Yes, you are missing the fact that there is only one Galileo satellite in orbit right now, and this one doesn't include all the technology that will make Galileo an interesting system, namely the high-precision onboard atomic clock. In all generality you need timings from at least 4 different satellites visible from everywhere to be able to locate a point in 3D. This means about 12 at a base minimum must be in orbit for the system to be useful. The final system will have 30.
The current sole Galileo system in orbit is a test system. The final systems will be significantly different.
Actually NAVSTAR is not the only one available. The Russians also have a satellite navigation system called GLONASS. GLONASS is purely military, AFAIK, but has been in operation since the 80s.
As an illustration, I avoid using my very own application if I can help it under OS/X, because it so doesn't fit with the rest of the desktop. I wrote it with a portable toolkit (FLTK) that doesn't require X11, but still looks like one. It doesn't work well with all the rest of OS/X. I painfully got D&D working, I think I can get the menus sort-of worked out, but this is not good enough.
I know some clients use it, I never had negative feedback, but based on my own opinion they can't possibly love it. If the author doesn't like his own creation, what hope is there ?
Just about the only people on Earth who do have some time for games and enough cash to buy them are students. A large proportion of student customers are going to want to play some games, whether or not you think this is a good idea.
The iMac can boot Windows, it could potentially play all the games on the market but for the crippled video card. It could be the perfect machine for student: great for productivity, studying *and* also for fun times. For want of a $50 card they won't be buying this machine.
Too bad, Apple condemns itself to be a minority player yet again.
If I may add, I'd say that Apple hasn't understood yet that some people actually do buy desktop PCs with the same crappy Intel video chips, for sure, but that except for very few exceptions, this is completely upgradable on PCs. Not so with the iMac.
The thing is I've never seen an X11 app behave sensibly under OS/X with the rest of the applications. Printing is special, services don't work, menus are not where they need to be. Drag-and-drop ? Did you manage all that ? Just about the only thing that works by default are the 3 buttons on the window's frame.
If so this is a major undertaking, and If you really pulled all of that off in under a month, my hat's off to you, and I'd like a screenshot !
Please consider giving the OO.org people a tip or two.
I've personnally written a largish application that sort-of-works OK under OS/X, but with all the above caveats. I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the lot with a more sensible toolkit, in this case QT. It doesn't take as long the second time, apparently.
This law is terrible, not because of the iTunes/iPod furphy, but simply because it is the almost exact copy of the DMCA adapted for France.
Under this new law, DeCSS and equivalents are illegal. Simply using a reverse-engineeed DRM module to watch your legally purchased DVDs under Linux, is prohibited and incurs a fine. This clearly promotes forced sales tied to existing big businesses : if you want to watch a DVD on your PC, the only legal option is to buy a Microsoft O/S and associated third-party viewer.
Under this law, tying DRMs to user identification -- even using biometrics and usage tracking, becomes legal, raising serious privacy questions.
Worse, this laws makes a large number of people criminals overnight, for simply exercising their right to private copy for private use. It was voted with only the voices of the current Chirac's party majority (UMP) voting for it. A single UMP député voted against with the rest of the minority. This particular député has been very vocal against the bill. He recently co-wrote an article in the most important right-wing (majority) newspaper im Framce (Le Figaro), earlier this week, why he thought this bill was disastrous. Interestingly, his co-author was socialist ex-prime minister Michel Rocard, who is credited with defeating the pro-patent lobby in Europe last year, as the enlightened rapporteur.
The socialist party minority has vowed to bring the bill before the constitutional council, the last body that can declare the bill contrary to the constitution, and to repel it if they get the majority next elections, due next year. At least some politicians get it, but unfortunately not enough to make a difference today.
BTW, Apple can rest easy. The DADVSI bill, as it is called, was considerably watered down on this issue by Senate, and represents no threat whatsoever to Apple's business in France.
OK, then how are the LIGO arms suppose to extend ? It seems to me (naively) that either distances expand or contract and then there is no relative motion, or there is relative motion and rigid bodies dont contract/expand. Unless we are talking about a second order effect.
