Just wait until MS decides to turn off the server farm that enables XP installations; that'll put the music in perspective.
Can't say they should be surprised -- after all, they knowingly depend upon a product with fatal, vendor controlled DRM on it. That's playing with fire in any sensible person's book. The question is: Will MS's victims (excuse me, I should probably call them consenting masochistic partners) learn from this? Or will they continue to buy products booby trapped with fatal DRM?
I guess we already know the answer, anyway. It's that darned Gaussian come back to haunt us again.
On February 13, 2006, two years ago, Cheney shot his lawyer in the face while they were hunting. Cheney admitted that he had been drinking. Quote: 'Mr. Whittington's doctors "had no comment on whether Whittington's blood alcohol level had been tested after the accident." ' As someone mentioned in the comments, everyone stopped for DUI says they have had only one drink.
...and you know what the outcome of the whole event was? The lawyerapologized to Cheney and his family for the hardship his being shot in the face had caused them.
"Posting anonymously" means that here on slashdot, your post won't have your user ID on it. What it doesn't mean is that the usual NSA packet tracking didn't catch everything you said on the way to being posted, make note of your IP, and correlate it with the user account your ISP currently has assigned to you. And they have your name, address, and so on.
There's a huge difference between being anonymous to other slashdot users, and actually being anonymous in the reality-based sense of the word. The one is easy; the other isn't likely at all unless you take very careful steps to make it so, and even then, I have my doubts.
You can extend this argument to prove that waiters, for example, support the entire economy.
No. You can't. That's absurd. You didn't understand what I wrote. Read it again until you do; I'm not going to try to defend things I didn't say or mean.
Ok, you pass your income tax bill along to Exxon. and where did they get their money, in the final analysis? From the consumer, of course. From the money they have left after paying their own taxes. So guess who pays your income taxes, really?
The actual tax burden on the lowest income group will never drop to 0%, much less to a negative number, because the income taxes (and other taxes) of all the people involved in producing everything they consume are 100% built into the prices of those things they consume. From natural gas to a loaf of bread, everything carries a built-in tax burden.
Furthermore -- for instance in the case of natural gas or electricity -- where the utility company has a health care plan in place for its employees, anyone paying for natural gas is forced to pay for that health care plan before they can address their own health care needs, unless they're willing to live in the cold. This is true for all benefits that accrue to workers supplying low income people with services or goods for money.
Painting low-income people as a tax-free or contribution-free group is either naive, or disingenuous. It just isn't so. Less than the middle class? Sure. The middle class carries a huge load.
Exxon pays more in taxes than the bottom 50% of American taxpayer.
Followed by...
How are you comparing a corporation's income to a private citizen's income?
You both came close. A considerable amount of Exxon's income (doesn't matter if it's moved to the CEO's pocket or part of a new drill bit or tanker) comes from what? -- selling gasoline, of course. And who is it that pays for that gasoline? The private citizen.
Corporations pay taxes, sure, but everything they pay is built into the price of the items they sell, and you should keep in mind who pays that: The consumer. Who also pays their own taxes.
When someone says "corporations pay XXX and the consumer doesn't have it so bad because they only pay X", they're blowing smoke. Those corporations got a good proportion of that money from the consumer.
For every item you buy, you're paying built-in costs for income tax (and other taxes in some cases) that went into the materials, manufacture, transport, marketing, retailing, etc... of that item. This is with the money you have left over after paying for your own income taxes.
The bottom line is that the tax load on the average consumer is much higher than you think it is.
And if you'd read the page I linked for you, you'd see what those countermeasures are.:-) But of course that would destroy your lame argument, so you're not going to do that.
Your first paragraph extols "PD" (the public domain?) over the GPL (and does so unfairly, IMHO).
In order for that part of your comment to be meaningful, you need to say why you think my characterization was unfair. I have reasons for what I said (and I've laid them out, but I'm prepared to be more specific as required.)
In your second paragraph, you sound more like a copyright holder embittered by piracy on one hand and by the GPL on the other than like a big contributor to the PD.
As far as my feelings about the GPL go, I'm both a PD and a commercial author embittered by the GPL. In both cases, the GPL has done things ranging from what I'd call merely "cramping my style" to forcing me to write huge chunks of code, work that, were it not for the GPL, I could have avoided in favor of something more rationally characterizable as productive. Work that had already been done by others, was available in public to others, but not to me, because I had the temerity to presume that some of my work product was actually an appropriate thing to request payment for, or even simply wish to distribute without incurring additional obligations. It sneaks around and annoys me from surprising directions. For instance, midnight commander won't compile on my Apple; One might ask, why is that? It turns out that in the final analysis, it's specifically because of the GPL. Apple can't ship what they need to so that MC will compile and run. Instead, I have to get a huge pile of crap (the "Fink" project) and cobble up a mostly-working copy from that.
Pirates, frankly, don't make me bitter. Quite the opposite. They've been very good to me. It's just free exposure for the commercial software; it isn't like they were going to buy it anyway. And they can't "steal" PD software, now can they? I can count the number of times a non-purchasing person came looking for support for our commercial software and didn't buy it when told we only support purchasers on one hand in 23 years of selling commercial software. On the other hand, I could not possibly count the number of sales made to people who ran into non-purchasing folks using my stuff.
