I would bet he might be ok with the last one and the pregnancy one
You're confusing behavior which could lead to dangerous behavior (carrying a gun which could be used to shoot someone) with dangerous behavior. There is nothing inherently dangerous about the existence or possession of a gun.
What you should be asking is does he support your right to a car knowing you could drink and drive? Yep.
Does he support drug use or drug dealing? Couldn't tell you, completely unanalogous.
I think you're the one in a misguided cycle of fear. The only reason people are afraid of law abiding, safe, gun owners is their own prejudice against guns. Which is more rational, the fear of a population that seeks to harm and deprive by force, operation outside the laws of society; or a population who values their lives and property, crosses the Ts and dots the Is on all the relevant paperwork isn't taking anything from anyone?
Here's a little note for you. Law abiding gun owners don't fear other law abiding gun owners, unless you think sportsman clubs, social clubs and the dreaded NRA are all figments of my imagination. What they do fear is people who would break the laws they follow.
Oh wait, I bet you think I shouldn't have them either! Thankfully the SCOTUS disagrees with you or we'd live in a fabulous country where only criminals have a right to defend themselves or to enjoy an honest and fun hobby like target shooting.
However, their joysticks cost money, their mice can be had by the boatload when offices update their hardware, and they're a lot better than the opticals that Dell and IBM ship.
And what does any of it matter with the 700 Billion that went to the financial geniuses who sold us down the river?
Having bigger fish to fry does not mean that the smaller fish should get a free pass. If it did I'd stop paying taxes and let them know they wouldn't have gotten much from me anyway.
I think the Mac as a platform will continue to be ignored for as long as there is a large enough population of poorly managed Windows machines that money can be mad with little to no work. If you were pulling in 500K a year doing absolutely nothing other than letting a botnet run wild would you really care if you could be making more? I'm not saying it wont be done, I'm just saying that if I were a botnet herder unless times got tough I don't think I'd bother with putting in any kind of effort at all.
It doesn't matter how much or little of a pain in the ass to compromise it is, the point is that it's clearly enough of a pain that no one bothers to do it. It's not possible vs. impossible, it's easy and plentiful vs. anything else.
I can only speak for myself, but I think there's a big difference between the independent people and governments taking action.
If someone is going to try to fix the world with vigilante justice they better be a vigilante. The problem with the government is that if you give them the authority to work outside of the rules you lose the ability to tell them which rules and when, there are no consequences, no one watching the watchers. Someone on the internet working to clean out other people's computers was never following the rules to begin with, and they face prosecution for their work no matter what the result is.
That's why I would support a small group of technically proficient do-gooders crossing into a gray area of legality, and not the government.
I believe there was a study back in 2006 that Baltimore Maryland spends more per student than any other district in the country. They also have some of the worst academic performance.
Not funding school properly is a problem, but I would agree that misuse of the funds they get is a definite factor.
I'll grant you that there can be educated people without public education but I dare you to tell me, since you're curious what the argument is that an educated public benefits everyone, do you have an argument as to how an uneducated populace would in any way be more beneficial? The arguments for a society where all members are provided the basic foundation to be skilled and competent employees through training in math and literacy seem pretty obvious to me. Throw in some history as a good civics lesson and I honestly don't see how you can say education doesn't benefit the society by preparing them to function productively as adults.
Obviously good parenting is also a factor, but there's nothing a school can do to fix people not taking any responsibility for the wellbeing of their children. It's nice of you to bring up that you don't feel like you have enough control. Well tough shit, welcome to America. You don't decide where they build roads, what laws are passed, where your tax money goes, who gets hired to non-elected positions the list goes on forever. If you want complete control of the next generation have a child and raise them well. Home school them if you like. Yes, you still have to pay property taxes even if your child isn't getting the money, but you also get to reap the rewards of the tax money and labor those students will later produce.
