Wow! Thank Gawd for that! I mean, I can finally sleep at night again knowing we won't be roasted by a supernova. Truly that loomed the largest of all for me, right after the thought that my house sat on top of a supervolcano. How could I survive that? I'm not Pierce Brosnan after all.
1. It isn't theft, no matter how many times you say it. 2. It's been known for centuries that if you just let the poor suffer without some sort of remediation you create a very angry and potentially dangerous underclass. 3. We're all in this together. You didn't make your money all on your own. There's a wider society out there that creates the environment in which it is made possible for you to accrue wealth, so pay your fucking taxes and quit calling your fucking obligations to the wider society "theft" you greedy piece of garbage.
Nothing in their arguments lays out what kinds of taxes should or should not be levied. You surely must now how appallingly shallow your argument is. Besides, the Constitution was amended to permit the levying of an income tax.
Jesus you Libertarians go to astonishing lengths to justify what amounts to near sociopathic selfishness. No government since civilization was invented has been able to survive without an at least somewhat predictable revenue stream, and that means an infrastructure to estimate and collect taxes.
Nothing the Founding Fathers said or wrote backed the notion that any citizen could voluntarily pay taxes or not. The debate was never whether to tax or not, but rather who has the right to create and impose taxes.
Taxes are your obligation. A society would collapse quickly without them, and it is an absurdist fantasy to imagine that any society could long stand with a purely voluntary system.
The mere fact that you can accumulate any kind of wealth is because society has created through various means an environment in which it is possible, at least without the dedication of a substantial portion of that wealth to protecting it.
You are in no way solely responsible for what you earn. What is afforded to you is the right to choose those who will tax you.
Don't you get it. Being a Tea Party candidate means you're for taking government benefits away from all the other constituencies, not from your own. Hence such bizarre slogans as "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!"
Not to mention he was a goddamned thief. The Religion of Edison is a ludicrous thing, and was largely built by another very unsavory figure; Henry Ford.
Amen! A good government is not a government that just slavishly follows an ideology, but rather a government that remains pragmatic, and is populated by people who realize there are shades of gray to be found, and that no one has some sort of automatic and permanent patent on the truth.
Or, as Isaac Asimov said; Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
That's my axiom. A lot of what you think to be the capital-T truth is just simply prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. I work my ass off never to simply believe something because it "makes sense". Always be ready to modify, and yes, sometimes, even drop a position. I remember for many years I was staunchly anti-homosexual. I even wrote and had printed a letter in a big city newspaper railing against gay rights; a letter written in the foolishness and delusion of youth and a letter I truly regret now. I realized at some point that it doesn't matter at all what I think of homosexuals; they're people, they have a right to pursue their life as they see fit, they're not hurting me, and any objection I have had to them is nothing more than the untested assumptions that came out of my youth being raised in a very religious home.
It extends even to economics. This idea that a purely centrally controlled command economy is the way to prosperity is just as absurd as the idea that castrating a government's ability to regulate commerce is equally the road to happiness. I don't even think finding a middle path and sticking to it is a good idea. A government has to be able to modify its strategy and policy, and thus has to have the power to do so. That power cannot be unlimited, but it cannot be rendered so insignificant that ultimately the government cannot act at all.
The single biggest problem I have with ideological purists is a total inability to modify position. It's one thing to define oneself as, say, a fiscal conservative, but quite another to say "I think the Federal Government should be cut to pre-Civil War levels!" I think ideological purism shows an intellectual rigidity and an emotional immaturity, and neither of these are particularly desirable character traits.
The Boston Tea Party happened not because of the taxing of tea per se (though I'm sure some were pissed at that), but because they didn't believe that the British government had the right to levy a tax without consulting them and going to their representatives. It was not fundamentally a battle about taxes, but about political rights.
Since no Tea Party member is without a Congressman or a Senator, they cannot make that complaint at all.
I takes it as I sees it. Whatever the Tea Party's origins, and I don't buy for a second it was as pure as the driven snow, but conceding your point, what it has indeed become is a home for all the birthers, Dominionists and other unsavory sorts that have sort of collected at the bottom of the GOP barrel. Yes, there are some valid points, but they are so eclipsed by a lot of nonsense that they get drowned out. But the Tea Party purists shouldn't feel bad. That's what has happened to previous populist movements. Look at the Occupy Movement, which seems to have started with guys pissed that they were going vastly into debt to pay for educations or losing their houses because they couldn't pay their mortgages, while big banks got billions of dollars in bailouts. But before too long it had accrued a sufficient number of lunatics that the initially understandable and even sensible message was drowned out.