When asked if gravity waves could transmit energy, RPF in 1957 had the following argument :
Feynman's argument
Later in the Chapel Hill conference, Feynman -- who had insisted on registering under a pseudonym to express his disdain for the contemporary state of gravitation physics -- used Pirani's description to point out that a passing gravitational wave should in principle cause a bead on a stick (not oriented parallel to the direction of propagation of the wave) to slide back and forth, thus heating the bead and the stick by friction. This heating, said Feynman, showed that the wave did indeed impart energy to the bead and stick system, so it must indeed transport energy, contrary to the view expressed in 1955 by Rosen.
As I understand it, the movement of the bead is caused by the gravity wave causing local changes in spacetime metric, i.e. locally contracting and expanding. Assuming this, why aren't the stick *and* the bead both moving ? If the stick is also locally contracting/expanding, then it may remain locally motionless with respect with the bead, and hence no friction, and therefore no heat and no energy.
Is it the case that the gravity wave is generating local acceleration and not the kind of contraction/expansion one sees in both special and general relativity ? if so, why is the LIGO experiment supposed to work ? LIGO relies on contractions and expansions (at 90 degree angle ), not local changes in acceleration.
I'm not sure that having several distributions is so bad. Fedora cannot be the one true Linux distribution, its aim is to eventually improve a commercial server distribution. It's not so incompatible with comfortable end-user experience, but it does mean FC will not include mp3 playing because they feel they can't take the risk, however small. Remember that FC has all the weight of RedHat behind them. They have money, they can be sued.
On the other hand Ubuntu has the potential to be the One True Linux distribution like everyone thought Debian would be back in the day. However they are finding out right now that it is more complicated than they thought, if 6.06 is any indication.
With all due respect, you are falling into the trap of thinking that putting all the manpower resources on a single project (the OTL distro) will imply greater progress. In fact larger teams lead to more red tape, even with FOSS. Developers will argue endlessly about the proper implementation of such and such feature and will split.
It is inevitable that FOSS like so many other human endeavours leads to disagreement. The great thing about FOSS is that even when people disagree they can continue to collaborate. Everyone take their sources home and duke it out.
In other words, I'm not sure a federated effort at building the OTL would succeed any better than the huge collection of distros we have now. Remember that at the time of Apollo/Soyuz great orbital meeting, the Russians were amazed that the Americans had two large manufacturers of hand calculators : TI and HP. This was unthinkable in ideal communist terms, Both had interesting but incompatible features. Yet the competition brought out the best in both competitors.
Well of course you can get a cheaper laptop than the MB, but it's going to be heavier and bulkier than the MB, for a start, and at $500 it won't have a core duo in it, more like a celeron M. Too bad it won't run OS/X either.
Apple doesn't do ultra-cheap, if that's what you want to say, but feature for feature the MB is reasonably priced.
I run FC5 at home and Ubuntu, Debian and Mandrake at work. Read this series of reviews of the latest Ubuntu release (6.06), they are not all positive. A significant number say Drake was rushed and not on par with the previous release.
I have tried many distros out there, everyone has their favourite, and in particular Ubuntu is quite good, but there is no clear winner. Most people I read tend to base their impression of Linux on the latest distro they've tried. Usually this shows some improvement over the one they had tried earlier and (incorrectlly) conclude this is due to the distribution being "just better".
In fact the whole of Linux is progressing at a rapid pace. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have quick and frequent release schedules, a large professional and dedicated team, and as a result they are quite solid, but the same is true of many distros out there. I've come to realize that by and large innovations by one distribution quickly permeate all. See the good work of Debian with apt, that of Ubuntu with their automounter and RH's work with sponsoring Gnome and SELinux.
Ubuntu and FC have different, incompatible aims. Ubuntu is not a testing ground for RHEL, they show little interest with SELinux for instance, whereas this is of strategic importance for FC. However strangely perhaps they cover much of the same ground as far as the end-user is concerned.
