Well, "Allah" is simply the Arabic term meaning "the God". And Zeus is very particular. "God", fully capitalized, has been used by English-speakers to refer to such diverse divinities as the Jewish YHVH, the Christian Trinity, the Islamic al-Lah, the Hindu Brahman, the High God of various tribal religions of the Americas/Africa/Australia, the Chinese Emperor of Heaven, the Unmoved Mover of Aristotelian philosophy, the pantheist and panetheist conceptions of the Divine, and other concepts that are to a greater or lesser degree incopmatible with one another. So the cases are not equivalent.
In any case, as an atheist, I find it very hard to get worked up over which mythical being is being invoked. Might as well say "under Harry Potter" for all I care. Now, if I were a committed believer in a religion that explicitly denies the existence of a God, believing instead in incompatible mythical beings, I might be able to get worked up. Except that I could just not say the words if I wished because . ..
[How] would you feel about saying them every morning?
[It] doesn't mean that everyone else who does not [agree] should be forced to recite them.
. . . the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to require anyone to recite the Pledge back in 1943.
The question in this current case was not should anybody be made to utter those two words, but rather whether the reciting of those words can be an administration-scheduled part of the schoolday for those who do agree with them.
At which point, I have a hard time seeing it as anything but trivial. Two words in a Pledge that you don't have to say? Shall we prohibit recitations of the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph to a school assembly as well? The degree of "establishment" is on the same order. Do we need to amend the Constitution to remove "in the year of our Lord" in favor of "in the year of the Common Era"?
First, there wasn't a single Reagan or Bush appointee who made the decisions on the basic cases. It was, instead, a Supreme Court ruling in Dobbins's Distillery v. United States, in 1877, 104 years before Reagan was President, that established the precedent. It was followed up, reconfirmed, and expanded in Calero-Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co. in 1974, seven years before Reagan took the oath of office.
Now, true, in 1996 the Court refused to further curtail civil forfeiture, bowing to those century- and decades-old precedents I mentioned above. So who stepped into the breach?
Republican senator Henry Hyde, with the support of Bill Clinton, shepherded the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act through the Republican-controlled Congress, after which it was signed by President Clinton.
In short, it's absolutely, ridiculously dishonest to blame this on Reagan-Bush appointees, when the major precedents predate Reagan, and all the recent laws on the subject were passed when one party controlled the Congress and the other controlled the Presidency.
Yes, you are presumed innocent when you come into court. But, if the object is sufficiently rare, then posession without evidence of lawful provenance is sufficiently suspect that it itself constitutes evidence of illicit provenance. That's merely the result of common-sense analysis of the current circumstances and standards that have long existed for items of archeological interest, major artworks, and the like.
Note, too, that this is not a prosecution trying to put the posessor in prison; it is a lawsuit to return the rock to its (presumed) rightful owner. Neither this man's life nor liberty is at stake, and the question of whether it's his property is the entire issue. Standards in such a case are, and always have been, more lenient than in standard criminal cases.
What happens "when other governments (e.g. China) start going to the moon and handing out moon rocks as party favors at state visits"? Then, since the rarity will have gone down, posession without proven provenance will be less convincing evidence, and it will be harder to win these cases no matter what NASA claims.
Question: why don't you have cable competition in your local community?
No, it's not because the local company has been granted a monopoly. All of those grants were revoked in 1996, with the Telecommunications Act.
Instead, either there just isn't enough of a market to justify a competitor coming in, or your local government is playing around with permits and fees to keep competitors out.
If the second, why are you whinging about federal government policies instead of asking for going after your local government?
since the cable company has been granted a local monopoly,
All cable monopolies were revoked by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Eight years ago. There is no cable company in the U.S. today with a grant of a local monopoly, and there hasn't been for eight years.
It wasn't because the ads were inaccurate about neighbor's activities slowing down cable; it was because the ads were deceptive about DSL. While cable shares bandwith closer to your computer than DSL, DSL access moves over shared pipes to reach a backbone after it reaches the teleco anyway. SBC's ads implied that DSL access to the Internet was never shared, which is just plain wrong.
The FTC can't plan to make things illegal. It can plan to pass regulations that define certain activities as violating already-existng laws, but even then they can be challenged in court, and if the court doesn't think the already-existing laws cover the issue, the regualtions are void.