This is what happens to these sorts of movements. They either become large and rudderless and come to stand for everything (and hence, nothing), or they become focused under some sort of leadership and either get subsumed back into the political movement they splintered from, or they create a new political movement. Now obviously the GOP was for several years stark raving terrified that the Tea Party would indeed take a walk, and leave the GOP a damaged rump like what happened in 1992. So they've taken the alternative road and have embraced, or at least claimed they embraced, all those things the Tea Party seems to stand for. Of course, it's all bullshit, and the GOP will work very hard after Obama's victory in November, to suffocate the movement and put the crazies back at the bottom of the barrel, because no matter what else the Tea Party is, it has proven an unwieldy, chaotic group.
This is the absolute worst aspect of the American Dream, the great lie that somehow you alone are responsible for what you become. There is this huge society around you that as responsible as anything you may want, but it won't survive if everybody argues themselves into a sort of self-righteous sociopathy.
Engineers can buy into all sorts of sheer bullshit. Look up the Salem Hypothesis. Being an engineer does not mean one has some special ability to evaluate studies or facts, though some engineers seem to believe they do.
As to this guy, he sounds like a bit of a nut. Just what the Tea Party seems to attract. Being an engineer doesn't mean one is sane either.
It is very much a lose situation, because if Oracle doesn't win, it means the JVM has a direct competitor that people can recompile their Java apps on, and with Dalvik now on every bloody Android device out there, it means there is a market to build from. In real terms, it means Oracle loses control of Java once and for all.
There's enough case law out there against copyrighting APIs, and the judge has shown himself pretty savvy on technical matters, so I assume he's no legal slouch, so I don't think Oracle has much of anything. And since Dalvik is a different virtual machine, there's no real way for Android to simply be moved over to Java.
Mobile Java is not going to be a growth market. Sure, it will still persist for several years, but as even low end phones begin to gain, processor power and memory, there will be no need for J2ME, as these phones will be able to use the full blown stack anyways. Of course, what's likely to happen is that it will be Dalvik, rather than Java, because Oracle is not only extraordinarily greedy, but also has shown itself just as inept at handling Sun's products as Sun was. This all started because Sun was stupid and shortsighted. If they could have cut a deal with Google, even as we speak, Java would be the major smart device platform.
The larger point on that score is that even if one concedes a copyright violation because the copyright was assigned to Sun, the damages are beyond minimal. It saved at the very best five minutes of time, and I think unless you're talking about a very incompetent programmer.
What's even worse is that the judge warned Oracle's lawyers a few days ago that they were on a perilous course over all of this. Oracle has to have known for some time that this was going to end in humiliation. I just can't figure out why Ellison doesn't just instruct Oracle's lawyers to ask for some moronically low settlement just to prevent the inevitable punishment. There's a point at which you have to look at the top guy's motives and ask "Does this really have anything to do with the company's interests any more?"
Identical range check functions, no different algorithmically than range check functions doubtless that go back to the earliest days of computing, and identical to many range check functions to be found throughout programs written in the C family for decades, cannot possibly be called IP. It's ludicrous.
I recall implementing a range check in my Pascal class in high school. I mean, we're talking bare bones, first year programming here. The idea that somehow you could claim any kind of copyright over such a function is so ludicrous that I almost pity the lawyer, who must realize just how wildly idiotic the claim is. I guess his compensation is that it is his inept client actually making the claim, but still, this is a very basic concept that goes right back to sanity checks on input, and I'd have a hard time holding my head up after having made that kind of an argument for a client.
So what you're saying is that he probably feels pretty ashamed making the outrageously retarded argument he's making, or possibly that he was hit by a brick and is now actually retarded.
Oh for fuck's sakes. It's a range check function. Jesus, you'd think it contained the cure for cancer the way Oracle goes on. Even if there are damages, they are going to be absurdly small, so small that any victory at this point for Oracle is very much Pyrrhic. Google has won the important war.
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Fuck pal, thanks a lot. Back to my endless insomnia.
