It's probably time to call an end to this particular discussion, as I've slipped into personal insults and you've started clipping my quotes to support your witticisms in an attempt to imitate fox news. Really, that kind of thing is beneath both of us.
We've identified the point where our world views diverge and it seems irreconcilable from that point onwards. I, like your founding fathers, am a strong believer in liberty and freedom from tyranny in all its forms, including militarily enforced environmental policy. Perhaps the founding fathers would have been less libertarian given the current environmental situation, but I'm not and never will be. I think it is the utmost height of arrogance to think that political boundaries are mere suggestions and your own countries will should be enforceable across them. A large part of this is likely that I don't believe the hype surrounding climate change, and don't believe the problem is as serious as it is made out to be. I am a minority in that view and my particular government is doing more and more to fix this "problem". This is a -good thing-, because it is the power of democracy that the majority should rule in a country - note, that this does not mean the majority in a completely separate country who happen to have bigger guns than you.
I also think borders are far more important than you seem to because without borders there is nowhere for dissidents to flee to. Early Americans would have understood that I imagine, as they understood tyranny and oppression all to well. I believe that any time your will is imposed via force of arms rather than compromise, treaty and rhetoric you are a dictator and a tyranny.
You are opposed to this view primarily because you think the environmental issue is powerful and important enough to call for the abandoning of sovereignty and the imposition of your own government and people's wishes on other countries. I can understand that view and if I shared your belief in the problem, might even share it. It is certainly true that you should defend yourself when attacked in any way, however this will-to-defend when combined with the current American belief in its own infallibility is always a concern to me. At this point we disagree, and we are both obviously acquainted with the issues so this disagreement is not due to a misunderstanding of the issue but rather a difference in personal values, so there is no point to further discussion.
I apologise if my comments earlier were rude in any way, I suspect they probably were.
As the posts before yours were direct criticisms of current American practice, it should really come as no surprise to you that multiple people so far have read your post as defending these practices. Your words are not so gold as to attract reading in a vacuum, without regard for the context in which it is written - but I digress.
Your main point still fails to hold water. What you are writing here is basically a defense of the practice of invading another country's sovereign territory simply because you do not like their environmental policy. Unfortunately, in order for such a policy to hold weight in an ethical sense, you must be able to prove your core assertion - that their environmental policies have a detrimental impact on the entire world, including your own country - and that is a burden of proof you cannot meet, though I am sure you feel you can.
The problem is simply this. Regardless of what large ecological concern groups publish and speak as 'fact', we have no concrete proof of either the widespread effects of particular types of activities or the global effect of these activities. Climate change is the poster-child in this case, there are plenty of well written peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the idea that our activities are seriously harming the environment, and just as many citing proof that this is not the case. To this point, neither side of the debate has proving conclusively, to the satisfaction of the entire (or even a majority) of the scientific community.
There are some cases for which this is not true - river water is a big example. There have been many problems in the past with pollution in a river that crosses countries have deleterious effects on other countries and indeed, wars have been fought over such matters. In this case, you would be correct, and such an action may well be justified.
But your central argument is too broad and far too lenient towards your own countries actions or potential future actions. The idea that a war in a country half-way across the world away because they're burning coal into air that "does not respect human boundaries" is patently ridiculous - and I would suggest that any country seeking to use that as an excuse is simply blowing smoke of their own to cover deeper, less "noble" motivations.
Quite true, it is terrible - and the ultimate tragedy of our current political environment - that political correctness has gone so far that children will be endangered because the government and its employees are scared to "appear" racist, even if there is good cause for an action to be taken. In the end, the children suffer for that as well.
But that is a completely separate issue and the problem is, once again, those people who think they know best for other people. The same sort of people who once said "it will be beneficial to integrate these children into white families" are exactly the same as those saying "well you can't move their children, it'd be racist!". They were wrong both times and both times the children are hurting because of it.
Simply because fear-of-being-racist is causing almost as many problems now as the actual racism did then does not mean that the racism that happened then -was not racist!-. It would have been better to move that child to a foster home where she would have been safe, regardless of the colour of her foster parents, but that in itself does not justify the stolen generation.
You are trying to use here a single example of a child left to suffer to justify a policy that had nothing to do with child safety. One child that -needs- to be taken from its parents does not justify the thousands that didn't and were, and does not justify the fact that the criteria for the policy was not potential for abuse at the time, but colour and socio-economic status - which I might point out, at the time, were generally the same thing.
There is a standard in our society for taking children from their parents if the parents are a danger to them. It should be applied to everyone regardless of race. It wasn't then as white abusers kept their kids whilst perfectly good aboriginal ones lost theirs, and it isn't now as that family obviously shouldn't be caring for their child. Both of these situations are perversions of the established community laws and norms by people who think they "know better", which was the entire point of this useless digression in the first place. This thread is supposed to be about our freedoms of speech being taken away, not the shocking way we've treated aboriginies - first killing them, now killing them with kindness.
I suggest you climb down off your horse for a minute and explain exactly how your pet theory explains the invasion of Afghanistan? Or Iraq? I don't remember the reasons given at the time to be "because they're poisoning our air and water". I remember something about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that didn't exist.
I'm not sure where you've gotten the idea that America is some sort of world Eco-police; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. America is interested in protecting its corporate interests overseas, not its environmental. If the environment is your worry, I'd suggest cleaning up your own borders before you even think about looking at other peoples.
I think you need to re-evaluate your understanding of the term "general consensus". It does not mean "What I Think, Disregarding Commonly Held Opinions Of My Fellow Countrymen". It certainly isn't the general opinion of Australians that the Stolen Generation are now to be considered the Rescued Generation.
