Chances are by the time you get to the point where you have to use the last resort, you won't have your firearms.
This is exactly our point. Give up your firearms and you will get to the point that you need them.
the whole point of democracy is to promote compromise and enable solution without the use of violence.
And yet even a well functioning democracy enforces its laws using, among other measures, police and gaols. Your idyllic violence free democracy does not exist. Let's talk about the real world now.
(I would imagine that the government/army would win in a fight vs the people)
You ought to do some reading on the Eureka Stockade of 1854. Yes, they were beaten decisively, but inside of two years had achieved most of their goals. Those brought to trial were acquited by jury nullification. Peter Lalor, the leader, was elected to the legislature.
While you are at it, check out the Easter Rising in Ireland.
As an Australian, I'm glad the guns have been taken away - we have few real reasons for them (you can get gun permits for hunting)
... because self defense isn't a legitimate action, right? Of course, we still have the theoretical right to self defense. It is only the means that is illegal.
We are a nation whose founding was precipitated by armed rebellion in response to excessive taxation and the abusive behaviour of the government agents involved in collection. What has become of us that our people boast of our disarmament?
Well, if we have the presumption that we are not crims, then why did we have to give up our guns? A nation of people who were presumed innocent until proven guilty would not be required to give up their firearms. Really though, that just stems from a greater problem, which is that Australians generally have never given a moments thought as to what liberty is, despite having the concept in our national anthem. You might be surprised how often I have spoken to people about liberty and it is the first time they've ever heard anything like it.
Regardless of the (important) issues you brought up, a woman and a black man can be considered to have a real chance at being elected US President, and industry polluting the environment can have serious consequences, sometimes from the law, sometimes from customers who vote with their wallets. It can hardly be said that it isn't worth it just because we haven't arrived at utopia. Change can be made to happen.
They believe popular history as taught by the enforcement and compliance arm of the government they are enslaved to... public schools.
Well you hit the nail on the head there. Home schooling is legal in a lot of places though. Possession of your own mind is a prerequisite to freedom. How can you be free if a government agent teaches you how to think?
Save those you love, save yourself... the rest will get what they want, and no one, not you, not me, can save them against their wills.
History indicates that given the choice, usually a majority will not choose to be free. What is needed is to have the ability to live free, while not denying the conditions of servitude to those who desire it. Even so, there are those that would seek to destroy the freedom, it would have to be vigorously defended in every generation. 1776 may have been a fluke and quickly corrected, but it still sent out a shockwave that impacts the world today. We have a system that can be infiltrated, quite openly, just by convincing people to vote for you. Use it.
System upgrade from 98SE to 2000 or XP was that seamless? Or XP to Vista? Ill have to take your word for it since I haven't had a windows box for quite a while, but I was of the impression that drivers etc + other programs were different.
I usually do a clean install and dual boot until I'm happy with the new distro on my home machine, that way I don't upset my wife. Much better to have difficulty with _any_ OS than with the wife.:)
No need for the manifest and the diff, really:
$ rpm -qa --qf %{name} > old-release.rpmlist
Do your distro upgrade.
$ yum --skip-broken `cat old-release.rpmlist`
or whatever the apt equivalent is. Compared to individually installing each program you use after an OS upgrade, yes, it's far better.
now Parliament is feeling upward pressure from the other power-hungry pricks who've grown accustomed to the ability to breach our Constitution whenever they please.
Now? Since the Whitlam government you means. Have a read of Whitlam's book, "On Australia's Constitution". He openly admits that our constitution is (was) the biggest obstacle to the Labour parties goals and details the ways they used to get around it. Having opened the way, "both sides" of politics have been doing it ever since. This is not a party political issue (unless you include the LDP, but they don't seem to have much chance of a major influence, we can hope though http://www.ldp.org.au/).
I find it very disturbing that you believe a private company has more right to spy on you than the Government.
Monitoring your private email at home would be spying, monitoring your work email is not. Its a basic ownership issue. If the government monitors my email, its spying. If it monitors the work email of a public servant, it isn't. If I open my neighbour's mail, its spying. If I hire them as secretaries and they write something on my time and my letterhead, I can read it, it is not spying.
This is not a privacy issue at all, it is clarifying a law that was drafted poorly so that it is more sensible.
Even he says that one man can't do it alone. He has changed one thing though - there is now someone you can support. Get involved locally, find other people with similar desires for change. Support others to run for office. You could even run for office yourself. The situations not hopeless unless people give up, but the sort of people who want others to make the system right for them are not the ones who will get the changes they want.
Liberty has dissappeared piece at a time. Unless you are crazy enough to want a revolution, it will be restored piece at a time also. Look at women's lib, equal rights, environmental movements... none of them happen overnight. Take part.