Wow! Thank Gawd for that! I mean, I can finally sleep at night again knowing we won't be roasted by a supernova. Truly that loomed the largest of all for me, right after the thought that my house sat on top of a supervolcano. How could I survive that? I'm not Pierce Brosnan after all.
1. It isn't theft, no matter how many times you say it.
2. It's been known for centuries that if you just let the poor suffer without some sort of remediation you create a very angry and potentially dangerous underclass.
3. We're all in this together. You didn't make your money all on your own. There's a wider society out there that creates the environment in which it is made possible for you to accrue wealth, so pay your fucking taxes and quit calling your fucking obligations to the wider society "theft" you greedy piece of garbage.
Nothing in their arguments lays out what kinds of taxes should or should not be levied. You surely must now how appallingly shallow your argument is. Besides, the Constitution was amended to permit the levying of an income tax.
Pay your goddamned taxes.
Jesus you Libertarians go to astonishing lengths to justify what amounts to near sociopathic selfishness. No government since civilization was invented has been able to survive without an at least somewhat predictable revenue stream, and that means an infrastructure to estimate and collect taxes.
Nothing the Founding Fathers said or wrote backed the notion that any citizen could voluntarily pay taxes or not. The debate was never whether to tax or not, but rather who has the right to create and impose taxes.
Taxes are your obligation. A society would collapse quickly without them, and it is an absurdist fantasy to imagine that any society could long stand with a purely voluntary system.
The mere fact that you can accumulate any kind of wealth is because society has created through various means an environment in which it is possible, at least without the dedication of a substantial portion of that wealth to protecting it.
You are in no way solely responsible for what you earn. What is afforded to you is the right to choose those who will tax you.
Don't you get it. Being a Tea Party candidate means you're for taking government benefits away from all the other constituencies, not from your own. Hence such bizarre slogans as "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!"
Not to mention he was a goddamned thief. The Religion of Edison is a ludicrous thing, and was largely built by another very unsavory figure; Henry Ford.
Amen! A good government is not a government that just slavishly follows an ideology, but rather a government that remains pragmatic, and is populated by people who realize there are shades of gray to be found, and that no one has some sort of automatic and permanent patent on the truth.
Or, as Isaac Asimov said; Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
That's my axiom. A lot of what you think to be the capital-T truth is just simply prejudices and unquestioned assumptions. I work my ass off never to simply believe something because it "makes sense". Always be ready to modify, and yes, sometimes, even drop a position. I remember for many years I was staunchly anti-homosexual. I even wrote and had printed a letter in a big city newspaper railing against gay rights; a letter written in the foolishness and delusion of youth and a letter I truly regret now. I realized at some point that it doesn't matter at all what I think of homosexuals; they're people, they have a right to pursue their life as they see fit, they're not hurting me, and any objection I have had to them is nothing more than the untested assumptions that came out of my youth being raised in a very religious home.
It extends even to economics. This idea that a purely centrally controlled command economy is the way to prosperity is just as absurd as the idea that castrating a government's ability to regulate commerce is equally the road to happiness. I don't even think finding a middle path and sticking to it is a good idea. A government has to be able to modify its strategy and policy, and thus has to have the power to do so. That power cannot be unlimited, but it cannot be rendered so insignificant that ultimately the government cannot act at all.
The single biggest problem I have with ideological purists is a total inability to modify position. It's one thing to define oneself as, say, a fiscal conservative, but quite another to say "I think the Federal Government should be cut to pre-Civil War levels!" I think ideological purism shows an intellectual rigidity and an emotional immaturity, and neither of these are particularly desirable character traits.
The Boston Tea Party happened not because of the taxing of tea per se (though I'm sure some were pissed at that), but because they didn't believe that the British government had the right to levy a tax without consulting them and going to their representatives. It was not fundamentally a battle about taxes, but about political rights.
Since no Tea Party member is without a Congressman or a Senator, they cannot make that complaint at all.
I takes it as I sees it. Whatever the Tea Party's origins, and I don't buy for a second it was as pure as the driven snow, but conceding your point, what it has indeed become is a home for all the birthers, Dominionists and other unsavory sorts that have sort of collected at the bottom of the GOP barrel. Yes, there are some valid points, but they are so eclipsed by a lot of nonsense that they get drowned out. But the Tea Party purists shouldn't feel bad. That's what has happened to previous populist movements. Look at the Occupy Movement, which seems to have started with guys pissed that they were going vastly into debt to pay for educations or losing their houses because they couldn't pay their mortgages, while big banks got billions of dollars in bailouts. But before too long it had accrued a sufficient number of lunatics that the initially understandable and even sensible message was drowned out.
