Trite, but true. In order to increase the general amount of freedom, a specific freedom must go. It's like restricting one freedom of expression (say, in the form of graffiti) in order to protect another (such as people's right to create and/or view paintings that would otherwise be quickly covered in graffiti).
People attribute all kinds of ethics and high moral principles to [RMS], but I've never heard him say this was his motive. From all I can tell, and all I've ever heard him say, he's just single-mindedly selfish in a way that happens to have some positive community benefit.
Agree.
I don't think he is offering what some see him as offering, and so it never comes out looking like what they expect.
Agree. And I think this is one reason for so many OSS businesses having bitten the dust recently: their business model was not mapped onto reality, but onto their expectations.
The difference is that RMS - like soft water dripping on a hard rock which eventually wears away the rock - sets out to change the circumstances to fit his expectations, and does so with complete persistence, therefore must ultimately succeed unless he dies first. Mohandas Ghandi would have been pleased to recognise at least some of his principles in action. (-:
Back in the days when the typewriter was king of the office, IBM's office products division was accused of monopolising the market, and asked to propose a solution, before one was imposed on them.
No worries, they said, we'll just double the price. And they did. And guess what? They sold more units than at half the price, because people figured that the more expensive product had to be better...
Microsoft haven't actually doubled the price of Windows here, but there proposed remedy reeks of similar or worse chutzpah, what with getting a full-price tax break on what they supply for peanuts, swamping the schools with their monopoly product, and proposing a ``penalty'' that amounts to a few weeks' interest on their cash holdings, and at the end of five years leaves the poverty-stricken schools dependent on paying licence fees in order to keep using their now-established software.
As another poster said, it's like tabacco companies handing out free cigarette in apology for luring people into using a product that kills them slowly and painfully.
...thus guaranteeing that these machines will never run Windows, and also helping to work against Intel's monopoly.
Intel does actually innovate, as well as monopolise. In this respect they're ahead of Microsoft.
Also, $1.1G is literally petty cash for Microsoft. If California suffered $3G-$9G, let's call it $3G and figure out the value per capita, then amortise that across the whole world, call that the spend, and make sure it gets spent worldwide too. (-:
Can anyone improve on the justice of this proposal? (-:
/ME would be better off searching for a known-good credit card number.
If you find it, it might lead you to many other credit card numbers - but first cancel the one that you found, and sue the company exposing it. Ask them if they have the box their computer came in. (-: And maybe post the URL to CERT as a vulnerability:-)
There was a birth notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald on the appropriate day in 1980, one of the doctors thanked for helping with her delivery was ``Asimov.''
Susan Calvin is a character from Asimov's ``Robots'' series who is a whiz-bang robot, uh, psychologist.
Asimov spent much more time being loud and assertive than inventing stuff like Heinlen and Clarke did, and he missed some very significant points of chemistry and physics in his non-fiction-ish works like ``The Left Hand of the Electron.'' He did, however, write a *lot* of words!
The invention that I'm waiting to see implemented is skyhooks AKA inside-out orbiting bridges, as in ``The Fountains of Paradise.''
the eventual disposition of the IP rights depend on where the funding for the research came from. in public institutions, like state schools, this should be clear: they're public institutions, funded by public money, so the public should get the benefits.
Therefore they have the right to declare the IP Public Domain, but not the right to restrict it with the GPL?
Up until Jurassic Park came out, there were all of THREE T-Rex fossils found.
I think you'll find that this was three complete Rex skeletons, which is quite a different matter.
Flying species like the bird, Archeopteryx, or delicate species like jellyfish don't meet the conditions for fossilisation as easily, so there are only a handful of those. Marine creatures like trilobites and turtles, on the other hand, we have running out of our ears - so in a way Terry Pratchett's Discworld model is actually right, it's turtles at least some of the way down. (-:
Nowadays, if the face of so much consistent evidence, you'd have to have some really spectacular counter-evidence to be taken seriously. There are still scientists out there trying to debunk the idea, of course, but mostly they just keep turning up more evidence in favor of the impact.
Unfortunately, the evidence is consistent with a lot of things, including a strong episode of vulcanism, most of what Immanuel Velikovsky's had to say, and the idea of rapid worldwide flooding which so neatly explains many other things (-: a theory so popular on bone-dry Mars, but anathema here on our own soggy globe:-).
