So into which group (the gun-totin' law abiding citizens or the gun-totin' law breaking gangsters) do the loud-mouthed students belong? The loud protesters? Did the Stonewall rioters deserve to be shot? Tazered? John Brown was a "criminal element" when he freed slaves, as was MLK, Jr. when he protested segregation.
Not all "perps" are dangerous, or even necessarily guilty of anything. Saying to cops, "here are some toys, have at it, damn the 4th Amendment, full speed ahead!" is not going to have a healthy effect upon the social fabric.
Have you ever been in agony? Okay, now imagine that feeling connected to an on/off switch that someone else's hand is on. That someone doesn't have your best interests at heart (rather, another set of interests, ranging from maintaining order to getting their rocks off). That someone can legally detain you and hold you immobile, take you into their custody, whose orders under most circumstances you are required to obey, and whose word in a court of law is more readily believed than yours. Guess what, when there are no marks, its their word against yours...and theirs always wins.
Are you getting the picture yet?
Read about the Stanford Prison experiment in case you still maintained rosy notions of the human nature of those given authority.
Nah, it's the one-two combo. Some care but are powerless, whereas the others don't care--ironically making those that do care powerless!
More seriously, it's very easy for a person to off-handedly say to a pollster that they don't approve of Congress; it's quite another for that person to know what Congress is doing in the first place. That disapproval is more probably an expression of general malaise, distrust, or cynicism towards the government in general than it is any sort of appraisal of Congress as an acting body. I'd say of those polled (if past stats hold up) barely a third of respondents even know who their reps in Congress are, probably barely a half could name any rep. Most Americans would be hard pressed to name one piece of legislation passed in the last session, and even fewer to correlate that piece of legislation with its supporters and detractors correctly. Those that care are outnumbered by those that don't, and in that circumstance it is awfully difficult to take statistics that purport to show a true measure of the American people's approval or disapproval of Congress with any more than a grain of salt.
More evidence--in case you needed it--even when Congress' approval rating drops into the doldrums, as it has on several occasions, re-election rates for seated members rarely drops below 90%.
You are missing the point. For such regimes, this device would not be so attractive for crowd control as it would be for torture. Let's see...cheap and easy to reproduce, causes agony, doesn't leave marks. Perfect for extracting confessions and discrediting dissidents!
Come to think of it, considering how trigger-happy some cops around here seem to be with tasers, I'd hate to see what they would do with a device like this if they ever got someone they didn't like (accused rapist, molester, cop killer, smart-mouthed teenager) in the lock-up.
Totally agree with you there, that copyleft is a specific form/implementation of copyright. What the GP was whining about was the idea that copyleft is a made-up word (whatever the hell that means...I'm pretty sure *all* words are made up) and thus somehow a less legitimate term than copyright. I'd say that copyleft is simply a descriptive term that means exactly what you said, and in that context, it is as legitimate as any other properly used word.
Yeah, so does "Google it!", and I chuckle every time I hear a 50+ year old say it. (I don't know why exactly; I think my brain cannot process the absurd incongruity and simply malfunctions). And yet, there it is, in our language, probably to stay, just like Kleenex and Xerox. Sociopath is a really new word, replaced psychopath as preferred terminology and sort of filtered into regular use. 'Brainstorm' is only 50 years old, and upon reflection you must admit it sounds a trifle silly.
Euphemism and neologisms generally sound a bit odd when they are first percolating through the language, and are often only adopted by younger people (Google as a verb being a notable exception).
I'm pretty sure at some point in history "Copyright" was a cute, gimmicky made-up word used to connote the warm feeling of having "rights" to the idea of owning intellectual and artistic content. Then after heavy usage it became accepted as the proper word to refer to the concept, connotative baggage and all. Eventually that usage was even enshrined in the law. People make stuff up all the time; in language, reality is what people want it to be, more than in almost any other area.
I see no reason why "Copyleft" could not follow the same path.
Well, while/.ers are quite aware of DMCA takedown notices, most find their deployment a distasteful tactic at best. I don't think it is an issue of awareness so much as an issue of commitment to principles. While the tactic is normally employed by scary and disreputable corporate drones, the landscape becomes more complicated when it is employed by the so-called "little guys". Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
No, I do not demand equal time; that would be silly, and I agree that lately the demand for equal time for absurd positions has become irritating.
But, I would like the original story told by someone who doesn't have an obvious vested interest in one side. If the vast majority of evidence indicates that that side is correct, then I have no problem with all supplementary material coming from that source. As this purports to be a news posting site, it would be nice if the original articles were, um, news, not op-ed pieces from painfully partisan sources.