I personally do not agree with most of the attempts of the government to "make up" for mistakes of the past, nor am I a fan of the "gravy train" as you put it. Certainly a percentage of the children removed from their parents custody were safer, and perhaps the majority were better off financially if that is the only measure you wish to use, though they themselves would argue they are not emotionally better off.
The fact remains that the standards used to determine when it was appropriate to remove a child from its parents custody were laughably low for that entire segment of the population. Abuse is not a racial issue, the last government's disgusting attempts to play it out that way to the contrary. Children born to white parents in similar situations at the time were left in their mother's care to experience both the love and/or abuse that would come from the situation.
These children weren't taken because they were abused, but because of the situation they were in. Black and poor is what it boiled down to. White and poor were allowed to keep their children.
I don't suffer white guilt, and I don't believe that pampering the aboriginals and setting them aside as needing extra compensations is the right way to go - but blindly denying that there ever was a problem, that there ever was a racist policy, and asserting that the racist actions of the past were actually good ideas and product of a sound domestic policy.
In anycase, we're off topic now. This set of comments is about Senator Conroy's idiocy, not that of historical Australians.
Since we're going to play World Police, and apparently someone has to....
Gee, I wonder why the rest of the world has such a problem with America. It wouldn't be that they think they have some sort of god given mandate to stick their noses into other people's business would it?
Lets make this clear through the use of an example. If you spend some time over here in Australia, you'll find there are a few things in our past that tend to resonate in the cultural "guilt" consciousness. One of those things is what we call the "Stolen Generation". For those who don't know, this was a policy enacted by the Australian government that allowed them to take Aboriginal children away from their parents and place them in foster homes of white Australians. Not because they were abused, but because it was thought that doing this would aid to "integrate" the Aboriginal children into white Australian culture and life.
Seems pretty horrific, because it was, and the leftists jump up and down about how we can never make up for it and completely miss an important point - it was the leftists who -did- this thing. It was done with the best of intentions, had it worked it would have meant the Aboriginal people wouldn't suffer differently to the white Australians and we'd all be one big happy family - which is the supposed goal of leftist thought anyway, equality through legislation.
Where is this example going? Americans are doing the exact same thing to the -entire world-. It sounds good to say you are "bringing democracy" to people and performing "police actions" around the globe, but what you are really doing is preventing large groups of people from working out their own problems and creating an enormous class of people whose lives have been profoundly influenced for the worse by American Intervention. These people hate you.
I challenge the assertion that "somebody has to play world police". People have been oppressed in countries forever, including yours. Historically, these people have either fled the country (and founded a new one... like say.. America?) or risen up against their oppressors and been stronger for it (like say... -America-?). You think you're doing the right thing now, just as those men and women who took the babies from their loving mothers thought they were then. Even the Nazi scientists thought they were helping to bring about a better world, and i'm sure the idiotic Senator Conroy with his national filtering scheme thinks the same. All these people have that in common - an egotistical certainty that "they know best".
Perhaps we, as nations, need to stop and think about how history will judge our own misguided actions. From the outside, it rarely looks so noble.
Quite true, there are good reasons to have anonymised data available for scientific research. Computer science research for instance has been greatly aided by the fact that people like google store such huge quantities of data.
Except that the data -isn't- anonymised. It's associated with your google account. The same account is used for reader, mail, groups and finance information. That's one of the great things about it, it's convenient, however it also means that your data is associated with your name, with no promise or incentive for google to anonymise it in any way.
As for "unable to harm you in any way", I can't see any way either to be perfectly honest. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'd rather err on the side of caution, because once the information is out there, it never goes away. That's the biggest lesson to learn of the modern era, I think.
That's a good point, there isn't any real damage that could be done to me from knowing my positions in the market. Not with respect to the positions anyway. I haven't pissed off anyone enough that they would dump stock to hurt my position, and i'm nowhere near so deeply invested that something like that would work anyway;)
It is still information that is considered private however. A lot of people don't like openly discussing their finances - but what bothers me more is knowing just how much information about me is out there. I have left a sizeable footprint over the years across the net and it's important to stop and think about just how much information you freely make available to people who are not necessarily going to tell you how they'll use it.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that there are these huge stores of information about them sitting out there, churning away, doing their best to find a way to make a profit from what they know?
Why would you trust -anyone- with your portfolio information? Has it become old-fashioned to believe that financial status and business is no-ones business but your own?
I have no idea what possible use Google (or anyone) could make out of knowing how much of which shares I own, what they're worth, and how much I'm up/down in the current market. There might be no advantage whatsoever they could make out of that information.
Personally, I'd rather not give them the chance to experiment and find out. That's just me, I like to keep my privacy regardless of whether or not it would hurt not to have it. Once you give it up, it's gone, and if you figure out it hurts later - too bad.
I've started looking at this too as i've picked up some stock recently, and it is a difficult proposition (given that i'm not really willing to pay for a commercial solution).
Personally, I absolutely love the interface of Google's stock ticker - the interface is nice, the information is top notch. The problem being of course that there's way in any of the nine layers i'd trust google with my portfolio information. The big advantage of a local program in my mind is that the information you put in, even if it is only "I want to track these stocks" is kept wholly to yourself and not stored on some remote server where you have to trust the hoster not to take a peek.
In the end i've been using the default stock program that came on the iPhone to watch the stock prices. Thats all it will do, that and a short graph history, and it uses the yahoo info instead of the google, but it's close to realtime and it's stored (I hope) on the iPhone. Course, Yahoo can still see which stocks i'm requesting, so maybe in the end it makes no difference.
Ideal would be a device-based solution that could draw down the information, either from google/yahoo or direct from the *sx, and hold information regarding you portfolio too - but locally, so theres no worry of the monetary values being shunted across the net to the infovores.
It's by science fiction author whatever and covers a large range of topics from science fiction (obviously) to politics, and also bears the honour of being on of the first ever blogs.
