As a church, if you replace the ads with ones that you think are better, you're keeping people ignorant. An empowered person is one who chooses to believe, in this case, in the Jeebus. There should be no force, there needs to be no obscuring of other world views. Wait... so are you saying that at church watching the superbowl is the only time people can learn about beer? I'm sure the networks would love to say that switching advertisements violates all sorts of copyright and licensing agreements, but it's hardly about making people ignorant.
Certainly I imagine she would make some money. But in a patronage society, you have to tailor your works to attract wealthy patrons, and they may not always be so enjoyed by the population at large.
Also, without copyright, the works can be redistributed largely and cheaply, without payment of any royalties, making profits for publishers very small. I think books would be printed in only very small editions.
I'd also like to point out that its good to have a civil discussion about this issue. I appreciate the tone of interest rather than hostility, and honestly wish that more such conversations could be carried out as part of our civic discourse, so, thank you for that.
Indeed. While I disagree with your position, I respect it.
I'm a software developer and F/OSS consultant. I make my living off of writing code that's available for free, because I am the person best able to implement it in a given environment, add features, and fix it if something goes wrong. I also sell support services for other projects (here, if anybody is interested) and give we're starting a program to give back between 10 and 20 percent of the value of any bid to the project that generated it.
Long story short: paying for people gets you what you want when you want it. Paying for imaginary property gets your ropes made of sand. That's great for you, but not universally applicable. For example, consider the Harry Potter series. Although I would hardly classify this as fine literature, millions of people have obtained considerable enjoyment from reading these books. But, it seems fairly clear J.K. Rowling is in it for the money. If you get rid of IP, she doesn't write the books, and the millions of people who found they valued the books more than their money don't get the enjoyment they do with copyrights.
Well if you had agreed to pay him to sing in the first place, then you deserve to be forced to pay him. Well, that's the issue isn't it? I don't agree that you have a right to the profits of the past based on a concept of property that no longer applies. But there are an awful lot of people who make creative works for the express purpose of selling them. Take away this "concept of property that no longer applies" and they lose their incentive. Suddenly the world is a lot poorer place.
If a iPhone can receive an update that unbricks it, then it was never bricked in the first place. Dude... please. My MacBook got bricked once, and after many hours of struggling in vain, I was able to locate the power cord, whereupon it was instantly unbricked!
On the other hand, not all Apple interfaces are rubbish. I was very impressed by Xcode when I made another abortive attempt at using it the other day.
I particularly love the way that you can add files to projects by drag-and-drop! Oh, wait, no you can't, you have to add them with an "Add file" dialog. Interesting... drag and drop is the way I've always done it...
But at least you can add a whole bunch at once! Oh, wait, no you can't, you can only add one at a time.
Interesting... drag and drop multiple is how I usually do it...
But at least the dialog box remembers where the files were so you don't have to navigate your directory structure again and again for every single file! Oh, wait, no it doesn't, it always goes right back to the project directory.
And that's before we get onto the really fun details, like the only way to change the build settings for your project is to right-click on the build target name and select the intuitively named "Get Info" option.
These I'll give you.
Apple, king of user interface design? Don't make me laugh. OS 9 was very good, but it's been downhill all the way since they abandoned usability in favour of useless eye candy. Well, I didn't like Aqua at first, but after I was using it for awhile, it kind of grew on me. Now Platinum just looks out of place.
Resolution too low. I wouldn't buy a computer under 900 lines of resolution. Depends what you're using it for. I use a MacBook (same 1280x800 resolution) as my primary computer and like it very much. When I need more resolution, I dual-screen it.
Speaking of Smultron, can you tell me how to get it to not jump the cursor halfway up the screen when you scroll down and the cursor hits the bottom of the current screen of text? Very annoying.
I'm afraid I don't know how to do that. It seems to be the default functionality of OS X text editing, as a quick test shows XCode and TextEdit have the same behavior, although TextWrangler does not.
There are plenty of decent editors on Windows, you don't have to use VS.
Ah, yes. I had edited my post, and accidentally deleted that part. For a standalone editor I generally use Crimson Editor. Although its feature list is nominally similar, it just isn't as nice to use.
Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance.
I am a programmer. I use a Mac to write the software. Unfortunately I have to use Windows to compile it (proprietary language), but at least I can use the much nicer editors that are available on the Mac (TextWrangler, Smultron).
VS is a piece of crap. The only thing it has that is remotely better than these Mac editors is code segment collapsing. Everything else is far worse. KDevelop isn't much better.