Besides, the topic is "polygraph tests being admitted in court", and the source is an article from "antipolygraph.com". What's so tainted about the source? Where's your head, sir? Do I have to draw a picture for you?
I'm not complaining about antipolygraph.com per se. What I was complaining about (and I suppose I should have been more clear) was that the/. editors saw fit to make their site the main citation for the posted story with no supplementary material that perhaps covered the matter from a less, um, tainted perspective.
That's fantastic! That means only people who can't afford better lawyers than the schmucks on TV will be imprisoned, and who cares about them, anyway?
But, to lose the sarcasm for a moment, most defendant protections in criminal law were developed so as to defend even the indigent, since they are the most vulnerable to unfairness seeing as how their lawyers either suck or are overworked (or both). If a method of obtaining evidence is bad enough that a decently trained lawyer can demonstrate its utter ridiculousness, it does not belong in a courtroom in the first place. The competence of the defendant's lawyer should not be depended upon as the single fail-safe employed to determine whether a person should be deprived of their freedom.
Well, it is Natural Selection, which only goes to show how insufficient an excuse natural selection is. Humans are a natural selection pressure force (unless you believe that we were placed here by divine or other supernatural powers...pleh) just like any other species. Humans are unlike most in that we can, if we choose, attempt to gain awareness of what our effects are, and modulate some of them with a bit of effort. That we can change things to accord to some moral conception of proper living within an ecology or not is a different issue, quite beyond the notion that it is, at base natural selection at work.
The problem here is you are identifying a normative impulse in the phrase Natural Selection (natural=good, artifical=bad...roughly) and then complaining that the normative meanings being assigned are insufficient to describe the actual moral consequences of the situation. I'd say it would be better to read "natural selection" as a descriptive term only, and take moral considerations where they belong, which is in identifying when and how human actions can be good or bad.
antipolygraph.com? Well, anyway, this is quite unfortunate, especially if polygraphs are as unreliable as they have always been...and I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest that they aren't.
I would say that the economics of a Mars base in particular depends upon two factors; cheap native Mars fuel (perhaps nuclear fuel) and the economics of asteroid mining. If asteroid mining for raw materials did become practical, a Mars base would have many advantages, such as closer proximity to the belt, as well as lower gravity and thinner atmosphere so take-offs/landings would be cheaper on the whole.
Other than that, I can't see any up-front economic benefit to such an endeavor, though there would likely be many lateral benefits from the research necessary to produce the technologies to make a Mars colony sustainable.
This is picking and choosing at its worst. Ananias' sins seem to be, as the passage indicates, both withholding part of the proceeds from the community and bearing false witness as to the money received from the sale. To focus on the second part of Peter's quote and ignoring the first, you are distorting the context in the very manner you accused me of doing. If it was the case that the only problem was the lie, the first part would not have been an issue and thus would not have been mentioned by Peter as a pertinent element of the offense.
Also, and this is the clincher, the last sentence: "You have not lied to men but to God." really throws a hydrospanner in the works as to the argument that Ananias' crime is publicly misrepresenting the amount from the sale so as to keep some for himself. That, in point of fact, would be a "lie to men". The lie to God is his greed, unfaithfulness to the community, while professing to be a faithful and fully contributory member of the community.
I realize that political scientists are a rare species on/., but since I am a member of that species, I must take exception to your blanket (and unbelievably incorrect) statement that all socialism is coerced. There are three main historically-significant branches of socialism: Utopian or Proto-Socialism, Scientific (Marxist) Socialism, and Christian Socialism. The first was not generally conceived as coercive in its many forms, and the last is not in any sense coercive, since it is an 'opt-in' system, i.e. you choose to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community.
And I do not believe I misrepresented the thrust of the Bible passage quoted above at all. Acts 4:32 literally dismisses the notion of private possession and in the context of the section clearly advocates for communal redistribution of property. The fact that it is voluntary is, as I pointed out above, quite irrelevant to the question as to whether it is socialist.
Acts 4:32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
Sounds like Socialism to me. Call me crazy. Also, given Acts 4:32-35, which is literally the pretext of the story of the deaths of Ananias and Saphira, it is clear from the text that the church community had laid claim to an expectation that all the proceeds from any sale of property would go to the community, as Peter himself reminds Ananias right before he drops dead.
On the other hand, Buddhist monks spend a decent amount of their studies on the subject of humor, so maybe this is simply the single greatest cultural practical joke ever perpetrated...a Zen masterpiece.