I'm pretty sure that actually happens already, at least on Xbox360 games. The 360 has a parental lock, that sets the rating appropriate to the primary users (so the parents can lock it at 13+ or 15+ for instance), and then it will refuse to play anything higher unless the rating lock is raised (protected with a password).
This is a best of all worlds scenario from my point of view, as it helps parents monitor their kids useage (you can refuse to buy it, but what if a friend lends it?), whilst not preventing the parents themselves, or any other adult in the house, temporarily lifting the restriction for their own use.
The biggest problem with this "Save the children!" mentality affecting America and, lately in particular, my own country, Australia, is that it seeks to remove responsibility from the parents. Every time something is banned to "save the children" the government is effectively saying "You aren't responsible enough to decide if your children are old enough to play this."
We all suffer for the sake of people who are too fricking lazy to raise their own children. They want the government to do it, and in its wisdom, it decides banning it for all people is the best way to "protect the children.".
I guess it's just a coincidence that the people making these decisions hold strong moral views that see perfectly legal things that some adults enjoy, such as sex, pornography and simulated violence, as evil and wrong. We should all respect the views of our new moral overlords.
I use windows as well, for one reason only - I get paid for it. I'm a.net specialist programmer working on windows platform, so some time ago (when I decided that was the way I was going) I reluctantly left my mandrake installation by the roadside and switched back to XP.
But don't get me wrong, I moved back to windows solely for the purpose of having a clean environment to work in and not wanting to play around with virtual machines all the time. There is very little you can't do on Linux that you can do in windows, with the primary one being games. (There are just more games available for windows boxes).
Of course, you have nethack and z-code, but no everyone shares my love for those types of games.
In anycase, what you are saying is perfectly true. There are a lot of programs available on a windows box - there should be, it's the main consumer system. If well looked after, a windows installation can go years without needing to be reformatted, and yes, when special approval is needed it is nearly always for windows.
But as otheres have said, you could use wine for the windows only programs, there are plenty of case tools (hell, Linux is a system built by developers, of course there are plenty of development tools), VPN software exists and there are alternatives for photos, video and everything else you mentioned.
Also windows machines can go for many years without a reformat (though in defence, I always liked to reformat a windows machine every six months. I havn't recently, as I havn't had time, but windows systems clutter quicker than linux ones or at least it feels that way - not to mention virii and adware that don't target linux.), but i've never heard of one -running- for years without a reboot, the way some unix servers have in the past.
You've got some great reasons for using windows, just as I do, but reason to use one is not the same as a reason not to use the other. I choose to use windows, it helps my career, keeps things simple for me. This isn't my way of saying windows is superior to Linux or the other way around, just that my circumstances leads me to prefer one over the other at this point.
As for the six month thing being FUD, it really isn't. Maybe you're just better at keeping your system clean and running than the average user, or maybe you just have different standards for you expect out of a running system, but lots of people reformat a windows box every 6-12 months, this isn't some evil lie by the Linux Fanatics (tm).
One of the early adopters of this technique was infocom (perhaps the first?) who liked to put all sorts of things in their game boxes - ID Cards, cloth maps, collectable coins, all sorts of stuff.
It was, for a long time, considered a staple of interactive fiction to have "feelies" in your game packaging. Some members of the quite active interactive fiction community have once again started looking to provide feelies with their games, even though the vast majority of their games are actually free to download.
They do this through Feelies.org, a company specialising in producing such things.
I'm not sure if I buy the whole "it's too expensive" argument as a reason for the nonexistance of feelies. The reason they no longer exist is simply because people are buying games that don't have them. It's an expense they see as unnecessary. The price games are sold for these days (-particularly- in Australia) has less to do with the cost of the product and far more to do with greed, fuelled by region coding in many ways.
As a case in point, you can buy Asian versions of games, if they are region free, and self import them using express shipping (quite expensive) and still pay only 3/4's of the retail price in Australia. That extra cost obviously isn't in shipping the product (as bulk shipping would give them far greater disscounts than what I can achieve) and marketing for games in this country is trivial compared to the blitz's they put on in other countries, so where is the justification for the extra cost?
I used to agree, but it seems to depend on the businesses themselves. I used to work at a big comapany that felt like a small one because of the immaturity of its it department (they had only just moved from total outsourcing) and it was great fun at first. As it got bigger and tried to be more "corporate" then things went really downhill.
However I've also worked at a smaller company that was awful to work for. The manager cared about nothing but the bottom line, employees who tried to leave were threatened and new employees were bullied into taking far less than they were worse simply because they didn't know any better.
Now I work at what is considered a large IT company for the area and i'm having a great time. The work is interesting, my co-workers and managers know their stuff and are great people to boot.
Size really doesn't matter, its all about the people.
Doesn't or can't doesn't really matter if you read the rest of what I said. Perhaps I didn't make my position clear enough, it's not really that it's impossible to implement artificial scarcity (although, producing better safe's generally produces better safe-crackers), but rather that anyone who tries to do it is working on a flawed business model.
If you need to impose artificial restrictions on your product, then you've made a mistake somewhere. If technological progress renders your business unprofitable, you need to change with it, you can't fight it.
It's not nice. It'll hit my industry too, as everyone has pointed out. (Though I think the doom-and-gloom of some posts is a bit much, particularly the person who said we wont be doing this in 10 years. I will. It's not our problem finding work - people who need computers require programs for them, it'll be the money-men's problem figuring out how to profit off of us now that things have changed.)
It wasn't nice for the craftsmen put out of work by the industrial revolution, it wasn't nice for factory workers put out of work by robotics and computerisation. Why does it feel worse to some people now that it's musicians, film-makers and software companies that may be facing the same fate?
The difference is, of course, that those technologies made things cheaper and more profitable for big business, whereas this change makes things cheaper for the consumer.
