Translation: I'm a libertarian idiot who seeks to turn EVERY issue into my favorite issue. Libertarians, like any party, have their share of extremists who unfairly make the rest look bad by association. You are in that share. You're just like the uber-feminists who make reasonable feminists look bad, by trying to turn each and every issue into a gender war even by the most tenuous of threads.
It was not a media assumption. There were passengers who were able to get some limited information out via cellphone calls - information that included what the terrorists were armed with.
I agree with you up to the point where you say hardened doors would have been useless. How could the terrorists have gotten control of the plane?
Consider: You're an airline pilot. One of the hijackers knows how to fly. They demand you give them control of the plane or they will kill more passengers until you do. They do NOT tell you that their plan is to fly the plane into a target and use the onboard fuel as an incinderary weapon, killing everyone on board in the process. They just tell you to hand over control to them or they kill more people.
What do you do. Do you close your hardended door and say "no"?
Hell no.
The biggest advantage the terrorists had is that nobody suspected what they were about to do. Once they lose that and everybody knows, then they were easy to overpower with or without hardened cockpit doors. (In the case of the Pennsylvania crash, what probably happened is that the survivors of the scuffle didn't know how to fly the plane.)
Point number 4 - That the "with us or against us" atttitude of the community is a problem, ignores one very BIG fact - it's an attitude thrust upon the commnity BY those who are against it. I'd be perfectly happy in the imaginary world where other people using Microsoft could work seamlessly with me using something else. I'd be perfectly happy in the world where others could use their own DVD players and I can use my own. It's those who are against open source that are against that world and actively seek to prevent it from being possible. They're the ones that chose to pick the fight and make peaceful coexistance possible.
There is no room for dissent (just watch this post get attacked)
Any argument which can be boiled down to "If you respond in disagreement with me, then that response is proof that I'm right", is automatically dishonest and deceitful. Your true clors have shown through.
9/11 was caused by poor airline security and lax regulation and oversight.
NO. NO NO NO NO!!!!. The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board. The best weapon the terrorists had was deceit. They had the passengers convinced that all that was going to happen was that the plane was going to be forced to land somewhere and then negotiations would begin for hostage release. Under those expectations, the risk of being stabbed with the knives wasn't worth engaging in any heroics. In the one case where the news was already out, and the element of deceit was lost, the passengers did decide to overpower the terrorists' wimpy arsenel of box knifes. The same thing would likely have happened on the other three flights if they too had known what was going to happen if they sat still.
Don't blame airline security. Blame excessive optimism on the part of the passengers.
Windows crashing problems are due to operator error from installing bad drivers (from other manufacterers), installing bad hardware, installing crappy software.
Two points:
1) You just listed three things that are NOT the operator's fault. Why call them operator errors? Did the operator write the buggy driver? Did the operator know the driver was buggy? Did the operator know the software package had a fatal flaw? I know your point is that they aren't Microsoft's fault, but that doesn't mean they are the operator's fault either.
2) In the case of drivers, yes it's reasonable to expect that a third-party driver can crash the system. But in the case of higher-level software, it IS the operatiing system's fault that it allows crappy software to crash the system. That's evidence of crappy security in the OS.
The people who write open source software are programmers, so they make environments that programmers would be comfortable in.
I don't think that's an adequete explanation, since programmers like things like good task switchers too. It's more that closed-source writers are typically working at companies that ONLY spend time on the end-user interface and not on the infrastructure, so that's where a lot of their effort goes.
Let's follow the progression of the term: 1. "Hacker" is used by computer geeks to denote a particular style of programming for which there just wasn't a good word already in the language. 2. The style of programming used by people finding holes in computer systems is to be one of the many uses of this "hacker" style. 3. The media hear geeks saying "hacker" in reference to people breaking into computer systems and misunderstand what the geeks are talking about - thinking they are talking about the breaking in, when they are actually talking about the style of programming being used to do so. 4. The media's definition gets more usage because they get more airplay than the geeks' meaning.
IN this case, the "some moron trying to change the way people talk" is the media, not the geeks. They succeeded. So, NO, it's not hypocracy to defend the difference between hacker and cracker while at the same time being agaisnt politically correct bullshit. BOTH are instances of the exact same thing - being against the media redefining terms.
