It would be hard to change the mind of someone who had a strong belief, but most people don't have strong beliefs.
This was driven home to me way back in high school, where my English teacher one day aggressively pushed the Greek "crystal sphere" idea of the universe, just to make a point. He started with all of the arguments-by-logic that the Greeks had used to construct their idea of the universe (which seem to make a lot of sense if you haven't studied basic "modern" physics concepts like gravity), and ruthlessly used both his position as an authority figure & his greater experience as a debater to basically crush any attempt at dissent.
After a couple of days of this, none of the class aside from myself was willing to argue the "pure science" position. (I was grimly hanging in there by getting counter-arguments from the physics teacher:-) Although most weren't willing to commit to the Crystal Sphere theory either (as established by a survey afterward), there were actually a few who had gotten excited about the theory and were actively assisting the teacher in shooting down counter-arguments.
I found the peer pressure effect to be mind-bogglingly effective - just the fact that most of my classmates weren't _sure_ what was true was enough to make me feel doubt about my own facts, even though I intellectually felt I had a iron-clad set of arguments.
From a social engineering viewpoint, I think that, unless most of the society is well-trained from birth to be critical thinkers (and ours isn't even remotely close to that), allowing demagogues to aggressively push their ideas on people is dangerous for the long-term health of a society, especially if they succeed in crowding out almost all alternative memes. Such an unbalanced society will almost inevitably turn on anyone who is incompatible with the prevailing views.
I understand that the Republicans were twisting the re-districting to their advantage, but they were doing it within the letter of the law, which is all you can ask for these days.
Fuck that kind of attitude. I demand a _LOT_ more from my leaders than just "doing it within the letter of the law". If they don't perform to a higher moral standard, then I'll support screwing'm any way possible - and if it takes "pathetic and childish" acts (which were also "doing it within the letter of the law"), as long as it totally pisses off the original assholes, then that's fine with me.
The moment I "understood" multidimensional contour integrals, it was like a supernova in my brain & I absolutely loved math. Unfortunately, that neuron burned out & I was never able to comprehend math of that complexity again.
the simple and obvious solution is to abolish the income tax and replace it with a sales tax of some sort.
Nah, tax a fixed percentage of assets per year, with a large exemption for real people (but not for ficitional entities like corporations).
That would provide a systemic way of keeping wealth moving through the economy, plus prevent rich people from playing shell games with assets to slip through taxing loopholes.
What happens if a person copyrights something that he does not have the capital to go-live in the first five years (which is a relatively short time frame)? Do they get screwed?
Then they should sell it to someone who CAN bring it to the public in a timely fashion.
If someone creates something only to sit on it for an extended period of time, then it doesn't benefit society at all. There's no point in society giving special rights to certain members if the overall effect doesn't have long-term societal benefits.
A team of 4-8 persons, properly trained in unarmed combat,
They'd have to pick a plane without too many passengers (or commandeer then blockade the cockpit before anyone knew what was going on) - even highly trained unarmed combat specialists will fall when they are dogpiled by about 1000 pounds of human flesh willing to sacrifice themselves to save their families and/or prevent the plane from being flown into a building.
...people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff...
No, the people who believe in free markets champion the basic concept that people should get paid if they provide desired goods & services, and shouldn't expect to get paid otherwise. Why should someone get paid over and over every time someone ELSE distributes their work, when the creators put out the effort to create that work only once? If they want to keep getting paid, then they should keep producing, just like any other craftsperson on the planet.
...but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff...
No, people who believe in private property rights champion being able to use your own private property without being charged a "usage fee" by someone who doesn't own the property you are using. If someone wants to have control over your private property, they should have to convince you to sign a agreement/contract giving up your private property rights.
You know, the basic principles of free markets _aren't_ that complicated - except for the people who somehow feel that they are entitled to more than what a free market will give them.
Those children were being extremely disrespectful to someone who was sent by God, by extention to God himself, and they did not do it ignorantly.
So it was alright for the All-Merciful & All-Loving God to send the bears to eat them. Excellent, I'll be sure to tell the next little kid I beat into the afterlife to tell God I was using his example of being All-Merciful & All-Loving.
