"The easy fix is to abolish the laws that give churches and religious groups tax exemption. Treat them as political groups."
The reason religious groups are tax exempt is because governments can easily use taxes as a basis for elimination of any religious group that voices opposition to the state.
In the US it's on the very short list of reasons people fled their homes seeking to found a new country, and the doctrine is rooted in the very foundation of the system.
I've just run into another company who is following the Microsoft model to the teeth.
A certain audio hardware maker who I won't name, but it's Mackie, makes a line of control surfaces for digital audio workstations. They are really well-engineered hardware devices, by anyone's standards.
However, the company advertises the communication protocol they use as "Univeral", and claims that they are open and anybody's software can support them.
Naturally, I got excited about this, and decided it might be a good project for me, to create the driver layer for Linux/ALSA/JACK systems, and maybe give Ardour support for Mackie's HUI.
So I investigated, and contacted the company. Boy, did I get a harsh, hostile response. Turns out their protocol is not open at all. Specs may be available under NDA, at the company's discretion, and I know from another developer that the NDA contains language that binds you into a partnership with the company far beyond a mere release of the specs.
Needless to say, I was shocked (SHOCKED!) that a company would advertise the openness and universal compatability of their hardware, while ALSO failing (REFUSING!) to make documentation available even to the people who buy the hardware.
It put the company, who I will not name, but it's Mackie, on my personal blacklist forever. Other people may have less radical policies, but mine is "corporate deathlist forever banned, period, the first time they are openly hostile to an open source developer."
Since they aren't Microsoft and don't have a billion users and since their users don't include governments, etc., there's not much hope for them to come around.
Well, my circle includes a lot of motorcyclists and people who race on a rally course, so my perspective would be a bit skewed. But the city I live in has a LOT of bad drivers. I couldn't count the number of cars I've seen upside down -- on roads with a 35MPH speed limit. I know of an intersection where you can sit and drink coffee and see at least a near miss from a red light runner every few minutes, and you're sure to see a serious accident every day or two. And around here doesn't even qualify as the worst I've seen!
>Now that the collisions are so easy to find, the RIAA will have a harder time (along > with those bastards at BayTSP) proving that song downloaders have infringed. It's >called "plausible deniability."
So far, they have rarely if ever had to prove anything at all. The people they have sued have been essentially guilty, or else settled without calling the question in court, or else were boundary cases like grannies and infants.
As for the whole "losses to file sharing" argument, I need to be convinced by a record (or movie) company declaring its losses to "piracy" on its annual tax return. That's my personal minimum standard for credibility of the claim.
"What about other circumstances where I sped up to avoid an accident, or to avoid further traffic congestion (as in moving into place to merge into an open spot rather than having 10 people brake behind you)?"
In my state, that's generally accepted as a defense, but if you do it to display your speed agressively, it's a separate violation.
"If the speed limits are properly set according to engineering priciples, 15 over a 70 limit is about as dangerous than 15 over a 30 limit. "
An engineer worth his creds would look at the multitude of parameters, such as visibility, surface composition, foot traffic, etc.
120 km/h in a 100 km/h zone, which is a straight road, paved for high-speed driving, no school children crossing, no stop signal ahead, is certainly safer than 60 km/h in a 45 km/h zone through an area with schools or shopping centres, or with blind turns, poor pavement, etc.
I will disregard your un-cited accident statistics.
There seems to be a divide between those who consider that period to be a quaint, distant, vaguely interesting piece of history, and those who have a personal recollection of the time, or at least, were not born so far after it that it was forgotten.
What people don't seem to grasp is the suddenness with which the situation turned from seemingly reasonable to atrocious.
I loved them, I even wrote a few myself. But the affair ended abruptly with Scott Adams' "Savage Island" adventure. After that I stuck to games like the classic Star Trek (which I still enjoy today), and my first roguelike, "Temple of Apshai", which is where my current addiction to nethack finds roots.
Seems that someone's ego is always plugged in somewhere. Nobody wants to really do a decentralized, anonymous, completely not-for-profit system with fully distributed expense outlay. You know, the sort of thing that could never be shut down by, probably not even observed by, "the establishment."