What seems to be happening is the same thing, over and over, as when geologist Harlan Bretz fought tooth and nail for four decades before geology accepted his theory for the Spokane badlands. A theory becomes dogma (generally without much real proof) and then all new evidence is seen as conforming to the dogma until finally the explanations become so stretched as to become indefensible, then everyone hurries to been seen as having allowed for the new idea in their old prognostications.
There are a couple of big showstoppers for the meteor-strike-kills-dinosaur idea, including the observation that a lot of dinosaurs did not perish at the end of the Cretaceous, and a lot of creatures which should logically have perished as readily, didn't. Perhaps the most damning is the occasional multiple or conspicuously absent Ir layer, features which are often masked, overlooked or rationalised away during reporting. [pro multi strike] [con vulcanism] [con flood, many references esp in the linked PDF] [con egg-stinction, but he's wrong, eg non-stealthy birds survived]
Has anyone found strata anywhere that is well-dated and continuous across the 65-million-year age that doesn't show a thin anomalous layer and a radical change of fossils?
I recommend using names, rather than specific ages, or you'll see still more debate about the length of the periods involved, rather than a focus on more ``core'' ideas like seqences of events. And yes, many such have been found; there are less than 200 sites worldwide that do show Ir anomalies, and many of those either show multiple anomalies, or anomalies at depths other than the top of the Cretaceous. Do your own searching. (-:
I don't think Bill will be shooting a wad at Hillary anytime soon.
He will if the SSSCA is passed and Microsoft DRM is chosen as the music protection device of choice.
He might even get to tattoo her posterior, in the best Microsoft tradition. It'd be enough to keep her a banana buddy for life - even though she's publicly stated that she'd like to lie down with money, because she probably meant female money.
the highjaking of airlines and flying them into buildings are acts of mass murder, and auto related deaths are accidents.
Very few people get drunk accidentally, even fewer drive cars accidentally.
Drink-driving is gross negligence, and when you drink, drive and kill someone it's absolutely, unquestionably your fault that they died. You took every step on the road to their death. You killed them. You trundle past policemen, knowing you're doing wrong and hoping that they'll not notice you, as did bin Laden's hijackers. It's no different in principle, only in scale.
A number of countries with a more pragmatic attitude to such things have discovered that shooting repeat-offense drink drivers out of hand is immensely profitable in terms of lives not lost. Perhaps America should do the same?
.
Unfortunately, it's generally one sort of idea
on
Defining Globalism
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· Score: 2
It's hard to preach a monotheistic view of the world if all sorts of ideas are available to your kids online and via TV, music and film.
False at face value, but an overwhelming preponderance of the material you're describing (much less so for the 'net than the other media, but it's still there) comes from a nominally Atheistic Humanist viewpoint.
I wish to specifically labour the point with that word ``nominally,'' since the vast majority of ``Atheistic'' Humanists are actually Gnostics but don't realise it.
[Terms: Agnostic == doesn't have any particular belief, including belief in the absence of a deity; Atheist == believes that there definitely is no deity; Gnostic == believes that there is a deity but that same is a form of ``good'' spirit and won't sully itself with ``evil'' matter; Theist == beieves that there definitely is a deity]
Many professed Atheists make an argument for materialism by pointing to a feature of nature and saying, ``that's ridiculous, no {sane,sensible,rational} deity would do such a thing.''
Well, how do they know? I mean, where do they get off defining the behaviour of a postulated all-powerful supernatural being in their own finite terms?
While we're visiting that argument, vestigial organs in the human body - objects of such an argument - once numbered hundreds, now we're down to at most 6 and the future for the remaining candidates is becoming steadily less clear as our understanding of biology expands.
Returning to the point: in order to say what a deity would not do, you have to define (however sketchily) a hypothetical deity, and the deity defined seems inevitably to be Gnostic, a sugar-daddy Strawgod who would never be involved in anything messy or nasty.
In order to rationally defend such a Strawgod in the face of threats such as people murdering and raping each other and generally being nasty, you have to distance it further and further from messing around in (becoming tainted with responsibility for) mundane matters until Strawgod is of no particular relevance.
Being a Theist, I look at statements that the world has been cursed, and destroyed by a flood, and - hey presto - it all suddenly starts to look reasonable again.
Globalism is basically a gradualist attempt to force Atheistic Humanism on everyone. Everyone the same. Pity that people are all different, isn't it?
the radical Islamist point of view won't follow these points
bin Laden, being a Saudi, would have recieved the bulk of his tactical learning from Western sources and would be accustomed to the ways and mannerisms of US forces.