If I have a computer program, and I tell it to loop infinitely doing exactly the same thing, that's exactly what it will do.
Spoken like someone who I would not trust to program a fault-tolerant or hardened-for-space system. What a lousy example.
At some point, a cosmic ray will come through & jolt your computer out of its loop - or just cause it to hang. Or someone will run into a telephone pole & kill your power, and your generators eventually run out of gas. Or your O.S. will decide to crash for no apparent reason & interrupt your loop. Or a meteor/volcano/tornado will destroy your computer.
Given enough time, no one can guarantee the existence of _anything_.
Sometimes the person who comes up with an idea doesn't have the capital to make it into a product.
Then they sell the idea to someone who can. Just because they came up with an idea doesn't mean they have the "right" to control how it's used (or to stop anyone who might have come up with the idea by themselves). From a societal-benefit standpoint, it doesn't matter WHO uses the idea - and, by definition, public policy should be made with the resultant societal-benefit in mind.
"Free" markets should be strictly limited to payment for providing desired goods or services. Unnatural definitions such as "intellectual property" have no place in a free market.
In many areas, there's the "official" law, and then there's the _real_ law which the common people have been operating under for at least 100s of years.
Sometimes the laws which are on the books are pretty damn irrelevant (although a convenient ass-covering for government officials pretending to have a "civilized" society).
Safe mode isn't necessarily good enough to stop some spyware from running (which means that they can prevent you from removing them).
You have to use a boot disk to be sure, and even then some spyware will use Trojan-kit & virus-like infection tactics to squirrel copies of themselves away for future infection.
The _only_ sure way to get rid of spyware is to wipe & reinstall. If you're lucky, you won't have any executable code embedded in your data, and you'll be able to save that too. Any other tactic is just playing the odds that you're smarter than the virus-author.
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It would be hard to change the mind of someone who had a strong belief, but most people don't have strong beliefs.
:-) Although most weren't willing to commit to the Crystal Sphere theory either (as established by a survey afterward), there were actually a few who had gotten excited about the theory and were actively assisting the teacher in shooting down counter-arguments.
This was driven home to me way back in high school, where my English teacher one day aggressively pushed the Greek "crystal sphere" idea of the universe, just to make a point. He started with all of the arguments-by-logic that the Greeks had used to construct their idea of the universe (which seem to make a lot of sense if you haven't studied basic "modern" physics concepts like gravity), and ruthlessly used both his position as an authority figure & his greater experience as a debater to basically crush any attempt at dissent.
After a couple of days of this, none of the class aside from myself was willing to argue the "pure science" position. (I was grimly hanging in there by getting counter-arguments from the physics teacher
I found the peer pressure effect to be mind-bogglingly effective - just the fact that most of my classmates weren't _sure_ what was true was enough to make me feel doubt about my own facts, even though I intellectually felt I had a iron-clad set of arguments.
From a social engineering viewpoint, I think that, unless most of the society is well-trained from birth to be critical thinkers (and ours isn't even remotely close to that), allowing demagogues to aggressively push their ideas on people is dangerous for the long-term health of a society, especially if they succeed in crowding out almost all alternative memes. Such an unbalanced society will almost inevitably turn on anyone who is incompatible with the prevailing views.
Fuck that kind of attitude. I demand a _LOT_ more from my leaders than just "doing it within the letter of the law". If they don't perform to a higher moral standard, then I'll support screwing'm any way possible - and if it takes "pathetic and childish" acts (which were also "doing it within the letter of the law"), as long as it totally pisses off the original assholes, then that's fine with me.
This is insightful?!
There are plenty of dissidents who don't harm innocents.
The moment I "understood" multidimensional contour integrals, it was like a supernova in my brain & I absolutely loved math. Unfortunately, that neuron burned out & I was never able to comprehend math of that complexity again.
Nah, tax a fixed percentage of assets per year, with a large exemption for real people (but not for ficitional entities like corporations).