As for being a "big" contributor to PD, the whole point is you don't know what I've contributed because there's no requirement to keep my name associated, nor is there any particular motivation on my part to put it there in the first place. I don't do it for fame and recognition, I don't concern myself with such things. I do it to help out, that's all. In terms of lines of code, I'm a consistent, long-term contributor. Also of PD hardware designs and things like PD analog AFSK mode designs. You can find my name in the ARRL handbook, numerous programs of various types, and even some of the Orion blue books if you try hard enough. Heck, I even try to always give out the critical details when I take a photo so others can learn and emulate if they so desire, instead of playing "I know something you don't know, nyah-nyah." In terms of do you know me... no, probably not. Do I care? No, probably not.:-)
Your web site doesn't mention the PD at all (please post a link if I'm wrong about that).
Black Belt Systems is a commercial operation of mine; it has nothing in particular to do with producing PD software. I, as an individual on the other hand, do. For the sake of an example, here is a PD database app I wrote in Python (with docs, and sample databases, and database processing examples); I've been writing software since my first Altair computer; my first PD software was published in the 1977 issue of Kilobaud; there have been many more such since then.
However, since you were digging around on the BBS site, did you manage to come across the terms of re-distribution for WinIm
They took a posse after posse comitatus
You know it's cuz those fuckers hate us
They'll use the mil-i-tary
Our ass to quickly bury
If anonymous, we try to make us.
PD is superior in every way, because it gives, it promotes freedom, it does not coerce, it does not fund and encourage shysters and shysterism (though it gives you the freedom to do so if you so choose), it is neutral as to commercialism and charity and philanthropy and service, builds a base of 100% usable prior art, a library of freely available resources to give people a leg up without forcing them into a restrictive model of any kind, while still giving them the option of any model they freely choose to follow. GPL coerces, winds up the lawyers and the court system for yet more involvement and more of a dead weight on society and individuals, limits future mechanisms -- the GPL is inherently viral and poisonous by nature. Which is not to say you shouldn't use it, by all means, if it is in your nature and intent to prevent others from using your work unless they use it just as you say, then the GPL was designed just for you. Me, if I want to give something away, I'm not going to put any strings on it, and that means PD -- PD is the mechanism that gives everything to everyone without taking anything away from anyone and without forcing anyone into - or away from - any particular path.
"Winning" is not always about superiority of product; often it is a matter of marketing and/or social engineering. The GPL is riding a wave of huge desire for name recognition brought on by the MTV generation (hence the terms never take my name/terms off of this") and a backlash against commercial models that has arisen in a generation who have grown up with the new idea that because something is easily copied, they cannot be held liable for any value for that something. The GPL offers unity to a group that attempts to lock out commercial models unless they are service based; hence the intentional infection characterized as "if you use my stuff, you have to release your stuff the same way", and the lesser "you're responsible for continuing to forward my work under the same terms" delivery of obligation.
We have seen many inferior products win. VHS over Beta is the classic example, but there are others at every level. Back when the IBM PC was being architected, one fatal decision choose the inferior path between little endian and big enian architectures that we're still stuck with today because it wasn't the critical part of the decision, just a "carry-along" consequence of other issues. We have a shoddy political system because we can't deal, socially speaking, with the idea that simple democracy is flawed right out of the gate - democracy without qualification is simply a system where any two uninformed people can outvote an expert. But admitting one person is better than another, much less testing for it... that's so much of a problem that the other is swept right under the table. My point being that the superior choice is not by any means guaranteed to be the natural choice. Things just aren't that simple.
Use is not synonymous with acceptance. Toleration or passivity in the face of it is; personally, I'm active in a number of ways, from not allowing DRM of any kind on the commercial executables we produce, to creating PD software that demonstrates the fallacy of the GPL type of approach, to pestering my representatives to stop creating legislation that presumes citizens are criminals absent probable cause, oath or affirmation, and warrant. I donate to causes that support this view, and speak against causes that criminalize legitimate action.
You accept DRM. Acting on the presumption that the consumer is a criminal before the fact is ample evidence that the system - not the consumer - is broken.
Yes, it is my business. The issue is not your choice or reasoning. The issue is the potential side effects.
No, it isn't your business until I actually do something wrong. You are promoting the idea of punishing someone for an imaginary future crime which they may or may not commit. Which makes you so wrong I don't even know where to start explaining it to you.
If you get drunk or take a drug, then you directly place yourself in a position that can harm others.
Nonsense. Utter, unmitigated nonsense. Not to mention inflammatory, far too general, and just plain wrong.
What objective criteria could be used?
You really can't figure this out for yourself? How about inquiring of the individual so as to ascertain their knowledge and understanding of various relevant issues? Emotional entanglements, pregnancy and prevention thereof, STDs, anatomy, and so forth? You know, actual knowledge and sophistication in the matter at hand, instead of using age, which (a) fails to select out people who are below the line, but quite competent, and (b) fails to select out people who are over the line, but sexually and reproductively incompetent (I refer you to the introductory footage of "Idiocracy", a comedy with an unfortunate dose of very uncomfortable truth at the start.)
Do you think it would take any longer to ask those questions and get some reasonable answers than it does to enter into the sick sequence of automatic witch-huntery, psychobabbling "oh you poor abused baby" and subsequent courtroom shenanigans?
I mean, really — if the question arises as to whether person A and person B had consensual, informed relations, why not just find out? Is that so difficult a concept? Obviously this implies physical maturity, which rules out people who are children in the physical sense. Again, not a difficult thing to ascertain. Certainly if the individual has been sexually mature for years, is well informed and can demonstrate a rational and fact-based decision making capacity, I have no trouble whatsoever with calling society's current approach entirely pathological in every sense, and seriously characterizing the individuals involved as victims of society, rather than each other.
