Discrimination is choice / having an opinion. It may be a dumb choice / opinion or a smart one - but that is irrelevant. By saying people aren't allowed to discriminate, you're saying that they shouldn't be allowed to make choices or have their own opinions and instead should be making the "choice" (or have the "opinion") of whatever group is creating the guidelines by which people should operate.
Right, anything to deny people's responsibility for their actions. It sure is nice to live in a world where just because your life sucks you have superior rights to everyone else.
Scientists work for a company and expect to be paid in relation to their education (which they also put money from said salary to pay off their loans and such). That means that the company DOES pay for the education of the scientists.
I'm not going to waste the time reading up on who did the research (because it doesn't matter), but if you want to bitch about "stealing money" the better question is "Why should the US government be allowed to steal from taxpayers to pay for this research for a disease that is easily prevented by not doing things that can cause it?"
You want to do your part to stop the spread of AIDS? It's really simple. Don't shoot up or screw everyone you meet. If you're going to have sex, make sure they're clean AND that you use a condom.
I also love how I get modded a troll for standing up for freedom. Fuckin-a man! I've already had my account banned for 6 months before, lets see if I can do it again for standing up to the masses of asses.
AIDS isn't some disease you catch through the air by luck, it isn't something that you can accidentally get through eating infected / undercooked meat in a restaurant. You have to physically perform an action which every semi-intelligent person knows carries the risk of AIDS (unprotected sex, sex with a stranger, sharing needles, etc) to get AIDS. It's only a "needed" drug because they went out and did something stupid to get the disease. Remember what Darwin said - survival of the fittest.
Yes, because it didn't cost anything to do all the tons and tons of research and testing (not to mention the cost of education for all the scientists) to produce the drug.
This is why I hate slashdot. It's full of communist bastards who think that just because they want something that they have a right to take it by force. Without capitalism, that drug wouldn't exist.
Go ahead, mod me down for standing up for freedom. You'll only prove my point.
Except that companies are run by people and if person A says "I'll pay you X amount of money but you can't *blah blah*" and person B says "ok", there is nothing wrong with that because they both voluntarily agreed to it. I hate NDA's and all that crap - but no one is forcing you to work there if you don't like the terms.
Exactly. CCA is nothing but a pain (thankfully I no longer live on campus so I don't have to waste my time fighting with it / run extra processes). The main reason my college started requiring it was because Johnny Frat-moron couldn't figure out how to download his porn without getting a thousand viruses (because something simple like getting anti-virus and setting it for auto-updates is too complicated for a frat guy). They could've solved the problem by banning fraternity members from having computers - and they'd have saved everyone else a lot of trouble!
Oh come on you fuckers - get a sense of humor. I love how someone says something completely inane and gets a "Funny" mod - I actually make a joke off of him insulting someone (which would ACTUALLY be a troll) and get modded a troll instead.
And of course you're ignoring the fact that wireless is significantly slower than a wired connection merely to promote government run everything. If you want to share with your neighbors, get a wireless router and let them mooch for free or charge them half of what the bill is.
"which means that financially it's better now to have government- and community-provided Internet connectivity."
Right - it's financially better for someone who doesn't want internet or broadband (because they either don't want to pay for it or don't feel a need for it) to pay for YOU to have internet.
There is no such thing as "government funded" or "free" when it comes to government projects - all it means is that EVERYONE is forced to pay for it, regardless of if they want it or not.