Ferraris are stolen because they're worth vastly more than Toyotas. Are you implying that each infected Mac would somehow provide a multiple of what an infected PC would, thus justify the extra work involved? What's the point? If you could steal the most common car in America and get the same money for it as Ferrari would you really go through the effort of dealing with all the security and added attention?
BTW there;s far more to cybercrime than botnets so the idea that you'd get anywhere close to 7% by switching platforms just isn't going to happen. Plenty of things like phishing, fraud, and spam are completely platform independent and already running at a good clip as we speak. Crime is a high risk, high reward, game. If there was as much money as you think to be made from cracking Macs someone would have done it by now, or do you honestly think that there's no one in the world talented enough to find a hole in OSX with $28 billion on the line?
This all come back to the other article about the FSF's new definition of open. It's completely ridiculous to refuse to use proprietary software in any form to run proprietary hardware, and there's nothing that the average person can do to not have to trust in the work of a secret keeping commercial entity without a completely absurd amount of commitment and investment.
Way to disregard his completely valid point about modern military spending to push your own agenda. I can tell you straight off that there's absolutely no chance that the U.S. will stop fighting "pointless" wars any time soon because we've been doing it since the country was founded, so rather than create some hypothetical situation where you've got a point, why not address the reality of the situation.
That being, the biggest threat to American military operations has, for the last 60 years, been public opinion. The public doesn't like hearing about Americans dying and to counter the equipment and tactics in use are, in large part, designed to minimize American loss of life. (Sometimes more effectively than others).
We could put our soldier out on the streets with a two days of training and an AK-47 and slash down to probably 20% of what it is, but I don't think there are many people you'd find to support that. Where you went wrong is the idea that we're not willing to see our countrymen die. That's clearly not the case and never has been, there's only the hope that as few as possible die to achieve whatever goal we've swallowed. Public opinion has turned against Afganistan and Iraq because there doesn't seem to be any victory to be won, not because there never was or because military spending is seen as wasteful.
Not to seem like a propagandist, but the F-22 had been in active service for almost three years now and every indication is that it absolutely blows everything else in our arsenal out of the water. Obviously with our current military situation not calling for many dog fights these are all test exercises, but I think 108/0 and 221/0 kill-ratios against F-15s and F-16s indicates that they might be worth spending a little money on.
A recent report by the Washington Post reports that over $49 Million in farm subsidies has gone to people who make more than cut off $2.5 Million per year. I've never been a fan of subsidies to begin with, I bet you can imagine how I feel when anyone making millions a year gets a check for free money
I just don't see the difference between having to use certain software because of the demands of the hardware (Broadcom, most videocards) and having to use certain hardware because of the demands of the software (whatever can be supported using only completely open drivers). Either way you're sacrificing a degree of freedom in your choices, it's silly to think that one is somehow morally superior or more relevant.
Very limited circumstances, but to continue with the rest of my sentence: How is being forced to use the OpenMoko Freerunner, a phone which I had no interest in using superior than using whatever phone I want, but having to deal with software I may not agree with morally?
Until all platforms are 100% open and firmware support is universal you'll always be cutting corner at one end or the other. I guess they are the FSF not the Freedom Foundation though, so I guess I've answered my own question about their stance.
Is it any more free than having a distro that's free but not having the freedom to run it on your hardware because it's completely useless?
I understand the moral conflict, but it's not like I could buy a complete set of open hardware, and even if I could, I'd just be compromising on a different front.
Great! You should contact ASA and tell them that PC Pro's demo was flawed so obviously their banning of the ad (which is why there was a demo made in the first place) is completely without merit.
Nothing is even a plausible effective solution, so don't try. The solution "Let's ban x" not only doesn't solve the problem of x, it doesn't solve a hundred other problems that are completely unrelated. So yes, stop flailing at flies with sledgehammers.
Backing you up, the person I knew who was making minimum wage was in between jobs and it was very much a temporary situation.
The only other positions I can think that are minimum wage are mall jobs, and I would argue that there's a fair lack of skill in selling spiky bracelets to 12 year olds.