Sometimes I think there's very little hope for this society. At least you asked, though I'm appalled you couldn't get there yourself.
"Them" and "themself" used in the singular, as can happen following someone (look up Shakespeare for a ton of examples). Otherwise, if you object to "them" as a singular pronoun, as some authorities do, you should have put "(sic)" after "them" as well. Please be better at correcting others' grammar.
Ahem. "(sic)", Latin for "thus", in parenthetical or bracketed context within a quotation simply means "verbatim" or "as originally written" and is correctly used when the original construction is unusual or doubtful. It is not, as you seem to be under the impression, necessarily a "grammar correction", nor was it in this case. In this instance, I'm afraid you're guilty of ad arma concurrere.
As for the rest, you repeat yourself without having substantiated your positions, and I will now exercise my cherished option to summarily exit circular arguments. Vade in pacem.
Not trying to. But I don't want to ever harm someone, or convince them to harm themself(sic), just to get more bang for my buck.
Don't worry, they don't care what you think - until you try and create legislation that forces them to do, or not do, something in particular. So as long as you don't tell them they can or can't use cognitive enhancement if they so choose, you'll be ok within your stated goal.
How they do their work is also important. Or do you favor child labor, etc. etc.
Certainly I favor child labor, given reasonable safeguards. I think it is despicable that society has elected to discriminate against their ability to earn based upon a line in the sand described by age of all things, the single least consistent metric we could possibly have chosen. As for how someone does their job, my concern is that they do it well, and I would hope -- but in no way force them -- to do it in such a way as to provide them with enough of a positive experience that they will keep on learning to do it better and better.
If we could distinguish them, I would agree. But since we cannot, and coersion(sic) (subtle as it may be: desire for promotion/retention) is far more likely than desire, we protect 95%* of the population at the expense of 5%*.
No. "We" don't. You may, but that's something else entirely. Unions are dying; and thank goodness for that. They have been instrumental in destroying much of the industrial capacity of this nation by over-valuing unskilled and minimally skilled labor, while holding companies hostage to ridiculous levels of pay. I don't know if we'll ever be able to rebuild our industrial base back to where it once was, but I have to tell you, I think it is perfect poetic justice to see companies outsource labor to other countries while the union leaders scrabble around on the floor, looking for the one clue they never really had.
In addition, nowhere did I define those as my goals. I said I was unwilling to destroy peoples lives/health.
Other people (myself included) want government funds to not to create undue externalities. One example of such an externality is destorying(sic) a scientist's health/long term affects.
Your goal here is to create a class of scientists who can work for the government because they don't use cognitive enhancers, the subject at hand. In so doing, you create a class of scientists who cannot work for the government, because they do use cognitive enhancers. You do this on the basis of a presumption, not verified, that the use of cognitive enhancers is harmful or debilitating; further, you presume that you have the moral and/or ethical right to say where my tax money can be spent, as well as the right to dictate to these scientists what methods they may use to manage their own bodies. I find your goal and your methods to be repugnant, frankly.
I don't want to control anyones personal liberties
In fact, that's exactly what you want to do. Stop your campaign to dictate what substances informed, competent people can choose to apply to their own bodies and then you'll be out of the box you put yourself into.
The problem is that, when those bills are not paid by the person who overdosed, the Hospital has to raise costs for everybody else to compensate.
You're being disingenuous. The law forces the care of the non-paying drug user; the hospital passes the cost of the care to the paying customers. You. Me. Us. Our insurance carriers (who then raise our insurance bills.) This is not significantly different in the end from the law saying that we must pay taxes which are then directly given to the hospital. The care is mandated, the costs are unavoidable; consequently payment is inevitable.
If you want to pay for the care of those who cannot pay, then you should support the law. If you don't, then you shouldn't. I'm not telling you what to think (no one has even asked, which I think is kind of funny); I'm just telling you how it works.
The problem with your position is that it describes an expectation and a license to control any behavior of any person because a 3rd party or parties made a decision completely independently of the rights, needs, welfare, posterity, and property of the person being controlled. King George took this position with regard to the colonies and the residents thereof; it didn't work out for him.
Either we recognize and respect people's individual liberties, or we don't. If we don't, there's almost certainly going to be a violent reaction, as history has shown us. Personally, I'd rather avoid such a situation. Last time, many people were killed, and the consequent devastation to families, property, the countryside and the economy was substantial. This time, considering that there are a lot more people here and that our weaponry is significantly more efficacious, the mess would probably be quite a bit larger.
The smart thing to do here is re-invest in liberty and drop the pathological control mindset. It'll save us all a lot of trouble. Me, I'm eating cheeseburgers regardless.
I assume, based on this statement, that you are also pro-life?
Presuming the mother is capable of informed and competent reasoning, as long as the fetus resides in the mother's reproductive system and she intends to let it be born, I think she has an ironclad obligation to care for her own health as if she were caring for the health of any other utterly dependent child or person. I believe this obligation arises due to the fact that if one intends to allow the child to live, then one must extend to it any consideration one would give any other child.
I consider a child that the mother intends to allow to be born, but currently still in the womb, to be in a state similar to a child who is asleep; not currently thinking for itself, capable of defending itself, or otherwise very interesting: Nonetheless, when that child exits that state, care and protection extended to them (or not) during sleep or pregnancy for may have the most serious of consequences. My perception of an obligation to care for the child derives from my opinion that insufficient care is most likely to degrade its future potential, which I also think isn't a particularly controversial stance to take.