Uh.....except they're not a monopoly, they're merely a successful business that politicians use as an easy cash cow due to their massive resources. I have no brand loyalty to MS, and if they were a monopoly there wouldn't be ANY competition - but since you use/. I'm sure you've heard of this little thing called Linux? No? Well, it's an OS that runs on PC's (that box you have on your desk running windows...yes, it can run things other than Windows) and guess what? It's FREE! And there are pretty much infinite variations of it so you can get it just the way you want it. Sorry, but people whining just because a company makes a product (regardless of if it's the best product) and then successfully markets it to end up becoming one of, if not the, biggest companies in the world is just a bunch of sore losers. The only thing keeping me from permanently switching to Linux (I've run it before) is that I'm a gamer, so I'll always run Windows on at least one machine until there is a distro of Linux that can easily run all of my games. Oh, fyi, I've never paid a cent for MS stuff and I use lots of open source, so the "You love MS!!!" crap that people will want to try to stick on me is bull. I just think it's bogus to criminalize a company just for being successful. MS gets sued for pre-installing media player and IE while no one says boo to Apple for pre-installing iEverything - why? MS has money, Apple doesn't even come close to being a cash cow for the government to milk.
"On the surface it may seem worthy, but new technologies may be making internal combustion engines obsolete in the next decade"
Sorry, but as a person who loves new technology as well as cars, I can tell you that short of Vulcans landing on earth to give our technology a jump, we'll still be using IC for quite awhile. Yes, there are other things to make cars go, but they're not practical. It'll be a long time before technology advances to where non-IC cars are feasible.
So pointing out that CO2 is a necessary part of life and that labeling it as a pollutant is crap is "lying"? As far as I know, radon is not vital for life - CO2 is. Also, even if we just went with your great plan of eliminating human made devices that release CO2 - well, hello Dark Ages, how we've missed you for the past 1,000 years. There's a huge difference between being inefficient with production and saying that anything that releases C02 is bad. Also, I said "eliminate CO2" as in ENTIRELY for the morons that want to label it as an environmental hazard - not eliminate human inventions that release CO2. But thanks for lying to prove that you really have no ground to stand on other than hating technology.
Oh, and that computer you used to post this crap - chances are the electricity to power came from those "evil" CO2 releasing inventions of man. Don't try to order others to not use modern technology "for the planet" unless you're willing to give it up first.
"It is illegal to speed. That in and of itself isn't news to anyone...we've been getting speeding tickets for years."
Actually, up until recently, it wasn't illegal everywhere in the country (Montana I think it was didn't have speed limits until like a year or so ago). And why do we have speed limits? Almost everyone who knows about cars will tell you that speed doesn't kill - poor driving does. We have speed limits to generate money for the government (because 30+% from your paycheck just isn't enough!).
"There is something you need to consider, though. The highest speed limit I've ever heard of in the USA is 75mph."
Yes......but do you know anything about how a car works? If you're relying on the capabilities of the engine or transmission to keep it from going over a certain speed, then you are completely wasting fuel because the engine will be running extremely high rpms at a mere 75mph.
"There's no need for this to be the standard in cars distributed to the general public. If the car manufacturers want to make cars that go over 100mph, keep it to the realm of muscle cars that manage to get 15mpg."
A 2006 BMW 325 (I haven't checked up on the new 328 and 335) had a top speed of around 140mph AND honest to god would get 30 mpg at 75mph (epa ratings test highway at 45mph) - if you dropped speed to 60mph (where it is in some places) you jump to about 37 mpg. These aren't fiction, these are actual results by a guy using the trip computer on his car seeing what that BMW was capable of when it comes to fuel consumption.
"I'd much rather have an econobox that has a top speed of 80mph (just so I can accelerate around the people not actually driving the speed limit), gets 100mpg, and is relatively cheap to purchase and maintain."
VW made one like that a few years back. It's called the Lupo. It got 78 mpg (US) and 93 mpg (Imperial). This is a VERY small and lightweight diesel car. It didn't sell because it made a Mini Cooper look like a Hummer and was very slow.
"And if that becomes the standard from all manufacturers, as opposed to the beefy cars we have, then people will just have to deal with it, or pay the extra money for a car with some kick - which is completely fine by me."
That's how things have been pretty much for the entire history of cars. Why do you think you pay more for a Mustang than for a Civic? Why do you think a Ferrari costs more than a house? Yes, companies all around are increasing power because only morons want to take forever just to get up to speed, but you still (normally) pay a higher price for a higher performing car.