Cambodia was not a neutral under international law. You see, to legally be a neutral, you must not allow the military forces of either side to use your territory, and Cambodia was unable to keep the North Vietnamese from running their forces down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail through Cambodian soil.
As soon as that happened, under international law, Cambodia had a choice. It could go to war with North Vietnam, or it would be, de jure, an ally of North Vietnam.
(To give another example. In 1914, German troops swept across Belgium to ivade France. Under international law, Belgium from that point forward was either at war with Germany or an ally of Germany. Belgium chose to fight the Germans. If they had not, they would not have been a neutral, but a cobelligerant at war with France.)
Since Cambodia did not declare war on North Vietnam, Cambodia was, legally, a cobelligerant ally of North Vietnam.
Now, the U.S. Congress prohibited action in Cambodia, and U.S. forces in Cambodia were in violation of U.S. law. But Cambodia ceased to be a neutral the moment it failed to successfuly defend its neutrality from the NVA.
Describing the United Nations as a "collection of dictatorships" should be a first clue.
No. That it's published in National Review, a magazine founded by William F. Buckley specifically to advocate conservative views, should be your first clue.
Amazing! You've figured out that National Review, explcitly founded to further the conservative political agenda, prints articles to further a conservative political agenda!
Actually, no, it isn't a thinly-veiled attack on the U.N. You see, the magazine it's printed for is National Review. National Review already assumes that you've got enough sense to see the U.N. for the worthless boondoggle it is, and goes from there. So they don't need to thinly-veil an attack on it. Instead, they're using the opinion that most readers of NR already have of the U.N. to attack the Outer Space Treaty.
And, BTW, congrats on finding an agenda in an atricle written for a magazine that was specifically founded to support a conservative political agenda. Maybe next time you can find a chocolate chip in a bag of Chips Ahoy.
it will live in extreme poverty and hardship, the conditions that on Earth itself caused societies with no or weak property rights to be formed.
Exactly backwards. Poverty and weak property rights are related, but it's the weakness of the latter that maintains the former, not the other way around. Poverty is the state of nature; if it caused weak property rights, then strong property rights would never have formed in the first place.
Weak property rights maintain the natural state human condition of poverty by preventing the formation of capital, which is necessary to the investment needed to raise productivity, which is the prerequisite of reducing poverty.
AT&T sold the Unix source to Novell, Novell sold it to SCO, and SCO was bought by Caldera. Caldera released the versions up to V7 and 32V under the BSD license this January.
Sure, it's old, but it's genuine AT&T, Thompson-and-Ritchie Unix. And it's Open Source.
Since many cable companies are given monopolies by the local governments
Actually, no cable companies are given monoplies by local governments in the U.S. anymore, since the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
If you live in a cable monopoly area, it's because either your local government has been actively obstructing the entry of new companies through zoning laws and the like, or there isn't enough of a market to convince a rival cable company to make the infrastructure investments.
You are correct, I did not make a logical argument. I merely presented several facts. (Admittedly, one is not universally accepted.)
Instead, my unexpressed logical conclusion (and I should have expressed it) is that a "superbug" that destroyed the Earth's geological petroleum would not be an environmentalists' dream because its benefits would be limited to reducing short-term, localized ecological damage, while it would cause irreperable harm to the seabed ecosystems.
The Department of Energy defines petroleum as: "A generic term applied to oil and oil products in all forms, such as crude oil, lease condensate, unfinished oils, petroleum products, natural gas plant liquids, and nonhydrocarbon compounds blended into finished petroleum products."
And, of course, that something isn't "that big a deal in the overall scheme of things" doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to prevent. It does mean that there are other things more important to try to prevent, and if a choice has to be made (and a choice always has to be made at some point, because that's how the real world works), we should handle the more important things first.
Each year, more petroleum seeps up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico into the world's oceans than in every human-caused oil spill in history combined.
There are entire ecosystems near these oil seeps whose primary source of energy is not solar photosynthesis, but breaking down petroleum and natural gas.
Yes, petroleum spills by people cause temporary and localized deaths of organisms and disruption of ecosystems, but they just aren't that big a deal in the overall scheme of things.