I'm sorry, but I've met my share of wacky fundies in my day, and even the most tweaked Dominionist had to think long and hard before considering shooting an abortion doctor, a person, mind you, that they consider to be a murderer. Even suicide bombers don't make their decision to join up on a dime. What I find most ridiculous is not so much the content of the rationalization at the end (which was ridiculous enough ***SPOLIER ALERT***
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...considering it was infanticide on an unimaginable scale, which might or might not lead to human extinction), but rather its speed. He accepted the rationalization far too quickly for it to be believable that a fragile and, dare I say it, slow human mind generated it so soon after that bombshell. Especially since the framework within which he was working (Christianity) would have had to be bent much more severely to accommodate a justification of murdering infant babies, especially since the driving motivation was combating moral decay, which babies of course do not experience (as the Bible itself indicates at several locations).
An interesting story, though the very end I thought stretched the bounds of credibility (not the end twist, but rather the protagonist's reaction to the twist).
Every time I hear or read Kurtweil and other Technocrats wax on about biology becoming a pure information science, with biological entities becoming computable structures, I can't help thinking "boy, are we fucked". And I am not pessimistic by nature.
Not at all. Microsoft undoubtedly realizes that (as some other posters have noted) they themselves may only benefit from the fair use doctrine if it exists, perhaps to wiggle around the GPL for example, hence it must apply to everyone. Thus they would logically act to bring pressure so that the fair use doctrine remains intact.
However, it is not necessarily in their own best interest to make it easier for you to use their software to engage in activities that would traditionally fall under fair use, because such capacities may harm their business relationships with content production and distribution companies, and may laterally increase the chance of intrusive federal regulation re: media player technologies, since the content production industry has a decent amount of sway with legislators, at least here in the US. To avoid either damaged business relationships or governmental interference, Microsoft would do well to make sure the tools it publishes do not make it easier for others to realize their fair use rights.
Hence, Microsoft's actions here are, conceivably, entirely consistent with one another.
I have the right to print a publicly distributed newspaper; however, I can't do that, because I don't own a printing press or the means to rent the use of one. Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean you have the resources or tools to make good on that right. There is no logical conflict between a company defending a legal right for a customer to do something, while also failing to provide the technical means to exercise that right, or even placing technical hurdles to exercise it.
Slashdot Mirror
Get extra points for the Next Gen reference...or at least you should. ;)
So into which group (the gun-totin' law abiding citizens or the gun-totin' law breaking gangsters) do the loud-mouthed students belong? The loud protesters? Did the Stonewall rioters deserve to be shot? Tazered? John Brown was a "criminal element" when he freed slaves, as was MLK, Jr. when he protested segregation.
Not all "perps" are dangerous, or even necessarily guilty of anything. Saying to cops, "here are some toys, have at it, damn the 4th Amendment, full speed ahead!" is not going to have a healthy effect upon the social fabric.
Have you ever been in agony? Okay, now imagine that feeling connected to an on/off switch that someone else's hand is on. That someone doesn't have your best interests at heart (rather, another set of interests, ranging from maintaining order to getting their rocks off). That someone can legally detain you and hold you immobile, take you into their custody, whose orders under most circumstances you are required to obey, and whose word in a court of law is more readily believed than yours. Guess what, when there are no marks, its their word against yours...and theirs always wins.
Are you getting the picture yet?
Read about the Stanford Prison experiment in case you still maintained rosy notions of the human nature of those given authority.
Nah, it's the one-two combo. Some care but are powerless, whereas the others don't care--ironically making those that do care powerless!
More seriously, it's very easy for a person to off-handedly say to a pollster that they don't approve of Congress; it's quite another for that person to know what Congress is doing in the first place. That disapproval is more probably an expression of general malaise, distrust, or cynicism towards the government in general than it is any sort of appraisal of Congress as an acting body. I'd say of those polled (if past stats hold up) barely a third of respondents even know who their reps in Congress are, probably barely a half could name any rep. Most Americans would be hard pressed to name one piece of legislation passed in the last session, and even fewer to correlate that piece of legislation with its supporters and detractors correctly. Those that care are outnumbered by those that don't, and in that circumstance it is awfully difficult to take statistics that purport to show a true measure of the American people's approval or disapproval of Congress with any more than a grain of salt.
More evidence--in case you needed it--even when Congress' approval rating drops into the doldrums, as it has on several occasions, re-election rates for seated members rarely drops below 90%.
You are missing the point. For such regimes, this device would not be so attractive for crowd control as it would be for torture. Let's see...cheap and easy to reproduce, causes agony, doesn't leave marks. Perfect for extracting confessions and discrediting dissidents!
Come to think of it, considering how trigger-happy some cops around here seem to be with tasers, I'd hate to see what they would do with a device like this if they ever got someone they didn't like (accused rapist, molester, cop killer, smart-mouthed teenager) in the lock-up.