An Aussie mate of mine opened his laptop on an American aircraft recently, and discovered his large, flat-bladed screwdriver inside the bag. It would make a dandy lethal weapon. A hostess was leaning over his seat to adjust something at the time, and advised him to hide it and say nothing.
How difficult would it be to hide a couple of pistols in the laptop's docking bays?
The reason that Israeli airliners don't get hijacked is that if a terrorist stood up in one, he'd be dead in seconds, weapons or not. You can't legislate safety, but you *can* legislate the right to self-defense, and you *can* avoid so drowning your people in a network of complex rules for every breath and every step of their lives that they're aware enough to actually use that right.
You can also remove a lot of reasons for others to hate you by not throwing your weight around internationally. That reduces terrorism without hamstringing your own people.
Finally, you need to ask why the government would declare a war when 5000 people die, but not against the tens of thousands of drunk-driver killings that happen in the mainland USA every year.
Can't remember where I heard it, but there is a story about a Physics exam...
A group of tourists is being taken around the Physics department of a major university, and one tourist is puzzled by a long document mounted in a glass case in the foyer that they pass on the way in. When the tour ends in the same foyer, he asks the guide about the document.
``That's our exam,'' he is told.
Stunned, he asks, ``What? Don't you change the questions every year? Don't people just read it and cheat?''
``Well, no...'' the guide responds, ``we have a much better system. We only change the answers.''
The only time I've ever seen it upset was when someone ran zgv at the same time as XFree86v4.1 (on a CyberBlade-based mobo video) and caused a hardware insanity then lockup while they were writing config back to/etc... ugh...
...nor did I hear an explanation of how this wound up in a 2.4.* kernel instead of 2.5.*, where right now it really belongs, even though AFAICT it's dead stable.
``Last chance to see...'' with the polar caps melting fast, I guess it's now or never...
Work has an 80GB jukebox, upping it soon
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
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· Score: 2
One of my workplaces has 80GB of HDD in their jukebox. They buy scratched/useless CDs so that they own the right to play the songs, then rip the music from good copies.
They're going to up it to 160GB soon. Ripping at least two CDs every day soaks up a lot of disk space.
There were some insightful comments in other articles from musos with the opinion that they almost and/or literally give away the albums in order to spread their name (they get SFA for the ones sold through RIAA channels, maybe 5% typical, 10% on special occasions, so from a $Oz39 CD they normally get $Oz2, or maybe $Oz0.20 a track on average), and make their actual living from concerts and merchandise. I think this process is something that the hard drive manufacturers need to look into fostering. (-:
Slashdot Mirror
Trite, but true. In order to increase the general amount of freedom, a specific freedom must go. It's like restricting one freedom of expression (say, in the form of graffiti) in order to protect another (such as people's right to create and/or view paintings that would otherwise be quickly covered in graffiti).
Agree.
Agree. And I think this is one reason for so many OSS businesses having bitten the dust recently: their business model was not mapped onto reality, but onto their expectations.
The difference is that RMS - like soft water dripping on a hard rock which eventually wears away the rock - sets out to change the circumstances to fit his expectations, and does so with complete persistence, therefore must ultimately succeed unless he dies first. Mohandas Ghandi would have been pleased to recognise at least some of his principles in action. (-:
Back in the days when the typewriter was king of the office, IBM's office products division was accused of monopolising the market, and asked to propose a solution, before one was imposed on them.
No worries, they said, we'll just double the price. And they did. And guess what? They sold more units than at half the price, because people figured that the more expensive product had to be better...
Microsoft haven't actually doubled the price of Windows here, but there proposed remedy reeks of similar or worse chutzpah, what with getting a full-price tax break on what they supply for peanuts, swamping the schools with their monopoly product, and proposing a ``penalty'' that amounts to a few weeks' interest on their cash holdings, and at the end of five years leaves the poverty-stricken schools dependent on paying licence fees in order to keep using their now-established software.
As another poster said, it's like tabacco companies handing out free cigarette in apology for luring people into using a product that kills them slowly and painfully.
...thus guaranteeing that these machines will never run Windows, and also helping to work against Intel's monopoly.
Intel does actually innovate, as well as monopolise. In this respect they're ahead of Microsoft.