I also think that while the fetus is a dependent part of the mother's body, and as long as it can reasonably be demonstrated that she is capable of making informed and competent decisions, she should retain an absolute right to make binding decisions about carrying that fetus to term, or not.
I don't care about their free and informed personal lifestyle choices. If they want to snort coke of a stripper's ass every night, I don't care. What I do care about is making the competition for my dollar not force those lifestyle choices on the scientist.
No, sorry, your reasoning here is insufficient to the task. If the scientist is competing with others, then every decision they make that affects their cognitive performance is directly complicit in affecting how that competition will turn out. Snorting coke will affect it. Lack of sleep will affect it. Having a good breakfast will affect it. They compete for your dollar with the same physical resources that they meted out a ration of sleep to, and for the benefit of which they decided whether or not to drink coffee.
Your isolation of your concern to the use (or not) of performance enhancement techniques at the office is ridiculous in light of your lack of concern for performance enhancement techniques (and/or performance limiting behaviors) at home; it isn't like they are isolated from one another. Both are matters of personal liberty. In the end, one must allow the scientist to make a set of personal choices that they are satisfied with. It's not your business to try and make those choices for them. Ever. It is your business (or that of your proxies) to evaluate the work they do for you, because that's the only legitimate contract you have with them.
Similar to the reason that unions don't allow more than 40 hour weeks. It's not the one person who wants to work 45 hours a week that's the issue. It's the people who don't who are forced to just to keep up.
Yes? Then why not limit the work week to just 8 hours? After all, there are many people who are forced to work 40 hour weeks just to keep up but would much prefer working for only 8 hours. For that matter, why not five minute work weeks? The whole idea is ridiculous from the outset. It is one thing to limit the employer from demanding a 60-hour work week; it is entirely another to limit the employee from choosing to work 60 hours. I often work 60 hours a week, and I'm happy as a clam doing so. I'd be unhappy — and less efficient — working fewer hours, as I know quite well from long experience.
As it turns out, arbitrarily limiting the number of hours any one person chooses to work is indeed a violation of their personal liberties. Unions, to the extent that they control the workers and not the abuse of workers liberties, are detrimental.
I guess I don't view employment as equivalent to most economic transactions, as I don't care about the toaster or TV, but I do about the person.
That's fine, unless you become so confused that in your excitement over thinking you know how people should conduct their affairs, you try to force them to do things how you think they should be done. At that point, someone should eventually turn around and shoot you, either figuratively or literally.
That's the best strawman I've seen in a long, long time.
It wasn't a strawman at all. You want to control personal liberties to conform with your own goals, which you variously defined as life, health of others, specifically those scientists. I simply built an example where you could ensure maximal life and health by taking away all liberties, and asked if that was reasonable. Your inability to consider it isn't a consequence of the example being invalid, it's just a demonstration that your argument has no basis in reason.
If you can demonstrate that your prediction is in fact accurate, such a thing is not a corner case. If you can't, it's still not a corner case.
My right to swing my fist ends where your chin begins. However, it is not my fault if I say, "hey, I'm going to swing my fist through this empty space here", and as I begin to swing you promptly and with full understanding of what I just said, put your chin in that very space. In other words, knowing that over-enthusiastic antibiotic use does indeed constitute "putting your chin in the target space", the people near and above the center of the IQ Gaussian will not indulge in such use. This is a specific case of what I was saying above; the mythical "everyone" you alluded to don't do any one particular thing for very long if they learn it isn't actually in their best interests. Consequently, there's no demonstrated need to regulate the use of antibiotics. There is a need to understand what the consequences of antibiotic use are, but we need very little legislative encouragement — if any — to follow that path.
One example of such an externality is destorying(sic) a scientist's health/long term affects.
A legitimate right to ultimately control another informed, competent person's management of their own physical and mental resources has not been established by any reasonable argument.
That you entertain a concern about such things is your business. That you inflict said concern upon others (either directly or via elected surrogates) in the form of mandated behaviors becomes abuse of personal liberty.
As a taxpayer, you directly shoulder the shared burden of expense for any undertaking the government pays for from the pool(s) your taxes go into. One would hope that your primary concern would be the real world quality of the job done; not the free and informed personal lifestyle choices of the people doing the job.
If it resulted in maximal health, extended lifespan, and optimum performance to put the scientist's brains in jars and enslave them to government tasks forever, would you override all personal choices in order to achieve your goal? I doubt you would; because at some level, you know that it isn't your business to tell these people how to eat, drink, stimulate, sleep, have sexual relations, etc. Not casually as opinion, because that's offensive in that it presumes your right to control their liberties, and not formally as legislation, because that is all of the abuses of the former, coupled with malicious abuse of power.
When you express a concern for the use and management of a publicly owned resource of something on the order of copper or oil or even (perhaps especially) water, this is appropriate. These things cannot and do not manage themselves, and to the degree that they can be managed, the better we define what the optimum degree and scope of that is and ensure that we cleave to that as closely as possible, the better off society will be as a whole. This simple congruence does not hold for people, who can and do think for themselves. What you are doing here is attempting to manage people as if they were publicly owned copper deposits. Consequently, your thinking on the matter is pathological.
how about antibiotics? An informed adult might choose to use them as a precautionary measure but if everyone did that the number of resistant critters would increase drastically.