Instructions aren't copywriteable... and software programs aren't a series of instructions that a computer performs?
Each line is sometimes even called an instruction.
There is a logical disconnect when it comes to software copyright (thats even worse with software patent) and any form of digital media. What looks perfectly common sense of the surface (should be subject to the same protections are art and literature), has some very different properties when looked at closely.
I hope my own government sits up and takes notice of this lawyer fellow. I hope they divert our limited policing resources away from these cheap, unimportant crimes (such as assault, bank robbery and fraud) and instead police piracy better.
In fact, if they do, I pledge to never, ever pirate anything from that point forward. Never. Instead, I will get a gun. That'll be easier then, because there will be less focus on preventing unlicenced people from obtaining them. I probably wont pay for it, they're paying less attention to assault too, and the guy's a criminal - hell, he's selling me an unlicenced gun. So i'll rough him up a bit and just take it. Then, I happen to know a nice armoured truck I can rob when its full of bank money. Then, i'll buy some cd's from RIAA with my new fortune.
It's rare to get a worthy though from a hollywood action flick, but see if you remember this one. A person is smart, people are dumb.
This article just shows that a person can be dumb too.
Especially if you factor in the fact that prostitution is illegal in many places, imagine the lost government revenue that the fines bring in if they went out of business!
Insightful? That mod wasn't posted by a software engineer i'm sure.
As a proud member of the development corp, I do really feel insulted to hear the sum of my creative energies, and the sweat and blood of my work referred to as an imaginary product. That said, I understand what you're trying to say. The real problem the MPAA and RIAA have is trying to apply traditional economic theory (based on scarce-resource distribution and pricing) to an unlimited resource (something that once created, can be replicated ad-infinitum.
Why they want to do this is obvious, it's a licence to print money. Unfortunately for them, under these traditional economic theories it is the scarcity of a resource that makes it valuable (gold, platinum, wood) and an unlimited resource has very little, or no, monetary value.
Thus DRM, which is fundamentally an attempt to impose scarcity on an unlimited resource, thus creating artificial value. It doesn't work, because the methods are inefficient and if content has intrinsic worth itself, DRM reduces it by making it difficult to use.
I'm not sure how we're going to get around this particular problem and it is concerning for all of us involved in creating the content. There needs to be money in creation in order for us to get paid to do it, but the traditional methods of commercial software/music/films may not be the most efficient.
Perhaps we need to explore commoditization of software, or perhaps a return to the patron model enjoyed by artists of the last several centuries. Hard to say.
The current patent laws are so stupid that it causes me physical pain to witness the things that actually make it to court. When the people envisaging the patent system designed it, had they recieved applications like the ones routinely honoured today, they would have laughed the applicant out of their office.
What they are claiming to have a patent on is the idea, or process, whereby you buy an item for a set price rather than bidding on it.............. And your court system is happy to deliberate on this. Seriously, how much deliberation do they require?
I bought some sushi today from the local sushi bar, and I didn't have to bid on it... they are obviously in violation of this patent... and I bought some hardware components from an online retailer, didn't have to bid there either.
The idea of patents was to enable people, particularly individuals on limited budgets, to profit from their original inventions. One of the core requirements of a patent is that it not be for something obvious.
Lets be honest. Does it get more obvious than the purchasing of something for a set price? Is there anyone that isn't familiar with that idea?
I think i'm going to burst a blood vessel on this one.
Completely - At what point did we decide our leaders had to be perfect? Sainthood is for religions, not leaders.
I mean really, is it so terrible if a president/prime minister/whatever smoked a bit of pot once? Or if he likes to get blowjobs in the oval office?
We should be reserving that sort of disgust for people who prey on the weak, and steal and cheat huge quantities of money. I'm not talking about shoplifting when they were fifteen to impress their friends, but real crimes.
I can tell you, the majority of Australians (of my social crowds anyway;) ) couldn't work out what the big deal was with the Clinton problems. Sure cheating sucks, makes him a lousy husband and some would say a pretty lousy person. Doesn't make him a bad president.
Starting wars with countries based on hidden agenda's aimed at stealing wealth from the citizens of those countries. Thats a pretty lousy president. But aren't we lucky he isn't getting head.
This seems a bit naive to me. To speak of "no-good" person, I assume you mean criminal. You might mean morally no-good, but really, if they're doing something you find offensive morally (excessive drinking, participating in obscure religions, sodomy...) and they can find a way to keep it off the net, more power too them. It's really no-one else's business whilst they're obeying the law.
If they're breaking the law, thats different. However, this sounds very similar to the anti-drugs, anti-guns type laws and arguments that go on in the US and here in Australia, to a lesser degree. The idea is, that if you make it hard to do something (by making it illegal is a perfect example), then people wont do it. The truth is of course that people who want to do it, do it. If you did stop these companies from helping people to paint a false picture of themselves, as you put it, by making it illegal or shooting them, however you'd do it, you would definately stop some people from doing it. Some of the privacy obsessed who hate the idea that info about them floats about would have to deal...a lot of casual users info would remain untouched.
Those that really wanted the info gone. The real "no-good" guys, would make the info gone, and have been making it gone i'm sure.
As Penn and Teller said in their episode on gun control - "How, you might ask, does a convicted criminal get a gun when it's against the law for them to do so? THEY BREAK THE LAW".
That is, after all, the definition of a criminal.
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It's probably time to call an end to this particular discussion, as I've slipped into personal insults and you've started clipping my quotes to support your witticisms in an attempt to imitate fox news. Really, that kind of thing is beneath both of us.