The scary thing is that there is absolutely no way to oversight this. These officers could start plucking people for absolutely any reason they want, they are being asked to make a value judgment with an expected accuracy of 1%!!
And so what? If they pluck more people, it just means the arrest rate will go down, unless the 1% that are arrested are representative of the population as a whole.
I once got pulled to the side because I forgot I had a nail clipper in my pocket. After setting off the metal detector twice in a row, they pulled me aside, patted me down, and sent me on my way. Sure, it was kind of awkward, but really no big deal.
The two camps are victims of their own earlier success with DVD. The standard DVDs offered a quantum leap in quality from the picture and sound of VHS videotape
From Wikipedia: In physics, a quantum leap or quantum jump is a change of an electron from one energy state to another within an atom.
So a quantum leap is a very, very tiny change, usually smaller than a nanometer. If the writer is stupid enough to think a sub-nanometer change means something big, why would one take anything he has to say seriously? If you look at a quantum leap on its own scale (i.e., atomic scale), that's a pretty big jump. Besides which, the point is not the size of the jump, but that it instantaneously transferred from one state to another, without moving between them. Just like DVD was not a slow evolution of gradual improvement over VHS... it instantaneously improved the standard. In other words, it was a quantum leap.
Taking drugst to improve your performance is cheating. Of course the ones doing it allways deny this. Befere that they deny taking anyting. It is typical for the mid-set... Hmm... looks like taking drugs is the opposite of cheating...:)
OP, I'll get to you later today, but I wanted to address this:
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
The problem, from the OP's perspective, is that the law does in fact prohibit adults from pointing loaded guns at themselves and pulling the trigger. (to the extent that suicide can be illegal in the first place -- police and others can forcibly prevent you.)
Or, in other words, if we accept that action X is prima facia evidence of irrationality, why allow anyone to do it, even adults?
For smoking, I don't think you can say it is prima facie evidence of irrationality. If you have a reasonable understanding of the consequences, you may decide the benefits are worthwhile to you. But children cannot be expected to have a reasonable understanding of the consequences.
Back to the gun example, suppose instead of shooting oneself in the head it's just blowing one's thumb off. The argument still stands. An adult is theoretically capable of understanding the consequences of pointing a loaded gun at his thumb and pulling a trigger. A child may not be capable of fully comprehending the consequences.
No, it contradicts your point: you (presumably!) can see why it's justified to force a 1-yr-old to eat five times a day, but not to force a grown-up to eat because he skipped breakfast. Or don't you?
Ah OK, but I think that's different because a 1-year-old is pretty much just a passive recipient of what their parents feed them, so it's their parents deciding when and how much -- and nobody forces the parent to force-feed their kid 5 times a day. The laws that informally regulate how much and how often parents have to feed their kid, are motivated by a threshold of harm, just like the laws that regulate at what point you can force an adult to eat if they're in danger of starving themselves.
1) Rational person: After five years, he suffers the consequences of smoking *and has known they would happen all along and made other decisions with this in mind*. (e.g. budgeted more for health care, anti-addiction medicine, cosmetic surgery, etc.)
2) Irrational person: He underestimates the costs of smoking, and arrives at the future date, five years later, suffering consequences he hadn't planned on bearing.
Similarly, a rational person would be better at predicting what he would value at a later date, and at allocating resources robust across a broader range of personal values.
It seems this boils down to: The costs are less if you're rational enough to see them coming. (Or as you wrote later, "irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed".) Well the costs of medical care, anti-addiction meds, etc. are not less on paper, whether or not you see them coming, so let's assume this refers to a more abstract notion of "cost" -- perhaps the stress of getting hit with surprise fees later on.
But even if you assume adults have greater foresight and foresight brings the costs down, there's still an inconsistency, because whatever harm is done by 1 cigarette to a minor without foresight, there is again some number N cigarettes that does an equivalent amount of harm to an adult with foresight... in which case, why don't we ban the adult from smoking that number. (And yes, it would be far less than the threshold you mentioned, where an adult smokes enough all at once to nearly kill themselves.)
Also, note that this would justify letting kids smoke if they could prove that they were setting aside a trust fund for their future smoking-related health costs, not a position that you hear advocated a lot:)
I think it's more that the child isn't capable of being fully cognizant of the consequences of smoking. An adult should be. And should be allowed to make his own decisions. It's not really a question of societal or personal cost.
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
Of course, I was once running OS X for quite awhile with no firewall, because I had turned it off for some reason (debugging X11 connection, I think), and forgot to turn it back on. Still no problems when I realized it was off several months later.