CO2 is a naturally occurring gas. Volcanoes, vents in the earth, every living creature, decomposition, etc all release CO2 into the atmosphere. Plants require CO2 as well and without plants humans and animals cease to exist. So yea, lets get right on eliminating CO2 and the subsequent annihilation of the human race.
"We've shown that every prerequisite for life can be synthesized by processes known to happen on Earth prior to life."
And that "experiment" has been proven to be a fake and does not work if you try to re-create it.
Before you go on some rant about me being a "religious fanatic" - I have no religious bias keeping me from believing in macro-evolution. All I want is some solid evidence. Evolution is statistically impossible. Sure, there may be that.00000000001% chance or whatever that is did happen, but it takes WAY more blind faith to think that the dice might've rolled JUST RIGHT trillions of times than it does to believe in the FSM. When I see fossils that truly back up macro-evolution as opposed to huge creative leaps between the fossil and the creature that TIME or whatever group is showing the "this is what the creature looked like" article and biology textbooks no longer require faked "experiments" as proof of evolution, I'll consider it.
I know I'll get modded down for defying the hive mind here, but on something so fantastically outrageous, I want real proof before I'll believe it. I'd say the same thing if we were talking about the transporter from the starship Enterprise or if someone said they found a way to modify their DNA to make themselves bullet-proof. Are these things possible? Sure, but they're incredibly unlikely. I don't have an explanation for how things came to be and all that. However, until there is real, 100% no one (even psycho nutjobs) can deny this proof, I place macro-evolution in with the Bible and mythology as just another story for how the world came to be.
You're ignoring the real reason for all of these lawsuits. It's not "stealing" (which copyright infringement isn't) that caused this - it's the fact that (regardless of if people were getting music for free), people got so fed up with being overcharged for music that they started to stop buying music. Even if they didn't have the free music, the RIAA would still be out the money. That's what the lawsuits are really about - the fact that they think they deserve money, even if they aren't selling anything worthwhile.
I had no problem having to spend 20 - 30 minutes here and there tracking down other codecs and such I needed for my common media uses, but it just really turned me off that after hours of searching I couldn't find a way to watch stuff from my favorite websites (like Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie) or watch movie previews on it. If I just wanted something to program on, type papers, and do web browsing, I'd totally use it. I just think that for a distro like Ubuntu that's supposed to be so user-friendly and ready out of the box (or in this case out of the iso) for ordinary people to use that it's kind of dumb for them not to include more media apps / codecs (that are at least optional to install). If they did, they'd probably get a lot more average people to use Ubuntu - which is sort of necessary if they ever want to make MS irrelevant.
I tried using Ubuntu a few months back. It was pretty nice, but there were certain basic things (such as installing quicktime to view movie trailers) that are not easy to do with Ubuntu and I couldn't find anyone online or in person who did know how to do them. Overall though, it's pretty nice. However, it's still not ready (unless they've changed the things I disliked).
The ones complaining about how a college education is useless are the ones that are 40 years old, living at home, and have a 100% accurate replica of the original Enterprise in their basement to play in. They have their own "business" doing some basic HTML / XML programming.....it's not much, but it's enough to buy their action figures each month.
My belief in NASA ended once I started learning about their constant screw ups and their recurring "oops, we just wasted $10 billion because Bob on the third floor had the calculus wrong and now the space probe is useless". Honestly, scrap NASA and let the private industry do it cheaper and better.
Actually, that's been done. Car and Driver took out a Camry, Escape, and I forget what other cars and their hybrid counterparts. They used regular driving habits on identical courses and maintained the same speed, etc. When the numbers came in, the Escape Hybrid was the hybrid that had the largest % increase in mpg over it's gasoline counterpart and just to recoup the extra money paid to get a hybrid you'd have to drive it over 97,000 miles. So, that pretty much kills the whole "you save money" BS people attach to buying a hybrid. If you want a car with good mpg, buy a diesel with a manual transmission and as few useless options (heated seats and all that crap) as possible.
