>>>...copyright holders drink harder and do more cocaine...
And it follows that if P2P were stamped out and revenues to copyright holders increased as a result, we'd see more copyright holders dying from overdoses and committing more serious crimes because of their increased access to dangerous chemicals.
>>> If you are working 10-12 hours a day you are spending too much time at work. Scale back your lifestyle a bit.
So you're saying the guy should do an 'Atlas Shrugged' and scale back his effort because society is taking too much from him that it doesn't deserve. Are we that far gone?
I'm not sure what's still available, but when I replaced my main home PC earlier this year I bought a Sony VIAO that came with a 3.2 GHZ P4, 180 GB SATA Drive, 1 GB RAM, DVD burner, and Video input/output card with tuner. I came with Windows XP Media Center 2005 already installed and configured to do PVR.
It works great and I use if for everything. I'm amazed at how many things it can do at once, like burn DVD's, record TV, web surf, etc.
As I recall, it cost about $1400. The nice thing is it's also very quiet and there was hardly any setup to get it working.
>>> Would it be more prudent to build this in a place far away from a coastline??
After reading "Red Mars" I don't think it will matter where you build it. If it comes down it will leave a path of destruction all the way around the Earth's circumference.
Besides, the termination point needs to be easily accessible or you negate much of the advantage of having the elevator.
>>> the real Republicans-very smart people like Newt Gingrich- were kicked out of the party because he insulted this new wave of Tom Delay followers with his intellegence
I thought Newt was shot down by liberals rather than NeoCons. He was prosecuted for having dared to finance the teaching of American History with tax deductible contributions as I recall.
Am I wrong?
>>> That totally went over your head. What the parent meant is that the Religious Right and the Neocons have eaten the Republican Party alive
I get your drift, the 'Republicans' of old are going away in spirit even as the party rolls on to victory. I don't really make much of it though because neither the Republican nor the Democratic party has an actual set of defining principles.
At any period in time they are an evolving mass of competing agendas, and to some extent they must be, in order to appeal to a wide enough audience to win nationwide elections.
So the previous blue-blood 'Republicans' could just as easily have said the party had gone away when the 'lower spending and smaller government' types took over the party the last time it went through a major shift.
>>> You are a victim of lies. Right after the WW2 some forces in the US started to create and spread anti-Soviet myths.
It turned out, after the Soviet Union and East Germany fell from within and their records were made public, that those Communist governments had in fact been much worse than had been suspected in the West. Tremendous campaigns of domestic terrorism and government bungling that cost the lives of many, many innocent people had been completely hushed up.
The effort to recover data from shredded documents and identify murderous STASI agents and their informants among the German population still goes on today.
The Communist leaders had little to fear from lying, while they could control the dissemination of information to their own people. And they had much to fear from telling the truth because they were in fact as inept at governance as they were adept at brutality.
>>> The American government routinely lies to its citizens, but they still believe it by default...
I don't know where you've been living, but in the U.S.A. there is a free market in information from many, many sources and it is next to impossible to keep anything secret for very long. The average person does NOT implicitly trust the government, but when the government says something and there has been no credible rebuttal for a while, we start to think it's probably true.
Contrast this to the Soviet Union or East Germany where everybody knew the government was probably lying about everything, but it was too dangerous to question them.
>>>if we just "got rid" of all the Republican (sic)
>>the Neoconservative and religious factions are already doing a great job of that
They are? It seems to me that they hold the White House, The Senate, and the House of Representatives and have not lost an important election in years.
It also seems to me that they are poised to set the leadership of the Supreme Court for decades to come.
They are of course being pounded in the press every day, but all their previous victories were won under the same circumstances. It may be that vast numbers of people approve of what they are doing, but don't make so much noise about it.
>>> can ugly truths about their race situation be told? No, they can't and the Americans are the first to admit that
Ummm, how do you know about it then? I seem to hear about it every day as well. What they mean is certain people can't speak certain truths and keep their jobs because of 'political correctness'.
With the explosion of news and opinion outlets available in free societies today, that is not enough to keep information out of the public's hands.
Policital Correctness will probable die out along with Communism eventually.
>>> they [citizens of Communist countries] see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
That's why The Soviet Union and East Germany fell from within? My suspicions that you are joking grow stronger.
People used to steal my bottled water out of the refrigerator at work. I made up some Dihydrogen-Monoxide labels to put on the bottles (with skull and crossbones prominently featured) and the problem was solved.
You have demonstrated admirably why Communism is dying, and should die.
Communists value their own dogma so highly that they sacrifice all to it; all honesty, all honor, and even the very lives of those who try to get away.