Saying that one particular distro among the big ones does something "much better" than any other is misinformed. Because of the nature of FOSS, none holds any permanent advantage over the others, as long as they all continue their development efforts.
Actually Microsoft had a chance when the US government wanted to split them up. They fought tooth and nail against this, and now they are facing even bigger hurdle.
Microsoft is still making a ton of money, but can they keep it up? That the only question for all the shareholders.
I know LN has had a reasonable amount of success, but I'm wondering whether this was due to technical excellence or to Lotus PR. On paper is sounded like great software, at any rate a great idea. I hear the implementation could have been better.
Anyway, I have never had the direct pleasure of using LN, however a very close colleague had his whole database of contacts and clients in it, shared amongst the other marketing people. Using one of the first versions of LN he was unable to search in it in any reasonable amount of time. I suggested that he exported the list to plain text, and since he was an engineer and had the Unix tools installed on his PC, that he simply used grep.
I'm sure LN has gotten better since, but I'm worried for Microsoft.
4 Power management Unfortunately, this is not very reliably supported under FreeBSD. If you are lucky, some functions may work reliably; or they may not work at all.
To make things a little more complex, there are two existing standards for power management: APM and ACPI, the latter superseding the former and including more features, but also introducing more problems.
According to Cringely, the last time WHGIII wrote production software was in 1983. Things were noticeably simpler then than they are now, if only because of the size of the machines.
It doesn't matter, perhaps he is a great programmer, but that's not how he will be remembered.
If people were actually forced to pay full price for music and software, I believe we'd actually have better music and software, but not for the reasons outlined by the BSA and the RIAA.
If people were truly forced to pay $1500 for a copy of photoshop, one wouldn't see a lot of/.ers complaining that the GIMP isn't as polished or intuitive. They'd be simply grateful it existed, and perhaps more people would contribute. Similarly people might start buying cheaper independent music, actually helping new original music to be heard more.
This is so simplistic it's not funny. Women don't get into programming jobs not because they are not smart enough, but because there is a social stigma associated with the profession. You may be a programmer (I am too, so don't be offended) and not be aware, but in the society at large, programming is now by-and-large considered as a profession for people who don't know how to communicate properly with people. This doesn't come across as very attractive for the majority of women.
Where I live there are programs to get more men into primary education. The men that do end up being recruited are not at all mediocre, but most men consider they are not and cannot be patient, caring and generally a good teacher with young children.
In both cases, programming and primary education, we are talking about perceptions and society models that have little to do with reality. It is extremely useful to have good communicating skills to be a good programmer, if only to be able to write good documentation and to promote one's job. Most men are in fact really good with children, and it is good for children to have positive male models.
That is why outreach programs are needed, to dispel the "bad" images and in fact promote gender equality in professions. I have noted both in the industry and academia that working groups that have a reasonable gender equality perform better overall than groups that have striking gender imbalance. Broadly speaking, male groups tend to descend quickly into power play and female group into catfights.
> There are lots of stupid people that do lots of stupid things without realising the consequences. It's not a justification for prohibition.
This sentence is too broad to be correct. It sounds nice, but if these stupid things that stupid people do have sufficiently grave consequences for others (who are not so stupid perhaps), yes prohibition can be justified. Not only that, but broad drug prohibition is in fact in place in most Western countries precisely for this reason.
> This is why stealing is already against the law.
And the fat lot of good that it does too. Have you been burgled ? Have the burglars been caught ? Is burglary as a crime down or up in your neighbourhood ? is it better to prevent burglary in the first place or to punish the offenders ?
> Nevermind that far more people are in prison for simple drug offences than theft.
This is simply false. Many people are in prison for *drug related* reasons. Extremely few people are in prison for possession. Usually they do commit some other crimes like burglary or selling drugs near schools and get time for this. If all you do is some some pot or sniff a line from time to time, if you buy and sell drugs from/to adults without making it an essential business of your life, then you are very safe. The likelihood that you may end up in prison is very low.
It may be illegal but it's not important. We are talking about drug pushers and serious addicts here. With all the libertarian arguments in the world, letting people getting addicted is not something anyone can reasonably advocate.
