. The goal is *exactly* the same.
PS. No, I'm not an anarchist
When a camera monitors and records all my actions all the time when in public, I have no privacy left.
The state knows,
1. who I talked to and when,
2. did I pass any information to the other person,
3. what I talked about in public, even if conversation is private
4. the patterns of my movements,
They know *everything* about you unless you live in your parent's basement and never leave for anything. But then they know you do that too because they can't find you on their cameras.
It would invade privacy *less* if they stick the cameras in people's houses. Are you so blind to not see that your privacy is everything you do, your relationships, your conversations? (most of private conversations occur in public places) Privacy is about the number of moles on your ass!
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Yes, it is a mess. It is a mess because it was designed not for power production or even safe processing. You can see similar examples of these messes in former Soviet Union. One incident by the enriching plant was that they dumped pure uranium on a pile. The pile got so big that the middle went critical. It actually *melted* inside and no one noticed for a while. Then the Uranium leaked into a lake and they noticed the leak when the lake started to get surrounded by radioactive flies. They traced it back to the centrally-melted Uranium stash.
Current Uranium handling techniques are not comparable to what happened in the "cowboy" days. Hanford would never happen in US, Canada or Europe. I'm not so certain about other countries though, like Iran or Pakistan or India or even China.
Anyway, nuclear power will not harm humanity. I think we will kill ourselves faster over water than through any civilian nuclear accident.
You cannot do a whois lookups often. Registries only allow limited number of lookups per day to prevent spammers from getting email addresses and also so these servers are not overloaded. Some sell this service though.
I guess good news for people living in Easter Europe that got a nice dose of strontium-90 for entire life. And I guess then moving and living on clay soils with all the extra uranium may help too. :)
But this is very interesting observation. Do they have any idea why cancer rates are down in higher radiation?
I like this much better than the entire CCTV surveillance. The camera just sees what the officer sees. So no blatant invasion of privacy as we see with the CCTV system.
Now if only they removed CCTV and use the cameras like this on every officer we should probably have less misconducts and brutality.
Actually the fuel waste is difficult to deal with because no one can come close to it during reprocessing. You have to have virtually all the work mechanized. And everything has to be in stainless steel because all substances are very corrosive. Repairs to equipment have to be remote (ie. broken pipe or similar) which causes problem.
The decommissioned plants are relatively easy to deal with because it is just irradiated *light* materials like steel and concrete. These substances are only radioactive for short period of time (100 years or so) and since a reactor is active for at least 50 years, the decommissioning time is very acceptable IMHO. One could build new reactors on site so the decommissioned reactor buildings do not incur much additional costs (ie. security, etc).
The modern alternative to nuclear is to burn coal (no other energy source abundant enough and cheap enough). That releases huge amounts of mercury and other toxins including Uranium into the air. Virtually all of the ocean contamination in mercury (ie. can't eat too much tuna - hopefully this will save tune from extinction, but you never know) is generated from the coal plants. True, you could add precipitators to remove most of this stuff from the smoke, but then you end up with the CO2 problem. So you have to sequester that. The end cost is even more than a nuclear plant and in a nuclear plant at least one deals with the entire fuel cycle and not dump the waste into the air (remember, radiation contamination will affect humans A LOT MORE than animals as animals don't really care about short term (1 or 2 generations until they adapt) birth defects).
Hey, what is the worst that can happen? We could have nature reserves where people dare not enter! (hence I cannot believe why the environmental crowd is not 1000% behind nuclear technology) Also, France has something like 90% of their power from nuclear plants. It also has one of the best (if not the best) air quality of any industrialized country.
Usury is about interest rates, not about "percent of income". IF you have good credit, loans of up to 600% of income are common in the United States at high interest rates. Loans of 300% of income are easy to find for under 10% interest. ...
So you'd rather leave them in slavery than create laws that fit the responsibility level of the general population? Guess we know which side you're on.
I stand corrected. It makes sense then, but I think that there are already laws about charging exuberant interest rates. I think they are capped at something like 60% or similar. This is still extremely high and very bad.
The problem with capping rates at anything has more to do with inflation than "creating slavery". I am on the side of freedom so I believe that anyone should be able to charge any interest they want provided it is legal. It does take *both* parties to agree on such rates. What I really loath are the contracts where there are additional fees not included in the normal interest rate and this is what is even more alarming than people having a perpetual CC debt at 20% or 30%.
Anyway, what happens when inflation jumps to 10% or 15%? Interest rates on loans have to be *at least* that to just break even, but normally are at least 5% higher. Capping interest rates artificially would stop lending after inflation got high enough. That probably could stop inflation too, except we are now in the global economy era so inflation is usually imported as we are currently seeing (China/India used to export deflation so inflation was pulled very low, but now the wages in China are going up, yuan is going up and base metal and oil prices are 3X-5X higher than a few years ago, so inflation HAS TO happen worldwide. Interest rate increases will not stop it that easy, but I digress)
Maybe the only possible solution is to flag people with debt problems so they can no longer get any loans. But that maybe seen as draconian as well.
In conclusion, I think people should be more responsible themselves as if they get into these debt problems it is usually their own doing.
PS. But if you are talking about the "payday loans" businesses, I really think they should be shut down. These prey on the uninformed or otherwise and I do not think there is ANY reason for their existence. If one cannot get a loan from a normal bank (ie. a line of credit) or does not have a CC because of current debt load, then they should not get more debt. Sadly these "payday loan" sharks are allowed to exist. Very sad.
That would absolutely KILL the current housing market. It would put *millions* in the street because they could no longer get credit or find an affordable apartment. I think the country would go bankrupt in short order as 70% (or more?) of the economy is consumer spending.
:)
Furthermore, very few people use cash anymore. All transactions are done on credit cards or similar. If you limit the credit limit to 10% of income, then suddenly credit cards become useless. Remember that in the early 80s almost no one used credit cards.
Removing these laws allowed more freedom for the consumer. It is sad that they have used this freedom to enslave themselves. Maybe it was a mistake to get away with these laws in the 80s. Maybe people in general are not as responsible as some thought
My devices are always on because they are always on, you insensitive hippie clod!!