It is contact with open societies, where even the ugly truths can be told, that drives the downfall of Communist regimes. By comparison, the Communist leaders are then seen by their own people for the liars and monsters they are.
Ultimately, the Berlin Wall failed to prevent the people of East Germany from discovering this. Eventually the same fate will befall the remaining Communist regimes.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." - Winston Churchill
>>> A September 2004 poll found that...12% of East Germans wished that East Germans were again cut off from West Germany by the Berlin Wall...
So is that your measure of how many 'happy Communists' it takes for a nation to justifiable remain under a Communist dictatorship, in spite of what the other 88% may think?
It's interesting that we can now take polls of these Germans to find out what they think about Communism. Before the wall came down it was too dangerous to disagree with any official position of the government and such a poll would have been meaningless. Only the most extreme measure of 'voting with the feet' could be used to voice one's displeasure then, and it cost approximately 1000 East Germans their lives in the attempt.
>>> Of course, some people tried to get across the wall and were shot...
>>>...it's absolutely normal that the border guards shoot people who are trying to cross the border illegally. Yes, it's not always necessary, but you can hardly blame anyone for upholding the law.
You miss one tiny, but important point here. In non-Communist countries the border guards are there to prevent people and contraband from entering the country illegally, and they very rarely shoot them even then. The East German border guards were not shooting people trying to enter East Germany illegally, they killed approximately 1000 people for trying to leave the country.
After Soviet control was removed from Germany, former East German leaders were tried and convicted for instituting and carrying out this policy, precisely because it did not mirror the activities of a free country but those of a prison camp.
I notice you didn't include East Germany in your list of places full of happy Communists. Is that because it's hard to explain why it required a deadly barrier to keep them there if they were so happy?
"The majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." - Larry Flynt
If you (parent author) like sci-fi you should read the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
In this futuristic tale a perfect, working communism (although the author never calls it that) is develped on a Mars colony and then spreads back to Earth.
The books were a great read, but I think the masses of human beings that can actually thrive and remain happy under communism only exist in Science Fiction.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." - Bill Cosby
The Pre-Movie commercials actually stopped me from going to movies for a while. I can't tolerate them. Everytime I saw the those crap commercials I would vow never to go to that theater again. Then my daughter mentioned to me that I should just show up ten or fifteen minutes late, like she does.
I didn't think it would work because there wouldn't be any decent seats left. But, I was surprised to find that it does work, there are usually even some good seats left, and I enjoy the movie much more. I still only go a few times a year when there's something I really want to see, but at least this tactic makes it possible for me to go.
Maybe there are good seats left because the commercials have made a lot of other people stop going too.
"We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins."
- Arthur C. Clarke
Not only that, they had the government give them practically free money through S&L's, govt. programs, etc. so they could buy up all the good real estate, creating ever more debt for future generations to service.
Now they own everything and somebody else has to pay for the S&L meltdown and all the social perks they voted themselves.
Back in the 80's John Naisbitt predicted that pure computer jobs would begin to lose their luster as IT skills filtered out to more and more people and the real money and prestige would be found in jobs that combined computer skills with other specialized knowledge.
He also predicted, in the same book, the reunification of Germany.
"Every time I learn something new it pushes some old stuff out of my brain." - Homer Simpson
>>>The reality is that ( if you are found guilty ) when the sentencing phase arrives, there may as well be a computer behind the bench, instead of a human judge. In other words, your only chance is if the jury declares you "not guilty".
>>>In case some of you cannot figure this out, this places the federal courts in the US a lot closer to fascism than any courts in western Europe.
Didn't history's great fascist regimes have ways of making sure an accused was found guilty?
In the U.S. that is up to the jury and the jury always has the power to find a defendant not-guilty, no matter what the facts.
If the punishment phase is consistent, the jury ends up taking this into account as well. For instance I've seen a jury refuse to bring in a guilty verdict on a particular charge because the likely penalty seemed too severe for the circumstances.
With the U.S. Jury system in place there is not so much need for Judicial leeway.
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
- Mark Twain
Slashdot Mirror
You had me going there for a moment until I spotted the giveway clue that this was a hoax.
>>> and date a girl who...
And you expect us to believe you do that and read Slashdot too?
... with a gasoline powered generator!
>>> ...copyright holders drink harder and do more cocaine...
And it follows that if P2P were stamped out and revenues to copyright holders increased as a result, we'd see more copyright holders dying from overdoses and committing more serious crimes because of their increased access to dangerous chemicals.
'Save an Artist, burn an MP3!'