We've identified the point where our world views diverge and it seems irreconcilable from that point onwards. I, like your founding fathers, am a strong believer in liberty and freedom from tyranny in all its forms, including militarily enforced environmental policy. Perhaps the founding fathers would have been less libertarian given the current environmental situation, but I'm not and never will be. I think it is the utmost height of arrogance to think that political boundaries are mere suggestions and your own countries will should be enforceable across them. A large part of this is likely that I don't believe the hype surrounding climate change, and don't believe the problem is as serious as it is made out to be. I am a minority in that view and my particular government is doing more and more to fix this "problem". This is a -good thing-, because it is the power of democracy that the majority should rule in a country - note, that this does not mean the majority in a completely separate country who happen to have bigger guns than you.
I also think borders are far more important than you seem to because without borders there is nowhere for dissidents to flee to. Early Americans would have understood that I imagine, as they understood tyranny and oppression all to well. I believe that any time your will is imposed via force of arms rather than compromise, treaty and rhetoric you are a dictator and a tyranny.
You are opposed to this view primarily because you think the environmental issue is powerful and important enough to call for the abandoning of sovereignty and the imposition of your own government and people's wishes on other countries. I can understand that view and if I shared your belief in the problem, might even share it. It is certainly true that you should defend yourself when attacked in any way, however this will-to-defend when combined with the current American belief in its own infallibility is always a concern to me. At this point we disagree, and we are both obviously acquainted with the issues so this disagreement is not due to a misunderstanding of the issue but rather a difference in personal values, so there is no point to further discussion.
I apologise if my comments earlier were rude in any way, I suspect they probably were.
As the posts before yours were direct criticisms of current American practice, it should really come as no surprise to you that multiple people so far have read your post as defending these practices. Your words are not so gold as to attract reading in a vacuum, without regard for the context in which it is written - but I digress.
Your main point still fails to hold water. What you are writing here is basically a defense of the practice of invading another country's sovereign territory simply because you do not like their environmental policy. Unfortunately, in order for such a policy to hold weight in an ethical sense, you must be able to prove your core assertion - that their environmental policies have a detrimental impact on the entire world, including your own country - and that is a burden of proof you cannot meet, though I am sure you feel you can.
The problem is simply this. Regardless of what large ecological concern groups publish and speak as 'fact', we have no concrete proof of either the widespread effects of particular types of activities or the global effect of these activities. Climate change is the poster-child in this case, there are plenty of well written peer-reviewed journal articles supporting the idea that our activities are seriously harming the environment, and just as many citing proof that this is not the case. To this point, neither side of the debate has proving conclusively, to the satisfaction of the entire (or even a majority) of the scientific community.
There are some cases for which this is not true - river water is a big example. There have been many problems in the past with pollution in a river that crosses countries have deleterious effects on other countries and indeed, wars have been fought over such matters. In this case, you would be correct, and such an action may well be justified.
But your central argument is too broad and far too lenient towards your own countries actions or potential future actions. The idea that a war in a country half-way across the world away because they're burning coal into air that "does not respect human boundaries" is patently ridiculous - and I would suggest that any country seeking to use that as an excuse is simply blowing smoke of their own to cover deeper, less "noble" motivations.
But then, we've seen that before haven't we.
Quite true, it is terrible - and the ultimate tragedy of our current political environment - that political correctness has gone so far that children will be endangered because the government and its employees are scared to "appear" racist, even if there is good cause for an action to be taken. In the end, the children suffer for that as well.
But that is a completely separate issue and the problem is, once again, those people who think they know best for other people. The same sort of people who once said "it will be beneficial to integrate these children into white families" are exactly the same as those saying "well you can't move their children, it'd be racist!". They were wrong both times and both times the children are hurting because of it.
Simply because fear-of-being-racist is causing almost as many problems now as the actual racism did then does not mean that the racism that happened then -was not racist!-. It would have been better to move that child to a foster home where she would have been safe, regardless of the colour of her foster parents, but that in itself does not justify the stolen generation.
You are trying to use here a single example of a child left to suffer to justify a policy that had nothing to do with child safety. One child that -needs- to be taken from its parents does not justify the thousands that didn't and were, and does not justify the fact that the criteria for the policy was not potential for abuse at the time, but colour and socio-economic status - which I might point out, at the time, were generally the same thing.
There is a standard in our society for taking children from their parents if the parents are a danger to them. It should be applied to everyone regardless of race. It wasn't then as white abusers kept their kids whilst perfectly good aboriginal ones lost theirs, and it isn't now as that family obviously shouldn't be caring for their child. Both of these situations are perversions of the established community laws and norms by people who think they "know better", which was the entire point of this useless digression in the first place. This thread is supposed to be about our freedoms of speech being taken away, not the shocking way we've treated aboriginies - first killing them, now killing them with kindness.
I suggest you climb down off your horse for a minute and explain exactly how your pet theory explains the invasion of Afghanistan? Or Iraq? I don't remember the reasons given at the time to be "because they're poisoning our air and water". I remember something about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that didn't exist.
I'm not sure where you've gotten the idea that America is some sort of world Eco-police; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. America is interested in protecting its corporate interests overseas, not its environmental. If the environment is your worry, I'd suggest cleaning up your own borders before you even think about looking at other peoples.
Glass houses, big stones.
I think you need to re-evaluate your understanding of the term "general consensus". It does not mean "What I Think, Disregarding Commonly Held Opinions Of My Fellow Countrymen". It certainly isn't the general opinion of Australians that the Stolen Generation are now to be considered the Rescued Generation.
I personally do not agree with most of the attempts of the government to "make up" for mistakes of the past, nor am I a fan of the "gravy train" as you put it. Certainly a percentage of the children removed from their parents custody were safer, and perhaps the majority were better off financially if that is the only measure you wish to use, though they themselves would argue they are not emotionally better off.
The fact remains that the standards used to determine when it was appropriate to remove a child from its parents custody were laughably low for that entire segment of the population. Abuse is not a racial issue, the last government's disgusting attempts to play it out that way to the contrary. Children born to white parents in similar situations at the time were left in their mother's care to experience both the love and/or abuse that would come from the situation.