Totally agree with you there, that copyleft is a specific form/implementation of copyright. What the GP was whining about was the idea that copyleft is a made-up word (whatever the hell that means...I'm pretty sure *all* words are made up) and thus somehow a less legitimate term than copyright. I'd say that copyleft is simply a descriptive term that means exactly what you said, and in that context, it is as legitimate as any other properly used word.
If there was ever an appropriate time for mod "Funny", the parent's post is it.
Yeah, so does "Google it!", and I chuckle every time I hear a 50+ year old say it. (I don't know why exactly; I think my brain cannot process the absurd incongruity and simply malfunctions). And yet, there it is, in our language, probably to stay, just like Kleenex and Xerox. Sociopath is a really new word, replaced psychopath as preferred terminology and sort of filtered into regular use. 'Brainstorm' is only 50 years old, and upon reflection you must admit it sounds a trifle silly.
Euphemism and neologisms generally sound a bit odd when they are first percolating through the language, and are often only adopted by younger people (Google as a verb being a notable exception).
I'm pretty sure at some point in history "Copyright" was a cute, gimmicky made-up word used to connote the warm feeling of having "rights" to the idea of owning intellectual and artistic content. Then after heavy usage it became accepted as the proper word to refer to the concept, connotative baggage and all. Eventually that usage was even enshrined in the law. People make stuff up all the time; in language, reality is what people want it to be, more than in almost any other area.
I see no reason why "Copyleft" could not follow the same path.
Well, while /.ers are quite aware of DMCA takedown notices, most find their deployment a distasteful tactic at best. I don't think it is an issue of awareness so much as an issue of commitment to principles. While the tactic is normally employed by scary and disreputable corporate drones, the landscape becomes more complicated when it is employed by the so-called "little guys". Takedown notices are just a tool in an arsenal: Is it the tool itself that is the problem, or just the people who usually employ it?
No, I do not demand equal time; that would be silly, and I agree that lately the demand for equal time for absurd positions has become irritating.
But, I would like the original story told by someone who doesn't have an obvious vested interest in one side. If the vast majority of evidence indicates that that side is correct, then I have no problem with all supplementary material coming from that source. As this purports to be a news posting site, it would be nice if the original articles were, um, news, not op-ed pieces from painfully partisan sources.
Besides, the topic is "polygraph tests being admitted in court", and the source is an article from "antipolygraph.com". What's so tainted about the source? Where's your head, sir? Do I have to draw a picture for you?
I'm not complaining about antipolygraph.com per se. What I was complaining about (and I suppose I should have been more clear) was that the /. editors saw fit to make their site the main citation for the posted story with no supplementary material that perhaps covered the matter from a less, um, tainted perspective.
That's fantastic! That means only people who can't afford better lawyers than the schmucks on TV will be imprisoned, and who cares about them, anyway?
But, to lose the sarcasm for a moment, most defendant protections in criminal law were developed so as to defend even the indigent, since they are the most vulnerable to unfairness seeing as how their lawyers either suck or are overworked (or both). If a method of obtaining evidence is bad enough that a decently trained lawyer can demonstrate its utter ridiculousness, it does not belong in a courtroom in the first place. The competence of the defendant's lawyer should not be depended upon as the single fail-safe employed to determine whether a person should be deprived of their freedom.
Well, it is Natural Selection, which only goes to show how insufficient an excuse natural selection is. Humans are a natural selection pressure force (unless you believe that we were placed here by divine or other supernatural powers...pleh) just like any other species. Humans are unlike most in that we can, if we choose, attempt to gain awareness of what our effects are, and modulate some of them with a bit of effort. That we can change things to accord to some moral conception of proper living within an ecology or not is a different issue, quite beyond the notion that it is, at base natural selection at work.
The problem here is you are identifying a normative impulse in the phrase Natural Selection (natural=good, artifical=bad...roughly) and then complaining that the normative meanings being assigned are insufficient to describe the actual moral consequences of the situation. I'd say it would be better to read "natural selection" as a descriptive term only, and take moral considerations where they belong, which is in identifying when and how human actions can be good or bad.
antipolygraph.com? Well, anyway, this is quite unfortunate, especially if polygraphs are as unreliable as they have always been...and I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest that they aren't.
I would say that the economics of a Mars base in particular depends upon two factors; cheap native Mars fuel (perhaps nuclear fuel) and the economics of asteroid mining. If asteroid mining for raw materials did become practical, a Mars base would have many advantages, such as closer proximity to the belt, as well as lower gravity and thinner atmosphere so take-offs/landings would be cheaper on the whole.