>>> If you are working 10-12 hours a day you are spending too much time at work. Scale back your lifestyle a bit.
So you're saying the guy should do an 'Atlas Shrugged' and scale back his effort because society is taking too much from him that it doesn't deserve. Are we that far gone?
It could be evidence that she is cute?
I'm not sure what's still available, but when I replaced my main home PC earlier this year I bought a Sony VIAO that came with a 3.2 GHZ P4, 180 GB SATA Drive, 1 GB RAM, DVD burner, and Video input/output card with tuner. I came with Windows XP Media Center 2005 already installed and configured to do PVR.
It works great and I use if for everything. I'm amazed at how many things it can do at once, like burn DVD's, record TV, web surf, etc.
As I recall, it cost about $1400. The nice thing is it's also very quiet and there was hardly any setup to get it working.
>>> lest they be accused of Americanization.
Shouldn't that be 'Americanisation', since only we Americans use the evil 'z', and we never accuse anyone of it?
>>> Would it be more prudent to build this in a place far away from a coastline??
After reading "Red Mars" I don't think it will matter where you build it. If it comes down it will leave a path of destruction all the way around the Earth's circumference.
Besides, the termination point needs to be easily accessible or you negate much of the advantage of having the elevator.
>>> Fuuny it works great for me at home. I get almost no calls.
Me too.
Now I only get to torture and annoy the people who call me because of 'existing business relationships'.
>>> the real Republicans-very smart people like Newt Gingrich- were kicked out of the party because he insulted this new wave of Tom Delay followers with his intellegence
I thought Newt was shot down by liberals rather than NeoCons. He was prosecuted for having dared to finance the teaching of American History with tax deductible contributions as I recall.
Am I wrong?
>>> That totally went over your head. What the parent meant is that the Religious Right and the Neocons have eaten the Republican Party alive
I get your drift, the 'Republicans' of old are going away in spirit even as the party rolls on to victory. I don't really make much of it though because neither the Republican nor the Democratic party has an actual set of defining principles.
At any period in time they are an evolving mass of competing agendas, and to some extent they must be, in order to appeal to a wide enough audience to win nationwide elections.
So the previous blue-blood 'Republicans' could just as easily have said the party had gone away when the 'lower spending and smaller government' types took over the party the last time it went through a major shift.
>>> You are a victim of lies. Right after the WW2 some forces in the US started to create and spread anti-Soviet myths.
It turned out, after the Soviet Union and East Germany fell from within and their records were made public, that those Communist governments had in fact been much worse than had been suspected in the West. Tremendous campaigns of domestic terrorism and government bungling that cost the lives of many, many innocent people had been completely hushed up.
The effort to recover data from shredded documents and identify murderous STASI agents and their informants among the German population still goes on today.
The Communist leaders had little to fear from lying, while they could control the dissemination of information to their own people. And they had much to fear from telling the truth because they were in fact as inept at governance as they were adept at brutality.
>>> The American government routinely lies to its citizens, but they still believe it by default...
I don't know where you've been living, but in the U.S.A. there is a free market in information from many, many sources and it is next to impossible to keep anything secret for very long. The average person does NOT implicitly trust the government, but when the government says something and there has been no credible rebuttal for a while, we start to think it's probably true.
Contrast this to the Soviet Union or East Germany where everybody knew the government was probably lying about everything, but it was too dangerous to question them.
>>>if we just "got rid" of all the Republican (sic)
>>the Neoconservative and religious factions are already doing a great job of that
They are? It seems to me that they hold the White House, The Senate, and the House of Representatives and have not lost an important election in years.
It also seems to me that they are poised to set the leadership of the Supreme Court for decades to come.
They are of course being pounded in the press every day, but all their previous victories were won under the same circumstances. It may be that vast numbers of people approve of what they are doing, but don't make so much noise about it.
>>> can ugly truths about their race situation be told? No, they can't and the Americans are the first to admit that
Ummm, how do you know about it then? I seem to hear about it every day as well. What they mean is certain people can't speak certain truths and keep their jobs because of 'political correctness'.
With the explosion of news and opinion outlets available in free societies today, that is not enough to keep information out of the public's hands.
Policital Correctness will probable die out along with Communism eventually.
>>> they [citizens of Communist countries] see their own leaders as paragons of integrity...
That's why The Soviet Union and East Germany fell from within? My suspicions that you are joking grow stronger.
People used to steal my bottled water out of the refrigerator at work. I made up some Dihydrogen-Monoxide labels to put on the bottles (with skull and crossbones prominently featured) and the problem was solved.