Also, BMW has a MUCH better solution for a hybrid car - instead of using a gas/electric hybrid they built a gas/steam hybrid. It boosts mpg by 20% and has zero maintenance costs and doesn't increase pollution from disposing of a battery. If they'd sell a diesel/steam hybrid I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
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Discrimination is choice / having an opinion. It may be a dumb choice / opinion or a smart one - but that is irrelevant. By saying people aren't allowed to discriminate, you're saying that they shouldn't be allowed to make choices or have their own opinions and instead should be making the "choice" (or have the "opinion") of whatever group is creating the guidelines by which people should operate.
Right, anything to deny people's responsibility for their actions. It sure is nice to live in a world where just because your life sucks you have superior rights to everyone else.
I'm not going to waste the time reading up on who did the research (because it doesn't matter), but if you want to bitch about "stealing money" the better question is "Why should the US government be allowed to steal from taxpayers to pay for this research for a disease that is easily prevented by not doing things that can cause it?"
You want to do your part to stop the spread of AIDS? It's really simple. Don't shoot up or screw everyone you meet. If you're going to have sex, make sure they're clean AND that you use a condom.
I also love how I get modded a troll for standing up for freedom. Fuckin-a man! I've already had my account banned for 6 months before, lets see if I can do it again for standing up to the masses of asses.
AIDS isn't some disease you catch through the air by luck, it isn't something that you can accidentally get through eating infected / undercooked meat in a restaurant. You have to physically perform an action which every semi-intelligent person knows carries the risk of AIDS (unprotected sex, sex with a stranger, sharing needles, etc) to get AIDS. It's only a "needed" drug because they went out and did something stupid to get the disease. Remember what Darwin said - survival of the fittest.
Yes, because it didn't cost anything to do all the tons and tons of research and testing (not to mention the cost of education for all the scientists) to produce the drug.
This is why I hate slashdot. It's full of communist bastards who think that just because they want something that they have a right to take it by force. Without capitalism, that drug wouldn't exist.
Go ahead, mod me down for standing up for freedom. You'll only prove my point.
If Vista ate kittens, I'd actually buy it. I freaking hate cats!
Uh.........correct me if I'm wrong, but if Walk died in 1966 and the protection term is life + 50, then wouldn't it still be protected until 2016?
Except that companies are run by people and if person A says "I'll pay you X amount of money but you can't *blah blah*" and person B says "ok", there is nothing wrong with that because they both voluntarily agreed to it. I hate NDA's and all that crap - but no one is forcing you to work there if you don't like the terms.
Exactly. CCA is nothing but a pain (thankfully I no longer live on campus so I don't have to waste my time fighting with it / run extra processes). The main reason my college started requiring it was because Johnny Frat-moron couldn't figure out how to download his porn without getting a thousand viruses (because something simple like getting anti-virus and setting it for auto-updates is too complicated for a frat guy). They could've solved the problem by banning fraternity members from having computers - and they'd have saved everyone else a lot of trouble!
Oh come on you fuckers - get a sense of humor. I love how someone says something completely inane and gets a "Funny" mod - I actually make a joke off of him insulting someone (which would ACTUALLY be a troll) and get modded a troll instead.
You have to admit you walked right into that one!
"which means that financially it's better now to have government- and community-provided Internet connectivity." Right - it's financially better for someone who doesn't want internet or broadband (because they either don't want to pay for it or don't feel a need for it) to pay for YOU to have internet.
There is no such thing as "government funded" or "free" when it comes to government projects - all it means is that EVERYONE is forced to pay for it, regardless of if they want it or not.