Furthermore, the whole "it is my infrastructure so I can do whatever the bloody hell I please" argument also doesn't make much sense. My ISP and phone provider also own their infrastructure, so I guess that makes it ok for them to read all my email and listen to all my conversations too?
There is a significant difference. You are paying your ISP to provide a service, that is your email address. Sure, they own the domain, but you are paying them for the email address, you have a right to it. At work, you are effectively being paid to use your employers email, even if one is assigned to you by name. It is similar to claim that letters you write on company letterhead could be private. They are not. A work email identifies your communication as being from that business, just as letterhead does. There is no reasonable right to privacy in this case, use your own equipment and email address if you want that.
Here in Europe, Belgium in particular, it is a crime to read someone elses paper mail and or electronic communications and thank god for that.
If I hire someone to communicate on my behalf, it is not their communications, it is mine. Nobody is suggesting they could intercept your mail/email at home.
Ok as an Australian SysAdmin and after discussing this with a few of my Sydney based counter-parts today we've come to the following couple of points:
1. A phone conversation may not be monitored or recorded without prior consent from both parties.
Commonly believed, but incorrect:
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lrc.nsf/pages/r98appA "At present a participant has a legal right to record conversations to which he or she is party. It is obvious that there are many completely legitimate reasons that such a person might have for so doing. To require that person to first obtain permission from the State on pain of criminal prosecution is a substantial interference with his or her legal rights."
It is illegal for a 3rd party to record other people's conversations.
It is interesting to consider the concept of "spirit". It seems that it will always be in the realm of mythology, even if true, due to the apparent impossibility of measuring or observing it.
If such a thing as "spirit" exists, and is not subject to physical laws, then it could be the origin of decisions and free will could also exist.
The question of whether it exists or not does not seem to have any objective answer. "There's no evidence of it, so it doesn't" is insufficient for something that by its nature would not provide physical evidence even if true. "It's in my book" is also insufficient.
My comments supposes you understand and accept the fact that there is no free will.
If you do not have free will, you are incapable of understanding something and choosing how to act based on that understanding. You are merely acting as you are predestined to act, any sense of understanding being purely coincidental.
From TFA: "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done,"
I think most of us would hope that decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity, regardless of our view of free will.
For example: Someone instructs you "Kill that innocent person." I would hope that your decision is prepared by brain activity. Preferably brain activity that occured well before you became aware of the instruction, let alone the decision.
The only reason people believe in free will is that much of religion makes no sense without it,
This is another in the series of nails being driven into the coffin of the religious conception of humanity.
I Corinthians 1:21
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
At least in Christianity, there is no requirement for the religion to make sense. In any case, you might need to do some more research, as belief in predestination is not uncommon in religions.
Sadly, much of what you say applies to OO.o and ODF.
And I'd bet you a twinkie that nearly all (and possibly ALL) of the 4-star apps aren't independently developed from the spec, but are using rebranded versiond of OO.o's code.
There appears to be some difficulty in implementing standards, yet there is a substantial difference in effect. As the GP states:
"but MS Office will always be able to produce files that don't quite look right everywhere else because of the way MS interprets/wrote the specification, or deliberately left out some important little detail."
By considering MS's history, it is reasonable to conclude that they intend to make it difficult or impossible for others to compete with them by using this standard. On the other hand, your own post concedes that people can compete with OOo by simply rebranding the OOo code. While it could be accurately stated that this has nothing to do with the standards process itself, it is still relevant. It demonstrates that their is no intentional effort to make ODF unusable to restrict competition, whereas no matter how good OOXML might be as a standard, the holding of relevant patents by MS is not useful for anything other than to restrict competition.
So for what purpose do we want standardization? If one of the reasons is to allow competitive implementations, OOXML is seriously deficient when compared to ODF. Perhaps on other criteria they are equal.
I am aware that there are other standards that have patents, but in todays world F/OSS software (GPL in particular) is a part of the competitive marketplace. Standards that don't allow competition by GPL'd software are anticompetitive.
But the all the authors of ODF have to do is publicly announce that they no longer consider the ISO accreditation of ODF to be valid.
Since the whole point of getting ISO accreditation is to gain access to markets where buyers are demanding standardised formats (government purchases) that would be the final victory to MS. It would leave their format as the only accredited standard.
Also, even considering buying from the next state over was quite a challenge in the horse and buggy days. It would have probably taken you a whole day to travel to the next town over, just to buy your goods.
Which is why I mentioned people living near state borders. Remember it was a much higher proportion of people in rural areas too, so for many it wasn't a matter of going from one town to another (inconvenient) but from their farm to a town. For those near the border, a town in the next state could well be closer than one in their own state. For a store owner in a town near the border, a supplier from the next state could well be closer than one in their own state.