That would provide a systemic way of keeping wealth moving through the economy, plus prevent rich people from playing shell games with assets to slip through taxing loopholes.
He'd just ask his wife to do it - I believe she's won some national-level martial arts championships.
Then they should sell it to someone who CAN bring it to the public in a timely fashion.
If someone creates something only to sit on it for an extended period of time, then it doesn't benefit society at all. There's no point in society giving special rights to certain members if the overall effect doesn't have long-term societal benefits.
They'd have to pick a plane without too many passengers (or commandeer then blockade the cockpit before anyone knew what was going on) - even highly trained unarmed combat specialists will fall when they are dogpiled by about 1000 pounds of human flesh willing to sacrifice themselves to save their families and/or prevent the plane from being flown into a building.
Real Men pass arguments by buffer flow!
My computer is dreaming...
Actually, I would say that the loophole is with the word "adequate".
Because they want to ram their beliefs down the throats of everyone who _doesn't_ believe the same way they do.
That the person who did the plagiarism was the one who created the work that ended up being plagiarized.
Are you normally this dense, or are you deliberately misunderstanding simple word definitions?
Uh...because it requires claiming something that isn't true. It really isn't that hard to understand, you know.
No, the people who believe in free markets champion the basic concept that people should get paid if they provide desired goods & services, and shouldn't expect to get paid otherwise. Why should someone get paid over and over every time someone ELSE distributes their work, when the creators put out the effort to create that work only once? If they want to keep getting paid, then they should keep producing, just like any other craftsperson on the planet.
No, people who believe in private property rights champion being able to use your own private property without being charged a "usage fee" by someone who doesn't own the property you are using. If someone wants to have control over your private property, they should have to convince you to sign a agreement/contract giving up your private property rights.
You know, the basic principles of free markets _aren't_ that complicated - except for the people who somehow feel that they are entitled to more than what a free market will give them.
Damn, see if you can find a link! A brief like that would spread through the 'net like wildfire.
I do like the "be fruitful and multiply" mandate :-)
So it was alright for the All-Merciful & All-Loving God to send the bears to eat them. Excellent, I'll be sure to tell the next little kid I beat into the afterlife to tell God I was using his example of being All-Merciful & All-Loving.
Spoken like someone who I would not trust to program a fault-tolerant or hardened-for-space system. What a lousy example.
At some point, a cosmic ray will come through & jolt your computer out of its loop - or just cause it to hang. Or someone will run into a telephone pole & kill your power, and your generators eventually run out of gas. Or your O.S. will decide to crash for no apparent reason & interrupt your loop. Or a meteor/volcano/tornado will destroy your computer.
Given enough time, no one can guarantee the existence of _anything_.
Then they sell the idea to someone who can. Just because they came up with an idea doesn't mean they have the "right" to control how it's used (or to stop anyone who might have come up with the idea by themselves). From a societal-benefit standpoint, it doesn't matter WHO uses the idea - and, by definition, public policy should be made with the resultant societal-benefit in mind.
"Free" markets should be strictly limited to payment for providing desired goods or services. Unnatural definitions such as "intellectual property" have no place in a free market.
They're still voting for him, so their "disagreement" isn't worth the wind they use to state it.
In many areas, there's the "official" law, and then there's the _real_ law which the common people have been operating under for at least 100s of years.
Sometimes the laws which are on the books are pretty damn irrelevant (although a convenient ass-covering for government officials pretending to have a "civilized" society).
Bacteria have moving parts. As far as I know, viruses don't (until they infect their host cell).
On the other hand, viruses would be the natural vector for reprogramming your bacteria on the fly...
What did you do when you had two or more processes which start each other when you kill each one?
Safe mode isn't necessarily good enough to stop some spyware from running (which means that they can prevent you from removing them).
You have to use a boot disk to be sure, and even then some spyware will use Trojan-kit & virus-like infection tactics to squirrel copies of themselves away for future infection.
The _only_ sure way to get rid of spyware is to wipe & reinstall. If you're lucky, you won't have any executable code embedded in your data, and you'll be able to save that too. Any other tactic is just playing the odds that you're smarter than the virus-author.