These children weren't taken because they were abused, but because of the situation they were in. Black and poor is what it boiled down to. White and poor were allowed to keep their children.
I don't suffer white guilt, and I don't believe that pampering the aboriginals and setting them aside as needing extra compensations is the right way to go - but blindly denying that there ever was a problem, that there ever was a racist policy, and asserting that the racist actions of the past were actually good ideas and product of a sound domestic policy.
In anycase, we're off topic now. This set of comments is about Senator Conroy's idiocy, not that of historical Australians.
Since we're going to play World Police, and apparently someone has to....
Gee, I wonder why the rest of the world has such a problem with America. It wouldn't be that they think they have some sort of god given mandate to stick their noses into other people's business would it?
Lets make this clear through the use of an example. If you spend some time over here in Australia, you'll find there are a few things in our past that tend to resonate in the cultural "guilt" consciousness. One of those things is what we call the "Stolen Generation". For those who don't know, this was a policy enacted by the Australian government that allowed them to take Aboriginal children away from their parents and place them in foster homes of white Australians. Not because they were abused, but because it was thought that doing this would aid to "integrate" the Aboriginal children into white Australian culture and life.
Seems pretty horrific, because it was, and the leftists jump up and down about how we can never make up for it and completely miss an important point - it was the leftists who -did- this thing. It was done with the best of intentions, had it worked it would have meant the Aboriginal people wouldn't suffer differently to the white Australians and we'd all be one big happy family - which is the supposed goal of leftist thought anyway, equality through legislation.
Where is this example going? Americans are doing the exact same thing to the -entire world-. It sounds good to say you are "bringing democracy" to people and performing "police actions" around the globe, but what you are really doing is preventing large groups of people from working out their own problems and creating an enormous class of people whose lives have been profoundly influenced for the worse by American Intervention. These people hate you.
I challenge the assertion that "somebody has to play world police". People have been oppressed in countries forever, including yours. Historically, these people have either fled the country (and founded a new one... like say.. America?) or risen up against their oppressors and been stronger for it (like say... -America-?). You think you're doing the right thing now, just as those men and women who took the babies from their loving mothers thought they were then. Even the Nazi scientists thought they were helping to bring about a better world, and i'm sure the idiotic Senator Conroy with his national filtering scheme thinks the same. All these people have that in common - an egotistical certainty that "they know best".
Perhaps we, as nations, need to stop and think about how history will judge our own misguided actions. From the outside, it rarely looks so noble.
Quite true, there are good reasons to have anonymised data available for scientific research. Computer science research for instance has been greatly aided by the fact that people like google store such huge quantities of data.
Except that the data -isn't- anonymised. It's associated with your google account. The same account is used for reader, mail, groups and finance information. That's one of the great things about it, it's convenient, however it also means that your data is associated with your name, with no promise or incentive for google to anonymise it in any way.
As for "unable to harm you in any way", I can't see any way either to be perfectly honest. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'd rather err on the side of caution, because once the information is out there, it never goes away. That's the biggest lesson to learn of the modern era, I think.
Did you just log this as AC to avoid flaming responses and then.... leave a link to your twitter?...
That's a good point, there isn't any real damage that could be done to me from knowing my positions in the market. Not with respect to the positions anyway. I haven't pissed off anyone enough that they would dump stock to hurt my position, and i'm nowhere near so deeply invested that something like that would work anyway ;)
It is still information that is considered private however. A lot of people don't like openly discussing their finances - but what bothers me more is knowing just how much information about me is out there. I have left a sizeable footprint over the years across the net and it's important to stop and think about just how much information you freely make available to people who are not necessarily going to tell you how they'll use it.
Doesn't it bother anyone else that there are these huge stores of information about them sitting out there, churning away, doing their best to find a way to make a profit from what they know?
Why would you trust -anyone- with your portfolio information? Has it become old-fashioned to believe that financial status and business is no-ones business but your own?
I have no idea what possible use Google (or anyone) could make out of knowing how much of which shares I own, what they're worth, and how much I'm up/down in the current market. There might be no advantage whatsoever they could make out of that information.
Personally, I'd rather not give them the chance to experiment and find out. That's just me, I like to keep my privacy regardless of whether or not it would hurt not to have it. Once you give it up, it's gone, and if you figure out it hurts later - too bad.
I've started looking at this too as i've picked up some stock recently, and it is a difficult proposition (given that i'm not really willing to pay for a commercial solution).
Personally, I absolutely love the interface of Google's stock ticker - the interface is nice, the information is top notch. The problem being of course that there's way in any of the nine layers i'd trust google with my portfolio information. The big advantage of a local program in my mind is that the information you put in, even if it is only "I want to track these stocks" is kept wholly to yourself and not stored on some remote server where you have to trust the hoster not to take a peek.
In the end i've been using the default stock program that came on the iPhone to watch the stock prices. Thats all it will do, that and a short graph history, and it uses the yahoo info instead of the google, but it's close to realtime and it's stored (I hope) on the iPhone. Course, Yahoo can still see which stocks i'm requesting, so maybe in the end it makes no difference.
Ideal would be a device-based solution that could draw down the information, either from google/yahoo or direct from the *sx, and hold information regarding you portfolio too - but locally, so theres no worry of the monetary values being shunted across the net to the infovores.
Try the Whatever blog then:
http://scalzi.com/whatever
It's by science fiction author whatever and covers a large range of topics from science fiction (obviously) to politics, and also bears the honour of being on of the first ever blogs.
It's also quite prolific most of the time.
On the subject of authors, there is also:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
Charles Stross, science fiction author
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
William Gibson - surely you know who this is.
http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/
Laurell K Hamilton, most well known of the Paranormal Romance emerging genre
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/
Wil Wheaton, author and famous as "Wesley" from Star Trek: TNG years ago.