> You'd better be able to show that that cost plus the cost of the drug war is less than the cost of letting people decide what to put in their own bodies, or all your financial arguments are out the window.
Another nice-sounding argument, unfortunately neither you or I can make that computation. Now the prison complex in the US is big enough to be a whole industry, complete with lobby group. A lot of people have vested interests for the war on drug to continue. Is this a good thing ? probably not, but the original financial argument is irrelevant at this point. It has already become too complex.
> This rationale could be used to outlaw everything dangerous, from McDonald's food on up.
No, personally I don't believe anyone can really get addicted to McD food, to the point of having to commit crime to support a BigMac habit. Contrarily, smoking cigarette is addictive, dangerous in the long term and annoying for those who don't smoke. Consequently it's now illegal to smoke in public. The reasons for this are pretty rational, I happen to think.
> Let's add joining the Church of Scientology to the list of things that should be illegal along with drugs.
Actually why not ? CoS is already illegal in many countries, due to their shady accounting practices rather than what they teach, which I don't care about one way or the other.
When was the last time you tried Linux, honestly ? are you still stuck with Debian 3.0 or something ?
Cut and paste works fine between KDE and Gnome. Even drag-and-drop does now.
I'll grant you that ^C^V doesn't always work, because ^C is the keyboard combo for SIGINT (interrupt process). Cutting and pasting always work from the menus.
Now under Windows, try cutting and pasting in the cmd.exe console, and tell me with a straight face that Linux is worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that you want a full 3D solution, there may not be a ridiculus solution. GPS doesn't assume you are on the surface of the Earth.
Yes, you are missing the fact that there is only one Galileo satellite in orbit right now, and this one doesn't include all the technology that will make Galileo an interesting system, namely the high-precision onboard atomic clock. In all generality you need timings from at least 4 different satellites visible from everywhere to be able to locate a point in 3D. This means about 12 at a base minimum must be in orbit for the system to be useful. The final system will have 30.
The current sole Galileo system in orbit is a test system. The final systems will be significantly different.
Actually NAVSTAR is not the only one available. The Russians also have a satellite navigation system called GLONASS. GLONASS is purely military, AFAIK, but has been in operation since the 80s.
Yes, exactly.
As an illustration, I avoid using my very own application if I can help it under OS/X, because it so doesn't fit with the rest of the desktop. I wrote it with a portable toolkit (FLTK) that doesn't require X11, but still looks like one. It doesn't work well with all the rest of OS/X. I painfully got D&D working, I think I can get the menus sort-of worked out, but this is not good enough.
I know some clients use it, I never had negative feedback, but based on my own opinion they can't possibly love it. If the author doesn't like his own creation, what hope is there ?
Idiocy? from Apple's marketing department, yes.
Just about the only people on Earth who do have some time for games and enough cash to buy them are students. A large proportion of student customers are going to want to play some games, whether or not you think this is a good idea.
The iMac can boot Windows, it could potentially play all the games on the market but for the crippled video card. It could be the perfect machine for student: great for productivity, studying *and* also for fun times. For want of a $50 card they won't be buying this machine.
Too bad, Apple condemns itself to be a minority player yet again.
If I may add, I'd say that Apple hasn't understood yet that some people actually do buy desktop PCs with the same crappy Intel video chips, for sure, but that except for very few exceptions, this is completely upgradable on PCs. Not so with the iMac.
The thing is I've never seen an X11 app behave sensibly under OS/X with the rest of the applications. Printing is special, services don't work, menus are not where they need to be. Drag-and-drop ? Did you manage all that ? Just about the only thing that works by default are the 3 buttons on the window's frame.
If so this is a major undertaking, and If you really pulled all of that off in under a month, my hat's off to you, and I'd like a screenshot !
Please consider giving the OO.org people a tip or two.
I've personnally written a largish application that sort-of-works OK under OS/X, but with all the above caveats. I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the lot with a more sensible toolkit, in this case QT. It doesn't take as long the second time, apparently.