Uh.....except they're not a monopoly, they're merely a successful business that politicians use as an easy cash cow due to their massive resources. I have no brand loyalty to MS, and if they were a monopoly there wouldn't be ANY competition - but since you use /. I'm sure you've heard of this little thing called Linux? No? Well, it's an OS that runs on PC's (that box you have on your desk running windows...yes, it can run things other than Windows) and guess what? It's FREE! And there are pretty much infinite variations of it so you can get it just the way you want it. Sorry, but people whining just because a company makes a product (regardless of if it's the best product) and then successfully markets it to end up becoming one of, if not the, biggest companies in the world is just a bunch of sore losers. The only thing keeping me from permanently switching to Linux (I've run it before) is that I'm a gamer, so I'll always run Windows on at least one machine until there is a distro of Linux that can easily run all of my games. Oh, fyi, I've never paid a cent for MS stuff and I use lots of open source, so the "You love MS!!!" crap that people will want to try to stick on me is bull. I just think it's bogus to criminalize a company just for being successful. MS gets sued for pre-installing media player and IE while no one says boo to Apple for pre-installing iEverything - why? MS has money, Apple doesn't even come close to being a cash cow for the government to milk.
"On the surface it may seem worthy, but new technologies may be making internal combustion engines obsolete in the next decade" Sorry, but as a person who loves new technology as well as cars, I can tell you that short of Vulcans landing on earth to give our technology a jump, we'll still be using IC for quite awhile. Yes, there are other things to make cars go, but they're not practical. It'll be a long time before technology advances to where non-IC cars are feasible.
Oh, and that computer you used to post this crap - chances are the electricity to power came from those "evil" CO2 releasing inventions of man. Don't try to order others to not use modern technology "for the planet" unless you're willing to give it up first.
"It is illegal to speed. That in and of itself isn't news to anyone...we've been getting speeding tickets for years." Actually, up until recently, it wasn't illegal everywhere in the country (Montana I think it was didn't have speed limits until like a year or so ago). And why do we have speed limits? Almost everyone who knows about cars will tell you that speed doesn't kill - poor driving does. We have speed limits to generate money for the government (because 30+% from your paycheck just isn't enough!). "There is something you need to consider, though. The highest speed limit I've ever heard of in the USA is 75mph." Yes......but do you know anything about how a car works? If you're relying on the capabilities of the engine or transmission to keep it from going over a certain speed, then you are completely wasting fuel because the engine will be running extremely high rpms at a mere 75mph. "There's no need for this to be the standard in cars distributed to the general public. If the car manufacturers want to make cars that go over 100mph, keep it to the realm of muscle cars that manage to get 15mpg." A 2006 BMW 325 (I haven't checked up on the new 328 and 335) had a top speed of around 140mph AND honest to god would get 30 mpg at 75mph (epa ratings test highway at 45mph) - if you dropped speed to 60mph (where it is in some places) you jump to about 37 mpg. These aren't fiction, these are actual results by a guy using the trip computer on his car seeing what that BMW was capable of when it comes to fuel consumption. "I'd much rather have an econobox that has a top speed of 80mph (just so I can accelerate around the people not actually driving the speed limit), gets 100mpg, and is relatively cheap to purchase and maintain." VW made one like that a few years back. It's called the Lupo. It got 78 mpg (US) and 93 mpg (Imperial). This is a VERY small and lightweight diesel car. It didn't sell because it made a Mini Cooper look like a Hummer and was very slow. "And if that becomes the standard from all manufacturers, as opposed to the beefy cars we have, then people will just have to deal with it, or pay the extra money for a car with some kick - which is completely fine by me." That's how things have been pretty much for the entire history of cars. Why do you think you pay more for a Mustang than for a Civic? Why do you think a Ferrari costs more than a house? Yes, companies all around are increasing power because only morons want to take forever just to get up to speed, but you still (normally) pay a higher price for a higher performing car.
CO2 is a naturally occurring gas. Volcanoes, vents in the earth, every living creature, decomposition, etc all release CO2 into the atmosphere. Plants require CO2 as well and without plants humans and animals cease to exist. So yea, lets get right on eliminating CO2 and the subsequent annihilation of the human race.
"We've shown that every prerequisite for life can be synthesized by processes known to happen on Earth prior to life."