I don't know why you replied to me. Honestly I don't know anyone who makes minimum wage, nor have I ever, I was just making the point that generalizing all workers based on pay rate is stupid, much like any other generalization.
And while I don't know anyone now, I have known people in the past. The most frequent reason was low cost of living where they worked. A job that might pay $8-10 starting in a metropolitan area can frequently be a minimum wage job out in the sticks because there's no need to keep up with cost of living and far less competition for workers. Does it make them any more or less skilled than their urban counterparts who are making more for the same job? I wouldn't think so.
You may want to invest in a home theater system and a person chef then, because I don't see theaters, restaurants, airlines, banks, or any other public place banning children any time soon.
That's not the point though. Everyone can find a reason to be annoyed about something at any given time. You can't fix everything about everyone so you may as well just suck it up.
The best part is I'd be willing to bet money you, like everyone else, have probably annoyed someone in a theater or restaurant. Consider your ass banned.
My point is that there's no way to get rid of everything obnoxious. What happened when someone pays extra for one of these preferred experiences but they have a nose wistle? What if they have a small bladder and have to get up too much for your liking?
There's no practical way to ensure that no one will do anything to annoy you in a public setting so why not just get over it? If someone is doing something they can control either ask them to stop or live with it, no rules will ever satisfy every need for every person.
If all of these holier than thou smartasses want a good movie watching experience where is the cry to ban children? People with colds? People who breathe too loudly or wear the swishy coats? There are plenty of things that can annoy me when I go to a movie, and cellphones have never been one of them.
I came to the realization long ago that my absolute guaranteed comfort does not trump the basic day to day existence of other people. While we're at it why don't we ban them is stores so that people can't talk in line, and ban them in public so people don't drive with them. In fact I find other people on cellphones annoying where ever I am, so why not just ban them altogether?
Slashdot Mirror
I would bet he might be ok with the last one and the pregnancy one
You're confusing behavior which could lead to dangerous behavior (carrying a gun which could be used to shoot someone) with dangerous behavior. There is nothing inherently dangerous about the existence or possession of a gun.
What you should be asking is does he support your right to a car knowing you could drink and drive? Yep.
Does he support drug use or drug dealing? Couldn't tell you, completely unanalogous.
I think you're the one in a misguided cycle of fear. The only reason people are afraid of law abiding, safe, gun owners is their own prejudice against guns. Which is more rational, the fear of a population that seeks to harm and deprive by force, operation outside the laws of society; or a population who values their lives and property, crosses the Ts and dots the Is on all the relevant paperwork isn't taking anything from anyone?
Here's a little note for you. Law abiding gun owners don't fear other law abiding gun owners, unless you think sportsman clubs, social clubs and the dreaded NRA are all figments of my imagination. What they do fear is people who would break the laws they follow.
That's simple then, don't buy them.
Oh wait, I bet you think I shouldn't have them either! Thankfully the SCOTUS disagrees with you or we'd live in a fabulous country where only criminals have a right to defend themselves or to enjoy an honest and fun hobby like target shooting.
However, their joysticks cost money, their mice can be had by the boatload when offices update their hardware, and they're a lot better than the opticals that Dell and IBM ship.
And what does any of it matter with the 700 Billion that went to the financial geniuses who sold us down the river?
Having bigger fish to fry does not mean that the smaller fish should get a free pass. If it did I'd stop paying taxes and let them know they wouldn't have gotten much from me anyway.
I think the Mac as a platform will continue to be ignored for as long as there is a large enough population of poorly managed Windows machines that money can be mad with little to no work. If you were pulling in 500K a year doing absolutely nothing other than letting a botnet run wild would you really care if you could be making more? I'm not saying it wont be done, I'm just saying that if I were a botnet herder unless times got tough I don't think I'd bother with putting in any kind of effort at all.