How about you show up the political correctness camp by using ACTUAL ENGLISH. Using made up slang is the same problem as using made up politicaly correct terms - it's an instance of artificially deliberately warping the language instead of sitting back and letting it happen on its own.
Example Old Age Pensiors (OAPs) - 'We are offended by the name given us and see it as ageist. Therefore we would like to be known as Senior Citizens' (um, cause that doesn't refer to your age?)
Uhm, that one is a problem because it assumes that age must be mentioned in the context of pensions. That someone is old does not require that they are retired and drawing a pension, and thus if you assume "pension" whenever you see someone old, you are using an innaccurate term. It's not the political correctness that's a problem with that term. It's the factual correctness.
The rest of the stuff you said I agree is a problem.
Voting is only an effective means of keeping the government honest if what the government does is open and well publicised. If they tack a Patriot Act II onto another bill as a rider, and sneak it through without a period for public comment, then voting doesn't help because people don't even realize what has occurred.
The biggest, most evil part of the government is the notion of the "rider". It allows the congressmen in committes to force the rest of the congress into a position where to vote for one bill they have to vote for a package of other ones with it as well. Remember the CDA, Communications "Decency" Act? It was a rider on a freakin' telecom deregulation bill. That meant that if you were a congressman who favored telecom deregulation, but not the CDA, your ability to vote how you want was stolen from you - by the rider process.
Telling more people to vote is insufficient. Telling people to INFORM THEMSELVES when they vote is far more important. The last thing we need is even more ignorant people voting. What we need is for those who vote to THINK when they do it.
Go do an informal poll among your neighbors about the patriot act. Look at how many of them don't see anything wrong with what it does. Now ask yourself again if more people voting would help get rid of this problem?
The good thing about peaceful resistance is that it fails if the resisters are the minorty. That bad thing about armed resistance is that it ignores amounts of supporting people and instead counts amounts of supporting firepower.
Then the emancipation proclimation had no jurisdiction, since it was issued in the Union, and only applied to states "in open rebellion". If the south was viewed as a foriegn country, that law would have applied to nowhere.
People quick to hate Lincoln would do well to look at what he had to say about slavery BEFORE becoming president. He'd hated it for a long time. Yes, it's true the the emacipation proclamation was on very shaky legal ground, and probably not within his jurisdiction to sign, and had ulterior motives. But it was all he could get away with at the time. It's much like, how later on FDR wanted to get into the war but had to hold back because isolanionists had a lot sway, and so he had to make do with halfway measures like the lend-lease act. Lincoln had to move gently with regards to slavery and do halfway measures or else nobody else would have gone along with it. So he wrapped himself in rhetoric about the union, and all that, because that would sell better.
In order for an uprising to be truly nonviolent, it MUST be popular (meaning supported by a vast majority of the people). The problem with this issue is that most of your neighbors have no clue about it. Writing your congresscritter is fine as far as that goes, but publicising the problem to your fellow citizens is really the only path that has a chance of working. A congressman will start paying attention only when you can get a lot of voters to support your cause and thus affect his future re-electability.
The people affected by the downed routers were people who were in the blackout and couldn't turn on their computers anyway, so it doesn't matter that those machines were down. People outside the blackout were able to route around it, and THAT is the relevant part of the statement that the internet did well during the blackout.
If the artist cares to, he'll release the song some other way. HIS copy isn't gone. If I was an author in the days of the Library of Alexandria, then the copy of my book in their hands might very well be the ONLY copy in existance, written in my own handwriting, and thus their copy being burned represents an irreversable loss of MY labor. If the artist with a song on MP3.com doesn't release it anywhere else to give it back to the public again, that's his right. If the only place you can find it is through piracy, and you bitch about it not being available there, than shame on you.
What makes it a stupid example is that the artist left all her copys of a work SHE OWNS THE COPYRIGHT TO in the hands of other people. Anyone that does that deserves what they get. That her producer's basement flooded shouldn't have destroyed her only copy. That was the really contrived part of this stupid example.
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Translation: I'm a libertarian idiot who seeks to turn EVERY issue into my favorite issue. Libertarians, like any party, have their share of extremists who unfairly make the rest look bad by association. You are in that share. You're just like the uber-feminists who make reasonable feminists look bad, by trying to turn each and every issue into a gender war even by the most tenuous of threads.
It was not a media assumption. There were passengers who were able to get some limited information out via cellphone calls - information that included what the terrorists were armed with.
