You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It refers to an opponent of those wishing to disestablish the Church of England (in other words to stop Anglicanism being the official State religion of the UK). So in other words, it refers to a conservative who wants to retain the status quo.
We have all the instincts of carnivores, an urge to stalk, an urge to hunt and yes, an urge to kill prey.
So what? We have animal instincts to mate whith anyone who can't fight us off, murder rivals or children if they're in the way and steal food or anything else if we want to. The whole point about civilisation is that we place limits on these things.
Anyway, there is no need or opportunity for most people to hunt for food, and most people who don't live in the countryside in fact have no interest in hunting.
Anyone who would prefer a pigeon over a cat has such severe psychological problems that they should probably be banned from the interwebz for life, in case they infect someone else.
I think the fact that SNP stands for Scottish National Party covers the second part (for the nitpickers, they are a nationalist party; their student wing is called the Federation of Student Nationalists).
I could be wrong, but I was always of the understanding that "nationalism" is not an "ism" of quite the same form as "racism" or "sexism."
The problem is that extreme Nationalism can lead to fascism. However, I don't think there's much likelihood of the SNP trying to annexe Northumerland for Lebensraum.
...I really liked most of his work as well, but unfortunately his political views were pretty bad....
I really liked most of his work as well, but unfortunately I didn't agree with many of his political views....
There. Fixed that for you...
Some political views go beyond being a matter of personal taste.
Nothing to do with Patrick Moore, but if someone believed that all Jews/blacks should be murdered, that would be objectively "bad", not just something I don't happen to agree with.
No individual matters compared to humanity as a whole. Anyone who ever did anything was only doing something that some other person would have done eventually. If Newton had died of polio as a kid, we'd still have ended up with his laws of motion, calculus and so on.
All you can do is live a good life and hope you made some people happy along the way, all the "achievements" in the world and all the "making your mark on history" are pure bollocks. Many so-called famous people were complete and utter arseholes and far less worthy of rememberance than a nurse.
Also, we would be underestimating the enemy - a fatal mistake - to describe racists as 'stupid'. It's not stupid, it's wrong, mean-spirited, indefensible, but to suggest that only stupid people can be racist is false.
No, racism is stupid, as human beings are one species, and variations in skin colour are trivial. The idea of "race" is inherently stupid.
Mod parent down, Patrick Moore was not a member of the BNP. He was in many ways reactionary/right wing (e.g. in his views on gays and women) but he was not an actual fascist.
As pointed out below, he actually supported UKIP in later life, and that is a more or less mainstream party, representing the anti-European Tory position, but not racist like the BNP.
In other words you can only publicly write damaging things about people if you can show them to be true.
Exactly. This is why Private Eye is continually being sued: a lot of the things they get sued for are (probably) true, but they won't always have strong enough evidence to back up their claims. For example, they might have relied on anonymous informants and/or people who can't afford to repeat things in court for whatever reason.
You are also free to kill someone you just have to face the consequences afterwards.
I think a lot of Americans fall down by thinking there is a simple and clear cut distinction between "speech" and "action", so that you can somehow have absolute free speech without this requiring absolute freedom of action. In fact there are grey areas. The standard "shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre" is one example.
Slander/libel is another: your words can self evidently have an actual impact on the life of someone else, or else the concept wouldn't exist.
Ultra-libertarians like to repeat the childhood rhyme of "stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" but that's palpably untrue. If by lying I destroy your business or artistic reputation or marriage, I have caused you actual harm.
The plaintiff is asking the government to force her to pay them money as a result of her speech.
Whether you call it government, the courts, the legal system or whatever, there obviously has to be some means of enforcing civil damages or else they're totally meaningless.
Same with contract law: you can have the best contract laws in existence, but if someone can just walk away without suffering any consequences, they're equally meaningless.
He has to prove the claims about the theft and shoddy work are false.
That is not true. The defendant can try to justify the words in many ways, but showing they're true is by far the most effective. The accuser has to show that he has incurred damages thanks to the words, the defendant is the one who needs to justify them.
It may be impossible for the accuser to "prove" that the theft didn't take place. If the defendant had said that the accuser enjoyed raping and murdering children, what is the latter supposed to do? Get a parade of non-raped-and-mudered children in the area to testify that he hasn't molested them? That doesn't prove anything.
Free speech does not, even in the US, extend to slander and libel. In actual fact, the more libertarian you are, the more important suing for slander and libel become, since you do not want to depend on pre-emptive government interference (aka "laws") stopping you saying anything, and yet there needs to be a way of preventing people getting away with trashing your reputation short of shooting them in the head.
