We keep trying to come up with rules which include those objects want to include and exclude all the others. The rules are arbitrary too, the result of a majority vote by some group. This is not science; it is semantics.
Perhaps the British prisons succeed in rehabilitating criminals, but the US prisons only succeed in making a person unfit to live in society (other than prison society).
Even/. has bought into calling copyright infringement "piracy". If you don't think it's the moral equivalent of murder on the high seas, then don't use the RIAA term "piracy". You just play into their hands.
Re:Confusion About Abbie Hoffman
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 1
Aren't one-sided documentaries more commonly referred to as "propaganda"?
Only when produced by the established power (government, church, etc.). Otherwise they are just polemics.
You may be right, but don't you think they may have thought of this too? It doesn't even require a lot of medical training to know that clots can cause strokes. Thanks for reminding us but I wouldn't mod your post as "insightful."
Maybe you should look at more than one definition or more than one dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary (on www.thefreedictionary.com) give these two definitions (among several):
1. One who assumes responsibility for another person or a group during a period of instruction, apprenticeship, or probation.
2. One who vouches for the suitability of a candidate for admission.
Granted it's not software, but it certainly implies a responsibility on the part of the sponsor.
Also known as the CADET (Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) because it didn't even have an adder. Did all it's arithmetic operations by table lookup. I didn't actually own one of these beasts but a friend of mine bought one surplus for $75. A bubble-pack calculator can run rings around it now.
Of course not. Everything you post to/. is recorded somewhere. So is everything you said on Wikipedia and every query you ever made on Google, Yahoo, etc. etc. Not to mention all the ads that trace where you've been. And anyone can correlate all that together. So what are your choices? Turn off your computer? Use something like idzap for all your Internet work? Because privacy is dead. All you have is unimportance. As long as you remain unimportant, then no one will care what you do.
The Chinese government hasn't made similar demands. Why do you think they might? If you're looking for a "slippery slope" argument, what will Google say when the US government asks for a list of all people who make queries critical of Bush?
The late, great, Scientific American
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Scientific American used to be a fine magazine with level-headed articles, which presented difficult scientific topics in language that a well-read lay person could understand and appreciate. In the last few years, however, it has increasingly moved toward the sensationalistic article which predicts that doom "could happen any day now." It's bad journalism and it's bad science but it does sell subscriptions. For some reason, I still have mine.
Piracy is a ridiculously strong word for any "illegal" data copying and I am ashamed that a Slashdot contributor would repeat it. Piracy was capturing ships at sea and murdering everyone on board before sinking the ship. It's silly to use this metaphor for some dumb file copying.
No, lobbying is not illegal. But maybe it should be. At least, it should be considered immoral. You get a vote and I get a vote and Microsoft, because they can contribute millions to congressional and presidential candidates, makes our votes worthless. It doesn't matter if you have a better mousetrap because some company will prevent you from selling it. Patent violation, they will say. And where were the patent and copyright laws written? In some lobbyist's office. Your representatives don't write legislation anymore, the lobbyists do. So why should I be thrilled that a Linux company has joined this band of thieves. Maybe they're the good guys -- but they're certainly associating with a shady crowd.
Okay, so the analogy was a little lame. And I know there are good lobbyists out there fighting the good cause. I'd just like to clean up the whole campaign contribution mess and eliminate the need for lobbyists on both sides.
Sorry, I don't like Linux companies trying to get special favors from the government any more than I like Microsoft doing it. Now you might argue that Linux, being the underdog, deserves to try to balance things in Washington. Using that argument, it would be okay for a poor kid to shoplift because he needs it. Doesn't make it right.
I think that many of us object to the type of ad, not to ads themselves. Text ads, especially targetted ones, are not obtrusive and sometimes give useful information on how to find things you're looking for. It's the "in-your-face" ads that blink at you or cover up what you're reading that I hate. I have no ethical problems with avoiding ads like these.
You need both experience and the degree, although I'm not convinced that a prestigious college will give you much of an edge with an undergraduate degree. In my first job out of college, I didn't have a CS degree and my GPA wasn't that great, but they hired me because I had worked summers for them. But some companies won't even look at you unless you have some kind of degree.
I will probably be modded down for being insufficiently paranoid, but for goodness sake, who cares where I go? There are already dozens of ways to track my every step, from credit cards to cell phones to video cameras to E-Z Pass to employment badges to internet connections. Correlate them all and you have a pretty good picture of how I spend my day. But who cares how I spend my day? Am I really that important that people would go out of their way to trace my behaviour? Sometimes I think we get too hung up on principles and forget about reality.