This is what happens to these sorts of movements. They either become large and rudderless and come to stand for everything (and hence, nothing), or they become focused under some sort of leadership and either get subsumed back into the political movement they splintered from, or they create a new political movement. Now obviously the GOP was for several years stark raving terrified that the Tea Party would indeed take a walk, and leave the GOP a damaged rump like what happened in 1992. So they've taken the alternative road and have embraced, or at least claimed they embraced, all those things the Tea Party seems to stand for. Of course, it's all bullshit, and the GOP will work very hard after Obama's victory in November, to suffocate the movement and put the crazies back at the bottom of the barrel, because no matter what else the Tea Party is, it has proven an unwieldy, chaotic group.
This is the absolute worst aspect of the American Dream, the great lie that somehow you alone are responsible for what you become. There is this huge society around you that as responsible as anything you may want, but it won't survive if everybody argues themselves into a sort of self-righteous sociopathy.
Engineers can buy into all sorts of sheer bullshit. Look up the Salem Hypothesis. Being an engineer does not mean one has some special ability to evaluate studies or facts, though some engineers seem to believe they do.
As to this guy, he sounds like a bit of a nut. Just what the Tea Party seems to attract. Being an engineer doesn't mean one is sane either.
Don't be daft. He wakes up in a whore house where he discovers he's actually a "working girl" who has a fondness for Romulan Ale.
It is very much a lose situation, because if Oracle doesn't win, it means the JVM has a direct competitor that people can recompile their Java apps on, and with Dalvik now on every bloody Android device out there, it means there is a market to build from. In real terms, it means Oracle loses control of Java once and for all.
There's enough case law out there against copyrighting APIs, and the judge has shown himself pretty savvy on technical matters, so I assume he's no legal slouch, so I don't think Oracle has much of anything. And since Dalvik is a different virtual machine, there's no real way for Android to simply be moved over to Java.
Mobile Java is not going to be a growth market. Sure, it will still persist for several years, but as even low end phones begin to gain, processor power and memory, there will be no need for J2ME, as these phones will be able to use the full blown stack anyways. Of course, what's likely to happen is that it will be Dalvik, rather than Java, because Oracle is not only extraordinarily greedy, but also has shown itself just as inept at handling Sun's products as Sun was. This all started because Sun was stupid and shortsighted. If they could have cut a deal with Google, even as we speak, Java would be the major smart device platform.
The larger point on that score is that even if one concedes a copyright violation because the copyright was assigned to Sun, the damages are beyond minimal. It saved at the very best five minutes of time, and I think unless you're talking about a very incompetent programmer.
What's even worse is that the judge warned Oracle's lawyers a few days ago that they were on a perilous course over all of this. Oracle has to have known for some time that this was going to end in humiliation. I just can't figure out why Ellison doesn't just instruct Oracle's lawyers to ask for some moronically low settlement just to prevent the inevitable punishment. There's a point at which you have to look at the top guy's motives and ask "Does this really have anything to do with the company's interests any more?"
Identical range check functions, no different algorithmically than range check functions doubtless that go back to the earliest days of computing, and identical to many range check functions to be found throughout programs written in the C family for decades, cannot possibly be called IP. It's ludicrous.
I recall implementing a range check in my Pascal class in high school. I mean, we're talking bare bones, first year programming here. The idea that somehow you could claim any kind of copyright over such a function is so ludicrous that I almost pity the lawyer, who must realize just how wildly idiotic the claim is. I guess his compensation is that it is his inept client actually making the claim, but still, this is a very basic concept that goes right back to sanity checks on input, and I'd have a hard time holding my head up after having made that kind of an argument for a client.
Indeed, because the only other accusation is that Google is reading the old man's mind.
So what you're saying is that he probably feels pretty ashamed making the outrageously retarded argument he's making, or possibly that he was hit by a brick and is now actually retarded.
I was thinking a bottle or a coupon drive, myself.
Oh for fuck's sakes. It's a range check function. Jesus, you'd think it contained the cure for cancer the way Oracle goes on. Even if there are damages, they are going to be absurdly small, so small that any victory at this point for Oracle is very much Pyrrhic. Google has won the important war.