Serious question : how can a X11 application look and feel like an OS/X app ? If this is not an X11 app, why do you need X11 installed ?
Other serious question, why not PHP-QT, which uses the native carbon bindings and doesn't require X11?
If you've gone to a lot of trouble to fake the OS/X behaviours, why not change the toolkits ?
Can we ask how big the cheque was ?
Ok, thanks, it makes much more sense now.
This law is terrible, not because of the iTunes/iPod furphy, but simply because it is the almost exact copy of the DMCA adapted for France.
Under this new law, DeCSS and equivalents are illegal. Simply using a reverse-engineeed DRM module to watch your legally purchased DVDs under Linux, is prohibited and incurs a fine. This clearly promotes forced sales tied to existing big businesses : if you want to watch a DVD on your PC, the only legal option is to buy a Microsoft O/S and associated third-party viewer.
Under this law, tying DRMs to user identification -- even using biometrics and usage tracking, becomes legal, raising serious privacy questions.
Worse, this laws makes a large number of people criminals overnight, for simply exercising their right to private copy for private use. It was voted with only the voices of the current Chirac's party majority (UMP) voting for it. A single UMP député voted against with the rest of the minority. This particular député has been very vocal against the bill. He recently co-wrote an article in the most important right-wing (majority) newspaper im Framce (Le Figaro), earlier this week, why he thought this bill was disastrous. Interestingly, his co-author was socialist ex-prime minister Michel Rocard, who is credited with defeating the pro-patent lobby in Europe last year, as the enlightened rapporteur.
The socialist party minority has vowed to bring the bill before the constitutional council, the last body that can declare the bill contrary to the constitution, and to repel it if they get the majority next elections, due next year. At least some politicians get it, but unfortunately not enough to make a difference today.
A sad day. More details and alarmist news there.
BTW, Apple can rest easy. The DADVSI bill, as it is called, was considerably watered down on this issue by Senate, and represents no threat whatsoever to Apple's business in France.
OK, then how are the LIGO arms suppose to extend ? It seems to me (naively) that either distances expand or contract and then there is no relative motion, or there is relative motion and rigid bodies dont contract/expand. Unless we are talking about a second order effect.
Hello,
When asked if gravity waves could transmit energy, RPF in 1957 had the following argument :
Feynman's argument
Later in the Chapel Hill conference, Feynman -- who had insisted on registering under a pseudonym to express his disdain for the contemporary state of gravitation physics -- used Pirani's description to point out that a passing gravitational wave should in principle cause a bead on a stick (not oriented parallel to the direction of propagation of the wave) to slide back and forth, thus heating the bead and the stick by friction. This heating, said Feynman, showed that the wave did indeed impart energy to the bead and stick system, so it must indeed transport energy, contrary to the view expressed in 1955 by Rosen.
As I understand it, the movement of the bead is caused by the gravity wave causing local changes in spacetime metric, i.e. locally contracting and expanding. Assuming this, why aren't the stick *and* the bead both moving ? If the stick is also locally contracting/expanding, then it may remain locally motionless with respect with the bead, and hence no friction, and therefore no heat and no energy.
Is it the case that the gravity wave is generating local acceleration and not the kind of contraction/expansion one sees in both special and general relativity ? if so, why is the LIGO experiment supposed to work ? LIGO relies on contractions and expansions (at 90 degree angle ), not local changes in acceleration.
Sorry if this is not clear.
I'm not sure that having several distributions is so bad. Fedora cannot be the one true Linux distribution, its aim is to eventually improve a commercial server distribution. It's not so incompatible with comfortable end-user experience, but it does mean FC will not include mp3 playing because they feel they can't take the risk, however small. Remember that FC has all the weight of RedHat behind them. They have money, they can be sued.
On the other hand Ubuntu has the potential to be the One True Linux distribution like everyone thought Debian would be back in the day. However they are finding out right now that it is more complicated than they thought, if 6.06 is any indication.
With all due respect, you are falling into the trap of thinking that putting all the manpower resources on a single project (the OTL distro) will imply greater progress. In fact larger teams lead to more red tape, even with FOSS. Developers will argue endlessly about the proper implementation of such and such feature and will split.