Now you can place your order in 5 minutes, and it's delivered to your house in a day or two.
If you lived more than a few hundred yards from your town, you couldn't buy something in 5 minutes in state either.
I think it would be much more efficient to have one organization at the top managing all the taxes, then having to repeat everything 50 times over.
You are correct, it would be more efficient. That's a problem, not a solution. The freedoms enjoyed by the west have very often come by making the government less efficient.
Trial by jury? Inefficient! Just have an appointed judge make a decision.
Congress? Parliaments? How inefficient compared to having one leader with supreme authority.
Elections to decide on who governs? Inefficient! Much more efficient to crown the eldest son of the last king.
Freedom requires a certain level of government inefficiency. Inefficient government must be small in order to not drain the economy, as it is more expensive to get anything done, producing more freedom.
Federal taxes go to pay for federal programs.
Most of which could be considered illegall according to the 10th amendment. (And 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 9th)
I am going to sue Micro$oft and that will allow me to subpoena CowboyNeal's recored relating to any treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, psychopathology, and substance abuse. Like duh its obvious why his claptastic history would be pertinent.
You will achieve nothing. CoyBoyNeal will simply use the tactics outlined in this post and overwhelm you with too much documentation for you to sort though.
Once someone is in a community like this, they will continue to fight for the cause no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.
Yes, because the evidence is all provided by people that have already been accused of being a part of the conspiracy.
I'd much rather have a minuscule and totally unproven chance of a few kids getting autism, which is not fatal, than have a virtual certainty of thousands of kids getting fatal and/or permanently disfiguring diseases like pertussis or polio.
I'm well and truly on the side of vaccination, you only have to look at the health situation in countries that don't have strong vaccination programs. As I understand it though, thimerosal is not an active ingredient of vaccines, but a preservative or something. So that people who don't want thimerosal are not necessarily against vaccination.
I'm not sure what the supposed benefits are to the conspirators of giving people autism though. Election rigging? sure. Control of financial systems or the military? I can see why. But autism? Why would anyone conspire to give people autism? It doesn't seem to make sense.
Not to mention that he lives in a Australia, a country that bases a lot of its defense strategy on military ties to the US. Also the freedom of religion provision in our constitution, among other things, was a concept copied from the US constitution, and the relative ease with which we transitioned from British military rule to a constitutional democracy was likely affected by the earlier British experience of the USA gaining independence.
[sarcasm]Of course, we'd be fine without US military alliances, because the Muslims in Indonesia and other asian countries, and the CCP in China are all peace loving hippies who would only ever want friendly trade, and are champions of free speech.[/sarcasm]
Slashdot Mirror
While you are at it, check out the Easter Rising in Ireland.
We are a nation whose founding was precipitated by armed rebellion in response to excessive taxation and the abusive behaviour of the government agents involved in collection. What has become of us that our people boast of our disarmament?
Well, if we have the presumption that we are not crims, then why did we have to give up our guns? A nation of people who were presumed innocent until proven guilty would not be required to give up their firearms. Really though, that just stems from a greater problem, which is that Australians generally have never given a moments thought as to what liberty is, despite having the concept in our national anthem. You might be surprised how often I have spoken to people about liberty and it is the first time they've ever heard anything like it.
Vote LDP http://www.ldp.org.au/
System upgrade from 98SE to 2000 or XP was that seamless? Or XP to Vista? Ill have to take your word for it since I haven't had a windows box for quite a while, but I was of the impression that drivers etc + other programs were different.
:)
I usually do a clean install and dual boot until I'm happy with the new distro on my home machine, that way I don't upset my wife. Much better to have difficulty with _any_ OS than with the wife.
No need for the manifest and the diff, really:
$ rpm -qa --qf %{name} > old-release.rpmlist
Do your distro upgrade.
$ yum --skip-broken `cat old-release.rpmlist`
or whatever the apt equivalent is. Compared to individually installing each program you use after an OS upgrade, yes, it's far better.
This is not a privacy issue at all, it is clarifying a law that was drafted poorly so that it is more sensible.
Even he says that one man can't do it alone. He has changed one thing though - there is now someone you can support. Get involved locally, find other people with similar desires for change. Support others to run for office. You could even run for office yourself. The situations not hopeless unless people give up, but the sort of people who want others to make the system right for them are not the ones who will get the changes they want.
... none of them happen overnight. Take part.