I agree with you up to the point where you say hardened doors would have been useless. How could the terrorists have gotten control of the plane?
Consider: You're an airline pilot. One of the hijackers knows how to fly. They demand you give them control of the plane or they will kill more passengers until you do. They do NOT tell you that their plan is to fly the plane into a target and use the onboard fuel as an incinderary weapon, killing everyone on board in the process. They just tell you to hand over control to them or they kill more people.
What do you do. Do you close your hardended door and say "no"?
Hell no.
The biggest advantage the terrorists had is that nobody suspected what they were about to do. Once they lose that and everybody knows, then they were easy to overpower with or without hardened cockpit doors. (In the case of the Pennsylvania crash, what probably happened is that the survivors of the scuffle didn't know how to fly the plane.)
That last word should have read "impossible", not "possible". Damn me for not proofreading.
Point number 4 - That the "with us or against us" atttitude of the community is a problem, ignores one very BIG fact - it's an attitude thrust upon the commnity BY those who are against it. I'd be perfectly happy in the imaginary world where other people using Microsoft could work seamlessly with me using something else. I'd be perfectly happy in the world where others could use their own DVD players and I can use my own. It's those who are against open source that are against that world and actively seek to prevent it from being possible. They're the ones that chose to pick the fight and make peaceful coexistance possible.
There is no room for dissent (just watch this post get attacked)
Any argument which can be boiled down to "If you respond in disagreement with me, then that response is proof that I'm right", is automatically dishonest and deceitful. Your true clors have shown through.
9/11 was caused by poor airline security and lax regulation and oversight.
NO. NO NO NO NO!!!!. The terrorists took over using friggin' BOX KNIVES! I, for one, do NOT want to see the level of paranoid security that would be required to prevent someone from carrying a tiny razor-blade sized knife on board. The best weapon the terrorists had was deceit. They had the passengers convinced that all that was going to happen was that the plane was going to be forced to land somewhere and then negotiations would begin for hostage release. Under those expectations, the risk of being stabbed with the knives wasn't worth engaging in any heroics. In the one case where the news was already out, and the element of deceit was lost, the passengers did decide to overpower the terrorists' wimpy arsenel of box knifes. The same thing would likely have happened on the other three flights if they too had known what was going to happen if they sat still.
Don't blame airline security. Blame excessive optimism on the part of the passengers.
Windows crashing problems are due to operator error from installing bad drivers (from other manufacterers), installing bad hardware, installing crappy software.
Two points:
1) You just listed three things that are NOT the operator's fault. Why call them operator errors?
Did the operator write the buggy driver? Did the operator know the driver was buggy? Did the operator know the software package had a fatal flaw? I know your point is that they aren't Microsoft's fault, but that doesn't mean they are the operator's fault either.
2) In the case of drivers, yes it's reasonable to expect that a third-party driver can crash the system. But in the case of higher-level software, it IS the operatiing system's fault that it allows crappy software to crash the system. That's evidence of crappy security in the OS.
Good News: They backed down, so complaints on their bad voting technology can go forward.
Bad News: This avoided a situation where the DMCA could have been challenged in court like it desperately needs to be.
render farm of over 6000 Linux PC's
I didn't realize Google was doing 3-D graphics.
The people who write open source software are programmers, so they make environments that programmers would be comfortable in.
I don't think that's an adequete explanation, since programmers like things like good task switchers too. It's more that closed-source writers are typically working at companies that ONLY spend time on the end-user interface and not on the infrastructure, so that's where a lot of their effort goes.
Let's follow the progression of the term:
1. "Hacker" is used by computer geeks to denote a particular style of programming for which there just wasn't a good word already in the language.
2. The style of programming used by people finding holes in computer systems is to be one of the many uses of this "hacker" style.
3. The media hear geeks saying "hacker" in reference to people breaking into computer systems and misunderstand what the geeks are talking about - thinking they are talking about the breaking in, when they are actually talking about the style of programming being used to do so.
4. The media's definition gets more usage because they get more airplay than the geeks' meaning.
IN this case, the "some moron trying to change the way people talk" is the media, not the geeks. They succeeded. So, NO, it's not hypocracy to defend the difference between hacker and cracker while at the same time being agaisnt politically correct bullshit. BOTH are instances of the exact same thing - being against the media redefining terms.