There are a lot of other feeds on my list, many of which have already been mentioned. One that hasn't however is The Register.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
A british news site with a tech slant
and Worse than Failure (The Daily WTF)
http://thedailywtf.com/
A site that highlights the worst of the worst in programming and IT stories. Highly entertaining.
I'm pretty sure that actually happens already, at least on Xbox360 games. The 360 has a parental lock, that sets the rating appropriate to the primary users (so the parents can lock it at 13+ or 15+ for instance), and then it will refuse to play anything higher unless the rating lock is raised (protected with a password).
This is a best of all worlds scenario from my point of view, as it helps parents monitor their kids useage (you can refuse to buy it, but what if a friend lends it?), whilst not preventing the parents themselves, or any other adult in the house, temporarily lifting the restriction for their own use.
The biggest problem with this "Save the children!" mentality affecting America and, lately in particular, my own country, Australia, is that it seeks to remove responsibility from the parents. Every time something is banned to "save the children" the government is effectively saying "You aren't responsible enough to decide if your children are old enough to play this."
We all suffer for the sake of people who are too fricking lazy to raise their own children. They want the government to do it, and in its wisdom, it decides banning it for all people is the best way to "protect the children.".
I guess it's just a coincidence that the people making these decisions hold strong moral views that see perfectly legal things that some adults enjoy, such as sex, pornography and simulated violence, as evil and wrong. We should all respect the views of our new moral overlords.
I use windows as well, for one reason only - I get paid for it. I'm a .net specialist programmer working on windows platform, so some time ago (when I decided that was the way I was going) I reluctantly left my mandrake installation by the roadside and switched back to XP.
But don't get me wrong, I moved back to windows solely for the purpose of having a clean environment to work in and not wanting to play around with virtual machines all the time. There is very little you can't do on Linux that you can do in windows, with the primary one being games. (There are just more games available for windows boxes).
Of course, you have nethack and z-code, but no everyone shares my love for those types of games.
In anycase, what you are saying is perfectly true. There are a lot of programs available on a windows box - there should be, it's the main consumer system. If well looked after, a windows installation can go years without needing to be reformatted, and yes, when special approval is needed it is nearly always for windows.
But as otheres have said, you could use wine for the windows only programs, there are plenty of case tools (hell, Linux is a system built by developers, of course there are plenty of development tools), VPN software exists and there are alternatives for photos, video and everything else you mentioned.
Also windows machines can go for many years without a reformat (though in defence, I always liked to reformat a windows machine every six months. I havn't recently, as I havn't had time, but windows systems clutter quicker than linux ones or at least it feels that way - not to mention virii and adware that don't target linux.), but i've never heard of one -running- for years without a reboot, the way some unix servers have in the past.
You've got some great reasons for using windows, just as I do, but reason to use one is not the same as a reason not to use the other. I choose to use windows, it helps my career, keeps things simple for me. This isn't my way of saying windows is superior to Linux or the other way around, just that my circumstances leads me to prefer one over the other at this point.
As for the six month thing being FUD, it really isn't. Maybe you're just better at keeping your system clean and running than the average user, or maybe you just have different standards for you expect out of a running system, but lots of people reformat a windows box every 6-12 months, this isn't some evil lie by the Linux Fanatics (tm).
One of the early adopters of this technique was infocom (perhaps the first?) who liked to put all sorts of things in their game boxes - ID Cards, cloth maps, collectable coins, all sorts of stuff. It was, for a long time, considered a staple of interactive fiction to have "feelies" in your game packaging. Some members of the quite active interactive fiction community have once again started looking to provide feelies with their games, even though the vast majority of their games are actually free to download. They do this through Feelies.org, a company specialising in producing such things. I'm not sure if I buy the whole "it's too expensive" argument as a reason for the nonexistance of feelies. The reason they no longer exist is simply because people are buying games that don't have them. It's an expense they see as unnecessary. The price games are sold for these days (-particularly- in Australia) has less to do with the cost of the product and far more to do with greed, fuelled by region coding in many ways. As a case in point, you can buy Asian versions of games, if they are region free, and self import them using express shipping (quite expensive) and still pay only 3/4's of the retail price in Australia. That extra cost obviously isn't in shipping the product (as bulk shipping would give them far greater disscounts than what I can achieve) and marketing for games in this country is trivial compared to the blitz's they put on in other countries, so where is the justification for the extra cost?
I used to agree, but it seems to depend on the businesses themselves. I used to work at a big comapany that felt like a small one because of the immaturity of its it department (they had only just moved from total outsourcing) and it was great fun at first. As it got bigger and tried to be more "corporate" then things went really downhill.
However I've also worked at a smaller company that was awful to work for. The manager cared about nothing but the bottom line, employees who tried to leave were threatened and new employees were bullied into taking far less than they were worse simply because they didn't know any better.
Now I work at what is considered a large IT company for the area and i'm having a great time. The work is interesting, my co-workers and managers know their stuff and are great people to boot.
Size really doesn't matter, its all about the people.
Doesn't or can't doesn't really matter if you read the rest of what I said. Perhaps I didn't make my position clear enough, it's not really that it's impossible to implement artificial scarcity (although, producing better safe's generally produces better safe-crackers), but rather that anyone who tries to do it is working on a flawed business model.
If you need to impose artificial restrictions on your product, then you've made a mistake somewhere. If technological progress renders your business unprofitable, you need to change with it, you can't fight it.
It's not nice. It'll hit my industry too, as everyone has pointed out. (Though I think the doom-and-gloom of some posts is a bit much, particularly the person who said we wont be doing this in 10 years. I will. It's not our problem finding work - people who need computers require programs for them, it'll be the money-men's problem figuring out how to profit off of us now that things have changed.)