Also, $1.1G is literally petty cash for Microsoft. If California suffered $3G-$9G, let's call it $3G and figure out the value per capita, then amortise that across the whole world, call that the spend, and make sure it gets spent worldwide too. (-:
Can anyone improve on the justice of this proposal? (-:
/ME would be better off searching for a known-good credit card number.
If you find it, it might lead you to many other credit card numbers - but first cancel the one that you found, and sue the company exposing it. Ask them if they have the box their computer came in. (-: And maybe post the URL to CERT as a vulnerability
There was a birth notice for her in the Sydney Morning Herald on the appropriate day in 1980, one of the doctors thanked for helping with her delivery was ``Asimov.''
Susan Calvin is a character from Asimov's ``Robots'' series who is a whiz-bang robot, uh, psychologist.
Asimov spent much more time being loud and assertive than inventing stuff like Heinlen and Clarke did, and he missed some very significant points of chemistry and physics in his non-fiction-ish works like ``The Left Hand of the Electron.'' He did, however, write a *lot* of words!
The invention that I'm waiting to see implemented is skyhooks AKA inside-out orbiting bridges, as in ``The Fountains of Paradise.''
Therefore they have the right to declare the IP Public Domain, but not the right to restrict it with the GPL?
I think you'll find that this was three complete Rex skeletons, which is quite a different matter.
Flying species like the bird, Archeopteryx, or delicate species like jellyfish don't meet the conditions for fossilisation as easily, so there are only a handful of those. Marine creatures like trilobites and turtles, on the other hand, we have running out of our ears - so in a way Terry Pratchett's Discworld model is actually right, it's turtles at least some of the way down. (-:
Unfortunately, the evidence is consistent with a lot of things, including a strong episode of vulcanism, most of what Immanuel Velikovsky's had to say, and the idea of rapid worldwide flooding which so neatly explains many other things (-: a theory so popular on bone-dry Mars, but anathema here on our own soggy globe :-).
What seems to be happening is the same thing, over and over, as when geologist Harlan Bretz fought tooth and nail for four decades before geology accepted his theory for the Spokane badlands. A theory becomes dogma (generally without much real proof) and then all new evidence is seen as conforming to the dogma until finally the explanations become so stretched as to become indefensible, then everyone hurries to been seen as having allowed for the new idea in their old prognostications.
There are a couple of big showstoppers for the meteor-strike-kills-dinosaur idea, including the observation that a lot of dinosaurs did not perish at the end of the Cretaceous, and a lot of creatures which should logically have perished as readily, didn't. Perhaps the most damning is the occasional multiple or conspicuously absent Ir layer, features which are often masked, overlooked or rationalised away during reporting. [pro multi strike] [ con vulcanism] [con flood, many references esp in the linked PDF] [con egg-stinction, but he's wrong, eg non-stealthy birds survived]
I recommend using names, rather than specific ages, or you'll see still more debate about the length of the periods involved, rather than a focus on more ``core'' ideas like seqences of events. And yes, many such have been found; there are less than 200 sites worldwide that do show Ir anomalies, and many of those either show multiple anomalies, or anomalies at depths other than the top of the Cretaceous. Do your own searching. (-:
http://www.electric-universe.de/ (warning: contains flash)
http://www.kronia.com/
...there are more, but those should be enough.
.
How many of them bailed out?
.
How many of them bailed out?
He might even get to tattoo her posterior, in the best Microsoft tradition. It'd be enough to keep her a banana buddy for life - even though she's publicly stated that she'd like to lie down with money, because she probably meant female money.
.
Your point. (-:
Very few people get drunk accidentally, even fewer drive cars accidentally.
Drink-driving is gross negligence, and when you drink, drive and kill someone it's absolutely, unquestionably your fault that they died. You took every step on the road to their death. You killed them. You trundle past policemen, knowing you're doing wrong and hoping that they'll not notice you, as did bin Laden's hijackers. It's no different in principle, only in scale.
A number of countries with a more pragmatic attitude to such things have discovered that shooting repeat-offense drink drivers out of hand is immensely profitable in terms of lives not lost. Perhaps America should do the same?
.
False at face value, but an overwhelming preponderance of the material you're describing (much less so for the 'net than the other media, but it's still there) comes from a nominally Atheistic Humanist viewpoint.
I wish to specifically labour the point with that word ``nominally,'' since the vast majority of ``Atheistic'' Humanists are actually Gnostics but don't realise it.