This is not a corner case. Everything we do affects everyone else in the final analysis. The test is, does it directly affect others. As Thomas Jefferson put it, when "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (which he said with regard to his neighbor's religious beliefs, or lack thereof) then it is not something over which you should have jurisdiction. The attempt to regulate every action that in any way affects others would eventually result in every action being regulated, which is neither practical, sensible, or reasonable.
In the real world, there are very few things that "we all" do. The much-maligned Gaussian is a staple in statistics not because we want it to be, but because it shows up all by itself whenever we measure the vast majority of behaviors, characteristics, and choices. Further, what is common today may well be uncommon tomorrow, or be directly complicit in engendering behaviors that counter the effects of actions today.
In the end, for any number of reasons, maximal personal liberty makes more sense than any other approach.
Clinicians use "drug abuse" to describe drug use (legal or otherwise) that is problematic.
Then the article is wrong, just as I said. Because enhanced cognitive abilities is not something you can reasonably describe as a "problem." The error lies in the conflation of "abuse" with "illegal" and/or "wrong", again, just as I said. Abuse is clearly something else other than the acts described; it may, within the domain of people who are specifically tasked to provide treatment for those who are complaining of having social problems, indeed have the precise limited meaning you ascribe to it, but this in no way affects what I said or the ideas underlying what I said. Very few people are clinicians, or for that matter are clinicians concerned with "treatment" of the cognitively enhanced.
Perhaps you need some coffee or other cognitive enhancement this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, right.
Now all you have to worry about is the feds turning off activation for your "free to walk around" program.
Just wait until MS decides to turn off the server farm that enables XP installations; that'll put the music in perspective.
Can't say they should be surprised -- after all, they knowingly depend upon a product with fatal, vendor controlled DRM on it. That's playing with fire in any sensible person's book. The question is: Will MS's victims (excuse me, I should probably call them consenting masochistic partners) learn from this? Or will they continue to buy products booby trapped with fatal DRM?
I guess we already know the answer, anyway. It's that darned Gaussian come back to haunt us again.
It was mind-boggling.
"Posting anonymously" means that here on slashdot, your post won't have your user ID on it. What it doesn't mean is that the usual NSA packet tracking didn't catch everything you said on the way to being posted, make note of your IP, and correlate it with the user account your ISP currently has assigned to you. And they have your name, address, and so on.
There's a huge difference between being anonymous to other slashdot users, and actually being anonymous in the reality-based sense of the word. The one is easy; the other isn't likely at all unless you take very careful steps to make it so, and even then, I have my doubts.
No. You can't. That's absurd. You didn't understand what I wrote. Read it again until you do; I'm not going to try to defend things I didn't say or mean.
Ok, you pass your income tax bill along to Exxon. and where did they get their money, in the final analysis? From the consumer, of course. From the money they have left after paying their own taxes. So guess who pays your income taxes, really?
The actual tax burden on the lowest income group will never drop to 0%, much less to a negative number, because the income taxes (and other taxes) of all the people involved in producing everything they consume are 100% built into the prices of those things they consume. From natural gas to a loaf of bread, everything carries a built-in tax burden.
Furthermore -- for instance in the case of natural gas or electricity -- where the utility company has a health care plan in place for its employees, anyone paying for natural gas is forced to pay for that health care plan before they can address their own health care needs, unless they're willing to live in the cold. This is true for all benefits that accrue to workers supplying low income people with services or goods for money.
Painting low-income people as a tax-free or contribution-free group is either naive, or disingenuous. It just isn't so. Less than the middle class? Sure. The middle class carries a huge load.
Followed by...
You both came close. A considerable amount of Exxon's income (doesn't matter if it's moved to the CEO's pocket or part of a new drill bit or tanker) comes from what? -- selling gasoline, of course. And who is it that pays for that gasoline? The private citizen.
Corporations pay taxes, sure, but everything they pay is built into the price of the items they sell, and you should keep in mind who pays that: The consumer. Who also pays their own taxes.
When someone says "corporations pay XXX and the consumer doesn't have it so bad because they only pay X", they're blowing smoke. Those corporations got a good proportion of that money from the consumer.
For every item you buy, you're paying built-in costs for income tax (and other taxes in some cases) that went into the materials, manufacture, transport, marketing, retailing, etc... of that item. This is with the money you have left over after paying for your own income taxes.
The bottom line is that the tax load on the average consumer is much higher than you think it is.
And if you'd read the page I linked for you, you'd see what those countermeasures are. :-) But of course that would destroy your lame argument, so you're not going to do that.
In order for that part of your comment to be meaningful, you need to say why you think my characterization was unfair. I have reasons for what I said (and I've laid them out, but I'm prepared to be more specific as required.)
As far as my feelings about the GPL go, I'm both a PD and a commercial author embittered by the GPL. In both cases, the GPL has done things ranging from what I'd call merely "cramping my style" to forcing me to write huge chunks of code, work that, were it not for the GPL, I could have avoided in favor of something more rationally characterizable as productive. Work that had already been done by others, was available in public to others, but not to me, because I had the temerity to presume that some of my work product was actually an appropriate thing to request payment for, or even simply wish to distribute without incurring additional obligations. It sneaks around and annoys me from surprising directions. For instance, midnight commander won't compile on my Apple; One might ask, why is that? It turns out that in the final analysis, it's specifically because of the GPL. Apple can't ship what they need to so that MC will compile and run. Instead, I have to get a huge pile of crap (the "Fink" project) and cobble up a mostly-working copy from that.