It doesn't matter how much or little of a pain in the ass to compromise it is, the point is that it's clearly enough of a pain that no one bothers to do it. It's not possible vs. impossible, it's easy and plentiful vs. anything else.
I can only speak for myself, but I think there's a big difference between the independent people and governments taking action.
If someone is going to try to fix the world with vigilante justice they better be a vigilante. The problem with the government is that if you give them the authority to work outside of the rules you lose the ability to tell them which rules and when, there are no consequences, no one watching the watchers. Someone on the internet working to clean out other people's computers was never following the rules to begin with, and they face prosecution for their work no matter what the result is.
That's why I would support a small group of technically proficient do-gooders crossing into a gray area of legality, and not the government.
I believe there was a study back in 2006 that Baltimore Maryland spends more per student than any other district in the country. They also have some of the worst academic performance.
Not funding school properly is a problem, but I would agree that misuse of the funds they get is a definite factor.
I'll grant you that there can be educated people without public education but I dare you to tell me, since you're curious what the argument is that an educated public benefits everyone, do you have an argument as to how an uneducated populace would in any way be more beneficial? The arguments for a society where all members are provided the basic foundation to be skilled and competent employees through training in math and literacy seem pretty obvious to me. Throw in some history as a good civics lesson and I honestly don't see how you can say education doesn't benefit the society by preparing them to function productively as adults.
Obviously good parenting is also a factor, but there's nothing a school can do to fix people not taking any responsibility for the wellbeing of their children. It's nice of you to bring up that you don't feel like you have enough control. Well tough shit, welcome to America. You don't decide where they build roads, what laws are passed, where your tax money goes, who gets hired to non-elected positions the list goes on forever. If you want complete control of the next generation have a child and raise them well. Home school them if you like. Yes, you still have to pay property taxes even if your child isn't getting the money, but you also get to reap the rewards of the tax money and labor those students will later produce.
Ferraris are stolen because they're worth vastly more than Toyotas. Are you implying that each infected Mac would somehow provide a multiple of what an infected PC would, thus justify the extra work involved? What's the point? If you could steal the most common car in America and get the same money for it as Ferrari would you really go through the effort of dealing with all the security and added attention?
BTW there;s far more to cybercrime than botnets so the idea that you'd get anywhere close to 7% by switching platforms just isn't going to happen. Plenty of things like phishing, fraud, and spam are completely platform independent and already running at a good clip as we speak. Crime is a high risk, high reward, game. If there was as much money as you think to be made from cracking Macs someone would have done it by now, or do you honestly think that there's no one in the world talented enough to find a hole in OSX with $28 billion on the line?
It does when you say "I haven't used it".
This all come back to the other article about the FSF's new definition of open. It's completely ridiculous to refuse to use proprietary software in any form to run proprietary hardware, and there's nothing that the average person can do to not have to trust in the work of a secret keeping commercial entity without a completely absurd amount of commitment and investment.
Way to disregard his completely valid point about modern military spending to push your own agenda. I can tell you straight off that there's absolutely no chance that the U.S. will stop fighting "pointless" wars any time soon because we've been doing it since the country was founded, so rather than create some hypothetical situation where you've got a point, why not address the reality of the situation.
That being, the biggest threat to American military operations has, for the last 60 years, been public opinion. The public doesn't like hearing about Americans dying and to counter the equipment and tactics in use are, in large part, designed to minimize American loss of life. (Sometimes more effectively than others).
We could put our soldier out on the streets with a two days of training and an AK-47 and slash down to probably 20% of what it is, but I don't think there are many people you'd find to support that. Where you went wrong is the idea that we're not willing to see our countrymen die. That's clearly not the case and never has been, there's only the hope that as few as possible die to achieve whatever goal we've swallowed. Public opinion has turned against Afganistan and Iraq because there doesn't seem to be any victory to be won, not because there never was or because military spending is seen as wasteful.