It wasn't nice for the craftsmen put out of work by the industrial revolution, it wasn't nice for factory workers put out of work by robotics and computerisation. Why does it feel worse to some people now that it's musicians, film-makers and software companies that may be facing the same fate?
The difference is, of course, that those technologies made things cheaper and more profitable for big business, whereas this change makes things cheaper for the consumer.
Instructions aren't copywriteable... and software programs aren't a series of instructions that a computer performs?
Each line is sometimes even called an instruction.
There is a logical disconnect when it comes to software copyright (thats even worse with software patent) and any form of digital media. What looks perfectly common sense of the surface (should be subject to the same protections are art and literature), has some very different properties when looked at closely.
I hope my own government sits up and takes notice of this lawyer fellow. I hope they divert our limited policing resources away from these cheap, unimportant crimes (such as assault, bank robbery and fraud) and instead police piracy better.
In fact, if they do, I pledge to never, ever pirate anything from that point forward. Never.
Instead, I will get a gun. That'll be easier then, because there will be less focus on preventing unlicenced people from obtaining them. I probably wont pay for it, they're paying less attention to assault too, and the guy's a criminal - hell, he's selling me an unlicenced gun. So i'll rough him up a bit and just take it. Then, I happen to know a nice armoured truck I can rob when its full of bank money. Then, i'll buy some cd's from RIAA with my new fortune.
It's rare to get a worthy though from a hollywood action flick, but see if you remember this one. A person is smart, people are dumb.
This article just shows that a person can be dumb too.
Especially if you factor in the fact that prostitution is illegal in many places, imagine the lost government revenue that the fines bring in if they went out of business!
Insightful? That mod wasn't posted by a software engineer i'm sure.
As a proud member of the development corp, I do really feel insulted to hear the sum of my creative energies, and the sweat and blood of my work referred to as an imaginary product. That said, I understand what you're trying to say. The real problem the MPAA and RIAA have is trying to apply traditional economic theory (based on scarce-resource distribution and pricing) to an unlimited resource (something that once created, can be replicated ad-infinitum.
Why they want to do this is obvious, it's a licence to print money. Unfortunately for them, under these traditional economic theories it is the scarcity of a resource that makes it valuable (gold, platinum, wood) and an unlimited resource has very little, or no, monetary value.
Thus DRM, which is fundamentally an attempt to impose scarcity on an unlimited resource, thus creating artificial value. It doesn't work, because the methods are inefficient and if content has intrinsic worth itself, DRM reduces it by making it difficult to use.
I'm not sure how we're going to get around this particular problem and it is concerning for all of us involved in creating the content. There needs to be money in creation in order for us to get paid to do it, but the traditional methods of commercial software/music/films may not be the most efficient.
Perhaps we need to explore commoditization of software, or perhaps a return to the patron model enjoyed by artists of the last several centuries. Hard to say.
The current patent laws are so stupid that it causes me physical pain to witness the things that actually make it to court. When the people envisaging the patent system designed it, had they recieved applications like the ones routinely honoured today, they would have laughed the applicant out of their office. What they are claiming to have a patent on is the idea, or process, whereby you buy an item for a set price rather than bidding on it... ..... ...... And your court system is happy to deliberate on this. Seriously, how much deliberation do they require?
I bought some sushi today from the local sushi bar, and I didn't have to bid on it... they are obviously in violation of this patent... and I bought some hardware components from an online retailer, didn't have to bid there either.
The idea of patents was to enable people, particularly individuals on limited budgets, to profit from their original inventions. One of the core requirements of a patent is that it not be for something obvious.
Lets be honest. Does it get more obvious than the purchasing of something for a set price? Is there anyone that isn't familiar with that idea?
I think i'm going to burst a blood vessel on this one.
It's the goat's isn't it? The goats always come back to bite you.
Completely - At what point did we decide our leaders had to be perfect? Sainthood is for religions, not leaders. I mean really, is it so terrible if a president/prime minister/whatever smoked a bit of pot once? Or if he likes to get blowjobs in the oval office? We should be reserving that sort of disgust for people who prey on the weak, and steal and cheat huge quantities of money. I'm not talking about shoplifting when they were fifteen to impress their friends, but real crimes. I can tell you, the majority of Australians (of my social crowds anyway ;) ) couldn't work out what the big deal was with the Clinton problems. Sure cheating sucks, makes him a lousy husband and some would say a pretty lousy person. Doesn't make him a bad president.
Starting wars with countries based on hidden agenda's aimed at stealing wealth from the citizens of those countries. Thats a pretty lousy president. But aren't we lucky he isn't getting head.
This seems a bit naive to me. To speak of "no-good" person, I assume you mean criminal. You might mean morally no-good, but really, if they're doing something you find offensive morally (excessive drinking, participating in obscure religions, sodomy...) and they can find a way to keep it off the net, more power too them. It's really no-one else's business whilst they're obeying the law. If they're breaking the law, thats different. However, this sounds very similar to the anti-drugs, anti-guns type laws and arguments that go on in the US and here in Australia, to a lesser degree. The idea is, that if you make it hard to do something (by making it illegal is a perfect example), then people wont do it. The truth is of course that people who want to do it, do it. If you did stop these companies from helping people to paint a false picture of themselves, as you put it, by making it illegal or shooting them, however you'd do it, you would definately stop some people from doing it. Some of the privacy obsessed who hate the idea that info about them floats about would have to deal...a lot of casual users info would remain untouched. Those that really wanted the info gone. The real "no-good" guys, would make the info gone, and have been making it gone i'm sure. As Penn and Teller said in their episode on gun control - "How, you might ask, does a convicted criminal get a gun when it's against the law for them to do so? THEY BREAK THE LAW". That is, after all, the definition of a criminal.