Pirates, frankly, don't make me bitter. Quite the opposite. They've been very good to me. It's just free exposure for the commercial software; it isn't like they were going to buy it anyway. And they can't "steal" PD software, now can they? I can count the number of times a non-purchasing person came looking for support for our commercial software and didn't buy it when told we only support purchasers on one hand in 23 years of selling commercial software. On the other hand, I could not possibly count the number of sales made to people who ran into non-purchasing folks using my stuff.
As for being a "big" contributor to PD, the whole point is you don't know what I've contributed because there's no requirement to keep my name associated, nor is there any particular motivation on my part to put it there in the first place. I don't do it for fame and recognition, I don't concern myself with such things. I do it to help out, that's all. In terms of lines of code, I'm a consistent, long-term contributor. Also of PD hardware designs and things like PD analog AFSK mode designs. You can find my name in the ARRL handbook, numerous programs of various types, and even some of the Orion blue books if you try hard enough. Heck, I even try to always give out the critical details when I take a photo so others can learn and emulate if they so desire, instead of playing "I know something you don't know, nyah-nyah." In terms of do you know me... no, probably not. Do I care? No, probably not. :-)
Black Belt Systems is a commercial operation of mine; it has nothing in particular to do with producing PD software. I, as an individual on the other hand, do. For the sake of an example, here is a PD database app I wrote in Python (with docs, and sample databases, and database processing examples); I've been writing software since my first Altair computer; my first PD software was published in the 1977 issue of Kilobaud; there have been many more such since then.
However, since you were digging around on the BBS site, did you manage to come across the terms of re-distribution for WinIm
They took a posse after posse comitatus
You know it's cuz those fuckers hate us
They'll use the mil-i-tary
Our ass to quickly bury
If anonymous, we try to make us.
--fyngyrz
PD is superior in every way, because it gives, it promotes freedom, it does not coerce, it does not fund and encourage shysters and shysterism (though it gives you the freedom to do so if you so choose), it is neutral as to commercialism and charity and philanthropy and service, builds a base of 100% usable prior art, a library of freely available resources to give people a leg up without forcing them into a restrictive model of any kind, while still giving them the option of any model they freely choose to follow. GPL coerces, winds up the lawyers and the court system for yet more involvement and more of a dead weight on society and individuals, limits future mechanisms -- the GPL is inherently viral and poisonous by nature. Which is not to say you shouldn't use it, by all means, if it is in your nature and intent to prevent others from using your work unless they use it just as you say, then the GPL was designed just for you. Me, if I want to give something away, I'm not going to put any strings on it, and that means PD -- PD is the mechanism that gives everything to everyone without taking anything away from anyone and without forcing anyone into - or away from - any particular path.
"Winning" is not always about superiority of product; often it is a matter of marketing and/or social engineering. The GPL is riding a wave of huge desire for name recognition brought on by the MTV generation (hence the terms never take my name/terms off of this") and a backlash against commercial models that has arisen in a generation who have grown up with the new idea that because something is easily copied, they cannot be held liable for any value for that something. The GPL offers unity to a group that attempts to lock out commercial models unless they are service based; hence the intentional infection characterized as "if you use my stuff, you have to release your stuff the same way", and the lesser "you're responsible for continuing to forward my work under the same terms" delivery of obligation.
We have seen many inferior products win. VHS over Beta is the classic example, but there are others at every level. Back when the IBM PC was being architected, one fatal decision choose the inferior path between little endian and big enian architectures that we're still stuck with today because it wasn't the critical part of the decision, just a "carry-along" consequence of other issues. We have a shoddy political system because we can't deal, socially speaking, with the idea that simple democracy is flawed right out of the gate - democracy without qualification is simply a system where any two uninformed people can outvote an expert. But admitting one person is better than another, much less testing for it... that's so much of a problem that the other is swept right under the table. My point being that the superior choice is not by any means guaranteed to be the natural choice. Things just aren't that simple.
Use is not synonymous with acceptance. Toleration or passivity in the face of it is; personally, I'm active in a number of ways, from not allowing DRM of any kind on the commercial executables we produce, to creating PD software that demonstrates the fallacy of the GPL type of approach, to pestering my representatives to stop creating legislation that presumes citizens are criminals absent probable cause, oath or affirmation, and warrant. I donate to causes that support this view, and speak against causes that criminalize legitimate action.
You accept DRM. Acting on the presumption that the consumer is a criminal before the fact is ample evidence that the system - not the consumer - is broken.
No, it isn't your business until I actually do something wrong. You are promoting the idea of punishing someone for an imaginary future crime which they may or may not commit. Which makes you so wrong I don't even know where to start explaining it to you.
Nonsense. Utter, unmitigated nonsense. Not to mention inflammatory, far too general, and just plain wrong.
You really can't figure this out for yourself? How about inquiring of the individual so as to ascertain their knowledge and understanding of various relevant issues? Emotional entanglements, pregnancy and prevention thereof, STDs, anatomy, and so forth? You know, actual knowledge and sophistication in the matter at hand, instead of using age, which (a) fails to select out people who are below the line, but quite competent, and (b) fails to select out people who are over the line, but sexually and reproductively incompetent (I refer you to the introductory footage of "Idiocracy", a comedy with an unfortunate dose of very uncomfortable truth at the start.)
Do you think it would take any longer to ask those questions and get some reasonable answers than it does to enter into the sick sequence of automatic witch-huntery, psychobabbling "oh you poor abused baby" and subsequent courtroom shenanigans?