...that brings up a question I've had for some time. It's quite common to hear about people switching from PCs to Macs. What about the other direction?What percentage of people switch from Macs to PCs. I would wager that figure is extremely low.
I imagine most people who switch from Mac to PC originally switched from PC to Mac, but just didn't like the change, so they went back to what they were familiar with.
"Classically the associated diseases are the following: rheumatoid arthritis, menopause, hypothyroidism, acromegaly, end-stage renal disease, pregnancy, and obesity. Even then the data is not clear that the repetitive use contributes any."
Menopause is a disease? Pregnancy is a disease? No. But ending a sentence with the word 'any' is evidence of poor journalistic skill. Holy crap! Using a keyboard all day causes pregnancy?! I wondered why all my male coworkers were going on maternity leave!
I can demonstrate that stimulating for movement is linked to the muscle, and color sensation is linked to photon hitting the retina, in the absence of direct stimulation by electrode.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly I imagine she would make some money. But in a patronage society, you have to tailor your works to attract wealthy patrons, and they may not always be so enjoyed by the population at large.
Also, without copyright, the works can be redistributed largely and cheaply, without payment of any royalties, making profits for publishers very small. I think books would be printed in only very small editions.
I'd also like to point out that its good to have a civil discussion about this issue. I appreciate the tone of interest rather than hostility, and honestly wish that more such conversations could be carried out as part of our civic discourse, so, thank you for that. Indeed. While I disagree with your position, I respect it.Long story short: paying for people gets you what you want when you want it. Paying for imaginary property gets your ropes made of sand. That's great for you, but not universally applicable. For example, consider the Harry Potter series. Although I would hardly classify this as fine literature, millions of people have obtained considerable enjoyment from reading these books. But, it seems fairly clear J.K. Rowling is in it for the money. If you get rid of IP, she doesn't write the books, and the millions of people who found they valued the books more than their money don't get the enjoyment they do with copyrights.
I particularly love the way that you can add files to projects by drag-and-drop! Oh, wait, no you can't, you have to add them with an "Add file" dialog.
Interesting... drag and drop is the way I've always done it... But at least you can add a whole bunch at once! Oh, wait, no you can't, you can only add one at a time.
Interesting... drag and drop multiple is how I usually do it... But at least the dialog box remembers where the files were so you don't have to navigate your directory structure again and again for every single file! Oh, wait, no it doesn't, it always goes right back to the project directory.
And that's before we get onto the really fun details, like the only way to change the build settings for your project is to right-click on the build target name and select the intuitively named "Get Info" option.
These I'll give you. Apple, king of user interface design? Don't make me laugh. OS 9 was very good, but it's been downhill all the way since they abandoned usability in favour of useless eye candy. Well, I didn't like Aqua at first, but after I was using it for awhile, it kind of grew on me. Now Platinum just looks out of place.
Aha! So that's what bricking really means!
I'm afraid I don't know how to do that. It seems to be the default functionality of OS X text editing, as a quick test shows XCode and TextEdit have the same behavior, although TextWrangler does not.
Ah, yes. I had edited my post, and accidentally deleted that part. For a standalone editor I generally use Crimson Editor. Although its feature list is nominally similar, it just isn't as nice to use.
I am a programmer. I use a Mac to write the software. Unfortunately I have to use Windows to compile it (proprietary language), but at least I can use the much nicer editors that are available on the Mac (TextWrangler, Smultron).
VS is a piece of crap. The only thing it has that is remotely better than these Mac editors is code segment collapsing. Everything else is far worse. KDevelop isn't much better.
The scary thing is that there is absolutely no way to oversight this. These officers could start plucking people for absolutely any reason they want, they are being asked to make a value judgment with an expected accuracy of 1%!!
And so what? If they pluck more people, it just means the arrest rate will go down, unless the 1% that are arrested are representative of the population as a whole.
I once got pulled to the side because I forgot I had a nail clipper in my pocket. After setting off the metal detector twice in a row, they pulled me aside, patted me down, and sent me on my way. Sure, it was kind of awkward, but really no big deal.
From Wikipedia:
In physics, a quantum leap or quantum jump is a change of an electron from one energy state to another within an atom.
So a quantum leap is a very, very tiny change, usually smaller than a nanometer. If the writer is stupid enough to think a sub-nanometer change means something big, why would one take anything he has to say seriously? If you look at a quantum leap on its own scale (i.e., atomic scale), that's a pretty big jump. Besides which, the point is not the size of the jump, but that it instantaneously transferred from one state to another, without moving between them. Just like DVD was not a slow evolution of gradual improvement over VHS... it instantaneously improved the standard. In other words, it was a quantum leap.