Re:I want to help the beatles
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
There's a difference between The Law and lawyers. The former keeps us from having to decide every issue on the basis of who is the strongest. It is a set of rules which we, as civilized people, agree to so that we don't have to make up things as we go along. When rule of law breaks down, we have things like Abu Ghurayb and Mi Lai. Or Bush v. Gore.
Lawyers (not MY lawyer, of course) have a vested interested in disputes and in the complexity of the law. So where two parties like Southwest and the other airline could settle a dispute by mutually agreed upon rules, a good lawyer could turn it into a multi-million dollar court case, with them taking a sizeable portion.
So as we might be tempted to do away with all the lawyers, the idea of doing away with all the law scares me shitless. There's a dialog from A Man For All Seasons:
Roper So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
"We have it...on the authority of African explorers that many Hottentot tribes do not have in their vocabulary the names for numbers larger than three. Ask a native down there how many sons he has or how many enemies he has slain, and if the number is more than three, he will answer 'many.'"
[ George Gamow, "One, Two, Three...Infinity" 1953 ]
I don't think this is a matter of who owns katie.com but rather what right anyone has to publically display your web page, email address, home address, or phone number. IANAL but if Katie Jones' actual phone number had been used as the title of a book about sexual harassment, she would have every right to sue the publisher for any actual or potential harassment she herself might suffer. Same thing should apply to web sites.
As they say, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. What we have here is either bravado or, at best, a marketing goal. Lots of thunder and very little rain. What it's doing in./ other than as a troll, I don't know.
How ironic it is that a law which allows the government to
keep track of reading habits (let alone our surfing habits),
is called a Patriot Act. Not long ago, countries such as
Communist Russia were considered un-American because they
practiced such invasion of privacy. Now the right wing,
who fought so vigorously in the past against such "Communist"
practices are their strongest defenders in this country today.
True, it's not the Travelling Salesman problem, but it is interesting. In the beginning, the challenge is to drink at every Starbucks in town and then move to the next town. But as you begin to succeed, the appearance of new stores insures that the average Starbucks density, worldwide, grows smaller. So small that, at some point, it may be impossible to traverse in one week all the new Starbucks that are being built in that week. Unless, of course, they are all built in the same town. And then you can declare a victory and go back to more meaningful pursuits such as sky diving or trainspotting.
Slashdot Mirror
We keep trying to come up with rules which include those objects want to include and exclude all the others. The rules are arbitrary too, the result of a majority vote by some group. This is not science; it is semantics.
Perhaps the British prisons succeed in rehabilitating criminals, but the US prisons only succeed in making a person unfit to live in society (other than prison society).
Even /. has bought into calling copyright infringement "piracy". If you don't think it's the moral equivalent of murder on the high seas, then don't use the RIAA term "piracy". You just play into their hands.
Only when produced by the established power (government, church, etc.). Otherwise they are just polemics.
You may be right, but don't you think they may have thought of this too? It doesn't even require a lot of medical training to know that clots can cause strokes. Thanks for reminding us but I wouldn't mod your post as "insightful."
Maybe you should look at more than one definition or more than one dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary (on www.thefreedictionary.com) give these two definitions (among several): 1. One who assumes responsibility for another person or a group during a period of instruction, apprenticeship, or probation. 2. One who vouches for the suitability of a candidate for admission. Granted it's not software, but it certainly implies a responsibility on the part of the sponsor.
Also known as the CADET (Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) because it didn't even have an adder. Did all it's arithmetic operations by table lookup. I didn't actually own one of these beasts but a friend of mine bought one surplus for $75. A bubble-pack calculator can run rings around it now.
Of course not. Everything you post to /. is recorded somewhere. So is everything you said on Wikipedia and every query you ever made on Google, Yahoo, etc. etc. Not to mention all the ads that trace where you've been. And anyone can correlate all that together. So what are your choices? Turn off your computer? Use something like idzap for all your Internet work? Because privacy is dead. All you have is unimportance. As long as you remain unimportant, then no one will care what you do.
The Chinese government hasn't made similar demands. Why do you think they might? If you're looking for a "slippery slope" argument, what will Google say when the US government asks for a list of all people who make queries critical of Bush?