So if you were to post on the internet that you're next door neighbor is a transvestite, you could be sued for libel, even if it's true because it's no one's business that he's a transvestite
No, if your next door neighbour IS a transvestite, s/he can't successfully sue you for saying so.
Remember what happened with Oscar Wilde? He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for libelling him as a "sodomite" and lost. Queensberry's defence was that Wilde was in fact a homosexual, and he produced enough evidence for this to get the case thrown out (after which Wilde was arrested for the crime of homosexuality as it then was).
There's absolutely no reason that the government should have laws on the books that give people monopolies over ideas and tell what people can and cannot copy in the first place...
I don't know what job you do. Say you work on an IT support desk, or flip burgers, or clean toilets, or whatever. Do you think you should get paid for your work?
Because that's all copyright does. It says that the creator of a work is entitled to get paid for that work.
Once you get rid of that ability, you either have to go back to some sort of patronage system, or else artists have to fund their work by working on an IT support desk, flipping burgers or cleaning toilets.
I think of blowing up green peace related stuff as counter-terrorism work myself. They aren't exactly law abiding citizens or even ones you'd actually want to be around.
Fuck you, Greenpeace are a legitimate non-violent protest group. Funny how everyone here's in favour of free speech if it's to allow neo Nazis and homophobes to chant their filth in public, but as soon as someone makes a genuine political protest against the Establishment, it's "fuck those hippies". See Occupy Wall Street.
New Zealand is a sovereign nation right? (or were b4 you sold out to big media) How can France force you to give them back?
The Greenpeace people were protesting against France's nuclear weapons testing. Scary as this may sound to some Americans, France has working nuclear weapons.
The thing is that a lot of people on slashdot don't want sane copyright reform, they want it abolished entirely. So from that point of view, Kim Dotcom is on the right side and that's it.
Nobody quite seems to think through why he should be able to make money from other people breaking copyright, it's just assumed that breaking copyright is a reasonable end in itself. I suppose his benevolence in setting up the Megaupload servers gives him more of a right to make money than the original creators of the content, because, as we all know, digital media cost nothing to copy, therefore they must cost nothing to create, therefore it should not be possible to make money on people just copying "your" work.
Slashdot Mirror
Having only my own company 23 hours a day and being fed and watered for free sounds... absolutely awesome.
Which crimes can I commit in the UK to get this?
Try blowing your brains out wih an unlicensed firearm, we're pretty hot on gun control.
antidisestablishmentarism
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It refers to an opponent of those wishing to disestablish the Church of England (in other words to stop Anglicanism being the official State religion of the UK). So in other words, it refers to a conservative who wants to retain the status quo.
We have all the instincts of carnivores, an urge to stalk, an urge to hunt and yes, an urge to kill prey.
So what? We have animal instincts to mate whith anyone who can't fight us off, murder rivals or children if they're in the way and steal food or anything else if we want to. The whole point about civilisation is that we place limits on these things.
Anyway, there is no need or opportunity for most people to hunt for food, and most people who don't live in the countryside in fact have no interest in hunting.
Australia does not have any native cats
Further proof that humans were not meant to live there.
Anyone who would prefer a pigeon over a cat has such severe psychological problems that they should probably be banned from the interwebz for life, in case they infect someone else.
Now if they can be engineered to live on land and adapt to city life.
They already have. They're called cats. Where do you think the name "cat" came from? It can hardly be coincidence.
What do you do if a bird shits on your car?
Don't ask her out again.
There are people who pay good money for that sort of specialised service.
Fish eating birds though... seems wrong, somehow...
How about cows eating birds then?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXhElaGCZVU
Aren't cows herbivores?
interesting that these fish have picked up the idea (maybe it's the "cat" in their name?)
Yes, and similarly dogfish can bark and lick their balls.
I think the fact that SNP stands for Scottish National Party covers the second part (for the nitpickers, they are a nationalist party; their student wing is called the Federation of Student Nationalists).
I could be wrong, but I was always of the understanding that "nationalism" is not an "ism" of quite the same form as "racism" or "sexism."
The problem is that extreme Nationalism can lead to fascism. However, I don't think there's much likelihood of the SNP trying to annexe Northumerland for Lebensraum.
I really liked most of his work as well, but unfortunately I didn't agree with many of his political views....
There. Fixed that for you...
Some political views go beyond being a matter of personal taste.
Nothing to do with Patrick Moore, but if someone believed that all Jews/blacks should be murdered, that would be objectively "bad", not just something I don't happen to agree with.
All you can do is live a good life and hope you made some people happy along the way, all the "achievements" in the world and all the "making your mark on history" are pure bollocks. Many so-called famous people were complete and utter arseholes and far less worthy of rememberance than a nurse.