Liberty has dissappeared piece at a time. Unless you are crazy enough to want a revolution, it will be restored piece at a time also. Look at women's lib, equal rights, environmental movements
"At present a participant has a legal right to record conversations to which he or she is party. It is obvious that there are many completely legitimate reasons that such a person might have for so doing. To require that person to first obtain permission from the State on pain of criminal prosecution is a substantial interference with his or her legal rights."
It is illegal for a 3rd party to record other people's conversations.
It is interesting to consider the concept of "spirit". It seems that it will always be in the realm of mythology, even if true, due to the apparent impossibility of measuring or observing it.
If such a thing as "spirit" exists, and is not subject to physical laws, then it could be the origin of decisions and free will could also exist.
The question of whether it exists or not does not seem to have any objective answer. "There's no evidence of it, so it doesn't" is insufficient for something that by its nature would not provide physical evidence even if true. "It's in my book" is also insufficient.
I think most of us would hope that decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity, regardless of our view of free will.
For example: Someone instructs you "Kill that innocent person." I would hope that your decision is prepared by brain activity. Preferably brain activity that occured well before you became aware of the instruction, let alone the decision.
I Corinthians 1:21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
At least in Christianity, there is no requirement for the religion to make sense. In any case, you might need to do some more research, as belief in predestination is not uncommon in religions.
Ron Paul.
Check out his voting record. Maybe you're not libertarian, but show me where he has voted in favor of any advances of government power like this.
"but MS Office will always be able to produce files that don't quite look right everywhere else because of the way MS interprets/wrote the specification, or deliberately left out some important little detail."
By considering MS's history, it is reasonable to conclude that they intend to make it difficult or impossible for others to compete with them by using this standard. On the other hand, your own post concedes that people can compete with OOo by simply rebranding the OOo code. While it could be accurately stated that this has nothing to do with the standards process itself, it is still relevant. It demonstrates that their is no intentional effort to make ODF unusable to restrict competition, whereas no matter how good OOXML might be as a standard, the holding of relevant patents by MS is not useful for anything other than to restrict competition.
So for what purpose do we want standardization? If one of the reasons is to allow competitive implementations, OOXML is seriously deficient when compared to ODF. Perhaps on other criteria they are equal.
I am aware that there are other standards that have patents, but in todays world F/OSS software (GPL in particular) is a part of the competitive marketplace. Standards that don't allow competition by GPL'd software are anticompetitive.
Consider than within 50 years of the Constitution being in place, the USA was selling ice to India. http://www.todayinsci.com/T/Tudor_Frederic/IceTradeAmericaToIndia.htm Buying goods from more than a days journey away was most definitely not an unknown phenomenon.
Trial by jury? Inefficient! Just have an appointed judge make a decision.
Congress? Parliaments? How inefficient compared to having one leader with supreme authority.
Elections to decide on who governs? Inefficient! Much more efficient to crown the eldest son of the last king.
Freedom requires a certain level of government inefficiency. Inefficient government must be small in order to not drain the economy, as it is more expensive to get anything done, producing more freedom. Most of which could be considered illegall according to the 10th amendment. (And 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 9th)
Have you ever considered that perhaps, the constitution is a little out of date?
Yes. If we place any value on the rule of law, amending the constitution is the proper response, not ignoring (or reinterpreting) it.
Do you think they ever conceived that people would be able to buy everything they needed, easily from another state?
This has always been feasible for people who live near the borders. Not so much for others.
Once someone is in a community like this, they will continue to fight for the cause no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.
Yes, because the evidence is all provided by people that have already been accused of being a part of the conspiracy.
I'd much rather have a minuscule and totally unproven chance of a few kids getting autism, which is not fatal, than have a virtual certainty of thousands of kids getting fatal and/or permanently disfiguring diseases like pertussis or polio.
I'm well and truly on the side of vaccination, you only have to look at the health situation in countries that don't have strong vaccination programs. As I understand it though, thimerosal is not an active ingredient of vaccines, but a preservative or something. So that people who don't want thimerosal are not necessarily against vaccination.
I'm not sure what the supposed benefits are to the conspirators of giving people autism though. Election rigging? sure. Control of financial systems or the military? I can see why. But autism? Why would anyone conspire to give people autism? It doesn't seem to make sense.
Not to mention that he lives in a Australia, a country that bases a lot of its defense strategy on military ties to the US. Also the freedom of religion provision in our constitution, among other things, was a concept copied from the US constitution, and the relative ease with which we transitioned from British military rule to a constitutional democracy was likely affected by the earlier British experience of the USA gaining independence.
[sarcasm]Of course, we'd be fine without US military alliances, because the Muslims in Indonesia and other asian countries, and the CCP in China are all peace loving hippies who would only ever want friendly trade, and are champions of free speech.[/sarcasm]
Get real, people.
May wee!