Seems that the system in the article was centralized with someone having a switch that *could* shut it down, and someone to whose name and address a court order could be sent. In other words, someone's ego was plugged in, and that was its undoing.
On the assumption that you're not just trolling, I'd be willing to bet your problems are more directly related to migrating to OpenOffice from MSOffice, than from WindowsXP to Linux.
>I lost in court last year defending myself against a traffic ticket for "failure to >yield," simply...
Your story doesn't sound that simple. You weren't, for example, parked in your driveway and rear-ended by the lady, to put it in an extreme context. You are upset that you didn't prevail, but you weren't quite as completely innocent as you'd like to have been. It would have been very easy to defend yourself against this ticket if you were, say, not driving the vehicle at the time of the accident, or you could show you were out of the country at that time, etc. Ok, a bit too extreme, but starting there, you must agree that the cost of defending yourself becomes more expensive the closer you are to "guilty".
The woman in the article did publish material that named names in an effort to discredit a specific party. She may have free-speech/free-press rights, but the damaged party has rights as well. How do we know, other than our prejudices, that she is in the right?
>I think your paraphrased version of "If you aren't guilty then you shouldn't have >anything to worry about/hide" (often used to justify unreasonable search and >seizure) is incredibly naive.
That's really not what I'm saying.
I'm merely saying that it tends to be more difficult to defend yourself, the guiltier you are. Most of the noteworthy cases where a defendant has trouble, you will find the defenant is not clearly innocent at all, but rather, trying to make a case that the actions were somehow justified.
In an extreme example, say the case of libel was raised and the woman had not actually written anything at all. Do you think the defense would be difficult?
In this case, it's not quite so easy, since she apparently did actually publish something, complete with names and accusations, with the intent to damage someone's reputation. She's not claiming that she did not write this -- she is claiming that it should be acceptable for her to have written it. And she will probably prevail, actually, when it's all said and done. I'll bet she's ordered to take the website down, and the claim of damages will not be awarded by the judge.
She will certainly have some debt to a lawyer. Supposedly she had the support of several government agencies at one point. I'd encourage her to leverage that relationship or even make them co-defendants.
"Remember when there was a big Press Conference about him? It's been many, many years since then, and we see him doing fine."
It's obvious you haven't known many people with HIV personally. You seem to have the idea that you get HIV on Monday, AIDS on Tuesday afternoon, and by the end of the week you've withered away and buried on Sunday. That's really not how it goes.
>This disease is human kind's biggest biological threat
Alcohol abuse kills far more. AIDS is WAY down the list. But it changes the sexual milieu in interesting ways, and is therefore regarded with inflated significance.
"They need to tell this guy he doesn't have a choice, this is for the better of humanity."
Who are "They" and how exactly do you propose to enforce this? Oh, and if you set a precedent for imminent domain against human beings, how do you constrain it before it becomes a form of slavery? In fact, how is your proposal not a form of slavery already? Why is it up to the state what's important for humanity, and that's a choice denied the individual?
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"The easy fix is to abolish the laws that give churches and religious groups tax exemption. Treat them as political groups."
The reason religious groups are tax exempt is because governments can easily use taxes as a basis for elimination of any religious group that voices opposition to the state.
In the US it's on the very short list of reasons people fled their homes seeking to found a new country, and the doctrine is rooted in the very foundation of the system.
Good luck changing that.
Read the quotes aloud with an Alabama accent and a mouth full of chewing tobacco, and it'll be more like being there!
Why don't you ever wear safety glasses when using power tools or working with volatile chemicals?
I've just run into another company who is following the Microsoft model to the teeth.
A certain audio hardware maker who I won't name, but it's Mackie, makes a line of control surfaces for digital audio workstations. They are really well-engineered hardware devices, by anyone's standards.
However, the company advertises the communication protocol they use as "Univeral", and claims that they are open and anybody's software can support them.