.00000000001% chance or whatever that is did happen, but it takes WAY more blind faith to think that the dice might've rolled JUST RIGHT trillions of times than it does to believe in the FSM. When I see fossils that truly back up macro-evolution as opposed to huge creative leaps between the fossil and the creature that TIME or whatever group is showing the "this is what the creature looked like" article and biology textbooks no longer require faked "experiments" as proof of evolution, I'll consider it.
And that "experiment" has been proven to be a fake and does not work if you try to re-create it.
Before you go on some rant about me being a "religious fanatic" - I have no religious bias keeping me from believing in macro-evolution. All I want is some solid evidence. Evolution is statistically impossible. Sure, there may be that
I know I'll get modded down for defying the hive mind here, but on something so fantastically outrageous, I want real proof before I'll believe it. I'd say the same thing if we were talking about the transporter from the starship Enterprise or if someone said they found a way to modify their DNA to make themselves bullet-proof. Are these things possible? Sure, but they're incredibly unlikely. I don't have an explanation for how things came to be and all that. However, until there is real, 100% no one (even psycho nutjobs) can deny this proof, I place macro-evolution in with the Bible and mythology as just another story for how the world came to be.
You're ignoring the real reason for all of these lawsuits. It's not "stealing" (which copyright infringement isn't) that caused this - it's the fact that (regardless of if people were getting music for free), people got so fed up with being overcharged for music that they started to stop buying music. Even if they didn't have the free music, the RIAA would still be out the money. That's what the lawsuits are really about - the fact that they think they deserve money, even if they aren't selling anything worthwhile.
I had no problem having to spend 20 - 30 minutes here and there tracking down other codecs and such I needed for my common media uses, but it just really turned me off that after hours of searching I couldn't find a way to watch stuff from my favorite websites (like Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie) or watch movie previews on it. If I just wanted something to program on, type papers, and do web browsing, I'd totally use it. I just think that for a distro like Ubuntu that's supposed to be so user-friendly and ready out of the box (or in this case out of the iso) for ordinary people to use that it's kind of dumb for them not to include more media apps / codecs (that are at least optional to install). If they did, they'd probably get a lot more average people to use Ubuntu - which is sort of necessary if they ever want to make MS irrelevant.
I tried using Ubuntu a few months back. It was pretty nice, but there were certain basic things (such as installing quicktime to view movie trailers) that are not easy to do with Ubuntu and I couldn't find anyone online or in person who did know how to do them. Overall though, it's pretty nice. However, it's still not ready (unless they've changed the things I disliked).
The ones complaining about how a college education is useless are the ones that are 40 years old, living at home, and have a 100% accurate replica of the original Enterprise in their basement to play in. They have their own "business" doing some basic HTML / XML programming.....it's not much, but it's enough to buy their action figures each month.
My belief in NASA ended once I started learning about their constant screw ups and their recurring "oops, we just wasted $10 billion because Bob on the third floor had the calculus wrong and now the space probe is useless". Honestly, scrap NASA and let the private industry do it cheaper and better.
Actually, that's been done. Car and Driver took out a Camry, Escape, and I forget what other cars and their hybrid counterparts. They used regular driving habits on identical courses and maintained the same speed, etc. When the numbers came in, the Escape Hybrid was the hybrid that had the largest % increase in mpg over it's gasoline counterpart and just to recoup the extra money paid to get a hybrid you'd have to drive it over 97,000 miles. So, that pretty much kills the whole "you save money" BS people attach to buying a hybrid. If you want a car with good mpg, buy a diesel with a manual transmission and as few useless options (heated seats and all that crap) as possible.
Also, BMW has a MUCH better solution for a hybrid car - instead of using a gas/electric hybrid they built a gas/steam hybrid. It boosts mpg by 20% and has zero maintenance costs and doesn't increase pollution from disposing of a battery. If they'd sell a diesel/steam hybrid I'd buy one in a heartbeat.