Also, we would be underestimating the enemy - a fatal mistake - to describe racists as 'stupid'. It's not stupid, it's wrong, mean-spirited, indefensible, but to suggest that only stupid people can be racist is false.
No, racism is stupid, as human beings are one species, and variations in skin colour are trivial. The idea of "race" is inherently stupid.
As pointed out below, he actually supported UKIP in later life, and that is a more or less mainstream party, representing the anti-European Tory position, but not racist like the BNP.
In other words you can only publicly write damaging things about people if you can show them to be true.
Exactly. This is why Private Eye is continually being sued: a lot of the things they get sued for are (probably) true, but they won't always have strong enough evidence to back up their claims. For example, they might have relied on anonymous informants and/or people who can't afford to repeat things in court for whatever reason.
You are also free to kill someone you just have to face the consequences afterwards.
I think a lot of Americans fall down by thinking there is a simple and clear cut distinction between "speech" and "action", so that you can somehow have absolute free speech without this requiring absolute freedom of action. In fact there are grey areas. The standard "shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre" is one example.
Slander/libel is another: your words can self evidently have an actual impact on the life of someone else, or else the concept wouldn't exist.
Ultra-libertarians like to repeat the childhood rhyme of "stick and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" but that's palpably untrue. If by lying I destroy your business or artistic reputation or marriage, I have caused you actual harm.
The plaintiff is asking the government to force her to pay them money as a result of her speech.
Whether you call it government, the courts, the legal system or whatever, there obviously has to be some means of enforcing civil damages or else they're totally meaningless.
Same with contract law: you can have the best contract laws in existence, but if someone can just walk away without suffering any consequences, they're equally meaningless.
Honestly, Ghandi slept in the nude with young girls, and had an very intimidate relationship with a woman who was not his wife.
That's interesting, but I thought we were looking for bad things against him?
And the onus is in the accuser to make his case.
He has to prove the claims about the theft and shoddy work are false.
That is not true. The defendant can try to justify the words in many ways, but showing they're true is by far the most effective. The accuser has to show that he has incurred damages thanks to the words, the defendant is the one who needs to justify them.
It may be impossible for the accuser to "prove" that the theft didn't take place. If the defendant had said that the accuser enjoyed raping and murdering children, what is the latter supposed to do? Get a parade of non-raped-and-mudered children in the area to testify that he hasn't molested them? That doesn't prove anything.
. . . if you hate free speech.
Free speech does not, even in the US, extend to slander and libel. In actual fact, the more libertarian you are, the more important suing for slander and libel become, since you do not want to depend on pre-emptive government interference (aka "laws") stopping you saying anything, and yet there needs to be a way of preventing people getting away with trashing your reputation short of shooting them in the head.
So if you were to post on the internet that you're next door neighbor is a transvestite, you could be sued for libel, even if it's true because it's no one's business that he's a transvestite
No, if your next door neighbour IS a transvestite, s/he can't successfully sue you for saying so.
Remember what happened with Oscar Wilde? He sued the Marquis of Queensberry for libelling him as a "sodomite" and lost. Queensberry's defence was that Wilde was in fact a homosexual, and he produced enough evidence for this to get the case thrown out (after which Wilde was arrested for the crime of homosexuality as it then was).
There's absolutely no reason that the government should have laws on the books that give people monopolies over ideas and tell what people can and cannot copy in the first place...
I don't know what job you do. Say you work on an IT support desk, or flip burgers, or clean toilets, or whatever. Do you think you should get paid for your work?
Because that's all copyright does. It says that the creator of a work is entitled to get paid for that work.
Once you get rid of that ability, you either have to go back to some sort of patronage system, or else artists have to fund their work by working on an IT support desk, flipping burgers or cleaning toilets.
I think of blowing up green peace related stuff as counter-terrorism work myself. They aren't exactly law abiding citizens or even ones you'd actually want to be around.
Fuck you, Greenpeace are a legitimate non-violent protest group. Funny how everyone here's in favour of free speech if it's to allow neo Nazis and homophobes to chant their filth in public, but as soon as someone makes a genuine political protest against the Establishment, it's "fuck those hippies". See Occupy Wall Street.
New Zealand is a sovereign nation right? (or were b4 you sold out to big media) How can France force you to give them back?
The Greenpeace people were protesting against France's nuclear weapons testing. Scary as this may sound to some Americans, France has working nuclear weapons.
Nobody quite seems to think through why he should be able to make money from other people breaking copyright, it's just assumed that breaking copyright is a reasonable end in itself. I suppose his benevolence in setting up the Megaupload servers gives him more of a right to make money than the original creators of the content, because, as we all know, digital media cost nothing to copy, therefore they must cost nothing to create, therefore it should not be possible to make money on people just copying "your" work.