Naturally, I got excited about this, and decided it might be a good project for me, to create the driver layer for Linux/ALSA/JACK systems, and maybe give Ardour support for Mackie's HUI.
So I investigated, and contacted the company. Boy, did I get a harsh, hostile response. Turns out their protocol is not open at all. Specs may be available under NDA, at the company's discretion, and I know from another developer that the NDA contains language that binds you into a partnership with the company far beyond a mere release of the specs.
Needless to say, I was shocked (SHOCKED!) that a company would advertise the openness and universal compatability of their hardware, while ALSO failing (REFUSING!) to make documentation available even to the people who buy the hardware.
It put the company, who I will not name, but it's Mackie, on my personal blacklist forever. Other people may have less radical policies, but mine is "corporate deathlist forever banned, period, the first time they are openly hostile to an open source developer."
Since they aren't Microsoft and don't have a billion users and since their users don't include governments, etc., there's not much hope for them to come around.
At least with Microsoft there's a chance...
Star Raiders was a gestalt of game greatness that has yet to be matched by anything.
> Brail at drive through ATMs?
What's more insane?
Giving your PIN and card to a taxi driver?
>Know many people who can judge there limits?
Well, my circle includes a lot of motorcyclists and people who race on a rally course, so my perspective would be a bit skewed. But the city I live in has a LOT of bad drivers. I couldn't count the number of cars I've seen upside down -- on roads with a 35MPH speed limit. I know of an intersection where you can sit and drink coffee and see at least a near miss from a red light runner every few minutes, and you're sure to see a serious accident every day or two. And around here doesn't even qualify as the worst I've seen!
>Now that the collisions are so easy to find, the RIAA will have a harder time (along
> with those bastards at BayTSP) proving that song downloaders have infringed. It's
>called "plausible deniability."
So far, they have rarely if ever had to prove anything at all. The people they have sued have been essentially guilty, or else settled without calling the question in court, or else were boundary cases like grannies and infants.
As for the whole "losses to file sharing" argument, I need to be convinced by a record (or movie) company declaring its losses to "piracy" on its annual tax return. That's my personal minimum standard for credibility of the claim.
"wait...i can have 4 kids, sit on my ass all day, get a free house, free dental, free health and make £40,000 a yer."
So you won't get with the program. Whose fault is that?
"Can i come to USA?"
I thought the USA was the laughing stock of the world, where everybody is fat and supports a government of morons and warmongers.
>It's an entirely arbitrary system
Tell it to the judge.
"What about other circumstances where I sped up to avoid an accident, or to avoid further traffic congestion (as in moving into place to merge into an open spot rather than having 10 people brake behind you)?"
In my state, that's generally accepted as a defense, but if you do it to display your speed agressively, it's a separate violation.
"If some guy is going 90 along a road and turns a corner to see someone going 20 then they're pretty fucked (aka dead)."
If that's the case, the driver isn't qualified to drive that speed.
If you can't avoid hitting a stopped car, moose, stone, etc., you are driving beyond your limits.
"I'm virtually certain that b > a"
Also consider: "What do you hit when you leave the road?"
On a highway, you go into a ditch, a retaining wall, impact barrels, etc.
On a residential road, you go into someone's garden -- or living room! (I have seen both, more than once).
On a mountain road, you go off the mountain.
On a bridge, you go into the water.
There's more to the equation that the "engineer" is considering.
"If the speed limits are properly set according to engineering priciples, 15 over a 70 limit is about as dangerous than 15 over a 30 limit. "
An engineer worth his creds would look at the multitude of parameters, such as visibility, surface composition, foot traffic, etc.
120 km/h in a 100 km/h zone, which is a straight road, paved for high-speed driving, no school children crossing, no stop signal ahead, is certainly safer than 60 km/h in a 45 km/h zone through an area with schools or shopping centres, or with blind turns, poor pavement, etc.
I will disregard your un-cited accident statistics.
>The Nazi Germany had a VERY little crime rate.
There seems to be a divide between those who consider that period to be a quaint, distant, vaguely interesting piece of history, and those who have a personal recollection of the time, or at least, were not born so far after it that it was forgotten.