Going up two posts: "First, you'll need to get a binary of the kernel without compilation using gcc . . . [y]ou can find binary version of the Linux kernel and its required user-space utilities, but did these reequire GNU tools to create."
That a system uses certain important tools is a valid argument. But you didn't only make that one, you also made an argument based on the tools used to create the system, as seen in my quote, and to which the OS/2 comment was directed.
Now, from the article
"There are people like Torvalds that will pressure our community into use of a non-free program, and challenge anyone who complains to provide a (technically) better program immediately or shut up."
"If people credit Torvalds as the main developer of the GNU/Linux system . . . it also makes his message more influential--and that message says, 'Non-free software is ok; I use it and develop it myself.'"
Are those attacks on Torvalds's non-commitement to free software? I'd say they are. You may, of course, differ.
Finally, remember that BSD was in legal wrangling at least as late as 1994, and that since then FreeBSD has been used by people who chose not to use Linux. The HURD would not have been done by 1995. I think that the people who went with Linux would have gone with FreeBSD if Linux had not been available/if Linus had left Linux under its original noncommercial-only license.
Obviously, I can't prove that, but if it had happened that way, RMS would today be a much less influential figure than he is today. In that context, RMS's yelling that Torvalds message isn't sufficiently pro-free-software strikes me as comparable to the actions of the scorpion on the frog's back in Aesop.
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after all, she's only a pied piper for simpletons that haven't read any real literature since twelfth grade.
Only those who are both insecure and pretentious are as desperate as you are to insult other peoples' tastes. So fuck off, twit.
If the words were "under Allah" or "under Zeus"
.
Well, "Allah" is simply the Arabic term meaning "the God". And Zeus is very particular. "God", fully capitalized, has been used by English-speakers to refer to such diverse divinities as the Jewish YHVH, the Christian Trinity, the Islamic al-Lah, the Hindu Brahman, the High God of various tribal religions of the Americas/Africa/Australia, the Chinese Emperor of Heaven, the Unmoved Mover of Aristotelian philosophy, the pantheist and panetheist conceptions of the Divine, and other concepts that are to a greater or lesser degree incopmatible with one another. So the cases are not equivalent.
In any case, as an atheist, I find it very hard to get worked up over which mythical being is being invoked. Might as well say "under Harry Potter" for all I care. Now, if I were a committed believer in a religion that explicitly denies the existence of a God, believing instead in incompatible mythical beings, I might be able to get worked up. Except that I could just not say the words if I wished because . .
[How] would you feel about saying them every morning?
[It] doesn't mean that everyone else who does not [agree] should be forced to recite them.
. . . the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to require anyone to recite the Pledge back in 1943.
The question in this current case was not should anybody be made to utter those two words, but rather whether the reciting of those words can be an administration-scheduled part of the schoolday for those who do agree with them.
At which point, I have a hard time seeing it as anything but trivial. Two words in a Pledge that you don't have to say? Shall we prohibit recitations of the Declaration of Independence's second paragraph to a school assembly as well? The degree of "establishment" is on the same order. Do we need to amend the Constitution to remove "in the year of our Lord" in favor of "in the year of the Common Era"?
First, there wasn't a single Reagan or Bush appointee who made the decisions on the basic cases. It was, instead, a Supreme Court ruling in Dobbins's Distillery v. United States, in 1877, 104 years before Reagan was President, that established the precedent. It was followed up, reconfirmed, and expanded in Calero-Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co. in 1974, seven years before Reagan took the oath of office.
Now, of course, that didn't become a major issue until the Democratic Congress and Ronald Reagan jointly put through the 1988 Drug Act. But, at the height of Reagan-Bush influence on the Court, in four cases in 1993, the Supreme Court began to recognize the harm done by civil forfeiture laws and acted to curtail some of the government's most obvious abuses.".
Now, true, in 1996 the Court refused to further curtail civil forfeiture, bowing to those century- and decades-old precedents I mentioned above. So who stepped into the breach?
Republican senator Henry Hyde, with the support of Bill Clinton, shepherded the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act through the Republican-controlled Congress, after which it was signed by President Clinton.
In short, it's absolutely, ridiculously dishonest to blame this on Reagan-Bush appointees, when the major precedents predate Reagan, and all the recent laws on the subject were passed when one party controlled the Congress and the other controlled the Presidency.