Not to seem like a propagandist, but the F-22 had been in active service for almost three years now and every indication is that it absolutely blows everything else in our arsenal out of the water. Obviously with our current military situation not calling for many dog fights these are all test exercises, but I think 108/0 and 221/0 kill-ratios against F-15s and F-16s indicates that they might be worth spending a little money on.
They can also run on synthetic jet fuel.
A recent report by the Washington Post reports that over $49 Million in farm subsidies has gone to people who make more than cut off $2.5 Million per year. I've never been a fan of subsidies to begin with, I bet you can imagine how I feel when anyone making millions a year gets a check for free money
Link
I just don't see the difference between having to use certain software because of the demands of the hardware (Broadcom, most videocards) and having to use certain hardware because of the demands of the software (whatever can be supported using only completely open drivers). Either way you're sacrificing a degree of freedom in your choices, it's silly to think that one is somehow morally superior or more relevant.
Very limited circumstances, but to continue with the rest of my sentence: How is being forced to use the OpenMoko Freerunner, a phone which I had no interest in using superior than using whatever phone I want, but having to deal with software I may not agree with morally? Until all platforms are 100% open and firmware support is universal you'll always be cutting corner at one end or the other. I guess they are the FSF not the Freedom Foundation though, so I guess I've answered my own question about their stance.
Is it any more free than having a distro that's free but not having the freedom to run it on your hardware because it's completely useless?
I understand the moral conflict, but it's not like I could buy a complete set of open hardware, and even if I could, I'd just be compromising on a different front.
Great! You should contact ASA and tell them that PC Pro's demo was flawed so obviously their banning of the ad (which is why there was a demo made in the first place) is completely without merit.
Nothing is even a plausible effective solution, so don't try. The solution "Let's ban x" not only doesn't solve the problem of x, it doesn't solve a hundred other problems that are completely unrelated. So yes, stop flailing at flies with sledgehammers.
Backing you up, the person I knew who was making minimum wage was in between jobs and it was very much a temporary situation.
The only other positions I can think that are minimum wage are mall jobs, and I would argue that there's a fair lack of skill in selling spiky bracelets to 12 year olds.
I don't know why you replied to me. Honestly I don't know anyone who makes minimum wage, nor have I ever, I was just making the point that generalizing all workers based on pay rate is stupid, much like any other generalization.
And while I don't know anyone now, I have known people in the past. The most frequent reason was low cost of living where they worked. A job that might pay $8-10 starting in a metropolitan area can frequently be a minimum wage job out in the sticks because there's no need to keep up with cost of living and far less competition for workers. Does it make them any more or less skilled than their urban counterparts who are making more for the same job? I wouldn't think so.
You may want to invest in a home theater system and a person chef then, because I don't see theaters, restaurants, airlines, banks, or any other public place banning children any time soon.
That's not the point though. Everyone can find a reason to be annoyed about something at any given time. You can't fix everything about everyone so you may as well just suck it up.
The best part is I'd be willing to bet money you, like everyone else, have probably annoyed someone in a theater or restaurant. Consider your ass banned.
My point is that there's no way to get rid of everything obnoxious. What happened when someone pays extra for one of these preferred experiences but they have a nose wistle? What if they have a small bladder and have to get up too much for your liking?
There's no practical way to ensure that no one will do anything to annoy you in a public setting so why not just get over it? If someone is doing something they can control either ask them to stop or live with it, no rules will ever satisfy every need for every person.
No kidding.
If all of these holier than thou smartasses want a good movie watching experience where is the cry to ban children? People with colds? People who breathe too loudly or wear the swishy coats? There are plenty of things that can annoy me when I go to a movie, and cellphones have never been one of them.
I came to the realization long ago that my absolute guaranteed comfort does not trump the basic day to day existence of other people. While we're at it why don't we ban them is stores so that people can't talk in line, and ban them in public so people don't drive with them. In fact I find other people on cellphones annoying where ever I am, so why not just ban them altogether?
Right.