You have demonstrated admirably why Communism is dying, and should die.
Communists value their own dogma so highly that they sacrifice all to it; all honesty, all honor, and even the very lives of those who try to get away.
It is contact with open societies, where even the ugly truths can be told, that drives the downfall of Communist regimes. By comparison, the Communist leaders are then seen by their own people for the liars and monsters they are.
Ultimately, the Berlin Wall failed to prevent the people of East Germany from discovering this. Eventually the same fate will befall the remaining Communist regimes.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." - Winston Churchill
>>> A September 2004 poll found that ...12% of East Germans wished that East Germans were again cut off from West Germany by the Berlin Wall ...
So is that your measure of how many 'happy Communists' it takes for a nation to justifiable remain under a Communist dictatorship, in spite of what the other 88% may think?
It's interesting that we can now take polls of these Germans to find out what they think about Communism. Before the wall came down it was too dangerous to disagree with any official position of the government and such a poll would have been meaningless. Only the most extreme measure of 'voting with the feet' could be used to voice one's displeasure then, and it cost approximately 1000 East Germans their lives in the attempt.
>>> Of course, some people tried to get across the wall and were shot...
...it's absolutely normal that the border guards shoot people who are trying to cross the border illegally. Yes, it's not always necessary, but you can hardly blame anyone for upholding the law.
>>>
You miss one tiny, but important point here. In non-Communist countries the border guards are there to prevent people and contraband from entering the country illegally, and they very rarely shoot them even then. The East German border guards were not shooting people trying to enter East Germany illegally, they killed approximately 1000 people for trying to leave the country.
After Soviet control was removed from Germany, former East German leaders were tried and convicted for instituting and carrying out this policy, precisely because it did not mirror the activities of a free country but those of a prison camp.
I notice you didn't include East Germany in your list of places full of happy Communists. Is that because it's hard to explain why it required a deadly barrier to keep them there if they were so happy?
"The majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper." - Larry Flynt
If you (parent author) like sci-fi you should read the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
In this futuristic tale a perfect, working communism (although the author never calls it that) is develped on a Mars colony and then spreads back to Earth.
The books were a great read, but I think the masses of human beings that can actually thrive and remain happy under communism only exist in Science Fiction.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone." - Bill Cosby
I found the problem! If the wiley culprit is using Opera and the investigator hits Control+H to view browser history.. the browser disappears instead!
Clearly a showstopper.
>>>Just hope for a big inheritance then?
Baby Boomers don't leave an inheritance.
After retirement they sell their property and go on the road with a BIG motorhome and party it up till they die.
The Pre-Movie commercials actually stopped me from going to movies for a while. I can't tolerate them. Everytime I saw the those crap commercials I would vow never to go to that theater again. Then my daughter mentioned to me that I should just show up ten or fifteen minutes late, like she does.
I didn't think it would work because there wouldn't be any decent seats left. But, I was surprised to find that it does work, there are usually even some good seats left, and I enjoy the movie much more. I still only go a few times a year when there's something I really want to see, but at least this tactic makes it possible for me to go.
Maybe there are good seats left because the commercials have made a lot of other people stop going too.
"We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins."
- Arthur C. Clarke
Not only that, they had the government give them practically free money through S&L's, govt. programs, etc. so they could buy up all the good real estate, creating ever more debt for future generations to service. Now they own everything and somebody else has to pay for the S&L meltdown and all the social perks they voted themselves.
Back in the 80's John Naisbitt predicted that pure computer jobs would begin to lose their luster as IT skills filtered out to more and more people and the real money and prestige would be found in jobs that combined computer skills with other specialized knowledge.
He also predicted, in the same book, the reunification of Germany.
"Every time I learn something new it pushes some old stuff out of my brain." - Homer Simpson
>>>The reality is that ( if you are found guilty ) when the sentencing phase arrives, there may as well be a computer behind the bench, instead of a human judge. In other words, your only chance is if the jury declares you "not guilty".
>>>In case some of you cannot figure this out, this places the federal courts in the US a lot closer to fascism than any courts in western Europe.
Didn't history's great fascist regimes have ways of making sure an accused was found guilty?
In the U.S. that is up to the jury and the jury always has the power to find a defendant not-guilty, no matter what the facts.
If the punishment phase is consistent, the jury ends up taking this into account as well. For instance I've seen a jury refuse to bring in a guilty verdict on a particular charge because the likely penalty seemed too severe for the circumstances.
With the U.S. Jury system in place there is not so much need for Judicial leeway.
"We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read."
- Mark Twain