Yes, you are presumed innocent when you come into court. But, if the object is sufficiently rare, then posession without evidence of lawful provenance is sufficiently suspect that it itself constitutes evidence of illicit provenance. That's merely the result of common-sense analysis of the current circumstances and standards that have long existed for items of archeological interest, major artworks, and the like.
Note, too, that this is not a prosecution trying to put the posessor in prison; it is a lawsuit to return the rock to its (presumed) rightful owner. Neither this man's life nor liberty is at stake, and the question of whether it's his property is the entire issue. Standards in such a case are, and always have been, more lenient than in standard criminal cases.
What happens "when other governments (e.g. China) start going to the moon and handing out moon rocks as party favors at state visits"? Then, since the rarity will have gone down, posession without proven provenance will be less convincing evidence, and it will be harder to win these cases no matter what NASA claims.
Question: why don't you have cable competition in your local community?
No, it's not because the local company has been granted a monopoly. All of those grants were revoked in 1996, with the Telecommunications Act.
Instead, either there just isn't enough of a market to justify a competitor coming in, or your local government is playing around with permits and fees to keep competitors out.
If the second, why are you whinging about federal government policies instead of asking for going after your local government?
since the cable company has been granted a local monopoly,
All cable monopolies were revoked by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Eight years ago. There is no cable company in the U.S. today with a grant of a local monopoly, and there hasn't been for eight years.
It wasn't because the ads were inaccurate about neighbor's activities slowing down cable; it was because the ads were deceptive about DSL. While cable shares bandwith closer to your computer than DSL, DSL access moves over shared pipes to reach a backbone after it reaches the teleco anyway. SBC's ads implied that DSL access to the Internet was never shared, which is just plain wrong.
The FTC can't plan to make things illegal. It can plan to pass regulations that define certain activities as violating already-existng laws, but even then they can be challenged in court, and if the court doesn't think the already-existing laws cover the issue, the regualtions are void.
Cambodia was not a neutral under international law. You see, to legally be a neutral, you must not allow the military forces of either side to use your territory, and Cambodia was unable to keep the North Vietnamese from running their forces down the Ho Chi Mihn Trail through Cambodian soil.
As soon as that happened, under international law, Cambodia had a choice. It could go to war with North Vietnam, or it would be, de jure, an ally of North Vietnam.
(To give another example. In 1914, German troops swept across Belgium to ivade France. Under international law, Belgium from that point forward was either at war with Germany or an ally of Germany. Belgium chose to fight the Germans. If they had not, they would not have been a neutral, but a cobelligerant at war with France.)
Since Cambodia did not declare war on North Vietnam, Cambodia was, legally, a cobelligerant ally of North Vietnam.
Now, the U.S. Congress prohibited action in Cambodia, and U.S. forces in Cambodia were in violation of U.S. law. But Cambodia ceased to be a neutral the moment it failed to successfuly defend its neutrality from the NVA.
Describing the United Nations as a "collection of dictatorships" should be a first clue.
No. That it's published in National Review, a magazine founded by William F. Buckley specifically to advocate conservative views, should be your first clue.
Amazing! You've figured out that National Review, explcitly founded to further the conservative political agenda, prints articles to further a conservative political agenda!
Actually, no, it isn't a thinly-veiled attack on the U.N. You see, the magazine it's printed for is National Review. National Review already assumes that you've got enough sense to see the U.N. for the worthless boondoggle it is, and goes from there. So they don't need to thinly-veil an attack on it. Instead, they're using the opinion that most readers of NR already have of the U.N. to attack the Outer Space Treaty.
And, BTW, congrats on finding an agenda in an atricle written for a magazine that was specifically founded to support a conservative political agenda. Maybe next time you can find a chocolate chip in a bag of Chips Ahoy.
Oh, wow! A political opinion magazine had an artcle expressing political opinions, and you're able to detect a them. You must be Einstein!
it will live in extreme poverty and hardship, the conditions that on Earth itself caused societies with no or weak property rights to be formed.
Exactly backwards. Poverty and weak property rights are related, but it's the weakness of the latter that maintains the former, not the other way around. Poverty is the state of nature; if it caused weak property rights, then strong property rights would never have formed in the first place.