Other than that, I can't see any up-front economic benefit to such an endeavor, though there would likely be many lateral benefits from the research necessary to produce the technologies to make a Mars colony sustainable.
This is picking and choosing at its worst. Ananias' sins seem to be, as the passage indicates, both withholding part of the proceeds from the community and bearing false witness as to the money received from the sale. To focus on the second part of Peter's quote and ignoring the first, you are distorting the context in the very manner you accused me of doing. If it was the case that the only problem was the lie, the first part would not have been an issue and thus would not have been mentioned by Peter as a pertinent element of the offense.
Also, and this is the clincher, the last sentence: "You have not lied to men but to God." really throws a hydrospanner in the works as to the argument that Ananias' crime is publicly misrepresenting the amount from the sale so as to keep some for himself. That, in point of fact, would be a "lie to men". The lie to God is his greed, unfaithfulness to the community, while professing to be a faithful and fully contributory member of the community.
I realize that political scientists are a rare species on /., but since I am a member of that species, I must take exception to your blanket (and unbelievably incorrect) statement that all socialism is coerced. There are three main historically-significant branches of socialism: Utopian or Proto-Socialism, Scientific (Marxist) Socialism, and Christian Socialism. The first was not generally conceived as coercive in its many forms, and the last is not in any sense coercive, since it is an 'opt-in' system, i.e. you choose to be a Christian and belong to a Christian community.
And I do not believe I misrepresented the thrust of the Bible passage quoted above at all. Acts 4:32 literally dismisses the notion of private possession and in the context of the section clearly advocates for communal redistribution of property. The fact that it is voluntary is, as I pointed out above, quite irrelevant to the question as to whether it is socialist.
Acts 4:32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.
Sounds like Socialism to me. Call me crazy. Also, given Acts 4:32-35, which is literally the pretext of the story of the deaths of Ananias and Saphira, it is clear from the text that the church community had laid claim to an expectation that all the proceeds from any sale of property would go to the community, as Peter himself reminds Ananias right before he drops dead.
"The parties are advised to chill."
On the other hand, Buddhist monks spend a decent amount of their studies on the subject of humor, so maybe this is simply the single greatest cultural practical joke ever perpetrated...a Zen masterpiece.
I'm sorry, but I've met my share of wacky fundies in my day, and even the most tweaked Dominionist had to think long and hard before considering shooting an abortion doctor, a person, mind you, that they consider to be a murderer. Even suicide bombers don't make their decision to join up on a dime. What I find most ridiculous is not so much the content of the rationalization at the end (which was ridiculous enough ***SPOLIER ALERT***
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...considering it was infanticide on an unimaginable scale, which might or might not lead to human extinction), but rather its speed. He accepted the rationalization far too quickly for it to be believable that a fragile and, dare I say it, slow human mind generated it so soon after that bombshell. Especially since the framework within which he was working (Christianity) would have had to be bent much more severely to accommodate a justification of murdering infant babies, especially since the driving motivation was combating moral decay, which babies of course do not experience (as the Bible itself indicates at several locations).
An interesting story, though the very end I thought stretched the bounds of credibility (not the end twist, but rather the protagonist's reaction to the twist).
Every time I hear or read Kurtweil and other Technocrats wax on about biology becoming a pure information science, with biological entities becoming computable structures, I can't help thinking "boy, are we fucked". And I am not pessimistic by nature.
Not at all. Microsoft undoubtedly realizes that (as some other posters have noted) they themselves may only benefit from the fair use doctrine if it exists, perhaps to wiggle around the GPL for example, hence it must apply to everyone. Thus they would logically act to bring pressure so that the fair use doctrine remains intact.
However, it is not necessarily in their own best interest to make it easier for you to use their software to engage in activities that would traditionally fall under fair use, because such capacities may harm their business relationships with content production and distribution companies, and may laterally increase the chance of intrusive federal regulation re: media player technologies, since the content production industry has a decent amount of sway with legislators, at least here in the US. To avoid either damaged business relationships or governmental interference, Microsoft would do well to make sure the tools it publishes do not make it easier for others to realize their fair use rights.
Hence, Microsoft's actions here are, conceivably, entirely consistent with one another.
You blew a geek fuse; I can smell the fried childhood from here.
I have the right to print a publicly distributed newspaper; however, I can't do that, because I don't own a printing press or the means to rent the use of one. Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean you have the resources or tools to make good on that right. There is no logical conflict between a company defending a legal right for a customer to do something, while also failing to provide the technical means to exercise that right, or even placing technical hurdles to exercise it.
Nobody said it would be easy.