For the record, pi^(e*i) is approximately -0.99955 + 0.02989i
For the further record, I found that using some complex math software I wrote in high school. :) (Why yes, I am a nerd... why do you ask?)
wait... I thought your new slogan was going to be "Americans who missed the boat"?
That's why we all need our own tank. And helicopter gunship.
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
The problem, from the OP's perspective, is that the law does in fact prohibit adults from pointing loaded guns at themselves and pulling the trigger. (to the extent that suicide can be illegal in the first place -- police and others can forcibly prevent you.)
Or, in other words, if we accept that action X is prima facia evidence of irrationality, why allow anyone to do it, even adults?
For smoking, I don't think you can say it is prima facie evidence of irrationality. If you have a reasonable understanding of the consequences, you may decide the benefits are worthwhile to you. But children cannot be expected to have a reasonable understanding of the consequences.
Back to the gun example, suppose instead of shooting oneself in the head it's just blowing one's thumb off. The argument still stands. An adult is theoretically capable of understanding the consequences of pointing a loaded gun at his thumb and pulling a trigger. A child may not be capable of fully comprehending the consequences.
No, it contradicts your point: you (presumably!) can see why it's justified to force a 1-yr-old to eat five times a day, but not to force a grown-up to eat because he skipped breakfast. Or don't you?
Ah OK, but I think that's different because a 1-year-old is pretty much just a passive recipient of what their parents feed them, so it's their parents deciding when and how much -- and nobody forces the parent to force-feed their kid 5 times a day. The laws that informally regulate how much and how often parents have to feed their kid, are motivated by a threshold of harm, just like the laws that regulate at what point you can force an adult to eat if they're in danger of starving themselves.
1) Rational person: After five years, he suffers the consequences of smoking *and has known they would happen all along and made other decisions with this in mind*. (e.g. budgeted more for health care, anti-addiction medicine, cosmetic surgery, etc.) 2) Irrational person: He underestimates the costs of smoking, and arrives at the future date, five years later, suffering consequences he hadn't planned on bearing. Similarly, a rational person would be better at predicting what he would value at a later date, and at allocating resources robust across a broader range of personal values.It seems this boils down to: The costs are less if you're rational enough to see them coming. (Or as you wrote later, "irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed".) Well the costs of medical care, anti-addiction meds, etc. are not less on paper, whether or not you see them coming, so let's assume this refers to a more abstract notion of "cost" -- perhaps the stress of getting hit with surprise fees later on.
But even if you assume adults have greater foresight and foresight brings the costs down, there's still an inconsistency, because whatever harm is done by 1 cigarette to a minor without foresight, there is again some number N cigarettes that does an equivalent amount of harm to an adult with foresight... in which case, why don't we ban the adult from smoking that number. (And yes, it would be far less than the threshold you mentioned, where an adult smokes enough all at once to nearly kill themselves.)
Also, note that this would justify letting kids smoke if they could prove that they were setting aside a trust fund for their future smoking-related health costs, not a position that you hear advocated a lot :)
I think it's more that the child isn't capable of being fully cognizant of the consequences of smoking. An adult should be. And should be allowed to make his own decisions. It's not really a question of societal or personal cost.
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
Of course, I was once running OS X for quite awhile with no firewall, because I had turned it off for some reason (debugging X11 connection, I think), and forgot to turn it back on. Still no problems when I realized it was off several months later.
in which FEMA employees posed as reporters
Maybe one of these days FEMA employees could start impersonating first responders.
Probably not how you mean... they'll let the real first responders take care of it, then impersonate them and take the credit.
It doesn't matter what you would prefer, it matters what the Iraqis would prefer.
Indeed. But I don't think the Iraqis are expressing a preference for having Saddam back in charge.
...that brings up a question I've had for some time. It's quite common to hear about people switching from PCs to Macs. What about the other direction?What percentage of people switch from Macs to PCs. I would wager that figure is extremely low.I imagine most people who switch from Mac to PC originally switched from PC to Mac, but just didn't like the change, so they went back to what they were familiar with.
Menopause is a disease? Pregnancy is a disease? No. But ending a sentence with the word 'any' is evidence of poor journalistic skill.
Holy crap! Using a keyboard all day causes pregnancy?! I wondered why all my male coworkers were going on maternity leave!
But can you prove it's not just all in your mind?