Weak property rights maintain the natural state human condition of poverty by preventing the formation of capital, which is necessary to the investment needed to raise productivity, which is the prerequisite of reducing poverty.
Unix? Open source? I don't think so.
Actually, Unix is open source now.
AT&T sold the Unix source to Novell, Novell sold it to SCO, and SCO was bought by Caldera. Caldera released the versions up to V7 and 32V under the BSD license this January.
Sure, it's old, but it's genuine AT&T, Thompson-and-Ritchie Unix. And it's Open Source.
Since many cable companies are given monopolies by the local governments
Actually, no cable companies are given monoplies by local governments in the U.S. anymore, since the passing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
If you live in a cable monopoly area, it's because either your local government has been actively obstructing the entry of new companies through zoning laws and the like, or there isn't enough of a market to convince a rival cable company to make the infrastructure investments.
Look at the countries involved. Twenty years ago this list would have been headed by Russian.
OTOH, twenty years ago the Russians had been the enemy for thirty-five years, so we had already trained lots of people to speak Russian.
You are correct, I did not make a logical argument. I merely presented several facts. (Admittedly, one is not universally accepted.)
Instead, my unexpressed logical conclusion (and I should have expressed it) is that a "superbug" that destroyed the Earth's geological petroleum would not be an environmentalists' dream because its benefits would be limited to reducing short-term, localized ecological damage, while it would cause irreperable harm to the seabed ecosystems.
Billions of planets full of life doesn't sound too "alone" to me.
Um, that puts the nearest inhabited planet a minimum of 163,000 years of travel away from Earth. That's close enough to "alone" for me.
The Department of Energy defines petroleum as: "A generic term applied to oil and oil products in all forms, such as crude oil, lease condensate, unfinished oils, petroleum products, natural gas plant liquids, and nonhydrocarbon compounds blended into finished petroleum products."
And, of course, that something isn't "that big a deal in the overall scheme of things" doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to prevent. It does mean that there are other things more important to try to prevent, and if a choice has to be made (and a choice always has to be made at some point, because that's how the real world works), we should handle the more important things first.
Sure. Here's a story about one of the ecosystems.
Yes, it beats the Athlon clock-for-clock - but in 2 years time when the P4 is at 6Ghz or whereever, what is the Athlon going to do then?
In two years? Be retired in favor of the x86-64 K8/Hammer/Opteron architecture.
Each year, more petroleum seeps up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico into the world's oceans than in every human-caused oil spill in history combined.
There are entire ecosystems near these oil seeps whose primary source of energy is not solar photosynthesis, but breaking down petroleum and natural gas.
Yes, petroleum spills by people cause temporary and localized deaths of organisms and disruption of ecosystems, but they just aren't that big a deal in the overall scheme of things.
Hmm. The U.S. Army needs more recruits, having missed its recruitment goals for several years now, and the game is a tool to get recruits.
Whether it will be an effective recruiting tool, of course, is an open question. But it is definintely an attempt to fill a NEED, not a want.
Going up two posts: "First, you'll need to get a binary of the kernel without compilation using gcc . . . [y]ou can find binary version of the Linux kernel and its required user-space utilities, but did these reequire GNU tools to create."
That a system uses certain important tools is a valid argument. But you didn't only make that one, you also made an argument based on the tools used to create the system, as seen in my quote, and to which the OS/2 comment was directed.
Now, from the article
"There are people like Torvalds that will pressure our community into use of a non-free program, and challenge anyone who complains to provide a (technically) better program immediately or shut up."
"If people credit Torvalds as the main developer of the GNU/Linux system . . . it also makes his message more influential--and that message says, 'Non-free software is ok; I use it and develop it myself.'"
Are those attacks on Torvalds's non-commitement to free software? I'd say they are. You may, of course, differ.
Finally, remember that BSD was in legal wrangling at least as late as 1994, and that since then FreeBSD has been used by people who chose not to use Linux. The HURD would not have been done by 1995. I think that the people who went with Linux would have gone with FreeBSD if Linux had not been available/if Linus had left Linux under its original noncommercial-only license.
Obviously, I can't prove that, but if it had happened that way, RMS would today be a much less influential figure than he is today. In that context, RMS's yelling that Torvalds message isn't sufficiently pro-free-software strikes me as comparable to the actions of the scorpion on the frog's back in Aesop.