I mean, really — if the question arises as to whether person A and person B had consensual, informed relations, why not just find out? Is that so difficult a concept? Obviously this implies physical maturity, which rules out people who are children in the physical sense. Again, not a difficult thing to ascertain. Certainly if the individual has been sexually mature for years, is well informed and can demonstrate a rational and fact-based decision making capacity, I have no trouble whatsoever with calling society's current approach entirely pathological in every sense, and seriously characterizing the individuals involved as victims of society, rather than each other.
Sometimes I think there's very little hope for this society. At least you asked, though I'm appalled you couldn't get there yourself.
Ahem. "(sic)", Latin for "thus", in parenthetical or bracketed context within a quotation simply means "verbatim" or "as originally written" and is correctly used when the original construction is unusual or doubtful. It is not, as you seem to be under the impression, necessarily a "grammar correction", nor was it in this case. In this instance, I'm afraid you're guilty of ad arma concurrere.
As for the rest, you repeat yourself without having substantiated your positions, and I will now exercise my cherished option to summarily exit circular arguments. Vade in pacem.
Don't worry, they don't care what you think - until you try and create legislation that forces them to do, or not do, something in particular. So as long as you don't tell them they can or can't use cognitive enhancement if they so choose, you'll be ok within your stated goal.
Certainly I favor child labor, given reasonable safeguards. I think it is despicable that society has elected to discriminate against their ability to earn based upon a line in the sand described by age of all things, the single least consistent metric we could possibly have chosen. As for how someone does their job, my concern is that they do it well, and I would hope -- but in no way force them -- to do it in such a way as to provide them with enough of a positive experience that they will keep on learning to do it better and better.
No. "We" don't. You may, but that's something else entirely. Unions are dying; and thank goodness for that. They have been instrumental in destroying much of the industrial capacity of this nation by over-valuing unskilled and minimally skilled labor, while holding companies hostage to ridiculous levels of pay. I don't know if we'll ever be able to rebuild our industrial base back to where it once was, but I have to tell you, I think it is perfect poetic justice to see companies outsource labor to other countries while the union leaders scrabble around on the floor, looking for the one clue they never really had.
Is that so? You said (here):
Your goal here is to create a class of scientists who can work for the government because they don't use cognitive enhancers, the subject at hand. In so doing, you create a class of scientists who cannot work for the government, because they do use cognitive enhancers. You do this on the basis of a presumption, not verified, that the use of cognitive enhancers is harmful or debilitating; further, you presume that you have the moral and/or ethical right to say where my tax money can be spent, as well as the right to dictate to these scientists what methods they may use to manage their own bodies. I find your goal and your methods to be repugnant, frankly.
In fact, that's exactly what you want to do. Stop your campaign to dictate what substances informed, competent people can choose to apply to their own bodies and then you'll be out of the box you put yourself into.
You're being disingenuous. The law forces the care of the non-paying drug user; the hospital passes the cost of the care to the paying customers. You. Me. Us. Our insurance carriers (who then raise our insurance bills.) This is not significantly different in the end from the law saying that we must pay taxes which are then directly given to the hospital. The care is mandated, the costs are unavoidable; consequently payment is inevitable.
If you want to pay for the care of those who cannot pay, then you should support the law. If you don't, then you shouldn't. I'm not telling you what to think (no one has even asked, which I think is kind of funny); I'm just telling you how it works.
The problem with your position is that it describes an expectation and a license to control any behavior of any person because a 3rd party or parties made a decision completely independently of the rights, needs, welfare, posterity, and property of the person being controlled. King George took this position with regard to the colonies and the residents thereof; it didn't work out for him.
Either we recognize and respect people's individual liberties, or we don't. If we don't, there's almost certainly going to be a violent reaction, as history has shown us. Personally, I'd rather avoid such a situation. Last time, many people were killed, and the consequent devastation to families, property, the countryside and the economy was substantial. This time, considering that there are a lot more people here and that our weaponry is significantly more efficacious, the mess would probably be quite a bit larger.
The smart thing to do here is re-invest in liberty and drop the pathological control mindset. It'll save us all a lot of trouble. Me, I'm eating cheeseburgers regardless.
Presuming the mother is capable of informed and competent reasoning, as long as the fetus resides in the mother's reproductive system and she intends to let it be born, I think she has an ironclad obligation to care for her own health as if she were caring for the health of any other utterly dependent child or person. I believe this obligation arises due to the fact that if one intends to allow the child to live, then one must extend to it any consideration one would give any other child.
I consider a child that the mother intends to allow to be born, but currently still in the womb, to be in a state similar to a child who is asleep; not currently thinking for itself, capable of defending itself, or otherwise very interesting: Nonetheless, when that child exits that state, care and protection extended to them (or not) during sleep or pregnancy for may have the most serious of consequences. My perception of an obligation to care for the child derives from my opinion that insufficient care is most likely to degrade its future potential, which I also think isn't a particularly controversial stance to take.
I also think that while the fetus is a dependent part of the mother's body, and as long as it can reasonably be demonstrated that she is capable of making informed and competent decisions, she should retain an absolute right to make binding decisions about carrying that fetus to term, or not.
No, sorry, your reasoning here is insufficient to the task. If the scientist is competing with others, then every decision they make that affects their cognitive performance is directly complicit in affecting how that competition will turn out. Snorting coke will affect it. Lack of sleep will affect it. Having a good breakfast will affect it. They compete for your dollar with the same physical resources that they meted out a ration of sleep to, and for the benefit of which they decided whether or not to drink coffee.