It is inevitable that FOSS like so many other human endeavours leads to disagreement. The great thing about FOSS is that even when people disagree they can continue to collaborate. Everyone take their sources home and duke it out.
In other words, I'm not sure a federated effort at building the OTL would succeed any better than the huge collection of distros we have now. Remember that at the time of Apollo/Soyuz great orbital meeting, the Russians were amazed that the Americans had two large manufacturers of hand calculators : TI and HP. This was unthinkable in ideal communist terms, Both had interesting but incompatible features. Yet the competition brought out the best in both competitors.
Well of course you can get a cheaper laptop than the MB, but it's going to be heavier and bulkier than the MB, for a start, and at $500 it won't have a core duo in it, more like a celeron M. Too bad it won't run OS/X either.
Apple doesn't do ultra-cheap, if that's what you want to say, but feature for feature the MB is reasonably priced.
Throwing my mod points away to respond to this :
I run FC5 at home and Ubuntu, Debian and Mandrake at work. Read this series of reviews of the latest Ubuntu release (6.06), they are not all positive. A significant number say Drake was rushed and not on par with the previous release.
I have tried many distros out there, everyone has their favourite, and in particular Ubuntu is quite good, but there is no clear winner. Most people I read tend to base their impression of Linux on the latest distro they've tried. Usually this shows some improvement over the one they had tried earlier and (incorrectlly) conclude this is due to the distribution being "just better".
In fact the whole of Linux is progressing at a rapid pace. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have quick and frequent release schedules, a large professional and dedicated team, and as a result they are quite solid, but the same is true of many distros out there. I've come to realize that by and large innovations by one distribution quickly permeate all. See the good work of Debian with apt, that of Ubuntu with their automounter and RH's work with sponsoring Gnome and SELinux.
Ubuntu and FC have different, incompatible aims. Ubuntu is not a testing ground for RHEL, they show little interest with SELinux for instance, whereas this is of strategic importance for FC. However strangely perhaps they cover much of the same ground as far as the end-user is concerned.
Saying that one particular distro among the big ones does something "much better" than any other is misinformed. Because of the nature of FOSS, none holds any permanent advantage over the others, as long as they all continue their development efforts.
Actually Microsoft had a chance when the US government wanted to split them up. They fought tooth and nail against this, and now they are facing even bigger hurdle.
Microsoft is still making a ton of money, but can they keep it up? That the only question for all the shareholders.
You can say what you want about the huge series of blunders that lead to the Titanic's disaster, but at least Captain Smith went down with his ship.
Come on, Mr. Bill, fix Microsoft if you can!
I know LN has had a reasonable amount of success, but I'm wondering whether this was due to technical excellence or to Lotus PR. On paper is sounded like great software, at any rate a great idea. I hear the implementation could have been better.
Anyway, I have never had the direct pleasure of using LN, however a very close colleague had his whole database of contacts and clients in it, shared amongst the other marketing people. Using one of the first versions of LN he was unable to search in it in any reasonable amount of time. I suggested that he exported the list to plain text, and since he was an engineer and had the Unix tools installed on his PC, that he simply used grep.
I'm sure LN has gotten better since, but I'm worried for Microsoft.
Hello, I don't want to start a flamewar, I think FreeBSD is splendid, but for example it's not well supported on laptops :
from the FreeBSD documentation
4 Power management
Unfortunately, this is not very reliably supported under FreeBSD. If you are lucky, some functions may work reliably; or they may not work at all.
To make things a little more complex, there are two existing standards for power management: APM and ACPI, the latter superseding the former and including more features, but also introducing more problems.
Moreover, urine is normally sterile.
According to Cringely, the last time WHGIII wrote production software was in 1983. Things were noticeably simpler then than they are now, if only because of the size of the machines.
It doesn't matter, perhaps he is a great programmer, but that's not how he will be remembered.
If people were actually forced to pay full price for music and software, I believe we'd actually have better music and software, but not for the reasons outlined by the BSA and the RIAA.