What people don't seem to grasp is the suddenness with which the situation turned from seemingly reasonable to atrocious.
>Where's the outrage coming from?
The few who remember Europe before and during WWII. Especially those who belong to a class of people likely to be targetted for elimination.
I use the word "zorkmid" pretty often. I'm about as likely to say "gimme ten vaqueros" though.
I loved them, I even wrote a few myself. But the affair ended abruptly with Scott Adams' "Savage Island" adventure. After that I stuck to games like the classic Star Trek (which I still enjoy today), and my first roguelike, "Temple of Apshai", which is where my current addiction to nethack finds roots.
>have the redefinition elves been busy?
Seems that someone's ego is always plugged in somewhere. Nobody wants to really do a decentralized, anonymous, completely not-for-profit system with fully distributed expense outlay. You know, the sort of thing that could never be shut down by, probably not even observed by, "the establishment."
Seems that the system in the article was centralized with someone having a switch that *could* shut it down, and someone to whose name and address a court order could be sent. In other words, someone's ego was plugged in, and that was its undoing.
>I am a secretary
On the assumption that you're not just trolling, I'd be willing to bet your problems are more directly related to migrating to OpenOffice from MSOffice, than from WindowsXP to Linux.
> suppose a client of yours decided to call Zaire on your modem!
The last time I had a modem it was still called Congo.
>I lost in court last year defending myself against a traffic ticket for "failure to
>yield," simply
Your story doesn't sound that simple. You weren't, for example, parked in your driveway and rear-ended by the lady, to put it in an extreme context. You are upset that you didn't prevail, but you weren't quite as completely innocent as you'd like to have been. It would have been very easy to defend yourself against this ticket if you were, say, not driving the vehicle at the time of the accident, or you could show you were out of the country at that time, etc. Ok, a bit too extreme, but starting there, you must agree that the cost of defending yourself becomes more expensive the closer you are to "guilty".
The woman in the article did publish material that named names in an effort to discredit a specific party. She may have free-speech/free-press rights, but the damaged party has rights as well. How do we know, other than our prejudices, that she is in the right?
>I think your paraphrased version of "If you aren't guilty then you shouldn't have
>anything to worry about/hide" (often used to justify unreasonable search and
>seizure) is incredibly naive.
That's really not what I'm saying.
I'm merely saying that it tends to be more difficult to defend yourself, the guiltier you are. Most of the noteworthy cases where a defendant has trouble, you will find the defenant is not clearly innocent at all, but rather, trying to make a case that the actions were somehow justified.
In an extreme example, say the case of libel was raised and the woman had not actually written anything at all. Do you think the defense would be difficult?
In this case, it's not quite so easy, since she apparently did actually publish something, complete with names and accusations, with the intent to damage someone's reputation. She's not claiming that she did not write this -- she is claiming that it should be acceptable for her to have written it. And she will probably prevail, actually, when it's all said and done. I'll bet she's ordered to take the website down, and the claim of damages will not be awarded by the judge.
She will certainly have some debt to a lawyer. Supposedly she had the support of several government agencies at one point. I'd encourage her to leverage that relationship or even make them co-defendants.
"Remember when there was a big Press Conference about him? It's been many, many years since then, and we see him doing fine."
It's obvious you haven't known many people with HIV personally. You seem to have the idea that you get HIV on Monday, AIDS on Tuesday afternoon, and by the end of the week you've withered away and buried on Sunday. That's really not how it goes.
>This disease is human kind's biggest biological threat
Alcohol abuse kills far more. AIDS is WAY down the list. But it changes the sexual milieu in interesting ways, and is therefore regarded with inflated significance.
"They need to tell this guy he doesn't have a choice, this is for the better of humanity."
Who are "They" and how exactly do you propose to enforce this? Oh, and if you set a precedent for imminent domain against human beings, how do you constrain it before it becomes a form of slavery? In fact, how is your proposal not a form of slavery already? Why is it up to the state what's important for humanity, and that's a choice denied the individual?