Your isolation of your concern to the use (or not) of performance enhancement techniques at the office is ridiculous in light of your lack of concern for performance enhancement techniques (and/or performance limiting behaviors) at home; it isn't like they are isolated from one another. Both are matters of personal liberty. In the end, one must allow the scientist to make a set of personal choices that they are satisfied with. It's not your business to try and make those choices for them. Ever. It is your business (or that of your proxies) to evaluate the work they do for you, because that's the only legitimate contract you have with them.
Yes? Then why not limit the work week to just 8 hours? After all, there are many people who are forced to work 40 hour weeks just to keep up but would much prefer working for only 8 hours. For that matter, why not five minute work weeks? The whole idea is ridiculous from the outset. It is one thing to limit the employer from demanding a 60-hour work week; it is entirely another to limit the employee from choosing to work 60 hours. I often work 60 hours a week, and I'm happy as a clam doing so. I'd be unhappy — and less efficient — working fewer hours, as I know quite well from long experience.
As it turns out, arbitrarily limiting the number of hours any one person chooses to work is indeed a violation of their personal liberties. Unions, to the extent that they control the workers and not the abuse of workers liberties, are detrimental.
That's fine, unless you become so confused that in your excitement over thinking you know how people should conduct their affairs, you try to force them to do things how you think they should be done. At that point, someone should eventually turn around and shoot you, either figuratively or literally.
It wasn't a strawman at all. You want to control personal liberties to conform with your own goals, which you variously defined as life, health of others, specifically those scientists. I simply built an example where you could ensure maximal life and health by taking away all liberties, and asked if that was reasonable. Your inability to consider it isn't a consequence of the example being invalid, it's just a demonstration that your argument has no basis in reason.
If you can demonstrate that your prediction is in fact accurate, such a thing is not a corner case. If you can't, it's still not a corner case.
My right to swing my fist ends where your chin begins. However, it is not my fault if I say, "hey, I'm going to swing my fist through this empty space here", and as I begin to swing you promptly and with full understanding of what I just said, put your chin in that very space. In other words, knowing that over-enthusiastic antibiotic use does indeed constitute "putting your chin in the target space", the people near and above the center of the IQ Gaussian will not indulge in such use. This is a specific case of what I was saying above; the mythical "everyone" you alluded to don't do any one particular thing for very long if they learn it isn't actually in their best interests. Consequently, there's no demonstrated need to regulate the use of antibiotics. There is a need to understand what the consequences of antibiotic use are, but we need very little legislative encouragement — if any — to follow that path.
A legitimate right to ultimately control another informed, competent person's management of their own physical and mental resources has not been established by any reasonable argument.
That you entertain a concern about such things is your business. That you inflict said concern upon others (either directly or via elected surrogates) in the form of mandated behaviors becomes abuse of personal liberty.
As a taxpayer, you directly shoulder the shared burden of expense for any undertaking the government pays for from the pool(s) your taxes go into. One would hope that your primary concern would be the real world quality of the job done; not the free and informed personal lifestyle choices of the people doing the job.
If it resulted in maximal health, extended lifespan, and optimum performance to put the scientist's brains in jars and enslave them to government tasks forever, would you override all personal choices in order to achieve your goal? I doubt you would; because at some level, you know that it isn't your business to tell these people how to eat, drink, stimulate, sleep, have sexual relations, etc. Not casually as opinion, because that's offensive in that it presumes your right to control their liberties, and not formally as legislation, because that is all of the abuses of the former, coupled with malicious abuse of power.
When you express a concern for the use and management of a publicly owned resource of something on the order of copper or oil or even (perhaps especially) water, this is appropriate. These things cannot and do not manage themselves, and to the degree that they can be managed, the better we define what the optimum degree and scope of that is and ensure that we cleave to that as closely as possible, the better off society will be as a whole. This simple congruence does not hold for people, who can and do think for themselves. What you are doing here is attempting to manage people as if they were publicly owned copper deposits. Consequently, your thinking on the matter is pathological.
This is not a corner case. Everything we do affects everyone else in the final analysis. The test is, does it directly affect others. As Thomas Jefferson put it, when "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (which he said with regard to his neighbor's religious beliefs, or lack thereof) then it is not something over which you should have jurisdiction. The attempt to regulate every action that in any way affects others would eventually result in every action being regulated, which is neither practical, sensible, or reasonable.
In the real world, there are very few things that "we all" do. The much-maligned Gaussian is a staple in statistics not because we want it to be, but because it shows up all by itself whenever we measure the vast majority of behaviors, characteristics, and choices. Further, what is common today may well be uncommon tomorrow, or be directly complicit in engendering behaviors that counter the effects of actions today.
In the end, for any number of reasons, maximal personal liberty makes more sense than any other approach.
Then the article is wrong, just as I said. Because enhanced cognitive abilities is not something you can reasonably describe as a "problem." The error lies in the conflation of "abuse" with "illegal" and/or "wrong", again, just as I said. Abuse is clearly something else other than the acts described; it may, within the domain of people who are specifically tasked to provide treatment for those who are complaining of having social problems, indeed have the precise limited meaning you ascribe to it, but this in no way affects what I said or the ideas underlying what I said. Very few people are clinicians, or for that matter are clinicians concerned with "treatment" of the cognitively enhanced.
Perhaps you need some coffee or other cognitive enhancement this morning.