[Terms: Agnostic == doesn't have any particular belief, including belief in the absence of a deity; Atheist == believes that there definitely is no deity; Gnostic == believes that there is a deity but that same is a form of ``good'' spirit and won't sully itself with ``evil'' matter; Theist == beieves that there definitely is a deity]
Many professed Atheists make an argument for materialism by pointing to a feature of nature and saying, ``that's ridiculous, no {sane,sensible,rational} deity would do such a thing.''
Well, how do they know? I mean, where do they get off defining the behaviour of a postulated all-powerful supernatural being in their own finite terms?
While we're visiting that argument, vestigial organs in the human body - objects of such an argument - once numbered hundreds, now we're down to at most 6 and the future for the remaining candidates is becoming steadily less clear as our understanding of biology expands.
Returning to the point: in order to say what a deity would not do, you have to define (however sketchily) a hypothetical deity, and the deity defined seems inevitably to be Gnostic, a sugar-daddy Strawgod who would never be involved in anything messy or nasty.
In order to rationally defend such a Strawgod in the face of threats such as people murdering and raping each other and generally being nasty, you have to distance it further and further from messing around in (becoming tainted with responsibility for) mundane matters until Strawgod is of no particular relevance.
Being a Theist, I look at statements that the world has been cursed, and destroyed by a flood, and - hey presto - it all suddenly starts to look reasonable again.
Globalism is basically a gradualist attempt to force Atheistic Humanism on everyone. Everyone the same. Pity that people are all different, isn't it?
bin Laden, being a Saudi, would have recieved the bulk of his tactical learning from Western sources and would be accustomed to the ways and mannerisms of US forces.
An Aussie mate of mine opened his laptop on an American aircraft recently, and discovered his large, flat-bladed screwdriver inside the bag. It would make a dandy lethal weapon. A hostess was leaning over his seat to adjust something at the time, and advised him to hide it and say nothing.
How difficult would it be to hide a couple of pistols in the laptop's docking bays?
The reason that Israeli airliners don't get hijacked is that if a terrorist stood up in one, he'd be dead in seconds, weapons or not. You can't legislate safety, but you *can* legislate the right to self-defense, and you *can* avoid so drowning your people in a network of complex rules for every breath and every step of their lives that they're aware enough to actually use that right.
You can also remove a lot of reasons for others to hate you by not throwing your weight around internationally. That reduces terrorism without hamstringing your own people.
Finally, you need to ask why the government would declare a war when 5000 people die, but not against the tens of thousands of drunk-driver killings that happen in the mainland USA every year.
``Why be yourself, when you could be someone really worthwhile instead?'' - (no known attribution)
Yes, just swap VCC and VDD. Can't see why this hasn't been thought of before. (-:
Disclaimer for the idiots: trying this will almost certainly popcorn your entire computer.
Can't remember where I heard it, but there is a story about a Physics exam...
A group of tourists is being taken around the Physics department of a major university, and one tourist is puzzled by a long document mounted in a glass case in the foyer that they pass on the way in. When the tour ends in the same foyer, he asks the guide about the document.
``That's our exam,'' he is told.
Stunned, he asks, ``What? Don't you change the questions every year? Don't people just read it and cheat?''
``Well, no...'' the guide responds, ``we have a much better system. We only change the answers.''
The only time I've ever seen it upset was when someone ran zgv at the same time as XFree86v4.1 (on a CyberBlade-based mobo video) and caused a hardware insanity then lockup while they were writing config back to /etc... ugh...
...nor did I hear an explanation of how this wound up in a 2.4.* kernel instead of 2.5.*, where right now it really belongs, even though AFAICT it's dead stable.
``Last chance to see...'' with the polar caps melting fast, I guess it's now or never...
One of my workplaces has 80GB of HDD in their jukebox. They buy scratched/useless CDs so that they own the right to play the songs, then rip the music from good copies.
They're going to up it to 160GB soon. Ripping at least two CDs every day soaks up a lot of disk space.
There were some insightful comments in other articles from musos with the opinion that they almost and/or literally give away the albums in order to spread their name (they get SFA for the ones sold through RIAA channels, maybe 5% typical, 10% on special occasions, so from a $Oz39 CD they normally get $Oz2, or maybe $Oz0.20 a track on average), and make their actual living from concerts and merchandise. I think this process is something that the hard drive manufacturers need to look into fostering. (-:
Bananarama?
Oh, so you think my joke was in poor... taste...? Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew? (-:
On a side note, I've always wondered about the banana and anchovy pizzas favoured by UU's Librarian.