Scientific American used to be a fine magazine with level-headed articles, which presented difficult scientific topics in language that a well-read lay person could understand and appreciate. In the last few years, however, it has increasingly moved toward the sensationalistic article which predicts that doom "could happen any day now." It's bad journalism and it's bad science but it does sell subscriptions. For some reason, I still have mine.
Yet!
If it's open to all, then who are the rest?
Piracy is a ridiculously strong word for any "illegal" data copying and I am ashamed that a Slashdot contributor would repeat it. Piracy was capturing ships at sea and murdering everyone on board before sinking the ship. It's silly to use this metaphor for some dumb file copying.
No, lobbying is not illegal. But maybe it should be. At least, it should be considered immoral. You get a vote and I get a vote and Microsoft, because they can contribute millions to congressional and presidential candidates, makes our votes worthless. It doesn't matter if you have a better mousetrap because some company will prevent you from selling it. Patent violation, they will say. And where were the patent and copyright laws written? In some lobbyist's office. Your representatives don't write legislation anymore, the lobbyists do. So why should I be thrilled that a Linux company has joined this band of thieves. Maybe they're the good guys -- but they're certainly associating with a shady crowd. Okay, so the analogy was a little lame. And I know there are good lobbyists out there fighting the good cause. I'd just like to clean up the whole campaign contribution mess and eliminate the need for lobbyists on both sides.
Sorry, I don't like Linux companies trying to get special favors from the government any more than I like Microsoft doing it. Now you might argue that Linux, being the underdog, deserves to try to balance things in Washington. Using that argument, it would be okay for a poor kid to shoplift because he needs it. Doesn't make it right.
I think that many of us object to the type of ad, not to ads themselves. Text ads, especially targetted ones, are not obtrusive and sometimes give useful information on how to find things you're looking for. It's the "in-your-face" ads that blink at you or cover up what you're reading that I hate. I have no ethical problems with avoiding ads like these.
You need both experience and the degree, although I'm not convinced that a prestigious college will give you much of an edge with an undergraduate degree. In my first job out of college, I didn't have a CS degree and my GPA wasn't that great, but they hired me because I had worked summers for them. But some companies won't even look at you unless you have some kind of degree.
I will probably be modded down for being insufficiently paranoid, but for goodness sake, who cares where I go? There are already dozens of ways to track my every step, from credit cards to cell phones to video cameras to E-Z Pass to employment badges to internet connections. Correlate them all and you have a pretty good picture of how I spend my day. But who cares how I spend my day? Am I really that important that people would go out of their way to trace my behaviour? Sometimes I think we get too hung up on principles and forget about reality.
Lawyers (not MY lawyer, of course) have a vested interested in disputes and in the complexity of the law. So where two parties like Southwest and the other airline could settle a dispute by mutually agreed upon rules, a good lawyer could turn it into a multi-million dollar court case, with them taking a sizeable portion.
So as we might be tempted to do away with all the lawyers, the idea of doing away with all the law scares me shitless. There's a dialog from A Man For All Seasons:
Roper So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
What would you prefer, a fist fight?
"We have it...on the authority of African explorers that many Hottentot tribes do not have in their vocabulary the names for numbers larger than three. Ask a native down there how many sons he has or how many enemies he has slain, and if the number is more than three, he will answer 'many.'"
[ George Gamow, "One, Two, Three...Infinity" 1953 ]
I don't think this is a matter of who owns katie.com but rather what right anyone has to publically display your web page, email address, home address, or phone number. IANAL but if Katie Jones' actual phone number had been used as the title of a book about sexual harassment, she would have every right to sue the publisher for any actual or potential harassment she herself might suffer. Same thing should apply to web sites.
As they say, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. What we have here is either bravado or, at best, a marketing goal. Lots of thunder and very little rain. What it's doing in ./ other than as a troll, I don't know.
How ironic it is that a law which allows the government to keep track of reading habits (let alone our surfing habits), is called a Patriot Act. Not long ago, countries such as Communist Russia were considered un-American because they practiced such invasion of privacy. Now the right wing, who fought so vigorously in the past against such "Communist" practices are their strongest defenders in this country today.
True, it's not the Travelling Salesman problem, but it is interesting. In the beginning, the challenge is to drink at every Starbucks in town and then move to the next town. But as you begin to succeed, the appearance of new stores insures that the average Starbucks density, worldwide, grows smaller. So small that, at some point, it may be impossible to traverse in one week all the new Starbucks that are being built in that week. Unless, of course, they are all built in the same town. And then you can declare a victory and go back to more meaningful pursuits such as sky diving or trainspotting.