How about you show up the political correctness camp by using ACTUAL ENGLISH. Using made up slang is the same problem as using made up politicaly correct terms - it's an instance of artificially deliberately warping the language instead of sitting back and letting it happen on its own.
Example Old Age Pensiors (OAPs) - 'We are offended by the name given us and see it as ageist. Therefore we would like to be known as Senior Citizens' (um, cause that doesn't refer to your age?)
Uhm, that one is a problem because it assumes that age must be mentioned in the context of pensions. That someone is old does not require that they are retired and drawing a pension, and thus if you assume "pension" whenever you see someone old, you are using an innaccurate term. It's not the political correctness that's a problem with that term. It's the factual correctness.
The rest of the stuff you said I agree is a problem.
A UPS won't last for days. A laptop's batter won't last for days. The blackout did.
I'm just waiting for the day that Manifest Destiny creeps back into mainstream consciousness.
That we should expand and stretch the country out to the west coast? Already been done. Now, what did you really mean by "manifest destiny"?
Voting is only an effective means of keeping the government honest if what the government does is open and well publicised. If they tack a Patriot Act II onto another bill as a rider, and sneak it through without a period for public comment, then voting doesn't help because people don't even realize what has occurred.
The biggest, most evil part of the government is the notion of the "rider". It allows the congressmen in committes to force the rest of the congress into a position where to vote for one bill they have to vote for a package of other ones with it as well. Remember the CDA, Communications "Decency" Act? It was a rider on a freakin' telecom deregulation bill. That meant that if you were a congressman who favored telecom deregulation, but not the CDA, your ability to vote how you want was stolen from you - by the rider process.
Telling more people to vote is insufficient. Telling people to INFORM THEMSELVES when they vote is far more important. The last thing we need is even more ignorant people voting. What we need is for those who vote to THINK when they do it.
Go do an informal poll among your neighbors about the patriot act. Look at how many of them don't see anything wrong with what it does. Now ask yourself again if more people voting would help get rid of this problem?
The good thing about peaceful resistance is that it fails if the resisters are the minorty. That bad thing about armed resistance is that it ignores amounts of supporting people and instead counts amounts of supporting firepower.
declared a war against a foreign state.
Then the emancipation proclimation had no jurisdiction, since it was issued in the Union, and only applied to states "in open rebellion". If the south was viewed as a foriegn country, that law would have applied to nowhere.
People quick to hate Lincoln would do well to look
at what he had to say about slavery BEFORE becoming president. He'd hated it for a long time. Yes, it's true the the emacipation proclamation was on very shaky legal ground, and probably not within his jurisdiction to sign, and had ulterior motives. But it was all he could get away with at the time. It's much like, how later on FDR wanted to get into the war but had to hold back because isolanionists had a lot sway, and so he had to make do with halfway measures like the lend-lease act. Lincoln had to move gently with regards to slavery and do halfway measures or else nobody else would have gone along with it. So he wrapped himself in rhetoric about the union, and all that, because that would sell better.
In order for an uprising to be truly nonviolent, it MUST be popular (meaning supported by a vast majority of the people). The problem with this issue is that most of your neighbors have no clue about it. Writing your congresscritter is fine as far as that goes, but publicising the problem to your fellow citizens is really the only path that has a chance of working. A congressman will start paying attention only when you can get a lot of voters to support your cause and thus affect his future re-electability.
The people affected by the downed routers were people who were in the blackout and couldn't turn on their computers anyway, so it doesn't matter that those machines were down. People outside the blackout were able to route around it, and THAT is the relevant part of the statement that the internet did well during the blackout.
No, moron, it's the style of government that's the relevant change. HK is now communist.
If the artist cares to, he'll release the song some other way. HIS copy isn't gone. If I was an author in the days of the Library of Alexandria, then the copy of my book in their hands might very well be the ONLY copy in existance, written in my own handwriting, and thus their copy being burned represents an irreversable loss of MY labor. If the artist with a song on MP3.com doesn't release it anywhere else to give it back to the public again, that's his right. If the only place you can find it is through piracy, and you bitch about it not being available there, than shame on you.
What makes it a stupid example is that the artist left all her copys of a work SHE OWNS THE COPYRIGHT TO in the hands of other people. Anyone that does that deserves what they get. That her producer's basement flooded shouldn't have destroyed her only copy. That was the really contrived part of this stupid example.