/.ers complaining that the GIMP isn't as polished or intuitive. They'd be simply grateful it existed, and perhaps more people would contribute. Similarly people might start buying cheaper independent music, actually helping new original music to be heard more.
If people were truly forced to pay $1500 for a copy of photoshop, one wouldn't see a lot of
This is so simplistic it's not funny. Women don't get into programming jobs not because they are not smart enough, but because there is a social stigma associated with the profession. You may be a programmer (I am too, so don't be offended) and not be aware, but in the society at large, programming is now by-and-large considered as a profession for people who don't know how to communicate properly with people. This doesn't come across as very attractive for the majority of women.
Where I live there are programs to get more men into primary education. The men that do end up being recruited are not at all mediocre, but most men consider they are not and cannot be patient, caring and generally a good teacher with young children.
In both cases, programming and primary education, we are talking about perceptions and society models that have little to do with reality. It is extremely useful to have good communicating skills to be a good programmer, if only to be able to write good documentation and to promote one's job. Most men are in fact really good with children, and it is good for children to have positive male models.
That is why outreach programs are needed, to dispel the "bad" images and in fact promote gender equality in professions. I have noted both in the industry and academia that working groups that have a reasonable gender equality perform better overall than groups that have striking gender imbalance. Broadly speaking, male groups tend to descend quickly into power play and female group into catfights.
responding
> There are lots of stupid people that do lots of stupid things without realising the consequences. It's not a justification for prohibition.
This sentence is too broad to be correct. It sounds nice, but if these stupid things that stupid people do have sufficiently grave consequences for others (who are not so stupid perhaps), yes prohibition can be justified. Not only that, but broad drug prohibition is in fact in place in most Western countries precisely for this reason.
> This is why stealing is already against the law.
And the fat lot of good that it does too. Have you been burgled ? Have the burglars been caught ? Is burglary as a crime down or up in your neighbourhood ? is it better to prevent burglary in the first place or to punish the offenders ?
> Nevermind that far more people are in prison for simple drug offences than theft.
This is simply false. Many people are in prison for *drug related* reasons. Extremely few people are in prison for possession. Usually they do commit some other crimes like burglary or selling drugs near schools and get time for this. If all you do is some some pot or sniff a line from time to time, if you buy and sell drugs from/to adults without making it an essential business of your life, then you are very safe. The likelihood that you may end up in prison is very low.
It may be illegal but it's not important. We are talking about drug pushers and serious addicts here. With all the libertarian arguments in the world, letting people getting addicted is not something anyone can reasonably advocate.
> You'd better be able to show that that cost plus the cost of the drug war is less than the cost of letting people decide what to put in their own bodies, or all your financial arguments are out the window.
Another nice-sounding argument, unfortunately neither you or I can make that computation. Now the prison complex in the US is big enough to be a whole industry, complete with lobby group. A lot of people have vested interests for the war on drug to continue. Is this a good thing ? probably not, but the original financial argument is irrelevant at this point. It has already become too complex.
> This rationale could be used to outlaw everything dangerous, from McDonald's food on up.
No, personally I don't believe anyone can really get addicted to McD food, to the point of having to commit crime to support a BigMac habit. Contrarily, smoking cigarette is addictive, dangerous in the long term and annoying for those who don't smoke. Consequently it's now illegal to smoke in public. The reasons for this are pretty rational, I happen to think.
> Let's add joining the Church of Scientology to the list of things that should be illegal along with drugs.
Actually why not ? CoS is already illegal in many countries, due to their shady accounting practices rather than what they teach, which I don't care about one way or the other.
Hello,
When was the last time you tried Linux, honestly ? are you still stuck with Debian 3.0 or something ?
Cut and paste works fine between KDE and Gnome. Even drag-and-drop does now.
I'll grant you that ^C^V doesn't always work, because ^C is the keyboard combo for SIGINT (interrupt process). Cutting and pasting always work from the menus.
Now under Windows, try cutting and pasting in the cmd.exe console, and tell me with a straight face that Linux is worse.